EQUALITY MYTH

Lady Gaga Talks Feminism: “It Really Doesn’t Mean ‘Man-Hating’”

Gaga talks feminism with the Times of London, which gives us a great excuse to post the Lady Gaga barbie collection. On feminism:

“Do you know what that girl at the bar said to me?” Gaga says, sipping her Scotch. “She said, ‘You’re a feminist. People think it means man-hating, but it doesn’t.’ Isn’t that funny?”

Earlier in the day, conversation had turned to whether Gaga would describe herself as feminist or not. As the very best conversations about feminism often will, it had segued from robust declarations of emancipation and sisterhood (“I am a feminist because I believe in women’s rights, and protecting who we are, down to the core”) to musing on who she fancied. (“In the video to Telephone, the girl I kiss, Heather, lives as a man. And as someone who does like women, something about a more masculine woman makes me feel more… feminine. When we kissed, I got that fuzzy butterfly feeling.”)

We had concluded that it was odd most women “shy away” from declaring themselves feminists, because “it really doesn’t mean ‘man-hating.’”

Salon: The Tina Fey Backlash and Feminists as ‘Mean Girls’

Amen to Rebecca Traister at Salon, who writes today about the Tina Fey backlash, most-recently prompted by her “pathetic single girl” skit on last week’s SNL. Fey has been called all kinds of things, but this week, the ladybloggers of the world took it to a whole new level, questioning what the single woman trope was “really trying to say,”  whether Fey secretly resented single women, attacking her brand of feminism, and then, of course, speculating “who her husband’s been dicking.”

As Traister puts it:

I have quietly wondered whether the level of acclaim she’s received has rendered her ever so slightly overrated. But the swift and high-pitched pile-on, in which considered appraisals of the attitudes reflected in Fey’s work quickly descended into her ejection from feminism, guessing games about the imagined tedium of her marriage, and the suggestion that her husband is “dicking” someone else, resembles nothing so much as the cafeteria from “Mean Girls.”

As Traister points out, Fey is a comedian, not a a professional feminist. Isn’t all the finger-pointing a potentially divisive waste of time?