Content area
Full text
"I consider myself a hard-core feminist," said a twenty-year-old women's studies major at Tulane University in New Orleans. "But is it okay that I wear thong underwear?"
We laughed-in recognition primarily-when we heard this "feminist in a thong" question. At the 150 or so colleges where we have spoken since our book Manifesta: Young Women, Feminism, and the Future hit the shelves, the "can I wear a thong?" type of query is one of the most popular.1 On the surface, the statement feeds into stereotypes about young women, seeming to reveal that they are oddly obsessed with body image and shopping issues and their personal lives, rather than politics and revolution. On a different level, however, the question is symbolic of young people's relationship to feminism: meaning that the relationship is often personal, invisible, and uncomfortable. This question can be a metaphor for the generation gap between older women's feminism and younger women's. Many older women hear that Tulane student and think, "what's a thong?"
These women worrying about their underwear are not the "I'm not a feminist, but . . ." types. They are women who fear they aren't worthy of being feminists because they haven't done enough-and there are thousands of these women. They are the women's studies majors, the girls who volunteer at the women's center and Planned Parenthood, the ones who organize domestic violence week and Take Back the Night. They are the feminists. In our talks with college students (mostly women, but always a handful of men, too) we spend a lot of time confirming that they are capable of being just as good feminists as anyone else, which brings us back to the issue of the thong.
Young women are into the ideals and goals of the women's movement, but they are afraid. The real question being asked by that Tulane student is: Can I be who I am and be a feminist? Many young women sense that the personal decisions they make-having boyfriends, indulging in Brazilian bikini waxes, getting married, wanting to have a body like Gwyneth Paltrow, or being into fashion-permit others to assume that they are dupes of the patriarchy. Aren't these the trappings of femininity that their mothers (or women's studies professors) rejected? Manifesta was...