In defense of the sanctimonious women's studies set || First feminist blog on the internet

Revisiting the Porn Debate

Chyng Sun attends the annual Las Vegas Adult Entertainment Expo for AlterNet:

Pornography encourages people to disregard others’ pain for one’s own pleasure. Many people I interviewed acknowledged that, based on their own experience and knowledge of the human body, certain sex acts they’ve watched in films likely would have been painful for the female performers. However, they argued that since the performers were paid, it was not the viewers’ concern, and they acknowledged that they get aroused watching it. That mentality helps create a world in which a producer can brag about having originated a popular video series that shows women gagging during forceful oral sex.

Although pornography is often rationalized as a celebration of women’s sexuality and liberation, some gonzo pornographers were direct about their anger and contempt (or their imagined customers’) for women. When asked why he used certain brutal sex acts in his films, one producer replied that when a man gets angry at his wife, he can imagine she is the one being violated.

Pornography has been primarily made by men and used by men. Men watch these videos for their own sexual stimulation. Men also told me that they tried acts they learned from pornography with – or on – their sexual partners. However, as pornography becomes increasingly mainstream, it is not surprising that women’s use of pornography is rising. Pornographers are eager to explore the female market, with some claiming to make women-centered pornography. However, looking at the repetitive content, whether male-centered or female-centered, the essential message is the same: All women want sex all the time, in whatever fashion men want them.

There isn’t much differentiating this article from previous criticisms of the porn indistry except for a couple of points. The first is that “Alberto Gonzales told senators he intended to make obscenity prosecutions a focus of his tenure as the nation’s chief prosecutor,” perhaps opening the doors for another round of the porn wars, a la former Attorney General Edwin Meese III.

The second is this, an observation that is largely missing from previous debates that I have read and participated in:

We should be afraid of government forces interested in repressing sexual expression. But we also should be afraid of the influence of misogynist pornography. These two fears are not mutually exclusive and can co-exist. Our fear of the former shouldn’t stop us from critiquing the latter.

I personally don’t want to revive the porn debate unless it is to ask why this is more socially acceptable than this. Most Americans would be disturbed, if not made indignant, by the most obvious of answers.

Letter to the Editor, And Other Things

I fired off a letter to the editor this evening after stewing over this information.

I read with disappointment that the amendment to the Indiana Constitution against gay marriage was again coming to the forefront of state politics. I was even more disappointed to find that the state legislature was considering two related bills, one that bans gays and lesbians from adopting or fostering children and one that revokes partner benefits from the state’s universities.

Of all the time, money, and energy that could be spent at the state level, why is homosexuality, of all things, the trendy political target?

Indiana is taking great strides to move backwards, and in the meantime wonders why the Brain Drain of our young, successful college graduates is so high and our national reputation is so dismal. Hoosiers will do well to remember that gays and lesbians are among our finest assets and that a queer dollar is still green.

A legitimate government is one that represents all it’s people, not a select few.

It was hastily written but it pithy enough to make a point, I think. And yes, I used some of your words. Y’all are good.

I haven’t been feeling well lately. My poor sleeping abilities are catching up with me, especially with this new evil schedule, and my eyes feel constantly strained. It’s time for glasses but I can’t afford the initial cost all at once. If I spend too much time in front of a computer screen, read a book, or knit with finer gauged yarn, the dizziness, nausea, and headaches set in. To top it off, I have yet to fully shed the cold that killed me last week. Thus, keeping up the blog has become a chore — quick cut and paste jobs done in short spurts to avoid feeling sick. I’m trying to finish knitting a sock, but had to put it down tonight and lay around in the dark. And further, reading for my classes is getting close to unbearable.

My sub-para job was easy but draining. I was reminded today that I am mother to the best five-year-old I have ever known. Not like that’s biased or anything.

Indiana Legislature Proposes Three Anti-Homosexual Bills

I was aware of only one of these bills, but Scott, a fellow Hoosier, alerted me to them.

The fact that I’m living in a conservative state isn’t news, and I knew that a marriage-protection amendment was bound to be coming. But I’m a little bit surprised that not one, but three anti-gay amendments have been introduced by my state legislators.

Yes, there’s the protection of marriage amendment, but there’s also a proposed amendment prohibiting a homosexual from being a foster parent or adopting; and an amendment to eliminate domestic partner benefits for all state university employees.

While I’ve always been less than thrilled about being an Indiana resident, I’ve also always contended that a good job and nice home were enough to keep me here and reasonably happy. But today, I wish this fucking state and 3/4 of its residents would sink into a swamp.

And on the national front, the New York Times is reporting that “a coalition of major conservative Christian groups is threatening to withhold support for President Bush’s plans to remake Social Security unless Mr. Bush vigorously champions a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage.”

Today, I’m with Scott; I wouldn’t mind if the whole damn state sank into a bog. Of all the state’s worries, of all the ways political time and taxpayer money could be spent.

I’m so angry there aren’t any words.

These proposals come shortly after the booting of the state’s Democratic governor in favor of Mitch Daniels. Yes, the Mitch Daniels who used to be the White House budget director who wants to clean up Indiana’s deficit by cutting funding to our public schools. The first one in the White House who resigned under accusations of insider trading. Yeah, him. I’m hoping those who are bringing these bills, primarily Brian Bosma, the house bigot, do not have a friend in Daniels.

But it doesn’t look hopeful.

Fiscal Responsibility Loses Popularity At White House


The White House estimated on Tuesday that the U.S. budget deficit for 2005, including an extra $80 billion for Iraq and Afghanistan operations, will total $427 billion. Senior officials asserted that fretting over the deficit is “definitely not punk rock.”

“In the 2006 budget that we release on Feb. 7, OMB will estimate that the 2005 deficit, including the outlay effects from the supplemental we are discussing today, will be 3.5 percent of GDP or in nominal terms $427 billion,” said a senior administration official in a news briefing.

He referred to supplemental spending of more than $80 billion for military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, making the White House estimate for the deficit higher than the $368 billion forecast by the Congressional Budget Office.

White House spokesman Scott McClellan insisted on Tuesday that fiscal responsibility and economic accountability “are so, like, 1999.”

Context to the Gender Intelligence Quotient

Via Brutal Women, this NYTimes article gives some context to the arguments surrounding biological differences in men’s and women’s intelligence voiced by Harvard president Summers:

The modest size and regional variability of the sex differences in math scores, as well as an attitudinal handicap that girls apparently pack into their No. 2 pencil case, convince many researchers that neither sex has a monopoly on basic math ability, and that culture rather than chromosomes explains findings like the gap in math SAT scores.

Yet Dr. Summers, who said he intended his remarks to be provocative, and other scientists have observed that while average math skillfulness may be remarkably analogous between the sexes, men tend to display comparatively greater range in aptitude. Males are much likelier than females to be found on the tail ends of the bell curve, among the superhigh scorers and the very bottom performers.

Among college-bound seniors who took the math SAT’s in 2001, for example, nearly twice as many boys as girls scored over 700, and the ratio skews ever more male the closer one gets to the top tally of 800. Boys are also likelier than girls to get nearly all the answers wrong.

For Dr. Summers and others, the overwhelmingly male tails of the bell curve may be telling. Such results, taken together with assorted other neuro-curiosities like the comparatively greater number of boys with learning disorders, autism and attention deficit disorder, suggest to them that the male brain is a delicate object, inherently prone to extremes, both of incompetence and of genius.

But few researchers who have analyzed the data believe that men’s greater representation among the high-tail scores can explain more than a small fraction of the sex disparities in career success among scientists.

Read the rest.

In the meantime, German scientists think women are bad drivers and poor map readers because of low testosterone and short index fingers. You know, it’s awfully hard to parallel park with hooves.

Knitting, Beans, Ed Blog and Summers

I made a lengthy post on my ed blog in response to a dissenting commenter on the Summers controversy.

In other news, I have a substitute job this Wednesday working with two little ones in a special needs classroom as a para-professional. One is sight-impaired and the other is hearing-impaired. I hope that the two years of ASL I’ve slogged through might pay off in a real world situation with one of the kids.

Today I have next to no responsibilities (for once). I got another wild Crockpot hair up my butt and decided to cook Navy beans and sausage for dinner — and what’s funny is that I’ve never really liked them. I had a craving. I also plan on preparing a sock so someone can help me pick up stitches along the heel flap at tonight’s knitting group, knitting a bit more on the Klaralund, doing some laundry, and reading a lot of Shakespeare that I don’t care about. In addition, I may add more to the ed blog on some issues I’ve been mulling over.

Other than that, today is a day for sweatpants. Excellent.

Wear It, Bitch: Musings on Beauty Culture and the Femme Feminist

Several years ago, Anne leveled an accusation at me that straight pissed me off. She said I was vain.

Me? Vain? Pshaw. I mean, I was only spending an hour on my daily beauty routine and maybe two hours for a really big night. Perhaps twenty or so hours a week on the stair machine and the weight benches at the YWCA. Vain? For real. There was an art to this package.

But the more I thought about it and shucked the initial repulsion of identifying myself with a culture I despised, the more I realized she was correct. I was spending an unbelievable amount of my time maintaining an image I didn’t value. I took it as a challenge, stopped blow-drying my hair, cut the makeup down to three products, and cut the shower routine down to soap, shampoo, conditioner, and a razor (and most of the time, not even the razor). I also cut back on the time at the gym, partially because the YWCA doubled their rates and I could no longer afford it. I substituted an at-home yoga and pilates routine which soon faded for more lifestyle-exercise activities.

To my genuine surprise, I didn’t look much different.

In fact, I looked healthier and more well-rested.

I never gave up the skirts and heels that I took up during a self-imposed pant boycott, partially because I like them and partially because nearly no one my age wears anything remotely similar except to job interviews. But I’ll tell you this, a skirt is far more comfortable than pants on most days.

I’m late to this article, a response to the lawsuit in which the court found that women can be fired for not wearing enough of, or the right, makeup:

Never again is anyone allowed to give me crap about how women naturally want to adorn themselves with makeup, as if there’s some genetic urge to look fake that’s wended its way here on the sparkly pink path of evolution. This ain’t biology. This is your government, endorsing your corporate lackey’s creepy-ass urge to make me turn my happy, natural face into a twisted parody of comeliness. This is some cosmetics executive getting rich on state-enforced gender norms.

This quote resonated with me as well.

Let’s not get into the question of whether it’s degrading or sexist for women to wear makeup. Sure, it might be for some women – but there are plenty of politically aware girls out there who like to get dolled up. The question here is whether women who are forced to wear makeup when men aren’t can be described as experiencing gender equality. The 9th Circuit’s opinion acknowledged that makeup costs money and takes time, then dismissed this point as “academic.” But if these costs are so insignificant, why not require Harrah’s to pay to keep its female employees looking as if they’d just had a makeover? Maybe the company could even pay these women for the time it takes to keep their faces properly clad.

My defiant nature dictates that anyone who requires me to adhere to a gender-based standard will quickly find me behaving in just the opposite fashion. The pedestal of femininity is not only a high place from which to fall, but I will whip that thing out from under me and hit you with it faster than you can blink. Nothing (nothing!) irritates me more than someone informing me how I or someone like me ought to appear or behave.

The operative term here is “ought.”

The lovely Bitch Ph.D. touches on these points in a completely unrelated post:

Now, by doing all this shit, I recognize that I am being shaped by (and myself contributing to) a system that judges women by how they look, that burdens us temporally and economically with adhereing to a fairly narrow standard…

At the same time, I do speak out about the falsehoods inherent in these systems. Should I walk the walk as well as talk the talk and refuse to play the game at all? Should I refuse to wear stylish clothing, refuse to spend $50 on a haircut, refuse to consider my appearance, eschew vanity? Doing so would, on one level, be consistent with my beliefs. But not entirely, because frankly, I enjoy this shit. I enjoy it when my colleagues whisper, “fantastic purse!” or “we were talking earlier about how great your shoes are!” after a meeting. I take pleasure in compliments, and I like it when people find me attractive. I’m not interested in a revolution where I can’t dance, and I think there is not a goddamn thing wrong with enjoying pleasure and flirting. I also, of course, reserve the right to schlep around and look like crap on a given day, and I’m not going to play the game of running other women down, and frankly I go through periods where I am more or less femmey (right now I’m in a femmey phase), and I’m cool with that too.

Because frankly, even while I can criticize the system, even while I can bitch about the beauty standard and point out the constructedness of gender and all of that, I am also well aware that I do live in that system. We all care about what we look like, even if the look we choose to project is “I don’t care about what I look like” or “fuck your fascist beauty standards” or “combat boots kick ass.” I can pull those looks off, too, and sometimes I do. But it is a fact that, if I stand up and identify myself as a feminist, the fact that I am femmey, the fact that I am married and have a kid, the fact that I have a Ph.D., gives my words a certain kind of weight.

In my unbiased opinion, the words of a femme feminist help, in some unenlightened circles, to defy the stereotypical feminist image. This notion in itself is inherently irritating — while my words are rarely different than, and rarely more poignant than, most feminists, the messenger sometimes makes the difference.

One of my goals here on the blog has been to mix the personal and political to an indefinable mush. We cannot easily divorce our politics from our personal experiences thus this has been my experiment in the opposite. I have found readers who have reluctantly begun to stick around and like what I have to say about feminism because something about the rest of my online persona appealed to them, just as I have had people in my tangible life who have approached me for my looks or femmey personality and been turned onto feminism by virtue of my physical persona.

While this wasn’t a conscious effort on my part, I have noticed over time that for some people, especially young women, the acceptance of the belief system and the feminist label are far more acceptable from someone who appears in every other way to be like them (and for young men, from someone physically unthreatening). Sometimes I want to hold them down and wash them of this silliness, but I usually tell carefully crafted stories about my coming out as a feminist at the same time I came out as an unabashed femme.

This may get me some criticism, but I’m not sure I care. As the doctor paraphrased: “I’m not interested in a revolution where I can’t dance.”

Anti-Abortion Catholic Group Targets Pro-Abortion Rights Catholic Politicians

Grab your torches, it’s a witchhunt!

American Life League, the nation’s largest grassroots Catholic pro-life educational organization, will hold a press conference on Monday, Jan. 24 at the Hyatt Regency on Capitol Hill. At the press conference, American Life League will unveil a two-page ad identifying the 72 pro-abortion Catholics in the U.S. House and Senate.

“This is the first time American Life League has publicly identified all pro-abortion Catholic Republicans and Democrats in both houses of Congress,” said Joe Starrs, Director of American Life League’s Crusade for the Defense of Our Catholic Church.

He sounds so proud.

“A public figure who claims to be Catholic cannot support the direct killing of preborn babies through abortion. It is our hope that the bishops will use this opportunity to counsel Catholic members of Congress who support abortion, impressing upon them the immorality of their stance and the gravity of maintaining such positions.”

Oh, I see. These poor politicians are just misguided. With enough guilt-tripping and bible-banging (I mean, “counseling”) they’ll see the light, give themselves back to Jesus, and halt the “preborn” fetus roast.

I love terms like “preborn,” really I do. Such language is precious. But be wary of any rhetoric coming from a group with “Crusade” in their name. It’s not only creepy, it alludes to the kind of sweeping accusatory judgement, supposedly from above, being hoisted on Congress next Monday.

Hell, I say we do what they want. Let’s uproot Vatican city, plunk it down right atop DC, and elect the Pope president for life. Sure beats democracy!

Black Thursday

Pouty Betty has returned to match my mood.

Do yourself a favor. Turn off the inaugural circle jerk and all the talk about political Providence. No god I am aware of would choose a man willing to lie, cheat, steal, and kill for his own ideological ends.

Today is Black Thursday and I’m holding my own one-woman countermovement. Dressed in black, yes I am, and no blogging until midnight. Further, I am devising even more long-term ways to divert my money from corporate entities to local entities and spread the word of what I know to be true. What can I do in the next four years that might make a difference in my immediate sphere? What can you do?

Media Girl has more counter-inaugural suggestions for those of us who cannot rip ourselves away from today’s responsibilities.