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 ... 1415161718(19)2021222324... 34

 
 
sleazenation
17:17 / 15.06.06
I don't think 'quisling' is really equivilent since its origins are Vidkun Quisling, the treasonous Norwegian fascist - his name has become an eponym for traitor, especially a collaborationist...
 
 
*
17:19 / 15.06.06
I think this is especially difficult with Ann Coulter because she generalises women while existing as female. Thus the temptation to call her a bitch simply to relate her to the people she criticises is ever present.
I can see that, but I would think it would be important to have consistency. There are trans people whom I disagree with profoundly. I think they are doing bad things, and in my heart of hearts I think they are bad people. But I will criticize them based on their harmful actions and not their gender, because my gender could be just as easily attacked by someone who thinks I am a bad person. If it's not fair game to do to me, it's not fair game to do to people I want to attack, period. Similarly, I think being sexist at Ann Coulter sends the message that sexism is okay, just so long as you think someone is a bad person or is being sexist herself.

Thought experiment: Let’s say a colleague of mine at work is being rather irritating and I’m already in a mood because my best friend’s in the hospital or something, and I say to no one in particular “That man is intolerable!”. This isn’t really an attack upon his gender so much as adding defining characteristic of the fictitious colleague to a statement of opinion. How is this different from saying “He is such a bastard!”?
For one thing, "man" in this context is value-neutral, and is a separate label from the one that describes your target's fault. "Bastard" is value-laden. For another, as xk alludes, "bastard" is less gendered than "bitch"; it's more commonly used for men but in that "male as default" sense. Calling a woman "bastard" might seem odd, but it wouldn't attack her gender the way calling a man "bitch" does. So in that sense, your example doesn't link the person's gender with their personality flaw the way "bitch" does— "bitch" implies that the way in which a person is "bad" is bound up with the way in which they are a woman (or feminized, if a man).
 
 
Tryphena Absent
18:29 / 15.06.06
The intent is much the same, but does the rewording change the connotation? Or was the connotation there from the beginning? And does the situation change if the fictional individual is female rather male? Should it?

I think entity has pretty much covered the rewording aspect. Man is not a derogatory term- well it can be but not in the context you're talking about- both bastard and bitch are derogatory towards someone's gender rather than their behaviour.

Calling a woman "bastard" might seem odd, but it wouldn't attack her gender the way calling a man "bitch" does

I'm not sure about that. I think that calling a woman "bastard" is unusual and might bring with it a comment on femininity and masculinity.

I think being sexist at Ann Coulter sends the message that sexism is okay

I agree. Really I think it's best not to entertain the idea of Ann Coulter as a person since this leads all of us into the deficiency of the English language. Best to read her articles and let a string of words come out. Or one word if you prefer... "fuck fuck fucking fuck fuck fucking bullshit."
 
 
grant
19:35 / 15.06.06
"Bastard" is definitely male, but illegitimacy(*) is nowhere near the stigmatized(*) condition it once was, while dogs are still generally regarded as inferior beasts.

"Bastard" and "bitch" also sound very different coming out of the mouth; I don't think the violent nature of the short-"i"+that grating palatal "tch" following the explosive "b" can be overstated. It's like a cough or a bite. The sound of teeth penetrating skin, or of a bullet hitting a target.

(*) interesting etymologies here, too.
 
 
grant
19:39 / 15.06.06
Like so. Couldn't make it up....
 
 
Ticker
19:57 / 15.06.06
I often wonder if that biting effect is the reason so many people use 'cunt'. Which in the US is almost always a female addressed derogative term.

I tend to chastise people who use it in my company without a modifer. A scum cunted hellbag or frou frou rot twat, is acceptable, a twat or cunt is not. I've recently heard more people saying cooz as well. I find the use of dick or prick equally gender offensive though it is interesting to note they are used in gender segregated ways (if lesser degree of insult) as well.
 
 
*
21:30 / 15.06.06
I'm not sure about that. I think that calling a woman "bastard" is unusual and might bring with it a comment on femininity and masculinity.
I think it would comment on her gender a bit, but I don't think it would attack it in quite the same way. That is, a woman being a "bastard" would be just a bit rough-and-tumble, maybe cold and hard, whereas a man being a bitch is being a pansy, a wuss, a sissy, catty, effeminate, a bit homosexual perhaps— in short, committing the sin of being a "feminine" man. Also noteworthy is that I have rarely, if ever, heard a woman called a "bastard" as purely an insult— I think I've heard it used once or twice with a sort of admiring undertone ("You'd better watch her. She's a real hard bastard; there's no getting anything past her"), but never in my memory purely as an insult ("She's being such a filthy bastard"). Whereas calling a man "bitch" as an insult is fairly common, and in intention and effect can range from playful (among my queers) to fighting words (usually with allusion to the target being penetrated). So this goes back, plainly enough, to the different values people in my society place on masculinity vs. femininity, which goes back to how men and women are valued differently.
 
 
Our Lady Has Left the Building
10:42 / 19.06.06
I came across a website this morning of some guy who claimed that he wanted to be a feminist when he was older but for now wanted to be a 'playa' while he was young and could enjoy it. Leaving so many of the icky parts of that aside, what is the role of men and the male-identified in feminism?
 
 
All Acting Regiment
12:02 / 19.06.06
Just had an unpleasant experience on another forum. The experience relates to myspace and boundaries, and I think it might also relate to this topic. Long post, sorry.

The forum's not really like here. There's quite a lot of (shudderingly unpleasant to read) internet flirting, and the forum's mostly comprised of people who are involved in music/club promotion near me. This being a BBS, anyone can get in, they have signatures, links to email and websites, and avatars- a jpeg picture- on each post under the username.

A female poster, a student of 18 who we'll call A, put up an avatar of her and her friends on a night out, dressed as one does for such occasions. This garnered quite a lot of interested attention from the overwhelmingly male board and she became something of a celebrity. I've no doubt she had a good laugh about this- I found it slightly sickening because I know what most of the fatbeards on the board look like IRL and she doesn't, being new to the scene, but fair enough, it wasn't a hugely salacious picture and she could change it whenever she wanted.

She went on to change the avatar to another picture, again of her and pals, dressed up for some kind of halloween party as maids, nurses etc- I'm sure we've all got a picture of ourselves like that somewhere. This one was a little more revealing, but again, it was her choice to put it up there- as far as I can see, I might be wrong, female posters please say if I am- and she probably laughed at most of the "hubba hubba can i av ur number" responses.

The trouble started when one of the guys found out her myspace adress from her profile, and started posting the link to her pictures- they were all capable of acessing them because they all had myspace. On the forum, all that was posted was a link- her pictures were set up in a java slideshow, the slideshow page could be linked to but not individual pictures, and individual images couldn't be displayed on the forum.

At this stage, they suddenly stopped talking to her and started talking about her pictures as if she wasn't there. I posted pointing this out and saying it seemed dodgy how it had gone from intrapersonal flirting to a clinical discussion of her images, but she told me to piss off and not to talk for her, so I suppose she must have been okay with the way things were going (again, I might be wrong).

Then, a new thread popped up called "Caption Competition"- there's a tradition of caption competitions on the board and they're always popular- everyone on the board, in other words, would be sure to look at that thread.

It turned out that the thread-starter, B, a man, had gone to A's myspace picture slideshows. Now, there was photoset on there of her at a party, where she had lifted up her top with another girl and posed for a picture- this was just one picture among many and hardly defined the set. Like I said, you couldn't display these images in a forum, but what he'd done was to save that particular image to a photobucket account and then published it on the forum.

Now, this obviously wasn't OK. Where before, she had had control over which pictures people saw and she could delete or change them at will- because they were either in her myspace profile or in her avatar, places she had the keys to- now this image was up for everyone to see and on someone else's account, and she couldn't change that.

None of the men complained, they all arrived and made a barrage of sexual comments (not compliments to her, but things along the lines of "Top Spec Bitch" etc). A posted, obviously quite angry and distressed, asking for it to be removed.

B said: "It's was your choice to put it on the internet" and others added that removing it would be "censorship". I posted, quite angrily, pointing out that the guy had saved the pictures to his CPU and republished them, and anyway, she had published them in a conditional context that he had broken. I also said that it wasn't censorship if he did the decent thing and deleted them of his own accord.

I got a barrage of nasty replies and a few agressive PMs. I seemed to have broken the ultimate taboo of Hetmale and was now receiving hate mail. Ultimately, A contacted a moderator who deleted the thread.

Now, I'm not sure why I came here to say this except

a) It was horrible, urgh
b) I'm very glad to have Barbelith, and
c) I guess it shows how a technically detailed method of expression (Myspace), if one is unaware of the full working details and potential (and few people are) can be used by others to break one's rules, very easily, and in a very unpleasant way.

More importantly, why do I feel as if I could have done more to help?
 
 
Regrettable Juvenilia
12:30 / 19.06.06
Our Lady: I don't really see the connection between that example and the question - which is so big a question as to warrant a Head Shop thread, I'd say. However, as 101 style introductions go...

First of all, I assume you're talking about what the role of male-identified people should be in feminist activism, rather than how feminist thinking views the ideal role of male-identified people in the world?

I think it was Deva who once invoked the idea that one of the roles of male (assume -identified from here on in as a suffix to this and 'female') feminists to argue (and probably have the same tiresome basic arguments again and again) with male misogynists, so that female feminists could get on with thinking and discussing and doing more interesting things. This might sound like a thankless task to some but for many members of the Men's Auxiliary of S.C.U.M. it's the fight we were bred for.

The danger of this, which in some ways is a more common idea than the one Deva mentioned, is that by taking an active role male feminists are in danger of "speaking for" female feminists and women in general. (And now I see Legba's story illustrates this.) Two things I'd note about this: a) it's actually not that difficult to avoid this as long as you make sure to include some fairly obvious caveats and avoid generalisations; b) while it's a charge that has no doubt often be levelled with justification, it's also used in a very disingenuous way quite often - I'm not saying that was happening in Legba's example, but if it had been one of the guys on the board saying "shut up, don't presume to speak for her, how do you know she doesn't like us talking about how fit she is?", that would almost certainly have qualified.

I'm getting a bit over-specific here, maybe. What is the role of men and the male-identified in feminism? Well, to an extent the same as anybody else's in terms of aims and some of the methods, although there will be differences in terms of opportunities and responsibilities... Point out inequalities where you see them, try and do something about it, try and affect the way people think and talk and behave... And above all this, I suppose, there's the responsibility for male feminists to examine themselves, to try and keep their own misogynistic tendencies (which will be present for reasons of nurture, not nature) to a minimum.
 
 
All Acting Regiment
12:34 / 19.06.06
I'm not saying that was happening in Legba's example, but if it had been one of the guys on the board saying "shut up, don't presume to speak for her, how do you know she doesn't like us talking about how fit she is?", that would almost certainly have qualified.

Absolutely- I made sure to only attack the thread when I knew she wasn't happy about it, and tried to make sure that I was adding my voice to hers as an equal.
 
 
Ticker
13:38 / 19.06.06
Legba, that does sound horrible. Sorry you had to deal with mass human jerkery.

I do believe your conduct would have been valued good form regardless of A's gender, which for me is a good litmus test. You witnessed a privacy trespass and called it.

The common perception of feminism has always irked me. It saddened me a great deal when the actress Sarah Michelle Gueller who played an young empowered female character said ' the word feminism brought to mind women with hairy legs'.

(this maybe a bit simple sounding and basic...)

To me it is about individuals treating other individuals with respect and acknowledging the other person's sovereign self rule. While there is misogyny to contend with it often plays out along perceived gender lines but I believe that someone who is a feminist will defend anyone who is not being treated with respect for bigoted reasons. Viewed in this way the gender of the feminist is not as much of the issue as is the treatment of the person being defended. Whenever a person of greater social privilage tries to intercede for someone with less (based on minority standing) there is the danger of transposing the champion's voice over that of the defended. The great strength of the feminist approach is to empower the person being oppressed so they may speak with their own voice.
 
 
Hallo, Paper Spaceboy
13:46 / 19.06.06
I suppose the alternative response that wouldn't necessarily court responses of "Don't try to speak for her," would be speaking to the board admins about it on the grounds that it was making *you* uncomfortable, because it obviously was, that this example of inappropriate objectification was occurring. Even if that's breaking the "ultimate hetmale taboo" (ha!).
 
 
Regrettable Juvenilia
13:56 / 19.06.06
True, Papers, but the problem with that is that you're then presenting the whole personal discomfort/"offence" model which (as has been discussed in the Policy forum) is not without its own... complications.

xk: I believe that someone who is a feminist will defend anyone who is not being treated with respect for bigoted reasons.

Well, ideally, word to that. It depends what you mean by "is a feminist", though - I agree entirely that it makes a mockery of feminism to not do this. However, would that it were not the case that there are plenty of people who identify as feminists and are called feminists by others whose politics when it comes to race, class or even sexuality are deeply fucked-up... This, of course, applies to every positive form of political thought/activism... There's a thread about this here.
 
 
Alex's Grandma
14:03 / 19.06.06
This might sound like a thankless task to some but for many members of the Men's Auxiliary of S.C.U.M. it's the fight we were bred for.

I can see why you might not enjoy his paintings, films or thoughts in general, but did Andy Warhol really deserve to be shot that time? Or was that just a temporary blip in Valerie S's otherwise sensible worldview? Because really, whatever else that incident might have been, it wasn't an accident. It wasn't at all like Uncle Bill's thing with Mrs B.

(I should say that this a vaguely ongoing off-board discussion that Top Spec and I have been having when he's been kind enough to visit me, here in the Twilight Home, about what happens when writers, by accident or design, go postal.)
 
 
Our Lady Has Left the Building
16:26 / 19.06.06
Flyboy Our Lady: I don't really see the connection between that example and the question

No, you're quite right, it doesn't have anything to do with anything. All I can say was that there was some point to that when it left Mr Brain but by the time it made it to the Typing Finger quints there had been some signal degradation.
 
 
*
19:33 / 19.06.06
Leaving so many of the icky parts of that aside, what is the role of men and the male-identified in feminism?

These people seem to have an idea; is it any good?
 
 
illmatic
08:08 / 21.06.06
Very interesting interview with Ariel Levy, author of Female Chauvinst Pigs

I find her point about the narrowness of the heavily promoted roles for sexual expression really interesting. Something I can see is true to a degree for men, as well. Possibly a subject for another thread.

There's a debate also for next Monday - I think I might check it out. If anyone wants to go PM me.
 
 
Regrettable Juvenilia
09:43 / 21.06.06
Hmmm. Levy certainly comes across better than some previous reports of her book (including lots of positive ones as well) led me to expect. Kira Cochrane does better than most at the Guardian, too: even though she lists a bunch of dodgy pseudo-statistics and factoids which don't stand up to scrutiny (Big Brother contestants are a type in themselves; how many Cambridge students have taken up pole-dancing? - for starters), this may be intended to illustrate why Levy's book feels intuitively insightful to many people. Cochrane is also right to flag up the appeal which the book has to conservatives/puritans, and Levy does a reasonably good job of convincing that she is neither.

The two of them still conspire to spell "third-wave feminism" short*, though, as far as I can tell - although Kira Cochrane lets us know implicitly that the problem isn't that Levy criticises the Cake parties but rather that she presents/sees them as the representative be-all and end-all of sex-positive feminism. If she thinks Susie Bright is great, does she mention her in the book? Doe she include a chapter on those sex-positive, queer-positive writers, etc., who are definitely not offering only one form of sexual expression to men and women? I suspect I know the answer, but I suppose I'd have to read it to find out. Perhaps I will. Also, speaking of the bit where they discuss Susie Bright:

"At the moment, though, it remains the case that most women who enter the sex industry are poor, and most of them will stay poor. So let's not pretend that it's a fabulous, empowering industry."

This is one of those great bits of rhetoric that requires us to ask the question "who IS pretending that [mainstream porn] is a fabulous, empowering industry?" - 'cos it's definitely not Susie Bright or the majority of what might be called her ilk. Again, I suppose I'll have to read Female Chauvinist Pigs to find out the degree of strawperson-weaving going on...

As for the bit in the article about how great the 60s and 70s were... cue up the Sandi Thom.

*Not that anyone knows exactly what "third-wave feminism" is, I think because it is used to refer to lots and lots of different, often conflicting movements and viewpoints and even unconscious tendencies. See another Ex post, a brief history of waves of feminism, for reference...
 
 
alas
16:03 / 21.06.06
I've read the book, but it's been a few months, now, so I can't remember some specifics. It's important to note that it's a popular-press book, not an academic work, and it has some problems as a result--the problematic but sensational title is evidence of that, and her arguments rely more on anecdote than is justifiable and she doesn't hedge sweeping claims where they would need to be hedged to withstand the kind of "but what about...?" scrutiny that academic works have to try to account for.

Then, stylistically, there's also a kind of "purple" quality to the prose that grates--everything is fervently "wrong," there's an impending "crisis" atmosphere, an apocalyptic quality, that I suspected was emphasized primarily in order to sell the book, rather than a dull/ even handed analysis of the situation. Moreover, the writing is uneven--although mostly it's very journalistic in language and approach, she's still kind of an undergraduate English major at times (she includes an analysis of Uncle Tom's Cabin/the Uncle Tom character as an analogy that ignores the complex differences and entanglements of racial and gender oppression that really doesn't work, in my opinion.)

Finally, Ex's point about Levy (as linked in Flyboy's post) is accurate--she does pretty strongly imply that " 'boi' identified lesbians and transmen in the US . . . [are] all about the sex and the misogyny." Again, there's a tendency to make sweeping claims based on a few anecdotes and experiences for a kind of sensationalistic (book selling) effect, and that does mar the book. And in this case, in particular, it can be legitimately seen to have the effect of blaming, as Ex puts it "a tiny and fairly disempowered bunch of people for culture-wide misogyny." Although she does step away from doing that, in the book, anti-trans sentiment can pretty readily step in and finish the job.

But I think it's a necessary book, all the same, because there is a whole lot of confusion out there about women's sexuality and the book explores that confusion pretty sympathetically, despite the title, and I think DOES pay some good attention to the sex-positive feminist movement. In fact, her brief history of the interactions between men like Hugh Hefner and the Women's Movement over abortion, the divisions within the movement over pornography and the possibilities of female sexualities in a still patriarchal, are succinct and helpful--a story we need to hear. Her argument is, in part, that we are living with the unresolved struggle and schism in feminism over portrayals of women as sexual objects and whether--or the degree to which--those portrayals are inevitably degrading and/or whether they leave any room for genuine sexual subjectivity for women. The degree to which that central conundrum remains unfaced and unresolved in the mainstream culture is partly responsible for our confusion today. Third wave feminism/Susie Bright could definitely have received more attention, perhaps, as offering solutions to this problem, but part of her goal was, I think, to demonstrate that the problem is real and growing in the mainstream culture.

As the standard commercial image of female sexual beauty become more predominant (and these things are hard to prove, but I am fairly convinced that there is more soft-porn imaging of women in my daily world and much more pressure to "perfect" the female body), Levy argues, many women have a harder time accessing what gives them pleasure beyond being pleasing-looking for others, and that pleasure in objectification is almost inevitably a compromised pleasure, at the very least from the physical discomfort that comes from, e.g., the arched back, the high-heeled shoes, the thongs, the plastic surgery that can leave breasts and labia less sensitive to touch.

And, in my memory, the book quite overtly and succinctly puts the lion's share of the blame on capitalism itself (which is ironic since I read the problematic sensationalizing and sweeping nature of her claims to be rooted in the same culture), rather than the women caught up in the mainstream marketing of sex, all of whom, herself included, she suggests at some level harmed by their participation in this system's pressure on our bodies to be emblems of standard het sex appeal.
 
 
Ex
16:32 / 21.06.06
Although I found a lot to sympathise with on her sense that women's sexual 'empowerment' is being marketted in ways very convenient for sexist culture, I found the way Levy phrased her conclusion problematic. Levy - and I'll check when I'm next out and about, because this is from memory - says that if women were really confident about themselves and their sexuality, they wouldn't have to behave like men.
By 'like men' I think she's including women involved in hard-drinking point-scoring random shagging and porn-watching, and other traditionally masculine activities, but also the more literal transman/genderqueer stuff (which I got annoyed about earlier).

I came at her statement (and possibly thus overemphasised it) from a genderqueer angle, and found it really problematic. But it's not just me - the 'behaving like men' thing runs right through feminist debates generally (including Dorothy L Sayers actually, for extra Barbelith bonus points).

For kick-offs, 'being masculine' or 'immitating men' has been a shibboleth that has been used to demonise feminism for years. Which means that feminism has spent a lot of time drawing distinctions between 'wanting empowerment' and 'wanting stuff that chaps have'. Dorothy L Sayers writes (in Unpopular Opinions in 1946, and this is from memory also, so excuse innacuracies) that women should fight for the things that are useful and currently associated with men, but not bother themselves with the things that are fundementally not useful to women (her example is trousers v. braces - trousers are useful, and women should be allowed to wear them, but women don't need braces so they shouldn't see them as something that is denied them).

While it has a pragmatic sense to it, I feel that we can't untangle things that easily - it's hard to know in advance when something that seems like an innocuous little gender frippery will turn out to have huge emotional power and amazing results if it's taken up by the 'other' gender. So while a lot of the things Levy is referring to I have qualms about also, I think she's prematurely closing down discussion by saying 'we've got confused between aping men and getting real liberation'.

So to reply to Levy's formulation, I would say: women cannot be truly confident with themselves and their sexuality if that debate is artifically limited by a sense of what behaviour is 'like a woman' and what is 'like a man'.

So at the moment, there are dozens of things I think that women may not need that have been associated with masculinity (smoking, for example). But I think if you step in and say 'you don't need that, don't do it, it's just a manly silly thing that we women don't need' you're doing feminism a disservice.

Also, I really like wearing braces.

I'll look a tit if I've misremembered Levy - I miss working in an academic library in the evenings, it made this kind of thing much easier.
 
 
Ex
16:36 / 21.06.06
And thanks for the summary, alas - I think I'll return and reread Levy now I've excorcised the snark.
 
 
alas
17:37 / 21.06.06
Actually, by the end of my own analysis of the book's shortcomings--even just the ones I noticed--I had started to question whether I should still claim it is a worthwhile book. After reading your helpful analysis, Ex, I'm even more dubious of my position that the book is still valid, and also want to re-read it with your analysis in mind...

And I am so happy to have the chance to talk about this with someone who's read it more critically than I did. It's really useful, since I had been thinking about using (parts of?) it for a Women's Studies class because it's focused on stuff that matters to them and is not quite so academic even as it engages complex questions.... I'm now wondering, however, if my students (introductory students, mind) wouldn't be better served by some pop culture analysis from Bitch Magazine, e.g., instead...?
 
 
illmatic
19:06 / 21.06.06
Cheers for the analysis, both of you (and Fly). I'm defintely going to give it a read, with your comments in mind, and will probably go to the talk also.
 
 
Our Lady Has Left the Building
05:39 / 22.06.06
An argument against the book by Jennifer Baumgardner.

Ariel Levy was right.

We must rebel against raunch.
 
 
Regrettable Juvenilia
07:39 / 22.06.06
we leave the job to the media companies, then we shouldn't be shocked that quite a lot of them learn that it is just normally naughty for girls of 13 to get drunk and have sex. They may not remember much about it, and they almost certainly didn't enjoy it, but that is after all what adults do, "innit"?

AND KIDS THESE DAYS CANNOT TALK PROPERLY EITHER I BLAME TXT MESSAGES God I hate the Guardian sometimes.
 
 
illmatic
08:33 / 22.06.06
Seconded. I thought she made some interesting points about sex education even if it must be with "properly trained, responsible adults", but overall, it's very "arrrrrghh."
 
 
Regrettable Juvenilia
09:04 / 22.06.06
See, the reason that Baumgardner's piece if good, and convincing, and of a higher quality than all the Guardian pieces is thatit gives you the sense that the author has a working knowledge of the history of the movement(s) about which she is writing. I wasn't being entirely flippant when I mentioned Sandi Thom - like cultural nostalgia, political nostalgia relies on an actively ahistorical mindset too.

Again, still without having read the book, if this quotation is at all representative then I think it's pretty damning:

"If the whole point is change and redefinition, then I wonder why the Cake imagery is so utterly of a piece with every other bimbo pictorial I've seen in my life."

...I mean, Baumgardner seems pretty bang on to me when she says that Levy is contributing to the finger-pointing and "slut"-calling, 'cos here Levy seems to be using the word "bimbo" as a straight up misogynistic insult... Where's that old thread on "misogynistic feminism"?

One other thing. alas says:

It's important to note that it's a popular-press book, not an academic work, and it has some problems as a result--the problematic but sensational title is evidence of that, and her arguments rely more on anecdote than is justifiable and she doesn't hedge sweeping claims where they would need to be hedged to withstand the kind of "but what about...?" scrutiny that academic works have to try to account for.

And alas is right that that's how things currently stand. But it depresses the hell out of me that popular-press books aren't subject to more rigorous scrutiny than academic works, because they ought to be, since their impact will be so much wider... Le sigh.
 
 
Kit-Cat Club
10:31 / 22.06.06
With 'bimbo pictorial', isn't the term indicating that the problem is that the women are depicted as 'bimbos', not that they actually are? I.e. that the whole purpose of such a pictorial (I assume she is thinking of stereotypical top-shelf stuff here) is to reduce a woman to a brainless sex object. Which is surely not totally unreasonable. The issue is surely with Levy's apparent feeling that Cake-goers appropriate the visual language and everything else it implies.

Haven't read the book mind you, probably should...
 
 
Princess
10:14 / 07.07.06
Also in the Q and A thread:

Strangely, I'm having a highbrow afternoon. What was the name of the feminist deconstructionst who decided that "I" was too phallogocentric to be her personal pronoun, and so she switched to "O"? I need to remember and I can't.
 
 
Thorn Davis
10:22 / 07.07.06

Didin't she used to go by 'o' until she had a kid?
 
 
Princess
10:54 / 07.07.06
I almost went beyond the pail by agreeing and then continuing to explain back when she was 0. Luckily the font on Barbelith doesn't support it, so no heartless remarks for you.
 
 
Thorn Davis
13:54 / 07.07.06
Heh.

Actually I'm just laughign there to look like I fit in; I don't quite get the 'heartless comment' comment. Anyway, the bitch in question is - I think? - Dominique Aury, described in literary circles as 'a goer'.
 
 
Regrettable Juvenilia
14:04 / 07.07.06
Ooh, you're a dangerous iconoclast, aren't you Thorn!
 
 
Kit-Cat Club
14:05 / 07.07.06
'bitch' probably the least sensitive word you could possible have picked in the context of this thread, suggest you rethink...
 
  

Page: 1 ... 1415161718(19)2021222324... 34

 
  
Add Your Reply