Feminism

[stip]

An open letter to Red Mosquito:

Dear Red Mosquito,

I understand that some of you are wondering whether or not Miley Cyrus' foray into being an obnoxious rich late teens dipshit counts as an act of female emancipation, primarily because Cyrus is to young and too rich to experience emotions like embarrassment, regret, and, although not strictly speaking an emotion, good judgement . But all that aside there is a serious question to be asked here.

Feminism is not about being allowed to do whatever you feel like it because you feel like it. That's called being 4. It is also not allowing women to make whatever sort of 'choices' they want. That's the way capitalism has bastardized the concept to defang it and make some money off of it (see also the curious transformation of freedom into options in the marketplace--the United States was freeer than the Soviet Union because we can stock an entire supermarket shelf with 30 varieties of Mountain Dew).

Feminism is in the end about challenging power--allowing women to author their own decisions on the basis of the rules they chose to adopt, reflecting the values they wish to embrace. So in order to figure out if Miley Cyrus is a feminist we need to figure out whether or not the choices she is making reflect her own emancipated interests, rather than playing a role prescribed to her by a male dominated society. Is she simply a good dog being rewarded with nice treats for doing a clever trick. I suspect it is the later, but who can say for sure?

More interestingly is the possibility that she could be authentically making her own choices and still harming women. When Miley Cyrus is rewarded for getting naked she gets millions of dollars. She is a celebrity. And that money grants her power and independence. But is she also helping to perpetuate the objectification of women as objects which does real harm to women much further down the chain. The stripper at the dive bar, the girl who has to pose for some website to pay her rent, or who needs to prostitute herself to get money for school, food, etc. Does it help legitimate rape culture? Does it devalue women who lack the resources that enable them to not care what other people think about them. If a different woman did what she did and put it on Facebook what is going to happen to her when an employer sees it? Is Miley Cyrus acting how she acts going to open up new avenues for Malice or Sarah or someone else? Probably not.

That's the issue. Miley Cyrus will be fine controlling for the possibility of celebrity self-destruction. But she could still be helping to reinforce images and expectations about women that are harmful to those weaker then her.

It's possible that 20 years ago, when you could make a more credible argument that women's sexuality was taboo, that what she was doing was helping to push back against other destructive social taboos. But she's not Madonna. There's nothing shocking, interesting, or transgressive about this anymore. See also: Lady Gaga.

When someone like Amanda Palmer does this kind of stuff it might be a bit different. She is not a conventional sex object. There is also a self-conscious political agenda behind what she does. She uses nudity to challenge certain cultural and artistic norms and expectations. It's still less impressive than it it would have been pre Madonna, but at least there is an ideology behind it. Miley Cyrus is just the version of Girls Gone Wild that People magazine chooses to cover.


The United States is not afghanistan. Nor is it 30 years ago. If Miley Cyrus wants to help women she can donate money to political groups that fight for equal pay, reproductive rights, better family leave and fleixible workplace laws. Things that impact the lives of women who are not also multi millionaires.
real feminism

Stip, your ability to disenfranchise the individual and victimize groups of people is unparalleled. You are a wold champion genderist.

First, who are you to tell Miley how she should help people? Or that she is harming people? Or to think thank a person can't be a millionaire and a real feminist.

I am the writer of an open letter. That gives me all the moral authority I need

And I think people can be millionaires and real feminists. But I don't think a celebrity taking her clothes off is liberating a mom who would prefer to not be working at a strip club. And I think any rich person who is trying to help other people through their example needs to remember that fame and resources grant you privileges and immunities that other people will not share. For the same reason I never find stories of celebrities struggling with diseases or adversity or what have you to be all that moving.

Second, the way you victimize groups of people is beyond belief. You denigrate them while acting like you are looking out for their interests. Have you ever befriended any strippers? Treated them like real people and and just gotten to know them? Maybe even get your hands dirty and hang out with them? Because I think if you did you would not look down on them and your circumstances like you do. I have been lucky enough to have been friends with a handful of strippers. Lucky enough to know them as real people and close enough to ask them questions about their career choices. I can tell you that none of them felt exploited and a couple of them felt they exploited mens needs for profit.

That's good. I'm glad they enjoy it, and I also think it is perfectly possible for this to be the case, nor do I judge them for that. A friend bought me a lap dance for a wedding present (he missed the wedding and this was another friend's bachelor party) and it was an incredibly uncomfortable experience precisely because i felt like I was being exploited (the egg timer she took out at the start kinda said it all).

If someone chooses to do something and they are comfortable with it and enjoy it good for them. I think the tone of my posts makes it fairly clear that my concern would be with people who do these things because they feel like they do not have other options. As does my definition of feminism.

Having said that, the anecdotal evidence you've accumulated is probably not as persuasive as the voluminous research that's been done on this stuff, unless you really know a lot of strippers.

A couple of them were even in my university program. I know, you are shocked, a stripper can have agency and a brain

I'm not sure who you are arguing against, but it isn't me. In fact, I mentioned people having to strip to pay for school. So presumably they have a brain. Although I guess if they were really smart they would have had a merit scholarship.

. You completely disempower them by your choice of words "has to", "needs to". I really think you should get to know people before you cast such damning judgement on them. You should step out of your ivory tower and get to know these people you cast judgement on and think so little of, you will be surprised be the real stories and how they differ from your misogynistic stereotyping.

I bet at least at one point in your life you've actually used the phrase 'some of my best friends are black'

You say Miley is harming people but you're the one disempowering them. You're the one casting judgement. If Miley is doing harm, what are you doing?

posting

[harmless]

A handful of strippers.

[stip]

A handful of strippers.

They travel in handfuls, like a school of fish or a gaggle of geese

[Sarah.]

It's perfectly possible to be pro an individuals choice to be a stripper, wear a burka or even be in porn films whilst still being against the objectification and commodification of women's bodies. I am perfectly happy to support the choice of an individual person who's working within the boundaries of an oppressive system.

You could argue that Miley (and now Lily Allen) is propping up the system by reinforcing that white, rich, attractive women can 'opt out' and manipulate that system for personal gain (as long as they do it in a way which is acceptable to the white, middle class male majority) which is something your average stripper is never likely to be able to do. Even if she's moderately successful and enjoys her job, she never going to be in ultimate control.

IMO I think Miley is a shill. 'Maybe if we do feminism in a way that makes them horny, they won't notice we're doing feminism'.

[stip]

http://www.theonion.com/articles/women- ... does,1398/

Women Now Empowered By Everything A Woman Does

OBERLIN, OH—According to a study released Monday, women—once empowered primarily via the assertion of reproductive rights or workplace equality with men—are now empowered by virtually everything the typical woman does.

San Diego women empower themselves by eating dinner unaccompanied by men.

"From what she eats for breakfast to the way she cleans her home, today's woman lives in a state of near-constant empowerment," said Barbara Klein, professor of women's studies at Oberlin College and director of the study. "As recently as 15 years ago, a woman could only feel empowered by advancing in a male-dominated work world, asserting her own sexual wants and needs, or pushing for a stronger voice in politics. Today, a woman can empower herself through actions as seemingly inconsequential as driving her children to soccer practice or watching the Oxygen network."

Klein said that clothes-shopping, once considered a mundane act with few sociopolitical implications, is now a bold feminist statement.

"Shopping for shoes has emerged as a powerful means by which women assert their autonomy," Klein said. "Owning and wearing dozens of pairs of shoes is a compelling way for a woman to announce that she is strong and independent, and can shoe herself without the help of a man. She's saying, 'Look out, male-dominated world, here comes me and my shoes.'"

Eating energy bars specially fortified with nutrients "for women" has become a feminist trend, as well.

"Unlike traditional, phallocentric energy bars, whose chocolate, soy protein, nuts, and granola ignored the special health and nutritional needs of women, their new, female-oriented counterparts like Luna are ideally balanced with a more suitable amount of chocolate, soy protein, nuts, and granola," Klein said. "Proto-feminist pioneers like Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony could never have imagined that female empowerment would one day come in bar form."

Whereas early feminists campaigned tirelessly for improved health care and safe, legal access to abortion, often against a backdrop of public indifference or hostility, today's feminist asserts control over her biological destiny by wearing a baby-doll T-shirt with the word "Hoochie" spelled in glitter.

"Don't tell this bitch what to do," said Kari Eastley, 24, a participant in the Oberlin study and, according to one of her T-shirts, a "Slut Goddess." "I wear what I want when I want, and no man is going to tell me otherwise. We're talking Pussy Power, baby."

Other acts of empowerment include gossiping about the sexual proclivities of male acquaintances, lunching with other women in small groups, taking calcium-rich antacid tablets, and reading The Nanny Diaries.

The study also cites the act of pumping one's raised fist in a gesture of female solidarity against the oppressive forces of air pressure.

"Nearly 90 percent of study participants have done this at least once in their lives, often accompanying their action with the exhortation 'You go, girl!' or, simply, 'Whooooooo!'" Klein said.

Perhaps most remarkably, the mere act of weight gain is now regarded as a feminist act. Though some women express reservations about the negative impact of obesity on one's health, overweight women display a level of assertiveness, or "sassitude," that thinner women lack.

"Women who proclaim themselves 'large and in charge' refuse to be bound by traditional notions of beauty and health," said Carla Willets, a Vassar College women's-studies professor. "They love themselves for who they are, something no 'normal-sized' woman could possibly do."

"Of course, women can be empowered by losing weight, too," Willets added. "Pretty much any change in weight—up or down—is empowering."

Klein said empowerment is now accessible to women who were long excluded.

"Not every woman can become a physicist or lobby to stop a foundry from dumping dangerous metals into the creek her children swim in," Klein said. "Although these actions are incredible, they marginalize the majority of women who are unable to, or just don't particularly care to, achieve such things. Fortunately for the less impressive among us, a new strain of feminism has emerged in which mundane activities are championed as proud, bold assertions of independence from oppressive patriarchal hegemony."

Long Beach, CA, resident Jeanne Bradley was recently given a special commendation by the city of Los Angeles for regularly attending WNBA games.

"From midnight cheesecake noshers to moms who don't fool around with pain, feminist achievement covers a broad spectrum," said Bradley in her acceptance speech. "It is great to be a female athlete, senator, or physician. But we must not overlook the homemaker who uses a mop equipped with convenient, throwaway towelettes, the college co-ed who chooses to abstain from sex, and the college co-ed who chooses to have a lot of sex. Only by lauding every single thing a woman does, no matter how ordinary, can you truly go, girls."

[broken iris]

So if Miley is not the end game of Feminism, what is? How will we know when we get there?

[stip]

and will there be boobs?

[BurtReynolds]

So if Miley is not the end game of Feminism, what is? How will we know when we get there?

When all men are slaves. slaves!

[harmless]

[malice]

So if Miley is not the end game of Feminism, what is? How will we know when we get there?

there's no end game. the idea of an endgame for 'feminism' is no different than the idea of an end game for any type of equal rights movement or whatever you want to call it - movement sounds a bit outdated these days - it's like the idea of an end to racism - it has more to do with people deciding to keep themselves in check about how they perceive others and some kind of awareness about how that perception influences our actions as well as how it effects the people we're perceiving.
everyone is subject to it, because we're all (mostly) the same- that's what bothers me. no one is all that different from anyone else. no one is capable of being completely without some bias and application of stereotypes towards other people, and no one is capable of not allowing that bias to influence our decisions about how we treat other people. so our only end game is to pay attention to what we think and how we act on it so we can at least try to get along better with other people, even when we can't agree with them.
I think the right word here is empathy. trying to hold some image in our heads about how we, personally, would feel if we were "X" and trying to act based on what we believe is least offensive to ourselves if in a similar situation.

the door swings in both directions, by the way - over-sensitivity to bias or the actions we take according to that bias can be just as ridiculous as the inattention to our actions or a willful use of that bias to exercise some form of control over others based on our differences.

I don't want men to put me in a position of privilege, and I don't want to men to use my gender as a reason to exclude me from participating in the society in all the ways men do either. so it's a balancing act, for everyone.
the only way (I think) that happens is to try to understand what actions are troublesome, what effect they have, and how we'd feel if it was happening to 'us' instead of 'them' - so that we ALL become 'us'.

[---]

it's only after reading this thread that i finally understand the green habit account's decision to establish RM's strategic testosterone reserve

[Green Habit]

it's only after reading this thread that i finally understand the green habit account's decision to establish RM's strategic testosterone reserve

I wonder how I accomplished such a thing. :hmm:

[BurtReynolds]

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/19/scien ... 31119&_r=0
shame those sluts!

i was thinking of possible male equivalents to this behavior, but for the most part guys really do just resort to punching or threats of punching.

[broken iris]

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/19/science/a-cold-war-fought-by-women.html?smid=fb-nytimes&WT.z_sma=SC_ACW_20131119&_r=0
shame those sluts!

i was thinking of possible male equivalents to this behavior, but for the most part guys really do just resort to punching or threats of punching.

Articles like this make laugh at all the times I have heard someone say "If women were in charge there would be no war".

[malice]

thanks supreme court.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/20 ... _that.html

An Interview With a Texas Abortion Doctor Who Can No Longer Do His Job

Slate: How do you help them? 


Minto: I give them a sonogram to make sure they are pregnant—and if they are pregnant, to make sure it is a uterine pregnancy—that they have no ectopic issues or anything. Then I give them vitamins. Because if they decide to keep the pregnancy, you want it be a healthy one. If they decide to do “something,” you don’t want them to hemorrhage excessively. That is a risk if a lady is anemic. A lot of my patients don’t have great health care, so a lot are anemic.

Slate: So the women take the drug and ...

Minto: They stay close to home, and sometimes it all works fine. But if it doesn’t—or it works part-way, that is what often happens— they can come to me, and I can do “miscarriage management.”

Slate: That’s legal in Texas?
Minto: Yes, in Texas once a woman is vaginally hemorrhaging, it is legal for me to help her.

[harmless]

http://www.theonion.com/articles/10-pho ... n-t,34700/

[broken iris]

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB1 ... 2857012920

Camille Paglia: A Feminist Defense of Masculine Virtues
The cultural critic on why ignoring the biological differences between men and women risks undermining Western civilization.

'What you're seeing is how a civilization commits suicide," says Camille Paglia. This self-described "notorious Amazon feminist" isn't telling anyone to Lean In or asking Why Women Still Can't Have It All. No, her indictment may be as surprising as it is wide-ranging: The military is out of fashion, Americans undervalue manual labor, schools neuter male students, opinion makers deny the biological differences between men and women, and sexiness is dead. And that's just 20 minutes of our three-hour conversation.

When Ms. Paglia, now 66, burst onto the national stage in 1990 with the publishing of "Sexual Personae," she immediately established herself as a feminist who was the scourge of the movement's establishment, a heretic to its orthodoxy. Pick up the 700-page tome, subtitled "Art and Decadence From Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson, " and it's easy to see why. "If civilization had been left in female hands," she wrote, "we would still be living in grass huts."

The fact that the acclaimed book—the first of six; her latest, "Glittering Images," is a survey of Western art—was rejected by seven publishers and five agents before being printed by Yale University Press only added to Ms. Paglia's sense of herself as a provocateur in a class with Rush Limbaugh and Howard Stern. But unlike those radio jocks, Ms. Paglia has scholarly chops: Her dissertation adviser at Yale was Harold Bloom, and she is as likely to discuss Freud, Oscar Wilde or early Native American art as to talk about Miley Cyrus.

Ms. Paglia relishes her outsider persona, having previously described herself as an egomaniac and "abrasive, strident and obnoxious." Talking to her is like a mental CrossFit workout. One moment she's praising pop star Rihanna ("a true artist"), then blasting ObamaCare ("a monstrosity," though she voted for the president), global warming ("a religious dogma"), and the idea that all gay people are born gay ("the biggest canard," yet she herself is a lesbian).

But no subject gets her going more than when I ask if she really sees a connection between society's attempts to paper over the biological distinction between men and women and the collapse of Western civilization.

She starts by pointing to the diminished status of military service. "The entire elite class now, in finance, in politics and so on, none of them have military service—hardly anyone, there are a few. But there is no prestige attached to it anymore. That is a recipe for disaster," she says. "These people don't think in military ways, so there's this illusion out there that people are basically nice, people are basically kind, if we're just nice and benevolent to everyone they'll be nice too. They literally don't have any sense of evil or criminality."

The results, she says, can be seen in everything from the dysfunction in Washington (where politicians "lack practical skills of analysis and construction") to what women wear. "So many women don't realize how vulnerable they are by what they're doing on the street," she says, referring to women who wear sexy clothes.

When she has made this point in the past, Ms. Paglia—who dresses in androgynous jackets and slacks—has been told that she believes "women are at fault for their own victimization." Nonsense, she says. "I believe that every person, male and female, needs to be in a protective mode at all times of alertness to potential danger. The world is full of potential attacks, potential disasters." She calls it "street-smart feminism."

Ms. Paglia argues that the softening of modern American society begins as early as kindergarten. "Primary-school education is a crock, basically. It's oppressive to anyone with physical energy, especially guys," she says, pointing to the most obvious example: the way many schools have cut recess. "They're making a toxic environment for boys. Primary education does everything in its power to turn boys into neuters."

She is not the first to make this argument, as Ms. Paglia readily notes. Fellow feminist Christina Hoff Sommers has written about the "war against boys" for more than a decade. The notion was once met with derision, but now data back it up: Almost one in five high-school-age boys has been diagnosed with ADHD, boys get worse grades than girls and are less likely to go to college.

Ms. Paglia observes this phenomenon up close with her 11-year-old son, Lucien, whom she is raising with her ex-partner, Alison Maddex, an artist and public-school teacher who lives 2 miles away. She sees the tacit elevation of "female values"—such as sensitivity, socialization and cooperation—as the main aim of teachers, rather than fostering creative energy and teaching hard geographical and historical facts.

By her lights, things only get worse in higher education. "This PC gender politics thing—the way gender is being taught in the universities—in a very anti-male way, it's all about neutralization of maleness." The result: Upper-middle-class men who are "intimidated" and "can't say anything. . . . They understand the agenda." In other words: They avoid goring certain sacred cows by "never telling the truth to women" about sex, and by keeping "raunchy" thoughts and sexual fantasies to themselves and their laptops.

Politically correct, inadequate education, along with the decline of America's brawny industrial base, leaves many men with "no models of manhood," she says. "Masculinity is just becoming something that is imitated from the movies. There's nothing left. There's no room for anything manly right now." The only place you can hear what men really feel these days, she claims, is on sports radio. No surprise, she is an avid listener. The energy and enthusiasm "inspires me as a writer," she says, adding: "If we had to go to war," the callers "are the men that would save the nation."

And men aren't the only ones suffering from the decline of men. Women, particularly elite upper-middle-class women, have become "clones" condemned to "Pilates for the next 30 years," Ms. Paglia says. "Our culture doesn't allow women to know how to be womanly," adding that online pornography is increasingly the only place where men and women in our sexless culture tap into "primal energy" in a way they can't in real life.

A key part of the remedy, she believes, is a "revalorization" of traditional male trades—the ones that allow women's studies professors to drive to work (roads), take the elevator to their office (construction), read in the library (electricity), and go to gender-neutral restrooms (plumbing).

" Michelle Obama's going on: 'Everybody must have college.' Why? Why? What is the reason why everyone has to go to college? Especially when college is so utterly meaningless right now, it has no core curriculum" and "people end up saddled with huge debts," says Ms. Paglia. What's driving the push toward universal college is "social snobbery on the part of a lot of upper-middle-class families who want the sticker in the window."

Ms. Paglia, who has been a professor of humanities and media studies at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia since 1984, sees her own students as examples. "I have woodworking students who, even while they're in class, are already earning money making furniture and so on," she says. "My career has been in art schools cause I don't get along with normal academics."

To hear her tell it, getting along has never been Ms. Paglia's strong suit. As a child, she felt stifled by the expectations of girlhood in the 1950s. She fantasized about being a knight, not a princess. Discovering pioneering female figures as a teenager, most notably Amelia Earhart, transformed Ms. Paglia's understanding of what her future might hold.

These iconoclastic women of the 1930s, like Earhart and Katharine Hepburn, remain her ideal feminist role models: independent, brave, enterprising, capable of competing with men without bashing them. But since at least the late 1960s, she says, fellow feminists in the academy stopped sharing her vision of "equal-opportunity feminism" that demands a level playing field without demanding special quotas or protections for women.

She proudly recounts her battle, while a graduate student at Yale in the late 1960s and early '70s, with the New Haven Women's Liberation Rock Band over the Rolling Stones: Ms. Paglia loved "Under My Thumb," a song the others regarded as chauvinist. Then there was the time she "barely got through the dinner" with a group of women's studies professors at Bennington College, where she had her first teaching job, who insisted that there is no hormonal difference between men and women. "I left before dessert."

In her view, these ideological excesses bear much of the blame for the current cultural decline. She calls out activists like Gloria Steinem, Naomi Wolf and Susan Faludi for pushing a version of feminism that says gender is nothing more than a social construct, and groups like the National Organization for Women for making abortion the singular women's issue.

By denying the role of nature in women's lives, she argues, leading feminists created a "denatured, antiseptic" movement that "protected their bourgeois lifestyle" and falsely promised that women could "have it all." And by impugning women who chose to forgo careers to stay at home with children, feminists turned off many who might have happily joined their ranks.

But Ms. Paglia's criticism shouldn't be mistaken for nostalgia for the socially prescribed roles for men and women before the 1960s. Quite the contrary. "I personally have disobeyed every single item of the gender code," says Ms. Paglia. But men, and especially women, need to be honest about the role biology plays and clear-eyed about the choices they are making.

Sex education, she says, simply focuses on mechanics without conveying the real "facts of life," especially for girls: "I want every 14-year-old girl . . . to be told: You better start thinking what do you want in life. If you just want a career and no children you don't have much to worry about. If, however, you are thinking you'd like to have children some day you should start thinking about when do you want to have them. Early or late? To have them early means you are going to make a career sacrifice, but you're going to have more energy and less risks. Both the pros and the cons should be presented."

For all of Ms. Paglia's barbs about the women's movement, it seems clear that feminism—at least of the equal-opportunity variety—has triumphed in its basic goals. There is surely a lack of women in the C-Suite and Congress, but you'd be hard-pressed to find a man who would admit that he believes women are less capable. To save feminism as a political movement from irrelevance, Ms. Paglia says, the women's movement should return to its roots. That means abandoning the "nanny state" mentality that led to politically correct speech codes and college disciplinary committees that have come to replace courts. The movement can win converts, she says, but it needs to become a big tent, one "open to stay-at-home moms" and "not just the career woman."

More important, Ms. Paglia says, if the women's movement wants to be taken seriously again, it should tackle serious matters, like rape in India and honor killings in the Muslim world, that are "more of an outrage than some woman going on a date on the Brown University campus."

[malice]

I tend to agree with her, the country is struggling right now to put together a more realistic set of ideals as far as gender roles. we don't know how to define what men (or women) should 'be like' anymore because the society has changed so rapidly.

I think men are more affected by these changes because the push for equality has been focused on women's rights without much consideration for how this impacts men in the society. as a result, men are now being forced to redefine their own identities as men, and this results in a huge upheaval in how we handle relationships of all kinds.

[malice]

also, I have this book: "Sexual Personae" - wish I could remember something about it to comment here but it's been years since I even glanced at it. maybe I'll look it over and comment again.

[Green Habit]

That was a very difficult long read to get through, just because I think the very concept of prescribed sex roles is one that needs to be thrown into the garbage can of history. Suffice to say, I didn't agree with her at all.

I think men are more affected by these changes because the push for equality has been focused on women's rights without much consideration for how this impacts men in the society. as a result, men are now being forced to redefine their own identities as men, and this results in a huge upheaval in how we handle relationships of all kinds.

I think you're right about this part. While women have done a decent job of taking on traditionally male tasks (when they can), men haven't come nearly as far taking on traditionally female tasks.