Recently in Deep Thoughts Category

I was having a conversation with a friend of mine about the differences between first, second and third wave feminism, and how now, the third wave has branched out and become interconnected with other social movements, such as anti-globalization, third world representation and solidarity, gay rights, et cetera.

My friend raised an interesting question which I was at pains to answer. She asked: "So when is something a feminist issue, and when is it not?" There are plenty of issues which, while important, have little to do with women's rights, or affect women about the same as they affect men. Below is a partial list of issues, so you can see what I mean:

-Animal Rights

-Anti-Scientology

-Atheist / Humanist / Nonreligious Activism

-Activism for Increased Regulation of Chemical Solvents that go into food, drinking water, household products, etc.

-Climate Change

-Culture Jamming

-The Deschooling/Unschooling movement

-Healthcare

-No Nukes

-Prison Reform

-The Slow Food Movement

These are just picked up off the top of my head. Some of these can have a feminist bent (I for one would like to see more feminist culture jamming) but some of them could not really be linked to the feminist movement (no nukes, for example).

So this is my question for you, which she asked me. Where do we draw the line between a feminist or women's issue, and one that, while important, isn't really feminist? Is it more like a gradation than a line? How do you see it?

Apologies for such a long post...I tend to type really fast and not realize how much I've typed when I get into things...

I am pro-choice.

Some background: I was an anti-choicer until I left high school and began to learn who I really was outside of my parents home (as I think many of us do). I realized that what I had been told (brainwashed) about abortion was so wrong and horrible that it was refreshing to be a part of a group (pro-choicers) who generally rely on facts and common sense to make their point instead of lies and pressure like many anti-choicers do. I will also note that my parents do not approve of pre-marital sex (the only sex-ed I got as a young teen was don't do it)...this didn't stop any of us though, I used to sneak out with my boyfriend (now hubby) but I utilized Planned Parenthood for my sexual health needs in secret and I am not against pre-marital sex myself.

Sometimes I struggle with what I believe pro-choice to really mean, and that is respecting and valuing ALL choices women make about whether or not to bring a child into the world, and going further, respecting their decisions on how to raise said child. (with exceptions for violence or mistreatment obviously).

I just wanted to pose a question for you -- how do you respond to someone who has a negative reaction when you mention that you're a feminist?

Most of these people are just pretty obvious about feminism and think of it as the bra-burning, man-hating type. So whats a light-hearted way to respond when people say "Oh..so you're one of those.."?

I know there are so many things that you can bring up...gender roles, rape culture, etc...but whats a not-so-serious, conversational, quick way to make them understand your position?

Any thoughts would be great!

I'm a feminist.

I believe women are all beautiful no matter what their size shape or color.

But I can't believe I'm beautiful.

I am an activist for women's reproductive rights. I'm so proud of what I do and don't care if others oppose my beliefs.

Why am I desperate for my parents to approve what I do? They never will. I'm ashamed to even talk to them about my activism--I fear their response.

I hate how women think they have to be thin to be beautiful.

But sometimes I don't eat.

And sometimes I can't stop eating, it's like a drug and I am ashamed of myself.

I think the women in advertisements have been photoshopped to "perfection" and it's sad that's what we expect women to look like.

But sometimes I wish did look like them.

I'm a strong, beautiful, intelligent woman.

I don't always believe it.

Am I a feminist?

Not sure what this is...just have had it on my mind for awhile. These are some of the conflicts I have inside. No matter how many feminist blogs I read, no matter how many women I tell are beautiful just the way they are, no matter how many times I say I don't care what my family thinks about my involvment in VOX...it's not true. I do care. I have serious self esteem issues and am only now realizing I have a serious eating disorder that I can't control. And yet on the outside I scream strong, feminist woman. How can I believe something so strongly and have the opposite feelings?

My inability to spell the word privelege privilege manifested itself in such a real way this week. I am writing my philosophy senior thesis this year on global feminism and international feminist interventions, and I've been reading up a storm this semester. The last thing I read was a piece on Cosmopolitan Feminism that used a lot of the language and ideas I had read about before, and I was sort of bored with it, so I took just one part of the article and wrote my response paper on it. The author was examining the work of international bodies and groups and claimed that their work could be justified by the philosophy she was advocating, but not that the groups necessarily held the notions she said their actions reflected. I ended up pondering the link between consciousness and activism:

To what extent do people need to be aware of what motivates them to act in a certain way if that certain way creates positive outcomes? Does the extent of one’s knowledge about what one is doing make an action more ethical? Consciousness has always been valued by feminism, and during American second wave feminism it came before everything else, both action and scholarship. Now it seems as if it is more common to become involved in activism related to women’s standing in the world (especially if it isn’t called “feminist”) without really thinking about structural inequality first. It seems possible that individuals could be passionate about an isolated issue, like a lack of funding for medical research on women’s health, without it changing the way they think about the world in general.

I ended up sending out a late night email to some people I regarded as feminists asking them about this. Here's what I said in the email:

Gender is a perplexing notion to all of us and one which we struggle with in our daily lives and here on Feministing.  Recently we've been contemplating the idea of gender essentialism and how it manifests itself under the surface, circumventing our best intentions and influencing our decisions.

I think what is so particularly confounding about gender is that it is purely a construct rather than an established fact.  What is male or what is female depends on the person, depends on the context, depends on the situation, and depends on a series of free-floating variables.  What is masculine or what is feminine, I suppose, is up for debate and if surveyed, everyone would have his or her own answer.  However, we all feel compelled to act our assigned gender and are frequently the target of messages which attempt to shame or to otherwise manipulate the fluidity of gender and, for that matter, gender identity.

As I've mentioned before, I have a particularly tortured sense of gender identity as a result of childhood sexual abuse at the hands of an older man, thankfully now deceased.  My feelings towards masculinity are overwhelmingly negative and indeed, from the vantage point of several years and lots of therapy, I recognize I came to hate masculinity and hate my own gender, while simulataneously idealizing femininity and women.  In my teens, girlfriends found themselves placed up high, a position they found uncomfortable, yet they frequently kept me around even when I wasn't wanted because I could always be counted on to stroke their egos and suppliant their insecurities.  At the time, I never questioned what the practice said about whom.

The point of this anecdote is merely to illustrate how one person's conception of gender creates a highly individual view of humanity and the world itself.  Indeed, the more I analyze human perception of any sort, the more I wonder that we see anything in common at all and can manage to find any shared humanity whatsoever.  Part of Feminism is trying to make sense out of the seemingly senseless and challenging existant power structures.  Facts, data, and events move us towards a greater understanding, but personal anecdote often speaks more powerfully to me, since I personally think of gender studies as an effort to decipher a very large riddle and a frequently moving target.  It is in that spirit that I offer this musing.

(First post!)

A few posts from last week got me thinking again about choice. I again found myself torn between wanting to respect other women's decisions, not make decisions for them, etc. on the one hand, and the desire to keep challenging societal standards in general on the other.

One question that kept occurring to me as I thought about women making choices that to me seemed unfeminist was: "But has she REALLY considered it? What if she's just deceiving herself?" This was fueled, in part, by some of my own experiences with challenging standards. When I first wanted to stop shaving, I had a period of a few months where I was afraid of doing so because of the social stigma, and anxiously trying to justify continuing to shave by saying that it was my choice. I was deceiving myself. Eventally I owned up to the fact that I was doing something I didn't want to, and stopped. Which was hard.

So this makes it sometimes difficult for me to accept other women's choices, whether they concern shaving, letting men pay for them in bars, or engaging in traditional gender roles in general, when those choices seem unfeminist to me. It's hard not to think - Is this REALLY her choice? This is further complicated by some strains of third-wave feminism, which do seem to attempt to justify any traditional behavior (stripping comes to mind) with choice.

Here is where I have my epiphany. The thing is, I can't see into people's minds. I really don't know what they're thinking. I really can't distinguish between a woman who is, say, wearing heels because she's fullly considered them and still likes them, and one who is using the language of choice to justify her unfeminist act. And, in the end, it's not my business.

Was I deceiving myself when I was continuing to shave? Yes. Would I have liked to have other feminist deny my agency during this period and tell me I didn't know what was good for me and that I should shave? Fuck no.

So here is the point, people. Question your own choices. Question them continually and passionately. But please, please, don't tell other women they are deluding themselves. This will lead to bad things.

I tend to think about gendered social expectations a lot. For one thing, I'm raising a couple of girls here, and for another thing, I tend not to conform to some of the expectations, and have gotten my share of shit from well-meaning friends and family as well as complete strangers. I used to be sort of bewildered by this. Why on earth would a complete stranger be so invested in how I perform gender? So I've written before on the topics of owning your physical space and changing your speech patterns in order to stop apologizing and verbally deferring to men so often. But over the last few weeks I've been thinking about another way in which women and men are socialized (and judged) differently.

I am not a naturally friendly person. I'm just not, and at this point in my life I think I can stop being in denial about it or subconsciously feeling guilty about it. Some people have a natural propensity to be friendly, and others don't. And not being naturally friendly doesn't reflect on your character or moral worth at all. There's no universal obligation to be friendly. And many men are unabashedly unfriendly and downright prickly, but people don't tend to judge them or guilt them about it. But women who aren't naturally friendly are frequently judged. Think about how many male authors there are who are notoriously reclusive, and abrasive and irritable when they do come into contact with others. This is generally thought to be a charming eccentricity. Now think about all the things that are said about Annie Proulx's personality. Why does she have an obligation to be warm and empathetic and put others at ease, when her male counterparts don't?

Hello, I just want to vent about something that I find extremely annoying and baffling. I'm sure many of you have probably experienced the same thing, and I just wanted to hear some other opinions and feedback on this subject. I am 28 years old, I spent 6 years working towards my Bachelor's degree, I finally have a professional, well-paying career, and I have hopes of attaining a Master's degree. I have spent my 20's chasing down all of my wildest dreams and goals....I have been on television, I have done modeling work, and I currently hold TWO state pageant queen titles. I have done things that many women can only dream of. While many of my female counterparts have aged from having children and having stressful jobs, I have maintained my youth through constant exercise and still look 10 years younger than my real age. Right now, the entire world is in my hands and I can do whatever I want. Other than getting my Master's, the only thing I have not done yet is get married and had babies yet. I have had 2 unplanned pregnancies before that did not come to term, but I just rolled with whatever life dealt me. The Lord giveth, and the Lord taketh away. I figure that everything happens for a reason, and the reason why I have not had children yet is because God has many great things planned for me to do first. As for marriage, I was engaged once when I was in my early 20's, but I ended the relationship because the reality of making such a huge commitment like that suddenly sank in. To me, marriage is a BIG decision, and it's definitely not something I want to rush into or enter into lightly...especially since I don't believe in divorce unless it's absolutely necessary. I live in a rural area where there just aren't very many desirable men at all, and I happen to be very picky about the kind of men I want to be with. My father has always told me to never settle for less than what I truly want, so I have been content to remain single for long periods of time instead of settling for a man I truly don't want to be with just so that I can be attached to somebody. I know in my heart that God will bring the right man for me along when the time is right, and I will reap the benefits of it.

My only problem is other women who just can't accept the path that my life has taken and feel the need to condemn me for being "an old dried-up, lonely spinster" at the ripe old age of 28.

I've been thinking a lot about language lately, especially concerning pronouns. The gender/sex dichotomy lingual system we operate under is something activist try to deconstruct. I could blog about this forever, and I probably will eventually, but another word I want to talk about it "race."

At first, I really wanted to find a new word for racism, and that's because of the root's origin. "Race" was a scientific term was once a heavily "researched" concept. Race implies that there is a genetic difference between those of a different skin color, and hence that there is a "pure blood" that is superior to the rest. And this concept does NOT limit itself to black vs. white like we so often think. Plenty of groups were "impure" including the Irish and Italian. We can use the word ethnicity, even though we very often are still asked to identify our "race." So I went on a mini-campaign to find a new word for racism as well. If race doesn't exist and is actually a social construct, kind of like gender, why is it that we still use the word racism? People don't discriminate based on genetic differences, they make judgments based on skin tone, among other factors.

I was told by a few people that it wasn't worth it to try to put a new word out there for racism. That this word was never going to change.

I got frustrated, and took a nap, and then had some thoughts. I think the word racism is actuallyok, because it's definition is not flawed. Racism is the discrimination or assumptions based on the notion that there is a genetic difference between people of different colors. Well yeah. There is a good chance that racist people still actually believe that. Racism is alive and well, just ask those principles who wouldn't allow President Obama's message to be broadcasted in their school. "Staying in school" is totally a liberal agenda.

I just think that instead of asking people what their "race" is or saying they made a decision based on your "race..." we should utilize the word ethnicity. Whether the perpetrator of the assumption knows it or not, ethnicity (among other factors including class and dress) is the real reason why we make "racial" assumptions in the first place.

So what's my "race"...human.
What's my ethnicity...Jamaican, Italian, German, Irish, Dutch, and Cherokee Native American.
Why is the word racism still relevant...because people are ignorant enough to believe that there is a genetic difference between humans with beautiful differences. 

But I still want to try really hard to begin using queerphobic! Homophobia is based on homosexuality which is based on that gender/sex dichotomy. We do use transphobia to more inclusive, but what about those who are intersexed? Just like the word queer has become an all encompassing, unifying term for the LGBTTIQA community, I hope we realize that the word "homophobia" leaves out a lot of people!

Looking at my past experiences over my entire life, I am not sure if it is safer to say that girls/women do not like me as a friend or that I just prefer to have guys as friends. This is not to say that I have never had girlfriends in my life. I have. Many of them. Some of them for very extended periods of time. But they have usually been very destructive to me as a person, and while I am happy to and more than willing to essentially become a doormat to accommodate my friends and fulfill their needs I cannot seem to find another who does the same.

My first friendships in my early years were with other girls. I had a friend down the street who I visited constantly, and she was so cool because she was older than me. Unfortunately, this friend was also friends with a teenage girl a little further down the street and this teenage girl apparently was in the habit of telling my friend about sex and her having sex with boys. Not that this is inherently bad, but it ended up being bad for me in the long run. My friend would constantly make me take my clothes off and have me do things to her, often mentioning that the teenage girl told her boys do that and it feels good. If I refused she threatened to not invite me to her birthday party, which at that age for me was like threatening death. The next girl friend after that (also older while I was still fairly young, I think I wasn't past 10 yet, but my memory isn't all that great) liked to have me lay down with her and imagine that tiny men were messing with our lower parts. My relationship with girls did not start out great.

I'm sure this is all too common a thing, but I today I saw a bumper sticker that made me feel weird in a way I'm not sure I can describe. The sticker was on a pick-up truck (ever the gendered "male" vehicle if there was one) and it said in large type: "I LOVE MY WIFE."

Oh, OK, that's nice. It immediately made me feel odd. Was this more like those stickers that say "I (heart) my X breed of dog" or maybe more like the ones that proclaim pride in the honor roll child?

Isn't the assumption that one would love one's spouse? It just struck me as a whole "wife as property" thing...of course I might be reading too much into it.

What do you think?

(When WVFC asked its writers to contribute some thoughts about Labor Day and the back-to-school season, we were nearly overwhelmed with smart thoughts. Stay tuned for more pairings this week. Below, Ainslie Uhl and Diane Vacca speak to that elegiac edge, when we can't decide whether to grieve summer or push forward. -- Ed.)

Diane Vacca : Labor Day is a bittersweet time: Janus-like, the end of summer and the start of the academic year have me looking forward and back at the same time... Ainslie Jones Uhl : The basil and I become survivalists about this time every year, struggling and striving to reach a common goal: making it past Labor Day. My whole being is on August autopilot, making sure that each of my offspring is well-equipped physically, emotionally and materially for a new school year and a new level of independence. The last few days are always frenzied, no matter how much I’ve done in advance.

Read full essays by Ainslie Uhl and Diane Vacca at Women's Voices For Change.

I've been struggling with my racial identity lately. Here's the scope:

A friend of mine, who is incidentally also Mexican, has dubbed me The White Mexican. Think of that what you may, but it is true. I am Mexican, Italian, German, Spanish, and probably much more, all wrapped up into one. I've been told by many that my siblings and I look all Italian, and when I mention I am part Latina, it usually comes as a surprise. Only recently did my close friends 'discover' that I was Mexican; my dad's mother actually immigrated from Mexico years previous.

A few incidents have got me thinking. My mother (the German- Italian :]), told me about the troubles she had when I was born. My parents were young and lacked insurance around the time my mom was pregnant with me, as my dad was in between jobs. The morning she went into labor, a hospital denied her stay because of her lack of coverage. My mom was told that had she been a minority, she would have been able to stay. She protested, saying that her husband, the father of the child inside her, was indeed Latino. But he told her that wasn't "Mexican enough."

Another issue on my mind is college. It's application and scholarship time. The majority of my friends are white, and I feel a weird sense of guilt as I check the Hispanic block in the race section of applications. I have debated whether to just not say my race in applications, but my last name is kind of a give-away. I've been sent a few scholarships regarding financial aid for People of color, still feeling guilty. I'm not sure how to articulate this; it's an odd sort of feeling.

Let it be said that I'm not crying 'reverse racism' here. I'm just thinking. I am proud of all that I am, it's just complex and overwhelming at times such as these. I just need to work things out with myself. Any thoughts would be appreciated.

"For Strong Women"
Marge Piercy

A strong woman is a woman who is straining.
A strong woman is a woman standing
on tiptoe and lifting a barbell
while trying to sing Boris Godunov.
A strong woman is a woman at work
cleaning out the cesspool of the ages,
and while she shovels, she talks about
how she doesn't mind crying, it opens
the ducts of the eyes, and throwing up
develops the stomach muscles, and
she goes on shoveling with tears
in her nose.

A strong woman is a woman in whose head
a voice is repeating, I told you so,
ugly, bad girl, bitch, nag, shrill, witch,
ballbuster, nobody will ever love you back,
why aren't you feminine, why aren't
you soft, why aren't you quiet, why
aren't you dead?

A strong woman is a woman determined
to do something others are determined
not to be done. She is pushing on the bottom
of a lead coffin lid. She is trying to raise
a manhole cover with her head, she is trying
to butt her way through a steel wall.
Her head hurts. People waiting for the hole
to be made say, hurry, you're so strong.

A strong woman is a woman bleeding
inside. A strong woman is a woman making
herself strong every morning while her teeth
loosen and her back throbs. Every baby,
a tooth, midvives used to say, and now
every battle a scar. A strong woman
is a mass of scar tissue that aches
when it rains and wounds that bleed
when you bump them and memories that get up
in the night and pace in boots to and fro.

A strong woman is a woman who craves love
like oxygen or she turns blue choking.
A strong woman is a woman who loves
strongly and weeps strongly and is strongly
terrified and has strong needs. A strong woman is strong
in words, in action, in connection, in feeling;
she s not strong as a stone but as a wolf
suckling her young. Strength is not in her, but she
enacts it as the wind fills a sail.

What comforts her is others loving
her equally for the strength and for the weakness
from which it issues, lightning from a cloud.
Lightning stuns. In rain, the clouds disperse.
Only water of connection remains,
flowing through us. Strong is what we make
each other. Until we are all strong together,
a strong woman is a woman strongly afraid.

Hi,

I am almost twenty years old, a soon-to-be sophomore in college, and have been in a monogamous relationship for the past three years (and am now living with my boyfriend). This past year, thanks to the liberal musings of my boyfriend and this lovely blog, I have taken a great interest in breaking down society - especially the representation and treatment of women.

I am currently taking my first women's and gender studies class (Intro.) and have begun to question EVERYTHING. While rendering T.V., magazines, chats with friends, chats with my parents, etc. completely unentertaining (and often unnerving), it is somewhat affecting my relationship. My boyfriend considers himself a feminist, and while he plays into some gender stereotypes (likes when I wear makeup, dress sexy), he cooks meals, cleans dishes/clothes, is extremely giving in bed, and will call out the objectification of/stereotypical attitudes towards women (he was raised by a very strong mother).

Yet, lately I see him as the total enemy, undermining me to hold his power --- I'm not joking. For example, I found an advertisement in GQ that I found particularly offensive and stereotypical and posted it on the fridge door. He told me that I should take it down, that it wasn't even "that good" and that I misunderstood the context. Another example, I told him a project idea for my women's studies class, he immediately launched into how it was a terrible idea and that blah blah blah. Now, I am open to constructive criticism (I think), but I feel like his insensitive remarks are a way to debase my intelligence. It is as if he knows everything, and instead of softening the blow with "oh..that was good, but" he has to criticize every. single. aspect. He has to maintain his power, his authority, his superior intelligence.

I approached him after these events, calmly, and asked what he was thinking, why he opposes my idea, why he chooses to phrase it in a way that makes me feel upset, etc. But he tells me to lower my voice (though it really isn't loud!) and he gives me the shush face (we have roommates). When he talks about our relationship, it is not "talking," when I talk about our relationship, it is "bickering."

I'm sorry if this is a bundle of nonsense, or self-pitying reflection, but I wanted to know the opinions of other feminists on how to deal with this issue.

Thank you in advance!

Often, traditional romance seems based on the old trope of aggressive males pursuing passive females. However in many cases this indirectly romanticizes rape, since the women don’t actively express their own desires, or at least rarely act upon them. Rather it is up to the men to chase the women, follow them to their homes, and block them from leaving because he just can’t live without you! For example, in the first “Twilight” book the guy sneaks into the girls bedroom to watch her sleep. He is technically breaking and entering yet it is considered highly romantic.

There are also problems for men. If the guy if expected to constantly chase after the girl, that represents a huge investment of time, money, energy, and emotion. Meanwhile he may or may not really find that he likes the other person after a few dates. Also men tend to be rated on the quality of the dates they provide rather than their actual characteristics. Also, in some cases it can lead to true heartbreak. On the website girlsaskguys.com a women asked “Why don’t men chase women anymore?” In addition to the many answers citing changing cultural attitudes, one male answerer talked about girls who break up with their boyfriends when they don’t really want to. The original question asker countered that it could be romantic if the guy stopped her from leaving him. However it is still incredibly heart breaking for the guy, who effectively is having his emotions toyed with.

Often the two parties in a heteonormative relationship can have wildly different goals for their relationship. This is sometimes jokingly referred to as the “Battle of the Sexes”. Of course the stereotypes about what men and women want in a relationship are not necessarily true, but they do represent certain ideals that get pounded into people’s heads. Men want to be the guy with the hot girlfriend. Women want to be the girl with the great boyfriend. However these two are often mutually exclusive. Often relationships are ruined when men and women refuse to abandon their gender specific ideals

Personally I prefer a relationship based simply on a mutual appreciation of the other person and desire to be together. I.e. you like them as a person, so you want to be with them. Then romance is defined simply as anything that confirms and/or nurtures the love in that relationship. While I understand that feminists are typically critical of such traditional forms of romance, I doubt that they have anything against romance in of itself, despite the stereotype.

So then how does one get past these old romantic ideas?

How does one form a romantic relationship of equals?

What sort of feminist literature exists on the subject of love and romance? What does feminist romance look like?

There is something that I have been doing ever since I have been moved into the city. I walk a lot by myself, mostly to and from the train to my apartment. It's not that far. About five blocks at the most. It's usually during the daytime or in the early evening, and it's in a familiar neighborhood (I've lived here for over 2 years now) but I still do it. When I see that I'm about to approach a man in the street or sidewalk I pull out my phone and pretend I'm talking to someone on it. I use this as a deterrent for street harassment. I've found that most of the time if guys think I'm on the phone they won't harass me, or at least if they do I'll have an excuse for ignoring them. They won't get more abusive or loud if I ignore them because they "understand" because I'm on the phone. I also wear my sunglasses most of the time when I'm outside, even if it's not very sunny. This way guys can't make eye contact with me. I've found that if I make eye contact with a man, even by accident, he's more likely to try and engage in conversation with me.

None of my male friends do these kinds of things when they're walking alone. They think it is weird that I do. They think it is strange that I am so put off and scared just by the prospect of being talked to or approached by strange men on the street.

As many of you probably know from reading previous posts of mine, I'm a rape survivor. These things that I do make me feel more comfortable when walking by myself. I consider them my armor. While I don't feel 100% safe doing them, they make me feel safer.

I was not raped by a stranger. I was raped by someone I knew, in my parents' home. So why am I so afraid of random men while walking outside, even in perfect daylight? I have no idea. But that is my life now. I didn't have any of these behaviors until I moved back to Chicago, the place where my rape occurred. I walked around in DC and New Orleans without a care in the world. But I feel like since moving back here I've moved back into some sort of rape culture that I had escaped from.

I don't really know what I'm hoping to accomplish with this post. It was something I just noticed today. Something I felt like I needed to write down.

We've all heard those words before, often spoken by someone who agrees with the basic tenants of feminism but doesn't want to be labeled as a "hairy man-hating bitter dyke" (though personally, I find nothing wrong with any or all of those labels). It is clear that feminism has a bad reputation in current society. This became apparent to me when engaging in a conversation with a group of friends.

A new hobby of mine is referring to myself as "the feminist in the room", so, during this conversation, when one of my friends said something sexist I replied with "Careful what you say, you might just get beaten up by the feminist in the room.".

Another of my friends looked at me. "Who's a feminist?" he said. I looked at him.
"I am," I replied.
He replied with, "but I thought you were intelligent!"

It took me a second to realise what it was he was saying, and another second to respond. This wasn't the first time I have encountered a negative response to my declarations of feminism. My partner's father, for example, hates feminists, and always says something derogatory when I am found to be reading a feminist text or website. When I asked my partner why this was, He responded that the majority of feminists are the angry man-haters everyone is afraid of being associated with. I honestly don't think this is the case, but I do think those feminists represent a vocal minority within feminism. (I should note at this point that my partner is a feminist ally, and also doesn't see a problem with those feminists)

Honestly, I'm not sure how to respond to these criticisms. How do I tell people that, no, not all feminists are like that, without discounting the ones who are? After all, their opinions are just as important as mine. I try to be proud of my feminism, but at times like this it gets really hard.

What can I do?

(X-Posted to my livejournal)

I am nineteen years old. In the beginning of the year, I did something that not many other girls my age do; I changed my last name. I had been ready to make the jump for a few years, but I had waited patiently for the right time when I was old enough, and maybe considered mature enough.

The process was easy. It was a lawyer and some hoops to jump through and four trips to the DMV to get everything settled. However, contrary to the assumptions of the ladies at the social security office and the DMV and the man doing my background check at the Red Cross, I did NOT get married, and I never have been married.

I now proudly carry my mother's name. She has always been the one reasonable, logical, and caring parent in my life. She's the person I feel closest to in the world. She is my ultimate definition of family and unconditional love.

I shouldn't have been surprised when marriage was the first assumption. Culturally, that's why women change their names. I've been told I look old for my age, and I'm often asked if I am my sister's mother, even though she is only four years younger than me.

I was surprised though. I look too young and wild to be married. I'm barely nineteen, heavily pierced, and more often than not, I'm in lifeguard apparel and I reek of chlorine. Maybe I am letting these stereotypes limit me, but I really don't think I have that newlywed glow.

However, The surprise was nothing compared to the confrontation I had by the man checking my medical history at the Red Cross before I donated blood. Before I got checked, I let the man know that I had changed my name and showed him proof of everything, and who I was. His first response, "Congratulations!!" a little more enthusiastic than I had received previously. I'm very proud of the fact that I share my mother's last name, so I told him I hadn't gotten married, just changed my name to be closer to her. This is where I think that conversation should have ended.

My assumption is that he was just trying to carry on friendly conversation. It can be awkward sitting in a small booth with a perfect stranger, but the way he approached the situation left a bitter taste in my mouth. He pressed for details, went on and on about how my father must have done something terrible. He asked me if I talked to my father, what my father did to deserve this kind of punishment. Punishment? I was thinking why does this add up to punishment? The one thing I wanted to scream at this man was that my father does not own me. The last name means nothing to me.

I didn't think he deserved to know the personal details of my life if he was going judge me and berate me like this. I also believe in being polite to people, and giving them the benefit of the doubt. I did keep my mouth shut to a point, and didn't rant at him about how rude he was being. I kept repeating that I took my mother's name, and that my father wasn't really in my life. Then he made the usual comments I get about being a 'kid of divorced parents.' After ten years of getting this, I'm pretty numb to it but it still annoys me to no end when people make assumptions about me because my parents got divorced when I was young.

I surprised myself when I got home at realized that I had stopped to think if I had possibly done something wrong. Was it disrespectful to change my name? Why is it so important to have his name? He was never there for me, at this point in my life, he barely knows me. But I still stick by my guns, I'm honoring my family. My friends and family understand why I did it, and are proud of my actions. My younger siblings are considering following my lead. I don't mind if people assume I got married, it's a common occurrence. I just don't understand why people make snap judgments about my personal life, and I still don't think my actions were 'disrespectful'.

*One Voice of Many. Because I speak in a tone of privilege. I speak believing my thoughts are important. I want to acknowledge that my voice is only one of many voices and I do not understand why I was born in a place and time where I can be heard. I don't take the responsibility lightly. I hope that my voice will give strength to the voice neglected in each of us- because I believe peace will come when humanity learns what it means to truly hear all parts of ourselves.*

We need space where the feminine voice exists alone. We are socialized into a world of masculinity and if given the option, we'll retreat back into its walls. The feminine voice does not know itself well enough to constantly defend itself. She needs a break to just be.

Voice. It's such a powerful thing.

I was raised to speak openly and vulnerably. And vulnerability can be a strength but in this dominating political world, using apolitical words is a political statement. And so too, vulnerability is a weakness in a world of power.

I feel like I was never given the guard of the masculine voice over my personal, intimate thoughts. I hate how open and vulnerable I feel I consistently am. I wasn't given a choice-- I was RAISED by a father with trust issues to be honest, open and vulnerable. And yet, these are things he never has been.

It's time I claimed my voice back for myself.

My father is in an emotionally abusive relationship. I don’t know how this directly correlates with feminism, but I believe all victims of abuse, including men, should be addressed in the feminist dialogue. I am in need of some advice or feedback—my family and I are currently going through a very difficult situation and I have found Feministing discussions to be always helpful and engaging.

In December, my father married a woman who seemed, at first, to be ideal—poised, successful as a businesswoman, attractive, doting, and outwardly successful. When they were in the ‘courting’ stage, she was constantly doting on him, buying him gifts, and buying the rest of the family gifts. They quickly moved in together, and bought a house.

As soon as they got married, however, things took a completely dire turn. Her behavior changed suddenly and dramatically. I would awaken at 4AM to screaming fits of rage by my stepmother (let’s call her Linda). For days she would cry and whine and complain about my father, when I see no indication that he’d been mistreating her. She would make accusations that he treats her horrendously and cheats on her all the time. I live with them—I see that he obviously cares very much about her and displays it in his actions—cooking her meals, etc. My dad doesn’t go anywhere except for home or work (so logically, cheating would be impossible).

Her out-of-control rages usually end up in her crying and seeking the comfort and sympathy of my father’s family. She would say things like, “How dare he treat someone as beautiful as me like that?” or “He doesn’t deserve me! I am a perfect person”. No matter how much we try to rationalize with her, she would place all the blame on my father and make herself out to be the victim. If we do not agree with her, she shouts and fumes. She tries to keep the family away from my father and isolate him. The most trivial thing would set her off—such as my father not remembering a shirt was bought by her. And if she is not making a complete scene, then she is completely ignoring him—not returning his calls, not talking to him at all. Respect and communication are null. She does not handle criticism well, always believing she is superior to everyone because of her “beauty” and her wealth.

It has brought waves of anxiety to my entire family, including my dad’s sister, brother-in-law, mother, and me. My grandmother is so worried and distressed about my father’s situation (he has health problems) that she is constantly trying to appease Linda, even when she is unappeasable. The fact is when she forces us to listen to her make unfounded accusations against my father’s very character—even demonizing him—she does not listen to us in turn. I can already see the detriments to my father’s self-esteem and health. He is constantly anxious about doing even the slightest thing to offend her—and so is the rest of my family. My dad’s little sister, to whom she goes to vilify my father, is developing a sense of anxiety and fear as well.

It was only very recently that I learned to characterize Linda’s behavior as abuse. Before I thought this is just an aberration in her character, that she is isolated in her ability to manipulate others. But then I was researching it online yesterday, and indeed this behavior <a href="http://www.therapeutic-stories.com/articles/abusivewoman.pdf">is characterized as</a> emotional

abuse, and possibly of personality disorders like borderline or narcissistic disorders. It is just scary to me that in this particular list of traits, all of them apply to her (except for the child portion, but we’ll soon find out because her daughter is moving in soon).

Being a feminist, I tend to think of “abuse” in terms of domestic and emotional violence perpetrated by men toward women. But recent events shaping in my family have enlightened me to the fact that spousal abuse by women is entirely possible. And that the situation is incredibly delicate, but I fear for my father’s health and his mental well-being. He wants to keep this all from me, but it is clear that I have witnessed it myself.

Any thoughts or comments would be deeply appreciated. Thank you for reading.

Long time reader, though this is the first time I've actually written...anything here. As a fairly young person, I've always felt like I would have very little insight to add to the discussion here. I've always felt content to read and ruminate.

Today I have something to say. First, my background...I am twenty, have been enlisted in the U.S. military since I was 17. I don't meet many females. At all. In the past three years, I have had exactly 10 female co-workers (total. combined.) and at least three dozen male coworkers (total). Many times I have been the only female in the office/shop what have you, or one of two. I've decided this is unhealthy for me, but we'll talk about that later.

I am having ethics issues at my current place of employment and went to discuss them with a career counselor today, who happens to be a woman I've know my whole career and whom I respect and admire very much. And she says to me

"You know, I've always admired you? You are so smart, so capable...you are just great. You are going to have no problem making a career out of the military. You are just amazing."

I was floored. Here is this woman, thirty years my senior, who I have looked up to and admired for these past three years...and she thinks I'm worth a damn? That's...that's awesome. 

Please. Please. Those of you who may be older, wiser, what ever (quite honestly, just HAVING a blog makes you a bit of a celebrity)...even if YOU don't think you are an inspiration, you are. Us newbies, we watch you. We look to you. We value you. When you take the time to mentor us, take the time to let us know that YOU value US...it washes away the bull crap. It makes us stronger women. It enables us in a way that no amount of "Girl Power" posters in fifth grade ever could. 

Take the time today to tell a young woman the things about her that you value. Commend her honesty, her bravery, anything. It means the world to us. 

(Cross posted at Daily Kos and featured on Bitch magazine's website)

The following is a incomplete list of my many thoughts, objections, and suggestions concerning the current state of feminism and where we should be headed. All of the following points could be expanded upon. They are listed in no particular order.

As a feminists, marriage is a personal battleground for many of us.  Some of us can marry and happily use that commitment to rewrite the meaning of the institution, while others choose cohabitation.  (And plenty others, none of the above.)  But in a long-term feminist relationship, defining commitment in relation to norms can be tricky.  My personal desire has, for a long time, registered as "Definitely not marrying."  And a lot of it still does. But now that I'm a little older (a little) and in a professional career, I find that I'm struggling between what makes sense to me and what I want but know isn't the right reason.

Why I Don't Want to Get Married: 

Because I don't want to participate in any institution that discriminates against others based on their sexuality. I don't care about or even like any of the traditions: hate ceremonies, wedding rings, name changes, and ugly dresses. I am too young.  Or at least I feel too young. My relationship doesn't need it -- we've been together happily for almost six years. I don't want to be called (or to be) a "wife.

To be respected in society as a "real" adult. To be seen as "valuable" enough for someone to marry, which unmarried women are too often judged not to be. So that my family will be proud of my choices and view my relationship as legitimate. So people won't assume I'm a pitiful girl being used by a guy who doesn't care about me.   So people won't assume that the man I love is an asshole who doesn't care about me. So that people won't consider me the "cow" that's "giving the milk away for free." For the tax break.  Sorry.

So for others in similar positions, tell me your thoughts?  And for those who are still legally denied marriage rights, please give me your thoughts as well.  The inequality between marriage laws is an enormous factor in my thinking on the issue.

I am so busy at work right now but I had to take a moment to acknowledge the death of E. Lynn Harris . I had the great fortune of requesting funds to bring him to the University of Pittsburgh, my alma mater, when I was editor of BlackLine, the Black student publication there. He was such a kind, gentle, and provocative man. I will never forget his lecture about the lies he told about himself when he was in high school because of the social consequences of being poor in a predominantly White school. Sounds of concern rippled through the crowd when he shared that he once walked almost ten miles home in the middle of the night because he was ashamed to tell his football teammates where he lived. That would only be the beginning of the stigmas he had to confront. As a Black gay man he was once so cornered by the rampant homophobia that proliferates in our culture that he almost took his own life.

I think my experience with E. Lynn Harris is important to feminist discourse because, for me, he was the first messenger I had on the subject of same-sexual romance. I am resolved that positive, feminist self-identity is based on one’s primary source on the concepts and ideas that we use to grapple with and resist our oppression. And he did this for Black same-gender loving people and their loved ones.  I ran into his writing in 9th grade on the New York subway when a passenger beside me was clutching one of his novels intently and I read along. From then on I was hooked and read everything he wrote.

His writing made me want to be a writer. In my life, he was arguably one of the most transformative, Black writers of the ‘90s that pushed Black people to talk about sexuality, race, the AIDS crisis and the fullness of relationships that we could arrive at if we dared to just love each other despite the consequences. He gave complexity and context to the men in our community who sleep with men through characters like Basil and Raymond. The world needs more writers like E. Lynn Harris—writers who are willing to tell the truth about the many different sexualities that exist in communities of color. This is especially true in the Black community where media coverage of the Obamas has rendered invisible the familial and sexual arrangements of Black people that more often than not do not take the form of the nuclear heterosexual family.

I hope the famous athlete who E. Lynn Harris loved so much—but never publicly—finally has the courage to come out, stand up, and be counted at his funeral. I hope that those who are homophobic, especially in the Black community, rethink this framework of hatred and discrimination and begin their journey to allophilia by picking up the Invisible Life trilogy. While some may cast E. Lynn Harris off as a typical Black author who abandoned form for content, he had a profound impact on many. I know his stories have opened the discursive space in my community to talk about our sexualities more candidly. I know I am a better person, writer, and ally because he took the time to write even one, single word. He will be missed.

I met a very sweet middle aged couple on a trip, recently. It turned out we lived very close to each other. I really hit it off with the woman, whereas her husband was mostly very quiet and aloof. We talked about hanging out more on our trip, and since she didn't have a cell phone, she gave me her husband's number.
I called her husband's phone the next night, and he was incredibly rude to me and when I asked if they wanted to do something he simply said "no" followed by stoney silence.
I very much doubted that this was his wife's sentiment.
I recently sent her an e-mail (not mentioning the phone call), and sure enough "We thought about you and wondered if you were okay. We waited for your call".
So, he disrepected his wife, knowing that she wanted to see me and talk to me, and then lied about me calling.
Because this was so disrespectful, I feel I need to mention it in my e-mail response, but have no idea how to bring it up delicately. Keep in mind that I've met this couple only once, and they're 25+ years older than me.
What would you say?

Alright. I really, really, seriously debated on writing this post. It's a very emotional process, but I feel like, given the recent post on Chris Brown, I wanted to share my perspective. Hopefully I can give some insight on abusive relationships, and what happens afterward if you decide to stay.

As some of you know, I'm married to an active duty soldier. Domestic abuse is rampant in the military community. However, I never thought that I would be a part of that unfortunate statistic. So here's my story:

Being a high school student, a girl who dresses girly, a girl who loves shopping and a girl who keeps up her frame, there's no way she can be a feminist right? Well that's what I've been going through Sophomore year when I finally decided to openly admit I was interested in feminism and to look more in it. I found out about feminism by coming across Feministing in a search engine but being a Freshman, I was trying to hard to fit in and when the upper classmen in the computer lab class started making feminist jokes, I closed the site immediately out of fear of being made fun of.

In my freshman year, I built up a reputation by being pretty and being hot that my appearance and how guys viewed me was all that mattered (especially the upperclassmen guys). For some reason my teacher told me that I was selling myself short and that she wanted me to embrace my intelligence and to find myself as a person. So she gave me the book Colonize This . I looked at it and said, "It's my chance to probably actually understand where feminism is coming from and it's a book about women of color!" But of course I didn't show my excitement to my friends. I just acted like I was being forced to read it for summer credit and they bought it since as a freshman, I couldn't stand school. So I ended up using my free time in the summer to read the book and I fell in love with (I'm a Junior and I still haven't returned it to my teacher yet). That's when I really did get where my teacher was coming from. I was selling myself short by just focusing only on my appearance and not my mind.

1. At the Porte Saint-Antoine, 14 July 1789

Independence Day celebrates a revolution--however important its future would prove--that was inaugurated to protect the rights of the entitled. I prefer Bastille Day, the start of the French Revolution, the first struggle to try to break the shackles of the Agricultural Revolution, to radically reshape the human destiny. It is the French, not the American, Revolution that haunts the Western consciousness, a bloody ghost shrieking of ways not taken and tyrannies unfought.

The starving and enraged sans-coulottes who gathered near the Porte St. Antoine that hot July afternoon knew nothing of the finer points of either revolution or democracy. They knew not whether they were Rousseau's ennobled primitives or Hobbes' mindless mob. Nor did they care. They gave not a sou for the National Assembly's parliamentary debate on the proper techniques to constitutionally cage a monarch: they knew only that they were oppressed, and sick of it, and incapable of letting it stand any longer.

Behind the walls of the ancient fortress were only seven prisoners--but they were the symbols of an entire regime. Never extensively used as a prison, the Bastille remained nonetheless the notorious symbol of absolute monarchy, the place those who dared speak against the Crown were warehoused. It was against this symbol, more than anything else, that the mob struck; but they had a more immediate goal. The Bastille was also a gigantic gunpowder depot.

By 5:30 in the afternoon, after four hours of fighting, it was all over. The commander of the garrison--mostly disabled veterans and a small contingent of Swiss mercenaries--had surrendered, and then intentionally provoked his own lynching, apparently unable to live with the dishonor. The powder was seized, muskets were charged, and the Royal Army abandoned Paris to the sans-coulottes . In time, those muskets would carry the Revolution (and more, the Revolutionary spirit) across the Rhine and into the rest of Europe. Nor would the vintage laid down that day ever completely fail, even after the force of revolution was channeled into a new tyranny and the blood of patriots was wastefully spent in defence of Empire. As much as Bonaparte and his successors might try, the power unleashed that July afternoon could never fully serve autocrats.

I wonder, though: what did the garrison see that day, as the mob burst into the outer courtyard of the fort, as the air grew opaque with gunpowder smoke--what flashed accross the sky for them that day? Portents of the ceaseless wars France would plunge into? Of the civil unrest and the great Terror to come? Or a presentiment that the world would never again be the same, that from now on the voice of the oppressed would never be stilled, try as they might to suppress it?

Today I choose to make my witness.

For feminists, for people who struggle against sexist oppression, that set of privileges and oppressions we call patriarchy looms like the Bastille over the landscape of our lives. The comparison is apt: because patriarchy is both more and less than it seems.

Patriarchy is claimed as the father of all oppressions, the most common prejudice, the heaviest burden, the source of all tyrannies. Patriarchy must be nearly transhistorical--it certainly must go back as least as far as the Agricultural Revolution--and like a dark star, it bends all other forms of oppression towards it, warping them into its own mold. But like the Bastille, its symbolic presence is greater than its actual oppression, vast as that may be.

Okay so I saw this clip being featured on another popular site for women, Jezebel. Here is the clip.

      Now the reaction to this clip on Jezebel was visceral. A lot of the replies were very negative, but I think a lot of the ladies missed the whole point that Superhead was trying to make.  But I digress, here's what I wrote on the website: 

"Okay. Never thought this day would come, but I kind of agree with Superhead. (No, Noooo, don't throw stones at me!) I think what she's trying to say is, you can be an independent woman, but with your man you don't have to be all "Ra-ra, I'm powerful, I'm independent, I don't need you" all the time. In a relationship a person needs to feel needed or appreciated. In my own marriage, I don't mind letting my husband fix everything in the house, take out the trash, or hold me during the scary parts in movies, b/c things like this, as dumb as it may seem, do make men feel like, well...men. 

I really don't have much time, so I will have to keep this post short and simple.  I did want to pose a question to everyone here concerning something I have always struggled with.  I wanted to maybe hear if others have dealt with the same thing, and if so, how they managed to deal with it. 

I tend to look up to people, to idolize, praise, aspire to be like them, etc.  Yet, being a feminist, I find that I have looked up to people who didn't always feel the same way I did about the equality of women.  I wasn't always aware that I was doing it, of course.  Some of these people, it turns out, didn't even respect women in the way I thought they should be respected.  Now, in the days where I wasn't as passionate about, or even as aware of feminism as I am today, it wasn't much of an issue; however, today I find it harder and harder to ignore when someone I have always loved, and admired turns out to be, quit simply, a jerk! 

I love to write, and to read.  It turns out that some of my favorite poets and authors have been either very abusive to their wives, or have had a history of very misogynist attitude towards women in general.  Do I stop loving their work?  Do I stop reading their work?  Do I stop aspiring to write like them?  Do I need to change the way I write now, because trying to imitate them would be unthinkable?  What about my favorite musician whose music has always reached a special place in me?  Whose music means quite a bit to me on a sentimental level?  What do I do now that it turns out he thinks of women the same way one would think of a pesty house fly ?  Is he just a guilty pleasure now?

When I come across these scenarios, I feel alone, like I've just been slapped in the face.  It effects me more than most other forms of verbal disrespect towards women, because I can just count those people out as ignorant, or bigoted.  There is at least some form of a perceived excuse.  But when it turns out that someone whose work and ideas have always mirrored mine, and that I've always looked up to and respected is a misogynist, I feel intellectually raped on some level.  I feel like I've been betrayed and let down.  I feel extremely insignificant, and like I have no one or nowhere to turn, and like I have to now give up that part of myself or thought process because in some way I am not entitled to it, and it nomlonger represents me.  Has anyone else ever felt like this or experienced this, and how did you come to terms with it?

This was more like a stream of consciousness, so my apologies if things aren't as coherent as they ought to be.

Knowing the pain attached to not being able to publicly express or seal the love for a partner due to gender, race, culture, or religion, etc, I was compelled to write about it. It is a bit rebellious, and amateur; but I wanted to share it in hopes that it might make someone feel better. I hope you like it, and I hope it doesn't offend anyone. My apologies if it does. It is certainly not intended.

Our Silent, Sinful Vows

She said "lets run into town and do it as the sun rises."

The chests of cathedrals heaved high--
denied our entrance
as the dawn filled with color from behind;
the clouds still thick with night,
and the morning so bright it was almost frightening.
Demons encroached,
their shadows ready to snatch us into hell
as wings spanned as far as the eye can see,
sent Rain onto headstones,
and soaked us
as the day broke--
and we exchanged vows before the absent sun.

She said "Don't worry love,
the truth apparently rests in the clouds,
and so all we need is to wait for the rain.

when the storm clears, the sky will be thin again
like the gloaming gossamer skin of a butterfly's wing;
when it moves, the highest of heavens will be exposed--
but for now, we can move like gargoyles breaking through stone.
Strangers are our witnesses."

Perhaps this is silly, considering it in the grand scheme of things. But it's something I think of often and wanted some other feminist opinions on.

I live in Chicago and do not own a car. I take the L and bus everywhere, or I walk if it's in my neighborhood. A little over a year ago, I was sexually assaulted on a bus. Perhaps my current predicament seems silly in contrast with this example, and that is what makes it complicated. 

I'm having quite an extensive online argument (I know; futile) with someone at the moment and I'm kind of stumped on how to answer this particular question in a way that he might understand.

How do you explain to someone, especially a male who believes the world is just as sexist toward him as it is toward women, that the word "Feminism" does not imply any sort of inequality? I've tried to explain to many people, especially males, how Feminism is for everyone and stands to fight sexism in any form, as well as racism, classism, homophobia, etc., but they always seem to focus on that word, "Feminism", and dismiss it as equally... well, inequal.

If any of you have any suggestions, I sure would like to hear them.

If you would like to read the conversation that we have had so far, or maybe even supply your own input, go to: DeviantArt:SerenFae:I-Wanna-Know.

A recent comment to a post about the new Transformers movie got me thinking (always a dangerous thing, when a woman thinks) about women in the military.

Almost all the combat arms in the US military bar female applicants, right?

Why?

I realize that physically men are like 30% bigger and stronger, on average, and I know that personally I couldn't be in ANY part of the military due to the fact that I'd never survive basic training, but there ARE women out there who could do the job. No matter how small the numbers might be, does that mean we should prevent them completely? If the requirement is to lift X amount of weight and go X amount of miles and shoot X far or whatnot, and a woman can do it, why not let her?

You know there are women out there who want and can successfully do the job.

Does anybody have any thoughts, ideas, links, etc., on this?

(I was torn between putting this under "Deep Thoughts" and "Transgender Issues"; I settled on "Deep Thoughts" because I'm a confused cis person, not someone who's qualified to talk about trans issues.  I hope this is OK.)

I've been thinking about posting this for a long time, and I'm still not sure that I really should.  The world does not need another cis person's view of trans people—I really do think that cis people should just shut up and listen more than just once in awhile.  Which is really what this post is about (I hope); this post is the result of a lot of listening without ever having actually said anything before.  That said, though, I'm almost certain that I'm getting it all wrong.

Quite frankly, I don't think it's possible or even desirable for me to thoroughly understand trans people's lives—because it's not my life or my experience, there are things that I am simply incapable of understanding.  Total comprehension isn't always necessary for a peaceful coexistence.  But I do think that I have to respect the fact that trans people exist and that their identities and choices have fuck all to do with me and my cis self, so if friend-who-I've-always-known-as-a-man tells me that she's a trans woman and has decided to start living as the woman she is, it may take a bit of getting used to simply because we've known each other for a long time and before she told me differently I used to think she was a man.  Beyond that, it's her life and her identity and she's entitled to do what she needs to in order to make that life a happy one.  All things considered, isn't that all that I really need to know?

Yet I do have questions that I'm afraid to ask because there's a line between respectful curiosity and pushing my nose into something that's not my own business, and while I may see these questions as the former, someone who's actually lived as a trans person may very well see them as the latter.  I wonder how transitioning has changed the lives of people who've done it, what new attitudes or behaviours they've picked up since they started to transition, and what they were most looking forward to.  What they were least looking forward to as well, come to think of it.  I wonder what advice they'd give to people who are trans and still learning how to deal with it, and what advice they'd say to people who have friends or family members who have told them that they're trans.  Most of all, I wonder why people think it's their business that "Andrew" used to be called "Jane" at some point in his life.  After all, I may be relatively new to the concepts of privilege and transgender issues, but I'm not new to the concepts of good manners and common decency to other human beings. 

(Incidentally, have you ever seen Calpernia Addams' video about stupid questions that cis people ask trans people?  I admire her for not strangling most of those idiots with her bare hands.)

And I wonder if my current attitude is wrong.  I mean, I don't claim to be an ally—I'm not enlightened enough—but I do wonder if sometimes I should be more accepting, more aware, more...something that I can't quite put my finger on.  More open-minded, perhaps, or less condescending or self-centred (and I'm sure those last two things are there in large amounts, privilege being what it is, especially to someone who's relatively new to the concept).  After all, my perspective isn't the one that matters because it isn't my life.   Neither is it a trans person's job to educate me.  But when ignorance is inexcusable and my questions are bound to be too personal—what kind of an attitude is the, or at least a , right one?

by Jacki Lyden

It seems like only yesterday I was driving, through the middle of the night, down Vali-Asr street in downtown Iran, behind the wheel of a blue truck we called the Bas-Mobile. The flames of workers’ fires lit the streets. The gurgling of small streams beside the long avenues could be heard. The scene was romantic and exhilarating, because so much of what I was finding contradicted Iran’s stern image. And I had encountered someone. My new boyfriend was a young Iranian chemical engineer, and we had fallen in love while I was on assignment for NPR to cover the 16th anniversary of the revolution. That was in 1996—a long time ago.

Yet several trips to Iran thereafter worked the country into my system in a way that few other places have. Ramin and I remain on good terms, and the friends I made then are friends today. With Iranian colleague Davar Ardalan, now author of My Name is Iran , I produced an eight-part series called “Iran at the Crossroads.” Underneath all those black veils and raised fists, it was easy to perceive all the leanings towards self-expression and open dialogue, toward art and thought, that is being expressed by many of today’s protesters. Indeed, repression seems to breed the best in a number of people.

Continue reading at Women's Voices For Change.

In a discussion below, the issue of the definition of consent came up. I'm now curious not specifically about the definition, but about who is allowed to decide that definition for each perseon. We obviously have the law to decide what consent means for people who are underage, so let's just talk about people who are eighteen and older (or possibly adults looking back on things that happened when they were younger than eighteen -- I'm not talking pedophilia, but let's say someone looking back on sleeping with a 20yo when they were 16).

I've had a few interesting experiences lately regarding the issue of "taking up space". It's been discussed here on feministing a few times, the issue of how much physical space women as opposed to men feel they can take up in any given place. I've been conducting a few experiments lately. Well, I don't know if they were experiments so much as genuine willfulness on my part as I've begun to realize that I do, indeed, have a right to take up space! (insert shocked face).

The other day on the subway I was passing by a man. He was walking straight toward me, and briskly, and seemed to have no intention of moving even an inch to let me pass. Normally, if a man passed me, I'd be the one to move, without a doubt, even if it meant having to step off a curb or something. Not this time. I stayed my course and smacked into his shoulder and just kept walking, and the second I did that he let out a very audible indignant grunt and stared back at me a good few seconds as he kept walking. As if he couldn't believe what happened. Like, HOW DARE I TAKE UP HIS SPACE (insert angry face). Well, I can honestly say that was very satisfying. Although I admit I was a bit scared for a second to have incited such a reaction. There were a good few seconds I thought he was gonna follow after me and conk me on the head or something.

Then, last night, I was walking in Brooklyn, Park Slope. It was around 9:30 at night. There is a little circular area in the middle of an intersection of four streets, where there are benches all around the perimeter to sit on. It was dark, the sun had gone down. My feet and legs ached from walking all day and I desperately wanted to sit. I walked by and noticed there was a single man seated on every single bench in the circle. None of them talking to each other or even looking at each other. Just like they sort of claimed that area as their own. So of course I was left with no choice but to sit down. And I did. And you have that distinct sense as a girl, when you know you've "intruded" on some supposedly distinctly male space. So I sat with a sigh (it felt SO good) and every single man stared at me. But I didn't care. In fact it was very satisfying. They didn't bother me or anything; I think they were more surprised than anything else. Once I was rested I got up and left.

And today. I was on my way back from work. I was waiting for the D Train, holding my book and reading while standing on the platform. Lo and behold from my peripheral vision I see a group of 3 guys, 20-ish or so, walking straight toward me. I look up and immediately take one step to the left, without thinking, and sure enough they occupy almost my entire space. But I only took that one step before realizing, "hey, what the fuck am I stepping aside for? I was reading, dammit, why should I have to move over to accommodate them?" So I didn't move anymore; they were quite close to me and it felt awkward being so close; They glanced at me a few times, but I just kept reading. I was literally like two inches from them. But I didn't move, I just kept looking down at my book. I could feel my face flushing with heat and my synapses felt like they were popping in my brain. It's strange, the physical reactions you get when you know you're doing something others don't expect or necessarily appreciate. But sure enough, as a minute passed, I could see the guys inching away bit by bit, as I think they subconsciously began to realize that I wasn't going to move, and this time it was they who began to retreat. That was very cool. A minor victory.

Anyway, just thought I'd share. It's wonderful to see how awareness of these things can put one's sense of self into such perspective. Just a couple of years ago, I would have totally taken these sort of situations for granted. It's nice to know by doing these small acts of rebellion, I can gain parts of myself back and let others know they can't take up my space unless I want them to.

We've all seen the constant debate on educating. Is it worth it to teach the sexist guy the basics of feminism and why it matters? Is it useful to post a trans 101 post on this site to educate cis women? The list is endless.

The general agreement seems (to me) to be that it's not the oppressed group's job to educate the oppressor, and I think that's absolutely correct. However, it makes me sad to see the conversation stop there.

Just because it's not your responsibility doesn't mean it's not a good thing to do. Respectfully laying out your position can be the difference between having a somewhat ignorant ally willing to learn or a resentful enemy resolved to write you off. No one has an innate knowledge of things that are unfamilliar to them.

I understand getting tired of playing that role, I really do. I'm not saying that anyone is a bad person for not having the desire to go back over 101 bullshit, especially if it seems like the person you're talking to is resistant. But I do think we underestimate the value of taking the time for individual education. It really can make a difference, sometimes right away but sometimes slowly.

So, the next time you see someone being offensive and you get the feeling it's out of fear and ignorance not just pigheaded bigotry, if you can, take the time to change someone's mind.

Anyway, that's my not-so-deep thought for the year.

I love meat. I don't really care about healthy living. Short story shorter, I'm not an ecofeminist. The point of this article is that just because I am not an ecofeminist, doesn't mean I'm not a feminist. It's been rehashed several times on this website that not all feminists are created equal. I am pro-choice, sex-positive (let's not snarl about this term, I don't like it either but I don't have an alternative), and several other things, but I am not an ecofeminist.

Why am I telling you this?

Because of the following comment:

"There are deep connections between feminism, an ethic of care, and animal rights. For me, those connections are so significant that I cannot imagine any feminist still willing to support the exploitative practices of factory farming and industrial agriculture. The culture surrounding meat consumption is entirely masculinist, to the degree that vegetarianism or veganism is viewed by many in the mainstream as "effete" or feminine. As a male, I am expected to consume large amounts of charred meat products and be able to wield grilling tools. There are more forces at work here to tarnish the reputation of vegans or vegetarians than PETA. I hold every self-proclaimed feminist accountable to the ethic of care. If it does not extend to animals and the choice to consume their "products," then the feminist care we expect to be extended to ourselves from other dominative forces suffers a contradiction."

There may be SOME connections between feminism and animal rights - one would expect a feminist to be somewhat compassionate, after all we care about SOMETHING, there's a good chance we care about something else too. Deep is going a little too far, though. As a city dweller that cannot drive I have no access to local farmers selling half a cow's worth of meat, thereby avoiding "exploitative practices of factory farming and industrial agriculture." (Because there are farms that don't torture animals, etc).

I'd like to talk about my best friend...and why she is my best friend.

Her name is Sarah. She is still very young. She is fun, feisty and strong. She has had lots of ups and downs in her life...all of which she has faced with an optimism and grace well-beyond her years.

(Cross-posted from UneFemmePlusCourageuse. )

You know, I've been reading all over the usual feminist blogs, and the blogs they link to, and the blogs my friends on Facebook link to, about Dr. Tiller's murder. And on nearly all of them, there's been some asshole anti-choice troll saying something along the lines of, "this doesn't really matter, because he was a murderer too, and of course I would never condone the murder of any one, but they're both guilty."

And I responded to the first one I saw, with some pretty choice words--on one of the smaller blogs linked from Feministing. Everywhere else, other people had already taken the torch for me.

And then there was RH Reality check--and I shouldn't've even read the comments on either article I read there. They're a good site, but their trolls are always so evil.

And the pattern holds. Look here .

I just don't see how these people can do this.

Or no, wait, scratch that, I can. I can see how middle-class white men, from fundie Christian denominations, who have never had to deal with the loss of their actual loved ones and who have such an inflated vision of themselves that the thought of their sperm possibly being aborted and not made into a dozen tiny mini-mes is the most tragic thing on earth--I see how they could cheer on a murder. And then say they're not cheering. Because hey, when people are focused on the death of a good man, of a hero, of someone who legitimately cared about other people, they're not focused on Little Fundie Man. And that's a travesty.

Before I read about this this morning I was reading the Cleveland Plain Dealer --and one of the topics up for debate in the Forum section was Sonia Sotomayor, and her 'empathy.' One letter to the editor says that judges have no right to be empathetic--and then David Brooks, of all people, explains how this is ridiculous, and emotions form the basis of peoples' decisions--and that otherwise, we'd all be sociopaths.

I forgot about that for a while. Then I was catching up on my Rachel Maddow viewing and she discussed the same subject a few nights ago. Explaining how Sotomayor is "empathetic," but so is...God, I forget if she said Scalia or Alito or Thomas. Maybe all three. I'll have to watch again.

So I am bitterly laughing at seeing Sotomayor's empathy used as a mark against her by conservatives. I scorn the idea that being able to relate to the feelings of others could ever be a bad thing. Empathy should be encouraged . Everywhere. That some people don't get this is fucking sad . Heartbreaking, really, because lack of empathy--both for Dr. Tiller and for the many women who he has helped in their hours of need--is what led to the tragedy earlier.

Lack of empathy does not assist in justice. It leads to death.

For anyone who doesn't see that, on a day like today--fuck all y'all. May badgers feast on your cadavers. You're scum, and you're supporting terrorism.

To Dr. Tiller's family, friends, and colleagues--I am sorry for your loss. As badly as I feel, I did not know Dr. Tiller, and I can only imagine how bad this must feel for you. Please know that there are many in the pro-choice community who feel as I do about Dr. Tiller--that he was a hero in life and that his death was a tragedy.

This is short enough to be a comment, but I think it's important enough to get its own post:

You're not allowed to call yourself "pro-life" after you kill a man.

Nor are you allowed to claim Jesus Christ is on your side after you kill a man in his church.

Also, you cannot be both a patriot and a terrorist. That's just not the way we do things in this country.

That is all. Thank you.

Source:

http://www.kansas.com/946/story/834448.html

I realized after a recent post of mine called Vagina Phobia received some commentary about differing definitions of feminism that to some extent there is as much debate among feminist about the social and political implications of being a feminist among feminists as there is within society. What exactly is feminism? And what does it mean to be a feminist? Certainly the meaning it carries is different for the individuals that consider themselves such that came of age after the second wave of feminism than it does for the brave females that fought for women's rights during the civil rights movement.

Thinking about this I realized that there is something very positive about the fact that there are differing beliefs about feminism and what it means among feminists. Every epistemology, ideology, or belief system should have differing ideas contained within it, this is what keeps the movement alive, fostering debate fosters growth.

But like anything that requires internalization of ideas and beliefs, it should be up to the individual feminist to determine how they put their feminism into practice, and that is where the key to feminism might just be. Recognizing those things which support or reinforce power structures and thought patterns that define women as not men and therefore somehow subject to different rules and attempting to do something about them.

This can be as simple as supporting a friend in leaving an abusive relationship or joining a local organization that promotes women's welfare and rights. Feminism, to me, isn't as much about an idea, a definition, or a belief system as it is about women. The fact is that our society, is not completely egalitarian. Just two days ago I listened to the laments of a female friend (who is not only beautiful, but an incredibly sweet spirited person) who'd been broken up with by a man who told her she had the 'wrong' body type, specifying that her breasts and ass were too small. After bashing him for a few minutes I realized how much real work men and women still have to do in redefining beauty to include more than just the big breasted, nice assed, skinny waisted women that hollywood has taught us to aspire to be.

Feminism may never have one concise definition, and that may not even be necessary, feminism is as personal to me as my spiritual beliefs, my work, and my sex life, it can never be defined for me in a way that works for everyone else, so feminism must ultimately be defined by the individual feminist. Any textbook definition would fall short of revealing the true meaning the movement holds for the individuals within it.

Crossposted from my blog

…and there’s a sickening crunch as a brick pulverizes my skull. I’ve long since fallen silent; I don’t make any noise. As I lie the street, I am kicked a few more times until my attacker – or my attackers, I’m not even sure anymore – decides to run. I wonder I’m ever going to see any of my loved ones again. Still, I don’t move. I don’t think I can. I listen to the rasping sound of my own breath forcing its way through a crushed throat and then I die.

The newspaper uses the wrong gender when reporting my murder, because I am a trans woman. Because I am a trans woman, a jury declares that my murder was merely a crime of passion. The transgender community pounces upon my death and the murder trial and my name (names?) are tossed around for a while by activists and their enemies until they either forget about me or yet another one our sisters is murdered.

This is my fear, my, to take a phrase from Susan Faludi, terror dream.

I’ve had this terror dream every day for a month now, and not only at night. If I allow myself to daydream, or if I even dare to allow my thoughts to wander, I experience my own death. I wish I could say that I was used to them, or that they felt any less real, or that I had any idea how to stop them.

Often in my work (I do prevention education for a large midwestern domestic violence and sexual assault organization), I get asked if "it" has ever happened to me. Of course, there is the standard answer: the numbers tell us we all know someone who has been sexually or physically assaulted. The standard answer redirects the question to community responsibility rather than on my survivorship or victimhood, which is the right path for prevention work. It also removes my vulnerability as an educator and reaffirms my status as an "expert" on violence against women-rather than just an expert on my own experience.

But the real and honest answer is yes. But it isn't yes because I had a girlfriend who was scary, emotionally abusive and controlling in my early twenties. And it isn't yes because I was sexually assaulted when I was 16 and again when I was 21. Those things are true, and they did shape me as a person, as an activist and as a feminist/womanist. But they aren't the reason the answer is yes.

So if those aren't the reasons why the answer is yes, then what is? Frankly, I am a woman. I have lived my entire life in opposition to the patriarchy. Certainly, as an adult this has been more an act of consciousness than as a child. To be raised as a girl, and grow into a woman, is always in opposition to the patriarchy. I am not special in this regard.

I don't claim to be intellectual, or have intricate thought patterns to be brought forth with eloquent and erudite language. When I try, I have been accused of being reductionist. Which I think just meant that I speak in plain language and perhaps don't have as sophisticated an understanding of identity politics as the person who called me that. And truthfully, most people are simple in that they get generalizations first and then the specifics, and it's incredibly frustrating to be put down for using words that people actually understand, particularly from people who only speak in words that are understood by a very small subset of the population. Of course I get that reductionism can distort the complexity of things or phenomena, but I also get that sometimes the simplest explanation has a hell of a lot of value.

I am a male feminist, 17 years old (very young for a guy to be into this stuff, I know, but that's beside the point), and I find dating a bit of a a complicated issue.  The truth is, I like girls as much as any other teenage guy.  None the less, I have always found that I can be just as sexual as anyone else without being at all degrading to those I am with.  There is very little about sexuality that seems truly affected by which person you happen to be in the relationship (male or female) other than that which is generated by our culture.

Anyway as a guy, I can't say I have experienced the same sexism that most women have.  I have seen misogynism, and male privilege imposed on girls, and feel for them greatly.  none the less, my perspective is always that of an observer.  I can sympathize, and I can fully understand intellectually, but I can't feel what it is like to be on the receiving end of patriarchal oppression.  I do my absolute best to be a good feminist, doing what I think I would want someone to do for me if I were the oppressed one, but sometimes that isn't good enough.  Sometimes, like in cases like this, I need some perspective and direction from those who are actually taking the brunt of tradition.

I am writing this post as a response to Gular's recent post on men and feminism, "Can Anyone Be Overated?" It was originally intended as a comment to that post, but when it reached a certain length, I began to think it merited a post of its own.

I think the idea of male feminists as "overrated" which was lately expressed in the comments on the overrated/underrated post reflects less a desire for men to abstain from participating either on this site or in women's movements in general and more an acknowledgement of some of the problems of male participation. To say that something is overrated is not to say that it is bad or even that it is not important, but that too much attention is devoted to it. For instance, here we are, discussing the desirability of men's participation in feminism and the terms on which it ought or ought not to take place, rather than engaging in discourse that some of us might find ultimately more productive. In this post, I will attempt to lay out some of my feelings on men's participation in feminism and on Gular's post in particular.

One reason many in the feministing community may find male feminists "overrated" is that others may feel, as I do, that we need to be careful to avoid deferring to male voices precisely because, as women, every one of us has been socialized to do so. The ways in which those of us who are women are socialized to defer to men's opinions and judgments while men are socialized to treat their own opinions and speech as inherently worthy of respect is thus one issue that needs to be mentioned. Male privilege is situated not only in economic and political power but in psychological, linguistic and rhetorical power as well (and some would say these are its primary sites of power); thus, I believe we as feminists should certainly seek men as allies and as activists, but I also feel that we must be extremely careful to avoid submitting to men's rhetoric as more authoritative than our own, whether that rhetoric is pro-feminist or misogynistic in nature. Dworkin observes  that one manifestation of male cultural authority is "the power of naming," that is, the power to use language to define experience;  since masculine language itself (whoever uses it) silences us as women, I think that, as feminists, we are right to be on the lookout for men's attempts to restate our issues in different terms. You are offended to have been labeled as "overrated" and feel that your participation is thus being construed as peripheral, but I'm not even sure that that was what was meant. Perhaps some of the commenters who labeled male feminists "overrated" meant that men shouldn't be handed cookies for having enlightened views "despite" their maleness (and your reference to MercurialGirl's comment is apt on this point); perhaps some meant that we should not as feminists defer to masculine authority by using it as a primary indicator of success (i.e., "Look how well we're doing! We even got men to agree with us!") But I think that your apparent need to feel central rather than peripheral to feminism does reveal a certain amount of male privilege. I do not write this to Other you or to indicate that your participation is unwelcome; but I think all of us need to examine our own privilege and take into account where it influences our views and actions.

I have been closely following the overrated/underrated post that Courtney put up a couple days ago.  I find one of the trends rather confounding, and that’s the pile on of “male feminists” as overrated.  I think it highlights a problem that should be addressed within this, and the entire, community of feminists.  It’s this: male feminists are important and, more over, vital.

Now, taking my own list into consideration, I do not enjoy the “waves” of feminism theory, not only because I find it a bit revisionist (how can someone be feminist before the word exists?) and because I think it is used in the movement to divide people.  However, for sake of discourse, I’ll be using the terminology for ease of readability.

There are many men here on Feministing, especially as of late.  They are a pretty vocal minority and I am admittedly one of them. I think it’s first to start there and work into where the rest of this is going.

I've been working on a project for my feminist studies class.  It's a website with several different people's interpretation of feminism.  A few are from classmates, a few are from books I've read.  The idea is to show people all the different types of feminism--and anti-feminism--that are out there.

Anyway, it's not exactly feminist blogging, but I would really like some opinions on it.  The concept is important to me, I'm just not sure if the execution is good.

http://people.southwestern.edu/~yterdalh/feminism/feminism01.html

And on that note, I'm curious to hear what all of your personal definitions/interpretations/practices of feminism are.  Feel free to share what makes feminism important to you.

I was shocked reading this recent story about a police officer who asked women to flash him so that they would not get a ticket. But it makes me wonder how often this sort of thing occurs.

As an art student, I'm well aware of the typical art school stereotypes and clichés. One of the widely known archetypes, unfortunately, is the "unfunny feminist." While I consider myself a rather "funny feminist", I'm sure several of my peers in my Research class would roll their eyes and disagree.

My Research class is about incorporating the "funny" into our projects. For our last assignment, we had to create three variations on a project and display them for critique. However, a particular piece happened to irk me a little bit as a female. One student hung up a drawing of a faceless woman, legs over her shoulders, with... prepare yourselves... a 25 cent coinslot for a vagina.

I uncomfortably spoke up and asked if anyone else in the room felt uneasy about it. Now, first of all, my Research professor is one of those guys with the mantra: "If it's not offensive, it's a failure", which I suppose is a good motto in some cases. But, he applied it to this case as well.

"Kimberly," he said, after I made my somewhat weak statement, "do you think he [the artist] thinks that a woman's vagina is a coinslot?"

I shook my head, and needless to say the rest of the class snickered in unison. Yet, now that I look back on it, I can't help but ask myself, "Was I just being an unfunny feminist? By being offended, was I contributing to the 'greatness' of this student's piece? Are we already at that point in history where we can laugh at subtly sexist art as if it were an old, ridiculous PSA from the 1950's? Am I on crazy pills?"

The thing is, I am still unsure of whether or not this student was aware of what he made and what he was putting out there. However, knowing him, I kind of doubt he was thinking on a number of levels. I know it was only a simple assignment. So was it worth it to speak up when I felt uncomfortable by a silly little line drawing made by some horny 19 year-old boy?

Whatever the right thing to do was, I can feel at ease knowing that I'm speaking out, no matter how uncomfortably, when something just doesn't seem quite right. I may be the "unfunny feminist" cliché of my class, but, hell, I at least I'm a Feminist!

It's so common. You and her have been best friends since you both were 14, and the older you get, the less you hang out. Not because you don't love the shit out of each other, but because she tends to spend much more time with her boyfriend, and <I>his</i> friends, rather than her own.

Why is this so common among hetero women?

When I confront my girlfriends, they basically say that as we get older, we just naturally spend every waking moment with our significant other. And that it's just "growing up".

Yes, I understand that when we get older, we spend less time with our friends, and more time with our husbands, wives, kids, whomever. We have more responsibilities. But why then, do our girlfriends spend so much time with him and HIS FRIENDS?

Maybe I'm just bitter. But I was discussing the movie "I love you, man" with my boyfriend, and I was saying how awesome it is that both people in the relationship respect the others need for outside relationships. And it made me think about how jealous I am of the woman in the movie and all of her awesome friends in the movie.

I personally think that women believe that guys won't want to hang out her and her friends, because of __(insert sexism here)____.

But guys bring their girlfriends along to hang out with them, because the women are okay with hanging out with him and his buddies. It almost seems like women don't believe their friends are worthy enough for the boyfriend to hang out with them. Or that their boyfriend might not like her friends. They want to keep it separate but unequal. 

I know that some women share friends with their signifigant other. But what about the women that pretty much don't hang out with their girlfriends anymore?

I mean, maybe I don't have the right friends, or maybe my friends aren't the perfect feminists. But whatever the reason, it sucks and I feel I'm probably not the only one. I want to know everybody else's take on it.

A few weeks ago I posted about my worry for my female friend.

I was advised by some to continue to be there for her.  Others told me to cut off ties with her.  I would see her at work, and we would say hi.  But we stopped doing things together like we used to, mostly because Y was always there. 

The brief background is that my friend, who, after dating 3 guys (named X, Y, and Z), decided to stay with Y, a controlling, manipulative, insecure guy who had no job , never left her side (even when she was at class/work), threatened to kill her previous boyfriends. I encouraged the previous boyfriends to file reports against him to the police, and when he was cyberbullying her, I and Z led the campaign to get the material removed. She knew that I did not like Y and I asked her not to bring him to my house, both because I did not like him and because I do not like random people to know where I live. One morning she needed to get something from her wrecked car (tow truck couldn't fit up her driveway, so I held onto it until the Kidney foundation got it), and she brought him. I was angry at her for that. In between all of this was a breakup with Y, a makeup, and her not doing things with our normal social circle because we did not feel comfortable around him.

Not Safe for Work.

My SO and I have been thinking about using a strap-on on him. It's not going to happen for some time, but conversation has opened up. He's nervous because of the way society has basically told him that he's gay if he does that and it's bad. But he is open to the idea and a big part of him really does want to. So we've been looking online for information and harnesses and dildos and whatnot, and a lot of rhetoric about power comes up. You know, how 'women enjoy gaining power' when using a strap-on to penetrate their male lover.With something other than a finger,I haven't found much on women feeling empowered by using a finger to penetrate anally.

First of all, what exactly are the implications here? I understand that power is something involved, I feel a little empowered just thinking about wearing a harness, even if it's not with the dildo in it. But I think a lot of comes from the idea that to have power in sex is to penetrate. And to me, that's more than a little messed up. I mean, what does that say about men and women in their natural state? Are women really considered naturally powerless in sex just because we are the ones being penetrated? It shows in gay men relationship ideas we have, too: the one receiving is the 'woman,' the 'bitch,' if you will.

I personally feel like we are BOTH gaining power by switching roles, and I can't really describe why. We both think of it as being able to choose what role you have during intercourse (give/receive,) but I can't really describe it better than that. I keep falling on the 'well, I'm able to penetrate now' reasoning.

So my main questions are, why do these women and men keep saying that a woman is 'empowered' by strapping a cock on? Is there any idea of men losing power by taking it? Is it bad that these women feel like they are gaining power by being able to penetrate? Does it only reinforce the idea that one is only empowered during sex if they are penetrating? I'm just not sure what most people mean when they talk about gaining power by becoming the one who is penetrating.

This is crossposted on my blog.

Today Monica of TransGriot asked the following question in the comments section of this post:

if they hate the transgender community so much, why do these wannabe rad fems bother coming on our blogs?

Similar questions have been posed and have occurred to me many times before regarding Defenders of Male Privilege who comment on womanist/feminist blogs, Defenders of White Privilege who comment on POCs blogs, Defenders of Ableist Privilege who comment on blogs that take on issues surrounding disabilities, etc. It seems like whatever issue you're dealing with on your blog, you'll attract some individuals who are not interested in constructive dialogue or learning or growing or working together in any way. They're simply there to preach at you about how wrong/evil/disruptive of society you are. Since it's so clear that neither of you is going to change your position at all based on this interaction, you wonder why they keep coming back? And why do they often have to be such assholes about it and interpret everything you say as a personal attack against them? For one thing, this view is incredibly narcissistic. But more interestingly, I think it reveals a deep insecurity and problem within their own personal identity.

In the comments on a recent post on the Feminist Agenda, Erin recommended Gender Treachery Homophobia Masculinity and Threatened Identities by Patrick Hopkins, which I'm obviously going to have to read. Erin summarizes Hopkins main point as follows:

He posits that the reason some men have so much vitriol towards other men who display any feminine characteristics is that they have so much of their identity tied up in notions of 'masculinity' (defined simply as NOT a woman), that any
threat to traditional definitions of masculinity is a threat to personal
identity.

So, by now I'm sure most of us have seen the new commercial from the organization calling itself the National Organization for Marriage.

Two things strike me about this commercial. First, its implication that freedom is a zero-sum game - if you gain rights, I automatically lose some of mine. And second, that every one of its arguments - Every. Single. One - was used 40 years ago to scare white people into opposing integration laws. We can't let black people ride our buses and drink from our water fountains, or be allowed any of the other privileges that whites take for granted, because they won't be able to restrain themselves if we do. (Which is pretty funny... I'd rather hang out with Emmitt Till than the guys who beat him to death any day of the damn week.) A recently as last November, on the Saturday before the election, a Republican poll volunteer earnestly shared with me his profound worry of what "they" would be empowered to do to "us" if Barack Obama won the presidency.

How do you talk to the men you love about feminism? How does it affect you when someone you care about can't identify with your perspective on gender-based oppression? The Feminism 101 blog is a great resource for online debate, but when you are sitting face to face with a father or boyfriend who cares about you deeply but cannot understand your feminist perspective, a more personal approach is required.

My parents were in DC this past weekend to visit and see the cherry blossoms. We had a lovely time, but as is customary, ended more than one evening in intense post-dinner wine and beer-fueled debate. My dad and I have a great relationship, but we are both strong-willed and argumentative people. He is incredibility supportive of me and has always told me I could be whatever I wanted to be. I had touched on feminist issues in our frequent arguments from time to time, but on Sunday night what started as an off-hand comment from me about feminist critiques of Judd Apatow's movies and his problematic female characters devolved into an all-out battle about the effects of patriarchal oppression and how people concerned about women's rights should conduct themselves.

I brought up the stark difference in character development that many feminists see between Apatow's male and female characters, and the myriad issues in the plot of his film "Knocked Up" that are problematic from a feminist perspective, in particular the reproductive and career choices of its main female protagonist. My dad was completely indignant. He felt that Apatow had the right to tell stories from his own perspective, and that it was completely logical that he was able to create more well-rounded, interesting, and appealing male characters because "you write what you know."

Tonight I went to the Minnesota Twins home opener, and was suddenly struck by the crazy spell that sports can put over people...drunken (and sober) screaming, running around in a frenzy, and swearing in front of 4 year olds. Then I looked closer and realized that all of these things were done by men.

I am tired of men getting away with acting RIDICULOUS in public, while I can't.

You're asking me if I'm PMSing because I'm legitimately angry while you're running around the Metrodome after the game screeching "woooooo!" with beer drool coming out of your mouth and your ass crack nearly showing? Really?

I don't really know what to say so I'll just begin and hopefully it'll flow. It's just about boys and having relationships with them...I don't necessarily mean all-out romantic and physical relations; just like, relating to them and being able to communicate and connect with them. I find this really hard to do and it's very frustrating sometimes.

There's this boy I like in my film production class. I think he likes me too. I definitely get the sense that he's attracted to me, at least. He's just my type; jokey and lighthearted, playful, even if he has a bit of a player persona (that is definitely NOT my type lol). I like those kind of guys because they're generally positive and fun to be around. Thing is, both of us like each other but it seems like we can never seem to let up our guard enough to get a good look at each other. Whenever we're alone or in a small group, he's really sweet and shy and it's obvious to me that he likes me. But then other times, he teases me (mildly, but still), or he just seems totally indifferent, even as if he's avoiding me. Now I know what you're all thinking. "Why are you even wasting your time, just forget about it, you deserve better etc. etc." But that's why it's hard for me to talk about this stuff with other girls; it's like I always feel like they're gonna tell me I'm stupid or weak for feeling a certain way. So that's why I wanted to share. I have to get over my fear of communicating openly and honestly with other girls....

This is my second post (the first one I just wrote earlier today) so please go easy on me.  I totally love and respect the feministing community, and I really would love to see this question debated thorougly.

The question, "can men be feminists?" is one that I have seen a lot of different opinions on and reactions to.  My response to that question is that I think we need a new word.  I think that men acting as feminists parallel in some ways to a white person working for or speaking for black rights.  Men can never be women, they will never experience life from the perspective of a woman, and they will never be subject to the same oppressions or vulnerabilities entailed by womanhood.  I think that men working in favor of feminism are essential to feminists work, but I prefer to call them bridges, not feminists.  I think that Bridges are necessary relationships to open doors (among other things).  For example, in a group where men are dominating the conversation, sometimes it take a man's voice, someone who the dominators wills see as a peer, saying, "We need to hear from the women," in order to get the conversation to open up.  The reason I think these men should be called bridges and not feminists is because these men still have power.  Some of the most prominent bridges in my life and favorite people are guys who still make mistakes.  These are occasional happenings, but still sexist mistakes that only a man would make.

I'm trying to lose weight. After being informed by several doctors that my weight was impacting my health, I made the decision to lose weight - a significant amount of weight. (I want to be clear that this is about my health; I don't want or mean to imply that overweight people are neccesarily unhealthy or that being thinner means you are automatically healthier. I haven't ever been a very healthy person regardless of my weight, I'm trying to change that, and I want that to be clear to everyone who reads this.)

Weight loss is a touchy subject in the feminist community; posts about weight on Feministing illustrate this regularly. Negative comments include people who are hesitant to accept those who are overweight for fear of - I'm not sure, exactly, unless it's fear that overweight people will somehow become a menace to society, no doubt perpetuated by common myths about being overweight. While these people have good intentions, however misguided and damaging, other people display outright hatred for overweight people, calling them disgusting, a threat to society, and portraying them as people who have no self-control, who could lose weight if they really just tried harder.

In reality, weight loss is tough. Remember that your weight is at least partially genetically determined by your parents' weight, and factor in that when you gain weight, you also gain more fat cells, and that makes it harder to lose weight. Losing weight is usually portrayed by the media as easy and quick, while in reality, there is no quick fix. Yes, there are crash diets, but losing weight rapidly on a crash diet almost guarantees that you'll gain it back just as quickly. The only way to lose weight and keep it off is to make major lifestyle changes and keep them, while slowly losing weight. This is a recipe for frustration and abandonment of goals.

Just wanted to broach this topic. I have wondered now and again, if our being split into two sexes is really worth the trouble it brings us. I am fascinated by Transhumanism and all the possibilities that entails and I often think about the possibilities. If we had no gender and no sexual drives of any kind, rape would end immediately for instance. We would no longer have std's. There would no longer be any problems with unfair, degrading gender roles being foisted off on one sex or the other. If we reproduced by some mechanical means, all the complications of pregnancy would simply disappear. The whole gay verses straight, verses, bi debate would no longer be an issue. The time and effort we put into our sexuality could be put into creating new technologies, or art, or some other endeavor. In short, a lot of headaches would simply go away. Opinions?

Good morning! Happy Sunday! To start off this beautiful sunday I thought I would leave these questions with all of my Feministing sisters:

What are five things that I appreciate about myself recently? OR What are five things I have done well lately?

These can be anything that you have done well lately, from going to the gym, to cooking for yourself, to getting enough sleep to believing in yourself when no one else did, etc.

Let yourself bask in this self-appreciation. Start off the morning like this--or-- if you're like me and always late--when you're walking to the train or feeling down after a day of work, ask yourself this question. Go through five things. Start training your mind to appreciate yourself instead of worrying, or criticizing yourself, or whatever those little voices in your head usually talk about.

Let me know how it goes!

I see myself as able to be assertive, as willing to tell how I feel.

Then I realize I'm wrong.

Until I read this site, I didn't realize it was because of how I was socialized (though I suspect my fiance did... he's probably a better feminist in some ways than I am).  So... putting up two things about me, both involving guys.  One with a positive outcome, one where the only positive outcome is that I no longer talk to the guy involved.

First the positive outcome:

Important, yet somewhat... oversharing background:  I am very tight vaginally.  Sometimes (not often), intercourse is painful because the stretching is just not what it wants to do (I have my yearly women's, the speculum causes the same problem, I get checked out, it's not a problem, it's just my body).

And the story:  My now-fiance (when this happened we were dating, not engaged) is the only man I've had sex with.  I've known him over half my life now (I'm 21), and I trust him completely.  I also want to satisfy him.  This desire is too strong, really, but thankfully my fiance knows me so well, and is an amazing man.  One time (okay, several times before he convinced me that it was OKAY), sex was painful.  I tried to hide it, because I wanted to get my fiance off, even though it wasn't enjoyable, and was not fun for me.  My fiance noticed the difference in me, and kept asking, "Are you okay?", and even though I nodded, or told him yes... he could tell I wasn't, and immediately stopped.  Not only did he stop, he was immediately completely turned off, and went straight to comforting me because I was feeling guilty for not satisfying him.  He was so wonderful about it, taking care of my emotional needs.

Now... the very negative story, the one I hope I'm assertive enough to avoid now.

Why do we say "Husband"? The word "husband" means care taker like animal or plant "husbandry" that is, to care for plants or livestock. If I marry a woman I certainly won't see my self as her caretaker. I find the whole thing creepy and demeaning. It all goes back to the whole protector provider problem we have with relations between the sexes.

I have never felt a need to protect women I am with, or otherwise care for them. That doesn't mean that if I'm with a girl and she needs help she's on her own, it just means we look out for each other. The idea that a woman would pick me out because she thought I would make a good bodyguard is just weird (for lack of a better term). I do have a personality and I would like to think that a woman would choose me because I have something in common with her, because of attributes I possess that she admires. If I thought she was looking to hide behind me It would make my skin crawl.

I also wonder about the motivations of men who feel protective of women and look for a woman who seems weak and vulnerable. I feel attracted to strong, intelligent, dignified women because I admire them. I can't imagine what would be the attraction to a woman who is afraid and vulnerable unless or course a man was thinking "this woman needs me I can be the boss, I can control her" Think about it, a woman who is so weak she can't even open the door for her self is not going to question what you tell her, she is just going to passively sit there and take orders. Is this what the "knight in shining armor" is really thinking? Keep her home, keep her isolated, keep her financially powerless?

I feel we need to seriously rethink the whole idea of men as husbands; the whole thing needs to be replaced with a better philosophy of sex relations. We need a system of mutual respect, with human dignity for each partner and a focus on equality.

In a bioethics class I'm taking, we were talking about the death penalty, and the discussion progressed to include abortion. Someone raised the question: "If a woman on death row happened to get pregnant, should we still execute her?"

I'm pro-choice, and support embryonic stem cell research. But, my gut instinct to the question was "No, of course you can't kill her baby!"  Then I realized the inherent inconsistency there- in the other cases, I don't think of the embryo as a baby. I'm not sure how to rectify this.

So, what do you think?  What if the woman was 8 weeks pregnant?  8 months?

Note: I'm against the death penalty in all cases, but that's another discussion entirely.

I recently finished reading Jessica's book Full Frontal Feminism, and on the whole I found it amazing (Hi, Jessica, if you happen to read this!). However, there was one topic that I had an issue with when it came to my specific circumstances, and that was in the arena of marriage and women taking their spouse's last name.

While I certainly understand the point of view presented in the book (which basically said not to take his name) and realize that keeping your original last name can be very empowering for many women, I have decided that if I should get married one day, I will most likely take his name. Yes, I know, it can be seen as essentially branding myself and it historically symbolizes the passage of ownership of me from my father to my new husband. But here's my problem: in society's mind, you're already nominally "owned" by your father. I bear my father's last name, not one I consider my own, as does my entire immediate family. From the moment I was born, I was linked to him through my last name, and I had no choice in the matter.

My father was an emotionally/verbally abusive alcoholic throughout my childhood, so let's just say I don't particularly get along with him. When I talk about "my family," I am speaking of my mother and my sister. When referring to my father and his side of the family, we have always said "the Smiths" (fake name, of course). So in my head, my last name is even more linked with the paternal branches of my family tree.

If I end up getting married, I'll take my husband's name because then I will have at least chosen the man I'm nominally linked to. Rather seeing retaining my maiden name as keeping a part of myself, I see it as letting my father continue to have that "ownership" over me, and I refuse to let him keep me down.

Just wanted to throw my two cents into the name debate, and present another (still feminist) side of this argument that was not mentioned in the book.

I have always been aware that feminism, and those who hold feminist beliefs, is deeply linked to many tenants of non-violence and a majority of women I know who identify as feminist also embrace the ideas of pacifism and non-violent living. And that's a admirable thing, which I respect them greatly for. However, it's become a bit of an issue between myself (and a few of my friends) and several feminists that we all know mutually. And here's the rub:

I belong to a gym that offers sessions and classes in both boxing, martial arts, and what's referred to as MMA (mixed martial arts or ultimate fighting). These classes are women only and taught and referred by women who have been in the sport for a long time. And a lot of times, we'll hold friendly sparring and fighting bouts, just to train and test each other, and most of the time, we're allowed to invite friends and family to watch and cheer us on. A few weeks ago, some friends of mine who are open feminists came to see a friendly match between me and a friend. Now, during an MMA match, one of the ways you can win is to "tap out" the other person (which pretty much means getting them into some kind of chokehold or headlock that will cause them to tire or lose breath and therefore submit). You can also win by straight knocking out the other person (which can involve knocking them out or just causing them to go down and stay down). It is common during an MMA match to get struck many times, bleed heavily (especially from the head) and display injuries like cut lips, black eyes, ect. Well, the match ended with both me and her banged up pretty bad. I approached my friends after the match (which ended with a hug, by the way), and they were appalled. One of them said that she could not believe that two women could do that to one another. I didn't understand, and asked her to elaborate a bit. She continued by asking how I could call myself a feminist after taking part in something like that. She stated that two women attacking each other, beating each other, causing that much physical damage to each other, couldn't really feminists. "Violence is never feminist!" she argued, going on to say that violence, which is so often used against women, could never be something we should accept or do ourselves. And it perplexed me.

And I don't agree with her. I have wracked my brain, but I still seem unable to see her side of the argument. Yes, sports like those I take part in are violent. They involve injuries, blood, and the like. But so do many sports. And I'd argue that violence itself, or taking part in a violent sport, doesn't disqualify one from being a feminist. My friend seemed especially upset by the fact that, at one point, I did manage to get my opponent flipped over and into a basic chokehold to try to tap her out. Perhaps this triggered her (I don't know her background enough to know if she was ever victimized), and I now realize that I probably should have warned her that MMA is a very violent sport. But I still think that taking part in something like MMA doesn't mean one can't support feminism. Yes, I tried to choke out my opponent. She tried to knock me out several times. We kicked and punched and struck each other. That's the nature of our matches. And I'm not totally convinced that violence, in and of itself, is always wrong. For instance, if a woman resisted a rape or other attack with violence, I doubt anyone here would think less of her for it. So I'm cynical to the argument that violence is always, always bad. And I don't think women who choose to engage in violent sport are less feminist for it. For me, the key is that it is happened in the context of SPORT. What everyone saw that day were two athletes who had trained and learned and practiced for a long time running up to our match, and a display of strength, skill, and determination from us both. We're friends, and we understand that we are opponents within the confine of the fight, and then, we leave it behind. The violence itself is a part of the sport, but it is not indicative of ill will, malice, or the like. And I think that's what distinguishes it - that the violence of MMA and our match is not attached (usually) to any bad feelings or desire to harm, embarrass, or injure the other person - it's a part of the sport that we take part in. And from the angle, I really don't think that feminism is enhanced or harmed by taking part in such things. I appreciate my friend's input, but I am not a non-violent feminist, and I don't think that makes me any lesser.

So, I have not been to Feministing in some months. I got kind of repelled by certain mindsets and attitudes and decided to take a break. I still figured I was a feminist, just one who feels differently. Well, my crisis was happening then anyway, but I still felt that, deep down, I was a feminist.

Enter Feminist Theory class. Amid the "This is why this movement/point of view failed ," the wonderful black hole like-tangents, and my teacher's arbitrary references to babies as "flesh bags" (And I don't even arbitrarily like babies!),  I found myself getting feeling disgusted with the whole thing.

The thing is, I used to think it didn't matter how you got to the conclusion that women are people, too, but that you got there and that you were there and now we can do something with it.

For example, I can see the value of Existentialism and how it can reveal the points of Feminism, and how it's a valuable stop on a mental journey, but I do not by any means want to stop my journey there and base all future thought on it. Unfortunatley, I'm getting the impression from my teacher and my readings that Existentialism is Feminism, and if you can't have one without the other, then maybe I shouldn't be a feminist. If it really is that essential to the feminist mind, then whatever way I've reached the conclusion that is feminist ideal is moot because my thinking is wrong.

It may sound selfish to not want to give in and take one for the team, but Existentialism really gets me down. It eats me up from the inside and kills my mind and will.

So, I'm wavering here: On the one hand, I'm ready to resign my identification as Feminist and admit the the world that I am not, in fact, a feminist, but just another one of the fallacious stupid people and that I really don't care to change that. In that case... goodbye, for whatever I am, I am not feminist. 

On the other hand, I remind myself that this could just be another case of "Philosophy Ruins Everything," and that Feminism seems to be the only term around for people who think women are deserving of respect as individuals, equal pay, rights, and protections under law, so I might as well use it.

That should be all that matters, right? Right?

I usually try to ignore my past; my viewpoint is that nothing good comes from reliving old wrongs. However, something that happened today made it all come crashing back in excruciating clarity...

I was applying for some scholarship or another, and one question asked this: "If you could send a postcard back to yourself 3 years ago, what would you say? (Answer must be less than 80 words.)"

Whoa. I thought about this for a good while, and after much deliberation (and many revisions--79 words isn't enough!) I came up with this:

I know you're going through some hard times right now, but don't give up. You've managed to make it this far, and I'm so incredibly proud of you. I know it seems like nothing will ever get better, but remember that you're loved. You're so strong, and even though you don't think so, you're a beautiful, intelligent young woman. Abuse has scarred you, I know, but believe me that one day, things will get better. Suicide won't solve anything.

And I hope I've become somebody that the past me would approve of.

What about you gals? What would you tell your past self if you could?

I am taking a Women's Studies class called New Technologies, Changing Bodies, and Shifting Identities . Our readings last week were from Ann Fausto-Sterling's book Sexing the Body . It is a fascinating look at the politics of sex and gender, and the way the medical industry has perpetuated our dichotomous views of sex. Approximately 1.7% of the population is born intersexed, meaning that their genetalia is ambiguous. However, doctors and biologists, who are just as socialized as anybody else by our society which polarizes gender, have come to naturally assume that there are only two options for the sex of every child upon exiting the womb - male or female.

My class also watched a film called Hermaphrodite's Speak . It was filmed by Cheryl Chase in 1997 at the first retreat for the Intersex Society of North America . It exposed the sad, yet unfortunately typical stories of these individuals, and how inhumanely most of them have been treated since birth. Some immediately had parts of their genetalia removed after being born, some didn't have any body parts removed until they were older, and some never had anything removed, but still experienced discrimination because of their ambiguous sex.

In her book Revolution from Within: A Book of Self-Esteem , Steinem writes about the Task Force to Promote Self-Esteem that was established in 1986 in California. The legislator responsible for it believed that self esteem would be a “social vaccine” against an epidemic of seven major social problems: crime and violence, alcohol abuse, drug abuse, teen pregnancy, child and spousal abuse, chronic welfare dependency, and failure to achieve in school.

When the results of the studies and public hearings came in, low self esteem was found to be a “primary causal factor” in each of those seven social problems. As a result, the Task Force implemented self-esteem programs in schools, prisons, drug treatment centres and battered women’s shelters. They found that even simple efforts such as holding discussions about self esteem made people feel empowered.

The cost of this entire three-year effort was $735,000. In 1986 that was less than the price of keeping a 21 year old in prison for a life sentence. Incredible.

Ayn Rand believed that self esteem was absolutely essential to living a happy, virtuous life. To Rand, self esteem is the absolute certainty that you are fundamentally able to succeed in life, and are deserving of that success. You know you are worthy of happiness, which means that you are worthy of living.

Self esteem is not just about “feeling good.” It is deeply interconnected with everything else in your life: relationships, jobs, family, and your health. People who work in dead-end jobs when they can do better, people who stay in abusive relationships, and people who are addicted to drugs, video games or food ALL have one thing in common: a lack of self esteem.

I fear that most governments do not place enough value on the self-esteem of their citizens – but why should they? A population of miserable, dependent people who think they’re unworthy are much easier to control and manipulate than a confident, self-assured group.

My advice to all feminists in particular, and to all people in general, is to work on your self esteem. Without it, you’ll never believe you’re worthy of the life you deserve to live.

“Self Esteem isn’t everything; it’s just that there’s nothing without it.”

- Gloria Steinem

There's been something weighing on my mind quite strongly, and I just thought I'd throw it out here and see some the thoughts I get back. Well, here goes...

I am a redneck.

I am from an extremely small town in western Montana (pop. Less than 600 people). Up until I left to attend school in the District of Columbia area, I never thought it was strange or weird. But when I lived in the greater D.C. area (I lived in Virginia), my viewpoint started to change. People would ask me "where are you from?" And I would say Montana. And they'd say something along the lines of "Oh, aren't you glad to be out?" or "I'll bet you're so much happier here." And I really wasn't. I mean, DC is great. It really is. But I like my home state. Then, I noticed something else. I noticed that in the most open-minded, egalitarian, progressive liberal groups I knew, there was a very strong tendency to talk about "rednecks" and "white trash" and "stupid Mid-westerners." I heard people talk about Sarah Palin's thick Idaho accent (BTW, don't take that a defense of her, just her accent). And I wondered what they thought of me, because my voice sounds very similar to hers. They would rail against the "bigoted Midwest" and the terror of "small-town values." And they would use the term redneck like it was the worst thing they could think to call someone. And all the terms that went with it - white trash, hick, hillbilly, ect. And it just made me want to go home.

But then I came to a really strong realization while I was on the East Coast. What if, instead of being ashamed of terms like redneck and acting like being Midwestern was a source of shame, I tried to own it? After all, there's a lot of country music out there declaring "redneck pride" and celebrating the way of life of the Midwest and South. And no, I am not going to deny or justify the often biased or wrong attitudes that come out of many states of the Midwest. However, bigotry exists in all places - no geographic location has a monopoly on that. If one has a problem with a law coming out of a state, then be angry about it - especially at the state legislature. But don't go and fire off a rant about the hicks and their small-minded ways and how THANKFUL you are that you got out/moved away/never have to go back there again. Because some of us have our roots there, and WANT to be there.

And yeah, I know that almost all Midwestern states, without fail in elections, will go red. And you're free to disagree with those results (I know I have, on occasion). But when you start making judgments about the people, about how they must be stupid and ignorant and hate-filled for that to happen, then I would challenge someone to come out to some of these states and see good things happening here. The only completely green community in the US is currently being built in, of all places, KANSAS. A large number of alternative energy sources and small sustainable farms, including family-run operations, are springing up in the Midwest, making it one of the greenest parts of the country. If you don't like it that the politics are different, that's perfectly fine. But it gets under my skin when so called feminists and progressives take every available chance to throw words around like redneck and hillbilly as if they are meant to insult a place that most of them have never even seen. Because a lot of great things come out of the Midwest, and towns like mine, and I feel as though I am constantly having to defend myself based on where I happened to be born.

So for the first time, I will openly say to anyone who cares to listen, yeah, I AM A REDNECK. I grew up in a small town in Montana and I've been muddin' and I've been to tractor battles and hoedowns and skeet shootings and rasslin' matches and all that stuff. I listen to country music and have driven a pickup and I shop at the only Wal Mart within 100 miles of us. I've had Starbucks and think it tastes like shit and can brew a better cup with Folgers in my kitchen. So I am a redneck. As the great Joe Diffie sang in one of his songs, "We're from the country, and we like it that way!"

This past Valentine's Day, I went and got my navel pierced. It's something I've wanted for years, ever since I was thirteen and I saw a pierced bellybutton in person for the first time: it belonged to a girl in my gym class whom I admired and, if I'd been aware of my bisexuality at the time, on whom I would've said I had a crush. But I always told myself I would only get it pierced when I "lost enough weight" or "got thin enough". Now, I am not the world's fittest person, but I'm healthy enough to climb Mount Fuji and run a couple of miles at a time. My body might never grant me a career in Hollywood or an Olympic medal, but it's a good body that gets me where I need to go and is mostly pain-free most days, which I'm aware is more than a lot of people get. But I still have a BMI of 29, which is cause enough for loathing in this society.

My name is Kesiah and I'm a feminist attending University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Yesterday I saw The Vagina Monologues, performed right here on campus, funded by the Women's Resource center and the library. It was amazing (I've never seen it before) and I loved that so many people turned out. The audience really got into it and the actors were really good. My friends and I stood up afterwards, I almost teared up so many times during the performance.

The point of this post is how many people showed up. When I walked in, I was completely floored. It always seems like (even in my liberal ass city) that feminists are painted as the typical stereotypes, and anything associated with feminism is kind of taboo. However, so many people showed up -- so many people genuinely wanted to watch, to laugh, to tear up, to hear what women had to say.

Did I mention I'm going to a Drag show here at UWM tomorrow? It's going to be amazing.

The NY Times coverage of MIA has held her accountable for certain statements she has made in support of the Tamils in Sri Lanka – and, because she has certain connections to the terrorists or whatever you call them, I call them terrorists – the LTTE -- she has been characterized as having dissonant politics. 

That article, and Samhita’s response made me think about my complicated relationship with MIA.  Let me be clear, I’m not objective, and I’m not an expert.  I’m a girl from NYC whose parents are from Sri Lanka. I’m Sinhalese and a Buddhist.  I’m a sister and a cousin, a lawyer and writer and I think MIA looks familiar, sorta like family, somehow.

I’ve realized that I’m of two minds.  One part of me she says she speaks as a Tamil on behalf of Tamils about their issues, which is laudatory, but it appears that she is using her status to sow more discord and anger than to promote conciliation and peace.  She also speaks without thinking.  She claims that there is a genocide going on in Sri Lanka – which, with only a little research, can be debunked.  But she’s trying to draw negative attention on the Sri Lankan government.  She could do that a lot better if she called for accountability for Sri Lankan army violations of human and humanitarian rights and disparaged the government’s ludicrous decision to throw the press out.  They’ve done enough for her to use facts and truth to make her point.  But what is her point, really? Surely she doesn’t want the war to continue on indefinitely.  We all know that a military solution is not a solution at all and that at some point, we’re going to have to talk to each other and work with each other. Not all of us think that all Tamils are terrorists, and wouldn’t it be nice if she was rallying people to work together to forge a way out of this disaster? 

As I'm sure many of you are aware, Monday Millard Fuller died of an unnamed illness at the age of 74. While many of you may not recognize his name, I'm sure you'll recognize the charity he started in the 1970s, Habitat for Humanity. As a long-time supporter and volunteer of H4H, I was saddened to hear of his passing. But as a feminist, my feelings were somewhat mixed.

While I disagree with some of his political positions, Fuller devoted his life to housing the homeless and under-housed and making charity and goodwill a central part living a Christian life. From what I understand (and I could be wrong about this), he was also a pillar of the interracial religious community in Alabama. These aren't just good things; they're great achievements that should be commended and are worthy of being exemplified.

However, in 2005 Fuller had a semi-well-publicized sexual-harassment claim filed against him and was summarily ousted by the Board of Directors for H4H. Good on them, what he did was inexcusable and he was punished for it, if not legally, than at least he lost his job.

Now, for the past two days I've been wrestling with some moral questions of my own: at what point do we forgive someone for committing this crime? Do his good deeds outweigh his crimes against women, or is it not the sort of thing you measure on a tipping scale?

I suppose it's not right to speak ill of the dead, especially when they've done so much good in their lives, but I also feel like to sweep his bad acts under the rug is to do a disservice to the feminist community.

So I guess I'd like to hear some more opinions for you all: do we remember him for his triumphs, or his faults, or both?

There have been a lot of posts on abortion with Roe vs. Wade turning 36 in the past couple days.  I thought I'd add to the pile on and throw in my own thoughts.

My Sophomore year in college, I went to the March for Women's Lives in Washington, DC.  I had always believed strongly in any woman's right to choose, but have also been sympathetic to the idea that abortion is the elimination of a potential human life.  The arguments of abortion rest on which side of the life cycle you find more important: the potentialities of a woman living her life and wanting to continue to life her life the way she chooses, or the unborn child who has yet to have the opportunity to make his/her impact or impression on the world. Is the life of someone already living more important than the life of someone who's yet to live.

I believe in firmly in the idea that a woman has a right to choose because a woman should not have to be subjugated to raising a child which she would not necessarily love.  I've seen, in years following, what accidental children can have happen to them by their parents: unloving houses, abusive parents who blame the child for their lack of success, and an unpreparedness for the realities of parenthood which result in perilousness unhappy children. I've always believed that the mother's life, as someone who can full well make the decision of altering her life's course, is more important because she can then go on and very directly do something for herself, society or anyone she wants.  The direct potential of her child free life is something which I personally find more important and valuable than the life of someone who most likely will not contribute to society for at least 20 untils into the future.  The impact NOW I feel is more important than the impact later.

The structure of the debate has always troubled me.  Having access to choice does not then mean that everyone will take the termination option or that not having choice will stop women from ending undwanted pregnancy.  The dichotomy of this argument, which does originate on the Right, is completely false.  People will continue to pursue abortion, regardless of its legality, safety or any other factor.  If a woman wants an abortion, she will get one.  It doesn't matter where, when or how.  Making abortion safe and legal (and on demand) is something which will always protect women's health and will always be something that is a positive.

I just thought I'd add some of my thoughts here in something more official since I've taken some devil's advocate positions in some past threads and I wish to clarify my positions.

The other night I woke up in a cold sweat because I had this too-much-pizza-before-bed induced nightmare. It goes as follows: I find out I'm pregnant, go through my options, and choose to follow through with the pregnancy. In my dream, this is what I'm absolutely convinced is the right choice for me.  Then for some reason based on dream un-logic, I decide to triumphantly post all of this on Facebook. It all spirals out of control when the internet baddies,  vaguely familiar nightmare versions of my facebook friends, rip me apart for not getting an abortion in what was a much more dramatic internet battle than it would be if I actually typed out the details. You know how some nightmares are--they seem so horrifying but then when you come to, they're just really ridiculous.

But I was genuinely very afraid during those moments before the it occurred to me how silly it would be if all of this took place on facebook. I had a very real fear of being forced to make a choice I didn't want to. 

I feel like rather than being forced to choose between a pregnancy or an abortion, I'm being forced to choose between pro-life and pro-choice. 

I was reading one of Amanda Marcotte's recent posts over at Pandagon. It's about the misogynistic language used by the anti-choice movement, and this passage jumped out at me.

What they fail to understand is that “life begins at conception” is a misogynist statement. It’s the erasure of a woman’s role in making new people, and a claim that the only effort that counts is the effort a man put into ejaculating.  Abortion is horrifying because it’s a reminder that men do not actually make babies, but that women do through a 9 month process, and that if a woman chooses to interrupt that process, there will not be a baby.  Which is pretty conclusive proof that men don’t make babies.  Which directly contradicts the misogynist belief that only men are capable of really doing jobs worth doing.

What Marcotte is describing here is the phenomenon that psychoanalyst Karen Horney (1885-1952) called "womb envy." Basically, boys and men are jealous of women because women have the ability to go through pregnancy and nursing. Women can find fulfillment from creating new life and from enhancing their own lives through work outside the home. Since men can't give birth, they can only turn to the outside world for personal fulfillment. She believed that the womb envy that is experienced by males is the source of denying women equal rights, blaming women for the perceived downfall of society, and demonizing women's sexuality. Whatever your feelings about pregnancy, I think Horney makes a clearly pro-choice, pro-woman point. "Life begins at conception" is a way for anti-choice men to claim a piece of the womb they secretly covet by claiming sole responsibility for the creation of the next generation. I think Marcotte applies the concept of womb envy beautifully in the passage I quoted, even if she didn't mean to. 

I'm filing this post under 'Deep Thoughts', which is ironic.  I feel like my thought process is severely lacking today!

My 22 year old cousin called me to talk about her college English class focused on female writers.  She said that she feels the class is turning into a Women's Studies course.  The problem is that she isn't all that interested in Women's Studies or feminism in general.  I really love her, and we're close; though I'm four years older, we grew up together, and she's one of the people closest to my heart.  We're quite different though.  I'm swooning over the inauguration today while she is extremely upset by Obama's pro-choice stance. 

The problem is that she can't think of any ways in which feminism relates to her, personally.  She says she's happy with her views, and she doesn't like hearing her professor and her classmates "whine."  She also feels that feminists are their own worst enemies because they "devalue motherhood."  I was so glad that she called me, because I love to talk about why I believe what I do.  But I felt pretty ineffective.  I talked about the fact that none of us live in a bubble, and that great inequalities still exist.  I just don't think what I said swayed her at all, and I'm disappointed in myself for that.  After all, I'm a graduate student instructor, and I should know something about teaching people who aren't much younger than I am.

My cousin is young, pro-life (or anti-choice, depending on your preferred phrasing), longs for motherhood, doesn't feel that she's been held back by her gender in any way, and prefers action to talk.  I also know that in calling me, she cared enough about the idea of feminism to hash it out with me, which is a glimmer of hope.  What I'm wondering is what you all would have said.  What examples would you have given her?  What reasons to care would you have given her? 

Thanks!

Hello, feministing. I am a newly-aware feminist. This website and an awesome feminist named April helped me figure out why I always felt like something was wrong with the way society portrayed and perceived women.

As I've become more confident and comfortable with myself as a feminist, I've started a few dialogues about it with the men in my life.

Here's the problem:

They often convince me I'm wrong.

One of my friends takes issue with the word "feminism." Although he agrees that gender equality is a great thing, something to strive for, he says it's unfair for a movement to claim to be champions of equality while refusing to even pay lip service to half of the world's population. I feel like there is a response to that, but I don't know what to say.

Another claims that the imbalance of pay is due to maternity leave and women taking time off from their careers to be with children. "When someone takes large portions of time away from their career, they will happen to get paid less," he says. 

Another feels it's unfair that there are scholarships, etc. available based solely on race or gender. He takes issue with affirmative action because he feels it's not helping to promote equality so much as diversity, and he says he'd rather people be valued for their achievements and contributions than their physical differences.

And although their arguments don't sit right with me, I don't know how to articulate why something feels wrong. I don't know how to explain white male privilege to them, and I don't know where to find impartial statistics to back my opinions up.

I hate being silenced because I don't know how else to defend my position. All these men are articulate, well-educated, and it's frustrating to know their privilege is showing but not to know how to make them see it.

I love these men, and they are nothing but respectful during these debates. I just want help defending my feminism.

If anyone could help me, whether with arguments, statistics, or suggestions, I would be very grateful. Thank you all, and thanks feministing for helping me to discover and embrace the f-word.

Samhita wrote something a while ago that struck me. She wrote:

Many of my female friends drink in excess, not because they wanted to be "one of the guys" but because they had lives that were difficult as women, either for internalized sense of failure, experiencing abuse, depression around money, depression around social stature or failed relationships. I am not just talking about drinking for fun, of course women engage in that as well, but I am talking about drinking as a way to numb the pain, difficulty and reality of this often cold cold world.

Cross posted from Salon's Broadsheet

For all the ink that's been spilled on the Madoff investment scandal, I've read nothing about its impact on funding for progressive women's causes -- which is considerable. Simply put, only a small pool of foundations are funding litigation and advocacy work related to criminal justice or constitutional rights; the pool that supports related programs targeted to women is smaller still. With the recent shuttering of two of Madoff's clients, the Picower Foundation and the JEHT Foundation, that pool has shrunk to a puddle.

Picower was one of a handful of foundations willing to stick their necks out and significantly fund the three organizations that handle virtually all major reproductive rights-related litigation and legal advocacy in the United States. Now the Center for Reproductive Rights needs to make up a $600,000 shortage in 2009; Planned Parenthood is out $484,000; the ACLU's Reproductive Freedom Project is off $200,000.

The economic crisis makes it particularly difficult to replace that kind of money. Meanwhile, there's a backlog of bad new laws that need to be contested. It's likely to grow this year with the popularity of mandatory ultrasound laws for abortion patients, one of the favorite new litigation strategies of antiabortion activists. (Seventeen states considered more than 30 ultrasound bills in 2007 alone.)

I know there have been posts about this before, but I need to get this off my chest. (This is coming from a heterosexual woman, so this is just my reflections on some heteronormative dating standards). This is also sort of a rant... but I really needed to put this out there....

Dating as a feminist is hard. Sometimes it sucks. Sometimes it hurts.

It's sad that when I meet a man, I have to slowly and cautiously let him know I am a feminist because the majority of men I have met are not feminists (I believe that they are out there, somewhere).

The guy I've been dating (for only a few months) told me he knew he could never be in love with me because he learned: 1. That if I get married, I don't want a traditional wedding/engagement ring/any of those sexist traditions, and 2. That I don't want my own children, I want to adopt and could see myself adopting as a single mother.

To complicate that more, he said he was "falling for me" and "starting to love me" but couldn't because of the aforementioned reasons.

So yeah, I just had the most horribly awkward "talk" with my mom...on the issue of bisexuality. And the possibility that that's what I might be. I bring this up because there is much discussion on feministing about lesbian/gay/transgender rights, but bisexuality continues to be the invisible sexual preference....Not that I am totally comfortable with the term myself. I wish people would discuss the inherent fluidity of sexuality; as such I hesitate to say I'm bi, because the prefix 'bi' indicates two, and I can't say my sexual preference falls into two categories (namely, male and female). I am attracted to pretty much everybody. Gay men. Lesbian women. Transgender people. Transsexual people. Androgynous people. Men that look like women. Women that look like men. Everyone.

I'm reading Jennifer Baumgardner's 'Looking Both Ways'; someone in it described themselves as 'omnisexual', saying that 'bisexual' was too limiting a word. I agree wholeheartedly.

Anyway, back to my horribly mortifying talk with my mom. I (very awkwardly and stupidly) brought the issue up after a long heart to heart we had. I figured we had both talked for a while, were both relaxed, and maybe it was a good time to bring it up. The possibility that I was bi. Well, after my mom laughed with disbelief in my face, she informed me that she doesn't believe in 'bi' and that everyone settles for one gender sooner or later. She said it was a phase and for people who are confused. She then seemed uncomfortable and mad at me for the rest of the night. I felt really bad so I apologized and said I was joking. She just told me she wasn't ready for that kind of "joking or whatever it was". I feel really stupid now, and a little mortified.... Anyway, I wanted to share my little story (this is my first time posting on feministing), and maybe get a discussion going about bisexuality and/or people's experiences in trying to talk to their parents/loved ones about it, or coming to terms with it in themselves.

My 16 year old sister came up to my room the other day to tell me how she was bummed out about her boyfriend. Apparently he keeps making “that’s so gay” and uses the word “faggot” a lot. This is something that really offends her considering that in her spare time she does A LOT of gay rights activist work and so forth. SO they got into a big fight and she still felt terrible about that one time when one of his friend was blaming feminism for the way things are so screwed up today. He just squeezed her hand as if to signify for her not to say anything. So she didn’t say anything. This still bothers her today. So while she was telling me all this I was thinking of how to compose an answer for her when she interrupted my thoughts with that stinging question “How will I ever find someone better?” I stumbled over my answer and told her she didn’t need a boyfriend to be happy, etc etc. But it made me wonder. I am pretty lucky I have a progressive boyfriend who even claims to be a feminist, but not everyone is as lucky.

Something I've been thinking about:

In the feminist community, encouraging purity is bad, but so are photos of naked women. 

I think one of the main divisions between the schools of feminism is which one seems like the worse threat. I am sex-positive third-wave because the chastity-pushers piss me off far more than any perfume ad with naked women. With the abstinence crowd, the judgment on those who fail conform to the ideal is very, very overt. If you don't save yourself for marriage, you'll get herpes and AIDS and abortions and you'll never find a husband. Most of the time, sexy pictures are just sexy pictures.

To me, there is no problem unless the image or ad or whatever it is comes with judgment towards those who don't fit. 

The market is saturated with pictures of the same kind of woman -- skinny, with big tits and lots of make-up -- and that's a problem. But in cases where the trend is the problem you can't point to one particular example and claim that it's excluding you. That's saying that this particular woman isn't sexy, and she isn't real. Supermodels are real people, and calling a woman unsexy because she's too thin or because she's had plastic surgery is douchebaggy and hypocritical.

This is a bit of rant, but I'm hoping to open it up the discussion of tactics used to silence minorities.

I really did not luck out when it comes to discrimination. I'm oppressed as a bisexual, as a woman, as a person who struggles with mental health, as a Jew, as a teenager. It could be a lot worse, I know. But it's not fun to live your life in fear of discrimination everyday.

I've never really got why people want to silence those who simply want equality. I've never gotten why it's so scary that people of color, or woman, or anyone wants to be treated equally. I was raised by leftist radicals, and I guess it never occurred to me that anyone should be denied their basic human rights. I don't understand it.

I live in a very conservative, upper-middle class, white town. It's truly frightening how intolerant a lot of people are. But I've always limited myself to the small group of liberals, or even moderates, who are part of my school. So when people start sending me chain letters, pictures, etc on facebook that are bigoted and offensive, I'm shocked.

One that made rounds at my school was a horrible piece of flair that called homosexuality perversion, and said that only heterosexual couples had love. Someone was dumb enough to send this to me and a good friend of mine who is gay. The worst part is, the girl who sent it had always been nice and polite to us. It's awful that people think they can do that.

I happen to be the owner of a webcam . So I decided to record a little shout-out to my friends about this. It turned into a nineteen minute long rant about everything from Prop 8 to religion. But I fond it mostly came down to two things: Feminism and silence

I ended up posting the thing on youtube in three parts, just to see what peoples reactions would be. I may post a link later, but in truth it's beside the point. This is a good time to point out I am very neurotic in manner. I'm jumpy, talk fast, etc. I do suffer from mental "illness." I've accepted it as part of who I am. It doesn't make me anymore or less of a person.

So far I've only got one comment on the video:

"Does feminism make women neurotic, or do neurotic women gravitate towards feminism?"

Really. This person could of said something sensible, cited facts, and actually talked about why they think I'm wrong. But no. They just tried to reduce me to nothing because of my mannerisms. I have no doubt that I will soon get a bunch of "fat and ugly" comments as well.

I've been insulted before, and almost never does someone try to disprove my point. Instead, they try and de humanize me.

The weird thing is people still take those who say only sling mud seriously. The leader of the young republicans at my school is infamous for personally insulting everyone who dared disagree with him, yet people still think he's a stand up guy.

So, I leave this group with a question: How have others tried to dehumanize you, and why do you people still follow those who sling mud?

I've been doing a lot of thinking lately, about myself, and what it means to know myself. I realized that as a feminist, I often define myself in terms of things outside myself - how I fit into society, how I react to other people. Just as important, however, is starting from inside myself and building outwards. In my introspection, I ran across some beautiful letters that Rainer Maria Rilke wrote at the beginning of the 20th century (published as his "Letters to a Young Poet"), and one section resonated particularly deeply with the part of me who identifies as a feminist. The text:

The girl and the woman, in their new, individual unfolding, will only in passing be imitators of male behavior and misbehavior and repeaters of male professions. After the uncertainty of such transitions, it will become obvious that women were going through the abundance and variation of those (often ridiculous) disguises just so that they could purify their own essential nature and wash out the deforming influences of the other sex. Women, in whom life lingers and dwells more immediately, more fruitfully, and more confidently, must surely have become riper and more human in their depths than light, easygoing man, who is not pulled down beneath the surface of life by the weight of any bodily fruit and who, arrogant and hasty, undervalues what he thinks he loves. This humanity of woman, carried in her womb through all her suffering and humiliation, will come to light when she has stripped off the conventions of mere femaleness in the transformations of her outward status, and those men who do not yet feel it approaching will be astonished by it. Someday (and even now, especially in the countries of northern Europe, trustworthy signs are already speaking and shining), someday there will be girls and women whose name will no longer mean the mere opposite of the male, but something in itself, something that makes one think not of any complement and limit, but only life and reality: the female human being.

I myself have never been able to find out precisely what feminism is: I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat or a prostitute..."
--Rebecca West, The Clarion, 11/14/13

The reason racism is a feminist issue is easily explained by the inherent definition of feminism. Feminism is the political theory and practice to free all women: women of color, working-class women, poor women, physically challenged women, lesbians, old women --as well as white economically privileged heterosexual women. Anything less than this is not feminism, but merely female self-aggrandizement."
--Barbara Smith, 1979

I went out to dinner at a local bar/restaurant last night with my two guy friends from high school. Toward the end of our tex-mex dining, I noticed that on the wall there was a large painting of a woman holding a tray of drinks. She had a low cut blue dress that showed off her shoulders and part of her chest (no cleavage), and the outline of her left breast and nipple was quite visible once the waiters moved tables out of the way to make room for the band.

This painting got our conversation started about the objectification of women and their bodies in advertising and in the media in general . My conservative Republican counterpart opined it was up to the consumer what was in and hot and now, and that advertisers, television shows, musicians, etc., simply “give the people what they want.” My centrist psychology major friend conceded that what I was saying was true and that change should happen…but it won’t for another 20-50 years. “I’m all about gradualism,” he said, “And what you’re saying and what you’re working for right now, you’re not going to get any results for.”

Conservative agreed. “It’s the undecideds you’re going after. I don’t like people who think they can change my values, my views, my opinions. I’m already set in my ways. Don’t try to change that.”

The conversation continued on for just about an hour, and I even tried to break it down to the simplest terms: patriarchy, who are the determinants of what is “the social norm,” why must we follow those, and another Yuengling later dot dot dot

I want to pose to the community, If this is what I meet in a group of my peers, my closest, what kind of hope do I have in this feminist movement to push forward with change? The kind of change we work for and want to see? How does one respond to that?   Do you have similar stories?

I have a couple of friends, whose identities are sadly built around men. One of them feels too ashamed to be single, after splitting up with one bf, always goes back to her ex, because she "might as well," and is too embarressed of being single, as if she needs a man to have an identity.

Another friend, and in hindsight I realise now how she was influencing me of succumbing to sexist ideals, would look at my Myspace and comment on me not being "photogenic" and spending ages lecturing me on the "correct" angles to take my pics, and ways to look sexy. She also got me into shaving my bikibi line, as "guys prefer it so much more" and generally how to be "sexy." Also telling me one time "it feels weird to be single."

Classic line that really gets on my tits? "Have you got a bf YET?" What's with the "yet"? Since when has it been a rite of passage? I used to get so depressed by it, started hating myself for not being able to get guys I like and branding myself "not a real woman" coz of it, and becoming very bitter towards my mates who could get guys.

But as I've grown up, I've seen from many young women, they don't want a particular someone special, they want a Boyfriend (with a capital B) like a must-have fashion accessory.

I have a tremendous amount of anxiety problems: Generalized Anxiety Disorder and Social Anxiety Disorder.

So...

I have a lot of trouble mustering up the courage to speak up in class or at work, and lot of times just general interactions with co-workers and accquiantances will be hard for me. When I have time to rehearse what I want to say it never comes out that way, or at least that is my analysis.

The physical reactions of this are apparent. My face, neck, and chest turns blotchy deep red. I can literally feel the blood pumping like mad throughout my body all the way to my toes. I feel like I am burning up, but I am shivering and trembling like I was freezing. Its kind of like whatever the opposite of an awesome orgasm would be.

So, believe me when I say that speaking out about human rights issues, feminist issues, and the like is hard for me.

But I do it.

This Thanksgiving, as my family sits down to their traditional dead animals, I'll be munching on Tofurky and vegan stuffing. Whatever, I've been a vegetarian for eight years, I'm used to being the odd girl out every fourth Thursday of November. And, just like every Thanksgiving since I stopped eating meat, I know I'm going to get the comments and the jokes, even though it's hardly a novelty after all this time.

What is it about Thanksgiving that brings out the super-traditional? Even in my fairly feminist household (my parents are proud of their egalitarian marriage, split the chores and childcare responsibilities pretty evenly, my dad had no problem moving for my mom's job, etc.), my dad and uncles and brothers will still watch the football game and chug beers after the big dinner while all the womenfolk clean up the kitchen. No one even pretends that there's an equal distribution of responsibilities. Sure, every year Dad ceremoniously asks if there's anything he can do, but much like the ceremonious cutting of the turkey at the beginning of the meal, it's all for show. The men have nothing to do with the preparation of the meal, and they certainly have nothing to do with the cleanup. Their role is to eat and digest, and compliment to gals on a job well done. I don't know what would happen if this year Mom answered, "Sure, we've got dishes for thirty people to clean and about fifty pots and pans that need scrubbing...there's the sink!" It's as unfathomable as my meat-and-potatoes family deciding to share some Tofurky and forgo the bird carcass.

Today, actually less than two hours ago, I was taking the bus to and from a Target across the city. I wasn't by myself, my boyfriend tagged along with me. When we were getting on the bus back to my house, I notice the bus was occupied with mostly males, all these thoughts in my mind started to occur. What if I decided to go to Target by myself?

Or worse, sometimes I go with my 13 year old sister. The thought of being alone with about six guys, including the bus driver himself, scared me. I immediately felt like all eyes where on me and I realized what I was wearing. An adorable black skirt that was above my knees and leggings underneath, with that I thought of the times I heard about women in rape cases getting blamed for their own rapes, because of what they where wearing and how they where "asking for it", because you know, women ask to be raped all the time!I felt a sudden fiery and rage and mostly shame on my part, for even thinking this way, and even more guilt when I thought, "at least my boyfriend's here to protect me".

The guys great guy, but the thought that I wasn't feeling safe without a male protector, ticked me off. Why can't I feel safe taking the damn bus at 6 at night? Why can't I feel safe walking down the street with whatever I have on, without worrying about if "I'm asking for it?". WHY????? Why was it that when I was only 15 years old, this creepy ass old guy followed me out of the library and sat with me at a bus stop, inches away from me, asking me questions, and sitting closer and closer to me, in broad daylight, and I couldn't move out of fear. I remembered his fingers touching my keychain I had hooked to my jeans, and asking where I lived. Thankfully, my best friend called my cell phone and I pretended it was my mom and he took off. But the point is, I want to be able to do things, without fear, EVEN MORE I want guys to fear the same way women fear every single days of our lives, whether we realize it or not. Because it's there and it simply has to stop.

[ggbfdsghvnsjg!!!!]

(I originally posted this on my own blog about a year ago but have been thinking a lot about the topic recently so thought I'd bring it up here)

Let me preface this post by explaining a few things I believe to be true about feminism:

1. Feminism has many different definitions and means different things to different people. It is a very broad subject area.

2. Damn right it is. Feminism is arguably the oldest and most successful social justice movement in the world (it goes back much further than the suffragettes, y'know). Moreover, it pretty much touches every aspect of our lives. So it had bloody well better be a very broad subject area.

3. This is why people often refer to feminisms, not feminism. It is not monolithic.

Now we've got that out of the way, let me explain something about my particular feminism.

For me, the more my feminist consciousness grows and develops, the more strongly I believe that feminism is not just about women, it is a movement for men as well. I believe there are as many restrictions placed on man by the patriarchy as there are on women, and no doubt I will elaborate on this in a future post.

But now, on with my main argument: Why we should keep the word 'feminist'.

There have been a few times where I've found myself in discussion with non-feminist friends and acquaintances of mine about feminism's relevance in the world, and I have explained that I don't really consider feminism nowadays to be about "equal rights" so much as about liberating people from restrictive gender roles. Therefore, it is just as relevant to men as it is to women. The typical response goes a little bit like this:

"Then why is it called 'feminism'? Why don't you just call it 'humanism' or 'equalism' or something? 'Feminist' implies it's only about females by virtue of its very name."

As is often the case after a really intense experience, I find myself with a strange mix of emotions today. I'm incredibly relieved that the presidential election went off so well, and realize now how cynical and stressed out about it I was right up until the end. I'm also disappointed in the gay-rights results, but pleased with the anti-choice results.

But beyond that, I'm feeling this deeper kind of sadness and displacement that's really unusual for me. I know from the comments on this post that there are others like me who have moved from blue states to red, and I'm wondering if you're feeling the same? I grew up in Seattle and then moved to Southern CA for college, so I'm most comfortable on the west coast. My friends warned me when I moved to Wyoming that you can move from one coast to the other, but you can't move from one of the coasts to one of the "square states" without some serious culture shock. Of course I expected this, but I'm a pretty flexible, down-to-earth person. And most of the time I like living here. Unlike the cities I'm used to on the coast, Laramie still has an old-fashioned downtown area with locally owned shops and restaurants (including a kick-ass vegetarian café and a natural foods coop), and it's within easy walking distance from our house. The landscape here is not dominated (yet) by strip malls and chain stores. And we can walk or bike almost anywhere in town, so our use of fossil fuel is minimal (except when it's 30 below). We're close to campus and so enjoy a lot of cultural events and benefits from it, and Wyoming Public Radio kicks ass. And then there's the fact that you can go hiking and camping here without being surrounded by crowds of people. But even though I've been here almost 5 years now, I feel like I'm never going to feel like I'm "from here," and it gets a little wearing to always feel sort of displaced. The Democratic candidate for our only House seat came very close, but lost last night, in spite of a great "ground game" and lots of work by volunteers. I should just be happy that a Dem came so close to winning here, twice. But it's still kind of depressing. It's harder than I thought it would be to almost constantly be surrounded by people who don't share your worldview, haven't read any of the same books you've read, aren't concerned about the same things you are, have a really weird view of feminism, etc. And it's hard to be far away from the protests and public actions that I used to be involved in, and too busy raising kids to start up my own. So I'm wondering, what does it really mean to be "from here"? Does it just mean you live here or grew up here? Does it involve a shared worldview, cultural background, or political stance? I'm curious to hear about the experiences of other "transplants" like me. How are things going for you?

I'm still not sure how I feel about this article ....I've never heard of Dr. Wendy Walsh and I've never read any of her other articles, I just sumbled onto this page. 

In my opinion her argument that feminist woman are hurting their love lives because they're too independent is just plain wrong.  Maybe we just have different views on what a "feminist" is.  Feminism is more than just being independent financially, it's more than the notion that we don't need men, and it's more than trying to be more "masculine".  It IS about loving yourself as a woman, working to make a place for women in a man's world, embracing the sexuality that women have, and working together to teach younger generations about tolerance and respect towards women. But to me the most meaningful meaning in feminism is to be equal with men. 

I am almost insulted because, to me, what she is saying is that the feminist movement made women more masculine, and I just don't believe that.  I don't believe that in order for me to be a feminist I have to make money.  I'm a stay at home mom.  Not because that's what my husband wants, because that's what I want.  I can get a job and make more money than my husband, but why?  I'm happy being a stay at home mom, and when the time is right I will go back to work.  I'm living without the "little extra" because I'm a woman and my natural motherly instincts work for me.  I don't need to prove my independence to my husband....he knows and he always has and THAT is why we have a great relationship.

Maybe the problem isn't in the women being too independent, perhaps it's the men that they are dating.

So Samhita's latest post on heteronormative dating prompted me to post on an issue that I've been thinking a lot about lately that I'd like to try and articulate here.

All of us here have certainly had a laugh at the stereotypes that pervade the mainstream when it comes to feminism and feminists, and it's easy to see why a lot of women who would othersise identify as feminists don't. But I think there's another reason, and it's not something that we in the feminist community really discuss. (Well,at least, I don't.)

A lot of women just plain like traditional gender roles.

(Now hear me out.)

I'm watching something about chemical warfare on the history channel, and they are talking about the deaths in a certain area when they said it.

"75% of the deaths were women and children"

Why only women and children? Are women of the same innocense level as children? Are men somehow less innocent victims of an attack?

I see it all the time in the news, equating women to children only when it comes to mass attacks. In history, there was always "women and children first" type of mentality, but we're in the twenty-first century. For the most part, the aristotilian view that women are weak, incomplete men no longer exists so why are men taken out of tragedies and women seen as the only adults taken advantage of in the attacks? Why is it sadder for a woman to die than a man?

I am a proud, vocal, young feminist. I make sure people know where I stand. I'm also a college freshman trying to make friends in a mid-west school that is not as progressive as some are led to believe. As luck would have it, my closest male friend here is a staunch republican and a card-carrying member of the religious right. We are equally passionate about our opinions and so far have managed to keep them from interfering in our friendship.

Until about ten minutes ago.

I was watching today's friday feminist "fuck you", one of my favorite features on feministing. (holy repetition Batman!) I mentioned to him that it makes me mad how these pharmacists can get away with lying to women. That they can deny them medication that Doctors have prescribed. He, of course, sided with the pharmacists. Even after I mentioned how birth control can be necessary for some women to prevent diseases like endometriosis. This particular illness caused my mother to have an ovary removed promptly after the birth of my brother. It causes sterilization in numerous other cases, which is why I'm on the pill. I asked him to tell me why it was okay for the pharmacist's morals to remain intact while I'm forced to go through painful, nightmarish periods and risk infertility. He couldn't tell me why.

So, my cheeks are still flushed from the argument. He has apologized profusely for upsetting me. The problem is this: can I be as close to him as I want? He is kind and genuine; a gentleman in all regards. We have similar tastes in music and usually have long interesting discussions that rarely end in hurt feelings. But he believes that the state should be able to tell me what to do with my body and that my eventual place is in the home, not the workforce. Where do you draw the line?

Dear Elizabeth Hasselback,

Your location (ethnically, socially, etc.) allows you to hold the views that you do. For others, like Rev. Wright, for example, America has been a very different experience. For me (a black, queer, working class, college educated, graduate student), life has been a different experience. My godson will have a different experience than your son will, because, America is not perfect, as your candidate would have us believe. There is a very painful history, as well as a current reality of inequality.

Reverend Wright and my best friend's grandmother came of age in a time when blacks didn’t have the same rights under the law that white people do. In fact, my best friend’s grandmother’s grandparents were slaves. We are only 6 or 7 generations from a time when black people were considered 3/5ths a human being in this country. I give this short background, just to show that things have not always been this way. And if you (and the republican ticket) could see the world from a different location, you would understand that America is not the same for every person. There are people here that have no hope for the American dream, their country has failed them, through messages in the media, through failed education systems, through failed public policy, but mostly from that history of pain and internalized inferiority.

By Patricia Yarberry Allen

Americans are drowning in a sea of information about the financial calamities that roil our society.  We seem to be incapable of understanding that our Titanic, a ship of a country so large and so prosperous, could ever go down.  One of the reasons these events seem so incomprehensible to us is that many of us have no memory of   the U.S. stock market boom of the 1920’s.  

In linguistics there is a phenomena known as code-switching. From my experience with it it is best described as an unconscious shift in speech on part of the speaker in order to a) comply with social norms b) better achieve a goal or c) achieve social acceptance.  Code-switching is what happens when you swear less around your grandmother for instance or when you switch from aave to standard american pronunciation in your respective home and school settings.

The last few weeks I have been thinking a lot about the word entitlement. I'm pretty sure it started when my roommates and I came back to our apartment after a long day of school/work and found a note taped to our door. It said something like:

I think I've figured out the source of most of society's ills, including many pertaining to feminism.

When I was very little, I went through a phase of only wearing dresses and skirts because I was afraid people would think I was a boy. Later, I went through a "not-girl" phase of shunning dresses, pink, etc.

Did any of you go through something like this?

It seems to me that much of the angst around us revolves around ourselves and the manipulative forces around us decided what we aren't . Women and feminists go nuts trying to not be the good girl, the bad girl, the made up woman, or the unshaven makeupless woman. Are we really being a certain way, or are we just in a state of avoiding another label?

I am on the board of an annual fashion charity show in charge of charity relations and fundraising.

I am also a domestic abuse survivor.

In addition, I watched a very, very dear friend of mine embark on a downward spiral of self-destructive behavior after her rape because she was offered no counseling at all. It was like looking into the window of someone's personal hell.

This year, I made the charity suggestion that we sponsor a local charity that provides an abuse shelter for women and children, sexual assault advocacy, crisis line, counseling, teen mother parenting classes, among a host of other programs that help victims of domestic abuse, sexual assault, and women of lower socioeconomic status. This choice was backed by several other board members, and I wasn't surprised at all. I was feeling good about the prospective charity indeed.

Then it happened.

A senior board member posted "I prefer that we support causes linked to animals BECAUSE they seem to have a stronger turnout."

My name is Chris, and  I'm an editor at the nonprofit,nonpartisan Women's Voices for Change - a two-year-old site established to increase visibility for women over 40, with a more substantive, less celebrity-driven tilt than many others.

Sorry to have our first post on feministing.com be on such a somber topic. But  this post by our president, Dr. Patricia Yarberry, just felt like something that needs to be shared as widely as possible. If this week has been a perfect storm for all our fears and hopes about the economy and the election, it's also a call for a sharp increase in our financial literacy -- perhaps the first step to empowerment.

I struggle constantly for authenticity in my life. I believe I can achieve it. I ache for an authentic equality in my relationship, an authentic sexuality, authentic hungers, authentic spirituality, and a personal authentic style.  I strive to be true to myself, authentic at my core, not just unique in vanity. I yearn for what is best for me, for my life, at this very moment.

Hey. Having had many of those "sir" moments, i have pondered this one. I am glad to be a woman but the gender models are so limited..short hair, must be a GUY. Loose baggy clothes, must be a guy. For years i responded just as many do..i was indignant and uncomfortable about someone not knowing I WAS A WOMAN BY GOD! Just recently after reading Whipping Girl by Julia Serano (excellent book!) when the first person who said "thank you sir" to me, i respond with the comment "Well i am not a sir but then again, what would u like me to be?" The cashier, whom i think was a young gay man, smiled. Not an embarrassed smile but an smile of enjoyment of the comment. From now on when i confront confusion about my gender, i will simply ask the person, who usually is someone who is a total stranger, like a cashier or waitperson, what gender they want me to be.

I found Feministing completely by accident. You could call it divine intervention.
I was stumbling around Youtube one day when I came across Friday Feministing.
I was on my twin sister's computer at the time so it was her name on Youtube. I
subscribed her and just recently went back to get it for my youtube account.
And that is where I learned about the website. I know I'm new but already I feel
as though I belong. I haven't always been a feminist. I used to be that shy, quiet
girl that sat in the back corner of the classroom that no one payed any mind to. Being
introduced to feminism turned my attitude into a complete 360.

OK, I'm going to try not to piss anyone off here. We'll see how this goes.

So, we recently got a piece of mail that was intended for my neighbor, who's a sweet lil older lady. It was a postcard reminding her about a meeting of her "Homemaker's Club." My partner held it up and read it to me while I smirked at the picture on the other side of a sweet lil gal in a gingham dress and bonnet, riding a horse (this is Wyoming, after all) and carrying a charming lil picnic basket. We were just being smart-asses, of course, but it got me thinking.

Last Friday, a speaker from the Republican party came to my high school and gave a speech on why he worked for the Republican party and what his daily schedule consisted of during an election year. After he gave the speech, the audience was allowed to ask questions. I raised my hand knowing he was sexist, because before the Q&A session he said, "now girls will need to speak louder, because I have trouble hearing girls". However, when I raised my hand he told me "I will answer your question in a minute young sir" and answered the boy with the Sarah Palin button's question first. When he got back to me, he continued to call me "young sir" until I told him "actually I am a woman". The look on his face was priceless! But I was hurt by his comments.(the entire school saw this conversation) I do not want to be called "sir" until I get knighted!

I am proud to be a woman even if I don't look "stereotypically female" and comments like that are a slap in the face. I hate it when people call my gender into question! Yes, I could conform, but that is not me either! I am a woman, a woman that doesn't wear makeup or pluck her eyebrows or wear "girly" clothes, but I still LOVE the fact that I am female!

I guess my main question is, what is the best way to remain calm when someone calls your gender into question when you don't want it to be called into question?

I'm really grateful to Feministing for providing a voice for young people like myself. Despite calling myself a feminist, I still am working out some (very) sexist ideas I have whirling around inside me at all times. Feministing has really helpful in pin-pointing everyday misogyny and introducing ways to combat it. Unfortunately, it's easy for me to passionately embrace feminism in theory, but still be "asking permission" of authority and deferring to men on a daily basis.

I didn't realize this about myself until I read the following quote by Anais Nin. I was profoundly moved and inspired by it.

So maybe the underlying issue here is actually women's sexual autonomy. Maybe the differing views on what female sexual autonomy looks like, how it develops (if it in fact can in a patriarchal culture), and what kind of environment we should strive for in order to foster autonomy are really the sticky issues here.

Today at work, a co-worker called me out for being loud.  That typically doesn't bother me. But instead of telling me to lower my voice, she was obnoxious and announced "You're really loud!" while I was talking to a customer.  I was taken aback and took liberty of blaming nature.  "I'm a bit hormonal today," I told her. 

"Oh so I'm not a woman and wouldn't know? I have hormones too."

I mentally raised an eyebrow at her snide remark and continued with "Well I'm on my period."

"Way to broadcast it to the world.  Why don't you say it louder."

"I don't mind telling people when I'm on my period. I'll say it to any one.  It isn't like it's something I need to be quiet about."

"Look, I'm a woman too, and I'm just saying that you don't need to broadcast it."

The conversation went on that way until she saw that I was getting upset, hormones notwithstanding.  But the whole thing got me thinking: Why is my period taboo?  Why is saying that I'm on my period equivalent to some people that I have diarrhea?  "Ew we didn't need to know that?"  The story goes on.

My boss is rather intrusive with, on the whole, ridiculous remarks about a conversation he's not a part of.  Needless to say, laughing at him is something we avoid since it furthers this behavior.  So I didn't laugh at his gross remark about blowing up puppy dogs and said it wasn't funny. 

"Well you're no fun," he said.

My co-worker, while my back was turned no less, whispered loudly, "She's not going to laugh.  She's on her period."

So, lately I keep hearing women refer to themselves as "sex-positive" feminists, as if all the rest of us are sex-negative prudes who live with our legs crossed and a disapproving frown glued to our faces. I'm a feminist and I like to fuck. With men, as it turns out. But why do I have to identify as sex-positive in order to avoid being viewed as a man-hating prude? I hesitate to give blanket approval to things like porn, female sexuality as portrayed in the media, careers in the sex-industry, and Girls Gone Wild. I think these things are complex and nuanced, and require careful consideration. Sometimes I think they're harmless, and other times I think they project harmful images of women, or put women in positions that seem empowering on the surface but are quite harmful to their self-conception and perceived role in society. So why, if I'm ever critical of these things, must I sit back and accept the implied title of "sex-negative"? Now you'll ask, "why do you think there's an implied title here at all?" Well, it seems to me like there must be if it's so important for you to make the distinction. The things that we take special pains to disambiguate are very revealing of what categories and distinctions we take to be important.

So all this talk of being sex-positive makes me wonder what the default position is supposed to be. I've spent a few years studying feminism (history, theory, etc) in an academic setting, and I've never thought of "sex-negative" as being a default characteristic of feminist positions. In my experience, sex-negativity is a feature of some forms of radical feminism. Have these radical positions now become the feminist norm? If so, then this is a construct that's been foisted upon us by the media, or some conservative talk show hosts, or whoever. Because everyone knows that it's easier to deal with a caricature of your opponent. The point is, instead of accepting that feminism is by default sex-negative and then trying to differentiate ourselves from it, we should set the record straight and take back our own definitions. I don't know about you, but I'm done allowing middle-aged white men to define me and my political position.

18 pages. Out of 574, there are 18. One SHORT chapter, AND it's from 1939.

A program that's been around for a significant period of time only offers women (more specifically wives) a 70 year old, 18 page blurb on how to deal with an alcoholic. And from reading it (or making the attempt to, I wanted to hurl) the words haven't been changed since 1939.

The Scene: a woman and her boyfriend are watching MSNBC in their hotel room, drinking coffee and enjoying some spirited political discourse regarding the conventions. The story turns to Sarah Palin. After watching several minutes of videos of Palin, the boyfriend nonchalantly says, "You know, I bet she gives great head."

Thanks, honey, for reminding me that even a highly intelligent, insightful man can spout utter sexist crap if he forgets to censor himself for the sake of his feminist girlfriend. If that's what my favorite man is saying, I can only imagine what kind of "political discourse" the rest of the men in this country will be having in regards to Sarah Palin. Ugh.

From the centre of Bogota, it is a good fifty minute drive, heading south along the Autopista Sur and, at a determined point, turning left onto a dirt-paved road alongside fields filled with diminutive ‘social interest’ houses and cows.  When we arrived at our final destination – Barrio la Esperanza in Soacha – one of the poorer parts of Bogota, even if it’s not officially part of the city.

The aim of the trip was to observe one of Profamilia’s brigadas in action.  This is a project run by the NGO that involves sending out a nurse and a psychologist to visit with socially excluded women, perform cervical smear tests and speak about sexual and reproductive rights.  When we arrived, there were over 40 women, mostly mothers, waiting for us, summoned by the voice over the loudspeaker calling out to the mamitas .

The first part of the chat was on women’s rights, how to identify violence, what to do about it and explications about how to make one’s rights effective.  Then the nurse gave a talk about sex – from contraceptives to sterilisation.  As a number of these women have been obliged to have children by their partners, this is particularly important.  Many also either don’t know very much about contraception, or fear possible consequences should their partners discover this ‘evidence’ of ‘unfaithfulness.’

At the end of everything, the Legal Director of the NGO waved her hand towards us and commented that as we were all lawyers, if the women needed any advice, they just had to ask; and, so, I found myself giving legal advice about alimony payments.  What really amazed me was the amount – 35,000 Colombian pesos per week, which is roughly $20, a struggle, both to raise and not to receive.  Officially, the minimum wage is 461,500 Colombian pesos, or around $240 – notwithstanding, many Colombians would consider themselves lucky to receive this.

It was a sobering experience which left me humbled.  It’s hard to worry about the bigger picture when you struggle to pay the most basic stuff.

I am not voting for McCain/Palin.

However, Palin's selection as veep has created a discussion unlike any other I've seen in this election. I spend far too much time in the liberal blogosphere (partially because I have a hard time finding reasonable conservative blogs-- I'm always up for referrals, though!), and it's too easy for me to just say, "Oh yeah, Obama's great, McCain is bad. *yawn*"

The discussion following McCain's announcement, especially on this site, has included a lot more intelligently conservative argument than I have heard in months. It forces me to look hard at my beliefs and ask again, "Why am I supporting Obama? Why is McCain the antichrist?" (Okay, he's really not, and I always know that. But it's hard to respect someone who so strongly disrespects women.)

It was difficult having to think over the entire election from scratch again and realize that I had been blindly following Obama for months. I'm still following Obama-- but it's with a lot more thought and temperance. In this, I am very grateful to McCain/Palin for starting a necessary discussion, and most of all to the Feministing community for providing the opportunity for rational people to discuss this openly.

Dear Feminist Consciousness Changer,

I am writing to you today because as I help you I am helping myself.  You are a consciousness changer.  You are a rebel with a cause.  You are a world lover who cares for women, men, children, families, single folk, tribes, communities, cities, towns, villages, counties, states, provinces, nations and countries all over the world.  As a feminist consciousness changer you must understand that you do much more than help women.  As a feminist you empower women to empower themselves and these women empower everyone they come in contact with in their daily lives. Feminism is also not just about feminism.  You as a feminist consciousness changer are involved in changing consciousness in other areas such as: environmental, social justice, racial/cultural, housing, communities, education, art, family/parenting, health/medicine/holistic health, GLBTQ, disability, military, immigration, human rights/civil rights, work place issues, family/parenting, international relations, urban/suburban/rural and religion/spiritual issues and aboriginal/first nations/indigenous/native issues.  You are able to take several of these areas and merge them into what drives you to live your life as a feminist. 

(I've just started a new blog dedicated to feminist issues and other things close to my heart. I wasn't sure where to start, so I ended up writing a fairly generic piece about how feminism has personally affected me and how it ties into my interest in other social justice issues. I figured it would be a good way to start posting on this community as well.)

Living my Feminism

Elle m’a dit: “Garde tes tresors,
moi je vaux mieux que tout a
Des barreaux sont des barreaux, meme en or
Je veux les memes droits que toi
Du respect pour chaque jour,
moi je ne veux que de l’amour ”

She said to me: “Keep your treasures,
Me, I’m worth more than that.
Bars are still bars even if made of gold.
I want the same rights as you
and respect for each day,
Me I want only love.”

I’m a feminist. Capital F, -eminist. I’ve been a feminist my whole life but it’s only relatively recently that I’ve learnt to claim the term for myself and have begun to actively identify with a movement of women all over the world who have one thing in common: the tenacity to fight for full equality and the audacity to be content with nothing less.

I'm a middle-class cisgendered white male in a monogamous, heterosexual relationship.  I know, great way to start a post on a feminist journal, right?

I've always thought of myself as the progressive sort, but as time goes on I'm starting to realize how much privilege has permeated my life, and how that has affected my judgements and my perceptions.

I think about the people I spent time with in high school and college.  About the jokes wrought with racism, classism and sexism that were "okay, because we don't really mean it".  I don't want to get into it, but the drill's pretty familiar.  Rationalization is great: it's okay to be wildly offensive and make light of other people's trauma because hey, it's just a joke.  Makes everything aaaall better, right?  Yeah, right.

Even now though, it's important to me, to recognize that no matter how much I educate myself, I will always have the life experience of somebody who is privileged, and not somebody who's been oppressed.

FEMME SHARK MANIFESTO!

FEMME SHARKS DON’T EAT OUR OWN.
FEMME SHARKS LIKE TO EAT THOUGH
FEMME SHARKS RECOGNIZE THAT FEMMES COME IN ALL KINDS OF SIZES AND EACH KIND IS LUSCIOUS. WE WORK TOWARDS LOVING OUR CURVY, FAT, SKINNY, SUPERSIZE, THICK, DISABLED, BLACK AND BROWN FINE-ASS BODIES EVERY DAY. WE REALIZE THAT LOVING OURSELVES IN A RACIST/SEXIST/HOMO/TRANSPHOBIC/ABLIST/CLASSIST SYSTEM IS AN EVERY DAY ACT OF WAR AGAINST THAT SYSTEM.
FEMME SHARKS DON’T THINK ANOREXIA IS CUTE.
WE THINK EATING A BIG-ASS MEAL IS SEXY.
WE SAY SCREW “HEIGHT WEIGHT PROPORTIONATE PLEASE” IN CRAIGSLIST WOMEN SEEKING WOMEN ADS AND IN LIFE.

Earlier today, I saw the trailer for 'Flying: confessions of a free woman'. At one point, some women are shocked at being told that in the West, women masturbate.

This got me thinking about something that's been on my mind a lot lately, which is what it means to be a masturbating woman in a patriarchal world. I was eleven when it first occurred to me to masturbate. I remember that the thought seemed so original, and so daunting. After a while of doing it I stopped because I was rather scared. I felt like I'd done something monumental, something that was a big deal, and I wasn't sure it was right. However, I didn't realise then that what I was doing is enormous threat to certain ways of thinking. That's something I've come to understand gradually ever since.

I'm pretty new to feminism. For a long time, I listened to society tell me that feminists were all hairy, man-hating crazies that wanted female domination and didn't argue, so I wouldn't have dared associate myself with the term. Fairly recently, I had an honest discussion with someone about the values of feminism that was very enlightening, and I realized I had been a feminist in belief and action all along-- despite my bold ignorance and denial of the fact.

So, Jen The Fem’s post from last week got me thinking about something that happened nearly a year ago but which I haven’t stopped thinking about since. 

Last year, I occasionally accompanied my boyfriend (Zach*) to his Dungeons and Dragons games.  D&D doesn’t particularly interest me; I went because I got along with a few of his friends in the group, they played at his college’s student center which has both an excellent bagel place and an excellent tea place, and I can read blogs on my laptop there as easily as I can in my dorm room.  Plus it was always on Friday evenings, I spent the weekends at his apartment (45 minutes from my school) and as I didn’t have a car (my campus is small, and first and second-year students aren’t allowed to bring cars to campus if they’re living in the dorms), it was far easier for him to drive up around 4:00 than around midnight or later. 

Last September 22nd I stopped caring about all of this.  My sanity was far more important. 

I'm sorry this post is so long, but I wrote this in my word processor just because I had to get it out, and wasn't sure what to do with it. After hearing the Alix Olson poem submitted yesterday, I decided to dig it out again and submit it, in case other feminists would like reading it.

--------

Recently, I went on a WWI tour in France and Belgium. Our party of about 50 were driven around the countries in a coach for two days, looking at battlefields, the scars of trenches, cemeteries and museums. Those who didn't get tearful were at least very sombre and quiet. There was an atmosphere of respect and regret. When we visited the Menin Gate, a collossal building carved with the names of the missing or dead, I wondered whether the reaction would be different if all the names were of women.

I want to know where and when in history did women became the oppresed? If we look back at history it seems that women have always been looked down as the lower one or have only been appreciated in a few ways. Is it religion and customs (culture) that began oppressing women in early history? Or was it the fact that women and men needed to separate and put roles in order to survive? Did men became threatened by our equality to them, that they created this ideas such as; religion, roles, "scientifically proven studies," to maintain their higher role and used us? Please write back I want to hear more opinions on this. Thanks.

sometimes i think im incredibly lucky to have met my fiance, dan. if someone made up a list of qualities a person should have to be a rad egalitarian partner dan would get checks next to each one.

EXCEPT, im not lucky. this isnt luck. i got thinking after reading the posts from virginblood and really, having a partner who treats you as a true equal and a real human being, that shouldnt be an exceptional thing, that should be standard. what does it even say about society that i think of myself as lucky to be treated like im a worthwhile human being? i mean, WTF.

I've had my share of emotionally manipulative relationships. Hell, I've even been a manipulator, and I'm not proud of it, but I will admit to having used the emotions of others to get my way.

A lot of the time, when someone is undergoing emotional abuse, though, the one thing they all say is "...but he [or she] would never hurt me" when discussing an instance in which words were exchanged, threats were made, etc that caused the person saying this to feel like less of a human being. I've even said it, after a guy I was dating said something that hurt me and I realized as I was saying it that he already had hurt me, just not physically.

The problem with emotional abuse is that a lot of the time it can turn into physical or sexual abuse because the abuser has been allowed to believe that their victim is somehow less than human, that they deserve to be berated, that they deserve to be smacked, that they don't really have a say over when and whether there is sex. We all know this in theory, but in practice it's hard to identify especially if you're at the center of it. But if you find yourself justifying the actions of your partner with the clause "but he would never hurt me" we have a problem -- because he probably already has.

I'm not saying that all emotional abusers will eventually become physical or sexual abusers, but I will attest that emotional abuse does just as much damage as physical and sexual abuse. Feelings of worthlessness follow, feeling trapped, depression, and it can get so bad that even if the abuser never actually lays a hand on you, physical harm can be done. Many who have engaged in self-mutilation (cutting, eating disorders, etc) have a history of being emotionally abused. Stress disorders cause other physically manifesting disorders (ulcers, hair loss, obesity, irritable bowel, chronic nausea, migraines, etc) and can lead to immune deficiency because the brain is telling the body that it doesn't matter.

The bottom line though, is that you and your body do matter. Always. Anyone who tries to tell you differently is trying to sell you something (and usually that "something" is the notion that you brought this abuse upon yourself). Women are taught that others come first. If it's not our spouses, it's our children, our parents, our friends. We're taught that it's selfish to take care of ourselves FIRST, for whatever reason, and that being selfish is bad.

I call bullshit. Always take care of yourself first, especially if you have dependents. YOU have to be the most important person in your life, because you will always have to live with you and you can't get away from yourself.

I just adore the word 'sweetheart.' It makes me think of Valentine's Day when I was in elementary school when everyone gave each other a card in a little decorated shoe box on your desk and there was a never ending supply of those chalky candies with the cheesey messages on them.  I get called a sweetheard a lot. I'm flattered to be considered a person with a sweet heart. A heart is your love and what better kind of love is there than sweet love?

But being called a sweetheart is so limiting. When I'm labeled a sweetheart, where do I go from there? Anything I do that isn't sweet, caring, selfless, cheery makes it seem as if I'm straying from my 'true nature.' Once I'm considered a sweetheart, there's a pressure to always be that way. If I'm not being extra sweet, something's gotta be wrong. (Why aren't you smiling?) If I try to stand up for myself, get into an argument, do something for myself instead of others, consider my own feelings, it makes me selfish. What happened to the girl with the sweet heart? If a woman is anything but, she is now a bitch. Why is there so much guilt surrounding doing something for ourseleves or asking someone to do something for you? Why must we always be making sacrifices for others?

"To some men, the definition of selfish is that you don't think about them all the time. Well then, I am proud to be one selfish bitch."-Margaret Cho

My apologies if this shows up twice - I tried to post it yesterday and haven't seen it.

I work for the Canadian federal government, and we have Employment Equity. We're encouraged to self-identify as women, visible minorities, or persons with disabilities.

I'm a Marine Communications and Traffic Services Officer with the Canadian Coast Guard. The application process includes an aptitude test, an interview, language testing for positions in bilingual centres, and a typing test (we log all our calls, especially the emergencies, and getting information down quickly is really important for us).

After all the testing and interviewing, an eligibility list for future positions was released. I'd scored higher than a man.

This is something that I wrote in my personal blog last October.  I had just started my second year of women's studies and my first year being involved with the V-Day campaign on my university campus. 

I have wanted to share something on the Femininisting community but have had little time between work to write a coherent post, so I'd like to share this one with everyone.

One of the criticisms I have heard again Feminism is that the movement is exclusive to women and that, as the stereo-type says, feminists hate men. I am a strong believer in men becoming more involved in feminist issues. I think that if you believe as I do, that we live in a Patriarchal society that generally privileges a certain group over others (that group being White, Upper Middle class, Christian, Able Bodied, Heterosexual Males), then part of the struggle towards equality does include men.

Yet, how do we get men more involved? And how can they be convinced that as privileged persons they will have to learn to put that privilege aside?

I have been a feminist since I was eight, about around the time I began to want to move out of Kansas. My mother was reading Ms., and took the opportunity to explain feminism to me.

"Feminists think that things aren't equal between men and women and want to change that. Some feminists go really far and are against everything men do, but most just want things to be equal, and that's what I believe."

Maybe her summary of some radical feminists was a little dismissive. But I was eight, and her definition convinced me to adopt the latter interpretation into my worldview. Soon after, I began using my mother’s name (my mother kept her name when she married my father and gave me and my brothers her name as a middle name) as part of my everyday name. The name didn’t stick until college, but it was a key shift in the way I thought of myself.

A little disclaimer before I begin. This post is NOT, I repeat, NOT the result of, nor a response to, any poor treatment of myself by a member of the opposite sex. It's simply something I've discovered and something that has been in the forefront of my mind over the past few days due to overheard conversations, a newspaper article and some inner conflict.

So here goes...

I was in Starbucks one night last week, quickly picking up my favourite drink, a strawberries and creme frappuccino, during my hour break from work. I was quietly and patiently waiting for my drink to be made but couldn't help eavesdropping on the conversation of the baristas. They were two girls, probably 19 or 20, who were carelessly gossiping about someone they knew. That's nothing new. We all gossip. But it was these lines which made my ears perk up:

"I CANNOT work with her another minute knowing that she's never had a boyfriend, never been in a relationship, never been kissed, never had a drink, never - you know... We have to fix this! Someone needs to take one for the team and fix this! It's sad.  It's just...wrong !"

Well, damn. I probably blushed, even though I knew they weren't talking about me ( I didn't know them) - but they might as well have been. I got my drink shortly after my eavesdropping, muttered a 'thanks' and went back to work. I didn't really think about their conversation much more as I went back to work as soon as I returned from my Starbucks run.

But it came back this weekend when I was browsing the books on a shelf at work. I noticed one entitled, "How to Be Single," and was rather amused. After coming home from work that night, I sat down to browse The Globe and Mail and found Leah McLaren's article about the same book: "Why are you single?"

I hate that question. I really, really do. But I didn't realize WHY I hate it until all of the above happened and I began to think about my singledom.

I'll admit I've had moments where I've had pity parties and wondered, "When?? When will Prince Charming come and save me from my loneliness??" Those moments have been few and far between - thank God. But as my friends and siblings move in together with their significant others, get married, have kids and pass all those relationship milestones I can only dream of at this point, my continuing singledom has come to occupy more and more of my thoughts, becoming a source of frustration.

Ashley Ann got me thinking about marriage again.  For some reason the threads that pop up on this site always seem to come around with the most diverse set of opinions.  And that always gets me thinking.

It's especially interesting for me to see how other people conceptualize marriage.  See, I definitely noticed the incredibly sexist conditions under which the institution of marriage has and continues to thrive.  The thing of it is though, it seems like a lot of people thus feel that the institution of marriage is consequently fucked.  That their options are to have THAT kind of marriage and wedding, or none at all.

That's not my conclusion.

Marriage is beholden to the people undertaking it.  Therefore it is as malleable as the people who are getting married.  The traditions surrounding it are the same.  My husband and I, our marriage is exactly what we want it to be, and designing the wedding ceremony to reflect that was incredibly important to us.  And design we did, from start to finish, including the vows.  The fact is it never even occurred to me not to do so.  A wedding ceremony is far too important to ever attempt a "cookie cutter" version.

Traditional elements that were included:

Engagement ring.  I got a wedding set from an estate case (woot recycling!).  My husband paid for it, I felt that was important because it was for me a sign of commitment.  I also got him a ring sometime earlier which he felt served the same purpose.

Asking dad.  We did not do this.  I thought it would be "cute" in a very ironic sort of way given how untraditional both my relationship and my family was.  But it didn't happen.  What I suppose I was more looking for was the two men I cared most about to sit down and have a heart to heart, for my dad to be able to trust my husband and for them to be on the same page.  I am a Daddy's girl, and I wanted them to get along.  Turns out they ended up having that without the "asking for" thing included.  That's even better.

Walking down the aisle.  We did not do this either.  And I told my Dad right from the beginning we wouldn't be.  I am not a fucking parcel to be given away, no thank you.  I understand why the engagment ring is looked at as a dowry or down payment or something and why some people are against that, but this giving away shit was just too much for me.  Husband and I walked down the aisle together.  We both felt that was far more appropriate, I mean we're undertaking this life together, right?

Name change.  Didn't do this.  We talked a lot about it.  He'd prefer to take my name as he has no attachments to the family his last name comes from.  We also discussed both changing our names to his mother's maiden name, as that is the family he is connected to.  Honestly, I doubt either of us will actually change our names unless we have kids, I dislike the way our names would look hyphenated.

"Mrs".  Yes, I use this.  I like it.  I've seen arguments against it, and I understand them.  But I still like it.  It's a spiffy new title.  Honestly I think it's stupid that guys don't get their own new title!  In the name of equality I think we should come up with one!

I guess my point is, you can take a symbol and it can mean something to you that it doesn't mean to other people.  The thing that I think disturbs me about marriage and weddings is that people take what is one of the most important commitments of their life and simply copy traditions laid out for them.  They don't talk about their wants and needs, what symbols are meaningful to them, what exactly they're vowing to...  Symbols are meaningless unless we GIVE THEM meaning, it seems like that's what a lot of people fail to do, and for me that's the real problem with weddings and marriage.

ashley_ann706 wrote a piece about how she grew into her feminism and suggested that we all share similar stories. So here is mine:

To me feminism is personal. It is the awareness of my gender, and it is also the ability for me to take pride in my womanhood. I cannot explain very eloquently, but recently I had been thinking about what it means to be a girl, to be girly, to be a woman and the difference between the three. I think what propelled my recent musings was when my Lit professor brought up the widely ignored issue of girl versus woman.

I am sure most of do not ignore the difference of the two labels, but I believe (and my professor believes) that most women do. We were reading and discussing a story about a young woman, and the language of the character, or literately the author used the word "girl" when he or she could have easily said "woman". So my lit professor asked all the girls in the class if we call ourselves, and each other "girls". And the answer was yes. In fact it totally dawned on me that at my place of work, a retirement home, some of my co-workers call women who are old enough to be their great grandmothers "girls". How wrong is that?

My professor may have made this speech part of her lesson plan, or it may have struck her out of the blue, but she told us her thoughts on "girl". She thinks that it is wrong for women to label themselves and each other as a "girl". And she wondered out loud why we do it. Is it because of men? Men do not call themselves and each other "boys"! Men are guys, or dudes. And women are girls.

So for the next few weeks I mused about gender differences. I had become extra perceptive about insensitivity to my independence that my boyfriend displayed. I began paying for all my meals when we went out. And I had a conversation about teenage pregnancy with a man friend (or a guy friend if you want to think that way). Then I decided I want to go to graduate school and at least get my master's after college, because I think education is the perfect path for me to become a strong, independent woman. I realized that I can do anything I want to; I do not have to stay in central Pennsylvania. I do not have to huddle close to my parents for protection. I can move to New York City, or Nova Scotia, or Bangladesh if I want to! And then I had a problem, what if this interferes with my dream of becoming a mom? But I figured I cannot look too far ahead; I have to be able to support a child before I can become to mom I want to be. All of these thoughts amounted to the climax of my feminism, I believe.

And one morning I woke up. I woke up and decided I needed to know what other woman, real feminist think about gender roles and differences. So I googled "feminist blog" and I found feministing.

Here I realized how latent I am with my feminism. Woman (and male feminists) here care about each other, and the world's oppressed woman so much that they do things, like spread information, protest, etc. So now my feminism is personal, aware, and opened-minded. Thanks to feministing.com I can stand up to the sexist jokes my co-workers tell. And that is a big deal -because I am not a stand-up-for-the-right-thing-in-the-face-of-peer-pressure type of person. Also feministing.com has helped me, and will continue to help me realize how I feel about major political and social issues, like sexual education. And I know that in the future, when I really am an independent woman, with a career AND a family (I will have my cake and have babies too) my feminism will grow and change again, but for now this is who I am as a woman and I hope I will not be as an impassive of a feminist that I am now.

I know it's a bit of a cliche, but I thought it would be kind of neat of people shared their stories of how they came to feminism.

Here is mine:

I think I've always been a feminist - I just didn't always know what to call it. I grew up in a very fundamentalist Christian Conservative household - men and women had their place, and that's just how it was. In a way, my upbringing was very 1950s, but with a twist - my mom worked. I first remember thinking that this whole "gender role" thing was bull shit (though not in those exact words) when I was about five years old. I remember asking my mom why my sister and I had household chores like sweeping, dusting, and doing the dishes, while my brothers had outside chores like helping my dad bail hay. Her answer was "because women do the housework - it's not right for a man to have to clean. That's just how it is."

Then there was the softball fiasco when I was in first grade. I played softball for a total of two whole weeks (impressive, I know). My career in sports came to an abrupt end, however, when my mother made me quit. Her reason: it conflicted with my brothers' sports, and their sports were more important. She explained that girls weren't supposed to play sports, anyways. Sports were for boys. Immediately, I smelled something fishy. You see, I grew up questioning everything. I had this ridiculous need to make sense - a need I obviously didn't get from either of my parents, because on the off chance they ever did explain their reasoning (and not just say "because I said so), it was usually something that made no sense, like the sexist "explanations" I've listed so far.

I remember one time, however, when my mother gave me a real answer for a question I had. I remember watching a movie when I was a kid about a girl who was raped by her high school track coach. I asked my mom what "rape" meant, and she said it is when a man makes a woman have sex when she doesn't want to. A normal little kid probably would have left it at that - gone back to their toys and forgotten all about it, given that they knew nothing of sex - but this idea of a man forcing a woman to do something against her will really got to me. "Why didn't he stop when she said no?" I  asked. My mother pulled me onto her lap and we proceeded to have one of the most honest and open conversations we've ever had. She explained to me that there are men who think of women as objects - things they can own and do with as they wish. I  couldn't wrap my head around this. Weren't women people, too? Couldn't women do anything men could do? My head was filled with questions, and I was itching for answers. That 's when I really started thinking a lot about women's rights, although I didn't know what it was called (I was a precocious little kid, and I was always very curious about the world and how it worked).

This is a poem I wrote when I was 15, and I thought it would be appropriate to share it here:

It's ideology, not biology
That keeps us apart -
Takes away our humanity
And darkens our hearts.
Break through the torment
And there you'll find
The love and compassion
That was left behind.
It's ideology, not biology
That keeps us down -
Drowns out reality
So we can't hear a sound.
Lost in similar differences,
Can't find a common ground.
If you didn't know now
What you didn't know then,
You could lose what you
Now have found.
It's ideology, not biology
That cheapens our worth -
Seeds of discrimination
Planted at birth
Blossom and bloom
In a hostile earth.
Hate fuels the rage
That burns inside
So that we're left searching
For a place to hide.
It's ideology, not biology
That makes us discriminate -
Misogynistic, racist, narcissistic woes
Breed animosity that turns
Friends to foes.
It's ideology, not biology.