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

Month: March 2007

Is Dr. Mike Adams on the School Board or Something?

Because concern about his incredible shrinking dick is about the only reason I can see for forbidding a bunch of high school girls from using the word “vagina” during a reading of “The Vagina Monologues.”

The students, all juniors at John Jay High School, stood by their actions, saying everyone should be comfortable with the word and the female sexuality it invokes.

“We had no doubt in our minds that we were willing to be ‘insubordinate’ to do the right thing and get this word out there and we were willing to take whatever consequence,” said Hannah Levinson. The press conference was held in Levinson’s living room where all the girls were accompanied by their parents.

“It just doesn’t make sense for an administration to expect me not to talk about my body – it’s mine,” added Megan Reback.

The controversy centers around a stanza from Eve Ensler’s “The Vagina Monologues,” a book that was written in 1996 and has since been translated into 45 languages. The stanza reads: “My short skirt is a liberation flag in the women’s army. I declare these streets, any streets, my vagina’s country.”

Whoops! They said it. Now everyone will know that vaginas exist!

What really gets me is that this is going on in Katonah, not too far north of where I’m sitting. Maybe the good folk of Katonah like to pretend that if they don’t say the word “vagina,” then the girls won’t figure out they have them.* Because if they know they have them, they might use them! They might get on the Metro-North train and go into the city and who knows what kind of decadence they might get up to there!

OTOH, I do have some experience with the kind of blinders affluent parents put on when it comes to the behavior of their little darlings. Ask me sometime about the death threats my family got for going to the cops and calling parents after our house got wrecked during a high school flash party. The only parents who admitted their kids were even there, let alone involved in the destruction, were the ones who lived in welfare housing in our affluent town. The only people who said anything to me at school about it were the Madonna Wanna-bes, who were widely considered to be “bad girls,” and a kid who had a long history of being in trouble (and later raped and killed some goats at a local petting zoo). And none had been involved in the damage.**

Amusingly, the principal, in his own press conference, said that he wasn’t trying to censor the play by forbidding mention of a rather prominent word in its title, oh no!

School officials this afternoon also defended the decision to suspend the girls. They say the punishment has nothing to do with censorship, but rather is based on the students agreeing to omit the word from their presentation and then failing to honor that.

At a press event held after the girls’, Principal Rich Leprine said the school “recognizes and respects student freedom of expression,” but that the freedom is not unfettered, especially when an activity or event is open to the general community.

Here’s a hint, Rich: the play is called “The VAGINA Monologues.” You knew that. You could have said the whole thing wasn’t appropriate; you could have said that this particular excerpt wasn’t appropriate and please choose another. Instead, you tried to bowdlerize the thing and drain it of all its meaning. Because without the word, it’s just about a fashion choice.

Also? They know they have them. What might be nice is if the adults around them didn’t treat that as something shameful and something to be suppressed and something to be ignored rather than something to be owned and be proud of and to be put to one’s own uses rather than the uses of others.

Which, again, is the ENTIRE POINT OF THE PLAY.

Doofus.

Amanda and Samhita have more.

__________

*I can recall knowing what a vagina was from an early age. If I’m not mistaken, that was one of Dr. Spock’s things, giving the proper names to body parts, and my mother read Dr. Spock. Plus, my grandmother was a nurse and very no-nonsense about stuff like that.

** None of the people who apologized to me at school, that is. One of the kids whose parents did not just shut the conversation down when my mother called was caught running out of my parents’ room, which had been utterly trashed (all the contents of the drawers and closets on the floor, picture frames broken, shit left on sink). My parents wound up dropping it after the insurance company paid for the damage. And after one too many firebombing threats.

Beyond Enabling

Roxanne has a great post up at Pandagon about a recent church abuse scandal, and how apologists for abuse are a huge part of the problem. When people ask “How does this happen?” they need only look to some of the responses to this story (warning: graphic accounts of sexual assault) to understand. Roxanne quotes a few of them, and I’ll present some others, which seem to volley back and forth between “bitchez are stupid” and “the sluts wanted it”:

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The Back of the Bus

Here’s what theocracy will look like when it comes here:

A group of Israeli women are fighting back against what one called “Taliban-like” Jewish fundamentalists who order women to sit in the back of the bus and to abstain from wearing “immodest” clothing on public bus lines. The women have filed a lawsuit in Israel’s high court aimed at reforming bus lines used primarily by ultra-Orthodox Jews. Some of the women see the bus dispute as part of a larger struggle against the growing influence and radicalization of the ultra-Orthodox in Israel.

Writer Naomi Ragen says she did not want to start a revolution from her bus seat or become the Jewish Rosa Parks. She just wanted to get home. An observant, Orthodox Jew, Ragen was on the No. 40 bus line, headed to her house near Jerusalem, when an ultra-Orthodox — or Haredi — man told her to move to the back.

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Campus Exposure



Who needs equality when you have legs like these?

Apparently every article I read today is going to be about sex, the mainstreaming of pornography, and the ongoing attempt to subjugate women as much as possible while telling us that we want it (a national past time, apparently). So, onto Campus Exposure, an expose of college sex mags.

The article is actually pretty good, and while I’m kind of tempted to just lather, rinse and repeat, I think that some of these magazines have the potential to be decent. The ones which primarily involve naked chicks simulating intercourse? Not so great, and definitely not so new. But there are a few which are making attempts to normalize conversations about sex and dismantle traditional gender norms. There’s a difference between open conversations about sexuality and pornography. And there’s a difference between sexual imagery and pornography, although the two seem to be blending together more than moving apart. But unfortunately, even the magazines which started out with great intentions and a solid conceptual framework — like Harvard’s H-Bomb — have devolved into standard, uncreative and certainly not feminist stereotypes and ideas.

And then there are the college sex magazines which are entirely uncreative and intellectually lazy, and have been from the beginning — like Boink, the mag that, naturally, gets the most coverage in the article, and is apparently even popular with the Boston University Women’s Center:

What really stood out is that there were male students in it,” Heather Foley, 21, now president of B.U.W.C., which devoted a meeting to discussing the issue, said in a phone interview. “Because there were men in it, and gay men, under the same cover, it was sort of alternative. It kind of equalized it: gay men could look at it, women could look at it, and that was great. Women as objects, men as objects.”

Now we’re all objects! Isn’t equality grand?

On a laptop computer, Vandenberg, 20, showed a few of the pictures she is planning to publish in the next edition of H Bomb, which will be online only for financial reasons. “Quite tame,” she said. In one, female Harvard science majors peered earnestly at test tubes, wearing lab coats opened to expose black lacy bras and panties, as in the old Maidenform advertisements. It was intended, she said, as a comment on the brouhaha that ensued after Lawrence Summers, Harvard’s former president, publicly remarked that genetics might account for why women are still a minority in the sciences. “I really don’t think he said much wrong,” said Vandenberg, who is pursuing a bachelor’s degree in biological anthropology. “I’m not a feminist. Feminism has this premise that men and women are equal, and I have a more biological view of things. I don’t think men and women are equal at all. I think we’re different, and what’s wrong with that?”

Clearly, absolutely nothing. There is no problem with an assumption of inherent inequality that is biologically fixed. It’s not like biological justifications have been used to keep women out of Harvard or anything. I’d imagine that there’s nothing female scientists want more than to be told that (a) their brains just aren’t wired to be as smart as men, but being different is ok, and (b) men are more than happy to think of the black lacy bras they’re wearing under their lab coats rather than, say, their accomplishments in the lab.

Somewhere in there a few women also mention that they’re proud of their bodies because they don’t have saggy tits or extra weight on them. Astonishing progressivism, no?

I’m disappointed that the supposed best and brightest undergraduates can’t do any better than recycling tired stereotypes and tried-and-true porno standards in their magazines. I’m not surprised, but I still wish that they could do better.