Lady of Shalit

Oh, look. Wendy Shalit's back.

You remember Shalit -- she's the one who discovered modesty back in 1999 and was amazed to realize that feminists had forced women to stop practicing it? And that this was why women were being raped and sexually harassed all the time? (Because, you know, previous to feminists, women, at least the good ones, who had practiced modesty, like Shalit, never got raped or harassed or called names on the street by those icky men, and if they did, well! Good brave men stepped in and dealt with it, like they were meant to, before feminism made them afraid to be men. Or something. The book where she explains it all is called A Return To Modesty and it was way too badly written for me to get entirely all the way through, but that was, apparently, its thesis. She has a website now with the same claim: http://www.modestyzone.net/)

Anyway, now she's written another book! Yay!

This one is called Girls Gone Mild, and it's all about how young feminists are rejecting the aged old cranky feminists and their way of life. You know: sex, and drugs, and crankiness.

Young feminists want to dress modestly

(Go here for a charming picture of how young feminists want to dress:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118254928882245220.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

I must tell you I have never, in all my years of dealing with young feminists, seen a young feminist dressed this way, not ever, but then Shalit and I do not run with the same crews, as someone told another woman recently.)

and young feminists want to control their own lives; but they do not want casual sex, and they are not interesting in the hating on men, which is, apparently, what we older feminists spend our time doing, hating on the fellas and researching inventive ways to do the sex (young feminists? Not so much interested in doing the sex. Hmm.)

Tellingly, the National Organization for Women invited the Pittsburgh girls to one of their conferences, to honor them for "taking action," but the girls themselves were put off by what they saw there. As one of them put it: "I support equality and would never like to be controlled by a man, but the NOW conference was more like a brainwashing feminist summit than anything else. They had this artistic performance that was so much about sex and how much all men suck; it made me feel sick."

Ms. Shalit has little patience for the thinking of the older generation of mainstream feminists. They are, she says, "so committed to the idea of casual sex as liberation that they can't appreciate or even quite understand these younger feminists." To them, modesty is a step back, even a betrayal of the liberationist spirit. "They don't understand," Ms. Shalit says, "that pursuing crudeness is the problem, not the solution."

Ms. Shalit is in a good position to speak on such matters. As an undergraduate at Williams College, she caused an uproar by objecting to the school's coed bathrooms.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB118254928882245220.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

Ai, yi, the co-ed bathroom again. Will they ever shut up about that one? Like the pantsuit and the "but she GLARED at me when I held the door open for her!" -- can't these folk find a new trope? Seriously.

So. What do young feminists want to do, according to Shalit?

At the end of every chapter are "how to" boxes, obviously aimed at young readers, on such subjects as taking back your college dorm room when your roommate, planning a tryst, wants to send you into exile. Another -- "Confronting Your Baby Boomer Parent" -- tells you how to explain yourself to parents who think that you're "weird for being a virgin." A box called "A Recipe for Pleasing With Integrity" asks: "Is there a way for a young woman to impress others, without having to be mean or compromise her value system?" Why, yes: Bake an apple pie!

Pie.

Silly me. I thought we wanted justice, all this time.

Boys want liberty, justice, and equality.

Girls just want a pat on their pretty little heads.