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

Month: August 2012

Tom Smith clarifies: Rape is only like having a baby out-of-wedlock to fathers.

A lot of attention has been paid to Rep. Todd Akin’s asinine assertion that “legitimate rape” can’t result in pregnancy, and Republicans have been backpedaling left and right to distance themselves from such idiocy. Take, for instance, Republican Senate candidate Tom Smith (mentioned in Jill’s post), who knows full well that rape, “legitimate” or not, can result in pregnancy. For instance, his daughter had sex out of wedlock, and she got pregnant, and it’s pretty much the same thing.

Rape: Just another “method of conception.”

In response to a question about the “legitimate rape” / Akin debacle, Paul Ryan says that life is life and the “method of conception” — in context, remember, rape — that doesn’t change that. Which sounds an awful lot like downplaying a vicious crime, no? I suppose he is technically correct, in the same sense that punching someone in the face is also a “method of touching.”

Science Fiction: Saving Me, Saving the World

Story Collider is a podcast and magazine collecting “true stories about how science has affected people’s lives.” Aaron Wolfe’s story, “Saving Hubble, Saving Aaron,” is about how science fiction makes a life of science possible — by sparking wonder, sure, but also by allowing us an escape from the brutality of scientific reality and offering a purity of hope that only fiction can maintain.

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(h/t Lisa. Transcript, currently in progress, available here.)

I’ve been bingeing on science fiction lately, both in books and on television. It’s no coincidence that I’m rewatching Stargate SG-1, discovering Fringe, and reading Contact while I’m establishing myself in a new community after losing both my job and my marriage.

In science fiction, anything is possible and ordinary people become extraordinary heroes. Those heroes rarely suffer from endless days of mundane grief or fits of existential purposelessness. Details about physics, biology, anthropology, psychology — not to mention alien languages, technical sleight-of-hand, alternative histories, future backstories, whole fictional cultures — keep the audience’s attention occupied on a level beyond the seductively fantastical plot itself. It doesn’t hurt that people like me, civilian nerds whose special skills are confined to words or numbers or stars or chemicals or whatever unglamorous esoterica, get to be at the center of the action. It’s wish-fulfillment, it’s escape, it’s a perfect distraction.

Science fiction also has great potential for political engagement. In college I took a course with playwright and novelist Andrea Hairston called “Shamans, Shapeshifters, and the Magic IF.” We explored how genres like fantasy and science fiction take advantage of their distance from reality to throw hard truths into sharp relief. (See also: Brecht’s alienation.) Indeed, science fiction and its artistic relatives have been employed to great feminist effect — as in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, for an example that is particularly relevant to current politics in the United States; or X-Men (2000), a parable of identity politics.

The best awareness-raising stories don’t actually fix the big problems like gender inequality, because no tidy end to those conflicts would ring true. But most stories do provide some resolution, however temporary or superficial: we came home from this adventure; we staved off this catastrophe; we walked away from that shoot-out with all our limbs in tact.

Those fabricated resolutions offer a kind of catharsis that I, as a feminist, long for. Scary legislation gets mulled over for months, killed, and then reintroduced, bigger and scarier, years later. Protest campaigns are launched, attract a smattering of media attention, and then go ignored for months because they aren’t new anymore. You call one person out on their carelessly hateful language, or you explain privilege to them, and maybe they even listen! But then they fail to apply those concepts broadly, or there happens to be more than one person in your life, and the next day it’s all here we go again.

I don’t have to tell you this. You know what it’s like. We can’t ever feel that we’ve found the solution and cured the epidemic, hooray, the end! because oppression is a million interconnected epidemics and the pathogens that cause them are adaptive little fuckers. We can’t take off our uniforms and go home because the Patriarchy knows where we live and is probably coming over for dinner.

So you can escape into action-adventure, where it’s very clear who the good guys are and the bad guys are and at the end we can all rest easy because the bad guys are dead. But good luck enjoying that, because the bad guys are probably people of color and the good guys’ main virtue is violence and their heroic “protective” vibe is kind of creepy if you think about it. Different but parallel issues apply for romance and other easy realism. Alternatively, you can go for more difficult, culturally-critical realism or nonfiction, but that’s a busman’s holiday for feminists.

Science fiction is just as vulnerable to problematic representation as other genres. Its canon is rife with exoticization and paternalism, in particular. Yet I find that science fiction as a medium is uniquely capable of combining escapism and engagement in a kind of productive utopianism that promises to save me and save the world.

Science fiction asks the big questions: What does it mean to be human? What makes people good or bad? What does it feel like to be different? Why can’t we all just get along? It elevates social issues to epic meaning-of-life and fate-of-the-universe glory. And it reminds us that while the end may not be in sight, we are working towards something meaningful. It invites us to imagine a time when we can take off our uniforms, declare our missions accomplished, and go home for the night. It suggests that our world can be different from how it happens to be — even different from how we are able to imagine it.

Perhaps best of all, the escape that science fiction offers is to a world where our engagement is always effective. Every action signifies, and every person makes a difference. Grief is never meaningless. We are fairly burdened with purpose. The refuge itself is a renewed call to arms.

“Will I be pretty?”

The classics of yesteryear, brought to you today: From the 2002 National Poetry Slam, Katie Makkai on “pretty.”

Bye, All!

It’s been fun times writing here for the last two weeks, and I really hope that you enjoyed my posts. I’ve been pretty terrible at keeping my blog updated, but I have plans to write a bit more in the future, so if you liked what I wrote here, check out Catalytic Reactions. And, of course, I’ll be hanging around the comments section here.

Huge thanks to Jill and everyone else at Feministe for inviting me back! I’ve really appreciated and enjoyed the opportunity.

Great! News!

We have talked breastfeeding to death and it is gone, all used up, over. I’m finished here, you’re weaned.

Thanks for having me, it was lovely at Feministe. You were lovely! A big thank you to Jill for inviting me to be a guest writer here and my gratitude to all of you who read and commented on my posts and made interesting conversation with me. My biggest nightmare was that they would all have tumbleweeds rolling about through them, so thanks for not letting that happen.

Finally, a special thanks to the person who wrote me a scathing critique of my morality as someone breastfeeding a kindergartener – I will always be a “filthy mother”, just for you. Sorry you never made it out of moderation, you sounded fun.

All my love,
blue milk

Also, @bluemilk on twitter.

Hair Part III: Head

I have a love/hate relationship with the hair on my head. I hated it for most of my childhood and adolescence. I was super envious of the curls that many of the other girls in my Jewish school had. My hair was thin and mousy brown. Mousy. I remember seeing that word in the book “Jennifer Murdley’s Toad,” an awesome piece of young adult fiction. The main character, Jennifer Murdley, was chubby and had mousy brown hair, just like me. Of course, the girl on the cover was thin and blonde. I loved the book anyways.

The summer after I graduated high school, I dyed my hair bright red. I had intended on highlights, and got the cap method instead of foils because of price. My hair was thin enough that is pretty much just looked solid red. Bright red. The color of a good, ripe tomato. My hair stayed red throughout most of college. When I got lazy, it grew back out to brown. But I always loved it red. With bright red hair (as well as the blue, green, purple, and orange that followed), I could be noticed. With mousy brown hair, I was plain and shy, the fat girl who hid in the corner. But I couldn’t hide when my hair made me stand out.

***

Around age 21, I started thinking about covering my head full time. Traditionally, in Judaism, men cover their heads. Those are the little caps that people associate with Jewish events. Many religiously observant men wear them everywhere. Some also wear hats or other head coverings, depending on the sect. I’ve heard a number of explanations for this practice: it’s a reminder that there’s something higher than you; it’s a public statement of Jewishness; it’s a safeguard against vanity. As an egalitarian Jew, one who believes that requirements should not generally differ between men and women, I felt conflicted. My beliefs said that I should cover my head. It seemed incredibly simple. But I didn’t want to wear a kippah. I didn’t have the energy to challenge gender norms in that way.

Non-Jews, if they’ve seen people wearing kippot, have usually only seen them on men and tend to ask lots of questions. Many people, especially non-egalitarian Jews, assume that women who take on historically male rituals and garments are simply doing it for attention or to make a statement. I wanted neither, but covering my head seemed like an important affirmation of my Judaism and my egalitarianism. I thought about wearing hats or scarves or bandanas, but there was another problem: historically, the only women who covered their heads were ones who were married. I was looking to date, and didn’t want to have people interpret my action that way. I also didn’t want people to think that I believed that women had to have their hair covered, and I very much differentiate between head covering and hair covering.

And, though I hated to admit it, part of it was vanity. I loved my brightly-colored hair and didn’t want to cover it up. So I didn’t.

But when Mr. Ruggedly-Handsome and I were a couple months away from getting married, I revisited the issue (Mr. R-H has been asked not to be referred to as Mr. Shoshie because he thinks that Shoshie is a weird alias– no accounting for taste). I wouldn’t have to worry anymore about signaling that I was single because, well, I wouldn’t be, and hadn’t been for quite a while. I knew I wasn’t going to cover my hair, for the aforementioned reasons. And, after having a long conversation with a friend who had recently started covering her head, I realized that vanity wasn’t a good enough reason for me, anymore.

When I mentioned my decision to Mr. R-H, he asked me why. And I told him that, in all other ways, we were observant Jews. But not in this one, and I thought it was important. He decided to start wearing a kippah full time. We’d both start after wedding. I bought a bunch of thick headbands, headscarves, fascinators, and awesome hats. I looked up ways to tie up the headscarves, and brainstormed haircuts that would allow me to show off my brightly colored hair while still covering my head sufficiently (traditionally, a covering as least the size of your fist). These days, I feel weird if I don’t have my head covered, at least if I’m not at the gym or hanging out around the house. It’s become a part of my daily uniform.

***
These days, I have another reason for favoring my head coverings: my already-fine hair has become even thinner. It’s possible that it’s been due to stress or my recent ill health, but female pattern baldness runs in my family, so it’s definitely possible that my hair will continue to thin until I barely have enough to cover my head. I’ve thought a lot about how I’m going to respond when/if this happens. Will I wear a wig? Will I shave my head? Will I just wear lots of hats and scarves? Should I continue dying my hair? It may make my hair fall out faster, but it brings me a lot of happiness in the meantime.

I’ve probably cried more over this hair issue than any of the others that I’ve brought up.

Mr. R-H tries to cheer me up by saying that we’ll lose our hair together, but it’s not the same. He can lose his hair and still feel like a man. How can I lose my hair and still feel like a woman? We don’t have any cultural tropes for this, because women are supposed to have hair on their heads.

For the time being, I’m ignoring it. I’m wearing my hats and my headbands. I have a box of red hair dye sitting on my bathroom counter. My hair may not be the curly locks that I craved when I was 10, but it’s doing OK for me now. As for the future, well, I’ll try as best as I can to build my own story.

Hair Part II: Face

I was horrified when I started getting hair on my face. Little mustache hairs at first, then some on my chin. I also have wispy sideburns and thick eyebrows, though those don’t bother me as much.

I thought I was a freak.

I didn’t know that other women got facial hair as well. Nobody told me. No other women ever mentioned getting eyebrows sugared, mustaches waxed, chin hair tweezed or lasered off. Because, while we acknowledge that leg hair is a fact of life for most women, we never talk about facial hair. But just from doing some cursory Internet research, it looks like 10-25% of women are estimated to have facial hair. That’s a lot of women.

I could write about the ways in which facial hair blurs the boundaries between masculine and feminine, and how that’s scary.

I could write about wanting to feel beautiful, despite being a fat woman, and how facial hair gets in the way of that.

But I want to talk about race and ethnicity. Because I think far more than 10-25% of my Jewish female friends have facial hair, though none of us talk about it, except for a quick tip now and then regarding a method for removal. And although, theoretically, I feel the same way about my facial hair as I do about my leg hair (Why should I remove it? It’s not hurting anyone. Smash the patriarchy!) I still bring my tweezers along on trips. I’ve even contemplated laser treatment because I feel so ashamed of it.

One of the few fights that I remember between me and my brother (and trust me, we’ve had many fights), was when I was 20 and he was 15. He tried to insult me by telling me that my mustache was better than his, and it worked. I ran to my room in tears.

What is it about facial hair that makes it so shameful?

I think that one reason for Ashekenazi Jewish women,* is because it’s a reminder that we can almost blend in to whiteness, but not quite.

Don’t get me wrong. I benefit from white privilege, as do many of my friends. I am white, and I’ve never heard a compelling reason from a light-skinned Ashkenazi Jewish person in the US for why they do not qualify as white. But it wasn’t so long ago that we were considered a different race, fully separated from whiteness. Distinguishing physical characteristics brings that past to present. Despite my pale skin, fairly straight hair and nose, despite my English last name, I am hairier than your average US woman, and that hairiness is because of my Jewish ancestry. It sets me apart. It plays into Jewish stereotypes about Jewish women being more masculine (loud, overbearing, whathaveyou) than their non-Jewish counterparts.

In a culture that privileges tall, narrow-hipped, light-skinned, light-and-straight-haired, women, who definitely don’t have any facial hair south of their eyelashes, it’s another way that we can’t possibly fit, because even if we spend every day meticulously tweezing those wayward hairs, even if we drum up the money to remove that mustache for good, it wouldn’t matter. We still had to concern ourselves with it in the first place, same as the stereotypical Jewish teenage girl and her nose job (thank you, Glee, for perpetuating that hateful bit of misogyny against Jewish women). It’s even more beauty work that’s required of us, and even if we follow through with it, we can’t win. Because you get more facial hair as you age. Because even laser treatment doesn’t work perfectly. Because sometimes you don’t have time to tweeze in the morning. Because of stereotypes about the sneaky Jew trying to fit in. Because patriarchy.

I don’t have any good answers here. My feeling, at least, is that facial hair is even more taboo than leg hair, for the reasons mentioned above and many, many others (one other: transmisogyny! another: powerful women = scary! another: masculine women are unfuckable! I could go on and on…)

So, at this point, I just want to get the conversation going. Do you have facial hair? If so, how do you deal with it? Do you let it grow? Do you remove it? Have you ever considered *not* removing it? How much beauty work is too much? When is it enough?

When do we get to stop?

*I’m not a Jewish woman of color, and so I can in no way speak for their experiences.