Who Does Enlightened Sexism Affect?

I really enjoyed reading Douglas’s often sarcastic and ironic writing. Her introduction contained a developed rant carefully crafted to appeal to her audience (most likely consisting of liberal feminists and would-be feminists who wouldn’t mind the bashing of past Republican presidents and mainstream popular culture), used intellectual language (including a few words I had to look up: verboten, kvetched, screed, ersatz, and cabal) and included media influences that white middle and upper class women encounter frequently.

However, she seems to suggest that “enlightened sexism” only affects rich white women and, aside from a few statistics found on page twenty comparing the wages of white, African American, and Latina women (are there only three ethnicities in this country/world?), largely neglects to convey the experience of ethnic minorities, poor women, women who were once men, or individuals who question their own gender (The list of neglected populations could go on and on.). Even though women outnumber men in population, most women do not possess the culture of power or may possess power that is misdirected by the media toward “less significant” aspirations, including the promotion of physical and sexual power rather than political and economic power. Therefore, the status of being a women incorporates a sort of “minority” quality. Douglas is concerned with the influence of enlightened sexism on her own daughter, but what about girls whose parents don’t recognize the dangers of “buying into” the media’s message about how women should look and act and the resulting decline in power for women? Though some media may have a target audience of upper-class white women and girls, media affects individuals from all backgrounds, sometimes in widely differing regards.

Though what Douglas has experienced personally is the life of an upper-class white women, our class discussion on Tuesday affirmed that feminism can (and, I believe, should) embody stepping outside of one’s own experience and seeking to learn about and include the experiences of others, operating as a collective movement to affirm the worth of women and others who are oppressed. Douglas seems to stay within the confines of her own gender, ethnicity, and class. I am left to wonder: Are the rich white women and their children the only victims of the force labeled “enlightened sexism?” And if not, how can the experiences of others be conveyed?

But this may be an unnecessarily harsh critique. As the adage “Don’t judge a book by its cover” expresses, first impressions are not necessarily accurate. If a book’s introduction contained everything written within its chapters, the chapters would have no purpose. I still need to give the rest of the book a chance before I write it off as narrowly-focused and even antifeminist in some of its tendencies.