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

Suddenly all the feminist rights advocates in my twitter are posting selfies as some sort of solidarity thing.

some of them are pretty cuet

http://theaerogram.com/surreal-media-reaction-today-show-marriage-proposal/

Thought this was interesting

― 乒乓, Monday, November 18, 2013 2:21 PM (3 days ago)

it's great and she is otm

it's sort of surprising that salon still exists.

I've been too busy this week to think about this thread but I don't think I have a problem w the defense of rape fantasy, which the title makes sound way more sensational than the article actually is, iirc.

http://www.irishtimes.com/news/science/it-s-true-male-and-female-brains-are-wired-differently-1.1615484

yeah i read that, apparently the differences are so marked that you can see exactly whereabouts on Venus women come from

has to be v marked because you know how terrible women are at maps

yeah but they can't help it because science

but seriously folks, and you'll excuse my science dilettantism because i'm a shallow person, i've seen no account of or connection to neuroplasticity in the reports on this research. doesn't current understanding of the way brains can rewire themselves indicate that brain function cd have just as much of a socially conditioned component as an evolutionary one?

tbh i didnt even bother reading it but nv was moaning that it was quiet and it was onscreen and..

lol you know you've got a winner in science journalism when the headline starts: 'it's true:'

ha i feel like a study on that would be well merited indeed

http://io9.com/5651462/brain-scams-the-real-science-behind-sex-differences

Take English class, for example. In the girls' class, you will find teachers asking their students to reflect on story protagonists' feelings and motives: how would you feel if? . . . sort of questions. But not in the boys' classroom, because "that question requires boys to link emotional information in the amygdala with language information in the cerebral cortex. It's like trying to recite poetry and juggle bowling pins at the same time. You have to use two different parts of the brain that don't normally work together." The problem for boys and young children, according to Sax, is that emotion is processed in the amygdala, a primitive, basic part of the brain — "that makes few direct connections with the cerebral cortex."  (In fact, the amygdala appears to be richly interconnected with the cerebral cortex.) This supposedly renders them incapable of talking about their feelings. But in older girls, emotion is processed in the cerebral cortex, which conveniently enables them to employ language to communicate what they're feeling. The implications for teaching are clear: girls to the left, phylogenetically primitive ape-brains to the right! Yet this "fact" about male brains-variants of which I have seen repeated several times in popular media — is based on a small functional neuroimaging study in which children stared passively at fearful faces. It's doubtful whether any negative emotion was involved during the study (except perhaps boredom); the children were not asked to speak or talk about what they were feeling and, critically, brain activity was not even measured in most of the areas of the brain involved in processing emotion and language. As Mark Liberman has pointed out, "the disproportion between the reported facts and Sax's interpretation is spectacular."  Even if studies did show what Sax claims (questionable), why on earth would we assume that the language parts of the brain wouldn't get involved if the child wished to speak? Shifting information from A to B is, after all, what axons and dendrites are for. Yet Sax describes with admiration a boy-brain-friendly English class in which boys study The Lord of the Flies by reading the text not with an eye on the plot, or characterization, but so as to be able to construct a map of the island.

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/neuroskeptic/2013/12/03/men-women-big-pnas-papers/#.Up5yzLtFTr0

http://nymag.com/thecut/2013/12/reading-while-female-misogynists-masturbation.html

This was a good read

You should buy the n+1 issue too

I remember getting mad at a boyfriend who had lied and saying, “YOU THINK YOU’RE THE HERO OF A FUCKING UPDIKE NOVEL.”

Thank you, that's so good.

Haha yes

I read Portnoy's Complaint when I was I in high school, I think

No idea why it was in our house. Perhaps left behind by my jewish uncle

I also found Witt's comment here:

Witt: I get kind of irritated or prickly when people say men who write are just creating a fantasy woman, because in fact a male writer can reveal a woman to you in a way that you wouldn’t see it. And vice versa.

really interesting, especially when set against that Junot Diaz quote that gets pasted around everywhere (I'm not sure if this is the exact one but it feels like a close enough approximation)

I wonder. The one thing about being a dude and writing from a female perspective is that the baseline is, you suck. The baseline is it takes so long for you to work those atrophied muscles—for you to get on parity with what women's representations of men are. For me, I always want to do better. I wish I had another 10 years to work those muscles so that I can write better women characters. I wring my hands because I know that as a dude, my privilege, my long-term deficiencies work against me in writing women, no matter how hard I try and how talented I am.

Like maybe the gap is just inherently unbridgeable, never the twain shall meet, but there's still value to that

But at the same time

Witt: Well, the pernicious thing about reading Roth when you’re a young person is that you think, “I don’t want to be that girlfriend. I don’t want to act like that.” Because the men around me were speaking that language when I read those books, that was how I reacted. I thought, “This is a world that I have to conform to.” And I still haven’t resolved whether that’s true or not. It may be true.

And I feel like the reverse just isn't quite true because men growing up just aren't made to read that many books by woman authors

Like I think I read the Bell Jar in high school too, on my own time, but in class it was Golding Faulkner Salinger etc. etc.

I have a picture of me at 17 reading The Bell Jar in a pool on vacation. It's one of my favorite pictures! But yeah, otm in school and also outside of school. I read a lot of canonized male authors growing up and I drew the line at Richard Yates somewhere in my mid 20s. No more.

good read, yeah

surprised, though, that the participants are so seemingly willing to accept the negative characterizations of women they read in novels by men as accurate, even damning ("desperate" seeming, "that girlfriend", "such a brenda"). a product of the absence of counter-narratives, maybe: "Except for The Bell Jar I didn’t have a book that gave me an archetype, of a young, educated, sexually curious, neurotic but adventurous heterosexual female who was not trying to overcome sexual trauma."

I don't think they're actually "accepting" those characterizations, contendo

I liked Marjorie Morningstar well enough.

perhaps not, but nor is there much direct challenge. that said, i do understand that this is just a brief excerpt.

xp

full disclosure: male suggestion that women who are direct & open about their interests (not coy prizes to be captured) are "desperate" always raises my hackles

I didn't realize it at the time but I chose to hew completely to non-cannon female authors in my early teens, putting that qualification ahead of prose style, and never read the "mid-century misogynists" (ty ty that is perfect) at all. Later when I tried Updike in college I did explicitly start avoiding all those male novelists because being exposed to that world and having it be valorized or even just validated by being written about...it was poisonous to me. It was bad for my mental and emotional health. It's hard enough to live in the world without having it reshaped for you into something inimical to your survival.

These books taught me a lot about what it must be like to be a young man, and gave me some terrible ideas about the kind of woman I didn’t want to be, in order to not be thought dull or needy by the intelligent, masturbating young men I liked, but they did not help me understand my life.

i just read i love dick last month, it was great

But his early books — I’m just the worst reader of them. They’re the only books where my gender and social life had felt involved in my capacity to read them.

The idea that having a personal stake apart from critical faculties makes you a bad or flawed reader is...interesting.

As a lit major I was taught that self-identification with art was a suspect move for a critic to make

Of course you were. Just like everyone coming out of j-school has been taught that "unbiased journalism" is really really important (or even possible).

ppl don't realise they're self-identifying with art most of the time, do they? i mean, once we've become aware that it's a suspect move we start pretending to ourselves that we're not doing it.

i really don't mean "most of the time" or "people" here, i mean "a rareified set of folx who consider themselves in alignment with critics even when they're not paid critics"

i.e. me

to have a point of view isn't to be a "bad reader", i don't think, even if that point of view causes one to reject certain texts. then again, her choice of words is probably just casual self effacement.

So I mean when you are a young adult reading young adult novels it is 100% ok to be like "you are SUCH a felicity" but when you are reading Grown Adult Novels it seems passé to be attempting to find yourself in them.

xxxxp Yeah! Also, as in everything else, the values that are considered neutral are always going to be those of the most powerful/present factions, so really everyone in alignment w that constructed "neutrality" actually IS identifying w it by not being critical of it in the first place.

i never saw myself represented in those books at all, which did tend to make them really boring

don't really know why you'd read the endless brilliant novels with their insight about life and not occasionally find comfort in relating to them.

it's hardly like you have a choice to either buy a t-shirt with the author's face on it or else analyse the book as a piece of work.

Well maybe you want to become a Seriously Literary Critic

i still think it's prob impossible to switch off your ability to self-identify. as c sharp major sort of says upthread.

I admit, when casually asked about something that I have an ideological critique of, if I know the questioner is sympathetic to that critique I'll just go in, but if I don't want to get into it for whatever reason, I will say, "I may be the wrong person to ask" or something like that. But it feels important to me that it's not calling MYSELF bad, it's just saying, "You might not like my answer."

i never saw myself represented in those books at all, which did tend to make them really boring

i just mentally associated myself with a series of bright and brittle young english literary men despite the yawning knowledge that i was not in fact going to grow up to become one.

i still think it's prob impossible to switch off your ability to self-identify. as c sharp major sort of says upthread.

― Legitimate space tale (LocalGarda), Wednesday, December 4, 2013 11:13 AM (48 seconds ago) Bookmark

For sure

That's why it's suspect to think identification is suspect

:)

suspect and just like, sad. maybe some super-pro critics do this, i guess the more you process a given form of art the less likely it is to have deep personal resonance, but i read quite a bit and i can't imagine this ever happening. hope it doesn't.

i tend to relate to observations about the world or whatever more than specific characters - i didn't think these were all dependent on me being a man but that's not for me to say i guess. still... i dunno, lots of modernist stuff does seem seem quite neutral/analytical, like you can self-identify with the general truth of a book and not necessarily specific characters or who they are.

still... i dunno, lots of modernist stuff does seem seem quite neutral/analytical, like you can self-identify with the general truth of a book and not necessarily specific characters or who they are.

Funny you should say that because one of the big proponents of the no-self-identification angle was Nabokov

Who preferred his books to be puzzles

And once published a book of chess problems paired with poems

i just mentally associated myself with a series of bright and brittle young english literary men despite the yawning knowledge that i was not in fact going to grow up to become one.

Full disclosure: I had an active imaginary life as a child, which for some time took the form of spin-off Star Wars adventures in which I had to insert myself as a new character because the only woman was Leia and she was terrible and I refused to even imagine myself as one of the men.

lots of modernist stuff does seem seem quite neutral/analytical

And again, it gets considered "neutral" because it reflects the status quo. I'm not even going to start on how self-consciously that whole body of writing is wrapping itself IN that supposed neutrality on purpose, because that kind of critique isn't my strength, but it's very apparent to me.