For Feisty Feminists

I put the posts on this blog into the Gender Guesser, an online tool that analyzes word choice in to determine the gender of the writer. Here’s what came up.

Fair Pay verdict: Male

“Men we Love” verdict: Male, 68%

You’re Never too Young to Develop an Eating Disorder verdict: Male for informal language, weak male for formal language. There is a note that “weak male” could indicate European.

Riding the Bus, Part II verdict: Informal is weak female, formal is weak male.

The Anti-anti-Clinton Backlash verdict: Weak male on both counts.

How not to be an Asshole, Part II verdict: Male for both formal and informal, informal by 75%.

How not to be an Asshole verdict: Strongly male for informal (over 84%) and weak male for formal.

‘Consent’ verdict: Male by 77.5% for informal, weak male for formal.

Saturday Night at the Drive-in verdict: Male.

“Masculism” verdict: Male for formal, weak male for informal.

Adventures in Research verdict: weak male for informal, male for formal.

Friday Random Thought verdict: Male and weak male.

Success! verdict: the only one that correctly identifies my gender, and then it’s only partly. Apparently, I am informally a male but formally a female.

What’s the point, really? I’m guessing (ha!) to shore up gender norms. Let me try to write more female from now on - maybe something about kittens and rainbows.

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.