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

Month: June 2010

What kind of mirror did your mom make you look at your vagina with?

So MAYBE it’s just because I work for Planned Parenthood, or maybe it’s just because I’ve now learned my open and overly forthcoming parents were a rarity, but I think the ways we learn about sex and the way we first experience/define sex are fascinating.

For instance – my mom was of a generation where she kept her ten-pound “Our Bodies, Ourselves” book handy on the shelf, and felt it was her duty to teach me how to straddle a hand mirror when I was five so I could see what my vagina looked like. I learned how babies were made when I was three, when my mother became pregnant with my sister. She figured if I was old enough to ask I was old enough to know (the story goes that she emphasized the “when mommy and daddy love each other so much they decide they want to take that love and make a baby” part to the point that when she was done my first reaction was “I want to do that!” Apparently though I had the more age-appropriate “ewwwww” reaction a few years later when, having forgotten how it worked, I asked again.)

All this measures up very differently when I hear friends’ stories about how they only really learned about sex in their twenties, or thought that by only having oral, or anal sex they could still remain virgins. So, to expand my horizons a little, I asked everyone I knew to contribute their virginity and/or their how they learned about the birds & the bees stories. They’ll be going up all this week starting later today.

These are by no means meant to be exhaustive, representative, or even anything other than conversation-starting. My group of friends that I asked was narrow enough already, and the group that actually responded (under promise of anonymity!) was even more self-selecting. So, Feministe readers, I have an assignment for you. Was your experience vastly different? Please share it! Was it exactly the same? Tell us that too! No matter what your reaction, I firmly believe that the more we keep having conversations around these topics the more we learn about ourselves, each other, and possibly even about having a healthy relationship with that crazy little thing called sex.

PS – Have kids but have no clue how to talk to them? Let me just take this moment to plug PPNYC’s guide on how to talk to your kids about sex. Want to make sure NYC’s kids are being taught sex ed in school (which, surprise! Most aren’t)? Check out the “We’re Going to the Principal’s Office” campaign, which is helping make sure every kid gets medically accurate, age-appropriate sex ed.

Last-minute Monday Fluff: Mysterious As The Dark Side Of The Moon

In which I talk about my really like disproportional, somewhat inexplicable, and frankly kind of embarrassing love of Disney films! …again. Y’all, I swear, I think about things other than this! Like all the fucking time! Like, I HAVE semi-substantialish posts in the works, I do! Buuuut none of them are going to get done tonight sadly, and man, wasn’t my last post ever a total bummer (which: I really, really appreciate the comments on that post, which I do not have time to respond substantively to right now which I feel terrible about, but – thanks to all who have done so for sharing)? Plus, Monday start with “M,” and so does music, which this is, and so does Mulan, which this also is, and so do both make and man, which are also relevant words to tonight’s babbling session post!

So: Mulan! I ♥ this movie, pretty weirdly intensely, especially since I can’t even really claim childhood nostalgia for it since I was like ten when it came out, which is kind of beyond the pop-culture-imprinting stage. THE BAD THINGS that exist in like seriously every Disney movie, like I thought Great Mouse Detective was maybe the exception because it’s about mice, in England? But then I watched some clips from it a while back (seriously people, I need a new hobby) and Basil’s first appearance is in this totally racist disguise and you’re like, “…ah. WELL then.”

…that was supposed to be an introduction, let’s try this again. THE BAD THINGS: racism, pretty much. There’s a lot of humor that has a kind of undercurrent of “lolz Asian people are funny,” and also I admit I am not really well-versed enough in almost-ancient (? what is the cut-off for ancient, exactly? I was thinking BC but that’s super Western-centric of me, isn’t it, which is even wronger than usual in this case) Chinese culture to detail the particulars of this but it being Disney, I am just going to go ahead and assume they get it horridly, wildly, egregiously wrong. Also, the Huns are like, literally inhuman-looking, which, what is up with THAT? So, as per always: this is just as if not more important, and I care about it at least equally in a very different way, than the thing I am going to talk about super-enthusiastically below!

Now that that is clear, may I present to you: what is pretty commonly agreed upon by every person I’ve ever asked, at least, as the greatest Disney song ever (it also cracks the top five of the list of most people my age I know of Best Songs To Sing Along Drunkenly Too, right up there with Don’t Stop Believin’):

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Dhamma Comments: An Experiment

collage of feuding Buddhist bloggers, by Stephen Kroninger
Awesome image © Stephen Kroninger for Tricycle magazine. This is what we'll try to avoid. 🙂

Hey, friends!

How’s things?

Goodness gracious, it is a pleasure to be here. Been following this blog and its community for years now (even wrote part of my college thesis about it!), through many changes in my own feminist life. I’m super thankful for the opportunity to participate as a guest writer, exploring a bit of Klonckedom outside of my cozy lil’ blogging home, and I hope that many of us will find something useful in what unfolds over the next two weeks.

My own Feminist Vital Stats (race, gender, class position, etc.) will follow tomorrow, but for today, in order to start crafting a container for our conversations (which, for a discussion lover like me, is one of the best parts of blogging as a medium), I wanna talk a bit about comment guidelines. And comment guidelines is a topic that leads beautifully into one of the main themes of my own blogging work: dhamma (a.k.a. dharma).

Dhamma, as a praxis, has probably impacted me the most out of any consciously/voluntarily adopted system of thought so far, besides feminism. (Not that they’re mutually exclusive! Lots of intersections. But. You know what I mean.)

So how does this relate to ‘crafting a container’ for threads? Are you gonna, like, only allow Buddhist comments or something?

Sort of.

Seriously?

Well, kind of….but not really.

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Allo, allo

I see a couple of the other guest bloggers this week have already started, so I figured twas time for me to get cracking myself with an introduction. I do this with some anxiety, since my introductory thread last year All Went A Bit Wrong…

For those of you who don’t know me, I’m Queen Emily. I blog mostly at Questioning Transphobia, though I occasionally pop in at Hoyden About Town. I’m a Greek-Australian trans woman currently living in the US, in a queer relationship, unemployed academic and eater of jellybeans.

I’m likely to write about trans people and outing, institutionalised transmisogyny, trans women’s relationships to feminism, and the problems with neo-liberal assumptions in feminist blogging. Oh, and the magnificence of Canadian electropop band Dragonette.

In terms of my moderating style, I don’t think I’m too tough. However. I’d like to re-iterate my basic principles from last year for what kinds of comments are problematic:

Un-gendering. Trans people are the sexes and genders they say they are. A story about a trans woman means female pronouns, and male pronouns for one about a trans man. Don’t use third gender pronouns (eg “ze” and “hir”) on a binary identified person. For genderqueer people, they may use third gender pronouns, or they may not. If you’re not sure ask (but don’t be surprised if you get an exasperated response, this may be the eleventy billionth time).

Thread drift. Ok, any thread is going to have a bit of drift, but it can be remarkably hard to get cis people to focus on actual instances of discrimination against trans people. Not every thread is appropriate for a trans 101 question. If I’m talking about immigration, I don’t want to have to stop that necessary conversation by answering what “cis” means or why I felt the need to transition. If someone repeatedly insists on making a thread about themselves and not the subject at hand, I’ll probably begin with the mocking and end with the banning if it continues long enough.

Transphobic bingo. Feminist transphobia has a long and not so distinguished history. Some common memes include: “really a man/woman,” “but why do they have to modify their bodies,” “reifying gender binaries!11“, “trans women has patriarchal privilege,” “my theories are more important than your lived experience (aka Is it Theory Wank Time Yet?)” and “I’m not cis, I’m normal.” And any objectifying questions/comments about trans bodies (cis people have a disconcerting habit of focusing on trans genitals) will probably go straight to reject pile.

And that’s that. Hopefully we’ll have a fun two weeks together… now, if you have any questions about whether I’d take a pill to not be trans… don’t ask them!

The Media v. Black Women: The Peculiar Case of the Media’s Obsession with Unmarried Black Women

This is a guest-post by Diane Lucas. Diane is an attorney in New York.

By now, everyone in the country with access to a television, the internet or a book store has gotten the memo that black women marry at a dismally low rate compared to women of other races. We’ve seen and read it in the Economist, The Washington Post, U.S. News, Essence Magazine, Ebony and on The View, Oprah, and Nightline, among others. We know that of the hetero-black male population, there are significant numbers of black men incarcerated, lower rates of higher education, and disproportionate numbers of black men marrying outside of their race, as compared to black women. We heard that even setting aside those factors, there are fewer black men than woman in the U.S. population. No one is denying that there is an issue. It’s been an issue for a while now. So why the New York Times recently published what seems like the millionth and one article on why black women can’t find a man is absolutely baffling.

I have been thinking a lot about this issue and discussing it with friends — black and white, male and female — to pinpoint precisely why these articles bother me so much. I, like many other black feminists/womanists, constantly call for more discussion of issues affecting black women and other women of color in the mainstream media. Black relationships and the black family are important mainstream topics. But the media is obsessed with unmarried black women. One black woman commenting on the ABC Nightline post put it best — she said she is waiting for the article about black women tripping down altars riddled with reporters and social scientists. The inundation of these articles, T.V. specials, and books is an attack on black women. The overall message conveyed is unproductive and harmful.

Specifically, here’s my beef (and bear with me, because I have a lot of it):

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Rape, Trauma, and Terrorism

Jessica Stern had an incredible op-ed in the Washington Post yesterday. Stern is a noted expert on terrorism and national security, and is a lecturer at Harvard and served on Bill Clinton’s National Security Council. But in her piece yesterday, she talks about the violent rape she was a victim of in 1973 – and how as a result, she has spent her whole life being fascinated with terrorism and violence, so much so that she is one of America’s preeminent experts on terrorism.

For the past 20 years, I have studied the causes of evil and violence. Until recently, I never questioned why I was drawn to this work or why I was able to do it. Now I finally have an answer to the questions: How could a “girl” like you visit terrorist training camps in Pakistan? Weren’t you afraid?

I wasn’t aware that I was afraid. After a series of traumas, one can lose the capacity to feel fear appropriately.

On Oct. 1, 1973, my sister and I biked home from ballet class. We were doing our homework in our living room in Concord, Mass., when a man entered the house. For an hour, this rapist had a gun trained on my sister and me while he attacked us. She was 14, and I was a year older.

Both my sister and I went on to lead relatively happy and productive lives. My sister is a successful marketing executive, an opera singer and an actress. She is married and has two children. She feels great joy in her family and in her music, and no one would describe her as a victim. I similarly take enormous pleasure from my family and my work.

And yet, from adolescence on, I noticed changes that grew worse over time. With each passing year, I seemed to feel less and less — less pain, but also less joy. As a child, I wanted to be a writer, but bad grades in classes that required writing persuaded me to give up. I was more comfortable studying unemotional subjects. I majored in chemistry, in part because it came more easily to me, and in part because I liked that the answers were either right or wrong, unlike in real life, where emotional valences count.

I was planning to become a chemist, but then I got seduced by curiosity about violence. I was both repulsed and fascinated. I skipped the war parts in “War and Peace” but wrote a doctoral dissertation on chemical weapons that focused mainly on the mechanics of violence, with little attention to the human toll.

Ultimately, I became an expert on terrorism. I wrote my first article on the prospects for terrorists to attack chemical plants or use toxic chemicals in 1983. At the time, working on this issue wasn’t a wise career move. Very few people took the threat seriously. Still, I believed that terrorism would become increasingly important, and I continued to focus on it. I started out doing technical work related to weapons, but eventually I gave in to an intense curiosity about terrorists themselves. In that work I made use of a personality quirk, rather than my academic training. I am fascinated by the secret motivations of violent men, and I’m good at ferreting them out.

I’d highly recommend reading the full piece. Stern has a new book coming out tomorrow, Denial: A Memoir of Terror, and this op-ed is a prelude to that. In her memoir Stern explores the lasting effects of her rape at age 15 — how it shaped her, how she became obsessed with terrorism and violence as a result, and how she didn’t realize she had post-traumatic stress disorder until years later after interviewing dozens of terrorists as well as victims of terrorists. It was then that she began to piece together the connection between her own experiences and the violence she has spent every day of her career thinking about.

It’s pretty rare to see prominent women driving the conversation around terrorism and national security, typically a male-dominated field; it’s sad and unfortunate that her success in this field came out of such a traumatic, violent personal experience. But hers is a gripping story that deserves to be heard — and I for one am looking forward to reading her book as well.

Genital cutting as “research” at Cornell University

UPDATE: In the comments, many people have pointed out that these surgeries appear to have been done on intersex children. I have updated the post to reflect that.
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Several readers have sent on this story out of Cornell University (trigger warning on that link and the rest of this post), where a pediatric urologist is performing “nerve-sparing” genital surgery on young children who are deemed to have over-sized clitorises. He basically removes large portions of the clitoral shaft, leaving the glans, and then performs annual follow-up exams which involve stimulating the childrens’ clitorises, labia and inner thighs with a vibrator and asking them if they feel anything.

Um.

There are, of course, legitimate reasons to use vibrating tools to test sensitivity in patients who have undergone procedures which may cause nerve damage. But a few things are off here. First, why are we decreasing the size of a child’s clitoris without their consent? Yes, we are talking about clitorises which deviate significantly from the average size; but unless there is some actual physical problem, I have a hard time understanding why doctors should cut away at healthy tissue — at the risk of decreasing genital sensation — just so that a child’s genitalia fits the doctor’s aesthetic sensibilities. If the child in question is an adult and can consent to this kind of medical procedure, then that’s their business. But if we’re concerned about psychosocial harm, I’d say it’s a better idea to quit demonizing certain bodies as aberrations and embrace the fact that human beings have variable physical traits. And unless the body part that is deemed “abnormal” is creating physical problems like pain or discomfort, we should probably leave it alone until the person whose body is in question can decide what they would like to do.

In any case, we definitely should not be having children go to the doctor’s office, lay down and have their clitorises stimulated with a vibrator. Talk about potential for psychosocial damage.

For further reading, I would recommend Dan Savage’s take, and this piece at the Bioethics Forum.

Hello, and an introduction

Hi Feministe!

I’m Nisha, and I’ll be guest blogging here for the next two weeks.

I have a blog, although I don’t update it that much since I usually write in a variety of other places. I’ve written for Mediaite, Politics Daily, The American Prospect, NPR.org and Ms. Magazine online. I’m also an editor of CitizenJanePolitics.com, where I reported on the 2008 elections (we are currently on a hiatus but coming back soon for midterm coverage!). I also have a day job where I do digital strategy for a communications/PR firm (But of course, disclaimer: any opinions here are mine and do not belong to my employer).

I don’t always write about feminism, but do sometimes. I typically write about politics, media, technology, and foreign policy. I studied political science and Middle Eastern studies in college, and after spending so many semesters learning Arabic and researching/writing on the Arab-Israeli conflict, I have a certain interest in that topic, so if something explosive happens in the Middle East you may see a post on that. Otherwise, expect a lot of politics, policy, and media.

A little other stuff about me: I live in Washington DC, but grew up and went to school in Illinois. When I’m not tooling around on the internet I love travelling, eating at good restaurants, exploring DC, reading, writing, and lots of bad television.

I’ve been a reader of Feministe for a long time so I’m excited to be guest blogging here — thanks to the editors and readers for having me! I welcome comments, so feel free to comment away. You can also find me on Twitter.

on language, and body, and fear

Originally posted here like eight thousand years ago in internet time; reposted because I’ll try but I’m not sure whether I’ll get a chance to write something for Feministe today, and because it’s in a pretty different vein than the stuff I normally do and variety is the spice of a guest-blogging stint, or something. Warning for people who are (as I am) sensitive to discussion of body image related issues; this is the only post I’ve ever cried while writing.

I remember once I was talking to a friend about how I knew I should be happy with my body (implied: because I was thin; this was the way she thought, this was the way I didn’t want to think but couldn’t stop thinking, neither of us would have filled in the blank with: because it is my body and I deserve love—not even love, not even satisfaction, comfort, just that much, just peace) but I couldn’t let go of wanting to lose weight. I blamed my belly. I knew it wasn’t large, but I wanted it gone.

My friend said, “Oh, but you don’t need to diet for that, that’s just toning, just do sit-ups.”

I felt hollow.

I wanted to be dumbfounded, but I couldn’t be, because I knew this friend’s own relationship with her body too well, and I had heard this sentiment too many times, had thought this sentiment too many times, to be surprised.

I wanted to be angry, but I couldn’t be, because I knew she meant well and while the intentions of strangers don’t matter to me when I consider the effect of their actions, the intentions of my friends have always made me slow to anger and quick to forgive, too quick according to some.

We are both self-described feminists, we are deep friends, we share stories and secrets, and I couldn’t begin to imagine how to explain to her why her words were a punch in the gut. Such a stupid, simple phrase. Well-intentioned—she was trying to convince me I didn’t need to diet or hate myself (implied: because I was thin, if I were heavier it wouldn’t be kinder to discourage me after all). I had said I wanted a flatter stomach, she had told me how to get one. Doesn’t everyone want a flat stomach?

I wanted to say: No, stop, you misunderstood, I want you to tell me how to stop wanting a flat stomach, I want you to tell me it’s okay if I don’t have a flat stomach, I want you to challenge me to stop fighting with myself, I want you to tell me this is crazy, I want you to tell me all the ways I can devise to hate myself are unacceptable and would always be unacceptable no matter what I look like. I want you to tell me, I understand why you feel that way, but I as your friend can’t condone it.

I don’t remember what I said. I probably mumbled, “Yeah.”

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