There are varying views of feminism. And while feminism has core concerns such as equality for women, adequate wages etc., there are also many aspects which are being palmed off as female empowerment, when they are not. I have written about them here and here, and recently I came across an article in the Times by Janice Turner, slightly old, written in Aug 2009, which says it very well :

Almost every day, I’m flabbergasted by things that I’d call sexist, although I know this very word makes me officially 100 years old. Like this year, when Wimbledon officials allocated Centre Court matches to women players based not on whether they were top seeds, but top totty. . .


And during the boom years, the language of women’s liberation was ransacked by companies trying to flog us stuff. Suddenly feminism wasn’t about rights or social advances, but shopping. Self-worth now came in a shampoo bottle — “Because you’re worth it”.


Liberation was brunch and designer bags as in Sex and the City. As Maureen Dowd, the US columnist, put it: “Feminism has been replaced by narcissism.”


The most unlikely things are now classed as “empowering”: buying shoes, taking a pole-dancing class, having a boob job, sending a snap of your breasts to Nuts magazine, entering one of the beauty contests newly revived across British campuses. That these are the kind of dumb-ass submissive practices long performed for male view, is, it seems, coincidental. Feminism 2009 means acting out male masturbation fantasies — because you want to.

Full article here.