Culture Shock

What is the state of American feminism if Lena Dunham and Allison Williams are household names, but Elizabeth Holmes and Monica Dunford are not?

Holmes, a brainy entrepreneur, is a passionate and incredibly successful humanitarian. In 2003, at just 19, she founded Theranos, an innovative blood diagnostics firm that today is worth some $10 billion. Recently Holmes won approval from the Food and Drug Administration for further disease analysis.

Dunford, for her part, is a young postdoctoral astrophysicist who worked on the Higgs boson experiment near Geneva, Switzerland. She’s pushing boundaries of human knowledge about mathematics and the universe.

In short, these women are geniuses. But are Holmes and Dunford mentioned in women’s magazines like Vogue, Elle, or Seventeen, or even self-labeled feminist outlets like Jezebel and Feministing? A quick web search: zilch.

Cosmo magazine ignores a pioneer of the cosmos (and the magazine will soon be behind brown wrapping at Rite Aid and Food Lion because of its racy content).

In contrast, Dunham and Williams are darlings of the feminist media establishment. President Barack Obama’s older daughter, Malia Obama, is reportedly interning on the set of the HBO TV “Girls,” a nod from the first family, including the first lady. And Durham will start publishing a newsletter this fall for the “contemporary feminist.”

Dunham’s character on her series “Girls” calls herself a “voice of a generation,” a claim worth examination by millennials. Dunham is skilled at exhibiting her work, which is designed to titillate, not liberate. She and her colleagues project that sexual promiscuity and cocaine-snorting are normal, that dating relationships must occupy vast portions of our brains.

She and her colleagues project that sexual promiscuity and cocaine-snorting are normal, that dating relationships must occupy vast portions of our brains.

Did suffragettes march so Williams could raunch out on national television? Outrage at her pornography in “Girls” is pointless; rather, she triggers a profound sense of waste. Williams, the daughter of Brian Williams, a rich and famous (albeit embattled) newsman, could use her inherited profile to further humanity rather than coarsen it with juvenile prattle.

The gift of female empowerment so kindly offered by our foremothers is squandered by “Girls,” whose characters are otherwise likable and sympathetic. What’s troubling is they are hyper-sexualized and infantilized, by even the name itself. This contributes to an ecosystem of what clinical psychologist Meg Jay calls “benign neglect” in her powerful TED Talk about 20-somethings: “As a culture, we have trivialized what is actually the defining decade of adulthood.”

Millennial women serious about moving past dogmatic, feminist pablum would look beyond the soap opera “Girls.” The HBO show is lady mags personified: dating, mating, histrionics, obsession with small-scale squabbles. For all the bluster about advancing women into higher-paying STEM fields, the characters on “Girls” work almost exclusively in art, not science, math or business. Dunham, a self-professed feminist, paints her canvas with obsessions about men and her body. If that’s millennial feminism, count me out.

Today’s self-identified feminist culture prefers the interpersonal over the interstellar.

Today’s self-identified feminist culture prefers the interpersonal over the interstellar. If feminism today means hissing at a groundbreaking male rocket scientist for his (admittedly ugly) shirt patterned with women clad in outfits befitting “feminist icons” Madonna or Lady Gaga, count me out.

Ayann Al-Hirshi, a powerful voice against radical Islam’s misogyny, criticized the myopia: “I want you to remember that once upon a time, feminists fought for the access — basic right — access of girls to education.”

Today’s feminism is a textbook case of the law of diminishing marginal utility. Like all women today, I owe a tremendous debt to foremothers who fought for my right to vote, own property, get educated, hold a job. But we’ve long passed those victorious battles. Gone are the days of suffragist Susan B. Anthony. Today we have the insufferable feminist peanut gallery. Women around the world lack basic human rights; meanwhile, rich, white American feminists waste tremendous energy and brainpower.

Dunham is troublesome beyond the realm of entertainment because she sways young voters. She bought the Democrat “war on women” narrative that reproduction and sex should outweigh all other factors in the voting booth. Dunham cut a sexist campaign ad for Obama comparing first-time voting to losing her virginity. A middle-aged, male Republican politician commissioning that from a young female actress would be excoriated by “feminists” for setting back women’s progress (and libertarian vlogger Julie Borowski cut a hilarious parody on YouTube poking fun at Dunham’s hypocrisy). Yet somehow Dunham’s overt sexualizing of the voting process is acceptable by feminist priestesses.

She bought the Democrat “war on women” narrative that reproduction and sex should outweigh all other factors in the voting booth.

It’s true that women are underrepresented in STEM fields, though as writer Christina Hoff Sommers points out, this is from personal choice rather than patriarchal repression.

Enter women like Christina Wallace, a millennial working to create more Holmeses and Dunfords through her work as founding director of BridgeUp: STEM, a $7.5 million program at the American Museum of Natural History. Its mission: “to captivate, inspire, and propel girls and minorities into computer science.”

If that’s millennial feminism, count me in.

More broadly, it’s worth asking why we as American women put so much stock into celebrity lifestyles. Perhaps if we spent more time reading Popular Science instead of People magazine we’d narrow that STEM gap and leave the men trailing our astrodust.

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