feminist blogs

I spent a good part of today refinishing my sad, sad bathtub.

Whee! Paint fumes!

It looks *fabulous* now, though. Even though I’m still lightheaded from the vapors.

Here’s what happens when USA Today tries to write from a feminist point of view: you end up with a headache.

Women are more kind and nurturing than men. They are natural altruists, placing the common good — including education, health and the environment — ahead of their narrow personal interests. And that’s why we need a woman president. Right?

Wrong. We don’t need a female president, any more than we need a male one. Instead, we need to jettison the gender stereotypes that block half the population — the female half, that is — from participating equally in our politics.

Oh boy.

(more…)

No, seriously. And it’s just too haaaard to try to get men to pick up the slack, so those 70s feminists must have been wrong about the drudgery! And Rena’s just the kind of contrarian rebel who’s gonna get in the face of a dead woman and tell her what for!

The problem with our liberation from housework is that it left no one at home to create such a haven. My generation of women threw out the baby with the bathwater, as it were — and now we’re scratching our heads and wondering what’s missing.

I’m sure we all remember that the guys were supposed to pick up the slack. But that idea really didn’t seem to catch on, did it? Yes, we all are acquainted with a Mr. Mom or two who can watch the kids, do the laundry and bake a mean batch of brownies, but those guys are the exception. Study after study has pointed out that, although men are helping more around the house than they did a generation ago, women are still the ones pulling the “second shift” after coming home from a full day at the office.

And for some reason, be it genetics or societal brainwashing, 40 years of liberation has not changed the fact that the female of the species is most often the one who cares about matching towels and well-equipped kitchens. Case in point: My husband and I rented a furnished house for the summer once from a confirmed bachelor. His kitchen had three — three — corkscrews, a couple of martini shakers, a well-used (read dirty) microwave and not a heck of a lot else. The stove didn’t even work properly. And don’t get me started on the bathrooms (a word to the wise — do not sit on a toilet seat without first inspecting it for cracks). My husband, incidentally, thought the place was just fine. Though I hate to come across as a biological determinist, despite decades of attempts to reeducate men, you simply cannot make one of them care about how the towels are folded.

So there you are, Betty — despite your best efforts to raise our consciousness and liberate us from the broom and dust mop, there are renegades among us who insist on liking housekeeping. Oh, I don’t enjoy the minute-to-minute minutiae of the job, any more than someone in the corporate world enjoys time-wasting meetings or bureaucratic directives. But I like the results — a refuge for everyone to come home to, with a nice meal on the table and clean linens (well, most of the time) on the beds. My home is my little kingdom where, on a good day, with a lot of organization and a little bit of elbow grease, things run as smoothly and peacefully as I wish the big outside world did.

Whoohoo. You really showed Betty Friedan, you did, there, Rena. Next up: why chastity and modesty is rebellious!

Via.

Let’s take a break for a second.

No better place than the kitchen table, right?

Take a break from the mess and exhaustion and day-to-day, and where do a lot of us end up? Right there, at the kitchen table, if we’ve got anything like a kitchen. When I think of the home I want to make someday, I think of the smell of the kitchen–garlic and coffee and yeast and dried peppers–at the heart of it. And when things are rough, I go, like many of us, to comfort food. Hot and sour soup, nursed carefully with a big spoon. Meatloaf with a good old-fashioned Midwestern ketchup glaze. All sorts of stuff probably bad for me but that makes things better, somehow. The kitchen table, no matter where I live, warm in winter, usually with a teapot close to hand, sometimes with a glass of something stiffer, is the center of the home and its warmth.

Food isn’t just a feminist issue when it’s a problem, after all. It’s not just the many of us not getting enough nutrition, not getting access to fresh and nourishing foods; it’s not just the many of us afflicted with eating disorders; it’s not just the messed-up cultural messages we all get about what we put in our bodies. Food is also a vitally important way to look at our connections to each other, to our ideas of family, to our traditions. Look at the way many people identify so elementally with the staple their ancestors have eaten: rice, maize, wheat, potatoes, taro, olives. Look at the way we’re constantly told the myth of the family meal as a binder of loved ones in troubled times. We’re made of the foods we consume, from the very beginning. Pathologized or not, the food matters.

So have a seat.

(more…)

Gawker has the list.

Sadly, my apartment does not match up — I don’t have stacks of magazines or Nair or self-help books or stuffed animals or cat hair. In fact, the only things on the list that can be found in my apartment are scented candles and “anything pink” — but that’s only because I have a set of pink sheets which used to be white, until I accidentally washed them with my red sheets. The commenters are a little more accurate when it comes to objets d’ Single Girl”:
(more…)

Magic 8-ball says: Childhood Obesity. Oh, noes! It’s because feminists hate children, isn’t it? No, not quite:

Middle-class mothers who work long hours increase the risk of their offspring being overweight or obese, according to an astonishing new study.

Astonishing is right, but some women have always worked:

Research revealed by The Independent on Sunday for the first time will turn perceived wisdom on its head with the revelation that the nation’s higher-paid working mothers bear much of the responsibility for the country’s ticking obesity time bomb, and not the poorer working-class families who are usually blamed.

You hear that, all you highly paid professionals with children(women only, sorry men)? Not only as feminists are you responsible for the destruction of families, but you make them fat too!

More shockingly, the risk of childhood obesity soars in direct correlation with family income. Children in families where household income is greater than £33,000 are significantly more likely to be overweight or obese than youngsters from families with the lowest incomes, the new study shows. And in higher income households, the longer a mother worked each week, the greater the risk of the child being overweight.

More shocking is that they are just now figuring out that families with low incomes have less disposable dollars to spend on things like soda and chips. Those conscious working mothers who chose childcare facilities because of the nutritional programs that they offered, you don’t get off so easily either:

Compounding the misery for working mothers, the study found that children’s weight problems got worse if mothers relied on a nanny to hold the fort while they pursued their careers. Children in childcare are 24 per cent more likely to be overweight or obese than children cared for by their mother or her partner.

Ladies, if you are not aborting them, abusing them by not marrying the father, or abandoning them in childcare then you are plumping them up with your selfish work hours:

Dr Colin Waine, chairman of the National Obesity Forum, said: “I do not wish to condemn these women but I do think the priority has to be the health of the child and its continued health into adulthood. We are in danger of raising a generation of young people with a much shorter life expectancy than previous generations.”

Next week’s edition of Blame Feminism/Working Women: Alzheimer’s, how parents with working daughters are at a higher risk.

some of us may be shit out of luck.

Basically, Kim of Bastante Already! has this piece ruminating about her lack of affinity for the traditional womanly arts.

Amid her notes that she hates gardening and cooking and simply doesn’t have the wherewithal for making a beautiful “nest” right now, she asks,

In damn near every feminist periodical (Bitch, Bust) and on many feminist blogs, there’s this big, trendy push to get all Knitty and Crafty and Womanly Arts with our bad selves.
What is up with that?

Well, a few different things are up with that…

The most immediate answer to that particular question, at the Bitch, Bust, popcult etc. level, I think it’s just the same thing that’s been true of any number of other “trends:” stuff like knitting groups and gardening clubs become popular for more or less the same reason that stuff like sex toy parties or pole dancing classes becomes popular. Because, well, they involve activities that a lot of people find–dreaded word–”fun.” And yeah, one could file preferences for such things into “patriarchal conditioning” (as opposed to, say, a womens’ auto-mechanic club, I guess); truth is, I think it’s more, “we maybe eschewed these things because we were concerned about what it all Means, or it wasn’t available in our neck of the woods, or it simply never occured to us before; when we let that go some of us realized, hey, I kind of like this, it’s not what I thought it would be, and actually there are various benefits to this (mentally and physically engaging, develops various skills, social, relaxing, possibly good ol’ fashioned small-business venture capitalism in some cases). Personally, I think: hey, and if men want to enjoy these “traditional womanly arts” too, more power to ‘em.

None of this is probably “radical” in any sense of the word (not that there’s anything wrong with that); for a start, here we are probably mostly talking about how you say, “hobbies,” which in itself comes with a lot of assumptions about the hobbiest’s resources, spare time, general position in the grand scheme of things. More to the point, it’s probably not going to fundamentally overhaul one’s total way of life and being, much less the greater society; it’s not meant to do so.

What’s more overarching is the vision of, well for one, cultural feminism:

Many cultural feminists support their arguments by examining the behavior of women in both the distant past and the present. Bachoffen’s groundbreaking work on early matriarchal societies is often used as evidence that women were the earliest and most important members of society. [3] In societies led by women, or “matriarchies,” there are vastly different rules governing sexuality and marriage, property inheritance, and the distribution of power than those rules operative in societies led by men, or “patriarchies.” When women have greater social control than men, less stringent social sanctions are imposed on female sexual activities and choice of partners. Illegitimacy is absent, and inheritance and descent are organized through female ancestors. Matriarchal societies are generally nonmilitaristic, with the dramatic exception of Amazons. Religion, arts, and crafts are organized around female symbols of fertility and anatomy. Engels took the archaeological evidence developed by Bachofen and Morgan and extended their analyses to include changing economic conditions as a cause for the transition from matriarchal societies to patriarchal ones. [4] Succinctly, Engels’ argument is that as men accumulated capital, because of technological and social inventions, they altered the norms controlling sexuality, the family, and government. Women became a commodity of exchange who supplied men with both status and heirs. Recent anthropological evidence largely supports the existence of early societies where women had significantly greater power than they do today.

In short, what it boils down to, roughly, is a belief that matriarchy is the once and future Way to Go. It also is the basic premise behind such things as the “back to the land” movement within feminism(s) (there are and have been many “back to the land” movements, of course. We’ll get to that).

And you know, in theory, I have to say, I always had a soft spot for this, the basic idea. There’s a fair strain of it within neo-paganism, for instance, in which stream I paddle and occasionally do a few laps, although I lean more Phyllis Curott than Z. Budapest. I’ve been moved byJudy Grahn. I dig Riane Eisler. I dunno how literally to take the herstory/prehistory, but at a certain level, I think, provided one is -not- a fundamentalist, it doesn’t much matter: the importance of myth is not that it’s literally true, it’s. Point being: if one both believes that one is living in an overarching System, i.e. the Patriarchy, and that further this system is inimical and cannot be salvaged, well, what’s the alternative? Well–Matriarchy, I suppose, for one. Which could mean any number of things; in my fondly vague imaginings, I had always pictured something more like the bonobos than, say, a beehive.

On the other hand..

Well, to bring us back to the whole, “traditional womanly arts” thing.

See, if you are adamant that these traditional womanly arts are “traditionally womens‘” and should STAY such, on account of men and women are different and that’s really really important,

to me, it kind of doesn’t matter so much that, in this particular framing, those neglected “womanly” values–hearth, home, gentleness, peace was a big one–are in fact superior, which sets this worldview apart from the more right-wing movements that put such emphasis on men and women are really different, ’twas ever thus, shall always be. Because, once you have that essential…essentialism, well…sooner or later, inevitably, it’s going to mean that someone ends up in a (yes, this IS was “gender” means) gendered box that sie doesn’t feel comfortable in. Also it keeps this sort of endless binary war-of-the-sexes going, which personally I’ve always found sort of tedious.

But also, all of which, to me, kind of goes against the whole, “liberty, equality…fraternity.” Sorority, even. It’s one thing to buy (I do) that certain values and behaviors that have been coded as “female” or “feminine” or “yin” or whatever you like are, by and large, looked down upon, in this culture, and that this is a problem. It’s another to insist that those values, behaviors, etc. are the -sole property- of female-chromosomed/genital’d/even identified persons.

Curiously enough, fundamentalist Christian women can sound some familiar notes amid the o-my-Lord-what-are-things-coming-to-why-does-no-one-respect-Godly-AUTHORITAH:

According to this plan, who was to teach the womanly arts? Who was to teach the young women how to love and be subject to their husbands, how to love their children, how to be sensible, how to be pure, how to be a worker at home, how to be kind within the home and to extend kindness from the home? It was the older women. The womanly arts were to be transmitted from the older women to the younger women.

Please note that no male was assigned this task…

… Beyond the obvious impropriety of male involvement one must question the value of male instruction in the womanly arts. The simple question is: What do men really know about the womanly arts anyway?

What man has ever birthed a baby? What man has ever nursed a child? What man has ever related as mother to a child for even one day, let alone twenty years? What man has ever or will ever fathom the intricate complexity of God’s design in woman, and the urges and emotions, unique to us, which God has built into our very beings that we might naturally and easily and yet with a profound skill which defies textbook description or explanation, nurture the next generation for Him?

Is it not obvious that men do now know, and that they cannot know? Is it not clear that they are not even equipped biologically to know in any experiential way what they would pretend to teach as experts?

Apart from the “teach the young women to love and be subject to their husbands” riff, (and -maybe- the bit about “impropriety,” there’s nothing here that wouldn’t fit comfortably into a cultural feminist narrative. She is, in fact, making a case for a “womens’ culture,”* albeit a womens’ culture that is framed very specifically within the precepts of her (Father(s)-headed) Church, yes.

What makes all the difference, according to some, is the presence or absence of that Father-headed System. Get rid of the Fathers, the husbands, the priests, the God, and we’ll be free.

Which, well, perhaps. But besides the very real “so, what about the Men?” question that arises in that scenario (i mean, if we’re peaceful-loving we can’t just -kill- them all, fun as it sounds; and, well, they’re still there, at best wondering what the hell to do with themselves now that they can’t be Patriarchs anymore and all the women are off having Birthing parties and frolicking on the land and such)…well, I’m not so convinced that that WOULD be enough to bring about utopia, as opposed to, well, just another communitarian experiment, subject to human (which women, lest we forget, are) failing as much as any other.

So that’s one thing.

The other consideration is, getting back to the more practical side…well, first of all, of course there are other reasons beside grand sweeping Visions of the End Goal to buy into a cultural/separatist/communitarian set-up, feminist or otherwise. There are a -lot- of back-to-the-land movements these days, have been ever since the advent of Industrialization, really; the ideology behind far left to far right, but one of the basic principles is self-sufficiency (as opposed to Owing your Soul to the Company Sto’, or Big Brother, neither). An antidote to the alienation of modern life: get your hands dirty, Do It Yourself, and probably bond in loving fellowship with like-minded peoples.

Which all sounds great, you know, and I’ve been a guest, at least, at a couple of “intentional communities” which I might talk about at some point. I admire it all, again, in theory.

There’s just one small problem:

I live in the city.

Well. I live in the city, and my idea of foraging in the wilderness is finding a decent takeout joint, AND, due to a combination of ‘burb-based relative privilege, urban/cultural family background (my NYC-derived grandmother, once, sitting on her Sun City astroturf porch, shooing away the quail: “Yeah, cute, but those fucking birds crap all over the place. I don’t like nature. I’d rather have an ice cream soda”), and general murky Fears of my own ineptitude/which I’m not going to get into right now, suffice it to say that I am a Compleat Klutz when it comes to -most- of this Traditional Womanly Arts shit.

And no, I am no good at the traditional “masculine” arts either (changing oil, fixing plumbing). I am the first to admit that I am a bougie genX slacker who thinks finally learning to tie her shoes at some advanced age (six? seven? twenty-two?) is “working with her hands.”

Essentially, I’m fairly certain that when the Revolution comes, the people who’ve been canning and preserving and making sweaters out of sheep all this time will be doing great, and i’ll be scavenging the subways and fallout-laden streets and eating roaches and grubs out of my fellow useless urbanites’ hair, assuming we all just don’t kill each other first in a blind panic.

“But I’m good company.”

*Margaret Atwood nails this irony pretty astutely in “The Handmaid’s Tale,” at the end of the scene where Janine, one of the Handmaids, is giving birth in the company of her sisters and the Wives and the Marthas and the Aunts (no men allowed):

The womens’ voices rise around me, a soft chant that is still too loud for me, after the days and days of silence. In the corner of the room there’s a bloodstained sheet, bundled and tossed there, from where the waters broke…

The room smells too, the air is close, they should open a window. The smell is of our own flesh, an organic smell, sweat and a tinge of iron, from the blood on the sheet, and another smell, more animal, that’s coming, it must be, from Janine: a smell of dens, of inhabited caves, the smell of the plaid blanket on the bed when the cat gave birth on it, once, before she was spayed. Smell of matrix.

“Breathe, breathe,” we chant, as we have been taught. “Hold, hold. Expel, expel, expel.” …Janine, her eyes closed, tries to slow her breathing. Aunt Elizabeth feels for the contractions…

…She’s grunting now, with the effort. “Push, push, push,” we whisper….We’re with her, we’re the same as her, we’re drunk. Aunt Elizabeth kneels, with an outspread towel to catch the baby, …Oh praise.

We hold our breath as Aunt Elizabeth inspects it: a girl, poor thing, but at least there’s nothing wrong with it…We are one smile, tears run down our cheeks, we are so happy.

…The Commander’s Wife looks down at the baby as if it’s a bouquet of flowers: something she won, a tribute.

The Wives are here to bear witness to the naming. It’s the Wives who do the naming, around here.

“Angela,” says the Commander’s Wife.

“Angela, Angela,” the Wives repeat, twittering. “What a sweet name! Oh, she’s perfect! Oh, she’s wonderful!…”

By now I’m wrung out, exhausted. My breasts are painful, they’re leaking a little. Fake milk, it happens this way with some of us. We sit on our benches, facing one another…we might be bundles of red cloth. We ache. Each of us holds in her lap a phantom, a ghost baby. What confronts us, now the excitement’s over, is our own failure. Mother, I think. Wherever you may be. Can you hear me? You wanted a women’s culture. Well, now there is one. It isn’t what you meant, but it exists. Be thankful for small mercies.

x-posted at fetch me my axe

I actually don’t know if that’s true, but the closer I get to standard marrying age, the less I think it’ll ever happen — first because I think marriage is kind of a crock, and second because I’m becoming fairly certain that there just isn’t anyone out there who I want to be forever bound in marriage with.

Before anyone gets mad at me for calling marriage a crock, let me just say that I think marriage can be a good thing for a lot of people. I think that, in rare instances, it can be egalitarian. I think it offers a valuable support system, and that it is an important cultural symbol.

I’m just not sure it’s for me. As far as I can tell, most people end up getting married — yet I can’t imagine that every one of those people, or even most of them, found someone who, social constraints and cultural expectations aside, they would actually want to spend the rest of their life with in a monogamous relationship. I don’t think it’s cynical for me to point out that most people settle. And there’s nothing necessarily wrong with that. Marriage is the cultural norm. It brings tons of benefits with it, including important social ones — men and women of a certain age are expected to be married; married people socialize with other married people; not being married is often viewed as an indicator that something is wrong with you. At some point (early 20s in much of the country, early 30s in places like New York), it seems like everyone around you is getting married, and if you’ve been with the same person for a while and you get along well enough and love each other, then marriage just makes sense. And of course, there are those rare people who find the love of their life and enter into a fabulous marriage that they whole-heartedly want to be in and that trumps all other aspects of their life in its perfection. But those people are few and far between.

Which isn’t me making a judgment about the goodness of marriage, or saying that a less-than-storybook marriage isn’t worth having. For most people, it is. Marriage is a powerful social and economic institution, and ain’t nothing wrong with wanting to enter into it.

But, being that it is a powerful social and economic institution, it continues to reflect cultural norms that are wrapped up in gender and power. Same-sex marriage rights are perhaps the best example — same-sex marriage is offensive to social conservatives precisely because so many of us rely on gender difference as a way of organizing society and our experiences, and marriage equality challenges those notions. “Traditional marriage between a man and a woman” is valuable because men and women are presumed to be fundamentally different, and because marriage is reflective of an ingrained power structure. Within traditional marriage, there are gendered requirements that go along with the roles of “husband” and “wife.” The roles and the requirements are different, and with delineated, sex-based roles and requirements comes a power differential. Traditionally, men held most of that power. They still do — even in our modern, supposedly egalitarian construction of marriage. Without that gendering of power, same-sex marriage would not be an issue.

And then there’s the engagement ring thing. I’ve honestly never given much thought to the politics of engagement rings — I long assumed I would get married and would have a fancy engagement ring, I had a general idea of what I liked (platinum band, square-cut stone, maybe a blood-free diamond but probably an emerald) and that was that. When I started doubting the whole marriage thing, the issue of the ring was the last thing I was concerned about. As for marital politics, issues like name changing and distribution of domestic labor seemed more important, or more visible. I didn’t think much about it until I read Jessica’s take on engagement rings in Full Frontal Feminism. Like O’Rourke, Jessica thinks that they’re very problematic. And I’m inclined to agree.

…which is guaranteed to piss a lot of people off. So read O’Rourke’s article, and remember that this isn’t about you being a bad feminist. It’s about a fucked-up cultural practice, which is but one of many fucked-up cultural practices that we have to negotiate every day. Sometimes, out of ease or in the name of personal pleasure, we engage in them. Sometimes we opt out. None of these practices are simple, and none of them mean one thing, or the same thing to every individual who engages in them. This is about the practice, and the broader implications and assumptions that it rests on and perpetuates — it is not about you, or your value as a feminist or progressive, any more than my constructed desire for a shiny diamond ring is just about me.

But behind every Madison Avenue victory lurks a deeper social reality. And as it happens there was another factor in the surge of engagement ring sales—one that makes the ring’s role as collateral in the premarital economy more evident. Until the 1930s, a woman jilted by her fiance could sue for financial compensation for “damage” to her reputation under what was known as the “Breach of Promise to Marry” action. As courts began to abolish such actions, diamond ring sales rose in response to a need for a symbol of financial commitment from the groom, argues the legal scholar Margaret Brinig—noting, crucially, that ring sales began to rise a few years before the De Beers campaign. To be marriageable at the time you needed to be a virgin, but, Brinig points out, a large percentage of women lost their virginity while engaged. So some structure of commitment was necessary to assure betrothed women that men weren’t just trying to get them into bed. The “Breach of Promise” action had helped prevent what society feared would be rampant seduce-and-abandon scenarios; in its lieu, the pricey engagement ring would do the same. (Implicitly, it would seem, a woman’s virginity was worth the price of a ring, and varied according to the status of her groom-to-be.)

On the face of it, the engagement ring’s origins as a financial commitment should make modern brides-to-be wary. After all, virginity is no longer a prerequisite for marriage, nor do the majority of women consider marriageability their prime asset. Many women hope for a marriage in which housework, child-rearing, and breadwinning are equitably divided. The engagement ring doesn’t fit into this intellectual framework. Rather, its presence on a woman’s finger suggests that she needs to trap a man into “commitment” or be damaged if he leaves. (In most states today, if a groom abandons a bride, she is entitled to keep the ring, whereas if she leaves him, she must give it back.) Nor is it exactly “equitable” to demand that a partner shell out a sixth of a year’s salary, demonstrating that he can “provide” for you and a future family, before you agree to marry him.

It’s certainly not very egalitarian. Of course, neither is the fact that women are generally expected to shell out far more money for the costly business of looking like a woman — make-up, clothes, shoes, haircuts, lotions, skin-care products, hair products, hair removal, and on and on. Yes, men invest in many of those things too, but not to the same extent, and it’s not as much of a cultural requirement. Which isn’t to say that beauty culture justifies engagement rings, just to point out that we often seem more concerned with gender inequality when a man is losing money on it.

For those who aren’t bothered by the finer points of gender equity, an engagement ring clearly makes a claim about the status of a woman’s sexual currency. It’s a big, shiny NO TRESPASSING sign, stating that the woman wearing it has been bought and paid for, while her beau is out there sign-free and all too easily trespassable, until the wedding.

Which is kind of the point, right?

O’Rourke also points out the conspicuous consumption aspect to engagement rings. They also serve as a physical indicator of how much someone more powerful than you thinks you’re worth. They don’t just symbolize commitment — they demonstrate how wealthy your partner is, how much he can afford to adorn you with, and how vicariously valuable you are.

None of which seems very egalitarian, progressive or feminist.

The engagement ring thing isn’t enough to drive me away from marriage — but the bachelor party might be. Especially when it serves as a nice reminder that even the “progressive” dudes don’t mind a little exploitation in anticipation of a future tied down to the ol’ ball-and-chain.

Consider that Emily Post has not had anything fresh to say on the subject since 1922. “The groom’s farewell dinner is exactly like any other ‘man’s dinner,’ ” she lied, continuing, “Usually there is music of some sort, or ‘Neapolitans’ or ‘coons’ who sing, or two or three instrumental pieces, and the dinner party itself does the singing. Often the dinner is short and all go to the theater.” The other day, I queried the adorable Neapolitans who frequent an Italian social club in my neighborhood as to whether they’d consider singing at my BP. They demurred, telling me they thought it was “real funny” that I “had the nerve” to ask, and we all enjoyed a good laugh.
…
While you might correctly venture to a sporting event as one element of the fete—a Triple Crown race, say, or a carefully selected cockfight—the crux of the BP is enjoying lively conversation with other men keenly interested in society, literature, and the arts. Naturally, “the arts” include exotic dancing: The bachelor should be teased, humiliated, and possibly oil-wrestled by a professional ecdysiast. Some of you may object on feminist grounds, but strippers claim to find their work empowering, and this is no time for a debate. It is sufficiently progressive to treat the dancers with respect and to tip generously.

Entitled white boys used to be entertained by Italians and blacks. Now it’s naked women. But that’s totally cool, because they say it’s empowering. And it’s international:

Adventuresome sorts might consider a trip overseas, or at least to Montreal, home of Club Super Sexe and its DJ, who brings the most charming Quebecois lilt to such phrases as “Lesbian show, lesbian show!” Amsterdam, Ixtapa, Reykjavik, and Cartegena have also become popular, but who can keep up with extradition treaties? Why not see America first? There’s always New Orleans, a jaunt with a humanitarian vibe: The tragedy of Hurricane Katrina may have slipped from the front pages, but the ladies of Larry Flynt’s Barely Legal Club still need your support. Those of you planning a summertime event in the Hamptons should bear in mind high-season hassles—the notorious traffic, the scarcity of great oysters, the fact that Long Island strippers are hideously susceptible to sunburn in early July. Those of you going to Las Vegas manifestly lack imagination. No, New York City, more than ever, is the best place to have a bachelor party: In the fall of 2001, celebrating the pending nuptials of a college chum, I had occasion to admire the American flags management had installed on either side of the main stage at Scores and found myself so moved by New Yorkers’ collective courage that I started misting up. That, or I had some body glitter in my eyes.

Bachelor parties where the boys get together and go fishing or out to a nice dinner are one thing. But the “take the groom-to-be out to watch naked women dance around” is problematic not only because of the feminist issues with paying women to strip,* but because it strikes me as a direct statement of power over his to-be wife — the message is that marriage is such a burden and a bore that he has to get all of his youthful energy out before he enters into it, even at his fiancee’s expense.

And then there’s the fact that if marital bliss with my strip-club-going husband wasn’t all puppies and rainbows, it would be my fault for not giving it up enough.

The penis rules. Or should, anyway. “If men don’t feel respected or loved, if they don’t feel like a man, if they have to walk around on eggshells when it comes to their sex drive, if their horniness is treated like an inconsiderate act of selfishness – like typical male behaviour – then they will reassert themselves with another woman,” says a man I will call Mr. Multiply Divorced.

Clearly, Mr. Multiply Divorced is the victim, and there’s nothing wrong with him – something is wrong with everyone else.

It’s children that change the sexual energy of a marriage. I remember an acquaintance of mine complaining about her husband’s expectation of sex. She had two young sons at the time, and she was a wonderful hands-on and attentive mother. There were lunches to be made, laundry to finish, dinner to make, homework to help with, errands to run, and just before she passed out from exhaustion, a husband to do. And she did, because if nothing else, she is highly responsible. (And still married, by the way.) The whole yummy-mummy trend is really a statement of denial, if you ask me. Most young mothers will tell you that after having their bodies taken over by pregnancy, and then the demands of breastfeeding and constant monitoring of a baby, what they would really like at night is to be left alone for a bit, untouched. They’ve overdosed on closeness for the time being.

But husbands still want their wives to view them as the primary relationship. Another man I know – okay, we can call him Mr. Former Boyfriend – told me that in his marriage of 20 years and three children, his ex-wife, who gave up work to devote herself to the care of their offspring, denied him sex so often he had to beg for it. And when she relented, he felt it was out of pity or obligation.

Such a dynamic is common and emasculating, notes Esther Perel, a New York-based couples therapist and the best-selling author of Mating in Captivity: Reconciling the Erotic & the Domestic, published last year.

“It’s not healthy for men to feel pathetic about their urges and shame about their desire. It’s not just their masculinity they are expressing through sex but also their lesser masculine qualities, their tenderness, their vulnerability, their desire to give pleasure and receive it,” she explains.

So Mommy is exhausted from running around all day and cleaning up after her husband and the kids, but she’s driving him to another woman if she doesn’t enthusiastically have sex with him at night. Would it be silly to suggest that maybe he could contribute to the household tasks so that she isn’t totally exhausted and stressed at the end of the day, and might then enjoy sex a little more?

“Men marry for two reasons,” she states. “They’re proud to be with that woman socially. Look,” she adds in best-girlfriend whisper, “we both know women who have sex with men who aren’t seen with them publicly. The second reason men marry is sexual compatibility.”

Which brings me to a final bit of good advice. Be a lady in public and a whore in the bedroom. And help him understand that before talking dirty, the whore sometimes needs to have a cuddly chat about her day.

Oh, dichotomies, I love you. I also love how the most anti-feminist people are always the most man-hating: Saying that men marry for social status and for sex is a little reductive and insulting, and if I were a dude it would probably tick me off. But if you’re using it to further blame women for every possible shortcoming and relationship problem, it’s apparently acceptable.

Hence my commitment to ending up an old maid.

Thanks to Shannon, Anne and Oni Baba for the links.

*Here I should add that I’m not opposed to stripping as a job or as a way to make money. But I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that men who attend strip clubs make me very, very uncomfortable.

It hurts me to say this because Walt Disney World holds a landmark place in my heart. But the Carousel of Progress, in Tomorrowland in the Magic Kingdom of Walt Disney World, is watchable only as an artifact of an American narrative we no longer want to tell. Queue up and watch the 21 minutes of patriarchal late capitalist GE-approved “progress.”


The ultimate takedown of Walt Disney World as an ideologically loaded place is in the book Vinyl Leaves. And the Carousel of Progress, perhaps the longest running stage show in America, is perhaps the most ideologically loaded place in this most ideologically loaded place, as it commits itself to a story of American progress. The Carousel is a stage show in which an audioanimatronic family discusses the theme of progress. The show is divided into stage sets upon which the audience (and not the stage) revolves. Each stage set features the family in a different technological era from the turn of the 20th century onward to the near future.

And what is progress to the Carousel of Progress? Well, the GE-sponsored show seems to link progress almost exclusively with… the purchase of more and more GE products in each stage set’s period of time. In each stage set, the father of the family narrates and directs traffic, identifying all of the new technological advances that have enabled he and his family to overcome previous inconveniences. It now takes the mother of the family Sarah “only five hours to do the wash,” we find out in the first stage set in 1900 - as Sarah irons the laundry. Now Sarah has time to engage in “canning and cleaning the oven.” In each stage set, what I have previously (and painfully) labeled as “traditional gendered behavior” is performed throughout.

Disney apologists might point to the final scene, in the near future (around 15:25 in the video), as evidence that progress has suddenly taken not just a technological, but also a social component. The maternal character now appears dressed in business attire and she sits in front of a laptop. She is now the most knowledgeable about the household technology, and the father character is now wearing an apron and doing the cooking. Of course, he is terrible at cooking, and the family longs for the day when technology will liberate the father from his kitchen responsibilities. “One day,” the son hopes, “everything will be so automated that [Dad] will never have to cook another Christmas turkey again.”

The final scene was the product of a 1994 update - the only stage set that has ever gotten an update (other than to the theme song, which has alternated historically between “It’s A Great Big Beautiful Tomorrow” and “Now is the Time” and back again since the show’s conception in 1964). The final scene is a departure in script from the previous final scene of the near future. (The video of the original Carousel, whose embedding is disabled, is here - the final scene starts around 4:01.)

As such, Walt Disney World had every opportunity to include in the script lines that explicitly confirmed that progress has a social, as well as a technological, component. One of the family members could have made a comment about Sarah working, for instance. Instead, the main changes from the original near-future stage set is to update the technology, the interior design of the living room, and the clothing, which was vaguely Star Trekked, and remove the embedded GE sloganeering (We Bring Good Things to Life!™). Yet in other ways, the update is a step backward in its story of progress from the original. For seven seconds (6:19 - 6:26) in the original scene, we see a minority female journalist reporting live from Walt Disney World about holiday celebrations - the only dark-skinned face in Tomorrowland. That image is not in the update.

Perhaps I would be willing to accept certain limitations on any improving of the Carousel of Progress. Disney could say, for example, that the show is beloved and one of Walt Disney’s most personal creations and that they don’t want to gut the thing. They could say that they only want to periodically update the final stage set. But if so, that stage set can do more than just imply that Sarah is a liberated woman by putting wire-framed eyeglasses on her robot face.

I think most of us would agree that young girls are over-sexualized, and that’s a problem. So here’s a novel idea: Blame mommy!

Judith Warner’s column doesn’t start off all that poorly. She writes:

Bling-Bling Barbies and pouty-lipped Bratz. Thongs for tweens, and makeover parties for 5-year-olds. The past couple of shopping seasons have brought a constant stream of media stories — and books and school lectures and anguished mom conversations — all decrying the increasingly tarted-up world of young girls and preteens. Now the American Psychological Association has weighed in as well, with a 67-page report on the dangers of the “sexualization” of girls.

The report takes aim at the music lyrics, Internet content, video games and clothing that are now being marketed to younger and younger kids, and correlates their smutty content with a number of risks to girls’ well-being. It finds that sexualization — turning someone into “eye candy” — is linked to eating disorders, low self-esteem and depression in girls and women. Adopting an early identity as a “Hot Tot” also has, the researchers wrote, “negative consequences on girls’ ability to develop healthy sexuality.”

She doesn’t fall into the “little girls are turning into sluts” trap, which is nice — she clearly recognizes that girls are being turned into eye candy, and that they’re the victims instead of the perpetrators. But then:

This isn’t surprising, or even new. But what did surprise me, reading through the A.P.A.’s many pages of recommendations for fighting back (like beefed-up athletics, extracurriculars, religion, spirituality, “media literacy” and meditation), was the degree to which the experts — who in an earlier section of the report acknowledge the toxicity of mother-daughter “fat talk” — let moms themselves off the hook as agents of destruction requiring change.

Continue reading at Feministe …