A Response to Susie Orbach: On Generation and Femininity

This article provides a response to the article by Susie Orbach proposing that a more intensively regulated framework of femininity is now directed to young women in the guise of freedoms won and choice exercised. Orbach is right to argue that among its various performances femininity has recently lost many of its subservient dimensions. However, this is replaced by a regime of cultural values associated with body image that both appropriates from feminism and disavows it as having any new place in young women's worlds.