Are you are a late-30-something woman who has spent the last decade juggling family and job, with one hand putting on a wash and the other dragging yourself up the career ladder? Or have you stayed at home to look after your family and find that some people treat you as though you've only half a brain? Have you lost touch with feminism, or do you think it's a faintly embarrassing topic that's only of interest to women with lank hair and slack bottoms? Did you ignore the issues raised by foxy feminists like Naomi Wolf and Camille Paglia back in the 1990s but devour self-help books like Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus? At work do you consider yourself the equal of any man, but are your male colleagues paid more than you are and promoted faster to better things? Are you alarmed by seeing so much sex in advertising, do you find Spicedup Girl Power downright brazen? Do you find laddish behaviour obnoxious?
If you answered "yes" to most of these questions, then it could be time for you to get in touch with new-wave feminism and find out where women are going in this brand new century. A good place to start is with Overloaded: Popular Culture and the Future of Feminism, a fast-paced read delivered by a major voice in British feminism, Imelda Whelehan. A lecturer in English and Women's Studies at De Montfort University in Leicestershire, Whelehan takes a fairly jaundiced look at the way young women live now, and at the men that they aspire to live with. The news isn't good. Men are still pulling the strings and it seems that some women actually like it that way.
It's a nattily packaged book, its name a play on lads' magazine Loaded, the glossy cover showing an almost empty pint glass ringed by lipstick, and the bumph on the back cover playing up the sexy, right-on elements within - Men Behaving Badly; Wonderbras; The Spice Girls. Don't be fooled, though. This is slick marketing by the publishers, The Women's Press, who are obviously determined to shed an old image and catch a younger audience, but Whelehan's style is academic and this is no light bedtime read.
Under chirpy chapter headings like `Girl Power?', `Lads - The men who should know better', `Blair's Babes?' and `The Bridget Jones Effect', Whelehan explores new feminist thinking across a range of issues as wide-ranging as the packaging of feminism itself to whether men are suffering from an identity crisis and why feminists have failed to deal with the concept of motherhood. While there's nothing startlingly new in it - in fact, Whelehan draws a depressing number of parallels with feminist issues of 30 years ago or more - what is interesting is her relentless analysis of popular culture. Take the Spice Girls. Whelehan puts them up there with Madonna as post-feminist icons. Their catchphrase, "Girl Power", has inspired a generation of young adolescents to band together and give the lads as good as they get, but has it really furthered the cause of feminism? She thinks not. The Spice Girls are feisty, outspoken good looking girls, and they can dance and sing. Their very ordinariness, coupled with super stardom, has shown young girls that it is possible to get on, to be stars and to give men a wake-up call at the same time. They've encouraged girls to dress up and dance, but it's not enough. While on the surface they offer adolescent girls a vision of success, youth and vitality, of brash aggression that gets what it wants, they don't really inspire them to do it for themselves - musically, that is. Their format as a dance and vocal group, Whelehan points out, harks back to the male-managed girl bands of the 1960s, and there is no obvious attempt to encourage girls to take up an instrument, or become involved in the music industry. And their youthful vitality won't last forever. Later on, she warns, the Spice Girl, or her type, may run into inequalities that no amount of brash, in-yer-face aggression will solve.
Girl Power dispensed with, Whelehan moves onto the new lads. New lads are not at all to be confused with the New Man, that caring sharing type who emerged in the 1980s as the answer to every working woman's prayer. He, apparently, never existed at all, according to Whelehan, but was a figment of the advertising industry's imagination. The new lad, though, is far more real. "He is almost always white, part soccer thug, part lager lout, part arrant sexist". Sounds charming. The alarming thing, however, is that women like these new lads and they like their laddish magazines. Even well-known women who excel in areas other than their looks are keen to appear in alluring poses in men's magazines, and this, Whelehan says, is an alarming development. Men, on the other hand, are delighted to see feisty women reduced to pin-up status. Feisty women may be multiplying but they're not getting to the top, at least not in politics, says Whelehan. Tony Blair may have just over 100 female Labour MPs, but almost none of them are movers and shakers. And British women don't seem as keen on solidarity as their US counterparts, she says. While American women can draw strength from powerful organisations like NOW (National Organisation of Women), which has chapters all over the States, British women have no such network to join.
Where this book is most useful is in giving a whistle-stop tour of feminist thinking over the past decade, with a tremendous range of quotes and ideas from Germaine Greer, Erica Jong, Susan Faludi, Charlotte Raven, Katie Roiphe, Marilyn French and Maureen Freely, listed in no particular order. The chapter on `New Feminism, Post Feminism and Feminist Revivals' might confuse the less dedicated reader, but it does give a flavour of how splintered feminism has become, and there's a hefty bibliography for those who want to go further.
One problem with Overloaded is that it literally is overloaded with references to other books, magazines, TV series, films and advertisements, so that it is difficult to find any thread running from start to finish. Ally McBeal, Cosmopolitan, Sleepless in Seattle, Fantasy Football League and Madonna's conical breast costumes are referred to alongside heavyweight texts on feminism, world politics and sociology. This approach probably makes Imelda Whelehan compelling as a lecturer but in print the effect is jittery and sometimes confusing.
There are lots of unpalatable truths in Overloaded but then you don't really need a book like this to see them. The media is full of unflattering and bemusing views of women, who obviously still have a long way to go. And while Imelda Whelehan shows where they stand in popular culture, she doesn't offer any real guidelines as to where they should be.
Orna Mulcahy is an Irish Times journalist
