Blaming the Internet for the failure of feminism

Yet another one: Feminism in the Web era: It ain't pretty. This one, by Judith Timson, is a little less virulent - at least.

But it's still wrong.

At the outset Timson ponders the bigger issues that may lie behind an increased trend towards extreme violence (and especially in the context of intimate relationships) perpetrated by young women:

First, there has been the sexualization of young women very early in their teens, so that being "hot" and attracting boys becomes an early measurement of their worth, and remains that way well into adulthood.

Second, there's been a devaluing of feminism and its true principles in the media and popular culture. Feminism has been both trivialized - softened into what I call "you go girl-ism" - and demonized by exaggerating scary things such as man hatred.

But regardless the apparent failure of feminism, and the over-sexualization of young women, in the end Timson places the blame squarely on technology again:

The Internet has made girl-on-girl viciousness so much more virulent, with mass shunnings, false rumour-mongering and online slagging of each other.

Really, so if suddenly the internet disappeared, the bigger problems, (so helpfully elucidated above) would go back to being just pesky annoyances - things girls can shrug off in their quest to become whole persons and not objects of desire - really? Personally, I think *the internet* at this moment in time, may just be the most perplexing and frightening evidence of a malady in our culture, not the cause. But I mean, scapegoating technology or technological cultural practices is pretty old hat - there's violent video games as a provocateur of male violence, why wouldn't chatting, texting and writing on people's walls enflame a murderous rage as well?

What really irritates me, is the author's first point is that feminism failed teenage girls. My question is - did feminism ever work? I am a feminist, I believe that the less we live in a culture driven by misogyny the happier we'll all gonna be. BUT the fact is that we never have lived in a culture that wasn't a hotbed of anti-women sentiment.

Sure my mom did her Phd, sure I was never told I couldn't do whatever I wanted when I grew up. I still had an eating disorder as did my mother, I still remember that one of the first current events articles I ever obsessed about (at age 10) was an article about a woman from Barrie who was picked up drunk at a bar, raped multiple times (by a man wielding a beer bottle at one point), and left in a ditch. Six years later when one of my first boyfriends used the term "ditchpig" to describe women he found unattractive, I thought about the beaten woman lying in a muddy ditch. Sure, ditchpig - I get it.

It's not just the internet people, misogyny has gone on much longer then the existence of the graphical browser and cellular technology.

Note: this is an article for another day, but there is also a body of thought which suggest that mental health problems, that occur specifically in one subset of the population - in this case young women, can be evidence of a wider cultural influence. Ie; a person's fucked up mental state, doesn't develop in a vacuum, it takes it's cues from what the larger culture is saying about what it means to be a "well" person. For example the famous Female Hysteria as the negative bi-product of Victorian repression of female sensuality.

If we can look at teen girl murder with less of an eye to demonizing girls, or their cultural practices, and instead see personality disorders, gossip, plotting, and the whole bizarre apparatus as a generation who have developed the most ill-conceived and damaging of disorders, anti-social, selfishness, a lack of respect for human life, or civil society. Oh wait, doesn't that sound like the culture that surrounds them, to wit, a market economy where materialism, getting it done your way right away, while dispensing with the needs of cohesive and caring social whole - why yes it does. I rest my case.