Wave Again

So, a few days ago, as I was writing the cover letter for that East Bay Express job, I overheard a woman talking to her friend, apparently about her son or daughter (the story that follows makes me think son) as if they were just a lazy good-for-nothing freeloader who was not in school because his mother told him it was what he must do, and did not have the slightest understanding of the meaning of hard work. This, as students on their summer break work feverishly around her at 1 o'clock on a Friday and she sips coffee and bitches to a friend. She caught my attention with a tone of righteous mockery, saying something like, "...and he goes, that sounds like third wave feminism..." clearly skeptical of the very existence or certainly the accuracy of such a categorization. I get it. I'd never heard of "third wave feminism" growing up raised by a third wave feminist (and her Suffrage/Women's Lib mother), and in point of fact, the very term itself is confusing and obfuscating, because if the third wave is essentially the elderstateswomen of the women's lib era and their proteges of the eighties and nineties (and that, to the best of my understanding is what merits the name), then it's really the fourth wave. Right? I mean, I'm a dude, but Seneca Falls is a wave of its own, Suffrage is a generation later, lumped with the depression, and Women's Lib is after the war and into Vietnam. Right? I mean, can we get it straight, please? I can understand how "third wavers" would rather not be pinned down, it's been their modus for thirty years now, "that's not what I said," "who are you to ask that question," and so forth, but unfortunately their children have been hearing those lines for thirty years. If "third" is the first word a substantial number of women scholars have ever voluntarily used to self-label, then we'll take third regardless of the reason you want to obfuscate the uniqueness of your ideology. Because that's really what this was about, that lady's denial of categorization, the misnomer label, used to cause confusion about just what constitutes a "third wave feminist," its about not wanting to be distinguished from earlier, successful movements because the inevitability of women gaining suffrage and thence moving into the workforce in a federated republic felt like momentum that should be tapped, that the image of inevitability would go a long way in creating the inevitability of a world according to Gloria Steinem. It was the Hillary Clinton strategy for winning the presidency. But here's the thing. Gloria Steinem did a couple of wonderful things, half a century ago. But Gloria Steinem is a bitch. And contrary to a recent Tina Fey meme I've seen going around, bitches do not get shit done, bitches get one or two things done, then everyone around them is too alienated to work with, for, or even in charge of them. Which makes "third wave" sort of ironic, really, since its the third thing, the third goal, the one that, whatever it should have been, won't get accomplished because the feminist movement turned into the Bitch Movement for the eighties and nineties. Its no coincidence that the label that "third wave" is meant to substitute for, academically, is "femme nazi," women who didn't want to be labeled certainly did not want to be labeled with that moniker for eternity, and 'we,' the academy, that good old boys club, accommodated with the first thing that was even slightly acceptable. And that's the real thing, that nothing substantial does distinguish the third wave strategically or tactically except for the bitchy attitude, and as some idiot trying to "take back the word" on Political Animals, that shitty send up of Clinton family drama that I watched hoping it would be another West Wing, said, "Never call a bitch a bitch, us bitches hate that." But here's the thing, those bitches are just a bunch of bitches, they don't have a point, you don't have to listen to their idiocy, because somewhere (I just know it) there is a rational woman, and you can always count on at least, like, twenty percent of all women to be in lucid windows of rationality at any given moment (that's a joke, get it?). No, you don't have to listen to their shit because no one else wants to hear their shit. Don't tell the bitch she's a bitch, tell the fucking world, and the world will respond "right on! You're right, man, fuck that bitch," and then she'll really hate that, because she'll be as powerless as she's always felt. Ok, I'm just gonna start spit-balling names for a new "wave" here, now, if I don't come up with many now I'll edit them in later or do another post: Fivers, um...Environmental Feminism, Gender Fusion, I don't know, I'm getting off topic. Bitch, is not the only thing worthy of critique about their ideology, its just the only real reason they've been shrinking instead of growing for the first time in a century. These are the assumptions that, of course, no group wishes to examine, and which the "third wavers" have successfully used to escape scrutiny by never publishing a crystallizing ideological manifesto. We all know the mantras however. I've already discussed the one about "All men think about is sex," (cliffsnotes: the reality is that sex is something that men are always thinking about, but even the human male's mind can hold more than that single, simple thought, at one time) Another, which I have to deal with in my thesis, is the refusal to accept anthropological explanations for social behaviors, the refusal to believe that discipline of mind and training from birth cannot overcome all inborn instincts, and the ridiculous belief that we would even want to do such a thing to our kids. Of course, with my thesis, the problem is a, you guessed it, third wave feminist, objecting to my application of this assumption to feminists broadly. I told him, I have worked through a simple argument, premise by premise with a woman my own age of a decidedly third-wave outlook, got buy in, at great effort, having to change the subject back to my argument, multiple times, but finally had buy in on every single minor and major premise, in sequence, without interruption. When I proposed the inevitable logical conclusion, this young woman flatly refused to acknowledge it, having no refutation, no rational argument at all. You're telling me that a student who is that adamantly irrational regarding a single point, who was intelligent enough for me to work through the logic piece by piece, knowing she could follow it, is not doing so according to an ideological belief? What about the scholar from my own literature. I did not have to depart my own literature to find an almost verbatim reprise of the point I refute in the thesis, and this from a scholar I agree with on every assertion she makes, I just disagree with her on this philosophical assertion she makes in the introduction to her article. The one female scholar after 1950 I agree with, I think. Of course, there's only one before 1950, and none before 1985 on my part of Africa. I'll end the post with a book recommendation, especially for women aspiring to be anthropologists or archaeology. Gertrude Caton-Thompson, with a woman photographer and a woman ethnologist, excavated The Great Zimbabwe in the 1930's, and was the first person to confirm beyond doubt the sequence of exclusively indigenous builders. Her report is the most professional, informative and straightforward example of the archaeologist's trade I have ever read (although my experience is limited to Africa, that's not insubstantial), and she's a BADASS. Not a bitch, but a fucking badass.