Female Chauvinist Liz: Third wave feminism through the songs of Liz Phair

Popmatters.com, October 31, 2005

It was a splendid time for a teen girl to become a feminist. The Year of the Woman, 1992, saw a record number of American women elected to public office, the riot grrl scene was in full swing, and Bill Clinton was feeling our pain years before he would feel up his intern. Influenced heavily by Madonna’s merging of sexual display with money and prestige in the 1980s, I embraced a nascent form of feminism claiming women could fuck their way to equality with men if we were just sexy enough. Young women like me were hanging our sexual self-definition on the fashionable hook of whore chic and called ourselves “third wave” feminists in ideological opposition to second wave women’s liberationists of the 1970s who rejected sexual objectification and opposed pornography. It seemed like a good idea at the time.
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