Not Like the Other Girls

‘Rethinking sex,” as Christine Emba eloquently wrote in her book of the same name, is all well and good. But what do we do with the women who have lost their value in the sexual marketplace (or who never had it at all)? What do we do with the women who forcibly exited because they are already married or already mothers? What do we do with those who are, once again, being told to sit down and shut up, to make space for the younger cohort, who, by virtue of their youth, are more “in touch” and thereby know better?

I sought out Victoria Smith’s Hags: The Demonisation of Middle-Aged Women on a quest to find contemporary feminist literature that touched on female invisibility.

Everywhere in feminism is the presupposition that women are first seen: To be a victim, one must first be acknowledged. To be objectified, you must first be an object. The elephant in the room is that not every woman is an object, and feminism seems curiously stuck on the idea that we all retain positive sexual value. The ugly truth is that some women go their whole lives beneath objectification, and, as many women are surprised to learn, all women eventually hit “the wall” of realizing they’ve ceased to be an object. Once they reach middle age, they’re “ghosted by life itself,” suddenly not even worthy of being dehumanized. Or, as Smith reframes the sentiment slightly more charitably, “you’re still an object; you’ve just changed in status from painting or sculpture to, say, a hat stand.”

Feminism is changing its tune. There’s been a departure from the “raunch feminism,” variously known as sex-positive, choice, or liberal feminism of the ‘90s and ‘00s, a feminism that touted a vision of womanhood where women could be freely “one of the boys” without stigma to a more critical feminism, with voices on the Left, Right, and everywhere in between. But still, everyone operates on the assumption of visibility. Not just visibility but sexual capital. We are now rethinking what to do with that sexual capital and how to retain our humanity while doing it.

Finally, the question of whether there’s an upper limit to what kind of sex and with how many partners is no longer just for finger-wagging Phyllis Schlafly wannabes. Everyone has become hip to kink-shaming, once the domain of moralizing prudes.

In a recent episode of the Female Dating Strategy podcast, which serves as one of the better examples of this new type of feminism, somewhat confusingly labeled “conservative” despite addressing themes shared by many leftists, the hosts discussed a Twitter conversation in which younger women from Generation Z voiced their concerns about millennials promoting uncomfortable and even unsafe sexual practices. The hosts quoted @postnuclearjoan, who wrote: “i’m not done talking about this because i’m so sick of millennials harassing gen z-ers and grooming them into thinking that sexual abuse is empowering and then having the audacity to get mad when we feel uncomfortable because young people setting boundaries is unacceptable.”

Discussions like this are emblematic of the types of changes feminism is undergoing across the political spectrum. “Anything goes” is no longer the mantra. No longer are we under the delusion that liberation and endless choice are one and the same, that the completely unbounded, autonomous individual is the natural endpoint for a feminism that truly champions women. This is clearly progress.

There’s a flavor of feminist thought for everyone that acknowledges, finally, that maybe, just maybe, the girl power women like me grew up with was little more than an empty slogan. Maybe, just maybe, those pesky second wavers weren’t all big, bad, frigid uglies trying to suck the fun out of womanhood. Yet curiously missing in these conversations is any acknowledgment of the women who are nonentities. The women who are no longer, as Smith puts it, “feminine, fertile, and f***able,” who are “squatting in womanhood despite the space now being reserved for the young and the pretty.”

Today’s conversation is an improvement. But we are still saying: Feminism is for those of us who are still in the sexual marketplace. We just know how to navigate it better now.

For Smith, the solution doesn’t lie in expanding the sexual marketplace or simply navigating it more carefully. Her advice is familiar but welcome. We must recognize that women are women the entirety of their lives, that menopause and all that comes after is not an exit from womanhood but another stage of it. Womanhood is diverse, and the erasure of older women is the erasure of all women. Every maiden becomes a mother who eventually becomes a crone. We should nurture the relationship between women and other women, between women and themselves.

We may ignore our mothers’ advice, Smith says, but mother still knows best. Not because of some specter of “matriarchal oppression” or “societal feminization,” as recently become trendy to invoke, or because of the tyranny of what we now recognize as a “Karen,” a clever mask for ageist misogyny, but because your mother lived a long and full life. She knows the score because she’s been at the game since the beginning.

We must stop living in the perpetual now of new feminisms that rewrite past ones and recognize the importance of an intergenerational story. We must work together as women — not as disjointed cohorts correcting the mistakes of the women who came before us but as a whole.