I am never quite sure what I believe about the present. Is it good, or is it bad? Are our human conditions improving, or catastrophically deteriorating? Psychologically, I can only measure my state of being in relation to the present and whatever my memory and education tell me. Scientifically speaking, the data is not conclusive except for, well, climate change. So, the present is simultaneously the best and the worst.
This feeling penetrates how I interpret the many facets of my feminism. There's no way to quantify what my satisfaction levels would be if I were born into another time or another culture, and so it's not entirely up to me to determine how others interpret their own lives. Liberal feminist rhetoric, which is tethered to the capitalist machine, is fairly certain that progress is natural and inevitable, and that equality is bound up in financial liberation, or liberation as determined by the self-made individual.
Sexual liberation, on the other hand, has fallen out of favour. The porn industry kind of exploited that one. Women's liberation from domestic enslavement has taken a hit, too. In the era of the mummy blogger, that just seems judgemental. So here's a proposal for the new woman: to be liberated from niceness.
Not that there's anything wrong with being nice; it is a virtue. But women need to stop asking nicely for equality, and instead just expect it, in every social interaction.
An anecdote: my housemate, wide-eyed and mouth agape, knocked on my bedroom door to ask me if I happen to be named after a character in an F. Scott Fitzgerald novel. The character is Eleanor Savage, and to paraphrase my housemate and John Lennon, I am she and she is me.
I read the Eleanor Savage chapter 'Young Irony' in This Side of Paradise (1920) and squealed. Her physical descriptions match mine, she loves, and lives through, literature, she is a bit of a petulant smartypants, and she doesn't tone down her feminism for any man. She is characterised as 'wild', an adjective long attributed to me by half-smiling elders who are probably concerned for my safety. And 'crazy', which is more than problematic.
I identified with Eleanor much more than I expected to, especially in her final scene, where she unleashes on her lover a tirade of pent-up frustration:
Oh, why am I a girl? Why am I not a stupid — ? Look at you; you're stupider than I am, not much, but some, and you can lope around and get bored and then lope somewhere else, and you can play around with girls without being involved in meshes of sentiment, and you can do anything and be justified — and here I am with the brains to do everything, yet tied to the sinking ship of future matrimony.
She asks why she couldn't have been born 100 years into the future, which would be the present, her assumption being that 'progress' would ensue, and that a century of it would give her the freedoms she desires.
It forced me to think about our parallel conditions. She, bound to marry a dinner suit, me, without any obligation to matrimony; she, tethered to her family's moral expectations if she is to not become destitute, me, with the good fortune of liberal parents and a late capitalist workforce to participate in.
My conditions are immeasurably 'better' than Eleanor's. But do they extend to the full spirit of her conviction? Do women have the right to be as bold and bad as men have always? The answer is no. Not really.
'Having it better' — the gendered conditions I was born into as opposed to my ancestors — is not the same as having innate equality recognised and respected. And that includes the equal right to be reckless, to make mistakes, and to maybe even learn from them, as all Great Men in literature have without punishment.
Eleanor is 'feast and folly', she is a 'weird mystery', but most of all, Fitzgerald's character is a little bit cuckoo; there's just no way a character as bright and voracious could escape without having some kind of nervous breakdown. That characterisation is as prevalent in art and the media now as it was 100 years ago. Women may now have the right to talk about their bodies, to earn money, and self-determine politically and financially. What we need now is the right to be bad, to want more, to not be content with what we are given.
Ellena Savage is an Australian journalist and editor who edits an entertainment and pop culture magazine in Ho Chi Minh City. She tweets as @RarrSavage