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

Month: January 2012

Now with pro-pixel fauxtanical hydro-jargon microbead extract

Do you ever feel like your skin has that unpleasant skin texture? Are you worried that your waist isn’t narrower than your head? Do you look at photos of yourself and think, “Oh, no, I look like myself!”? Have no fear–you stop looking like a human being and start looking like the walking incarnation of an unrealistic, unattainable beauty standard with Fotoshop by Adobe.

“This commercial isn’t real,” says faux-ad creator Jesse Rosten, “and neither are society’s standards of beauty.” (For the record, the whole “eat healthy and exercise” thing ain’t a slam-dunk either, Rosten. But your overall point is sound.)

[Transcript after the jump.]

Wife of a Preacher-Man

This article in the Times about the historical view of priests’ wives is fascinating for a lot of reasons, but I particularly enjoy how it butts up against modern visions of human sexuality. In white middle-class Christian American culture, it’s taken as biological truth that men are the sexually aggressive ones, and while white women’s bodies are tempting and women can be slutty, white female sexuality isn’t about wanting sex so much as embodying sex (non-white women get different treatment, as either asexual or as insatiable hussies). Priests’ wives, apparently, were a little too close to power for comfort:

On the Hugo Business

There have been a lot of calls in this thread and elsewhere around the internet for me personally to Say Something about the Hugo debacle. Caperton put up this post addressing the situation, which I stand behind, and Clarisse solicited the cross-posting of this piece by Maia. I’ve made a few limited comments, but I’ve mostly stayed silent on the whole thing. That’s for a few reasons:

The Parallels Between Breast Augmentation and FGM

A very interesting article asking what distinguishes voluntary genital mutilation from voluntary breast augmentation:

But even if FGM were carried out in the best of clinical conditions on a consenting adult woman, we call it a human rights violation. Why? Because it is an intervention which is carried out solely to satisfy stereotyped notions of what a women could or should be, and which has:

1. no discernible health benefits;
2. a negative impact on women’s sexual health; and
3. permanent effects on women’s health more generally.

Lessons Learned And Unlearned

I realized something recently. I realized something about rights, about oppression, and about voices—specifically, Native American voices.

I can already hear some of you exhaling in thought, shuffling through your memories, trying to recall a recent incident, a story in the news, a connection between this post about Native Americans and current events. There isn’t one. There isn’t one because stories of Native American hardship don’t get told very much. While headlines do occasionally appear, most people have never heard of the abject poverty suffered by the Attawapiskat, or the imprisonment of five Makah men for their participation in a traditional hunt, or of the state of South Dakota essentially kidnapping Crow Creek children from their community. Many of us carry out our lives completely unaware of what is going on just miles away from the communities that we know.