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Women Who Make Us Ask WTF?: Ladies Against Feminism
By Jennifer Mathieu
In an effort to escape my ever-growing To Do List, I often find myself tooling around La Internet in an effort to put off grad school homework or laundry or whatever. Of course that means I spend way too much time deciding which kitten is cuter, but it also means I stumble across some pretty kooky thinking from time to time.
Gals, check out Ladies Against Feminism, which must be read to be believed. Now before I get tomatoed, yes, yes, feminism does mean women have choices, and there's nothing wrong with choosing to be a stay-at-home mom or choosing to enjoy crafting or housekeeping. BUST magazine and other feminist-friendly creations have certainly done their best to reclaim the "womanly" arts without suggesting women give up their sense of self.
But at Ladies against Feminism, we are inundated with articles and images that shove one view of "womanhood" down our throats. What's that view? Well for one thing it involves women referring to themselves as Mrs. Sherman or Mrs. Chancey instead of by first names. They post pictures of themselves doing housework in "feminine dress" and deliver such thoughtful missives to single women as: "Singleness...just the word can bring shudders and dread to a person's heart - especially if she is unmarried."
It's way groovy with me if women get a sense of pride from keeping a nice home and providing their husbands with warm meals. And while I applaud LAF for speaking out against the sexualization of young girls in media, their insistence that we whittle down a woman's identity to only that of a "keeper at home" is freakishly reactionary and really frustrating.
For their myopic world view, for their obsessive interest in cleaning and cooking, for their inability to identify each other by their first names...for all this and more, Ladies Against Feminism make us ask...WTF?
