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

Month: June 2011

links for 20-6-2011

Father’s Day was yesterday! Did you celebrate it with meat? Meat is very manly. Or perhaps you just purchased your father a very manly card, praising his manly familial-providing… ness. But seriously, thank you to all the fathers, mothers, parents, guardians, grandparents, mentors, siblings etc, who make a positive difference in our growth.

I’m sure if you’ve managed to turn on a TV in the past three years you’ve noticed that yogurt is suddenly magic lady food. Well, now Yoplait has recently pulled an ad that the National Eating Disorders Association thought was triggering to those who struggle with disordered eating. If you scroll down to the end of the link, there’s a slideshow of seven other ads NEDA feels are triggering as well.

Oh, poor British Vogue! They are simply so overrun with Asian models THEY LITERALLY CANNOT TELL THEM APART.

A list of 30 things people need to stop believing about Third World Women. Some of my favorites:

4. In popular culture and media, if Third World Women characters don’t wear shiny and bright colours, reality will not crack I assure you.

18. Representation of Third World Women that doesn’t posit the hijab synonymous to oppression will not mess with Global Time.

23. Not all of us have British accents, we don’t speak in archaic prose when addressed. And we do speak even when no one addresses us — apparently this is very shocking for people.

TRIGGER WARNING: A trans woman in Halifax was violently assaulted in her own apartment, and the police are reluctant to call it a hate crime.

Chloe Angyal’s piece on why when we call someone a slut, we are lying about our own safety.

How’s this for a pleasant surprise? REPUBLICAN New York State Senator Roy Macdonald supports gay marriage.

Feminist Teacher is a great resource for any one who considers themselves an educator. Check it out!

There are mixed reactions in Wales over the decision to make the morning after pill free. One Catholic Church official is worried that making emergency contraception available will turn sex into A SPORT. Gasp!

“You’re left with something that is devoid of its intention – a recreational activity, almost.”

Ah yes, recreational sex. Our world’s greatest problem. What if it should lead to a sexual Olympics?! Heavens.

Actually much of the concern revolves around teen pregnancy. Yes, teens get pregnant, and many choose to make a family, in various forms, and face intense stigma, with access to very few resources.

If you don’t already know about the microagressions tumblr check it out. Sometimes I just go there to have a cry/laugh.

Supreme Court blocks sex bias suit against Wal-Mart

Not going to get too into the details here, but this happened:

The Supreme Court on Monday threw out the largest employment discrimination case in the nation’s history. The suit, against Wal-Mart Stores, had sought to consolidate the claims of as many as 1.5 million women on the theory that the company had discriminated against them in pay and promotion decisions.

The lawsuit sought back pay that could have amounted to billions of dollars. But the Supreme Court, in a decision that was unanimous on this point, said the plaintiffs’ lawyers had improperly sued under a part of the class action rules that was not primarily concerned with monetary claims.

The court did not decide whether Wal-Mart had in fact discriminated against the women, only that they could not proceed as a class. The court’s decision on that issue will almost certainly affect all sorts of other class-action suits, including ones asserting antitrust, securities and product liability violations.

Why date hot men?

Glad I’m doing something right:

What is fascinating about this evidence is that the authors find that if the man in the couple is very attractive and/or very masculine, the woman is significantly more likely to have an orgasm either at the same time as her partner, or just after. So the timing of orgasms for women with attractive partners coincides with the period that increases fertility supporting the argument that orgasms play an evolutionary function – women orgasm more frequently and with better timing when their partners have better genes.

Also, obviously, “on average, women have orgasms before men and that most frequently they involve some activity other than intercourse.” Science!

Posted in Sex

“I don’t have kids. Deal with it.”

It is true that people can be total assholes when it comes to having/not having kids. Asking someone why they don’t have a baby, or slipping them the number to a fertility doctor, is not polite! And I agree that more people should actually think through whether or not they want children; it would also be nice if we lived in a society where having children wasn’t assumed to be the Best Normal Thing once you hit a certain age and marital status.

But you know what rudeness toward child-free is not? It is not “almost the last remaining prejudice.” It really really is not.

Posted in Uncategorized

The Manly Men of Yore

An interesting perspective on the Anthony Weiner saga, and the idea that men are naturally sexually voracious:

The conventional answer is that when it comes to sex, a certain kind of man, no matter how intelligent, doesn’t think at all; he just acts. Somehow a need for sexual conquest, female adulation and illicit and risky liaisons seems to go along with drive, ambition and confidence in the “alpha male.” And even if we denounce him and hound him from office, we tend to accept the idea that power accentuates the lusty nature of men.

This conception of masculinity is relatively new, however. For most of Western history, the primary and most valued characteristic of manhood was self-mastery. Late antique and Roman writers, like Plutarch, lauded men for their ability to resist sexual temptation and control bodily desire through force of will and intellect. Too much sex was thought to weaken men: a late-15th-century poem mocks an otherwise respectable but overly sexually active burgess who has “wasted and spent” his “substance” until there is “naught left but empty skin and bone.”

Rampant sexuality was something men were supposed to grow out of: in medieval political theory, young male bodies were used as symbols of badly run kingdoms. A man who indulged in excessive eating, drinking, sleeping or sex — who failed to “rule himself” — was considered unfit to rule his household, much less a polity.

Far from seeming “manly,” aggressive sexuality was associated with women. In contrast to the Victorian view of women that is still influential today, ancient and medieval writers described women as consumed by lust and sexual desire. In 1433, officials in Florence charged with regulating women’s dress and behavior sought “to restrain the barbarous and irrepressible bestiality of women who, not mindful of the weakness of their nature, forgetting that they are subject to their husbands, and transforming their perverse sense into a reprobate and diabolical nature, force their husbands with their honeyed poison to submit to them.”

Because of this association of sexuality with femaleness, men who failed to control their sexual urges or were susceptible to feminine attractions found their masculinity challenged. Marc Antony was roundly mocked as having been “softened and effeminized” by his desire for Cleopatra. When the king and war hero Pedro II of Aragon spent the night before a battle not in prayer or council but in bed with a woman, he was labeled effeminate.

The Tyranny of Education

Arielle is a college student living in Philadelphia.
In many ways, I am a model college student (never thought I’d say that!). So it was surprising, then, that I should find myself looking at the website of Goddard and other alternative college options, and wondering if my decision to go to college hadn’t been a mistake altogether.

Shorter Scott Adams: Men are naturally rapists, cheaters and dick-pic-texters (and maybe Scott Adams likes pegging?)

How I knew this post was going to be terrible:

1. It’s by Scott Adams.
2. It’s called “pegs and holes.”
3. You can probably guess who’s the peg and who’s the hole.
4. There’s a strained metaphor about zebras and lions and watering holes.
5. You can guess who’s the zebra and who’s the lion.
6. Hugh Hefner plays the Everyman.

So:

If you have a round peg that doesn’t fit in a square hole, do you blame the peg or the hole? You probably blame neither. We don’t assign blame to inanimate objects. But you might have some questions about the person who provided you with these mismatched items and set you up to fail.

If a lion and a zebra show up at the same watering hole, and the lion kills the zebra, whose fault is that? Maybe you say the lion is at fault for doing the killing. Maybe you say the zebra should have chosen a safer watering hole. But in the end, you probably conclude that both animals acted according to their natures, so no one is to blame. However, if this is your local zoo, you might have some questions about who put the lions with the zebras in the same habitat.

Now consider human males. No doubt you have noticed an alarming trend in the news. Powerful men have been behaving badly, e.g. tweeting, raping, cheating, and being offensive to just about everyone in the entire world. The current view of such things is that the men are to blame for their own bad behavior. That seems right. Obviously we shouldn’t blame the victims. I think we all agree on that point. Blame and shame are society’s tools for keeping things under control.

The part that interests me is that society is organized in such a way that the natural instincts of men are shameful and criminal while the natural instincts of women are mostly legal and acceptable. In other words, men are born as round pegs in a society full of square holes. Whose fault is that? Do you blame the baby who didn’t ask to be born male? Or do you blame the society that brought him into the world, all round-pegged and turgid, and said, “Here’s your square hole”?

The way society is organized at the moment, we have no choice but to blame men for bad behavior. If we allowed men to act like unrestrained horny animals, all hell would break loose. All I’m saying is that society has evolved to keep males in a state of continuous unfulfilled urges, more commonly known as unhappiness. No one planned it that way. Things just drifted in that direction.

The “natural instincts” of men are to rape women and tweet photos of their dicks? That’s some jungle.

The rest of the post is just as bad, and is mostly a disturbing look into Scott Adams’ mind — he would apparently be raping up a storm if bitches ladies weren’t making him a slave to their laws and their rules and their morals. And he seems to be under the impression that men who sexually assault women are just finally giving in to the kinds of natural urges that all men have to force sex on unwilling females. Because all men, in Scott Adams’ head, are misogynist brutes who don’t see women as people and who basically view the female body as a semen recepticle over which they should have full rights. Scott Adams’ perception of men? REALLY BAD. The worst. Scott Adams kind of makes it sound like men should just be exiled to a private island where they can brutalize each other and text as many dick pictures as they want without harming women (women, of course, are gentle and moral creatures). Which makes Scott Adams a super-radical man-hating feminist, maybe? Welcome to the dark side, pal.