March 2011 – Page 2

Diana Wynne Jones, 1934-2011

I’m sorry to have to tell you that Diana Wynne Jones, the much-loved British fantasy author, has just lost her life to cancer.

According to her official website, she has two forthcoming books; it’s strange to think that new things are going to come from her even though she is gone. And, of course, new readers will benefit from her legacy even as old fans revisit her work.

Please feel free to share your favourite memories and books in the comments.

We Hunted The Mammoth to Feed You

Note: Portions of this post appeared, in a rather different and far more crudely sarcastic form, on Man Boobz.

One of the recurring complaints on Men’s Rights and MGTOW (“Men Going Their Own Way”) websites is that the women of today are insufficiently grateful for all the wonderful things men have done for them over the centuries: men, the argument goes, created civilization while women were sitting on their asses at home, desultorily watching the kids and eating bon bons — or whatever the equivalent of bon bons were in 400 B.C. (Never mind all the stuff men did TO women as well, denying them education and the right to own property, and so on and so on and so on. Or that agriculture, pretty much the bedrock of civilization, was almost certainly invented by women.) The “men did everything good that you now take for granted” argument is invariably greeted with “huzzahs” of assent from the assembled dudes whenever it’s set forth on many MRA and MGTOW message boards.

My favorite example of this loopy argument comes from a fellow calling himself TheGrendler, who garnered dozens of upvotes in the Men’s Rights subreddit on Reddit for a barely coherent stream-of-consciousness rant suggesting that women are ungrateful wretches because, well, they don’t mine coal, and didn’t invent air conditioning or hunt mammoths. Of course, no one posting in the Men’s Rights subreddit has done any of those things either, but apparently everyone with a penis gets automatic credit for them. (The post has since been deleted, probably by the author himself, but if you click here you can see that the comments that most bluntly criticized its vapid illogic garnered mucho downvotes.)

Without further ado, here it is, in all of its typo-filled, punctuation-challenged glory:

We men built a nice safe world for you all the the coal-mines of death, roads, railroads, bridges and tall office buildings. Its $1,000,000 spent per death of a man on a large dangerous project on average now you can just 9-5 it and call it a day in air-conditioned and heated safety. Forget about the wars we died in and the sacrifices made just ignore history or is it now hersorty? You are accruing the benefits without ever having to pay the price you still don’t have to sign up for the draft and who will protect you? The Sex and the City girls will fight off the North Koreans with their Manolo Blahniks?

Men gave you this modern world now you take it for granted we hunted the mammoth to feed you we died in burning buildings and were gassed in the trenches but that was just for fun right?

How quick and conveniently you forget who made this possible.

We gave you Leonardo da Vinci, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy not to mention countless others, Jonas Salk saved half the world from death and you just piss on it all.

Shame on you,

You hedonistic, narcissistic, sociopath metastasizing cancer.

Quite a performance there, big fella!

You might be interested to hear that one of TheGrendler’s remarks – “we hunted the mammoth to feed you” – has become such a popular catchphrase amongst readers of my blog that we turned it into a t-shirt. Which you can buy. For reals.

Tough Times, Alanis, and Giggling

I’ve had a weird/hard year in my personal life (well… all aspects of my life, really), and my therapy through most of that was music. Nothing new, really, but I did find myself going back to Alanis again and again because no matter what mood I’m in, I can always count on Alanis to see me through with her infinite wisdom.

I’ve realized that for the last few weeks, when I’ve really needed it, music has failed me. I think I want to listen to something (Nicki Minaj, Robyn, NSYNC, whatever the hell) and then when I start, I realize it’s just not working. Today I accidentally had my entire library on shuffle instead of the playlist I had listened to last, and Alanis came on. I have no idea why I hadn’t already thought to play her, but I hadn’t and, of course, it was just what I needed. (Now I’m listening to Flavors of Entanglement on repeat, so it’s fine.)

ANYWAY! I wanted to share with you all the song that started playing because I think it’s great for anybody going through a hard time: Giggling Again for No Reason.

As you try to dig yourself out of whatever mess you made or fight through whatever life has thrown your way, you need those things that will pull you through. You need the long drive/run by yourself. You need the night of dancing with your friends. You need a case of the giggles. You need the tequila. You need those moments of pure joy and inhibition.

So enjoy, check out the lyrics after the break, and share in the comments a song that helps you through tough times.

When the Movement Disappoints

I moved to Brooklyn from Philadelphia almost a year ago. My partner got his dream job here, so I left my decent reproductive health gig to live in the feminist mecca. I had high hopes – almost every major feminist and/or reproductive health organization has a presence in NYC. Surely, I thought, it will take me no more than a few weeks to find a job that I love.

You can imagine my excitement when over the course of a few months, I landed interviews at many of the big pro-choice organizations here. I don’t have to name them. You know who they are. I interviewed for jobs at these places that fit my experience, jobs at which I could’ve kicked ass. But each interview ended with some version of this: “I’m sorry, but you are too radical/too much of an activist to work for us.”

At one particular organization, a senior executive looked me in the eye and said, “If you work here, you have no voice on reproductive rights.”

Another organization wanted me to delete my twitter account. Some wanted me to stop blogging. Others said that because I have a published opinion on later abortion, I would be a liability. One wanted me to resign from all my volunteer pro-choice activism, namely being on the board of the New York Abortion Access Fund.

These requests were not implied. They were said to me in no uncertain terms.

I have a few theories about why this happened. Each theory deserves its own blog post, but I’ll summarize them in three bullet points.

1. New media is still, somehow, an intimidating enigma to these organizations, and they have no clue how to deal with it and with people who know how to use it well.
2. The thought of new leadership coming in means the old leadership has to go somewhere, and, well, where would they go?
3. Fear of the anti-establishment approach and of hiring someone who could potentially offend your board/donors.

Or I just could’ve been wearing the wrong outfit.

Don’t get me wrong, there are many reasons I could’ve been rejected from these positions. I’m not on some kind of vengeful rampage against these organizations. What I AM on a rampage about is this: how can a pro-choice organization tell a job candidate that her dedication to pro-choice activism disqualifies her from a job? How can you STILL, in 2011, not understand the activist potential of new media? The necessity of using anti-establishment approaches every now and then?

I can’t tell you how profoundly disappointed I was in the movement-at-large every single time this happened. Not because I’m special and deserve to be hired, but because I can’t be the only one having this experience. There is something perverse about not wanting to hire people who are so committed to the movement that they work in it in their spare time.

How many other young activists are being cast aside because we are “too radical”? How many people who do great work on their own are disqualified for being “too established”? How is a young, fired up activist supposed to pay her rent in this town without selling out?

It breaks my heart that so many of the organizations I admire mirror the corporate world: they are just as hierarchical and scared of the power of young people. We should not have to apologize for our experience or our passions. I ultimately got lucky and found a job at a place that does great work AND doesn’t force me to compromise my extracurricular activism. I remain furious that young people are treated this way, this profoundly un-feminist way, in our own movement. If your organization isn’t going to treat young, committed activists with respect and dignity, it has no future in the feminist movement.

Scott Adams to Men’s Rights Activists: Don’t bother arguing with women; they’re like children.

Note: A slightly different version of this piece originally ran on Man Boobz. Trigger Warning: Some of the links in this piece contain harsh anti-woman slurs; the comments section on my blog is largely unmoderated.

So Scott Adams — the Dilbert guy — has a blog. Recently he made the mistake of asking his readers to give him a topic to write about. Well, some Men’s Rights Activists heard about this, and, being the herd animals that they are, quickly flooded his site with comments urging him to write about Men’s Rights. And so he did.

What he wrote ended up revealing a lot more about Scott Adams than it did about any issues involving men. And what it revealed wasn’t pretty; after explicitly insulting Men’s Rights Activists, Adams insulted women much more profoundly, without, it seems, even recognizing that what he wrote was, well, a load of misogynistic drivel. Evidently unhappy with the response he got from his readers, Adams decided to take his post down, saying that it had gotten “a bit too much attention from outside my normal reading circle.”

The post has not only vanished from Adams’ blog; it’s vanished from Google Cache as well, but fortunately you can still find it here (on a feminist site), as well as on an assortment of MRA blogs I won’t bother to link to.

It’s a strange beast indeed. Adams started out, depressingly enough, by more-or-less agreeing with MRAs on a wide assortment of their pet issues big and small — from men paying more for car insurance to the alleged anti-male bias of the legal system. Much of what he wrote made as little sense as many real MRA rants; even his little jokey asides fell completely flat.

We take for granted that men should hold doors for women, and women should be served first in restaurants. Can you even imagine that situation in reverse?

Generally speaking, society discourages male behavior whereas female behavior is celebrated. Exceptions are the fields of sports, humor, and war. Men are allowed to do what they want in those areas.

Add to our list of inequities the fact that women have overtaken men in college attendance. If the situation were reversed it would be considered a national emergency.

After more or less agreeing that men are getting a raw deal, Adams dismissed the complaints of women upset that women earn less than men; to Adams, this is because they are naturally timid souls who don’t know how to ask for raises.

So far, so not-so-good. But then Adams pulled the old switcheroo on his MRA readers, who up until this point were presumably giddy with excitement.

Now I would like to speak directly to my male readers who feel unjustly treated by the widespread suppression of men’s rights:

Get over it, you bunch of pussies.

Uh oh! This is what MRAs love to dismiss (and not without reason) as a “shaming tactic.” As it turns out, MRAs love directing vagina-based insults at others – they use the “c-word” constantly, and I couldn’t even begin to estimate how many times I’ve been called a “mangina” — but they hate hate hate it when anyone directs a vagina-based insult at them. To be fair to them, though, calling someone a pussy is not much of an argument.

But here’s where Adams pulled a sort of double switcheroo. After insulting Men’s Rights activists, he did them one better with a bizarre, brazenly misogynistic argument that seemed to have been cribbed from some of the more idiotic comments on MRA and “Men Going Their Own Way” message boards. It turned out that the reason Adams thinks men should “get over it” is that … well, you’d best just read it for yourself.

The reality is that women are treated differently by society for exactly the same reason that children and the mentally handicapped are treated differently. It’s just easier this way for everyone. You don’t argue with a four-year old about why he shouldn’t eat candy for dinner. You don’t punch a mentally handicapped guy even if he punches you first. And you don’t argue when a women tells you she’s only making 80 cents to your dollar. It’s the path of least resistance. You save your energy for more important battles.

As Kyle’s mom would say: “what what what??” This is the sort of shit you expect from some low-grade loser on a misogynist Mecca like The Spearhead. But no, this is Scott Adams, internationally famous cartoonist and bestselling author. Instead of trying to explain just what the fuck he means by all this, Adams continued on with a very strange, and strangely sexual, chess metaphor:

How many times do we men suppress our natural instincts for sex and aggression just to get something better in the long run? It’s called a strategy. Sometimes you sacrifice a pawn to nail the queen. If you’re still crying about your pawn when you’re having your way with the queen, there’s something wrong with you and it isn’t men’s rights.

After a few more paragraphs that, frankly, don’t make any more sense than what I’ve quoted so far, Adams seemed to realize that maybe he shouldn’t have really suggested that women were a bunch of retarded children. [NOTE: My use of the phrase “retarded children” has caused some concern in the comments; here is my explanation of why I used the term, in retrospect unwisely.] But instead of going back and removing that from his post, he dug himself further in with a weird and completely unconvincing denial that he really meant what he had just explicitly said:

I realize I might take some heat for lumping women, children and the mentally handicapped in the same group. So I want to be perfectly clear. I’m not saying women are similar to either group. I’m saying that a man’s best strategy for dealing with each group is disturbingly similar. If he’s smart, he takes the path of least resistance most of the time, which involves considering the emotional realities of other people.

As far as I can figure out his weird and convoluted argument, it is this: The world really is unfair to men. But, fellas, you’ll never win this argument with a woman — you know how they are. So keep quiet and maybe … you’ll get to fuck the queen?

No wonder he deleted the post.

Note: Scott Adams has responded to this post in the comments below. You can find his comment here.

Read This: Afterthoughts on Alexandra Wallace and White Female Privilege

There’s an excellent piece on Racialicious today by Andrea Plaid, which quotes Feministe guest blogger Sarah Jaffe quite liberally. Go read it and tell me what you think. Excerpt below:

To me, Wallace’s tirade pivots on Jaffe calls the Sarah Palin Thing, “where you can say more outrageous shit because you’re a pretty white lady.” Wallace visually presents as the physical and sexual ideal of the “all-American” blonde white girl-next-door doing something so not-PC, the “pretty white lady” who thinks she can get away with this verbalized racism—which Wallace attempts to get across as some sort of racial “truth-telling”–because it would be more “palatable.” I also wonder if she thought—since she seems to deeply believe in some anti-Asian stereotypes, like they function in “hordes” bent on “taking over” her beloved UCLA with their familial “ways”—that Asian Americans wouldn’t push back because of the stereotype of their being “quiet.” (She found out quite differently.)

The Right to Fuck Up

I almost called this post “Fucking Up: A Right or a Privilege?” but I decided that A. I am tired of debates over privilege and B. I believe we SHOULD have a right to fuck up.

I’m not talking just about fucking up in feminism/social justice movements, mind you. I’m talking about life fuck-ups. I’m talking about oversleeping and missing your final exam, being late to work, kissing the wrong person, having pregnancy/STI scares (or actually having and terminating pregnancies, dealing with STIs).

I mean, isn’t not being able to fuck up the major tenet of the antichoice movement? They believe that you should have to take the “consequences” of your “actions” (only people with uteruses, however–if you can’t get pregnant, no consequences for you! Well, aside from the aforementioned STIs, which I guess they’re controlling for by defunding health care centers.)

Last time I guested at Feministe I wrote about Helen Thomas’s fuckup. (For those who don’t remember/know/want to click through, Thomas was fired for saying to a blogger that Jews should “get out” of Palestine and “go home.”)

I recently got into a conversation about Helen Thomas and others at South By Southwest with my friend (and fabulous artist) Molly Crabapple. Molly, like me, is Jewish. She also made the point that when people like Thomas are fired for one thing they say or do not on the job, we’re helping to create a world in which no one is allowed to fuck up–or better yet, only certain people are allowed to fuck up. That firing someone doesn’t truly hold them accountable. That we need a better system for responding to public fuckups, especially as the Internet makes us all more and more public. Should someone not get a chance at a job because her friend posted a picture of her drunk on her Facebook page?

If every single person on Feministe isn’t already reading Liliana Segura’s blog, you should be. Liliana is another friend of mine and an absolutely amazing journalist whose focus is on the prison system and the death penalty. Liliana, in other words, spends a lot of time talking to people, most of the time men of color, who have fucked up. Sometimes in the most colossal, violent ways. Other times by being unlucky enough to be caught up in a racist system that locks up certain people and not others.

Part of being concerned about social justice is understanding that humans fuck up. That we are, to use a cliche, all more than the worst thing we have ever done. That Helen Thomas can say something that feels like a personal slap across my face and still be a journalist that I look up to. That someone can commit a crime and still deserve more than being locked up and having the key thrown away.

Melissa Gira Grant hosted a panel at South By Southwest on “The End of Shame”–about “oversharing” in Internet culture and the culture at large. (Podcast of that panel available here.) The panelists one by one noted that being public about their worst moments, the things that people try to shame them for, has made them freer to move beyond those moments. If you acknowledge those things first, no one can dig them up later and throw them in your face.

We don’t have anything remotely resembling true accountability in the age of the Internet. We’re just starting to realize the consequences of our actions all being public, of finding ourselves under the same scrutiny as politicians and media stars. In the feminist blogosphere, we have a frequently toxic “call-out” culture but still no way of truly being accountable to one another.

One of the reasons I’m leaning more towards bell hooks’ phrasing “I advocate feminism” rather than “I am a feminist” is that it makes feminism or any sort of activism contingent upon action rather than identity. Rather like identifying as an ally to movements–I am an ally to the degree that people consider me one. It’s not an identity I get to claim. Because I will fuck up and people will decide after that whether or not they can still work with me. I will kiss the wrong boys and get too drunk and curse too much and say the wrong things and not know enough and not have read the right book or been in the right place or known that story.

Last time, I wrote:

We need to understand this, and it is good for us, because it allows us to realize that our own fuckups don’t keep us from being “heroes” too. Even if it’s just for one day.

I still think that’s true.

Compassion Fatigue

I’m in a clinic. It’s dirty. There are lots of other women there, women who look like me. The room is rectangular and the chairs squeak when you get up. I’m there to have an abortion. I’m 14 weeks pregnant. I’m on an operating table. I see the doctor. I’m filing charts. I’m calling patient names. I’m on the operating table and the anesthesia isn’t working. I’m taking a woman into a room to counsel her about her abortion.

This is the dream I have when I’m on the verge of burn out. This is how my body tells me that it’s going into over drive and is getting ready to shut down. And when my exhaustion gets to that point, you better believe I listen to it.

A good friend of mine told me that she doesn’t have time for self-care. As progressives, we’re taught to sacrifice ourselves, our desire for a living wage, our desire to be treated like human beings for the movement, for the greater good. This is not a tenable model. We lose when we don’t take care of ourselves.

Instead of rambling on about this, I want to ask for your thoughts. How do you give your life to a movement that you love without losing yourself? How do you balance the need for self-care with the fierce urgency of activism?

Reporting for duty

Poster for The Three Stooges in Woman Haters

TRIGGER WARNING: Many of the links below lead to articles commenting on and quoting some pretty extreme misogyny.

So hey, Feministes. Jill has generously invited me to guest blog here, and I thought I’d introduce myself.

I’m a longtime journalist, writing about everything from gender and sexuality to money. (It’s the latter kind of writing that actually pays the bills.) You can see an assortment of my articles and book reviews here.

For the past seven months or so I’ve been writing about misogyny on my blog Man Boobz. It’s been a highly educational experience, to say the least. I started the blog initially intending it to offer a critique of the Men’s Rights movement, but the more I delved into the MR movement the more misogyny I found, and the more I became convinced that for a considerable number of Men’s Rights Activists (MRAs) it was misogyny, not a deep concern for men’s issues, that drove their online activism. (I suppose I should put “activism” in quotes here; as I have pointed out before, MRAs are some of the least activist activists I’ve ever run across, and mostly spend their time kvetching about feminism and/or women in general online.)

Now I focus mostly on tracking down and critiquing – or, in many cases, simply mocking — misogyny online, much of it found on MRA and related sites. I devote a lot of time to one sort-of bastard child of the MR movement that refers to itself by the ungraceful acronym MGTOW, which stands for Men Going Their Own Way. What this little formulation means for individual MGTOWers varies – not all of them are literally male separatists who try to avoid women altogether – but for most of them, it seems to involve posting a shit-ton of misogynistic crap on the Internet.

Some of what I write about is truly vile and disturbing, and tough to read, but much of it is so over-the-top that it’s impossible to do anything but point and laugh at its absurdities. Given that the people I’m writing about tend to be mostly inconsequential idiots, I try to keep the tone as light as possible, given the subject matter. But a word of warning: much of what I write about – and quote from extensively – on my blog is fairly vile, and my posts should probably come with an assortment of trigger warnings. Also, the comments section of my blog is pretty much overrun with angry and often misogynistic guys, and many of their comments are pretty obnoxious. It’s a pretty lively place, but not a “safe space.”

So there’s my somewhat long-winded intro. This week I will be posting reworked versions of some posts on my site that I think will be especially interesting to the Feministe crowd, as well as some new pieces. We’ll be discussing everything from the geeky misogyny of Dilbert creator Scott Adams to the notion, strongly held by some MRAs and MGTOWers, that sexbots will destroy feminism and put women “in their place.”

One post that might be useful for newcomers to my blog is this one, explaining some of the weird terminology that crops up.

And here is a general overview of misogyny in the Men’s Rights movement that I wrote for the Good Men Project Magazine.