There’s a scene in an early episode of Lena Dunham’s “Girls” where Dunham’s character, Hannah, openly fantasizes about testing positive for HIV. That way, she says to a gynecologist examining her, people will congratulate her just for staying alive rather than expect her to accomplish something, and she’ll have a reason to be upset besides just a boy not texting her back. “That’s an incredibly silly thing to say,” the doctor, one of the show’s few brown faces (at least in initial episodes), says gently, citing infection and fatality rates for young women – mostly young women who don’t have much in common with Hannah, though the doctor doesn’t say so.
That’s also around the time the gynecologist says, in a scene clipped for the trailer, “You could not pay me enough to be 24 again,” and Hannah says, “Well, they’re not paying me at all.”
If the teenager was an invention of the second half of the 20th century, more recent decades have brought another period of suspension between childhood and adulthood, the post-college era of confused self-creation. As Dunham herself recently said of the show’s title, “I think that these are girls who will feel like girls until they’re 35 maybe.” For a certain kind of lucky person, freed of the most immediate financial burdens and rich in a family’s emotional investment, college might have felt like independence or responsibility. But it turns out to be so cosseted and circumscribed that graduating feels a little like leaving the womb.
Even so, the ways “Girls” and the new film “Damsels in Distress” treat the problems of young womanhood can tell us a little bit about the realities of class and generational change in America. Since Dunham’s characters aren’t visibly encumbered by one of the most serious matters actually facing her generation – crippling student debt – and they can control their fertility to delay childbearing, they’re both grasping and adrift, left feeling both entitled to more and vaguely guilty about their right to be upset about not getting it. No wonder Hannah, in a moment of weakness, seems to wish for a “real” problem.
The interim solution, it seems, is to talk through it as articulately and self-deprecatingly as possible, and the long-term solution is to wait it out. The former tactic has always been preferred for characters in Whit Stillman movies, who try to cope with the emotions of early adulthood by offering as much cerebral distance as they can muster. Stillman’s first film in over a decade, “Damsels in Distress,” offers yet another self-possessed hero pronouncing to an outsider how to rationalize and handle one’s feelings in a world of elaborate social customs – in this case, college. As in earlier Stillman movies, there are more dewy, lovely girls, often surrounded by inadequate and self-obsessed men. In Dunham’s work, the two meet to have mostly unsatisfying sex, but Stillman’s more genteel, ahistorical types favor dance crazes.
Sex for the characters on “Girls” is plainly influenced by porn, but the characters’ congress as we see it is deliberately the anti-porn: at best, demystified, often disappointing, intermittently funny, and never quite leaving the realm of self-consciousness. This is how group socializing – parties in particular — functions in Stillman movies. It’s never quite as fun as it’s supposed to be, and the best lines come on the sidelines. But people still valiantly try to lose themselves in dance, a more raw form of interaction even as it has its own rules. It is almost always a nostalgic exercise – his first three movies, “Metropolitan,” “Barcelona” and “The Last Days of Disco,” each take place at the lingering close of an era, and the “Damsels’” device-free world is steeped in tap and line-dancing. Moving your body unself-consciously is a goal in itself — in “Damsels in Distress,” the highest ambition of Violet (Greta Gerwig) is to start a new dance craze, the Sambola. It’s one of the funniest jokes of the movie that this is actually just a pastiche of several existing dances, remixed.
What does it mean to be ambitious when so much has been made easy and so much came before you? When your parents seem to have done all the heavy lifting and the significant cultural work? Sometimes, it means lowering your sights so low you can’t fail – per Hannah, just staying alive is an accomplishment. In the beginning of “Barcelona,” one character vows to only date women who aren’t beautiful, and now in “Damsels,” Violet proclaims that one should only date “morons,” ostensibly because one has an opportunity to improve the world that way. Of course, it’s also a way to preempt rejection when there is very little concretely at stake.
Preempting rejection is something Dunham knows well: She’s often admitted to doing it by putting forward her un-Hollywood body as mortifyingly as possible. The same goes for what she called in the same interview with critic Alan Sepinwall “self-exposure and the age of the over share.” It functions, she said, as “another kind of self-defense in a certain way. It’s like, I’m going to tell you everything about me so you can’t tell me anything about me that I don’t already know.” That includes the semi-shamefaced revelation that one wants to be famous or important: While Dunham’s characters crave sexual validation, career validation is at least as meaningful. In a moment of honesty, Dunham’s Aura in her movie “Tiny Furniture” admits that she wants to be as successful as her mother. In “Girls,” Hannah is more open about her desire to be something – “a voice, of a generation,” as she eventually amends.
Dunham picked Stillman’s “The Last Days of Disco” for her recent week of programming at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and she cast Stillman mainstay Chris Eigeman as the boss at her internship in “Girls.” In that movie, two recent college graduates who like each other less than Dunham’s girlfriends toil in publishing and cycle through sexual and romantic partners. As they embark on an apartment hunt, a male colleague sneers, “That’s comical, that girls like you really worry about paying the rent. Aren’t your fathers heavily subsidizing your living expenses with big allowances?” The character played by Kate Beckinsale replies indignantly, “They’re not big at all.”
There are other, more acute humiliations, but in the arc of the movie, they pass. Chloe Sevigny’s Alice gets slut-shamed by the first man she has sex with, and dates yet another arrogant jerk, until she doesn’t. By the end, disco is dead, but Alice has moved on, having gone with her instinct and landed a career coup. She finds a better guy, at least for now, to bust a move with on the subway. Meanwhile, in “Girls,” Hannah momentarily frees herself from anxiety in a dance – first solo in her bedroom, then with her roommate. Forged in the absence of responsibility for a nuclear family, friendships of particular vitality and import are a signal achievement of this stage of life – and a way to survive it.
In the end, for the women and men of Stillman and Dunham’s world, these elite woes are emotionally destabilizing but ultimately transient. That’s partly why the pity and dismay that’s been bestowed upon Dunham’s characters by some of her elders seems so misplaced. Even as she takes her characters – and her peers’ – pain seriously, she’s affectionately skewering them for our benefit, partly because she knows they’ll come out of it mostly fine. As the New Yorker’s Emily Nussbaum has pointed out on Twitter, in “Tiny Furniture,” Dunham’s character, Aura, finds her mother’s diary from her early 20s “and finds out that things weren’t different for her. Same struggles with sex, body and artistic ambition, same unformed identity. But now, that mother “RARELY thinks about those experiences. They’re valuable, they shaped her, but [they’re] just history now.”
These are bumps along the learning curve that have long been part of the male coming-of-age narrative – “sowing wild oats” and so on – that still prompt a sort of paternalistic panic when practiced by “girls.” Sure, not everyone will emerge as quickly and as brilliantly as Dunham, but for those temporarily freed from the most pressing burdens of life, left only to figure out what the hell they actually want from theirs, it’s a light at the end of the tunnel.
Ashley Judd would like you to get out of her face. The 43-year-old actress, activist and sometime controversial memoirist has had a high-profile return to the public eye, with the debut of her new drama “Missing.” And it’s a profile that has been the subject of much snark and WTFing.
In the past few weeks, Radar has lamented that she’s gone from “pretty to puffy” and “fattened her face with fillers” while Us declared her “nearly unrecognizable.” SheKnows hit her even harder, complaining that “the pretty face we’re used to [has been] replaced by a puffy disaster.” And when her reps declared that her swollen look was the result of steroids for a sinus infection, they only fanned the flames, leading The Stir to snap of her “way chubbier than usual” look, “Come on, Ashley, we may be dumb, but we’re not stupid.”
Now Judd, never one to shy away from expressing her feelings, has penned a rebuttal to the face haters. In a column for the Daily Beast, Judd addresses the tongue wagging about her “puffy” face and straightforwardly declares that “the conversation was pointedly nasty, gendered, and misogynistic and embodies what all girls and women in our culture, to a greater or lesser degree, endure every day, in ways both outrageous and subtle.”
While it’s a vast step up from Samantha Brick’s already notorious defense of her looks, Judd’s piece is not without its own flaws. Even in high dudgeon, she manages to come off as impossibly pleased with herself — she humbly brags about her “nearly flawless” skin and still has time to mention her “serious work, such as publishing op-eds about preventing HIV, empowering poor youth worldwide, and conflict mineral mining in Democratic Republic of Congo.”
But the point Judd makes — about how wildly screwed up the relentless public scrutiny is — is valid and necessary. Of her weight fluctuations, Judd says that “We won’t even address how extraordinary it is that a size eight would be heckled as fat.” And, perhaps most tellingly, she addresses the absurdity of the suggestion that she’s “messed up” just because “my 2012 face looks different than it did when I filmed ‘Double Jeopardy’ in 1998.”
The lengths to which celebrities — mostly women – go in the name of youth and beauty are a matter of public discourse. We grapple with questions about women and aging and body image by talking about Nicole Kidman’s forehead and Megan Fox’s nose and plus-size models. But the gotcha! put-downs any time a woman expands or contracts in size or seems too creased or too smooth — the “general incessant objectification” and “abnormal obsession with women’s faces and bodies,” as Judd calls it — create a culture of viciousness and perpetual dissatisfaction. Look at that girl. She’s so fat/thin/wrinkled/fake. Who does she think she is? How dare she? That’s not just hateful. That’s lazy.
That Judd looks different than she did in 1998 is a fact. How she arrived at her current look is her business. By confronting the speculation head-on, Judd has acknowledged her place in an often cruel, unwinnable war of public opinion. One opinion column likely won’t make the tabloids and blogs pause in their daily digging on who is displaying cellulite or a trout pout. But by calling out the critics, Judd reminds us how useless and hollow the sport of body snarking truly is, and the fact that expecting anybody to be the same kind of “pretty” she was 14 years ago is, in her word, pure insanity.
When we first meet Alma (Helene Bergsholm), the blond, almost angelic-looking teenage protagonist of the Norwegian comedy “Turn Me On, Dammit!,” she’s sprawled out on the kitchen floor of her mom’s house with her hand down her pants, eagerly following the instructions of some phone-sex dude named Stig. You’ll have to trust me that this is the setup for a memorably awkward sight gag and not a creepazoid NC-17 fantasy — or, to put it another way, if Alma definitely has a dirty mind, the movie doesn’t.
A dry, whimsical and finally sweet film that tries to turn the conventional teenage sex comedy inside out (at least in gender terms), this debut feature from writer-director Jannicke Systad Jacobsen is one of those rare movies that gets better and more complicated the more you think about it. Watching the film is a thoroughly charming experience on its own terms, and then you’re left puzzling over all kinds of thorny questions that fail to yield clear answers. Is female sexual desire fundamentally different from male desire? If so, why is that true? Is a teenage girl’s sexuality, as one female friend put it, mainly a question of “playing around with her newfound power over the desires of others, rather than an expression of her own desire”?
Indeed, teenage female sexual desire remains something close to a cultural taboo, and let’s stipulate two things right now: The more I talk about this the more I run the risk of seeming like a perv, and I’m definitely not going to work out the whys and wherefores of that in a movie review. Perhaps teenage girls and young women are such central objects of sexual fascination in our culture — in the form of both lustful fantasy and puritanical repression — that it’s difficult to conceptualize them as being subjects too. I kicked this around with a few colleagues, and we could only come up with a few examples of movies involving teen female horniness, all of them problematic in one way or another: Phoebe Cates and Jennifer Jason Leigh in “Fast Times at Ridgemont High,” Laura Dern in “Smooth Talk,” Katie Jarvis (opposite Michael Fassbender) in the disturbing but undeniably hot British indie “Fish Tank.” “Dirty Dancing”? Sort of. “The Virgin Suicides”? Sort of. There’s a lot of sublimated, metaphorical, kinda-sorta, which you just don’t encounter in the endless numbers of movies about the endless horniness of teen boys.
At any rate, Jacobsen (a woman, in case you can’t parse Scandinavian names) isn’t interested in sublimated kinda-sorta. She drives cheerfully straight at the taboo, spinning an absurdist, imaginative coming-of-age yarn that would seem far more conventional if its hero were a teenage boy. Whether you see “Turn Me On, Dammit!” as a realistic tale of teen lust and confusion in the post-feminist welfare state, or as something more like satirical farce, is entirely up to you. Is it believable that a cute teenage girl would have to resort to phone sex to get off? Have there ever been phone-sex lines aimed at women in the first place? If you’re going to get hung up on questions like that, this movie is not for you. The point is that Alma is stuck in the nowheresville fjord-side town of Skoddeheimen — I think that’s Norwegian for “Podunk” — and she’s desperately horny, and the boundaries between her sexual fantasies and the rest of the world aren’t what they might be.
Alma has sporadic phone-sex-interruptus sessions with Stig (inflating her mother’s phone bill to alarming dimensions) and elaborate nightly fantasies about a sleepy-eyed local dreamboat named Artur (Matias Myren), who seems to like her and all, but won’t make a move. Almost everyone she encounters, from her dour boss at the village convenience store to her best friend’s bitchy sister, can become the temporary star of Alma’s (often hilarious) erotic imagination. Her partner in loathing for life in Skoddeheimen — they flip off the village sign every time they pass it on the bus — is her classmate Sara (Malin Bjørhovde), who writes meandering letters to Texas death-row inmates that we see as low-tech animations. (There is indeed an element of “Napoleon Dynamite”-goes-to-rural-Scandinavia quirkiness to this picture, but I never minded it.)
Things don’t improve any for Alma after she finally has an intimate moment with Artur, amid the ruined outdoor furniture behind the local youth center. Her would-be beau either does or does not display his throbbing naked manhood for her, which raises both the question of what actually happened (Alma says he did, but Artur denies it) but also of what Alma really wants, whether from him, from boys in general and from life. Since Alma is a known deviant and phone-sex addict, even her so-called friends don’t believe her, and she isn’t entirely sure herself. That’s when “Turn Me On, Dammit!,” which is largely light in tone, swings back toward social realism. Like girls shamed for their real or imaginary sexual conduct all over the world, Alma becomes a social pariah and the subject of vicious bathroom graffiti. She runs away to the perceived bohemian freedom of the big city, forcing a somewhat predictable crisis in which Artur, Sara, Alma’s eternally horrified mom (a difficult role, nicely handled by Henriette Steenstrup) and Alma herself are all forced to reexamine their actions.
When I first saw “Turn Me On, Dammit!” at last year’s Tribeca Film Festival — when the last word of the title was “Goddammit,” with no exclamation mark — it provoked a certain amount of debate, with some viewers suggesting that it might be too conventionally naughty to carry a feminist message. In fact, pervo-expectations will be thwarted, in that “Turn Me On” is all talk and no action. There’s no sex or nudity at all, unless you count Artur’s egregiously fake male member. It might merit an R rating (if it were rated), but just barely. This is a wry, affectionate small-town movie that ends up much closer to old-fashioned teen romance than you expect at first. But as I suggested earlier, along the way it sneaks up on a genuine feminist issue. Boys Alma’s age are expected to be sex-obsessed, but a girl who yearns for action is likely to find her lust and confusion simultaneously stigmatized, commodified and exploited. If Alma’s story scores an extremely modest victory against repression and hypocrisy, it’s one that female libertines everywhere (and those who honor and support them) can embrace.
“Turn Me On, Dammit!” opens this week in New York and April 13 in Los Angeles, with a national rollout to follow.
During a long train ride with an acquaintance, my female friend was recently paid the ultimate compliment. Comparing her to a woman he’s casually seeing, he looked deep into her eyes and said without irony, “but you, you’re wife material.”
I thought this antiquated expression had gone the way of “arm candy” and “trading up” as part of the second-wave agreement that likening your lady to something you consume or drive is just not cool anymore. But perhaps even in 2012, our “Mad Men”-fueled nostalgia-fest is making us long for an era of clear-cut sexist distinction, when wives were wives and mistresses, mistresses. The AMC show’s fifth season premiere explored this dichotomy, as Don Draper’s secretary-turned-wife Megan bridged the divide separating working women from their marriageable counterparts.
These days, concerns like Megan’s seem absurdly anachronistic, but they also raise a bigger question: In an age of increasing divorce rates and single ladies celebration, what does this wife material “compliment” really mean?
Perhaps simply the apparent interest in a long-term relationship, one of the many options an independent woman can choose from. Rebecca Traister, Salon contributor, is in the midst of writing a book about unmarried women. “If you lift the social imperative for early marriage,” said Traister, “then the varied sexual and romantic impulses of the people around us are revealed. You see this incredible variety, not only in how people act, but in how they want to act and what might make them happy.” If there’s no longer just one accepted model for fulfilling relationships, people are liberated to choose from a spectrum of lifestyles and arrangements.
Back in the day, of course, being wife material meant you could keep a good home, would make a good mother, and that you were a “good girl” – not like one of those fast women that a guy can’t bring home to meet the folks. You were respectable, that is, you didn’t challenge repressive gender norms. Surely there’s no need to spell it out, but you were material, literally that which constitutes an object: You could easily be fashioned into the role of wife. What made “wife material” a compliment is the dichotomy between the women who are and those who are not deemed worthy of putting a ring on it (where worthy means chaste).
And today? For one, sex outside marriage isn’t social suicide. Secondly, we’re told marriage isn’t what it used to be. Kate Bolick reports in her popular Atlantic piece, “All The Single Ladies,” that in 1960, the median age of first marriage in the U.S. was 23 for men and 20 for women, while today it is 28 and 26. She writes, “Today, a smaller proportion of American women in their early 30s are married than at any other point since the 1950s, if not earlier.” And according to the Pew Research Center, Americans increasingly think marriage is obsolete.
Of course, that’s not to say that it is. Marriage is unarguably still a cultural norm, even as the conversation expands to include alternatives. Though it’s happening later in life, people are still settling down and doing the whole house-and-kids thing. And whether and when one does tie the knot can often run along geographic and socioeconomic lines. For women with financial and educational privilege, marriage has slowly shuffled out from under the spotlight of Ultimate Goal and has become one choice among many in a broader spectrum of what a fierce fulfilled female can look like.
What replaces this wife-or-spinster mantra is new terrain. Traister stresses that from 1890 to 1980 – for 90 years! – the median age for first marriage fluctuated between 20 and 22 for women. “We now live in a world where it’s normal and expected for women to live independently – professionally, economically and sexually – whether it’s for two years, 10 years or 40 years,” said Traister. “That’s never existed as a norm before. It’s created a whole new life stage for women.”
Before, a woman’s identity was shaped by how she was connected to her family, first as a daughter, then as wife and mother. Now she often has a period of single independence. And being in such a period, as a 20-something single woman, I attest that it can feel both exhilarating and tempestuous, as thrillingly liberating as it is often lonely, surprising, blissful and straight-up mundane. It’s unimaginable how different life would be if I’d married two, three or four years ago, how differently I thought of relationships then.
Interestingly, in his new book “Going Solo,” sociologist Eric Klinenberg found that women living alone are on average more content with their situation than their male counterparts. This is due, it seems, to the cultivation of other close relationships and communities, be it friends, family or neighbors. Men are, of course, as capable of such social networking, but seem to be more susceptible to isolation, especially in older age. Through urbanization and communication technology, modernity makes a wider array of relationships easier than ever before.
It’s also worth noting that even the expectation that all satisfaction can come from one romantic relationship is a new idea. As historian Stephanie Coontz has written, “It has only been in the last century that Americans have put all their emotional eggs in the basket of coupled love.” As new generations couple up, we reinvent the way we think about relationships.
Popular culture sometimes tells the story of a passionate female friendship as important as romantic love. The recent blockbuster “Bridesmaids” – as well as its darker indie twin featured at Sundance, “Bachelorette” – highlights a new anti-rom-com genre where women are the ones making the jokes, and despite the titles, it’s not all about love and marriage. Kristen Wiig’s great success has been praised for representing the multidimensional women the film was made for and by. The once competitive social and economic pressure to become a wife translates (with the exception of “Bridesmaids’” pat ending) into a humorous girl fight for the role of best friend.
As the stigma of raising children outside of wedlock declines – over half of births to American women under 30 occur outside marriage – and the normative nuclear family is less mandated, a reimagining of the family may be taking place: from same-sex relationships to single parenting, community living to polyamory, and more. This isn’t to say that alternative arrangements are always easier or more satisfying; as often as single parenting isn’t always difficult, it is not always easy. But it is liberating – the idea that family planning doesn’t necessarily have to follow the path prescribed by the conservative right.
Notable events in the effort to legalize same-sex marriage, like the recent overturning of Proposition 8 by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, widen parameters to include many more couples as marriageable, and demonstrate that more and more Americans believe the law should recognize same-sex marriages (53 percent of Americans, according to a 2011 Gallup poll). As marriage equality expands, so too does the notion of marriage.
I’m reminded that “wife material” is meant, deep down, as a genuine, if misguided, compliment. We’ve all met someone and thought, Hey, I want to spend time with this person, this is someone I could picture as my boyfriend, husband, partner — even if rings, wedding cake and forever aren’t regular visitors to our imagination. The assumption that this is something that especially women want to hear is an obsolete translation of a larger, much more correct cliché that people just want to love and be loved.
What Traister described as the lifted imperative to marry really does give us a better view of how different people truly are. I’ve never been one to imagine my wedding or even, really, my romantic future at all, and I don’t say this with particular pride; in the past the realization has freaked me out. My aforementioned friend, on the other hand, has been super-excited about her domestic future since she was old enough to flip through Martha Stewart Weddings. But the idea that one of us is normal while the other isn’t simply isn’t compatible with the present.
And it is increasingly clear that we can all be made of wife material, but only if we want to be.
Until now, reclaiming the word “slut” never appealed to me. I fully supported the message of SlutWalk — that women don’t ask to be raped by dressing a certain way — but I had no interest in applying the slur to myself. But this Limbaugh thing has me singing a different tune.
I’m not exactly scrawling “slut” on my forehead, but suddenly, reclaiming the word seems potentially exciting. I’m not the only one recognizing a shift in the conversation about reclamation. Megan Gibson of Time wrote, “While the motivation [for SlutWalk] was inarguably sound … the protest caused controversy, in part because many were wary to associate themselves with the word slut.” She continues, “Remarkably, thanks to Limbaugh’s ignorant vitriol, we’re seeing a marked change in that wariness.”
That said, in identifying with Sandra Fluke, the target of Limbaugh’s rant, some women have instead chosen to distance themselves from the term, which perfectly illustrates how complicated reclamation can be.
This week, the hashtag “iamnotaslut” went viral. Jessica Scott, an Army officer who started the hashtag, tweeted, “I am a 35 year old mother of 2, an Army officer who has deployed. I use #birthcontrol to be a good soldier & responsible parent #iamnotaslut.”
Feminist activist Jaclyn Friedman points out that the message here is, “Just because I use birth control doesn’t mean I’m a bad girl” — which might imply that some women are bad. “The problem with the ‘iamnotaslut’ hashtag is that it creates a line,” she explains. “[It says,] ‘I’m a valid spokesperson on this but women who have lots of sex are not.’”
Fluke is such a sympathetic character in part because her testimony — contrary to Limbaugh’s bizarre interpretation — wasn’t about sex; it focused on women who need birth control for reasons other than pregnancy prevention (specifically, polycystic ovarian syndrome and endometriosis).
“It’s a way to categorize and differentiate yourself, that you are deserving of respect,” says Leora Tanenbaum, author of “Slut! Growing Up Female With a Bad Reputation.” It’s not all that different from what she observed among teenage girls while researching her book: The slur was most often used by girls, not boys. It’s a way for girls and women to displace anxiety about their own sexuality. “It’s a classic scapegoating technique,” she says.
The Limbaugh affair is a perfect example of how reclaiming, or rejecting, the term is immensely personal and dependent on context — and it goes much deeper than either SlutWalk or SlutRush. As many have pointed out, the word “slut” comes with different baggage for many women of color. A letter written to the organizers of SlutWalk and signed by hundreds, read, “As Black women, we do not have the privilege or the space to call ourselves ‘slut’ without validating the already historically entrenched ideology and recurring messages about what and who the Black woman is. We don’t have the privilege to play on destructive representations burned in our collective minds, on our bodies and souls for generations.”
How individual acts of reclamation are understood by others is also dependent on context. “If you’re with a girlfriend and you’re like, ‘Yo slut,’ or whatever, everybody laughs and you all understand that you’re being ironic,” says Tanenbaum. “You can be ironic when you’re with people that get the irony.”
One of the major arguments against reclamation at this point in time is that not enough people get the irony. “It may sound funny for me to say, because I did write a book that’s called ‘Slut!,’ but I do have a problem with taking back the term,” says Tanenbaum. “In order to successfully reclaim the term ‘slut’ we need to be in a place where more people have their awareness raised and are cognizant of the sexual double standard and what that means for women’s sexuality and freedom.” It’s still “too much of an in-joke,” she says.
It also means different things to different reclaimers, depending on the context they use it in. Bikini Kill’s Kathleen Hanna once explained her early-’90s performances with “slut” scrawled on her stomach, like so, “I thought a lot of guys might be thinking this anyway when they looked at my picture, so this would be like holding up a mirror to what they were thinking.” It was a way to preempt critics. Friedman gave a similar explanation for why she chose “My Sluthood, Myself” as the title for a personal essay she wrote about her experience with Craigslist’s Casual Encounters.
“Slut” can also “denote an uninhibited, adventurous and celebratory approach to sex for both men and women in all their magnificent diversity,” says Dossie Eaton, author of the classic “The Ethical Slut,” which was published in 1997. She says, “In the wondrously explorative ’70s, I learned that gay men use the word ‘slut’ as a term of admiration and approval, as in ‘What did you do at that party? Oh, you slut!’” Similarly, the organizers of SlutWalk Seattle wrote in a blog post that “slut” serves as a “sex-positive” term for individuals “who have and enjoy frequent consensual sex, especially with multiple partners.”
In reaction to Limbaugh’s remarks, saying, “Yes, I’m a slut!” feels to me like saying, “Yes, I’m a woman!” My comfort in this case might speak to a lack of daring: It’s certainly less bold to align yourself with “sluts” who use birth control and testify before Congress in conservative professional attire than with “sluts” who raucously march through the streets wearing fishnets and bustiers. Maybe on an emotional level I buy into the notion of good girls and bad girls.
The truth is that, as a slur, “slut” is used to control the sexuality of all women. It can be leveled at any woman, regardless of sexual experience or dress. There is no strict definition of what a slut is — there is no set partner count, no percentage of exposed skin. Part of the difficulty of reclaiming “slut” is that it’s such a divisive term, but that’s also part of the argument for reclaiming it.
Republican Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell agrees that the state should not compel a woman seeking abortion to take a probe up her vagina. Polls show that even Republican women flee the specter of Rick (no amnio) Santorum, opening a gap in his improbable march to the nomination. And these are considered feminist victories?
Where once angry feminists flooded the streets of New York with photogenic protest marches and vowed to “take back the night” on campuses across the nation, now they’re grateful that their penetrator is not the government they elected. Where abortion was legalized and protected in every state in the nation, now they fight the government they elected not to empower their employers to deny them birth control insurance. Where once feminists combined support for the Equal Rights Amendment with campaigns to address the scourge of breast cancer, now they fight their own cancer charity, the Komen Foundation, not to victimize Planned Parenthood.
Amid all the celebration of the reversal in Virginia and in the Komen Foundation and the insurance of birth control in the Affordable Care Act, one thing remains true: If that’s where the battle over women’s lives is taking place, you’ve come a long way, baby. A long way down, that is.
For 40 years, women, the majority of the population and the majority of the electorate, have been the Sleeping Beauties of American politics, slumbering obliviously while vigilant and relentless adversaries surround their rights with a thicket of thorn trees.
Maybe it’s the fault of the ’60s feminists. The Princess Sleeping Beauty’s royal parents tried to protect her from the fairy’s curse – that she would be pricked by the spindle of a spinning wheel — by banning all spinning wheels from the palace. Using the modern equivalent of royal edict –a constitutional ruling from the U.S. Supreme Court — feminists tried to protect reproductive rights by banning all anti-choice politics from the nation. The poisoned needle arrived anyway in the form of a law forbidding the government to use funds, mostly Medicaid, for abortions (the “Hyde Amendment”). Women, ignorant of the danger, failed to stop it. Oh well, the rich Princesses said, it’s only money. We don’t need Medicaid for our abortions, as long as they’re not criminal.
They missed entirely the Hyde Amendment’s toxic message that abortions are not the tool of women’s liberation, but a shameful private act that no populace should be expected to pay for. Women should be grateful if the country turned its face away as they sneaked off to unmarked abortion “clinics” and did the dirty deed. And so the downward spiral began. Having uncoupled abortion from the goal of women’s flourishing lives, women’s opponents attacked the value of women having such lives at all, positing a series of counterweights: children’s flourishing lives (home schooling), God’s will (abstinence, rhythm method, quiverfull movement).
And still the women snoozed. Reproductive rights became “reproductive health,” as if preventing a life-altering pregnancy was not a worthy enough goal. Keeping women healthy, for their male sexual partners, now that was a goal. Rep. Hyde’s Republican Party paid no price in the voting booth, a majority of women voting Republican when men did and Democratic when men did too. Not until 1996 did women’s disaffection from the Republican Party even arguably change the outcome of a presidential election and even then it was one point, well within the margin for error.
Ambitious female New York writers made contrarian reputations denying the existence of date rape and falling in love with their babies. In 2008, a critical percentage of female Democratic primary voters declined to support the first viable woman candidate in the history of the Republic.
In the fairy tale a prince does the waking. In social movements, it’s usually the bad supervisor, as the saying goes, who “is the best union organizer.” Maybe insult from the Komen Foundation – women’s own pretty ribbon – will turn out to be the thing to sound the reveille. The pieces are in place for a reawakening. Social media makes it possible, as the Komen flap showed, and there are women in high cultural places like “Saturday Night Live” (“SNL” almost revived Hillary’s candidacy), which unexpectedly took on the Virginia law.
For some years, women with open feminist values have been emerging in the interface of mixed mainstream, online and social media, blogging at first, or writing for aggregators like the Huffington Post, and slowly moving into mainstream outlets as those outlets moved into the online world. Amanda Marcotte from Pandagon.com, who now often appears in the Guardian, and Jessica Valenti, who started Feministing.com and often appears in the Washington Post, are perfect examples of how the changing environment makes it possible for former social rebels to find outlets.
More important, the old online/mainstream divide is, well, old, with mainstream media increasingly emphasizing their informal, time-sensitive online outlets and online magazines flooding the zone in a very traditional way when stories like Komen appear. Slate, Newsweek/The Daily Beast and, of course, Salon, have fielded a range of feminist-oriented writers, so, when Komen erupted, women and sympathetic men covered the story everywhere from the Young Turks radio show to Politico. A combination of social media, highly placed opinion makers and self-conscious activists with access to liminal media has done wonders for the gay revolution in the last 10 years. Similarly positioned, women stir.
None of this will work unless women emerge from the dozy mind-set that made them vulnerable to the pushback. Valorizing Planned Parenthood for its cancer tests and defending amniocentesis because some women have it and don’t abort, won’t change a thing. As Planned Parenthood’s Gloria Feldt put it in her brilliant afterword to “Abortion Under Attack,” “where you start determines where you will end up in any conversation that has social and political ramifications.” Only claiming women’s right to a flourishing life and to any social technology, including, openly, abortions, which enables it, will stop the long downward spiral of the women’s movement. Are women ready? It’s been 40 years since the Hyde Amendment. Maybe American women have been sleepwalking in the wilderness long enough.
Stills from "Girls" (top) and "Damsels in Distress" 
Ashley Judd (Credit: Reuters/Jean Amet) 
Matias Myren and Helene Bergsholm in "Turn Me On, Dammit!" 
Jessica Paré and Jon Hamm in "Mad Men" (Credit: AMC) 
SlutWalk participants cheer a speaker (Credit: Olivia Harris / Reuters) 
Members of Planned Parenthood, NARAL Pro-Choice America and more than 20 other organizations hold a "Stand Up for Women's Health" rally in supporting preventive health care and family planning services, including abortion in Washington April 7, 2011. (Credit: Reuters/Joshua Roberts) 
