I’m supposed to be celebrating small adventures on this blog until I manage to have some bigger ones. In that spirit, I’ll begin this post with last night’s inaugural meeting of the Colorado Women’s Blogging Group, hosted by Beth Hayden. By the end, I think you’ll agree my subject is a large issue after all.

At least 40 of us crowded into a room at Boulder Digital Arts to talk about our blogs and listen to Beth’s presentation on search engine optimization (SEO). There was diversity of subject, from SEO to women’s health to “thriving, not just surviving” to Claire Walter’s blogs on Colorado cuisine and travel news to my rather garbled explanation of Restoration Nation. And those from half the room; people were almost done introducing themselves when I arrived late.

The real adventure, for me, is to see how women’s groups are still thriving in a metro area that’s considered to be rather progressive and has lower unemployment figures than much of the country. In July I attended the inaugural meeting of an editors group, and although most there didn’t call for it to be exclusively a women’s group, there were no men in attendance.

I don’t think I would call these groups consciousness-raising groups, since they don’t necessarily embrace gender issues, yet I find it notable that there are still so many of them, more than 40 years after the second wave of the feminist movement began in the 1960s. So many despite the fact that “feminist” became a bad word decades ago and still needs to be reclaimed. For example, I was just reading the August 2010 issue of the Denver Voice, the magazine sold by homeless people in the Denver Metro area, and the article “Pink Collar Glam” had the following comments about feminism: “Christine and I were just talking about feminism in the 70′s as being so angry and trying to be more like a man, very masculine. We think feminism should embrace femininity more. And not try to be so dominant, but being comfortable with the fact that we are women.”

I can just imagine feminists of the 1970s frothing at the mouth at the thought that they weren’t feminine. They were trying to EXPAND the definition of femininity. And if they were trying to dominate someone, they were doing so because they were tired of being dominated by men.

And then the interviewer replies: “Yeah, that wave of feminism in the 60′s and 70′s was somewhat of a failure because it was too angry and reactionary. It doesn’t make sense to counteract oppression by trying to re-oppress something else.”

I had to laugh at this author calling feminism reactionary. Look up the word, please. It means “ultraconservative.” It refers to retrenchment, not what 1960s feminism was about. Those women wanted, for example, to be able to apply for jobs and not be told, “We don’t hire women.” They weren’t trying to oppress anyone, though they may have been clueless about the needs of women of color and lesbians.

Todd and I talked about this subject today at lunch. He said if someone tried to put together a group of male programmers, for instance, people would laugh at the idea that men have more commonalities than differences. Apparently, women still feel they have more commonalities than differences. Is that a result of a second-class position in society, or have we simply gotten into the habit of thinking women’s groups will help us?

I told him about the comment I recently heard (from a woman) that women are more emotional than men. That’s nonsense: there are more emotional individuals, not more emotional sexes. If women seem more emotional than men, it’s because they are raised to express their emotions, not because they have more of them.

And then I remembered the almost-all-male fiction workshop I took through Lighthouse Writers, run by Viet Dinh. My young female character got called a tramp by another writer because she had sex with her boyfriend fairly soon after they met. Yet the very next week, when a man presented a story about a male character going to a prostitute, no one made any disparaging comments about the character. No one, including me, had the courage to point out that double standard. Instead, I quit the class and lost my money.

I’m not sure what’s going on here. Am I noticing sexism more because I’m older, or has sexism flowered in the last few years? I would have expected Hillary Clinton’s run for president to have reduced sexism, but I think it may have increased it. Perhaps it was the prospect that her campaign presented of women gaining so much power over men.

Of course, if women don’t get together in groups, how will they fight sexism? It’s not a fight that can be won on a individual level.

What do you think? Have you noticed more sexism lately? If so, what do you think is causing the increase?