Archive for Feminism

Ignorance in the face of victory

October 24, 2006 / / 12 comments

Today, the New York Transit Authority settled a lawsuit with a transgendered woman. She had been arrested three times for using the women’s bathroom in the subway (she works for Verizon and was repairing payphones in the subway).

When I heard this story on the morning news, they chose to devote a lot of airtime to some “woman in the street” interview spewing a lot of ignorance. Seriously, they give major news ten seconds and this woman was quoted twice, for a total that must have approached a half a minute.

First, she blathered about how “they” shouldn’t be in the “wrong” bathroom and so on and just basically expressed her discomfort with the whole notion of transgender. And then she said how the obvious solution was to have them use the bathroom for their “real” gender.

Right. Because it would be so much more welcome for a woman to show up in the men’s room. That would definitely go over better. Geez Pete, even if you insist that a transgendered woman is “really” a man, how thoughtless do you have to be not to envision the kind of problems, including violence, that would ensue?

The beer is out there

October 24, 2006 / / One comment

Jill at Feministe is on a roll. This is frickin brilliant:

And while I’ve written before about the headscarf and the hijab, my opinion that they should be neither required nor outlawed, and my belief that a woman can wear whatever she wants and still be a perfectly autonomous human being, I do have a big problem with the underlying message behind the idea that women should always dress modestly. It essentially comes down to the idea that men are incapable of interacting with women in public, and that women should shoulder the burden of men’s animal nature by covering themselves and not “tempting” them. It’s sort of like blaming grocery stores for alcoholism — I mean, the grocery stores put the beer out there!

This is such a great quote. It was in the middle of a very long (and great) post, so I wanted to highlight it. It’s smart about feminism and women’s choices. It’s smart about rape and contraception and “asking for it” and being punished for choosing it. The hard right has been expanding its anti-choice umbrella to include more and more. To include contraception and “immodest” attire. These rights are at risk. So it’s good to trace it back to the underlying message:

Women must not trick men into having sex. Women are permitted to trick men into marriage in order to have sex, on condition that they be punished by the inequality of marriage and the inability to control how many children they will have.

That’s the Christian Right anti-choice message in a nutshell. Whenever they disguise their agenda as being about “life” or “choice” or “protecting women” or “decency,” run it through the anti-choice message translator and see if it doesn’t change significantly.

Interacting with Image

October 18, 2006 / / 9 comments

I was kinda wondering last night how I ended up being included in two Big Fat Carnivals. I don’t consider myself a fat activist particularly.

Here’s the thing: Both of the included blogs were about movies. And this is what fascinates me; the image. The interaction between images and social constructs. The things we see on-screen (or on TV or in magazines) reflect the unspoken and often unconscious prejudices we hold. What is acceptable to see, what is unacceptable to see; what is shown as good, shown as evil, never shown at all. I honestly don’t see how you can watch movies with a critical eye and not notice the sexism and the narrow definition of acceptibility.

What makes The Celluloid Closet a great movie? It’s because it looks at homosexuality in the movies through that lens. Which is to say, it just looks. It looks and asks, ‘What is being shown here? What is not being shown?’ It doesn’t make any activist statements particularly, or issue any answers on right and wrong. It just says ‘Look at this.’ It exercises the intelligence of pattern recognition, and the pattern it recognizes is largely homophobic.

I’m interested in that. I’m interested in what movies say about women and age and size and Teh Gay and Teh Slutness and race and money. All that.

I’m very capable of getting worked up over triviality, because we express ourselves in triviality. The recent blogstorm over the intersection of feminism and femme beautification has everything to do with that. Looking For Mr. Goodbar says more about our reaction to women who have casual sex than any dissertation or politician ever could.

So, yes. I will keep reviewing movies. In case you were wondering.

(A cross-post is worth a thousand words.)

Relational Rights

October 11, 2006 / / 4 comments

Per Shakes, today is National Coming Out Day. Shakes posted a list of reasons why she, a straight woman, is so fierce an advocate for gay rights. I want to add my own.

Gay rights are my rights. Yours too.

If gay rights aren’t a reality, we’re voting “yes” on standardized sexuality; on forcing all of us to goosestep to a sexual norm. And I may not be gay, but I ain’t normal.

Is anyone? (Actually, yes, some people are.) Most of us like a little kink, or have strolled into the forbidden zone. Few of us want to be confined by a bunch of heterosexual rules that expand like housework to fill the space allotted them.

Gay rights are human rights. They are relational rights. They are our rights no matter who we are.

Things that happen to pressure cookers

October 5, 2006 / / 10 comments

Here’s my take on the whole Foley thing: It’s not a coincidence.

It’s not a bizarre coincidence that the co-chair of the House Caucus on Missing and Exploited Children is also a pedophile. And it’s not just a coincidence that it’s mostly (not exclusively, but mostly, and by an impressive margin) Conservatives who are being knocked down like tenpins by sex scandals. Yeah, part of it is that power corrupts, and the consolidation of power that has increased dramatically in Washington these past five years has been massively corrupting, particularly of Conservatives.

But it’s not just that. It’s that it’s built into the system.

When you suppress, suppress, suppress, you create a pressure cooker. Pressure cookers only do the one thing, yet everyone is all suprised by the explosion. In terms of psychology, you generally only suppresssuppresssuppress when you have something serious that needs suppressing, and you generally only blame everyone else for being a perv when you need to avoid blaming yourself. It’s called “projection.” Look it up.

These Conservative freaks with their constant and intense fascination with Teh Gay and Teh Sex and Teh Dildoes, who want to make laws about my bedroom and yours, my marriage and yours, my orgasm and yours, what do you think is on their minds? This morning, while I was deciding if I should go back to using an alarm clock, and thinking about a writing project, and making coffee, and thinking about t-shirts (I swear by the Goddess, I was thinking about t-shirts), the Foleys and Dawn Edens and Santorums and Fred Phelpses of the world were thinking about gay gay naughty gay sex with boys how naughty how gay I must write a column to denounce that oh look I have a woody.

That’s how it works.

Two things: (1) If you’re a sick motherfucker, you have a higher tendency to denounce everyone else for being a sick motherfucker. (2) If you have natural, normal urges, ’cause you’re, lemme think…human, that you suppresssuppresssuppress, those urges, when inevitably expressed, won’t be expressed in the nice, normal way they started.

I’ve written about this before. Suppression is not only a bad model, but it’s had a good long test run, and people should have figured out by now that it’s not working.

Big Fat Link

October 3, 2006 / / Comments Off on Big Fat Link

The latest Big Fat Carnival is up, and I’m in it. Go look!

The Taming of the Shrew

October 3, 2006 / / 6 comments

Continuing on my tirade about whores whores and more whores, I’ve decided that the only acceptable script for an interesting woman in which said woman survives happily is The Taming of the Shrew. All scripts written before 1988 (and most since) punish a woman for her freedom, especially her sexual freedom, as well as her willingness to compete with men.

(In the old days, women were punished for unmarried sex. Unmarried sex=slut. In recent years, sexual freedom is not simply unmarried sex. A woman can have unmarried sex without necessarily being a slut, but only if it’s fundamentally pre-married, not un-married. Uncommitted sex is still Teh Slut; women who fall in love and fuck are not punished, but women who fuck for fun are.)

Punishment is herewith defined as death (Looking for Mr. Goodbar), prison (High Sierra), drunken misery (the aforementioned The Long Riders), or just plain ol’ humiliation/ostracism/misery (Dangerous Liaisons).

Anyway, cheer up girls. There’s a way out. The Taming of the Shrew (a.k.a. Annie Get Your Gun, a.k.a. Pillow Talk, a.k.a. Spellbound). Any woman who admits her wrongdoing and gets in touch with her inner wifeliness and desire to be dominated by manly manly macho men is off the hook.

Phew.

(Cross-posted for your reading pleasure.)

Monday Movie Review: The Long Riders, the Wild West, and Whores, Whores, Whores

October 2, 2006 / / 6 comments

The Long Riders (1980) 7/10
Jesse and Frank James (James and Stacy Keach) ride with the Younger brothers (David, Keith, and Robert Carradine) and Clell Miller (Randy Quaid), robbing banks and being pursued by the Pinkertons.

The Long Riders is stylish and earthy. It feels authentic and sticks fairly close to history. It is a sweeping celebration of outlaw machismo, a pure boy sort of experience. This movie is so obsessed with the idea of brothers—real brothers—that the fourth Younger brother, John, is here called a cousin, presumably because there wasn’t a fourth Carradine to play him. (The brothers motif continues into Dennis Quaid playing Ed Miller, and Christopher and Nicholas Guest playing the Ford brothers.)

David Carradine gives one of his most relaxed performances. He’s terrific, and the performances in general are good. The complex history of the Civil War guerrilla actions that took place on the Missouri/Kansas border; important to the story of these men, is lost, but then, it is complex, and it’s not the story the movie chooses to tell.

I have lately been fascinated by Westerns. I find them terribly sexy—not in an artificial fetishistic Midnight Cowboy sort of way, but in a cool, silent, scary Man With No Name sort of way; although I suppose that, too, is fetishistic. They are washed, rinsed, and wiped down in testosterone; stark, iconic, and dramatic. They rely on silence, restraint, and very cool costumes.

So naturally, they are usually sexist.

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Sullying the Archetype

September 4, 2006 / / 18 comments

Here’s an absolutely terrific article about homophobia among a certain segment of Bond fans (whom the author amusingly terms “Bondamentalists”). (Hat tip to CBn for the find.)

The author rightly points out that a strong voice among Bond fans is disturbingly homophobic. I’d say they see Bond as an “ideal man” and they don’t want that “tainted.” (The anti-Craig freak out, by the way, is about an on-screen kiss between Craig’s straight character and another man.)

During the endless post-Die Another Day, pre-Craig chatter about casting a new Bond, the name Rupert Everett came up many times, and each time, a massive wave of homophobic diatribes was unleashed.

“I’m not homophobic,” they tend to say, “It’s just ‘not Bond’.” Except we’re not talking about Teh Gay on-screen, just in the private life of the star. Who is also, yo fanboys, ‘not Bond.’ So yeah, it’s homophobic. Different than ordinary run-of-the-mill, I’m a snotty teenager who says disgusting things and sometimes beats people up homophobia (which is, I think, mostly what John Ruch encountered on the homophobic anti-Craig site to which I will not link).

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More news from the dating wars

September 1, 2006 / / 5 comments

Personal ad sites try to show you ads that are matches when you log on. You say, “I’d like someone within 50 miles of my Zip, within 8 years of my age, with the following characteristics” and every time you log on they show you someone.

So okay, I got shown one that I didn’t like. The picture kinda creeped me, the text wobbled between smart, self-important, and bizarre, and the goal of the person was to create a poly group, which is something I’m not seeking.

Moving on, I see another ad. No photo, very brief text, but a little interesting, Wiccan, like that. I send a non-commital note: “It seems we have some things in common. What do you think?”

Guy writes back, saying he has two ads and suggesting I might like to learn more about him by reading the other. Sure enough, the other ad is the creepy one. So, polite note back, because after all, I’m the one who initiated contact: “Thanks, but this isn’t what I’m interested in. Best of luck to you.”

This is supposed to be the end.

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