If what the world needs is more metaphysics-and I think the lack of it is precisely what ails us-then Lyonne, who wrote, directed, and starred in the show, is doing us all a service. I wrote last year about her brilliant series Russian Doll, which is as course as it comes, but is also about as fine an exploration of modern philosophy as you are going to find on screen these days.
Natasha Lyonne has re-invented herself in recent years after drug addiction and other health problems in the early 2000s, adopting a funny, no-nonsense persona, complete with a gravelly voice that emanates from her petite, even cute, exterior. In recent offerings from each, we have an opportunity to explore a post-feminist landscape, where the old mystique may not yet be experiencing a rehabilitation, but something beyond the “waves” is coming into focus. Into this scene enter two creative women: actress/writer/director Natasha Lyonne ( generally loved by feminists), and singer/songwriter Lana Del Rey ( a little more complicated).
Feminism’s last-gasp “ fourth wave,” therefore, is full of contradictions, embodied in popular culture by the somewhat conservative 2017 wrap-up of Lena Dunham’s otherwise excruciatingly of-the-moment HBO series Girls. But the old longing for freedom to live within the limits of our biological givenness remains too strong to ignore. Today, amid the various worldly successes of women, feminism is collapsing under the weight of confusion about the great anthropological crisis of our age, a cliché only because it is so important: What is a woman? Progressives have ever-evolving ways to answer these basic questions. But a “ third wave” of feminists were soon needed to search in vain for what activists like Friedan had made them free for.
The old “mystique” of traditional femininity was said to give way to a new freedom. Friedan’s book is said to have sparked the “second wave” of feminism that led by the early 1980s to a new American economy dependent upon two adults instead of one per household toiling away in a cubicle, or standing all day on the floor of a retail store, or teaching other people’s children (often in order to pay a stranger look after their own). In 1963, Betty Friedan published her influential book The Feminine Mystique, inventing a term to describe the languor born of unfulfilled desires among American women, whose primary duties consisted in keeping their homes and raising their children.
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