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

I'm not ignoring, I just can't speak w/ much experience about the second scenario – I have such unremittingly terrible taste in music, and such a preference for mid-century melodic drivel that my tastes transgress boundaries far beyond the gender-inflected ones, and kind of fail in a way that preculdes any serious consideration. IOW, you are potentially right, but I wouldn't know, and I don't have an analogue in my own life for comparison.

As to the first example... I think the reactive gendering of activities you cite – the attachment of a gender/sexuality sum to an innately neutral activity – is a very real thing and has as much to do with fear of sissiness or faggotry on behalf of the men themselves, as with an outward directed pressure toward women. This doesn't make the labels less offensive – it reduces the participation of women to an epsilon - but is in significant fashion a construct for power-holding men to elevate their own preferences. Anecdotally, I enjoy growing small potted herb plants and flowers. I was well into my 20s before I acknowledged that (a) I liked this activity and (b) I had avoided participating because I felt it wasn't proper/appropriate/sissyish (c) it had been a favorite childhood hobby to garden with my grandmother that I had stopped as a teenager. What I mean to illustrate is that in the experience of my life, this type of indoor gardening was a feminized activity* in a strictly non-valuative way, but nevertheless one that I felt I could not access for fear of transgressing a strictly described gender stereotype.

* Feminized in the sense that I could not participate, and I was masculine, and the container gardeners in my circle were female. The singular experience trumped the larger cultural one that says 'gardening is an obv. gender-neutral activity,' and was directed only inward – I didn't, to the best of my recollection, make any assumption or attach meaning to any male gardeners I encountered.

that post is like an hour old, sorry

remy, what does "reduces... to an epsilon" mean? i've never come across it before and google's not being super helpful.

epsilon is a maths analogy! it's something very very small

http://mathworld.wolfram.com/Epsilon.html

just a mathy way of saying 'makes women a trivial sum'

maths analogies! awesome, i am using that one forever.

Wow, this thread. Holy hell. By the way, if you start your argument on the premise that a very very common turn of phrase is actually something to be taken painstakingly literally, you've already lost.

I can't deal with the multitude of points and ideas that have been on this thread since last I checked in, so I'm just gonna...

i don't know much about the trans experience or trans norms at all. i was raised by two cisgender lesbians & a hetero pair of parents, and i feel like i have some sense of what friends mean when they describe themselves as queer, but i haven't known or read of much of the trans experience. does anyone have suggestions on that?

― BIG HOOS aka the steendriver, Tuesday, February 14, 2012 6:50 AM (9 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

My friend has written a good personal column about it, if you're interested? http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/series/transgender-journey

Also, I saw someone ask for a clarification of 'cisgender' upthread, but not sure if anyone answered? I know wiki's not the best resource, but this sort of covers it. Basically, it's in contrast to 'trans' but without the highly offensive use of terms like 'normal' that people often use without thinking (I'm sure I have done in the past).

cis gay men seem to get especially het up about the word 'cis' ime - like i've seen a few bloggers claim they don't like the word because it sounds like "sissy" and is thus feminizing/demeaning (and yet they're content to fling the word 'tranny' around as if that word isn't extremely problematic either)

i like cis because it's both a good shorthand that dispels the idea of all trans ppl as being 'other' and bcz it's etymologically consistent

huh I've never seen this cisgender term before, interesting.

Any dude, gay or otherwise, who gets het up about "feminising" being inherently "demeaning" can GTFO AFAIC.

I mean I get the negative reductive stereotypes of gay men as effete can be pretty offensive and RONG but that derives its power from an intensely misogynist worldview that sees femininity as naturally tainted as much as reductive ideas about homosexuality.

sure - otoh it isn't really that surprising that some gay men overcompensate in the masculine gender roles dept. defense mechanism etc

"het up" <-- also problematic :)

i like cis as useful & necessary shorthand but i'm also aware of how jargony it can come across to people who haven't heard it before - the influence of academia and academic language on queer/feminist theory is not something i would dismiss but i think it's also helpful (and necessary!) to move away from it if we actually want to effect this change we talk about.

SO MANY gay men i've known have casually flung around "tranny" (and terms like "slut", "slag" too for that matter) and i fucking hate it.

lol mark

SO MANY gay men i've known have casually flung around "tranny" (and terms like "slut", "slag" too for that matter)

lol yeah if anything that's where I've picked it up from. long-running club night called the "Trannyshack" in SF etc

i thought "het up" was derived from "heated up"?

have any transsexual communities attempted to reclaim "tranny" incidentally? i have no idea

well I can tell you from experience that most of the attendees at Trannyshack are uh, cisgendered, I guess

Het up is past tense of heated up, it's punny! Duh!

ooh look there's a website

maybe SFW, I dunno

those angry hets! ;)

re: 'tranny': the impression i have is that, much like 'fag', some ppl are fine with it, others aren't. either way, not cis ppl's place to make that call (and i personally don't feel comfortable using it in just about any context)

Any dude, gay or otherwise, who gets het up about "feminising" being inherently "demeaning" can GTFO AFAIC.

i agree but there's also a thing that i recognise where you feel like someone's treating you like a stereotype of a particularly flaming/feminine gay man and i tend to respond by having to put my foot down and make it clear that's not on

Sorry I forgot, I'm meant to still be participating in the Great Feminist Humour Boycott of 1973 - we will boycott humour until equality is achieved... oh wait.

I understand that, Lex, I just wish that there were a way gay men could resist the stereotype without agreeing with perpetuating the construct that being ~like a woman~ is inherently awful. Say it's incorrect, but no need to say it's demeaning?

gay men tend to have butch/femme and top/bottom dichotomies but no real useful way to describe the in-between stuff, which is why i hate both of those dichotomies

well the thing is it's usually in situations where you can't really spell it out in those exact terms, it's something you have to convey through your own behaviour rather than a calm & sober debate about identity/gender.

which might be something to talk about, actually, b/c how these gender issues affect us in a practical way is often not in a situation like this thread, where it's entirely appropriate to be discussing these things in these terms - most of one's quotidian life isn't like this, and it's navigating those situations where the actual problems come from

or something. don't feel i expressed that quite clearly

gay men tend to have butch/femme and top/bottom dichotomies but no real useful way to describe the in-between stuff, which is why i hate both of those dichotomies

― Prince Rebus (donna rouge), Tuesday, February 14, 2012 5:50 PM (3 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

otmfm

(though i don't want to hijack the feminism thread with gay male talk, ha. btw i have always found it funny how many str8 ilxors lurk on the gay thread!)

late replying to this but couple of xps to NV...

question tho, isn't there a more general division happening here between, for want of a better phrase, the libido-led and the intellect-led? a division that also cuts across normative gender lines?
this interests me greatly because on the one hand you have 'male' logic, reason etc explicitly positioned against 'female' sentimentality, hysteria etc.

Yet with sexuality you see the opposite popular perceptions - men are passionate, sexual, unafraid etc vs women who are "not as sexual", "don't think about sex as much as men", "are more aroused by the mental than the physical" etc.*

why is that?

and yeah huge awful double standards still in play but female sexuality is a little way out of the angels vs whores box by now surely?
irl yes obviously but the public perception really hasn't moved on much; you see this literally every time a rape case hits the news.

*all actual things men have said to me.

Yet with sexuality you see the opposite popular perceptions - men are passionate, sexual, unafraid etc vs women who are "not as sexual", "don't think about sex as much as men", "are more aroused by the mental than the physical" etc.*

i recognize what you're describing but i think associations with female sexuality are way more incoherent than that. women are also viewed as sexually voracious in a way that threatens men, especially women of color in our cultural context.

i am not actually sure the way female sexuality is understood is all the far out of the virgin-whore box, but like i said, i can be reactionary about this stuff.

women are also viewed as sexually voracious in a way that threatens men, especially women of color in our cultural context.

this is news to me. examples?

i guess i'm just talking about the whore pole of the virgin-whore dynamic. "Hottentot Venus" type-stuff.

men are passionate, sexual, unafraid

More reckless, maybe.

xxp definitely true horseshoe.

when i say about it having moved on, I was definitely not referring to the wider societal perception!

i guess i'm just talking about the whore pole of the virgin-whore dynamic. "Hottentot Venus" type-stuff.

right, this seems to comfortably encompass, say, Nicki Minaj or Li'l Kim or whoever. otoh I can't recall too many asian dragon-lady representations lately... and latina women are like a whole other basket of nuances when it comes to the virgin-whore axis.

xp

I shd also re-read this book, but even having not covered this ground in a few years, I can highly recommend it. I think I would get so much more out of it now than I did when I was mostly confused by all the historical ideas.

Beginning with "vamp" Theda Bara's 1915 silent-film debut in A Fool There Was, Dijkstra (Idols of Perversity), writing with passionate feminist scholarship, decodes images of women as predators, destroyers and vultures who deplete civilized males of their creative energies. He unmasks predatory females in Hemingway, H.L. Mencken, Elinor Glyn's bestselling 1907 potboiler Three Weeks, and unravels the sexist assumptions of sociologist Emile Durkheim, sexologist Havelock Ellis and philosopher of love Remy de Gourmont. Shuttling between high and popular culture, Dijkstra argues that antifeminine, racist and imperialist attitudes merge in Conrad's Heart of Darkness, Fitzgerald's The Beautiful and the Damned, in Kipling, Edgar Rice Burroughs, H. Rider Haggard, in Jung's psychology of unchanging archetypes, in the social Darwinist teachings of Herbert Spencer and William Graham Sumner. Finally, he traces a trajectory of fantasies involving men attaining supermale status from Nietzsche to Ezra Pound and Hitler.

sounds interesting

decodes images of women as predators, destroyers and vultures who deplete civilized males of their creative energies.

would read lol debate between her and Dave Sim

yeah i didn't mean that all women of color are viewed as menacingly sexual or that only women of color are--if you were raised in a monotheistic faith surely you recognize what i'm talking about when i talk about women as sexual temptresses who can destroy men. i am being very shorthandy i guess in talking about the mythology surrounding women and sex because there's so much of it and it's so directly contradictory and overdetermined.

this is news to me. examples?

minority ladies like the kind you'd meet in their ~authentic~ cultural setting are freeks/subs/wildcats etc and could ruin your life with their appetites

many xps

xxxp It's all about man as rational being who needs woman and their emotional vampirism in order to have children and have his family taken care of but should resist their appeal at all other times. Because all women crave his hot, hot, male...energy, and will sap him of it until he is a lifeless husk that does their bidding and is pitied by all clean-living, masculine men, everywhere.

also because it bums me out tbh

yeah sure. I was raised Jewish, which has perhaps a more generous view of female sexuality than Islam and Xtianity. (still contains the formative adam/eve myth, obvy)

xxp

the succubus myth

horseshoe otm

I find male-only groups/spaces somewhat alien and would be depressed to think of any of my activities as masculine-coded.

― jaymc, Tuesday, February 14, 2012 8:33 AM (3 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

^this. Sometimes I wish I didn't feel this way, I would like to be able to find camaraderie in a "guy's night", but it just doesn't work out that way.

take it to the guy's thread guys

(if there is one I will complain about sports fyi)

Excerpt from forthcoming book about modern sexuality in the West --> http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/jan/20/first-sexual-revolution

The first sexual revolution: lust and liberty in the 18th century

Adulterers and prostitutes could be executed and women were agreed to be more libidinous than men – then in the 18th century attitudes to sex underwent an extraordinary change

Not sure if it's shitty or not, but the excerpt was entertaining at least.

decodes images of women as predators, destroyers and vultures who deplete civilized males of their creative energies.

Baudelaire trafficked in this imagery as did Coleridge. If you mess with sexuality as much as religious anti-fornicators have, you end with highly distorted views, yet the underlying human fascination remains however sublimated or perverted.

and women were agreed to be more libidinous than men

It's funny that to religitimize itself, Christian patriarchy abandoned the Eve myth and Salome, etc., and put sentimental domesticity at its center. Perhaps this is more a Northern/Protestant thing but it's a pretty weird turn-around. Healthy, well-bred men are supposed to be rational and prefer clean male company. It does fairly reek of suppressed homoeroticism.

Hey has anyone read this?

http://thecaptivereader.files.wordpress.com/2010/04/enlightened-sexism-the-seductive-message-that-feminisms-work-is-done.jpg

Read an excerpt online the other day, and it seemed good. I liked Douglas's Where the Girls Are when I read it in college, and the premise of this one kind of reminded me of Ariel Levy's Female Chauvinist Pigs, which I liked as well.