Dubecki’s article is just another hatchet job on feminism as a whole by trying to stir up generational conflicts between second-wavers and third-wavers that don’t in actuality exist.

No offence intended, but I actually used to work with Larissa Dubecki at The Age, and can safely say that your comment is, well, bollocks. She has no interest in undertaking a “hatchet job on feminism as a whole”. Rather, she is genuinely a young feminist who happens, on this occasion, to disagree with much of the commentary being offered by some older feminists. Really, this should be no biggie, and certainly no reason for The-MSM-Is-Anti-Feminism conspiracy theories.

http://news.yahoo.com/edcartoons/jerryholbert;_ylt=A0WTUdSUb7NHjCAAgCEHcggF

I struggle with Obama. I’m such an anti-american that his pulpit prose jars.

He’s impressive. Something of the young Jack Kennedy but more intelligent. An African-American but somewhat apart from other African-Americans who are descended from slaves, which is probably what makes him appeal to whites who still find the ghetto scary and who would not vote for a Jesse Jackson.

BUT

You are correct about the pulpit prose, rhetoric without hard policies is not our way but Americans expect it from their Presidents because they still fondly (and mistakenly) believe that the President is somehow above mere politics as practised in Congress, and that magical speech will produce results.

I do not expect things to be substantially different in the actual Presidential campaign either.

I’d like to see Obama talk in concrete terms about issues like health care, housing and enlightened social policies. I’d like to hear him say how he would mend relationships with the rest of the world, and how he would engage the countries of the Middle East, particularly in the peace process.

It is all dazzling verbal sleight-of-hand. Strip away the verbal gymnastics and so far there is little substance.

And I would still have liked to have seen a woman in the White House, if just for the message it would send to the rest of the world, far more so than having any number of female Presidents and Prime Ministers of smaller and less powerful countries.

Maybe we in Australia will just have to gratefully settle for ABB (Anyone But Bush).

Perhaps young white women just don’t like Clinton for reasons that have nothing to do with feminism.

Well done, Katz! First to solve the puzzle in 20 words or less.

I struggle with Obama. I’m such an anti-american that his pulpit prose jars. Nevertheless I would vote for him in a heart-beat.

I don’t like Clinton. I don’t care how civilised her health policy is. The fact remains she is part of the C20 US that sees the globe as its domain. Foreign lands to be exploited. Even assimilated. And, at the end of the day, to see the lands beyond its borders always as its adversaries and often its enemies.

The USA developed, in the previous century, (yes, like many countries) a fortress mentality. With Obama, the US has will get a chance of moving beyond that pre-global nation state neurosis.

Whether it’s literally true or not, the story that George Bush never travelled abroad, and yet became president in the year 2000, sums up the mindset that Obama hopefully can move his country on from.

Raving aside, though, Clinton voted for the invasion Iraq.

No brainer. She must be defeated. She is no equally good choice. Not by a long shot.

Correct!

Such as they are, said ‘wars’ are being conducted by a small minority of loudmouths of all ages,

But if the polls demonstrate that young women and older women are voting differently then we are looking at something more than a bunch of isolated loudmouths.

If true, here is a phenomenon that must be explained, if for no other reason that Clinton’s inability to swing young white women behind her may well cost her a shot a the presidency.

Perhaps there are some inter-generational tensions between white, self-identified feminists.

Perhaps young white women just don’t like Clinton for reasons that have nothing to do with feminism.

PS: It will be interesting to see how the Democrats stack up against McCain – here after all is a Republican who finally has a war record and who has children in the Armed Forces

Is that a reliable figure?

It’s a guess, based on long and careful observation of my students (late teens, early 20s) over 20+ years and of my feminist colleagues and mates. Whether it’s “reliable” probably depends on what you want to rely on it for.

For all your terminological needs, I can’t recomment Finally, A Feminism 101 Blog highly enough.

I don’t think it will. Obama has punctured Clinton’s seeming invincibility, and people will go towards the candidate they think can pile up votes in November. Whether he will be able to in sufficient numbers is an open question, but one thing is sure, if the Republican candidate is promising a ‘hundred years war’, whoever the Dems candidate is, all they have to do is to remind people just how much blood and treasure has already been expended in running cold war redux, against, well, against a person/movment/ideology or something, that appears impossible to properly name, but nevertheless requires trillions of dollars and the blood of thousands of people, to properly ‘nail down’.

Clinton has pitched herself as best able to manage this ‘chimera’. Obama has pitched himself as rejecting the whole adventure. In my view, this now makes him the winner of he Primary. People are sick and tired of a bellicosity that appears to have no real object, and which obscures the issues that are beginning to really bite, which are all domestic, and play on Democrat strengths. It is BO’s to lose.

There’s something very limitingly literal-minded about the ‘woman in power’ trope, however powerfully symbolic it might be, but if the woman in question is playing by patriarchal rules and values then the symbolism is completely hollow.

Whilst I agree that simply electing a woman as president doesn’t change things – excpet insofar as it proves that a woman can be president, no small thing – how do signify a break with patriarchal rules?
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Most patriarchal rules have been done away with in modern societies. Women are enfrachised, can own property etcetera. I wouldn’t say we live in a non-patriarchal society but we don’t live in a patriarchy in the sense that Saudi Arabia is a patriarchy. England was not so different not so long ago. Great and unprecendented changes have been made. Surely one of the major things left is that women now take advantage of the franchise by occupying positions on all levels.

said ‘wars’ are being conducted by a small minority of loudmouths of all ages, steeped in the adversarial/hierarchical model that many of us associate with masculinist values

Are hierachies and adverarial conflict inherently masculinist? How do you organize something as simple as a meeting without a hierarchy? How do you make way for the expression of conflicting views if you are not willing to be an adversary. How would a court of law operate without hierarchies and adversaries? What would be the alternative?
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How do you resolve the conflict between the ‘pro-sex’ and ‘anti-sex’ feminists in the US for example? It seems to me that their positions are irreconcilable. refursing to play this ‘masculinist’ game of adversarial debate would lead ironically to the ‘masculinist’ phenomena of a hierarchy where one or the other group would dominate and silence its, um, adversary.

But the rest of us are just getting on with it. My 20-year-old goddaughter and I are singing off the same feminist page, and in that we resemble about 90 per cent of the feminist population.

90%? Mmmm. Is that a reliable figure?

And if feminists were actually saying that, you might have had a point.

I thought one of the hopes of feminism was to rise above the old macho, gung-ho, bullying ways…..

Orwell called it GroupThink, didn’t he?? And made it clear enough that the “Think” part was fraudulent.

deary-me!