Douglas, Susan J. Enlightened Sexism: The Seductive Message That Feminism's Work Is Done.

Douglas, Susan J. Enlightened Sexism: The Seductive Message That Feminism's Work Is Done. New York, NY: Times Books/Henry Holt and Company, 2010. 354 pp. $26.00 (hardcover). ISBN-13:978-0805083262 Susan J. Douglas reveals once again that women everywhere are subject to a double bind. In her well-known 1994 book, Where the Girls Are, Douglas reviews the 1990s and labels it the decade of women with "split personalities." Douglas argues this phenomenon is the result of being portrayed in the media as both dominant and yet still obedient to men. In Enlightened Sexism, Douglas provides new insight into how this double bind has grown more complex by introducing two concepts for understanding mediated messages focusing on women. The central theme of Enlightened Sexism is to warn young adults and teenagers that mass media representations of women are distorted. According to Douglas, this process of distortion is twofold. First, Douglas argues "embedded feminism" promotes the idea that women's issues are already privileged in society and, as such, collective women's activism is no longer needed. Second, Douglas contends "enlightened sexism" is a new form of mediated backlash that uses embedded feminism to allow for sexists' stereotypes. Douglas proposes that "embedded feminism and enlightened sexism serve to reinforce each other: they both overstate women's gains and accomplishments, and they both render feminism obsolete" (p. 15). Three chapters focus primarily on debunking the beauty myth in televised popular culture programs in order to unveil embedded feminism within a popular culture context. More specifically, in chapter 1, "Get the Girls," Douglas discusses how popular culture television shows pioneered the "media wedge that would divide many mothers and daughters around the issues of sexuality and consumerism" (p. 27). In chapter 8, Douglas unmasks the myths behind the thin, unrealistic body images media industries continue to perpetuate. In chapter 9, she fires back at the culture of celebrity. Douglas argues, "Gossip, celebrity obsession, and celebrity worship have become the herpes of the mass media, highly contagious, blistering previously celebrity-free media zones like the news" (p. 247). Consistent across each of these chapters is Douglas's aspirations for young women in today's society to embark on their own journeys toward self-discovery. The vast majority of Enlightened Sexism deals with the implications of enlightenment feminism. Chapters 2 through 7 explore this fundamental contradiction further by deconstructing normative mediated representations. For example, in chapter 2, "Castration Anxiety," and chapter 3, "Warrior Women in Thongs," Douglas begins to unravel enlightened sexism. She explains how backlash media coverage surrounding infamous transgressions like the Lorena Bobbitt and Amy Fisher hearings "heightened ever-present nervousness about gender roles, the dangers of female power, and the pathos of emasculated men" (p. 56). Douglas's analogy of the warrior woman kicking butt--as long as she wears a thong while doing it--is representative of, and clearly illuminates, enlightened sexism. In chapters 4 and 5, Douglas conveys how enlightened sexism creates ambivalence between women rather than encouraging collaboration among women. In chapter 4, Douglas uses the character Ally McBeal to expose how mediated representations tend to inflate the way "real" people shape their identities in everyday lived experiences--an experience "navigated between the public selves they presented to others and the inner imaginings that helped, or interfered with, getting through the day" (p. …