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Domesticating Women

February 19, 2006 / / Comments Off on Domesticating Women

Guys and Dolls was on TCM last night. I’m a freak for musicals, and it’s one of my favorites. It’s also one of the most sexist things ever written, and it’s all about the war between the sexes (hence the title). I’ve been thinking about this musical and its implications, on and off since I was twelve years old.

One of the themes of the musical is that women tame men. Men are wild and adventurous, and women are domestic. Women will steal men’s wildness, and this threatens men. The “wild men” in this story are outlaws; gamblers one step ahead of the cops. Women seek marriage; and marriage, being of society, will reinforce social bonds. Women want “wallpaper and bookends;” if their man strays:

Slowly introduce him to domestic life
And if he ever tries to stray from you
Have a headache
Have a pot roast
Have a baby
Have two!

This story is seven thousand years old.

It starts in Mesopatamia, with Enkidu. In one of the oldest pieces of writing yet discovered, we are told of Enkidu, the wild man of the forest. He is destructive to grazing and hunting grounds, so a hunter seeks out Gilgamesh for advise:

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Decorators, Dancers, and Figure Skaters

February 15, 2006 / / Comments Off on Decorators, Dancers, and Figure Skaters

A few of years ago (probably four years ago, in relation to the Salt Lake City Winter Olympics) I read an article about young male figure skaters in the U.S. Seems they are subject to harrassment and even gay bashing because they skate. There was an interview with a teenage skater who had come here from Russia, and he just couldn’t understand it. In Russia, skating is a sport like any other.

Indeed, this is something that strikes close to home, as my son is a heterosexual dancer, and while there has been no bashing or danger, there have been…remarks. And for him, there was a difficult choice: His love of dance won out over the discomfort of being thought gay; not an easy experience when you’re eleven or twelve.

There’s a wonderful article in the New York Review of Books that said a great deal of what I want to say about whether or not Brokeback Mountain is a “gay movie.” A parenthetical remark in that article really struck me:

Had this been the story of, say, the love between two closeted interior decorators living in New York City in the 1970s, you suspect that there wouldn’t be full-page ads in the major papers trumpeting its “universal” themes.

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It Just Feels Right

February 7, 2006 / / 6 comments

One of the hardest things to learn is that your gut feeling is not my gut feeling.

Don’t trust your gut.

Okay, go ahead and trust your gut for you. That’s good sense. That’s using your intuition wisely. But your gut feeling is not an indicator of human gut feeling. How you feel doesn’t tell us how “all men” or “all women” or “all parents” or “all teenagers” feel. (When I see the ubiquitous “What do women want?” “What do men find attractive?” message board plaint, I am often tempted to ask if the poster really believes that all men/women/girls/boys are the same.)

No one seems to know this, yet the knowledge is crucial. So get this: Just because homosexuality squicks you out, doesn’t mean it is against nature. It just means it squicks you. Just because polyamory offends your sensibilities doesn’t mean it is inherently offensive. Just because your gut says “wrong, wrong, wrong” when you think of aborting a fetus, doesn’t mean that this is the right and normal way for a woman to feel.

Years ago, I got into an abortion argument with a friend and I said that to me it felt, viscerally, really violating to have anyone tell me what to do with my uterus (in fact I said it felt as bad to be told not to have children as to be told not to abort). He said it was all well and good that I felt that way, but his wife’s viscera were every bit as trustworthy as mine, and she felt differently.

He was right. Basing an argument about choice on my gut feeling was wrong. But the thing is, lots of arguments are based on that. The whole anti-gay propoganda machine is all about that it feels unnatural to straight people. And it does feel unnatural; if you visualize screwing someone you don’t want to screw, that feels ew yuck oh no no way no. (It feels especially unnatural to people in denial about their own gayness, but that’s another story.)

What’s needed in our world, in many arenas, is for people to unhook from the idea that they can predict nature, right, wrong, and all of human society based on what makes them go “ick.”

Freedom is on the March. With stirrups jangling.

February 3, 2006 / / 4 comments

One of the things that drives me (and indeed, many on the left) batshit crazy about those on the right is that they claim to love freedom yet seem to hate any displays of that freedom. I’ve wondered my entire life what, exactly, conservatives define as “liberty.” They hate the ACLU! How can you love freedom, and hate the defense of civil liberties? How can you love freedom, and applaud restrictions on free speech, on free assembly, or on a free press?

This latest rant on my part arises from a combination of two news stories. Not the news stories, really, but the wingnut reaction. First, the ongoing revelations about the NSA spying on ordinary Americans without a warrant. Now, some right wing folks understand the gravity of this. But the wingnut reaction in many places is more or less: Rah, cheer, we’re defending freedom.

Then there’s Cindy Sheehan’s arrest at the State of the Union. The wingnuts I was conversing with (on a message board) were adamant that it was right, and good, and proper, that her freedom be curtailed at the SOTU, because after all, she was breaking the law! (And not one of them bothered even to backpeddle, let alone apologize, once the police admitted she wasn’t.)

So my question is, at it has always been, how do the right wing define freedom? And I think I figured it out.

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Building a Better Brain with Incense

February 1, 2006 / / One comment

This all came up out of a Topic of the Day on Shakespeare’s Sister. The topic was on how we relax, and one of the things I brought up was incense.

Incense can be used to create all manner of moods, by imprinting the mood. If Pavlov had used scent instead of a bell, he’d have had his dogs salivating in half the time. We respond incredibly well to scent.

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Bond Girls Are Forever

January 18, 2006 / / 2 comments

Via Carnival of Feminists 7, I found this post on Bond girls vs. Bond women. The writer deplores the sexualization of girls (“Bond girls” says one actress, is a “sexier” phrase than “Bond women”), and that is certainly a good point. On the other hand, the writer admits to neither knowing nor liking Bond films.

In my book, I do use the term Bond girls, and I also go to some length explaining why I do, and why a feminist can love Bond. The short version of the use of the term is that “Bond girl” is a meme. It isn’t the same as a “Bond woman.” A Bond woman is a woman in a Bond film. She could be Judi Dench, playing Bond’s boss with great skill. She could be eye candy, a woman hanging out poolside in a bikini but never interacting with 007. Both of these are Bond women, but neither plugs into the “Bond girl” meme. For that reason, I persist in using the sexist terminology.

The other thing is that every Bond girl has said she’s not “just” a Bond girl “like the others.” Honor Blackman says it all the time, and she was in the third movie; that’s pretty early on, isn’t it? Well, Ursula Andress has also said it, and she was in the first movie! The fact is, the “bubble-headed bleach blonde” stereotype attached to the meme has never been all that true.

Virtually every woman in the first seven Bond films has been self-directed, independent, strong, owned her own sexuality, and sometimes beat Bond at his own game. Okay, not all of them were exactly as independent or strong as all of the others, but the trend was there from Day (or Film) One. It wasn’t until Roger Moore came along that Bond girls were helpless eye candy in desperate need of rescue. The first four women (in his first two films) were all wimpering idiots. But then, I’ve never been a Moore fan.

What is more interesting to me, as a feminist, is not the whole “girl” vs. “woman” thing, but how a stereotype developed despite the existing evidence. (That stereotype was solidly in place by the early 1960s, and Moore didn’t come along until 1972.) I think the sexual aggression and independence of these women was so threatening that it was easier, and safer, to see them just as beautiful and objectified. (True, they were cast for looks, but so was Connery, so was Moore.) I think to be a beautiful woman in an action film engendered the stereotype despite the evidence. And I think that Bond girls rock.

Too Many Gods Spoil the Broth

January 18, 2006 / / 12 comments

Amy wants to know what’s wrong with mixing pantheons, anyway. It’s a good question.

Our culture is an eclectic one by nature; it is the way of modernity. Even the most hidebound Traditionalist is affected by this. At lunch the other day, the Indians were eating pizza, the Libyan had Chinese food, and I ate Greek salad with the Israelis. The polyglot West uses TV, movies, and yes, the Internet, to convey a broad cultural mix. We might think this doesn’t effect religion, but we’d be wrong. In fact, I’d argue that the Radical Christian Right is fighting against exactly this blended cultural stew, more than Paganism, liberalism, or homosexuality, which are merely symptoms of accepting the coexistence of a multiplicity of values. They know that even Christianity grows, changes, and embraces other influences, and it frightens them.

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The Art of Invocation

January 7, 2006 / / One comment

Oberon Zell-Ravenheart invited me to contribute to his forthcoming book, Creating Circles & Ceremonies. He’s looking for contributions of invocations, chants, and other ritual bits. So I wrote up a little something, and since I’m not giving him exclusive rights, I thought i’d share it here.

Invocation to Mother Earth

In The Elements of Ritual I suggest that every invocation should have six components: Specificity, descriptiveness, praise, need, invitation, and greeting. Whenever I write an invocation, I make sure to include each of these. When invoking Mother Earth, I specify Who I am invoking, I describe Her, praise Her, and explain why I need Her to come. I invite her to come, and, acknowledging that my invocation has been successful, I greet Her.

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The Perils of Heterosexuality

January 3, 2006 / / 9 comments

Over at I Blame the Patriarchy, Twisty is twisting over The Pill. In part, she says

It is the duty of the patriarchy-blamer–particularly one who supports zero-population growth– to cast a jaundiced eye on any research that impugns contraception, but you know what? Fuck the Pill. As liberating as it has been for straight women, it is not without its vile misogynist elements. While it leaves men footloose and fancy-free to roam the earth pronging at will, it consigns women to shoulder the entire burden of contraception, and it does this while making us fat and giving us heart attacks, strokes, and, depending on who you talk to, breast cancer.

That’s a strong statement. Yeah, I get that the Pill is a product of the patriarchy. What isn’t? It’s like saying cars are products of the automobile industry (which, y’know, sucks). That doesn’t mean that the choice between a Hummer and a Prius is meaningless.
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Ganymede and Hyacinthus

January 3, 2006 / / Comments Off on Ganymede and Hyacinthus

When I was a kid I was obsessed with Greek mythology. By the time I was 13, I’d read every book in the school library on the subject, and every book in the town library to which children had access. Then I moved on to Norse myth, then to fairy tales. But Greek myth was my first love and remained my favorite. Perhaps it is too obvious to say that this had a strong influence on my religious life.

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