feminist blogs

I usually don't (won't) watch any reality television. Television is better if it either collects something, information or art or whatever, or just appeals to my fantasy. But last week I watched the "Loser" weightloss show (and blogged it), and this week I found myself watching it again. I want to draw some connection between this show and Kathleen LeBesco's latest. I was disappointed in the book a bit - it doesn't have a lot that seems new and drastic to say, and I loved the transgressiveness and inversion of Bodies out of Bounds. And really, how much did I need to re-hear the point that Judith Butler's insights on queerness and gender apply to fat, too? Seems obvious. But LeBesco's perspective on fat "apologism" is a good one. It doesn't matter politically if you contextualize it as a genetic fact or a choice, as long as you step away from thinking of fat as a disease and a debilitation in and of itself. I said that a couple of years ago, and I'm pretty sure the others I've learned from have been saying it for much longer. Some things bear repeating. This television show is strangely compelling. I think anyone who can watch it without revulsion is hoping for a transformation. Probably most people aren't thinking of the transformation I'm thinking of, though. Last night, everyone lost a lot less weight than the first week. Yeah, I've seen that cycle before. I bet all the fat people on the show did. They voted off a woman who weighed maybe 175 lbs (pretty tall, too) and didn't lose weight; they decided that small people had less weight to lose. That's the barometer they go with when they vote off team members, who they think has the most capability to lose more, based entirely on what they weigh. They cry a lot, which makes sense - they're in the worst sort of boot camp, and it's not like they can really rely on their team members for support. I suppose the show is aiming for sniping and such. It's pretty revolting. It intentionally plays the emotions. It wants to be revolting. So, the first week they leech all the water out of their bodies, and the second week they lose a little weight. Exercising most of each day, eating a lot less than normal, basically giving up all sense of normal routine and their own community; it's no surprise that they're pissed they don't lose more. It doesn't seem like anyone notices that these results say a lot about the complexities of people's response to food reduction and exercise. We're not calorie-processing machines. That's what I would want people to take away. It's more complicated than that. People build muscle, too. Muscle is heavier. I wanted to grab and shake someone and say "IF YOU FEEL HEALTHIER, MAYBE YOU ARE" when she started crying about how she felt so good but she was just bad because she wasn't losing 20lbs every week. The women they voted off this week and last get shown at the end of the episode with how much weight they lost or kept off. I wonder if they think 10 lbs is failure or success, you know? If they think that 10 lbs is worth handing weeks of your life over to someone else? We must feel so badly about the body. As a culture, I mean, we must feel terrible and hateful things to want so badly to change this little quantifiable number. To make it smaller; to make making it smaller this overarching focus. It seems like something's fundamentally broken. I don't think that combatting the science of the Obesity Crisis! Egads! is really about apologism. I think Kathleen's wrong about that one. The audience is different. The science is our olive branch to the people on the "Loser" show and the people who are thinking the same things but not on television. People who haven't had the realization that weight gain or loss isn't all about willpower, but might be happier if they did. Maybe you need to have that before you can start to wonder whether fat is really all that bad or not. I started to care about these people, about the things they represent in the rest of us. That's why I keep watching this show. I want them to feel better. I want to understand better how they came to conclude that this was the thing to do. I want - I want more people to look up and look around them and wonder why they have to waste all this time and maybe, well - revolt. And I kinda want the big quiet black man to win or to stand up and walk out.

Hey, I just realized that this week marks the rough one year anniversary of what was formerly known as New Healthy Active Lifestyle (now simply the stuff I do) AND the four-year anniversary of my first blog entry (10/30/00, entitled "bite me, sierra club", back in the Diaryland days - one of a handful of entries I later copied to this site).

This morning, I caught a bunch of what I believe to be really stupid misinformation about children and teenagers on the news. One piece casually dismissed kids on skateboards as a menace to society while it seriously considered whether old people on scooters and motorized wheelchairs ought be able to drive 5mph down a local street. Kids are bad! Old people, who may have more experience but impaired senses, aren't. And then (or before, whatever) there was a bit about how sexual predators are coming into your home (via the internet), thereby making your home about as safe as the mall. Which is, in essence, true - kids have about a 1:1,000,000 chance of being kidnapped or assaulted by a stranger in the mall, which isn't much higher than the chance of it happening in your house. Of course, if you factor in the possibility of a kid getting sexually abused, they're much more in danger from the people their parents bring home (and the parents themselves) than from strangers. The suggestion touted in this ridiculously badly researched piece was that you try to invade your kids' privacy as much as possible. GAH! So, I'm continuing my continuence of the utopia piece, with the bit about education and children (#1 from my original list). The essential tenet of dealing with children is that they must be granted every human right granted adults and granted individuality. As the t-shirt my partner covets said, children must be seen, heard and believed. (narf) But they also deserve what every adult deserves - the basics of life, of course, but also trust and assumption of their competence. My views on education and rights for kids are based upon (or at least reflected in) those espoused by John Holt and the like, and those theorists have written many books on the subject that I trust you can read if you're interested. Their main idea, and mine, is that the most important thing we can do is educate kids to become better thinkers. Humans have a strong impulse to learn, and our current system of education and parenting squashes that more than it values it. Education in my ideal world would allow for a lot of different types of schooling, for more freedom for families and communities to interact with children (and for kids to participate in the adult world they want so badly to join), and for a notion of learning that isn't classroom- or youth-bound but rather all about experience. It would not include rote learning, forced adherence to curricula or standards of proficiency in subjects - or, for that matter, subjects themselves. There'd still be a need for schools for kids to meet at and for teachers who could offer guidance, answer questions & provide approaches for people to select from when they, for instance, wanted to learn to read. I think the single greatest use of teachers and schooling would be in asking questions - not "what's 2 + 2" so much as "why do you think that?". But everyone around you would serve as a sort of teacher in this way. Kids in happy feministy heaven would also be spared gender bias and all the many million little subtle and not so subtle hints adults send them about the importance of being "normal" or "what girls do" vs. "what boys do" or skin color or any of that other shite. Partially because adults wouldn't have these issues themselves (and so wouldn't, say, treat a baby in blue differently than a baby in pink) and partially because adults would teach with listening and giving real - that is NOT black and white - answers to questions. Childcare, by the way, would also have little bias of any form, because every child would have a community of chosen family members (all of whom are presumably bias-free, at least in my community) to care for it - those people would generally be of somewhat varied thinking and background. Men and women and those other and in between would all consider themselves equally responsible for childrearing, and this would be facilitated by economic factors as well as the political nature of the community.

Whatever we believe about the candidates, we still have to live together after November. Maybe understanding how the other half thinks will ease the divisions.

Why people are voting...

• for Bush
• against Bush
• for Kerry (a)
• for Kerry (b)

via Shaula at tsuredzuregusa

The question of whether Valium use is a problem in Iraq came up on Trish Wilson's blog.

Riverbend discusses Valium use in Iraq.

Shameless Agitator lists the fourteen common characteristics of fascist regimes:

"5. Rampant sexism. Beyond the simple fact that the political elite and the national culture were male-dominated, these regimes inevitably viewed women as second-class citizens. They were adamantly anti-abortion and also homophobic. These attitudes were usually codified in Draconian laws that enjoyed strong support by the orthodox religion of the country, thus lending the regime cover for its abuses." [my emphasis]

Orcinus has written a series on "The Rise of Pseudo Fascism": [December 8, 2004: Links to final articles added]

• Part 1
• Part 2
• Part 3
• Part 4
• Part 5 new(er)
• Part 6 new(er)
• Part 7 new(er)

Sexist

The New York Police Department refused to investigate a police officer who wore a motorcycle helmet with the words "Loud Wives Lose Lives" on it during the GOP convention.

Under current HMIS guidelines, that cop would have access to the addresses of domestic violence shelters.

Many domestic violence shelters in this country rely on HUD funding and will be required to participate in the Homeless Management Information System (HMIS), a computerized database to track people who are homeless. Within any given state there could be literally thousands of people who have access to this information. Early in the process of developing HMIS standards, domestic violence organizations raised concerns about client safety, explaining that there was a need for domestic violence victims' identities and temporary residences to remain confidential so that their abusers can't locate them. The exemptions for domestic violence shelters and domestic violence victims have been removed from the final standards. Go here to complain about these standards.

Sexist and homophobic

Katherine R at Obsidian Wings writes:

"All of this [Coburn's lesbian epidemic and Keyes' accusing lesbians of selfish hedonism] becomes a lot less funny when you read stories like these two. But note that it's not just a red state thing--the two follow-ups are about a girl from Newark:

'Survival is a part of everyday Newark, but for Felicia it intensified in May 2003 with the killing of her friend, a 15-year-old lesbian named Sakia Gunn, who was at a bus stop downtown when she rejected a man's pickup attempt with the declaration that she was gay. A fight followed and Sakia was stabbed to death.' "

I read all the advice columnists in the newspaper--childrearing, physical fitness, automobile repair, it doesn't matter. The columnist that grates on me is the younger Dear Abby. She has to put in her opinion after every single letter, even when the letter stands alone, nothing needed but a thank you for writing in.

Most of the comments here don't need any response from me, like these two:

"How do we insult upper-class, white, heterosexual men?" (Sarah)

"We become equal to them." (Hanna)

Here's a question that does need an answer:

"I have a generic question about your blog: is the name a conscious tribute to Les éditions des femmes, the historic French feminist publishing house?" (Jimmy Ho)

No. Embarrassingly, I don't think I ever heard of it or Antoinette Fouque before. Thank you for asking and making me learn something new.

Graham asked:

"Is 'ass-kisser' homophobic?"

And Greg said:

"Brown-noser and ass-kisser strike me as strongly homophobic."

Wow, that's a reaction I never anticipated. I was thinking of someone making obeisance, instead of kissing the ground kissing the foulest part of someone's body, which in our culture would be the anus. Think "put it where the sun don't shine," "eat shit," "asshole," "got their heads up their asses," and so on.

Maybe I'm just out of touch--how do others feel? Is ass-kisser homophobic?

Graham continued:

"I would actually find 'spunkless' incredibly insulting. It suggets that I cannot impregnant a woman and am therefore less than a man."

It sounds like we're looking at different meanings for "spunk." My dictionaries say spirit, pluck, mettle. Spunk is also slang for semen?

In any case, your being insulted by the word "spunkless" is amazing. Can any man seriously consider that his worth as a human being depends on what squirts out of his penis? To judge a man by his ability to impregnate a woman implies that men are nothing more than baby-makers, worthless for anything else. That standard demeans all men, and specifically insults those who are physically unable to or who for any reason choose not to procreate.

James D said:

"I'm curious about how you feel about 'suck' -- i.e.; he/she/that 'sucks.' Obviously referencing oral sex with the implication that it's a bad thing (to be giving, of course, not receiving), which leads back to being a whore..."

I didn't comprehend how insulting "suck" could be, not just to gay men but also to nursing mothers. I'm trying to weed "suck" out of my vocabulary, and alsis38's suggested substitutions--reeks, stinks, rots--are a big help; these words have the same strong emphatic sound. Alsis38 also said, "Good suffixes to add empahsis are things like '...on ice,' 'on toast,' 'on stilts,' etc."

RepubAnon proposed these terms:

"ashcroft (v) wanton destruction - as in 'They've done a real ashcroft on the Bill of Rights.'

cheney (v) as in 'go cheney yourself'

Powell (n) powerless toady, as in my manager sure is being a powell after the CEO called.

Rumsfeld (n) insane, as in 'crazy as a rumsfeld'"

The Blogosphere's invisible women explain the Ownership Society, presented in suggested reading order.

How to disenfranchise people without even trying
(Pinko Feminist Hellcat)

Maybe people don't care because they don't have time to think
(BlondeSense)

The faces behind the numbers
(tsuredzuregusa)

Jobs (or jorbs, if you're the coach)
(Utopian Hell)

Life on the edge
(Suburban Guerrilla)

Work hard for the money
Strong and getting stronger for the multi-millionaires
(Just a Bump in the Beltway)

Hello Bush, bye bye jobs
(Democratic Wings)

Self-Made Billionaires
(echidne of the snakes)

John Aravosis of AMERICAblog says:

"Ann Coulter, Miss Conservative, always dresses in public like she wants to get fucked, right then and there. As someone who makes her living off of launching personal attacks on others, it's fair game to ask why Coulter panders to her conservative fan base by dressing like such a skank? She appeals to them with sex, when I thought that was a big no-no on their side of the aisle. Not to mention, for someone so highly critical of others for being supposed intellectual fakes, you have to wonder about a chick who relies on T&A to sell her ideas."

Chiming in with insults would be so easy. Why on earth should I care what anyone says about Ann Coulter? She sure as hell would never stand up for me, a corn-fed, no make-up, natural fiber, no-bra needing, sandal-wearing, hirsute, somewhat fragrant hippie chick pie wagon.

I care because too many people take these underlying assumptions as truth:

• She has only her looks to sell.
  Coulter sells the same thing Rush Limbaugh does. If he doesn't have to rely on his looks, why think that she must?

and

• A woman never wears certain styles just because they're fashionable or comfortable.
• A woman should never wear clothing that reveals her sexuality unless she wants sex.
• A woman wearing clothing that shows she wants sex can't complain when someone gives it to her.
• Specifically, women who wear leather, miniskirts, or high heels are skanks; they're sexually promiscuous--immoral, lewd, whorish--and panting for sex with anyone.
  Do I need to explain how offensive these beliefs are? Women don't plan every single thing they do just for men, and a short skirt isn't an automatic invitation.

You know what's amazing? Those guys with half their cracks showing, their nipples poking out through holes in their T-shirts, and their bellies hanging out over their pants--no one ever thinks they're sexually promiscuous just because they show a little skin when they go out in public.