Shoot the Slut: The 21st Century Backlash Is All About Sex
by Amanda Marcotte
As Susan Faludi demonstrated in “Backlash,” attitudes about gender and sexuality tend to be cyclical. Women’s success in the workplace, especially, has a tendency to create anti-feminist backlashes. As Faludi documented, the 80s backlash in response to the normalization of professional work for women took shape in demands that women embrace more feminine-submissive behaviors and fashions, the idolizing of housewives as perfect women, and attacks on reproductive rights.
Despite the previous anti-feminist administration, the past couple of decades have been good for women: education levels rose to meet and exceed men’s, women’s leadership became more normalized from Condie Rice to Hillary Clinton, and the public debate over sexual harassment in the 90s was won by feminists (though social disapproval of it remains no more than an inch deep). Even the existence of the feminist blogosphere can be counted as a major triumph. The tendency of news magazines to periodically declare feminism “dead” can’t withstand the overwhelming online evidence that feminism is very much alive.
