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

Article reminds me FONDLY of the couple times a stranger has asked me, while knitting in public, if I was doing a Madame Defarge code. <3

guess she's overhighlighted or whatever but i hope lady macbeth kills everyone on that list until she's #1

that which hath made them drunk hath made me bold
what hath quench'd them hath given me fire

This is pretty interesting. I don't have much to say about it and am just gonna throw it out there:
http://america.aljazeera.com/articles/2014/5/29/slut-shaming-study.html

thanks for the links, RAG & hurting.

wr2 the "h-word" article, i'm torn in two directions. on one hand, i'm often troubled by the limited number of modes available to women as characters in popular entertainment. on the other, i sometimes have the unpleasant sense that "horrible" women in stories created by men are punching bags for the venting of grievance. thinking in particular of the "bad exes" of mad men and weeds.

You might know about this already but Kier-La Janisse written a book called House Of Psychotic Women and she talks about lots of films that have been dismissed as sexist (misogynist often). The book (which I haven't read but I listened to a series of interviews with her about it) is about horror films prominently featuring female neurosis and how they resonate with her and seem to with quite a lot of other women (plenty of female bloggers particularly love giallo and slasher films). She talked about even though giallo films are sexist they still showed her things that she felt were true in her life. The book has been well received and it doesn't sound like it strains too hard in the apologist bullshit direction.

Personally I think that men often get actresses or create female characters that are often beautiful (usually in a innocent or ethereal way) and can scream and express emotions in way that is impressive, enviable, cathertic and intoxicating. I think it helps them articulate emotions that they couldn't otherwise.

i sometimes have the unpleasant sense that "horrible" women in stories created by men are punching bags for the venting of grievance. thinking in particular of the "bad exes" of mad men and weeds.

wasn't weeds created by a woman?

wuzzit? [investigates...]

lol, yeah, i guess i'm guilty of exactly what SPM was talking abt in that nightmare essay: rejecting a negative female character based on what i assumed it was trying to "say". weeds eps written by a large and gender-varied group of people, but by no means generally "by men".

imaginary sexism aside, show's treatment of elizabeth perkins' cecilia still bugs me. seems vindictive & unfunny. i don't dislike her, but the show seems to.

I felt like even though the characters were good in Sopranos, I feel like a lot of them were punching bags too. I think Betty Draper is a good character too.
I feel like when I read Victorian ghost stories there is often an idiot portrayed with total contempt and that annoys me, maybe these writers didn't have anyone to bitch about these people to, but I rarely appreciate characters who are nothing but punching bags.

I just read my previous post, sorry for how horribly I written it.

Female-named hurricanes kill more than male hurricanes because people don't respect them, study finds

karma

And Hurricane Amanda seemed so warm and fluffy.

didn't she though

Regarding that hurricane article, there was a comment on the Economist that was basically to the effect of "people who evaluate the danger of a storm by its name are being killed... are we sure this is a bad thing?"

Lol do not underestimate Hurricane Amanda.

No one could have predicted that a sassy lil thang named Katrina could have breached the levies.

xp i called her mandy and she blew my house down now that's just over-reacting

"Female hurricanes are 'crazy'"

No one could have predicted that a sassy lil thang named Katrina could have breached the levies.

― ₴HABΔZZ ¶IZZΔ (Hurting 2), Monday, June 2, 2014 8:48 PM (2 hours ago)

More fool them, she'd been openly associating with The Waves since like 1985.

haaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

so good.

category 5!!!!

Beautifully done

Debunked:

http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2014/06/02/why-have-female-hurricanes-killed-more-people-than-male-ones/

All hurricanes had female names until 1979, and hurricanes have been getting steadily less deadly in recent years with the increase in early warning etc. Correlation does not imply causation.

that was exactly my first thought

my first thought was also a Katrina and the Waves joke

my first thought was a Boston lyric: "I'm gonna say it like a man and make you understand/ Amanda"

I thought this was really really good:
https://nplusonemag.com/online-only/online-only/the-ultimate-humiliation/

this whole thing has made me think a lot about stalkers and romance, particularly that awful poster board guy from "love, actually"

my first thought was a Boston lyric: "I'm gonna say it like a man and make you understand/ Amanda"

when i was in 8th gr it was "i'm gonna take you by the thighs and make you realize…amanda"
not cool

wowed by that piece

first graf reminded me of joan didion.

It was the one thing about this situation that I read from start to finish.

Part of what impressed me about it was how much the author seemed legit driven to understand her subject rather that fall back on canned explanations, even though it's in some ways a repulsive subject. Also some of the stuff toward the end was some of the smartest writing about sex I've ever read and actually helped me understand myself a little better.

Definitely reminded me of Didion as well.

need to finish that; i see both dlh and i both posted it to the shooting spree thread in the same afternoon, ha

the writer is, like, super cool afaict. and the magazine she runs is pretty hot stuff: adult-mag.com

I'm a little surprised to see such praise for an article that includes sentences like

I’ll join the “conversation” on gun control when cops start dropping their Glocks.

what I do dead seriously want to consider is why the messy, shockingly diverse, and sometimes parodically sexist world of pornography—and not the Puritan, hierarchical, and secretly sexist world of Facebook—will indubitably be blamed for the way it makes some boys see women.

If Rodger had a problem with porn, it was that he didn’t see nearly enough of it.

It seemed to me like a weird, meandering piece, one that has some good ideas and writing but then crashes full force into stupid stuff like the above.

I winced a little at the gun control line, but overall it seemed like a piece that was able to get past the *correct* stances on political issues in order to hit on some deeper truths. I think she's obviously right about porn not being at fault for the way men see women (after all, it's a much older problem than porn) and her "didn't see nearly enough of it" I take to mean that he didn't see enough varieties of it -- perhaps an overly optimistic thought since I presume she means kink or stuff that is way outside of the porn realm that most young straight males frequent.

i don't think that piece is perfect, but it's interesting, and honestly written

i mean, she also says she doesn't think the kid was insane

I think it's worth asking what we mean by "insane." He was someone who thought about things in a way that we consider (rightly) grossly unacceptable and way outside the norm, but I think she's suggesting that he may have been a "rational" person who carried ugly and wrong ideas to their extreme conclusions. I got a similar feeling from Breivik. IDK. Like he wasn't hallucinating, he wasn't convinced there were voices telling him to do something, he might be described as "paranoid" in a way I guess, with his sense of the entire way gender and sex works being designed to fuck with him.

Like would we describe a racist white supremecist who went on a killing spree of black people as "insane"?

yes

I think she's obviously right about porn not being at fault for the way men see women (after all, it's a much older problem than porn)

Well yes, that is obvious. Which is why, as far as I can tell, no one is blaming porn alone for Rodger's massacre, and in general no one blames porn alone for misogyny. I would say it's equally obvious that porn is a prominent part of the culture of misogyny of which Rodger was a product, much more so than the "secretly sexist"(?) Facebook.

and her "didn't see nearly enough of it" I take to mean that he didn't see enough varieties of it -- perhaps an overly optimistic thought since I presume she means kink or stuff that is way outside of the porn realm that most young straight males frequent.
― ₴HABΔZZ ¶IZZΔ (Hurting 2), Tuesday, June 3, 2014 10:02 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I interpreted it that way too, and it doesn't make any sense to me. Rodger felt entitled to conventionally attractive women, and was obsessively jealous of the men who dated and slept with those women. I can't think of a good reason to suppose that seeing other kinds of people depicted in porn would have helped.

Many sentences begin with incisive, timeless, and true generalizations (“The most beautiful women choose to mate with the most brutal of men”)...

God that first sentence is like a Didion cover version. Great piece though.

I dont really know where to put this and am just kind of thinking aloud - but Ive been feeling a lot of commonality between sociopathy and sexism of late. The inability to see or acknowledge the experiences felt by others, means those experiences are invalid, they dont exist?

Anvil, I might be wrong on this because I do not entirely understand sociopathy. But sociopathy seems to involve, as you say, the *inability* to see or acknowledge the experiences of others. I think with sexism and misogyny, it is much more a *refusal* to recognise that women are people or even human beings, and therefore are capable of having experiences to acknowledge.

It's not "incapable of acknowledging others"; it is sorting others into "people, and not-people/things".

pretty much everything bad looks like sociopathy cuz it's an empathy disorder and so is pretty much everything bad

Yeah i mean i dont know! its just until recently i wouldnt have even thought of them being linked! and ive only come to understand sociopathy a lot more, recently too. dont think they are the same thing but ive just started wondering about overlap, or how they link. like if one comes out of the other...or can come out of the other. Sociopaths dont value the opinions or thoughts of others, so they are already in the right kind of place for sexism. Sociopaths also get angry when they dont get validation/attention, and the validation has to be constant. It doesnt matter if one gets validation for 16 hours in a row - if the 17th hour involves no validation, they get angry. For the sociopath your views are of no value, you exist purely to give them validation, that is your purpose in life. Their views are always objectively correct, and anything that opposes this is wrong and therefore emotional and subjective (which are both 'bad'). It is an inability to see the experiences of others, but if you bring your views up, then it becomes a refusal. Of course they will lie, obfuscate, wilfully miss your points, but your views have no relevance (even if they are your own experiences, they will understand them better than you, and they will always have an answer)