It's (not) just the victim in me: Gender and power in the 1990s

The 1990s have seen various challenges to "the established feminist order" around the issues of acquaintance rape and sexual harassment. In Australia, women who have come out of the 1960s "second wave" of feminism are dismayed with younger feminists who, they argue, see themselves as hapless victims of male sexual violence. In the United States, this same argument is being made by an under-thirty generation of self-styled feminists who see entrenched academic feminists, also of the 1960s generation, as the promoters of victim mythology. In this paper I argue that those who make this argument, both in Australia and the United States, do not fully appreciate the ways in which power and sexuality are still heavily gendered. Furthermore, the effect of such a mistaken analysis is to make male sexual violence more likely and to disempower those women who are fighting against it.