Here we are, part two of the last lecture. Oh my goodness, I don't know where to laugh or cry or do a happy dance. Let's just move on, shall we?
All right, next slide. So, how are the second wave feminist movement and a third wave feminist movement different? Well, this is the question.
This is how we know that there is such a thing as a third wave movement. Because they are different. So the first wave movement, if you remember that lecture from last week, was very much focused on, much like this first wave, the first wave was very much focused on changing laws, particularly getting women the right to vote and getting married women the right to own property.
Those were the two big laws they were after. That thing that culminated in the movie Iron Jawed Angels. That's the first wave.
The second wave is again interested in getting a bunch of laws passed from the... equal rights amendment to equal credit stuff, laws about rape, laws about marriage rights. There was a ton of stuff, if you remember, in that lecture.
The third wave feminist movement is less focused on laws. We really have almost all the laws we need. What we don't have is a culture that pays much attention to most of them. Rape is still a chronic... crime, we're far more likely to blame the victim than the perpetrator for.
Sexual harassment in the workplace is still ubiquitous. The president is a sexual predator and 62% of Republicans don't think that should disqualify him from the presidency. That is, we have the laws.
What we don't have is the changing social attitudes. The third wave is also less divided by race. The same way that your generation, you young people listening to this, and even some of you not so young people, care less about race than the generation before me, or even my generation.
I'm 57. The movement is less about sort of an organization, here's a group for white women, here's a group for black women, here's a group for Native American women. Rather, it's sort of a notion that, one, we don't really need groups. We just need movements, and two, we shouldn't group up by our race or our religion or our class. The third wave is just as divided over prostitution and pornography as the second wave, and as it says there, that's okay. You don't have to agree on everything to be a feminist.
I think it's even possible to be an anti-abortion feminist. if you're good about everything else. You can see I'm struggling with that a little bit, but I know there are people who describe themselves as feminist and everything except the matter of abortion. I don't understand it, but again, I don't have to. Also, third-wave feminism is very rooted in queer theory.
Queer theory? That sounds like fun, Peg! Would you tell us more? Well, sure I would. How about the next slide?
Queer Theory! Queer Theory, and this is stuff you probably actually know, even if you didn't know you knew or you didn't know it had a name. Queer Theory focuses on that mismatch between sex and gender and sexual desire and attention. So Queer Theory is where we begin to get this notion that both gender and sex and sexual attractive, who you're attracted to, that those things are a spectrum.
It's not that you're either box A or box B, you're either this or that, you're either a heterosexual or homosexual, you're a boy or a girl, but that rather there's a spectrum along there, uh, that, that you can, that you can respond to with regards to your gender, who you're attracted to, all that kind of stuff, right? So, well, queer, and queer is, we're going to talk later about reclaiming words, and Certainly the LGBTQ community has reclaimed queer. Queer was a pejorative word you used to hurt people, or not you used, but that homophobes used.
And rather the community reclaimed it and we get queer theory. And much in the same way later on we'll talk about bitch theory. So queer theory is this notion that all kinds of...
issues of sexuality belong in the same study group as it were um and that they're they're related that to be bisexual lesbian gay cross-dressing intersex and gender ambiguity gender corrective surgery all that stuff you can lump under queer theory. Because queer is to be not normative. Not normal. And indeed, queer theory says, it's the last thing, we're going to pop down there real quick, that there's nothing wrong with not being normal. Indeed, that normal maybe isn't, shouldn't be a goal.
That to be queer is to be good. I certainly agree. I'm a pretty straight up heterosexual girl. But I'm an odd... person and I enjoy being odd and and I find that the odder I am and the more odd people I have in my life the happier I am normative people with their you know beamers and their beige deco houses and and they're they're eating at apple bees those people make me nervous anyway so then wrong with it just not my people if we go up to our just above there above the second to last bullet point you Queer theory is attempts to debunk this notion of stable binary approaches to sex and gender.
Again, I said this, but I'll say it again, that it's not that you're either heterosexual or homosexual, male or female, but this notion of shifting identities, and that indeed you can't, just because you're one thing at one time doesn't mean you aren't going to be something some other time in your life. That the identities, that there's a continuum. Not only for individuals, but that there may be a shifting continuum within an individual's own life. So queer theory opens the door for all the possibilities of personal expression with regards to one's gender and sexuality. So that's cool, I think.
Why not? What the heck? Why do you care what other people do?
Right? And I suspect most of you are like, well, yeah, duh. Anyway, next slide. the third wave care about?
If they're not about organization and laws, what do they care about? Well, some of the same things as the second wave, like gender violence and reproductive rights, I think as long as there are human beings with uteruses and there are sexists, there are, we're going to have to care, feminists are going to have to care about gender violence and reproductive rights. And just in the same way that the LGBTQ community reclaimed queer, a third wave feminist. have reclaimed some derogatory language under the heading of bitch philosophy. So I have a really fun, there's a ladies blues group I have a CD of, and they have a song about being a bitch, and the song says that bitch stands for being in total control of herself, which I like.
The bitch philosophy first came from Elizabeth Wurzel's 1990 book, Bitch in Praise of Difficult Women. and that same year, fifth column, another punk group's song, All Women Are Bitches. You can look those up if you want, or you cannot. I decided instead I would have you watch Helen Hong's really funny monologue on being a bitch.
It's very short, so go ahead, click that, and go watch that, and then when you come back, we'll go on and we'll talk about vaginas. See? That'll be fun.
Alright? Go watch Helen Hong. She's funny.
Yeah? Okay. All right.
Did you enjoy that? I love Helen Hong. She makes me laugh. Um, I, I, if we'd had class, you'd have known by this point that I use bitch and bitches all the time in a casual way, because I, I too, even though I'm an old feminist, I'm attempting to reclaim the language. And, and I know that when I do use the word in front of like my mother, it makes her nervous.
Get to her. It's still a bad word. But this is what oppressed groups have done for much of the last 50 years, is take words that other groups use to hurt them and reclaim them as their own, and thus take the power out of the hurt.
Right? Yeah. And we have vagina monologues. So I've got a slide here, but I'm the advisor for the vagina monologues over at Cal Poly.
That's a picture of my group of girls from last year or the year before. You can see me down there in the front, sitting next to my friend Roseanne, with sweet Adrienne laying on the floor in front of me. Oh, Adrienne. Anyway, there it is.
That's a bunch of girls doing the Vagina monologue performance at Cal Poly. Let's look at the next slide and see what that is. Okay?
All right. Written by Eve Ensler and first performed in 1996, which is a long time ago. The idea was that she, Eve Ensler, she was a performance artist and she got interested in sort of, somebody was, she used the word vagina in public and somebody was shocked by that.
And she began to think... How odd that was that vagina was a dirty word. Penis? You can say penis. Nobody's like, oh no, but vagina.
And so she began this sort of asking women sort of casually. And then as a, I think she got a grant to do it about their vaginas. And then she, um, she created a series of monologues about all kinds of things, uh, vaginas, rape, sex, menstruation, birth, the female experience.
And the whole idea of the monologues is to celebrate the female experience. and to celebrate that most female of anatomy, the vagina. Because what could be more delightful than a vagina? So cozy, so warm, so much fun. So vagina monologues in America are performed all over America, either on or around Valentine's Day.
Valentine's Day is renamed for many feminists V-Day. So instead of Valentine's, it's Vagina Day. And then V-Day organizations or vagina monologue organizations like the one at Cal Poly, what they'll do is they'll put on these monologue productions and make money, like we used to sell tickets and fill the house, and then donate that to organizations that promote ending violence against women.
Our money went almost entirely to House of Ruth, which is a domestic violence shelter in Claremont. Anyway, you're going to know more about the vagina monologues because we have, you have a video assignment to watch me doing a vagina monologue with my writing partner, Roseanne Welch. And then you're going to watch some other vagina monologues and write up a list of your thoughts. And so that'll be delightful.
Okay, so that's enough talking about that. All right, next slide. Classic third wave feminist movement.
activity. That is, instead of having an organization, you have things that women and men get together and do. So the vagina monologues is number one, take back the night is number two.
These tend to be sort of like gay pride parades or queer pride parades. Take back the night tend to be sort of public demonstrations, parades. And the idea is to protest rape and domestic violence by being...
Outrageous and in your face. I've got some pictures in the next slide if you want to go take a peek at anyway The notion is that all violence against anyone is bad But that violence against women is a particular problem and that women do not invite Violence by their behavior or their outfits take back the night tends to be really inclusive We do it take back the night or we did I suppose we won't do it this year take back the night event at Cal Poly I've been the keynote speaker twice, but, you know, twice in almost 20 years. So we do sort of speeches and open mic and usually a band and some booths and stuff. But it can be walks. It can be vigils.
It can be parades. Any number of things. Okay, next slide. Tell you that this is, if you're thinking, well, that seems sort of ridiculous or whatever, that Take Back the Night comes from the fundamental place that it is that after dark is a dangerous place for women.
That whatever your experience walking across campus is at night, if you're a male student, is very different from your experience as a female student walking across campus. And that historically what we have done in America is essentially tell women that because men are dangerous, you girls should be more careful. Rather than saying, hey dudes.
quipping assholes. And again, I don't mean to suggest that all dudes are assholes. That's ridiculous and also sexist, but rather that some men are predators and some women, but let's be super honest about this. More men. Patriarchy creates male violence against women.
It just does. So again, this sort of notion that you should be able to dress what you want, how you want, you should be able to do what you want. You should be able to be out at night. You should be able to do the things male people could do.
Can you? Am I telling you all to go out after dark in a bikini? No. But you should be able to. But you really can't.
Unless maybe you go to, you know, downtown Claremont and not too late. Someplace nice. And even then it can be dangerous. Don't do it.
Peg didn't tell you to do that. Anyway, now I'm uncomfortable. Next slide. Run away!
Other sort of classic on-campus things that are very third wave, there's walk a mile in her shoes. which is a dudes duo, usually on college campuses, kind of a walk around campus, wearing high heels. Generally, it's kind of like a walk-a-thon. They get people to donate money based on how far they walk in high heels.
And again, to support, to suggest male solidarity for feminist issues or to suggest male feminism. And then the Clothesline Project, which we also do, we do Take Back the Night at Cal Poly and also the Clothesline Project, and they do them all over the place. Clothesline Project, we often do that in conjunction with Take Back the Night Is that we'll have a bunch of tables with the each colored t-shirt signifies different kinds of things.
You can see the pink t-shirt is signifies I think domestic violence, the red t-shirt signifies rape, there's colors for incense, there's colors for all sorts of things. The idea is you go to the table, pick a t-shirt color and then write on it whatever you want. You can write your story, you can write a slogan.
Etc etc and then we hang them up on ropes We've stung around campus and the notion is to sort of get people to understand how many human beings Have been victimized by sexual violence because it is a crime We don't talk about and we can pretend like it doesn't exist or it's not very common Until people speak up and force us not to indeed if we were in class I would tell you that half of the people in this room have been or will be raped. Jeez, that's shitty. But virtually none of you are going to talk about it. And that's shitty too.
So the idea is that these movements, sort of like the Me Too movement, take the secrecy away. All right, next slide. About the Riot Grrrl movement.
So this is, the Riot Grrrl movement then starts. This sort of chick power, girl power music. And then that's how it ends up in pop music. So you get whoever those pop music people are.
Beyonce and, I don't know, I'm really bad at pop music. Because I've got to tell you, I'm not very fond of it. But if you are, that's cool.
But it starts with these punk girl bands. And women-centered music. And now, if we had class, I'd put you in small groups after this lecture. and say, let's do, everybody put together a little playlist of, you know, women-powered, chick-centered music, and then come up to the front of the class and perform it, not perform it, but show it to the room.
And it's a really fun way to sort of explore how much of that music is out there. But I've already had plenty of links, and I think you can explore what you want to explore, and it's not my job to tell you what your musical taste should be. So feel free, if you're at all interested, to Google or YouTube or whatever it is you use to find your music. Any of those fun little punk Riot Grrrl bands, if you want. And if you don't, hey man, that's cool too.
Alright, next slide. Perhaps the most powerful of all third wave movements, the Me Too movement. The phrase Me Too was first, this is how you know it's old. It first appeared on MySpace.
MySpace? What the heck? MySpace.
Tarana Burke worked, she's a social activist who worked in a not-for-profit that dealt with violence against girls, and she was in Atlanta, and some very young girl, 11 or 13, told her this terrible story about being a victim of incest, and all Tarana could think, she said later, was, I wish I could say Me Too, but this has never happened to me. And then it occurred, she'd occurred to her that she could say Me Too in a symbolic, supportive sort of way. And so she started a Me Too page on MySpace. And it kind of, the Me Too thing kind of lurked around the internet for about a decade.
And then in 1917, 1918, it got a lot of play with a rash of sexual abuse allegations. Bill Cosby, Harvey Weinstein, Kevin Spacey, Louis C.K. There's more. You probably could add other names to the list.
I didn't want to spend too much time listing men who've been bad. Honest to God, that's a depressing and stupid list. But nonetheless, the point was there that there was a ton of powerful men in America and a ton of regular, not powerful men who abused their power in a patriarchal society.
by abusing women. Oh, fun. So what the Me Too movement does is it starts this widespread social discussion.
You've all heard of it. You may not have heard of the vagina monologues or walk a mile in her shoes or the clothesline, but you've all heard of Me Too. It is without a doubt the biggest third wave phenomenon.
Indeed, it might be the third wave at this juncture. And this massive social conversation about the widespread nature of sexual harassment, sexual assault, and rape in our culture. And it is a conversation that is ongoing.
Next slide. If you're very, very fond of the current president, you're just going to have to tough this out because this is a reality. All these things on this slide are true.
It turns out when you poll Republicans, they either don't believe they're true, or they believe they're true but they don't care. That's up to you. But it turns out that something like 63% of Americans believe all this stuff, and it turns out they believe it for a reason.
The stuff is true. There is such a thing as truth. It exists.
If you want to pretend it doesn't, then you got to ask yourself, what am I doing in college? Right? Anyway, right before the election in 2016, President Trump was caught on tape talking about grabbing women's pussies.
He also bragged about walking into beauty pageant rooms to look at naked women. He talked about kissing women against their will, that he just grabbed them and kissed them. He did all of this before the election and still people voted for him.
Clearly, not the majority. We know that. The majority did not vote for him, but people did vote for him. That is, he clearly demonstrated he was a sexual predator, and America said, some part of America said, I don't care. For a lot of reasons that I don't want to go into here, but I find that appalling, and quite frankly, disappointing.
President Trump has been accused of sexual misconduct. by 25 different women as of the research I did this morning, May 2020. He has been accused of rape, sexual assault, and sexual harassment. All of those, that's the big three there.
He's been accused of all of those. Here's the thing, one or two women you might be able to say, well I don't know, maybe they're lying because he's the president. You might be able to say, oh it's a democratic or progressive or a liberal conspiracy, you know, like the COVID.
Or or or or you could just maybe agree that women don't generally lie about this stuff I'm not saying no woman in the history of the universe has lied But 25 women have come forward and said he did something horrible to me and we have his own words Testifying that he does horrible things to women his own ex-wife of Anna Trump said he used to rape her Because you can indeed rape your wife several beauty pageant contestants because you know he funds these beauty pageants so that he has access to women. Several beauty pageant contestants have said that he raped them as well. That's rape, people.
That's a bad crime. Right before the election, when it was clear that much of America didn't really care that the presidential candidate was a predator, Michelle Obama gave a speech about it, expressing the feelings that I suspect a lot of us have about this. You can click that to listen to it. I'd kind of like you to do it because I think this is really depressing. This business about the highest position in our government is not only incompetent in dealing with the COVID crisis, but literally, legally a sexual predator.
Let's walk away from this slide having seen Michelle Obama's speech and thus, unless you're a Trumper, feeling better about this. okay so you click that go watch that and then i will see you to conclude this lecture okay okay go do it michelle empowering good for you yay next slide in conclusion the third wave is diverse diverse and diffuse diverse The third wave tends to have more men in it than the second wave. It tends to be more racially diffuse. It tends to be more diffuse about sexuality. And then diffuse.
So diverse and diffuse. I'm getting tired. Diverse. It tends to have everybody in it.
Kind of everybody in the same pie. And then diffuse. It's not like you can point at this organization and that organization.
It's stuff that happens. with hashtags and and and and social glue. Um, and what does this mean? I know, I don't think you have to draw really hard lines between a third wave feminism lecture and what does this mean to me today.
But if we understand how some of this, like how does the backlash work? How do Americans, including American women, collaborate in the backlash or in electing a president who's a sexual predator? Some of it's about, remember the witchcraft lecture and Stockholm Syndrome and class status anxiety? Well, that's how we understand people who operate. In ways that are not actually in their best interests So we do that we talked about the best L test at the end of the world war two lecture We know for a fact there are still not enough Roles for strong women in films So the third wave is working on that and I think right now in American movies We're doing better than we ever have since the beginning of film remember Susan Douglas's critique of television How it tended to be really sexist I suspect that's still the truth on TV.
It may be better. I don't know. I don't watch TV, but I don't watch TV because it can be pretty awful.
So the interesting thing about the third wave, it is really hard to point at a place and say, there it is. So it's a funny lecture. But for all that it lacks, for all that some people may criticize the third wave for lacking focus or cohesion, I think that is, it's very strange that in this sort of, it's not just this group of women and that group of women engaged in political activity, but that it's, it's this big, that's how you get the LA Women's March.
I don't, I don't know if you were, I was there, the, after Trump's inauguration, we had a big women's march in LA. They had big women's marches all over the country. It was massive. Massive and I went again the next year and it was massive again That's how you get that kind of protest. You can't get that kind of protest with these three organizations filled with point oh oh oh seven percent of the population you get that kind of turnout at a protest march Because you figured out how to reach a lot of people.
So is it is it does it lack focus? maybe But in that lacking focus, does it reach more people? Absolutely. I think that's good. Because again, we have all the laws we need.
What we need now to do is change social customs. Especially the bad stuff. The bad social customs. It's okay for presidents to be predators. We need to change that custom.
Which is why you should vote. Yes. Anyway. Next and last slide.
Last slide of History 36 ever. Brace yourself. Here it comes.
Okay. I'll admit, that's a picture of a white girl, and I really struggled with that. But I couldn't find a funner, punkier picture that said Chicks Rock. So I went with that, recognizing it's a white lady and I'm a white lady.
Okay, so, you know. That is what it is. Anyway, chicks do rock.
So do the dudes. But this is a women's history class. And you're nearly done.
You've done this. You may have already done your reading response. You may not have.
But if you haven't, you need to do your reading response still. And then there's a really great video activity. You're going to watch me do a vagina monologue where I do a bunch of orgasmic moans.
It's every bit as ridiculous as you might think. And then I'm going to ask you to look at one or two other vagina monologues, and you're going to write up some thoughts about it. So it'll be a fun way to end the course.
I would save that video assignment for the last thing you do for this course before studying for the final and taking it. Anyway. Okay.
So that's the stuff about this. Here's my last thing to say to you in my last narrated lecture. Gosh.
Good job. And I don't mean that in a condescending, smart-alecky, or any kind of way. I mean that most sincerely. It's hard to sit here on my deck in May and say to you, who I can't see and barely remember, wow, great job.
But man, that's what I'm trying to do. Really great job. To have signed up for an in-class class and to have it ripped out from underneath your feet on week three.
and have to learn a whole new way of going to college, and have to do that while engaging and living in a state where the whole, everything changed, where you couldn't go sit at Starbucks and use the Wi-Fi, where you couldn't go to the library, where you couldn't go to campus for tutoring, where you had to wear a mask everywhere you went, even on hot days. Where some of your family members may or may not have been sick. Where you had to worry about being sick.
Where you couldn't go do stuff. Where you had to stand in line to get into Home Depot. And stand in line at Costco to buy toilet paper.
And all of those things which were really hard and really stressful. Even after we got used to them. To do all that and to still finish this course.
Jeez. That's really impressive. Ladies and gentlemen, really impressive.
And I want you to know, I'm not sucking up to you. I want you to understand that you have achieved something impressive. You did something hard. And if you can do this, you can do anything. Anything.
Do not be constrained by your gender or your racial status or your class status. or your sexuality. Decide who you are. Decide who you want to be. Figure out how to do it.
Because you can. And while you do it, remember to clock in politically. Because the things that happen in this country happen because you voted or didn't vote. Voting matters.
Remember Iron Jawed Angels. So you have to not only take care of yourself You have to take care of your community, your state, and your country, and you do that in a lot of ways by being good, by being kind, by being decent, but you also do it by showing up to vote every single time there's an election for the rest of your life. Midterm elections, presidential elections, school board elections, all of them. And if you're going to say, but I don't know enough to vote.
Well, bullshit. You didn't know any of this women's history stuff 15 weeks ago, did you? But you learned it.
How would you know enough to vote? I don't know. Google that shit.
Right? Yeah. You can do this.
I know you can. Okay. So, congratulations to you.
Go pour yourself your favorite beverage. And then look in the mirror and say, God damn, I rock. Alright. See ya.
Or not. Still. Bye.