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

Month: June 2007

Raising Children in Our Way-Past-Gender Society.

I consider traditional concepts of gender to be destroyed, social constructions that, if imposed, limit human freedom. And yet, when I think about raising children (Mikey wants to be a daddy someday), I am hopeful for a wife fluent in the language and practice of traditional gendered womanhood (just as I think I am fluent in the language and practice of traditional gendered manhood). What’s going on?

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Big Brother 8 in Britain is out to stereotype women…or is it?

Channel 4 is at it again this time with the 8th annual installment of Big Brother in the UK. This time there is a twist: it is a predominately female house with one sole male housemate. After this year Celebrity Big Brother Fiasco in the UK where contemporary Britain’s underbelly for prejudice and racism was carved open, I can only approach this new helping of Big Brother with scepticism.

Girls are constantly made to feel like they must compete against each other whether it is for the attention of that buff guy that everyone wants or whether it is for the adoration from other girls with “oh she is so pretty”. This TV channel truly believes that the claws will come out and is it a complete generalisation to say that they probably will? Bitchiness is not a female or a male thing. Yet, it is attributed to us because this sexist global society needs women to be at each others throats as opposed to saving each other – the divide and conquer theory is still live and kicing. Female solidarity frightens people and it definitely does not make “good TV” because snark, malice and rumour make people feel secure: as long as other people are tearing themselves apart like hungry lions, no one cares.

Part of me almost has a drip of pity seeping out of my eyes for the girls…Then again, I can’t find myself to have sympathy tears for them for one simple reason: Big Brother is formulated to create hype and with 7 years of Big Brother imprinted in British TV history, they know the drill: fight or the public evicts you quicker than Carl Lewis could ever sprint. Perhaps these girls in this serving of this sour dish will be strong and defy my opinion. I am counting the days until that happens.

Giuliani: Worse than George Bush?

rudy

Matt Taibbi does not like Rudy Giuliani. And since I don’t either, I’ll reproduce this gem from his Rolling Stone article:

Rudy Giuliani is a true American hero, and we know this because he does all the things we expect of heroes these days — like make $16 million a year, and lobby for Hugo Chávez and Rupert Murdoch, and promote wars without ever having served in the military, and hire a lawyer to call his second wife a “stuck pig,” and organize absurd, grandstanding pogroms against minor foreign artists, and generally drift through life being a shameless opportunist with an outsize ego who doesn’t even bother to conceal the fact that he’s had a hard-on for the presidency since he was in diapers. In the media age, we can’t have a hero humble enough to actually be one; what is needed is a tireless scoundrel, a cad willing to pose all day long for photos, who’ll accept $100,000 to talk about heroism for an hour, who has the balls to take a $2.7 million advance to write a book about himself called Leadership. That’s Rudy Giuliani. Our hero. And a perfect choice to uphold the legacy of George W. Bush.

Burn.

The article is a pretty good take-down of Mr. Giuliani. For a longer and more thorough expose, I highly recommend Rudy! by Wayne Barrett. And, since I know Zuzu is even more of a Rudy-hater than I am, I’m especially curious to hear her take.

via Gawker.

Project Guest Blogger: Week Two

Tomorrow we’ll have two new guest-bloggers joining us: Mikey and Aulelia. A big thanks to Ms. Lauren for her blogging this week.

Aulelia runs the blog Charcoal Ink, where she highlights and discusses subjects within the spheres of politics, feminism, culture and society that particularly affect Africans or members of the African diaspora. She is a student at Bristol University in England, currently living in Paris, studying Politics & French as a dual degree. She loves Darrin Henson, Denzel Washington, reading magazines, chocolate, gossip blogs, lipstick, feminism, Africa, unity, and activism.

Mikey used to blog at Michael Phillips, and served as creative director of Heartbreaking Industries. He is a talented and thoughtful law student and writer who is passionate about law and politics, and whose perspective I always find challenging and enlightening. He has also been made fun of by Jon Stewart.

A full summer guest blogger schedule will be posted very soon. Trust me, it’ll be worth the wait.

Hopefully you’re as excited for Mikey and Aulelia’s posts as I am. Check out the guest blogger comment policy, peruse their blogs for a taste of what they’re about, and get ready for another week of awesome guest posts.

Also, I think we need an official Project Guest Blogger logo — any Photoshop-savvy volunteers wanna take it on? (Alternately, does anyone want to send me Photoshop?)

Project Guest Blogger Comment Policy

We’ve invited several of the most talented writers and bloggers on the internets to join us this summer for a guest-blogging stint. We’ll generally have two guest-bloggers per week (there will be a handful of exceptions, when we’ll have either one or three), and the guest-bloggers will have full reign to write about whatever they want, however they want during their week. We’ve put together a pretty incredible line-up, which will be announced very soon. But first, a PSA about the comment policy during Project Guest Blogger:

All guest bloggers are permitted to delete comments on their own posts at their discretion. They may import their own comment policies from their own blogs into their posts at Feministe. It is entirely up to them what they allow up and what they don’t, and Zuzu, Piny and I will not be second-guessing their moderation decisions.

Ok, PSA over. Just want to make sure we’re all on the same page.

Performance Anxiety



Feminists: Emasculating young men since 1973

It appears to be Performed Masculinity Day here at Feministe, and across the interwebs. First, we have this tragic story from the Washington Post about how young men are thoroughly confused about what it means to be “manly” — all because the ladies are suddenly stepping on their toes.

Swish or swagger? That’s the choice that men — particularly young men — find themselves facing today. As author Calvin Sandborn — who juggled teaching and child-raising as he wrote “Becoming the Kind Father” — says, society used to assign certain characteristics to men, including power, aggressiveness, professional success and autonomy. Other, shall we say, swishier traits were expected of women, such as the ability to create and nurture connections, kindness and communication.

Of course, you could always find some crossover. But while catching up with or surpassing men at school and at their first jobs, young women have dumped much of the feminine to embrace the masculine traits that they think represent success.

The problem, basically, is that some women are becoming autonomous, powerful, professionally successful people. Since the worst thing for a man is to be like a woman, men are forced to come up with other social markers of masculinity, and they don’t really know where to go.

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Why I Provide Abortions

Lauren sent on this powerful piece written by an abortion provider, explaining why he provides the services he does. You really have to read the whole thing, but here’s a teaser:

By 1967 I was a third year medical student, still with no visible means of support, and we were pregnant with our third child. It was the spring of that year and I was ending my rotation in the Ob-Gyn Service clinic. I was assigned a 40 plus year old, poverty stricken mother of several children. I think she was unmarried but I am not sure of that now. This care worn mother-of-several had a large abdominal mass that I rapidly determined to be a well advanced pregnancy. I asked my resident to come and break the news to this woman; it was very obvious to me that she was not going to be happy about the news of another pregnancy. When told that she – already unable to adequately feed and clothe her family – was again pregnant, she looked up at me and the resident. There we stood, two white males, well clothed, well feed young men with superior educations. We were, in her eyes, stunningly blessed and obviously going places in the world. She began to weep silently. She must have assumed, for good reason, that there was no way that we would understand her problems; she knew also that there was nothing that we could or would do to relieve her lacerating misery.

“Oh God, doctor,” she said quietly, “I was hoping it was cancer.”

He concludes,

Like multitudes before me and, I trust, multitudes to come, I eventually heard (Try as I might to avoid hearing it!) in that mother’s grief-filled declaration, “Oh God, Doctor, I was hoping it was cancer”, a still, small voice asking, “Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?” to which I was at last compelled to reply, “here am I, send me.”

He also illustrates something that many pro-choicers emphasize — that there is no such thing as an “abortion of convenience” — but phrases it better than anyone I’ve read:

I have never seen an abortion decision entered into lightly by anyone involved. The decision to have an abortion is most often made in the time of the first great personal moral crisis that ever faces a girl, a woman, her family and the people who love them. It is only those who stand outside and condemn the women and families who are faced with these dilemmas who take lightly the decisions made in these straits and trivialize the circumstances in which they are made.

Emphasis mine, because that is an absolutely crucial point.

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At least he’s honest.

Bill O’Reilly:

But do you understand what the New York Times wants, and the far-left want? They want to break down the white, Christian, male power structure, which you’re a part, and so am I, and they want to bring in millions of foreign nationals to basically break down the structure that we have. In that regard, Pat Buchanan is right. So I say you’ve got to cap with a number.

I’ll at least give him some credit for admitting that white Christian dudes run things around here, and that his conservative political beliefs stem from pure self-interest in maintaining a power structure that allows him to walk all over everyone else. Some of us would call this belief system “white supremacy,” but I’m sure such a term would have Mr. O’Reilly howling about how we’re anti-white-male bigots, and besides he’s not racist or sexist, he just thinks that white Christian men run the country because they’re generally superior, and so their power should be maintained by systematically oppressing people of color, non-Christians, and women.

What’s white supremacist about that?

via Feministing.