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

Month: February 2007

Disorder

Pigeon, Little Light’s girlfriend, posted this incredible comparison between eating disorders and addiction on Little Light’s blog:

Any anorectic can tell you that, initially, starving creates an amazing high. As someone who’s also abused amphetamines and has a tendency toward hypomania, I can tell you they all feel pretty similar. I felt utterly invincible. I had so much energy, I was hyper-productive, I could go to school and dance and hang out with friends and do all my homework and whatever the hell else I wanted to do, on next to no food or sleep. The sense of power that comes with this is tremendous.

But, pretty quickly, the high starts to wear off. Fatigue and hunger set in, it becomes difficult to focus, difficult to do much of anything. I spent a long time feeling like I couldn’t do anything right, anything good enough, trying to get back the high that I’d had. I had to eat even less to get that euphoric, super human feeling, and even then the feeling was short lived. Like building up a drug tolerance, as an anorectic you have to continually do more– more fasting, more exercise, more rules, more discipline, more whatever.

I’m not Every Anorexic, but I can’t tell you how true this essay read to me. I’m not entirely sure why the addiction paradigm would not be the immediate parallel. Most survivors I’ve talked to have nodded right along with the idea, even if their individual histories have involved different causes and coping strategies. And as Pigeon says, it’s difficult to resolve an eating disorder without using at least some of the same tools to unpack disordered patterns.

The most obvious reason is that it’s probably counterintuitive for people who don’t have a tendency toward eating disorders. Addictive behaviors are supposed to be, you know, appealing in some way. That starvation can be really enjoyable and satisfying on a physical level, that fiercely physically inimical eating patterns can in fact become more pleasurable than eating normally, that there might be more at work than an adherence to deprivation in the face of misery, may be difficult to believe. And eating disorders have–justifiably–become so tied up with the idea of self-torment that any high or hook is inconceivable.

I think the second might have to do with ideology, with the need to reduce the constellation of factors down to one or two for easy analysis. (This is not, mind you, an assertion that strict cultural adherence to a bodily ideal is not a very important factor both in the prevalence of eating disorders and in the way people with eating disorders seek to shape and regulate their bodies.) Perhaps it’s difficult to see the problem as a complex one, a perspective skew that touches many parts of the sufferer’s psyche, because eating disorders are more common among people whose selfhood is denigrated: women, girls, minors. I’m not sure.

Barack Obama is a smelly Black. No, a scary Arab. No, an uppity Negro.

Burt Prelutsky needs to pick a racial attack and stick to it.

Is it that, contrary to Joe Biden’s characterization of him as “clean,” Barack Obama is actually smelly?

B.O. for President?

Or is it that Obama has a scary Arab-sounding middle name and therefore supports the terrorists?

So the question that begs asking is whether Barack Hussein Obama would ever be in favor of taking any action, no matter the provocation to America, that would put Muslim lives at risk.

Or is he an uppity Negro, trying to pass as white in order to get votes and then shamelessly pandering to his own people at the same time?

Down deep, he’s just another megalomaniac who thinks he should be running the world. He’ll be black for black voters, white for white voters, and beige for Michael Jackson.

No, Obama’s problem is that he’s crazy enough to suggest that we should try and get along.

The cuckoo getting most of the media attention at the moment is Barack Obama. With all of his high-sounding blather about building bridges and bringing people together, you might get the idea that he wants to be America’s pastor, rather than its president.

Doesn’t that building bridges nonsense sound something like what President Bush said in his inaugural speech? But that wasn’t “high-sound blather,” I’m guessing because President Bush can barely string two words together, let alone multi-clause sentences. Plus, with his Andover-to-Yale education, he’s an Average American, not like Obama, who looks like a damn foreigner.

There is nothing liberals can do to please the far-right nutbags. Hillary is too aggressive and divisive. Obama is too nice. Edwards is too smarmy. While it’s understandable that Democratic presidential candidates would be trying to capture the middle, it doesn’t make any sense for them to cater to an out-of-touch right who will find fault in anything they do. And in the meantime, I hope conservatives do keep up their cheap, thinly-veiled racist and sexist attacks. Because I do have enough faith in the American people* that we won’t be swayed by “He’s too nice! And his middle name is HUSSEIN!”

*A lot of us, anyway.

Help Us Help Ourselves

Feministe will be hosting the next Help Us Help Ourselves round-up on March 1st. The project is explained here. Submit your links on this site, either by posting a comment or a track-back to this post. Past examples are here. I will be posting my submission shortly.

Find the Illegal Immigrant

minutemen
Calling all patriots: Come support the NYU College Republicans this Thursday in protecting our beloved nation from the influx of brown people illegals.

minutemen
If there’s one thing that anti-immigrant nuts aren’t, it’s racist! (Picture from an actual Minutemen rally).

Oh NYU College Republicans. I thought you hit your low point during your affirmative action bakesale. But now you feel the need to top even that proud display of bigotry with your rally this Thursday, titled “Find the Illegal Immigrant – They’re everywhere so it shouldn’t be too hard…”

If you aren’t on Facebook, I’ve pasted a screen shot below the fold. Their event page features two pictures, both of which reference the U.S. – Mexico border. The CRs are currently crying that they’re being called out on their racism, and urging people to talk to them at the rally if they’re interested in “intelligent debate.”

Right. Because the best way to promote intelligent debate is to have an event which is described as, “The rules are simple: Be the first to find the illegal and you win a prize.”

It’s fairly clear that although the NYU College Republicans attend a pretty good university, they can’t be bothered to actually do their research on illegal immigration in New York — you know, the place where we’ll all be huntin’ illegals. Because in this state, Mexicans make up just 2% of the illegal immigrant population. The most illegal immigrants come from Italy, Ecuador and Poland. In neighboring New Jersey, it’s Portugal, Poland and Italy.

But the CRs are totally, completely not racist at all. It must be a simple coincidence that their Facebook event page only references those dirty wetbacks Mexican illegals who are stealing the jobs NYU graduates would otherwise be scrambling for.

Details, copied and pasted from Facebook (they’ve now changed some of it in response to various negative comments):

Name:
Find the Illegal Immigrant
Tagline:
They’re everywhere so it shouldn’t be too hard…
Host:
NYU College Republicans
Type:
Causes – Rally
Time and PlaceDate:
Thursday, February 22, 2007
Time:
11:00am – 2:00pm
Location:
South side of Silver
Description
The rules are simple:
Be the first to find the illegal and you win a prize.

There will be more info and refreshments at the table.

And since Google is forever, I’ll extend a special thanks to College Republicans president Sarah Chambers and CR member David Laska, as well as CR member Rick Halmo, the genius who wrote:

we, as CR’s, are free to hold politically incorrect events while at the same time making a point. Not all things politics need to be serious.

What is serious, is how quickly we’ve been able to garner so much attention and controversy, and so mission accomplished. Thanks guys.

(This message will probably piss you crazy wall-posters off more, which I do find funny)

We have more wall posts than people definitely attending this event. The people with no lives giving life-story testimonials to this event wall as if we, the real CR’s, actually give a shit what these people think should consider that we’re doing this regardless, but we appreciate how pissed off you guys get at a joke with which you dont agree.

btw, just another example how small minded people fear other people’s ideas and try to stifle it by attempting to cover it up/silence with their own rhetoric.

GO CR’S.
-Rick (The Captain)

Screen shot, and larger views of the images from the Facebook page, below the fold.

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Protect the Children: Hide Your Dictionary

protect

If there are children around, please shield their eyes. If you’re under the age of 18, or value your child-like innocence, or are an adult who thinks that there is a vast empty space below your belly-button and above your knees, please stop reading now, because I’m going to be writing a very naughty word:

Scrotum.

This may have upset you, and for that I apologize. I suspect this blog may now be banned from libraries everywhere (if it made it through the family-friendly filter in the first place). Because apparently, the anatomically correct words for human and animal body parts are unacceptable in Freedom-land. First there was the Hoohah Monologues, because some people are offended by the word “vagina.” Now there’s the banning of a Newbery-Medal-winning book because the author uses the word “scrotum” and that makes some librarians and parents uncomfortable.

The story involves a dog who is bitten on the scrotum love spuds by a rattlesnake. According to the author, the real-life dog of a friend of hers was bitten on the hangy-thing-below-the-weewee by a snake, and she based the story off of that incident.

“I think it’s a good case of an author not realizing her audience,” said Frederick Muller, a librarian at Halsted Middle School in Newton, N.J. “If I were a third- or fourth-grade teacher, I wouldn’t want to have to explain that.”

Well, he could explain it to them the way that my dad explained a scrotum gonad to my sister and I when, as little tykes, we saw a large dog running around and became extremely upset because we thought he had a tumor between his legs (our own dog was neutered): “Girls, that’s a scrotum, and it holds testicles. You might have heard the boys in the back of the school bus call them ‘balls.'”*

My mom laughed, we got it, and although I grew up to be a sexual deviant (or a “feminist”), my sister turned out all right.

Ms. Nilsson, reached at Sunnyside Elementary School in Durango, Colo., said she had heard from dozens of librarians who agreed with her stance. “I don’t want to start an issue about censorship,” she said. “But you won’t find men’s genitalia in quality literature.”

“At least not for children,” she added.

Too bad you will find male genitalia on roughly half the population of the world. And in the works of such tawdry, quality-lacking authors like James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, D.H. Lawrence, Toni Morrison, Margaret Atwood, Ian McEwan, Salman Rushdie, Haruki Murakami, George Orwell, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. And of course, family values crusaders like Bill O’Reilly, Newt Gingrich and Lynn Cheney at least make illusions to our naughty-parts in their forays into literature.

But, as readers point out, it’s about the children!

What on earth is this? Now this lady wants to turn a kid’s book into an explicit anatomy lesson? What for exactly? What happened to simply asking your parents about various body parts? This is completely unacceptable material for a children’s book as anybody with any average amount of common sense should know. I will ask our local libraries to ban this book from their shelves. Tell her to confine scrotal literature to her own family library.

Other readers wondered why the dog couldn’t have been bitten on the leg instead of the naughty place. So here are my questions: Why are some body parts considered totally taboo? Why is a bite on the scrotum an “explicit anatomy lesson” while a bite on the finger would go unnoticed? Why is the scrotum so much more controversial than the leg? After all, in many cultures, legs are considered quite sexual, and showing too much of them –or covering them with pants instead of a skirt — is scandalous. Little boys have scrota. It doesn’t sexualize children to use the anatomically correct word for a part of their body in a totally non-sexual situation. Teachers and librarians don’t even have to explain the sexual purpose of the scrotum if they don’t want to, any more than they have to explain the sexual purpose of the lips or the hands or the tongue. But half the class already knows it’s there, and the other half probably has a pretty good idea — ain’t nothing wrong with naming it. Why is the word itself controversial?

We have one of the highest teen pregnancy rates in the world. We have incredibly high STI rates. We far exceed other developed Western nations in our abortion rate (although countries where abortion is illegal and “pro-life” social policies are the norm pretty consistently beat us). Our knee-jerk anti-sex prudishness has very real social consequences, and they’re more wide-spread than banning books. The far right faction that opposes accurate sexual health education and any sort of rational response to human nature is a small minority in this country, but they are extremely vocal, and they have a whole lot of influence. The media focus on this book seems disproportionate, but it is evidence of a larger cultural battle between those who support science, human rights, sexual freedom, bodily autonomy, intellectualism, and proven solutions to social problems, and those who oppose all of those things. A minority of authoritarian, Puritanical librarians and parents have succeeded in banning this book from several libraries. People who share their views have succeeded in teaching students medically inaccurate, sexist and irresponsible abstinence-only “education, putting them in very real physical danger — 95% of people in this country have sex before marriage, and curriculum which boils down to “Don’t do it you filthy slut” isn’t going to be particularly helpful throughout these students’ lives (it’s also worth noting that a whole lot of people still value planning their pregnancies even after marriage).

Yes, this is silly, manufactured outrage over a word. But it’s also a microcosm of something that is very, very wrong with this country.

*Yes, this conversation did actually happen.

A Christian man considers contraception

The author of the blog Contraception and Christianity, who goes by the handle Contraskeptic, kindly emailed me a link to his blog, where I came across this post. It’s interesting. In his blog description, he says that his blog is intended for discussion about contraception in the context of Christian marriage, and that he’s trying to sort through his own views on contraception, as an Evangelical Christian. He supports birth control, but is sympathetic to the arguments against it. Shaping his perspective is his wife, who did not want to become pregnant after her second child, but did anyway, despite non-medical efforts at prevention. Before her third pregnancy, she was suffering from postpartum depression. She wanted to go back to work. She thought that having another child would be a “disaster.” She asked her husband to get a vasectomy, and he wouldn’t. She would only have sex with him once a month, the day after her period ended. She slept on the couch so that she wouldn’t be tempted into sex. And when she found out she was pregnant again, she sobbed, and was “devastated.”

After the birth of their third child, her husband went in to get a vasectomy, and was refused. Getting it at his wife’s request, his doctor said, was the wrong reason. It’s been 15 months since this couple has so much as cuddled, let alone had sex. They both want to — but the wife is so terrified of another pregnancy, another difficult delivery, another C-section, another long recovery — that it’s not worth it. Contraskeptic writes:

Here is the dilemma I face:

If I get a vasectomy, we’ll be sinning if we have sex, and unlike using a condom, the sin will be permanent (or extremely expensive if not impossible to reverse). Practically speaking, there’s no repentance if indeed contracepted sex is a sin.

But if I don’t get a vasectomy, and we have to abstain until my wife reaches menopause, we’ll be sinning by not having sex. Couples are only supposed to abstain briefly but to come back together to avoid temptation (see I Corinthians 7). And it seems that the NFPers and the Quiverfull folks would agree that abstaining for the purpose of avoiding children is also a sin.

Beyond the concern about offending God, if I opt for abstinence over a vasectomy, our marriage will suffer. Love will diminish because we’ll be avoiding physical affection and because my wife will be offended that I am not complying with her wishes.

This is not a trick question, this is not a hypothetical, this is not a rhetorical trap. This is a real-life dilemma. I have a real-life decision to make.

What would you do if you were in my shoes?

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Thank Feminism

Rape has significantly decreased over the past 40 years. You know who to thank.

The most likely explanation involves impressive generational developments. In 1970, women made up one-third of all college students (versus 57% today), earned about one-fourth of all young-adult income (versus nearly half today) and made up small fractions of doctors and lawyers (versus majorities of new entrants into these fields now). Women’s rapidly rising status and economic independence in the larger society fostered new attitudes and laws that rejected violence against women.

That younger people growing up in this environment of greater gender equality should show the biggest decreases in rape, while older generations lag behind, is consistent with this explanation. The youngest teenagers (presumably those raised with the most modern attitudes) show the biggest declines of all. Over the last 30 years, rape arrest rates have fallen by 80% among Californians under age 15, much larger than the 25% drop among residents age 40 and older.

Ultimately, however, sexual violence remains a serious danger. That is the best reason for rigorously scrutinizing its real patterns and trends (rather than taking tiresome potshots at “young people” and “popular culture”) to learn how to further reduce it.

Social Justice Round-Up

Lots of good stuff going on in the blogosphere/news media lately, and since I’m feeling far too lazy to write a real post, check it out:

1. From a bird and a bottle, and incisive look at the War on Drugs as it relates to the War on Terror. In order to make more young people eligible to go fight in Iraq, the Marine Corps and the Army are granting more criminal waivers to recruits. Given that most of these waivers are for drug-related offenses, it’s an interesting strategy — many young people who are convicted of drug-related crimes lack access to education in prison, are barred from voting in several states, and are ineligible for federal student aid. In other words, they have limited access to higher education, by extension limited access to well-paying jobs, and no political power to change that. But they do have access to a fine job, completely with benefits and good pay, in the U.S. armed forces. We take a hard line on drugs — unless taking that hard line begins to handicap Republican goals, instead of accomplishing the traditional ends of filling their pockets, maintaining their political power and enabling the prison industrial complex. We support our troops — so long as they’re economically coerced into the job.

2. Chris Clarke does a wonderful job of taking on the John Aravosis/Native American blog dust-up. I hope that this time around, Aravosis is paying attention to his progressive detractors. I don’t understand why it’s so difficult to grasp how the Indian Mascot thing is offensive, no matter how supposedly tasteful the mascot’s dress and performance is. Chris makes the apt comparison to minstrel shows, which were justified as respectful nods to black culture. I’ll further point out that minstrel shows were part of a multi-pronged attempt to justify slavery (and then segregation) by portraying the Jim Crow character as a happy half-wit, part of the greater slave family of the Mammy happily serving her master, the gentle Uncle, the lazy Sambo who had to be kept in line, the wide-eyed pickaninnies (who were always getting eaten by tigers and alligators), and so on. Contrasted with the images of Zip Coon (the free black man trying to imitate white culture) and the scary black brutes who wreaked havoc and regressed to savagery without the benevolent guidance of whites, Jim Crow served as part of a wider strategy to justify racial oppression. The use of Native peoples as mascots does the same thing — it positions the Native, untamed by civilized whites, as an aggressive, war-like, threatening character. A mascot. Whose purpose has traditionally been to strike fear into the hearts of the team’s opponents, in addition to representing the institution itself. Mascots are scary animals, objects, and… “Indians.” And occasionally representatives of long-dead cultures which have been mythologized for their strength in war (i.e., th Spartans). The image of the savage war-mongering Indian has been long used in this country to justify ethnic genocide, cultural marginalization and ongoing oppression of Native peoples. Using that image for a sports team is unconscionable.

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