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

Month: May 2007

Upgrade

Angry Brown Butch (who’s blogging again!) about California’s leadership role in resurrecting classic prison-management techniques:

For offenders whose crimes are usually relatively minor (carjackers should not bother) and whose bank accounts remain lofty, a dozen or so city jails across the state offer pay-to-stay upgrades. Theirs are a clean, quiet, if not exactly recherché alternative to the standard county jails, where the walls are bars, the fellow inmates are hardened and privileges are few.

Many of the self-pay jails operate like secret velvet-roped nightclubs of the corrections world. You have to be in the know to even apply for entry, and even if the court approves your sentence there, jail administrators can operate like bouncers, rejecting anyone they wish.

“I am aware that this is considered to be a five-star Hilton,” said Nicole Brockett, 22, who was recently booked into one of the jails, here in Orange County about 30 miles southeast of Los Angeles, and paid $82 a day to complete a 21-day sentence for a drunken driving conviction.

Ms. Brockett, who in her oversize orange T-shirt and flip-flops looked more like a contestant on “The Real World” than an inmate, shopped around for the best accommodations, travelocity.com-style.

“It’s clean here,” she said, perched in a jail day room on the sort of couch found in a hospital emergency room. “It’s safe and everyone here is really nice. I haven’t had a problem with any of the other girls. They give me shampoo.”

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Remiss

Mk wanted a “butch as a noun” thread as well, so here ya go, mk. I’ll open with a quote from S. Bear Bergman:

It’s both one of my talents and one of my, er, little problems that I’m a huge language geek. I love words, I love language, and I am always deeply satisfied when I can talk about something well, with good words. But I had a hard time, talking about butch. I would say I’m a butch, and people would hear I’m a butch woman or I’m a butch lesbian. Neither of which is comfortable, or accurate. I kept saying No, listen, I mean that I am a butch, as a noun, all by itself – not a modifier but a thing to them be further described.

Femme as a Noun

It sounded like the commenters in this thread were worried about turning into a derail, so I thought I’d open up a new thread. Nothing articulate yet, but I am experimenting with femininity these days (ask me about my socially-sanctioned hair-removal fetish), and so, you know, go for it:

Just like Femme is a noun, for me and many other Femmes out in the world, regardless of who we choose to partner with, Femme is our gender.

and

I will say that my being a woman is influenced by my sexuality as lesbian, and my gender as Femme, as different from the feminine gender presentations of straight women … it’s very concretely different, and while there are commonalities, I am getting really sick of being taken as straight because of my gender as Femme (even in LGBT spaces).

Instruments of Torture

All I ever had to do to decide not to wear high heels on any sort of regular basis was to look at my mother’s feet. Years of wearing high heels had given her bunions and pinched her toes so much that the nails had gotten squashed and thickened and started to resemble dog claws. Not only that, she could no longer comfortably wear flat shoes because her Achilles tendon had shortened over the years.

Plus, I’m tall enough. And the damn things make my feet hurt, no matter how expensive they are or how much padding is in them. Walking on your tiptoes is just unnatural.

That’s not to say that I never wear heels. Certainly I wore them a lot more in the days when I had to wear skirts to work; wearing heels was considered part of a “professional” look, and when you worked in a place that required women to wear skirt suits and men to wear their jackets whenever they left the office, you wore the heels. I just kept them in my desk and wore flats to get to and from the office. And then there are weddings and dances. Though I usually wind up kicking off the shoes to dance, unless I’m doing ballroom dancing. Then they’re actually helpful because you’re on your toes anyhow, and traveling backwards.

The WaPo had an article yesterday (via Feministing) about the kinds of damage shoes do to your body. It’s all there, in graphic detail, from the hammertoes and bunions to the increased forces the balls of your feet take with every inch of heel height. The article’s well worth a read, particularly for its observations about the origins of high heels — they’re meant to be non-functional, and were originally worn by both men and women of the upper classes as a sign that they didn’t have to do any useful work and had the luxury to be decorative.

Which really makes you think about the fact that typically, only women wear them today, even when they’re on their feet and trying to function. That they’re “required” by so many professional dress codes really tells you how deep the femininity=decorativeness equation is ingrained into our consciousnesses.

This little equation even seeped into the graphic used by the WaPo. Jessica cropped this bit:

Notice that the graphic is supposed to show what happens to one’s posture when one wears heels. Now, you’d think they’d take the same person in the same outfit and the same pose and just change the footwear. Nope, they used a photo of a woman in a pair of pants with covered arms for the flats graphic and felt the need to dress her in a strapless minidress for the heels graphic. Message? Heels are sexxxay.

Plus, they changed the pose. The woman is standing still while wearing flats and apparently walking out on stage to Riverdance while wearing heels (seriously, why else is she doing that with her arms? Though step dancers wear flats).

Now, the whole heels=teh sex thing does have some basis; after all, they force you to stand sway-backed, with your breasts and ass sticking out. But why reinforce the message that sexiness requires heels, in an article about how damaging they are?

Guh?

I can’t believe they fired Kat Von D. from Miami Ink.

Or, rather, I couldn’t believe it until they ran the promo for LA Ink afterwards. But, Jesus, did they have to spend an episode (and several earlier episodes) trashing her, then firing her, and filming her in tears, before they launched her on her own?

Though I have to say that I’ve been very disappointed in the Discovery family of channels in the past few years in terms of their female-visibility quotient. Mythbusters had equal numbers of male and female on-air personas during the second season (and each of the women had different relevant skills), then it got rid of Scottie, and Christine left, leaving Kari, whose main purpose seems to be cheesecake-to-the-geeks (though, to be fair, she is a talented artist even though her screaming at surprising events leaves me cold). Now, though, there’s Jess, who’s the newest Mythtern, though without the camera time of Christine.

But other than that — the women featured by the Discovery networks (save on Animal Planet, where they’re animal handlers or animal-welfare agents, or animal rescuers, or whatnot) tend to be the self-sacrificing mothers of either children who are bigger than they are (Little People, Big World), or who outnumber them to some scary extent (16 Children…) or who’ve lost lost large amounts of weight, usually through surgery (various “look at the freaks!” Sunday-night weight-loss shows). Or, you know, Stacy London.

Fusion

So awhile back, Holly sent me a link to a San Francisco Chronicle article about Margaret Cho and trannychasin’ (I understand that some of this language is Violet Blue’s, not Cho’s). I’m still a little incoherent on the subject, but, well, here’s a post:

I also discovered her new fetish, what she thinks is “the newest hottest thing to happen sexually”: transmen and trannyboys. Giddily, Cho gushed that she’s a born-again tranny-chaser — of the FtM (female-to-male) variety. “For me, it’s transmen. I’m doing a few things, like working with Ian Harvey. It’s not even FtM — it’s FtX. There’s a band from Toronto called The Clicks that’s all transmen, and it’s like a hot boy band. The girls just go crazy and scream for them — it’s like Beatlemania, but for queers! And packing, and the politics of packing, that’s, like, so hot.”

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The Good Abortion

Erika tells her beautiful, painful, good story.

Because of the recent Supreme Court decision banning “partial birth abortions,” which politicizes a personal, medical decision. Because of the newest ban on abortions in North Dakota. Because pro-choice activists are now forced to say that abortions are terrible things in order to defend a woman’s right to one. Because we still have freedom of speech in this country, and I’m so afraid that we won’t always have that freedom.

Because we need to keep a human face on abortion, let me tell you about mine.

Abortion is not just the woman who will suffer a stroke — or die — unless her deeply wanted pregnancy is terminated. Not just the rape victim. Not just the 15-year-old girl whose father haunts her bedroom at night. Yes, these women desperately need safe, legal abortions, but six years ago so did I, and so do the thousands of other “normal” women who have straightforward D&C or chemical abortions every year.

Yes, I too am the face of abortion: I, the married mother, the step-grandmother, the internationally-published writer whose books on parenting have sold tens of thousands of copies. I am a mother by choice. I have done the reproduction Trifecta — miscarriage, childbirth, abortion — in that order, and I had my abortion because I didn’t want another child. And I have never felt a moment of regret or guilt. Regret implies self-blame, and I didn’t do anything wrong.

My abortion was a good thing.

Go read it. It will make you smile, it will make you cry, and it will make you glad that women like Erika are generous enough to share their stories with us. A very big thanks to her for leaving a link to this in the comments.

The abortion debate brought home

Another reason to support abortion rights: You really never know when it’s going to be you.

I mean, my wife and I have always been pro-choice, but we never expected to actually confront the Choice. After all, we’ve been trying like crazy to have children. We had already undergone two in-vitro fertilization procedures before this last time, when we put back five embryos, despairing that any would take. Beforehand, the fertility specialist asked us if we were OK with “reduction” — also known as selective abortion — in the event that too many took hold. We said yes, not really appreciating what that meant.

To our delight, four set up residence. Our initial joy, however, was tempered by the realization that we would have to lose two to keep two. For the last couple of months, Tina and I have discussed our options with our doctors, gradually wrapping our heads around this personal and private decision — only to have the government invite itself to the conference at the eleventh hour.

Read it all.