March 2005 – Feministe

P-Lo Plays Roadkill

Friday Random Ten – Now With Downloads!

Happy April Fools Day! If it’s Friday somewhere, it’s time for the FRT. No joke. Load up those mp3s, set to random play and list the first ten that grace your eardrums.

1) Iomos Marad – Each 1 Teach 1
2) Norman Greenbaum – Spirit in the Sky
3) Tanya Stevens – It’s Over Now
4) Shuggie Otis – Inspiration Information
5) Too Short – Pimp Shit
I woke up singing this one to myself on Thursday morning.
6) Danielson Familie – Lord, Did You Hear Harrison?
Download especially for Amanda, who will probably like this considering her hipster status and the egregious amount of Ween on her hard drive. The Danielsons make up the coolest Christian band I could ever fathom.
7) Le Tigre – Deceptacon
8) Musical Youth – Pass the Dutchie
9) Cibo Matto – Spoon
10) The Constellations – Let’s Face It, Our Kids Are Stupid

Highlighted songs are mp3s available for download, guilt-free I might add.

Survey for Political Bloggers

Via Media Girl comes this academic survey for political bloggers of all shades:

My name is Anahí Lazarte and I am agraduate student at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Currently I am working on a project related to political blogs. I am looking for volunteers to share their thoughts about blogging.

If you know of friends or family who also read political Blogs please forward this email to them. The survey needs to be completed by Sunday, April 3, at midnight.

Your responses will help communication research to study political blogging and the experiences of Blog users. The goal is to achieve a better understanding of how individuals relate to media and the Internet, and how they perceive the political information that is available across different media.

This survey is part of a graduate course, and it is still in its developing phase. Your feedback will be very important to improve the questionnaire.

Remember, participating in this survey is voluntary, and you can withdraw at any time. This survey is confidential.

Thanks! For additional info call 313-413-2128 or send an e-mail to alazar3@uic.edu.

If you read or write a political blog, take the survey.

Food For Thought

I’m tired and busy and sore and don’t feel like coming up with an appropriate and original title for this post or adding any commentary to anything I write.

But Chuck heard this funny little fact on NPR today, a fact with philosophical implications that I’m too tired to decipher:

The 44 Democrat senators represent about 3.5 million more people than the 55 Republican senators do.

Brings a new light to representative government, yes?

One Rumor and One More Injury

While waiting for my project partner to show up at my house (dude, where the hell are you?), I took a long walk to campus to get some iced chai. When I walked into the coffee shop, by this point dripping sweat down my forehead and off the upper lip as I tend to do when I get off my ass and start moving every Spring, two women sitting nearby on a couch looked at me and said, “Is that her?”

“I think so.”

“Go ask.”

“No!”

I looked over at them and the two broke out into shit-eating grins. They looked like grad students or fresh faculty. One said hello. I said hello back. Then I got my coffee and sat outside on the patio for a few minutes before I left. Though tempted to talk to them, I didn’t.

I’ve had a bit of paranoia lately about the blog and about people recognizing me on the street, especially since my full name is more visible now than ever and because I’ve gotten email from several people on campus inquiring about me. I’ve only been approached about this blog by one person and it was an uncomfortable experience. Sometimes I forget about the publicity of this thing, and just how different I feel in person as opposed to the somewhat planned and guarded nature of online writing.

I walked home and mused about the evening, wondering if my project partner would ever call me (still hasn’t), and realized as soon as I walked in the door that I had a massive blister on the bottom of my foot, buried under one of the thickest callouses on my feet. And yes, it fucking hurts.

Femininity and The Wimp Factor

Media Girl (in the comments of XX) points to this interview by Stephen J. Ducat, author of The Wimp Factor: Gender Gaps, Holy Wars, and the Politics of Anxious Masculinity. If you didn’t get the point of Hillary hatred, the recast of war hero Kerry into a Frenchman, or the offensiveness of calling Edwards “the Breck girl,” this book and interview will help you understand the fear of feminine that drives Republican rhetoric.

From the interview:

Stephen J. Ducat: In a culture based on male domination and in which most things feminine tend to be devalued, even if they are secretly envied, the most important thing about being a man is not being a woman. This powerful adult male imperative to be unlike females and to repudiate anything that smacks of maternal caretaking is played out just as powerfully in politics as it is in personal life. In fact, political contests among men are in many ways the ultimate battles for masculine supremacy. This makes disavowing the feminine in oneself and projecting it onto one’s opponent especially important. This femiphobia–this male fear of being feminine–operates unconsciously in many men as a very powerful determinant of their political behavior. It also constitutes a very significant motive for fundamentalist terrorism.

…Femininity, for male fundamentalists, is seen as a contaminant, and there is an attempt to repudiate those aspects of one’s self that seem feminine. This is something that fundamentalists around the world share. As I argue in the last chapter of my book, there is a surprising affinity between Christian fundamentalists in this country and the extreme Islamic fundamentalists elsewhere, when it comes to this kind of devaluation, repudiation and fear of the feminine.

BuzzFlash: You discuss “anxious masculinity” as exhibited by right wing America, the Bush Administration, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz and George Bush. Why “anxious?” Is it that their masculinity has got to be constantly reproven?

Stephen J. Ducat: Yes. In fact, the kind of hyper-masculine strutting that we see on display by right wing males is a defense. It’s a defense against this anxious masculinity, against their fear of the feminine. In a culture in which it’s so important to deny the feminine in men, masculinity becomes a really brittle achievement. It’s quite Sisyphean–you know, you can never quite get there. You’re always having to prove it.

Part of the reason is that this type of masculinity is defined largely in terms of domination. The problem is that domination–either in a personal or a global context–can never be a permanent condition. It’s a relational state. It’s dependent on having somebody in a subordinate position. That means you could be manly today, but you’re not going to be manly tomorrow unless you’ve got somebody to push around and control, whether that is an abused wife or another country. So this kind of masculinity is really brittle.

In the meantime, I’d like to point out that the market on “femiphobia” is not cornered by fundamentalists. I see plenty of liberals, radicals, and progressives play out these same ideas on a daily basis, and in the meantime lauding feminist ideals as quickly as they subvert them. Oftentimes, women aren’t involved in these conflicts of masculinity except to serve as the anti-masculine metaphor for the political strut-fest du jour.

I Got Your Education Right Here

I may be a bad person for finding this hilariously funny, but the poetic justice of this one is too beautiful to ignore.

Oh, Schadenfreude. Via Bitch Ph.D. comes a digital smack-down in which a young woman gets the kind of education she definitely wasn’t looking for. A young woman on the Dean’s List of a Midwestern college contacts this author to write a paper for her on Hinduism. What she didn’t know is that she was talking to a man with an English degree that he worked for himself.

Things Ms. Plagiarism Learned In College:
· Never give your name to a stranger on the internet.
· Do your own work.
· If you decide to lift a paper off the internet, proofread. Look for things like “I made a doody,” and, “Your actions in each lifetime affect your karma, and if a Shudra watches dharma and greg, it will have a positive effect on his karma, perhaps elevating him into a class in which she will be allowed to study the Vedas and progress along its spiritual path.”
· Getting an F you deserve is far more respectable than an A you don’t.
· It is best to honor that part of your classroom syllabus and university policy that says it will punish plagiarism to its greatest extent. You may very well get called out.

Women, Video Games, and Politics

Astarte of Utopian Hell and XX has an awesome post on the nature of women and video games, drawing a correlation between the ways women are handled when seen as a demographic target for tech developers and the way women are drawn in the world of politics.

I’ve been doing a great deal of research within the last few months on women and video games. I’ve printed off about a dozen articles and studies, and made bookmarks to sites dedicated to nothing but this sort of research. Over the weekend, I received in the mail used copies of two of the only textbooks on the issue, and while reading through the first one, I started to realize how closely the plight of women in video games lines up with the plight of women in politics.

The two genres hold a variety of often frightening similarities. Politicians claim that they have fewer female politicians because women simply choose not to go in that direction with their time. Video Game Makers claim that they have few to no female game buyers and players because fewer women choose to purchase the video games, though if you corner them, they’ll tell you that women are not the target market of most video games. The same has gone on in the world of politics and political punditry. Again and again we’re told that we are not the ‘target market’.

Why aren’t we the target market? It’s easy and hopeful to think that women /can/ have access to this wonderful market, this beautiful piece of the pie – whether that pie be a great video game console game or a part in American politics. It’s nice to try and assume that we needn’t change anything. Women who want a part of it, get it; the vast majority simply don’t want it. Easy, but ultimately untrue.

Dr. B. weighs in as well:

I’d like to draw a further connection and say that they same is true of representations of folks of color and LGBT folks in video games. Black folk are portrayed as “Step N’ Fetchit” type characters in video games, who are acted upon more often than being active, just because that is “the way that they are” and black folks need G-Dubya to do what’s best for them because they can’t choose for themselves. While nothing more has been heard of GW’s promise to guarantee home loans to first time home buyers of color he has made it clear that Social Security changes are being done for the benefit of these same black folk (against many of our own wishes) because we won’t live to collect it at the current rate. Hmmmmm, why not just do something about health care, crime, or other issues that shorten the life span of black folks. I don’t know about you, but I’d rather live longer than collect Social Security earlier!

As Astarte says, “After all, we’re not asking for you to cut your penises off. We’re asking you to join the human race.”

Easter

Norbizness feels the holiday spirit:

— Blessed are the merciful: for they shall obtain mercy. I heard it in a Beatles’ song once, so it must be true. But what if I told you that you could double the amount of mercy you obtain without having to give out any more mercy? I know it sounds crazy, but hear me out!

— Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God. In a potato chip.

And because someone asked me, here are the relationships between Christian and Pagan holidays. Easter correlates with the Pagan holiday Ostara, marking the Spring Equinox, usually celebrated around March 21st. “With the return of spring,” says the site, “came the birthing of the farm animals for the year. Which is why we see bunnies, chicks, eggs and little lambs as symbols for this holiday. Part of the Ostara mythology involved the return of various deities from the underworld (symbolic of the end of winter). So it’s not surprising that this holiday got enmeshed with the Christian story of the ressurection of Christ.”

Also see the Pagan origins of the Easter Bunny.

Interconnectivity

Hope some of you can expand, agree, or disagree with this thought:

As tools enable us to do more, the bar keeps getting raised higher and higher for how much you have to scan, how quickly you have to respond, and how much output you must generate in order to stay relevant.

This relates directly to some action research I’ve developing for a project of mine. Do you feel pressured to “stay relevant” as a blogger? Internet user? Regarding other technologies and gadgetry? Lay pundit? Any comments would be appreciated.

via George