You can mark 2013 as the year feminism officially lost all meaning.
“The least feminist thing one can do is savage another woman based on [her] personal romantic choices.” That was the tweet from Audrey Gelman, former spokesman for Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer during his recent campaign for comptroller. Gelman was referring, of course, to Lis Smith, her opposite number from Eliot Spitzer’s team who then went to work for Bill de Blasio.
Smith, who has been linked romantically with her former boss, the Love Gov, has pleaded for privacy and understanding from the public and the media. Even as Client No. 9 has been caught coming out of her apartment wearing the same clothes as the night before and going to her family’s house for Christmas, Smith apparently expects that we will withhold judgment. She retweeted Gelman’s message, which also asked for “More civility and (peace) in #2014 pls.”
Who am I to object to a call for civility and peace, but do we have to do it in the name of feminism? Here is Smith, a 31-year-old Dartmouth grad who has worked on various high-powered political campaigns (including one for John Edwards — maybe there’s a pattern here), and she decides to throw herself at a still-married man who has been forced to resign from public office for money-laundering and transporting hookers across state lines.
Is this what the first wave (or for that matter second wave or third wave) feminists were fighting for? The ability for smart women to make stupid romantic choices? Gloria? Betty? You guys want to weigh in here?
A Huffington Post poll conducted this year by the firm YouGov found that only 23 percent of Americans identified as feminists. But asked if they believe that “men and women should be social, political and economic equals,” 82 percent said yes.
If you want to know why younger women are so reluctant to identify as feminists, it’s not simply that they don’t see women struggling the same way their grandmothers did. It’s that, as Taylor Swift famously put it last year when asked why she didn’t use the label to describe herself, “I don’t really think about things as guys versus girls.”
Solidarity is dead, ladies.
In fact, there are plenty of men out there who were happy to support the basic premise of feminism — as one Park Slope bumper sticker put it, “The radical idea that women are people, too.”
Many men saw the liberalization of divorce laws, the opening of opportunities for women in education and the workplace and the changes in women’s legal and financial standing in a marriage as positive developments. Most men didn’t want their daughters or sisters to be subject to the whims of dirtbags like Eliot Spitzer if they happened to have been so unlucky as to have married him.
There was a time when a woman who was married to a man cavorting with prostitutes or engaging in otherwise embarrassing dalliances would have little choice but to stand by her man and say nothing. What other options did she have? But today, no woman, especially no Ivy League-educated woman with a good job, would be forced to sacrifice her dignity for the sake of her security.
Which is why, by the way, it’s so puzzling to see women of a certain age still rallying around Hillary Clinton. If you’re Hillary or Huma Abedin or Lis Smith and you think that getting in with a slime-bucket is a good idea for your own life trajectory, well be our guest. But you could have accomplished that without feminism.
It is interesting that despite our society’s loosening sexual mores, we as a nation are actually becoming less forgiving of marital infidelity. In a 2008 USA Today/Gallup Poll, 33 percent of Americans said they would forgive a spouse who had an affair. In a 1999 CNN poll, that number was 56 percent. One reason for that decline is perhaps that we don’t need to forgive cheaters now.
So here’s a New Year’s message for the wives and the mistresses of the serially unfaithful: Maybe you missed the past 60 years of messages about female empowerment. If you want to put up with this kind of behavior in 2014, that’s fine, but leave the sisterhood out of it.