feminist blogs

I’ve been meaning to write some more game-related posts, especially in the wake of the very fun presentation that Roy and I gave at WAM! 2008. For now, however, I just have a review of Mighty Jill Off, a free downloadable PC game that I recommend you all check out. It’s bound to be one of the more notable offbeat, indie, retro, lesbian-BDSM-themed jumping games of the year. OK, so it’s probably also the only game that fits those criteria. Ever.

Let’s get the preliminaries out of the way: this is not a porn-tastic game replete with breast physics and girl-on-girl action to appeal to adolescent gamer dudes. If anything it’s closer to the opposite, and the theme actually makes a disturbing amount of sense. (And not only because the creator seems to be kind of into BDSM and fetish stuff herself.)

It’s long been noted by game scholars and humorists alike that there’s a masochistic quality inherent in many games. Hemmed in by the demands of an almost arbitary system of constraints and rules, you willingly submit to the system in search of an elusive and transitory experience of “fun,” to the extent where you let most of your thought processes be taken over.
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Lisa–as usual–has already devoted many paragraphs to responding to this post, but I’m adding my contribution here, because I read this comment and sorta went, “Hm.”

Here is my position in a nutshell:
1. Transwomen are people (yep! “people”) that have made some sort of *change* to be considered (trans) “women”
2. To have transitioned is to have supported the message that links what our bodies are to how we express them. That, to me, is gender. (That those expressions, however, oftentimes have binary influence-influence not carbon copy- is no accident.)
3. I don’t want body parts “expressible” (maybe you do? or don’t care either way)
To “express” womanhood/being a “woman” is to further define/perpetuate how those with the status of “woman” under Status Quo Norms should act or behave and, thusly, what people expect from them (for obvious reasons, you didn’t become trans to be considered translisa). Any positive re-enforcement of this, afaic, is problematic and oppressive.4. I recognize that my latter points are not appreciated by transpersons so I’m not going to go out of my way (across seas, lots of expense) to say those things to transpersons who already have a hard enough time with conservative values. Contrary to typical conflation radfems are not conservatives–our positions are wholly different and you are smart enough to discern.
5. All I would like, wrt to trans exclusive spaces, are enough places I may go, in one lifetime, on one hand, that allow me to speak comfortably about the points presented above.
6. I will always question the motives of trans who can in one breath call me transphobic (or bigot, or fundamentalist) and then ask “So can I come?”

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That’s right, I said scrubbing. Scrubbing sweat off of underage boys in a locker room. It’s central part of a new game for the Nintendo DS called Duel Love, in which you play a female transfer student who ends up as the personal trainer for a secret “Fight Club” at her new high school. That’s right, the companies that brought you Pac-Man, Tekken, Power Rangers, Tamagotchi and many more now bring you… scrubbing down sweaty boys and giving them massages!

Romance comics for girls, often featuring delicate, beautiful boys who fall in love with the plucky or cipher-like heroine — or, just as often, fall in love with each other — are nothing new in Japan. It used to be that you could pretend this was just another Or in the United States; check the Manga section of your local Barnes & Noble. Dating games based in similar scenarios (often called otome, the Japanese word for maiden) are nothing new either, but they’re getting to be bigger and bigger-budget projects. And utilizing new technology as well… as you can see in the trailer below, you have to actually scrub back and forth with the Nintendo DS styles, and here’s a picture instructing the player to blow into the microphone to clear away the steamed-up shower stalls. Why, whatever on earth for?

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I’m going to make “Feministe Feedback” a regular feature here, given that the last two reader-response threads went really well (see: Raising Feminist Daughters and Talking to Your Partner About Sexism). I’ll try to do it weekly, although I think it’ll depend more on when questions for the peanut gallery are posed.

This week, the question comes from a regular reader a close friend of mine in “real life.” The background is this: She and her husband (both 24) have taken in her husband’s 13-year-old cousin, who we’ll call A. They don’t have any other kids, and they only have A temporarily. Today, she emailed me with this (identifying information redacted or changed):

So. Today when I was home at lunch, A was saying how if his friend was gay, he’d punch him. I asked him why. Being gay is wrong, and being straight is right. I asked why again. No answer. So, I pulled up your video of Ellen, found the boy’s name, and googled the article. Then, I read it to A. I also told him about the 17 year that was killed (I sent you the article, I”m bad with names). Then I asked him if he thought it was okay that these guys got killed. He replied no. I asked why. He said they only needed to be beat up. To make a long story shorter, I continued asking questions, and discussing this with him. I was starting to get pretty upset. [My husband] jumped in a few times. A said it was okay for girls to be gay, but not boys. No answer for why that is. So I told him he had to think about why, and we were going to finish this discussion when I got home.

Jeez.

A is a smart kid. He’s pretty well versed in women’s rights. His mom was definitely a feminist. Wouldn’t even carry or use the word ‘purse’- only bags, lol.

I’m sure his parents have had gay friends, so this was pretty surprising to me. So we are going to keep talking and talking and talking about it.

Good thing is, is that I think having [my husband] hear this conversation made my point to him about how it all starts with a joke. And then snowballs into a 14 year old thinking its okay to kill someone.
I’ve never been stern with A cause I haven’t had to, so I think I kind of freaked him out because I was being really stern. If he was older, I would’ve been pissed, but I was trying to remain calm. He’s young, and really its not his fault. Hopefully I can get most of my point through to him. He’s a sensitive kid, so [my husband] asked him how he would feel if someone decided that being Mexican was wrong, and beat him up. (A is Mexican and Italian).

Having a 13 year old is hard.

Sure sounds like it.

So, Feministers: How do you talk to kids (your own or others’) about homophobia? How do you explain that homophobia is wrong to a 13-year-old who is steeped in it every single day, and who probably constantly hears “gay” as an insult from his peers? Any strategies for my friend and for other parents, guardians and folks who interact with kids?

via Ecdysiasm I came across this op/ed in the Seattle Times that illustrates pretty damn well why feminism cannot be separated from other gender-justice issues, and why women’s rights will never be fully realized until we also get rid of narrow masculine rolls and homophobia. The op/ed starts out discussing the new “men’s movements” in conservative churches, aimed at re-establishing masculine roles as a way to deal with what church leaders perceive as a masculinity crisis. The result?

Personally, I have no problem with the effort to make church work better for men or challenging men to step up and do something with their lives. I do have a problem with it when it means, as it sometimes does, putting down women or insisting women play only secondary roles in church or family. And I have a big problem with the guy emphasis when it relies on making gay men objects of derision and ridicule.

Such appears to be the case in remarks made by Ken Hutcherson, pastor of Antioch Bible Church in Kirkland. Hutcherson has gotten headlines for his efforts to pressure Microsoft on gay issues. He has a right to his views — views he supports with texts from Scripture. Reasonable people can disagree over whether gay marriage is a good idea.

But Hutcherson goes beyond reasonable, at least to judge by the report of Seattle psychologist Valerie Tarico. Tarico, a former staffer at Children’s Hospital and Regional Medical Center, was raised in a fundamentalist church. In recent months, she has made it her business to attend services at many of the large, conservative churches in the Seattle area, including Hutcherson’s, to see what’s going on.

On a Sunday when Tarico was present, Hutcherson was preaching on gender roles. During his sermon, Hutcherson stated, “God hates soft men” and “God hates effeminate men.” Hutcherson went on to say, “If I was in a drugstore and some guy opened the door for me, I’d rip his arm off and beat him with the wet end.”

Emphasis mine. Unsurprisingly, Hutcherson later defended himself by saying that it was a joke.

There is something very, very wrong with a masculinity premised on violence. There is something very, very wrong with a masculinity that sees femaleness as so insulting that men should react with full outrage if someone treats them like a “woman” by holding the door.

Hutcherson’s misogyny and his homophobia are not separate issues. He doesn’t just dislike homosexuality for the sake of it; he dislikes LGBT people because being queer challenges traditional gender roles. If penises and vaginas were just body parts without superiority attached to one or the other, and if sex was just an attribute like any other, two women pursuing a romantic relationship wouldn’t matter all that much. Two men getting married wouldn’t be any bigger a deal than a man marrying a woman. A person saying that their genitals don’t match their understanding of themselves, and taking steps to change that, wouldn’t be a threat to the social order.

These are not separate issues. And yet there are far, far more people in this country (and perhaps even reading this blog) who support women’s rights, but not gay rights or trans rights or the full destruction of traditional gender roles. Hopefully, comments like Hutcherson’s will at least help to convince more feminist-leaning moderates and progressives that all of us have a dog in this fight.

Simmie Williams, a 17-year-old kid, was shot and killed this morning. Simmie is alternately being referred to as a “cross-dresser” and a “transvestite” in the (already limited) press coverage. I’m having a hard time finding out details about what happened, since the news stories are simply telling me that Simmie was “dressed like a woman” and “he” had a verbal argument with two men (no info on whether Simmie identified as male or female, but the press is apparently comfortable choosing for Simmie). No quotes from Simmie’s family or friends. None of the usual humanizing comments or tidbits from people who knew Simmie. Just the usual identification of a freak, and impostor “dressed as a woman.”

Wonder why that could be.

You know, we could actually decide to do something about the Simmie Williamses and the Shanesha Stewarts and the Bella Evangelistas and all the victims whose names never make the papers, but instead our news media is bloviating about boys in the girls’ room. So you’ll forgive me if I kind of feel like throwing something right now.

Instead, I read Holly and I read Little Light and I cry. And I feel so, so ashamed of being part of a society that does this to people.

Thanks to Tatiana for the link — and for the simple statement that “People are assholes.” That just about sums it up.

Or if they do, I hope this guy failed it, and was also drop-kicked by his professor. He’s a par for the course fuckwit college columnist for sure, but I’m having a hard time even getting the point of his fuckwittery because he’s such a bad writer. For example, I take the following to mean that condoms enable people to place their tongues and penis in buttcracks:

In his music video “Tip Drill,” Nelly uses a credit card to demonstrate the act of a man scraping his penis on a woman’s butt crack. And some time ago, “Sex in the City” featured a jogger who has a fetish of putting his tongue on that same general region.

Indeed, the condom is no longer a barrier but an enabler-freely dispensed for “health” reasons. Duke’s “Healthy Devils” brandish them on the Plaza because apparently the group thinks that the only reason to avoid something sexual is to avoid something that is physically “unhealthy.”

Which is, well… I’m just confused.

He continues:

And, it is often said these days that each of us must express an “inner identity” or a “true self” through conscious action to be unique. Accordingly, people declare that the quest for sexual individuality justifies exposure to sex in its crudest forms.

As Duke’s LGBT Center Web site explains, “As an individual lets go of their heterosexual identity, they may experience a sense of isolation, of no longer fitting into the heterosexual world around them.” It adds, “The more comfortable you feel in college, the better you will do, and the more enjoyable your college years will be.”

I found this unsurprising.

From their it goes into a bizarre rant against bisexuality.

The public obsession with identity has forced the bisexual to act on his or her urges. As in heterosexuals, this is a form of deviancy because lust threatens sex’s role in entering relationships of love.

The bisexual, to conform to the public identity, must express urges for both sexes. Yet some things are in fact best left unexplored.

Perhaps the bisexual should consider reverting to heterosexuality with the understanding that sexual expression is slavishness to the ideology of identity rather than something truly beneficial.

It is important to understand that the bisexual identity is a creation of people intent on supporting the discussion of identity, not encouraging love. Suppressing urges out of shame and decency facilitates love; expressing desires for the sake of identity does not.

I do not expect many to agree with me. I only point out the situation in the hopes of showing to a few of our more prude peers that their suppressions (whether voluntary or not) of sexual desires for both sexes are more healthy than the brazen applications of rubbers and jellies in the name of health, progress and identity could ever be.

I really hate to pull the “he’s homophobic because he’s secretly gay” card, but this guy really sounds like he has some, er, “identity” issues (to use his terminology). Unless I’m totally misunderstanding him, which, given his general ineptitude with the written word, may be the case. Does the Duke Chronicle not employ editors?

The comments, however, are hilarious.

Thanks to blue devil lurker for the link.

Every day I love Stephen Colbert a little bit more:

So good. Now excuse me while I go back to destroying the sanctity of marriage.

I first saw this ad when I was in Germany, and took note of it mostly because the dude is smokin’ and because I was surprised to see men kissing on television (we don’t get that in ‘merica):

Then I saw it again on TV in the gym a few days ago. In the USA. Guess which part was cut out.

Attitudes like Sherri Shepherd’s are why there are still so many queer & trans youth out on the streets. At least attitudes like hers in kind, if not in degree. She tried to make some kind of point about how she wouldn’t just go off at her son if he wanted to wear a dress… but you know, if you have a serious problem and even a moral opposition to some part of your child that they can’t change about themselves? And you say that there’s no place for that in your house? It’s only a hop, skip and a jump before they have no place in your house. Seriously… how many more generations before good parenting means letting kids grow up, whether they’re trans or not, straight or not, while expressing their gender however they want to?

I found the clip via Feministing, where there’s some trans 101 going on in the comments as usual, along with people tsking at Barbara Walters for assuming that a child might be trans. That’s funny, I watched the video and it seemed to me like she spent more than half the time saying that it’s quite possible the child isn’t trans–which is quite true. When you take a step back, it starts to look really obvious which is the possibility that nobody wants to deal with or think about, isn’t it? Also, the question came up: is it all right to forbid your son from wearing a dress for his own safety? It’s not a bad question. But I think it needs to be asked with the understanding that for a whole lot of trans people, it’s far more than an issue of whether people are going to make fun of you or beat you up. And asked with the goal in mind that regardless of who a kid grows up to be, we ought to be working towards a home and school environment where kids are protected from persecution based on gender expression.