feminist blogs

The London Library copy of Before I Go…Reflections on my life and times, by the late Guardian women’s editor Mary Stott, was last borrowed in 1998, and only a couple of times before that.

It’s a pity for her 1985 memoirs have much to offer the reader of today, and have many reminders that many of the issues with which we’re wrestling politically – from voting systems to maternity leave – have been the subject of furious debate for decades.

Born in 1917, she’s something of a bridge between the First Wave feminists and the Second Wave, which she viewed from a place of mature professional power and influence (one of the few women in that position at that time) with some understandable bemusement. By modern standards she’s unsound on the subject of “Ms”, she hated it, and rather unsound on homosexual rights, but given the world she grew up in, she’s humane, commonsensical and remarkably clear-sighted, while being self-effacing and alost frustratingly humble.

She’s much to say on feminism that still has powerful resonance today, for example:

“The spate of books on women’s subjects in the last few years has been extraordinary. Too many, in my view, have been inaccessible to me, who left my grammar school at 17, and to the girls who leave their comprehensives at 16 – not to mention many others in between. I think it is time to concentrate more attention on the writing, on the simple, comprehensible exposition of ideas rather than on the bibliography.”

She’s also interesting as a defector from Labour to be a founding member of the SDP in 1981, and a member of its executive in 1982, a self-identified political neophyte:

“…it takes a very strong and politically idealistic spirit to survive bickering over procedural hassles. Procedure has to be sorted out, but perhaps the political novices, ‘the nice people’, the ‘wets’ have a role in indicating, now and then, when we can summon courage to tackle the technicians, that ‘ends’ are really what matter and what keep enthusiasm alive, and, even, that means can corrupt ends. Sometimes I fear that the more ‘political’ one becomes, the more one is likely to lose sight of the goal that made one join a party in the first place.”

Today, as the conservative government talks much of Big Society, while also slashing funding for the institutions that might support it, she reports on the president of the National Council of Women, Helen Waldsax, asking “that the government should ‘acknowledge in some constructive form the public service given by so many voluntary organisations to this country’ and warned that unless this was done, many organisations would have to function at half strength, or even disappear, which would mean the loss of ‘the source of supply of many specialist skills’. She added, ‘a very important democratic principle is at stake here’. But there has been no sign that Prime Minister Thatcher, who so heartily approves, she says the voluntary principle, has taken any notice.”

But perhaps the most pervasive sense one gets from this book is the modestly and self-deprecation of a woman who was obviously powerful and exceptional. It’s a reminder of how women were taught to be – and must never allowed to be again.

Earlier this month, authors Diane ‘DJ’ Connell and Michele Gorman debated the ‘chick-lit’ label in the pages of the UK’s Guardian newspaper. Connell started the debate by explaining her reason for choosing the neutral pen name ‘DJ’: In the funny-peculiar world of humorous literature, a female name is like an affliction. It repels potential readers [...]

Read more global feminist posts at Gender Across Borders.

by Amanda Marcotte

It’s August.  People are grumpy.  It’s time for extremely silly blogging based on this kick-ass article from Cracked about why a zombie apocalypse would fail. I’m a big fan of zombie apocalypse as a story, and I doubt many of these objections would reduce my enjoyment of these stories, since the answer for a lot of them is, “Magic, bitches.” (Such as why zombies can fend off maggots, injury, heat, and the cold, and why zombie viruses would spread through bites.) But I have to admit, I laughed out loud for #2 and #1.  Number 2 is basically, “It’s not nearly as fucking hard to find zombie-proof spaces as the movies would have you believe.” And number 1 touches on a reality that zombie stories basically all have to ignore.

As we touched on briefly above, if Homo sapiens are good at one thing, it’s killing other things. We’re so good at it that we’ve made entire other species cease to exist without even trying. Add to the mix the sheer number of armed rednecks and hunters out there, and the zombies don’t even stand a chance. There were over 14 million people hunting with a license in the U.S. in 2004. At a minimum, that’s like an armed force the size of the great Los Angeles area.

Remember, the whole reason hunting licenses exist is to limit the number of animals you’re allowed to kill, because if you just declared free reign for everybody with a gun, everything in the forest would be dead by sundown. Even the trees would be mounted proudly above the late-arriving hunter’s mantles. It’s safe to assume that when the game changes from “three deer” to “all the rotting dead people trying to eat us,” there will be no shortage of volunteers.

The number one cliche of zombie stories that makes me bananas is the, “Oh noez we’re running out of supplies!” gambit.  I’ve been reading The Walking Dead series, which is a very scary, very addictive horror comic.  They get a lot of things right about what would happen if most of the country was wiped out by a zombie attack.  For instance, I notice that many zombie flicks assume that we’d still have electricity for weeks and possibly months, when in fact there are actual people who keep power plants running, and so electricity would be the first thing to go.  And right on the heels of electricity would be running water, since most water systems rely on the electrical grid.  Robert Kirkman includes all these kinds of things, and he thinks of cool shit like holing up in gated communities or better yet, prisons. 

But then he pulls out the card that makes me go nuts, the “oh noez, we don’t have food or guns!” card.  This is bullshit.

Why?  Because the one thing you can be assured there would be plenty of if the vast majority of Americans ceased to exist would be a steady supply of canned beans and Doritos.  The second thing there would be more than enough of would be ammo.  This is because you and your small band of survivors would not be competing with a whole lot of people for these precious commodities.  But in Walking Dead, they always seem to run across empty cupboards, and even though most of it takes place in the South, no one seems to think about stopping at a sporting goods store to wipe them out of literally more guns and ammo than you could ever use. 

But they do seem to always get enough gas at the pump, a strange oversight because gas pumps also don’t work without electricity.

I will say that in this sense, I really enjoyed the movie “Zombieland”, because even though they incorrectly portrayed a working electrical grid, they were well enough aware that reducing the population by 90% would mean that you would literally never run out of Twinkies or guns.  Or cars.  (Though, of course, they, like basically every other zombie story out there, seem to have no problem pulling gas out of pumps even though the entire infrastructure that makes that possible would collapse.)

While this is all very silly, I do think there is an interesting political observation to pull out of all this.  Zombie stories are a product of a society where most people literally do not think about, much less comprehend, how complex and interconnected everything is.  Or huge.  We have dark fantasies about what it would be like if that infrastructure collapsed, but it is so big and so complicated that even people writing stories where they have to imagine what that would be like struggle to really capture all the details.  We don’t think about stuff like, “If there weren’t people at the power plant, I couldn’t actually flush my toilet or pump gas.” But nor do we consider how much food a grocery store really sells in a day compared to what any individual family’s needs are.  Trying to wrap your mind around all these different cogs and details about even just the way life runs in a mid-sized city is more than most people can really manage.

Article first published on Blogcritics.

Nina Power, if placed in a classification of feminists, would clearly fall within the socialist/Marxist camp, seeing the oppression of women arising chiefly from the economic base. But this is a sophisticated, nuanced form of this analysis, that is sensitive to the developments of the superstructure, as well as the base, of the past couple of decades.

Her One-Dimensional Woman is only about 50 actual pages of text, almost more pamphlet than book, but there’s a lot packed in, not all of it making an obviously coherent whole.

The title comes from Herbert Marcuse’s 1964 One-Dimensional Man, who is “fully immersed in the promissary world of liberal democracy and consumerism, and yet ‘the spontaneous reproduction of superimposed needs by the individual does not establish autonomy; it only testifies to the efficacy of the controls”. For women today, Power says, “what looks like emancipation is nothing but a tightening of the shackles”.

She begins with a brief exploration of the Sarah Palin phenomenon, which is something of an outlier, if a topical one. The conclusion: “She turns maternity into a war-weapon, inexperience into a populist virtue and feminism into something that even the Christian Right could approve of.” Power makes the point that if we allow the term “feminist” to be captured by such women, progressive women concerned about basic rights from access to abortion onwards will have to disown it – it is worth defending.

In a similar vein is the chapter on the attempt to justify the Iraq war, and particularly the Afghan war, by the claim that its purpose (so historically nonsensical) is to free the local women. The answer to this is easier, really, just listen to the local women, who are very clearly saying “get out”.

Then Power gets into the meat of her argument, that the workforce has indeed been feminised: “work is generally more precarious and communication-based, as women’s jobs tended to be in the past… Alternatively, we could turn this around and talk about the labourization of women – the way in which females are cast as worker first and only secondarily as mother or wife, or any other identity position not linked wiith economic productivity.”

Much of this has affected both sexes. So Power says: “The demand to be a ‘adaptable’ worker, to be constantly ‘networking’, ‘selling yourself,’ in effect, to become a kind of walking CV is felt keenly.” But for women this plays on older stereotypes to particularly focus on their looks, their clothes, their body, which bleeds into woman as consumer, and the claim that any consumer purchase – from lipstick to chocolate, is feminist indulgence, because you’re worth it.

On this, Power gets particularly strong: “Stripped of any internationalist and political quality, feminism becomes about as radical as a diamante phone cover.” (Here she’s being, I think on balance unfairly, strongly critical of Jessica Valenti.)

But perhaps the most original part of this text is the exploration of pornography, on which Power argues for historical perspectives. As she briefly alludes to, it is well worth remembering that pronographic images were used as a form of political communication during and around both the English Civil War and the French Revolution, but “the ahistoricism of the anti-pornography movement takes as its presupposition the idea that men will always nurture a violent desire towards women and that porn is merely a reflection of this”.

Power argues, however, that before WWII, porn lacked the mechanistic, highly specialised characteristics of today, in older forms, particularly French films, “sex isn’t just a succession of grim orgasms and the parading of physical prowess, but something closer to slapstick and vaudeville”. The performers, she says, genuinely appear to be having fun, and the “plot” not infrequently runs around men’s difficulty in “performing”. Very different she says, from sex that is clearly work in contemporary porn.

So there’s a lot here, but ultimately what it fails to do is really provide a road-map, a way forward. Power has entirely justifiable criticism of what is being presented to us today as “feminism”. But she doesn’t really tell us what her own looks like.

What’s the origin of the fundamental misogyny in Western thought? If we’re ever going to get rid of it – to, in the large-scale terms I’ve started to think recently – get rid of the gender binary, the insistence that everything be split in two opposing categories to which the negative is assigned the female – one of the things we certainly need to do is work out where it came from.

That’s the subject of Vigdis Songe-Moller’s Philosophy Without Women: The Birth of Sexism in Western Thought, translated from the Norwegian by Peter Cripps. That a publisher should have chosen to translate such a text suggests something pretty special, and while it ventures into aspects of philosophy to which I have limited exposure, I rather think that it is.

Songe-Moller is conerned primarily with how Greek citizens (which means of course men), and particularly classical Athenian citizens, thought about women, and about reproduction, and relations between the sexes. Her basic conclusion is that they “seem invariably to have drawn sustenance from the dream of women’s superfluity”. (p.4)

In Greek and particularly Athenian myths, she finds again and again asexual, vegetative reproduction preferred to sexual – and suggests that this is related to the fact that only this way can a “perfect” reproduction of the male – a copy – be related. Despite Greeks liking to think of women as simply a vessel for the male seed (she quotes from Aeschylus’s tragedy, Eumenides: “The mother is not the true parent of the child/Which is called hers. She is a nurse who tends the growth/Of young seed planted by its true parent, the male.”), the fact that a child was not a copy of its father was undeniable.

So Athenians (men) thought of themselves as the descendants of Erichthonius, who is born when the Olympian blacksmith, Hephaestus, fails in a bid to rape Athena, but instead spills his seed on the earth, the soil of Athens, from which the child springs. He has a father, but no mother.

There’s also sociology: “Since it is the woman who gives birth to the child, it seems reasonable to regard her as the physical link between one generation and the next. For the Athenian oikos, however, she was an unstable link, insofar as a new woman had to be fetched into a man’s family for each new generation. ..Thus the secure link in the family was the man, the master of the house, the paterfamilias. It was he who symbolized the family’s unit and continuity, that is who enabled the family to remain the same through time.” (P. 16)

But it is Greek philosophy that is at the heart of the author’s argument, and particularly the pre-Socratic Parmenides, who establishes an ideal: “The ideal is eternity and immutability… a form of divine reality in which mortal phenomena such as life and death play no part. Parmenides can be characterized as Plato’s spiritual father; and the extent of his influence on European philosophy right up to the present day can hardly be overestimated. Philosophers of the Platonic tradition – from Parmenides and Plato through to Kant and Hegel – have for example found it natural to think in terms of heirarchies. Immutability is suprerior to change; eternity is set above time; immortality above decay and death.” (p.21)

More, Parmenides tries to define what is existence, or Being – something that exists. And central to his definition is certainly, lack of plurality or mutability. Not-Being, the alternative, is an essential part of change – e.g. a shoot becoming a leaf, but No-Being can’t be allowed anywhere near the pure Being. In her introduction, Songe-Moller explains how as a pregnant post-doc, she realised that “the Parmenidian idea of all things existing ultimately as one and self-identical is… far from self-evident.”

Songe-Moller goes then back to the 1960s and 70s Paris School around Jean-Pierre Vernant, which she says argued that there was a close link between the geometrical way of thinking of the ancient Greeks, with the circle as the central motif, and the archaic and classical city state. Each citizen was theoretically equidistant from the centre of power. Extending on from this, she says that Parmenides establishes this balance and equality through exclusion – the exclusion of women and slaves. “The unity and balance of Parmenides sphere of Being depend on the exclusion of Not-Being, and … this strategy can be regarded as analogous to democracy’s dependence on those groups that were excluded from it.” (p. 51)

From this point, Songe-Moller moves on to the rather better-known misogyny of Socrates and Plato. Even where there’s apparent equal opportunities in Republic: “Socrates demonstrates the basic insignificance of sexual difference by means of a simple illustration. He maintains that the difference between the one who gives birth and the one who ‘begets’ us as trivial as the difference between long and short hair…but the way in which he presents his arguments is likely to lieave us in doubt as to whether his subject really is equality of opportunity, or whether here as well the real concern is the negation of the feminine… the male guardians are characterized as the best citizens (politai), the female guardians are described as quite simply the best women (gynaikes)… the ‘best women’ means – paradoxically – the women that have most successfully overcome the fact that they belong to their sex. Thus what we find in Book V of the Republic is not a proposal for equal empowerment of the sexes, as is often claimed, but rather an attempt to cultivate masculine qualities within the ruling class.” (p. 91)

More, of course, there’s the homoeroticism. On this, Songe-Moller goes to Phaedrus, saying: “The text clearly suggests that the desire for sensual beauty is a necessary precusor to the desire for the true Beaty, that is, for the form of Beauty itself, which lies beyond all form of sensuality… the love between a man and a woman has its ‘natural’ conclusion in coitus and does not in itself point to anything beyond the purely physical … this purpose can only be served by unconsummated physical love, which Plato’s text represents as an ideal of homosexual relationships.”(pp.93-4)

Songe-Moller moves on then to consider two “modern” views of Plato, that of Irigaray and Foucault, in which the book to some degree betrays its origins as individual essays, although the overall flow of the arguments remains clear.

She goes to Irigaray’s interpretation of the cave myth, from Book VII of Republic. It has men living in a cavern open to the light along its width, but fettered so they can only see the back wall, and so placed that they see manipulated puppets appearing as shadows against the wall. “The sole purpose of the wall in Plato’s myth is – as with the female – reproduction, although the way it performs this job leaves much to be desired…due to its material properties, the wall is an unsuitable medium for the reproduction of pictures… insufficiently virginal, or alternatively: it is not sufficiently frigid. It does not repulse and transit the masculine rays of light that are thrown at it, but rather receives and absorbs them, so that no more than shadows remain.” (p. 124)

“…I shall only mention the reference Julia Kristeva makes in her Histoires d’amour to Plato’s Phaedrus, where Socrates describes how the soul in love – that is the philosopher’s soul – grows warm, swells up, and sprouts great wings, in due course it raises itself in its desire to fly towards its beautiful lover, and together with him towards Beauty itself. The phallic connotation is clear, and Kristeva laconically remarks that, when we consider Plato’s description of the soul’s erection, it is not so difficult to understand why the Church Fathers hesitated in attributing souls to women.” (p. 127)

Perhaps the most exciting, and frustrating passage in the book refers to the possibility that there was an alternative thought system available, if probably now unrecoverable:
“In his exposition of what he refers to in the poem as the ‘opinions of mortals’, opinions that apparently contain ‘no true belief’, Parmenides seems to describe a world in which the two sexes are equal in status. Unfortunately most of that part of the poem that deals with this theme has been lost, but the surviving verses still convey a sense that in Parmenides’ day, that is in the 5th century BCE, there were the rudiments of an attitude that presupposed no hierarchical order among the sexes.” (p. 51)

But “the Greek political theory of the classical period – with Plato and Aristotle as its foremost representatives – built on the legacy of identity theory….the concept of the equality of opposites was unable to gain any significant influence is subsequent philosophy….much philosophy has been permeated by what we can call a one-sex model: in reality there exists only one sex, the man, who constitutes the norm of all human life. Within this model, the specifically female could only be defined negatively.”

It all makes me want to add another book to those I’d like to write – call it about No 12 – an alternative history that sees the alternative, non-hierarchical, view win out among the Greeks, and the whole course of human thought thus changed. (Or perhaps a time-travel history, in which we go back and wipe out the odd key philosopher on the “wrong” side, just to help the cause…)

by Amanda Marcotte

Spoilers.

Scott Pilgrim!  Yes, I saw it.  I’ve already engaged in some media about it, by being a guest on Overthinking It, where I contributed by being the person who’d had the opportunity to read all the way through book 6 of the series.  But I thought I’d go ahead and post on it, because I want to expand on my sadly cliched opinion that the books were ultimately more satisfying.  I really, really liked the movie.  It was entertaining as fuck, and perfectly pitched to people like me.  As we discuss on the podcast, the movie is supposed to take place in present times---the technology and a couple of cultural touchstones indicate that---but the fashion, attitudes, and majority of cultural references had a 90s era feel to them.  Scott even wears a Smashing Pumpkins T-shirt.  In this, they’re basically like the books, and that makes sense, because the writer Bryan Lee O’Malley is playing with the idea of past and memory, so it feels right to invoke the era when people our age (he’s two years younger than me) were actually the ages of the people in the book. Between that, the video game stuff, and the loving rendering of the indie rock scene, this movie was bound to be exactly as fun as it is for someone my age.  I don’t know if it has much appeal beyond that, which is why I think the box office wasn’t as great as it should have been.  Too bad, because it really is a funny movie.

But I really hope people read the books, because there’s a depth to them that simply wasn’t in the movie.  I ran into Sarah Jaffe last night, and she put her finger on exactly why, noting that they basically had to save time in the movie by writing out Ramona’s character. I mean, she’s still there and she’s still cool, but the entire story line in the book where Ramona has to struggle with her past and get over it isn’t really in the movie.  The many layers of Ramona are just lifted out of the story.  Scott is also rewritten somewhat to fit a more standard Hollywood narrative where the meek guy gains courage.  In the books, Scott is never what I’d call meek.  His journey is more that of a self-centered guy who has to stop thinking of himself in black-and-white heroic terms, and choose instead to be a human being.  The books are hilarious and clever, but ultimately they’re a meditation about the nature of love and the past and what it takes to go forward and take the leap of faith that is committing to love after you’ve had your fuck-ups.  And for that, the more in-depth portrayal of female characters like Ramona and yes, Knives and Envy is a critical element. 

Mike Barthel at Awl really dug into this issue, making similar observations about how the movie simply doesn’t have time to flesh out the female characters, much less pass the Bechdel test.  Which isn’t to accuse the movie of sexism!  Like Michelle notes, it’s actually a really refreshing film in that the female characters behave like actual human beings.  They have actual personalities that are theirs and not some manifestation of some generic Hollywood assumptions about femaleness.  Even as Ramona is holding down the spot of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl, she’s really not, since she doesn’t have MPDG mandatory traits like being all-forgiving and accepting of the hero or being unattached to reality.  (She even has a job that she’s uniquely suited to perform!) It’s hard to blame the movie for not having the depth of soul of the books because it’s not a function of sexism or bad writing so much as just an issue of time.  Once you work in the seven evil exes and the video games and the battle of the bands and the love triangle, there’s not a whole lot of room to explore the issues the book ends up being most interested in, namely what it means to choose to love someone and to fight for that. 

So, see the movie but please also read the books.  It’s very rare to see romantic love portrayed so honestly and yet without losing any ability to be touching.  In fact, I’d argue that it’s more touching for all its realism.  As one of the podcasters on OTI said, the movie falls into the trap of talking up destiny when it comes to love.  The books are basically the opposite of that---they’re more interested in choice.  The person who thinks love is about finding The One that you’re destined for and living happily ever after in harmony is a fool, but I do think it’s a widespread kind of foolishness.  Moving forward and being able to choose to be happy is, in the books, a matter of dealing with the past not as something to ignore or as some kind of horrible baggage, but just being what it is.  It shapes us but it isn’t us. 

Plus, it tells this story with more than a little humor and cleverness. 

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