You are currently browsing the tag archive for the ‘Feminism’ tag.
:(
Now that we’ve dispensed with that missive and hopefully all of the egalitarian fun fem types, we can be begin proper on the little ways of that being human and female are different in society. My faithful readership thoughtfully intones,”But why Arb, you’ve posted stuff like this before… we get it.” I’m sure you do, but not of enough of the people out there seem to get it, and thus we have will have another narrative interlude in which we get to see what it’s like to have two X chromosomes instead of just one.
Thank you Maggie for sharing.
” This post is going to be a mess, because I’m just …untidily angry right now. It began with a series of tweets I made today about my ever-broken Datsun. The mechanic had told my husband that he was “working on that Datsun just as fast as I can because now that I’ve met her I can’t wait to get that little girl behind the wheel again.”
Little girl.
As I tweeted that I was 33 and had earned each of those years and thus preferred to be referred to as “Danger Smog-Dragon” or “Rage-Mistress” or “Ephemeral Time Lady” or “Maggie Stiefvater, #1 NYT Bestselling Author of the Raven Cycle,” a well-meaning fellow replied that perhaps I should “use [my] words, politely but firmly, to his face…” He further observed that he’d told his wife that “you know, Honey, unless you’re willing to SAY THAT to (those people), NOTHING is going to change”.
(note: please do not go search for this fellow on twitter to rage at him; this is not about him. He is set dressing, made more appropriate to the conversation at hand by the fact that he probably is a perfectly nice guy who really didn’t mean disrespect).
I told TwitterMan that I was tired of have to use my words.It’s been 33 years of using my words. Why is it my job to continuously ask to be treated equivalent to a male customer? Why is that when I arrive at a shop, I’m reminded that I have to push the clutch in if I want to start my own car? It’s 2015. Why is it still all sexism all the time?
I discovered that I was actually furious. I thought I was over being furious, but it turns out, the rage was merely dormant. I’m furious that it’s been over a decade and nothing has changed. I’m furious that sexism was everywhere in the world of college-Maggie and it remains thus, even if I out-learn, out-earn, out-drive, and out-perform my male counterparts. At the end of the day, I’m still “little girl.”
Possibly this is the point where some people are asking why this tiny gesture of all gestures should be the one to break me.
Here is the anatomy of my rage.
Step one: It is 1999 or 2000. I am 16. I go to college. A professor tells me I’m pretty. A married man in the bagpipe band I’m in tells me he just can’t control himself around me: he stays up nights thinking of myskin. Another man tells me he can’t believe that ‘a little bitch’ like me got into the competition group after a year of playing when he’s been at it for twenty years. After becoming friends with a professor’s daughter, I’m at her house sleeping on the couch, and I wake up to find the professor running his hand from my ankle bone to my thigh. I pretend I’m still asleep. I’m 17. “If something happened to my wife,” he tells me later, “I could be with you.” At my next visit to her house, I see the wife’s left a book on the kitchen table: how to rekindle your husband’s love.
Step two: It’s 2008. I finally buy the car of my dreams, a 1973 Camaro, and make it my official business vehicle. The first time I take it to put gas in it, a man tells me, “if I were your husband, I wouldn’t want you out driving my car.” I tell him, “if you were my husband, I’d be a widow.” The car requires a lot of gas. I get cat-called every other time I’m at a gas station. Once, I go into the gas station to get a drink, and when I come out, a bunch of guys have parked me in. They want, they say, to have a word with me, little lady. We play automotive chicken which I win because I would rather smash the back of my ’73 Camaro into their IROC than have to stab one of them with the knife on my keychain.
Step three: It’s 2011. I’m on tour in a European country, on my own, escorted only by my foreign publisher. I am at a business dinner, and say I’m going to my room. My female editor embraces me; my male publicist embraces me and then puts his tongue in my ear, covering it with his hand so that the crowd of twenty professionals does not see. My choices are to say nothing to avoid making a scene in front of my publisher’s people, or to say FUCK YOU. I apparently was never offered the choice of not having a tongue in my ear.
Step four: It’s 2012. I buy a race car. Well, a rally car. Someone asks my male co-driver if I’m good in bed. Someone asks me if I got sponsorship because someone was ‘trying to check the woman box.’ People ask me if I drive like a girl. Yeah, I do, actually. Let’s play a game called: who’s faster off the start?
Step five: It’s 2014. I’m driving my Camaro cross-country on book tour. It breaks down a lot. I’m under the hood and a pick up truck stops beside me. “Hey baby,” asks the driver, “do you need any help?” “Yeah,” I reply, “do you have a 5/8 wrench?” He did not.
Step six: It’s 2015. It’s sixteen years after I learned that I was a thing to be touched and kissed and hooted at unless I took it upon myself to say no, and no again, and no some more, and no no no. My friend Tessa Gratton points out that a male author used casually sexist language in a brief interview. She is dragged through the muck for pointing out how deeply-rooted our systemic sexism is. The publishing industry rises to the defense of the male author as if he has been deeply wronged. I tweet that the language was indeed sexist, though I didn’t think it was useful to condemn said male author. A male editor emails me privately to ask me if maybe I wasn’t being a little problematic by engaging in the discussion?
Step seven. Still 2015. Someone very close to me confesses that her college boyfriend keeps trying to push her past kissing, and she doesn’t want to. I tell her to set boundaries, and leave him if he doesn’t. A month passes. This week I find out she just had sex for the first time after he urged her to have several glasses of wine. She doesn’t drink. She was crying. She says, “I didn’t say no, though.”
It’s been sixteen damn years. I’m tired of having to say no. I’m tired of the media telling me that it’s mouth breathing bros and rednecks perpetuating the sexism. No: I can tell you that the most insidious form is the nice guy. Who is a nice guy, don’t get me wrong. I carry my own prejudices that I work through, and I don’t believe in demonizing people who aren’t perfect yet — none of us are. But the nice guy who says something sexist gets away with it. The nice guy who says something sexist sounds right and reasonable. The nice guy’s not helping, though. It’s been sixteen years, and the nice guys are nice, but we’re still things to be acquired. We are still creatures to be asked on dates. We are still saying no, still shouting NO, still having to always again and again say “no, please treat me with respect.”
I was just invited to a car show; the well-meaning guy who asked wanted me to bring my souped up Mitsubishi. I clicked on the event page. It’s catered by Hooters. I’m not going. Yeah, it’s a little thing, but I have a lifetime of them. I’m taking my toys and going home.
“I can’t wait to get that little girl behind the wheel again.”
Boom. Hi there my empowerful third wave friends. Let’s grab our learning hats and listen to Anita describing what, to my ears, sounds a lot like crusty old second wave feminism. You know, the variety that gets shit done.
Let’s not forget that gamer men are still assholes.
Many women, I think, resist feminism because it is an agony to be fully conscious of the brutal misogyny which permeates culture, society, and all personal relationships.
-
Andrea Dworkin, Our Blood: Prophecies and Discourses on Sexual Politics
—–
“Women, under separate masters, are the most divided of oppressed groups. And men prefer a willing slave to a forced slave, hence the necessity to enslave the mind. When one considers the natural attraction between the sexes, the dependence of the woman on the husband, her achievement of identity only through him ‘it would be a miracle if the object of being attractive to men had not become the polar feminine education and formation of character’. Resignation of will and meekness become part of sexual attractiveness. What is now called the nature of women is eminently an artificial thing – the result of forced repression in some directions, unnatural stimulation in others…no other class of dependents have had their character so entirely distorted from its natural proportions by their relations with their masters.”—Charnie Guettell, from Marxism & Feminism (1974)
“Pornography has socialized a generation of men into watching sexual torture,” Dines said. “You are not born with that capacity. You have to be trained into it. Just like you train soldiers to kill. If you are going to carry out violence against a group you have to dehumanize them. It is an old method. Jews become kikes. Blacks become niggers. Women become cunts. And no one turns women into cunts better than porn.”
-Gail Dines, quoted By Chris Hedges in “Pornography is What the End of the World Looks Like“.
“Do you REALLY want the truth from real sex trafficking survivors? Because those of us sex trafficking victims/survivors who HAVE BEEN trying to speak out about how wrong this whole shit show is have NO money to even live on let alone mount a media campaign to protect our interests as we are NOT a $32 billion dollar a year industry—unlike the rapists, pimps and traffickers you seem hell-bent on protecting.
We have NO resources, NOTHING to enable us to protect ourselves when we DO speak out about what was done to us and then we get stalked, harassed, libeled, discredited, and threatened for speaking our truths.
This has happened to EVERY survivor who wants the Nordic model AND solid economic supports for women wanting to exit the commercial rape trade. And as a sex trafficking survivor, that is EXACTLY what prostitution is: COMMERCIAL RAPE.
So let’s be honest, shall we? You people who continue to stand on YOUR privileges (middle/upper class privilege and/or male privilege) to shout survivors down and subvert OUR human rights (yanno, like the right to NOT be pressed into commercial rape) don’t want to hear from the 90% who want out but can’t exit and you damn well don’t want to hear from destitute survivors like me who ARE out and who have had to resort to eating out of garbage cans and sleeping in cars for YEARS after escaping because of NOT being allowed ANY OTHER PLACE IN SOCIETY EXCEPT THE GUTTER AND AN EARLY GRAVE rather than go back to what your side glibly euphemizes as “a job like any other.”
You would prefer us to be PERMANENTLY silenced by being left to DIE from poverty, or DIE at the hands of violent abusive johns (either from deadly incurable STD’s since the majority of johns REFUSE to wear condoms and DELIBERATELY infect their victims, as revealed by Dr. Jay Silverman from Harvard Medical College in his 2007 report published in JAMA) from being economically forced to return to the very same sexual slavery hell we have fought so damn hard to ESCAPE from (often with NO help at all from ANYONE else in society, mind you).
So how about asking the the REAL question here: Whom does the Grail serve?
FACT: Only 15% of men are johns. At least 60% of them are married or are in a long-term relationship. Most are white and from the middle and upper classes. And many of them already have plans in mind to seek out women and girls specifically to TORTURE OR KILL when they seek out prostituted women—as revealed by recent john busts in Ottawa, Canada and also in the state of Virginia in the US where one john seeking a trafficked 14 yr old “for sex” was found to be carrying a loaded gun.
WHY are you more interested in protecting the profits of pimps, brothel owners, traffickers and johns—RAPISTS AND KILLERS—whose money and male privilege entitles them to do this shit with society’s full blessing and support and protection than you are in protecting the human rights of the VICTIMS of the commercial rape trade in the name of supporting women’s autonomy?
Is it because you think it’s perfectly OK to sacrifice an entire class of women and kids (and even young men too) as human shields to bear the brunt of life-threatening poverty due to job discrimination against racialized groups and poor, unvalued women (made worse by the lack of a social safety net thanks to Welfare Reform) and to bear the brunt of male sexual violence and cruelty just so that YOU can continue to unjustly benefit from it?
Or is it because you are really a paid shill for those at the apex of this trade in human flesh and blood and possibly have BLOOD MONEY in your bank account to protect?
Want to hear from some MORE survivors? How many MORE victims of the commercial rape trade do you need to hear from before you decide that OUR claims for some restorative justice and human rights are valid?
I tagged some brother and sister survivors as well as a male anti-trafficking ally. Whether they choose to participate in a convo dominated by johns, pimps and their cheerleaders where they know that they can expect to just get stomped into the ground yet again by those with privilege who don’t give a fuck about us is another matter.
I spoke out. You heard from me, a REAL sex trafficking survivor. If you will NOT listen or give a crap about me and my quest for justice and human rights, or Rebecca Mott’s or Rachel Moran’s or Stella Marr’s, then you won’t give a shit about what the rest of my fellow survivors have to say either. Your side never has. Which is why the Happy Hooker myth and the Pretty Woman Hollywood fantasy continues to dominate the public discourse in this matter at the expense of trafficking victims’ human rights.
There is NOTHING “objective” about this issue. Side 1 believes that a class of women and girls should continue to be set aside to be dehumanized and sacrificed as human shields to bear the brunt of poverty and male sexual violence and entitlement and allowed NO OTHER PLACE in society other than the gutter and an early grave, while Side 2 believes that women are human beings that deserve lives with dignity, to NOT be stripped of basic human rights by being reduced to disposable commodities for the sake of maintaining male privilege.”
Sometimes its hard to put your finger on what exactly this mysterious patriarchy is. Robert Jensen does a good job of offering an explanation.
Patriarchy
“This past year I have written about rape culture and trans ideology, in both cases anchoring an analysis in the problem of patriarchy. I’m often told that the term “patriarchy” is either too radical and alienating, or outdated and irrelevant. Yet it’s difficult to imagine addressing problems if we can’t name and critique the system out of which the problems emerge.
The late feminist historian Gerda Lerner defined patriarchy as “the manifestation and institutionalization of male dominance over women and children in the family and the extension of male dominance over women in the society in general.” Patriarchy implies, she continued, “that men hold power in all the important institutions of society and that women are deprived of access to such power. It does not imply that women are either totally powerless or totally deprived of rights, influence and resources.”
Like any resistance movement, feminism does not speak with one voice from a single unified analysis, but it’s hard to imagine a feminism that doesn’t start with the problem of patriarchy, one of the central systems of oppression that tries to naturalize a domination/subordination dynamic. In the case of feminism, this means challenging the way that patriarchy uses the biological differences between male and female (material sex differences) to justify rigid, repressive and reactionary claims about men and women (oppressive gender norms).
How should we understand the connection between sex and gender? Given that reproduction is not a trivial matter, the biological differences between male and female humans are not trivial, and it is plausible that these non-trivial physical differences could conceivably give rise to significant intellectual, emotional and moral differences between males and females. Yet for all the recent advances in biology and neuroscience, we still know relatively little about how the biological differences influence those capacities, though in contemporary culture many people routinely assume that the effects are greater than have been established. Male and female humans are much more similar than different, and in patriarchal societies based on gendered power, this focus on the differences is used to rationalize disparities in power.
In short: In patriarchy, “gender” is a category that functions to establish and reinforce inequality. While sex categories are part of any human society — and hence some sex-role differentiation is inevitable, given reproductive realities — the pernicious effects of patriarchal gender politics can, and should, be challenged.”
The rest of the article can be found on Nation of Change.
bleatmop
Mystro
Dead Wild Roses 
Your opinions…