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

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.

What do women have to do with the internet? We submit that, at least in the eyes of media executives, women are the internet.

idk

Women are the internet, and the internet is women. How else to explain male writers’ terror about taking it with them to the office? Women writers may admit they have a hard time working while online, but for men this appears to be a much more profound issue, and in some cases a hardware problem. (Zadie Smith thanks the internet-blocking application Freedom on the acknowledgments page of her latest book, but she didn’t name an entire novel after it.) Men tear the ethernet cord out of the socket, they hot-glue the socket, they use computers so old they say they were made without a socket. They claim they must avoid the internet so as not to masturbate all over their computers (see “The Porn Machine,” Issue Five). But their stories of covering up and gluing shut suggest that for men the internet is in fact the site of a perverse fear of penetration.

I find n+1 more unbearable than the atlantic and it's not like they don't go w/ their own version of linkbait

i couldn't tell how ridiculous the penetration line was meant to be but i'm glad someone said some nasty stuff about harper's

it seems like the penetration line is the thesis of the piece

the thesis seemed to be that the old women=frivolous/men=serious dichotomy that used to apply to like novels vs. things that aren't novels was now an internet/print one which i'm open to cuz "gossipy" "blogs" etc (and the quote from the harper's guy about how print allows you to read "something more complex than a blog" as if those 20-page harper's articles on the writer's interpretation of winter or whatever weren't the bloggiest in the whole printosphere) but that whole argument was yeah less developed than the one about how the atlantic sucks cuz SEO

yeah I kind of cut out after the part about the atlantic, think there's some hard thinking about the new yorker in there too? the dangers of crowdsourcing your article

ha it's totally irrelevant but

Did they spend one zillion dollars on a “digital reader” for subscribers that must have looked great at the pitch meeting but shrinks the 10.5 Caslon type just past the point of readability? Yes, they did.

certainly not gonna call the nyer's digital reader the apotheosis of UI design but did u know about zooming

http://www.extensionsjournal.org/the-journal/6/how-i-learned-to-stop-worrying-and-love-the-rape-kit

http://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2012/12/09/the-truth-about-pink-and-blue-brains/

http://www.rolereboot.org/culture-and-politics/details/2012-12-a-letter-to-the-guy-who-harrassed-me-outside-the-bar

http://pantograph-punch.com/eat-it-up-and-lay-wit-it-hip-hop-cunnilingus-and-morality-in-entertainment/

that's pretty great
"Ohmigosh, rap music is just horrendous! Back up the truck, Bön Iver fans: society is horrendous."

longwinded but thorough and otm

cool playlist! http://open.spotify.com/user/mordys/playlist/2aDGjZ24XJy22Q4gIiSd7l

this issue has bothered me increasingly & i've not found much in the way of thoughtful writing that i could get down w/, so i particularly appreciate it.

It's just a hyperbolic microcosm of all the hostile and fucked up ways we talk about women in our culture more generally

i think this is true, but then "oh it's just particularly hyperbolic sexism" doesn't seem like a winning defense. anyway, that article is otm to a rare degree regardless.

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The requested URL /eat-it-up-and-lay-wit-it-hip-hop-cunnilingus-and-morality-in-entertainment/ was not found on this server.

Additionally, a 404 Not Found error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request.

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:n91yr2yH7jsJ:pantograph-punch.com/eat-it-up-and-lay-wit-it-hip-hop-cunnilingus-and-morality-in-entertainment/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us

that 404 thing's happening to me with every page on the site, weird.

it's an excellent piece - it's good to see the "we’re allowed to enjoy problematic things but that doesn't mean pretending the problematic shit doesn't exist" t-bomb getting more air (plus, who doesn't want more cunnilingus jamz).

Nothing new here, but it's goof to see it getting talked about http://www.pbs.org/speak/speech/prejudice/women/

http://nymag.com/thecut/2013/04/report-denying-men-sex-is-like-child-neglect.html

good lord

“After reading online that women are turned on by men who do housework, he washed the dishes and vacuumed more often. ‘It didn't change anything,’ says the web designer and food blogger, now 30, who lives in West Jordan, Utah.”

It didn't change anything except your house was cleaner and your wife got an extra hour a week not picking up after your sorry ass.

"For some men, sex may be their primary way of communicating and expressing intimacy," says Justin Lehmiller, a Harvard University social psychologist who studies sexuality. Taking away sex "takes away their primary emotional outlet."

Lehmiller added, "Oh my god, I'm cumming! UNNNNNNNNNNH"

For some men

..with the emotional age of a needy five-year-old

how many five-yea-olds do you know who communicate through sex and why haven't you called the police yet

I doubt the baby has any comprehension of what's going on (do babies even see that far?), so nothing wrong with it.

― Tuomas (Tuomas), Monday, December 5, 2005 5:58 AM (7 years ago) Bookmark

xxpost djp you're killing it.

oddly enough, these men were still capable of emoting by throwing tantrums

I'm too busy being a man to figure out how to express myself using my words

it must be hard being only able to experience emotion with your dick

that's backwards

(to experience emotion with your dick, it must be hard)

all those years learning how to use morse code with my penis, and now you're telling me I have to converse using speech?

"For some men, sex may be their primary way of communicating and expressing intimacy," says Justin Lehmiller

"Then again," he continues, "it may not. Before we can decide this question, it would be important to locate 'some men'. I don't intend to put myself to that much trouble, but I suggest it as an exercise for the reader."

leading scientists agree: the human male is an emotionally stunted and fragile thing. so much so that he will completely fall apart if denied nookie by the wife-mom assigned to support him. therefore, it is every woman's duty as a vagina holder to provide the sex whenever baby might happen to shake his rattle.