Fifty Years of Feminism

It’s a fair criticism.

Sometimes, some of us are too ready to dismiss second-wave feminism. We see the glass half-empty and don’t notice that there is still something to drink.

Many people think that I should be doing some serious amends on this score, so I will point out some of the positive benefits that feminism has brought to modern women.

Credit where credit is due. We owe the insight to someone named Sarah Vine. For the record, I have no idea who Sarah Vine is, but she wrote her cri de coeur for the Daily Mail. What further validation do you need?

In fact, we do not even have to read Vine’s article. In her case it’s all in the headline:

How did 50 years of feminism end in THIS?

For your edification, she is referring to THIS:

Are you horrified yet?

Vine became apoplectic at the sight of a Victoria’s Secret fashion show in London. We note, if only in passing, that VS is not a novelty. It has been around since 1977. How did Vine miss it?

Considering how well it has been doing, one must assume that liberated women also shop there.

Now that Victoria’s Secret has made its way into Vine’s raised consciousness, she is horrified:

Victoria's Secret 'fashion show' suggests trashy costumes, strippers, nudity and lecherousness are the most natural things in the world

OMFG! I am not sure that I would say that the costume looks like the most natural thing in the world, but then, that's me.

Think that's bad. Take a gander at this angle:

I’m all for modesty. But isn’t Vine taking her crusade for a return to modesty a bit too far? Next thing you know she will be insisting that women cover themselves up… in burqas, perhaps.

Did I miss something, but wasn’t feminism supposed to be about sexual liberation, too?

A group that extolled The Hite Report and that was marching to The Vagina Monologues is not very well placed to rail about Victoria’s Secret.

Acting more like a zealot than a free-thinking woman, Vine continues, via the Daily Mail headline:

• 'I’m not a zealot but I’d burn a Victoria’s Secret bra' says Sarah Vine 

• She says the brand specialises in tiny, extremely uncomfortable underwear

It’s going to be the new feminist slogan: be liberated; go braless!

Or, was that the old slogan?

And yet, if women want spend the money they earned on VS undergarments, who am I to complain.

Vine, consumed by fury at the way women exercise their freedom to choose… what they wear:

• 'This is a world where how you look is the only thing that matters'

Obviously, this is a leap into the theoretical void. It is silly to say that a world that gave us Margaret Thatcher, Julie Burchill and Taylor Swift only values women for how they look when they are prancing around in their unmentionables.