Quality | 2009.08.08
Barbie can be a feminist, too | Ellie Levenson
Little wonder so many women recoil from being told how to look and to sign up to specific beliefs
Barbie dolls have been widely derided by feminists since they first appeared 50 years ago, accused of objectifying women and portraying an unrealistic view of the female form. And yet, given how many personas manufacturers Mattel have given Barbie over the years, would it be possible to make a "feminist Barbie"? If so, what she would wear? Hold the dungaree and body hair jokes. For just as women come in all shapes and sizes – despite Barbie\'s improbable vital statistics – feminists come in all different outfits too. Barbie has outfits for dancing and outfits for watching TV, outfits for the boardroom and outfits for cleaning the loo, and perhaps it is wrong to consider making a specifically feminist Barbie because feminism is not about one single look, identity or set of rules, and all of these outfits could potentially be feminist Barbie.
And just as you cannot judge a Barbie doll, or a feminist, by her outfit, you cannot judge a feminist book by its cover. In these pages last week, Libby Brooks did just that in deriding my book, The Noughtie Girl\'s Guide to Feminism , for being indistinguishable from a "chick lit" novel. This was a deliberate design decision, to appeal to readers who wouldn\'t normally pick up a book with feminism in the title. Its target readers are those women (and men) who start conversations with "I\'m not a feminist but …" before going on to espouse feminist concepts such as equal pay and better division of domestic labour. These feminisn\'ts, as I call them, are put off precisely because they feel that to be a feminist you are expected to look a particular way and sign up to a very specific set of beliefs.
The feminism I believe in has at its core two beliefs: equality and choice. It demands that women have equal access to work opportunities, money and property, and that they are judged on behaviour – sexual or otherwise – by the same standards as men; and it demands choice over the many day-to-day decisions in our lives. What it doesn\'t do is tell you what choice you must make. Essentially that means that a woman could make many traditionally feminist choices such as using the title Ms, keeping her surname if she gets married, having a successful career and sharing domestic and caring responsibilities, but she could equally well choose to do none of these and still be a feminist.
I have come under criticism for diluting feminism by emphasising this choice and therefore, as one critic put it, making the concept of feminism less scary. But feminism should not be scary or a fringe movement; it should be a movement for the good of all society.
Perhaps the key difference between me and my critics is that while I am keen to look at our everyday lives in the context of the society in which we live, they seem to prefer the idea of overthrowing the patriarchy – the belief that society is run by men to the detriment of women. Not only do I think it is impossible to start again – redrawing society from the beginning according to an equal opportunities policy – but if it\'s just going to be replaced with a prescriptive matriarchy that discounts the idea of individual choice, I am not sure that I want to.
My feminism is about realism, looking at the issues and choices that face us every day – what to wear, whether to put on make-up, who cooks dinner, whether the route home is safe, whether to apply for promotion at work, and so on. To see an insistence on choice in these areas as individualism is lazy, because there\'s nothing inherently individualistic about making your own choice providing it does not adversely affect others. In fact making our own choices about our lives and enabling others to do so is far better for the collective than being told what we must believe in and what we must do by self-appointed moral arbiters.
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/[...]choice-matriarchy-libby-brooks
