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

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.

cisgender lesbians
yo hoos what does this mean?

― a hoy hoy, Tuesday, February 14, 2012 10:07 AM (8 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Kristen Schilt and Laurel Westbrook defined "cisgender" as a label for "individuals who have a match between the gender they were assigned at birth, their bodies, and their personal identity", complementing "transgender".[2] A more popular term is "gender normative".[3] However, unlike "cisgender", this term suggests that there is a single, agreed-upon system of gender norms.

don't really know the backstory of "cis" as the prefix tho, haven't done the appropriate reading

The word has its origin in the Latin-derived prefix cis, meaning "to/this the near side," which is antonymous with the Latin-derived prefix "trans." This usage can be seen in the cis-trans distinction in chemistry, or in the ancient Roman term "Cisalpine Gaul", i.e., "Gaul on this side of the Alps". In the case of gender, however, "cis" refers to the alignment of gender identity with assigned gender.

i am making a concerted effort to keep my mouth shut itt btw

ime straight white dudes have a bad habit of loudly disagreeing with (everyone but especially) women about what it is like to be (anything other than a straight white dude but especially) a woman instead of listening to their stories of that experience and i'd rather not play into that

That Guardian excerpt was fascinating, Lechera! I feel like every paragraph needs to be unpacked and supported like 10x more and it would still be interesting.

First thing, though, was story about the man who fell ill and feared his sickness was punishment for once ATTEMPTING to have sex with some young woman, who rebuked his advances, but because he besmirched her, the elders brought her from another town to stand trial and be found guilty of adultery, and hanged along with the failed rapist. The criminal injustice of it and the bottomless pit of his selfishness in pulling her down with him have me just....

i like that discourse is (slowly) starting to incorporate a greater variety of gender-identities and modes of "having" a gender. on the other hand, id like to see more about how gender is (imo) inherently disruptive, for everyone, and that, at best, its something we only have relationship to as a performative or prosthesis (our gender is almost a difference within ourselves) rather than just a multiplicity of possible identities.

Re: cis. It's still used in romance languages, so West Bank becomes Cis-Jordanie in French for example.

Yo HOOS, I did answer that upthread. Bloody straight white dudes, ignoring the wimmins over here. (j/k, but if you missed my earlier post I did also respond to something you said.)

This part broke my heart, and is also why I love to read diaries.

The effects of this sharpened double standard can be seen everywhere in 18th-, 19th- and 20th-century culture. James Boswell's diary records the tragic story of Jean, the brilliant only daughter of Henry Home, Lord Kames, one of the leading thinkers of the Enlightenment. In the early 1760s, when she was only 16 or 17 and already married, she embarked on a passionate affair with Boswell, arguing to him that they were doing nothing wrong.
...
A decade later, when her husband divorced her over another affair, she declared "that she hoped that God Almighty would not punish her for the only crime she could charge herself with, which was the gratification of those passions which he himself had implanted in her nature." But her father, the scholar and moral authority, took the conventional view that adultery in a man "may happen occasionally, with little or no alienation of affection", but in a woman was unpardonable. After his daughter's divorce, he and Lady Kames exiled her to France and never saw her again.

Given the context provided by LL's entire excerpt, I am thinking that being "exiled to France" may not have broken this poor woman's heart. What's missing is whether she was reduced to penury, or still maintained her position as a member of the upper class.

Which doesn't mean that her parents and most of those around her were not acting oppressively.

i am making a concerted effort to keep my mouth shut itt btw

ime straight white dudes have a bad habit of loudly disagreeing with (everyone but especially) women about what it is like to be (anything other than a straight white dude but especially) a woman instead of listening to their stories of that experience and I'd rather not play into that

― BIG HOOS aka the steendriver, Tuesday, February 14, 2012 1:57 PM (15 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I am doing the same but for different reasons. It often feels like "what it is like to be a woman" is some sort of set experience that all women share and relate to which is most certainly not the case. Unfortunately when women have tried to express that on other ILX threads it's been met with a response that has felt pretty condescending and dismissive at times in a way that has put me (and other posters I've talked to offline) off participating in this discussion entirely. I am reading though and it's pretty interesting. HS on the money as per usual.

Yo HOOS, I did answer that upthread. Bloody straight white dudes, ignoring the wimmins over here. (j/k, but if you missed my earlier post I did also respond to something you said.)

― emil.y, Tuesday, February 14, 2012 7:09 PM (7 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

oh i must have missed that. thx!

Btw, despite his excellent patronage, Kames was lamentably a polygenist.

Am sorta feeling ENBB on this... honestly not sure I even know how to join in but I am v interested in what everyone is saying

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.

― Laura Lucy Lynn (La Lechera), dinsdag 14 februari 2012 19:39 (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I just read a lengthy, glowing review in a newspaper of this book the other day! Cut it out and it's on the "need to buy"-pile!

don't really know the backstory of "cis" as the prefix tho, haven't done the appropriate reading

cis- and trans- are common chemical prefixes eg double bonds and "trans- fats"

cis-kel and trans-bert

also i m dum and was ON IPHONE and did not see that this had been covered

I like the word 'cispontine', which means 'on this side of the bridge' and was used in the Victorian era to designate London proper as opposed to the scandalous south of the river.

my gender is racemic

gender politics of this are mindboggling

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m0vQOnHW0Kc&feature=player_embedded

PETA are pretty well known for ghastly campaigns that go well beyond making any kind of point and just into the realms of rampant misogyny.

Yeah I can't even begin to handle that. I mean seriously, fucking hell.

the mysogyny thing is not something I've noticed about them before, this just seems so extreme

Oh man, you've been missing out. Just a few of the first links that google comes up with for 'peta misogyny':

http://www.feministe.us/blog/archives/2008/03/04/peta-misogyny-strikes-again/

http://feministlookingglass.com/2010/05/22/peta-strikes-again/

http://bastardlogic.wordpress.com/2008/09/23/peta-misogyny/

http://fengi.livejournal.com/1287486.html

PETA is like the all time worst. "secret fascists" imo.

That's fucking dreadful.

I don't think they're very secret about their fascism!

I mean, I realise their ethos is 'shock tactics', and while I do eat meat I understand where that comes from. But they consistently target, objectify, and demean women and women alone. They are fucking horrible.

I'm a vegetarian and I'm p horrified by PETA most of the time, especially the misogyny. But they wouldn't be the first organisation w progressive (or whatevs) agenda to have appalling gender politics. It's endemic.

just observing the thread, just want to echo WCC, peta's gender politics are wretched and set back animal rights as a srs political issue to boot

I guess I was aware of their "veganism = sexy naked babes" angle before but this just seems next level with the whole sexualized violence thing.

point 1 - thanks people who talked about libidousness and "the feminine", i was posing my questions from a position of genuine ignorance and like so much else on this thread i feel like a world of reading/ideas has just been flagged out for me :)

point 2 - in my opinion the repressive narratives of an org like PETA are reproduced by plenty of "progressive" communities eg Green movements on class and race - this is the point of the idea of kyriarchy, surely i.e. "friendly" power structures still riddled with inequality etc

ENBB, the idea that "what it feels like to be a woman is emphatically NOT something that all women share and relate to, that being a woman is NOT a monolithic entity" is something that's pretty central to most (at least) Third Wave Feminism.

I can understand how, if you walk into a thread where a group of women have had a specific set of negative experiences are talking about them, and you say something like "well, I've never had those experiences (and can't really understand or relate to them)" that could be a pretty alienating experience. For *both* sides. But I do think there's been quite an effort on "the ILX gurl community" (through Jenny's (I think?)) manifesto (which may have got lost on the Sandbox) saying something like "it's valid for women to have these experiences and express them, it's valid for women to not have those experiences and express that, neither invalidates the experiences of the other." I'm sorry if you feel condescended to by that, but I'm not sure what else you want?

I watched the ad without sound (I'm at work obv).

but, wha?

isn't whether one has had certain experiences oneself actually...not relevant? what's important is the recognition that in other circumstances they could easily have happened to you.

i was never bullied at school for being gay, i've never been beaten up for being gay, i've never experienced homophobia in the workplace, marriage is something that i personally can take or leave, but those are all crucial to any discussion of gay rights and i recognise that. i certainly don't feel alienated when people talk about issues i haven't experienced. alter my circumstances or character slightly and it could easily have been me. i mean, all of that is why i'm in a thread about women's issues (along with several other dudes) even though we *can't* have experienced the things described here.