Feminist Theory & "Women's Issues" Discussion Thread: All Gender Identities Are Encouraged To Participate

how about keeping yr nose out of other people's business for starters? that's my main objection.

not personal you there, just in general

I've heard so many saddening and problematic things from older women both irl and tangentially in documentaries and stuff, for ex that it was important to them in their marriages to never "refuse" their husbands sex no matter how they felt, or the woman in the orgasm documentary who thought there was something PHYSIOLOGICALLY WRONG WITH HER bc she didn't have exactly a certain arousal reaction that erased personal variation. They just X-ed themselves out in preference to their partners (btw a big FFFFFF UUUUUU to Caitlin Flanagan on this one). If those women had, in their generation, discovered that this priority wasn't meaningful to them, and stopped submitting to what was at the very least unrewarding and possibly non-consensual sex in their marriages, then statistically they'd be having "less" sex, sure, but WHO GIVES A SHIT when the point of comparison is marital rape? Just, no.

Yeah that dinner party sounds positively dyspeptic.

She also uses "assortative" mating to mean exactly the OPPOSITE of what it means (which I only know because of its recent usage by another pseudo-scientific NYT asshat, David Brooks)

In addition to Laurel's excellent points, I just feel like stuff like this is designed to play on gender anxiety and to either goad "egalitarian" people into questioning their views or to pander to people who already think "equal" marriage goes against "the natural order" or something. There's this underlying tone of "How's that equality stuff workin out for ya?!"

“We use X number of positions and various forms of oral and manual stimulation, and we’re happy as clams”
“We use X number of positions and various forms of oral and manual stimulation, and we’re happy as clams”
“We use X number of positions and various forms of oral and manual stimulation, and we’re happy as clams”
“We use X number of positions and various forms of oral and manual stimulation, and we’re happy as clams”
“We use X number of positions and various forms of oral and manual stimulation, and we’re happy as clams”
“We use X number of positions and various forms of oral and manual stimulation, and we’re happy as clams”
“We use X number of positions and various forms of oral and manual stimulation, and we’re happy as clams”

i'm sorry i couldn't resist

Lori gottlieb wrote that "settle for a man you don't love" article a while back. She's one of those Caitlin Flanagan backlash types.

that's why I'm not reading this

though I do wonder if it's all those women she advised to settle who are unhappy with their sex lives. Obviously that's because of feminism

http://m.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/03/marry-him/306651/

And all I can say is, if you say you’re not worried don't agree with me, either you’re in denial or you’re lying.

I'm glad to see we're making defensible arguments today! This is going to end GREAT for everyone.

WHAT COULD POSSIBLY GO WRONG

she is an expert at universalizing her insecurities

Otm

"Granted, some might view a study like this with skepticism."

ya don't say

feel like this is an upmarket version of marital friendzone studies

the funny thing is that the reasons she gives for "skepticism" of the study are bad ones that show a lack of understanding of, like, how studies work, while meanwhile there are better reasons

will just leave this here, idk why
http://www.reddit.com/r/TheBluePill/comments/1x6p5j/women_are_not_aliensa_message_from_a_woman_to/
Women are not aliens--they are robots. interesting stuff in there like " Our current programming includes a complex function that serves to find the best mates possible. In order to find the best genes, our program looks for attractiveness, financial success, and independence, among other traits. When these traits are found, the TraditionalFem 2.0 program starts running. This program emulates the submissive female that existed pre-1900, before the mass-malfunction of women." he,he

"Financial success"? Amazing what genes can do when they put their little minds to it! Apparently, they correctly predicted the invention of money.

This was a nice thing to see on BBC 4 the other day (UK only).

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b03ycql8/oh-do-shut-up-dear-mary-beard-on-the-public-voice-of-women

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v36/n06/mary-beard/the-public-voice-of-women
(been meaning to read)

Hey all I'm sorry if this is inappropriate but I figured it's as good a place as any. If you're FB friends with me or read the abortion threads you've already seen this but I know some of you aren't and my not so I'm posting this again because it's really fucking important to me and to the women this might help benefit.

This weekend every donation to my fundraiser will be matched 1:1 by an anonymous donor to a to a new fund in West Texas, the West Fund. This means your money goes twice as far and to a place that really needs it considering that Texas passed a law that made 1/3 of their abortion clinics close in the past 6 months and that thousands of rural TX women now have no legal access to abortion. Anything you can donate counts even $5 (which this weekend is $10). The matching thing is only now through tomorrow so this would be an excellent time to give if you can.

http://bowlathon.nnaf.org/nnafbowl/participantpage.asp?uid=7819&fundid=1864#.UycCQG7E07U.facebook

i went to this kimberlé crenshaw lecture last week. she's such a good speaker and that ambulance metaphor really stuck with me.

http://www.lse.ac.uk/newsAndMedia/videoAndAudio/channels/publicLecturesAndEvents/player.aspx?id=2360

on the other hand you have the utter horror of the no more page 3 advert that came out today :(

My laptop really doesn't like to play videos (or indeed audio streams that aren't divided up into 4 minutes sections it can easily buffer). :-(

Would it be cheeky to ask what the "ambulance metaphor" was, or is it totally context dependent?

oops sorry didn't see your answer til just now. it was pretty straightforward - if intersectionality is analogous to being located at a junction and intersectional oppression is being hit by cars coming from two directions, then the ambulances (eg anti-racist groups or feminist groups) tend only to come from one of those directions and fail to diagnose you properly/consider it the other ambulance's problem

anyway, interview with crenshaw: http://www.newstatesman.com/lifestyle/2014/04/kimberl-crenshaw-intersectionality-i-wanted-come-everyday-metaphor-anyone-could

Oh, OK, that metaphor makes sense.

It's Bim's interview! Haven't had the chance to read it yet, but this will undoubtedly be excellent.

today in women's news

“Life didn’t work out that way,” she said. “I didn’t have a child. I probably treat my dogs more like children than someone with children would.”

http://www.montgomeryadvertiser.com/article/20140415/NEWS01/304140039/More-single-unmarried-women-choosing-small-pooches-over-motherhood-survey-finds?nclick_check=1

i found this because one of these proud dog-owning women posted it to a fb group about dachshunds in ohio that i joined for some unknown reason (i guess for lols?)
she boasted very seriously that she and her husband were super proud of their two dogs and then tagged all of these words and phrases that appeared to be about pride in being child-free
it was kinda weird and i didn't know where to put it so i put it here

Stephen Jay Gould's essay on neotony, as illustrated by the evolution of how Disney characters are drawn, sheds an interesting side light on the phenomenon of small dogs being treated like infants. I forget which of his many books of essays that one appeared in, but it was one of his most memorable ones.

http://america.aljazeera.com/watch/shows/america-tonight/articles/2014/4/17/nonconsensual-sexwhenrapeisreworded.html

Jordana Rosenberg on mothers, mourning, and rereading Judith Butler: http://www.avidly.org/2014/05/09/gender-trouble-on-mothers-day/

A friend sent me this as a response on why she's skeptical of sex-positive feminism. Don't really know what to make of it.

http://radtransfem.tumblr.com/post/39655781190/undoing-sex-against-sexual-optimism-negationparty

rape is implicated in all forms of sex, and to perceive rape rightly as a scandal calls into question the foundation of every form of sexuality. Normative, civil sex is only one part of a system which has rape as its basis, as a central operating principle. The imagined integrity of the perfectly consenting subject amounts to little more than a regulatory principle of rape, a purity to be defended against a threatening Other.

the fruits of a tumblr education

that's hardcore

This is not to say that humans, as animals prior to any development of culture, did not engage in behaviors now recognized as “sex”, but rather their discursive meaning and all the material practices constituting them are historically produced. In the same manner, humans have always acted and created, but it is only in capitalist development, in the processes that alienated and proletarianized us, that this becomes secured as “labor.” What drives us towards having sex, in the here and now, is something determined by the flows of power and economic structures that produce us as “women,” “men,” “trans,” “straight,” etc. If thousands of years ago there was a pre-gendered mode of pleasure, embodiment, and usage of genitalia, it is irretrievably lost to us.

seems iffy? at the very least this pre-cultural sex should be vestigial, if not underlining the entire thing.

it's such a bold critique to say that we are not only more than animals, but actually not animals at all

just glancing at the quotes, it seems like a bit of critical theory by numbers, even including a kind of negative idea of the subject as a way to, you know, actually do critical theory as itself something "undetermined" by "flows of power and economic structures." it makes an exception of itself from a totalizing vision of determination as a way to guarantee the coherence of that picture.

the idea of a prelapsarian sexuality seems a little... optimistic to me

but what do i know, i stan for kludgey modernity

i don't think anyone would describe animal sexuality as prelapsarian!

mb bonobos

http://www.slate.com/blogs/wild_things/2014/05/22/animal_social_justice_equality_in_bonobos_chimps_monkeys_lions_baboons.html

http://i.imgur.com/XgesA6n.jpg

wtf

Good article tbh

do not feed the clickbait

?

You talking about the Slate article?

Not sure how well this article fits here, but I found this interesting...
http://www.nightmare-magazine.com/nonfiction/the-h-word-in-search-of-horrible-women/

About how some people find it difficult to accept realistic female characters that are bad people.