I don’t think I’ve ever been happier on a Tuesday morning.

via @barrysaunders on Twitter

The first throbbing V8s of Australia’s pre-eminent bogan festival, Summernats, could be heard gathering last night. Expect updates.

As a young woman, I would identify as a feminist if asked, but it wasn’t something that I foregrounded. I grew up in an explicitly feminist, activist and very middle class household, and so did my partner. I expected that I was entitled to be treated as a human being, and that I wouldn’t be passed over or denied opportunity because I’m female. What made me more strongly identify as feminist was getting older entering the workforce and learning a bit more about the world. Since I started blogging I’ve ramped up my feminist identification again after seeing misogyny and feminist-blaming in the blogosphere.

So I’m not the target market for this book, which attempts to pick apart why young women are so alienated from feminism.

The authors relied on an informal survey, which they say is not meant be scientific or statistically valid. But they don’t give us much information about it and it all ends up coming across a bit like a Cleo article. In fact, most of the first half of the book has that feel, leading me to wonder whether tighter editing could have woven the two author’s contributions together more seamlessly (and got rid of the typoes and a few other infelicities – for example talking about “‘control crying’ and ‘attachment mothering’” rather than “controlled crying” and “attachment parenting”. )

Dux and Simic say that the feminist that lives in the imaginations of young women as channelled through the mass media “is a feminist who hasn’t kept up with the times, an anachronism that overshadows the way women perceive contemporary feminism”, and that those negative stereotypes persist because there are so few positive images of feminists about. It’s a problem, but the answer can’t be this ahistorical rejection of an unpretty, serious and passionate form of feminism:

“While the ideas of the radical lesbian feminists might seem threatening to many, their power is largely illusory. Their influence on the feminist movement in Australia has been about as significant as that of an eccentric opposition backbencher in our federal parliament.”

Particularly when they have correctly identified the media’s tendency to discuss feminism without feminists, why are they doing this?

Grrr. And there’s a lot more grr in a long thread at the Hoydens’ in response to a recent op-ed in the Age by Monica Dux, including comment from Dux. The op-ed serves to highlight the book’s problems with tone and to show up how an ironic authorial voice only really works when your reader already knows what you mean and is inclined to agree with you. Irony is actually easier to use successfully in the context of blogging because bloggers are more enmeshed with their readers. Also we have smilies

The authors point to lively feminism on the web and include a lengthy interview with tigtog and Lauredhel from Hoydens About Town. The interview is weirdly tacked on the end of a chapter in a grey box and not contextualised or developed. And why don’t they consider whether the online world might be a better vehicle to inform young women about feminism than a mass media that shown it doesn’t care to?

The tone of the second half of the book is more sober and analytical, and I found it much more persuasive. They canvas a number of media debates where strawfeminists have been invoked – in respect of single women, mothers in the paid workforce, raunch and the positioning of feminists as neglectful or uncaring of Muslim women by the “noisy sisterhood” of female MSM columnists such as the late Pamela Bone and Miranda Albrechtson. Angela Shanahan gets a thump too, which earnt my hearty approval.

These descriptive sections are fairly solid, but their attempts to reframe the debates seem underdone in the face of the relentless volume of their earlier material. For example in their discussion of mothers they suggest reframing the conversation as one about “rights” rather than “choices” but don’t acknowledge how rights discourse almost inevitably resolves into a contest of asserted rights. They claim that “choices made by labouring women are a little like confessions extracted under torture”. They ask whether the lower c-section rates and better perinatal mortality (I wonder whether it’s actually morbidity; no reference was cited) enjoyed by Dutch women are a result of robust health attributable to clog wearing. I know, I know, it’s a joke, but it’s not funny and it detracts from the seriousness of the argument.

See also a post by Helen from Cast Iron Balcony, who liked the book more than I did. I wish I had liked it more, but I think the problems with tone and clarity hobbled their attempt to persuasively address misrepresentations and misunderstandings of feminism.

Everybody’s doing it. You can make them here, and you can see Laura‘s, and PavCat‘s and Kirsty‘s and BlueMilk‘s.

And whatever else you think about China, they’re on message, aren’t they?

Also, I miss you Paul.

An explanation of title is here, and here is the blog of the phenomenon.

Hat tip to Hoyden About Town.

(And yes, I will post proper soon.)