"In many ways, Stoller is critical of the '70s feminists who steered the course of the movement's politics. "They rejected femininity by saying it was oppressive," she explains. A better philosophy, she believes, is that of the Riot Grrl movement of the early '90s. "I loved the reclamation strategy of Riot Grrl. They made a separate culture for girls by throwing their femininity in your face." "

Spice Girls and Courtney Love, girl power ... Obviously Riot Grrl philosophy is closely connected with the idea of women 'reclaiming their power' (what power? what does this mean?), using sexuality or anger to do so, and usually a combination of both. High heels and angry words. It's almost a simple manifestation of the embarressment of having surrendered back to sexual discomfort and parody. And how much of it is about sex ... it's just another aspect of the modern ideal of shovelling sex down your throat, day in, day out. How can anybody with even an intuitive understanding of the problem of materialism be complicit in these movements? What is disturbing is that it is precisely these people, who are supposed to question society, who you would expect to be most astute. It's just like the mistakes of the generation of 68, all over again. Rather than studying what right-wing or conservative elements are doing wrong, we need to turn our analysis upon ourselves. This is our most important task: we need to face our weaknesses. What went wrong after 1968? How does it relate to what is happening today? The most powerful political ideas on 'our side' of the last 30 years have come from people like Houellebecq and Fassbinder who, for one reason or another, were able to subject THEMSELVES and their friends to question, rather than 'the enemy.'

Ginia Bellafante: The point, of course, is that there are no obvious leaders of the women's movement anymore, and the most popular woman on TV--hardly an uninfluential medium by the way--is Ally McBeal

You can defend contemporary feminism by saying 'but what about the fight for abortion rights', what about the fight against spousal abuse ... but these were all issues that existed prior to this current corruption and had already begun to be fought ... this is to seriously underestimate the control that images wield in this society. They have basically replaced violence, which is risky for the abuser, as a means of control. Saying that TV is 'hardly an uninfluential medium' sums it up.

Hard Work, Self Esteem, Bedtime

So, I'm a girl; this morning I spent several minutes poking bobby pins into my hair so that it would stay back in a bun; but alongside me is walking this baffled alien, who keeps quiet but suffers more and more ... And should I say to other girls, 'Do you really feel that you are a girl? Or are you frigid too?' (I use frigid not in a limited sense, but in the sense of a complete shyness from the physical world and their supposed 'action' within it) - I know exactly what would happen, because I was raised poorly enough to have attempted to ask. (What do I mean by flattering myself like this? I wasn't really raised poorly enough to have asked.) A fleeting look of annoyance, a fleeting laugh, and if I'm lucky the victim will apply themselves to searching through their minds for a couple of cliches they learnt from a book about feminism, or maybe from the television or a song ... of course the type of frigidity I'm referring to is not the sort of thing that is easy to communicate about, precisely because it refers to solitude, to the quietness of a cell in which the prisoner has been made too patient ... I don't see myself as different to these 'girls' at all, I can tell when I am in shops, for example, by the moments when they hesitate, physically, when their movements betray a primal uncertainty, as they momentarily 'stammer', I mean physically freeze, over a dress before they pick it up, and millions of other little things like that. As if they have to summon up all their courage every 10 seconds simply to become girls again ... yet this is all a secret which we will never discuss.

And as I said at the start, I'm not the type of girl who 'abandons the pretenses' - I care about wrinkles, shave my legs and look in the mirror, I'm not a lesbian -

Yet inside me I find not a girl but ...

Imagine this painful conversation: 'But wait' you say,'I learnt all about this in Feminism 301. That baffling alien you refer to doesn't exist; all you are is the sum of your manifestations; and those pauses you're talking about, those moments of uneasiness, must be simply a delusion.'
'How can a feeling be a delusion - or anything except a delusion? Where does this uneasiness come from, if I am nothing but a collection of aspects? What is there to judge these aspects and experience this uneasiness?'
'Well,' you reply, 'this uneasiness is just another one of the aspects that constitute your 'self', worth no more or less than any other.'
'But then,' I argue, 'this uneasiness is so universal that it is the self.'

But now, imagine for the sake of argument, a hypothetical girl, who only wanted to have a baby when she was in high school, who entertained no ambitions higher than this. She didn't want to be a writer or a computer scientist, she wanted to have a baby. And eventually, in her mid thirties, having forged a successful career as a writer or a computer scientist and contracted a 'partner', she will have a baby, but much too late ... this life that she has had foisted upon her, and these ambitions, are inescapable ... there's no-one left who is going to turn aside from themselves and say 'I'm not a musician, I'm not a genius, I'm not a writer and I'm not an artist, my own fulfillment means nothing to me' because this particular brand of comfort has vanished from the earth. But you can still walk past the church at night and see the pointless spire, that houses nothing, that has no purpose except comfort - not physical comfort, I feel obliged to add, for the sake of my readers - this type of comfort that has vanished from the earth, even from the working classes, because they're a market for self help books too, and of course they're potentially productive - what kind of fucking irony is it that having given up heaven, we've made earth less comfortable than ever.

Fassbinder

"I take women more seriously than directors usually do. To my mind, women don’t exist to turn men on. They don’t have this function of merely being objects. In fact, that is one aspect of the cinema that I really despise. And I want to show that women, more than men, are obliged to resort to underhanded methods to avoid being mere objects." Rainer Werner Fassbinder, 1976.

Levinas

'Is it really just to ground the corn and spin the flax that woman exists? A slave would be good enough for such a task ... Yet a more subtle interpretation is required ... This corn and flax are wrenched from nature by the work of man. They testify to the break with spontaneous life, to the ending of instinctive life buried in the immediacy of nature as given. They mark the beginning of what one can accurately call the life of spirit. But an insurmountable 'rawness' remains in the products of our conquering civilisation.

'The world in which reason becomes more and more self-conscious is not habitable. It is hard and cold, like those supply depots where merchandise which cannot satisfy is piled up: it can neither clothe those who are naked nor feed those who are hungry; it is impersonal, like factory hangars and industrial cities where manufactured things remain abstract, true with the truth of calculations and brought into the anonymous circuit of the economy that proceeds according to knowledgeable plans that cannot prevent ... disasters. This is spirit in all its masculine essence. It lives outdoors, exposed to the fiery sun which blinds and to the wind of the open sea which beat it and blow it down, in a world that offers it no inner refuge, in which it is disorientated, solitary and wandering, and even as such is already alienated by the products it had helped to create, which rise up untamed and hostile.

'To add the work of servant to that of lord and master does not resolve the contradiction. To light eyes that are blind, to restore to equilibrium, and so overcome an alienation which ultimately results from the very virility of the universal and all-conquering logos that stalks the very shadows that could have sheltered it, should be the ontological function of the feminine, the vocation of the one 'who does not conquer.' Woman does not simply come to someone deprived of companionship to keep him company. She answers to a solitude inside this privation and - which is stranger - to a solitude that subsists in spite of the presence of God; to a solitude in the universal, to the inhuman which continues to well up even when the human has mastered nature and raised it up to thought. For the inevitable uprooting of thought, which dominates the world, to return to the peace and ease of being at home, the strange flow of gentleness must enter into the geometry of infinite and cold space. Its name is woman.'

… and the Rock City Rocker index page