If so many people are socially liberal, why don't I feel better?

One of my few must-reads, Mousewords, has some interesting commentary today on Salon's piece about the social conservative/liberal gap being, for the most part, generational, and roughly divided into pre-and post-Boomer. The gist of the Salon article is that the majority of social conservatives in America are older people, and that those behind them tend to be more tolerant and to assume that civil rights of all kinds are the norm.

Mousewords raises the question of what the gender breakdown (women are known to be more socially liberal than men) would be in the study analyzed by Salon's Leonard Steinhorn, and concludes that the greatest gender gap would be among Boomers. This is because many Boomer men, fed up with feminism, have decided, in their older years, that their father's way was right, after all.

This is a phenomenon of which I was unaware, since the only Boomer men I hang out with are liberals in the true sense. But it doesn't suprise me, especially with so much emphasis being placed on war and soldiers in the last several years. The post-war 50's, when men came home and took over everything, rushing their wives to the suburbs and showering them with avocado refrigerators and washer-dryer sets, was a nightmare of repressing by "protecting." Anyone who has seen the film version of The Hours has only to remember the haunting image of Juliane Moore's face at the window to comprehend this type of prison.

I'm afraid I don't have much optimism about the state of progressive values in this country. If Boomers, X-ers and Y-ers are really as socially liberal as they apparently say they are, then perhaps it is activism that is missing from their lives; I don't know. I was a Second Wave activist who endured repeated humiliation from idiots so that the country could be a better place for women, and sometimes I wonder why I did it (In moments of frustration, I have been known to exclaim: "I marched for bimbos!"). I will never forget Lisa Ling, who is not only a woman, but a minority woman, stating on The View something to the effect of: "These feminists go too far; we have everything we asked for, and it's time to move on." Apparently, Ling lives in a land where there is no wage gap, no glass ceiling, no sexual harrassment, no referring to women as children, no sexual assault and rape, no marathon discussions of the clothing of female political candidates.

Sexism, like racism, can be quite subtle. The phony politeness that puts women down, the exclusion of professional women from important social gatherings, the public humiliation of professional women whose male peers are chastised behind closed doors--men may not even realize they are perpetrating sexist behavior when they do these things. And women's failure to speak up, to say "I won't be treated differently from my peers," or "I'm not a girl" is dramatic. Most of the women with whom I speak on a weekly basis--X, Y, and Boomer--are well aware that there is sexism all around them, but they do nothing to make it stop, thus perpetuating the stereotype that women must be passive in order to stay "feminine." And they are often clueless when they themselves contribute to sexism, through their language, and through their attitudes about other women.

They need to think about the message they are sending to their children, who learn from them every day. Just last week, the governor of my state, who is a woman, told this story: Her daughter asked her 4-year-old son what he wanted to be when he grew up. She went through all of the standard suggestions--firefigher, pilot, police officer--and the boy said no to all of them. "Well," she ask him, "how about governor?" His reply: "Mom...I'm a boy."

Perhaps there really is reason to hope.