feminist blogs

First off, this will be my last post of the week. It’s been lovely and I’m so pleased to have had the opportunity. So come by and chat at my blog if you’re so inclined.

I figured that for my last post, I’d go for a little navel gazing and then one last picture of Bronx.

When I went to go meet T’s extended family for the first time last Christmas, I knew in advance that they were a conservative lot. I also know that I am not all that great at keeping my mouth shut, smiling, and nodding. I can do it for short periods of time and then I’m forced to drag T aside and rant about whatever is chapping my hide at the present moment while he implores me to keep my voice down and agrees with me all in one breath. And when we were greeting at the door by T’s aunt, smiling and wearing a bejeweled God brooch, I knew that I was more unprepared than I realized.

As I was introduced to T’s aunts, uncles, cousins, and cousins’ kids, they were all very pleasant. They said how nice it was to meet me and how lovely the wedding was going to be. And then they stopped. I waited for them to ask about law school or working for the Army or my family or *anything*. Nothing. T kept on answering his uncles’ questions about school or what he was up to professionally these days, but every question posed to me was about the wedding.

It was then that I had an important realization: with one exception, all of T’s female cousins and the wives of his male cousins are all stay at home moms. (The one who’s not a SAHM is single and works in retail.) They all live in the same small town and belong to locally prominent families. They’re well educated and well off. And we have nothing at all in common.

Under normal family circumstances, I wouldn’t worry too much about this. I’d see them at holidays, smile, nod, and drink a lot of Christmas punch. But come September, I am going to have to chat with all of the women in T’s family for an entire afternoon during a wedding shower.* My wedding shower.

Every wedding shower I’ve ever been to has been awash in gendered traditions, giggling about sex, and some really, really bizarre ideas about the inherent nature of men and women, none of which I want any part of. I could deal with the giggling about sex, but probably not with this crowd. My future mother-in-law is throwing the shower and has promised that there will be no ridiculous games and similar, but I’m still nervous. Are there survival tips for dealing with people you barely know, must make nice to, with whom you have nothing in common? I’ve already made a note of not mentioning my own lack of desire to be a SAHM or waxing poetic about Linda Hirschman. But beyond that, I’m not too sure.

In my own way, I’m mostly worried about being judged for not changing my name, not planning to stay at home, and dragging T to all corners of the globe while I work for the Army. Reading what I’ve just typed, I still have a hard time processing the fact that any of those things would be controversial or cause for comment, although I know they will be. And I know who to blame.

*BTW, is there a purpose for wedding showers besides getting more gifts?

P.S. And before I depart, one last puppy picture:

Said problem being the unrelenting publicity surrounding the Duggar family.

17 children! And counting! More than 10 collective years of pregnancy! (Abuse of exclamation points concludes.)

It’s stories like this one and posters like this that make me feel like a bad feminist blogger. (I also have this problem when talking to an acquaintance who is obsessed with becoming a stay at home mom.)

I want so desperately not to be judgmental and really to encourage reflection and introspection about one’s choices…and I fail. Try as I might, I cannot avoid thinking that Michelle Duggar is out of her mind and wishing, hope against hope, that we could, collectively, look away from the scene. I want to think critically about the situation and why anyone, under any circumstances, would think that featuring the power of their uterus on national television was a good idea or that their entire purpose was to keep having babies. And all I wind up doing is snickering.

This isn’t a comment on choice feminism, but rather a comment on my own unwillingness and inability to look at individuals making (mostly) private choices that I fundamentally disagree without jumping up and down and explaining exactly how I feel about said choices, why they’re wrong, and I know better. (And, as we all know, how I am possessed of superior knowledge and insight which enables me to tell others exactly how to comport their lives.) Rather, this is my own admission of self-righteousness judgmentalism.

Certainly, I have no desire to legislate on any of these issues, but I think that I (and if I may be so bold, most of us) fall into the trap of belittling others rather than critiquing choices within the dominant paradigm. It’s so much easier to snicker at Michelle Duggar (Vagina. Clown Car! *snerk*) than it is to try and understand why she’s planning to have more kids.

How do we work to keep the focus on the patriarchy, the systemic factors at work, and not on the couple who named one of their 17 children Jinger*?

*Is this a misspelling of Jigger, Jingle, a variation on Jingoism or something else entirely?

I was poking around Slate.com earlier and noticed a curious “line of the day”

See it right there in the middle there? “The top searches that begin with ‘my girlfriend is’: a bitch, pregnant, crazy, hot, fat, depressed, getting fat.” What’s the article about you might ask? The Google toolbar and Google Suggest, Google’s feature where you begin typing in your search and it gives you completion suggestions.

So we have an article which is about understanding what people are looking for and we illustrate it with a healthy dose of misogyny. Now, in fairness, the “my boyfriend is” searches aren’t all that flattering (an asshole, an alcoholic, depressed, mean, married, hot.) Neither are the ones about “my mom is”, although by far the creepiest to me is “my mom is hot”. But neither of these are the quote of the day. Instead of highlighting the novel or weird search terms, Slate opts for calling attention to the stuff that makes my skin crawl.

There’s nothing inherently vile about the search terms. They’re perfectly civil (mostly) on their face, but the implications are nauseating. “My girlfriend is getting fat” leads to pages which encourage you, either in the alternative or in combination, to belittle your significant other, try and control her food intake, take her hiking and to other activities, or to buy her clothes a size too small as a hint. “My girlfriend is a bitch” leads you to charming testimonials from men who are eager to agree.

A lot of the time, misogyny is frighteningly mundane and unremarked upon. At the same time, calling attention to it here feel weird somehow; that Slate is letting its male readers know that yes, other men are just like you. I’m not necessarily convinced of this interpretation, but the quote in question doesn’t come until the 12th paragraph in and on the second page. If you’re like me and *hate* Slate’s decision to go to multi-page posts, you’d miss it if you couldn’t be bothered to click through. Is it new that men will call their girlfriends bitches? Or think they’re crazy? The author isn’t even pointing out any implications the fact that these are the top suggestions, which leads me to feel more like a validation that I think is necessary. [Front-paging the quote, that is, not including the example.]

Google suggest also tells you more about the depressing state of -isms and -phobias than you’d probably care to know. In the interests of science, I also played around with it for a few minutes. Begin a search for “Mexicans are…” and the top three responses are stupid, dirty, and dumb. “Gays are” suggests evil, bad, and disgusting. “Women are” gives you evil, from Venus, and (not third, but still my favorite) like tea bags*. And there is a reason that there are no longer any suggestions at all for “blacks are”. Tells you great things about your average Google user, huh?

*This is a reference to Eleanor Roosevelt’s famous remark that a woman is like a tea bag; you never know how strong she is until she gets into hot water. (I’d not heard this line before and sat here thinking “Women steep and produce yummy liquid goodness? Who knew?”)

With Yearly Kos going on in Chicago right now, Bill O’Reilly is *obsessed* with Kos, ranting and raving about how it’s a far left website that spews hate and all sorts of horrors hereto unknown on the internet. Someone needs to turn off his Google filter in a big way if he thinks Kos is “the worst stuff on the internet” and that “there isn’t any worse.” (He’s particularly incensed about a photoshopped image that makes it look like Joe Lieberman is going to be giving a blowjob to Bush. There isn’t even any nudity, just them standing on steps so that the height differential puts Lieberman’s mouth near Bush’s crotch.) Maybe we should start a campaign to send him to the Real Doll sites?

Dodd, however, is completely ready for him.*

Of course, O’Reilly can’t even make is through the five minutes without blatantly lying about his own positions. He insists that there are no vile comments on his own posts and denies ever saying anything about it being kosher for Al Qaeda to blow up San Francisco. So “[I]f Al Qaeda comes in here and blows you up, we’re not going to do anything about it. … You want to blow up the Coit Tower? Go ahead.” was just some sort of misunderstanding? Duly noted.

Sweet Jesus, I hate Bill O’Reilly has more if you’re in need of additional laughter.

*Working on the embed. Stand by for technical assistance.

Via the incomparable Pam.

The BBC has seen fit to give voice to Julie Bindel, “a radical feminist and journalist, who [is] trying to persuade medics and trans people that sex change surgery is unnecessary mutilation.”

I’m not at all clear from the article whether or not Bindel identifies as a radfem or if radical is just the adjective chosen by the writer, although I do suspect that the author is unaware that radical feminist is a term of art (instead of just an epithet like devout Catholic.) What I am clear on is that Bindel is using the guise of feminism in whatever form to advance views that are blatantly transphobic.

Bindel expounds upon her views in an an op-ed in the Guardian, where she explains that the acceptance of transsexuality “arises from the strong stereotyping of girls and boys into strict gender roles.” She whines about how people were upset when she referred to transwomen as “men in dresses” and claimed that a world inhabited by transsexuals “would look like the set of Grease.” The nerve of those letter writers! Having the audacity to claim that she was being bigoted and intolerant when all she wanted to do was make mock of a group of people on the basis of their identity!

Bindel also frets that had she been sent to see a psychologist who endorsed the idea of sex reassignment as a child, she (as a lesbian) could now be writing as a transman. I have no idea where Bindel gets the idea that sex reassignment is somehow like having your tonsils out. It’s not something that your physician proposes to you, you respond that you’ll trust their judgment, and then sign on the line. There are many readers here far more qualified than I am to explain what their doctors required before performing surgery, but the typical requirements include living at least a year full-time in one’s new gender role, taking hormones for extended periods of time, and extensive psychological counseling. There is no possible way, whatsoever, that Bindel would have been forced into becoming a transman merely by saying she wasn’t attracted to men.

I’m also really irked that the BBC has attempted to ascribe Bindel’s bigotry to either feminism as a whole or radical feminism in particular.

Radical feminists have ideological reasons for opposing sex change surgery.

To them, the claim that someone can be “born into the wrong sex” is a deeply threatening concept.

Many feminists believe that the behaviours and feelings which are considered typically masculine or typically feminine are purely socially conditioned.

There are so many things wrong with these sentences, my head hurts. 1) “Radical feminists” (however defined) are not some sort of monolith. 2) Threatening to what, exactly? 3) The idea that gendered behaviors are conditioned and not innate is not the exclusive province of feminists. In fact, there’s a huge field called sociology which makes the same argument.

Then there’s Bindel’s take on the sine qua non of feminism: She seems to think that because “Feminists want to rid the world of gender rules and regulations…how [can it be] possible to support a theory which has at its centre the notion that there is something essential and biological about the way boys and girls behave?”

How, exactly, are these views incompatible? I don’t dispute, for example, that people who are born sexed male have, on average, more testosterone than those born sexed female. I do dispute that testosterone levels should have any kind of moral meaning or result in a judgment of superiority or inferiority. There is something innate and biological about the ways that *humans* behave. The gender roles are something that we’ve created.

NOTE: This post is not to be construed as radfem bash-fest or anything of the sort.

Via Vanessa at Feministing.

Oh, how I love living in Ohio. It gives me such marvelous pieces of legislation! Like House Bill 287. What is this lovely piece of legislative craftsmanship, you ask? A bill requiring paternal notification and consent before a woman can obtain an abortion.

A friend of mine who works for the ACLU sent me a copy of the letter from Representative Adams seeking co-sponsors back at the end of May. Here’s his lovely synopsis of the bill:

1) Prohibit a person from performing or inducing an abortion on a pregnant woman without the written informed consent of the father of the unborn child.

2) Require a pregnant woman seeking to abort her pregnancy to provide, in writing, the identity of the father of the unborn child to the person who is to perform or induce the abortion.

3) Prohibit a pregnant woman seeking to abort her pregnancy from providing to the person who is to perform or induce the abortion the identity of the man as the father of the unborn child if the man is not the father of the unborn child.

4) Prohibit a man from giving the consent required to perform or induce an abortion as the father of the unborn child if the man knows that he is not the father of the unborn child.

5) Prohibit a person from causing a man to believe that the man is the father of an unborn child for the purpose of obtaining the consent required to perform or induce an abortion, if the person knows that the man is not the father of the unborn child.

6) Require the person who is to perform or induce an abortion on a pregnant woman who identifies two or more men as possible fathers of the unborn child to perform a paternity test, or cause a paternity test to be performed, to determine the father of the unborn child prior to accepting any parental consent.

7) Provide that the written parental consent and written paternal identification are confidential.

The mind truly boggles. At the time, I sent a letter to Representative Adams, although I never received a response of any kind:

Dear Representative Adams:

It has recently come to my attention that you intend to introduce legislation aimed at protecting the rights of fathers in the case of abortion. (The original bill was introduced as HB 339 in the 124th General Assembly.) While the bill will do several things, its primary purpose is to require paternal notification and consent before a woman can terminate her pregnancy.

I am writing to you to urge you to abandon this proposed piece of legislation. First, the United States Supreme Court has considered the constitutional validity of spousal consent requirements and found them lacking. In Planned Parenthood of Central Missouri v. Danforth, 428 U.S. 52 (1976), the Court specifically held the state could not delegate a veto power to a spouse when the state itself was specifically prohibited from doing the same under Roe v. Wade. There is nothing based upon the language of your bill which suggests that paternal notification will not meet the same constitutional fate. I implore you not to waste taxpayer time and money (or compromise your own oath of office) in proposing a law that is facially unconstitutional.

Secondly, I am deeply troubled by the fact that you seem to be of the opinion that a man’s right to determine the fate of his potential offspring trumps a woman’s right to determine the same. Whether it is your intent or not, your bill would empower men to decide for women whether or not to carry a pregnancy to term. The Orwellian overtones of such a bill are, frankly, terrifying.

I am confident that it is not your intent to patronize women in this manner, nor is it your objective to put pregnant women at the whim of their sexual partners. However, I am not sure what other conclusion will result from your proposed legislation. In healthy relationships (sexual, romantic, marital, and otherwise), men and women already communicate the facts of pregnancy and proposed termination to each other. In circumstances where they do not, it is not the province of the legislature to intervene. It seems the height of arrogance to assume that a man’s right to know somehow overwhelms the right of a woman to bodily integrity.

It is indeed regretful when a man and woman are unable to agree on what to do in the event of an unwanted pregnancy, but attempting to legislate paternal consent is not a solution. I can only hope that you will please reconsider your bill and abandon your efforts to gain co-sponsors.

Sincerely,

etc., etc.

And as if the legislation were not bad enough, there’s the matter of the press coverage.

Several Ohio state representatives who normally take an anti-abortion stance are now pushing pro-choice legislation - sort of.

Led by Rep. John Adams, a group of state legislators have submitted a bill that would give fathers of unborn children a final say in whether or not an abortion can take place. “This is important because there are always two parents and fathers should have a say in the birth or the destruction of that child,” said Adams, a Republican from Sidney. “I didn’t bring it up to draw attention to myself or to be controversial. In most cases, when a child is born the father has financial responsibility for that child, so he should have a say.”

First, let’s be clear: there is nothing pro-choice about this bill whatsoever because it operates to give men complete and total authority to decide whether or not their partner may have an abortion. It’s not encouraging choices, it’s encouraging either (a) nothing at all because people in healthy relationships already talk about unplanned pregnancies or (b) abuse and manipulation. Let’s guess which is more likely. I’m not unsympathetic to the idea that would-be fathers should have some say in reproductive decision making,* but “a say” cannot be veto power. (Edited to add: you can talk all you like for as long as your partner is willing to discuss it, but the decision belongs to the person whose bodily autonomy is in question.)

Thank goodness we’ve got a liberal governor in office.

All 237 of them. Although they simplify the hundreds into 4 meta categories, researchers Cindy M. Meston and and David M. Buss have attempted for the first time to catalogue all of the reasons that humans have sex. (You can read the original article here. WARNING: PDF) By breaking motivations for sex into 4 huge categories (physical, goal attainment, emotional, and insecurity), Meston and Buss endeavor to explain the complexities of what was originally thought to be a pretty simple question. Researchers long assumed that there were three basic reasons that people have sex: to reproduce, to experience pleasure, and to relieve sexual tension, but no more. Their list includes things that seem incredibly obvious (I was attracted to the person) to the things that never would have occurred to me (to give my partner an STD). And some of them seem really, really redundant. What’s the distinction between “I was sexually aroused and wanted the release” and “I was ‘horny’”? Or “I wanted the pure pleasure” and “I wanted to experience the physical pleasure”? Hell, what even really distinguishes those four? I have no idea.

As it is, the article has some significant rejoinders to conventional wisdom. For example, the authors refute what one might call the gold digger myth: that women have sex to obtain resources and to sink their claws into an unsuspecting man’s wallet. Men were far more likely than women to admit to having a sexual relationship for purposes of getting a promotion, a raise, or a favor. They were also far more likely to cite the importance of proverbial arm candy in explaining why they were having sex.

While Tierney focuses on the points that either confirm or deny conventional wisdom, I find both the authors’ explanations of their results and possible sources of error to be the most fascinating part. (I mean, was I really supposed to be surprised that people do have sex because they feel obligated to do so? Or because they want to express affection for a partner?)

A gender-role perspective might explain this finding in terms of differences in the gender appropriateness of sexual constraint (i.e., females should be more restrained than males). If having sex (and lots of it) is something that society and evolution* have deemed successful men do (i.e., agentic, powerful, competent), then acting in this manner would be consistent with societal expectations for men. For women, however, endorsing reasons for having sex other than love, commitment, and reproduction would be inconsistent with societal expectancies. Thus, in order for a woman to do so, and to report doing so, she would necessarily need to be less concerned about social dictates and this might reflect an underlying cold and dominant personality style. In support of this explanation, disagreeableness (a trait linked to coldness and dominance) was strongly associated with each of the subfactors for having sex.

As with all self-report studies about sexual behavior, there is always the question as to whether or not your respondents are being truthful or conforming to expectations, and I think this part of the authors’ analysis is spot on. Questions about sex are loaded with cultural expectations and it can be difficult to get people to admit that they’re not within the acceptable range of behavior. The authors go on to point out that women who score higher on personality tests for disagreeableness and unconscientious are more likely to report more sexual partners, which at first makes it sound like only mean and irresponsible women have lots of partners, but really just illuminates the fact that if a woman doesn’t care what people think, she’s far more likely to buck expectations.

As far as reporting issues go, I am also concerned about the article’s discussion (or lack thereof) of rape. The article uses the word rape one time in the body of the paper and the term wasn’t included in the survey itself. (There were several choices: “I was afraid to say no due to the possibility of physical harm”, “I was physically forced”, “The person demanded I have sex with him or her”, “I was pressured into doing it”, “I was verbally coerced into doing it”.) Further, when talking about rape, the authors specifically only mentioned the two responses which address physical harm or threats. Given the overall significance of rape, particularly in their study population: mostly undergraduate and graduate students, I would have thought that this point required more inquiry.

And then there’s this, which made my stomach turn:

Men showed significantly greater endorsement of having sex due to physical reasons, such as “The person had a desireable body”; “The person was too hot (sexy) to resist”; and simply because the opportunity presented itself: “The person was available”; “The person had too much to drink and I was able to take advantage of them.

(Emphasis added)

It’s a little jarring to read an admission of rape in a scholarly article, but there you have it.

*One: this shouldn’t be phrased as a hypothetical. Two: evolution doesn’t “deem” anything. It’s not an agent.

I hate it when Post Secret makes me teary. Otherwise, posted without comment.

Updated: if the image isn’t showing up for some reason, click the link and scroll about halfway down. The card is a black and white photo of a woman leaning against a wall and the text begins “my greatest fear…”

I have no particular love for Perez Hilton (real name Mario Armando Lavandeira) , and clearly he doesn’t mind it that way. (For those with the fortune to have missed out on the PH phenomenon, he’s a celebrity gossip blogger with a penchant for abusing photoshop.) While the New York Times cheerfully documents his misadventures, I can’t help but notice the kinds of language that are being used in the piece. We’re supposed to believe that Perez is really just an edgy, edgy gossip columnist who’s loud and crude. And off course, the article goes to great lengths to explain to us how subversive misogyny, slut-shaming, and photoshopping a celebrity soiling themselves really are.

Mr. Lavandeira brags about his “exclusives” and “sources” but describes his formula simply: He says what many people think but never utter aloud.

Clearly, we have the set up for someone edgy. He’s going to give voice to all those cruel and obnoxious things you were thinking and just knows covet Angelina Jolie’s newest outfit and scorn Kirsten Dunst’s. Oh happy day when miracles take place! I mean, no one else has thought to snark about celebrities before.

In his blog postings, he lavishes exclamation points on the ravishing looks of arbitrarily chosen heroes like Angelina Jolie, Jennifer Lopez and Dita Von Teese, and snarkily picks on so-called villains like Clay Aiken, Kirsten Dunst and Sienna Miller for perceived sins like excessive drinking, promiscuity or denying homosexuality.

Because criticizing celebrities for their alcohol abuse and their perceived sexuality is what defines edgy. There’s something deeply subversive about calling someone a slut. And it’s skating even closer to the line to talk smack about someone’s substance abuse. The perceived misdeeds of celebrities have always been fodder for gossip pages, but let’s not pretend that Perez is some sort of vanguard, sticking it to the man, and calling it like he sees it. (He also has a thing about Victoria Beckham’s refusal to smile and “routinely ridicules” her for this. Yes, celebrities are expected to smile and mug for the camera, but seems to be more of the same when it comes to scolding women about smiling.)

Unsurprisingly, Perez is far from universally popular. He has lawsuits pending against him by both his celebrity targets for libel and paparazzi photographers who claim he’s grabbed their images without paying or giving credit. When he appeared on the view, the show’s hosts were unimpressed with his tendency to mock the children of celebrities. (He called Suri Cruise an alien, among other things.) However, he’s hardly alone in his obsession with celebrity and, I’d argue, is part of the pattern of the obsession with the proverbial bad girl*.

But as Vanessa at Feministing wonders, is this a feminist issue? Is the obsession with the behavior of female celebrities something we should be worried about and calling attention to? I’d argue yes. There’s something particularly hateful and something particularly perplexing about the antics of the Britney, Lindsey, Paris, et al. crowd. What you see is not just garden variety misogyny, but also an element of pearl clutching. Part of the reason these antics go unremarked (or less remarked) with men is because double standards (he’s a player, she’s a slut) and stereotypes (boys will be boys) make their behavior seem slightly more mundane and expected.

When women engage in exactly the same kinds of behaviors, we look for explanations like blaming it on dear old mom rather than saying “Well, people do stupid shit all the time.” For reasons that I’ve not yet fully developed in my head, I think there are a lot of people who will refuse to say such a sentence as it regards women. Women should have known better, they should have dressed differently, they should have done something else! Those are not lines you hear about men. Men are known and expected to be stupid. Women are just reminded of it every time they make a mistake.

*Via Feministing.

Hi, everyone! I just wanted to thank Jill for including me in the Summer of Guest Bloggers. I’ve guest-blogged a bit at Feministe before, and am thrilled to be back. The obligatory quick biographical sketch: I just graduated from law school and finished the bar. After I pass the bar (fingers crossed until knuckles hurt), I’m off to work for US Army JAG. (I worked for them last summer doing criminal law and labor and employment law.) I’m getting married in November to a lovely man hereinafter identified as T, flagrantly misuse parentheses, and am addicted to diet coke.

I will probably also post photos of my recently acquired dog, Bronx, even when it isn’t Friday because she is cute as a button and I like choruses of “awww!”