So, I finished reading Camille Paglia's essay (actually a keynote address at Harvard) where she ends with this forceful message:
we must stop seeing everything in life through the narrow lens of gender. If women expect equal treatment in society, they must stop asking for infantilizing special protections. With freedom comes personal responsibility.
And then, I thought I would read the Guardian, which I have not done for a while. There too was a lengthy piece on feminism, but from a completely different perspective.
The sex industry is booming, the rape conviction rate is plummeting, women's bodies are picked over in the media, abortion rights are under serious threat and top business leaders say they don't want to employ women. It all adds up to one thing ... an all-out assault on feminism.
I liked this paragraph there:
the obsession [with pregnant celebrities] is such that one magazine editor has said that "it's at the point now where some stars might decide to have more kids just to collect the money from their photos". We've seen Christina Aguilera, Britney Spears, former child star Melissa Joan Hart and Myleene Klass all pose naked and pregnant in the past few years - as Keri Russell, an actor who has played a pregnant woman in two films in the past year has said, there is "this weird, crazy pop-culture infatuation with all these actresses being pregnant. Have you ever seen so many pictures of [pregnant] actresses?"
Indeed not. The message that these images strike home is that women's worth is directly tied to childbearing,
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