The Obama Admin has opened up for public comment on rescinding the HHS "Conscience" Rule that passed in the twilight of the Bush Admin. As Liss noted earlier this month:
The Bad News: Team Obama reportedly does not want to jettison the idea of a conscience clause altogether:
The Obama administration supports the underlying federal laws that protect conscience rights, said the HHS official.
But the administration was concerned that the Bush regulation could also be used to refuse birth control, family planning services and counseling for vaccines and transfusions.
"The administration supports a tightly written conscience clause," said the HHS official. "While we are concerned about the Bush rule, we also understand there might be a need to clarify existing laws."
That sounds to me like there's a distinct possibility the administration may not have a problem with a rule allowing medical professionals to refuse to perform even emergency abortions and dispense emergency contraception to sexual assault survivors—two major concerns regarding the original rule change. Ugh.
Graanted, it's one AP article, so I'll take a cautiously optimistic approach and wait and see what the administration's official line is (which we should know soon).
That said, I'm going to be profoundly unhappy with any federal support of conscience clauses.
As am I--and, I'm guessing, most of us here.
Compassion & Choices, a group that advocates for the right of choice in end-of-life matters, is also opposed to this rule. I don't believe we've touched on end-of-life/palliative care being affected by this law before but it certainly is another aspect of medical care that can--but should not--hang in the balance. At Compassion & Choices, they believe that:
"This ill-conceived rule will surely obstruct and delay good care in many instances and increase the suffering of dying patients and their loved ones." Yet another reason to oppose and request that the Obama admin
wholly & absolutely rescind this rule. They have a form letter on their site that you can use to send a letter and have your voice heard:
just click here. Planned Parenthood
also has a form letter that you can email to voice your support for repealing the rule.
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I actually had to cut myself off when writing the below post, or I would have been writing it for ONE HUNDRED YEARS.
Examples of the disconnect between the overt hatred of feminism and the expectation that girls live feminist lives is something that makes me so angry I get chest pains.
That is all.
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A bunch of people have emailed me the link to this story in the New York Times about attitudes toward domestic violence among teens. The victim-blaming is just incredible.
What most struck me was this passage:
Boys who condone Mr. Brown's behavior disappoint, but don't shock Marcyliena Morgan, executive director of Harvard's hip-hop archive. "But it's the girls!" she said. "Where have we gone wrong here?"
As if boys and girls grow up in a different culture. As if girls who are told they are
less than over and over and over, in myriad ways, throughout their entire lives, who see rape and violence against women served up as the butt of jokes and consumable entertainment, are just going to
spontaneously reject all of that and create an alternative viewpoint for themselves in which abuse against women is wrong. As if, in a culture that communicates to girls from birth that their worth is largely determined on their ability to "get a man," girls will
spontaneously reject the narratives that excuse men's behavior and demonize their female victims. As if girls will
spontaneously be self-reflective enough to identify they blame victims because they deeply fear being one, and because society defines victims as "weak," and we tell girls to be "strong."
As if girls can just be brought up in a patriarchy and expected to spontaneously free themselves from its stranglehold.Why do we expect that of girls, but not of boys? If you're arguing that it's perfectly logical that boys should condone violence against women, then you're essentially just arguing that boys are socialized by their culture. And if you're arguing that it's consternatingly inexplicable that girls should condone violence against women, then you're essentially arguing that girls should be magically resistant to their socialization. That's fair.
Where have we gone wrong with girls? The same place we've gone wrong with boys: Not providing them alternative narratives, that's where. It doesn't do girls any fucking good if we just throw up our hands and say, "Well, of course boys excuse rape and violence against women," and take that as read, so we can move on and wonder what's wrong with the girls. Talk about victim-blaming.
Women and girls don't come to feminism/womanism after waking up one day with the tenets and narratives of equality and autonomy fully formed in their heads. If we're lucky, someone in our lives introduces us to some of these ideas, but most of us have to seek it out, or stumble across it in the middle of a struggle to come to terms with the fucked-up fucking fuckery that is living in a culture steeped in messaging that tells us we're second-class at best and worthless pieces of shit who don't even meet the basic qualifications for personhood at worst.
And our deliverance, the means by which we are conveyed from the self-loathing of less than, and the space we've made in which to do it, is still considered a fucking ghetto.
That's not my characterization. That's the phrase used by the "progressive" male bloggers who have asked me if I don't get tired of languishing in the feminist ghetto. Wouldn't I like to lift myself out of the ghetto? If I'd just stick to writing about politics, and shitcan all that strident feminist stuff, I could escape the ghetto.
Well.
One man's ghetto is another woman's salvation.
Where have we gone wrong with girls? By allowing womanism/feminism to be rendered to the margins—ignored, demonized, ridiculed, caricatured, dismissed. By allowing its advocates and practitioners to be harassed, threatened, intimidated, mocked, abused. By treating as a ghetto all the spaces in which young women might come to the ideas that underlie a belief that violence against women is wrong, that no woman "deserves it." By expecting girls to somehow be above a culture that keeps its boot firmly planted on their goddamn throats.
We, we feminists/womanists, are a fractured, disorganized contingent, for whom the solidarity we seek is often elusive—and yet we are nonetheless treated like a virulent virus that must be destroyed because our ideas are powerful. And they are also, for so many young women, inaccessible.
Where have we gone wrong with girls? By treating as a plague the antidote to what ails them. By pretending we want them to live their lives in a way only womanism/feminism can allow them, but withholding the tools at every fucking turn.
This article was filed in the Fashion & Style section of the New York Times.
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by Shaker rrp
It's not easy being an ally.
No, no, I'm not being snarky. It's difficult to see your own privilege to start with. Also knowing how to be a good ally (rather than spraining a shoulder by patting yourself on the back) is a learning process that never ends.
But being an ally means being willing to do that learning and willing to be wrong. And if you're not, then you're no ally; you're a fauxgressive.
Those Shakers who read livejournal probably heard about RaceFail2009 back in January when it first started*. It's still going on and there are some wonderful things coming out of it, something like lilies out of horseshit or computers out of recycled plastic bottles. But for this post I want to look at the endless need fauxgressives have for cookies.
The cookie monster in this case is fantasy writer Elizabeth Bear who led off this whole sorry mess with the following post on how to write about the Other in fantasy. Now on the face of it this is not a bad idea. Fantasy writers, all fiction** writers for that matter have to think through what it means to be someone else, to imagine a life other than their own. Avalon's Willow responded with the observation that Bear didn't actually do anywhere near a good job of writing the other in her own work. And what Avalon's Willow writes is something that I've read time and time again when someone tries to let someone know their privilege is a problem.
I'm not calling you a monster. I'm not calling you a racist. But I am calling you clueless and ill worded and more than a touch thoughtless. Your ability to think about things, sometimes, does not erase my pain or lack. And only thinking of how things come across, sometimes, is not enough to make me like you. In fact, I don't think there's anything that could make me like you, other than you somehow earning my respect. And that's never going to happen if you keep checking in with me (metaphorical me, the larger culture and audience of PoC me) to see how you're going. Cause then it looks like so much brownie points, so much patting yourself on the back, so much excuses and dissembling; so much pride.
Note that she's not calling Bear bad names; she's pointing out that not considering these things is a luxury for Bear and a reality for her.
But you'd never know that from the wave of white people who jumped all down Avalon's Willow's throat. (Go on and click that link to RaceFail2009; it's a marvel of condescension and cluelessness from Bear's pals and of patience and grace (mainly, though not always) from the antiracist side. Make yourself comfy, it takes days to read completely.)
Bear initially wrote that she agreed with Avalon's Willow's critique (a fact completely over looked by most of her defenders) but then after three months she turned around and wrote Cease Fire, where she says both sides were equally at fault and both sides needed to calm down and that she never did think Avalon's Willow was right in the first place, that she was only going along with it for the educational benefit.
It's my fault because I accepted criticism of my book that I knew to be untrue, that I knew to be based on a shallow and partial reading (a reading of the first chapter of a 160,000-word novel), because I felt it was important to serve as an example of how to engage dialogue on unconscious institutional racism.
I wanted to be part of the solution, and make it a teaching experience, rather than responding with hurt and defensiveness. I wanted the dialogue to be about racism and how to combat it, rather than about me.
In short, she felt so sure of her rightness and so sure that she could lead people out of the wilderness that the critique bounced right off. As person after person wrote in all the different threads, if you're a writer, you need to pay attention to even things you regard as misreadings because somehow you’re not communicating. She thought she could lead the dialogue on unconscious institutional racism through some false persona and she wanted a cookie for it.
What people who struggle honestly with privilege and oppressions learn is that you can't do good work if you deal in lies. You have to be there in the present, openly and honestly. You have to be able to make the mistakes and continue the discussion.
Bear's last comment on the firestorm was the revelation that she was thinking about taking her blog offline, that she felt sad about the people she had hurt, that she was sorry.
Avalon's Willow, at about the same time, was helping with the 12th Carnival of PoC in Science Fiction.
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*I got a link to it a couple of weeks ago from a friend who was getting back at me for turning him on to the time sink that is Crooked Timber. I think he won.
** Maybe non-fiction too.
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I just flipped through the April issue of Shape magazine, and came across this gobbet of enlightenment in the "Live Healthy News" section, on page 82:
The surprising secret to a sizzling love life
Want to have better sex? Skip the candles and sexy lingerie and pick up some condoms. A new study published in the journal Sexual Health found that women who used them along with a form of hormonal contraception, such as birth control pills, reported being more sexually satisfied.
Researchers say that may be because the women were able to stop worrying about sexually transmitted diseases and birth control mishaps, like missed pills or broken condoms, and focus on enjoying the moment. "It could also be that women who double up take better care of themselves, which has a positive effect on sexual health", says study author Jenny Higgins, Ph.D. So if you're not in a committed relationship, stash a box of condoms in your nightstand--and get set for some spicier sessions between the sheets.
The news item is accompanied by a photo of a man and a woman whose burnished and tangled caucasian legs (hers hairless; his blondly fuzzed) emerge from a pup tent, with the caption, "Be prepared: you never know when the mood will strike".
I'm not even sure where to begin, but the piece's breathless discovery that condoms are a good idea will do nicely. Granted, this is a magazine that offers such breakthrough advice as "tap excess powder off brush before sweeping on!" (p.70). But this "news" bit presents the idea that "those not in a committed relationship" should use condoms as revelatory, and that worries me. In the San Francisco Bay Area in the late 1980s, even the nuns at my Catholic high school required that we learn to put condoms on cucumbers. But condom use
appears to be leveling off at best. New HIV infections in the United States alone are also an even bigger problem than previously thought,
according to the CDC. Has condom use among Shape's
"key demographic of college-educated, socially and physically active women in their mid 30s" actually gone so out of style that it can be presented as radically new?
Shape also presents only part of the research. The article from the journal
Sexual Health is behind a paywall, but
here is the abstract (emphasis mine):
Abstract
Background: Little is known about how condoms and other contraceptives influence women’s sexual enjoyment, which could shape use patterns.
Methods: Data from an online study of women’s sexual health and functioning were used to examine how three categories of contraceptive use – hormonal method only, condoms primarily, and dual use – could help predict decreased sexual pleasure associated with contraceptive method and overall sexual satisfaction in the past 4 weeks.
Results: In analyses controlling for age, relationship length, and other variables, male condoms were most strongly associated with decreased pleasure, whether used alone or in conjunction with hormonal methods. Women who used hormonal methods alone were least likely to report decreased pleasure, but they also had significantly lower overall scores of sexual satisfaction compared with the other two groups. Dual users, or women who used both condoms and a hormonal method, reported the highest sexual satisfaction scores.
Conclusions: Because male condoms were viewed by many of these women as decreasing sexual pleasure, sexual risk practices are likely to be affected. Although hormonal only users were highly unlikely to report decreased pleasure, they reported lower sexual satisfaction compared with the other two groups. Dual users, who had the highest sexual satisfaction scores, may have been the most sexually satisfied because they felt more fully protected against unwanted pregnancy and sexually transmissible infections – consistent with previous qualitative documentation of ‘eroticising safety.’ This exploratory study suggests that different contraceptives affect sexuality in various ways, warranting further research into these sexual dimensions and how they influence contraceptive practices.
Keywords: contraception, hormonal methods, male condoms, sexual pleasure, sexual satisfaction.
Dr. Higgins, who researches "gender-sensitive HIV prevention efforts for heterosexual women and men", makes a distinction between sexual pleasure and sexual satisfaction. Shape, however, mentions only sexual satisfaction, but implies that satisfaction and pleasure are identical. Furthermore, the news piece's contention that using male condoms will lead to "spicier sessions between the sheets" contradicts Higgins' finding that women report decreased pleasure (though increased overall satisfaction) when using condoms.
Finally, the Shape author misunderstands Dr. Higgins' quote about "women who double up tak[ing] better care of themselves, which has a positive effect on sexual health". Shape implies that suddenly stashing some condoms will lead to better sex, while Higgins' point is that women who take good care of themselves to begin with have better overall sexual health, and that condom use is but one reflection of that self-care. So, whoever wrote the Live Healthy News piece is either utterly scientifically illiterate or hella* disingenuous.
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*as we used to say in Marin County CA back in '88 (e.g. "damn, these cucumbers are hella slippery now, dude!")
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What one totally unreasonable thing, for which you have absolutely no need, do you nonetheless rapaciously covet? Bonus points if it's also something wildly unlike you to desire.
Three words: Burberry's Nova Satchel.
I have absolutely no need for it; I don't even usually carry a bag (although I might if I owned this one, lol). It's completely absurd that I should want it, and its $795 (!) price tag makes me choke just thinking about it. Even if I were a gazillionaire, I don't think I could spend that much on a bag, just on principle.
(ETA: I'm not judging someone who would; I'm just a cheap-ass!)
What draws me to it is that it evokes a certain kind of womanhood for me. I associate the Burberry print with visiting my grandmother in Queens when I was a kid, and when we'd "go into the city" (Manhattan), it was the older businesswomen, the ones with the determined step and confident gaze, navigating their ways through crowded sidewalks with one raised eyebrow and an ambitiously-set jaw, who were marked with the Burberry plaid.
I don't need that bag at all (not functionally, and not psychologically to feel as accomplished as those women I adored as a kid), but damn if it wouldn't be nice to own it, anyway.
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"No one was arguing that Saddam Hussein somehow had something to do with 9/11."—Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, asserting in an interview with Charlie Rose yesterday that "no one" in the Bush administration believed that former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein had connections to the terrorist attacks of 9/11.
Wow.
For those who may have forgotten (and I envy your talent for it), members of the administration, including most notably former Vice President Dick Cheney, continued to contend that Hussein was connected to the perpetrators of 9/11, Al-Qaeda, for literally years after the alleged connection had been thoroughly debunked.
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Sophie is still insisting on being Monitor Cat, despite the fact that she hangs down over the top of the screen and drives me nutz by blocking the menus and browser tabs half the day. So the weather is finally nice enough that I could open the window, and I figured she's leap right into it.
No. She just continued to lie on top of the monitor, looking out the window.
So I picked her up and put her in the window:
"What the hell...?"
"Well, maybe this would work okay..."
That lasted a good five minutes.
She's now back on top of the monitor, and I have had to move her tail and back leg out of the way three times just to create this post. Each time she gave me a huffy look that can best be described as: "Excuse ME!"
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WaPo columnist Kathleen Parker--yes, that Kathleen Parker--has gone and written another column extolling male privilege, this time in the form of a piece blasting Obama for creating the White House Council on Women and Girls. Or, as Parker would have it, getting pussywhipped by the nagging laydees:
With a flick of his pen, President Obama finally laid to rest Freud's most famous question and iterated one of man's hardest-learned lessons: Women want what women want.
And the wise man sayeth: "Yes, dear."
Zing! Those crazy women, with their menses and their mood swings and their Cathy cartoons and their chocolate cravings, always hen-pecking men over silly stuff like equality of pay and opportunities! Why, next thing you know, they'll be demanding higher allowances, the right to own property, and autonomy over their own reproductive organs! Stop them before they nag their way to equal rights!
But Parker isn't
unreasonable:
There's little profit in criticizing a move to make life better for the fairer sex.
Reality check: As much as I'd like a White House office dedicated to making my life more pleasant-- the White House Council for Massages, Martinis, and Mind-Blowing Orgasms has a nice ring to it--that's not what the White House Council on Women and Girls is about. According to the
White House--which we can maybe agree is in a position to know?--the new agency is actually aimed at "addressing the challenges confronted by women of all ages."
But of course, Parker doesn't think women have any challenges. Nope, they're just using their feminine wiles to trick Obama into giving them extra candy and privileges:
Still, one does have to suppress a chortle as we pretend that the First Father's rescue of damsels in distress is not an act of paternalistic magnanimity. Chivalrous, even.
But enough about the ladies. What about the MENZ?!?!?!
And surely the president can't be ignorant of the fact that boys in this country are in far graver danger than girls in nearly every measurable way.
Where's the White House Council on Men and Boys? Okay, let men fend for themselves. But boys really do need our attention, not only for themselves but also for the girls who will be their wives (we hope) someday. We do still hope that boys and girls grow up to marry, don't we? Preferably before procreating?
OK. "Boy crisis"? debunked, debunked, debunked, debunked.
Leaving aside Parker's weird "hope that boys and girls grow up to marry" (I don't have kids, but if I ever do, I just hope they end up happy--married, domestic partnered, happily alone, whatevs), this obsessive be-all-end-all focus on boys and men is just... weird.
And, sorry to point out the blindingly obvious, but here goes: The need for a special agency focusing on women's and girl's needs is a product of hundreds of years of second-class citizenship in which women and girls have been denied opportunities, subjected to wildly different expectations than boys and men, and told we have to choose between a fulfilling home life and a fulfilling career (with the clear implication that only selfish bitches choose the latter). At the same time, we're told that we make less not because of a structural wage gap, but because of our "choices"--if we choose diapers and a "fulfilling" part-time job over the career track, well, that was our decision.
It takes a deeply delusional person to believe, as Parker clearly does, that the mere creation of a token (if symbolically important) new agency dedicated to addressing centuries of sexism is "advancing the false notion that girls are a special class of people deserving special treatment." You might assume that Parker believes that making any distinction among "classes of people" is advancing a "false notion" that everybody doesn't have the exact same opportunities. Except, of course, for men, who are apparently so threatened by women's advancement that they deserve special emphasis--"The White House Council Obama Forgot," as Parker's subhead puts it --a strangely pitiful portrait of American manhood from a woman so obviously obsessed with masculinity.
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Traveling through east Texas on my way back home Sunday, I saw this image on a Navajo Trucking rig.
I just could not believe those eyes, y'all, just could not. Now, I don't know how much of the rest of the image is authentic (her headdress and the coils around her neck, for example), but I am skeptical.
As I stared at that image, I wondered why in the world the company portrayed a Navajo woman with blue eyes. It occured to me later that it is for the same reasons PoC are encouraged to take on, or prized for being born with, "European" features IRL.
In theory, such features bring us closer to a standard of beauty that most people of European descent can't even achieve. They make us "stand out," "more beautiful," "different."
But I wasn't thinking of any of those descriptors as that truck rolled by me. I was thinking, "How sad." It isn't enough that Navajo Trucking appropriated names and images of a people to "represent" their company. They altered those images to conform to a certain aesthetic, perpetuating a long-standing pattern of trying to own and control the bodies of WoC and how our bodies will be represented.
crossposted
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Rolling Stone's List of "The 100 People Who Are Changing America" includes* a grand total of 13 men of color and 15 women, only 2 of color.
The best part is how at least 4 slots are filled with two white men, i.e. Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert were collectively counted as #5, making the list even more whitestraightdude-heavy.
It's hard to ascertain how many LGBTQIs are included on the list, for obvious reasons, though the only out person who really registered is Rachel Maddow. I might be forgetting someone.
Suffice it to say, the editors of Rolling Stone are not among the people who are changing America.
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* Based on my knowledge of the people included on the list, which means it is conceivable I may have misidentified someone, although I did research where possible.
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...for this important announcement.
All resident Discworld fans should remember to scurry to their televisions this Sunday evening at 7pm EST to view the latest film adaptation of Terry Pratchett's
The Colour of Magic. With Christopher Lee as the voice of Death, I'm all in! The film will be broadcast on the
ION Television network.
In the meantime, head on over to the
official site at Sky One for more information.
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Obama Administration to Stop Raids on Medical Marijuana Dispensers:
Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. on Wednesday outlined a shift in the enforcement of federal drug laws, saying the administration would effectively end the Bush administration's frequent raids on distributors of medical marijuana.
Speaking with reporters, Mr. Holder provided few specifics but said the Justice Department's enforcement policy would now be restricted to traffickers who falsely masqueraded as medical dispensaries and "use medical marijuana laws as a shield."
...Graham Boyd, the director of the American Civil Liberties Union drug law project, said Mr. Holder's remarks created a reasonable balance between conflicting state and federal laws and "seem to finally end the policy war over medical marijuana."
Nice.
At least, insofar as pot
still not being just bloody decriminalized already can
be nice. I'm sure I'm not the first person to suggest that simply ending the pot prohibition would serve as an authentically potent stimulus for our sluggish economy.
Which is pretty ironic, when you think about it.
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Sweet Jesus, I hate Michelle Malkin.
It's getting to the point where I'm having serious difficulty imagining how horrible the thoughts are in her head that she doesn't express. What a vile, contemptible, poisoned, empty shell of a human being.
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10. The number, in millions, of dollars that Citigroup, Inc. reportedly plans to spend on new executive offices "for Chief Executive Officer Vikram Pandit and his lieutenants, after the U.S. government injected $45 billion of cash into the bank." The $10 million would pay for the construction of 17 private offices.
These people are beyond tone deaf. They are utterly clueless.
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Guest Post by Faith
There's nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein. ~Walter Wellesley "Red" Smith
ShakesQuill, that fine repository of the writing of Shakers around the world is ready to resume operations!
Hi all. I'm Faith, a regular commenter on Shakesville, author of That is So Queer... and various published works around town and I am honored to be the new ShakesQuill editrix. Thanks so much to Bill Wolfrum for all of his work as the founding editor, Liss for basically everything she does and all of the courageous and talented writers that have made ShakesQuill into what it is today.
This is what Bill wrote at the inception of ShakesQuill. It is concise and still stands true, so:
"One thing to remember about ShakesQuill - it's a work in progress, and it will likely stay that way. We'll always be looking outside of the box (and inside) for different ideas."
A couple words on submissions: Please give me the name you'd like to use for the piece as a guest contributor, plus any bio info you'd like added, as well. Please remember that we can't use everything. That said, I'll try and use everything I get.
I'll be restarting the Monday Mind Opener and the word of the day. I am looking for volunteers for WOTD and I am completely open to ideas about what you would like to see in that department and any others.
I look forward to hearing from all of you.
[Note from Liss: ShakesQuill is always easily accessible via the icon in the righthand sidebar. Happy reading, Shakers! And thank you, Faith!]
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Here's something on which I won't spend a penny or waste a moment of my time reading*:
Former President George W. Bush, who once famously called himself "The Decider," is writing a book about decisions [tentatively (not decisively) called "Decision Points" and scheduled for a 2010 release].
"I want people to understand the environment in which I was making decisions. I want people to get a sense of how decisions were made and I want people to understand the options that were placed before me," Bush said during a brief telephone interview Wednesday with The Associated Press from his office in Dallas.
..."I want to recreate what it was like, for example, right after 9/11," he said, "and have people understand the emotions I felt and what others around me felt at the time."
Asked if he might write about the ouster of his first defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, or about his decision not to pardon Cheney's former chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, choices both openly disputed by Cheney, Bush said he didn't know.
"I made a lot of decisions," he said.
"I am a great decisionary," he added. "My decisivism is second to none. It's because of my renowned decisionry that I recently awarded myself the key to the city and honorary mayorship of an imaginary town called Decidersburg, USA."
Instead of telling his life story, Bush will concentrate on about a dozen personal and presidential choices, from giving up drinking to picking Dick Cheney as his vice president to sending troops to Iraq. He will also write about his relationship with family members, including his father, the first President Bush, his religious faith and his highly criticized response to Hurricane Katrina.
...Although he didn't keep a diary while in the White House — he "jotted" down the occasional note — he said he began "Decision Points" just two days after leaving the White House and had written "maybe" 30,000 words so far.
Awesome. Can't wait.
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* Unless, perhaps, someone else reads it first and assures me that it's comedy gold.
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In the "Rape is Hilarious" and "Today in Disembodied Things" series—the latest installments of which are respectively here and here, with previous entries linked at their ends—I've talked about the role of humor in perpetuating and normalizing rape and the objectification of women's body parts, and why humor is such a useful tool in the normalization of patriarchal norms and narratives:
[O]ne of the most common themes among the emails I get is gratitude for expressing frustration or contempt or anger at something of which, women have been told in explicit or implicit ways, our jovial and uncomplaining acquiesce is expected. Thank you for saying it's not funny. That something has always bothered me. It's an expression of relief that someone has said publicly what they've felt privately—and maybe never said to anyone for fear of reprisal, for fear of being told they are humorless, hypersensitive, over-reactionary, boring.
…It's a terribly effective silencing strategy, which is why the conveyance of patriarchal norms is so often closely associated with humor. Anyone who dares complain is just No Fun—hence, we find ourselves mired in a culture in which women who don't laugh at seeing parts of their body routinely used as demeaning gags, and the men who are disgusted by such objectification of people they're meant to love and respect, are the ones considered weird.
It can be really daunting to go up against all that, especially in one's everyday life, on one's own, just one woman against someone(s) equipped with such an effective institutionalized mechanism for shaming and silencing.
"Geez, can't you take a
joke?" That's all it takes—the implication that the woman who objects to public expressions of misogyny, who doesn't find funny the means of her own subjugation, or doesn't find amusing being triggered by careless "jokes" about a brutal event she has experienced, is humorless. Uncool. Oversensitive.
Weak. (As though standing up to bigotry is the easy way out, and laughing along is somehow strong.)
Humor that exhorts its targets to participate is even more insidious—and promoting the patriarchal narrative of women as sex class via humor has come to rely heavily on the participation of feminist women themselves. And our allies.
It all seems so innocuous, the jokes we make offering ourselves, our bodies, our services to men (and other women, irrespective of our sexualities, or theirs) to compliment them: Marry me… I want to have your babies… I totally want to fuck you, blow you, make out with you, be your slave… If only I were straight/gay/single…
Oh, it's harmless, you may be thinking—and I wouldn't blame you, as I've thought the same thing, too. It's just a bit of silliness, I've justified it to myself. Heck, even the boys say it! And who doesn't laugh when a feminist man says he wants to have a feminist writer's babies? Pish-tosh. It's innocuous.
But how can it be, knowing what we know about women still being valued (or not) primarily for their bodies and sexuality? There's nothing innocuous about playing into the idea that the greatest contribution any woman has to offer is her body as a sexual reward or or babymaking machine. There's nothing innocuous about implicitly reinforcing narratives that sex is a priceless gift to be meted out in reward for good behavior, or a cheap commodity to be bought, nothing innocuous about rendering the sexual-emotional spectrum down to its two extremes and thus its female practitioners down to one half of a familiar dichotomy—the virgin who rewards the prince with her precious cherry, or the whore who gives her body in exchange for something of value.
Okay, but it's ironic!
But how can it be, knowing what we know about women forced into sexual servitude around the world? It's only ironic if women (all women, women full-stop) have agency. If they don't, it's merely privileged—a proud display of agency that we have that other women do not, tinged perhaps with the anxious fear that we are not as far away from forcibly bearing babies against our wills as we'd like to believe that we are.
But when dudes say it, especially to other dudes, it's subversive!
In a closed audience, where everyone understands everyone else, that's true—in which case it operates much like an ironically-used slur among friends. But while "You're such a girl!" or "You're such a 'mo!" might pass between myself and a gay male friend in private, it's totally inappropriate in a public forum where not everyone understands everyone else, and where our affectionate banter might quite easily be mistaken for legitimate endorsements of misogynistic/homophobic language. Point is: How can a dude be sure that everyone reading along knows for certain that he's being ironic to undermine expectations of women, and not being ironic to mock women?
So, there's really no good way to use this kind of language, is there?
'Fraid not.
I hate losing my favorite phrases when I realize I've been soaking in unexamined bullshit.
Me, too—so may I humbly suggest replacing "I love you and want to have 10,000 of your babies" with the blissfully unoppressive and yet devastatingly tantalizing "I love you and want to do your taxes free of charge."
Now that's a hot offer.
[Related Reading: I Done Good—Where's My Sexual Gratification?]
Open Wide...
Shut Up!
Action Alert: HHS Rule Change Public Comment
