Recently in Generational Analysis Category

Ta-Nehisi highlights the following comment from his blog:

When it comes to Palin, there's an intersection of sexism and age that the Republicans don't understand (which is why they keep crying sexism and wonder why it's not working).

For many Boomer women, the primary sexist experience of their lives is: "Those men gave the job to that guy instead of me, even though I am more qualified and/or have more seniority."

For many Gen X women like myself (and Palin is Gen X) the primary sexist experience is: "Those men gave the job to that clueless chick instead of me, because the boss thinks she's hot and/or will be a yes-man with no ideas of her own."

If, for some Boomer women, Obama's win over Hillary represents the guy they lost the promotion to, Palin's selection plays the same role for Gen X women. We've seen it: first the incompetent yet babelicious woman is promoted over her head, then the boss orders the attention of the entire team/department/etc. to focus on ensuring that "we" shield her from "mistakes" (or worse, we get blamed for her mistakes). Palin reminds us of when we got screwed by this sort of bullshit. And it shows in voters' response to her.

Generalizations like this are tricky business. But it's undeniable that there are generational differences (just as there are differences based on race, class, etc.) in how women experience sexism. What do you all think? Do you agree with the generational distinctions in the quote above?

I've expanded my thoughts over at Alternet about this whole Rebecca/Alice clash. Check it out.

I am so deeply saddened by Rebecca Walker's recent expose on her childhood as Alice Walker's allegedly neglected daughter and the ways in which it scarred her. The two have been publicly nipping at one another for years, but this seems like the nail in the coffin of their doomed relationship.

I'm sad, first and foremost, for Rebecca--a third wave icon and clearly reflective and evolving leader of the movement. Whether everything she alleges (that her mother never went to her school functions, didn't spend time with her or money on her necessities etc.) is true or not, it is the emotional truth of what she experienced.

But I'm sad, on a larger scale, that she would (1) equate feminism with this experience and (2) not see the gray areas in between her mother's relationship to mothering and her own.

In terms of the former, she acts like our feminist legacy is explicitly anti-mothering. She writes: "Feminism has betrayed an entire generation of women into childlessness. It is devastating." This is so NOT my experience in the world or at home, where I was raised by a prototypical feminist mother (though not a famous one). Many, many of the second-wavers that I know and love are passionate about being mothers, while they recognize that there are dangers in it and many issues that arise from its all-consuming nature. Any biological confusion that women have is not a direct product of feminism; it's a complicated biproduct of the time we are living in, feminist successes included.

In terms of the latter, Rebecca seems to have swung the pendulum so violently in the other direction that she won't even acknowledge the ways in which mothering is problematic for independent women in a sexist world. She writes, "I am my own woman and I have discovered what really matters - a happy family. "I, for one, am freaked out to be a mom (though I know I want to), not because I think it is impossible not to lose myself, but because I think it is easy to. I want to find a middle ground between helicopter parent and can't be bothered, between stay-at-home and workaholic, between mother as identity and mother as irrelevant role.

Isn't that what so many of us are striving for? Isn't that what Amy Richards' new book is about? Why isn't this acknowledged in Rebecca's vicious take down of her own mother?

Your thoughts?

Some readers have asked us to devote a post to Robin Morgan's recent essay on Hillary Clinton. I think we've actually addressed in previous posts a lot of the issues Morgan raises. But there's one section in particular I wanted to respond to:

Goodbye to a misrepresented generational divide . . .

Goodbye to the so-called spontaneous “Obama Girl� flaunting her bikini-clad ass online—then confessing Oh yeah it wasn’t her idea after all, some guys got her to do it and dictated the clothes, which she said “made me feel like a dork.�

Goodbye to some young women eager to win male approval by showing they’re not feminists (at least not the kind who actually threaten the status quo), who can’t identify with a woman candidate because she is unafraid of eeueweeeu yucky power, who fear their boyfriends might look at them funny if they say something good about her. Goodbye to women of any age again feeling unworthy, sulking “what if she’s not electable?� or “maybe it’s post-feminism and whoooosh we’re already free.� Let a statement by the magnificent Harriet Tubman stand as reply. When asked how she managed to save hundreds of enslaved African Americans via the Underground Railroad during the Civil War, she replied bitterly, “I could have saved thousands—if only I’d been able to convince them they were slaves.�

This is all incredibly offensive to me -- not because of who I support in the presidential primary, but because of who I am. A younger woman. A younger feminist woman.

The above section of Morgan's essay is incredibly condescending. It completely fails to recognize that there are a variety of valid reasons younger women might decide to support Obama. Not because they think the "Obama Girl" video is empowering. (Uh, to the contrary.) Not because their boyfriends told them it wasn't cool to vote for Hillary. Not because they're "post-feminist." Not because they are in denial about the existence of sexism. Because they've taken a look at his position on the issues and decided that he would make the best president.

This crap is merely annoying when it comes from the mainstream media. It's really disappointing and hurtful when it comes from within the women's movement.

I know there are feminists of all ages who are Clinton supporters who don't feel this way about their fellow feminists who have chosen to support Obama. They realize that voting for Obama does not mean turning your back on the astounding, amazing, hard-won battles fought by feminists in previous decades. And they know that, as Hillary Clinton said, “Women’s rights are human rights. Among those rights are the right to speak freely -- and the right to be heard.� Even if certain feminist leaders don't like what you have to say.

We've been called apathetic. We've been called selfish. We've been called cheaters. We've been called petty. We've been called appearance obsessed. We've been called Generation Y, Millenials, Echo Boomers, the Look at Me Generation, and now, well, it's all been boiled down to simply Generation Me.

I'm, frankly, a little sick of the whole thing. The New York Times just ran a story about a new study that puts into question the previous wisdom on our generation--namely that MySpace, Oprah, and Free To Be You and Me has made us all narcissistic. The article explains:

Kali H. Trzesniewski, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Western Ontario...along with colleagues at the University of California, Davis, and Michigan State University, will publish research in the journal Psychological Science next month showing there have been very few changes in the thoughts, feelings and behaviors of youth over the last 30 years. In other words, the minute-by-minute Twitter broadcasts of today are the navel-gazing est seminars of 1978.

The study was done, in part, as a response to the work of Jean M. Twenge who wrote Generation Me: Why Today’s Young Americans Are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled — and More Miserable Than Ever Before. Twenge is already at work on another book, this one with an even more damning title, The Narcissism Epidemic (by the by, could we all agree on a definition for what constitutes an epidemic? It's getting a little ridiculous).

I appreciate this Yale fella's response:

Richard P. Eibach, an assistant professor of psychology at Yale, has found that exaggerated beliefs in social decline are widespread — largely because people tend to mistake changes in themselves for changes in the external world. “Our automatic assumption is something real has changed,� Mr. Eibach said. “It takes extra thought to realize that something about your own perspective or the information you’re receiving may have changed.�

Is it really us, people, or might it just be a little bit about you? Are older folks projecting their own unmet needs on an entire generation? Now that's narcissism.