Noah's Ark?

From thisgirl, an interesting article on why young women reject the term of "feminist". I found this section to be particularly thought-provoking:

Young women may believe that a feminist identity puts them out of the pool for many men, limits the options of who they might become with a partner, how they might decide to live. They may not be wrong either: how many young men feminists or feminist sympathizers do you know? A politics that may require making demands on a partner, or that may motivate particular choices in partners, can appear to foreclose rather than to open up options for identity, especially for women who haven't yet discovered that all relationships require negotiation and struggle. When you live on Noah's ark, anything that might make it more difficult to find a partner can seem to threaten your very survival. To make our case, feminists have to combat not just homophobia, but also the rule of the couple, the politics of Noah's ark in the age of "family values," This does not mean that heterosexual feminist women must give up their intimate relationships, but it does mean that feminists must continually analyze those pressures, be dear about how they operate in our lives, and try to find ways around and through them for ourselves, each other, and other women.

Backlash by Susan Faludi covers alot of ground in the various ways that women and their rights are under assault by the culture at large. One of the things that she addresses is the push to get women to believe that their sexual futures are precarious at best, that nothing is harder than finding a man. It's an amusing, in a way, that our culture is so hellbent on flattering male egos at random that we manage both to believe that women are desperate for male attention while we notice that women usually are the ones deflecting male attention. When I was younger I was rather confused--watch TV and you'd think that women are flinging themselves desperately at indifferent men. Leave your actual house and find that men actually tend to do the majority of pursuing.

I always thought the blatant cultural lie that men get their pick while women are fighting for scraps on the sexual market was just one more product of a culture that seems to want to pick on women for no good reason much of the time. But reading that paragraph, it occured to me that a big reason that women are told that men are fickle and elusive is that it's an effective way to discourage us from adopting feminist beliefs. After all, if it's nearly impossible to get a man when you're drop-dead gorgeous and also practiced at simpering, scraping and reading The Rules, then to actually adopt feminist beliefs will condemn you to a sexless, cat-filled life. Your rights or your love life--what's it gonna be?

Well, not an earth-shattering revelation, but I guess I never realized how transparent certain stereotypes are. Watching the women on "Friends" or something fall to pieces because a wedding hasn't happened yet isn't just annoying, it's politically damaging. And it's antagonizing how much of these stereotypes I've internalized--I find myself bowing and scraping sometimes since my perfectly natural desire to be attractive has been perverted into a desire to be subservient.