Archive for the 'Private Business of the Secret Feminist Society' Category

Spinster aunt slowly emerges from stupor

Published by Jill on September 5, 2011. 635 Comments

It’s 69 degrees! It’s 69 degrees! My dendrites are free from waxy yellow build-up!

So I thought I might as well enlarge on a point that seems to have sprouted some ambiguity of late, regarding my views on intersectionality.

Here’s what Bushfire said:

Twisty does focus on women’s oppression but she also makes it clear that other oppressions are at work and she doesn’t use broad generalizations about women.

And here’s what AlienNumber said:

Really? Funny, we’re reading the same thing and I don’t get this.

AlienNumber went on:

Twisty, the way I’ve been reading/understanding her – and maybe I am projecting, which is entirely plausible – connects ‘other oppressions’ to the one underlying, fundamental oppression of women. I’m putting ‘other oppressions’ in quotation marks because there are no such things. Racism/classism/colonialism/homophobia etc ARE sexism.

Apparently I have not been entirely clear. What else is new.

1. While I do perceive a connection between the “other oppressions” to which AlienNumber alludes, in my view the connective tissue is not Women’s Oppression, but rather the megatheocorporatocratic ideology of domination to which it is my somewhat lazy habit to refer as patriarchy. Domination ideology is predicated on the notion that social hierarchies are rooted in and validated by Divine Truth. All oppression — such as “women are whores” and “let’s enslave some Africans”– proceeds from this idea.

In other words, a universal oppression paradigm makes the world go round. As a result, all non-white, non-straight, non-abled, non-affluent, non-dude, non-godbag, non-Western [etc] persons are forced into subclasses in order that they may enjoy their own customized versions of tyranny. Women — the sex class — are but one of these many subclasses. It’s a pretty big and significant one, to be sure, hence the whole women’s liberation movement dealio (and this blog), but it’s not the whole bollawax.

Obviously, membership in one subclass does not preclude membership in others, hence the whole intersectionality dealio. Racism, classism, colonialism, homophobia — these are not equivalent to sexism. These isms share common components (see “domination ideology,” above), yes, and I speculate that a feminist revolt would go a long way toward fixing all that shit, on accounta most (not all) oppressed subclasses have women in’em, too — meaning that, for instance, racism cannot be eliminated without women’s liberation because you can’t say “racism is over!” if you’re still oppressing women of color — but the experiences and narratives and motives of all these subclasses, though similar in that they proceed from the same primary ideology, are demonstrably not identical.

To recap: women’s oppression is not the armature upon which all other oppression is hung. However, because sexism has been so comprehensively assimilated across the board, the elimination of racism, classism, ableism, homophobia et al cannot obtain without the simultaneous liberation of women from patriarchal tyranny.

2. This blog focuses primarily on the gruesome effects of patriarchy on the sex class because it particularly pleases me that it should. This focus should not be construed as an endorsement of the view that white feminists know what’s best for everybody or some shit.

Posted in Oppression Culture and Private Business of the Secret Feminist Society. Bite me, Chad.

Spinster aunt loses train of thought, abandons essay

Published by Jill on July 15, 2011. 90 Comments

It is one of the bitterest, lobe-burstingest ironies of feminism that its meager success has collaterally enbiggened the opportunities of antifeminist women. Susan Faludi once pointed out that progressive women who succeed professionally often publicly give props to feminism even as they inwardly struggle with patriarchy-generated guilt and self-doubt, but that prominent right wing women do the opposite, publicly espousing antifeminist ideology to the masses while personally putting feminist principles smoothly and efficiently into practice on the DL.

Take Michele Bachmann. She hates gays and fluorescent light, and loves Jesus and compulsory pregnancy, but has no qualms whatsoever about enjoying an influential, self-determined career outside the home as she flits about the political sphere.* It’s almost as though she fancies herself a liberated woman with some personal agency. She has used the feminist springboard to swan-dive into prominence, from which spot she can proceed to gay-bash, suck up to Dude Nation, and demand constitutional amendments prohibiting abortion.

Now one hears all this absurd murmuring about Bachmann (and her creepy godmother Sarah Palin) having turned themselves officially into something called “evangelical feminists.”

You know, like Jews for Jesus, or Baby Seals for Canadian Seal Clubbers.

Apparently there really is a movement of evangelical feminists, and they’re cheesed. They appear to actually grasp the idea that women are human, so they’re voting Bachmann and Palin off their island (Women Who Ignore Biblical Misogyny Island. It’s a about a thousand nautical miles south of Savage Death Island).

“This application of the term ["evangelical feminist" to Bachmann and Palin] twists the meaning of both “evangelical” and “feminism.” It equates “evangelical” with a far right political ideology rather than its historic definition. And it equates “feminism” simply with a woman’s running for public office even though she may deny full equality and autonomy for women in other areas of life. — Letha Dawson Scanzoni, founding mother of the Biblical feminist movement

Meanwhile, actual feminism continues to gasp for breath as it gets simultaneously coopted, beaten with fundie clubs, and redefined as antifeminism by various assholes. For example, the quotation above came from this blog called Religion Dispatches, where blogger Julie Ingersoll also hipped me to the existence of Smart Girl Summit 2011.**

Smart Girl Summit 2011 will feature arch-misogynist Phyllis Schlafly, who will address “girls” (actually women, but calling them girls reassures everyone of the actual status of female adults) on the subject of how feminism threatens to destroy all life on Earth. Smart Girl Politics is an antifeminist 501(c) dedicated to nurturing misogyny in nascent conservatives by “empowering” them to “fight like a girl” for their right to cram patriarchal mores down everybody’s throat.

Uh oh. This essay had a point, but I’ve forgotten what it was, and now I gotta go to work, so I guess I’ll just leave it here flapping in the breeze. Pointless, breeze-flappin’ essays; they’re what separate the spinster aunt hacks from the responsible journalists who are paid by employers to write professional, polished, unbiased pieces on Justin Bieber or health care reform.

_______________________
* When feminist women buck the hausfrau system, it’s a different story; Bachmann’s evangelical brethren view it as “a satanic attack on the [American family].”

** How fucking patronizing is that name, “Smart Girl Summit”? Can you even imagine a conservative political action group holding a Smart Boy Summit for adult men? To teach them how to fight like a girl? Haw!

Posted in Politics, Private Business of the Secret Feminist Society and Women hate you. Bite me, Chad.

Spinster aunt reads comment on Dawkins website, wrinkles lip

Published by Jill on March 19, 2011. 117 Comments

Liberal dudes (and that boobquake chick) just love celebrity biologist Richard Dawkins. Even some Internet feminists may be said not to vomit blood at the mention of his name. Because no greater proponent of atheism than yours truly ever camera-stalked a Rio Grand turkey in the Texas Hill Country, even the Spinster Library contains a couple of Dawkins’ popular, well-written books. They are enjoyable if one is charmed by that mellifluous English public school manner of expression, and if human penis-based arguments against godbagism typically convey buoyancy to your ocean-going vessel.

As an added precaution, the Great Council of the Dieri would also keep a stockpile of boys’ foreskins in constant readiness, because of their homeopathic power to produce rain.*

Despite his admirable enthusiasm for some of the richer morsels of history’s bounty, Dawkins is, as I have always maintained, no feminist. This is a disappointment but hardly surprising, since rare indeed is the intellectual Western motherfucker who is not enamored of the glorious myth that he and his ilk, in their educated and progressive magnanimity, have liberated their women.

It’s a disappointment, not just because it blows whenever a superstar brainiac turns out to be a knob about the global humanitarian crisis of patriarchal oppression, but also because of this: if otherwise rational, right-thinking, internationally worshiped dudes of Dawkins’ stature can remain deluded about the tyranny of male privilege, the chance in hell that feminist revolution might be said to stand is like unto that of a snowball. Particularly when women themselves, in the shape of self-described “equity feminists,” saunter through the town square declaring that patriarchal oppression in America does not exist. Even more particularly when the Dawkinses openly admire the  self-described feminists’ declarations.

The specific Dawkins-approved, self-described feminist to whom I allude is, of course, the notorious Christina Hoff Sommers, professional turncoat and author of several “Dudes Rule!”-themed books, such as the hatespeechy Who Stole Feminism, and that modern MRA classic The War Against Boys: How Misguided Feminism Is Harming Our Young Men.

Sommers thinks American feminists should put a sock in it and take it easy. Why? Because Americans have got patriarchy licked. Women are officially free. La di da da, free. She invents an enemy of American women’s freedom: “gender feminists,” mythical creatures who hate men but for some reason nevertheless maintain that men and women are “essentially the same.”

“Gender feminists” are probably more accurately described as “feminists who think Sommers is full of shit.”

So anyway, some commenter on the Richard Dawkins fanboy site suggested that Dawkins take a gander at one of Sommers’ antifeminist lectures. Here is the link to the lecture. Its gist is that “eccentric gender feminists” have staged a coup and taken over the women’s movement. Whereupon the eccentrics instituted a disinformation campaign, spreading foul lies about — I kid you not — ancient Roman emperors, while leaving a trail of bloodied, quivering equity feminists and the men they love in their wake. Sommers even takes a couple of shots at Eve Ensler for — get this — failing to sufficiently praise dudes in the Vagina Monologues.

This excerpt from Sommers’ lecture states her premise.

[I]n 1994 [...] I published a book entitled Who Stole Feminism? The book was strongly feminist, but it rejected the idea that American women were oppressed. For the most part, feminism had succeeded, I said. By the nineties, I argued, American women were among the freest and most liberated in the world. It was no longer reasonable to say that as a group women were far worse off than men. Yes, there were still inequities, but to speak of American society as a “patriarchy” or to refer to American women as second class citizens was frankly absurd.

Hey, Christina Hoff Sommers, what about that pesky 75 cents-on-the-dollar pay disparity, or the fact that only 15% of American political offices are held by women? Sommers, it turns out, isn’t even sure that these “factoids” are true (given the opposition’s proven propensity for lying about ancient Roman history), but even if they are, they can be easily explained by that handy psuedoscience mainstay, evolutionary psychology. You see, men and women are neither physically nor cognitively “the same,” therefore it is irrational to expect men and women to excel equally. Men are simply hardwired to win more political campaigns than women. Apparently men are also hardwired to make more money than women. So feminists should accept their biological destiny, “tone down the rhetoric against men,” and bask in our sexism-free utopia.

No advanced blamer requires a refutation of that ludicrous argument, so we’ll just press on to Sommers’ views on the “eccentric” idea that some menacing entity called “patriarchy” goes around victimizing women.

The dominant philosophy of today’s women’s movement is not equity feminism–but “victim feminism.” “Victim” feminists don’t want to hear about the ways in which women have succeeded. They want to focus on and often invent new ways and perspectives in which women can be regarded as oppressed and subordinated to men.

A few words on this women-as-victims stuff:

Largely because of the success of the funfeminist movement, which argues that women do too have agency, dammit! (as long as their choiciness stays perfectly aligned with male interests), to view women as victims has become passé and unpopular. Women aren’t victims anymore now that we can own property, vote, and have the right to pole-dance in our boyfriends’ apartments. Furthermore, the argument goes, if we traipse about the countryside exaggerating the sorry plight of women (when in fact the plight of women, though admittedly not quite as awesome as men’s, is at least not as sorry as it was), we’re just buying into that unattractive, unempowerfulized, hysterical “victim mentality.” We freely choose to wear 6-inch heels, and if we author this choice, we cannot therefore be victims of it. If we don’t think we are victims, we won’t be victims.

You know; only sick people take pills; therefore, if I don’t take pills, I won’t be sick.

What this argument fails to consider, regardless of a few funfeminists’ purported choice to choose choices, is that, hourly, billions of women worldwide suffer everything from discrimination to murder exclusively because of their sex. Women cannot choose the “I’m-not-a-victim” choice. Not even the funfeminists can choose it, not really, because when stuff like “you cannot rape me” or “my appearance is meaningless” or “the state cannot interfere with the contents of my own personal uterus” is not on the menu of choices, no real agency exists. But apparently, claiming that patriarchy victimizes women is just whiney.

So why in the world would scores of radical feminists, both Internetian (rhymes with “Venetian”) and regular, devote their public lives to exposing the violence perpetrated by the dominant culture if there were nothing to expose? What possible motivation could we have for supposedly “inventing new ways in which women can be regarded as oppressed”?

Sommers offers a helpful explanation: “There are a lot of homely women in women’s studies. Preaching these anti-male, anti-sex sermons is a way for them to compensate for various heartaches–they’re just mad at the beautiful girls.”**

Meanwhile, upon reading the Sommers speech, Dawkins was moved to comment: “Thank you for this. I have now read the lecture you recommend, and it is indeed excellent.”

The anointed one has spoken.
______________________
* Dawkins, Richard. Unweaving the Rainbow. Mariner Books, 2000. p.182.

** Sommers has denied ever making this remark.

Thanks, Stella Tex.

Posted in Dear god what about the men?, Men Hate You, Oppression Culture, Private Business of the Secret Feminist Society, Strawfeminism, The Spinster's Finger on the Pulse of Yesterday and Women hate you. Bite me, Chad.

There’s not enough femininity on the internet, so I wrote this

Published by Jill on March 16, 2011. 127 Comments

It separates the men from the sex class. It’s the cornerstone of the megatheocorporatocratic oppression of women. It’s a global humanitarian crisis.

It’s femininity! It sure gets a lot of ink around here! We were just talking about it day before yesterday. At which point blamer Ashley raised a swell issue.

Short of wearing a clown suit and speaking through a mechanized voicebox, I can’t think of how one could avoid being perceived as performing either masculinity or femininity. The meaning of your performance is imposed by the audience.

This precise quandary has long plagued spinster aunts the world over. We do not advocate clown suits, however; polyester satin makes us perspire, and the bright colors seem to attract bees. Our solution? Flowing robes. Too biblical for ya? Well, then, grey sweats and Tom’s shoes for everyone! Who’s with me?

Continues Ashley:

Not to say that all performances are equally feminist, or that personal performance doesn’t matter at all. Just, doesn’t it make more sense to focus activism on institutional change and resource reallocation?

If Ashley is suggesting that that the onus is on us (the onus is on-us, the onus is on-us) to change the way women are perceived, I couldn’t agree more. That’s why I advocate personal repudiation of femininity on as broad a spectrum as possible. The less femininity there is to perceive, the better for all women everywhere.

But if I read it wrong, and Ashley is actually saying “enough with this anti-femininityism, already; there are more important feminist matters afoot,” I reply:

Fear not, Ashley, for feminist rage is not a finite substance. There’s enough for all the doomed rebellions.

In fact, it makes sense to challenge patriarchy at every level. If I haven’t made that clear by now I’m a crapulent failure as an Internet feminist. Harshin’ on femininity is just one aspect of the fight. At the annual Obstreperal Awards on Savage Death Island, they pin silver medals on everyone who focuses activism on institutional change and resource reallocation (you should come next year; the afterparties are awesome).

But they enjoin feminists to think small as well, because knocking it off already with the feminine wiles and beauty treatments and self-enstupefication are acts of resistance that anyone can do on her own, in the privacy of her own boudoir, boat, or den. It’s simple to do, and unlike big, slow institutional changes that take decades, ditching femininity can have an immediate impact. The anti-femininityite merely quits shaving her pits, or burns her 5″ platforms or whatever, and presto! Newly liberated from another shackle, she gets to snarl a gratifying “fuck you, Establishment!” at the Establishment, and to feel a little bit more like an actual sovereign entity.

But isn’t it hard? Blamer Claire K, who, in her preamble to an inspirational tale that she accurately describes as a “long anecdote about my own personal body hair. Really.”, has this to say to those who aren’t too sure about going native.

Many of the comments on [the most recent anti-femininity] thread seem to be about how difficult it is to stop performing femininity and how not everyone will be able to do it, as if the commentators are worried some radical feminists have it easy and need to be reminded of how hard it is for other people. I think, though, that everyone is already too aware that revolution is hard, and that we will get farther if we encourage each other instead of holding each other back by responding to every incitement to even the slightest revolutionary act with criticism of the inciter for not thinking of how hard it is, how some women won’t be able to do this, and so on.

She goes on to reveal the liberating effects she experienced by giving one little femininity dealio the heave-ho.

Awesomely, everyone she knows will get hit with some anti-femininity fallout, too. Women who resist are so rare, an anti-femininityist action is unlikely go unnoticed (or in some cases, unpunished) for long. Perhaps you’ll tolerate another personal anecdote, this time on the subject of the repercussions of resistance:

A pal of mine from the cancer trenches just had a double mastectomy. After agonizing about it for months, she decided not to undergo the painful and oppressor-appeasing “reconstruction” surgery.* She’s no radical feminist, either, she’s a straight, white, Republican country clubber, and she really liked having boobs. But ultimately she determined that she’d be sending the wrong message to her daughters if she capitulated to the patriarchal boobal mandate by having plastic funbags stapled to her chest. Her act of resistance cannot fail to ripple (ha ha, it rhymes with “nipple”!). Not just with her kids, but with her whole WASPy social circle. I pinned a gold medal on her.

So do you get kicked off the Island if you perform femininity? Dang, whaddya take me for, some kinda radical feminist? That would be messed up. I’m a spinster aunt, goddammit, and we fucking love everybody. I merely urge women to engage in the intellectual exercise of examining femininity: how much of the gottadoo** is really gotta, and how much is actually wanna. The femininity-bagging suggestion is not, as this blamer surmised, that women endanger the lives of their sick children by appearing so unfeminine that their boss fires them and they lose their health insurance.*** The suggestion is that women pause in their daily sashay through Mansworld to evaluate their feminine personae. You know, really give it the old analytical eye. Which appeasements really are literally necessary for literal survival, and which are maybe just gratuitous expressions of internalized misogyny? The idea is to ditch as much of it as is possible without getting anyone killed. That this might trespass a bit on your personal comfort is sort of the point. No pain, no gain. The revolution begins at home. Etc.

____________________
* Why do I put “reconstruction” in quotation marks? Because this surgery doesn’t actually re-construct a breast at all; the resulting appurtenance contains no breast tissue, cannot nurse a baby, and is in fact actually just a prop designed to alleviate societal anxiety over women who might not otherwise present as sufficiently sexual. To those who have had reconstructive surgery, I do not vilify you. À votre santé!

** Gottadoo: Savage Death Islandish for femininity performed under the heading “I gotta do what I gotta do to survive.”

*** Irish Up, we are so sorry for your daughter’s illness. As a sicko myself, I know how it fucking sucks.

Posted in Femininity and Private Business of the Secret Feminist Society. Bite me, Chad.

New message appears on Chain Link Oracle Dumpster

Published by Jill on March 4, 2011. 99 Comments

Don't hate

Today’s question is: when is bathroom humor runny? I mean funny? I ask because there is a vas deferens between when some jokey sexist dude uses bathroom humor to tell women to lighten up and enjoy their oppression, and when some jokey spinster blogger uses it to draw attention to bigotry. Ha! Ha ha ha!

Today’s other question is: how would you explain “ladies room” to a representative of Species 8472 from the Delta Quadrant?

Posted in Announcements and Private Business of the Secret Feminist Society. Bite me, Chad.

Holy shit!

Published by Jill on February 25, 2011. 29 Comments

Phil, my assistant, just informed me that, while I was off doing the butt-dance for a couple of weeks, I Blame the Patriarchy sprouted about 1742 purulent boils and should probably be put down.

“You might want to check that blog you abandoned,” he said. “It’s full of morons.”

(Phil is only partially hip to the privilege he experiences as a non-moron.)

In actuality, the blog is not “full” of morons at all. It is only half full of morons.

My sibling Tidy has a T-shirt that says “This ain’t my first rodeo.” This blogular event could be mistaken for my first rodeo, though. Jesus in a jetpack. What was I thinking, posting wild fantasies like “transpersons are human beings” and then going off butt-dancing? I should have known that my remarks would attract a firestorm of hateshitcrapbombs. I should have known that once I got back to my desk I would feel sad and defeated, because it would turn out that I had failed the blamers who count on me to filter the ick out these polarizing discussions (even though it clearly states somewhere in the FAQ that blamers specifically shouldn’t count on me to do that. Putting a thing in a FAQ guarantees that reader expectations will veer in the opposite direction). I should have known that I would find 700 comments on the post and another 200 in the moderation queue, all incendiary in nature.

I am a dedicated spinster aunt, so naturally I only skimmed, with my jaundiced eye, in the most cursory way possible, the 900 (total) comments. Holy shit, there sure is a bunch of hatas what comment on this blog. I was invited by some of them to quit calling myself a radical feminist, since the definition of radical feminism is, apparently, “a branch of feminism based on hatred of transpersons.”

OK then. I’m a Savage Death Islandist. As a Savage Death Islandist, just let me say, “ew.”

“Ew” doesn’t even begin to express the precise nature of my disgust and disappointment, but I say it anyway because it taxes my blown lobe beyond its capacity to coin the mot juste.

In the spirit of Savage Death Islandist inclusionism, comments proceeding from the dudely hata perspective are still banned. It is likely, since I am on sabbatical, that dudes and hatas will incurse. If that happens, I urge the sensible reader to stop reading those comments immediately, and to watch cute puppy videos on YouTube.

Posted in Blogulation and Private Business of the Secret Feminist Society. Bite me, Chad.

Spinster aunt gets translucent

Published by Jill on February 9, 2011. 772 Comments

EMERGENCY MOBILE PHONE UPDATE: the Andrea Dworkin post to which I allude in this post was misattributed to Renee Martin. It was actually written by Daisy Deadhead. I Blame the Patriarchy regrets the error.

Well, it’s happened again. There’s a goddam “trans debate” thing roiling in the comments of yesterday’s post. My blogging chops are obviously rustier than I thought; back in the day I would have nipped the whole thing in the bud with one of my snappy little aphorisms and a couple of judicious deletions. That’s what I get for going on sabbatical. Use it or lose it, right?

Previously, on I Blame the Patriarchy

I announced that IBTP is going dudeless. The Blametariat threw me a parade. Then somebody wondered if the dude-ban includes transwomen or not. A little red light flashed on my Patri-O-Meter, but because I am dull-witted I ignored it. All I said was that the ban only includes persons who post as dudes. And sure enough, another poster took advantage of my inattention to opine, “well, transwomen are men after all.” Whereupon the kimchi taco I had for lunch began to form a wad of napalm in the pit of my stomach. “NOOOOOOOOOO,” I wrote, even as I sensed the crushing futility of my appeal, “I’m putting my foot down, we’re not having this horrible stupid argument again!” That’s all it took. It was on.

So today I am going to — albeit briefly and somewhat abstractly, because as much as I’d like to bloot out a New Yorker-sized article on gender politics, my assistant Phil (who, by the way, is a trans man) says I gotta motor in about 15 — I’m going to splain a couple things and link a couple things and then it’s on to some nice heartwarming nature crap.

There are three aspects of this “debate” that particularly chap the spinster hide. One is that it is even considered a debate. Is there anything more demeaning than a bunch of people with higher status than you sitting around debating the degree to which they find you human? I don’t think so.

The second is the main anti-trans “argument.” It goes:

Unless you were born a woman, how can you really know what women’s oppression means? You benefited from male privilege once; how can we trust you? You mock us with your femininity. You’re not authentic.

This argument is phobic and dumb. It proceeds from, among other things like fear and internalized misogyny, the premise that there exists a standard or authentic “woman’s experience” of oppression that derives entirely from childhood indoctrination and imbues the experiencer with some kinda moral authority. The premise is false. An experience of womanhood is not the experience of womanhood. For example:

Some women have a little privilege. Some women have a shit-ton of privilege. Some women have a shit-ton of privilege and then lose it. Some women have zippo privilege and then get some later. Some women only ever have zippo, period. Some women are atheists, have short brown hair, drive red Fords, have scars where their boobs used to be, eat only vegetables and shave their mustaches.

Thus we see that there are many manifestations of womanity, both in terms of privilege and otherwise, each topped with its own unique little dollop of oppression. Of the gazillion factors that comprise female awareness, the condition of having been born female is but e pluribus unum. How do your personal woman-factors compare to, I dunno, mine? How about to Nadya Suleman (“Octomom”)? Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani? Susan Boyle? Candida Royalle? Aung San Suu Kyi? Aileen Wuornos? Carolin Berger (“Sexy Cora”)? My assistant Phil?

Not only is there no “standard” women’s experience of oppression, but a primary experience of womanhood is in fact inessential to the understanding of oppression. It is not necessary, in order for the oppressed to unite behind the common cause of liberation, that every oppressed person should share the background experiences of every other oppressed person. It is not only not necessary; it is not possible. The imposition of such jingoistic strictures precludes all possibility of revolution.

Oppression is oppression. Race, ethnicity, religion, pigmentation, sex, gender, health, education, class, caste, age, weight, ableness, mental health, marital status, employment status, diet, IQ, internet access — any combination of these or a thousand other arbitrary markers may be used by the powerful to justify oppression, but the net result is always the same: discrimination, disenfranchisement, degradation, dehumanization. It’s the Four Ds! The Four Ds make all oppressed persons identical enough.

My third point strikes a somewhat different and theoretical note. It has long been the contention of all expert spinster aunts that the notion of gender is itself a fiction promoted by the usual hegemonic patriarchal forces as an instrument of oppression. A person can only be “trans” if there are rigidly enforced gender roles from which and to which one might transition. Obviously, post-revolutionary society will not be burdened by tiresome gender constructs at all; nobody will have to become anything because everyone will just be whatever they are. Meanwhile, we gotta stop slapping the Four Ds on anyone who fails to fit the stupid misogynist gender binary.

I would love to delve into this at greater length, but the aforementioned time constraints compel me to put a sock in it. Fortunately, yesterday blamers Nails and AlienNumber were kind enough to link to Renee Martin’s excellent essay on Savage Death Island’s executive director Andrea Dworkin and her remarks on transgender politics. The remarks, excerpted by Martin from Woman Hating (1974), are sensible and kind and radical and a breath of fresh 70’s air. And they pretty precisely express the Savage Death Island doxa. Essentially, Dworkin’s saying that everyone has a right to exist on her/his own terms. Duh, right?

Transsexuality* is currently considered a gender disorder, that is, a person learns a gender role which contradicts his/her visible sex. It is a “disease” with a cure: a sex-change operation will change the person’s visible sex and make it consonant with the person’s felt identity.

Since we know very little about sex identity, and since psychiatrists are committed to the propagation of the cultural structure as it is, it would be premature and not very intelligent to accept the psychiatric judgement that transsexuality is caused by a faulty socialization. More probably, transsexuality is caused by a faulty society. Transsexuality can be defined as one particular formation of our general multisexuality which is unable to achieve its natural development because of extremely adverse social conditions.

There is no doubt that in the culture of male-female discreteness, transsexuality is a disaster for the individual transsexual. Every transsexual, white, black, man, woman, rich, poor, is in a state of primary emergency as a transsexual. There are 3 crucial points here.

One, every transsexual has the right to survival on his/her own terms. That means every transsexual is entitled to a sex-change operation, and it should be provided by the community as one of its functions. This is an emergency measure for an emergency condition.

Two, by changing our premises about men and women, role-playing and polarity, the social situation of transsexuals will be transformed, and transsexuals will be integrated into community, no longer persecuted and despised.

Three, community built on androgynous identity will mean the end of transsexuality as we know it. Either the transsexual will be able to expand his/her sexuality into a fluid androgyny, or, as roles disppear, the phenomenon of transsexuality will disappear and that energy will be transformed into new modes of sexual identity and behavior.

I recommend reading Martin’s essay for a bit more context. Nails has a new post on the topic too.

______________________
* In 1974, “transsexual” was what we now call “transgender”

Posted in Keep your bias off my gender and Private Business of the Secret Feminist Society. Bite me, Chad.

Spinster aunt too lazy to write essay, posts blamer comment instead

Published by Jill on February 6, 2011. 35 Comments

This short essay, written by blamer TwissB in response to yesterday’s anti anti-abortion bill post, is so swell it deserves its own page. TwissB is, as the kids say, (or used to say 5 years ago), teh awesome. Wow, you say, I wish she had a feminist reference website! Well, your wish is my command. Yay!

********************

And even now another ERA silly season is in full swing as legislators in various states (e.g. Florida and Virginia) are being assured by ERA enthusiasts that a constitutional prohibition on sex discrimination against women will “NOT regulate abortion”! While they alternate these assurances on odd days with pro-choice marches on even days, one can only marvel at so much misplaced energy.

So, it’s time to offer a radical alternative.

Balkanizing primary sex discrimination into a swarm of separate issues as current Official Feminism does denies women a coherent way of rebelling against it. Primary sex discrimination is men’s invasive, subordinating attack on women’s reproductive organs through pregnancy regulation, prostitution, and pornography – the perfect target since nothing misogyny can do to hurt that organ unique to women can inflict the slightest pain on men. Consider any of those “but women are different so it would be discrimination if you treated them the same as men” bits of Aristotelian holy writ and sure enough the uterus or its related gotcha parts and functions are cited as the pretext for any acts of restriction or dehumanization men want to be free to inflict on women.

When it comes to anything men regard as “sex,” the right to treat women differently is taken for granted. Primary sex discrimination is protected by a gentlemen’s agreement. It is enough to trot out abstractions like the interest of the state, men’s natural needs, or the First Amendment to turn the cruelest attacks on women into unchallengeable institutions.

Difference arguments are more overtly made in cases of secondary sex discrimination in employment, for example, or military service assignment, or single sex schooling. Legal practitioners know that there is nothing in the Constitution to prohibit sex discrimination against women, but only Justice Scalia dares to say so.

Disparate impact is tertiary sex discrimination which can be ignored by courts and legislators or remedied as men’s advantage is perceived.

If women were to make a concerted attack on primary sex discrimination – pregnancy regulation, prostitution and pornography, I think we’d wreck the men’s game. It would tie the liberal and conservative cats’ tails together and hang them over the clothesline. But it would also challenge women on the left and the right to quit collaborating with men in reducing the most anti-women practices to political entertainment for men.

Posted in Men Hate You, Private Business of the Secret Feminist Society and Sexploitation. Bite me, Chad.

Spinster aunt executes close reading of seemingly benign remark, exposes hidden meanings!

Published by Jill on July 13, 2010. 122 Comments

Thanks to yesterday’s involuntary contributors, Valerie, Dr Sarah Tonin, and Saphire. You kids are all right. Today I’ll be picking a few more nits on the same theme. If a theme may be said to possess nits.

Queries blamer JenniferRuth on the subject of feminists gettin’ after other feminists for perceived infractions of the Unwritten Feminist Code:

[...] Is the tone of the message more important than the message?

In other words, if you see some patriarchy goin’ down, and it falls upon you to blame it, need you really mince words just to spare the feelings of the alleged perp? Shouldn’t the perp grow a pair, and learn from your expertise?

It can be argued (and is argued, by me, albeit somewhat obliquely, a bit further down) that the tone of the message is the message. Furthermore, when the tone may be construed as hostile or passive-aggressive or supercilious, “learning” cannot reasonably be expected to transpire.

Continues JenniferRuth (echoing the opinion of several other blamers):

I think that often a “gotcha” tone is inferred rather than intended. I see none of it in Dr Sarah Tonin’s comment. [Dr Sarah Tonin's comment is reproduced below -- Jill].

Alas, the intent of a remark is ultimately irrelevant to its audience; the net effect on the balance of the cosmos is what must be considered when assessing the gotchaness of any given remark delivered on a small-time blog. We have seen this intent-vs-effect scenario time and time again. For example:

When some progressive liberal dude drops anchor at Savage Death Island to take field notes on the wild feminist population, he might say something like “You ladies have really educated me, keep up the good work!” The dude imagines that he’s being supportive, but what he’s actually done is reinforce the dude-supremacist hierarchy by placing himself in a lofty position above the fray from which he may passively benefit from the ladies’ work while simultaneously condescending to bestow upon them the high honor of dudely approbation.

Privilege exercised by A is oppression experienced by B. Whether the A “means” it or not.

Back to Dr Sarah Tonin’s remark:

@Valerie, I agree with the basic sentiment of your comment, but druther you’d pick a less classist analogy than “trailer park”. Cheers.

It is well observed that Dr Sarah Tonin is not, in this example, mean. She opens with something conciliatory, briefly administers the correction, attempts to diffuse any potential sting with a breezy “cheers!” and gets the heck out. A case of the surgeon’s knife.

There are other, more extreme, more entertaining examples I might have used, but alas, you get what you pay for here at I Blame the Patriarchy.

However. As for whether, as JenniferRuth wonders, the “gotcha” tone is real or imagined: if it walks like a duck and talks like a duck …

Read it again:

@Valerie, I agree with the basic sentiment of your comment, but druther you’d pick a less classist analogy than “trailer park”. Cheers.

Observe that Dr Sarah Tonin speaks directly to Valerie using the first person “I.” She alludes to Valerie’s infraction as distasteful to Dr Sarah Tonin personally. In so doing, she introduces a “j’accuse” dynamic, establishing a mini-hierarchy wherein she confers upon herself hall monitor status. She’s a pleasant hall monitor, but a hall monitor nonetheless. This dynamic makes the “cheers” feel a bit disingenuous.

It should also be noted that Dr Sarah Tonin’s humorous Internet moniker contains the quasi-honorific “Dr,” which, whether or not Sarah Tonin is an actual doctor, adds to her remarks a subliminal and somewhat presumptuous dollop of authoritative clout. The subtext might be read as “As your superior officer, I deem you in violation of the unwritten code.”

A more enbiggening, albeit more time-consuming, approach would have been for Dr Sarah Tonin to eliminate both her personal preferences and Valerie from her remarks altogether, and to compose her argument from a more universal point of view. Perhaps something like:

“Although trailer parks have enjoyed a colorful history as joke-butts among the upper classes and other denizens of site-built homes, these jokes are considered by many feminists to contain classist slurs that a) unjustly portray low socio-economic status as a character flaw, and b) bolster the jokester’s own status as someone privileged enough to make such pronouncements.”

Such a statement might still have offended the charmingly implacable Saphire (Valerie herself, it should be noted, has, as of this writing, yet to weigh in on the subject), but at least it would have met most of the criteria upon which the Blametariat appears to agree are necessary for successful consciousness-raising: it’s neutral in tone; it’s addressed to a general audience rather than to a specific blamer; it describes a widely-held philosophical position re: trailer parks rather than a statement of personal opinion; it’s an introductory explication of the problem with trailer-park jokes; and possibly it might even serve as a template from which a less-experienced feminist might extrapolate for future instances of self-privilege-awareness.

I Blame the Patriarchy’s superfatted Guidelines For Commenters already contains a plea for the excision of the first person singular from the Blametarium; it should, at least for purposes of Internecine Nit-Picking, also include a moratorium on the pronoun “you.”

These pronouns, they’re really something!

In closing, let us remember that, although this blog originated as a light entertainment delivery device for the amusement of its author, today its primary function is patriarchy-blaming. So, if you see some patriarchy in progress, and think you can blame it, bring it, girlfriend! The less culture-of-domination shit you throw around while doing it, the better.

Fun fact: I used to work in a manufactured housing factory, where I was the lowliest form of life, the girl who swept out the houses when they rolled off the assembly line. I will always be grateful to that job for hipping me to the existence of the Hokey, an inexpensive, human-powered housekeeping implement I use to this day to remove golden retriever hair from a blue paisley rug.

By the way, as somebody pointed out yesterday, the actual term for the type of dwelling under discussion is “manufactured home.” It may be “PC” (as the commenter suggested), but it’s also the official industry designation, for the simple reason that, once delivered, these houses are affixed to the ground with concrete pylons and don’t go anywhere. I know what I’m talkin’ about when I say that manufactured housing often exceeds, in terms of eco-friendliness, energy efficiency, price, maintenance costs, and general quality, comparable site-built homes. See photo, above.

A “trailer” is something you hitch to your Ford F-250 to transport livestock, hay, landscaping equipment, or an Emergency Mobile Margarita Bar.

___________________
Photo: Adorable “trailer” is (surprisingly?) un-trashy. 475 sq ft “Eco-Cottage” by Nationwide Homes.

Posted in Blogulation, Oppression Culture and Private Business of the Secret Feminist Society. Bite me, Chad.

Horrifying frizz experiences and other stories

Published by Jill on July 10, 2010. 58 Comments

Uh-oh!

Sometimes I feel the patriarchy most of all with feminist groups, and the P leaves me alone on occasion in the real world. Hell, I turn off the TV and the patriarchy almost ceases to exist. Then I’ll be on a feminist committee and feel like women actually grouping together against the patriarchy are the most deadset against us getting anywhere.

But I refuse to believe I participate. [from a blamer comment on the Spot of Art post]

As a professional expert spinster aunt it is my sworn duty to inform you, blamer, that you are wrong-o.

What you are experiencing is Anti-Oppression Fatigue. You’re pissed at the feminists because they’re a ceaseless reminder that patriarchy does not leave you alone. You’re tasering the messenger. Ouch! It burns!

You can turn a jaundiced eye toward the arguing feminists, you can shoot your TV, you can imagine that the dominant culture “leaves you alone,” and you can refuse to believe stuff that’s actually true. But your agency is illusory. It is not possible not to participate. There are wheels within cogs around sprockets under layers of dung upon substrata of filth. To wit:

Even if — as you enjoy what you perceive to be a patriarchy-free moment — you’re lounging on the couch you made yourself from sticks you found in the woods, wearing the rough-hewn mu-mu made from cloth you spun yourself from the bamboo you grew on your roof, eating a salad of organic homegrown alfalfa you raised from heirloom seeds and gazing at this post with the computer you hand-built from scrap metal found in a dumpster — there is no way — no way — you personally have not availed yourself of the products of human oppression.

Even if nobody is molesting you, harassing you, hitting you, pimping you, judging you on the size of your ass, selling you carcinogenic wrinkle cream, working you like a dog in a strawberry field and paying you jack shit, taking naked pictures of you and posting them on the Internet, feigning interest in how you coped with your most horrifying frizz experience, sending you subtle messages through film, TV, the Internet, and other media that you’re nothing but a piece of ass, preventing you from obtaining an abortion, threatening to fire you if you don’t put out, leaving your toilet seat up, or murdering you, a gazillion women and kids actually are experiencing this shit — patriarchy — as a big, violent bummer.

The dominant culture of domination is all up inside your shit, too, like one of those 30-foot parasitic worms winding itself around your intestines. It oozes from every pore. You collude with it daily. It’s your first language. Deny this at your peril.

Patriarchy is the reason women don’t get it together and throw a feminist revolt, not feminists. The whole set-up is rigged, see?

Remember, ladies: whenever a feminist takes a day off, a penisface gets his wings.

Posted in Oppression Culture and Private Business of the Secret Feminist Society. Bite me, Chad.