Emmy award winning actress and director of the HBO television show “Girls” Lena Dunham has been both praised and attacked by the media for the contents on her show presenting the lives of four Brooklyn-based, 20-year-old women while trying to make a living for themselves after college and coping with interpersonal relationships. The show presents, in my point of view, the most up-to-date definition of post-feminism in America, portraying women shaped and accepted by general media. After researching for the appropriate meaning of the concept “post-feminism” I discovered the many variants it has and how juxtaposed they can be to each other; thus after reading copious amounts on this modern philosophical theory I landed on two authors/philosophers that conjugate appropriately contemporary post-feminism: Ann Brooks and Susan Bolotin. The first one states and conceptualizes post-feminism as “an expression of a stage in the constant evolutionary movement of feminism… once seen, somewhat crudely, as ‘anti-feminist’, the term is now understood as a useful conceptual frame of reference encompassing the intersection of feminism with a number of other anti-foundationalism movements including postmodernism, post-structuralism and post-colonialism”, which sums up what many other authors have stated but in a less radical manner. On her end, Susan Bolotin –who was perhaps the first woman to use the actual term “post-feminism” on her 1982 New York Times article “Voices from the Post-feminist Generation”– explains how most young women on their 20’s at that time declared themselves non-feminist, since they saw feminism as a “too-radical” movement that would leave them “lonely and bitter.”
Feminism, as it was initially conceived seemed to be too “radical” for the women interviewed by Bolotin back in 1982, most of the arguments expressed by these women were that they were “overly individualistic”.
