"Settling" and feminism (5)

In the diavlog embedded above, Emily Bazelon says:

I don't think most feminists ever really said women should get away from men. That is the most extreme, parody version of 1970s feminism ... I just don't believe it every had enough social or cultural power to quite warrant the kind of attacking we like to do.

Well, having been around at the end of the 1970s and through the 1980s, I have to disagree. That sort of extreme, "parody version" of feminism was very real and it did have that sort of social and cultural power. I don't think anyone has to give up on feminism as a consequence but we do need to acknowledge there were huge problems with feminism of that era. In particular "man-hating feminist" was not some fiction made up to blacken feminism during that period. Every college in the country had a significant subculture of women whose feminism derived from either a hatred of men or negative attitudes towards sex.

I appreciate that feminists don't want to see the good thrown out with the bad and that they want young women around today to "realize what feminism has done for them." And that is true enough but young women of today should be just as grateful to women such as Joan Didion and Katie Roiphe, to pick just two, who stood up to 1970s and 1980s feminists and said, "Wait a minute."