Feminist Blogs/Communities I Have Known...

For discussion of Feministing, Tiger Beatdown, Jezebel, et al.

What do you find useful, what not-so-useful?

Suggestions/discussion here

they are all obsessed w/ mad men and I can't watch the next series until after christmas so that kind of sucks

I don't own a television so I find the commentary kinda useful, like it gives me the sense that I've consumed what I need to know about these kinds of phenomenon. At least to the point where I'm not completley confused by office conversations.

ANyway, that was a really quick list from what we were talking about on Craigslist thread. What others do people read?

copy/past why I think these things are important to keep an eye on, from the other thread...

Plax, I think your two-pronged approach is a very good one. That's it's important both to know the high end theory of it (the kind of stuff you'll find in the public library's Feminism section) but ALSO the day to day workings of it. And that a very important part of feminism, traditionally, has been the consciousness-raising and experience-sharing part of it. And that is something that you have to go to individual women, sharing their experiences, to get. And that the blogosphere has very much taken over from middle class dinner parties as the place where that consciousness-raising activity goes on, because it's more inclusive and you do get the voices that were traditionally excluded even from nice 70s style middle class feminism. (Queer/LGBT voices, women of colour - I like the push and pull of discourse back and forth between say, feministing and racalicious when they talk about the same things from different angles, and don't always agree. That's opened my mind a lot. But a lot of that comes from the community section and the comments sections, that stuff gets cross posted and cross polinated.)

That feminism is a praxis as well as a set of theories, that you can't just read a bunch of dusty tomes in a library and get an idea of what it's about.

i admit i've never heard of tigerbeatdown before you posted that link abt the girls gone wild video.

but it definitely broaches what mackinnon says about pornography, that its status as protected speech is predicated on coercion and domination of the female body.

xp I've seen it linked to fairly often within the last few months, probably starting with the "13 Ways of Looking at Tina Fey" piece.

what do they say about mad men

its the only major tv show w/ a majority female writing staff

... i think a lot of sci-fi has a majority female writing staff?

o really? i just read that somewhere

also the glamour of oppression

anyway they like mad men. which is great i love mad men.

did not know that

you don't need a tv to watch tv kate

I had seen Tiger Beatdown a few times before - mainly through links posted through from other blogs I follow via twitter (a lot of body image and beauty myth type stuff which, although coming from a feminist perspective, I wouldn't call primarily "Feminist Blogs" - they are specific sites.)

And, come to think of it, that was a Jezebel link, in fact - someone was talking about Lisbeth Salander as a "feminist icon" and someone else posted a link to the Tiger Beatdown going OH NOES SHE'S BLOODY WELL NOT AND HERE'S ALL THE WAYS WHY... - again, a back and forth.

Again, I think a lot of these things are great because they take advantage of the web-like linkages to spread opinions both agreeing and dissenting. None of these individual pieces, taken in isolation is THE TRUTH, but when you read all the links and everywhere that takes you, and consume a wide variety of opinions, it starts to point towards patterns and ways of making sense.

And now I've become so vague I'm not sure what I'm talking about, which means I need to get some lunch.

'cisgendered'! that's a new word for me

every time i hear that word it makes me think of cysts

and not the ILX poster 'cis'? read yr blogs

MY GOOGLE READER IS CLEAR THANKS VERY MUCH SIR

one of these articles reminds me of my pet peeve: "i'm not a feminist but..." wait why not?

belief in essentialism usually

i don't follow it regularly but everything i've seen on the f word has been really smart and on point.

about two-thirds of the time i want to stand and applaud jezebel for the things they focus on and bring to light and the stances they take. the other third of the time i think they're the worst morons ever (see: the taylor swift débâcle). i find that the writers can be quite...proscriptive and judgmental about other women, ironically. and quite smug about their "liberal feminist smartypants" identity, as erika v touched on here.

i read that lisbeth salander debate randomly last night (idk how, i haven't read the books - i assume we followed some similar link somewhere k8!) - it started off really well and thought-provokingly, but christ if that "sady" poster (i assume sady doyle?) who seemed to be moderating the comments doesn't come across like a huge, hectoring bully towards the few women who had read and liked the books.

most of the time the comments are a lot more well-rounded than the editorial tone would indicate i think.

I read the ones you cite - I dig Tiger Beatdown. Big fan of Feminist Law Professors, through whom I found Hunter of Justice.

okay feminist law professors looks like exactly the kind of thing i've been looking for

that ggw story is wild

mackinnon legally represented linda boreman who is better known as linda lovelace for her appearance in deepthroat. afterwards she claimed that she was coerced into appearing in the film and testified that "Virtually every time someone watches that movie, they're watching me being raped." you can still buy it on dvd.

if you want to have a really depressing conversation sometime find somebody who doubts that linda boreman was being held prisoner often at gunpoint because after all she does such a good job

and then review their album for decibel

I used to be really into estronet.com which then got bought and turned into chickclick, and then into something even dumber. Haven't really looked for an alternative since then, seeing as how jezebel makes me absolutely insane and I don't think they like my sense of humor there.

Sort of lost interest with the thing about the guy who threw his girlfriend's cat out a window, and half the commenters said he was worse than Hitler.

jezebel commenters are totally inane, but the posts are more interesting than, say, the frisky dot com. that site sucks imo. i guess as a community --> not my bag. as something i read while waiting for water to boil --> ok.

man the guy who invents a widget that makes blog/newspaper comments invisible is gonna get a dollar from me - I know, I know, "just don't read," but it's just sort of second-nature to keep reading what's written on a page that was interesting to me and then it's like GAH SHUT UP

sort of like when Whiney posts his mindless ad-homs

i still get super confused by 'cisgendered' and start imagining a world where being me is a gender in itself (the horror, i kno). also when i read things that say e.g. 'cis women just don't understand' and i'm all 'shut up! you don't even know me!'. it is hard, to be me. and the commonwealth of independent states.

i like tiger beatdown! i like sady doyle more than her co-writers, pretty much entirely because she is a super fluent and funny writer - my fondness for feminist blogs tends to rest entirely on whether i personally am charmed with the writers, not entirely on their politics.

a lot of jez commenters are a little hard to deal with but it's still super weird when on gawker or kotaku or whatever every stray mention of jezebel commenters is like 'lol crazy ladies'.

like, i will take jez commenters over, i dunno, av club commenters?

hahaha

whiney I gotta hand it to you you're a good sport & an example worth following in how to take it when people come at you with snark

i just realised 'cis dur' and 'c sharp major' are the same thing. a doy

the other third of the time i think they're the worst morons ever (see: the taylor swift débâcle). i find that the writers can be quite...proscriptive and judgmental about other women, ironically. and quite smug about their "liberal feminist smartypants" identity, as erika v touched on here.

That's a good assessment of some of the problems I have with that site. That and the silly life/fashion advice posts like "How to Get Dressed for Work", which I don't understand the need for. What next, "How to Butter Toast"?

man the guy who invents a widget that makes blog/newspaper comments invisible is gonna get a dollar from me - I know, I know, "just don't read," but it's just sort of second-nature to keep reading what's written on a page that was interesting to me and then it's like GAH SHUT UP

sort of like when Whiney posts his mindless ad-homs

― gross rainbow of haerosmith (underrated aerosmith albums I have loved), Wednesday, August 4, 2010 8:48 AM (22 minutes ago) Bookmark

most comment boxes these days are built with java so if you run NoScript in firefox you'll have to elect to see them. saved me some ounces of sanity over the years.

Uhhhh do not underestimate a lot of people's ability to get dressed for a specifically pitched environment.

i love this blog

http://blog.iblamethepatriarchy.com/

I suppose, but it seems self explanatory and the writer of those posts takes it so seriously. xp

Sorry, shd have said "a lot of people's INability".

But okay, you're probably right anyway.

Use of the words bitch, whore, etc -- it was talked abt in one of the above articles, does anyone here still use them? I have pretty much given up on those words in virtually every instance (although I did use "bitch" today when my roommate suggested that he was noticing a lot of dogs with testicles lately and I asked "are you looking for a candidate for your bitch? -- tasteless, I know) and replaced them with what I think is the more gender-neutral "asshole" (which is actually really satifying -- two syllables!). I am taken to still using the gendered "dickhole" and "dickweed" occasionally but I spread those across both genders.

Is this a dumb conversation to try and start? probably ugh whatever it's what I'm thinking about.

he silly life/fashion advice posts like "How to Get Dressed for Work", which I don't understand the need for.

i find some of these useful! i am regularly worried that i am not doing these kinds of basic things right and it is v reassuring to read a whole passel of people explaining their personal rubrics (plus a bunch of pointless 'i just wear sweatpants because i work from home' type comments).

i have taken to (at least mentally) saying 'dickface' with alarming regularity - i am not quite sure if it is gendered or not, but it's bloody satisfying.

I've started that conversation very recently, coming down hard against 'bitch' and FOR more anatomical cuss-words

but this thread is kinda for links communities, rather than ad-lib debate, and I'm pretty sure we all agree on this one

oh well lj if you have laid down the law on that conversation already! (tho yeah it might as well go in the objectification thread along w everything else)

Hey - there's always a debate!

I still maintain that Kate's being ridiculously patronising when she asserts that I don't know what feminism is in practice just because I went to bat for some weird dude who's discovering his own principles and erring more in terms of expression rather than action - I'm reading this thread assiduously and plan to visit plenty of the sites but I have a certain grounding in this stuff and a hair-trigger sensitivity to a LOT of casual anti-woman tropes

that's really what got under my skin the most

re: use of bitch/whore

I never had much faith in reclamation of words. I was doing a group presentation w/four other guys in my class yesterday, and I had put the powerpoint together – they were all older than me & scared of computers. SO I told them I'd also run the presentation. When we were practicing, one guy finished his slide, and said, "New slide, bitch!" And I said, "Aw, fuck you," and everyone laughed (both had an air of levity but also an air of for-realness). I was, really mad! But after he explained his daughter 'who is a feminist' was trying to reclaim the word so it was ok for him to call me that. When, what the fuck, it so isn't.

dude, i'm not sure how much the problem is who you're going to bat for so much as how loud you are about going to bat for ppl!

aaaaanyway

i think this is a good recent thing by Sady Doyle on being feminist on the internet.

idk howi feel abt word reclamation. i mean for instance the way queer has become this totally acceptable academic word still really excites me and i feel weirdly empowered by it. but i mean i dont want to be prescriptive i guess.

It doesn't help that I thought this was basically the worst single of the '90s:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/2/23/Meredith_Brooks_-_B.tch.jpg

I'm still recovering...?

"queer" is different from "bitch" in a lot of ways imo

I really like Tigerbeatdown and Sady Doyle's take on things in general (she writes articles for the Atlantic and Broadsheet). Other feminist/womanist blogs that I like, which are all slanted towards a USA-perspective since, well, this is where I live:

Shakesville
The Pursuit of Harpyness
FWD Forward
Womanist Musings

Jezebel doesn't really do it for me in general, although when other blogs I like point to articles of interest, I generally enjoy them. LaToya Peterson from Racialicious was writing for them for awhile so I generally tried to read her posts. Bitch magazine's blogs (speaking of reclaiming language) are generally really great (they talk about Mad Men sometimes) because they bring in a lot of writers for guest stints.

Should this be where I admit that I often avoid conversations surrounding feminism here on ILX because engaging in them here exhausts and frustrates me? I guess this is where I admit that.

"queer" is different from "bitch" in a lot of ways imo

― gross rainbow of haerosmith (underrated aerosmith albums I have loved), Wednesday, August 4, 2010 3:01 PM (3 minutes ago)

both of them can be shouted at you on the street tho

i like tiger beatdown! i like sady doyle more than her co-writers, pretty much entirely because she is a super fluent and funny writer - my fondness for feminist blogs tends to rest entirely on whether i personally am charmed with the writers, not entirely on their politics.

otm. Now that TBD is a group blog, I just scan for Sady's name. A while back they all wrote about music for a few weeks and while some of it was insightful, it was also weirdly rockist.

sady doyle is really not a good writer

and latoya peterson was the one who did that awful nicki minaj profile which read like it was based on half a nicki minaj verse, right? not a good writer either.

at the risk of saying the obvious, doesn't word reclamation really depend on the word in question? being all 'make me a sandwich, bitch' to a woman who isn't a close friend isn't really reclamation, it's taking advantage of the concept of reclamation so you can say something with a frisson of offensiveness.

i read this iris murdoch novel recently where one man said to another, of a woman, 'she's a classic example of what one would call a bitch' (paraphrase) and got really confused because the woman in question was someone I would never have thought of as a bitch - she wasn't bitchy/catty/mean, it was somehow a reference to the way she used her sexuality, and it seemed way more offensive for that.

nb this novel (the bell) was from the 1950s - presumably it's just that the meaning of the word has shifted.

doesn't word reclamation really depend on the word in question

or context surely? like a girl referring to her friends as "my bitches" counts as +ve reclamation (or, for that matter, bitch magazine), but using it to put another woman down is obv not.

i'm pretty desensitised to "bitch" in a way that i don't think i could be for eg "slut"/"slag"/"whore"

yeah slut i just couldnt ever

When we were practicing, one guy finished his slide, and said, "New slide, bitch!" And I said, "Aw, fuck you," and everyone laughed (both had an air of levity but also an air of for-realness). I was, really mad! But after he explained his daughter 'who is a feminist' was trying to reclaim the word so it was ok for him to call me that. When, what the fuck, it so isn't.

I think I would have had to punch that dude.

Should this be where I admit that I often avoid conversations surrounding feminism here on ILX because engaging in them here exhausts and frustrates me? I guess this is where I admit that.

It is one of the many issues I written off discussing here.

yeah slut i just couldnt ever

the worst people in the world aren't even straight men who call women sluts, it's gay men who call women sluts and think that because they're gay they're entitled to be "bitchy" like that

sady doyle is really not a good writer

― لوووووووووووووووووووول (lex pretend), Wednesday, August 4, 2010 10:08 AM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

and latoya peterson was the one who did that awful nicki minaj profile which read like it was based on half a nicki minaj verse, right? not a good writer either.

― لوووووووووووووووووووول (lex pretend), Wednesday, August 4, 2010 10:09 AM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

Speaking of being proscriptive and judgmental about other women...

i like the pursuit of harpyness, especially michelle dean, who hasnt written for them in a minute

Lex, your definition of good writer is so unlike mine! i read Sady Doyle and Latoya Peterson for their charm and style far more than because I expect them to always express opinions I agree with. So what if Sady Doyle is punchily wrong about Taylor Swift, she's punchily right about a whole bunch of other things, and also her punchiness is just a delight in itself.

Sorry, long meeting was LOOOONNNNNNGGGGGG

Yeah, I also find debates about feminism on ILX exhausting and frustrating, and the irony is, I often *don't* post about 3x more than what I do post.

But there's this weird thing ON EVERY INTERNET FORUM EVER where you get it from both sides - and you're getting it in the neck from 1) the (either outright or "ironic" - I can't tell the difference) people who are saying anti-woman stuff you're trying to call out AND 2) women "who are not a feminist, but..." crew (see also: Well, I Am A Woman And I Am Not Offended By That Thing You're Trying To Talk About) and then 3) I have a different definition/experience of feminism and YOU DOING IT WRONG jump on you.

It's weird. I guess I just like to read these things to feel like I'm not a complete weirdo for having the views I do, (when I'm being told by 100 boys an electronic music forum that it's A-OK to post porn and sex fantasies all over threads about electronic music, so long as it's women's bodies, but not men's.) - and also to remind myself that feminism is a broad church and incorporates all kinds of viewpoints and ideas.

you might disagree with sady about her take on taylor swift lex but i dont think it makes her a "bad writer"!

Lex, I love you man, but for you "not a good writer" seems to equal "says things about pop stars that I object to based on my fandom of the pop star's music" which is kind of different from the messages these writers are saying. Especially when you're talking about that one writer's art, and they're talking about the general trend of how women are perceived/marketed in pop culture.

Kate, I often feel very bad because I agree with you in a lot of debates on ILX and I lack the energy/courage to back you up. :(

And reclaiming language is such an odd topic, because it's one thing when it's the group in question usually dismissed with that term reclaiming it as a term of power - and yet that's somehow used to justify teenage boys who are giggling over how faux-offensive they are for saying things like "make me a sandwich bitch!" because it was on South Park and they think that's so subversive and funny.

Also, yeah, the way that terms like "bitch" get used by women both as reclaiming, and then dismissal of another woman in a different sentance. So it's hard to reclaim a word that YOU are still using as being a totally negative thing in other contexts.

Thanks, Jenny, that's really cool, and thank you for saying that. It's good to know.

i dont think knocking taylor swifts feminist cred is w/o validity and i really like that hey stephen song

Lex, your definition of good writer is so unlike mine! i read Sady Doyle and Latoya Peterson for their charm and style far more than because I expect them to always express opinions I agree with

i think a basic component of being a good writer is doing one's research; in that screed doyle basically evaluates an artist's entire career based on one (misread) couplet. it's hella lazy writing. it's not so much that i disagree w/her point of view, more that she totally fails to back up what comes across like kneejerk prejudice.

xp
I'm not sure what Lex meant exactly, but Doyle does use a very stylized writing style (uh) that I usually like and every now and then find kind of annoying. But it is distinctive. While I originally discovered her site because of a great post she did on the show Dollhouse, her opinions on pop culture can be off the mark. She wrote an article for Salon about a James Franco short story that was just bizarrely at ease with assuming the story's narrator = Franco.

I don't know that she's so much evaluating an artist's entire career based on one couplet as saying "WOW, HOLY SHIT AM I EVER UNCOMFORTABLE WITH SOME OF THE GENDER ROLES REPRESENTED IN THIS COUPLET and here's how they relate to some other images of women within pop culture..."

i thought you and someone else (erika?) worked out that she was evaluating Swift's career based on one couplet plus the visual language of her video?

Conflation of writer and narrator is totally a thing with Doyle - there's this thing she wrote about Rivers Cuomo on the Awl which becomes indescribably wtf unless you keep in mind the bit early on where she says 'this is not about rivers cuomo the real person but about the version of him lodged in my brain as a result of these songs'

(Also, re: gendered insults. I've been really experimenting lately with changing the gender of my preferred insult words. (Partly out of IT room trying to address it's language, that my boss decided "COCK!" was a better expletive than the C-word they were using before I joined... hrmmm. Well. Yeah.) But also just for seeing how if it changes how I view things/people if I reach for "what a dick" and "cock" instead of "that's a bitch" or "cunt" - like, does it feel different to use, do people's reactions to those swear words differ. But, I mean, I'm just interested in the etymology of swearing to start with.)

i think its also fair enough to point out that swift kind of endlessly points out a fairly aspirational and exclusionary version of idealised teenage romance that might alienate ppl who fall outside her "cheerleader/cute guy/girl next door who is meant for him" set of characters

i blame the patriarchy is really good, yeah. i don't agree with her 100% of the time, but it's a v good blog. i think there's always a narcissim of small differences going on when i read feminist blogs and i'm like, i don't agree with that in every particular. also i should just stop reading comments because they always drive me crazy.

xp to Masonic
for a few days after reading this in Savage Love, I tried using "ballsack" or "nutsack" in this way, but it took too much explaining:

You are a huge pussy, CTOAC—excuse me, sorry. Pussies are powerful; they can take a pummeling and spit out a brand-new human being. What you are, CTOAC, is weak, vulnerable, easily manipulated, and far too sensitive for your own good.

What you are is a ball-sack.

I don't want to get too bogged down in Taylor Swift as an example, but I do wonder how much of the like and/or dislike is down to the fairly over-the-top eye-rolling blogosphere tone of a lot of the posts.

Again, I find something refreshing or charming, when that kind of "OMG" comic book guy derisive tone of voice is usually used in (let's be fair, quite male-dominated and often quite female-negative) blogosphere, it's kind of refreshing to see someone going "OMG, GTFO with your Gary Sue patriarchy fan fiction, Steig Larsson!" because you're not particularly used to seeing 4chan tone attached to woman-positive sentiments.

there's this thing she wrote about Rivers Cuomo on the Awl which becomes indescribably wtf unless you keep in mind the bit early on where she says 'this is not about rivers cuomo the real person but about the version of him lodged in my brain as a result of these songs'

I liked that piece, even though I have been utterly unable to listen to any Weezer songs without thinking of it since I read it. (It's not that I listen to Weezer a whole lot, but the water aerobics instructor at the Y plays selections from the blue album during class a lot, so there I am, hanging on my noodle doing crunches and thinking, "Oh yeah... I never thought about the lyrics this way but damn...")

Agree with a lot of the blogs listed (though with caveats), would also add The Angry Black Woman and maybe The Curvature. Avoid Shakesville. The Hathor Legacy and Feminists With Disabilities can be spotty but have some good posts.

it's kind of refreshing to see someone going "OMG, GTFO with your Gary Sue patriarchy fan fiction, Steig Larsson!" because you're not particularly used to seeing 4chan tone attached to woman-positive sentiments

yeah i think i'm just allergic to 4chan-tone wherever it's found.

i really liked moe tcacik as a writer, though i haven't kept up w/her since she left jezebel.

was interesting to read that article she wrote abt her time at jezebel

moe tcacik was/is a gifted writer but she was pretty explicitly not a feminist iirc

imo "maureen" is a great writerer, "moe" tcacik desperately needs an edito

^^Horseshoe OTM

I am generally against snark, but ironically enough, I was just randomly reading a blog that talked about *why* certain younger feminists use it... let's see if it's still in my history...

yeah, I have no idea what this blog is, I found it linked from an article I saw on twitter about the recent Jaclyn Friedman post...

http://pandagon.net/index.php/site/comments/no_laughing_no_screwing_no_learning_how_to_read/

Of course, Susan did swipe at that kind of comment:

aking refuge in snark is a favorite maneuver among feminists. “Something to do with?” “Getting all used up?” Snark, snark. Sneer, roll eyes.

The fantasy is that we snark in our writing and then go to bed and cry ourselves to sleep. Well, I fantasize about Jon Hamm and Matt Damon showing up at my door with a bottle of expensive wine and a lot of really big fluffy pillows, myself. To each their own, I guess. But I can tell the difference between a fantasy and a reality. And I know that the “feminists” she’s speaking of like snarking for the same reason Jon Stewart and Judd Apatow like snarking---that’s the language we grew up speaking. Of course, I can see why someone who doesn’t understand that women might have sex for the pleasure of it can’t understand very well that people crack jokes because laughing is fun.

It's not my sense of humour, no.

But I think, given that so much anti-woman sniping happens in the language of Snark, giving pro-woman stuff right back in Snark is perfectly reasonable. And, in fact, might be the kind of language that might reach the kind of little boy who's doing it coz they think it's so "edgy" and "transgressive".

(though obv that's not what she's talking about in that post.)

4chan tone attached to woman-positive sentiments

Kate have you seen this plot rundown of 'splice' (spoilers; also, caps)? it is pretty much exactly that.

Pandagon is a pretty good blog, even though Amanda Marcotte has gotten herself in some pretty hot water in the past by failing to recognize when her own privilege was tripping her up.

i'm kind of curious what a '4chan tone' is to be taken to mean, here

tits or gtfo

fag

i mean, i don't think that review of 'splice' (which i think is pretty good!) is '4chan' in tone

xpost haha YEAH, the 4chan response to that is 'tl;dr' or 'caps plz'

facepalm.jpg @louis

moe tcacik was/is a gifted writer but she was pretty explicitly not a feminist iirc

― horseshoe, Wednesday, August 4, 2010 3:50 PM (13 minutes ago)

really?

there was at least one post about her uneasiness about feminism and in a larger sense her entire body of writing at jezebel spoke to her uneasiness about feminism. i don't really want to get into details tbh, because she and tracie egan kind of drove me insane and were the reason i stopped reading jezebel.

i mean, she's really smart and talented, she doesn't need my approval.

I found that review of Splice pretty hilarious, TBH.

But I guess I meant snark more than 4chan.

dealwithitdog.jpg @ k8

ah, maybe i'm wrong about 4chan style, i haven't been there in ages. i guess maybe it's just all that all caps and shorthand i was thinking of, less of the lolfag etcetera.

horseshoe - i guess i assumed she was expressing uneasiness about feminism in a feminist way!

Also, re: gendered insults. I've been really experimenting lately with changing the gender of my preferred insult words

I have actually been playing with this too, but the problem with calling someone a "dick" is that it carries (at least in my experience) a lot of gendered baggage-- to me, "dick" is bad like "bitch" in similar but different ways, in that the words have meaning that is linked to heteronormative stereotypes (dicks strive for a success and mess up everything in their path in that pursuit, while bitches are irrational and irritable-- calling a woman a dick or a man a bitch doesn't make it any better). I have found myself reaching for asshole a lot recently. Its meaning is mutable enough that it applies to most situations and it is pretty much ungendered and unracist and unhomophobic and that. See also: piece of shit.

I have been toying with inventing my own words based on panhuman anatomy vs. gendered anatomy -- for example I have useless people on my team at work who I am determined to start calling appendices or tonsils or adenoids (i like the last one because it sounds liek a sci-fi insult). silly i know but why not!

I tried using "ballsack" or "nutsack" in this way

That's one of my favourite expletives (eg. bump my funny bone -- NUTSACK!) but using it to explain a person I'd probably just sounds like I was calling them wrinkly, anyway. Or saying that their existence frustrates me because they cause me to have to be very careful or experience pain (I think the latter I have used).

re: that AWL piece on Rivers Cuomo... man, yeah that did 2 things for me: 1. make it hard for me to listen to weezer anymore (not that I was doing it daily, but my grade-5 love for the Blue Album sure feels grimy now) and 2. make me laugh a lot. it was entertaining if nothing else.

I have had a lot of ambivalent feelings about a lot of the feminist stuff I read on the internet because for me it's a more peripheral interest -- which isn't to say it's a lower priority in my life but it is in my internet reading -- and a lot of the stuff I end up reading is related to "geek"/"gamer" culture because I am one of those nerds who's into making the whole stupid-ass backwards culture more accepting like it pretends it is. Angry black Woman was mentioned above and there was an article she wrote at some point about a video game whose trailer depicted a white man entering an African or Caribbean village (forget which, I never played the game) and shooting a bunch of black folks. It was really fucked up, and COMPLETELY should have been rethought before it was released, and deserves the negative press it garnered, but ABW's response wasn't focused, iirc (can't really look it up @ work atm). Of course the Nerd Defense Force lashed out in an absolutely REPULSIVE manner. I tried reading "feminist gamer" for a while which is now I believe a dead blog and just couldn't deal with the way feminism was presented there, which turned me off of it for a while, but I have read a few interesting articles on a site called geekfeminism recently that I have appreciated. Here is a thing.

well, the one post i am thinking of was an, i don't consider myself a feminist post, so...

xpost

because she and tracie egan kind of drove me insane and were the reason i stopped reading jezebel.

Also OTM.

Well, I've never been on 4chan, fullstop, I only know the posting style from ex-channers who are taking the piss out of it.

I guess my thing is - I dislike snark, in general. But I LUURRRVE seeing really whip-smart, funny women calling out misogynist snark, in its own language and on its own terms. There is something faintly gratifying in the "hoist on its own petard" nature of that.

x-post to cis

I found that review of Splice pretty hilarious, TBH.

― Masonic Boom, Wednesday, August 4, 2010 11:08 AM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark

agreed---also had no idea that 'splice' was that wtf

"Pussies don't like dicks, because pussies get fucked by dicks. But dicks also fuck assholes: assholes that just want to shit on everything. Pussies may think they can deal with assholes their way. But the only thing that can fuck an asshole" etc, etc, etc

Also OTM.

― no gut busting joke can change history (Jenny), Wednesday, August 4, 2010 12:12 PM (36 seconds ago) Bookmark

god bless you, Jenny; i wish we had actually talked about this when i still lived in Chicago; i felt like i was taking crazy pills!

x-post but ooh, I like the look of Geek Feminism - problem is, even though I'm not a gamer I inhabit a lot of geek spaces (computing, electronic music, that sort of thing) so I can certainly relate the unique problems of the girl geek in trying to negotiate a lot of the inherent misogyny of those kinds of spaces.

"asshole" is kind of a non-starter w/a british accent

Horseshoe: Lord, no, you were not taking crazy pills. I so do not want to open this particular can o' worms, but I found that whole "Tracie Egan's rape fantasy" thing to be deeeeeply problematic, mostly because any attempt to discuss the potential that it was deeply problematic was met with Egan's trademark brand of "giving blow jobs in filthy hipster bar bathrooms is EMPOWERING and if you disagree you're a stupid prude" feminism and while I'm not saying that someone can't be a "slut machine" (if you will, har har) and still be a feminist, at all, I am saying that I think taking that stance requires a little more introspection and motive-examination than Egan (or Moe) were ever willing to engage in.

The Team America quote reminded me of something I quoted in an e-mail today to my SO, which I got from the comments of one of the fem articles I read since following this thread this morning. See, we were at the cottage w/ her brother and his friends, and they kept trying to explain how South Park is amazing, and this wuote explained perfectly how I wanted to respond:

"I love your analysis of irony, because it’s one of the things that I didn’t have a name for but have felt since I watched my first episode of "South Park" — it was funny, and I laughed, but I’ve never watched another episode because I didn’t feel good about laughing, that even though I “got” that the words were a joke, I just couldn't shake the feeling that I’d rather not participate in it."

xp Kate I hope that it isn't a bad suggestion, like I said I've barely read it so far and I've found a lot fo geek feminist stuff kidn of... rough around the edges, at points. so far all good there, though.

"asshole" is kind of a non-starter w/a british accent

― لوووووووووووووووووووول (lex pretend), Wednesday, August 4, 2010 4:18 PM (8 minutes ago)

arsehole then

i was going to say "but y'all ahve fanny" then i realized that fanny over there isn't exactly "ass" like it is here huh :/ you still have -shit- though! piece-of-shit, shithead, shitheel, shitstain, poopshit, shitshit...!

arsehole is my number one insult but it does have istherectumagrave.jpg connotations

had a conversation abt this with my coworker at lunch who's convinced that the bad words are better because they have the better syllables and i asked him to explain why precisely cunt is empirically a more satisfying syllable than "tech" or "bliss" or "barf" as expletives and I think he changed his tune. CHALK ONE FOR THE HOME TEAM i guess.

i use the word "jerk" a lot

mostly because any attempt to discuss the potential that it was deeply problematic was met with Egan's trademark brand of "giving blow jobs in filthy hipster bar bathrooms is EMPOWERING and if you disagree you're a stupid prude" feminism and while I'm not saying that someone can't be a "slut machine" (if you will, har har) and still be a feminist, at all, I am saying that I think taking that stance requires a little more introspection and motive-examination than Egan (or Moe) were ever willing to engage in.

Whoa, OK, I wasn't there for that, and that kind of thing would deeply worry me if I'd read that kind of thing.

I'm really not into any kind of feminism that proscribes other women's experiences either as slut shaming OR prude shaming. That just seems to be missing the point a bit. (I thought one of the founding principles of feminism was the idea that people came in different flavours and priviliging one over the other of binaries is just not a good idea, whether that binary is man/woman or something like the madonna/whore dichotomy which really needs to be dismantled and taken out back and buried - but doing that is kind of a complicated job than it sounds like she was willing to engage with.)

...but yeah, that is one of my pet peeves. I used to follow someone on twitter who was constantly going on about OMG I CANNOT BELIEVE THE WAY THAT SOME FEMINISTS ACT!!! ARGH!!! and I tweeted something to the effect of not liking it when people tried to police other people's feminism. And she totally missed the point, because she retweeted what I said, until I pointed out "um, I follow all the same blogs and feminist tweetstreams you do, and there's only one person I ever see policing other people's feminism and actually, it's you?" but then she blocked me. :-/

i totally relate to that btw

There's probably something of the policewoman in me, for saying "BE OPEN MINDED OR I'LL NICK YOU!" so you can't win, really.

I guess I just generally feel that if someone is claiming a feminist identity, or writing in a feminist space, and that person wants to enthusiastic embrace something that is historically used to oppress or harm women, I would like that person to be a little more circumspect with his/her (what is the gender neutral possessive??? xer?) enthusiasm about that thing or at least be more transparent about reasoning/motives. Or, at the very least, not super duper defensive when somebody takes a critical look at their choices.

That probably IS policing someone else's feminism a little bit, to be honest. But in my defense, I will say that I'm not saying that person can't or shouldn't be a feminist. I just like it better when people are self-aware and intentional about these kinds of things.

xp - haha yeah, Kate, it's sort of a Catch 22.

i use the word "jerk" a lot

― max, Wednesday, August 4, 2010 11:35 AM (11 minutes ago) Bookmark

^^^^ditto. it is my stock insult.

i don't want to belabor my reaction to egan/tcacik, either, but yeah, Jenny. egan i think did identify as feminist but her feminism was unthinking/dumb; tcacik seemed to be devoting a lot of energy to feminism as the enemy/what if rape isn't really rape/weirdo counterfactuals that seemed like a misdirection of her talents and were really frustrating to read.

many xposts back to Jenny

IIRC, "jerk" is like the american version of "wanker"?

(I've been back in the UK so long I can't remember American culture any more.)

That Geek Feminism blog post has lead to SO many amazing links so far (this is the problem, I follow the link to find out what something like "Moff's Law" is (awesome, by the way) and then get sidetracked into reading something else amazing. Wow, remember when the internet used to be like that? So great.)

jerk has meant asshole for longer than it has meant masturbate, i think. it is possible that people consider it similarly now though. i was actually trying to look into it jsut now and i can't find where it comes from as an insult. apparently people who ran soda fountains were "soda jerks?"

I always thought "jerk" came from "jerk off". I could very much be wrong. American english confuses me.

I don't know the etymology of "jerk," but it's widely accepted as an innocent word so that makes me think that whatever connection it may have ever had to masturbating has long been erased.

Yeah... eg. your grandparents probably know the word jerk as a word for a pushy person (being "jerked around" is similar to being "pushed around") and have ZERO idea it also means wank.

moe and tracie used to drive me insane back in the day but jezebel is just a disaster now

i think latoya peterson quit/got ran off of there after one of the terrible commenter shitstorms that inevitably followed any post about race. i miss her comics nerd posts

aw that's too bad. she's great.

OED traces "jerk" (U.S. slang meaning "person of little importance; stupid person") to 1935 and suggests that it may be related to "jerkwater" (as in "jerkwater town") which it traces back to the late 19th C. (the word is derived from an old method for collecting water for the boilers of trains; after a while, the only trains that still employed this method were in rural areas). "Jerk off" meaning "to masturbate" dates to 1937. "Jerk-off" (noun), meaning "asshole," dates to 1968.

(Also, re: gendered insults. I've been really experimenting lately with changing the gender of my preferred insult words. (Partly out of IT room trying to address it's language, that my boss decided "COCK!" was a better expletive than the C-word they were using before I joined... hrmmm. Well. Yeah.) But also just for seeing how if it changes how I view things/people if I reach for "what a dick" and "cock" instead of "that's a bitch" or "cunt" - like, does it feel different to use, do people's reactions to those swear words differ. But, I mean, I'm just interested in the etymology of swearing to start with.)

I do this constantly and have for years, possibly as far back as high school. "Dick" is my go-to insult for everyone; I do call people "bitchy" from time to time but not nearly as often.

My wife uses "pussy" as a pejorative more than anyone else I know, which is kind of odd.

"bitchy" is a term I wd tend to use solely to describe malicious, underhand gossip. I wonder what an alternative shorthand term for such would be.

re feminist blogs in general:
part of the format of feministing is a daily roundup of news stories, which what with all the inequity in the world tend to be mainly negative. one of the things that unnerves me about checking it every day is there being a sort of daily mail daily hate vibe, where you're tuning in specifically to be riled, which is troublesome if you're hearing one set of stories one day, another the next and another the day after, without getting any sense of closure or context about those you've read about, just an initial sense of outrage. part of me thinks this outrage is fetishised and groomed by trigger warnings on the site, which hype the emotive content of something you're about to read. the positive part of feministing is that it's a real encouraging site that gives a pretty broad summary of what's going on and what you can do (they redesigned, and there's a column for activism right at the top, so you can routinely check to see if there's someone you should be writing to, etc), but - and maybe it's just a problem with 24h news in general - it's a weird experience to digest everything.

"Two-faced"?

See, I was trying to think of this the other day, when recently the "bitch" debate came up. That I was trying to think of ways of replacing this word in a non-gendered light, trying to get at the actual behavriour that people mean when they say "bitchy" - do they mean passive-aggressive? (indeed, any kind of aggressive when used to describe women?) or that kind of two-faced hypocrisy? gossipy? (this is also a gendered word in origin, though its origins have mostly been forgotten.) Overly territorial within a peer group?

The problem with trying to un-gender "bitchy" is that so many of the contexts for this word are things that are only a *problem* when seen in women. They're called something else in men - "assertive" or "political" or something like that.

x-post

PLEASE can all those people going on about how annoying they find "trigger warnings" please go and read WHAT A TRIGGER WARNING IS.

It is nothing TO DO WITH the emotive content, but with actual descriptive content.

It does not mean "OMG, this might TOTALLY trigger you to be annoyed and bitchy and outraged" - it means "there is content in here which could trigger PTSD type flashbacks to people who have been affected by sexual assault, incest, self-harm and other types of serious issues."

http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Trigger_warning

It is simply good manners on a site which (due to its nature) contains both a high degree of information about sexual violence, and which (due to its nature) may have readers who have been affected by issues of sexual violence.

I know this is really hard to get one's head around for people who have never been affected by sexual violence, or have never known anyone who has been - but maybe you need to think if that's your privilege speaking.

according to etymonline.com, "jerk" likely comes from "jerkwater" via carnie slang, in a sense of being insignificant or inferior. but the contemporary sense of "jerk" aggressive or inconsiderate is definitely influenced by / took on the masturbatory connotations of "jerk off."

ha xpost to jaymc

PLEASE can all those people going on about how annoying they find "trigger warnings" please go and read WHAT A TRIGGER WARNING IS.

woah, my bad- assumed wrongly and didn't think there was an alternative. thanks.

My recent use of the term "bitchy" stems from the office environment at my last job, which was poisonous - three seperate departments all at loggerheads with each other, leading to a constant background drone of backstabbing, low-rent-machiavellian bullshit. Male and female, they were all at it, from the MD down to the junior office boy. I should rant off about it on 77 or something.

I guess the term "backstabbing" might fit.

It's an astonishingly common misconception for something that can actually explained with two seconds of googling.

x-post yeah, Pash - I think all the words you've used to explain what you mean are perfectly good substitutes. Malicious, Back-stabbing, etc. (And you have kind of just described mine own workplace right now.)

Kate OTM in re: trigger warnings. To people who haven't survived abuse I can see how it might seem like "hyping emotional content" but you'd feel a little different if you'd been blindsided a couple of times by things that just put you in a whole different headspace than you'd intended to spend your afternoon in. I know there's a sentiment that "hey, sometimes having to think about things you hadn't want to think about can be good for you" and yeah, sometimes that's true, but trying to read a movie review and then goin oh boy, guess I'll be taking a walk down memory lane now, that's a different deal: you're not confronting something new, you're just swimming in the same river of shit. So yeah, pro trigger-warning.

I sussed what the term meant a long time ago. TBH if I see it used I usually assume if I haven't already that what I'm reading hasn't been written for my benefit, & scarper off & read something else.

I'm a fan of trigger warnings. Even if it's not something that I personally need, I respect that they make other people feel more comfortable, and really, it doesn't do me any harm to skim past the warning when it's there. And sometimes, I am personally grateful because there are some days when I really don't want to be blindsided with a graphic description of violence against another human being. Or, what aero said so well here: "blindsided a couple of times by things that just put you in a whole different headspace than you'd intended to spend your afternoon in."

I think this is true, however: "one of the things that unnerves me about checking it every day is there being a sort of daily mail daily hate vibe, where you're tuning in specifically to be riled, which is troublesome if you're hearing one set of stories one day, another the next and another the day after, without getting any sense of closure or context about those you've read about, just an initial sense of outrage." And in fact, I will occasionally unsubscribe from all blog feeds that rile me in that specific way because I am not always capable of processing all that information in a healthy way that allows me to get on with my daily life.

And Kate, you are totally OTM here: "The problem with trying to un-gender "bitchy" is that so many of the contexts for this word are things that are only a *problem* when seen in women."

So, this is probably NAGL, huh?

re: the initial sense of outrage thing, I don't think this is so true, at least of Feministing. They seem quite good about following up on stories, posting updates, so that you do feel that this is something that is unfolding in front of you - and in some cases have some actual effect on - rather than a parade of outrage.

i don't think it's fair to lump jezebel and feministing into the same category. both are staffed and written for younger women but i don't think the "market feminism" tag really fits feministing at all

i'm really pleased to have been informed about trigger warnings and corrected about my misinterpretation; i think it's a little unfair to get too riled at me for being ignorant of its meaning - one doesn't necessarily have any motive to google a term in case there's another interpretation of it, and trigger warning seemed, wrongly, pretty self-explanatory, irrespective of whether 'trigger' meant anything else to me. it's hard to imagine opposition to trigger warning given its correct meaning.

I wasn't riled just a little defensive is all!

other than trigger-warnings (which i don't care about either way) i p much agree w/ you, schlump re: fetishizing outrage. i don't generally feel like reading any of the big feminist blogs regularly, too "liberal" when i prefer more materialist/marxist stuff. i read infinite thought bc i love her (she had an internet beef w/ feministing that was cool) and feministlawprofessors even though the main lady is mackinnon-y, she has good links/legal news that is useful to me.

is or are

i read infinite thought bc i love her (she had an internet beef w/ feministing that was cool)

what was the substance of this? be interested to read it

iirc, it started with this review of Power's book. Valenti responded to that review--without reading One Dimensional Woman--very negatively. It spilled over to Tiger Beatdown too. It all kind of made me sad. I also <3 Power and was going to mention Infinite Thought itt--has anyone read ODW?

Jessica Valenti = feministing

i should say it's not with feministing but with jessica valenti http://infinitethought.cinestatic.com/index.php/3352/

hey harbl, i never knew about infinite thought; thanks!

well, valenti is mentioned by name in the review. i'd respond too!

xps

i haven't read one-dimensional woman, i will sometime

infinite thought was no longer coming up in my reader but i hadnt noticed it had moved. thanks for the reminder harbl!

She has harsh words, too, for upbeat "consumer"/"self-help" feminists such as Jessica Valenti, who subsume "the political and historical . . . under the imperative to feel better about oneself". In this logic, "Almost everything turns out to be 'feminist' – shopping, pole-dancing, even eating chocolate" – and feminism is sold as the "latest must-have accessory".

not to be capt save a valenti (oh ho ho that phrase...) or reopen a dead debate, but, if this is accurately describing power's book, power is not describing feministing accurately. shopping, pole-dancing, chocolate... none of these are met with u-go-girl approval on that site, unless i'm missing something.

just to be clear, is infinite thought = nina power?

yes, IT = Nina Power and just to be clear, I didn't mean to suggest that it was wrong of her to react. I do think it's totally wrong to take a review as a truthful stand-in for a book ...obviously?

Anyway, irt this specific debate, here is the Tiger Beatdown post on it. Power shows up in comments; I haven't read the whole thread since then though, so I don't remember the whole substance.

http://tigerbeatdown.com/2010/01/22/sexist-beatdown-you-darn-feminist-kids-keep-it-down-over-there-edition/

she is not so much into chocolate, shopping, etc. but imo pretty individualist in general. i think that is the criticism. xpost

yeah, i guess that's fair. if you're a marxist. i'm v suspicious of that as a source of analysis tho, tbh

i remember getting really emotionally worked up over the linda hirshman - megan carpentier beef from a year or so ago

good thread btw

Jos is the feministing writer i like i think

xp
I don't think it's fair to simply tag Power as marxist. Here are some hopefully clarifying quotes from the TBD comments:

My (admittedly polemical) critique of what I perhaps overgeneralise by calling ‘mainstream American feminism’ comes out of the concern that if there’s not enough attention paid to broader changes in work that negatively affect women, and the way in which the rhetoric of feminism is mobilised at times to justify war and Islamophobia, then feminism runs the risk of losing sight of the bigger picture.

...

At the time I wrote the book I was cross with what I saw as a kind of self-promoting rhetoric in some of the language of US feminism: precisely not because I have anything against proper self-confidence and true feelings of self-worth (obviously!), but because the job market too is constantly trying to tell you to be perky and positive and so on. I do believe in looking at the negative, paying attention to feelings of exclusion and anger and starting from there but much more could be said/argued about this question of where to begin.

Anyway, I don't think I can shed too much light on this as I regularly read IT and have only looked at feministing a couple of times.

Infinite Thought looks really interesting - and from my neck of the woods, it seems. Don't think I ever crossed paths with her at the university, though.

Schlump, the reason that I got riled was because your assumption about what "trigger warning" meant came within a paragraph in which you described Feministing as being "like the Daily Mail" in terms of "trying to build outrage" - which seems to point to the fact that you are already pretty biased about it. Now I don't know if that bias was fuelled by the misunderstanding of what a "trigger warning" was, or if it was pre-existing.

It's just completely at odds with my experience of the site. I don't think it fetishises outrage, or at least, that is completely not my usage of it.

What generates outrage for *me* is going about my daily life and seeing and experiencing inequalities and seeing NO ONE even blink or bat an eyelid at some of the most misogynistic and outright sexist statements and actions. The world (and especially the internet) is what makes me feel outrage. Feministing is where I go to feel, well, *normal* - like, thank fuck *someone* has noticed this stuff, and commented on it? For me, it's much more like an antidote to outrage.

Wait, I'm confused. In the Nina Power / Jessica Valenti beef, who are we supposed to be rooting for?

Because halfway through that Tiger Beatdown blog and I just want to go for a beer with Sady Doyle.

(but you know, it does kinda suck, because on so many levels, so many anti-feminists just love a big pillow fight between a bunch of ladies because it does make it easier to dismiss the entire spectrum of women, not just feminists, to dismiss the whole thing as oh look another catfight.)

((however, it is very funny, so I carry on reading))

so many anti-feminists just love a big pillow fight between a bunch of ladies because it does make it easier to dismiss the entire spectrum of women, not just feminists, to dismiss the whole thing as oh look another catfight.

i don't think anyone who would characterize a substantive argument between feminists with different views as a "catfight" is worth taking into consideration tbh

I know, but I also know that divide and conquer is a very good tactic to undermine.

btw feminism is so awesome!

to speak for myself i'm not asking anyone to root for one person or another.

the differences in analysis and tactical approach between UK/marxian and US/liberal (to shorthand it) feminism are interesting

a very good tactic to undermine things like feminism.

I'm not talking about undermining divide and conquer as a tactic. I'm confused.

is it UK and US? it is at least in part because nina power is an academic. which is why valenti thought she was being "elitist" blah blah

if its b/w marxist and liberal i know where my sympathies lie

I don't know who I'm supposed to root for either. The clarifying quotes just confuse me even more as to what, exactly, Power's problem is w/ Valenti aside from "you're not doing it the way I would do it."

nb: from what little I've just read of Infinite Thought, I tend to agree w/ Power on a lot of things (and I would def not classify myself as a "liberal feminist" per the prevailing US definition). I also find empowerment through pole dancing and the like to be a repellent concept, but I still don't see how the US emphasis on being positive in all things (another point on which I agree w/ Power) has anything to do with Jessica Valenti.

the argument between power and valenti is interesting to me, not because i think one is right and the other is wrong, but because of the ideas that are at work in the argument. xps

yeah, i feel like i fall somewhere between the materialist and liberal strands in modern feminism, so i love reading those arguments

it is fundamentally a marxist vs. liberal thing because it is clear the people on valenti's side were feeling hurted because they didn't get the vocabulary of it

think the "x is an elitist" line of criticism is pretty worthless though

^^^

I guess I don't have enough political knowledge to fully grasp the nuances of the difference between marxist feminism and liberal feminism.

I dunno, at least according to what I've read so far, it just seems like Power aimed her ire at the wrong folks (feministing) when she was aiming at consumerist feminism a la Jezebel. Have I completely got the wrong end of the stick?

I think that is probably accurate, though I'm not familiar enough w/Feministing to be sure. Also just the larger tendency to claim as empowering certain consumer choices.

i think when she has written about jessica valenti before it was pertaining to stuff written in her books rather than the blog, but i'm not sure

just conceiving of feminism as being essentially about choice can be kind of frustrating to materialist feminists. individual freedom can be an important part of feminist goals but if you think it's the whole game you're missing a lot.

i think it's an insoluble argument, where people are just bound to speak past each other because of the first-principle bases of their approach to everything

"how can you encourage women to not be miserable? they should be miserable! we live under Capital!! don't lie to yourselves"

"i am never going to tell women to be miserable, what do you do for a living? your misery is a luxury"

etc

xp power may have misfired at the wrong target or mischaracterized valenti to some degree, i don't really know.

If you are living in a consumerist society like most of the west, then what you do with your consumer choices (or what you choose not to do, just as importantly) can carry quite a lot of weight. But I'm thinking of this more in a political action/boycott sense, rather than "OMG, it is SO empowering to buy trainers that support my butt" type choices.

if it's a thing you have thought about a lot (i'm saying, it's ok some people don't think about it that much for whatever reason) the difference between materialists and liberals can seem pretty vast and frustrating and make you not wanna read or listen to those ppl

But then again, my consumerist choices are more like "I choose not to throw my money at corporations that make vast amounts of money making women feel bad about their bodies and their gender (even though I actually work for one)" - but, you know, I have many problems with Marxism as much as I do with Consumerism.

x-post, I'd like to think about these things more, but feel I lack the language because I haven't had the education.

also in terms of power's critique of valenti, i'm not sure i'm familiar enough with feministing to know if it's fair, but i'm sympathetic with power's irritation at the feministing logo as expressed in the blog post harbl linked to

yeah except that i think that if you are coming from w/n a marxist perspective, then the playing field of liberal feminism will seem limited. xxxps

I haven't read the books, but my understanding is that they are pretty entry level, feminism-101, which I can see being both a point of criticism (we shouldn't be afraid of depth, bad idea to dumb down feminism) AND a reason to find Power's criticism baseless (everybody's got to start somewhere and not too many of the damn kids today are going to curl up with Feminism Unmodified).

xp that is interesting, goole, about the misery. My Marxist theory is super rusty, but isn't keeping the working class miserable a tool of capitalist oppression? Like, if I'm too tired because my shit job that barely pays the bills is working me nearly to death, I don't have much energy to go out and agitate for change (this is actually pretty descriptive of my relationship w/ activism over the past year, tbh).

I'm kind of conflating "tired" and "miserable" there, which is maybe a symptom of my USA-style POSITIVE ATTITUDE bias.

Because halfway through that Tiger Beatdown blog and I just want to go for a beer with Sady Doyle.

4 real. just subscribed

still, its frustrating to characterize empowerment as something which seems so content to play w/n the configurations that structure oppression.

Feministing's logo seems a weird thing to go after, considering as it is an inversion/satire on the kind of Kappa logo/mudflap misogynist's symbol. It seemed more of a "let's take this awful thing and make it awesome" than anything else, but I could be reading it wrong.

no, you're reading it right, but i don't think power thinks much of that kind of reappropriation

it's not the focus of the blog post tho

i feel like i'm getting removed further and further from the actual objects/players here, but yeah, i can see how I-T's UK-based critique of "feel good" (or US-style) feminism might strike people wrong. how useful is it to feel bad, after all? this isn't a flippant question.

i have to write a paper today btw you should all shut up for a few hours

i don't think power thinks much of that kind of reappropriation

Kind of brings us back to language reclamation. Like, how problematic does something have to be before attempts to reclaim it are doomed to fail from the get go?

That seems a bit humourless to me. It's a wry, funny "let's take this symbol of oppression and turn it around on them" type gesture which seems quite in line with a lot of American Bitch and Bust style post-Riot Grrrl approaches to feminism.

well i am totally humorless

Because it's not even reclaiming it, it's just outright taking the piss out of it.

i think power would say you've still got this objectified female form at the top of your blog, you know?

I always thought I didn't have a sense of humour, but I think feminism is one of those things I *have* to have a sense of humour about or else I'd go mad with frustration (both at misogyny and the weird tensions of feminism itself.)

I think that kind of shiny logoed notion of empowerment is what power is tired of, a kind of Feminism™ that fails to see itself in a broader sense of engaging w/ capitalism in gen (which might be why they run into trouble when it comes to race issues for eg.)

how useful is it to feel bad, after all? this isn't a flippant question.

I *think* the idea is that you're being constantly told (by neoliberal capitalism) to buck up, put on a happy face, and ignore genuine misery and oppression so you don't get called a whiner or are considered some kind of social maladroit/failure.

so you should resist that

(Barbara Ehrenreich's book Bright Sided is a pretty good take down of American positive attitude-ism.)

"let's take this symbol of oppression and turn it around on them" type gesture which seems quite in line with a lot of American Bitch and Bust style post-Riot Grrrl approaches to feminism.

Which, I think, is part of what Power takes issue with, generally, which kind of brings me back to the "you're not doing it like I would do it" interpretation of Power's criticism.

(I'm pretty ambivalent about Feministing's logo in and of itself, personally.)

I think that kind of shiny logoed notion of empowerment is what power is tired of, a kind of Feminism™ that fails to see itself in a broader sense of engaging w/ capitalism in gen (which might be why they run into trouble when it comes to race issues for eg.)

― plax (ico), Wednesday, August 4, 2010 5:02 PM (1 minute ago)

yeah this, and then when they do talk about things like race and disability (which it seems they've done out of a sense of duty after non-white or non-able-bodied or whatever people have complained) they do it in the same sort of uncritical way without awareness of structural problems. imo.

I *think* the idea is that you're being constantly told (by neoliberal capitalism) to buck up, put on a happy face, and ignore genuine misery and oppression so you don't get called a whiner or are considered some kind of social maladroit/failure.

― elephant rob, Wednesday, August 4, 2010 4:03 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark

true enough, but feministing, for example, is criticized itt for being "outrage of the day"! or is "buck up, put on an angry face" only a variation on it?

I read a really interesting book recently about the selling of "positive thinking" to Americans recently, but I cannot remember the name of the author as I sent it to my mum (who gets equally annoyed at Americans' mindless positivity, but I always thought that had more to do with being British in America)

I think there's a problem with the conflation of the message of "you do NOT have to feel miserable about yourself all the time, for having the misfortune to be born a woman, like misogynists would like you to feel" and automatically buying into American shiny happy positivism. Because I don't think they're the same thing at all.

Oh, I just looked it up, it's called Smile Or Die in the UK, but it's the same book I read.

While i respect what you're saying Jenny about respecting diversity w/n a cause, that might not always seem possible, especially when in the case of Marxist v. Liberalist ideas of empowerment where the liberal feminist approach seems from a marxist POV to undermine your own efforts, that is it creates the illusion of empowerment w/n an unchanging power structure. So its not like you can just sit back and say "hey, room at the table" etc. in that kind of situation because its so oppositional and compromising for your own project.

xp
oh, I totally misread your original post goole. n/m, I thought you meant in general, not as a specific critique of US feminism

Interested that you mentioned that book, in fact, Jenny, because I was kind of wondering how it would go down with an American audience - it was easy for me to be critical of that aspect of American culture, as an outsider who never fully assimilated, but it seems to ingrained into so much of the American personality that I wonder how it was received.

So its not like you can just sit back and say "hey, room at the table" etc. in that kind of situation because its so oppositional and compromising for your own project.

― plax (ico), Wednesday, August 4, 2010 4:10 PM (40 seconds ago) Bookmark

funny enough, my position comes down to agreeing more-or-less with the structural critiques of the marxists (tho i'm not a marxist myself) but agreeing with the tactical approaches of the liberals. get what you can, of course! there is nothing else to be done, right?

this kinda extends to all politics for me, not just what gets put under the umbrella of 'feminism'

plax, I... have no idea what you just said there. Start me off by pointing to which post you're responding to?

ignoring Feministing as a specific entity, I think Power (and can I say I'm uncomfortable pretending like I can represent this argument well or fairly) was pissed off about a kind of "feminist" positivity that takes a kind of debased cultural studies take on consumer culture and sees empowerment everywhere, even in stripper poles. This kind of positive thinking then plays into the hands of neoliberal capitalism which wants you to be not just content with your lot, but happily pursuing your own oppression.

I think.

er, xps

http://www.theonion.com/articles/women-now-empowered-by-everything-a-woman-does,1398/

lol, yes exactly

Jenny, i was just trying to respond to ur "ur not doing it like I would" think, which kate has also mentioned on maybe this thread or the other i'm not sure. But i'm just saying that from certain positions its really difficult to treat members of seemingly allied factions AS allies bc if you're thinking w/n a marxist framework (and ok power isnt really) something like liberal feminism might work in many ways to undermine what you're trying to do. So it kindof complicates any live and let live ideals.

Yeah, sure - there was/is a weird element that tried to brand feminism as "finding empowerment in pole dancing."

But you know, Feministing/Valesi was NOT THAT ELEMENT.

i don't really have a problem with feminist thinkers doing the "you're not doing it like i would" thing; i mean, feminist thought is important; when people disagree with each other they should point it out.

otm

otm

I think Power ... was pissed off about a kind of "feminist" positivity that takes a kind of debased cultural studies take on consumer culture and sees empowerment everywhere, even in stripper poles.

can i cast a suspicious eye on this whole frame of argument -- not yours, but the one we're attributing to power here? where are these "feminist defenses of stripper poles" even coming from? who is making them? to my mind they are originating from the media, from neoliberal capitalism itself (as much as i don't really like that formulation). it's just, like, dimwit newspaper columnists, right?

the old jezebel that i used to read generated the defense of stripper pole thing, but again, i wouldn't call it a feminist organ

i'm trying to find a post she wrote about an article that valenti wrote, maybe it will be less meta than all this

http://www.theonion.com/articles/women-now-empowered-by-everything-a-woman-does,1398/

ahaha

I think the problem is "dimwit newspaper columnists" who claimed to be feminists?

but yeah, I think we all basically agree w/ Masonic that

But you know, Feministing/Valesi was NOT THAT ELEMENT.

the neoliberal defense of feminism is coming from inside the house

http://infinitethought.cinestatic.com/index.php/site/index/two_sides_of_the_same_con/

Yeah, exactly - "pole dancing is empowering!" was coming from that paragon of feminist theory, Kate Moss and people like that. (or maybe I'm just conflating that with the video where she pole danced.) But that was about the level of it. It was "how can we sell icky shit to women by dressing up old fashioned gender roles as something new and innovative" - THAT to me, is far more worrying than a deliberately cheeky twist like the feministing logo.

Man, I like Jezebel less and less the more I hear about it. Because I only ever see it when it's linked from the Illusionists or Adios Barbie or something to have a "LOL, photoshop fail" snark-fest.

i haven't read the book but i recognize that "yoghurt-drink" line as a thing that was quoted from the book, i guess she liked it a lot

or maybe the quote was just from that post

i didn't mean to make the feministing logo the focus of anything, tbh; it's just that i haven't read feministing extensively so the logo is a thing i can have an opinion about

and it is v important that i have an opinion

http://infinitethought.cinestatic.com/index.php/site/index/two_sides_of_the_same_con/

― the girl with the butt tattoo (harbl), Wednesday, August 4, 2010 4:25 PM (1 second ago) Bookmark

strikes me as a very unfair reading of the article, right off the bat

and it is v important that i have an opinion

you go girl!

*empowered*

*glitter!*

Because, you see, I haven't always called myself a feminist. When I was a teenager, although sexism really pissed me off - I hated hearing my friends called "sluts", for instance, or men leering at me on my way to school - I made sure to preface any feminist thing I said with "I'm not a feminist, but ..." All the ugly stereotypes about feminists - that we're hairy man-haters who hate sex - had permeated my consciousness and put me off entirely.

...

Trotting out the tired old line 'I used to think that all feminists were miserable and hairy', Valenti does her very best to sell us her feminist manifesto, in all its, cough cough, radicality: 'liking your body can be a revolutionary act' she concludes, regarding her navel with a curious kind of joy as centuries of political movements that dared to regard the holy body as secondary to egalitarian and impersonal projects crumble to bits around her.

yeah okay that's a misreading

halfway through that Tiger Beatdown blog and I just want to go for a beer with Sady Doyle

^^ highly recommended experience!

I read a lot of these -- I guess partly because a friend of mine used to work for Jezebel. I have ongoing issues with the whole sphere, but more and more, I realize they're the same issues the women populating these spheres have -- that it can turn insular, turn into infights over ideological purity, turn into being more interested in the personalities than the ideas. There's also a dynamic that crops up where the whole thing becomes a performance -- e.g., a lot of readers seem to show up at Tiger Beatdown expecting this show that's like "Sady slays a dragon," and on a lot of sites that aren't really careful, this becomes such a routine that the dragon becomes secondary, like it's just a tarted-up cardboard dragon stuffed with straw, but everyone is just there to see you tear it apart, and then we'll all clap righteously. This is part of why I didn't think Emily Gould's Slate piece about places touching hot buttons and manufacturing comments ire was entirely wrongheaded -- just partly wrongheaded. Mostly because, well: I'm not sure whose place it is to say these hot-button conversations are "unproductive." They matter to people and are worth talking about; judging the quality of that conversation is a different level.

(One other criticism I'd suggest is that when everything's getting used for that kind of "performance," you occasionally wind up with really bizarre commentary -- stuff that really tramples on a topic in an effort to twist it into a suitable prop for the performance.)

BTW here is a thing that is burned into my mind: being at a Jezebel commenter meetup and observing the behavior/body-language of everyone present when a person who turned out to be the Anonymous Model arrived. I felt like whole books could have been written on the dynamics of that moment.

i dunno

Trust me on this one - when you're a feminist, day-to-day life is better. You make better decisions. You have better sex.

*jerk* *jerk*

oops that was kind of sexist

there is at least one book i know of that i understand is about the dynamics of that moment

xposts to nabisco

harbl did you just *jerk* *jerk*!!!

I'm dumb, I'm not sure what "that moment" means and what the body language is?

But we already know I'm semi-autistic about these kinds of social cues.

i'm not seeing anything else, I-T's basic criticism comes down to "valenti has no marxism undergirding her work"

valenti:

All women, especially younger women, deserve feminism in their lives - and most don't have access to the university courses or feminist mentors who might introduce them to it. If you're not convinced, here are just a few reasons why feminism is still so important - and far from dead.

[subheadings follow]

Beauty/body image
Pay gap
Violence/sexual assault
Reproductive rights
Political representation
Sex

power:

'All women, especially younger women, deserve feminism in their lives '

Stripped of any internationalist and political quality, feminism becomes about as radical as a diamanté phone cover. Valenti 'truly believes' that feminism is necessary for women 'to live happy, fulfilled lives'. Slipping down as easily as a friendly-bacteria yoghurt drink, Valenti's version of feminism, with its total lack of structural analysis, genuine outrage or collective demand, believes it has to compliment capitalism in order to effectively sell its product. When she claims that 'ladies, we have to take individual action', what she really means is that it's every woman for herself, and if it is the Feminist-brand woman who gets the nicest shoes and the chocolatiest sex, then that's just too bad for you, sister.

i'm not seeing anything else, I-T's basic criticism comes down to "valenti has no marxism undergirding her work"

i know but that's why i agree with it, don't you see?

I'm dumb, I'm not sure what "that moment" means and what the body language is?

me too. what are youse talking about?

harbl did you just *jerk* *jerk*!!!

― max, Wednesday, August 4, 2010 5:37 PM (1 minute ago)

yeah what now

i was assuming nabisco meant the fraught tension in the air when a v conventionally beautiful woman walked in?

Kate, I don't know how it's being received, generally. I feel like there's some anti-positivity backlash, at least against the corporate-drivel type positive thinking (Who Move My Cheese, etc.) and against the idea that people who get sick somehow brought it on themselves by thinking too many bad thoughts, but it's hard for me to really say because I'm totally soaking in it. It's like asking a fish how the water is, to which the fish responds, "What's water?"

Okay, plax(ico), I see what you're saying. What I'm omitting from my interpretation of Power's criticism is the Marxist angle, which I think is a major oversight and a roadblock to my understanding of what she's saying. I'm looking at it instead as a second wave v. third wave beef, in which an older and more scholarly feminist automatically conflates Valenti's entry-level feminism w/ liberal, empowerfulling, stripper-pole feminism, and I think she's just wrong there. I'm definitely not stanning for "choice feminism" or liberal feminism, and I'm not saying that Valenti's books are perfect (shit, the original cover of Full Frontal Feminism is AWFUL) but I am saying that they maybe aren't as at odds as Power thinks they are. Hence my view that her problem is not so much with the possibility that Valenti is eroding the very fabric of feminism, but just that she's doing it different than Power would.

xp - and I don't think it's unreasonable to point out that sometimes people are doing things not just differently, but WRONG and stripper pole feminism or, god help me for even typing this word, "vajazzling" and its ilk are perfect examples of that.

There are some significant reasons why I'm talking out my ass here (haven't read Valenti's books, haven't read much of anything Power wrote, haven't read Feministing in a dog's age, am unfamiliar with the particulars of Maxist feminism), so I'm not, like, married to this interpretation. I'm just trying to explain how I got there. Or as 'shoe said, it is important that I have an opinion.

1,000,000,000 xposts dear god

harbl its rude!!!!!!!!!!!!

to be clear my *jerks* were not actual wanking but more this is the international symbol for "who gives a shit"

in case you weren't hip

xposts
it's definitely an unfair reading of the article, but if I had to guess I'd say perhaps Power doesn't think "feminism is necessary for women 'to live happy, fulfilled lives'" is the point of feminism.

i know but that's why i agree with it, don't you see?

― the girl with the butt tattoo (harbl), Wednesday, August 4, 2010 4:38 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark

i guess i do see. if i thought marxism was correct, i would be one!

a marxism?

i think nina power and jessica valenti are around the same age

Wait, sorry, my last post contained a lot of criticism! I read these sites because I like them -- I think some of them contain really top-notch thinking and writing. And I like that they're actively challenging to me, because in some cases they force a pretty serious sorting-through of where I agree and where I don't.

I no longer look at comments sections on pretty much any of them, though.

i was assuming nabisco meant the fraught tension in the air when a v conventionally beautiful woman walked in?

Basically, although it was WAY too complex to describe as "fraught tension" -- there was just this sudden charge of what felt like people having various gut reactions and then monitoring/adjusting their gut reactions and probably a billion different things going on. Including my own, because the end result was that nobody really greeted her or said "grab a seat here" except me, and I'm a straight guy.

harbl - Add that to the list of reasons why I'm talking out of my ass.

Ach, I keep writing really long posts and then deleting them. I don't think I really want to talk about this on ilx.

"fraught tension" is a horrible and redundant phrase; i apologize for foisting it on this thread

it's alright! xposts

I don't think I really want to talk about this on ilx.

smart

yeah, i totally get that, emil.y

i guess i do see. if i thought marxism was correct, i would be one!

― goole, Wednesday, August 4, 2010 5:42 PM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

i know what you mean. i feel like just by virtue of being american i start out kind of in the same general world as the more liberal feminists, but that viewpoint, at least as its represented on the internet (which is a significant qualification, i know) leaves me unsatisfied

Damn, Emil.y next time you write a long post, instead of hitting delete, can you just hit "email user Masonic Boom" instead? Because I am genuinely interested in reading your thoughts, even if I can TOTALLY understand not wanting to share them on ILX.

yeah and like that's why people say these blogs/books are a "good starting point" because we can all go from being liberals to liberal feminists but can't we have a good starting point for the commies among us xpost

commies among us?

careful

also, for real, if u care about race, much of the feminist blogosphere is perplexing

hey this thread seems cool

power is a SWP goon so yr better off killfiling and moving on

I dunno, much of what I read in the blogosphere seems to tie ideas of feminism and race together, there seems to be a lot of calling out and response, and blog posts and blog responses, and it gets discussed and counter discussed about how the same structures support both sexism and racism and it's counterproductive to try and fence them off. But that is also because a lot of those fireworks happen in the comments sections - and I suppose also, it's stuff like I read on MetaFandom (which is probably not part of the feminist blogosphere even though 90% of it is written by feminists or at least people who talk like them.)

i don't mean that it doesn't attend to race (also my take on what the feminist blogosphere is is probably woefully lacking) just that a lot of posts about race are like, "race is important! we should talk about it! i don't feel like i can talk about it!" so nothing ever gets said, or no kind of development of ideas takes place or something? i realize i'm venturing into, and probably started out at, why does the magical perfect feminist blog o' my heart not exist in the world territory here

I definitely think that reading feminist blogs has made me *more* aware of race issues, not less.

seriously i have to write this paper :/

But this could also be because the blogs I read are more based around beauty myth/body image stuff, and a big thing that they talk about is how much of the beauty myth propaganda is about whiteness as much as thinness and other unrealistic depictions of the female.

also, for real, if u care about race, much of the feminist blogosphere is perplexing

― horseshoe, Wednesday, 4 August 2010 22:49 (3 minutes ago) Bookmark

not disagreeing, but can you elaborate on this?
just ask because i feel like the foremost part of the ethos of a bunch of sites is to be visibly, comprehensively attentive and inclusive re: other branches and areas of feminism, other inequities whether gender related or not - maybe whether there's success here is debatable, but it seems like there's a very conscious effort. the times in the past in which feminism has detached from or been pitted against other equality movements seems to inform the attitude for most third wave approaches, imo.

xp question answered and will stop inciting you to answer more questions

haha xpost --

the race conversations always seem to devolve into the same argument -- "why are women of color criticizing feminism, which is freaking awesome?" vs. "here is a list of pretty good reasons why"

the problem is that it frequently ends with that "pretty good reasons" rebuttal, after which everyone is tired-out and prickly, so the actual questions being asked by the women of color who were criticizing feminism drift away

also here is just a personal opinion that might be dumb or ill-informed: part of the tradeoff for getting a whole lot more young women interested in "entry-level" feminism via the web (which is a great thing) is advancing a side of feminism that speaks to the everyday concerns of these web users, who are predominantly white and middle-class and educated. so there should at least not be a bunch of surprise involved in the fact that it takes another, possibly difficult step to pull SOME of these people over from thinking about feminism in terms of stuff that's near to them (body image, beauty standards, dating, electoral politics) into thinking about "intersections" with class, race, wider social-justice stuff, etc. ... especially if they've been brought into the fold with this promise of righteousness and fist-waving that's totally going to evaporate when you talk about something like class, and they can no longer enjoy being on the fun righteous side.

Sorry, did not mean to distract you from paper writing.

(If it's any consolation, this thread kept me from doing any data analysis this afternoon while I was at work, but I consider it a personal triumph to spend my workdays reading/discussing feminist theory because I work in an industry so opposed to it.)

aw, Kate, that wasn't directed at you, it was directed at my procrastinating self!

xpost --

the foremost part of the ethos of a bunch of sites is to be visibly, comprehensively attentive and inclusive re: other branches and areas of feminism

^^ see, I would agree with this, but I think they often wind up spending time dealing with infights where they tell their audience this is important, and therefore sometimes have less time/room to actually get into doing it

part of the tradeoff for getting a whole lot more young women interested in "entry-level" feminism via the web (which is a great thing) is advancing a side of feminism that speaks to the everyday concerns of these web users, who are predominantly white and middle-class and educated.

i know this and i'm not surprised but mrrrrmph

^^ yeah, I don't mean to suggest that's inevitable, but it's pretty understandably going to be a really engaging part for lots of readers. and there's going to be some kind of negotiation about how/whether you can convince them into less catchy bits, I think. (Doyle was alluding to this a lot a while back, right? sort of criticizing any vision of feminism that's limited to, you know, what's immediately in it for you)

It sucks that the discussions have to become prickly and tiring, but the problem is, so much of it seems like people are trying to compare and contrast which -ism is worse, when the whole point is attempting to unify under the idea of counteracting the lot.

But also, from experience, from having been a 20 year old (white, middle class) feminist, being told by a much older black man to shut up, bitch, you don't know anything about problems, you live in a golden palace, shut up and get me a cup of coffee etc. etc. which read to me, at the time, like he was still trying to assert his male privilege over me, while not even recognising that the same thing that gave him male privilege was the same structure that created the white privilege he was railing against.

Divide and conquer.

But then I started reading feminist blogs where they'd link through to the "feminism isn't always so awesome for women of colour" blogs on Racialicious, and it was quite eye-opening for me, to go "ah, so *that* is the concern" and some of it is valid (yes, it's always a good reminder, to be called on your own privilege that you take for granted, when snapping at others for their privilege - it helps you to remember how easy it is to not realise) but other bits of it, I kinda want to say "don't you want to question these assumptions, rather than snap at other women?"

But the important thing, I guess, is not to get too hung up on your own righteousness, and always be able to accept "oops, I didn't know that. Now I do. I'm gonna think about this in more depth."

(But I guess that also speaks to my own personal prejudices, and that my loyalties tend to run along gender lines before race lines because of my experiences with American hypocrisy regarding race - so it probably says something that I'm willing to listen to/engage with women of colour, but with men of colour, my kneejerk "get your male privilege out of my face" always seems to get in the way, because I'm just not prepared to listen to men any more, I guess.)

thats a major shame, especially when you think about the major overlaps b/w a lot of women's and black (male) liberation.

i have to write a paper today btw you should all shut up for a few hours

ha real talk

(Wait, I should amend that to, I'm not prepared to listen to straight cis men any more, because I actually have quite a lot of time for the thoughts of and issues of queer and transgender men (and women))

And the kneejerk is down to the male thing - I think - not the race thing, I hope. It gets complicated. But MY EXPERIENCE is that specifically straight African American males that I've discussed stuff with is that they really don't seem able to translate their experiences of prejudice into not being misogynist. This is probably equally true of white middle class women who are unable to translate their experiences of sexism into not being racist.

But I fully admit that this is down to a lot of my deep seated mistrust and suspicion of straight men.

Horseshoe, that Berlant book looks good (and has a blurb from a film professor I once had) -- have you read it?

specifically modifying the American bit, I should probably add, as there's a lot of adjectives.

But, you know, that's me, totally discounting anything I've ever said, since admitting that I am, essentially, a straight-man-hating feminist, ha ha.

::deeply uncomfortable looks all round::

i haven't read it, and i think berlant can be really hard to follow in writing, but i have heard good things

xp to John

Cool! Now go write your paper.

sometimes I wonder if the various progressive social justice movements (women's rights, immigration reform, marriage reform, anti-racism, antiwar, etc. -- environmentalists might even get onboard?) in the US have any chance of uniting in some kind of broad popular-front strategy. but even if they did, they probably wouldn't be able to smash capitalism :(

And on that level, having admitted several different levels of o_0 prejudice to the point where no one will now talk with me at all, I'm going to go to bed.

http://images.amazon.com/images/P/0802150845.01.LZZZZZZZ.jpg

btw KATE this is one of the things im trying to read right now and ive really only started it and am nowhere near the point where i could begin to possibly think abt having something to say about it but i think you would get a lot out of it (basic premise is that the idea of the universal in western society is a man which is itself gendered and racialised and that against this backdrop "a Black is not a man" and so its a critique of patriarchy as much as it is a critique of white supremacy, and idk if this is offensive to say but It kindof points to how racism might instigate a crisis in black masculinity while at the same time sustaining the superiority of masculinity which is a deadlock - maybe thats a really bad hash but idk i think its something u would get a lot out of, i could send u a pdf if u want)

That makes sense in a way. I think that it could be down to the way that oppressed people sometimes respond by turning around and oppressing someone even "lower" than them on the social scale.

(And that could explain both the misogyny of some African American straight males, and also my mistrust of those same men.)

Also, I'm not sure if the fact that I noticed/experienced it a lot more in American black males is down to my admitted prejudice against Americans (due to poor experiences there as an immigrant) or if it also suggests that it's something brought about by the particularly polarised effects of the American racial attitudes.

I realise that in trying to dig myself out of this, I am only digging myself further in. I'm just trying to work out why I have these admittedly horrible reactions rather than pretend I don't have them.

better to be honest, imo

fair enough
xp

(Brought about, or just exacerbated by? Not sure there.)

This thread was good; wish it hadn't ended on such a downer. :(

maybe it hasn't ended ;)

i'm tired

I didn't read any posts in this thread but lol

Man, I am way late on this but that review of Splice was just deadly OTM.

also lol

Kate -- I don't think many people (especially straight men) would be able to spend much time around these blogs/communities if they hadn't gotten pretty OK with hearing people vent resentments or mistrusts that they know aren't necessarily "fair." Especially if they've vented in a spirit of honesty and self-awareness. But I do wish your feelings there were painting with less of a broad brush. (I mean, maybe you do, too -- I understand we're talking about feelings here more than big claims.)

I am like e.mily, I think about this stuff but I am always very reluctant to respond. I always feel like my thoughts are still in the gas-cloud phase, never enough internal gravity for them to all form together into a planet or other ordered system.

please feel free to pass your gas here, I think we all are

No, I should just really go to a therapist.

That was a weird reply. Sorry. What I mean is, I get really sensitive talking about this stuff, IRL or on the internet, because I am just a person who is sensitive and also because of *trigger alert.* And I'm so glad there are so many cool people, on ILX and in the world, that care about this stuff and think about it with such nuance. But I don't want to have to call my mom or something and decompress all night and drink three beers because I chose to discuss some shit on the internet. Don't start what you don't want to finish, eh?

^
i'm very much the same way.

Wow, did I miss a thunderball! Was off discussing feminism in the context of class and post-colonial racial attitudes with some artists on a studio visit...and then they got me drunk. But I had a VERY useful discussion.

I was hugely, hugely involved with Riot Grrrl in Britain (but I never did a zine because I was already getting £$£$ for my writing so was not frustrated in my search for outlets to express myself). A long time ago, I made a promise to myself that I would never join in below-the-line comments on others' blogs or sites - and I've stuck to it, mainly because shit always devolves into personality attacks against the individual writer above the line. If I could be an above-the-line commenter on feminism in such a way that critics engaged with my points rather than my appearance, class or race I WOULD BE ALL OVER THAT. Because as hypocritical or moronic as we believe some commenters to be, they do not deserve to be attacked for anything other than their ideas. Also, I try to make career choices and work alliances that help other women represent themselves and I find it better not to make a big noise about it, primarily so the women I help will also be encouraged to help other women not through any ideology, but because doing that is the right way to treat others. Just because something isn't announced, doesn't mean it isn't happening.

i dont think anybody here criticised anybody for anything other than their ideas. also

feminist thought is important; when people disagree with each other they should point it out.

Plax, your ideas in particular have rocked this thread - I was referring broadly to threads discussing feminism across ILX and developments in other media, not just this one. But waywayway up there someone mentioned 'feminist police' attacks on higher-profile feminist commentators and that deserved a response, albeit a belated one. Like I said, I was off setting the world bang to rights in a North London kitchen for most of the day.

lol okay :-)

The most difficult thing a feminist has to negotiate, sometimes, is the 'feminist police' impulse: especially as a participant in a particular media culture, you know when certain commentators are chatting shit that just does not tally with your personal experience of them, or knowledge of choices they have made that would, in some contexts, require a 'full disclosure' notice.

Nabisco, I'm well aware that my resentments might be unfair. And perhaps I am painting with too broad a brush when I'm talking about a series of specific incidents, in a specific time and place (New York, in the 90s) - that I am able to view with a different perspective from 20 years of experience and age.

That, at 20, my reaction to being told, by black men within activist communities, things that were very much formed by the philosophy of "the position of women within The Movement is prone*" - was to say "fuck you & your movement if it has such an attachment to your male privilege." (and yes, I know this quote is in bad faith and possibly a joke, but it's hard to take it as a joke when people are *quoting* this, within the context of other overtly sexist statements meant to shut you down.) With nearly 20 years of experience on top of that, and being exposed to ideas probably kind of similar to Plax's book, I can modulate that, but the mistrust of *men* in general remains for, you know, *trigger warning* reasons that's built up on top of that.

I'm also aware, due to my own fairly unique immigrant experience in America, how many *white* American liberals use the whole "THAT'S RACIST!" thing as a way of shutting down debate. That they want the "Race Badge" medal for pointing out racism, like somehow just getting out a big label and slapping it on an idea or a person is The End, the point has been made, the problem has been dealt with. Even though, from ILX clusterfucks and everything else, we know that the assertion "that's racist" is the START of the debate, not the beginning, and that you NEED to go on, talk about how is this racist, why is this racist, is racism inherent in this, or just the way it's culturally framed, what can one do to make it not racist, or if it is irredeemable, how does one combat the racism. (I just wish that blatant misogyny attracted the same level of debate, instead of just mild shrugs and puerile laughs.)

There are a lot of people who just want to shut down uppity women talking bout feminism with a giant THAT'S RACIST label, INSTEAD OF using it to open up a debate and talk about ways of making it more inclusive. I really, really don't like that.

So this is kind of the spirit of my comments "argh, I hate when people use accusations of racism to shut down genuine feminist complaints" rather than "OMG, so many of the black men I met in supposedly liberal NY circles in the 90s were total misogynist pigs! (but actually so were a lot of the white and asian men, too, so it's a man-thing not a race-thing.)"

chatting shit that just does not tally with your personal experience of them, or knowledge of choices they have made that would, in some contexts, require a 'full disclosure' notice

does it matter if they talk a better game than they have (in the past or present) acted? Is this like Diane Abbot, where the fact that she chose to send her child to private school despite her stated principles on education is used as the dominating fact about her and as a reason to distrust all her principles?

I know you're talking about resisting the impulse to do it! But it does seem odd to me that there's this highly-accepted suspicion of people whose principles are better than their actions, as if that's not completely normal for most of us - and pernicious to me how it can turn into an attack on people for the effrontery of having high principles at all. The sense that having high principles automatically equals hypocrisy since in the long run you'll probably fail to meet them.

(xpost)

so it's a man-thing not a race-thing

so relieved about this, thanks kate.

if you could have pointed out this sentiment in an honest manner early on in the objectification thread, then i'd have known to take your rapid lapses into dismissive brow-beating with the appropriate pinch of salt. i still enjoyed that thread though, including a lot of your own contributions and direct answers to my clumsy fumbling.

it's really disappointing that 'I'm not prepared to listen to straight cis men any more' can pass without so little comment, especially as the thread had been booming up until then.

i expect that this will be dismissed easily enough given the source. fair enough. maybe it's a self-identified-feminist only topic, i don't know.

Yeah, because my distrust of men really just... APPEARED, one day, out of thin air. And it really wasn't actually a reaction to anything at all. It has nothing to do with any treatment I've experienced or seen, either by men as individuals, or cultures in general. And because I've admitted I'm biased, on account of having experienced these patterns for so long, that gives you a total free pass to just go on behaving exactly however you like because, like, I'm some crazy manhating feminist who is totally unable of admitting her prejudices and still trying to be objective despite them.

Yup. Give yourself a pat on the back, Darragh, you've caught me out.

Asshole.

that gives you a total free pass to just go on behaving exactly however you like

that's exactly what i'm saying.

never mind.

This is why it's often so hard to be honest, even if you're admitting your own faults.

Because someone will come along and say "HA HA, you have admitted these flaws, therefore I don't have to take anything you've said seriously ever again" - so it's like, you're damned if you do actually sit down and self reflect and try to call yourself out - and you're more damned, if you carry on, like Darragh or Louis continuing to attempt to inflate arguments that other people (and not just the crazy man-hating feminists) have continually punctured with reason and logic and experience.

So, you know, draw your own conclusions about which is more constructive.

xposts No, Cis, it's not like Diane Abbot at all - I actually respect her choice more because she owned up to its hypocrisy in public, and did not pull rank in private to preserve a right-on reputation in a way that would deprive someone with less influence or resources from a place. There is also the other issue: what did her son want out of his education once he couldn't get into any of *his* chosen schools near his home?

You're right in that lofty principles/base actions is something all people have to grapple with, but I think it's safe to say that I prefer figures who own up to that complexity over 'brand manager' types who espouse a set of values with one face and undermine others like them with the other.

Darragh, the problem that a lot of women seem to be having with you on these threads is that you seem to want to be spoon-fed an education about why women are angry or whatever, but you ignore what's in the spoon when it's going around. And that *really* makes women cross.

kate, i spent at least half of my time on those other threads acknowledging my ignorance about this whole area, and apologising for when you and others took things that i'd said the wrong way!

if you want to paint that as me somehow putting forward a strong argument for misogynism then i don't think that's fair.

and louis was arguing against me in just about every way, it's especially unfair on him to throw him in alongside me in this.

Darragh, the problem that a lot of women seem to be having with you on these threads is that you seem to want to be spoon-fed an education about why women are angry or whatever, but you ignore what's in the spoon when it's going around. And that *really* makes women cross.

yes, i'm probably tuomasing it quite a lot, suzy. and i'm making fairly dumb and simplistic arguments that are getting nailed, and hopefully taking it in the right spirit of 'tough schooling'. apologies for that- it's the main reason i wasn't going near this thread and its masters-level discourse from kate, plax and loads of others.

and on that, i'm not derailing it any more.

Because, you know, if anyone *had* called me on the "I'm not really prepared to listen to straight cis men any more" comment, I would explained that further, and put in the context of - hey, you know, straight white cis men have controlled the cultural discourse for the past, what 2000 years? of recorded history, at least. If I want to know what straight white cis men think bout stuff, I can turn on the television, I can open a newspaper, I can watch a film, pick up a CD, read a mainstream blog, play a videogame, look at a messageboard because there are loads and loads and loads and loads of places where I can get straight white cis man opinions, always anytime 24-7, in the media, in the canon. Straight white cis men really don't have that much of problem expressing themselves, and they don't have much of a problem getting themselves heard.

I don't *need* to seek out the opinions and experiences of straight white cis men. They are beamed directly into my experiential field without my needing to seek them out, ever.

I'm bored of it. It's as simple as that. I'm not prepared to listen to any more mansplaining, thank you.

I want to seek out, to hear to actively *listen* to other viewpoints. If that makes me horrible and prejudiced, then sorry, I'm horrible and prejudiced. I want to hear what the other 51% of humanity has to say for a change.

Sorry for any straight cis males I may have offended with that viewpoint. You will live. Apologies for the rant. I'm getting my angry on today for other semi-related reasons.

Darragh, the problem that a lot of women seem to be having with you on these threads is that you seem to want to be spoon-fed an education about why women are angry or whatever, but you ignore what's in the spoon when it's going around. And that *really* makes women cross.

Yeah, there's a DERAILING FOR DUMMIES blog post floating about that I really, really wanna post here...

http://www.derailingfordummies.com/

This point here and the next one really apply to the spoon thing...

http://www.derailingfordummies.com/#educate

sorry to keep on this (but also this has kindof just turned into a beef so) but there are wide ranging effects of what we're calling feminist policing that remain problematic and relevant (esp. w/n the context of these online feminist discourses and the idea of feminism as a brand) that relate to "women's groups" who are interested in the erosion of reproductive rights under the guise of feminism (some talk about it on the abortion thread) and also the appropriation of the word feminism by ann coulter/sarah palin types whose aims are often at complete right angles to the feminist movement, but at the other end of the spectrum the rights of islamic women and how that is problematized by western islamaphobia etc. (feministing tends to defend the rights of muslim women to wear the hajib/burka/w/e fwiw).

what i mean is that there are many feminisms, and many of them are at odds w/ each other and even (legitimately imo but thats another story) question the legitimacy of other "feminists" to even call themselves feminists. And i think that goes back to the fact that while we accept that feminism must always be prepared to change and adapt and move forward, it must be something

I don't think that's feminist policing, so much as pointing out that feminism does have certain principles, and that if you are actively working towards eroding those principles, you are Not Feminist.

There's a difference between that and "I'd do it differently" - this is not at all what Suzy and I are referring to when we're talking about women that police other women's feminism.

yeah but i'm using extreme cases an what i'm saying is that there's no fixed place that you can draw the line

Yeah, but there's a difference between trying to figure out where to draw the line, and pretending like the line doesn't exist (this latter is what the "Sarah Palin is a feminist - NOT" stuff is about)

It's like the difference between "misguided/bad feminist" and "not a feminist".

Because a lot of the "policing" type behaviour is aimed at painting women who believe different things (about economics, about slut/prude shaming, whatever) as BAD Feminists, not about saying "NOT a feminist." It's about MY FEMINISM IS MORE FEMINIST THAN YOURS rather than painting a line in the sand saying "actually, you're not a feminist at all."

At least, that's my experience of the feminist police. Your experiences may vary.

but again i'm saying that you exist that these larger distinctions exist, that between them there are smaller and smaller distinctions. and also its worth again pointing out that if you are invested in any sort marxist notion of gender relations, then a lot of guiding principals of liberal feminism end up being oppositional to your own.

i partly wonder if there is some anxiety about hierarchy that contributes to this (eg. accusations of elitism v. not understanding the possible incommensurability of different feminism)

yeah again though i totally relate to what you're saying at the same time

sorry admit that these larger distinctions

Need more thought on this, because I'm not entirely educated on differences of political subtlety. But I don't think that the difference is on "guiding principles of feminism" but about the political expression of those principles. You can be Marxist or Liberal, and still believe that men and women should be treated equally (or whatever your overarching idea of "Feminism" is) but disagree about how to go about achieving that.

The "this is Not Feminism" accusations come in at the point where they no longer agree with the "men and women should be treated equally" bit (which is where Palin and Coulter fall down)

Obviously vast oversimplification. But there's a difference between political expression of how Feminism should proceed, and not actually holding the ideals of Feminism in the first place.

but i think by reading the objections power is making about valenti, you can see that its not just a distinction b/w what forms the fight for equality should take, but what the goals of that fight are and what constitutes equality.

But it still doesn't debate the fact that "equality" is the goal that is aimed for.

While, when someone like Coulter is going around claiming that women should not be allowed to vote, that's very clearly dismantling the very notion of the goal being equality.

she actually says that?!

i mean i knew she was bad, but damn.

graun profile, 2003 (http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2003/may/17/pressandpublishing.usnews):

[]qWhy does she think the franchise is too big already? Who exactly has the vote who shouldn't have? "Women," she says, laughing. "It's true. It would be a much better country if women did not vote. That is simply a fact. In fact, in every presidential election since 1950 - except Goldwater in '64 - the Republican would have won, if only the men had voted."

As for her own life, she insists she would love to be a traditional 1950s woman - the kind Julianne Moore might play in the movies - if only she could meet the right man. If that happened, she would give up her work "instantly". But isn't work the driving force of her life? "Yeah, it is. But that's because I don't have somebody supporting me." (For now she's stuck with serial dating, the longest relationship weighing in at around 18 months.)[]/q

man bbcode fail

I'm not denying that there aren't very real and valid schisms within the broad church of Feminism as a whole. And they need to be debated and discussed, and to get at the (cultural and political) assumptions behind them.

But I do think that it's possible to try to find a division between "Good belief, bad way of going about expressing it" and "whoa there, bad belief" - the former is where the ugly side of feminist policing comes in, when people try to paint the former as the latter.

x-post to Plax, obv

surely you can still see how this is not a clean cut issue though! i mean take for eg. the rights of muslim women in france to wear the hajib. I mean you could easily turn to feminist/trans/gender theory and say that it is only fair for cis women to be able to express their gender identity via social conventions specific to their cultural background but another way of looking at it might be a radical feminist view that could say that the hajib is a symbol of male subordination and that women who wear it are being subordinated and perpetuation their own subordination by a patriarchy which has claimed ownership of religious orthodoxy as a means of...

okay MAYBE i'm strawmanning there but, there are ways in which what constitutes equality is itself problematic, and I think that the constant negotiation of those problems is crucial for feminism to remain vibrant and to change as it needs to. And i think a certain amt of zealotry and tribalism w/n feminism is def. required for that.

i think we're agreeing more than disagreeing on this obv but still

division between "Good belief, bad way of going about expressing it" and "whoa there, bad belief"

but there's also space for 'no seriously i cannot agree with you on this' - the recurring arguments about sex work w/in liberal feminism are a case in point, that argt is not a question of people saying "bad belief" when they mean "poor expression", they're saying "bad belief" because that's what they think it is.

Sady Doyle is a really good writer! I have learned that, yesterday.

I have had exactly that discussion (re: French veil ban) with a radical feminist (who I admire very much) within the past weeks, and this is what I said (within 140 characters, no less, v v difficult for me):

If it is wrong to coerce women to wear the veil, isn't it also wrong to legally force them to remove it?

To which she replied: actually you're right. Definite coersion is worse than possible coersion. Two wrongs do not make a right.

Reading a lot of Mary Midgley lately, and she talks about how the biggest problems in morality come where there are competing conflicts. You can argue about what *constitutes* or would express equality best, but that does not change the idea that the idea of "equality" is what specifies Feminism. But I fear I am becoming really Essentialist here.

To argue about what constitutes Equality is debating Good v Bad Feminism (and this is where your feminism and your marxism could come into conflict) - but saying in some way that women do not deserve Equality (however that is defined) is Not Feminism.

Arguments about sex work, again = "how do we *define* equality?"

Not denying Equality as the goal.

but fighting for women's the right to wear a burka might not necc. be "equality" per se

But who's to say that Coulter's 'women do not deserve the vote' can't be framed as a what-constitutes-equality argument? Maybe Coulter's saying 'women having the vote does not make them equal - being able to subordinate themselves to the right man in the rightly-organised society is how women find their true role, which is the role in which they are equal to men because they're not trying to be pale shades of men'.

I believe in fighting to create a space where women have the right to wear a burka if they choose, and have the right to not wear a burka if they choose. It is the aspect of choice, to me, is more important than what is symbolised by the choice.

(I guess that makes me a Liberal?)

It also goes along with my ideas about freedom of religion, and that people have the right to believe religions I find distasteful, because denying them their expression would also open the door to denying my expression. But I'm comfortable with apparent contradictions and paradoxes in that way.

No, sorry, Cis, that one doesn't fly for me, because the idea of inequality inherent in those "pale shades of men" and "true role of women = different from true role of men" notions.

I'd like to allow Anne Coulter the right to choose to go be a housewife if that's what she thinks will make her happy, but at the same time, I'd like to state that Anne Coulter does not have the right to tell me that her choice is the right one for me.

isn't "true role of women = different from true role of men" is an idea w reasonable currency within many forms of feminism?

The only thing raised so far that really gives me conceptual trouble is the sex work thing, because I can think of Feminist defenses of sex work (especially when allied with the idea of actually protecting sex workers in a way that they are currently not) and I can think of Feminist reasons to abolish sex work. I can't resolve those two conflicting ideas, and I don't know which I believe.

However, I can also think of *reasons* which are very Not-Feminist both to ban or support sex work.

This is a really odd one.

there's also the possibility that certain "rights" might also be the prerequisite for certain normalizing impulses (like you can use islamic customs as a proxy for controlling women by disassociating yourself from the policing of femininity w/n a racialized community) and again i'm thinking of the anxiety that a lot of queer ppl have about the rising tide of gay marriage and heteronormativity for eg.

but the key is surely the difference between acting on that maxim as an individual, according to your own personal feminism, and seeking to enshrine it in law (and in so doing preventing other women from acting according to their own feminisms)? which is why i don't think it's feminist to ban the burqa (though it could be feminist to argue against wearing the burqa)

xps

isn't "true role of women = different from true role of men" is an idea w reasonable currency within many forms of feminism?

I don't really have time for that way of thinking, I find it Essentialist and Determinist in ways that make me really uncomfortable. I suppose I support the right of women to choose to have different roles from men if that's their actual choice, rather than being coerced by massively unequal culture. I also support the right of men to have "true roles" which are currently assigned to women within our society.

I am going to shut up now because I am starting to sound like FEMINIST HULK SMASH ESSSENTIALIST VIEW OF GENDER WHETHER EXPRESSED BY FEMINISTS OR ANTI-FEMINISTS right now.

(Also, the marketing department has just sent round another horrorshow Daily Mail clipping which supposedly promotes our company and I have to go and do some work for them without actually getting so angry that I smash up a consulting room or something.)

i'm thinking of the anxiety that a lot of queer ppl have about the rising tide of gay marriage and heteronormativity for eg

gay people should have the right to "normalise" themselves, or not, as they see fit. the option NOT to get married is already there for gay people, and will continue to be there.

I am going to shut up now because I am starting to sound like FEMINIST HULK SMASH ESSSENTIALIST VIEW OF GENDER WHETHER EXPRESSED BY FEMINISTS OR ANTI-FEMINISTS right now.

lol this is my favourite tho!

you know what's sad? i've started finding feminist hulk's twitter really smug and boring. :(

gay people should have the right to "normalise" themselves, or not, as they see fit. the option NOT to get married is already there for gay people, and will continue to be there.

― لوووووووووووووووووووول (lex pretend), Thursday, August 5, 2010 11:35 AM (1 minute ago)

this is not where we're gonna get into this but just so you know this doesnt really address my problems w/ gay marriage or marriage at all so

Lex, I'm going to say it again.

Women have the right to wear burkas if they choose to, if that is how they choose to express their religion. I do not know, without talking to, for example, each and every woman in a veil on the 109, if they are wearing the veil because they are being coerced to, or if they are doing so because that's what they feel comfortable wearing. I do not feel comfortable saying for definite that it is *always* coersion, because I know that, even within the secular western world, there are woman who have such strong religious impulses that they willingly go and become nuns (even though forcing women to join convents was a method of oppressing uppity women in Europe for a long, long time.)

I *do* know that it *is* definitely coersion to ban women, specifically, from wearing something, whether that thing they are banned from wearing is a burka or a bikini.

In a choice between definite coersion and possible coersion, I'm going to choose possible, and work towards making a country free enough that women are allowed to make their own choices.

Because I see a history FULL of episodes where ideological differences have been fought on the backs of womens' bodies. And I definitely see this hysteria over veils as a way of expressing conflict between "Europe" and "Islame" as being part of this tradition.

last sentence at least is otm

Because I see a *lot* of anti-veil sentiment being all sorts of things - both anti-Religious sentiment dressed up as Feminism, and also weird crypto-racism dressed up as liberal outrage. (see those remarks of an acquaintance that I brought up on the "politically correct" thread.)

I can't even spell Islam today.

i absolutely agree w/that post on possible vs definite coercion kate, and it should apply to other comparable issues - the most important thing is surely to give women the right to do [action x] if they wish (whether this is wearing a burqa or voting or sex work) and then once you've established that right, then you can tackle the complexities on a structural and individual level - protecting sex workers, working to prevent coercion and so on - but those can only be dealt with once you acknowledge the existence of the right to start with

Yes, I agree with that, Lex. Protect the right to *have* the choice, and then dismantle the structures that lead to coersion rather than choice.

Kate requested I post the following I wrote to her in an email after reading through the discussion on this thread. Having not posted since 2007 (!), I had to re-register first. I should say first that I work in a research institute which focuses on sexual and reproductive health and it is actually part of my job to sort through articles in which we are quoted, many of those are hostile to choice and some even hostile to women specifically (M3N's N3W5 D41LY anyone?). Our data has shown up here from time to time. We are awesome. ;) Anyway, here's my rant, of sorts, that I sent to her:

-----------
Here's a little on the Palin not-a-feminist and member of Feminists for Life thing from the repro rights angle.

I certainly see enough of it on my end.

Can a Feminist be pro-"life"? For herself, yes, if one defines it as being against abortion as a personal choice. And in fact, a large portion of women claiming to be "pro-life" these days mean it as a personal decision and usually add the disclaimer, "but I would never tell another woman what to do." That's Feminism right there.

But if someone demands other women have those babies, regardless of any physical/emotional risk or inability to support a child, that is NOT Feminism. And that is where Palin and her ilk are coming from. Palin is also against social services that would aid pregnant mothers and teens because that would be "Socialism." She is also for abstinence-only-until-marriage education. In other words, she is for keeping teen girls ignorant of their own sexuality and ability to protect themselves from pregnancy and STDs, presumably to keep themselves pure for their husbands on their wedding night. She is against government aid for those who DO decide to keep their babies, thus encouraging a cycle of poverty and dependence which often leads to staying in abusive relationships. She didn't even intervene when her own town of Wasilla was requiring rape victims to pay for their own rape kits. Doesn't sound very Feminist to me.

Now, about Feminists for Life, of which Palin claims to be a member. They are also specifically against hormonal birth control (they believe it's abortion), and are often silent on other methods. Occasionally they will come out with the usual abstinence-only rhetoric of, "birth control fails so you should just never have sex unless you want teh babbies" that you often hear from the anti-choice crowd. If they are against and/or indifferent toward women having reproductive control of their own bodies, they are NOT Feminists. For women, who possess wombs that other people want to force them to keep babies in, reproductive control IS a key issue and cannot be brushed aside.

I'm totally in the "it's all about women having control of themselves in every aspect" camp. Even if that personal choice could be the result of misogynistic societal pressure.

Okay back to work! (which will involve going through a ton of articles calling women who have abortions, "murdering whores.")

------

Oh, I don't say where I work as I prefer not to in public forums (especially given my line of work.) But if anyone needs some statistics...

really wish i hadnt brought up sarah palin, i think we all agree she's not a feminist, i was trying to make another point (badly as well!) and the sarah palin thing got roped in and blech omg

that said, booming post.

^^^^^^kaliflwr has been, like, my bff since late teenage years and has done me a huge amount of good, in terms of schooling and shaping and modulating my (admittedly sometimes flying off the handle with rage) feminist thought.

Just thought, considering where she works, it'd be really relevant to the thread. So thank you for posting!

yeah thanks!

She didn't even intervene when her own town of Wasilla was requiring rape victims to pay for their own rape kits.

ugh

yeah that's the sarah palin fun fact that always flashes in my head when she calls herself a feminist

is it worth asking what happens if you cant afford it?

poor women can't be raped, didn't u know?

I'm totally in the "it's all about women having control of themselves in every aspect" camp. Even if that personal choice could be the result of misogynistic societal pressure.

this is huge. like, i think this idea of allowing bad outcomes as a struggle continues over time is potentially very powerful. it's part of my attitude toward the creeping heteronormativity of gay marriage -- given the enemies of the thing, it seems like a small price to pay for full legal consideration. but i'm not gay, so what do i know...

the discussion of the burqa bans is especially fascinating to me, especially the aspects of a) being a gendered instantiation of european xenophobia and b) allowing a kind of portal for left-liberals to express their loathing of an other

but what's missing in the discussion, afaik, is any recognition of the efficacy of the state in carrying out the ban. it is as if (for anti-ban ppl) outlawing them will erase this "chosen" cultural practice overnight, or (for pro-ban ppl) the state can will a subject population into liberty at the stroke of a pen. i have seen very little consideration of whether the force of the state can even make this change if it "wants" to.

it's not a larger question, but a whole other question about exactly how -- or even whether -- forcing the legal regime (marriage laws, public conduct bans) alter peoples lives. it's discussed as if its a switch that's flipped and that's that.

it is as if (for anti-ban ppl) outlawing them will erase this "chosen" cultural practice overnight

i'm not super-well-versed in this debate, and i am lol american, but i consider myself vaguely anti-ban for almost precisely the state efficacy reasons you cite. i would imagine at least some of the anti-ban advocates share this perspective? like, good luck making the muslim cultural practices you find offputting totally disappear immediately, french state. that's not how it works.

btw i read that nina power book today

the bit abt valenti is pretty much the exact bit harbl i think posted upthread

its not as good as i hoped tbh

That was quick.

its really short

its like 60 pages

liveblog plz, plax!

liveblog what? i'm waiting for bread to rise

:-)

That's really short. The book, not your bread.

haha whatevs, retroactively blog the book, you know what i mean. unless you don't want to.

theres one bit where i think she completely misunderstands something? because she's quoting this lacanian guy and he talks about a "lack" and i dont think she knows about the lacanian sense, or at least acts like she doesnt

hang on let me get it

Some bread would be good, too.

i'm not super-well-versed in this debate, and i am lol american, but i consider myself vaguely anti-ban for almost precisely the state efficacy reasons you cite. i would imagine at least some of the anti-ban advocates share this perspective? like, good luck making the muslim cultural practices you find offputting totally disappear immediately, french state. that's not how it works.

― horseshoe, Thursday, August 5, 2010 2:43 PM (9 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

surely the ban isnt just making 'muslim cultural practices you find offputting' disappear but making 'muslims' or really even making 'arabs/africans/turks' disappear

no i know, and i have fairly strong feelings about that but i'm trying to address the stated goals of the ban and also not trying to be crazy muslim girl for once.

also, just personally, i basically have zero problem with the headscarf, know a lot of women who wear it, am comfortable with it as a cultural practice. burqas and face-veils, less so, tbh, even though i don't trust any western states to legislate against them.

you always say that but you are never crazy muslim girl!!! i would like to see crazy muslim girl for once tbh

xp

man it's ugly

Trotting out the tired old line 'I used to think that all feminists were miserable and hairy', Valenti does her very best to sell us her feminist manifesto, in all its, cough cough, radicality: 'liking your body can be a revolutionary act' she concludes, regarding her navel with a curious kind of joy as centuries of political movements that dared to regard the holy body as secondary to egalitarian and impersonal projects crumble to bits around her.

to tee off on power one more time, this line is growing steadily more horrifying to me. what is it, other than a defense of the killing fields? the proper position of feminism ought to hold "impersonal projects" more important than the "holy body"? what's the benefit of that, to anyone? i don't even think not-hating yourself and "egalitarian projects" are mutually exclusive, either.

let me try to summarize, if i can, fairly: the misery of misogyny must not assuaged by liberal incrementalism, it must be "correctly" seen as a source of anger in a project of total (teleological?) revolution. it really looks to me like power wants to muscle feminism into being a support arm of plain-ol' leninism and, forgive me for refighting the 20th century here, but fuck that

i think its definitely something muslim girls have a clear right to be crazy about. especially as you never really get given any muslim girl persp.
xp

i don't even think not-hating yourself and "egalitarian projects" are mutually exclusive, either.

i agree with this, and i dislike the dimissive attitudes i sometimes see toward feminist projects that are focused on self-love. people who don't see how that's radical are not really seeing our culture properly imo. it's not appropriate for that to be the only feminist goal, of course, but i am a fan of it.

nobody seems more quintessentially english as when they piss and moan about positivity and self-regard as being quintessentially "american"

haha yeah that seems like a *cultural difference* issue for sure

goole, what you're saying is def. a problem for a lot of queer activists/thinkers i think goole, especially the way in which the project of queerness has in many respects split itself off from "queer acts" or the "problematic queer body" or w/e. that it makes itself respectable by suppressing what remains transgressive. i feel like that def. has applications for feminism right now but I probably couldnt really say what they are

goole

who was that directed to

i know

is it possible to be eternally transgressive? the transgression changes as the rules change, right? (srs questions!)

isn't a goal to remain forever transgressive, in a sense, a goal of keeping the rules as they are? i might be critically misunderstanding something here. or maybe i'm just a conservative? don't think so tho.

xps haha

i agree with this, and i dislike the dimissive attitudes i sometimes see toward feminist projects that are focused on self-love. people who don't see how that's radical are not really seeing our culture properly imo. it's not appropriate for that to be the only feminist goal, of course, but i am a fan of it.

― horseshoe, Thursday, August 5, 2010 3:00 PM (5 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

i feel like this reads as a direct contradiction of some of what i posted yesterday, so i want to clarify that i also understand when people are suspicious that some self-love projects have been coopted by...oh call it patriarchy or capitalism or whatever. makes me think of the "love your body day" celebration at my college, which, during my tenure there was run by a high-functioning anorectic, which left me really suspicious of positive-body-image thought for a long time. but i think the real deal can still be truly radical/feminist.

i do think there is a disconnect there that's worth thinking about it, i dont really have words for what i mean right now, sorry for the cul de sac

Maybe it's the term "self love" which sounds kind of self-helpy or just masturbatory. But I think that for a lot of women, especially women who don't fit whatever beauty standards are current, not hating yourself is pretty revelatory. I mean, being fat or visibly disabled or hirsute in a socially unacceptable way and going out in public and being totally unashamed and liking your physical self right out there in public for everybody to see is pretty radical and, in light of the constant barrage of (capitalism driven) messages of why we need to hate the hell out of ourselves (and buy stuff to make it better), loving ourselves can be a very feminist act.

yeah, "self-love" is totally ooky, it was just a quick way of summarizing a whole bunch of stuff. that you totally just said way better.

totally

totes

to

I am pretty attached to the radical act of liking one's non-confirming body, as you well know, horseshoe, so I just wanted to speak up in defense of that particular component personal-is-political style feminism.

makes me think of the "love your body day" celebration at my college, which, during my tenure there was run by a high-functioning anorectic, which left me really suspicious of positive-body-image thought for a long time.

my university feminist club was started by an anorexic trying to recover. The club and the "love your body day" activities were part of her personal healing process even though she was still struggling with the disease. Maybe it was the same for the girl at your school.

you know, that's totally possible. i have anecdotal reasons for thinking it wasn't the case, but that's really no one's business, including mine. that is a good point, peacocks.

its worth pointing out that power criticizes valenti for being like "i used to think all feminists were miserable and hairy" (actual quote) which is kind of at odds w/ the healthy positivity ur talking about i think ms. shoe

:) The only reason I am able to have this perspective is because she was my roommate. Before I got to know her I definitely would have thought something along the lines of "what is SHE doing running a feminist group? She lounges around all day reading wedding magazines!"

xp

yeah, i don't think, from what i understand of power, that she is dismissive of these things. though i do think what valenti said does not exactly=i used to think all feminists were miserable and hairy. i read valenti as bearing witness to the cultural forces that marginalize feminism. whether she tries too hard to make feminism palatable as a counter is something i'm totally not qualified to comment on, being v unfamiliar with her work.

its worth pointing out that power criticizes valenti for being like "i used to think all feminists were miserable and hairy" (actual quote) which is kind of at odds w/ the healthy positivity ur talking about i think ms. shoe

― plax (ico), Thursday, August 5, 2010 3:23 PM (4 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

isnt this a misquote?

"what is SHE doing running a feminist group? She lounges around all day reading wedding magazines!"

xp

― peacocks, Thursday, August 5, 2010 3:25 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

not to make this all about the girl i knew in college, but i would never call her anti-feminist; she just needed treatment and it kind of drove me crazy that the feminist clearinghouse org we both worked for was all blithely like, yeah, go ahead, run love your body day, without heads exploding from the cognitive dissonance.

yeah i guess i see ur point. ive mentioned before that most of my friends who are girls take being called a feminist as a horrible insult?

max i cant tell if thats a joke r not

Because, you see, I haven't always called myself a feminist. When I was a teenager, although sexism really pissed me off - I hated hearing my friends called "sluts", for instance, or men leering at me on my way to school - I made sure to preface any feminist thing I said with "I'm not a feminist, but ..." All the ugly stereotypes about feminists - that we're hairy man-haters who hate sex - had permeated my consciousness and put me off entirely.

...

Trotting out the tired old line 'I used to think that all feminists were miserable and hairy', Valenti does her very best to sell us her feminist manifesto, in all its, cough cough, radicality: 'liking your body can be a revolutionary act' she concludes, regarding her navel with a curious kind of joy as centuries of political movements that dared to regard the holy body as secondary to egalitarian and impersonal projects crumble to bits around her.

― goole, Wednesday, August 4, 2010 5:31 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

oh ok

i guess i have to admit that i partly side w/ power bc she is a miserable bastard like me

Hey hey hey! If you (horseshoe) want to talk about the stuff that makes you crazy, then I'd hope this is a free enough place for you to feel comfortable doing so because we're all venting and so far people haven't been that judgmental for the crazy stuff we vent (at least in my case.) However, I really do not want anyone to feel like they have to be the performing "crazy xxxxx girl/boy" for anyone, because that is no fun, being the token xxxxx that has to speak for xxxxx-kind. (and trust me, I've been there.)

i think when it comes to muslim stuff, what i like to do is make a big production about how i have all these FEELINGS but never clarify what they are. but this thread is great, and it's no one's fault i feel crazy.

There are lots of Muslim girl voices on the internet if you look for them. A lot of them seem to be run by teenage girls so ymmv, but I like reading and clicking through them from time to time.

They're heavy on the fashion & lifestyle tip that everyone hates, I'm just warning you.

hs, or anyone, do you know of a thoughtful ADULT woman online or women's community about Muslim issues?

x-post to the Powers/Valensi beef stuff now...

On another blog, linked from the Tiger Beatdown, there was a woman talking about how a lot of what Power is saying comes across to her as cultural mismatch. Not just the "OMG, why do Americans have to be CELEBRATING themselves all the time" because in the UK "celebrating yourself" is something you say to take the piss out people who are big-headed (this was a pisstake term for shoegaze that was supposed to be condemning them for their self congratulation, which is seen as a sin in the UK and a basic human social skill in the US.

But this blog was also talking about how the early parts of Valensi's work (and the OMG sex and shopping feminism so hated by Power that I'm not so sure Valensi is really part of) in the US is in itself a politically motivated force - in the face of how much of 00s US became quite seriously anti-woman, anti-body, anti-sex, Purity Balls and abstinence only education being forced down kids' throats. That given the puritanical nature of so much of the Bush administration's policies and so much full-on red-state woman-hating, the kind of sex-positive feminism takes on kind of a different meaning than it does to a more laid-back culture.

At least that was what this blog suggested, which made a lot of sense to me - I wasn't aware how far backwards the US went under Bush, and kaliflwr's research on it was kind of shocking and eye opening to me when she was telling me about it.

Laurel - http://muslimahmediawatch.org/

I used to read that, but it slowed down or was re-directing for a while...?? Thx for the reminder.

not to make this all about the girl i knew in college, but i would never call her anti-feminist; she just needed treatment

for sure.

Feministe

either has posters that are Muslim or has had guest posters discussing those issues which were pretty interesting. I've kind of stopped reading this one because it seems like recently they mainly recap a bunch of different shows I don't watch.

in ireland "american" is a often used as a synonym for like "mushy or mawkish" i am not making this up btw

i really love the dour british outlook and tried to cultivate it in myself for a long time, but it wouldn't take

xp to MB*
I graduated college in 2000 and was genuinely disturbed and confused to emerge from a liberal bubble of pro-PC, pro-sensitivity in language mindset being kind of a given (at least ime) to suddenly feeling like a huge part of the country was like "feminism? that's so 90s lol"

*btw, (when) is it acceptable to just use people's real names that you've figured out?

Feministe! I was trying to remember that blog yesterday irt feminist blog logos.

Ha ha, my real name is Kate (or K8 for LOLs) and it's fine if you wanna call me that, Rob. People just tend to call me Boom or MB so I don't get mixed up with Aussie Kate (who I think has the Kate log-in at the moment.)

Laurel, i've only ever really dabbled in muslim blogs...found both the practicing muslim feminist and the ex-muslim feminist strands interesting and obvs sort of polarized. religious identity is tricky. one of the bloggers for bitchphd and sometimes tiger beatdown, i think? is Arab and I get the impression she was born into a secular Muslim family? she goes by silv4na now, used to go by m. lebl4nc. anyway, i like reading her.

i don't think she would characterize her own perspective as Muslim, though.

in ireland "american" is a often used as a synonym for like "mushy or mawkish" i am not making this up btw

Haha I am experiencing alternating feelings of defensiveness and sheepish acknowledgement of the rightness of this.

xp
yeah, silv4na is on TBD now.

well like in ireland for most ppl i know, telling your family you love them or something is like a really socially awkward moment. i include myself in this. i wouldnt really feel bad abt being left out of that club.

i imagine it makes u guys so much clearer-eyed about everything tho!

I really love this thread and everybody who is posting in it.

yes! much <3

no it means that every moment is pregnant w/ subtext
xp

as a UK-born but US-raised child of Brits, I have mixed feelings about the broadly drawn but kind of accurate emotional attitudes of each place. The relentless pursuit of misery & constant need to find the bad side of everything that some of my UK family indulge in is hard to relate to, but living in Georgia for a while I got to feel like excessive cheeriness was fuckedup.

telling your family you love them or something is like a really socially awkward moment

def true in my family

again if this ever happens it is prefaced by "i dont mean to sound all american but..."

xp
oh and Boom, thanks for responding to that question, and since I <3 yr user name I have no problem not calling you Kate

lol plax, that is really funny

No lie: when I was growing up, if I would express irritation at people for some reason, my mother would say, "Remember, people are for loving." I also come from one of those outrageously huggy families who will like, hug and kiss each other goodbye before running out to get the mail.

OMG

irl lols btw

mine too; i always blamed this on our immigrantness but i guess it was our americanness!

xps to jenny

My whole life/family/community is rooted in excessive cheeriness (and mush) tbh

okay now that is worthy of a screenname

i work in a shop that gets a LOT of american tourists and everyone who works there is always like "it must be SUCH a weird place"

"Remember, people are for loving."

Mine would say that Jesus didn't make me to be a thundercloud. Or something like that, you could pretty much bet money on it.

OMG, Dan, my mother would be so THRILLED by that. If only I could somehow tell her without having to explain ILX... or message boards...

i work in a shop that gets a LOT of american tourists and everyone who works there is always like "it must be SUCH a weird place"

I think this when I encounter other americans abroad. it really does require context!

wtf why wont this dough rise ffs?

btw i do know a few americans properly irl and have mad love for your nation just in case its not coming across that way

You probably weren't thinking enough positive, loving, dough-rising thoughts.

this has never happened to me, and i'm always eyerolling my mam for saying it never works for her. i have no idea

It was my first moment of genuine reverse culture shock (the culture shock that happens when you've assimilated into your new country enough that returning to the old feels strange) that my grannies took one look at my brother and I, wearing T-shirts that said "the best" and "super-me" (you know, as American kids do, to build their self esteem or something) and freaked out because we had become SO AMERICAN.

And that was when we were taken off and given lessons in Being British (i.e. not being too boastful and not being too loud, so that we were completely confused and slightly broken by the time we got back to the States.)

But that was the other thing that a lot of upthread discussion of the veil reminded me of - that my Grannies, worried that we were losing our "britishness" (and specifically our "Scotsness" which is kind of ridiculous considering no member of my family had been born in Scotland since the 1930s) and it was considered a big deal to be taken up to Inverness and have kilts *made* for us. (Which is ridiculous, considering how much of the "celtic" kilt-thing is Victorian invention) But it was important on two levels - first, to keep our cultural identity in our minds as a kind of inoculation against turned into Americans. (That whole immigrant thing where you have one identity at school or work, and another at home - *totally* know how that feels.)

But the other was on this deeper level, because my Gran was a history buff and liked to go on about the '45 and the evils of the English (yes, all the things that they went on to do the colonies, they practiced on the Scots first, grew up hearing that) and then I went back and read the history of that to see what she was on about - and yeah, after two successive attempts at civil war by the Scots, the English went about the wholesale destruction of highland Scots culture and broke the clan system and banned highland dress and banned the speaking of Gaelic (hence why kilts had to be reinvented in the Victorian age) - and perhaps my Grannies went a bit overboard with this because they were Colonial and had been taught to hold onto their (Scots) culture - but the amount of anger about this, 250 years later, was still very palpable. Suddenly this itchy bit of wool I had to wear to please the Grannies took on this slightly different context when it's a piece of your "heritage" that someone else tried to ban, in order to erase a whole culture for political reasons.

And the Veil, to muslim culture is about 100x emotive than the border sniping of the English and Scots. But this is the kind of thing I think about when people are all "ban the veil, ban the veil!" and they are pretending it's for the good of women when it's about so much more.

This has massively x-posted now but, erm, yeah.

I feel bad now, that's so long and it's all "wah wah I am projecting my little experience into the massive and huge experiences of people with real problems" but it's kind of my way of trying to experience empathy. And that constant need to look at things from both sides.