Recently in Feminism Category
This, from a female college professor who identifies as a feminist:
"Who really needs another boring mommy blog about crockpots and carpool schedules?"
Really?! This is your feminism? Dismissing a whole category of women's writing like it's a joke?
Get out of the goddamn classroom before you poison our nation's youth.
So there's this blog called Frou Frou Fashionista, which is all about lingerie. 99% of my wardrobe consists of jeans and tank tops and all my cotton underwear is from Target, so I am not the kind of person who typically reads fashion blogs, let alone lingerie blogs. Regardless of topic, though, most good blogs share certain things in common regardless of the topic - enthusiasm and a personal viewpoint being among them. The Frou Frou Fashionista gals definitely have that, and I have nothing against their blog specifically.
(It does seem likely to give me the same body image / appearance issues that caused my breakup with Glamour magazine years ago, since both are filled with images of women who are, let's say, unnaturally compliant with bizarre cultural beauty standards? But that's not specific to them, that's a nationwide epidemic, so we're going to ignore that part for right now.)
One of their recent posts was a startling reminder of how far removed my day to day thoughts must be from the rest of the world. The Lake & Stars - Spring 2010 is a collection of photographs produced to highlight a new lingerie collection. The images include what look to me like a lingerie-clad woman in the following situations:
- being pulled by a rope tied around her midsection
- being stalked by a man holding an axe
- caught in a net in the back of a truck
- floating dead in a lake
When I saw that there were over 30 comments on the post, I scrolled down to check them out, expecting to see some controversy. Instead, every single comment praised the photography, the lingerie, and the creativity of the photo shoot.
I was stunned. In my world, SOMEONE would have said something like "Um, yeah, because what's sexy is women being captured, stalked, and killed. Wait, WTF?" I am aware that some non-sexist people find images of people tied up to be sexy, and I'm not taking a position on that here. I'm just so unaccustomed to spending time in environments where no one would point out that these images have the potential to be problematic.
If you go on to the The Lake & Stars Spring/Summer 2010 Lookbook itself, you can see the entire sequence of images in the order they were published, along with the "captions and a bit of a dangerous story" mentioned in the Frou Frou post.
In context, the unsettling images are a bit more "suspense thriller" and a bit less "exploitation." The woman is in the woods running, setting traps, and spying on her unnamed opponents with binoculars. The caption that goes with the axe photo is this:
When a guy suddenly comes at you with an axe, it usually means he's as unprepared as you are. Remember, an axe is rarely a weapon of choice.
The caption that goes with the picture of her in the net is this:
Sometimes, your opponents will be sure they have the upper hand. That's when they're most vulnerable.
Taken altogether, I'm not as disturbed by the set as I was by the subset presented on Frou Frou Fashionista. However, I'm still a little freaked out by the fact that in over 30 comments on the post, no one raised even a slight concern.
Either I'm completely off-base, or I spend too much time in the feminist blogsphere, or I should spend ALL my time there because the rest of the blogosphere is too unsettling. I can't decide.
Earlier this year, Maria Niles wrote a post on BlogHer called Why I'm Pro-Choice. Maria is a great writer, so I read it. While discussing how we can find common ground on abortion, she said this:
What I would love to see is that we focus our energy towards loving women.
To me, this seemed like the perfect description of feminism. When you love someone, you try to help her, and you want her to grow into the person she was meant to be, using all of her talents and gifts to the fullest extent possible. No one is perfect, of course, so the WAY we love is sometimes messed up by our own individual dramas. If you can pare that all away, though, real love is something wonderful.
Borrowing from Maria's words, to me being a feminist means loving women.
That definition might not work for everyone. I'm specifically thinking about women of color here. Quite understandably, women of color might need more details, since they're fed up with white feminists like myself claiming they care about all women but only focusing on middle- and upper-class white women's concerns. That behavior by white women is racist. We're letting our f&*%ed up cultural behavior hurt the people we should be loving. In my personal universal definition of feminism, to truly love someone and love them well, you have to hear them, respect them, and find out what they need to be happy - not just what you think they need. It's hard work. And if you're running around focusing on yourself and your needs exclusively while claiming to help others, you're dong it wrong.
So if we can agree (at least for the purposes of this post) that I actually mean loving ALL women properly and not just when it's convenient or self-serving, then let's also talk about conservative Christian women.
My husband has an amazing talent for picking up verbal bad habits. What starts as a funny joke once or twice gets stuck in his speech pattern until he's said it 5.2 million times and I WANT TO STRANGLE HIM. Then he starts working to get it under control. About a year later, it's finally extinguished.
The first one that got really out of control pluralization. One of us made a joke out of pluralizing some noun, and then that noun was pluralized all the time, and then other nouns were pluralized in almost every sentence, and then I threatened divorce. Not really. I just complained a lot about hearing him talk as though he had more than one wife, son, and car, when to the best of my knowledge he has but one of each. Ditto for his head, the computer, the kitchen table, and several other frequently discussed objects.
The toaster oven escaped the pluralization episode, only to meet a different fate. I anthropomorphize objects, particularly ones that have been with me for a long time. This toaster oven was purchased when I moved out of a dorm and into an apartment, which was 1993? 1994? Let's just say over a decade. So it's practically an old friend, and I made the mistake of calling it "that guy" one day when I was tired and couldn't think of the word "toaster."
Do you see what's coming?
C-Man thought it was funny, so he started doing it too. First the toaster, and then the heating pad became "the hot guy," which was amusing, and then it spread. It spread and spread and spread until any object at any time could be referred to as "that guy" whether he could think of the actual name for it or not.
Then toys for our son began arriving in the house, and they too fell into the new classification scheme. The only toy that was not called "that guy" was a tomato. (Because it was short and round?)
From the way I'm writing this, you'd think this was all my husband's doing, but I got stuck with it too. One of the most difficult tasks ahead for me in raising my middle-class white son is going to be making him aware that the world should not revolve around rich white boys, but here I was going around saying "that guy" when I meant a diaper, a sock, or a drinking glass.
Feminists get ridiculed for obsessing about things like this. "Why can't they focus on something important?" people complain, "It doesn't mean anything, it's just a word, and 'guy' is practically gender neutral at this point anyway!" I admit, I've have had moments of impatience with women who complain about being part of a group addressed as "you guys." Though I agreed that the person using the phrase "you guys" could have been more courteous, it just didn't seem like a big deal to me as a marker of sexist oppression. (Side note: Why doesn't everyone just use the gender neutral second person plural "y'all"?)
The "guy"-ification of every inanimate object in my home didn't seem like as big of a deal as, say, the pay gap or funding for rape crisis centers, but it started to get creepy. Even C-Man had to admit that it WAS gendered. We were specifically using the word "guy" instead of "thing" or "doohickey" or "whatsit," and we both felt like it was gendered when we said it. Our mental images were becoming gendered. And Boy Detective was spending all his time hearing about how everything in his world was a guy unless proved otherwise.
Yuck.
So we started getting rid of it. Every time I noticed one of us saying "that guy," I would loudly say "that THING." And somehow, despite the record levels of sleep deprivation experienced by parents of a baby who won't sleep through the night, we started remembering the actual names for the objects in our environment. Amazing.
Next on my list in battling everyday sexism... oh, who am I kidding, I'm too tired to make a list.
Last time I took it, I failed.
 | 42 As a 1930s wife, I am |
If you've been reading this blog for any length of time at all, you know that I love BlogHer, and that I am a feminist. You don't have to be a feminist to love BlogHer. You don't have to identify as a liberal or progressive. You don't even have to be a woman.
So when BlogHer created BlogHers Act, a project to harness the power of women online to make the world a better place, was it difficult to find a project that everyone could agree on?
Um, no. There are plenty of ways to help out in the world that everyone can agree on as A Good Thing. BlogHers Act has assembled nine of them.
So, care to join me in saving women's lives by improving maternal health? As BlogHer Denise pointed out this week in her post There's Still More Work To Do, "The women and children and families of Afghanistan, Africa, Burkina Faso, Burma, China, Darfur, and Nepal still need our help."
We're giving part of our "economic stimulus" check to our local food bank to help repair some of the damage done to our local community by national policies (past and present), and some of it will go to this to help repair some of the international damage (again, past and present). Those are our motivations, they don't have to be yours. Not everyone can afford to spare some of that unexpected cash, but if you can, won't you join us?
Peace, everyone.
So what's with the use of "Jane" as a universal signifier for femaleness?
First instance, the "Be Janes" who appeared at BlogHer last year. They were representatives of an online home improvement community on Windows LiveSpaces. Their marketing pitch was a bad match for the conference, and most of the attendees disliked them - but what struck me was the name Jane. The two women are not named Jane in real life. They are named Heidi and Eden. Why do they go around pretending their names are Jane?
Second instance, found through their ad in Gmail: Being Jane. From their About Us page:
Being Jane is an explosive online community dedicated to shattering the preconceived notions of women in society and the evolving roles that women are forced to play. Founded by Kelly Smith in 2004, Being Jane provides access to advice, mentoring, support and a compendium of women-related information that leverages the experiences of women who have achieved non-traditionally female goals by actualizing their authentic beliefs and desires. Being Jane is committed to redefining the idea of feminism to symbolize women coming together to raise the bar, embrace the vitality of being a woman and champion the connection to future generations.
The website menu options include Are You a Jane? and Talk With Other Janes. How do you shatter preconceptions by evoking the epitome of 50's girlhood? And why does a redefined feminism mean we all have the same name?
Third instance, the See Jane program founded by Geena Davis. It's a project to improve gender portrayals in children's media. For this, the Jane name makes more sense due to its origin in children's books.
However, isn't the Jane reference a little... kitschy? And, y'know, white?
Just thinking.
The Princess: I am not commenting on this post.
C-Man: Thank you, I feel so much stupider after having seen that page. I need to go listen to Mozart or some shit to undo the damage done to my brain.
The Princess: I'm just sad that there are no other words in the English language to convey weakness except for words referring to women's genitals. It's such a restriction on talented writers like this fine gentleman.
Me Elsewhere
