June 2008 – Feministe

One of these things just doesn’t belong here…

A few recent headlines:

Female suicide bomber in Iraq kills 15, wounds 40

Suicide bomber kills 7 policemen in northern Iraq

Can you guess the gender of the third suicide bomber?

I spent a while as an anti-sexual and partner violence educator, and one of my favorite exercises to practice with people was something like this one, created by Jackson Katz. Essentially, you begin by having the group read a typical “educational” passage about violence against women—the kind of thing you’d read in your average newspaper, or even in old-school rape crisis center type educational programming. Then, once you’ve let that sink in, you start breaking down the language of the article. What becomes clear, as you do this, is the fact that a lot of statements about how we think about gender and violence are made in the things we don’t explicitly state. Most glaringly, the focus of such articles is almost exclusively on the victims of gender violence, who are explicitly stated to be primarily female. The gender of perpetrators, however, is not mentioned.

According to the Department of Justice, 88% of violent crime in the U.S. is committed by men. But as a society, we rarely talk about the prevalence of male violence, or how striking it is that gender, more than any other factor, is such a predictor of violent behavior. And we virtually never really discuss why men are so much more likely to commit acts of violence than women are. In my experience, if I manage to wrangle your average person into considering why this is the case, they’ll generally fall back on bogus pop science. Something to the effect of, “Testosterone makes them do it!”

In other words, “I have based a large part of my identity and sense of self-worth on my conformity to conventional gender roles. The suggestion that gender roles as they are constructed in a patriarchal culture is somehow flawed is deeply threatening to me. Therefore, I will attempt to use essentializing pseudo-science to convince you that feminist change is completely impossible, so you will stop saying these unsettling things that make me uncomfortable and suggest that by reinforcing traditional gender roles, I have unintentionally aided in the creation of great suffering.”

Denial. Not just river.

The Ivory Ceiling: How Academia Keeps Women Out

Last March, Native American scholar and activist Andrea Smith was denied tenure by the Women’s Studies department at the University of Michigan. Smith’s publications and awards were more than enough warrant the job security that tenure provides; to students, colleagues, activists, and observers, it seemed clear that the decision stemmed not from objective concern over academic integrity (that is, whether or not she could do the job), but from a (probably subconscious) belief that work centering on women of color doesn’t have a place within higher education. It raised profoundly disturbing questions about which lines of inquiry are considered “intellectual” and which aren’t, and indicated that work that makes lives better doesn’t seem to be a priority in the university system. Brownfemipower, the leading archivist and commentator on the Smith case in the feminist blogosphere, was forced to wonder what the point of academia even is, if it’s actively disenfranchising such huge swaths of society. She writes:

As I talked with more and more women of color, I came to see that I was not the only one who spent a least a small amount of time feeling betrayed and angry that so much of our greatest thinking is created and owned by academia. I know many women of color who refuse to “do” academia at all, and I know just as many women of color who not only refuse to “do” academia, but think that other women of color who *are* in academia are not necessarily sell outs–but not necessarily doing the best thing with their time either. There’s SO much work that needs to be done in our communities, how can we waste any time fighting an uphill battle making inroads with a profession that has proven to be nothing but hostile to us?

…

It was about this time that things began to shift for me. I began to wonder what academia as an institution had to do with curriculum–who decided what was taught? Who decided what was researched? Who ‘owned’ the research once it was done? Who was the research done for? Who made the rules in this work place? And if women of color and their communities are not the first answers to ANY of these questions–then what’s the point of women of color being there to begin with?

Intro

Hello, all!

I’m one of this fortnight’s guest bloggers. My blogging name is The Girl Detective, and I write for Modern Mitzvot, a site devoted to exploring social justice from a Jewish perspective. I also write at my self-titled blog.

I teach freshman composition at a community college, although someday I hope to get a job teaching creative writing. My fiction has appeared in journals here and there (my greatest accomplishment is a story in The Missouri Review) and I have an essay on gray rape coming up in the next issue of Make/shift. I’ve got two novels: one that I’m sending to small presses, and another – my first foray into science fiction – that is currently going okay.

I’d love to tell you my name, but some bad experiences a couple of years back made me decide to go undercover. (Who knew that men don’t like it when women write about sex?) BUT. If you’re dying to know, you can look at this flash story I wrote here.

These are things I like:

1. Space (the exploration of)
2. Antisemitism (the ending of)
3. Academia (the improvement of)
4. Literature (the reading of)

Big thanks to Jill for giving me this opportunity – I’ve got some stuff in store for you, oh yes. It’s going to be awesome.

How about this? Don’t change your name.

I previously posted this last week on my blog and on BlogHer. I had initially intended it to be my first Feministe post, but I then I found the CNN.com article, and I had to express myself immediately. If you haven’t read it already, then it’s new to you. 🙂

“Name change tricky for working women” [I guess the change is simpler for the lazy bums who can’t find a job?], at CNN.com/living [where the Women’s issues are shoved] via AngryBlackBitch.

Well before her wedding, Lauren Abraham decided she would take her husband’s last name, Mahoney.

First, she became Lauren Abraham Mahoney, then Lauren Mahoney, confusing her co-workers at Home Depot headquarters in Atlanta. The tedious legal process of switching her name took about nine months to complete.

Finally, more than a year after her wedding, the 29-year-old e-mailed 160 friends and acquaintances to alert them to a new e-mail account and clarify her identity.

“As I was meeting people over the last year with my new name, and I gave them my e-mail address, it was my old name, which they didn’t know,” she said.

Changing one’s surname after marriage is still more common than not for women, often because they hope it will make for fewer complications in the long run, when they have children.

Except for the fact that 1 out of every 2 married couples will get divorced, and the husband, the wife and the kids might all end up with different names.

Hello, Feministe!

My name is Mahlena-Rae Johnson. I’ll be guest-blogging here for the next two weeks, and I’m very excited. Thank you, Jill!

Some of you may be familiar with the site I run at SteveThePenguin.com, where I blog about pop culture and politics. This year I self-published my first novel, Steve the Penguin. It’s about a young Hollywood assistant named Bianca who goes home to St. Thomas, Virgin Islands, for her ten-year high school reunion. I’m currently working on the first sequel, Hot Penguin Action, as well as the YA spin-off series about Bianca’s multiracial Mormon niece, Sage Dempsey.

Here are six random fun facts about me:

1. I have seen every episode of The Golden Girls, some more than five times.

2. I own the complete Sex and the City series on DVD, but I hated the movie.

3. I heart Al Gore.

4. I have traveled to at least 30 US cities, and 22 different countries, including Barbados, Canada, France, Greece, Jamaica, Martinique, Spain and Venezuela.

5. My big goal in life is to create a broadband television network for young women, so they don’t have to feel bad about themselves anymore. Not every teenager wants to be a Pussycat Doll.

6. I’ve called myself a feminist since I was 14, but I have actually been a feminist all my life.

What are some fun facts about you readers?

Ball Girl

Love this:

UPDATE: Nevermind, it’s fake!

Thanks to Trishka for the link.

I’m so utterly shocked

Apparently a new study shows that academics chosen to write op-eds for three major newspapers are overwhelmingly male. The Wall Street Journal was the worst of the bunch, with 97% of their op-eds by academics written by men.

The study doesn’t get into the fact that this gender bias isn’t limited to op-eds by academics. At the New York Times (which features 82% male writers of op-eds by academics), two out of 11 regular op-ed columnists are women. At the Washington Post, two out of 16 columnists are women.

Now, I don’t necessarily think that having more women write op-eds would be helpful to women. New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd is a woman, and her ramblings seem to alternately expound on how ridiculous she thinks other women are and questioning the masculinity of any man who doesn’t act like a complete asshole. However, I do think that this extreme disparity shows that editors buy into the cultural belief that when men write, what they have to say is more important than what women have to say. As this overview of the climate for women in academia notes:

In one study, first done in 1968 and then replicated in 1983, college students were asked to rate identical articles to specific criteria. The authors’ names attached to the articles were clearly male or female, but were reversed for each group of raters: what one group thought had been written by a male, the second group thought had been written by a female, and vice versa. Articles supposedly written by women were consistently ranked lower than when the very same articles were thought to have been written by a male.

So basically, if you’ve got a woman’s name, you’ve got to write better than the men if you want to be considered as good. Add to that the fact that editors want to hear about “important” issues and not “trivial” ones like us ladies are so concerned about (you know, “women’s issues”), and you get 90% of your editorials written by men.

I have a theory that the last jobs to be democratized to include oppressed people are those that hold the most power, and getting to control cultural dialogue and representations is one of the biggest kinds of power you can get. That’s why women never get to direct movies and it was so imperative for white corporateland to co-opt and gain control of popular hip hop.

These biases are replicated in the world of intertubes too. There are more women blogging than men, but go ahead and check out the blogroll and rec list on any blog that isn’t specifically devoted to feminism/womanism.

It might be a fun project to force various forms of media to include women’s voices at a 50-50 ratio. In the meantime, I’ll be getting ignored over here on the feminist blogs until I can attain the brilliance of Nicholas Kristof’s gender analysis.*

*Note: I have no problem with Nicholas Kristof, who has recently taken an interest in violence against women and sexism. I’m glad someone with the kind of visibility he has is addressing these issues. We need allies, however imperfect. What I have a problem with is the fact that dozens of women have made the points he is making, with more depth, nuance, eloquence, and understanding of interlocking oppressions, but they were ignored.

Katy Perry Plays Make Believe

Katy Perry’s “I Kissed A Girl” has been in my head a lot lately.

Not just because it’s catchy, not just because there’s something I like about the song, but also because the song has been bugging me.

On the surface, Perry’s song seems to be acknowledging and condoning alternate female sexualities, as well as singing the praises of traditional femininity, with lyrics like, “I kissed a girl / and I liked it” and “Us girls we are so magical / Soft skin, red lips, so kissable / Hard to resist so touchable / Too good to deny it”.

But other lines quickly quash any question about Perry’s sexuality: “I kissed a girl / just to try it / I hope my boyfriend / won’t mind it / It felt so wrong / It felt so right / Don’t mean I’m in love tonight”; “It’s [the kiss] not what / I’m used to”; and “It’s not what / Good girls do / Not how they should behave”. The last scene in the music video reinforces this idea that “good girls” don’t kiss other girls, with Perry waking up in bed next to her aforementioned boyfriend.

In popular culture, kissing a woman is only permissible and sanctioned if a woman is already an avowed heterosexual. This drags up the male fantasy of lesbian women that perform on each other to please him instead of each other. For examples, just watch a few minutes of a Girls Gone Wild commercial.

So we have faux homosexuality that plays into the male gaze with a video full of women in fishnets and underwear, gyrating and having giggly pillow fights, all while not actually kissing each other. The absence of any kissing, while nice because that’s one less titillation for the Male Gaze, drives the point home that this song and dance is really just about a male fantasy, having nothing to do with the desires of women.

The icing on the cake comes from Perry’s own objectification of a female subject: “Just wanna try you on / I’m curious for you” and “No, I don’t even know your name / It doesn’t matter / You’re my experimental game / Just human nature”. Now we’re free to dehumanize and sexualize each other into pieces of meat to be sampled, instead of waiting around for a man to do it! And we can pretend it’s just human nature, too. Free season passes for everybody! Yippee!

This attitude underscores an aggressive masculinity that runs through the song, its beat, and Perry’s singing: “and I liked it” is sung with such defiance. It poses as third-wave feminism with a “girly” but loud-and-proud protagonist, but is really just good, old-fashioned woman-using.

I suppose I shouldn’t expect much from the same woman who sings a song entitled, “Ur So Gay” that feminizes and demonizes men who drive electric cars and don’t eat meat. But I wanted to find something positive in this song that gets suck in my head and kind of gives me a boost of testosterone-filled attitude. I guess I’ll have to stick this in the “guilty pleasures” file.

Full disclosure: I’m coming at this from a heterosexual perspective. I’d love to hear queer voices on Perry’s song.

Feministe Feedback: Good Websites for Young Geeky Girls

A really great question from a feminist-minded dad:

I’m a concerned dad with a question that I’m hoping other Feministe readers might be able to help with.

I’ve got a daughter who’s about to turn eight. She’s loves and is very good math and science, and proudly describes herself as a “junior geek”. My wife and I want to encourage her to keep doing that. But as we all know, there’s a huge amount of pressure for girls to not do that sort of thing – both active pressure, in the form of people telling her that “Girls don’t do that”, and passive pressure, in the form of every toy, every book, every website that’s geared towards sciency kids has a strong “boy” bias.

She’s been getting very interested in doing things online. But in the online time we let her have, she’s mostly going to places like “americangirl.com”. When I asked her why she doesn’t go to some other sites, her answer was that “they’re for boys. ”

Are there any good sites on the web for young geeky girls, that encourage them in things like math, science, and technology?

Suggestions? Ideas?

I Objectify Men

I know this doesn’t sound terribly progressive of me, but I think some objectification is healthy, whether one is male or female. I believe that both male and female desire should have a place in our discourse – which is why so much of my professional work is dedicated to football and footballers and footballers’ legs. It is all quite serious. Stop smirking.

I do think that because of power differentials, objectification of women more readily becomes a springboard for abuse, and worse. But I do think that there is a genuinely OK way of expressing one’s appreciation for someone else’s physical body and/or persona (and hell, a beautiful mind can be just as sexy). And I want more women to be comfortable with expressing their views on men and women that they find attractive, and even be superficial about it.

These conversations can be dangerous. Desire can be dangerous. But a world in which we do not have these conversations would be too sterile for my taste. Too many times, I run up against the notion that it is somehow “undignified” for a woman to participate, to be too sexual, and too frank, or allow herself a moment of shallowness; I hear people say that she is merely “lowering herself” to the status of men (I’ve seen that on feminist blogs as well as other types of blogs). But I disagree wholeheartedly. I think it all depends on context.

I’m interested to know what you all think about this.