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Essential Feminist Reader
Rebecca Walker “Becoming the Third Wave”
This short piece was inspired by Walker’s reaction to the Hill-Thomas hearing in the early 90’s. Walker says, “to me, the hearings were not about determining whether or not Clarence Thomas did in fact harass Anita Hill. They were about checking and redefining the extent of women’s credibility and power” (389). She goes on to question: “can a woman’s experience undermine a man’s career? Can a woman’s voice, a woman’s self-worth and injustice, challenge a structure predicated upon the subjugation of our gender?” She felt that Anita Hill threatened to do so. Walker wanted to expose the misconceptions about gender equality. My understanding is that the third wave was born out of the idea that women already had all of their rights so there was nothing left to fight for. There was a veil over the inequalities that still existed because they were more implicit. This piece of writing really struck me by how passionate Walker was about this issue and I could really feel it in her voice on the page. Her description of an incident on a train where she stood up to some men who were making some disparaging remarks about women in the presence of a young girl was very moving and showed how intensely she felt about the issues of gender inequality.

Baumgardner and Richards. 2000
This list of 13 point agenda for 3rd wave feminism contained a variety of goals for the 21st century in regards to womens rights. Many of them related to sexual health and reproductive rights. I was interested in point number 4 that aims to “bring down the double standard in sex and sexual health, and foster male responsibility and assertiveness in the following areas: achieving freedom from STDs; more fairly dividing the burden of family planning as well as responsibilities such as child care; and eliminating violence against women” (425). These are issues that are seen quite often in today’s society. A great example would be on MTV’s show Teen Mom where the teenage girl almost always ends up taking care of the baby alone because the boyfriend breaks up with them and leaves. It seems to me that although a child is made by a man and a woman equally, because the woman carries the child and is biologically designed to be the nurturing parent, the man has the opportunity to ignore his responsibility. Even though a woman can go through the legal proceedings to obtain child support from the man, it never seems to justify the complete lack of care that the father fails to provide if he is not around to help care for the child. A couple hundred dollars a month does not seem to justify the absence of a father’s care and love. I could go on about this and obviously every family’s situation is different. The bottom line is that men need to be just as responsible about sex as women. Here is a link to a website I found about child-support. I looked this up because I don't really know much about child support and I wanted to know some statistics on it. http://www.rbowmanlaw.com/2010/10/child-support-statistics.html
I was also interested in the goal of “valuing (monetarily) stay-at-home parents, [and] aiding employees who want to spend more time with family and continue work” (426). I don’t know how this would be implemented but it is a very interesting thought. I know that parents work just as hard at home taking care of their children as they do at work. Seeing my mom take care of my siblings and I plus our dog and take care of the house everyday has allowed me to see how much time and effort it requires. I’m really glad that I babysit for other families with young children because it gives me a glimpse of what its like to be a parent. But I only see it for a couple hours at a time.
These 13 points contained so many interesting ideas that I’m looking forward to discussing them in class in more depth.

Enlightened Sexism
1. Get the Girls.
2. This chapter explores the new television phenomenon of the early 90’s where tv shows targeted teenage girls. The combination of sex and merchandizing reiterated the cliché that “sex sells.” The main focus of this chapter was 90210, the show that kick-started the trend of television shows of its kind that followed. You can still see today that shows like Gossip Girl appeal to teenage girls in exactly the same way they did almost 20 years ago. Douglas’s complaint with this style of show (as she usually tends to find fault in just about everything I’m beginning to realize) is that it went against everything feminism had worked for. Melrose Place showed successful women but it also showed that “’success’ and ‘bitch’ just went together” (37). 90210 made teenage girls feel important but it also reduced them to sexualized objects and it glorified material objects like clothes.
3. 2. Castration anxiety.
This chapter analyzed some very publicized news stories in the early 90s where women acted ruthless in a way that hadn’t really been seen before. It also goes into great depth looking at Janet Reno and the response that the public gave to her. That made me wonder whether androgynous women like Reno will ever be fully accepted in society? I feel like feminine men, although not completely accepted, are more accepted in society than masculine women.
4. Warrior Women in Thongs
This chapter looks at 90’s television shows that had strong, ass-kicking young women as the main character. After Douglas shows how many tv shows were of this genre, it made me realize that a new phenomenon became very over-used and I think people got sick of it after a while. Maybe that’s why there aren’t many shows like that on tv today.