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Women Deserve More Than Soft Power
We tell women to achieve their goals by charming the men around them — but charm is just helplessness with a positive spin
We are living through a historical moment obsessed with female power. The long-prophesied “blue wave,” after all, is primarily a wave of women: the middle-aged women who are plunging into anti-Trump activism; the black women who are stepping up to steer the Democratic Party; the angry women who made the Women’s March the largest single-day protest in history; the suburban white women who are supposedly abandoning Donald Trump (don’t hold your breath on that one); and, of course, the Democratic women now running for office.
We are currently testing the extent to which American women control public life. Yet even now, we remain profoundly uncertain about what female power is — how women should exercise it or whether they should want it or what it looks like. Which is why, somewhere in the furious hail of think pieces about women and the midterms, there was bound to be a headline exactly this silly: “What if women went on a sex strike before the midterms?”
The article in question was published Friday on CNN by author Wednesday Martin and argues, essentially, that if women didn’t have “service sex” just to appease men’s needs, structural…
