feminist blogs

The continuing news coverage of the election gradually went from exciting and a little funny to downright sickening last night. It's not so much the Kerry loss as what seems to have happened to Congress - centrist Democrats losing against semi-evangelical right wingers. And the thing the newsfolk kept coming back to around was "moral values". The BBC has a good article on the subject: [see link]. This election was exciting, if frustrating, from the "you've been served" primary days when Dean et al called Bush out and challenged each other surprisingly little. But the voting last night - or rather, the spin on the voting last night - fundamentally challenged my view of how this country is divided. See, my own experience leads me to believe that most Republicans actually share my views on most everything. They just disagree on what's important and how to solve the problems we all see. I think we can't let go of social issues, the stuff the press is calling "moral values" and still be a decent people; they think we can't address social issues without individuals and business feeling safer. But I always thought most non-extremists could agree that it was wrong to deny someone a basic civil right - marriage, for instance, based on any difference between ourselves and others. I always thought that most people were iffy about the ethical question of abortion, for instance, but understood a need to keep it legal as long as we weren't effectively protecting a woman's jurisdiction over her own body by preventing unwanted pregnancies. I figured the things we really disagreed on were logistical - like, how to fund adequate healthcare, or what the best form of education reform must be. But it seems that "moral values" - the things that amount to believing that one life is of greater value than another (a murderer should die, someone who isn't born yet shouldn't, a hetero couple is deserving of civil rights a gay couple isn't, etc.) - are the issues that most effectively got people out to vote on the right. My centrist pro-choice Southern EMILY's listers lost. Most (if not all) states with referenda on gay marriage and civil unions went the path of discrimination. At least it was close in a lot of places. At least the vote was gotten out. But that makes the results that much more unsettling. People weren't voting on the other side based on economic and defense issues. They were voting, to put it meanly and bitterly, for hate. Which means this country is surprisingly divided over social issues - things that I wish we wouldn't even legislate - not conflicting priorities. I miss the real Republicans, the ones who were embarrassed to court Southern racism in 1960 (not that I ever knew that party, but it sure sounds nice). Damn. It's going to be a long four years.

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.