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

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.

That take on the book may or may not be right but at least as far as the movie is concerned (which is all I've seen) think it misses a crucial layer of irony to the whole thing. Katniss is subject to an oppressive dystopian regime! any "act" she takes within that system is only gonna only perpetuate the system. I mean, taking charge of her situation means she would have to cold-blooded murder people! (hence the romeo and juliet moment at the end inciting fear in the authorities because it raises the possibility of actions outside the system.)

So I think the movie, at least, draws attention to the ironies of Katniss embracing "love" and femininity as means of survival within the system she's in.

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.

This is insane! To the extent that she doesn't make decisions it's bc of, like Ryan said, the oppressive dystopian/capitalist regime that eliminates agency from all ppl in her class and community. But even within that framework, the decisions she makes (to not kill the other participants, to resist particular elements of the game, to bury another contestant and inspire a revolution by doing so!) are significant, and more significant than the decisions of any other character in the film. Especially when you compare Katniss to Bella (the audience I saw Hunger Games with was largely an audience that was watching the Twilight films half a year earlier), it's a sea change in female agency.

nb I also haven't read the books

http://i.imgur.com/TCn4Q.jpg

Also surprisingly Deja Thoris in the John Carter film is at least a frame below Leia there!

i'm interested to see how the movie versions of the next two Hunger Games books turn out, because (very faint spoilers) by book 3, Katniss is an EXTREMELY reluctant hero. some people view this as a deliberate and worthwhile authorial choice, i.e. Katniss is pretty clearly suffering from PTSD and the world she's living in does not know how to engage with/rehabilitate this. but this also complicates the perception of Katniss as a "strong female character" because she spends large chunks of the book acting far more like Bella Swan than Hermione or Leia, and her PTSD/reluctance often manifests itself in behavior that's childish and whiny.

bummer :(

otoh i have to say, she does have one final wow-moment at the end of the series that very much represents her deliberately choosing to take action in a difficult situation, and it's super kick-ass.

ashley judd pretty otm for a kentucky wildcats fan

I posted this on the Ashley Judd thread earlier. It's great. So is she.

ps - Don't read the comments.

a guide to life tbh

a judd goes in on fools!

buncha my homies are posting this on fb, good set of suggestions imo

http://danthedude.wordpress.com/zine/

ashley judd, pretty, otm

She was one Dateline or some similar show last week talking about that article but I was out and didn't get to see it. Wish I'd been able to though.

ON dateline not one

the urinal-free campus campaign