Post‐feminism and popular culture

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes Bridget Jones's Diary appeared first as a weekly column in The Independent UK newspaper in 1996, its author Helen Fielding then published the diaries in book form, and the film, Bridget Jones's Diary directed by Sharon McGuire, opened in 2001. The Daily Mail has the highest volume of female readers of all daily newspapers in the UK. Its most frequent efforts in regard to promoting a post‐feminist sensibility involve commissioning well known former feminists to recant, and blame feminism for contemporary ills among women, for example, Saturday August 23, 2003 has Fay Weldon on “Look What We've Done.” The caption then reads, “For years feminists campaigned for sexual liberation. But here, one of their leaders admits all they have created is a new generation of women for whom sex is utterly joyless and hollow” (pp. 12–13). By the normalisation of porn, or “ironic pornography” I am referring to the new popular mainstreaming of what in the past would have been soft core pornography out of reach of the young on the “top shelf.” In a post AIDS era, with sexual frankness as an imperative for prevention, the commercial UK youth media now produce vast quantities of explicit sexual material for the teenage audience, in recent years and as a strategy for being ahead of the competition this has been incorporated into the language of “cool.” With irony as a trademark of knowingness, sexual cool entails “being up for it” (i.e. lap dancing clubs) without revealing any misgivings, never mind criticism, on the basis of the distance entailed in the ironic experience. Anthony Giddens is architect of the Third Way politics which were embraced by New Labour in its first term of office; this polemic in turn drew on his earlier work titled Beyond Left and Right (Anthony Giddens , ). Likewise Ulrich Beck was connected with the Neue Mitte in Germany, though the German Third Way had rather less success than its UK counterpart.