The World Split Open (67 page)

“What difference will marriage make in your lives?” reporters asked
these exuberant couples. Most had already shared their lives for many years and had held commitment ceremonies. Still, they were ecstatic about getting married. One woman said, “I won't have to call her my partner or girlfriend at a doctor's office or a hospital. She's now my spouse.” Another replied, “We want to have children. Someday I can call a child-care center or a school and say that my spouse will be picking up our child. We'll be viewed as a valid family.” Two men who had lived together for sixteen years rejoiced at the idea of their newfound legitimacy. One said he simply “wanted the respectability accorded married couples.” Even though they rightly suspected that the California courts would later invalidate their licenses, those who married during those days radiated a contagious sense of joy. “It's a historic milestone,” said one recently married man. “We're part of history and we know it.” So did the rest of world, as television broadcast images of these couples around the planet.
¹²

A few months later, in May 2004, Massachusetts became the first state to legally permit same-sex marriage. By the end of 2005, five nations—Belgium, The Netherlands, Canada, Spain, and South Africa—had legalized same-sex marriage, and England and New Zealand had made civil unions legal.

A backlash was predictable. Same-sex marriage, presumably between two equal partners, challenged the idea of a dominant husband and a submissive wife. Gay marriage quickly turned into a wedge issue during the 2004 presidential election. Although Bush's call for a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage failed in Congress, voters in eleven states passed all referenda banning same-sex marriage—placed by the Conservative and Religious Right—in the 2004 election.

But the attack against gay marriage paradoxically also changed the terms of debate. A growing number of moderate politicians, who once shied away from the subject, now began to embrace “civil unions” as a compromise position that conferred all civil rights, except the legal status of marriage, upon same-sex couples.

Still beneath the political radar was the rapidly growing transgender movement in the United States, which traced its roots back to large urban communities in the 1990s. The women's movement had challenged rigid gender roles. Now people who felt trapped inside their bodies began to seek freedom from discrimination and violence. Gradually, the movement gained a few of its goals. By 2005, more than half the states had passed legal protection for transgendered people.

Still, the transgender movement remained unfamiliar to most Americans
until films, literature, and television began to publicize the anguish of those men and women who desperately wanted to change their gender identity, if not necessarily their bodies. In the 1999 film
Boys Don't Cry
, actress Hillary Swank played a teenage girl who began living as a young man, with lethal consequences. The highly acclaimed 2002 novel
Middlesex
, by Jeffrey Eugenides, publicized the not-so-rare lives of those born with ambiguous genitalia, known as intersexed. In 2003, the feature film
Normal
focused on a middle-aged, married man in a conservative western Illinois town, who, after twenty-five years of marriage, stuns his wife, grown children, and church by announcing that he's always felt trapped inside a male body and now wants to live as a woman. In 2005, the Sundance Channel featured an eight-part documentary series,
Transgeneration
, which followed four college-aged students for a year as they confronted their desires to dress and live as the opposite sex. The year ended with a riveting feature film,
TransAmerica
, in which a rather prim transsexual, about to undergo surgery to become a physical woman, discovers that she once fathered a child who is now a teenaged male plying the streets as a prostitute.

The lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender movements were hardly alone in challenging conventional ideas about sexuality or gender. While the Bush administration eagerly promoted abstinence, chastity oaths, and new marriage covenants, some young people were busy celebrating the historic rupture between sexuality and reproduction that had taken place long before they were born. Most visible on liberal college campuses, and in nightclubs or raves, some of these young men and women flaunted their sexuality, paraded their pierced and tattooed bodies, and played with their gender identity through cross-dressing.

Among this group were some young women, born between 1965 and 1975, who called themselves the Third Wave. They knew that nineteenth-century First Wave feminists had fought for the vote and that 1960s and 1970s Second Wave feminists had tried to transform public and private life. Now, these young Third Wave feminists acknowledged their continuity with those who came before them.

Third Wave feminism had its roots in
both
academic life and the punk/grunge rock scene. In the mid-1980s, a group of feminist activists and academics concerned about racism in the women's movement collaborated
on an anthology titled
The Third Wave: Feminist Perspectives on Racism
.
¹³
Although some young African American feminist activists described themselves as “hip-hop feminists,” their white counterparts committed themselves to building an inclusive, multi-cultural, multi-issue movement, with a focus on women's multiple racial, class, and sexual identities.

Third Wave feminism also came out of young women's collective protests in the alternative rock scene, most notably sparked by the band the Riot Grrrls. “Whereas some second wave feminists fought for equal access to the workplace,” explained essayist Melissa Klein, “some third wave feminists fought for equal access to the punk stage.”
¹⁴
Feminist punk rock musicians inspired a “riot grrrl” movement that rejected the idea of “good” and “bad” girls, and promoted a defiant, sexual female stance on stage, as well as in their own lives. Many of these musicians dressed in gender-bending clothes—short skirts with heavy boots—and wore thick makeup and bleached hair—“for the pleasure of other women, not men,” they said. One fan of the punk rock band Bikini Kill described an unforgettable moment when its founder, Kathleen Hanna, “climbed on-stage in a mini-skirt, lipstick smeared, and sang/screamed about incest or rape or girl-girl desire.”
¹⁵

The Clarence Thomas hearings in 1991, at which Anita Hill accused the Supreme Court nominee of sexual harassment, also galvanized some members of this generation. The next year, Rebecca Walker, daughter of the well-known feminist writer Alice Walker, defiantly responded to the
New York Times'
seemingly endless campaign to pronounce an era of postfeminism. In
Ms.
Magazine, she wrote, “I am not a postfeminist feminist. I am the third wave.” With Amy Richards, she cofounded the Third Wave Foundation which, among other activities, mobilized young women to vote. That same year, the youthful Women's Action Coalition began organizing a series of consciousness-raising public events. On Mother's Day in 1992, they draped a Grand Central Station board with a pink banner that read, “It's Mother's Day: $30 Billion owed in child support.”
¹⁶

On television and radio talk shows, Americans mostly heard the conservative voices of such authors as Christina Hoff Sommers (
Who Stole Feminism?
and
The War Against Boys
), and Katie Roiphe (
The Morning After: Sex, Fear and Feminism
), who were regularly called upon to discredit feminists by denouncing them as too ideological or too caught up in their own victimhood.

The Third Wave grassroots movement was far less audible and visible, but it gradually swept up many young Generation X artists, artisans,
writers, and performers interested in exploring women's power and identity. Feminist magazines like San Francisco's
Bitch: Feminist Response to Pop Culture
and the New York-based
Bust
, which billed itself as “the Voice of the New Girl Order,” spoke to a generation eager to take up the feminist torch, but on their own terms. The turn of the millennium also witnessed an explosion of feminist “zines” and influential books, including Rebecca Walker's anthology
To Be Real
(1995), which used autobiographical stories to explore women's lives, Leslie Heywood and Jennifer Drake's
Third Wave Agenda: Being Feminist, Doing Feminism
(1997), and Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards's
Manifesta: Young Women, Feminism, and the Future
(2000), which described the next generation's direction and goals.

Third Wave feminists clearly valued, even honored, the legacy of older feminists who had opened up public life for them. “For anyone born after the early 1960s,” wrote the authors of
Manifesta
, “the presence of feminism in our lives is taken for granted. For our generation, feminism is like Fluoride. We scarcely notice that we have it—it's simply in the water.” But, wrote the editors of the 3rdWWWAve Web site, “This is not the second wave warmed over. We are building on what they accomplished and taking it in new directions appropriate for the twenty-first century.”
¹⁷

One important difference lay in their distinctive sensibility, which dramatically contrasted with the women who had forged the women's movement in the late 1960s. Younger women were ironic, cool, outrageous, and self-consciously politically incorrect. Baumgardner and Richards rejected ideology in favor of accepting the “lived messiness” of feminism. To some younger feminists, Second Wavers seemed like dogmatic, humorless, prudish women who demanded that men call them women, rather than girls or chicks and even worse, wore sensible shoes.

Inevitably, tensions arose between Second Wave feminists, who had emphasized collective action, and younger feminists, who often focused on individual self expression. Some older feminists argued that equating appearance and sexual adventures with empowerment, however playful or ironic, skirted feminism's still unachieved goals of social and economic equality. By itself, they argued, personal expression offered no real threat to discrimination or injustice, failed to free women from the home, and ignored the limitations on women's real choices.
¹⁸

What some older critics failed to grasp, though, was that this generation felt burdened by the pervasive stereotype of a feminist as a bra-burning,
hairy-legged, ugly, shrewish, man-hating lesbian misfit. For younger heterosexual women, a major issue was how to reconcile their feminism with their desire to embrace their sexuality and femininity. Liz Funk, a young NOW member in upstate New York, explained, “Just because a young woman feels inclined to argue in a class debate for pro-choice abortion rights, equal pay or having a woman president doesn't mean she cannot do so in Tiffany jewelry, a pink dress, and sequined sandals. . . . People are surprised,” she added, “that a 16-year-old high school junior doesn't ‘look like a feminist.'”
¹⁹
To counter the media's negative image of feminists, some young college women sported tight pink-and-black T-shirts with the words “This is What a Feminist Looks Like” written across their chests. “People have said to me you can't be a feminist, you are too sexy to be a feminist,” said Lisa Covington, a senior at Clarion University of Pennsylvania. “The T-shirt is a way to reconcile this. . . . I am a feminine feminist.” “The shirts are hot,” said Amy Littlefield, a freshman at Brown University in Providence, R.I. “Maybe they help us send the message that you can be sexy and proud of your appearance and still be a feminist.”
²⁰

Some Third Wave feminists also embraced what Baumgardner and Richards labeled as “Girlie feminism”—the color pink, glitzy fashion, Barbie dolls, cheerleading for causes, knitting, and cooking—traditional feminine activities or styles that Second Wave feminists had discarded in their effort to enter male-dominated institutions.
²¹
Some even fetishized fashion and consumerism, flaunted their sexuality, and argued for a “do-your-own-thing” feminism in which they emphasized individual choice and self expression. In the mid-1990s, Marcelle Karp, editor of
Bust
, wrote, “We've entered an era of DIY feminism—sistah, do it yourself. . . . Your feminism is what you want it to be and what you make of it.” The authors of
Manifesta
agreed: “Feminism isn't about what choice you make, but the freedom to make that choice.”
²²

An important contribution of this generation was to make feminism appealing and attractive. For them, reclaiming sexual power and a feminine appearance was vital. With a certain gleeful political incorrectness, Third Wave feminists reappropriated the words
cunt
and
bitch.
Some women even urged using their sexuality to wield power over men.
Bust
tested sex toys. In an essay titled “Lusting for Freedom,” Rebecca Walker expressed her generation's conviction that there was nothing incompatible with sexuality and feminism: “When I think back,” she wrote, “it is that impulse I am most proud of. . . . I deserve to live free of shame, that my body is not my enemy, and that pleasure is my friend and my right.”
²³

But Third Wave feminists did not always agree about sexual behavior, which has often divided feminists. Second Wave feminists had split over the emergence of lesbian feminists. Now, noted Lisa Jarvis, editor of
Bitch
magazine, “genderqueers”—young activists in the transgender movement—“were occupying the place that lesbian issues did in the last generation.”
²⁴
Genderqueers rejected all gender categories and promoted the ideal of a gender-blind culture. Speaking to NOW's National Board on Transgender Inclusion, Ricki Wilchins, an architect of the genderqueer movement, said, “Consider for a moment that men with vaginas are what gender looks like when it's deregulated.”
²⁵