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

Month: May 2005

FRT and Cat Blogging

I could absolutely kill Doug. He’s a sweet little kitty whenever I’m around, but as soon as I go to sleep or leave the house, even for five minutes, something gets torn to shreds.

Today’s victim was a $7 ball of nice cotton yarn that I was to sell in a group of yarn on eBay. I came home from class to find it trailing from the kitchen counter into the deep, dark depths of the basement, covered in hair and grime.

The kitty is nowhere to be found. Lucky for him. There are no pictures this week, or you’d see a lovely shot of me throttling a kitten. That would be bad for my image, no?

Friday Random Ten – The “Cat May Be Satan Spawn” Edition

  1. Of Montreal – The Party’s Crashing Us
  2. Martha Wainwright – It’s Over
  3. Donovan – Get Thy Bearings
    (This one has been on the list several times lately)
  4. The Icicles – You’re Just About My Everything
  5. Iron and Wine – Woman King
  6. Firewater – Mr. Cardiac
  7. Edwyn Collins – A Girl Like You
  8. Devo – Mongoloid
  9. Aimee Mann – It’s Not
  10. The Church – Under the Milky Way

Due to some rather personal events that occurred this week, I’ll be taking some time away from the blog. Look out for Jill and pass her some heady comments.

Posted in Uncategorized

Feminists Hate Sex

Can a bitch get a break?

Why do so many women not want to call themselves feminists? I sincerely think it’s because the word carries the stigma that feminists don’t like bonking — least of all bonking guys.

If feminism wants its good name back, it will have to come up with a pro-sex, highly bonkable feminist spokeswoman, who is seen to screw guys, and to like screwing them. Often. A feminist who digs cock.

Ahem. Well, I can think of a few “bonkable” feminists who “dig cock.” But most of us sex-obsessed feminists have moved far beyond the heteronormative memes and refuse to play nice with the PR machine.

Adam Ash needs to pick up BUST’s One-Handed Read, among other feminist erotica, and rethink his thesis.

via Archaeopteryx, a brand new, kickass, feminist-minded blog by a grad student in the sciences.

Newsweek Apologized Why?

White House spokesman Scott McClellan last week said Newsweek “got the facts wrong” and Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman called the article “demonstrably false.” Di Rita said last week the Pentagon had received “no credible and specific allegations” that U.S. personnel had put a Koran in the toilet.

But they did.

Teen Parenthood and Afterwards

Flea wrote a post several days ago that I linked to in my latest round-up post. She responded to a minister who grappled with ideas of abortion and choice and teen pregnancy with her usual eloquence. I returned yesterday to find nearly fifty comments to this post, some of which were absolutely disparaging.

I’ve relayed this story many times, the story of my pregnancy and giving birth at eighteen. In short, I had an unplanned pregnancy, decided for several reasons not to get an abortion, was kicked out of my parents’ home (though this is debated within the family), and lived with friends nearly until E was born. I was sick the whole time I was pregnant with chronic bladder, urinary tract, and kidney infections, one of which landed me in the hospital for a week (at which point I was released from the hospital a week early with an IV in my arm and instructions on how to change it by myself — Medicaid rules!), and ended up giving birth two months early due to HELLP syndrome, an affliction that very nearly killed me and will probably recur should I ever get pregnant again.

I chose not to get married, but moved in with E’s dad. We stayed together for one miserable year, both of us horribly depressed, until I finally moved out and back in with my parents. Nonetheless, I managed to finish high school (barely) and immediately started college. Five and a half years later, I’m about to finish up with my undergraduate degree and plan to apply for grad school.

My son is healthy, happy, and wickedly smart. He can read at a 2nd grade level even though he has yet to start kindergarten, knows how to tell a good joke, and loves music just as much as his mom and dad do.

We’re so obviously failures. *gag*

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Well if this isn’t timely…

Does William Saletan read this blog? Based on this piece on Slate, I think he does, because it sounds a lot like some of the comments in this post. He may have a cool chart, but I still like you all better. While this is a good piece (possibly because he doesn’t do much of the writing himself), Saletan has too consistent a history of ticking me off for me to throw myself blindly behind this article. But the chart is interesting.

Even better than Saletan is an anonymous person on Slate’s forum, who writes one of the most compelling arguments for stem cell research (and one of the most scathing attacks on the “culture of life”) that I’ve read in a long time.

As it happens, I have adopted one of those frozen embryos in a fertility clinic that this debate whirls around. My son—my six month old baby boy—is the blessing of embryonic adoption and that has without question transformed my life. It is troubling to hear so many talk about the disposition of these embryos when so few actually have any exposure to the process. So, having actually done more than talk about those frozen entities and done something about it, I’d like to take the opportunity to inform those who insist on meddling in the very private matters of those of us involved in these processes.

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Sex and the asexual girl

Asexuals are finally coming out. I can’t even begin to summarize the entire article, but it’s incredibly interesting; it seems that the discourse around asexuality is trying to walk a fine line where asexual people are validated, but where issues leading to asexuality can still be discussed and examined.

Posted in Sex

If One Believes in Binaries

Your Political Profile
Overall: 10% Conservative, 90% Liberal
Social Issues: 0% Conservative, 100% Liberal
Personal Responsibility: 0% Conservative, 100% Liberal
Fiscal Issues: 0% Conservative, 100% Liberal
Ethics: 0% Conservative, 100% Liberal
Defense and Crime: 50% Conservative, 50% Liberal

Have a quiz, it’s good for you.

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Listening to women about abortion

Jennifer Baumgardner writes a fabulous piece in the Fairfield Weekly about a seldom-discussed topic in pro-choice circles: the emotional aftermath of abortion. While I’m frequently disgusted at the right’s attempts to paint abortion as a choice that inevitably involves emotional scarring, depression, and so-called “post-abortive syndrome” (which isn’t recognized by any reputable psychological association), I do believe that it’s important to allow women a wide range of reactions to their own life experiences. The vast majority of women who have abortions report feeling primarily relieved afterwards; the I’m Not Sorry project documents the narratives of women who chose abortion and don’t regret their decision. But life is never as simple as “I’m not sorry” or “I am sorry” and that’s the whole story. Even women who don’t regret their decision can have complex emotions when dealing with their own abortion. And so far, the pro-choice side has been reluctant to take on these complexities.

There are definitely good reasons why many pro-choice groups focus less of the emotional outcomes of abortion: resources are scarce and must be used where they are most needed; legislative and judicial attacks have taken center stage in the abortion issue for the past 30 years; and once the pro-choice side recognizes that abortion is morally and emotionally complex, the anti-choice side throws it back in our faces. The religious right has succeeded in turning the abortion issue into a black-and-white battle over fetal “life” instead of what it really is: a complicated, personal issue that directly affects women’s lives — and our very right to life.

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A “gay” marriage between a man and a woman

Donita Ganzon’s driver’s license says “female.” So does her passport. And her marriage certificate. She’s married to a man. She has female sex organs. She looks and dresses like a woman. And yet her husband may be deported because the United States government says the marriage is “gay” (sounds a lot like a playground insult, huh?) and won’t recognize it as valid. Because the marriage isn’t valid, they won’t issue him a green card. And all this because more than 20 years ago, Donita Ganzon had a sex change operation to match her physical sex to the gender she had always identified with.

State laws on marriages where one or both partners is transgender vary widely, and have so far been generally ignored in the same-sex marriage debate (except from a handful of people on the right who cruelly use transgender people to illustrate how “perverted” the LGBT community is). Read the whole article, as it presents many pieces of information that I had no idea about. For example:

-Being transgender is more common than cystic fibrosis
-About 1 in 30,000 people undergo sex reassignment surgery — and many more identify as transgender but never have the operation
-Transgender people are murdered at a rate 16 times that of average Americans

This issue, as far as I can tell, falls into the category of, “Who does it hurt?” If these two people, who are already married, have their marriage recognized by the U.S. government, who is harmed by it? I mean, they fit the “traditional” definition of marriage, right? One man, one woman? If Ganzon shouldn’t marry a man, then would the government recognize her marriage to a woman? Or should she not be allowed to marry? If not, should she just be celibate her whole life, since sex outside of marriage is a no-no? This one has me thoroughly confused.