Whatever You Say I Am_ The Life and Times of Eminem - Anthony Bozza [111]
Perhaps in reaction to the growth of the “angry white male” figure in the first half of the 1990s women’s issues were center stage in national awareness, culturally and legally. Women’s rights were hotly debated in the national media, as the legality of date rape as well as sexual harassment in the workplace, following Anita Hill’s allegations against Clarence Thomas during his 1991 Supreme Court confirmation hearings, were navigated. An overriding mood of identity politics pushed America into the mores of political correctness that changed the policies of corporations, universities, and the government. During the Clinton administration’s eight years in office, women held more positions on Capitol Hill than ever before and celebrated a still higher profile in corporate America. In music, led by the success of Sarah McLachlan’s ethereal folk-pop smash Fumbling Towards Ecstasy in 1993, women such as Jewel, Joan Osborne, Shania Twain, and even one-hit wonders such as Meredith Brooks began a run on the pop charts. The all-female Lilith Fair was one of the summer’s top-grossing outings for three years running, from 1996 to 1999, until a desire for and corporate push toward more dance-oriented and harder-edged pop squelched the popularity of these sensitive and introspective female singer-songwriters. Then, sassier women such as Pink, Britney Spears, and Destiny’s Child came into vogue, personifying a liberated and sexually aggressive woman, while Lilith Fair figures such as Tori Amos represented as outdated a paradigm as traditionalist feminist theory. The male response to this cultural estrogen surge was immediate and compensatory, buoyed by the oppression of an increasingly middle-class economy: The transfer of wealth into the hands of a smaller percentage of the population assured that generations coming of age would not reach the same level of success as their parents had. The angry white male of the late eighties was back, this time in a whole new incarnation.
In 1997, Maxim, the American version of a British tabloid for men, opened its doors and in one year tripled its number of readers with a combination of soft-core porn and adolescent sex-obsessed humor. The magazine captured the mood of young American men who, in the face of women flaunting their femininity, were proud to consume the cultural opposite: male boorishness. Maxim’s runaway success inspired a slew of copycat, British-based or -flavored titles. FHM and Gear coach young men in the pursuit of the opposite sex through “proper” lifestyle and cultural choices, while justifying the objectification of women with a celebration of adolescent humor. According to statistics, men’s magazines of this variety attract male readers who are in their midtwenties and earn incomes of $60,000 or higher, generally in the corporate world. This is the boys-behaving-badly school of men’s magazines. In the hip-hop press, regular columns such as XXL’s “Eye Candy” or those in the magazine King feature pictorials of beautiful women next to reviews of the freshest materialistic expressions of hip-hop success: custom cars, expensive clothes and jewelry, liquor, and the latest technology. Magazine newsstand sales are always a good indication of what an impulse-purchase public wants to see, which, from fashion to music to general-interest magazines, is clearly as much female skin as possible. Pornography, too, seems to have lost its taboo, as documentaries, national magazine features, books, and even a cable-TV reality series, Family Business (Showtime, 2003), expose the workings of an industry with viable careers for young women and men, an industry in which the women earn more than the men for enacting male-driven fantasies. Younger women, less affected by feminism than by the tolerance of antifeminist sentiment, joyously engage in blatant objectification, from the “Girls Gone Wild” series to the resurgence of breast-flashing at rock shows—hardly the rage in the