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

I feel like it ends up just reinforcing bad attitudes by treating certain concerns and mindsets as genuine or appropriate

you seem to presuppose that this is a list of commandments to the troops, rather than strategies that people can adopt to make themselves work better as allies.

― inspector george gentlyfallingblood (c sharp major), Saturday, March 3, 2012 12:20 PM (3 hours ago) Bookmark

well, i'd say it presents itself as both, and that it's strong emphasis on the former undercuts its utility as the latter.

plus yeah, the suggestion that the oppressed "target groups" really do want you as an ally, no matter what they seem to be saying, seems way off base. if people indicate that they don't want or need your help, you should probably take them at their word.

"it's"

AAAARGH

plus yeah, the suggestion that the oppressed "target groups" really do want you as an ally, no matter what they seem to be saying, seems way off base. if people indicate that they don't want or need your help, you should probably take them at their word.

― Totes le Héros (contenderizer), Sunday, March 4, 2012 12:03 AM (7 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

agreed

you seem to presuppose that this is a list of commandments to the troops, rather than strategies that people can adopt

― inspector george gentlyfallingblood (c sharp major), Saturday, March 3, 2012 12:20 PM (3 hours ago) Bookmark

well, i'd say it presents itself as both

disagree with this reading but i'll admit my reading comes out of wanting the best from the text--a best which plenty of others here don't seem to think exists, so i'll defer.

OK, the provenance of this document has rolled back under the cut but hey, I'm going to assume that it is what it was represented as: a group of marginalised people saying, in very clinical language, how they would like to be treated.

And here is a thing: when someone expresses a direct request, "this is how I'd like to be treated," I try to treat them that way, instead of second guessing how I think they should *really* want to be treated.

I'm not going to sugar coat this. It's one thing for someone like horseshoe or lex, who actually are members of marginalised groups themselves, to say "well, I don't feel this applies to me" - but when a bunch of straight white dudes start picking it apart, that is presumptuous as fuck. Because, for many of us, part of the system of oppression has *been* SWDs telling us that we can't *possibly* really want the things that we explicitly state we want.

Additionally, it is very easy for SWDs to talk about "tough love" and insist that marginalised people should ~be more angry~ - but again, this is how privilege (sorry, there's no other word that fits here) works. That if you are a straight white dude getting angry, that anger is seen as legitimate, even righteous, and if it isn't, it is seen as a reflection on you personally, and not your entire group. That if you are a woman, or a person of colour (especially an African-American or a Muslim) and you get "tough love" or get angry, your actions will not be coded as righteous, you will be seen as "hysterical" or "a fanatic" or possibly even "criminal" or "a terrorist."

Personally, my inclination is towards scorched earth and toughlove, but we've seen this again and again on ILX, where some ~well-intentioned~ but bumbling dude comes and shoots his privilege off on one of these threads, people *don't* say "wow, that is some righteous tough love coming from WCC" - they say "wow, WCC is a fucking bitch."

i think it is likely that some SWDs were involved in the writing of that list, actually - if that list was written by and for ~activists~ it was probably written by a bunch of ppl together, probably both ppl who consider themselves 'allies' and ppl who consider themselves 'in the target group'. (however it was probably not written by people who would not be willing to think of themselves as members of a 'target group' or 'allies')

i think what people are missing about this is that it's written for people who consider themselves 'allies' w/in a specific set of circumstances, it's not a general set of rules for life or for everyone.

it's like thinking about e.g. religious law. our image of law is this thing that is top-down and imposed upon people by a state or other group, but there's a whole other historical existence of law as something you use to guide your practice: it's not 'don't steal a sheep because it is immoral and also the representatives of the law will take one back off you', it's 'this is how a good [religionist] organises their inheritance'.

yeah, thats all fair, didnt mean to derail. ill butt out again.

Has anyone linked this aready?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PTlmho_RovY&feature=share

It's a really brief, to-the-point lecture on how photoshopping images of women's bodies is, well, doing evil.

hi all,

i have been dating someone who recently showed their true colors by making some really awful comments about women, particularly women's mental health. because i am not quite ready to give up on him i am trying to educate him about it. i have had good luck finding articles about the prevalence of mental health issues in women, specifically linking them to violence towards women. here's a really good summary from the world health organization: http://www.who.int/mental_health/prevention/genderwomen/en/

what i'm looking for now is an article about the depiction of women with mental health issues in popular culture, how they are often very sexualized, and how it is a really tired trope/device that is offensive, unfair and inaccurate. the tropes vs. women series by feminist frequency was one things i thought of, but none of them specifically fit the situation and i'm looking for something a bit more general. is there a key text that is not too academic or jargony, or an article anyone could recommend?

s.e. smith at Tiger Beatdown and Melissa at Shakesville have both done some good writing on that topic, but unfortunately I don't have any bookmarked at the moment (lost all of my feminist 101 bookmarks when I quit my job.)

i would like to read those

photoshopping lecture is great, though i do wish she'd done a better job of supporting the "objectification leads to violence" argument.

couldn't find the tiger beatdown and shakesville pieces mentioned...

the whole thing is on youtube in two parts if you want more context. i don't think she's asserting a direct link but you could also rephrase that statement in the converse and it also makes sense: in a culture predisposed to hostility or at least resistance towards the concept of a woman's autonomous or psychically unified existence you're likely to see more depictions of women as a collection of abstracted parts or as hybridized human/ thing types of deals. i'm guessing it's more symptomatic than causal in a "violence leads to objectification" way but it's probably cyclical.

i dunno - i think a lot of it has to do with photography and its conventions - whether we expect it to be "real" or not. Before there was photoshop, there were centuries of painting women's bodies.

perhaps this belongs more on some politics thread than here, but i found it pretty interesting. Kirsten Powers on the "principled" outrage directed at rush limbaugh's misogyny in light of the free pass granted to liberal pundits like chris matthews and bill maker.

saw an interview with KM on fox news the other day, and while conservatives are predictably exploiting her arguments in order to make an issue of liberal "hypocrisy", her general point is very hard to refute: women in politics (as elsewhere in life) are frequently attacked and demeaned simply for being women, especially if/when they don't "play nice", and it's rare that anyone objects.

"bill maker" = bill maher, duh

an autiobiographical video game about living as a transgender person

http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/591565

wow that's very touching
plus such great Earthbound-type vid game music

ha, i was on her blog reading about castlevania level design just earlier today

that's neat and I really liked the Castlevania thing thomp linked to on her games blog so I will try not to be bummed out abt the levels involving "feminists" and "dumb bitches"

much

idk "womyn borne womyn" bullshit is depressingly mainstream in feminist circles.

i think i actually linked a thing that linked to her? she wrote the thing about walls, not the one about medusa heads (i like how this sounds like it could be about the subject matter of this thread as much as it does the ILG thread)

a.anthropy is actually pretty heavily talked about in some niches of the indie scene i think? a lot of her other stuff is more, you know, 'gamey'. i also noticed this which i do kind of want to play, http://www.auntiepixelante.com/rffps/ - 'realistic female first person shooter')

thomp: sorry, yeah - you linked to the medusa head thing, from which I followed the link to her blog, and forgot where it was from

judith: I s'pose, and she did say "these (feminists/dumb bitches)", so I should give the benefit of the doubt that it means "some particular (x)" - I just felt a bit awkward that several enemies and shame-bringers were singled out as cis female, and nobody gets singled out as male. but I'm not denying that trans people get a hard time from (some) cis feminist circles and obviously it is not my place to comment really

well i don't think its not your place to comment, and yeah i get what you mean, but its a problem thats headbutting a problem i think.

true, but it's still jarring and a bit depressing in an otherwise very cool game

i was playing that at work where the computer would slow down massively in chunks of it for little reason + that made for a rather different experience (particularly in a game where there are just 'now wait' chunks). + i didn't realise that it was possible to pass (e.g.) the using-the-women's-bathroom section. tho i'm not sure how much you can do with it as a game, i guess.

the comments on newgrounds are for the most part heartening.

interesting game imo

feminism & porn

http://www.newleftproject.org/index.php/site/article_comments/porn_hijacking_our_sexuality

i'm exhausted atm so i'm just gonna put that there and say it's a bloody good article and it's refreshing to see someone actually discuss (the variety of) desire re: this subject

OK, I haven't got all the way through it because I saw her discuss fanfic then a few paragraphs later, made a reference to "a liking for cheesecake" (probably totally unaware of its triple meaning) and laughed myself sick.

But... refreshing compared to what? This debate of are feminists for/against porn has been going on since the 80s! I guess maybe I move in rarified circles but the idea that All Feminists are Against Porn is one of those things that has been discussed and debated and debunked and reasserted and subjected to a million billion takedowns and seriously could outlast the Energizer Bunny. Sigh.

It's like, everyone's against "Sexualisation" and especially "Sexualisation of Children" but no one can come up with a convincing definition of what "Sexualisation" actually is.

Since the turn of the millennium, over 5,000 women have been murdered in Guatemala. To give a better idea of what this figure means, consider that if Guatemala, with its population of 14 million, were the size of the United States, this would add up to 110,000 women murdered in a decade.

An estimated 2 percent of these cases have received legal action.

i don't even

the murder rate is high across the board in guatemala: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/04/04/110404fa_fact_grann

more men are killed by an order of magnitude, even.

point being its not a "femicide" problem so much as a violent, murderous society problem as a whole.

the rate at which women are being killed has jumped dramatically, and their killings are decidedly sexualized--and let's not be coy and ignore the disparity in legal action.

^^^

is there a disparity in legal action? serious q. the article doesn't give statistics. also, since 2000 the rate at which pretty much everyone was being killed jumped dramatically.

Dines claims that porn portrays “acts that most girlfriends or wives would absolutely refuse to do” (pg 64), encouraging men to seek what she describes as “porn sex” involving “ejaculating on their partner's face or pounding anal sex” (pg 67). I don’t plan on claiming that these are universal features of women’s fantasy lives, but I am uncomfortable with Dines’ claiming that most women would absolutely refuse to do them. Some women actively seek these experiences, some heterosexual couples may be able to successfully negotiate them as part of their sex life, and in some couples, it might well be the woman ejaculating on the man’s face or performing pounding anal sex on him.

I'm down with people enjoying themselves sexually, watching porn, making porn, whatevs, but I wish the libertine slant of these kinds of articles would also concede that it's ok not to like porn, or that it's ok to not want jizz in your eyelashes. Like you can have boundaries and still be sex positive. That's not the vibe I get from ¶s like this.

Like who cares how many the "most" women are refuse to do them? She's arguing some undefinable set of numbers is probably bigger than another person is claiming, but neither of them are able to measure it. And why do you need to measure it, anyway, I think both groups of people (the open & closed anus groups) are doing what's best for them.

<3

s.clover you are right about the lack of statistics, but i'm pretty skeptical that legal actions against men are as low as 2%?

in any case, whether violence against guatemalan women is less, per capita, than that against men, i would argue that it is still noteworthy. unless, of course, they are wearing hoodies.

according to this, it was 12% of the murders in 2008: http://www.feminist.com/news/vaw68.html

which would compare to about 25% in america: http://bjs.ojp.usdoj.gov/content/homicide/gender.cfm

there is a story, or rather lots of stories here - but using decontextualized statistics to soup up your article is bad journalism

2005 not 2008

looks like it was 11% in 2011
http://centralamericanpolitics.blogspot.com/2012/01/murder-by-gender-in-guatemala-2010-2011.html

The Hunger Games has this same feminist problem. Other than the initial volunteering to replace her younger sister, Katniss never makes any decisions of her own, never acts with consequence-- but her life is constructed to appear that she makes important decisions.

I haven't even read the books and I had sort of guessed this? Uncomfortably and unhappily. So into this article.

maybe it's where/how i've run into that article but my impression of "the last psychiatrist" is not so good

Tell me?

let me quote the opening at length:

So there are some racist fans, so what? In itself, why would this be surprising? There are racists everywhere. I once asked a black guy where I could find some racists and he punched me in the mouth, turns out I'm a racist. Who knew? Actually, I did, because every time I see a black guy do anything odd I say to myself for no reason at all, "oh, hell no, oh no you didn't." This is going on in my head, silently, no audience. Apparently not only do I see race, I hear it. And god forbid it's a black woman, my neck and skull actually start moving from side to side as I think, "mmmm hhhmmmmm!" Why do I do this? I don't talk like that. So much for individuality, so much for free thought, I am so polluted by the world that my reflex thoughts are someone else's. You don't even want to know whose thoughts I think when I see boobs.

Of course, if this racism was attached to a Transformers movie you can be sure that Jezebel would pronounce all of the Transformers audience racist. But in this case, it's only some of the audience who are racist, because progressive Jezebel likes The Hunger Games, and they're not racist. How can they be? They're post-feminists, i.e. the racism for Jezebel is merely an opportunity to criticize the bridge trolls who live in Central Time, just in time for the elections.

Most of the "racist" comments I've seen about this complain about the race from a anti-Hollywood, anti-left perspective, i.e. "there goes liberal Hollywood, pushing the liberal agenda." The complaint appears to be not that they don't like black characters in general, but that this was some underhanded move to use the story to promote a political agenda, like making Sherlock Holmes a gay action hero. Now that's just wrong.

If that's the case I don't completely fault them, the story is important to these girls/women, and they feel betrayed that someone alters it to suit their interests rather than give a faithful telling of the story, which, as happens to stories, become partly owned by the audience.

The point here is not whether Rue should be black or not. What's interesting is how Jezebel seized on the racial controversy, but completely avoided the one bludgeoning them in the face for two hours: this is a book for females, written by a female, with femalist themes, gigantically popular among females, yet is more sexist than a rap video.

1st paragraph is just creepy and stupid. 2nd para is prime conspiratorial anti-liberalism. the 3rd sticks up halfway for the "anti-Rue" racists twitterer types. 4th and 5th betray that he completely misses the point of the controversy: the characters in the Hunger Games were not altered by "hollywood". they are black characters in the book. obliquely referenced, i gather, but not mistakable.

whatever he has to say about gender after that (btw, "femalist"? the fuck?) is highly suspect.

idk i just clicked on a few links and what i found is not inspiring much confidence either. not that i have an exact bead on his (and it is a he, isn't it?) POV. idk i'll have to dig around.

Also a lot of that post suggests the writer hasn't read the book either.

I'm not sure how I feel about any of those paragraphs, I think I may have skimmed them because they made me uncomfortable? Which is my critical fail.

I did latch onto the auth's "main" point (debatable, I guess) about how the story is a particular sanitized kind of fairy tale, and as far as I can tell it's directly in line w the vampire novels that I shall not name, and that Gemma Doyle trilogy that is also for "strong-minded young women" but challenges absolutely nothing, and approx fifteen hundred other "books for girls" that people like to fuss about.

And then this:

What makes this such an impossible, lose-lose situation for a woman is that this choice isn't about "what to do" but about who she is, what society wants a woman to be: while she must make herself look pretty, if she is observed doing this she is immediately and simultaneously critiqued for being vain. The decision about whether to be or not to doll herself up is thus somewhat up to her, but the judgment about whether she is vain is entirely out of her hands-- it is a judgment imposed on her for doing exactly what is expected of her. Her only hope is that she is can make herself look pretty enough that it looks like it was not on purpose, i.e reveal the results but hide the process. (4) This manipulation of her is all deliberate design-- what society actually wants is that it gets her to be pretty, demarcates her as an object to be gazed upon-- but not bear any of the guilt/responsibility for forcing her into this. If it works and you are pretty I guess that's some consolation, but imagine if you're not pretty but still have to go through all this, suspecting but never admitting that everyone is going to think, "why'd she even bother?" Being pretty is in many ways worse, because you're not only competing with other pretty women but with yourself ("you look tired today") and, as the old saying goes, a beautiful woman dies two deaths. But before you go try some of our Nivea skin care products. That's the system, it wants you to participate in your own marginalization so you don't dare unplug. It's exhausting being a chick. I mean girl-- woman. Jesus.

So this is why we have a book about a post-apocalyptic killing game that spends zero pages describing how Katniss kills anyone but spends countless pages on how she is dressed, how everyone is dressed. What will she wear? What kind of jewelry? Hair up? Will the "sponsors" like her better this way or that? Her chief weapon isn't a bow, it's her appearance.

...which ties into things I was just talking to people about at great length, about blame and self-blame and how feminism should be freeing you from blame because you can identify that something caused you to think like that, something made you "vain", it's not just who you are, and you can get off the treadmill now that you can see that it's there.

And this: Forget about it being entertaining, which I concede it is. It has managed to convince everyone that a passive character whose main strength is that she thinks a lot of thoughts and feels a lot of feelings, but who ultimately lets every decision be made by someone else-- that is a female hero, a winner.