a pith of a kith

what's it mean to say "i'm a feminist"? In 1965? In 1977? In 1985? In 1992? In 2006? looking back, according to hilary poole, it meant looking at patti, envying her androgyny, wanting to be her girl-part, wanting to ravage her boy-part, but thinking in binaries: housewife/mother/daughter-in-training-for-marriage v. feminist, monogamous/heterosexual/reproductive v. that way. patti couldn't claim to be a feminist in the 60s and 70s; she didn't identify that way. patti's fans back then couldn't categorize her in that way, either, since to do so would require that they step out of cbgb's and predict a future they couldn't begin to imagine: patti as wife/mother/moustached/postmenopausal? today, poole suggests, to say "i'm a feminist" means to admit that "she's ugly" (220). no sowing-wild-oats-rebellious-gal in the 60s would have dared speak such male-identified woman-selfhating heresy. she's ugly, she's ugly, she's ugly: today's feminists can repeat it aloud (like a consciousness-raising group back then chanted vagina, cervix, labia, oh my) and don't care whether she would "feel bad" if she knew because they are confident that "she's beyond worrying about what people...find worth looking at: love me, love my moustache, baby" (221). but there's more to it in 2006, if poole is right. a feminist today makes a statement about her own identity by denigrating the appearance of another woman, an older woman, a former avant guard celeb; a feminist today points to another's bad looks as a way to foreground her good looks. the mark of the millenial feminist in mirror-splotched lipstick traces: how many times does she pucker up and smooch?

[quotes taken from: Poole, Hilary. "Ugly Duckling." Women and Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 9:2 (1997): 210-222.]