It’s no great news that “feminism” — the word and, by extension, the movement — has an image problem. Women of all ages and colors have, at turns, bristled at the term, embraced it, lauded it and disdained it, practically since it was coined. However, after years of soldiering on under the burden of a heavily loaded word, a new crop of progressive and politically active women are finally addressing the problem. Some are looking to reinvigorate “feminist” by laying claim to the word — a new magazine and a recent book are both cheekily titled “The F Word” — while others are contemplating new words and phrases to employ in the fight for women’s equality. After years of quiet debate, women are tackling their own labels with the energy of a movement anxious to make itself fresh again.

The debate acquired a new urgency with Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s announcement on July 1 that she is retiring from the court. If Bush, as expected, nominates a judge opposed to Roe. v. Wade, women’s issues will move to the center of the national stage.

It’s almost remarkable that “feminism” has survived as long as it has, stigmatized as it’s been by a sneering right, and criticized by groups on the left for its early lack of interest in the concerns of poor and minority women. Now, as second-wave feminists look to the future and see a generation of women with a very different set of battles than their own, the question becomes: What do we do about “feminism”? Does it have anything to do with younger female activism anymore, or is it simply an Achilles’ heel? Do we replace it, phase it out? Or do we embrace it with renewed vigor and a spruced-up, all-inclusive definition?

When asked to consider what other terms besides “feminist” might be useful descriptors of the movement she helps to lead, National Organization for Women president Kim Gandy laughed and said, “Nothing has really swept anyone off their feet, but ‘egalitarian’ is one that always comes up. There’s ‘humanist.’ Sometimes ‘womanist.’”

Gandy isn’t suggesting that anyone rub the word “feminism” off their bumper stickers or refrigerator magnets. But she did acknowledge that she has had informal conversations — both with people who work at NOW and with those she meets on the road — about agitation from some within the movement who believe it’s time to retire “feminism’s” number.

“There’s nothing inherently wrong with the word,” said Gandy, invoking Dame Rebecca West’s famous assertion, “I … have never been able to find out precisely what feminism is; I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat or a prostitute.”

But, she said, we cannot pretend that “feminism” has escaped the fate of “liberalism” before it. “This is what the right-wing has done to our language,” she said. “‘Liberal’ is a proud term. But at a certain point, it became very difficult for people to call themselves liberal. If you asked them about issues they would say, ‘I’m not liberal, I’m progressive.’ Excuse me, you are a liberal! But the right made that a bad word. They’ve done the same thing with ‘feminism.’”

Unsurprisingly, Gandy has had countless encounters with women and men who open up a conversation by saying, “I’m not a feminist,” and then go on to espouse feminist ideals. “It’s like, ‘Do you have a belief in the political and social equality of women?’ Yeah? Then you’re a feminist,” she said.

Language shifts have often transformed the struggle for women’s equality. Gandy recalled the way that the term “suffragists” became the diminutive, mockingly feminine “suffragettes,” as though those who devoted their lives to secure the vote for women were actually a backup group for Ray Charles. Then there was the time in 2003 when the National Abortion Rights Action League changed its name to “abortion”-lite NARAL Pro-Choice America. But language has strengthened the movement as well. Gandy said that when she started at NOW in 1973, “We didn’t even have a word for sexual harassment. We knew how women were treated at work and on the street, but we didn’t have language for it. Domestic violence? You didn’t even whisper words for that in public. Now we have women’s studies. Now we have a word for everything,” said Gandy.

But she acknowledged, “I think that there’s a new generation that’s looking for a word or a term they can call their own. At some level they associate ‘feminism’ with their mothers. Not in a bad way, but just in a way that’s not about them.”

It might seem like a simple suggestion. But the hyper-sensitivity surrounding the “feminism” discussion makes it an ideological fire-starter. Weeks after my interview with Gandy, I called Feminist Majority leader Eleanor Smeal about this story. When I asked her to respond to some of the comments Gandy had made, I was apparently unclear, somehow leaving Smeal with the impression that I was reporting that Gandy wanted NOW to abandon the word “feminism.” This was certainly not what I was reporting. But Smeal alerted Gandy to the possibility that my story might suggest that Gandy was rejecting the word just days before her reelection as NOW president. A very agitated Gandy called me to clarify that her comments were not reflective of any formal discussions within her organization. I assured her that I only planned to report what she had told me: that she had had discussions about the word with colleagues at NOW. She responded: “I hear people talk about it. But they don’t talk about it that often. To say that ‘there have been discussions within NOW’ would convey a really inaccurate thing.” Gandy emphasized that she can’t imagine ever backing away from “feminism.”

But some people didn’t think the notion of ditching the word was such a crazy idea at all. “I think it’s very smart,” said Erica Jong, whose use of explicit language in “Fear of Flying’ changed the nature of American women’s fiction in 1973. “The problem hasn’t gone away. Women are still second-class citizens; the problem of choice is still with us — in fact it’s gotten worse. So if we need to change the name to get people involved, we should.”

But Jong was stumped as to what a replacement could be, and noted that “words always get degraded when associated with something progressive or something female. This is the way right-wingers capture the language, so we need to be smart.” She noted the right wing’s use of the term “pro-life” in the abortion debate. “If we had called ourselves pro-life — as in we don’t want women to die in illegal abortions — we would have won on that one, but they got there first.”

Jong thought that dusting off our lexicon was a natural generational progression. “It’s all so cyclical,” she said. “Mothers push forward, daughters pull back,” she said. “We have been in a period of backlash and now we’re ready to push forward again.”

It’s true that there is resistance to the feminist label from some young people. Kristin Rowe-Finkbeiner, a Seattle-area writer and author of “The F Word: Feminism in Jeopardy — Women, Politics, and the Future,” described a poll she’d done for her book. Noting that the 300 respondents were self-selected college-educated women between the ages of 18 and 34, Rowe-Finkbeiner said, “Sixty-eight percent of young women didn’t want to be confined by labels, and the word ‘feminism’ chafed the worst.”

But other national polls — including a 1984 Wall Street Journal/Gallup poll, a 1986 Newsweek/Gallup poll, and a 2003 Ms. Magazine poll — have shown that the younger the woman, the more willing she is to identify herself as a feminist. And, sure enough, many of the young women contacted for this piece were more vociferous in their defense of the word than their elders.

Melody Berger, a 25-year-old college student in Philadelphia, launched the new feminist magazine the F-Word in late May. She said she chose the name for her publication “because I was tired of tiptoeing around the word, of saying, ‘Don’t worry about us, we’re not feminists, we’re totally acceptable.’” Instead, Berger has proclaimed herself a full-blown “Howling Harpy.”

Berger is not alone in her affection for the word. “If I hear one more person say, ‘I’m not a feminist, I’m a humanist,’ I’m going to kill them,” said 26-year-old Jessica Valenti, founder of Feministing.com. “How do you possibly think you’re going to talk about gender equality if there’s no acknowledgment of gender?”

When I told Valenti that there was even casual discussion about the future of the word, she snorted, frustrated with what she perceives as generational tension between second-wave feminists and her activist peers — many of whom don’t align themselves with feminist organizations. “When they say they’re interested in pulling in young women, I understand where the sentiment is coming from because they feel like young women don’t like the word, but come on. How much are we willing to give up?”

Valenti acknowledged that many young women are “afraid of the word.” “Part of me gets so angry at younger women who are nervous about feminism because they’re afraid that boys won’t like them,” said Valenti. One of the reasons she started Feministing is because she wanted to meet young women and tell them, “I’m a feminist. And despite what you may think, feminism is pretty fucking cool.” In addition, Valenti added, “Part of me wants to say, ‘Yeah, someone’s going to call you a lesbian. Someone’s going to say you’re a fat, ugly dyke.’ Suck it up.”

Valenti did have a couple of non-linguistic suggestions about how to bring older and younger activists together, starting with how the older generation treats its daughters. She described meetings for young feminists where the young women talk “while famous feminists are sitting there taking notes and watching you like you’re some National Geographic animals.” She said that the very suggestion that “feminism” could be disposable in any way makes her feel like saying, “Hey! This is your word! You started this and I took it on. I have been working hard for you. And now you’re going to just give up on it?”

Erin Matson, the 25-year-old NOW chapter president in Minnesota and a member of the Young Feminist Task Force, said, “I wear the feminist label with pride and I love it. It’s hard for me to imagine leaving it behind or discarding it.” But Matson did recently write an article questioning the notion that feminism is a word that can describe a single, cohesive group, “all of us with pierced lips and hairy legs and the same concerns. That’s simply not true,” she said. Instead of the plaintive 10th-grade cry, “I’m not a feminist, but…” Matson’s piece suggested that the new disclaimer is “I am a feminist, but…”

“Crystal Plati, 32-year-old executive director of Choice USA, said that at her organization, We use [the word feminism] but we don’t belabor it. We are also open to other words.

She continued, “More than looking at just one word, for me it’s about doing some listening for what kinds of language young women are using to define their empowerment for themselves.” She also pointed out that it’s not just young women who are alienated by the term. “No matter what choice we make about language,” said Plati, “we need to be building toward an inclusive movement, in particular a movement that has women of color and young women in leadership. Changing the word is not enough. We need to address why it’s alienating.”

It’s an assertion familiar to women in the movement, who for years have been reminded that second-wave feminism of the 1970s did not address the concerns of women of color and women from lower economic strata.

It’s a concern that activist and author Rebecca Walker — whose mother, Alice Walker, coined the term “womanist” as an inclusive alternative to “feminist” — said she’s been anxious about for a long time. In an e-mail, she referred me to an interview she gave to Satya magazine in January. In the interview, Walker said that in 1992, when she co-founded Third Wave, an organization for young women activists, she worried that “the word feminist had become too divisive and culturally loaded.” Walker also told Satya, “It seemed clear to me that the term had more of a repellent effect than a magnetizing one within my generation, and I did not feel the need to prove my allegiance and gratitude to the women that came before me by holding on to something that had meant so very much to them, but did not mean that much to me.”

In the interview, Walker continued, “The left is getting our collective ass kicked because of just this kind of romantic, naove attachment to movement narratives and aesthetics of 20 and 30 years ago.” She also pointed out that “many women of color do not feel an affinity with the term because, among other things, we know firsthand that people who call themselves feminists are not always our friends,” she said. “They have not de facto done their work around race … though [they] would become appalled if we suggested that some ‘feminists’ were also racist.”

The racial wound remains fresh for many women who spend their lives thinking about and working on issues of female empowerment. When Berger launched her F-Word site in May, she said she was surprised that some of the anti-”feminist” mail she got was from other women activists. Berger explained, “The word ‘feminist’ alienated a lot of political allies I wanted to be tied to,” including women of color “who told me that traditionally this word is off-putting because of the predominantly white, middle-class vibe it had.” Others, she said, told her, “I hope you don’t make the same kinds of mistakes your foremothers did.”

The result, said Berger, is that a month after her launch, “the word ‘feminism’ is on the site, but it’s not the tag line anymore. I’ve toned it down a little bit.”

When I asked her what words could possibly replace the pesky descriptor of the movement, Berger was stumped. “I’m not such a fan of the word ‘humanist,’” she said in an e-mail. “I think it’s one of those ‘well, duh … who ISN’T pro-human??’ kind of concepts.” As for “womanist,” Berger wrote, “I like that it may be more appealing to women of color … However, I don’t think feminism is just about ‘women’ anymore.” It’s these qualms, Berger said, that keep her “pretty attached to the f-word.” But she conceded, “Maybe it isn’t worth fighting to reclaim a word. There are much bigger things we need to be fighting for.”

But what if we don’t need to fight to reclaim it? What if we’ve already begun to make it new?

There is a camp of women who say, “‘Feminism is just what we determine it is,’” said Mandy Van Deven, 25, founder of Altar magazine, a magazine about social justice, and the director of Community Organizing for Girls for Gender Equity in Brooklyn, N.Y. “‘So if we wear makeup and call ourselves feminists then we are feminists,’” she continued, adding that she did not necessarily identify with this multi-purpose definition. Van Deven said that changing definitions is “part of the evolution of political movements and the evolution of language and how people are going to identify themselves as individuals and in the scope of larger political context.”

Van Deven said she thinks that there are a lot of young women out there who — while they may not like the word or embrace the entire exclusionary history of the movement, “are really anxious to grab the word and claim it and say, ‘No, I don’t care, I am going to make this word work for me.’”

Rowe-Finkbeiner, author of the book “The F Word,” said that Van Deven’s attitude is typical of broader political and linguistic patterns. “In the history of social movements, many of the people who are most impacted by negative connotations of a word are the ones who take that word back,” she said. Rowe-Finkbeiner pointed out that women have already done this with “bitch” — as in popular “stitch and bitch” knitting circles and “bitch-n-swap” clothing swaps. It’s a phenomenon similar to a gay re-appropriation of “queer,” or African-American usage of “nigger.”

Third Wave co-founder Amy Richards said she isn’t too worried about the women’s movement agreeing on one word. In her work on campuses, she said the number of projects she sees young women taking on — from prison reform to AIDS funding in Africa to living-wage fights for university staff — is enough to satisfy her that there is tremendous life in the movement, even if no one knows what to call it. “The thing that’s different from 30 years ago is that young women are moving beyond organizing around reproductive issues and violence against women. It’s not that those issues aren’t relevant to them, but I think they’re just tired of them.”

Gandy said that membership in her organization is bigger than ever. “Eighty percent of people in the United States, based on what they think now about pay equity and domestic violence, would have been considered total feminists had they felt that way 30 years ago. And the women’s rights movement is living in our daughters every single day. Whether or not they consider themselves feminists.”

Besides, said Richards, “Whatever we’d change ‘feminism’ to would become a bad word too.” This story has been corrected since it was originally published.

Today, Obama doubled down on his disregard for the concerns of these groups, claiming that while Sebelius made her decision without his counsel, he agreed with it. Obama pooh-poohed the findings of the FDA, which had concluded that Plan B pills posed no medical hazard and supported Sebelius’ official argument, citing a lack of confidence that “a 10-year-old or 11-year-old going to a drugstore would be able to, alongside bubble gum or batteries, be able to buy a medication that potentially if not used properly can have an adverse effect.” The logic expressed today by the president, and yesterday by Sebelius, is ludicrous: Medicines like Tylenol – which have been proven to have adverse effects in high doses – are available by the truckload on drugstore shelves, at prices far cheaper than the $30 to $50 it would cost a preteen to purchase just one dose of Plan B, let alone go wild with it.

But part of what was most disturbing about Obama’s statement was his reliance on language that reveals his paternalistic approach to women and their health.

“As the father of two daughters,” Obama told reporters, “I think it is important for us to make sure that we apply some common sense to various rules when it comes to over-the-counter medicine.”

First of all, the president was not talking about “various rules.” He was supporting a very specific rule, one that prevents young women from easily obtaining a drug that can help them control their reproductive lives, at an age when their economic, educational, familial and professional futures are perhaps most at risk of being derailed by an unplanned pregnancy. “As the father of two daughters,” Obama might want to reconsider his position on preventing young women from being able to exercise this form of responsibility over their own bodies and lives.

But as an American, I think it is important for my president not to turn to paternalistic claptrap and enfeebling references to the imagined ineptitude and irresponsibility of his daughters – and young women around the country – to justify a curtailment of access to medically safe contraceptives. The notion that in aggressively conscribing women’s abilities to protect themselves against unplanned pregnancy Obama is just laying down some Olde Fashioned Dad Sense diminishes an issue of gender equality, sexual health and medical access. Recasting this debate as an episode of “Father Knows Best” reaffirms hoary attitudes about young women and sex that had their repressive heyday in the era whence that program sprang.

A question of who should be allowed access to a safe form of contraception is at its root a question of how badly we want to, or believe that we can, police young women’s sexuality. When Obama is talking about his daughters, we know he’s not really basing his opinion on an anxiety that they might suffer the adverse effects of drinking a whole jug of Pepto-Bismol or swallowing 50 Advil, things that any 11-year-old who walks into a CVS with a wad of cash could theoretically do. When he says that he wants to “apply common sense” to questions of young women’s access to emergency contraception, he is telegraphing his discomfort with the idea of young women’s sexual agency, or more simply, with the idea of them having sex lives at all. This discomfort might be  comprehensible from an emotional, parental point of view. But these are not familial discussions; this is a public-health policy debate, and at a time when “16 and Pregnant” airs on MTV, the fact that a daddy feels funny about his little girls becoming grown-ups has no place in a discussion of healthcare options for America’s young women. It is also nearly impossible to imagine a similar use of language or logic to justify a ban of condom sales.

Moreover, Obama’s invocation of his role as a father is an insult to the commitments and priorities of those on the other side of this issue. Are we to believe that those who support the increased availability of emergency contraception do not have daughters? That if they do, they care less about those daughters than Barack Obama does about his? And that if they do not, they cannot possibly know better than a father of daughters what is best for young women? Why should we be asked to believe that Obama’s paternity imbues him with more moral authority on the subject of women’s health and reproductive lives than the investments of doctors, researchers and advocates who – regardless of their parental status – have dedicated their lives to working on behalf of increased reproductive health options. This line of argument is no better than the Mama Grizzly argument developed by Sarah Palin during 2010′s midterm elections, in which she asserted that her band of super-conservative mothers were qualified for office because “moms just know when there’s something wrong.”

Barack Obama has long had a tin ear for language that has anything to do with women and even more specifically with women’s rights. While on the campaign trail for president in 2008, he waved off a female reporter who asked a question about the future of the auto industry, referring to her diminutively as “sweetie.” The same year, attempting to play both sides on the issue of reproductive freedom, he gave an interview with a religious magazine in which he asserted his support for states’ restrictions on late-term abortions as long as there was an exception for the health of the mother, but added that he didn’t “think that ‘mental distress’ qualifies as the health of the mother.” Attempting to recover from that line and reassert his pro-choice bona fides, Obama later clarified that of course he believed in a medical exemption for “serious clinical mental health diseases,” just not when seeking a late-term abortion is “a matter of feeling blue,” perpetuating a wildly irresponsible vision of the rare and difficult late-term abortion as a moody impulse-buy.

Today also isn’t the first time he’s used references to members of his family to make a larger offensive point about women. Back in 2009, when charges that his officially female-friendly administration included some boys’ club tendencies hit the front of the New York Times, Obama dismissed the claims as “bunk.” Reporter Mark Leibovich noted at the time that the president “often points out that he is surrounded by strong females at home,” an argument that not only mimics an old saw about how being henpecked by women is equivalent to respecting them, but reflects a dynamic as old as patriarchal power itself and sidesteps the question of how strong females are treated at work. In 2010, while appearing on “The View,” Obama made a creaky Take-My-Wife-Please joke about how he wanted to appear on “a show that Michelle actually watched” as opposed to the news shows she usually flips past. The joke being that his missus, the one he met when she mentored him at a high-powered law firm, just doesn’t have a head for news delivered by anyone other than Elisabeth Hasselbeck.

It should no longer come as a surprise that the president of the United States is, on perhaps an unconscious level, an old-school patriarch. What’s startling is the degree to which Obama seems not to have learned from any of his past gaffes, how no one seems to have told him – or told him in a way that he’s absorbed – that the best way to address a question of women’s health and rights is probably not by making it about his role as a father.

This might be an especially valuable chat to have with the president as he moves into 2012 and toward an election in which he is going to be relying on the support of people he has just managed to anger, offend and speak down to — women. The least he could do is learn to address them with respect.

But has it actually whetted the film business’s appetite for more female-driven projects? Salon called Lynda Obst, producer of movies like “Sleepless in Seattle,” “Contact” and “How to Lose a Guy in Ten Days,” the television show “Hot in Cleveland,” the author of “Hello, He Lied” and all-around movie sage, to see what, if anything, has changed in her town this summer.

Did the success of “Bridesmaids” make a difference to your business?

Yes. It had the biggest impact of any women’s movie that I can remember in my career.

In your whole career, which began with “Flashdance” in 1983?

Yeah. It came at a moment when any movies for women, women’s comedies — forget dramas, there are no dramas for anybody — but women’s comedies, women’s thrillers were going to get put by the wayside forever. Women’s projects were dying everywhere. That’s why the opening of “Bridesmaids” was so critical for every woman in features, why its success was attended with such profound interest by every woman writer, producer and director in town.

The second important factor was that there were no stars in the movie and it wasn’t tracking in advance.

And that matters because it means that it was the material, not a movie star, that drew people to theaters?

Yes. Its success wasn’t automatic. A star opens a movie. Sandra Bullock opens a movie. But there was nobody in this movie who had ever been in a movie before, so it’s the hardest kind of movie to open.

It means that its success was due to the fact that people enjoyed it, and gave it good word of mouth once the movie started screening. Which leads us to the gigantic thing, which was the revelation that women can open a movie, and also, that this [women's movie] crossed over. Men came. It drew women of all ages and it drew guys and was a major hit. And not just domestically, which is part two of this gigantic thing, because the movie business right now is being driven by international box office.

Comedy doesn’t usually travel well. Movies that travel are movies with very little dialogue, usually dependent on action or family content or big international stars. But “Bridesmaids” did very well internationally. The concept was easy to understand in all languages. It gave us a clue as to what movies will work internationally with women in them. So what we learned is: Broad comedies will sell abroad, even with broads.

What are the immediate effects of this?

There are suddenly projects for women! I’m pitching one right now that is a female-based comedy and people are really responsive to it. And then my directing debut, which was dead in the water at New Line, went from having no momentum to having momentum, the weekend right after “Bridesmaids” opened. “Bridesmaids” meant that the idea of being able to make a movie about women was resuscitated.

Well, for now. What if the next female comedy flops?

If the next one flops, who knows? Two action movies flop and it means nothing; one women’s movie flops and it’s the end. But “Bridesmaids” was followed immediately by the success of “The Help,” which was terrific because that was driven by women too.

So what we’re finding in the American market is that younger male eyeballs are disappearing in large numbers, going to video games, going to the Internet. But women are going to the movies, if you make movies for them.

Now, does this mean we will stop making movies for the younger male quadrant? No, because the young male quadrant likes the same movies as international audiences — action movies, man movies.

Man movies?

“Ironman,” “Spider-Man,” “Batman.” Man movies.

Are studios pursuing women’s projects or are people just feeling like they can pitch them again?

I think the latter. But I think studios were suddenly receptive to them.

This is not the first time in recent memory that a woman’s movie has done well and studios have failed to notice in any permanent way. “The Devil Wears Prada,” your movie “How to Lose a Guy in Ten Days,” “Sex and the City” have all been big women-driven hits, and yet women’s movies were on the brink of extinction.

Studios have institutionally short memories when it comes to women’s movies. “Sex and the City II” did better internationally than it did domestically, which would have made you think that they would have noticed it. I mean, that’s what inclines Fox to make “Ice Ages”; sequels do so well internationally. But studios don’t seem to generalize by the same rules in women’s movies as they do for other movies.

Every time a woman’s movie does well, it’s a brand-new fact. Every time we rediscover the female audience, it’s astonishing.

So it’s possible that despite “Bridesmaids’” success, four years from now you and I will be having the same conversation about the death of women’s comedy?

Yes.

That’s depressing. But back to the success of “Bridesmaids.” There was a certain amount of social awareness around going to the movie. Because of the press it got, women seemed to be aware that going to see the movie was not just about enjoying it, but about sending a message to Hollywood. Do you think that had an impact on its box office?

Well, I know there was tremendous awareness in Los Angeles that we had to open this movie. I believe it happened in New York too, but I don’t know that that happened nationally.

What happened nationally was that there was a hunger for something for women to relate to, because there’s usually nothing out there for them. It’s what happens with an urban audience with Tyler Perry.

I had a sense from friends in other cities that they were going with their girlfriends and that they knew it was made for them.  It’s so rare that there’s a movie made for them. It generated such excitement.

You would think that that excitement alone would send a message that there is an eager audience out there for material about women.

Well, I think you can see a lot of that reaction on television. It is the year of women on television. Television is much more female-friendly than Hollywood. There are a tremendous number of female executives, and when they see something like “Bridesmaids,” it’s much easier to react fast to it, and there’s less institutional resistance. They love the zeitgeist.

But timing-wise, this season of television was already a done deal before “Bridesmaids” opened, so it can’t have been a reaction, can it?

Well, the [final] decisions about this current fall season were made at the upfronts, which roughly coincided [Editor's note: actually, directly coincided in mid-May] with the opening of “Bridesmaids,” so there actually could have been a connection.

But also, I have just been through the next season of creative development and let me tell you it’s just as female-friendly as the one that’s on air now. There are shows about women and girlfriends and not just couples. There is television about women, for women. Real women.

“Hey A Lot Of Ladies,” began a mass email I received on Wednesday from Emily Bracken, a writer and acquaintance. She was forwarding a message from Kirsten “Kiwi” Smith, a producer and the screenwriter of “Legally Blonde” and “The House Bunny,” who has no professional connection with “Bridesmaids” but is nonetheless agitating on its behalf. “I know you get a lot of emails about donating money to worthy causes, but I’d like to draw your attention to one in particular: The Chick Flick,” Smith wrote. “It is currently on the Motion Picture Association of America’s list of Endangered Species and it faces extinction if we don’t act now.”

Urging everyone to buy tickets to the movie, Smith continued, “Let’s show the planet we are capable of queefing out some major box-office lady-power.”

Bracken added her own message on top of Smith’s. It read, in part, “I encourage each and every one of you to see ‘Bridesmaids’ this weekend, not just because it’s hilarious, but because we MUST show Hollywood that women DO want movies that are not vapid romcoms or something about shopping … A lot is riding on this movie. So please bring your girlfriends, boyfriends, husbands, and neighbors out in droves. And please, if you feel moved, encourage others to do so, as well.”

Yes we can … buy tickets to a Kristen Wiig movie in an effort to persuade Hollywood that multidimensional women exist, spend money and deserve to be represented on film.

What’s motivating this campaign is simple: Hollywood studios do not make comedies for or about women anymore. Yes, they used to. As recently as a few decades ago, when comedy stars like Lily Tomlin, Bette Midler and Goldie Hawn stalked through theaters alongside supporting players like Teri Garr, Carol Kane and Madeline Kahn, bringing us movies that were sometimes sublime and sometimes disposable, but which had women at their heart. Think “Private Benjamin,” “9 to 5,” “Outrageous Fortune,” “Down and Out in Beverly Hills”…

Those days are long gone, and we now inhabit an entertainment universe in which everything male-centered is standard, and everything female-centered is female (yes, this dynamic extends into publishing, politics and professionalism, but for now, let’s keep it to Hollywood). What that means in practical terms is that women will plonk down dollars to see a male-dominated action movie, a girl-gobbling horror flick, or a dude-centric comedy just as easily as they’ll pay for the kind of female-fueled movie that is literally made for them. Men, meanwhile, have apparently been so conditioned to find anything female emasculating (notwithstanding the expectation that their girlfriends find anything male, including “Thor,” scintillating) that they cannot be moved to sit through any movie with a fully developed woman at its center. As Tad Friend recently put it in his New Yorker profile of the actress Anna Faris — in a sentence mentioned frequently by “Bridesmaids” activists — “Studio executives believe that male moviegoers would rather prep for a colonoscopy that experience a woman’s point of view, particularly if that woman drinks or swears or has a great job or an orgasm.”

So studio executives simply don’t make movies, and especially comedies, from a woman’s point of view anymore. Which doesn’t even make that much economic sense, given the fact that even without a male audience, women are so powerful a consumer force that they can make the few movies that do focus on them successes — see “The Devil Wears Prada,” or “Sex and the City” and “Sex and the City 2.” (Actually, don’t see “Sex and the City 2,” but consider what its high grosses say about exactly how desperate women are to find themselves reflected on the screen in anything other than supporting, carelessly sketched nubile girlfriend roles.)

Enter “Bridesmaids,” a movie chock full of female talent, based on a script solicited from Wiig after she impressed bro-mantic comedy king Judd Apatow in her supporting role in “Knocked Up.” If this movie can win the box office (or, frankly, even get close) on its all-important opening weekend, the thinking goes, studio executives will have an economic incentive to make more female-friendly films like it.

The movie is being sold in the vein of Apatow’s boyish burp-fests: Trailers focus on a food poisoning scene that involves women in bridal gowns excreting from both ends. But the plot line — which centers on Wiig’s 30-something character, down on her luck professionally and personally, being put through the modern maid-of-honor mill by her best friend — offers the promise of something really good: an exploration of female social relationships, all the more complicated in an age when we do not all marry by 22 but create our adult lives alongside our girlfriends.

From the trailers, I have come to hope that “Bridesmaids” might in fact be a broader and more commercial take on the kind of relationship Nicole Holofcener painfully and hilariously picked apart in 1996′s “Walking and Talking,” one of the best movies about women ever made. (Holofcener has consistently made funny, stirring flicks about chicks, but they are by no stretch of the imagination blockbusters, or even major releases. It is a testament to their rarity that after her 2006 movie “Friends With Money” concluded, one of the two girlfriends I’d gone to see it with remained in her seat, staring at the screen. When I nudged her to move, she looked at me balefully and said, “I didn’t want it to end. I want it to keep going.”)

I have not seen “Bridesmaids,” though I know many people who have said good things about it, including Salon’s Mary Elizabeth Williams. And Tuesday night, before receiving the email from Bracken forwarded by Smith, I was moved to post on Facebook Melissa Silverstein’s explanation from “Women and Hollywood” of “Why Bridesmaids Matters,” after seeing a link to Silverstein’s post on the Facebook page of movie producer (“Sleepless in Seattle,” “How to Lose a Guy in Ten Days”) Lynda Obst. Obst had written, “Seriously, we have to see this movie this weekend. If you are a woman, like women, or simply don’t hate them … if we don’t go, they won’t build them anymore.”

Just a few minutes later, Farrin Jacobs, an editorial director at HarperCollins Children’s books, commented on the link that though she had already seen the film, she had made a date to see it again this weekend with girlfriends, “because I want funny lady movies to keep existing.” Jacobs later told me that her determination was born of that New Yorker piece, and how sad she’d become thinking that men just won’t watch female characters. She’d been in Los Angeles and scored tickets to the “Bridesmaids” premiere, and she claims that at one point, the movie made her laugh so hard that she cried. “Seeing the movie and thinking about the Anna Faris article, and knowing that if this movie didn’t do well, that would be it for at least the next couple of years for the life of female comedies, I’m trying to get everybody I know to see it,” said Jacobs. “Also, it’s funny.”

So here is this movie. This movie that may be silly, may be gross, may be great, may be terrible, may have hidden under its flatulent exterior a nuanced and too rarely spied depiction of female connection. It seems that it really matters — to Hollywood and its press and its executives and its female moviemakers and storytellers and performers — how it does. As Obst, who has no professional involvement in “Bridesmaids,” told me when I contacted her about this story, “We are all watching it like we made it.” The film’s director, Paul Feig, who perhaps has copped an overly chivalrous tone recently, told the Onion’s AV club, “It’s not often that a studio will allow a movie that’s all driven by women to be made, so I felt the pressure of, ‘If I screw this up, it’s going to fuck things up for women.’”

I just keep thinking about Wiig, the driving creative force behind the existence of the film, having been thrust, apparently unwillingly, into the role of feminist figurehead. I imagine her holed up in a hotel room, Hillary Clinton style, waiting for the polls to close and the weekend box office numbers to be finalized.

Me, I’ve been wondering how I’m going to get out of the house to the movie theater. I am home on a maternity leave, a 6-week-old beside me, just beginning to figure out baby sitting. Perhaps I will try to take my daughter to the earliest neighborhood matinee, provided she’s not fussing. She’s in the only stage of a woman’s life in which she’s actively encouraged to do what the ladies in this movie apparently are doing: belching, farting, barfing. More than that, maybe it will be an investment in her moviegoing future, an effort to ensure that she will have years ahead of her in which she has a chance to see herself, her friendships, her relationships, her work and her life reflected back at her in a way that makes her laugh till she cries.

The show begins when a website called JoanOfSnark.com takes “30 Rock’s” meta-show “TGS” and particularly Fey’s meta-character Liz Lemon to task for not employing enough women. In response, Liz hires Abby Flynn (Cristin Milioti), a pneumatic, infantilized, thumb-sucking trampoline jumper whose character was both an obvious reference to Munn (who took a girlish hop on the old trampoline for a Maxim shoot) and, to my eye, an even more devastating take on the pigtailed creepy-sex-object shtick of Sarah Silverman, two hot real-life funny women often credited by male critics for their comedic talent while those women who don’t make their sexuality the most salient part of their personae get ignored or dismissed.

When Lemon actually gets a load of Abby, and notes the way she plays to men for approval, she tries to “help” her by explaining, in front of a statue of Eleanor Roosevelt, that she doesn’t have to put on a baby voice and do her hair like a little girl in order to be valued. Abby retorts that her voice is not fake, and that “the whole sexy baby thing isn’t an act … I’m a very sexy baby!” More pointedly, Abby questions Liz’s claim that she’s trying to help her: “Really? By judging me on my appearance and the way I talk?” and wonders how her infantilized appearance is any different from Liz wearing glasses to convey that she’s smart.

Mesmerizingly, practically the whole half hour of network television was dedicated to slicing and dicing nearly every angle of the arguments that crop up any time anyone tries to talk about gender, popularity and perception. It was a testament to the fact that these arguments have been cropping up ever more frequently in recent years, thanks in no small part to the ascension of Fey and her generation of talented (and very often beautiful) comedians, as well as the rise of a critical and popular feminist-minded blogosphere that keeps a celebratory and often cutting eye on the gender history being made in media, politics and entertainment.

Yes, the episode took a couple of digs at Jezebel — a site whose success has offered one of the best examples of the heretofore dubious possibility that feminism, politics and high culture could effectively be mixed with pop culture, comedy and low culture — with Liz pointing out that it was “this really cool feminist website where women talk about how far we’ve come and which celebrities have the worst beach bodies” before hooting: “Ruth Bader Ginsburg!”

But the very fact that an NBC sitcom would revolve a plot around the commentary coming from a lady-minded website seems to me to be a warm tribute to that website’s clout in the landscape of cultural criticism. At least one person at Jezebel agrees. Irin Carmon, the reporter whose work on Munn and “The Daily Show” was most directly parodied in last night’s episode, told me, “We’re honored, of course. It’s fitting that this most meta of shows would tackle the contradictions and tensions of the whole ‘women in comedy’ conversation – and more broadly how women struggle with the external representation of our sexuality. Also, Nick Denton would never let us put a womyn sign on the homepage.”

Indeed, one of the finest site gags was the design of the JoanOfSnark.com site, which looked very much like Jezebel, with the “o” made into a “womyn sign” and the site tag line, “Perhaps correct. Definitely exhausting.”

As someone who has frequently weighed in on the topics being parsed last night on NBC, and who believes that public wrestling with questions of women and perception is not only necessary but itself a sign of progress, I could also not agree more with this nifty summation of how the process often feels. People coming at it — often from contradictory angles — are often correct. And the sparring is often exhausting. Last night, it happened also to be hilarious.

What Fey is good at is peeing all over sacred (or at least earnest) cows at the same time that she’s polishing them up and offering them more airtime than they would find anywhere else on network television. (Remember the episode from some seasons ago in which Fey’s Lemon lets down her feminist comedy writer idol with her unwillingness to tell a risky political joke in the same episode that Alec Baldwin’s Jack Donaghy imitates a series of African-American male characters in one of the more racially electric skits on television since the demise of “Chappelle’s Show.”)

Last night, Fey again took feminist piety as her mark (memorably telling Jack, “I support women! I’m like a human bra!”) at the same time that she engaged in it herself. At one point, when jealous Jenna (Jane Krakowski) tells Liz she must destroy lollipop-licking competition for male adulation, Liz responds, “No, Jenna, that’s exactly the problem: men infantalize women and women tear each other down.” No contradictory punch line here. Liz spoke the truth! Or part of it. Other parts included the fact that the JoanOfSnark critique of how women were treated on “TGS” was spot on, as evidenced by the fact that Liz’s purportedly female-friendly show had recently showcased Jenna … as feminist icons Amelia Earhart and Hillary Clinton … both losing control to menstrual cramps. To meta things up, these bits were followed by (fictional feminist icon) Liz Lemon announcing to her writers’ room: “This show started as a show for women starring women. At the very least we should be elevating the way women are perceived in society!” before clutching her midsection and shouting “Oh! My period! You’re all fired!” and fainting.

See? The blogofems might be hypocritical, pious and tiresome, but they are also … correct!

Fey herself has been one of those Joans of Snark she was sending up last night, at least when it comes to being full of contradiction and confusion at the same time that she’s genuinely and energetically engaged questions of gender representation in comedy, politics and entertainment. As the first female head writer at (and later guest contributor to) “Saturday Night Live,” her skits about and starring women were put under a microscope that revealed two different strains of DNA: the one where she and Amy Poehler made feminism gut-busting at the Weekend Update Desk and “Bitch Is the New Black” got emblazoned on Hillary Clinton-supporting T-shirts, and the one where she made lots of jokes about whores. Fey produced, wrote and starred in “Mean Girls,” a feminist movie filled with mixed messages about the innate natures of young women; she has said publicly dismissive and judgmental things about promiscuous women and strippers; she regularly pokes fun at the image of the pathetic single woman as Liz Lemon, and this summer finally ran afoul of some of her most ardent admirers in the blogosphere.

Just a few weeks ago, Fey’s upcoming book of essays was excerpted by the New Yorker, one of the magazines currently under scrutiny for its paucity of female bylines. Her roaringly unapologetic feminist piece about the scrutiny, pressure and conflicting responsibilities of working mothers included some deep jabs at Hollywood’s relationship to aging women, including her acidic assertion, in reference to a generation of older comedic actresses we never see anymore because they’ve been labeled crazy, that “the definition of ‘crazy’ in show business is a woman who keeps talking even after no one wants to fuck her anymore.”

The fact that there is hypocrisy in feminist criticism — and more maddeningly, that there are knots having to do with beauty, sexuality, comedy, respect, desirability, power and representation that will simply not come cleanly undone no matter how sharp a nail we take to them — does not mean that the criticism is invalid, or that we should stop worrying the knots, or that our struggles on both fronts should be exempt from mockery.

Jezebel does publish smart feminist content at the same time it publishes snarky items that might appear in more traditional women’s magazines. So does Salon. Tina Fey has made huge, feminist strides for women in comedy at the same time that she has made comedy at the expense of women. Such is life when you attempt — as we all should! — to bring gender criticism out of the pure ether of sociopolitical discourse and attempt to deploy it in the real, messy world of commerce, consumption and popular culture.

On the show, it turned out that Liz Lemon was correct: Abby’s voice and boobs and pigtailed hair had been fake. But Liz’s feminist victory was trumped by her feminist fail: the put-on personality had been Abby’s attempt to escape a violent and abusive ex-husband, who now knew where she was thanks to Liz’s “helpful” meddling. This final twist was ridiculous but made a final needle-sharp point: Different strands of feminism — or any kind of social activism — can work in contradiction to each other. Just because there’s no one correct answer doesn’t mean that the questions are useless or boring; they’re interesting enough to plot a sitcom around.

To dig deeply — and wittily — into these ultimately unsolvable but real issues, especially with direct tributes to places like Jezebel and more broadly the feminist critique of media powerhouses like Stewart’s “Daily Show” or of Fey herself, is to pay them the honor of taking them seriously — seriously comedically. Last night’s episode was Fey’s clever, direct admission that she’s been paying attention, and that her typically eagle eye has caught the hypocrisy on every side, including her own.