For Feisty Feminists

Book 30 in Cannonball Read 2

In 1995’s Where the Girls Are, Susan Douglas looked at the mixed messages that come from the media and influence young women as they grow up in a media-saturated society. In Enlightened Sexism: The Seductive Message that Feminism’s Work is Done, which came out earlier this year, Douglas looks at the messages about gender portrayed in our supposedly post-feminist society. Douglas compares current images of women in pop culture to those found even 10-15 years ago, and finds them sorely lacking; her conclusion is that the general feeling that our culture is past sexism has led to regressive images in tv shows - after all, it won’t undermine women in society to portray them as shallow, incompetent bimbos if everyone knows that it’s not true.

Enlightened Sexism looks at images of women in everything from popular tv shows like Ally McBeal, Xena, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, to the way that the news portrayed the unfeminine Janet Reno, to the media circus that surrounded Amy Fisher and Lorena Bobbit. She finds a lot to critique in reality tv, and while one could argue that reality tv portrays all of its participants as shallow and stupid, Douglas makes a convincing argument that its portrayal of women is particularly regressive. Douglas even finds some positive, complex images of women in soapy shows like Melrose Place and Beverly Hills 90210, and finds little to no corresponding images in today’s media.

One of the bigger flaws of Enlightened Sexism is the chapter on images of women of color. Douglas uses Wanda Sykes as an example of a black woman who uses her position to speak truth to power, and finds a great deal to admire in Sykes’ attitude, words, and style of speech. This position fails to acknowledge the precarious position of women of color in a patriarchal and racist society, and puts them in the position of being the cool version of white women, with the quick wit to put down and call out men without any consequence.

Enlightened Sexism is a good, if simple, study of pop culture and gender stereotypes. It’s interesting, and avoids the slut-shaming and reductive reasoning that feminist analysis of media often trades in. Although it is not particularly advanced feminism, it is still worth reading if you have an interest in feminist media analysis, or if you are looking for a beginning-to-intermediate feminist text.

How to Suppress Women’s Writing chronicles how women’s writing has been historically diminished, dismissed and belittled. Joanna Russ, a science fiction novelist, separates the methods of suppression in a nominally free society into broad categories, such as, denial of agency (she didn’t really write it - often said about the Bronte sisters); pollution of agency (it’s not really art because it is a genre piece); and false categorizing (dismissing women writers as insignificant except for in terms of their relation to male writers - i.e. Simone de Beauvoir being known as Sartre’s lover, not a writer in her own right). Russ brings up historical examples of these tactics, including the fascinating example of the reception of Wuthering Heights when the author was unknown. Before people knew who the author was, the critics, assuming male authorship, wrote about the complexity of the psychological issues raised, the manliness and beastliness of the author, and the brutality expressed in the novel. Within a few years, after Emily Bronte was revealed as the author, critics likened her to a beautiful bird flapping its wings in vain against a cage, and the book became a tender romance novel,(!!!) all the more easily dismissed as women’s writing, and not universal.

Russ builds a compelling case, and she is brief and succinct. In addition, she recognizes and states her own blind spots and privilege in the afterword. After beginning the book with an introduction that states that these methods are used to diminish and exclude the work of any minority group but she will be using almost solely the example of women, she tells us that after the book was published she was criticized for excluding and diminishing the works of women of color. Russ then relates her experience reading works she had previously ignored, and her subsequent recognition of these works as rich and rewarding, to be recognized as a parallel canon rather than an inferior or alternative one.

I would love to read similar works that explore the marginalization of other groups in writing or other art forms, so please share if you have suggestions. The methods of exclusion are likely similar in broad strokes, but I would like to learn about the specifics - and get some recommendations of artists whose work has been ignored in the process.

I just have to admit it: I am not good at picking non-fiction books. I picked up The Female Thing: Dirt, Sex, Envy, Vulnerability and Full Frontal Feminism mostly because I thought, why not? The Female Thing interested me because the author, Laura Kipnis, wrote another book that was a polemic against romantic love and attachment, which I find intriguing. Full Frontal Feminism is by Feministing’s Jessica Valenti, and like the blog, is an attempt to talk about feminist issues to a young audience; unfortunately, that ‘young’ audience doesn’t include me.

Let’s start with the worst. The Female Thing uses the four topics of the subtitle - dirt, sex, envy, and vulnerability - as a ‘map’ to the female psyche. And, already, it’s got points against it, because I really hate anything that pigeonholes men or women into certain boxes. Sure, we can talk about general patterns, but anytime anyone says ‘guys are just like x’ or ‘women are just like x’ their generalizations are severely limited by their own self-fulfilling perceptions. If you’re a woman who thinks that all women love shopping, high heels and makeup, and those things are their greatest concerns, you’re probably not going to have many women friends who hate those things, thus, you have no counter examples from your own life to disprove your shitty thesis. If you’re a man who thinks that all men talk negatively about women and call them ‘bitches’ and ‘cunts’, men who find that abhorrent aren’t really going to strike up a friendship with you - so you can look around at your troglodyte drinking buddies and say ’see, that’s just the way men are’ despite the many men who are not like that.

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The Gift of Fear (and other survival signals that protect us from violence) is a book that is well worth a read for the information presented, even if it is not particularly well-written. The book focuses on situations where we fear violence, and tells us how to analyze the possibility that someone will actually commit violence. De Becker is a renowned expert on violence in many forms - domestic violence, sexual violence, workplace violence, assassins, celebrity stalkers, even teenage suicide/homicide violence. The title comes from de Becker’s focus on intuition; the gift of fear, he tells us, is that it alerts us to danger that our mind has noticed without necessarily going through the rational part of our brains. True fear (i.e. not constant, crippling anxiety every time you walk to your car after work, but sudden, unexplainable fear that you are in danger) comes from small changes in the sound around us, a sudden flash of an image that we can’t process consciously, or the strange behavior of someone around us. These things, according to de Becker, tell us to fear attack.

De Becker is well-informed, and has a wealth of stories from clients to demonstrate his points. The book is most entertaining when he gets into his own viewpoints related to the topics - particularly his views on the media’s glorification of assassins, or his condemnation of the way our society treats children & teenagers. It is also interesting in the mis-steps he sometimes takes in making a point - in one chapter, he tells us about pre-incident indicators of violence in situations where one would not necessarily worry for safety. As an example, he tells us about three signs that a kangaroo is going to attack, which he says is a rare occurrence. After listing the indicators, he informs the reader that he actually just made it all up to point out that people sometimes spread false information. Wait, what?

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McCain has picked Sarah Palin as his running mate. I haven’t decided if I think this move is brilliant or profoundly stupid. I’m leaning toward profoundly stupid, because she has no national experience, plus the fact that she’s a woman - even if a pro-life, anti-gay marriage, traditional, non-threatening woman - will probably make some fundies heads explode, and may make some of those middle of the road defect to the Obama camp.

Clinton lost the primary. So, the first woman on a major party ticket in the general election since Geraldine Ferraro is anti-choice, anti-woman, and very conservative. Already the misogyny has started, with comments about her looks, her intelligence, rumors about the parentage of her youngest child. Some feminists are calling out the misogyny, even as they disagree with her politics. While I hope that continues, I think it’s possible to avoid misogyny but still look at the gender issues, the ways in which a woman who toes the line like Palin will get places that women who actually care about other women cannot.

Someone posted this excerpt from Andrea Dworkin’s ‘Right-wing Women,’ it illuminates why someone like Palin, a token, is electable - not like Clinton, who did not dissociate herself from other women, but tried to work for them.

The token woman carries the stigma of inferiority with her, however much she tries to disassociate herself from the other women of her sex class. In trying to stay singular, not one of them, she grants the inferiority of her sex class, an inferiority for which she is always compensating and from which she is never free. If the inferiority were not reckoned universally true, she of all women would not have to defend herself against the stigma of it; nor would her own complicity in the antifeminism of the institution (through disassociation with lesser women) be a perpetual condition of her quasi acceptance.

• A comparison of anti-trans arguments to anti-gay rhetoric at Fetch me my axe. Why all the stuff about trans issues? Because 1. I want it clear I do not believe that trans individuals or politics are a threat to feminism, and 2. those of us who are not anti-trans need to be vocally pro-trans.
• Nojojojo at the Angry Black Woman on POC on TV.
• Carnival against Sexual Violence 53, with links to posts on legal aspects, media, research, recovery, and other topics.
• Michelle Obama guest posts at BlogHer.
• Speaking of Obama…some dipshit produced shirts that said “Obama is my slave” is being sued by another dipshit who was surprised that black people were offended by it.
• On the lighter side, Pajiba finishes off a series on the greatest TV seasons of the last 20 years with Season 2 of The Office (US version).

Dear Bar Review Lecture Guy,

It would be much appreciated in the future if, when you tell the story of the will you successfully contested, you refrain from referring to the the young woman that an elderly man married as a ‘young thing.’ It makes it pretty clear that you don’t see her as a human, but as an object.

Furthermore, the fact that when she had a ‘legitimate occupation,’ - legitimate in your opinion - she was a stripper has nothing whatsoever to do with the eventual outcome of the case. There is absolutely no reason for you to mention this except to emphasize that you think she is a dirty, dirty member of the sex caste and is not entitled to any money from her husband - and you know nothing about that relationship except that he was old and she was young. Somehow, in your mind, he’s the victim, despite the fact that she has probably been groped and assaulted by men, and then was cheated out of the things promised to her in her husband’s will.

Please refrain from commenting beyond what I need to know to pass the fucking test.

Thanks!

Equal Pay. It’s hard to really wrap your head around the concept. There are so many excuses for un-equal pay: women ask for salaries on the lowest end of ranges; they don’t have as much training; they work in fields that just don’t pay as much. Never do the people putting forth these arguments consider that women are systematically taught to devalue and question themselves; that training is not as readily available because of the socio-economic difficulties and social obstacles (i.e. overwhelmingly male-oriented schools, lack of advising and support for women); the hostility and outright misogyny many women face in traditional male-dominated, higher paying fields.

I have come up against these obstacles time and time again. I am privileged as compared to many women, enough that I have been able to get accepted into a pretty good undergraduate institution, and have my choice of the six law schools that accepted me. However, I went into law school with the express purpose of going into public interest law, the lowest-paying sub-field in law. This sub-field also happens to employ many more women than men.

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As I was browsing in a store earlier today, I came across the newest issue of Bust magazine, that fun-feminist load of crap that may work for women who are just getting acquainted with feminism, but offends the senses of a radical feminist blamer like me.

Although the magazine is usually interesting, but ultimately posits ideas with which I do not agree, this issue was different. It’s a yearly issue entitled “Men We Love,” in which the magazine puts some attractive man on the cover and devotes the entire magazine to various men in pop culture, literature, and the like who are inspiring. Although some of the choices are men I admire (David Sedaris, Errol Morris, and Ira Glass) the whole concept is just off.

These are men that one would find in a mainstream (read: malestream) magazine, who I’m sure get lots of coverage in friendly liberal media sources. Errol Morris has won a fucking Oscar, for the love. Why does a supposedly feminist magazine devote one of their six issues a year to men (and the cover subjects seem to be chosen just for being good-looking, i.e. last year’s pick, Justin Theroux, and this year’s picks, the men from Flight of the Conchords and Elijah Wood) when 90% of the media out there is already devoted to men - and if they are not devoted to men, they’re devoted to telling women how to act properly subservient to men?

There’s also the fact that I really don’t like those guys from Flight of the Conchords. The musical parody numbers are funny enough, but anytime female characters are featured it’s in some plot about how these poor bumbling Nice Guys ™ can’t manage to get laid, with said female characters having the personality of a cardboard box - because, you know, they can’t be portrayed as actual people.

What about featuring Paul Campos, the author of The Obesity Myth, Gavin de Becker, who wrote The Gift of Fear and is dedicated to making women and others aware of what abuse and abusers look like, or Michael Kimmel, or just any man who publicly identifies as a feminist? Maybe the “Men We Love” issue is the one that brings in the most money, and they have to do it as some sort of awful compromise in order to print their usual radical feminist, hard-hitting, scathing exposes of the Patriarchy. Oh, wait. They don’t do that anyway. Instead, Bust magazine seems to want to constantly remind us that “Feminists love men! We really do! We think they’re swell!” and come off as not one of those feminist publications/blogs/people that are not warm and fuzzy and easy to digest.

Here’s the deal. Radical feminism means questioning the things that are at the very root of our society. It means everything from criticizing the role of the family in perpetuating sexism and misogyny, in the style of Firestone, to at least noting the misogyny of having no female characters in a popular TV show (Flight of the Conchords) that are viewed as anything other than possible nameless receptacles for some man’s dudely bodily fluids. It’s not fuzzy, warm, or capitulating. It’s not vibrators, stripper poles, and spangly tassles attached to nipples. It’s harsh, uncompromising, and makes you - including myself, a white, educated, straight, able-bodied, affluent women - uncomfortable.

That discomfort is not because radical feminism is wrong, it’s because you have unearned, unexamined privilege.

This article is a bit old, but it’s only recently getting some attention in many great sites around the fatosphere. (For those of you wondering what the fatosphere is, it’s the community of fat acceptance blogs. Fat acceptance = untangling our ideas of ‘weight’ from our ideas of ‘healthy’ and realizing that healthy is not a set weight, as well as critiquing the ’science’ that tells us that fat is unhealthy - which usually is funded by diet companies - and realizing the damage to your health that can be done by dieting. Well, it’s more than that, but there’s a quick explanation.)

The article is targeted at teen and pre-teen girls. It gives advice on how not to ‘binge eat,’ but the tips it gives actually promote incredibly disordered eating. It says that girls as young as 10 years old should:

• Write down everything they eat - clearly seeing the food their still growing bodies consume listed all in one place will shame them into eating less - when they actually should be eating whenever they are hungry to build muscles, feed their brains, and keep up with their high activity levels. This helpful ‘tip’ also suggests that looking at yourself naked in the mirror will cause you to realize how fat you are and stop eating.
• Wait 30 minutes before eating something when you are hungry. Hey, I had a friend who used to not eat until after she had had 40 ounces of water to drink, and she consumed maybe 1000 calories a day, that sounds healthy, right?
• Write post-it notes for yourself in visible places that say things like “How hungry are your really?” “Exactly why are you eating that now?” “What will the scale say tomorrow morning?” Those are direct quotes aimed at teenage and pre-pubescent girls to ‘help’ them with their eating.

The site has apparently been closed for comments, but includes a 13-year-old girl complaining about how she weighs a whopping 105 pounds, and a 12-year-old girl who says that everyone says she is not fat but she knows that she is.

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