Tahar Joblis wrote:Giovenith wrote:
I haven't taken one because I knew what bullshit would await me, but I've talked with many people who have, both who hated and loved it. It's about what you would expect. "THE PATRIARCHY IS OUT TO GET YOU. THE PATRIARCHY IS OUT TO GET YOU. IF YOU DON'T THINK THE PATRIARCHY IS OUT TO GET YOU, THEN THE PATRIARCHY HAS GOT YOU!" They teach one singular brand of feminism as not only the gospel feminism but the gospel of reality. I've met passionate gender studies students who didn't realize that "the patriarchy" is actually a relatively recent concept and not the foundation of feminism itself.
They basically hype up students' anger by telling them all the rotten things that used to be done to women and then teach them to practice confirmation bias. "Watch this movie. See the way the camera angle goes by? That's the patriarchy at work." - Not even joking, an old classmate told me how all they did was watch movies and have the teacher fuel them up on outrage by insisting all these minute, arbitrary details like camera angles, camera pans, the color of their shirts, their make up, are all the patriarchy at work. They connect the outrage students feel over the past and train them to not only project that outrage onto the present, but to do so over all the smallest and most neutral details in life.
The fact that there are other approaches to feminism isn't even acknowledged. It's just, "THIS is feminism. This has ALWAYS been feminism. You NEED feminism, because husbands hundreds of years ago men used to be allowed to hit their wives. Remember, THIS is feminism." So if someone says something contrary to what they learned, they are not feminist, and if they are not feminist, then they're part of the side that hits women, whether they know it or not. It works a lot like conspiracy theories, where people are so fervently dedicated to it because they're made to feel special about how they're smart enough to see the truth that society has hidden, all the "brainwashing" in all the music, the movies, the TV shows, the government bills, that they're in on a dirty little secret of the world and will be the ones to use that secret to take downthe Illuminatithe Patriarchy.
Well of course they're all going to lead into each other a bit, that's how progression works. I also don't think one can consciously create a new wave. Waves describe the era and the main debates associated with them, and as the name implies, they come and go like any societal trend. You can't just jump from one wave into another, there needs to be a significant "cooling off period" in between them, and the wave needs to be taken on by another generation. You don't create your own wave in response to feminists you don't like, you create your own sect - but you're all part of the third wave. A wave is all the feminists of that time period, not a certain brand of feminist philosophy, though waves are often associated with philosophies that were popular among that era.
tl;dr: Wave is a description of time, not ideas.
In terms of time, we're still clearly in the second wave. The term "third wave" originates in the early 1990s - but most of the structure and personnel of the feminist movement of the 1990s were inherited from the 1980s. Similarly, most of the structure and personnel of the feminist movement of the 1980s were inherited from the 1970s, and a fair share of that had roots going back into the 1960s.
There hasn't been a major interruption of the feminist movement since the early stirrings of the second wave in the 1960s, and the movement as a whole has been clearly and loudly active the entire time. Not the way that things calmed down on the feminism front after 1920.
As I have noted several times, the first wave in the United States has a pretty clear timeline that spans a bit over seven decades - you start with the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848 as the beginning of a coherent movement, and the last major achievement being the ratification of the 19th Amendment, with the movement ebbing through the 1920s.
There's very little in feminism currently that you can't see the roots of reaching back to the early days of the second wave. The major figures speaking for the feminist movement today include second wave luminaries. The major works consulted in Women's Studies courses include plenty of works authored by feminists active before the term "third wave" entered the scene. The purported third wave is both temporally and ideologically indistinguishable from a continuation of the second wave.
You could very easily complete an entire degree in Women's Studies without ever learning anything significant about the first wave of feminism, however.
The 3rd and 4th Waves are basically a form of damage control as far as I can see.
3rd Wave feminism is 2nd Wave with modern culture added to it, people like Laci Green and Anita Sarkeesian using modern technology to reach their audience. They rehash old dead arguments as though they just thought of them. In a way it's similar to how evangelical Christians discovered being 'hip' in the 90s and began to produce movies, television, self help books and stuff like that. None of the messages are new, but you see people with hipster glasses and work shirts saying them so it must be topical, right? The 3rd Wave also presents itself as being completely revelatory as though somehow the world became intensely more sexist since the 1970s. It's a desperate drive for relevancy. So yes, there is a 3rd Wave, but it's really just marketing and damage control for a movement that is increasingly irrelevant. Also these are the apprentices of the old 2nd Wavers grown up. Why else are there these huge circle jerks like the Women's March, Emma Watson and Gloria Steinem giving one another empathygasms over the F word?
The 4th Wave to me is another kind of damage control, this one still trying for relevancy but realizing how obnoxiously indifferent to the client base feminist leaders and teachers really are. I just think that it's too late, they should jump ship and get with the reality program.
And you are right about another thing: few people I meet know anything about the First Wave or proto-feminism. There are, after all, some weird things that they believed. Like for instance the Famous Five here in Canada all believed in the Yellow Peril and eugenics.
