What we seem to be discussing a lot here is the famous double bind that women have been dealing with for centuries upon centuries. If you do, you’re a slut, and if you don’t, you’re a prude. See, I’ve tried very hard to avoid calling anyone a prude or anything else. I don’t feel that I’ve gotten the same consideration from others. Being called “deluded” and told that I “miss the point” and accused of planning to say next something about “hairy-legged” feminists aside, I have not made personal insults against anyone.
I did say that appearance-bashing and slut-shaming under the guise of accusations of upholding the patriarchy were the same old Mean Girls shit.
Let me rephrase that.
Patriarchal society has kept women terrified of straying too far into either end of the pool, of being too prudish or too slutty. Different time periods have had different levels of acceptable behavior, but in all of them there was excess–the whore–and lack–the weird old maid, the witch. Because if we’re constantly worried that we’ll cross the line in either direction, we can’t accomplish anything. We’re too worried about acceptance.
Blaming women for upholding the patriarchy by their choices in clothing, dance, and expression is still placing them in a state where they have to worry that their behavior is appropriate. The amount of thought that goes into self-policing (where’s my Foucault when I need him) can’t be put into other activities. And I can assure you that it takes me a lot less time to put on lipstick than it does to worry about whether or not I might be crossing someone’s boundary of “appropriate.”
So yes, Twisty didn’t say that it was “bad.” She said that it was “antifeminist” to be a burlesque dancer, or by inference, to do anything that upheld “rape culture.” But on the blog of a self-professed “radical feminist” one can assume that “antifeminist” = “bad.”
When my sister and a few of our friends jokingly discussed which Golden Girls we were, I was always Sophia. Acerbic, observant, hilarious, and knowing, she was the queen of all she surveyed. Hell, the Golden Girls were around long before Sex and the City, and they had all the attendant discussions of life, love, and yes, sex, without the attendant commercialism or irritating voice-overs. And they were older women who still had lives. The Golden Girls are feminist icons.