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

"we are a bunch of college students"

the part where they explain how contraception leads to abortion by creating a culture of not wanting children

i hope it's not bad that the part about birth control making women less stunning than usual makes me laugh.

"creating baller graphics and video"

Can't wait for these kids to all get herpes

"hormonal contraception is associated with...HIV infection" fuck these people

this is a popish plot

among ye

do these advocates of awesomecy have any experience that tells them how much more awesome this one 2 one sex is or are their results merely speculative

stopping myself from posting the latest horror from overcomingbias.com

lol, i read the headline and was like "not something i think i'll enjoy reading about here" and skipped it

it is just straight detrimental.

straight up.

so i've been reading ellen willis' no more nice girls collection and there are so many quotes i want to post to ilx. there's this particular essay where she gives a list of questions "most likely to get a group of people, all of whom like each other and hate Ronald Reagan, into a nasty argument," and of course I thought of ILX immediately. I know we've done a few of these before but i'm really tempted to make a poll thread out of them.

Is there any objective criterion for healthy or satisfying sex, and if so what is it? Is a good sex life important? How important? Is abstinence bad for you? Does sex have any intrinsic relation to love? Is monogamy too restrictive? Are male and female sexuality inherently different? Are we all basically bisexual? Do vaginal orgasms exist? Does size matter? You get the idea.

here's the other quote i read that i thought belonged on an ilx thread somewhere:

On the family, debate is now virtually nonexistent, at least in the mass media; the idea that the problems besetting contemporary families might have something to do with the structure of the institution itself -- that domestic life may need to be transformed, rather than shored up with one or another palliative - - has dropped from public view, a mind-boggling feat of collective repression.

If anything, this repression has become more complete in 2012 (the quote is from the collection's intro which i think means it was written in 1992?), esp w/ the rise of marriage equality as major cultural progressive touchstone (where Americans of all kinds seem to aspire to create new families, but families nonetheless). Um - also this one:

But the [anti-PC] campaign has hit a nerve because it gets at something real. Coercion and guilt-mongering -- the symbiotic weapons of authoritarian culture -- inevitably provoke resistance; when the left uses these tactics it merely encourages people to confuse their most oppressive impulses with their need to be themselves, offensively honest instead of hypocritically nice. Perversely, racism and sexism become badges of freedom rather than stigmata of repression, while the roots of domination in people's rage and misery remain untouched.

Anyway, I thought about posting this stuff in her RIP thread but I don't really know a ton about Willis (except that she's a really compelling, provocative writer who I enjoy reading) and I'm more interested in discussing her ideas anyway. I'm happy to move this stuff to that other thread, or to start a new one entirely though if ppl don't think it really belongs here.

i love that last quote

yeah that last one is really good.

there's all this pressure to make dynamic relationships into relatively fixed directional roles and we freak out and pile more of that garbage on them as they change which makes it all worse imo. sort of the chocolate laxative effect. i wonder if state support of gay marriage is really just state dictation of new roles (loving self-sacrificing gentle caregivers). i think this kind of boils down to: how can we form bonds without needing.

I really feel that the standard right-wing argument about marriage and family and children, etc..., stems as much from a last-ditch attempt to pseudo-scientifically defend religion, the strictures of which were, at one time, a social technology what, for better or worse, was better adapted to the biological circumstances of their times but which no longer need apply, especially when the most pro-family ppl do bugger all to actually help families with children.

feel like it could be pointed out that, at least in my understanding, the model of "traditional family" that's currently being defended by the right (the "atomic family") basically arose out of and to suit the needs of modern capitalism. although i'm not sure what that brings to the conversation exactly

reminds me of a quote by Ian Hacking in his book on multiple personality disorder (Rewriting the Soul - I mentioned it in the Sybil thread). There's an extended discussion about the Victorian notion of cruelty to children, the more modern notion of child abuse:

This leads to my first difference between child abuse and cruelty to children. As I shall elaborate below, child abuse, especially in America, was supposed to be classless. It was supposed to occur in constant proportion, more or less, in every social class. Poverty was not an issue. This was an American political exigency, for legislation could succeed - and succeed it did, with a vengeance - only if it were not perceived as predominantly liberal social reform. Hence class differences were explicitly excluded. Cruelty to children, in contrast, was presented primarily as a vice of the lower classes, prosperous examples notwithstanding. One potent force behind the modern child abuse movement has been fear about the rot in the American family, an internal fear, as opposed to fear of the smoldering poor.

Is there any objective criterion for healthy or satisfying sex, and if so what is it?

Hmmm. "Healthy or satisfying sex". Since satisfaction is not an objective criterion, obv there won't be an objective measure for it. Which just leaves us "healthy sex", an odd term if ever there was one. Health can be measured objectively and sexually transmitted diseases can objectively undermine health, so I would conclude that "healthy sex" is sex that does not transmit a disease. Then again there could be certain cardio-vascular benefits from especially vigorous sex acts which might be measurable, too.

Is a good sex life important? How important?

Importance is a self-generated value. We can see this in the idea that importance is "attached" to actions or objects. Therefore the importance of a good sex life is widely variable, according to the importance each individual sees in it.

Is abstinence bad for you?

"Bad for you" has many senses. I suppose if abstinence made you unhappy, then in one of these senses it would be "bad for you". It is hard to think of any other senses that would apply.

Does sex have any intrinsic relation to love?

Love has a lot of subdivisions. We love our homes, our neighbors our chioldren, our sports and hobbies. The only subdivision of love that has an intrinsic relation to sex is the love that finds its natural expression in sexuality. Duh.

Is monogamy too restrictive?

Another ill-formed question. Too restrictive for what ends or purposes?

Are male and female sexuality inherently different?

The hormones are rather similar, but the apparatus is different. A better question would be whether the differences rise to a level where they are signifigant.

Are we all basically bisexual?

If we cannot rely on people's reporting of their own sexual inclinations, then how could we know the answer to this. If we can rely on them, then, no.

Do vaginal orgasms exist?

I have no way to know this, either way. I will defer to those who might know better.

Does size matter?

Only when it does.

Gonna disagree on the last quote. The vast majority of the time when people are throwing around "un-PC" statements it's in situations where they're unlikely to face any real social repercussions. Either their audience is sympathetic or has little power over them. There is no resistance in what they do, not even misguided resistance. Sexists/racists/whatevers react poorly to being told not to be sexist/racist/whatever, big surprise, it's not like you can blame anyone else for their persecution complex. Tbf I don't really know the context of when Ellen Willis actually wrote this but at this point anti-PC ppl do not "get at something real."

People reacting poorly to being told what to think or how to behave isn't about a persecution complex though, is it? I'd have thought more along the lines of feeling entitled to construct their own identity in the face of social approbation. The kind of knee-jerk defiance you feel when anyone bosses you around, no matter if they're right. If it's "something real" it's in the sense that it's a real feeling, a real reaction, not that it's in any way justifiable. I can't defend the notion that it *is* real, but it seems plausible to me.

If they feel genuinely oppressed by the fact that there are people out there who would rather they didn't behave that way then I would say that is a persecution complex. The people trying to get them to stop acting this way are not typically people with any power over their lives. I don't disagree that it's a real reaction, but it's not a reaction that can be blamed on anyone else. I was interpreting "something real" as meaning something deeper than knee-jerk defiance.

I think the crux of that last quote is "coercion and guilt-mongering", and she's arguing that there are other ways of convincing people not to be sexist/racist/whatever.

That's true and I guess I should have addressed that. I don't see either of those to have been a problem though. You can probably figure out from above why I don't think there is any "coercion" going on and I haven't personally noticed much "guilt mongering" beyond normal disapproval for things which are morally reprehensible.

The only place I know where 'political correctness' has acquired a mildly coercive quality (as opposed to federal hate crime types of activities) is on college and university campuses, where it has been incorporated into codes of conduct and a student could be disciplined or expelled for saying stupid, racist stuff.

seen a few people posting this on facebook today re: the iconic 'kissing sailor' photo and what's actually going on in it:

http://cratesandribbons.com/2012/09/30/the-kissing-sailor-or-the-selective-blindness-of-rape-culture-vj-day-times-square/

^^^ That photo has long made me feel weird and uncomf for that v reason and that article basically puts on screen my exact thoughts

Even though Obama's economic-plan numbers don't add up, this more than anything is why I still will vote for him over Romney/Ryan:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/oct/25/real-republican-party-rape-platform

http://www.theatlantic.com/sexes/archive/2012/12/you-can-give-a-boy-a-doll-but-you-cant-make-him-play-with-it/265977/

I love that the article presents "Is being a gender-typical little boy or girl a pathology in need of a cure?" as a knock-out punch rather than something Sweden has considered and clearly has a position on.

the atlantic dot com, the publication of record for dumb gender essentialism

ooh girls don't wanna have truh-ucks

the atlantic is indeed terrible now and for some reason 60% about "the end of men" and i don't care at all about those catalogues as all they do is highlight a choice but assuming this quote is not a misrepresentation (tragically for me the linked source is in swedish)

Another preschool removed "free playtime" from its schedule because, as a pedagogue at the school put it, when children play freely 'stereotypical gender patterns are born and cemented. In free play there is hierarchy, exclusion, and the seed to bullying.'

gender politics aside fuck anyone who gets rid of free playtime for any reason

the piece in the telegraph on the same topic is something alright - http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/finance/thomaspascoe/100021481/swedens-insane-anti-discrimination-laws-have-created-a-generation-of-lost-women/ that photo caption especially...

being a girl, that's where i'm a viking

thomas pascoe looks like a chubby adam scott

there is no 'free' play. play is always already captive to the mechanisms of global capitalism and gender imperialism. 'play' itself is nothing but another form of labor, a means of producing a commidified identity

the atlantic (or at least their online version) is a cesspool of shitty link baiting "articles" that seem to mostly focus on gender, or at least the ones i see being sent around are. better to ignore it and let it die.

the swedish school otm, in a sense. i still don't think it's a good enough justification for the abolition of free play. it seems way more psychologically damaging to never have unsupervised socializing then to accept, for an hour a day, reified gender roles. as hierarchical as the schoolyard is, it's much more liberating than the classroom.

Eh we don't know what the "classroom" setting is like, though, either. I mean whatever, the whole article only hand-picks ridiculous examples to lampoon, it's horrible writing and worse science. Unsupervised socializing probably overrated, but for reasons having nothing necessarily to do with acting out gender roles.

Also really why SHOULD kids play with trucks and guns and baby dolls, necessarily? Toys that are uh more conceptual? and don't present a ready storyline are prob way better for everyone: cardboard boxes, stacking blocks, craft projects, puzzles, simple costume items like tunics and hats or w/e that aren't "princess" or "soldier" levels of obvious.

it's a provocative idea, though. i think perhaps the importance of "free play" is that, while as max notes it is by no means "free," it does provide for alternative modes of "possibility" apart from the authority of the school/adults. clamping down on that (even if it takes the form of gender essentialism and whatnot) is gonna have some possibly unintended consequences.

the new n+1 eviscerates the atlantic's pose w/r/t gender issues (quite rightly, I think)

http://nplusonemag.com/the-intellectual-situation-issue-15

Listen up, Ladies

Every time a plane flies over New York, we think, “Oh my God — is it another Atlantic think piece?” We mean, “an Atlantic think piece about women.” The two have become synonymous, and they descend upon their target audience with the regularity and severe abdominal cramping of Seasonale. “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All,” “The End of Men,” “Marry Him!” These are articles intended to terrorize unmarried women, otherwise known as educated straight women in their twenties and thirties, otherwise known as a valuable market, if not for reliable lovers then at least for advertisers. Their purpose is to revive one formerly robust man of the house, who for years has been languishing on his deathbed: the cigar-smoking, suspender-snapping, mansplaining American general interest magazine.

Listen up ladies, these articles say. We’re here to talk to you in a way that’s limited and denigrating. Each female author reports on a particular dilemma faced by the “modern woman,” and offers her own life as a case study. Power Mom Anne-Marie Slaughter regrets that she couldn’t help her son with homework while working at the State Department. Straight Talker Lori Gottlieb admits she wishes she had married just about anyone. Single Lady Kate Bolick suggests that it may be possible to live alone and be happy, but only relative to the nightmare of trying to have it all. “Having it all,” or having what you thought you wanted, is never presented as a plausible option; these are stories of living with disappointment.

The problems these women describe are different, but their outlook is the same: traditional gender relations are by and large bound to endure, and genuinely progressive social change is a lost cause. Gently, like a good friend, the Atlantic tells women they can stop pretending to be feminists now. (Gottlieb: “We aren’t fish who can do without a bicycle, we’re women who want traditional families.”) The sensible path for ambitious women is to downsize — excuse us, restructure — their ambitions before circumstances force them to do so. These arguments are so constricting, so controversial, and so anxiety-provoking that they routinely attract hundreds of thousands of readers. Last summer, Slaughter’s article brought record traffic to the Atlantic website with 1.7 million hits.

The first of the woman-baiting stories — Gottlieb’s “Marry Him!”—was published the same year that the then-flaccid Atlantic implemented its “digital-first strategy.” As Justin Smith, named Atlantic Consumer Media president in 2007, put it: “We decided to prioritize digital over everything else. We were no longer going to be the Atlantic, which happens to do digital. We were going to be a digital media company that also published the Atlantic magazine.” This meant removing the website’s paywall, developing additional blogs and aggregators, and instructing salespeople that it didn’t matter what percentage of their sales were for print ads. They just had to hit their target figure, and digital was fair game.

What do women have to do with the internet? We submit that, at least in the eyes of media executives, women are the internet. Women, we mean the internet, are commanding a larger share of the traditional print market. The internet, we mean women, is less responsive to conventional advertising than to commenting, sharing, and other forms of social interaction. Women, we mean the internet, are putting men, we mean magazine editors, out of work. The internet, we mean women, never pays for its content — or for their drinks! The only dignified solution for publications like the Atlantic is to die, alone and unread, in the ghost town of the printed word. But the Atlantic has chosen the survivalist alternative: abandoning the old settlement for the domestic, we mean digital, realm, where it gives women what they want and, even more than what they want, what they fear.

Now we don’t even have to wait until that time of the month for the latest pop-neuro stats about the female brain extrapolated from studies on rats. The Atlantic allows us to check them daily on its new online vertical The Sexes, dedicated to stoking a “confusing” and “even perilous” conversation about contemporary gender roles. In her introductory message, the editor promised not to bait readers with “pseudo-provocative posts like ‘Is This Dress Making Us Look Fat?’” while a few inches down the screen, two women writers were already wondering, “Is It Weird That Politicians’ Wives Are Wearing Dresses Instead of Suits?” Spinoff talkbacks and livechats continue to offer advice about optimizing one’s time and “working differently,” and blog posts raise new and related fears: Do parents get more colds than non-parents? Do stressed men seek larger women? Why do successful women feel so guilty? That last one is a rhetorical question. Here’s one for the Atlantic: What if you stopped posing these patronizing, asinine questions and then asked us how guilty we feel? What if we told you, not one goddamn bit?

But like the guy who just won’t take no for an answer, the Atlantic will never stop asking. Guilt is a gold mine. “Marry Him!” They might as well say, “Subscribe!” The Atlantic takes one reactionary impulse and sublimates it with another, hoping it can persuade us to make the same error in reverse, substituting our freshly provoked anxiety about finding a fuckable husband with an intense desire to commit to a reliable magazine. So far, this strategy seems to be working. The Atlantic had its first profitable year in decades in 2010, and in 2011 made more than half its ad revenue from digital sales, while print ad sales were the highest they’d been in years. In fact, since we married our deadbeat boyfriend, quit our job, and accidentally had quadruplets through in vitro fertilization (all boys, thank God!), we’ve realized we could use some of that cash, so we’re thinking of pitching an article: “Why You’re Failing the Daughters You’ve Never Had and Probably Never Will.”

Haha. W/r/t discussion above, "free play" is not the same as unsupervised socialization.

yeah i was basically saying what ryan has said. classrooms are rigidly hierarchized, both between students and teachers, and among students on the basis of academic ability and things like that. it's difficult (impossible?) to find a social space that is innocent of power dynamics, but "free play" at least promises the possibility of the exploration alternative arrangements, like kids hanging out with kids they wouldn't usually interact with for various reasons, or just simply trying to imagine a subject position outside of that defined for them by adults. i think the school's premise that adults are radicals and kids are reactionaries is flawed.

In sum: The yogurt you're eating right now? It is going to make you miserable and kill you and you will die miserable and alone and full of emotionally toxic yogurt.
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the only solution is to IGNORE IGNORE IGNORE
i got mad at myself recently for clicking one of these about "xo"

xp
i don't think primary school classes are very hierarchical between kids, there's not as much opportunity to form groups &c. as there is in the playground.