Question: Are magazine advertisements going too far with extraordinarily excessive PhotoShopping of their already-for-the-average-person-unachievable-standards-of-anorexic-beauty models?
Answer:
A Picture Is Better Than A Thousand Words!
Monday, November 10th, 2008Mmm, Babies! They Stay Crunchy in Milk.
Thursday, October 23rd, 2008I like babies. They’re cute. I have about 50,000 pictures of my sons as babies and with the slightest encouragement, especially after a glass of wine or two, I will happily haul them out of the closet and make you admire each and every one of them.
However, I am pro-choice. I say “however” because clearly, there is a fair contingent of people out there who genuinely believe that people who are pro-choice don’t give a rat’s ass about babies. Sometimes, they even seem to believe that what pro-choice people really, secretly want to do is rend and splatter as many babies as possible limb from limb, and the only reason women are out there still getting abortions is because they just don’t realize that that’s what abortion is really all about. For example:
Oklahoma’s new [abortion] statute dictates that either the doctor performing the abortion or a “certified technician working in conjunction” with that doctor do the ultrasound, “provide a simultaneous explanation of what the ultrasound is depicting,” and also “display the ultrasound images so that the pregnant woman may view them.” The law goes so far as to specify the doctor’s script: The physician must describe the heartbeat and the presence of internal organs, fingers, and toes.
Widdle fingers and toesies! (ahem) I repeat, WIDDLE FINGERS AND TOESIES!!!!! To be smashed, crushed, torn, shredded into bloody BITS!!!!
Next up! Addendum to the statute: “Doctor (or a certified technician working in conjuction with doctor) must describe embryo’s desperate screams of ‘No, Mommy! Noooo! Don’t let them rip me apart, Mommy! I love you!’”
(Sigh.)
Usually, I’ve tried to shoot for compassion in my dealings with the pro-life mentality. As I said, I like babies and I think they’re cute. However, I’ve noticed that with the passage of years, my patience has shrunken gradually down to, well. The size of an eight-week old embryo. This big: ——-.
I’ve gone into great detail about my abortion stance and my feelings about the pro-life stance on more than one occasion already; I won’t rehash them yet again. I believe, though, that I am officially “done” with attempting to extend any sort of respect at all towards those who self-identify as “pro-life.” Seriously, why should I extend respect to people that have codified it into law that they have not only no respect, but anti-respect for those who self-identify as “pro-choice?” That does not mean that I will cease to extend respect towards those who personally would choose to never have an abortion; that is an eminently respectable position. It definitely doesn’t mean I will cease to extend compassion to any woman who was pressured into or otherwise regrets her abortion; that is a personal, not political, matter. However, anyone who affiliates himself or herself with any group of persons seeking to pass legislation that restricts, in any way, the right of women to choose..? I consider you fair game the minute you open your mouth (or heat up your keyboard) to say so. Be warned.
Beauty, Power and Feminism: Part 1
Saturday, October 4th, 2008Antigone, our happily married blogger, upon posting her wedding pics:
I would also hope that this would not undermine any credibility I have as a feminist, based on my appearance (for good or for ill), but again I have no guarantee of that. I always thought that people who put their photos out there (particularly feminist bloggers) were brave: they deal with all this stupidity day-in and day-out, and it just seems to roll off their back…If I write that “women are judged on beauty standards that don’t have a reasonable basis in reality, and those women who do meet those ridiculous standards are rewarded with illusonary and temporary benefits to undermine everyone else” someone can come back with “Well, you just say that because you’re ugly”. Even if I respond “that has nothing whatsoever to do with the topic at hand, and whether or not those unreasonable standards are moral or not”, it is still an effective method in derailing the thread.
Is our Antigone imagining things? Being overly sensitive? Hysterical, perhaps? Nope, I don’t think so.
From Feministing’s troll mailbag just a few days ago, for a quick and easy example:
Why are you obsessed with Sarah Palin? Are you jealous of her? Are you pissed that she has accomplished things without whining like a little child? Before you get all upset and call me a right-wing nut, I’m not voting for McCain/Palin or Obama/Biden. They all suck. But, you girls on feministing.com are what I would call stereotypical women. You are jealous, angry, and resentful of women who have success. It’s probably because she is hotter than any of you girls on feminsting. And that is at age 44. You girls have no chance of being that hot when you are that age.
Yep, yet another in an endless line of variations on the theme of feminists and how butt-ugly they are. Endless, seriously. And it’s completely ridiculous, because as any random sampling of pictures of women all over the philosophical spectrum when it comes to gender equality will demonstrate to you, feminists as a group are neither unusually ugly nor unusually beautiful. They look like…brace yourself!…women who aren’t feminists look as a group! They look like, well, just like women in general.
So why is “ur uglee!” such a pervasive and frequent component of anti-feminism? One easy answer, of course, is that people who don’t like feminists want to hurt feminists’ feelings, and it is a cultural standard that to insult a woman’s looks is the harshest criticism of her you can put forth. Her beauty, after all, is her most significant intimate personal asset, as a man’s virility is his, and the types who have a burning resentment of the ideals of feminism are frequently obedient robots when it comes to regurgitating the most reactionary of cultural stereotypes. So, no doubt they feel they’re delivering a crushing personal blow. But I think it goes deeper than that.
So who’s the Veep for “the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy?”
Saturday, August 23rd, 2008Gad, who’d say such a dumb-ass racist thing as that?!
Anti-war *IS* feminist
Tuesday, July 22nd, 2008Would people stop insinuating that I don’t care about women just because war is what I get the most worked up about right now? (I’m not just talking about on this blog. For some reason it seems to have become a common refrain lately.)
Being anti-war and being feminist are not mutually exclusive. After all, it’s impossible to support gender equality for women who you’re killing, or even for whom you’re just creating a constantly life-threatening environment. War zones, even once they’re ex-war zones, are where rights for women go to die.
(All pictures from here.)
Though I have argued that Obama appears to share McCain’s bloodthirsty imperialist core, it’s absolutely true that war is not the only issue that our choice of president could affect in meaningful ways. So, despite the fact that Obama has always been pretty lukewarm toward feminism, it’s also true that McCain has been downright hostile to it. Obama as president would surely be better for American women in general.
Women in Iraq, on the other hand — or in any other countries we’re raping to serve the business interests of the Great and Powerful Patriarchy — I’m pretty sure they won’t give a shit. Living in a war zone means the very fight for survival comes first. The things that feminists (quite rightly) fight for in America must seem like impossible dreams to Iraqi women who are forced to sell their bodies in order to keep their children from starving to death. Why is this our problem? Because we’re the ones who put them in this situation.
Since America invaded Iraq, an estimated 1.2 million Iraqis have been killed as a direct result. Surely everyone realizes that this means we’ve killed over half a million women in the bargain? I know it’s hard, but please take a moment and try to imagine what it would be like if some new threat (misogynistic terrorists, militant MRAs, whatever) had arrived on the scene five years ago and begun violently killing over half a million American women, with more killing still to come. Or if that seems like I’m rigging the argument too much, just make it over a million people of both sexes. Or, to make it even more analogous to Iraq, we can just say 3% of our population (9 million people, give or take).
Any which way you cut it, there would be absolutely no other topics of discussion in America. It would be priority number one to deal with. There would be no compromises that allowed the killing to continue at a slower place, no half-solutions which involved convincing the killers to target Canadians instead of Americans or somesuch.
But it’s hard for Americans to imagine that this is really happening to people just as human and important to themselves as we are to ourselves. Our compliant propagandistic press doesn’t show us life on the ground in Iraq. True critics of this war– those who say it’s wrong on every level, not just the way it’s been “poorly managed”– are marginalized and derided in our national discourse.
Let’s face it, the reality of war is just not pleasant to think about. Let’s watch HBO instead.
UPDATE: Ampersand points out that my assumption of 50% female casualties is off by quite a bit. Now I’m certainly no statistician, but if I’m analyzing the Lancet study (pdf) correctly, provided that the male/female death ratio has stayed more or less the same since 2006, we’re looking at 20% female mortality. Which means “only” about 240,000 female deaths directly caused by US involvement so far. (As opposed to 960,000 males. A particularly sick case of “The Patriarchy hurts men, too”.)
“Ilk!”
Thursday, July 10th, 2008
I’ve always yearned to be “ilk!”
Of course, I may be flattering myself. When the Lady Lydia referred to persons of “Kyso’s ilk,” she may not have been referring to me because she didn’t specify what Kysoean attributes a person must have to be considered one of “Kyso’s ilk.”
(I’m sorry for the incessant quotation marks, but since the Lyds used ‘em, I feel I must faithfully reproduce them. It would be wrong to assume that she simply isn’t aware of the proper usage of quotation marks. Wrong, I tell you.)
Who is this “Lady Lydia” broad, you may ask? (Well, you might already know. That was what I was wondering when I was nipping merrily through the site today and noticed somebody was leaving comments on a post that was two years old. I mean, it takes some dedication to read through two years of blog archives!)
Well, as it turns out, the simpler explanation is usually the correct one…nope, the Lyds didn’t actually just happen across the awesomeness that is PunkAssBlog and was so enchanted by the content therein that she spent the past week reading post after post in reverse chronological order til she accidentally encountered one that was actually about her. No, she was LOOKING for it! (Excuse me, them. There are two of them.) But still, two years later..? I smelled a Mystery! Happily, she very thoughtfully embedded her url in her username, so my investigation got off to a swimming start.
As it turns out, the Lyds is deeply into women doing nothing but homemaking. She tacitly admits that homemaking with all the modern conveniences out there is a grotesque bore, so she is also deeply into all the crap women used to have to do by hand, from scratch, in order to homemake. I can sorta understand this as a consuming hobby. It doesn’t move me personally, but then, neither does skydiving and I know at least two people who are totally into that. Diff’rent strokes for diff’rent folks. The only really bizarre aspect of her hobbyist obsession is that she appears to believe that all women should also devote themselves to her particular hobby, full-time, at the expense of a paying job. (And as a corollary, I guess she thinks men should be really excited to get to work full-time to completely financially support not only any woman who wants to entirely devote herself to this hobby, but all the hobby materials as well, plus a house with land suitable for planting to go with it.)
I’ve known lots of people with hobbies, some of ‘em dead crazy about ‘em. But I haven’t ever met anyone who thought that they should get to quit their job and somebody else should support them so they could pursue it full-time–and then wanted the entire world to follow suit. That’s just…wow. Words escape me.
I flicked through the sidebar as the Lyds recommended (some gorgeous examples of who she admires sufficiently to link to will be provided at the end of this post) and then scanned down her main page. And woot! I FOUND it! the answer to the Mystery of What She Was Doing Commenting On a Two-Year-Old Post by Kyso: an article entitled Silly Women, which she opens by saying that someone alerted her to a blog where she’s the main topic.
(Two two-year-old posts about her means she’s our blog’s main topic?)
Anyway, she spends the entire article attempting to simultaneously appear to turn the other cheek in a humble and ladylike fashion as laid out in the Bible when someone in particular has infuriated her, while squeezing out insults aimed at pointedly nameless silly women so that she doesn’t actually have to eat her own bile in silence in a humble and ladylike fashion as laid out in the Bible. This is otherwise known as passive aggression, and is a tactic not infrequently resorted to by women who find (or put) themselves in the Lyd’s domestic situation. Sad but true.
Now that we’ve pretty much explored her one dimension, let’s briefly turn to some quotes from the collection of links on her page that she labels ESPECIALLY FOR FEMINISTS for some fun quotes that support her oft-stated and obviously very important-to-her goal of KEEPING BLOGS LOVELY!
Oh, the tranquil beauty of these sites soothes my troubled soul!
On the Death Penalty, Partisanship and the Rape of Children: Part Three
Friday, June 27th, 2008I think I may have mentioned in a few previous posts, in passing, that my childhood and adolescence were perhaps unfortunate from both a socioeconomic perspective and from a family dysfunctionality perspective. I tend to not go into much more detail than that and when I do, it is usually both very sparsely presented and moved on from as quickly as possible, for various reasons. However, for the purposes of this post, I will choke out a little more information than usual, because it’s relevant.
Warning: Somewhat graphic descriptions of child abuse below the fold.
On the Death Penalty, Partisanship and the Rape of Children: Part Two
Thursday, June 26th, 2008I think it’s worthwhile to take a moment and look at the definition of partisan:
partisan[1,noun]
Main Entry:
1par·ti·san
Variant(s):
also par·ti·zan \ˈpär-tə-zən, -sən, -ˌzan, chiefly British ˌpär-tə-ˈzan\
Function:
noun
Etymology:
Middle French partisan, from north Italian dialect partiźan, from part part, party, from Latin part-, pars part
Date:
15551: a firm adherent to a party, faction, cause, or person; especially : one exhibiting blind, prejudiced, and unreasoning allegiance
In a post I put up earlier this week, I was rather snarkily harrassed for displaying the second half of the definition above…and fascinatingly enough, I was harrassed again today in a different post, for failing to display it. Now, clearly I’m either partisan or I’m not…there isn’t any gray area in terms of blind, prejudiced unreason. I am happy to report that in fact, not only do I not fit the second half of the definition, I don’t even fit the first. (Which I would have thought would have been a much more logical conclusion–the hypothesis that I must then be neither, rather than that I must be both! but hey. Diff’rent strokes for diff’rent folks.)
Now, don’t get me wrong; I’m a registered Democrat, have been since the age of 20 and am reasonably content with it. However, I have no emotional investment in the fact. If I felt sufficiently motivated, I’d go register as a Republican, or a Green, or as nothing at all. I do not feel any particular loyalty toward or love for the Democratic party as an entity. In the same way, I feel no hatred toward the Republican party as an entity. Basically, I see them as two “clubs,” and really the only games in town if you actually want to do something that has any real effect in the great game that is American politics–if that is what you want, you have to “belong” to one of the clubs. So I picked the one that has as its stated goals…I’d prefer to say achieved or even vigorously pursued but I think I must stick to the much more accurate stated…ideals that are closest to the ones I want to be ascendant in the world in which I must live.
Because I fail at blind, prejudiced and unreasoning allegiance to the one club (and therefore blind, prejudiced and unreasoning rejection of the other) I am capable of two great (I may be injecting a little sarcasm into that adjective) feats. One, I do not fail to see the flaws, hypocrisies, inconsistencies and artificialities displayed by any individual(s) representing my chosen club; and two, I am able to perceive it when a member or four of the other club has something worthwhile, important, true or valid to say. Even more delicately, I am able to successfully interpret slanting of information by both sides, even regardless of the direction of the slant.
I find rational thought a relief. Don’t you?
On the Death Penalty, Partisanship and the Rape of Children: Part One
Thursday, June 26th, 2008I am leery of the death penalty for two reasons, one philosophical, one brutally concrete.
The philosophical reason is that I object to the State, that amorphous and unaccountable collection of legislation, having the absolute power of life and death over any individual. The State already has a fair amount of control over our daily lives, sometimes with our explicit consent, sometimes only with the implied consent of I’m still choosing to live here so I guess I have to..? And I swallow a lot of things that fall short of taking an individual’s life, as non-mortal injuries carry with them the chance (in varying degrees of course) of recovery and restoration–however, your life is the one thing you can’t ever recover from losing. There is no recompense for that. When one individual takes another’s life, he or she has a set of consequences to face for having done so, and I am not just referring to legal ones–it is right that there should be a price exacted from anyone who does the ultimate, unrecoverable injury to another. In the case of the State, no recompense can ever be exacted; no one can be held guilty; no price can ever be paid–society did it! Whatever that means, and it can mean anything and everything and boils down every time to mean precisely whatever the person using the word wants it to mean. (Other words that have become so soggy and fluid are “government” and “culture” and “values.” It amazes me sometimes that those words are still in the dictionary. The way they are most commonly used robs them of any objective meaning at all.)
The brutally concrete reason is the complete imbalance in whom it is applied to in terms of race and gender. Even if it were something we were all philosophically prepared to accept, obviously that it is used disproportionately against a specific flavor of citizen is completely unacceptable.
However, you may have noticed, I do not object to the death penalty on any moral grounds–I don’t claim I think it’s wrong always, for any reason whatsoever, for one individual to kill another. There are instances of individuals killing other individuals that do not deeply disturb me, though I’m always saddened that any situation ever deteriorates to the point where that’s a viable or even the most viable solution. It IS sad.
Is it because I am consumed with “bloodlust?” Is it because I don’t “respect human life equally?”
Um, definitely not the first one. As a matter of fact, I am far more immune to bloodlust than most Americans I know. I do not watch reality TV, nor do I watch any sport that is centered around one person pounding on another while froth-spitting crowds roar them on–in short, watching real people inflict pain and humiliation of any degree upon each other not only does not attract me, it actively repulses me. That is “bloodlust,” my friends. I agree that it may be a significant part of our society, but it isn’t any part of me.
As for the second–that’s both true and not true. I do not respect all human life equally, but it has nothing to do with my feelings on the death penalty. I do not hold every speck of life that happens to have Homo sapiens DNA in its cell nucleus as being of equal worth, which is why I support reproductive choice, living wills, physician-assisted suicide and the concept of “brain-dead.” My philosophy here holds, though, that what I personally value the lives of others at is completely meaningless; my “valuing” of them should have no impact upon their continued existence whatsoever. The only “valuation” that should have that impact is their own. The only individual who gets to set a value on any individual’s human life is that individual. Period. In the cases where the human life in question is not capable of setting value upon its own life because it lacks the cognitive ability to do so, such as pre-viable fetuses and anyone at any stage of development who does not have a functioning brain, the person who is most affected by the continued existence or lack thereof of that individual gets to set the value on that life. Period.
In terms of a child rapist and his eight-year-old victim, say, I would consider both of them able to set their own value on their own lives and those values are the only ones that should ever count.
So, I am unhappy enough about the death penalty to consistently oppose it, regardless of the “worth” I feel any other individual has. However, if someone I personally find to have little to no value drops dead, I don’t even pretend to be upset about it or attempt to work up any feelings of “oh but we’re all EQUALLY valuable as human lives!” It’d be a lie. Even there, I make an automatic distinction between the method of death and the fact that the death results in the absence of that person from Earth–I am always repelled by and opposed to any deliberate and avoidable infliction of pain upon one human being by another and do not ever find any moral excuse for that. (Back to why I don’t watch all that sadistic crap on TV and how deeply horrible I find the practice of torture.) However, in regards to the bare fact of the sudden absence of certain human lives? I don’t care and in some cases, I think the world is an improved environment from when that person was alive. No doubt cold, but quite true.
Next: The Joys (or lack thereof) of Partisanship
Guns in schools
Wednesday, June 25th, 2008Whatever side one falls on in the gun control debate, most people agree that handguns should not be in schools. It’s just a bad mix—volatile, trapped kids and deadly firearms. Any sane person ought to feel a bit uncomfortable at the thought of guns in a high school.
Unfortunately, sane people aren’t in charge in my city.
Sticking police in schools is a bad idea on principle, but sticking armed police in schools is pure, unadulterated lunacy. We have enough problems with police shooting at teenagers of colour—why put them in a situation where they have even more opportunity to do that?
But of course, it all comes down to police chief Bill Blair’s inferiority complex:
“Quite frankly, as you can probably guess by my constant appearance, I believe in police officers in uniform,” he told a press conference this morning.
“I want the people of Toronto to see their police. I want them to have a relationship with the entire police service that is based on trust and respect. And my police officers are armed.”
That’s very nice for you, sir, that you believe in being formal. But we’re talking about arming crazed thugs who will be around children all day. Children—not criminals. How is anyone supposed to get an education with an armed cop just outside the door? Especially, say someone who is a refugee from a war-torn country or a police state, or from an impoverished region here, someone with every reason to fear large armed men carrying guns.
There’s a lot of talk about making schools safe and welcoming in Ontario. That’s all you hear about when you’re becoming a teacher. Apparently, though, that’s been amended to “safe and welcoming…or else.”
Russia wages war on emo
Monday, June 16th, 2008
What Americans do half-heartedly, the Russians will attempt with gusto.
Parliamentary hearings were held yesterday at which the “Concept for a State Policy in the Area of Spiritual and Moral Education of the Children of the Russian Federation and Protection of Their Morals” was discussed.
Really weird:
The draft law “On Children’s Toys” would ban the production and importation of toys that “provoke aggression,” “model actions of a sexual nature,” “justify extremism and a criminal lifestyle,” “depict horror or unbearable pain” or that are created “on the basis of the psychologically incongruous.” That might be, for example, candy in the shape of skeletons or stuffed toys in the shape of bacteria or viruses.
(Psychologically incongruous? But those are the best toys!)
But wait. It gets stranger. Apparently, the Russian government feels it necessary to fight the growing emo menace:
The drafters of the concept took a particular negative stance in regard to the Goth and emo youth subcultures, which are characterized by black clothing, piercings and a depressed outlook on reality. They authors compared the danger those subcultures hold for society to the dangers of skinheads, soccer hooligans, National Bolsheviks and even anti-fascists. Emo youths, according to the concept, “are subject to suicidal tendencies” and Goth children cultivate bisexuality. “The cost of the sexual services of an underage boy prostitute with Goth attributes is lower than for students in military schools but higher than for usual gay prostitutes,” the authors say, demonstrating their knowledge of life.
I like to think that the last sentence is just a poor translation, but really, judging by the rest of the proposed legislation, it probably isn’t.
If you’re a Russian emo kid now, though, don’t worry too much. You’re apparently already beyond hope:
The authors of the concept say that many of its clauses will have the power of law by the summer of 2009. “Nothing can be done with the current younger generation. It is lost,” said film director and Duma member Stanislav Govorukhin. “We have to save those who are two years old now and those who have yet to be born.”
Oh, just go read the whole thing.
Hat tip: shelestel
opPRESSion oLYMpics, Baby!
Friday, June 13th, 2008
I hold Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton personally responsible for having seriously overloaded the collective “oppression” brain circuitry of America. Bad, bad candidates for the supreme leadership of what is still the richest and most powerful country in the world. Naughty! You’re both grounded! Now go to your rooms and think about what you’ve done!
To date, I personally have based my own worldview of oppression upon (a) the fact that every human society on Earth is a patriarchy and (b) the timeless wisdom of Twisty Faster, quoted below:
[Twisty's] views revolve around evidence that patriarchy is a violently tyrannical but nearly invisible social order based on an oppressive paradigm of class and status fetishizing dominance and submission. Patriarchy’s benefits are accrued according to a rigid hierarchy at the top of which are rich honky adult males and at the bottom of which are poor female children of color.
Now, it hasn’t bothered me–the above definition is sufficient unto my needs–but not everybody seems to feel that level of zen about the precise degree of shafting being inflicted upon the folks who are in-between rich white men and poor nonwhite girls–those who possess some traits of the privileged group (say, being male) but not others (say, being poor). ‘Smatter of fact, some people are really, really obsessed with it. Really obsessed. I thought about linking to some examples of said obsession but quickly realized that the supply so far exceeded my demand that I’d run out of text space before I even got to say anything more on the subject. But I kid you not; it is everywhere; you have but to Google it or even just read the front page of any newspaper.
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