That is all.

Opted, Pushed or Just Plain Not Welcome?
(Via BlogHer – Feminism & Gender.)

Let’s Talk
It gave me a little thrill to see this article from Michelle Obama appear in my reader – I’m excited at the level of internet-usage in the campaign if she’s posting to BlogHer.

The history of America since 1980
I don’t always agree with Tyler, although I’ve come to enjoy having Marginal Revolution in my reader. It’s often food for thought. This one happens to be a short little article with some good points.

The word yellow wandered through his mind in search of something to connect with.
–Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

The quote, of course, is from the scene in HHGTTG where poor Arthur wakes up, extremely hung-over, and spies a pair of bulldozers outside his home. In his post-inebriated state, the facts of the situation – bulldozer, yellow, home – take some time to percolate before making sense

Adams’ words quite reasonably describe how I often feel while reading non-fiction articles, books, and blogs. One comment might wander through my mind for days or weeks before connecting with something I’ve read previously, others might connect immediately.

The latter is the case for today’s idle thought. I picked up Valenti’s Full Frontal Feminism after reading that Hugo Schwyzer added it to the syllabus for his Intro to Feminism classes.

So far, it’s all a given and rehashes most of the blog writing I’ve read from Valenti herself, as well as Amanda, Pam, and the gang and others.

One sentence though, about Valenti’s experience meeting former President Clinton and the resulting “Boobgate”, wandered through my mind briefly.

Valenti says:

If you’re a younger woman, no matter how much work you do, someone is always going to claim that your success is due to the way you look or to your general fuckability.

Somewhere around my move back to Oregon in 2001, I had a conversation with my friend Glenn in Boston. If I recall correctly, I was commenting on the career shift I was making at the same time, moving from doing counseling into working in computers. Glenn maintained that I’d have no problem at all finding a job in computers. Anyone would hire me, he said. Not because I’m smart, skilled, and have been working with computers and programming since grade school. No, of course not. I was young and female. The “quota” argument.

Once I started writing, the wandering thought connected with another, vaguely related, instance. A close friend of mine has spent several years now fighting the impression that, simply because she is an attractive woman working in a company with a large number of men, she MUST be sleeping with most or all of them. The men spreading this rumor never seem to take into account that A) she’s married and her husband works for the same company or B) she’s obviously not having this supposed affair with them.

Sadly, there isn’t a direct answer to this kind of problem. It’s education, one man at a time, one person at a time (because women are just as likely to accuse each other of succeeding based on our looks), that we are smart, intelligent, wonderful, organized, human beings.

Her[Susan Bordo] essay “Hunger as Ideology” was included in the composition reader I used, and I assigned it to my students. Bordo, a feminist philosopher, analyzes numerous food advertisements in close detail (reproducing the print ads in the essay) to show the cultural messages that underpin the selling of food. Given that ads rely on pre-existing cultural tropes to get their messages across, they can tell us about the ideological underpinnings of our culture. Some of Bordo’s findings:

-Voracious hunger is considered a sign of manliness.

-Hunger for food and desire for sexuality are constructed as analogous, but this is a gendered analogy. When women are targeted, “their hunger for food is employed solely as a metaphor for their sexual appetite.” When men are targeted, the metaphor goes in reverse: eating delicious food is depicted as a sexual conquest. (The examples for this include hilariously awful ads of men whispering sweet nothings to their Betty Crocker desserts.)

-Female hunger is represented in terms of misogynistic fear: sex is imagined as a form of eating in which the woman consumes and destroys a male object of desire.

-The only acceptable female desire in ads is the desire to provide food for others.

-Women are depicted eating in private, secretly, and this act is explicitly represented as a “substitute for human love.”

from Kate Harding’s Shaply Prose

As a woman of some size myself who grapples with several weight-related body issues – health, cholesterol, attractiveness, even finding clothing that fits properly – reading this today made me think: is there any relation between sex and food in the years when I gained most of this weight? If I were to chart out, year by year, the process of going from 110 at 18 to 220 at 30, would I find any surprising correlations?

What do you think? Do you think you’d find any connection in your past between your relationship with sex and your relationship with food?

This may just be the one thing that pushes us XX-types over the edge, though. I have yet to see – nor do I expect it to arrive shortly – a musk scented razor for men who can’t bear the possibility of – what, exactly? Depilitating with something that doesn’t smell like food? Holding one of the thousands of things that the average human might pick up in a week that doesn’t carry an attractive scent?

All of which is to say – WHY on EARTH would we *need* razors with scented HANDLES? Y’know, I can see them trying to sell us on some kind of scent added to the moisturizing aloe strip that’s standard on razors now. In a very loose theory, that aloe strip might even be replenishing our skin’s need for unnatural citrus or lavender smells. But the HANDLE? WTF?

In the last couple of months, there’s been several things about my hobby that have tweaked my nerves one way or another. First, there was the shoot in May where I walked away with all of 11 pictures – and most of those were set-up test shots – because once the models arrived, I was uncomfortable with the amount of playing to the “male gaze” going on.

June was better – everyone seemed to have fun, and the models, although dressed to appeal, weren’t groping and hanging off of each other like they were auditioning for “Girls Gone Wild”.

Somewhere in between, it started to dawn on me what was making me uncomfortable and the reasons behind it.

See, out of the usual groups of photographers, I’m often the only woman, and almost always the only feminist – and the only one educated in this area of media theory.

Take this image, for example. (click on it to access larger view). As a photographer, I looked at it and offered the feedback that the image, the pose, the choice of background…. suggest strong, independent, uncaring what the viewer thinks. And yet, that obvious nipple detracts from it *as an image*. Plus, it’s something that most women might find embarrassing. It would be very easy in post-processing to photoshop it out or minimize, and I really think it would make a stronger picture.

The response from Bob, the photographer, addressed the second half of that concern – the model saw the picture before it was published and was ok with it. And since he’s the photographer and presumably knows what his intention with the picture was, he has no obligation to respond to me on the first point.

What got me was the next commenter, HUBCAM, who said

“I think we’re all the better for it.”

What an ignorant and privileged thing to say! It sounds to me as though he is saying that what he wants, appreciates, and enjoys is more important than what the person in the image is comfortable with and even more important than the image being a stronger image with a consistent “story”.

I’m rather glad I don’t know who this person is, because I’d be twice as offended if we’d met. Shame on you HUBCAM, for putting your puriescent preferences ahead of art and human dignity.

Evidently, the Boy Scouts council in Southeastern Pennsylvania raised funds 80 years ago to build an office for their council – on public land. The city of Philadelphia agreed to charge them $1/year rent on the land so long as they maintained the building.

In recent years, however, there’s been a lot of government withdrawal away from BSA because of their anti-homosexual stance. They’ve been increasingly denied access or charged full price for access to public facilities, such as marinas, parks, etc.

And now Philadelphia wants them to either include gay and atheist boys in their mission, pay full market rent on the land, or relocate off of public property.

If BSA wants to make it a freedom of speech issue that they are a private organization and permitted to deny admission to anyone they please, the city of Philadelphia is well within its rights to deny to rent to an organization that violates city anti-discrimination law. I suppose, since the Boy Scouts council raised money and built the building, they could try and take it with them, but really – is it that hard just to become more inclusive?

I wish this had been the Philly I saw when I lived there for two years.

Tangentially, this quote comes from the Time article:

While some organizations and governments have been hostile to the Scouts, Bork said, many have been supportive. “We clearly had some issues with organizations that don’t respect the Scouts’ right as a private organization to set its own membership standards and have withdrawn their support,” Bork said. “But frankly that’s their right too, and we respect that.”

Let there be much “argh-ing” and gnashing of teeth. Talk about twisting words! Yo, Mr. Bork, let me clue you in on something – respecting the Scouts’ right as a private organization to set its own membership standards and AGREEING with those standards are two very different things. And while I respect your right to appear in national media to be a two-bit, ignorant sack of dung for twisting your own words to worst effect, in no way do I agree that this supports your cause.

From Time.com via Digg.

Recently, she called my attention to an editorial from the Guardian, titled “When Harry met Sexism”

In terms of which books sell plentifully and are acclaimed among knowledgeable fans, speculative fiction is not male-dominated at all – quite the opposite. It is the critical establishment which marginalises women. Bestselling female contenders remain unacknowledged while their male counterparts are robustly namechecked, absorbed reliably into the official history of the genre.

I have to say – I find it very curious that we have developed a society where we pay people who have no interest in books to pretend to read them (how much of the book do these critics actually read, anyways?), and then lumber forth with their ponderous opining on speculative fiction, which they had no interest in, think is childish at best, and certainly isn’t “high culture”.

I’m vaguely reminded of the ship full of hairdressers and phone cleaners depicted by Douglas Adams, a space ship full of people who had been deemed “too useless” by their own planet, and sent out into space to go colonize another world (or die trying) as an attempt to simply get RID of them. Perhaps we have developed this type of “critic” as an attempt at keeping cranky people out of doing further harm in, say, politics?

Dylan’s mother and Garrett’s mother were
talking about naps – Dylan doesn’t really take naps, she said, if
they’re lucky, he’ll lay down for 20 minutes. Garrett’s mother
was surprised, and said that Garrett usually takes a couple of naps
a day, sometimes for up to a couple of hours.

“Two hours?!? You could get something
DONE with that kind of time.”

…….

And people WONDER why I don’t want
kids. Because that was an honest reaction from a parent, that a
stretch of time two hours long is an astounding occurrence. I have
a hard enough time finding two hours NOW to get stuff done
in between working, cooking, and hobbies.

I’m just so utterly glad that other
people are willing to put the effort into child-raising that’s
necessary to propagate the species so that I don’t have to.

Note: I do have other reasons for being
childless, like not wanting to contribute to what I consider the
population problem we-as-a-planet will be facing soon enough. But
it all started with not wanting to put that time into child-raising
that it takes to do it right.

To wit: the discussion centers on the raised levels of awareness
(i.e., hypervigilance) that women are taught – and to which I could
provide examples if necessary. When a young tadpole by the name of
Ryan bursts on the scene with this brilliant question:

So tell me, if Im the “good guy”, and I
still get treated like Im any regular prick, then what is the
incentive to be a good guy.

More after the jump.

To truly understand the clueless nature of
this comment, we have to translate it into the terms of the
discussion.

So tell me, if Im the [guy who doesn't rape or assault
women], and I still get treated like Im [a stranger who may or may
not rape or assault women], then what is the incentive to [continue
my policy of not raping or assaulting women].

You see, Ryan just asked why he should not start raping and
assaulting women, since we’re going to be hypervigilant around him
out of trained wariness that men who rape and assault women don’t
wear labels and can’t be identified on the street.

Sounds to me like someone privileged enough to expect to be
rewarded for following the damn law. Someone who, as a kid,
probably had to be bribed into behaving.

More in the comments here (Great post, Chris,
BTW)