Susan Douglas starts off her chapter in the 1900s and shines a little light on the tug-o-war between enlightened sexism and embedded feminism in the media universe. With the increase of popularity of shows like Beverly Hills 90210, feminism was taking quite a battering and eventually led to the gap among generations of women over concepts of sex and consumerism. As Douglas tries to grapple with the drama in 90210, she points out the reason why this show was an important pillar that served as a foundation for enlightened sexism. The show ¨insisted that the true, gratifying pleasures for girls, and their real source of power, came from consumerism, girliness, and the approval of guys.¨ The primary, pivotal, and attracting factor of these shows is their ability to exaggerate women power and let the female audience succumb into a fanstasy world of make-believe. On the other side of a yawning gulf are shows like Murphy and that depicts women’s toughness, lack of maternal instincts, almost cold-blooded agressive individuals, characteristics which are only magnified by weak male roles. The show had great success for women over thirty at the time because it represented the very-sought-after image of a powerful women, one who was not afraid to speaking up her mind. This was not all, Douglas spends almost half a chapter on the Sassy magazine and its incredible feat in crushing the female characteristics that are portrayed in 90210. Although they did an excellent job in exploring the the banality of such shows, they were thwarted of by religious rights.
In chapter 2, Douglas covers the ¨castration anxiety¨ theme, a time when women were as violent as men if not more. For Douglas, the second stream of imput towards advancing enlightened feminism was that women’s sexuality was ¨fraught with perils¨. The most interesting part dealth with Reno and how three basic ways were used to tame her character: ¨she was more mannish than a man...undermine her power by sexualizing her...femininity left her hopelessly lonely, desperate for love, and desperate for sex.¨ Hence, Douglas concludes that to repudiate this sort of feminism became the ultimate jumping board for enlightened sexism.
On chapter 3, Douglas addresses the fuse of beauty and aggressiveness that turned into a lethal women. How did this happened? Douglas explains that in mid-1990s women were more focued on sexual politics and violence against them. Hence, ¨the rise of kick-butt women¨was only a legitimate, even justified outcome. Over the last few years, the contradiction between the how women were portrayed in the media sharpened significantly. Now, women had evolved from the original concept of stay-at-home mom would was caring, calm, and quiet to the agressive, overly-sexualized, rambunctious kind of woman-warrior. This transformation is perhaps one of the most unconventional and fascinating in the history of women liberation.
Rebecca Walker, who describes herself as being part of the Third Wave Feminism, felt the ripple effects of the feminism in a slightly different way. She denies that she is a postfeminist, because unlike those women, she is eager to make visible the many ways in which women, often politically and economically silenced by men, are subjected to rape and all kinds of violence in a day to day basis. After experiencing how persistent sexism of the 1990s was,, Walker tries to reach in her essay ¨Becoming the Third Wave¨ young feminists to join her fight.
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