BARBELITH underground
 

Subcultural engagement for the 21st Century...
Barbelith is a new kind of community (find out more)...
You can login or register.


Underground > Conversation >

Feminism 101

  
  

Page: 1 ... 678910(11)1213141516... 34

 
 
Tabitha Tickletooth
16:36 / 03.03.06
iconoplast I'd like to ask a related question which hasn't really come up, though (I think) it sort of haunts all discussions of femininity. Namely, the issue of hormones and how to engage it.

I know that this has been responded to by a number of posters, but I really would like to add my two bob's worth. I'm not attacking you Iconoplast for raising it, but it goes right to the heart of not discussions of 'femininity' but of discussions of mysogyny. Individual's experiences of hormones differ massively. Some women begin menstruating quite young, some quite old. Some people's periods are heavy, deeply impactful - often almost debilitating - and have a severe effect on their behaviour. Some people's are light, irregular and have almost no effect on their lives. For all of this, see the experience of menopause also. For me, the only real impact, is that I get an almost obsessive urge to organise (books and cds by various arcane codes of arrangement being a particular favourite).

My point is, it is ludicrous to suggest that this is something one considers in any wholesale sense, when determining how to deal with 'women'. The very act of suggesting that when dealing with women - and I do recognise that you were speaking of your own personal experience, but you were raising the question as a wider concern in relation to the debate about the treatment of female-identifying posters - hormones should be taken into consideration, is to again reduce all to a common denominator.

It's useless and pointless, and to me, demeaning. And I think it demonstrates the idea of othering that Celane so articulately described.

On a slightly threadrotty note, I feel compelled to explain what on reflection feels to me like a gratuitous 'look at me' passing reference to the assault in my initial post to this thread. Problem was I made a connection in my head between the experience of being assaulted (and in my case, a woman who has been assaulted) with the seriousness of misogyny and any excusing or accepting of it. Sadly, I failed to articulate that in any way in the rest of my post.

I'm not accusing anyone of being a wife beater for attitudes they have expressed in this thread, but it is my firm belief that misogyny and all other forms of othering create the environment in which violence occurs and can seem, to the perpetrators at least, to be either justified or sanctioned. The relationship between violence and misogyny is real - it is also wider than this thread.

Thanks to all those who expressed their support and concern and sorry if it came across a bit poor me!
 
 
eddie thirteen
16:59 / 03.03.06
Eddie, I think you're continuing to miss the point that id and (even more so) KKC were making. Let's see if yet a third rephrasing might help. And please correct me if I have also misinterpreted the point.

My attempt to process tens of thousands of words on this subject in the last...um...hour may very well have made me prone to missing the point, and far be it from me to say that I did not. It's been a long day. What I got out of this is that there's a tendency to zero in on a person who's getting emotional if what they're saying is not necessarily something that gels with popular sentiment on the board. Which probably had more to do with me still reacting to what someone else said in a related thread (which frankly upset me a lot more than things around here usually do, probably because I mostly visit Barbelith to talk about innocuous shit like comic books and b-movies and I just wasn't expecting to hear someone express how miserable the place has made her for, like, years), rather than giving the text in front of me its due attention. I'll be over here; carry on.
 
 
iconoplast
17:22 / 03.03.06
...but you were raising the question as a wider concern in relation to the debate about the treatment of female-identifying posters - hormones should be taken into consideration, is to again reduce all to a common denominator.

It's useless and pointless, and to me, demeaning. And I think it demonstrates the idea of othering that Celane so articulately described.

You are totally right, and I'm getting frustrated by my complete inability to articulate what I'm trying to get at.

I brought up hormones because they (to me) represented an easy way to make the 'Men =/= Women' point. Which I wanted to make in service to the question, do we want to treat women like men? Why would we? Women are not men.

In trying to pick an easy marker of difference, I guess I wanted to invoke something related to sex rather than gender, without getting into biological determinism. Anyway - hormones were loaded in ways I hadn't really thought through, so I probably underthought their use a bit*.

Anyway - my idea of treating women as women and not as mean was meant to prevent precisely the lowering to a common denominator. Or at least to prevent the use of 'the way male posters post' as being that common denominator.

I understand that the idea of treating women as women can, outside of a certain context (which I guess I'm not in) sound demeaning. I really and deeply believe that it should not. There ought to be nothing demeaning in being treated as a woman, nor in having the issue of hormones raised. These issues are demeaning only when they're used to judge the distance that some mythical unitary Womankind find themselves from the 'norm' of a unitary Mankind.

Hence, I think, your point about othering.

But what I'm trying to say is that Women ought not be 'othered' unless Men are being held as 'not othered.' And I'm wondering if saying 'We should treat women just as well as we treat men isn't, in fact, doing just that. If using men as the default yarstick doesn't by subtext accomplish that same othering of women.

* - i.e., was stupid.
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
17:50 / 03.03.06
Well, my bad for not properly qualifying everything for you, Haus. I thought it was just kind of presumed that I do not in fact (insofar as I am aware) share a psychic connection with yourself or anybody else on Barbelith, and that anything I said here -- or elsewhere, for that matter -- was conjecture based on my personal experience, up to and including my supposition that the sun will rise tomorrow at around five-thirty AM. It is indeed condescending to make a wee little joke about how I must have a magic window into your brain when it's obvious that I am delivering an opinion based on my experience of the board. At the very least, it is insulting.

It's good that IT WAS A JOKE!!!!11!!!!23!!!!

Iconoplast: I think the point is not that women and men should be treated as if they were the same per se, but that differences in the way that people express themselves should not be gendered and then written off according to a gendered response. So, if I and Nina both get cross and call somebody a fucktard, I am being angry and Nina is being "hysterical". Alternatively, the person I am calling a fucktard decides to call me "hysterical", to suggest that my reaction is unreliable and womanish. That happpens quite a lot, and it's based on the same principles - there's a bit early on in the "So, if we're banning anti-Semites" thread in the Policy where it becomes remarkably clear that the arsenal of the case for the defence revolves around accusing other people of "crying" - that is, it sees through the computer to the weak, emotional state of the person at the other end of the line (see e13, above), that emotion being something to which one has succumbed and which puts one in a position of weakness.

So, the point is not "women should be treated as if they were men", I think, so much as "different people, across a number of gender identifications, adopt a number of different methods of discussion and react to stimuli in a number of different ways. As long as these are not contrary to the health of the discussion and/or Barbelith (trolling, abuse, threats of physical violence, racist outbursts), these different ways should not be related to or conceptually identified with the gender of the person adopting them in order to derogate their value. "

Anyway, I think that's what I'm thinking.
 
 
ibis the being
18:01 / 03.03.06
I'm sorry, I know this is really silly and unhelpful, but iconoplast's post just made me want to scream

WOMEN ARE PEEEEEEEOPLLLLLLLE! THEY'RE MADE OF PEEEOPLE, DON'T YOU SEE? PEEEEEEOPLE!
 
 
Tabitha Tickletooth
18:07 / 03.03.06
I'm thinking much the same as Haus. I'm interested though, Iconoplast, in the idea that you treat women as women and men as men. What does that even mean? I'm certainly not asking that women be treated like men. I'm asking, cliched as it might seem, that people be treated like people. I see no value in bringing preconceived gender stereotypes to any individual on either side of a divide that I frankly don't accept as valid anyway (and I do respect that this is central to my desire for an end to gender not a better definition of it).

This thread is about feminism and misogyny - but I would equally argue that the category 'men' is debilitating to individuals fenced within it. Interesting, and a complement to this discussion, is that I don't see the kind of 'what a girl' response to male-identified posters adopting a posting style or using something like emotive language which might be stereotypically identified as feminine. I find that very heartening, and it leads me to think that it is an approach which could be broadened to female-identified posters with a little concerted effort.

I can't speak for your experience of people, but you might want to try to find a single statement which is completely representative of the individuals you know which might begin with the words 'all women/men are...'
 
 
Tabitha Tickletooth
18:08 / 03.03.06
Sorry, x-post. Damn you Ibis, you're so succinct.
 
 
iconoplast
18:32 / 03.03.06
I think my argument's out of place here, and I'm going to drop it as counterproductive.

My experiences with feminism & feminists seem to have been very different from those of the other posters here, and I'm really getting that weird 'are we even speaking the same language?' vibe.

So, dropping my whole illplanned 'politics of difference' schtick, I'd like to ask the female-identifying posters what would make them feel most comfortable posting here.
 
 
*
19:08 / 03.03.06
Very rarely have I seen an argument on the board (or outside it) where one or both parties was listening to the other so as to divine the sense of what that person was saying -- to try and determine whether his/her own logic might be flawed.

From eddie. I don't know whether this is a true insight into what people are actually thinking about as they post. Eddie and I both acknowledge that it is impossible for us to really know that. And it's also irrelevant to the thread, because men and women and othergender people should all be doing this equally, for all other posters equally regardless of gender. But I would like to point it out and reiterate it as something that I think all posters should strive for. I know I could certainly do better with this myself.

Sorry. Bit of a nonsequitur. As you were.
 
 
Tryphena Absent
20:43 / 03.03.06
If using men as the default yarstick doesn't by subtext accomplish that same othering of women.

Iconoplast, are you trying to say that gender has to meet in the middle? As in we shouldn't regard men as men or women as women but rather everyone as people with their own peculiarities and sometimes those peculiarities might include something that is uncontrollably gender specific- such as a period effecting someone's behaviour?
 
 
Aertho
20:48 / 03.03.06
I'd been skimming this and reading "Woman-Friendly Barbelith" over in Policy, and PM'd this to Nina. She suggested that I buck up and post it here.

The more I read, the more I want to say this, but I don't know where, or whether it's appropriate. In my experience, there seems to be more acceptable stereotypes for men than there are for women. Like there is more varied palette for men's personalities to be snarky, emotional, rational, etc, and still be publicly acceptable. For women, it seems there just aren't that many... so when a woman gets righteously pissed, she's viewed in "bitch" shoes, or "crazy" shoes or whatever. This seems extremely elementary...

But what if there were more female Muppets? What if we were exposed to a female Cookie Monster, a female Grouch, a female Statler and Waldorf? Instead, we can have Haus as Sam the Eagle, Jack Fear living in trash, and Gumbitch playing heckler. None of them [automatically earn] respect, but they get it regardless, because they're common enough characters...

I don't doubt you're ahead of me on all this, but the inequity starts early.

And when new characterizations do emerge, they're lumped in with unacceptable forms. Which is why I feel bad for Paris Hilton - not becasue she's dragging "women" down*, but that the world is dragging her down, and she can't stop it. There's an acceptable amount of lazy male steroetypes, and that angers me. But not for women, and Paris might be it, but she's quickly thrown into the Slut pile becasue she had some sex on camera... I have a meeting to go to... I hope I'm making sense.

Much love to those namechecked, but the argument was that we play roles/characters... ficsuits.
 
 
grant
20:55 / 03.03.06
Do I get stuck being Scooter again?
 
 
Dead Megatron
20:57 / 03.03.06
Can I be Gonzo?
 
 
Aertho
20:59 / 03.03.06
Well, I suppose I can venture a guess at who Barbelith's Bert & Ernie are...

but back to the topic. I really like Nina's interpretation of Iconoplast's view. I'd like to think that's how I approach people —as Muppets.
 
 
iconoplast
21:23 / 03.03.06
Almost, Nina. But it's not really relevant. What I was doing is, on reconsideration, pretty much threadrot - this is a conversation about Feminism and Misogyny on Barbelith. I'll start a Head Shop thread for the footnote junkie in me that wants to suss out this othering business, and to know what evil lurks in the subtext of equality.

For the purposes of this thread, and Feminism / Misogyny as they exist in a shared, online, text-based discussion community, maybe equal treatment under the dogpile is a good thing.
 
 
Tryphena Absent
22:25 / 03.03.06
Chad, someone mentioned cartoons earlier in this thread and like that one I think your point is important. The thing that really drew me into feminism was the disproportionate number of male characters on children's television. I didn't understand but I knew it was wrong that the muppets, Sesame Street, He Man and all of the shows that were watched by children featured so few girls. Children's TV effectively minimises the role of women in society.
 
 
Alex's Grandma
23:59 / 03.03.06
Children's cartoons do, arguably, although what about 'She-Ra, Princess Of Power', or, in terms of old school classics, 'Scooby Doo' (two competant, mystery-solving ladies, two, to varying degrees, clueless fellows, one of whom's a narcissist and the other a feckless, lily-livered pot-head, who are joined in their adventures by a cowardly, male-identified dog that's a slave to its own appetites, and the villain's always a man)? Or, on a more adult level, something like The Simpsons, where the male characters are pretty much identified as idiots throughout, while Marge and Lisa, Miss Krabapple etc are by and large presented as the conscience of the show? The same, I guess, would be true of 'King Of The Hill.' 'Rugrats' has a stromg female lead, as does 'Dexter's Laboratory', the Teletubbies are so sexually ambiguous that the gender issue doesn't seem too germane, and then there's the question of Japanese Manga, which, although perhaps often flawed in terms of its presntation of the female form, is by no means averse to portraying the actual characters in a positive light.

And that's before moving on to children's drama, magazine shows etc, which as far as I can remember (and the last time I watched any I was in the dentist's chair, stuffed full of whatever they give you instead of novocaine these days,) seemed to be fairly even-handed in terms of how the best lines panned out between the male and female characters.

The Muppets, all right, was an intensely misogynistic show, Miss Piggy routinely portayed as this sexually insatiable lunatic (but then again, she did get to karate-chop Roger Moore, etc,) and 'Sesame Street' is by all reasonable standards a stain on the soul of humanity - by the age of six, I recall feeling that there was something very wrong with what was going on there, but, I don't know, these seem like exceptions rather than the rule.

And I don't suppose 'The Smurfs' was ever meant to be taken as a model of the ideal human society, even implicitily - Yes all right, the Smurphette is the creation of an evil wzard who leads the smurfs into sin, and in that sense the story's echoing the book of Genesis, but, all the same, isn't there possibly an element of 'tilting at windmills' here?
 
 
Aertho
00:11 / 04.03.06
Too examine the idea of disproportionate stereotypes further, one could use The Smurfs as a significant start point. You have all sorts of idiotic, and ultimately limiting, personas for boy Smurfs, while there remains only ONE female Smurf in all of Smurfopia. And she is hardly a positive role model.

Gripes aside, and using what we are given, let's look at other shows... you brought up He-Man. Now the disproportionate ratio continues, but now the men are given gimmicks to accompany personas. The females are represented by four characters, who are incredibly more interesting than the men on the show.

Teela is, with all intents and purposes, Eternia's Lois Lane. She's intelligent, a skilled fighter, and featured prominently. Her mother is the Sorceress, arguably the most powerful character in the show. Though confined to Grayskull, it is implicit that she guards powers that are so important that no one save she can know of them. Then there's Evil-Lyn, Teela's opposite number, who uses wily opportunism in a way that Skeletor's other henchmen never seem to reach. Lastly, Queen Marlena, Adam's mother, who is actually an astronaut from planet Earth. I remember wishing they'd shown the mother-daughter episode more, and the one where Evil-Lyn and Teela team up to cross the desert.

My point is this: Though important (and I personally feel more interesting) characters, there is only four of them. And all of them are powerful and desirable. Where is the female Ram-Man? Where is the female Fisto? Where is the female Orko? Oh wait... Where are the fat girls? The lazy girls? The stupid girls? The girls that just want to hit stuff? Or go swimming? Or play with weird Eternian computers?

I say all this because I sincerely feel that it's changing. Turn to Cartoon Network and you will find female characters that do all sorts of things. Some are athletic, some are intelligent, some are stupid, some are fat, some are not desirable, and some are not powerful at all(without being victims). Children are learning and times are changing.

Recently, in DC Comic's Infinite Crisis, the comic character Wonder Woman is met by an older version of herself, one that was written by the ideals and plots of the early 20th century. She addresses the current Wonder Woman by saying that she, the current version, has been all sorts of things: a warrior, a princess, a goddess, and an ambassador. See: powerful and desirable. But what she hasn't been in a very long time is human. Humans make mistakes, and the older Diana was telling the newer that it was time to accept that she can make some.

This was not only a big deal for the character, but for DC Comics in the big picture. Wonder Woman is the oldest female property in superheroics. She has been lauded as a feminist icon and the double X answer to the greatest ideals of heroism. Of course she needed to be perfect, powerful, and desirable. But now, the company that owns that cultural symbol has decided that she might not have to be so perfect anymore, and that she'll still be the best. That's an incredibly big deal.
 
 
alas
02:01 / 04.03.06
I think Nina might have been referring to my earlier post (page 2 or something) back in the dark ages of this thread like 49.6 hours ago i.e..The analogy that's coming to mind is something I've heard called the "Smurfette syndrome" : Saturday morning cartoons tend to have, at most, one token female amongst a bunch of males--sort of like Hermione Granger. ... This happens, apparently, because marketers have discovered that boys won't watch "girl-shows" but girls will watch "boy shows."

I was talking offline to another poster, because this issue (and the policy thread) reminded me of one of the best feminist critiques of Harry Potter I've ever read (and i speak as someone who has a kind of bulimic relationship to the books). I think this was originally posted in the books forum as a link, it's from bitch magazine, and the article is entitled "Stepping on the Harry Potter Buzz" by one Jane Elliott, who, to me, explains one key issue:

In the world of the Potter series, the almost omnipotent powers of Dumbledore's good magic produce a compelling fantasy of being safe and protected but never limited or bossed. In that sense, the sexism in the books serves not so much as a deliberate diminishment of women but as a way to organize the intertwined aspects of even benevolent authority into two separate spheres. In the world of Harry Potter, we can divorce the comforting aspects of authority, the knowledge that someone kind and strong like Albus Dumbledore will protect us, from the evils of even benign authority, like the diminishment in freedom we experience when someone other than ourselves, however benign, is in control. Associating the inevitable downsides of even "good" authority with shrill, unappealing female characters allows us to see these negative aspects of authority as personal failures on the part of irritating women. Within this logic, we don't have to accept that even Dumbledore's authority must control when it protects; instead, we can blame those annoying women who won't stop shrieking about the rules.

[In addition to A Room of One's Own--which I hope you're all reading, because I'm going to be giving a quiz on Monday--you should all click on the link to the full article and read it. It's a good, not very long essay...]

So, in answer to iconoplast's questions, which I take to basically be about what's the critical thing that male-identifying posters might do well to keep in mind, beyond the WOMEN ARE PEOPLE idea, it's that there's a history of negating women in ways that are, alas!, often invisible because they're pretty normal for our culture. I.e., viewing a woman having any kind of emotion as "hysterical" "irrational" or "hormonal." That one of the few roles available to "successful" women/feminists is this Hermione Granger role of being a nay-sayer, a boundary placer, a "you can't do that! it's against the rules!" (Other than "bitch," "crazy bitch" or "SF, in dstress, ISO NS SKnight, pref. shng armr."). And that kinda sucks.

Because, see, any complaining about sexism prettily easily becomes just sexless, joyless women going all schoolmarmish on the cool rule breakin' boyz...
 
 
Goodness Gracious Meme
02:12 / 04.03.06
Because, see, any complaining about sexism prettily easily becomes just sexless, joyless women going all schoolmarmish on the cool rule breakin' boyz...

Yes!!! And when I'm less tired, I will come back and explain why this is so pertinent.

But really, as per my posts in the Policy thread, 'Barbelith culture' is one that allows for and encourages anger and aggression from male-identified posters, the more male-identified the better, and stamps on and minimises and mocks equivalent ways of posting from female-identified posters.
 
 
Aertho
02:58 / 04.03.06
encourages anger and aggression from male-identified posters, the more male-identified the better, and stamps on and minimises and mocks equivalent ways of posting from female-identified posters.

Wow. Really? May I ask for an example or two?
 
 
Goodness Gracious Meme
03:04 / 04.03.06
Yes, of course you may. I'm pretty tired and drunk atm, so I will attempt to come back with illustrations and examples.

But in the meantime, I'd ask you, when was the last time you saw a female-id'd poster valorised for their anger and (righteous) aggression in the way that posters like Jack Fear and Petey Shaftoe are?
 
 
Goodness Gracious Meme
03:07 / 04.03.06
and I should have said, only valorises and encourages those behaviours in what it considers 'good causes', but still, only in ways that relate to the performances of male-identified posters.
 
 
matthew.
03:16 / 04.03.06
Can I just say something here without being called an ass-kisser?

I've been following the Woman-friendly Barbelith thread and avoiding posting in it. I'm not PMing this to them because I think that everybody should hear this.

I've never thought Nina, GGM, alas, or any of the female-id'ed posters engaged in hysterics or shrill emotionally based arguments that were stereotypically "woman-y".

I've never thought that Nina, GGM, alas, etc, "handled themselves well against the boys" (eg Haus, JF, Flyboy, et al). Seriously. In all honesty, I've never thought that.

I've also never thought of them as "Teh Other" or some strange different group that needed to be treated differently.

In terms of valiantly reacting in a humourous and angry way like Flyboy or JF, I don't think I've ever even seen that. It seems to me that only those two can do it. I've never seen anybody do it properly other than those two. This is a genderless opinion. When I try to be all angry and funny, Flyboy swoops in and tells me to calm myself (this has happened twice).

The only posters who I thought were handling themselves like total idiots were all male-id'ed posters (Hawksmoor for eg). Everybody else, and I mean everybody, not just the heavy-hitters, handle themselves generally competantly. Sure, everybody makes logical mistakes, or says something bonehead.

Other than my aggressive reply to Celane, I don't think I've ever even mentioned gender or thought about it on Barbelith.

This is literally the first time I've ever imagined anybody as a person with either male or female genitals. I know that sounds strange, but I try not to become too attached to this board and its posters. Frankly, I don't know any of you. Why bother investigating all your personal details? I don't PM everybody and say "hey, are you a dude?" or anything like that.

I just wanted to tell everybody this because I've never thought anybody but Hawksmoor has used "hysterics".
 
 
*
03:23 / 04.03.06
(I mean this in the kindest way possible.)
*pats matt on head* Biscuit?

For most people— of whom you may not be one, because I can't see inside your head— if no conscious thinking about gender is happening, fucked up things in regards to gender are still being said and done.

For instance, your reactions to various comments are to some degree guided by other posters' reactions, who may know the person's gender (or think they know it).

This does not mean that the onus of the sexism on barbelith rests on your shoulders. I think we all share that burden, regardless of how nonsexist we are as individuals, because this is a community and we are all responsible for building this community.
 
 
matthew.
03:32 / 04.03.06
if no conscious thinking about gender is happening, fucked up things in regards to gender are still being said and done.

I agree. That is me. I don't think of gender or sexuality. I just let people be who they want to be. But I agree that this is a fucking problem with me and perhaps not with the board. I learn and evolve with the board, as I learn and evolve in life.
 
 
Goodness Gracious Meme
03:40 / 04.03.06
It's not just, or even, (I'm not quite sure of the correct word right now) a problem with you. It's not personal.

The point that alot of people are trying to make is that if you grow up female-identified, there is no option to not think about this stuff. It will smack you in the face and make you think about it.

The point where you realise you might be doing the same job as someone male-id'd and earning 2/3rds of the salary. The point where you realise you're the only female id'd person in your position, and that there's no-one f-id'd at the next level. When you see women being overlooked for promotion on some spurious notion of 'unrealiability' which equals 'might go off and get pregnant'.

And when you spend time in an online environment where it takes you(me) a long while to (re)realise that you're existing in a culture that priveliges typical masculinity.
 
 
alas
04:09 / 04.03.06
I just let people be who they want to be.

Matthesis: uhhhh....This is a nice myth to have about yourself, but I seriously doubt this actually is true. You certainly didn't want to let Celane just be. If you're communicating with people with any degree of persuasion (even if it's just "hey! I'm a good person") then you are wanting to have some effect on them.

Re-read id's point: you're coming across as kind of naive. It's ok, because this is hard stuff. I'm thinking of Pat Parker's poem "to the white person who wants to know how to be my friend": "The first thing you do is forget that i'm Black. Second, you must never forget that i'm Black." We're saying something kind of paradoxical: treat us like people, but realize that being perceived as "woman" has meant something "less than" or "other than" the kind of neutral humanity you seem to believe that lives in your brain.

Considering that "ze" and "hir" still look pretty weird (don't they?), I suspect that gender still lives as a concept in your brain, and that it may be shaping your ideas in ways that you're not fully aware of, if you have spent as little time contemplating gender as you claim. It's not your personal fault, but not having to think about gender is a privilege of being male, and privileges, while obviously being pretty "good" or we wouldn't call them by that name, have a blinding effect.

Peggy McIntosh explains this paradoxical effect in her essay on white privilege and male privilege:

the word "privilege" now seems to me misleading. Its connotations are too positive to fit the conditions and behaviors which "privilege systems" produce. We usually think of privilege as being a favored state, whether earned, or conferred by birth or luck. School graduates are reminded they are privileged and urged to use their (enviable) assets well. The word "privilege" carries the connotation of being something everyone must want. Yet some of the conditions I have described here work to systemically over-empower certain groups. Such privilege simply confers dominance, gives permission to control, because of one's race or sex. The kind of privilege that gives license to some people to be, at best, thoughtless and, at worst, murderous should not continue to be referred to as a desirable attribute. Such "privilege" maybe widely desired without being in any way beneficial to the whole society.

Moreover, though "privilege" may confer power, it does not confer moral strength. Those who do not depend on conferred dominance have traits and qualities that may never develop in those who do. Just as Women's Studies courses indicate that women survive their political circumstances to lead lives that hold the human race together, so "underprivileged" people of color who are the world's majority have survived their oppression and lived survivors' lives from which the white global minority can and must learn. In some groups, those dominated have actually become strong through not having all of these unearned advantages, and this gives them a great deal to teach the others. Members of so-called privileged groups can seem foolish, ridiculous, infantile, or dangerous by contrast.
 
 
Joy Division Oven Gloves
04:16 / 04.03.06
I've only been a member here 3 days and am a little uncertain about posting my feelings about this thread given the way it's tied up in the culture and history of a community I've only just been accepted into. But with this qualification in mind....I've been re-reading some of the earlier disscussion and Nina's post at the start of the thread, in particular the aims that were being envisioned by her for it:

I think we need to discuss the instances of sexism among ourselves, what we think feminism is, how we want to deal with it.

Reading through the thread thus far there's been some mention of the first part of this, a lot of interesting discussion about feminisms, identity and signification but little about the last part. So I was wondering what kind of thoughts and feelings people had about this last aspect, if any.

Again re-reading, I've picked up on a couple of posts which do make mention of 'what to do'.

Firstly from fred on page 3

I think that one good thing to do about misogyny is simply to have a primary thread like this one, in which we can examine misogynistic arguments should anything resembling a coherent argument be constructed. I have found similar threads on other subjects to be very useful

And from Tabitha's very lucid post on page 7

Threads like this go a long way. Constant vigilance, of the kind that we see practiced against the other -isms. A pro-actively female poster attracting board policy?

I think the ideas here are good jump-off point. Is adopting a more consistent reactive approach to posts with questionable gender politics enough? Or are more strategically-minded actions (like gender oriented threads and attempts to consciously alter the demographics of the board) desirable? Are they mutually exclusive? Are they already happening?

Am finding the focus on the gender and gendering very positive but am a little anxious about the velocity it arrived at. Not that is going to to fast, it's great lots of people want to talk about it; more that it could disappear as quickly. Cultural tendencies that are well established are difficult to change. And I'm aware I'm making judgements about Barbelith's culture here, which I've already indicated I don't feel qualified to do, so I think I'll stop there.

In summary

Sorry I'm new.
Apologies for the assumptions implicit in the questions.
I think the questions here are worth talking about.
 
 
matthew.
04:35 / 04.03.06
uhhhh....This is a nice myth to have about yourself, but I seriously doubt this actually is true. You certainly didn't want to let Celane just be. If you're communicating with people with any degree of persuasion (even if it's just "hey! I'm a good person") then you are wanting to have some effect on them.

alas - it's a nice myth, yes. But it's an ideal I work for. Sometimes I succeed, sometimes I don't. I'm not infallible, and neither is anybody else on this board. I've apologized for my reaction to Celane; it's become of part of how I deal with the board and deal with people, and deal with myself. I've changed, I'm changing, I will change. Is that so naive?

And, I think this is going to be my last post in this thread. I can't think of anything to say that isn't "hey, let's all be friends". I can't engage with this topic anymore because I can't really relate. I didn't even see the misogyny for Christ's sake. I was completely blind to it, just as I was blind to the fact that the term "mulatto" was offensive to some people. I've said that this thread has changed my outlook on the board as a whole. What more can I say? You're asking me to believe something paradoxical. I want to believe it because I don't want to hurt anybody. I don't think I can believe it because I don't understand it.
 
 
grant
04:45 / 04.03.06
I'd like the record to show that Sesame Street now features Zoe and Prairie Dawn, who are pretty OK, even if one of them is a monster and the other one is a little driven to succeed.

Zoe's especially complicated.

So, y'know, if the Street can change, just about anything can.
 
 
Our Lady Has Left the Building
09:38 / 04.03.06
An issue that's come up on here and the 'Woman Friendly Barbelith' thread is why ShadowSax is still here after his attitude in the F4J thread, whereas Hawksmoor got the boot. He was unwilling to accept any opinions that were not his own, often belittled those he read as female (including me and Haus). Was he not kicked because the board is more forgiving of male-identified bad behaviour towards women, or because he didn't start disruptive troll behaviour around the rest of the board?
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
10:05 / 04.03.06
Worth noting that Hawksmoor also remained non-abusive outside discussion of his "art". (Also possibly worth noting that nobody attempted to normalise Hawksmoor's homophobia as a product of his environment, or at least argue for its permissibility on those grounds).

Shadowsax... hmmm. I think we're into the world of the tipping point here. I'd say that Shadowsax (and, for that matter, Qwik) pretty obviously have issues with women. They, however, would insist that they do not. In fact, that they love women - this is interesting in itself, by the way - love rather than like. Whereas Hawksmoor never made any claims that he liked gay men - in fact, his identity was tied up with not liking them in a way that meant it was pretty clear that he would be unable to interact with Barbelith in a way that would not affect it adversely.

So, that's problem (a). Problem (b) is that, as has been discussed, traditionally Barbelith has been a space in which apalling cluelessness about women and behaviour towards women has been not only tolerated but often not noticed, or only mentioned by the same fairly small number of people. This arranges itself in various ways, but perhaps most obviously it has implications for the hierarchy of needs.

So, as an example, in the Comic Books forum a racist remark about gypsies was ignored and then defended by some because the important thing was to talk about comics. Likewise, in the Temple, until it was brought to light, people could apparently deny the Holocaust or make anti-Semitic remarks because the important thing was the magical implications of the protocols of the Elders of Zion, not that it was a fake used to encourage the persecution and murder of Jews. There's something in here about the life-experience drought that occasionally hits Barbelith as well...

Not saying that there is a straight comparison, but I think at times that the need for Barbelith to be supportive of other things that is allowed to overwhelm the demands of gender-equal space. I haven't read the Lost thread (spoilers), but I imagine that somebody at some point told those protesting about the use of the words "bitch" and "cunt" that they were interfering with the important thing, which was talking about Lost. In a more abstract way, yawn's self-representation as a tough guy from the schemes, or Jack Fear's self-representation as a masculinised curmudgeon, is trumping the requirements of maintaining gender-equal space.

This is eeenteresting, not least because we're back on the politics of identity. How does somebody's identity needs as somebody who shoots from the hip and takes no prisoners (myself no doubt included in that space, re GGM's "valorising" - although I'd like to come back to that) interact with somebody else's identity request not to be in a space where cowardice is represented by the word "pussy".
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
10:16 / 04.03.06
On a related note re: valorising, I'm a little concerned that the male-identifying posters who have recently reentered the "woman-friendly" space in the Policy might have done so out of a lack of faith in the ability of the female-identifying members to react correctly or with appropriate force to Babooshka and then Nobody's Girl...
 
 
Lurid Archive
10:28 / 04.03.06
You aren't alone in those concerns. I thought that thread was a female id'd only space.
 
  

Page: 1 ... 678910(11)1213141516... 34

 
  
Add Your Reply