EQUALITY MYTH

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?