An interesting by-product of the feminist wave cycle is that, while womens studies scholars sit within their ivory towers and pontificate upon their cause, they tend to leave their daughters at home to be raised by other caregivers, including the media. Now, these scholars are simply outraged by their daughters’ willingness to embrace the commodification of “Snooki”, the critical ass of Kim Kardashian, and the marketing genius of Paris HIlton. Naturally, the blame rests upon a “hyper-sexualized culture” and constant media bombardment that’s convenently targeted at their impressionable young daughters, and they’re understandably pissed:

Communications professor Susan Douglas, the mother of a 22-year-old daughter, compares popular culture targeted at young women to junk food. “I feel like Julia Child forced to eat at Hooters,” she writes in her new book Enlightened Sexism: The Seductive Message that Feminism’s Work is Done. Douglas, the chair of communication studies at the University of Michigan, articulates the plight of the progressive mom back in the late 1990s observing her little girl watch the Spice Girls: “Should she be happy that they’re listening to bustier feminism instead of watching Barbie commercials on Saturday morning TV? Or should she run in, rip the CD out of the player, and insist that they listen to Mary Chapin Carpenter or Ani DiFranco instead?”

Enlightened Sexism charts how the wedge between mothers and daughters increased during the first decade of the 21st century as so-called “millennials”–girls born in the late 1980s and early 1990s–became the most sought-after advertising demographic in history. The desire for power and change that coursed through Douglas’s generation was recast for their daughters as “empowerment” through conspicuous consumption and sexual display, she writes. Activist outlets like Sassy magazine, published from 1988 to 1997, and “riot grrrl,” the feminist punk movement of the early 1990s, were eclipsed by Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Xena: Warrior Princess, along with a tribe of female action heroes. These “warriors in thongs,” as Douglas dubs them, paved the way for the retro “girliness” championed by Legally Blonde, Ally McBeal, and Bridget Jones’s Diary. And from there it was a heartbeat to reality shows like The Bachelor and Say Yes to the Dress, which depicted young women as obsessed with boys and getting married when they weren’t engaged in catfights with one another.

“If you did not know anything about American culture or American life other than what you saw on reality TV, it would be extremely easy to believe that the women’s rights movement never happened, that the civil rights movement never happened, that the gay rights movement never happened,” says Jennifer Pozner, the director of Women In Media & News in New York City, whose book Reality Bites Back” The Troubling Truth About Guilty Pleasure TV, is to be published in November. “Reality TV producers have achieved what the most ardent fundamentalists and anti-feminists haven’t been able to achieve,” she says.

“They’ve concocted a world in which women have no choices and they don’t even want choices.”

“Enlightened sexism” is Douglas’s term for this new climate, one based on the presumption that women and men are now “equal,” which allows women to embrace formerly retrograde concepts, such as “hypergirliness,” and seeing “being decorative [as] the highest form of power,” she writes. What really irks her is how a Girls Gone Wild sensibility has been sold to women as “empowerment,” that old feminist mantra. But in this version, men are the dupes, “nothing more than helpless, ogling, crotch-driven slaves” of “scantily clad or bare-breasted women [who] had chosen to be sex objects.”

It’s quite easy to blame the media for its glorification of overly sexualized female icons, but I think that’s missing the mark. The problem with feminism — at least, as far as the notion of “having it all” is concerned — is that one really can’t have it all. Sure, one can be an incredibly successful, highly respected career-minded woman and still take maternity leave to pop out a few kids before returning to work and shipping the kids off to a nanny, sitter, or daycare. However, there’s often a serious absence of female role models for young girls during their formative years; then, during their tweens and adolescence, television and the internet become the primary caregivers while Mom has to stay late at the office or head off to a cocktail party. So, what’s a young girl to do except breed resentment as a result of her own mother’s seemingly self-absorbed journey to the top of the career ladder? Mom’s not exactly a role model if she only pops in for an hour each evening; and her daughters won’t look to their Mom as anything more than how Mom views her own success, which is “How high of a salary can I possibly earn to do the following: (1) Feel like a woman who truly matters in the workplace; (2) Toss material wealth twoards my daughter to overcompensate for being away all the time?” And while Mom is away and preoccupied with her own life, Daughter is left alone to look towards the scores of crotch-flashing celebutantes instead, which only leads me to believe that Mom just might be too busy within her self-actualization to even bother raising her own Daughter. You’ve come a long way, baby.

Thanks to Flea for the inspirational tip.