feminist blogs

… in this comment at I Blame the Patriarchy.

In some ways, it couldn’t be helped. For one thing, the author had just taken on a topic that remains agonizingly close to my heart - that of feminist internecine warfare (which I have discussed previously here, among other places). For another thing, she had done so using language that was in some ways just spooky to me:

We are all aggrieved by feminist infighting, “infighting” being the derogatory, male-framed way of describing the inevitable result of multiple intersections of multiple class struggles — the struggles of women of color, of poor women, of middle class women, of Jewish women, of prostituted lesbian intellectual women, et al — each of which classes has been engineered, it goes without saying, by patriarchy.

The spooky part being, for me, the language (although apparently used almost as a jokingly random tossing-together of social categorizations) around so-called “prostituted lesbian intellectual women.” Thus my response, with one minor edit (to correct a grammar goof in the original):

 

Twisty,

When you make this oddly specific reference to “prostituted lesbian intellectual women” I have to wonder if perhaps you might have been an angelic presence accompanying my ex girlfriend and I when we were in the midst of adventures eventually blogged in this post: “Counter-terrorism” as defined in patriarchy-blaming terms, ca. 1993; fragments from my “Patty Hearst” years.

At the time - before our relationship became another casualty* of the ‘divide and conquer’ forces you’ve referenced in such an erudite fashion here - we were all about articulating (and actualizing) a specifically radical feminist agenda of liberation on behalf of prostituted lesbians as a class.

Of course, as Sarah Schulman has noted (in The Sophie Horowitz Story), “Lesbian liberation and the mafia mix like scotch and prune juice. You don’t try it unless you have to.”

Maybe you had to be there to get why I’m invoking this particlar Schulman quote, but let me just say that once one has had the experience of grocery shopping with a mafia pimp (after a hitchhiking experience on I-35E, during which time there was some discussion of whether said individual could possibly provide one with a ride to Kate Millett’s St. Paul, Minnesota flat so that one might return said Famous Feminist’s car keys to her), dystopian novels by the likes of Schulman begin to take on further dimensions of meaning impossible to relate to those who haven’t been so precisely there.

But (as usual) I digress. Mostly, I’d like to call folks’ attention to this poetry fragment (first published in Common Lives, Lesbian Lives - complete cite on request, if you can give me a few days) by Amy Edgington. Here, she is writing specifically about lesbian battering, though the dynamic she invokes extend to less literal woman-on-woman violence:

When a woman beats a woman
the Old Husbands laugh
and admire their unbloodied hands…

Seriously Twisty, you rock.

*For whatever it’s worth, I described this dissolution as best I could in a poem called “How the Fugitives - Two Women Writers - Tried to Love Each Other and Survive,” published in Violence Against Women: An International and Interdisciplinary Journal, Vol. 6, No. 11 (November 2000).

Having commented (and now posted) thusly, I remain a bit freaked out.

Tags: Absurdity, feminism, identity politics, Kate Millett, Minnesota, prostitution, queer, Sarah Schulman, The Past is Not DeadAbsurdity, feminism, identity politics, Kate Millett, Minnesota, prostitution, queer, Sarah Schulman, The Past is Not Dead

In a recent post, I included the following tangent: Have you ever gone underground for years at a time, specifically for the purposes of hiding a young battered woman from white supremacist, organized-crime affiliated pimps? And in the process, getting raped in a downtown Minneapolis homeless shelter, thus becoming involuntarily pregnant? And through it all, actually [...]

Disclaimer: Links to others’ writings in this post should not be taken as indicative of such writers’ agreement with statements made here. (Ordinarily, I’d think that was understood, but I’m feeling extra-cautious tonight.) - VM

…Tonight I was reading an entry from January on Blac(k)ademic: why pornography harms women of color, concerning all the hateful, specifically racist and pornographic internet searches that lead readers to her blog. (That the blog’s author, Nubian, is considering quitting the blog - read the interview @ feministing - could not be less surprising, under the circumstances, not least of which is the tired old trend of feminist internecine warfare, in ample evidence in the now-closed comments to said interview. Sheesh, people.)I won’t repeat the specific terms she cites, precisely because I’m not interested in getting a fresh spike in porn-fed (yes, it rhymes with corn-fed) blog traffic. (When, a few months back, I posted something a very brief entry here about an icky, not to mention infuriating search stat, it only made that problem worse.)I will say, however, that Nubian’s post struck me as being emblematic of the struggle many bloggers whose work addresses sexist and/or racist oppression must deal with. Writing (especially online) about certain topics can simultaneously illuminate and obfuscate the issues one hopes to confront. More often than not, I go with paths of least resistance: rarely writing about the very topics I would be, in some cases, uniquely qualified to address, given specific experiences and situations I have witnessed. My default silences can be taken as apathy, and my posts on apparently “lighter” topics taken as unwarranted myopia, failure to engage, or simple privilege… when it’s anything but that.

(Tangent: Have you ever gone underground for years at a time, specifically for the purposes of hiding a young battered woman from white supremacist, organized-crime affiliated pimps? And in the process, getting raped in a downtown Minneapolis homeless shelter, thus becoming involuntarily pregnant? And through it all, actually losing count of how many variously rat-infested and otherwise dangerous squats you had to take temporary shelter in, how you went hungry more often than not, and how frequently you managed, just barely, to avoid getting yourself killed? No? Well then, don’t say a fucking word to me about privilege.)

But I digress.

I spent at least two hours alternating between the racism and porn post by Nubian @ blac(k)ademic, and the Feministing interview of the same author. And tried - desperately tried - to come up with a coherent and comprehensive response.

But somewhere between the shock of reading “brilliant” and “Patrick Califia” in the same sentence in the comments at blac(k)ademic, and reading some moron, commenting as “Eshew Obfuscation” (yes, the misspelling of eschew is in the original), who was attacking Nubian for her allegedly “atrocious writing style (misspelled words, incoherent grammar and shoddy support for your arguments)…” I had to stop reading and take a breath, for fear that my head could actually explode.

Then, thinking I’d take my mind off all that by reading something of a less overtly political nature at MetaxuCafe (a literary blog network), what I found was this: Debra Hamel’s review of Playground: A Childhood Lost Inside the Playboy Mansion, a memoir by Jennifer Saginor.

Mind you, I have no beef with Hamel’s review (and anyway, I like to actually read the books others review, before I get into those sorts of exchanges - crazy, crazy me), nor with what I was able to glean of the substance of Saginor’s memoir.

What I left that website reeling from, rather, were the advertisements, obviously targeted (by bots, rather than immediately available humans) for inclusion on the site, based on specific keywords in Hamel’s review, an excerpt of which would be illustrative here (I’ve placed certain keywords in boldface):

…Saginor’s father, “Dr. Feel Good,” was… a doctor with a thriving Beverly Hills practice, famous for dispensing pills to models and Hollywood starlets. He was also Hugh Hefner’s personal physician and Hef’s right-hand man for more than thirty years, a fixture at the Playboy Mansion. Saginor’s parents were divorced when she and her sister Savannah, two and a half years her junior, were very young. Saginor’s father had custody of the girls on Thursdays and alternate weekends: he started bringing them to the Playboy Mansion when Jennifer was six…

And wouldn’t you know it, alongside the review text, the following ads (posted here as image files only) appeared:

…Which means, of course, that for all the labor put forth by women to articulate the brutalities of sexism (a microcosm of which is readily found in the sex industry - including those corners of the industry where women pimp other women, and then pass themselves off as “feminist” “sex workers” - but that’s another years-suppressed diatribe, for another day)…

For Saginor’s efforts in her memoir, for Hamel’s work in her review, and, of course, for Nubian’s writing on a broad range of issues… there remain any number of cretins out there, positioning themselves to profit from, and/or get off on, our collective pain.

(And I’m not going to pick apart Hamel’s decision to use such “targeted” advertising; writers deserve to survive as writers. My stupid review of local espresso shops, printed four years ago in Style Weekly, earned me more money than I’d ever gleaned from writing, until that time - a whopping $70! - and I’m sure a good portion of those meager funds came from porn ads in the back section. Fuck it, that $70 was groceries.)

I just need to scream this, here and now (even if I go quiet again later, or return to writing more on less overtly political matters): I hate the way systems of oppression, interlocked and interlocking, trigger a kind of cultural cannibalism among us. The attacks on Nubian in the feministing interview were heartbreaking. So, too, is the notion that she may be too battle-worn to continue writing (at least, in the blac(k)ademic venue).

But as much as I want/need to scream this, I also long for silence. Is that self-preservation, or a cop-out, or both?

Again, from Adrienne Rich’s North American Time (I should just get the entire poem tattooed across my back already…):

Sometimes, gliding at night
in a plane over New York City
I have felt like some messenger
called to enter, called to engage
this field of light and darkness.
A grandiose idea, born of flying.
But underneath the grandiose idea
is the thought that what I must engage
after the plane has raged onto the tarmac
after climbing my old stairs, sitting down
at my old window
is meant to break my heart and reduce me to silence.

On This Day in 1911, 146 people died in the very building I work in. The result of their deaths was the rapid growth of the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union and the real beginning of the fight against sweatshops. It also was the beginning of fire regulations in American cities.I work in what is now known as the Brown Building at NYU. But in 1911 it was the Asch building. The top three floors of the Asch building comprised the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory. For the record, a shirtwaist is essentially a woman’s blouse. I work a couple of floors below where the factory was. This factory employed some 500 workers, mostly young women immigrants. The working conditions were essentially sweatshop conditions with fourteen-hour workdays and a 60- to 72-hour workweek. It was also a death trap. Workers of course smoked and lighting was from gas lighting…and, of course, the clothing was flammable. But it was even worse due to management distrust of the workers. One of the two exit...

On This Day in 1911, 146 people died in the very building I work in. The result of their deaths was the rapid growth of the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union and the real beginning of the fight against sweatshops. It also was the beginning of fire regulations in American cities.I work in what is now known as the Brown Building at NYU. But in 1911 it was the Asch building. The top three floors of the Asch building comprised the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory. For the record, a shirtwaist is essentially a woman’s blouse. I work a couple of floors below where the factory was. This factory employed some 500 workers, mostly young women immigrants. The working conditions were essentially sweatshop conditions with fourteen-hour workdays and a 60- to 72-hour workweek. It was also a death trap. Workers of course smoked and lighting was from gas lighting…and, of course, the clothing was flammable. But it was even worse due to management distrust of the workers. One of the two exit...