You are currently browsing the monthly archive for October 2015.
I thought we had a plan. The plan was that we were going to give the NDP a crack at the levers of power because the other two parties have both repeatedly demonstrated their commitment to Neo-liberalism and the destruction of the rights of Canadians.
But look at the polls as of October 11th, there be the NDP in their usual third place because the segment of the population that votes has decided that more of the same is going to be frakking awesome.
It looks like the Liberals are going to get in as the minority government. The same ones that voted for the disenfranchisement and removal of personal liberties of all Canadians; you remember that bill Law C-51?
Hey, whatever right? Let’s see if we can do a Trudeau-mania part 2 and relive those heady days of the 70’s. Woohaa.
The stuff you can find on tumblr these days. I applaud the trenchant analysis of gender and what being a woman (performing femininity) is like in much of western society.
“Why do you want to look like a man?”
I wear clothing from the men’s section of the clothing store. My leg hairs are longer than most of the hair in my head. I never wear any makeup, no matter if I’m going out to buy bread in the morning or if I’m going to a party. People often call me “sir”. Others hurl slurs at me, sometimes calling me a “dyke”, sometimes calling me a “faggot”, both showing their disapproval of my physical presentation. I see little kids asking their mothers, in whispers, if I am a boy or a girl. And people ask me all the time, why do I want to look like a man?
The answer is simple. I don’t.
And I do not look like a man.
I look like a woman who refuses to perform femininity.
My unshaven legs do not make me like a man, they’re MY legs, and MY hair, and I am a woman. My “boy’s” clothes are worn on my body, the body of a woman. My naked, unpainted face is the face of a woman. I am a woman, and this is not defined by a haircut or a choice of attire, or by lipstick or high heels, or boxer briefs and men’s deodorant worn over fuzzy unshaven armpits. There’s nothing manly about me.
I am a woman, not by choice, but by fact. Because “woman” is a reality imposed to me, from the day I was born and given a woman’s name, to the day I was six and I was told I couldn’t take off my shirt in a blazing hot summer day because one day I would have breasts, to last night when I walked home in a state of hyper-awareness, my house keys tightly clutched between my fingers, tracking the movements of every man in the dark streets.
I am a woman because, since before my own birth, when an ultrasonography picture informed my parents that I would be born with a vulva, I have been groomed to be a member of the woman class, the breeding stock class, the sex class, the lower class. I was taught to be accomodating and speak softly, to not bring attention to myself and to spare men’s feelings. I was taught that the boy who pulled my hair and threw his toy train at me, aiming for my head, probably did it because he liked me, and boys will be boys anyway. I learned that, if I did the same to him, I was a troublemaker. That my assertiveness is unladylike. That one day I would bear some man’s children, and this was pretty much destiny. That my worth was in my looks, more than in my brain. I am a woman because I was taught all these things, and I am a woman because people expect me to know these lessons by heart, and follow every one of them.
When people ask me why do I want to look like a man, what they’re actually asking is why am I not marking myself as a woman. They’re asking why do I fail to perform the role of femininity, to make myself pleasing and unthreatening to the eyes of the upper class, the man class. My mother once voiced her concerns to me, that my looks would make me a target for male violence, and she is right to be concerned. I am perceived as a member of the lower class who refuses to bear the marks and play the role imposed to me. I refuse to shave my legs to look like a pre-pubescent girl, innocent and vulnerable, or to wear shoes that force me to walk on the tips of my toes, slow and precariously balanced, and this makes men angry, because this is a counscious act of rebellion. This is me saying I am not theirs. I will not please them. I do not desire their approval or their attention. And men often get violent when we refuse to cater to them.
My choices of visual presentation make me a cautionary tale. I am the hairy, ugly, lesbian feminist, the one they warn other women about. “Don’t be like her”, they say, “or no man will ever want you”. But I don’t want them either, and I do not want to look like them, or be like them, or have anything to do with them. I want to be free from men and their bullshit standards. I want to strut around proudly, shamelessly unladylike, looking like a woman looks when she’s not covered in face paint and restrictive clothing, when she doesn’t care about pleasing men.
I do not look like a man, and nothing will ever make me look like one. I am pure, unadulterated woman. I choose myself over them, I choose women over them. If that makes them hate me, so be it. Because I am a woman, they would hate me no matter what I did.
Good Sunday Morning to my fair readership here at DWR. Yes, you heard me right, the loophole in my militant atheism has been exposed! If becoming religious came along with the Star Wars movie force like powers – I’d be in like Flynn.
Because honestly, who wouldn’t want to do this? 
It would be awesome. The prevention of cat-hi-jinks for afar would be completely worth having to listen to some grammatically challenged Muppet ramble on about how awesome the Force is.
Having force abilities as a religion sounds nice until one imagines someone who doesn’t like you having the same sort of powers available to them. Then the whole lightside/darkside dance begins, I suppose. It seems to me that the context in which the ‘Force’ as a religion is set in lacks much of the moral ambiguity that pervades much of the current human experience.
Our current crop of religious bally-hoo doesn’t do much better though. To justify being a dick in christianity there are just so many hoops to jump through – cherry picking and misinterpreting biblical verses to justify your dickishness, ostracizing heathens, spreading your credulous bullshit, all of this takes time and a goodly amount of effort. Also, depending on how big a dick you need to be (Witch-hunts, Inquisitions), one needs many people baffled on and doing the same bullshit you are to get the ball rolling.
Being a darksider or Sith just seems a heckuva lot more straightforward. Set sail on the good ship Narcissism and let the “Force” be the wind at your back. Zero organizing (don’t be in way of the good ship Narcissism), zero need for justification, zero need for a movement other than fomenting a “Fuck Ya!”X” sure is a Badass” cult of minions to be cannonfodder/housekeepers. Going Sith is no fuss, no muss.
The starwars canon has the current religious poop-bricks beat hands down when it comes to the afterlife though. Your reward for living the pious life? Living for eternity with the abominable prats that come and bother you early on Saturday and Sunday morning. My sanity would have the life expectancy of a potato chip wedged in a pro-wrestlers ass crack.
But with the force, you get to come back and all chrome-blue and shiny and give ambiguous advice to the unlucky sods you choose to haunt aaaaaand then wave away your tosser-like behaviour by dropping lines like, “Well what I said was true, from a certain point of view…“.
No contest really. :)
It is always nice to get some quality writing about that mysterious realm of Living as Female in our society. Joanna Russ wrote this in 1975 it is chilling how much still applies.
A new choral season has begun and this year, for me, it will be starting with Fauré’s Automne.
This is a smooth and cool piece. Written in 12/8 this tune has a more than a few rhythmical curve-balls written into the libretto. Good times.
French Text
Automne au ciel brumeux, aux horizons navrants.
Aux rapides couchants, aux aurores pâlies,
Je regarde couler, comme l’eau du torrent,
Tes jours faits de mélancolie.
Sur l’aile des regrets mes esprits emportés,
-Comme s’il se pouvait que notre âge renaisse!-
Parcourent, en rêvant, les coteaux enchantés,
Où jadis sourit ma jeunesse!
Je sens, au clair soleil du souvenir vainqueur,
Refleurir en bouquet les roses déliées,
Et monter à mes yeux des larmes, qu’en mon cœur,
Mes vingt ans avaient oubliées!
English Text:
Autumn, time of misty skies and heart-breaking horizons,
of rapid sunsets and pale dawns,
I watch your melancholy days
flow past like a torrent.
My thoughts borne off on the wings of regret
(as if our time could ever be relived!)
dreamingly wander the enchanted slopes
where my youth once used to smile.
In the bright sunlight of triumphant memory
I feel the scattered roses reblooming in bouquets;
and tears well up in my eyes, tears which my heart
at twenty had already forgotten!
“I felt that the [TNG] writers and producers could not escape from their own essential rigidity in their attitudes to women. They were continually featured as sexual objects, as softer, weaker, and therefore – it always seemed to me—second-class individuals. And because I believed and still do that the show represents what our underlying philosophies are, it doubly irritated me that in that area I thought we were failing.There is a kind of boys’ club about Star Trek, do you understand? It’s in the air all around the show, in the producers, in the front office, in the writers’ building. Our actresses were not finding sympathetic ears for the things they had to say, and I think at times they simply got exhausted by the battle.”
A small taste of the historical basis for the shit-deal women have gotten from patriarchal society through a small sampling of history. This sort of bias lies at the very root of how our society is structured. So please dudes stop declaring that the sexes are ‘equal’ and the job of feminism is done. It isn’t equal and it isn’t your call to make.
bleatmop
Mystro
Dead Wild Roses 
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