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

Month: May 2010

Elena Kagan and Harvard Law School

Our own guestblogger Diane Lucas is interviewed in an article about Harvard Law students’ reactions to Elena Kagan’s Supreme Court nomination. Diane talks about some of the racial issues at Harvard, and Kagan’s response (or lack thereof):

“It was blatantly sexist and racist,” Lucas said. “They depicted a number of women of color in the play, and one woman who is African-American, very intelligent, very well-spoken, they depicted her as being a ghetto girl from the ‘hood’ and they made her talk in ebonics and made it so that you could hardly understand what she was saying.”

Lucas said another African-American woman was depicted as promiscuous, and a Latina woman who in reality spoke English with an American accent was depicted as speaking no English. She said several students walked out.

But Lucas says when she and other students asked Kagan to issue a formal apology, set up diversity training and hire a diversity director, Kagan refused. Kagan defended the parody as students’ freedom of speech. From that, Lucas concluded that Kagan shirked her responsibility to make Harvard Law School a more racially sensitive place.

Does the Pill hurt your sex drive?

Studies point to yes (and the experience of many women points to yes).

In the 1960s, there was much hue and cry that the Pill would turn women into sex fiends and put marriages in peril. But in recent decades, medical concerns about hormonal birth control have shifted to the other end of the spectrum, with doctors maintaining that it may actually lower women’s libido and in some cases lead to sexual dysfunction.

Women have been saying for years that the Pill and other hormonal contraceptives can decrease their sex drives. Of course, for a lot of women, hormonal contraceptives have no such effect; for others, the decrease is small and is a tolerable trade-off for not getting pregnant. But I’m glad the medical community is finally catching on, and is recognizing that sexual desire in women is a good thing. Hopefully the evolution of birth control will continue to go in a lower-hormone direction, and will help women (and someday men, for pete’s sake) to prevent pregnancy without compromising desire or pleasure.

The Roman Polanski Humanitarian Award: Ilya Trushevsky & other recipients

This is a guest post by Natalia Antonova.

Sexual assault trigger warning.

So. Seems that something evil happened in Moscow over the May Day weekend. Ilya Trushevsky, a young artist famous for installations that involved turtles covered in rhinestones (I know, I know), was arrested and charged with attempted rape of a 17-year-old student. You can get the gist of the story from the article by Vladimir Kozlov, who works with me at The Moscow News (I ended up assigning Vladimir the story when I heard about it over the weekend).

Just as our headline states, the fall-out from the Trushevsky case has been epic. This is because Nikolai Nikifirov, a poet who was staying over at Ilya’s place, claims to have heard Ilya and an as-of-yet-unnamed friend of his assaulting the girl in the next room, and posted an account of what he says went down on LiveJournal. Most of it is so graphic that we couldn’t print the details.

Ilya initially retaliated with an LJ post that was more graphic – and more horrifying – because he laughed about the entire thing, made fun of the victim’s injuries (which, RIA Novosti reported, were extensive), gloated about how everyone down at the prosecutor’s office just thought the entire thing was hilarious, and that he will get off scot-free. He has since changed his tune somewhat – now he has tender concern for this girl, who was clearly “influenced” to press charges – though there are screencaps of his supporters threatening people who have written about the situation.

I have slogged through hundreds and hundreds of comments and commentaries, reading everything from “but they picked that slut up at a nightclub!” (as opposed to a convent – though it’s not as if we can’t find creative ways to blame nuns for getting raped as well – I mean, what are they DOING in those convents? You can’t blame the fellas for being curious, right?) to “haha, you better keep looking over your shoulder, Ilya, ’cause we’re coming for your ass!” (vigilante justice is not in the best interests of the victim in this case, but I can understand where that sentiment originated, especially when newspapers hadn’t yet reported on the case and everyone was wondering if it would simply go away) to people who came out of the woodwork to claim that Ilya is pretty famous for bad treatment of women. The comments sections on various LJ’s have turned into utter zoos as the result, and discussing all of the issues that were brought up as the result of this ase would probably require writing a dissertation or two.

I would, however, like to focus on one thing in particular, and that is the “Polanskification” of Ilya Trushevsky. Because it’s happening.

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Obama picks Kagan as Supreme Court nominee

Well, there’s that. I will write about this more in-depth in the coming days, as time allows. Suffice it to say that I think Kagan is a perfectly fine nominee; she’s very intelligent, she seems like a team player and she surely will be more than a competent Supreme Court justice.

But my perception of Kagan is that she’s a little bit gutless. And I would love to have seen Obama pick a slightly more daring, forward-thinking liberal — someone who isn’t afraid to take unpopular positions, and who is willing to put what’s right ahead of what is politically expedient. Sotomayor was another relatively centrist, highly-accomplished, incredibly intelligent pick who, while a bit braver than Kagan, is a model of judicial restraint. Despite the racist and sexist accusations throughout Sotomayor’s confirmation hearings, she is in reality a very centrist, conservative (in the judicial sense, not the political one) justice. I would have been much happier if, after getting a fairly “safe” choice onto the court, Obama went for a balls-out (or ovaries-out) liberal. My biggest concerns about Kagan are her lack of that kind of bravery, and her loyalty to this administration. The Bush administration consolidated executive power in extraordinary and terrifying ways; the Obama administration has been loathe to cede any of that power back. The Supreme Court will be tackling important questions of executive authority in the years to come, and I worry that Kagan will be more deferential to the government than I would like her to be.

At least she’ll probably be a fairy easy confirmation. The only thing that conservatives have to hang their hats on are the usual abortion and gay-rights issues — slightly more heated here after Kagan’s decision to briefly bar military recruiters from Harvard Law, since they violated the school’s anti-discrimination policy. But — and again, this is something I’ll tackle later when I have the time — that’s largely a non-issue, and (hopefully) won’t be too divisive of an issue once it’s actually explained. Especially since Kagan eventually did let the recruiters back on campus.

The New York Times has a run-down of Kagan’s notable statements and writings, and they are… not great. Some high/lowlights:

“I think it is a great deal better for the elected branches to take the lead in creating a more just society than for courts to do so.”

“I am fully prepared to argue, consistent with Supreme Court precedents, that the death penalty is constitutional.”

“It seems now utterly wrong to me to say that religious organizations generally should be precluded from receiving funds for providing the kinds of services contemplated by the Adolescent Family Life Act.”

“There is no federal constitutional right to same-sex marriage.”

Anyway, it’s nice to see Obama nominating another accomplished and intelligent woman to the court. But with so many of those women to pick from, I wish he had selected someone a little bit more progressive and a little bit less safe.

Faminist Theory

Apparently women cannot be both mothers and feminists — we have to choose between prams and politics. And most women are choosing prams! Which means that while in the past “women were protesting compulsory motherhood; now, it seems, they are not protesting anything at all—they are too busy mopping up crumbs.”

Filed under “read it and punch something.”

Defining Sluttiness

What sluts!

Chloe at Feministing has a run-down of the “slut panel” at Harvard’s Rethinking Virginity conference, which featured our own Sady Doyle. Chloe talks about how we define sluttery:

The panel opened with a discussion of what slut-shaming is, and Sady, who was the first to offer a definition, was careful to note that being labeled a slut can happen to anyone, even to people who have never had any sexual contact of any kind. Slut-shaming is often the result of perceived, rather than proven, sluttiness. As Therese then noted, sluttiness itself is entirely relative: In some cultures or among some social groups, she said, having slept with ten people over the course of your life is considered a pretty tame sexual history. In others, it makes you a dirty, untouchable slut. I added that, with definitions of what’s acceptable and what’s slutty being so malleable and poorly defined in our own culture, you often don’t know where the line between the two is until you’ve crossed it. And then – poof! – it’s too late: Other people have decided that you’re a slut, and you’re stuck with this damaging, divisive and damn stubborn label.

The fact that anyone can be labeled a slut, at any time, with any level of sexual activity under their belt, and the fact that sluttiness is a moving target, makes it clear that slut-shaming isn’t just about controlling how much sex women have*. If you can be called a slut without so much as kissing another person, then it stands to reason that your slut status must be based on something besides your level of sexual experience or activity. And often, it is. It’s based on what people assume about you just by looking at you – at your body, your clothes and the way you move through the world. Once you realize that, it becomes obvious that the slut label isn’t just about controlling how much sex women have: It’s about controlling how we dress, how we walk, how we talk, how we dance, how much we drink, who we talk to, how we feel about our own desires and so on and so on. And crossing the invisible, culturally-determined “slut line” in any of these arenas is enough to earn you a label that, no matter how much we denounce and detest it, no matter how well we understand its purpose and its perniciousness, somehow manages to seep into our brains and eat away at our certainty and self-assurance.

I used to joke that the definition of a slut is generally “Someone who has had more sex than me.” But Chloe’s right that it’s about so much more than that — sometimes confusingly so. And sometimes hilariously so! Like when the college student who is writing a sex diary for New York Magazine, in which she documents a week of doing it with three different dudes and suggesting threesomes left and right, updates her diary with the following:

11:34 p.m.: At the cast party for another show. My slutty friend is changing her panties in front of a few men we know. They ask me if I’d like to do it too. I don’t know how to reply without calling her a skank, and/or insinuating as much.

Panty-changing girl = slutty. Actual having-sex girl = ?. I can’t keep up!

I always feel a little silly engaging in these conversations, because I am apparently at an age where the word “slut” just isn’t a common insult anymore — it’s not a word that I’ve heard used seriously in years, and I can’t tell you the last time I called someone a slut in total seriousness.* I’m guessing that’s a factor of where I live, the kinds of people I surround myself with, and the fact that I am no longer in high school, which is where “What a slut” was a pretty common (and pretty devastating) way to insult a girl for anything at all. It’s up there with the phrase “that’s so gay” — kids said it a lot when I was in middle and high school, and then I just stopped hearing it completely, and now when people toss it out seriously it’s jarring not just because it’s offensive (although it is), but because it’s so retro. I want to respond by yelling, “WAAASSSUUPPP!” It’s kind of like when my mom decides to insult someone by saying that they look “loose.” Wrong, yes, and rare for such an insult to come out of my mother’s mouth, but unintentionally hilarious because, really? Loose, mom? Oh mom, you’re such a square.

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“For we are all one people created betzelem Elohim, in the image of God.”

This is a guest-post by Vivien Orbach-Smith. Vivien is an adjunct professor of journalism at NYU, and co-author of Soaring Underground: A Young Fugitive’s Life in Nazi Berlin. She is a contributor at Mothering21.com.

Molly Gabriella Kane is a fourth-year rabbinical student at Hebrew Union College, the flagship school of the Reform Jewish movement in New York City. Two weeks ago, standing before her peers, the HUC faculty, and a full congregation, she delivered her “senior sermon” – a rite of passage for every student embarking on the final year of studies before ordination (or, in Hebrew, smicha).

The only other time I saw Molly center-stage in a synagogue was at her Bat Mitzvah, wearing a summer dress and a winning smile. Now, 17 years later, watching her stride up to the bimah (pinstriped pantsuit, and that smile), I knew I was in for an emotional moment – but had no idea it would be a history-making one.

Molly was the last among a dozen students scheduled to give their sermons over the past several months. Her assigned date turned out to be fortuitous, because its accompanying Torah-reading was one that she was determined, as a gay woman, to tackle head-on. Among its verses are those routinely quoted as the Bible’s blistering condemnation of homosexuality (Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13).

Her oration was at once intensely personal, rooted in ancient tractates, and drawing on the history of Reform Judaism in America. (And, Molly being Molly, it was funny, too.) I was surprised to learn of this progressive movement’s fractured stance, over the years, regarding the ordination of openly gay clergy. Perhaps naively, I never imagined that the Reform/HUC establishment would’ve had issues with LGBT rabbis or cantors. And I honestly didn’t expect that Molly Kane’s speech, while candid and courageous, would be considered groundbreaking in the year 2010, in this particular milieu. But it was. Startlingly, applause erupted loudly at the end – led by a faculty member who was well aware that applauding in a Jewish sanctuary during a service is essentially a no-no.

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Thursday LOST Roundtable: The Candidate

Spoilers below!

The cast of LOST walks on the beach.

This week on LOST, Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse decided that they wanted to alienate every last one their fans — and it worked! We vent our continued rage below. Feel free to express your own anger in the comments (or talk about other LOST things, if you feel like it), so long as you do so without spoilers for future episodes.

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