The Permanent Revolution

I thought it was funny that Jessica Valenti telling Deborah Solomon she doesn’t like the label “third-wave feminist” ended up with an article being headlined “Fourth-Wave Feminism.” Such are the wages of the editing process.

But I think Valenti’s point was pretty clearly that it doesn’t make a ton of sense to try to slice things up into a series of waves. The interesting thing, I would say, is that for the past 40 years or so we’ve been in something like a feminist permanent revolution. On the one hand, the abstract idea that men and women should be treated equally in a manner that goes beyond formal legal equality, is now rarely contested by anyone. Yet at the same time, many of the practical implications of this idea remain extremely controversial. So we’ve seen, are seeing, and will continue to see many fronts of conflict animated by this incredibly far-reaching idea. I suppose my grandchildren will think it was weird that there used to be sex-segregated bathrooms everywhere. At the moment, that’s not much of a mainstream political issue, but I don’t think that really implicates any novel questions of principle.