I try to think how we got here. The theory I developed in college (shared by many I’m sure) is one I have yet to beat: Womb Envy. Biology: women are generally smaller and weaker than men. But they’re also much tougher. Put simply, men are strong enough to overpower a woman and propagate. Women are tough enough to have and nurture children, with or without the aid of a man. Oh, and they’ve also got the equipment to do that, to be part of the life cycle, to create and bond in a way no man ever really will. Somewhere a long time ago a bunch of men got together and said, “If all we do is hunt and gather, let’s make hunting and gathering the awesomest achievement, and let’s make childbirth kinda weak and shameful.” It’s a rather silly simplification, but I believe on a mass, unconscious level, it’s entirely true. How else to explain the fact that cultures who would die to eradicate each other have always agreed on one issue? That every popular religion puts restrictions on women’s behavior that are practically untenable? That the act of being a free, attractive, self-assertive woman is punishable by torture and death? In the case of this upcoming torture-porn, fictional. In the case of Dua Khalil, mundanely, unthinkably real. And both available for your viewing pleasure.

It’s safe to say that I’ve snapped. That something broke, like one of those robots you can conquer with a logical conundrum. All my life I’ve looked at this faulty equation, trying to understand, and I’ve shorted out. I don’t pretend to be a great guy; I know really really well about objectification, trust me. And I’m not for a second going down the “women are saints” route – that just leads to more stone-throwing (and occasional Joan-burning). I just think there is the staggering imbalance in the world that we all just take for granted. If we were all told the sky was evil, or at best a little embarrassing, and we ought not look at it, wouldn’t that tradition eventually fall apart? (I was going to use ‘trees’ as my example, but at the rate we’re getting rid of them I’m pretty sure we really do think they’re evil. See how all rants become one?)

That was written by Joss Whedon, you can find the rest here. I’m not even going to make a snarky comment about how well he knows objectification. I’m just going to say I’m feeling pretty good about naming my blog after him.

I’d like to comment on this recent cartoon from the webcomic xkcd.

This cartoon was brought up on a message board that I read and participate in, at the end of a long conversation about politics (although the point of the message board is non-political, the board does deal with politics sometimes). The conversation was about “tolerance,” and I voiced my opinion that I’m very suspicious when people bring up the topic of “tolerance” as an abstract, because in my experience, people who are talking about tolerance in that context often want to coopt the language of civil rights in order to draw false equivalence between non-equivalent statements. “I support rights for gay people” and “gay people are immoral” are not equivalent statements.

While I like and respect the two people who posted this cartoon, the effect* of introducing the cartoon into the conversation is to minimize anyone who is passionate about politics by saying that their opinions are based not on clear thinking, or passion, or reaction to oppression, but on “rationalization.”

There is a legitimate point being made in this cartoon, as any teacher well knows. Teaching in front of a classroom is a tricky business. It’s difficult to be endowed with so much trust, and I appreciate that people struggle with that.

Outside of math, there are rarely objective and concrete facts that can be pointed to with absolute certainty, by anyone, from any place. 2 + 2 = 4 is not, or at least should not be, a controversial statement.

But the simple fact that someone can argue with me when I say “I support gay rights” is not an indication that I am simply “rationalizing” my position. To suggest it is so is to dismiss the concerns and oppression of gay people.

To say that caring about and debating politics is all about “smart people rationalizing” is the epitome of a priveleged statement. People who are fighting for their rights and survival do not have the privelege to say “oh, well, it all doesn’t really matter” or “I guess this is just a difference of opinion.”

In this country, black women have been sterilized for the color of their skin. I strongly doubt that my interlocutors in that discussion would have agreed that it was acceptable behavior. For me to argue against it — for black women to argue against it — would they call this an exercise in rationalization? I certainly hope not.

People suffer. Queer people suffer. Women suffer. Poor people suffer. People of color suffer. Our suffering is not a cheap political point, to be argued away by saying that our justifiable anger is merely an example of “smart people rationalizing.”

But I don’t really want to pick on the people who posted this cartoon. They’re nice; they’re smart; and I don’t think either one of them intended to offend me. On a personal level, I’m not upset with them. But politically, I want to address the message behind that maneuver, and behind this cartoon, because it’s larger than a single exchange in a debate.
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This is what happens when ‘your employer owns your body and soul’ cross-breeds with ‘nothing is more dangerous than fat.’ A treadmill desk designed by the Mayo clinic. Don’t mock because they were seriously scientific about their research:

“If obese individuals were to replace time spent sitting at the computer with walking computer time by 2 to 3 hours a day, and if other components of energy balance were constant, a weight loss of 20 to 30kg a year could occur,”

It’s none of our employer’s business whether or not we lose 20 to 30 kg, or gain 20 or 30 kg. Our bodies and our lives should belong to us, that’s the basic meaning of freedom.

My friend James Trimarco is one of my favorite people in the world. We met in the summer of 2005 when we were attending a science fiction writing workshop during which we lived together with sixteen other writers in a sorority house in Seattle, writing a story a week for six serial instructors. Intense? Slightly. Working in tandem with one of the other writers in attendance, James is the first person to ever convince me that the label “radical” is something to embrace rather than be intimidated by — that it is possible to hold radical (as opposed to reformist) politics and still be an effective presence in the world.

And he’s lately published a couple of thought-provoking pieces which I’d like to share.

This year, Vanity Fair asked writers to answer the following prompt: In a country defined by video games, reality TV, and virtual friendships, with a White House that has perfected the art of politics as public relations, what is reality to Americans today? And did we ever have a grasp of it?

James won third place, drawing on his experience working as an anthropologist in the vastly different environments of Albania, and ground zero, to answer the question:

1. It’s June of 2002 and I’m doing an anthropological study on the street trade in 9/11 memorabilia near Ground Zero. Dust still lines the gutters; the stink of charred plastic and blasted concrete lingers in the air. Church choruses from far-flung states sing hymns to comfort the many visitors who shuffle past. My colleague and I walk up to strangers and ask them about the vendors who cluster nearby, their tables full of Ground Zero–themed snow globes, picture books, and T-shirts. Do they approve of the vendors? Would they buy something from them? Or do they agree with the tabloid papers that the vendors are “ghouls” profiting off of sorrow?

People from all over the country, of every age and skin tone, denounce the vendors for sullying a place they call sacred. Others, sometimes even members of the same family, call the vendors an embodiment of the great entrepreneurial spirit that the buildings symbolized—they were called the World Trade Center, after all.

These people think in symbols and ideals. When they look at a vendor, they don’t see just a Chinese immigrant, an African-American Vietnam vet, or an elderly Mexican woman. They see Commercialism on Hallowed Ground, they see the American Way in Action. Just around the corner, in the smoking ruins, some see Why We Are at War.

My friend and I enjoy this research. The feelings we’re talking about are vivid and strong. At one point, I casually refer to a group of passersby as “tourists” and the guy I’m talking to, a construction worker from New Jersey, nearly punches me in the face.

“They’re pilgrims,” he says.

Pilgrims.

The whole article is available up at Vanity Fair.

He also recently published an article on David Icke at Strange Horizons.

In case you’ve been living in the same cave as I have (in which case, “Hello! Care to share a hank of mammoth meat?”), David Icke is a conspiracy theorist who believes that the world is run by a secret class of reptiloid aliens who have infested the top ranks of society. They’re apparently disproportionately represented among the Jews, but can also be found in other “ruling” classes, including the presidency of the USA. It was they who both taught the Egyptians how to build pyramids, and then forced them to do so. These days, they sacrifice children and feed on the blood of the innocent. From James’s essay:

“The government made the hurricane on purpose. It’s the same Brotherhood that’s always been in charge. They’re playing the same old game.”

For a moment all of us were speechless. It had to be a joke. “What Brotherhood is that?” I asked, finally.

Roberto told me, “They’re called the Anunnaki and they’ve been using humans as slaves for five thousand years.” I sputtered and laughed but Roberto didn’t laugh back.

James argues that Icke is so popular because his ideas have hit on a kind of culturally unconscious truth. The ruling class does not really sacrifice the blood of children, but post-globalization, it’s increasingly possible to look at the world metaphorically in the way that Icke describes.

There are many cultural myths that function this way. For instance, there is documentation suggesting that enslaved Africans being brought to America feared that they were going to be eaten during middle passage. While African bodies were not literally used to fill European stomachs, they were used that way metaphorically. African fire engines are not literally powered by the blood of unwilling passengers, but there are some myths in Africa that suggest they are, and those myths have a certain metaphorical truth. Successful capitalists don’t really carve out their empires by making legions of zombie workers, but there are myths about this in Africa too, and they also have metaphorical resonance.

James argues that Icke has tapped into one of these visceral cultural narratives that describes power dynamics in vivid, surreal terms. James writes:

The followers of Icke that I’ve known have often been members of minority groups, lonely and confused, and experiencing types of unemployment that are connected to shifts in the global economy. Like blacks in South Africa, they witness manifestations of incredibly complex problems that are difficult to understand from their vantage point. Unlike those South Africans, however, they don’t have an indigenous system of folklore to provide an explanation. So they turn to David Icke, who weaves the warp of conspiracy theory with the woof of New Age and gilds it all with that system of folklore indigenous to the modern world, science fiction. In the end he creates a tapestry of belief that has a position on every issue and explains every atrocity, all while affirming the essential goodness of humanity.

James goes on to write about the ties between Icke’s appeal beyond the page and the appeal of some mainstream science fiction narratives, comparing Icke to work like Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time, which, as he notes, some activists have used as a touchstone for gathering their ideas about a utopic future. He dwells on how Icke manages, through science fictional imagery, to create and sustain not just the suspended belief of a fiction writer, but the belief of a myth maker.

From a feminist perspective, the power of Icke’s narrative — while just as different from the kind of feminist narratives we want to popularize as Icke is from mainstream science fiction novels — is still fascinating, if not exactly instructive. How does one tap that kind of unconscious resonance?

I fear we can’t, or at least not directly. People gravitate toward Icke not just because his work describes metaphorical truths, but also because it underlies those truths with comforting lies. It allows the reader to always ally himself with good, and to escape any agency in his own situation. In creating a new myth, Icke relies on old mythic concepts of heroics, making his narrative compelling, but not helpful. One cannot galvanize around Icke in order to create change.

If nothing else, though, Icke demonstrates the importance of narrative. People believe in him because he can weave a compelling story, and because the framework he offers for people to rewrite their lives into is appealing. For those on the fringe in wealthy countries, Icke’s story is a compelling way to make boundaries around the experience of alienation. Anti-feminist and white supremacist narratives have a similar appeal. Narratives get into people’s heads. It’s important for us to provide counter-narratives where possible, even if they aren’t as popular and inflaming. The existence of counter-narratives gives people the ability to see through our framework, at least for a moment.

Curtsy: Objectify This.

Every now and then I hear a story, and I feel compelled to speak on behalf of some of the people mentioned.  This case of a Flint, MI area teacher, who has been “disciplined” for an article published in the student paper, is one of those stories.  Here is a little background:

Griffin was suspended Monday while the inquiry continued, then disciplined on Tuesday after another meeting with administrators, Stein said. A union representative was present, he said.

The article in the May issue of the Blazer included anonymous comments from students questioning the intelligence of blacks and expressing disapproval of interracial dating.

Some of the anonymous quotes accompanied an editorial by a student staff member who called those attitudes appalling.

In a retraction written for the June issue of the Blazer, the staff said it had good intentions and regrets the anxiety caused by the article and editorial. Direct quotes were included to ensure accuracy, they said.

“Our motive was to expose the hidden racism we saw in the comments students sometimes make to be funny,” the staff said in the retraction, released by the school district today.

“We felt direct quotes lended power to our arguments, and in raising awareness, we hoped to inspire more sensitivity. We understand now that we have been guilty of a similar offense.

I think the students, and by proxy the teacher, were right.  Unfortunately, I don’t have the exact quotes in front of me, but it sounds very clear to me that the school administrators are punishing the messenger and blaming them for the fact that some students in the school are racist.

For the record, I do not know exactly what the quotes were, but if I were the school administrators, I would be worried that I had students saying and believing racist things.  I’d be less concerned about the students reporting this.  That doesn’t mean all news is fit to print.  I get many comments that I feel are not worthy of letting through.  However, someone could have the students discuss what comments are newsworthy, and they could also paraphrase statements minus graphic racist language.  I don’t think they need to be punished.  Also, paraphrasing has its down side it could santize the message and take away the power of the students’ arguments. Opposition to interracial relationships is still a prominent feature of contemporary American racial ideology, and punishing the messenger gives the appearance that the school board is trying to put the lid on racism rather than trying to address it head on.

It is difficult from the article to tell if the administrators were more concerned about how black students would feel after reading the bigoted comments or if they were more concerned about how it would make their school look.  But if school administrators think that these types of comments are not made on a regular basis, they need to get real.  Racial abuse is not uncommon in schools; bigoted remarks are also common.  They may be said only amongst racial peers or close friends, but they are there nonetheless.

I can relate to these students and their advisor because these are the reactions that people get when they talk about race.  I think people who don’t deal with race related issues on a regular basis don’t appreciate the vitrol that anti-racist writers have to sift through. People who have been around this blog for a while know that this site routinely gets hate mail, and some of those comments get through before I get to delete them.  It is hard for me as a 32 year old professor who has a PhD in sociology and a specialization in the area of race to filter and approve comments. I’m sure that it is even harder for high school students and their teacher to tell the true story of racism without sanitizing it.  Without denying it.

Should these students and their advisor be punished for exposing racism?  Should we shoot the messenger or attack the message?  I think we should attack the message without white washing it, and punishing the messenger only puts a lid ont he problem.

PS–What a weak union.  I hope they did more than the article reveals.

(Thanks to Local Crank for the heads up.)

Here’s a quote from Indianz.com:

The Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma has agreed to restore the citizenship rights of 2,700 African descendants pending appeals in the tribal court system.

The temporary injunction will allow the Freedmen to receive tribal services and to vote in a June 23 election. It only applies to a tribal court lawsuit and not to a federal lawsuit.

Tribal members voted March 3 to change the constitution in order to deny citizenship to the Freedmen. The move overrode a tribal court decision that said the Freedmen were members because their ancestors appeared on the Dawes Roll.

Cherokee Chief Chad Smith, who advocated for the removal, is facing re-election in June. One of his opponents is Stacy Leeds, the judge who wrote the Freedmen decision.

You can also go visit Cornsilks for another perspective (they seem more skeptical).

Copyright Ursula Vernon: Behold the velociraptor, the terror of the Cretaceous…–pictured here with beloved stuffed T-rex “Mr. Gobbly.”

I love dinosaurs.

Well, I do. Actually, make that extinct things. I love extinct things. Glyptodonts, for instance: giant, ice age armadillos with big club tails. And titanis walleri which is like the bird version of a T-rex, complete with wings that have devolved into little hands. And for sheer weird you can’t beat the Cambrian fauna like opabinia, the five-eyed critter with a vacuum mouth, or hallucigenia, the spiky creature so strange that for a long time paleontologists were unable to tell which way went up.

At this point, I should make the disclaimer: I’m sheerly a hobbyist. I rely on my fiance for most of my information. He comes home from paleontology classes, or reading sciency things, and gives me the digest version (unless it’s something like the BBC that I can pop over and read without confusing my social-science-addled brain). I don’t always repeat things accurately. So, take me with a grain of salt.

Still, I love reading about extinct things — probably in the same way that I love reading really weird science fiction novels. There’s that sense of wonder: a creature that looked like this really lived? And dinosaurs have only gotten more exciting since I was little. No longer the grey and brown reptiles that lumbered across text books, looking only slightly more intelligent than heads of cabbage, we now know that some dinosaurs were probably closer to warm-blooded than cold, and thanks to lithographic limestone in China, we can even look at the impressions of dinosaur feathers.

Reveling in the nerdy joy that is extinct critters, my fiance and I have a collection of dinosaur books. This year, for my birthday, my fiance flew out to see me in Iowa and gave me, besides a week with his wonderful self, The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Dinosaurs by Dougal Dixon.

This is a really good book. Apart from gorgeous, colorful illustrations (mmm, gorgeous colorful illustrations), it has different kinds of information than I’ve found in other books on dinosaurs. It features a number of drawings showing how dinosaur bones are found from different eras and ecosystems, for instance, and while my fiance is a geologist, I’ve never before appreciated the rock-heavy end of paleontology.

Alongside pictures of the dinosaurs, it also features descriptions of how paleontologists have come to the conclusions they have about certain animals. For instance, rather than just saying that caudipteryx couldn’t fly, the book explains that the asymmetry of the feather mpressions we’ve found from the animal lead us to that conclusion. It’s also very clear about when we’re guessing. Many animals are known from only a specimen or two, often an incomplete one, and we don’t really know what they looked like.

I had known before that we knew many dinosaurs from very few bones, but every time I learn anew how few, it astonishes me. Skulls in particular, the part of the animal that allows us to look dead creatures “in the eye,” are especially likely to be crushed and destroyed.

We know so little of what life was like on the planet before we were here. What little we have are tiny snapshot glimpses: this dinosaur with a fan of feathers like a peacock, this gigantic devonian fish with a head covered in armor of bone.

And as I’m thinking these thoughts, I flip to the entry on Spinosaurus, and draw entirely the wrong conclusions.

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A reader sent me a link from the local paper the heading said: Don’t want to be harassed? Stop acting like a man

The blurb said

Behaving like “one of the boys” to get ahead at work may not be the best strategy for women. A study had found that alpha-females are more likely to suffer sexual harassment.

The actual research said:

“The more women deviated from traditional gender roles - by occupying a ‘man’s’ job or having a ‘masculine’ personality - the more they were targeted,” Dr Berdahl said. “Although having a masculine personality would seem to help employees fit into male-dominated work environments, having such a personality appears to have hurt the women in this study.”

She said the study supported the theory that sexual harassment was motivated by a desire to punish “gender-role deviants” rather than by sexual desire.

I’ve only read Amazon’s extract of Jessica Valenti’s Full Frontal Feminism. After I’d finished I had to remind myself that there are lots of different kinds of feminism, and the fact that the media picks and chooses who to focus on isn’t the fault of the chosen.

But I still wanted to respond to what frustrated me in the extract I read. I was once a middle-class girl who was too scared to call herself feminist, the audience of the book. But I didn’t change my mind because feminism seemed easy, but because I realised what how hard the women who had been before me had fought, and I wanted to honour that struggle. I wrote about it a year ago, but thought I’d repost it just to show that even middle-class white girls who say ‘I’m not a feminist but…’ aren’t a homogenous group.

In some ways I was extremely precocious feminist. I still have my copy of the Railway Children which says “Happy 7th Birthday on the inside” and in which I had writeen RUBBISH in black felt tip pen over the paragraph near the end when the Doctor tells Peter that he must be nice to girls because they’re soft and weak. I grew up in the 1980s and really believed Girls Can Do Anything, and was prepared to fight for it.

But something happened in my teens, my feminism faded. I know why, and I know I’m not alone. To middle-class girls in all-girls schools sexism and misogyny often seem far away. I was taught by some of the coolest feminists I’ve ever known. My school had a quilt hung in the hall that said “Me aro koe ki te hä o Hine-ahu-one. Pay heed to the dignity of Women”. But it was an all women world and so feminism seemed unnecessary.

It was ridiculous, because sexism and misogyny were all around us, all the time. We didn’t recognise them mostly because we were too busy using them to try and destroy each other.

So all through high school, and into my first year of university I didn’t call myself a feminist. I was 18 when this changed, and I remember the change as a revelation. it wasn’t of course, I must have forgotten all the small things that lead me there.

I was babysitting, I’d put the kids to bed and settled down to do the readings for one of my tutorials. I was reading women’s accounts of growing up in Germany towards the end of the 19th Century. One woman was from the aristocracy, one was middle class, and the others were all working class women.

Most of the women had become involved in left-wing politics later in their life and their stories were amazing. The best of the fathers in the narratives were completely hopeless, most weren’t that useful, but the women survived, and fought for their brothers and sisters. I was blown away by those women and their strength. They had all fought so hard for things that I saw as so basic.

But it was still school work, so as soon as I was finished being blown away I watched a movie the kids’ parents had left behind. It was called The Heidi Chronicles and I remember almost nothing about it except that it was about a woman who was involved in women’s liberation, and it showed how much she’d gained but how hard it was, and how it had cost her.

My response to the stories of women’s lives, both fictional and real was: “I have to call myself a feminist, I owe it to all these women who went before me, who fought so hard and gained so much to become part of that struggle.”

And that was the beginning.

I went to see Rosita in theHuman Rights Film Festival this weekend.

Rosita’s parents were from Nicaragua, but they moved to Costa Rica to find work. Her father worked as a itinerant coffee picker, her mother sometimes joined him in the fields. Rosita didn’t start school until she was seven, because the school was a long way away. When she was 8 a man, who lived on her way to school, occasionally offered her and her cousins fruit while they were walking past. One day, when she was walking home alone, he raped her.

Rosita’s mother realised something was wrong and took her to the doctor’s several times. Eventually the doctors told Rosita’s mother that Rosita was pregnant.

The documentary Rosita is her story.

Rosita is a very well-made documentary. Despite the fact that Rosita is not shown on film (her parents’ decisions - their reasons are obvious) the film-makers work hard to let her voice come through. The story is told from an oral history Rosita did with her mother, and illustrated with Rosita’s drawings, which are sometimes beautifully animated.

The story would have been worthless if they hadn’t worked to give Rosita a voice, because her story is one of people trying to take away her voice, her choices, and her right to self-determination.

By setting her story in its full context, by showing us the cotton plantations that her parents worked in and the effect this had on her, the film-makers show how connected our struggles for self-determination are. That freedom from sexual violence, and control of reproduction alone would not be enough for girls like Rosita.

The centre of the story is her family’s struggle to get an abortion in either Nicaragua or Costa Rica, even though she was just nine years old. The rapist fades out of the film when he is sentenced to 3 months jail - demonstrating the effect of the rape on her life is so much greater than the effect on his.

There were doctors, Bishops, even government departments, who were trying to stop Rosita from having an abortion. The family had to leave Costa Rica in the middle of the night, because they were worried they would be stopped from leaving. Then they had to run out of the hospital to avoid government officials who were trying to remove her from her parents custody. Usually a Nicaraguan abortion requires authorisation from 3 doctors, in this case the Health department wanted it signed off by a committee of 16.

The attitudes of these various men (and a couple of women) were summed up by one man who said: “I said all along that it would have been better if she had died that day.”

That’s what we’re fighting - so many of our struggles are against people, and power structures, that would rather see us dead than living our lives the way we want to.

The film had a happy ending, as much as it could have. Rosita got an abortion; her parents got some land and moved to the country. But as well as this happy ending it also offered some more hope. It ended with a conversation between the film-makers and a taxi-driver who was saying “I don’t believe they should have had the abortion, abortion was wrong.” The film-makers asked: “What if it was your daughter?” And the taxi-driver couldn’t answer - because the right of someone you love to decide their life (and live their life - pregnancy at 9 carries huge risks) is much harder to deny. I think that compassion and that love is where we can build and organise.

Update: I almost forgot to give a shout out to Big Fat Blog, which got a mention in the article. 

The New York Times featured a story on Leonard Nimoy’s fat nudes exhibit in Northhampton, MA.  Here is an extended quote from the article:

He knows that he is an unlikely champion for the size-acceptance movement; body image is a topic he never really thought about before. But for the last eight years, Mr. Nimoy, who is 76 and an established photographer, has been snapping pictures of plus-size women in all their naked glory.

He has a show of photographs of obese women on view at the R. Michelson Galleries in Northampton, Mass., through June; a larger show at the gallery is scheduled to coincide with the November publication of his book on the subject, “The Full Body Project,” from Five Ties Publishing. The Louis Stern Fine Arts gallery in Los Angeles and the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston have acquired a few images from the project. A few hang at the Bonni Benrubi Gallery in New York. (Their explicitness prevents the images from being reprinted here.)

These women are not hiding beneath muumuus or waving from the bottom of the Grand Canyon à la Carnie Wilson in early Wilson Phillips videos. They are fleshy and proud, celebrating their girth, reveling in it. It is, Mr. Nimoy says, a direct response to the pressure women face to conform to a Size 2.

“The average American woman, according to articles I’ve read, weighs 25 percent more than the models who are showing the clothes they are being sold,” Mr. Nimoy said, his breathing slightly labored by allergies and a mild case of emphysema. “So, most women will not be able to look like those models. But they’re being presented with clothes, cosmetics, surgery, diet pills, diet programs, therapy, with the idea that they can aspire to look like those people. It’s a big, big industry. Billions of dollars. And the cruelest part of it is that these women are being told, ‘You don’t look right.’ ”

If you want to read the whole piece go here.

On a personal note, I have been thinking about generational differences (or in sociology speak cohort effects) in attitudes towards fatness.  While I remember my grandparents making comments about how fat people were, I don’t remember the ire associated with it that you see for so many younger people.  It also seemed to me that their definition of fatness was different. 

I started thinking about this after reading this piece because I’m not so surprised that this is coming from an older man of my grandparents generation.  I would have been much more surprised to see a younger male actor or artists come out for fat acceptance/rights. 

I’m just speculating, but what do you think about this?  Do you think there are generational differences around attitudes toward fatness?  If so, what do you think they are?

Hugo Schwyzer wrote a post about veganism and feminism that I found really frustrating. The point he is exploring is an interesting one - as a vegan who once had an eating disorder he is noting the similarities between the two:

The funny thing is that being strictly vegan (off honey entirely) means that I am more attentive to what I eat than at any time in my life since I was crash dieting fifteen years ago.

But, his perspective is extremely limited as he seems to see eating disorders primarily in terms of body image:

Back then, I counted calories and fat grams obsessively. Today, I largely ignore fat and calorie information and read to make sure that what I’m eating is entirely plant-based and devoid of hidden dairy or egg traces. (Damn that sneaky caseinate!) I’m once again radically concerned with everything that goes into my mouth — but for a radically different reason.

Eating disorders are not just about reasons, they’re not just about appearances, they’re often also about morality and control. Hugo doesn’t acknowledge that veganism can feed the food/control/morality connection, which is central to an eating disordered mindset. For someone with a tendency to trying to exert control through self-denial of food (which is rarely a small percentage of a female population), any language around veganism which emphasises self-control and morality is going to make things worse. I guess I’ve more experience of this than most; I’ve spent a lot of time in a scene where there are quite a few vegans and lots of young women. I’ve despaired every which way at the policing and limiting which young women do to each other can happen take on a radical hue, and still be just as damaging.

I don’t know if Hugo has tried to think about veganism in a different way (Stetnor suggests one). But I know that a restricted diet doesn’t mean that you have to control what you eat. I realised a couple of years ago that I was severely allergic to dairy products. I have to read the label. There are dairy products in most brands of some really basic products (bread and margarine, for example). If someone offers me food, then I don’t eat it unless I know it’s dairy free.

I don’t talk about, think about, or experience this as controlling what I eat. I didn’t know that I’d be able to avoid this dangerous thought pattern; I wasn’t even sure I could cut dairy out entirely. I was surprised at how easy as it was. Dairy products are not an option, in the same way foods I don’t like are not an option. Sure I miss them - other people’s cheesy food smells divine, but it’s not self-control that stops me from eating them. Avoiding dairy products is a choice I’ve made.

I’ve had to be incredibly protective of myself in all this: I’ve corrected people who say I’m not ‘allowed’ something, when people describe dairy products as if they were disgusting I’m likely to sing their praises. In order to maintain this as a choice, I have to avoid anything that sounds like moralism.

I’m sure it’s much easier for me than people with other food restrictions. My symptoms mean that I have every reason to avoid dairy products. But I don’t actually need the threat. Most of the time I don’t think “Wow that cheese looks yummy, but if I eat it I’ll feel ill and end the night crying on Betsy’s couch about much I hate my life.”* I think “What shall I eat?”

Even if I experienced every piece of cheese I didn’t eat as a massive battle for control, I’d be very careful never to talk about food and control. As a feminist, in the society I live in, my first goal when talking about food with people I know has to be to avoid reinforcing or triggering eating disordered thought patterns. I can have all sorts of conversations about food, but I need to have them in ways that won’t make other women’s eating disorders worse.

I think the way Hugo talks about veganism fails that basic test.

* Then after about half an hour of my whining at her she’d say “Could this be because you ate dairy products?”

So I have a pain in my left arm, and until the doctors figure out where it’s coming from I have only two states: unable to concentrate because of pain, or unable to concentrate because of pain-killers. In either case, not going to be doing much blogging.

I’m sure things will be fine, but in the meanwhile, I’m taking a hiatus.

Mwah! Love you all.

In the previous thread about the thin line between an ordinary guy and a rapist, Sailorman writes:

rethinking this: why do folks insist on using “rape” or “almost rape” or “like rape” to describe things that, well, aren’t rape?

I can see it if you think those things should be legally punishable. (in other words, it makes perfect sense if you think those things ARE rape)

But if you DON’T want to put those in the legally punishable category, then I wonder if it’s not such a powerful word as to be ineffective. It’s polarizing. You’ll get men to admit their behavior is “wrong” or “bad” way before you’ll get them to admit it’s “almost rape” or “very similar to rape.”** So using those terms increases the “preaching to the choir” aspect. I’m not sure that’s functionally a good idea.

And it’s also a bit a priori which i find sort of annoying: because rape is bad then “…____ like a rapist” means ___ is very bad. So using that label assigns those things a “fault level” that is fairly high.

The problem with THAT is that these conversations inevitably contain a lot of things that differ hugely in how bad they are. But because “like a rapist” = “veryvery bad” that makes no sense: surely telling someone they’re “prude” because they won’t sleep with you is in an entirely different category from, say, filling someone’s drink with the goal of getting them drunk enough to agree to sleep with you when you know they wouldn’t do so sober. **

There are a few–very few–generalizations one can accurately make, when one includes such disparate behavior. Why is “calling someone a prude” lumped in as Teh Eevil Misogyny together with wanting to rape someone? That’s just ludicrous.

Are some of those things bad? Yes. Some are VERY, VERY, bad. But some are, in the grand scheme of things, not that big a deal. And if there’s not going to be any distinguishing between those categories, I don’t think this is a good argument.

**The power of the word “rape” is not necessarily beneficial. A parallel exists in racism. There used to be things that were referred to as “prejudiced,” which was sort of “racism lite.” Now, “racism” has been deliberately expanded to include all of that, and a whole lot more. The benefit? People get to use a very powerful and socially unacceptable word, “racism,” to control and comment on behavior. The downside? You might have gotten someone to admit they’re a bit prejudiced; not many people will admit to being racist.

After a bit of back and forth, my reply was:

Sailor,

You wrote this: “I can see it if you think those things should be legally punishable. (in other words, it makes perfect sense if you think those things ARE rape) ”

That suggests that the only definition of rape that is acceptable is one with a legal ramification, because it suggests that one only thinks things ARE rape if one seeks to make them legally punishable. That means that you’re saying that a personal definition of rape should be consonant with one’s desired legal definition of rape, and thus that the deciding factor of rape is the legal system.

Which I meant to support the following assertion: “The legal system is not the sole arbiter of meaning. Period.”

Since various people, including Sailorman and myself, feel that this line of discussion is a distraction from the other thread, I’m reposting it here so that it can be explored by anyone who wants to. If people want to repost comments from the other thread here, that’s cool.

I’m locking this to pro-feminists only, in which category I am intending to include Sailorman in case that’s a question (I know he was excluded last time this came up).

There has been a lot of publicity over the last few years about rape by New Zealand police. Yesterday more allegations were made, which you can read in this (rather badly formatted) post.

Some of those allegations shouldn’t surprise anyone - police officers were able to rape prostitutes with impunity when prostitution was illegal. It wouldn’t surprise me if the larger allegations are true (and they’re consistent with comments left at the end of this thread).

One of the statements in the article has been confirmed. A pornographic video, which included bestiality, was shown at the police commissioner’s house (the police commissioner is the top police officer in NZ). This is minor compared with the other allegations. But, to me, it shows a pattern of contempt for women, willingness to ignore laws around non-consensual sex when fellow officers broke them, and putting male bonding above all else (this was all to raise money for the police rugby team).

This raises the problem of what could possibly be done about a police force where police officers have regularly abused and exploited women.* If some police officers in the area regularly demanded sex from the local brothels, then it’s likely that other police officers in the area knew about it. No-one who stood by while that was going on should be in the police force any longer. Likewise, anyone who promoted Clint Rickards, knowing that a police report had found that he had abused his power, should not be in the police force. Who is left? Anyone who had stood up against violence and abuse wouldn’t have survived; anyone who didn’t should not have the power they do.

For me this shows one of the fundamental problem with the police. Abuse, including rape, appears to be an inevitable result of the sort of power we give police. I know people have different analyses about how much good the police do (I come down on the side of ‘none’). But even if you believe that the police do improve society, do you really believe that what happened to Louise Nicholas, Judith Garrett and countless other women is an acceptable side effect of that good?

* The police also have a history of racism, homophobia, and abusing their power left, right and centre.

Last semester, I was privileged to take a fiction workshop with Marilynne Robinson, the author of Housekeeping and Gilead. In one of our later class sessions, we were looking at a beautiful story by one of my favorite writers in the workshop, Jill Wohlgemuth. The story was in the form of an informal essay about kissing, written by a thirteen-year-old girl who wandered away from her academic thesis to meditate on her own impressions of love and desire, framed around her burgeoning sexual attraction to a boy named Theo who she described several times as being incredibly smart — which is ironic, because of course any thirteen-year-old girl who could write an essay as beautiful as this story was would have to be a prodigy herself.

Marilynne watched patiently as we students gave our opinions of and reactions to the piece. Then she sat back and said, “I’ve noticed a problem in the writing of young women.”

Instead of giving character traits to their female characters, Marilynne argued, young women writers give those traits to male secondary characters — in this case, repeatedly describing Theo as intelligent when it was the narrator who was brilliant.

I’ve been thinking about that comment a lot lately.

Now, I don’t think that the particular story we were looking at was actually a black and white case of this happening. There are a lot of reasons why a particularly smart thirteen-year-old girl would fixate on describing the object of her affection as “so smart” — I did that a lot as a kid, particularly with boys I had crushes on, because I had swallowed some line that men needed to be smarter than their female partners. Still, I think that Marilynne’s observation is keen and insightful. Looking at broader media trends, it’s definitely possible to uncover cases where a female character’s personality is rendered through male characters, or not rendered at all.

Girl Detective talks about one such case in her review of Jonathan Lethem’s latest novel, You Don’t Love Me Yet. The plot of the novel literally revolves around the female main character, Lucinda. She acts as a middleman, conveying McGuffins (sought-after objects) and witnessing plot points. However, the story is happening to other people. Her characterization — personality and praxis — are deferred onto male characters.

Girl Detective writes, “Although Lucinda’s consciousness is what binds the novel together, her actual place in the story is minimal; her only motivation is superficial attachment and lust, and she spends the entire story either having sex, wanting sex, or masturbating while wanting sex. All the male characters in the story have traits, interests, and personalities… Lucinda, however, is completely devoid of any desires, aspirations, thoughts, or goals that don’t involve finding a penis to put into her vagina.”

“What’s really sad,” Girl Detective continues, “is that our culture is so ignorant of women’s inner lives (50% of the population, people! Seriously!) that this substitution of sex for psychology still very often passes for legitimate characterization in even the highest ranks of literature.”

And now that I’ve discussed a high brow example, you know what this reminds me of? Lost.

Read the rest of this entry »

Hey y’all,

This is Mandolin. Amp has invited me to guest blog for a month or two. In real life, my name is Rachel Swirsky. I’m a fiction writer and I just finished up the first year of my master’s degree at the Iowa Writers Workshop.

I write literary fiction sometimes, but I’m very interested in how narratives that include the non-real (science fiction, magical realism, fabulism, slipstream) can create a heightened sense of reality and social commentary. I’m fairly active in the science fiction community. I used to describe my work as trying to write like surrealists paint, although I’ve been publishing more mundane stuff as I learn.

You can read more about my writing at my needs-to-be-revamped website. I’m also a poster at a new blog on feminism and science fiction called Ambling Along the Aqueduct, and I even have my own personal blog where I post memes, rant incoherently about politics, and whine about writing. My first published short story is online in Subterranean Magazine #4 which was edited by John Scalzi of the Whatever; it’s a meta-fictional piece considering the embedded class and gender assumptions in dystopic novels.

And that should be about it, in terms of introduction. :) I’ll throw up the post I’m working on as soon as it’s done.

(Some of this post is derived from comments I wrote in the “nice guys” thread. This is a “feminists and pro-feminists only” thread.)

It’s common, when feminists and non-feminists talk, to see a great deal of mix-up over the terms “misogyny” and “woman-hating.” Many people, feminist and non-, tend to treat the two terms as if they’re interchangeable — but they shouldn’t be, because it’s not useful to have two words with the same meaning.

Wikipedia does a good job describing how feminists use the word misogyny:

Misogyny is hatred or strong prejudice against women. The word comes from the Greek words μίσος (misos, “hatred”) + γυνη (gunê, “woman”). Compared with anti-woman sexism or misandry (hatred, strong prejudice against men), misogyny is termed by most feminist theories as a political ideology like racism and antisemitism that justifies and maintains the subordination of women to men.

“Hatred or strong prejudice,” not just hatred.

Hatred, in contrast, means “Intense animosity or hostility” (according to the American Heritage dictionary). But it’s possible to be strongly prejudiced against someone without feeling intense animosity. Think of a father, for example, who loves his science-minded daughters, but at the same time feels that women are intrinsically incapable of being great scientists or mathematicians. We don’t have to doubt his love for his daughters, or suppose that he feels intense animosity towards them, to recognize that his beliefs are strongly prejudiced against women (including his daughters).

This brings me to rape. Many feminists believe that most rapists act out of hate — that is to say, out of “intense animosity or hostility” towards women. I think that these feminists are mistaken. There are some rapists who are motivated by hatred of women, but my belief is that they’re a minority.

When a shoplifter robs a store, he’s not doing it because he feels animosity towards the shopkeeper. He’s doing it because he wants something, and he’s doesn’t care what the shopkeeper wants. It’s not hate, because it’s not that personal.

A rapist wants sex, for whatever reason — maybe he’s horny, maybe he’s hypermasculine and so is driven to “prove” his masculinity over and over, maybe he’s being pressured by his male friends. But the important thing is that he feels so much entitlement to have what he wants (or what he imagines he “needs”), combined with so little empathy for women. For him, what he wants is a matter of great importance, while what a woman wants doesn’t matter.

Rapists are not, unfortunately, a species apart from ordinary heterosexual men. They’re towards the end of the spectrum, but their attitudes are not abnormal.

Consider a young man who is, as our legal system defines the term, not a rapist. Maybe he competes with his guy friends to see who can “hit” the most women. (The slang phrase “I hit that,” meaning “I had sex with that woman,” is amazing for it’s ultra-concise equation of sex with violence and women with objects). Or maybe he’s just desperate to have “done it” with one woman, just so he can feel like he’s a man. Or maybe he feels deprived because he has had sex, but not lately, and not as much as he thinks others are having.

He doesn’t use physical force or threats to have sex with women. But he manipulates. He plots with his friends, or in his mind. He makes sure her drink is never empty. He contrives to separate her from her friends so he can be alone with her.¹. He says “if you really liked me you’d do it with me.” He wonders if she’s a prude. He accuses her of leading him on.

He’s acting like a safecracker trying trick after trick to get into a safe. And that’s wrong, because a safecracker doesn’t give a damn about whether or not the safe is enjoying the interaction. A safecracker doesn’t care if the safe is left with permanent damage. All the safecracker cares about is getting what he wants.

His approach to sex is based in manipulation, and coercion, not about mutual flirting and seduction and fun.² Maybe he’ll luck out and not hurt whoever he has sex with; maybe she’ll have wanted it just as much as him, maybe she’ll tell her friends “I hit that.” But maybe not. Maybe she didn’t want it, maybe she was manipulated, and maybe she’ll be left emotionally hurt and appalled by the whole relationship.

He’s a misogynist because he was willing to take that chance. He didn’t care enough to make sure it was the former, not the latter — and in that utter indifference to what the woman wants, he’s on common ground with rapists.

It’s not “intense animosity or hostility,” but it sure as hell is misogyny. And it’s not how every guy acts all the time — but it’s how many guys in our culture have acted, at least some of the time. It’s ordinary male behavior. And that’s why I think our culture’s entire dominant conception of masculinity, especially in regards to sex, needs to be reformed.

1. None of this is new. In the 1950s and 1960s, this same guy would have contrived to “accidentally” have his car run out of gas with her in some remote spot (back)
2. Just for the record, I’m all in favor of casual sex that’s based in mutual flirting and seduction and fun. But the word “mutual” is essential. (back)

Bean’s workplace — and, with luck, Bean herself — will appear on tomorrow’s Today show. Bean has the details.

UPDATE: In comments, Bean writes:

Well, I made it in…for about 1 1/2 seconds, and I didn’t say anything. But that’s ok. I thought they did a great job telling Paula’s story and about the agency. And we definitely got noticed — lots of calls. But so far none from Oprah and none offering huge checks. [sigh]

Anyway, if you want to see it, you can watch it here.