If you haven’t already, I urge you to read Part 1 and Part 2. (If you haven’t read Part 2, or haven’t read it in a while, you might want to read it before reading Part 3, if only because the last paragraph of Part 2 feeds very specifically into what Part 3 is about. I will also say that Part 3, more so than either 1 or 2, contains material that some people might find disturbing and/or triggering. The issues raised by that material are resolved not in Part 3 itself, but later in the essay. I ask, therefore, for your patience in that regard, and I also ask that you be patient if my response(s) to comments about that material ask you to wait until I get to those later parts of the essay.)

Part 3

Sitting on my bed with her back against the wall, Beth–who’s come to visit during my first year of graduate school–is telling me something that I wish I could remember. Indeed, in the first drafts of this essay, including the one that was published online, I wrote this passage as if I did remember. I had her telling me that she’d decided to study fine art, a decision I’m pretty sure she actually made around the time that what I am about tell you took place; and it may have been that her decision was what we were talking about. Beth had been struggling with how to give what she considered legitimate and purposeful expression to the creativity that was in her for some time, but the fact is that I don’t remember and to let you think that I do would be to create, if not a justification–because justification, while it was the first word that came to mind, is wrong for what I want to say–than a logical explanation for something that I have in been trying unsuccessfully to explain to myself for more than 20 years.

So, Beth is sitting on my bed and talking, but I am suddenly listening from a place so deep inside myself that the sounds leaving her mouth no longer coalesce into meaningful units. There is a moment of blankness and then, as if someone else has taken control of my brain, I am forced to watch a vision of myself getting up from the chair when I’ve been sitting, putting one hand around Beth’s throat, holding her against the wall, and with my other hand slapping her back and forth until she is senseless and bloody. I see myself screaming in her ear, letting her drop to the floor and kicking her in the stomach as hard as I can. In the vision, my mouth moves but no words come out.

Unaware that I’ve stopped hearing what she has to say, Beth continues talking, gesturing to emphasize the importance of her words, imploring with her eyes for I-don’t-know-what, and then the violence in my mind begins again. Realizing that my hands have clenched into fists, I excuse myself and move quickly to the bathroom. Locking the door behind me, I take deep breaths and splash cold water on my face. When I’m sure the impulse to lash out has passed, I flush the toilet and go back to the bedroom where, thankfully, Beth notices it’s time for me to go to class, and she tells me she’ll finish later. I grab my books, kiss her quickly on the cheek and, knowing I will need some time alone to try to sort out what has just happened, tell her that I have work to do in the library and therefore won’t be back until just before we’re supposed to go out for dinner.

The afternoon sun is warm on my face, so I decide to walk to class instead of taking the bus. Beth’s decision to become an artist should make me happy. (I know I just wrote that I am not sure this decision is what we were talking about, but it was an issue in our relationship at the time, and since I’ve mentioned it, I don’t want to leave it hanging without at least some explanation.) Not only does it mean that she’s choosing to do what she really wants to do, but it also holds out the promise of a resolution to a tension between us that I had given up being able to do anything about. More than once, Beth has told me she’s afraid I will become more committed to my writing than to her. Now that she has her own art to commit to, I’m hoping she’ll begin to see that the two commitments need not be mutually exclusive.

I’m starting to feel a little better, more in control of myself, but I begin to realize that I will never be able to sit through class. I need somewhere quiet, where I can sit by myself and really think about what happened this morning.

I head to the library.

My idea as I settle into one of the chairs on the second floor is to  write out what I’m feeling in a letter to myself, a strategy I’ve used before when I don’t know what’s going on inside me. As soon as I put my pen to the page, though, what comes out does not begin Dear Richard. Instead, it is the beginning of a poem:

 I want a bearded man, shirtless, in faded jeans,

to come one barefoot night and take me in his mouth.

I don’t know where the words come from, but the shock of recognition when I read them is immediate and frightening, and I know there is a clarity in them that I am not fully able to see. Staring at the page, unable to write another word, I wonder if I’m trying to tell myself that I’m gay and that the problem I have with Beth is that I should be going out with a boy instead. I remember Brian and how we became friends in our senior year of high school, watching a teammate strike out trying too hard to hit the ball over the fence during a gym-class softball game.

“I don’t get it,” Brian said to no one in particular, shaking his head from side to side as the other boy slammed his bat to the ground, threatened to beat the shit out of the pitcher, and stormed off the field as if he’d failed to make a team he’d dedicated his life to making. “I just don’t get it.”

“Get what?” I asked.

We’d been standing next to each other through most of the class, but Brian looked at me as if he were seeing me for the first time. “What’s the big deal? I mean, it’s not like he’s going to fail for striking out.”

“You’re right,” I said. “It doesn’t make sense.”

Brian’s face lit up as if he were visiting from another country and had at last found someone who could speak his language. Then his eyes narrowed a little, “Yeah, but at least you can hit the ball.” It was a test; he was not much of an athlete.

“So I can hit the ball,” I responded. “So what?”

And we were friends; and we quickly became best friends. Sadly, though, what I remember most about our friendship is the day it began to end. “You’re just different,” he told me. We  were sitting in my room. “I’ve never met anyone like you, and they just can’t accept that.”

“I’ve never met anyone like you before either,” I said, not even bothering to ask him who they were.

“But they’re saying we’re closer than we should be, that we’re not, you know, normal.”

“So? When has either of us ever really cared about what they have to say?”

Brian looked so grateful for these words that I thought he was going to cry, and his eyes did start to grow big with a feeling that welled up in him, but then he looked away and almost whispered, “Maybe they’re right. Maybe we are closer than we should be.”

I tried to convince him that he was wrong, but it didn’t work. He started–or at least in memory, he started bringing female friends along whenever we went out, and–again, as I remember it–college applications, yearbook committee meetings and other graduation-related work suddenly kept him so busy that he had less and less time to see me. The summer after graduation, while I was working at a sleep-away camp in Massachusetts, we wrote letters, but when I came home, he was gone, off to his freshman year at Cornell University. I probably had his phone number and address, but I don’t think I ever used them, and I don’t remember receiving either mail or phone calls from him. We did try once to reconnect during the winter break of our freshman year, meeting for a drink at one of the bars we’d hung out at when we were still close. He brought his girlfriend, a dark woman I remember sitting silently in the corner of the booth while Brian and I struggled to find things to say to each other. The conversation is lost to me now, but I can still feel the finality of our good-byes, neither of us even pretending we’d try to see each other again.

At the end of the academic year, while I waited on line to register for my sophomore classes, I met the woman who’d sat next to me in twelfth-grade English. “Whatever happened to your friend Brian?” she asked.

“He’s at Cornell,” I answered, “but I haven’t heard from him in a while.”

“You know,” she said, “everyone thought the two of you were gay.”

“I know.”

“Were you?”

“No.”

With cinematic timing my turn to register came next, and I gave her a small, silent wave as I walked to the registrar’s window. I have continued throughout all these years, however, to wonder about my answer. It was the answer I think Brian would have wanted me to give, and I gave it without a second thought. Despite its literal truth, however, or, rather, its truth given that what the woman probably wanted to know was whether Brian and I had been having sex, the word “no” has felt dishonest to me for a long time, as if what I had done was to deny the emotional content of our friendship, not characterize its physical nature.

When I think about Brian now, I often wish to have back that moment when he decided “they” were right and we were wrong. Not because I think I could have done anything differently to change his mind, but because envisioning how things might have been different is a gesture of defiance I wish I had made a long time ago, a way to begin figuring out the answer I ought to have given to the woman from my English class, and of understanding why I responded with a homoerotic poem to the violence I imagined years later doing to Beth. We ended up not going to dinner that night. After I wrote those two lines, I felt better, calmer, more at peace with myself, and so I was able to tell her about the vision my imagination had conjured for me. We spent the night trying to figure out where in our relationship my anger came from, but our only success–at least from my point of view, since it left me bent over, laughing with hysterical relief–was that I found the courage to scream what I was really feeling, and they were words I regret even now, “I hate you! I hate you! I hate you!”

Beth, of course, was horrified and deeply, deeply hurt, but instead of breaking up with me, or at least putting some distance between us while I tried to figure out where my rage was coming from, she stayed with me for the rest of the weekend, a decision I can only describe as courageous and loving, and we talked and talked our way into the feeling that we could stay together, which we did for five more years. I was immensely grateful to her for that, though I don’t think I ever expressed that gratitude sufficiently.

What disturbed me at the time–aside from the content of what I imagined–and what continues to haunt me whenever I think about it, is that I didn’t even know I was so angry. There were tensions in my relationship with Beth, as there are in any relationship, but nothing of a magnitude, or at least nothing I experienced as of a magnitude, that corresponded even a little to the violence I’d imagined myself doing. Even now, more than two decades later–and in all that time I’ve had nothing even remotely resembling the experience I’ve just described–I find myself wondering what I don’t know about the subterranean workings of my psyche. I am an angry man–though I am now a much less angry man than I was when I first wrote this essay–and I know that much of my anger is sexual, and if there is anything that being a man is supposed to give you license to do, and I am talking here about deeply held cultural values, not the laws of any given country, or the ethical or moral principles taught by religion, it is to take your sexual anger out on the bodies of others, usually women, and to do so with relative impunity. I have, as you will see, good reason to be angry. Part of what writing and rewriting this essay has been about, for me, has been learning to stop being afraid of my anger and, therefore, of myself.

Cross-posted on It’s All Connected.

While I write a bit about bodies, fat and ‘the obesity epidemic’ I don’t write that much about the health aspects of this. Mostly because I largely find them irrelevant. Other people can do very good jobs of proving that the causative relationship between having a high BMI and negative health outcomes remain unproven at best. I think that in many ways this gives too much ground. Even if, someone down the track, they managed to prove that there is a causative relationship between being fat and dying earlier, then my problems with the way people talk about ‘the obesity epidemic’ wouldn’t change. Partly this is empirical - we have a couple of generations of women (particularly white middle-class women) who have been (and are being) told that their value as a human being was dependent on not taking up space, that hasn’t made all middle-class white women skinny. But it’s also part of my wider analysis: I don’t believe that health issues are an individual problem (let alone an individual moral problem).

But sometimes I read something that makes me go ‘How can anyone believe the shit that gets promulgated?”

In this case I was listening to a radio interview and they were talking about the death rate among Pakeha and Maori.* In this discussion the interview mentioned part of this was because the death rate from cardio-vascular disease has decreased hugely (over 50% for some ethnicities). This was partly because cadio-vascular disease is decreasing, and partly because people with cardio-vascular disease are living longer.

So where’s this ‘obesity epidemic’ and how is it supposed to be killing people if death from cardio-vascular disease has halved?

* Apparently the gap has gotten smaller, which is great until you hear that the Maori death rate between the ages of 1-74 is still two to three times that of Euopean/Other. Also just because it can’t be repeated enough health disparities were widening in the 80s and 90s:

It seems likely widening social gaps during the 80s and 90s, including income and unemployment differences between ethnic groups, were at least partly responsible for the widening health inequalities, Prof Blakely said.

Project Runway has got everything you’d want in a reality show, interesting challenges, weird people and a look at a different world. In the most recent episode here in NZ the challenge was to design for another contestant’s mother or sister. There was a lot gross about the way things were done; the designers got to pick the relatives, which was a ‘we want skinny people’ version of picking teams at school. But the episode as a whole was fascinating, most of the designers were truly stumped by designing for people who weren’t models, particularly fat people who weren’t models.

I think it was Robert Best who said “I don’t understand these proportions”. His day job is to design for Barbie.

Jeffrey, who is a misogynist prick at the best of times, said “If I go then there’s nothing I could have done - I couldn’t have prepared for this challenge.”

It makes me want to read about the history of fashion to figure out how we got here. Where there is a whole occupation, models, to make women to fit its clothes. We’re so used to this ridiculous artifice that it’s absurdity is only brought home when barbies proportions make sense to a designer, and a woman’s, any woman’s, proportions do not.

To read Part 1, go here.

You have to wonder what kind of research he did and how he did it. Did he interview women? Create a list of all the possibilities he could imagine and ask them to check off on a list “all descriptions that apply?” Did he talk to men, get them to narrate their sexual philosophies and techniques? Did he observe what he wrote about firsthand, somehow get permission to stand behind a wall constructed so that he could spy on the couples who had agreed to be his informants? Or did he just make it all up? It’s impossible to know, but when Sheikh Nezawi wrote The Perfumed Garden in the sixteenth century–it was translated into English by Richard Burton in 1886–he devoted an entire chapter to “The Divers Names of the Virile Member.” Some are self-explanatory, like Generative Organ, Hairy One or Bald-Head. At least one, The Pigeon, is interesting as a metaphor because of the way it feminizes the penis: “It is so called because, after having been swollen and at the moment when it is returning to its state of repose, [this kind of penis] resembles a pigeon settling on its eggs” (54). In most cases, however, Sheikh Nezawi treats the male genitals synechdocically, making it clear that, in describing certain kinds of penises, he is also describing the men to whom they are attached. Here, for example is The Creeper:

This name has been given to the penis because, when it gets between a woman’s thighs and sees a plump vulva, it starts to creep on her legs and pubis, then, approaching the entrance, it continues to creep until it has taken possession. When comfortably installed, it penetrates completely and ejaculates. (59)

And here is The Knocker

It is thus named because, when it arrives at the door of the vulva, it gives a light knock; if the vulva replies and opens the door, it enters; but if it gets no reply, it knocks again until successful. By knocking at the door we refer to the rubbing of the penis on the vulva until it becomes moist. The production of this moisture is what is called opening the door. (59)

My son will soon be nine years old. Especially during the first years of his life, when he began to learn the names for the parts of his body–though I am aware the question is relevant even now–I thought a lot about how the way we talk about our genitals in this culture expresses and, in part, creates the way we feel as a culture not just about the male body, but also about sex and the people we have sex with. Never before had I been confronted on a daily basis with the realization that someone else’s understanding of who he was, of what it might mean for him to live in his own body, hung quite literally on my every word.

When he was two, for example, my wife would tell me stories about how he occasionally got erections when she washed his penis in the bath. “I don’t like it like this,” she told he would say, starting to cry. “I want it to be soft,” and he would try to push his penis down, which of course did not have the result he desired.

One night, I happened to be home when this happened, and I walked into the bathroom to find my wife crouching at the edge of the tub, talking to our son in a very soothing voice, while he sat with the water running behind him, breathing the last gasping breaths of what had obviously been a two-year-old’s very heavy cry. When my wife explained that he was crying because he’d had an erection, I leaned over the edge of the tub, took our son’s face in my hands and said, “Sometimes my dool gets hard when I don’t want it to. I just wait and it gets soft again. You do the same thing. Don’t get upset. Just wait and it will go back to being soft.”

My son’s eyes widened with a feeling so big it left him speechless. I kissed his cheek and walked out, back to whatever it was that I’d been doing. Later, my wife told me that after I’d left the room, he’d turned to her and said, in Persian, which is her native language and was his dominant language at the time, “Maman, dooleh baba sefteh!” (Mom, Dad’s penis gets hard!) We puzzled briefly over what, specifically, he might have meant, and I tried to remember if, when I was a boy, any of my adult male relatives had talked to me about my own body in a similar way, offering themselves as a reflection of my biological maleness and the stance I might take towards it. I don’t think anyone ever did, but I did recall a moment when I was no older than six or eight in which I caught a glimpse of what I might have learned if someone had.

My father and I were in the locker room getting ready to leave the beach. His back was to me and he was talking about something I couldn’t listen to because he was naked. My eyes wandered among the whorls of black fur that ran from the nape of his neck, along his shoulders and arms, down is back and into the dark cleft of his buttocks. When he turned around, I could see where the hair of his back met the hair of his front in the bush between his legs. His penis hung like a pendulum, swinging slowly between his thighs when he walked, and I wondered if it got hard like mine did, if he played with it like I’d begun to do. I wanted to run and throw my arms around him, to pass through his skin and know what it would mean to live with such size. I was hungry with the prescience that his body would someday be mine, that my body was his in the making.

Read the rest of this entry »

“My Daughter’s Vagina” is the title of an essay I wrote about five years ago that was published online here but that I have never really felt comfortable with as a finished piece. Not too long ago, I came up with the idea of serializing the essay on my blog as I revised it, and so here I am. I originally had in mind that I wanted say a few things about the nature of the essay, but I think that, for the most part, it’s better that I just let the piece speak for itself. I will say that “My Daughter’s Vagina” is long, around 27,000 words, and so I will have to ask for your patience in letting the piece unfold at the pace that I am able to set for revising it; and I will also say that the goal of the piece is not to argue any particular position, but rather to raise questions about gender, sex and sexuality and explore them from within my own experience as a man in this culture. The narratives in the essay are deeply personal and very revealing, and do not always show me in the kindest of lights. I hope you will understand, therefore, that while I am perfectly comfortable reading and discussing good faith critiques of how I understand my experience in the essay, I am not going to tolerate any comments that even remotely resemble personal attacks on me or on anyone else who chooses to comment. Other than that, I am, for now, going to leave the comments section open to all comers. So, here goes:

My Daughter’s Vagina, Part 1

The first time a woman opened her legs long enough that I could look for more than the few seconds it took to bend to her with lips and tongue, or to climb up blind into her and start moving, I crouched between her thighs to get as close as I could, and I remember even now how the words began to list themselves in my head: pussy, beaver, twat, slit, fur, love muscle, muff, quim, cabbage, snatch, box…and all of them but one felt inadequate; and that was the one I wanted most not to use, not even to think, the one I’d come to understand as degrading of my lover by its very existence; and yet, somehow, no other word but cunt captured in my imagination the wet and hairy wildness, the pungent and disheveled and untamed and multi-shaded pink and red and brown and flesh-colored and even deep violet beauty of what I was looking at. I’d seen pictures of course, plenty of them, had discovered as a young teenager that I grew hard at the sight of them, but those images of carefully coiffed, sometimes completely shaven, meticulously arranged specimens of female genitalia were, I suddenly understood, so obviously composed, so clearly intended as artifice, that I felt, looking at my lover, as if I were seeing a cunt for the first time.

The more I stared, the more uncomfortable she became. “What are you looking at? Is something wrong down there?”

And when I didn’t respond right away, “Answer me!”

“You’re beautiful,” I answered, and I know it sounds like something out of a romance novel, but the words came in a whisper, and I looked up at her and I smiled, and then I tried in everything I did next with fingers and my lips and my tongue to make sure she knew I meant what I’d said; and when she asked me to fuck her, her words, not mine, tears–but how do I write this without sounding like I’m bragging? How do I make you see that this memory, even more than it makes me feel good about myself (which of course it does), humbles me and fills me with awe and gratitude–tears were filling her eyes. It was, she explained as we lay together afterward, the first time a man had told her she was beautiful “down there,” much less made love to her in a way that convinced her he really meant it.

“And all those other times,” I wondered to myself. “What had I meant then? What had she understood my meaning to be?”

///

The fundamentally alien universe that a woman’s experience of sex is to me. That mine is to her. So fully do we romanticize heterosexual lovemaking as a communion of souls, a synthesizing of opposites, the fulfillment and expression of our deepest emotional needs, that it’s easy to forget just how inaccessible the interior landscapes of male and female sexual embodiment are to each other. Or, perhaps more to the point, how strongly this romanticization invites our forgetfulness, encourages, even mandates that we refuse to see just how deeply, when it comes to sex, physical differences divide us.

When I began this essay, I was teaching an independent study project in creative nonfiction with two women, each of whom wanted to write about gender and sexuality, exploring specifically the meaning and consequences of the childhood sexual abuse she had survived. One of the books I asked them to read was Andrea Dworkin’s Intercourse, which is too often, and inaccurately, understood as arguing that heterosexual sex is by its nature–man penetrating, woman penetrated–a tool of the patriarchy and therefore exists almost solely to demean and exploit women. Given the way Dworkin writes, this is not a difficult misreading to come to, especially for college sophomores who are encountering her ideas for the first time, and so when my students asked me whether Intercourse should indeed be read that way, I suggested we discuss the following quote from the section called Occupation/Collaboration: “The political meaning of intercourse for women is the fundamental question of feminism and freedom: can an occupied people–physically occupied inside, internally invaded–be free […]?”

Easy to misinterpret and dismiss–after all, how can a woman who willingly has intercourse be understood as having been occupied and invaded, with all the connotations those words carry of warfare and colonization?–Dworkin’s question is less about any given woman’s personal experience of intercourse than it is about the nature of female identity. For while a clear distinction exists in most people’s imagination between a woman’s experience of rape and her experience of the kind of intercourse to which the term lovemaking is meant to refer, focusing on that distinction tends to obscure the fact that heterosexual intercourse is also generally understood in our culture–perhaps along with menstruation–to be the defining moment of femaleness and womanhood. More to the point, and this is what I understand the crux of Dworkin’s question to be, if a woman cannot be understood to exist fully as a woman until her body has been “physically occupied inside, internally invaded” by a man, then it doesn’t really matter how tender and/or loving and/or intensely pleasurable intercourse is for her. The freedom of her body was already compromised, by definition, not merely before she had sex, but even before she was born. If, in other words, intercourse is what makes a woman a woman, or, perhaps more precisely, if what makes a woman a woman in patriarchal culture is her capacity for being genitally penetrated–which means intercourse is both an expression and confirmation of her gender–then the question arises whether the difference between the kind of intercourse most people describe as lovemaking and the kind we call rape can accurately be described as one of kind. Maybe, Dworkin is asking, this difference is more properly described as one of degree, since in each case a woman is fulfilling the mandate of her socially prescribed gender identity.

I’d come to class prepared with references to passages in my students’ own essays that helped to demonstrate the validity of Dworkin’s question, but something in their eyes told they’d already gotten it and that to say more than what I have paraphrased above would have been both superfluous and self-serving. For now matter how important I thought Dworkin’s question was, it would never mean the same thing to me as it did to them, and so I fell silent, letting the room fill with the gap of otherness that had opened between us; and it was in this silence, watching the faces of these two women who had placed their trust in me both as a teacher and, given what they wanted to write about, as a man, that my imagination made the leap that was the starting point of this essay: Had I lived a different life–that of my parents, for example, who married when they were in their very early twenties–one of those two women was young enough that she could’ve been my daughter. I don’t mean that I felt fatherly towards her, or that she saw me as a father figure, but this abrupt awareness of the age difference between us brought me back to a conversation my wife and I had been having about whether or not to conceive a second child. I thought about how, if that still-hypothetical offspring turned out to be a girl, she would grow up–I would have to raise her–in a world where the validity of Dworkin’s question inhered, inescapably, in the fact of her body. I thought about how I would, from the first moments of her life, face this daughter across the same terrain of difference that was separating me from my students, and I thought about how, precisely because she would be my daughter, that silence would not be an option.

“And so what,” I almost asked myself out lout, “what will I say to her?”

 Cross-posted at It’s All Connected.

In her response to Barry’s cartoon, Seelhoff writes, “To compare radical feminists to the Religious Right is propaganda, it is a smear campaign, it is disingenuous, and it is transparently and hatefully misogynist.”

I disagree.

In some discussions of transphobia, I’ve seen radical feminists say things like what makes a woman is her ability to bleed and have children. Here’s one such comment, made by Sally C on I Blame the Patriarchy.

“Knowing that someone is a woman does not tell me anything about her fate, but it does tell me she knows what I know about what it’s like to bleed.”

I am a woman-born woman who experiences problems with mensturation and fertility. Sally C goes on to call women “the tribe that bleeds.”

I do not bleed.

What galls me about this logic — apart from the fact that it’s bad, as no one proferring this definition means to exclude me from being a woman (my existence is being ignored/erased, rather than repudiated) — is that it’s extremely similar to the logic, the specific logic, that I hear from the religious right who also claim that a woman is defined by her uterus and reproductive capacity.

I don’t know what defines woman. As commonly phrased, it is a boring and irrelevant question, as has been acknowledged. It is attempting to take a semantic concept — woman — and reify it in a way in which it can not be reified. The truth is that the concept woman is complicated. It is not binary, it is not either/or, it is not on/off.

When we add the concept of gender, the whole of it becomes even more complex.

The question of womanhood is interesting for class analysis. But we should always expect there to be outliers. There are children with ambiguous genitals. There are XX infants that develop with male external genitalia and uteruses. There are infants whose gender identity does not match their physical bodies. There are women who can happily don male clothing and live out a masculine life — and there always have been. Equally, there are women who could never bear that. I am not part of “the tribe that bleeds,” but I am feminine. I abhor the oppression of women, but I want to live as one.

My external genitalia can tell you certain things about me. It indicates likelihoods and probabilities. It indicates that I am part of the class that is likely to undergo sexual abuse or harassment, although I have been fortunate enough to live most of my life free of these things. It indicates that I probably was urged toward the arts and social sciences, instead of the hard sciences. It indicates I was probably touched less often as an infant than my brothers were; it indicates that I am likely to be paid .76 on the dollar compared to men in my profession.

It indicates these likelihoods, but it does not make them fact. I am an individual. Some probabilities apply. Others do not.

The idea that biology bleeding creates women is part of an essentialist stance — a stance that is shared by many sectors of the religious right. It reduces my varied experiences to the fact of my blood or lack thereof: an inadequate measure.

Sex is a continuum, with most people falling to one side or the other. Gender is a constellation.

I am feminine, and I am sexed female, but I do not bleed.

I have never been raped. I have never given birth to a child. I have dominated class discussions. I have been oppressed. I have been a bully. I have endured undesired sexual contact. I have slapped a sexual partner. I have come top in my class in math and science, as well as english and history. I have used my privilege to make asinine comments about other women to try to gain favor in social power structures where I was floundering. Equally, I have ridden on top of other structures.

A transwoman may have a different set of experiences and privileges. Yes, she will have been raised with some version of male privilege — although, if the women I know are any indication, the male privilege they will have received will have been much closer to my memory of childhood than my fiance’s. They will have been bullied and abused for being too feminine, and sometimes treated as though they were girls because their sense of femaleness was present even when they were male-bodied. A transwoman I know well wrote female characters in our creative writing classes; where other men were petted and praised for “daring” to cross gender lines, her cross-gender writing was never highlighted; it seemed more easy and realistic than her male narrators.

A transwoman and I are different. She will have to struggle to overcome the male privilege of her childhood. But we are not different like on and off on a flipped switch; we have both had our turns at oppressor and oppressed.

More, we are not totally defined by our childhoods. How I act now affects my life. Someone raised with male privilege can repudiate it in part, if not in whole. A transwoman will have an easier time rejecting the social aspects of male privilege, as she likely will cease to be accorded them. Internally, she may struggle with ghosts of old experiences. But her childhood is not the whole of her experience. She will continue to be shaped.

Your rejection of her is based in biological essentialism and binary thinking. Your argument shares traits with segments of the religious right, who also view gender as binary and physically based. These are similarities. You may shudder under that comparison, but it remains. It’s legitimate to compare things that are similar.

True enough, that comparison doesn’t continue to hold true. Radical feminists are not like the religious right when it comes to acknowledging and fighting against the oppression of female subservience in the home. But the comparison does not need to be true in all points for it to be legitimate; it only needs to be true at the point of comparison. No one is claiming that radical feminists and the christian right are wholly indistinguishable. The only claim is that on the single point of transphobia based in biological essentialism, both transphobic radical feminists and transphobic christian conservatives sound the same. Transphobic radical feminists and transphobic christian conservatives are united in the biological essentialism that leads them to the bigotry of transphobia.

A note to commenters: I am locking this to feminists only. I would like this to be a safe space for radical feminists who are interested in seeking dialogue, and also for transsexuals. If it’s acheivable, I would like Daisy and Nexyjo to feel safe in the same discussion. Please avoid saying things like “this exemplifies everything that’s fucked up about radical feminism” — that’s incendiary and unfriendly. Please also don’t mistake my own positioning; I often agree with radical feminists over people who identify as sex-positive. While I don’t necessarily believe that oppression of women is the original oppression (I don’t see how such theories can ever be proven), I do have a number of philosophical points of connection with radical feminists, as well as great respect for radical posters here including (but not limited to) Bean, QGrrl, Bonnie, Ms. Xeno, Pheeno, and Ginmar.*

However, bigotry against transsexuals is intolerable to me. I have a close transsexual friend who avoids most feminist blogs because of the nastiness that happens in threads like these. I refuse to support the kind of hatred that pushes people like her, already subject to isolation and bile from the rest of the world, closer to despair or suicide. Please remember we are discussing real people and real people’s lives.

*My apologies if any of you don’t identify as radical. I’m making some guesses.

Following up on Mandolin’s recent posts here on “Alas,” here are a few more discussions of the complexities of Female Genital Cutting (aka Female Genital Mutilation and Female Genital Surgery):

Official Shrub dot com: Why I Cringe When Western Feminists Discuss FGC

This is not to say that Western feminists ought to ignore FGC, or never examine patriarchal tendencies in societies outside of our own. This is not to say that all examinations of FGC by Western feminists are innately imperialist. What I am saying is that we ought to be very careful of the judgments we make in the name of feminism, when that feminism can be used to obscure our own complicity in imperialism.

To return once again to Razack, she quotes from Isabelle Gunning to list some basic necessities for feminist analyses of international human rights: “1) seeing oneself in historical context; 2) seeing oneself as the “other” might see you; and 3) seeing the “other” within her own cultural context” (97). These steps do not give us a complete guide on how to avoid perpetuating imperialism through our feminism - but they’re a start.

ThinkNaughty: Female Genital Cutting, Sexuality, and Anti-FGC Advocacy

Interesting post from last year pointing out that many women who have had FGC don’t consider themselves “victims.” As I wrote in ThinkNaughty’s comments last year, though, I think this post, in trying to point out that the issue is more multifaceted than Western critics acknowledge, goes too far in the opposite direction by not quoting local female activists who oppose FGC.

How Pledge Associations Can End Female Genital Cutting

This essay by academic Gerry Mackie describes “pledge associations,” a strategy that historically worked to end footbinding in China — and is working to end FGC in some communities today. Mackie’s argument is that FGC, like foot-binding, is to a great extent perpetuated by the need for marriageability; the practice continues because parents and daughters fear that an uncut daughter will not be able to get married. Even parents who don’t themselves approve of FGC often still practice FGC, because to do otherwise is to risk ruining their daughters’ chances of marriage. But when a critical mass of people in a community jointly pledge to end FGC, that allows people to quit practicing FGC with reassurance that their daughters will remain marriageable.

If Mackie is to be believed, pledge associations — group, public declarations that a practice will be ended — were critical to ending Chinese footbinding, and are now working to end FGC.

Here’s a brief quote from Mackie’s essay that I’m including mainly because it dovetails with Mandolin’s posts:

Nondirective education works. Harsh propaganda backfires. The example of footbinding suggests, however, that it is appropriate in some circumstances for outsiders to state their opposition to FGC, but only if such opposition is factual, understanding, and respectful.

Suppose that a law professor is charged with the task of eliminating automobile usage in Los Angeles, and proposes this strategy: legal prohibition enforced by serious penalty. Because the professor has provided no alternative method of transportation, no one can stop driving. Because no one is able to stop driving, police and prosecutors will not waste their time picking out some poor Joe Blow for punishment. But there will black marks on a white page to satisfy the irate Oregonians and Bangladeshi who demand that the Angelenos stop their destructive driving habits. Criminal law works because thieves and murderers are a minority of the population that the state can afford to pursue with the cooperation of the majority of the population. It is not possible to criminalize the entirety of the population, or the entirety of a discrete and insular minority of the population, without the methods of mass terror. Reactance complicates the problem. The example of footbinding shows that legal prohibition comes at the end of the process of abandonment, not at its beginning. Legal prohibition that is not the expression of local popular will on the subject is ineffective if not undemocratic. Europe and America have every right to prohibit FGC among their inhabitants, however, because FGC is a mistaken practice, and also because the children of the immigrants aspire to participate in their uncut host societies…

Larvatus Provodeo: Putting Her Money Where Her Mouth Is

Kim at Larvatus Provodeo is looking for a few good comments on FGC — and she’s willing to pay for them.

For every comment on this post which discusses the issue seriously without turning it into a political football, attributing motives to bloggers or indulging in disputation about religion, politics, culture wars, or clashes of or within civilisations, I will donate two dollars to The Foundation for Women’s Health, Research and Development up to a maximum of two hundred dollars.

As far as I can tell, Kim hasn’t reached her limit and her offer hasn’t been closed, so go leave a comment.

The point of these discussions, in my opinion, is not to say that there’s nothing we can do to bring about a major reduction in FGC. Rather, the point is that what’s most effective may be different from what seems most uncompromising and hardcore. It’s right that Western feminists feel anger and horror at FGC, but we have to be careful that our approach to FGC remains effective, aware of the problems of colonialism and racism, and serves women — rather than serving our own need to feel like we’re doing something.

As I wrote in comments of Mandolin’s post, it’s mistaken for Americans to think that we have the ability to change whatever we want about other cultures, if only we’re determined enough. (See: Iraq.) Very often there is no beneficial solution the US has the ability to implement. Even in cases where US motives are not imperialistic, we still have only limited power to make real improvements.

When it comes to FGC, if there’s any alternative in which we can prevent untold numbers of girls being mutilated and dying, then obviously that is what we must favor. But I don’t see any sign that such an alternative exists; and as Mandolin argued, there’s good reason to think that western pressure on the Egyptian and other governments to institute bans makes things worse, leading to more mutilation and death.

Curtsies to Katie and to The Rook’s Not To Blame for the links.

On Pandagon, Amanda relates what she calls some good news: Egypt has outlawed FGM.

From the article:

Officially the practice, which affects both Muslim and Christian women in Egypt and goes back to the time of the pharoahs, was banned in 1997 but doctors were allowed to operate “in exceptional cases”.

On Thursday, Health Minister Hatem al-Gabali decided to ban every doctor and member of the medical profession, in public or private establishments, from carrying out a clitoridectomy, a ministry press official told AFP.

On the Pandagon thread, a commenter called Dan writes: “Obviously, banning FGM is always a step in the right direction…”

I am not convinced that this is obvious. Nor am I necessarily convinced that this outcome is good news.

Some Background
One thing that one learns in the study of anthropology is that culture is a holistic entity. That means that you can’t split it up into tiny bits and interact with those bits piece by piece. You can’t hold up — say — dowry burnings and say “this is what dowry burning is, this is what it means” outside the context of the rest of the culture, anymore than you could hold up “I Love Lucy” to people who didn’t understand Western gender roles or Western materialism or a Western sense of humor and expect them to understand it.

Female genital surgeries (FGS) are the same way; they exist within a cultural context that gives them meaning. The cultural contexts are different, so the meanings are different.

Let me take a brief digression to deal with the issue of terminology. I’m going to call the procedures FGS, which is the term that an anthropologist friend of mine favors when he teaches Intro to Anth. FGS is not a perfect term. However, it is an attempt to ameliorate some of the problems with other terms. Female genital mutilation (FGM) is a term that many African women, and others, object to as stifling conversation because the term itself is alienating and inflammatory. Female circumcision is inaccurate, and leads to a false equivalency between male and female circumcision since it creates an ersatz linguistic link between the two procedures.* FGS is an attempt at a middle ground.

Female genital surgeries exist in many different forms, in many different cultural contexts. Here are some of the physical manifestations of the surgery:

• Nicking of the clitoris or removing the tip of the clitoris - relatively unusual
• Clitorodectomy - the most common form of FGS, involving removal of the clitoris. Often practiced along with the removal of the labia minora. May or may not be accompanied by a procedure intended to kill the clitoral nerve, such as pressing hot needles into the affected area.
• Infibulation - the removal of the clitoris, labia minora, and labia majora. The inner walls of the vagina are scraped and then sewn together, leaving a hole as small as a woman’s pinky finger. This procedure can make menstruation and urination very difficult and lead to an increased probability of health complications like uterine prolapse. Tough, inelastic scar tissue is unyielding, making birth a dangerous process. Infibulated women must be cut open for sex and birth, and are often resewn afterward.

FGS are also done for a variety of reasons. Each culture that practices FGS will be practicing its own variation — in terms of what the surgery consists of, and why it is done. For this reason, it’s very difficult to talk about FGS as a monolith. And there’s a good reason for that. FGS are not a monolith.

For instance, it’s not uncommon to encounter feminists arguing that FGM is done to eliminate female sexual pleasure, or to prevent women from cheating. FGS are not done solely for either of these reasons, although they are some of the reasons stated by some cultures.

For the Kikuyu in Kenya, who practice clitorodectomy, FGS is practiced as a rite of passage in order to create a more visible separation between men and women. The clitoris, or masculine part, is removed to make the woman more womanly (conversely, the foreskin which is seen as being like the labia, is removed to make men more manly). Therefore, any attempts to eliminate FGS among the Kikuyu will have to react to these cultural motivations.

It would be inappropriate for the same solutions to be attempted among the Kikuyu as would be used in infibulation-practicing East African countries like Ethiopia and Somalia, countries that are very patriarchal and have clear interests in establishing inheritance laws. Unlike the FGS practiced by the Kikuyu, Ethiopian and Somalian infibulation appears to arise from an interest in protecting paternity rights (Carolyn Martin Shaw). They want to make sure that inheritance goes to genetic sons. Women - often upper-class women - bear the brunt of this (as they did in Europe with chastity belts, in the middle east with seclusion, in China with footbinding) because the patriarchy (supported by both men and women) views them as vessels for heirs. Reducing their ability to become pregnant by men who are not their husbands makes it more likely that inheritance will go to genetic heirs. Cultural practices grow around this desire. Later, these practices are fetishized.

Clitorodectomy and infibulation are both practiced by some cultures that believe the touch of a woman’s uncircumcized genitals will sap a man of his ability to hold an erection, cause hydrocephally, and/or kill any infant the woman bears. This myth is enduring. You may think that decades of interaction with white women who are uncircumcized and yet able to bear children would have shaken the myth, but this is often not the case. White women often choose not to bear children or to bear very few children, which means that white women are often seen as infertile. Thus it is possible for African women from FGS-practicing cultures to interact with uncircumcized white women and still believe that circumcision is necessary for fertility.

The point of all this is: FGS is not something that exists in isolation. It exists for particular reasons. You don’t get rid of those reasons by changing the law. All you do is create a situation in which the reasons still exist (need for a rite of passage, to ensure paternity, to ensure fertility), but the traditional method of meeting those needs has been outlawed.

Laws Against FGS Analogized to Laws Against Rape

On a Feministe thread about the ban, Jill writes in defense of the law. “I don’t think anyone is saying FGM is going to disappear,” she writes, acknowledging that the ban will not be a cure. She goes on to say, “But it is important that they’ve outlawed it, since that reflects a profound social shift, and it allows people to be prosecuted for it… Rape laws don’t get rid of rape, but I’d rather have them than not.”

I think Jill is erring in comparing FGS to rape. FGS is a culturally sanctioned, overt part of how the society functions. Rape is at best a covert part of our cultural function. While it holds up patriarchy by limiting women’s movements, it also subverts patriarchy because it is a threat to paternal property. FGS is not like that.

In my opinion, a better analogy would be to compare FGS to - say — capture marriage as its practiced in Nepal, in which a young man kidnaps a young woman and marries her by force. To western eyes, these marriages look superficially abhorrent (and they’re certainly not 100% good). But we’re missing the subtleties of the capture marriages. These marriages are often arranged before hand and approved by both families as a way of allowing a young couple to marry when they do not have the financial resources to put on a huge wedding. In many (I think most) capture marriages, the woman is not actually in danger, or experiencing surprise; she feigns both ritualistically. However, the bride is not always told of the capture marriage beforehand. Capture marriages are a culturally sanctioned process which serves particular culturally sanctioned purposes (allowing a way for the children of families who have fallen on hard times to marry), and which puts the interest of families above the interests of the woman.

It would be possible to make laws against capture marriage, in ostensible defense of the woman’s independence. However, the kinds of laws that tend to get enacted in situations like these are made with a western gaze. We see the surface effect of a capture marriage and apply it to known situations — the biblical Sabine women of Roman mythology, for instance. We aren’t looking at the reasons why capture marriages exist, or how they are rooted in the culture. Addressing the symptom by making capture marriages illegal may actually make the situation worse for women.

And this is what we have seen, time and time again, with regard to legal remedy for FGS.

A Brief Overview of Some Historical Consequences of Outlawing FGS

Missionaries who got down to Africa really didn’t like FGS. Well, I don’t either. Many of them did what seems like the logical thing to do when you are in ostensible control of a group of people who are doing something that you think is a major violation of human rights, moral decency, and God’s law. They decided to ban it.

Early bans had a number of consequences (not all of which occurred in all places).

• Circumcision began to be performed on younger and younger girls. Because it was less likely that missionaries or western colonial agents would be messing in the lives of infant or very young girls, and because infants and very young girls would be less likely to understand what was going on well enough to discuss it with missionaries or western colonial agents, it made sense to do it on younger girls. (Here, again, we reach the problem with discussing FGS as a monolith. Some cultures started out performing FGS on younger girls. But many didn’t, and many of those started performing the surgeries on younger and younger girls.)

  Why is this a problem for women? Among other things, it decreases the likelihood of sexual function. Among the Kikuyu of Kenya, circumcision rituals were proceded with kinds of genital stimulation and body play that appear to have been intended to teach women how to orgasm once they had been cut. Adolescent girls and boys would wrap their bodies in tight strips of leather and rub up on one another. This kind of all-body stimulation is likely to have been instructive in helping women adjust to the altered physical sensations of a circumcized body. When circumcisions are done at a younger age, these kinds of rituals are likely to decline or disappear altogether.

  Women are also much more likely to acheive sexual pleasure after circumcision if they have orgasmed before circumcision. This is, obviously, more likely to be the case in girls who are adolescents than girls who are toddlers or infants.

  Circumcisions and younger ages also contribute to:

• The destruction of social practices that surround circumcision, such as coming of age rituals, that provide context and meaning to the procedure. These contexts may not have anything to do with sexual pleasure (which is why I’m making this its own category), but are likely to have to do with community building and the function of a healthy culture. Destroying these rituals, but KEEPING the circumcision, is the opposite of good. The better option, of course, is to figure out how to keep the rituals while changing their object (as some activists have worked on doing).
• Circumcision was often driven underground, to be done in private, furtive spaces, which makes it difficult for the procedures to be done in clean, healthy ways that minimize risk to the girls.

Perhaps the most important effect of banning FGS is that it created a dichotomy, the effects of which activists are still dealing with today. It underlined the idea that female genital surgeries are African, and not practicing female genital surgeries is American. Not to practice female genital surgery is to capitulate to colonialists. To practice FGS is to be genuinely African.

When Western feminists insist on framing the discourse about FGS on our terms, we make this problem worse. When we emphasize statements like, “African women are being denied sexual pleasure,” as if it were the worst part of the situation, we grind home this dichotomy.

It has been repeatedly proven to be much more effective to talk about FGS in terms of women’s and children’s health. FGS kills women and children. According to a study linked by Feministe last year, women who’ve undergone infibulation are 50% more likely to die or to lose their infants than women who have not. Women who’ve undergone clitorodectomy are 15% more likely to die or to lose their infants in childbirth than women who have not.

This is the kind of information that tends to persuade women, because it is culturally situated. It addresses what they are worried about. Sexual pleasure tends to be coded as decadent and western. It is therefore not only not of concern, but can be specifically opposed. It’s therefore not always useful to talk to African women about it. Our insistence on framing the narrative in our terms can damage African women’s actual lives.

Because while sexual pleasure is a big deal, in my personal opinion, poor childbirth outcomes are probably a bigger deal. Spreading HIV through the use of dirty razor blades is a bigger deal. Injury and lameness are bigger deals. Uterine prolapse is a bigger deal. Death is a bigger deal.

There are real world harms to the ways in which westerners have typically framed debates about FGS. The dichotomy I mentioned earlier, where FGS is coded as genuine, African, and anti-colonial, gained teeth during the pan-African movement. Since that time, in some places, FGS has become a marker of cultural superiority. Cultures that did not practice FGM have taken it up, in order to emulate other cultures that are considered more prestigious. And other cultures that did not practice FGM have taken it up, specifically in order to show that they are African and anti-colonial. Our attempts to legally ban FGS have not lessened cultural attachment. They’ve increased it.

The Egyptian Ban, in Particular
Read the rest of this entry »

Some paparazzi took pictures of actress Maggie Gyllenhaal breastfeeding her child in public. Somehow I missed this, when the “scandalous” photos were taken a couple weeks ago. They are posted all over the place at entertainment blogs. I thought I would pick out a few choice comments from sexist pigs for your reading (dis)pleasure.

Here are some comments from A Socialite’s Life

Here’s one from Conrad:

I am sure plenty of women find this beautiful, but thats a beauty that needs to be shared between mother and child in a quiet, discreet location. She had to know 1 million plus ASL readers would be viewing this spectacle. I never had much of an opinion of her, but now I know she’s an animal. It reminds of that childhood question - “what’s grosser than gross…”

Another from What Betheny said:

Gross. I like her, but this picture is gross. There are more private ways to breastfeed your baby in this country. We’re not living in Africa. I can’t stand the self-righteous breastfeeding moms who just show absolutely everything without thinking for one minute that just maybe not everyone is comfortable with seeing their body parts and their child sucking off of them. It’s a personal bond between you and your baby, so make if personal.

Now here is the good news: most people on the thread were supportive (at least the last time I read the comments a week ago).

Then, you have this site, where they put up a not safe for work warning and blurred out her breast (But apparently the pictures in this post are A-OK). Here are a few of the comments (out of 490+).

From eva:

hmmm… imo if you want to breastfeed in public, pump your tits at home, bottle it, and feed them that way.

From combustion8:

shes so ugly… look at that puppy sag.

From Frenchie:

Ewww…not good. She could have covered up a bit with a blanket. I know it’s a natural act but that is pretty tacky. Her tit hanging all over the place is not natural. She should be more conscientious of not offending the general public by being more subtle.

From Rebecca:

Discusting! I’ve seen women do that before but at least they had the decency to cover their breasts. What a freakin peasant! Yes breastfeeding is natural but so is urinating and defecating, does this mean we’ll catch people doing that in public too? This is what I call no self-respect. (Gee where has Rachel heard this one before.)

I couldn’t bare to read through all of the comments. This thread had many breastfeeding defenders even though it wasn’t quite as pro-breastfeeding as the other thread.

The fact that this was covered as a controversy reflects anti-breastfeeding attitudes. A few sites treated it as such, and I found a few that put disclaimers admonishing people to behave. A Hollywood actress is feeding her child in a public place should be a non-issue, and I even hesitated to post this. However, people do need to be reminded that many anti-breastfeeding attitudes are puritanical, sexist, and unhealthy. I think the number of commenters who feel the need to personally attack Gyllenhaal commenting on her appearance, her sexuality, and her morality (or supposed lack there of) is indicative of why breastfeeding is such an important feminist issue.

Shout Out to Jennifer at Black Breastfeeding Blog!

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.

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?”

And, you can be suspended from school for it.  Here is the story from the New York Times.

The three girls had been warned by teachers not to utter the word. But they chose to say it anyway — vagina — in unison at a high school forum, and were swiftly punished by their school.

Now the case of the three, all juniors at John Jay High School in this affluent hamlet 50 miles north of Manhattan, has become a cause célèbre among those who say that the school has gone too far, touching off a larger debate about censorship and about what constitutes vulgar language.

Is vagina, or the “v-word,” as some around here have referred to it, such a bad word?

“We want to make it clear that we didn’t do this to be defiant of the school administration,” said Megan Reback, one of the three girls, who all received one-day suspensions for using the word during a reading of “The Vagina Monologues” at the forum last Friday. “We did it because we believe in the word vagina, and because we believe it’s not a bad word. It shouldn’t be a word that is ever censored, and the way in which we used it was respectable.”

We actually had a discussion about this in my sexuality class in the first couple weeks of the semester.  The students seemed to agree that many (other) people thought vagina is a dirty word, but none of them expressed opposition to the word themselves. However, most of them agreed that vagina was considered a “dirtier word” than penis.  It was a good opportunity to talk about sexism and feminism. Now I’ve got to email them this article. 

The national office of Delta Zeta Sorority was disappointed with its chapter at DePauw University, so they decided to come in and conduct a review, which resulted in them purging the sorority of all of the women of color and the overweight women.  The New York Times reported on the story.  Here is a quote:

Worried that a negative stereotype of the sorority was contributing to a decline in membership that had left its Greek-columned house here half empty, Delta Zeta’s national officers interviewed 35 DePauw members in November, quizzing them about their dedication to recruitment. They judged 23 of the women insufficiently committed and later told them to vacate the sorority house.

The 23 members included every woman who was overweight. They also included the only black, Korean and Vietnamese members. The dozen students allowed to stay were slender and popular with fraternity men — conventionally pretty women the sorority hoped could attract new recruits. Six of the 12 were so infuriated they quit.

“Virtually everyone who didn’t fit a certain sorority member archetype was told to leave,” said Kate Holloway, a senior who withdrew from the chapter during its reorganization.

The article also suggests that one of the “problems” with the sorority was that it had a reputation for attracting brainy women, who were in math and science.  In order to revamp their image the national office of the organization tried to remake the sorority in a way that would make them more attractive to white fraternity guys, which apparently in their view meant that the women had to be skinny, white, and dumb.

This is not the first time the sorority engaged in discriminatory behavior.

This is not the first time that the DePauw chapter of Delta Zeta has stirred controversy. In 1982, it attracted national attention when a black student was not allowed to join, provoking accusations of racial discrimination.

Earlier this month, an Alabama lawyer and several other DePauw alumni who graduated in 1970 described in a letter to The DePauw, the student newspaper, how Delta Zeta’s national leadership had tried unsuccessfully to block a young woman with a black father and a white mother from joining its DePauw chapter in 1967.

Despite those incidents, the chapter appears to have been home to a diverse community over the years, partly because it has attracted brainy women, including many science and math majors, as well as talented disabled women, without focusing as exclusively as some sororities on potential recruits’ sex appeal, former sorority members said.

It sounds like the sorority was doing just fine.  If they needed to get their numbers up, they should have no problem attracting other intelligent women.

Unfortunately, this story supports all of the worst stereotypes of fraternities and sororities–they’re bigoted, party animals, who don’t care about school. 

Thanks to Rory for the link!

I’ve just read two very irritating articles in the guardian. Both purport to be about feminism and dieting - but both make Linda Hirschman’s version of feminism look like it belongs in ‘Notes from the First Year.’ Zoe Williams article is called You’re Vain and Stupid and the first sentance says: “Women who fixate on their weight should relinquish their right to be taken seriously.” I don’t even know where to start with this - when did women even win the right to be taken seriously? But the real reason Zoe Williams argument is not feminist is because it asks the question ‘why do women fixate about their weight’ and answers it ‘because they’re stupid’.

Feminism’s most basic tenet is women’s problems are structural and political, not individual. “Because women are stupid” is rarely a feminist answer to any question.

Even more annoying was India Knight’s reply to Zoe Williams (who are these people? I don’t know either - apparently they’re people that guardian readers would have heard of) titled It’s not anti-feminist to go on a diet (thanks to Big Fat Blog for the link). This is a misleading start, because India Knight didn’t just go on a diet, she wrote a diet book. At least part of her living now comes in telling other women how to lose weight. If this article is anything to go by she drums up business by making fat women feel worse about themselves (she asks “Why is it good to be pleased that you look like a pig?”)

What is so awful, so anti-feminist, about her article, is the narrative she tells about being fat:

You may occupy a great deal of physical space if you’re very fat, but in everyday life, it’s as though you weren’t there. Sales assistants stare blankly through you. Men pretend you don’t exist, or start calling you “mate”. You wonder whether your children are embarrassed to be seen with you in public (the answer to that one is yes, probably). You wish you could go for a bike ride with them, but you’re too self-conscious, because you look like a potato balanced on an ant. You can only buy clothes in specialist shops, and these clothes are as undesirable as you have started to feel. Your self-esteem - well, I was going to say “plummets”, but it’s hard to plummet when you’ve reached rock bottom.

She’s right - it sucks to be a fat woman in our society, it really fucking sucks. But every single example she gives isn’t directly about being fat, it’s about how people react to fat people. Her argument appears to be that men treat fat women like shit, so the solution is to stop being fat. That doesn’t resemble any kind of feminism I know.

She reaches a low point when she suggests weight loss as a solution for an abusive relationship:

just as I cheer for the woman whose husband puts her and her weight down every single day. One of these days, he’s going to have to stop. One of these days, she and her new-found confidence aren’t going to take it any more.

On first glance this is relatively trivial issue, which reminds me about everything that irritates me about the Guardian. But it’s actually about a much more fundamental issue, which is how we define feminism. This is what happens when we suggest individual solutions for collective problems. We all need to find ways to live as best we can with the problems that living in a misogynist world creates and I’d never criticise anyone else for feeling the need to lose weight or obsess about food. These sorts of survival mechanisms are neither feminist nor anti-feminist, they’re what you’ve got to do. It’s when your survival mechanisms make life harder for other women, for example if you denigrate fat women and reinforce society’s idea about the relationship between morality and food, then that’s anti-feminism. I think Emma Thompson summed up this dilema brilliantly:

As an artist, you can choose not to sell women down the river. When I decide, for instance, not to diet myself into a starved condition to play someone like Dora Carrington, then that’s a political act. And I was being lampooned by male journalists, saying: Who would want to sleep with her? She’s not that kind of shape. So I paid the price, but I would never betray other women in that way. I just wouldn’t do it and I’ve never done it. She pauses…. God, I’ve gone on every single diet under the sun, but I’ve never got slender in a very particular way for any role.

No being a feminist doesn’t give us magic powers to exit from a world that’s obsessed with our bodies. But it does mean, at a minimum, that we have a responsibility not to add to that pressure. For Emma Thompson that means she didn’t lose weight to play Carrington, for most of the rest of us it’s simpler, but possibly incredibly different, we have to stop talking about food and our bodies in any way that reinforces the hatred other women have for their bodies.

That certainly includes writing a diet book or saying that fat women look like pigs.

Sometimes its hard not to laugh at these headlines because they are so obvious.  I guess it is nice to have some research to back up the obvious–hence this report from the American Psychological Association on the negative effects of media sexualization on women and girls.  First, they operationalize sexualization:

The provocative research included a study of published research on the content and effects of virtually every form of media, including television, music videos, music lyrics, magazines, movies, video games and the Internet. Researchers also examined recent advertising campaigns and merchandising of products aimed toward girls.

Sexualization was defined by the APA Task Force on the Sexualization of Girls as occurring when a person’s value comes only from her/his sexual appeal or behavior, to the exclusion of other characteristics, and when a person is sexually objectified, e.g., made into a thing for another’s sexual use.

Then later they lay out the negative effects:

• Cognitive and Emotional Consequences: Sexualization and objectification undermine a person’s confidence in and comfort with her own body, leading to emotional and self-image problems, such as shame and anxiety.
• Mental and Physical Health: Research links sexualization with three of the most common mental health problems diagnosed in girls and women—eating disorders, low self-esteem, and depression or depressed mood.
• Sexual Development: Research suggests that the sexualization of girls has negative consequences on girls’ ability to develop a healthy sexual self-image.

The report also suggests families and health professionals take an active role in countering this trend.  They even suggest media literacy classes.  What is missing, unfortunately, is any direct accountability for media outlets.  The report does not suggest that media stop doing this; rather they suggest that we teach girls and young women how to cope with it. 

What do you think?  If we really wanted to take on patriarchal media capitalism, would it work, or should we focus more on teaching girls/women how to cope?  What kinds of actions could people use to get media outlets to change?  What about the good old fashioned boycott?  Is that dead?  What do you think?

Here is the link to the APA study.