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

Month: June 2010

For someone who doesn’t believe in a self, you sure talk a lot about yours.

As you may have noticed from my guest posts here (or, if you sneaked a peek at it, the work on my home blog), I write a lot about myself. My own experiences.

From a feminist standpoint: fine, okay. Might be better with some more news or articles mixed in, but overall no problem — the personal is political. Pretty much.

But can the personal also be spiritual? Or, in my case, as a dhamma practitioner, why on earth would someone who’s working on dissolving their ego decide to keep an autobiographical blog?

As it turns out, I find that dhammic memoir blogging is a wonderful form of spiritual praxis. It’s also got some pretty interesting gendered implications.

Let’s start with the gender stuff first. What does it mean to keep a “journal-style blog” versus a “filter blog” or a “knowledge log”? Definition-wise, it means you blog about events and thoughts in your daily life, as opposed to news and media or knowledge about a particular field of study. Connotation-wise, frequently, it means the things you blog about are mundane, trivial, personal, probably melodramatic, and generally unworthy of serious consideration. After all, we’re in the midst of a transformation of the public sphere! Obviously more important than photos of what you cooked for dinner last night.

Familiar trope, anyone? The authors of the article “Women and Children Last: The Discursive Construction of Weblogs” (article: useful; gender binary: not useful) break down the sexism related to differential coverage of, and attention to, filter and journal blogs.

A selective focus on filter-style blogs, and to a lesser extent, k-logs, characterizes mass media reports, scholarship about weblogs, definitions and historical accounts of the weblog phenomenon produced by blog authors (including by women), and patterns of linking and referring within the blogosphere itself […] Since men are more likely to create filter blogs than are women or teens, this selective focus effectively privileges adult male bloggers. In each case, this outcome is mediated by other motivations that are arguably not sexist or ageist in and of themselves, but that reproduce societal sexism and ageism around weblogs as a cultural artifact.

. . .

Women and young people are key actors in the history and present use of weblogs, yet that reality is masked by public discourses about blogging that privilege the activities of a subset of adult male bloggers. In engaging in the practices described in this essay, participants in such discourses do not appear to be seeking consciously to marginalize females and youth. Rather, journalists are following “newsworthy” events, scholars are orienting to the practices of the communities under investigation, bloggers are linking to popular sites, and blog historians are recounting what they know from first-hand experience. At the same time, by privileging filter blogs, public discourses about blogs implicitly evaluate the activities of adult males as more interesting, important and/or newsworthy than those of other blog authors.

Many of these participants (including most of the journalists) are themselves female. Nonetheless, it is hardly a coincidence that all of these practices reinscribe a public valuing of behaviors associated with educated adult (white) males, and render less visible behaviors associated with members of other demographic groups. This outcome is consistent with cultural associations between men and technology, on the one hand (Wajcman, 1991), and between what men do and what is valued by society (the “Androcentric Rule”; Coates, 1993). As Wajcman (p.11) notes, “qualities associated with manliness are almost everywhere more highly regarded than those thought of as womanly.” In this case, discourse practices that construct weblogs as externally-focused, substantive, intellectual, authoritative, and potent (in the sense of both “influential” and “socially transformative”) map readily on to Western cultural notions of white collar masculinity (Connell, 1995), in contrast to the personal, trivial, emotional, and ultimately less important communicative activities associated with women (cf. “gossip”). Such practices work to relegate the participation of women and other groups to a lower status in the technologically-mediated communication environment that is the blogosphere, and more generally, to reinforce the societal status quo.

So, in the same way that valuing laundry and lullabies as reproductive labor can shift our definitions of important activities and “work” itself, valuing journal-style blogging (and its younger cousin, microblogging) helps us understand the social and subjective functions that the medium might actually be serving for regular people, even while ‘history’ focuses elsewhere.

Still, just because journal blogging serves some meaningful function, doesn’t mean its a spiritual one. So, again, how can memoir blogging possibly fit into a dhammic practice?

More on that tomorrow. 🙂

Happy Wednesday!

How men and women pitch stories

The Awl ran a piece today about inquiries they get for submission, noting the difference between emails they receive from men and from women:

The emails from men are pretty direct. The emails from women are often kind of… apologetic!

Inquiry letter from a man:

“Do you take pitches? Should I just write something and send it? Do I have to tickle the balls? I want to write for the awl, dammit.”

Inquiry letter from a woman:

“As an long-time admirer of your site (and non-too-frequent registered commenter), I’ve been too shy to pitch as I’ve never felt like my work measured up to your fine standards.”

Inquiry letter from a man:

“Can you offer a word of advice regarding how submissions work, desired timetables, what you like the pitches to look like, and so forth?”

Inquiry letter from a woman:

“I’m sure I’m going about this all wrong, but I couldn’t find any sort of submission area on the site. What I’m wondering is, how does one go about becoming a contributor to The Awl?”

Reading the differences between these pitches, they sound almost as if they’ve been exaggerated for effect – but I’ve already heard a few editors echo that this looks exactly pitches they receive. A friend of mine was talking about this last week and noted that women often start pitching to less prestigious publications thinking that they can’t aim for the top, while men often shoot for top publications first and then work their way down if they don’t get their first pitch accepted.

As a freelance writer, I do my fair share of pitching to various editors. Pitching is easily my least favorite part of the process – you want to get every single thing right and then you imagine how the editor will react to it and then fine-tune it again, before you finally send and hope they don’t reject the idea that you’re so excited about. I’d like to say I don’t fall into the trap of self-conscious, apologetic, overly cautious pitches, but I have definitely done it. And I’ve seen some of my female writer friends do it as well. Not that there’s anything wrong with politeness, but part of getting published is about how well you can sell yourself and your story to editors, right? So why the self-deprecation?

And this contributes to an overall larger problem for women in the media. Women are already less likely to pitch stories, and according to the Op-Ed Project, men make up 80% or more of newspaper op-ed pages; 84% of Sunday talk show guests; 85% of Hollywood producers; 85% of bestselling authors on the New York Times nonfiction bestseller list; and 83% of Congress.

There are some terrific groups dedicated to combating this problem – such as The Op Ed Project, the Women’s Media Center, Women, Action & The Media, and others; but despite the discussion around this issue it sometimes still seems like there’s still a lot of room for improvement. For me, reading the pitches highlighted by The Awl and noting the staggering difference in their tone and their ask was a big wakeup call – are women writers doing enough to promote themselves and their work? And are we doing our part to help other women journalists get published as well?

Gun Proponents Take Aim at Domestic Violence Survivors

Let me start out by saying that I’m not totally unsympathetic to gun rights. I’m not opposed to people having guns. I’m not even opposed to people having lots of different kinds of guns. I get it that people go shooting for fun, or that they like to hunt, or that guns are part of their culture. Guns aren’t necessarily part of my culture, but that’s ok. But even though people should be allowed there guns, I don’t think it’s too far-reaching to say that there should be limits on deadly weapons. If you’re a convicted violent criminal, you probably shouldn’t be allowed to own a bunch of guns. If you’re a convicted terrorist, or if you’re convicted of conspiracy to commit a violent crime, I’m ok with not letting you have guns either. I’m ok with not letting people carry concealed weapons in certain public places. If you buy a gun, I think you should have to undergo a background check, and that getting a gun license should involve some sort of safety training — just like driving a car. A lot of these rules are already in place, obviously. Basically, guns are a responsibility with great potential to cause harm, and should be treated by the government as such. So, great.

But the gun lobby isn’t ok with that. The gun lobby seems to think that any person, no matter how many times they’ve proven their propensity for violence and unpredictability, should be able to have a gun. Take, for example, this NPR story, which highlights the gun lobby’s decision to try to tackle one of the most common-sense gun control laws out there: The law regulating gun ownership for those convicted of domestic violence.

Similarly, Paul Helmke, president of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, said there’s going to be a lot of groping as to where to “draw the line.” He expects court tests on assault-weapons bans, bans on armor-piercing bullets, bans on concealed carrying of guns and many other gun restrictions.

Glenn Ivey, chairman of the board of the Association of Prosecuting Attorneys, asked: “Will that apply to cars? Will that apply to yards? Will people be allowed to carry them on their person under this interpretation of the Second Amendment? How far will this go before it runs into the point where reasonable regulation is going to be permitted?”

Herb Titus, counsel for Gun Owners of America, agrees. He sees challenges, as well, to registration and licensing restrictions, to age restrictions for gun ownership, and to limits on the number of guns that can be bought at one time. But first in the pipeline of challenges, he says, will be challenges to laws banning guns for those convicted of domestic violence misdemeanors.

Putting aside the question of why someone needs armor-piercing bullets, you would think it’s pretty common sense to say that people who beat the crap out of their intimate partners are probably not the kind of people who we, as a society, want owning weapons. We know that domestic abusers tend to be repeatedly violent — beating up your partner is rarely a one-time thing. We know that domestic abusers tend to get increasingly violent. We know that women are killed by their abusers at horrifying rates, and are often killed by guns. We know that domestic abuse is under-reported and under-convicted.

So really, gun lobby? This is your great Constitutional and civil rights issue? The rights of people who have been criminally convicted of violent crimes to own guns? (Here, I’ll take a minute to point out that we limit the rights of people with criminal convictions all the time; we limit their liberty, but we also impose a series of restrictions from blocking voting rights to taking away drivers’ licenses to monitoring by the state to restricting where they can live and travel. Not all of these restrictions are good, in my opinion, but at least some are justified. Point being, the ban on gun-buying is not an anomaly).

A lot of Americans are sympathetic to the rights of gun-owners. But you know who most people are actually not super sympathetic to, at least in theory? Domestic abusers. So if the gun lobby decides to advocate for gun ownership rights for domestic abusers, I sure hope that liberal and feminist groups will take them on, and loudly. I have a feeling they’re shooting themselves in the foot with this one, if you will.

Where Do We Take Refuge?

I’d been working on some posts for today, but right now I think I’d just like to take a moment to acknowledge and honor the pain that a lot of us are feeling as a result of some recent threads here. Now that trigger warnings have been added and the harm has been addressed, maybe we can take some time to heal the suffering, and to take refuge.

“Taking refuge” in dhammic praxis has a specific meaning, and refers to the “Triple Gem”:

>> Buddha – taking inspiration from the qualities of the historical Buddha, and all enlightened teachers;

>> Dhamma – taking inspiration from the teachings of the buddha;

>> Sangha – taking inspiration from a community of dhamma practitioners.

For me, this practice (including mindfulness, everyday compassion, and Vipassana meditation) is kind of the ultimate refuge, that provides a foundation for the way I understand and participate in reality. But as the teachers at East Bay Meditation Center recently reminded me, whether or not we practice dhamma, we all have places and ways we take refuge. Could be taking a walk outside. Having a good cry. Writing in a journal. Practicing some yoga. Wilin’ out on our drum kit. Talking to a best friend. Spending time with an animal companion. Singing. Dancing. Praying. Going to therapy. Getting a good night’s sleep. Closing our eyes and breathing for one whole minute. Bringing awareness to what’s going on in our body.

Hopefully, our refuge will not be a means of escaping our suffering, but of engaging it from a different angle, which aids the process of letting go. Sue Nhim described this release beautifully just today on an earlier thread here:

this states so clearly what I have been feeling for the past few months, where before I denied that harm was done to me and yet I suffered, and then I accepted that I was harmed and still suffered, and now I understand that just because I was harmed/ damaged doesn’t mean that I have to suffer and hold on to my anxiety and anger, I can just let that go. It doesn’t negate the fact that I was harmed or mean that I should just ignore it, but it happened and what I can do to win is to not suffer and go on, wiser happier better. My mom calls it a state of grace, all I know is that it doesn’t hurt to go outside anymore.

So where do you take refuge? What are your best tools for letting go of suffering?

Wishing wellness to everyone,

katie

It’s Dark But It’s Promising, This Marxist Feminist Ground

[Please keep in mind the guidelines for commenting on this post! To summarize, they are: (1) Abstain from snark; (2) Prioritize the positive; (3) Honor our bodies; (4) Be honest(ly); and (5) Get friendly with silence. I hope you might find some benefit in practicing them – and feel welcome to let us know how it’s going on that front. As we know, participating in these discussions is about more than being right or smart. Thanks!]

Among the searchlights of critical thinking, feminism is one heck of a beam, right?

For a while there, my Women’s Studies classes served up mind-fuck after delicious mind-fuck: teaching me how to pick apart and expose the essencelessness, the cultural and historical contingencies, of so many “natural” or “obvious” patterns. Feminism also gave me a keen eye for harm: especially the kind of harm that results from apparent ‘progress.’ Those invisible, or supposedly inevitable ‘externalities’: one group getting saved while another gets screwed. Feminism was like this twin engine for understanding reality: extreme possibility and extreme constraint. Exciting, for sure. Made me feel like I had a good grip on the truth.

But after a while my feminism hit a block. I just didn’t know what to do with it anymore. Jessica Valenti describes the same sense of dissatisfaction with the academic side of things in Full Frontal Feminism:

When I started coming home from grad school with ideas and theories I couldn’t talk to [my mom] about, academic feminism ceased to be truly useful for me.

…[A]cademic feminism isn’t for me. I like activism.

But in activism, too, I ran into trouble. Shining my own critical beam on myself, I found that my activist feminisms tended to screw over some people (especially poor people): either by engendering more harms or creating the mere illusion of material gains where none really existed. (Too many examples to name, but see, for instance, the ongoing history of womanism, or “The Nonprofit Industrial Complex and Trans Resistance” by Rickke Mananzala and Dean Spade, and a related analysis of nonprofit work as gendered by yours truly.)

I’m still wrasslin’ with these problems, and certainly don’t claim knowledge of some sort of pure, perfect, correct feminist activism. But the reason I keep on searching, as thankful as I am for all my experiences, is that I strongly disagree with the idea, also offered in FFF, that

“At the end of the day, no matter what the form, any feminist activism is all good by me.”

I hear this a lot, directly and indirectly, and it’s probably the one idea that’s brought me closest to giving up on my feminism.

Read More…Read More…

You don’t get to out me

So far, I have avoided writing about trans subjects. Though that’s what I’m best known for here in Internet Land, it’s far from my only (or even dominant) interest in politics. I have layers, you know, like an onion or a parfait. Still, I have something that probably needs to be said. It’s basic, but so many cis people don’t even realise its necessity.

This one’s for those cis readers who have progressed past Trans 101, who might know and love the trans people in their lives. Sometimes cis people quite innocently out the trans people they know, or sometimes they mention them so as to demonstrate their allyness or even to make themselves more interesting (cos you know, all trans people simply must be fascinating by sheer virtue of existing).

When I out myself, or am outed, I never know what the reaction will be. Before hormones, and early transition, my transness was noticed quite frequently. Now, I have to be outed—by my documents most often, or by my friends, family and acquaintances. Which is where y’all come in. So here’s the deal: if you out us, you can do more damage than you can possibly imagine.

Read More…Read More…

One last note about sex, stories, and the whole ‘Jesus as cockblocker’ thing.

**Trigger Warning**

In regards to the post “Jesus Was Such a Cockblocker”

Let me start by saying I apologize if some of you found the language used in it triggering. I think there was an attempt to use humor to lighten a discussion of a difficult story and issues, and that humor didn’t translate well.

The author of this story is someone I know personally. She is not a monster, or a sadistic person: she was young, inexperienced, and involved in a relationship with someone she cared about while trying to negotiate their different views about sex. That doesn’t mean she didn’t make mistakes, or that what happened was ok. But she was brave enough to share her story with us.

In my experience, telling our stories, and sharing openly and honestly about our experiences is one of the most feminist acts we can do. It’s how we learn from each other, and it helps us to deconstruct the messages we’re given about who we are, who we should be, and what we should feel.

This past week I shared a number of personal stories that friends of mine submitted about their first sexual contact. Some have been funny, some have been sad. All have been courageously honest.

This particular post in question sparked a lot of extremely valuable conversation, about what is and isn’t ok, the role religion does or doesn’t play in sex, and whether or not gender roles being reversed in this situation would make a difference.

What’s particularly difficult in online conversations about these issues is that we can never really get the full story, or the broader context. We’re working with snippets and anecdotes, and evaluating them through the lens of our own experiences, beliefs and ideals — which isn’t a bad thing, certainly, but which is limiting. So I ask that as we continue to discuss this post, and as we talk about virginity and sex and experience broadly, that we not attack the character of people who have volunteered their stories. Instead, let’s talk about what these acts mean; how and where we draw lines; how gender and other identity-related power differentials come into play; and how we all negotiate sex and sexuality in different contexts and cultures.

Thank you for this discussion, thank you to all of the commenters who have also been courageously sharing their experiences, and thank you for the honor of writing for you during these past two weeks.

PS – should you want to find me outside of Feministe, I’m on Twitter, Tumblr, writing for Free Williamsburg, or The Awl. Or just email me.

Jesus was such a cockblocker.

**Trigger Warning**

I grew up in the 1980s in a Jewish-Unitarian household in the middle of Manhattan. To say that I was not immediately exposed to strict Christianity/Catholicism would be an understatement.

It wasn’t until I was in college that I actually met anyone who had been raised evangelical, or talked about saving their virginity for marriage in a non-ironic way. Now I know a number of women who were raised this way and are in various stages of shedding the shame that you’re taught should come with sex. My favorite one of these is a former roommate of mine, Christina, who was raised evangelical, baptized in a river and everything. By the time she hit college she had shed most of her christianity, but still had a steady boyfriend who she never seemed completely happy with. She put this guy through the ringer — breaking up with him, getting back together, feeling like she was missing something but couldn’t explain what.

Until I moved out of the apartment and a new girl, Laura, moved in.

Laura had just gotten out of a relationship with her long-term girlfriend, single for the first time in a while. They began hooking up and it was like someone had turned Christina’s lights on. All of the sudden so many things made sense. The boyfriends she kept breaking up with for no apparent reason. Her love of dressing up as a boy for Halloween over and over, every year. She’s no longer seeing Laura, but has had a series of wonderful girlfriends, and is very happily performing on the drag king circuit.

Below is the other side of many of these stories — mainly women I know who were in long relationships with boys who, for religious reasons, were reluctant to have sex for the first time. It’s interesting when we talk honestly about sex how the “boys always want it more, and pressure girls into losing their ‘virginity” dynamic disappears.

    When I was a freshman in college I dated a senior named Scott. Scott was from Iowa. Scott was Catholic. Scott was certain that losing one’s virginity should not happen outside “the ties of wedlock.”

    I was less certain.

    Saying that I forced Scott to give up his religious ideals and sleep with me would be a bit of a stretch. However, after months of pressuring and nagging, Scott finally relented and we agreed to have sex.  Like all other parts of our relationship, our sex was scheduled. It had to happen on a Saturday night so Scott could go to church the next morning. I realize now, eight years after the fact, that he was likely going to church that morning to confess what we’d done the night before. We also determined that the sex had to happen in Scott’s room, as I had a roommate.

    On the night of “the deed” Scott and I sat awkwardly next to each other on the edge of his twin bed. Slowly, cautiously, Scott started kissing me. Undressing each other was a pathetic exchange of “I’m sorry” and “are you okay.” Finally, we were naked.

    Scott paused. “I’m never actually, uh, put on a condom before.” he said.

    He tried, he really did, but no matter what Scott did, he could not make that condom go on. “I think there are instructions in the box…” Scott retreived the instructions and spread them across the on top of the blue quilt his mother and sisters had knitted for him for his birthday. “Okay, I think I understand now.”

    The actual sex lasted about 20 seconds and I didn’t feel a thing. Scott wasn’t able to sleep with me in his bed, so once we finished, I self-consciously got dressed and walked back to my dorm room. Alone.

    We never had sex again. I spent the next few days writing impassioned e-mails to high school friends asking if I was fated to have horrible sex. Scott and I broke up about two weeks later. He married a girl from his hometown almost immediately after graduation. They now have enough children to make up a baseball team, and seem really happy. In an Iowa sort of way.

Posted in Sex