Re: The Future That Never Happened

“I seem to sleep so much. I don’t know why I should be so tired. This house isn’t nearly so hard to clean as the cold-water flat we had when I was working. The children are at school all day. It’s not the work. I just don’t feel alive.”
The above quotation is from Betty Friedan’s The Feminist Mystique, and in many ways it expresses the core issue that Levy discusses in her book. This is the idea that many women who are categorized as homemakers simply don’t feel alive. And it is the fear of this feeling that leads women into participating in the raunch culture that Levy talks about. Though Friedan and Levy wrote their respective books almost a half-century apart form one another, the idea that women are forced to stay in the home and are virtually dying from the boring of such an occupation still resonates strongly with today’s feminist movement. Women resort to extreme portrayals of their sexual liberation because they are scared that they will either end up like the woman quoted above or will be perceived to be that woman in a stereotypical sense. The women’s movement has developed so many factions that are in contention with each other because none can find the ideal balance (assuming such a balance exists) between arguing in favor of equality and trying to prove that they are just as liberated as men.
Levy spends a good chunk of her chapter “The Future that Never Happened” on the organization CAKE. While Friedan obviously could not have possibly imagined such an outwardly sexual organization to be in favor of women’s rights, she would argue that while CAKE’s intentions are benevolent, their methods are too extreme. In my opinion, the events that Cake sponsors are too intimidating to the average feminist for her to feel comfortable participating, regardless of her politics. Also, it is very reasonable that say that many women would say that CAKE is on the verge of, if not already blatantly mocking the work of women’s liberation leaders such as Friedan and Brownmiller. The very reality that men are basically breaking down the door to attend CAKE events shows that there are aspects of the events that inherently undermine the women’s movement as a whole. Even though CAKE garners a great deal of attention and helps put the women’s movement in the spotlight (in theory), it still, in my opinion, does more harm than good.