Anyone remember the job ads titled “Office Help”? You knew, when a job ad was titled that way, that they expected, or wanted, a woman.Women help.They don’t actually do a job, they just help someone else do a job.So the someone else gets the credit.And the big bucks and the benefits.After all, you’re just helping out, you’re just doing a favor. Because you’re nice.That’s what women are.You never saw “Maintenance Help” or “Engineering Help” ads.
Another give-away was, and maybe still is, when the job was for something like “10:00 to 2:00”.A man wouldn’t take a part-time job. Men needed a full-time job.Even if they hadn’t made a couple kids they then needed to support.(Did I ever get paid more to support my choices?Don’t think so.)
And they’d get it too.The full-time job.Men are good at talking about their needs.Because having needs makes you important, If you’re a man.(If you’re a woman, needing something makes you weak, dependent.)
(‘Course everything makes you weak if you’re a woman.Even ethics.It’s called ‘sentiment’.In a man, it’s called ‘integrity’.)
In a rape trial, that the woman was walking alonein a parkat night has been considered relevant – presumably it’s a mitigating circumstance: the accused can be excused for thinking she wanted it if she was walking alone in a park at night.
What!? Why? Why is it that a woman walking alone in a park at night is understood – by men – to be implying consent to sex with any and all men?
Are parks designated sex zones? I suppose in a sense they are. Lovers often meet there for clandestine encounters. Yeah, for consensual clandestine encounters.
Okay, but parks at night are also popular mugging zones, perhaps because of the poor lighting which makes escape easier in the event they are policed. Okay, but a woman walking alone in a park at night is more at risk for rape than for purse-snatching.
So why is a woman walking alone – ah, is that it? A woman unaccompanied by a man is unowned? Up for grabs? Literally?
[Hell Yeah, I’m a Feminist is a feminist blog, often radical feminist (radfem), always anti-gender and anti-sexism.]
So I was browsing the movie collection at my online DVD rental site and feeling so very tired and bored with movies by men, about men, for men.My request list had dwindled to almost zero, and I wasn’t finding anything I was interested in.So I decided to check out the “Alternative” section for at least an off-beat movie (by men, about men, for men) and WOH.There they were! The movies by women. About women. For women. Lots and lots of movies with women front and center. Strong, interesting women.
So I’m thinking, what a labeling mistake.Why don’t they just call the mainstream ‘male’ and the alternative/indie ‘female’.(Oh.Right.)
If you just do as you’re told, you don’t get promoted, you don’t get advanced up the ladder, because you’re not showing initiative.
Yeah right. Every time I showed some initiative, I got fired. Or at least reprimanded.
Then I realized that’s because there are different rules of advancement for men and women. Initiative in a woman is insubordination, especially if her boss is a man.
Then I realized later, much later, there are no rules of advancement for women: do X, don’t do X; do X, do Y — doesn’t matter, either way you’re not advanced.
Quite apart from the likelihood that the positions you get aren’t even on a ladder of advancement.
‘You can’t get there from here’ comes to mind.
[Hell Yeah, I’m a Feminist is a feminist blog, often radical feminist (radfem), always anti-gender and anti-sexism.]
The fact that ‘you’ claim porn doesn’t harm women is proof that it does. Because such a claim indicates that you are so accustomed to seeing women sexually subordinated you think there’s nothing wrong with it. Such a claim proves that that porn has skewed your perceptions so much you actually believe the women are enjoying, asking for, whatever it is you see. (They’re pretending, asshole. They’re acting. According to some guy’s fantasy script. And they’re doing so because they’re getting paid.)
Such a claim also proves you haven’t read the research: for example, compared to those who did not watch porn, men who watched porn were more likely to have aggressive and hostile sexual fantasies, more likely to say that women enjoy forced sex, less likely to be bothered by rape and slashing, and more likely to consider women subordinate and submissive.
The research also indicates that males are starting to watch porn as young as eleven these days.
Wilmut’s team named the sheep cloned from a single adult cell “Dolly” because that cell had come from a mammary gland.I’m tempted, on that basis alone, to cast my vote against human cloning.I mean, if that kind of short-sightedness or immaturity is going to be running things, they’re bound to go horribly wrong.
Did they really not foresee that “Dolly” would become headline news?Or did they not even recognize how juvenile they were being?Mammaries = women = mammaries.We are not seen as people, or perhaps colleagues, certainly never as bosses.Really, need I go on?This is all so old.And yet, grown men, brilliant men, on the cutting edge of science, who become headline news, are apparently still forcing farts at the dinner table and snickering about it.
So, cloning?I don’t think so.Not until the other half of the species grows up.
(Then again, since cloning means we finally don’t need them at all, not even to maintain the species, let’s go for it.)(Could it be they never thought of that either – that cloning makes males totally redundant?)
[Hell Yeah, I’m a Feminist is a feminist blog, often radical feminist (radfem), always anti-gender and anti-sexism.]
Fresh from the office of my supervisor who persists in gently giving me unsolicited advice, despite being neither older nor wiser, I’m struck by Rousseau’s tone (in his “Marriage”): “Extreme in all things, they [women] devote themselves to their play with greater zeal than boys. This is the second defect. This zeal must be kept within bounds. It is the cause of several vices peculiar to women, among others the capricious changing of their tastes from day to day. Do not deprive them of mirth, laughter, noise and romping games, but prevent them tiring of one game and turning to another. They must get used to being stopped in the middle of their play and put to other tasks without protest on their part.” I have as much trouble imagining the absolute certainty, the arrogance, required to initiate, let alone sustain, such pontification as I do imagining myself putting an arm around the shoulder of the guy who works in Accounting, and telling him what he should be doing with his life. Even if I were his supervisor. I simply could not go on and on like that, not even to students, nor even to children. Not even at forty.
At least not without the qualifier ‘I think…’, that recognition of subjectivity – the absence of which is the presumption of objectivity, of omniscience. Can you spell ‘ego’? I recall one of my philosophy professors stroking out every single ‘I think’ in my paper, calling it wordy, but no doubt judging me to be lacking in confidence or certainty to ‘hedge’ so much. But his corrections left me with lies – with presentations of opinion as fact.
And I now recognize that omission as the quintessential male lie; it’s how we come to consider them as authorities, on everything. Refusing to accept one’s ideas as personal means refusing to accept the possibility that they’re incorrect or insignificant. (Particular shame on epistemologists for this. I now understand that, compared to my philosophy professor, I was subscribing to the more mature epistemology – by not arrogantly equating or ignorantly assuming that my (subjective) thoughts and perceptions were the (objective) thoughts and perceptions.)
Or maybe the absence of the ‘I’ is simply the denial of, the failure to take, responsibility. Compare “Your postal code is indecipherable” to “I can’t read your postal code”: the first, without the ‘I’, doesn’t even consider the possibility that the fault may rest with the reader.
Perhaps there’s yet another explanation. Owen Flanagan notes that “Insofar as reflection requires that we be thinking about thought, then an ‘I think that’ thought accompanies all experience” – but he goes on to qualify that, saying, “There is no warrant for the claim that we are thinking about our complex narrative self. We are not that self-conscious” (Consciousness Reconsidered 194). Well. He may not be. But I am. And I dare say men in general may not be that reflective, but women are. (Actually, I suspect some men are that aware – and they omit the ‘I think’ quite intentionally because of the effect.)
[Hell Yeah, I’m a Feminist is a feminist blog, often radical feminist (radfem), always anti-gender and anti-sexism.]
Snowmobilers are often presented as enjoying the natural beauty of the North. Oh please. Not at the speeds they drive. Not while their exhaust pipes spew fumes into our air. And their engines roar at a volume that must be endured by everyone within five miles. And their tossed beer cans litter the forest until someone comes by and picks up after them.
What snowmobiling is all about adolescent males going VROOM VROOM.
Which means that our government has handed over thousands of miles of crown land to a bunch of young men to use as their personal racetrack. How fair is that? And did they ask us first?
When a friend of mine contacted the MNR to ask about putting up signs at each end of a short trail through crown land that snowmobilers are using as a short cut to get to their trail and, in the process, making it dangerous (not to mention extremely unpleasant because of the fumes and the noise) for the rest of us to use (for walking and cross-country skiing), she was told No, they can’t put up signs prohibiting snowmobilers from using it because everyone has access to crown land. Right. Then why do the signs on the snowmobile club trails say ‘No Trespassing – You must have a permit to use this trail’?
Why has the government done this? Because they’re adolescent males themselves. Who still want to go VROOM VROOM.
And because local businesses asked them to, because they want to make money from the snowmobilers.
Snowmobilers are a minority. Local business owners are a minority. Why do they get to determine policy and practice? Policy and practice that affects other people?
When snowmobilers (and ATVers and dirtbikers – essentially, all motorized ‘recreational’ vehicles) use crown land the way they want, no one else can use it the way they want. Consider the trails, mentioned above, unsafe and unpleasant now for hikers and skiers. Consider the lake we all live on. In winter (and in summer too – jetskis, another motorized recreational vehicle), our properties may as well be backing on, well, a racetrack. (So much for sitting outside and – well, so much for sitting outside. Not to mention canoeing or kayaking.) Consider all the backroads we live on, the ones without sidewalks. It’s nice that we can hear a snowmobile coming from miles away so we have time to get off the road, but it’s not enough to get off to the side (assuming that’s not where we already are), because that’s where the snowmobiles drive. It’s not even enough to get off the road and up onto the snowbank, because they like to ride the banks. You have to climb up and over the snowbanks to be safe. In some countries, pedestrians have the right of way. In Canada, gas-guzzling, fume-spewing, noise-farting, male-driven snowmobiles do.
It’s Monday night basketball, an all-comers pick-up game, supposed to be fun and a good sweat. But week after week I steel myself against the anger, the frustration of not knowing how to correct the problem, and the despair of not being able to even begin to do just that. Eventually it happens: this time it’s Josh who yells at me to switch, to guard the new grade niner who’s just come onto the court to sub for the guy who’d been guarding Josh and Josh would guard the guy I’d been guarding.
I am distracted, as always, by the insult, the unwarranted assumption that I’m always the worst player there (even worse than the new grade niners) (although I’m thirty-five and played basketball throughout high school), and by the faulty logic that weak offensive players* are weak defensive players and should therefore guard other weak offensive players.
Nevertheless, I manage to focus on yet another problematic aspect of the shouted order: that it was an order, and it was given with the full expectation of compliance. How is it, I thus have occasion to wonder yet again, that a kid, a 17-year-old less than half my age, believes he can tell me what to do, believes he knows better than me? The answer is simple: he’s male. And I’m female. If I were a man over twice his age, he’d keep his thoughts to himself. And if he were a girl, he wouldn’t even have such thoughts.
When Chodorow wrote “Being and Doing”, a ground-breaking analysis of sexism in terms of passivity (of being, of women) and activity (of doing, of men), she got it right – but she also got it wrong. Josh is so easy in his authority over me simply because he’s male, simply because he is male. He hasn’t had to do anything to gain that authority, or the respect I feel myself giving him just before I catch myself acting like Pavlov’s dog. The confidence, the assurance, the arrogance that he must have to even think he can just tell me what to do – he has it just because he’s male. And he probably started developing it as soon as he realized he was indeed male: I’ve heard 5-year-old boys speak with the same kind of authority.
Women, on the other hand, have to do – we have to earn respect, we don’t just get it automatically. And I’m not sure we ever achieve any authority, no matter what we do.
And of course it’s not just respect and authority men feel entitled to just because they’re men: they also feel entitled to money (pay, and higher pay) and power (supervisory positions). In short, they feel entitled to dominance, just because of who, of what, they are (not because of what they do).
* I concede on this point, especially when I’m playing with people who are taller than me, who play with a slightly larger ball than I learned to play with, and who, most importantly, recognize only a hotshotting inside kind of game.
"We License Plumbers and Pilots - Why Not Parents?"At Issue: Is Parenthood a Right or a Privilege? ed. Stefan Kiesbye (Greenhaven, 2009); Current Controversies: Child Abuse, ed. Lucinda Almond (Thomson/Gale, 2006); Seattle Post-Intelligencer (October 2004)
"A Humanist View of Animal Rights"New Humanist September 99; The New Zealand Rationalist and Humanist Winter 98; Humanist in Canada Winter 97
have been previously published in Canadian Woman Studies, Herizons, Humanist in Canada, The Humanist, and The Philosopher's Magazine - contact Peg for acknowledgement details.
ImpactAn extended confrontation between a sexual assault victim and her assailants, as part of an imagined slightly revised court process, in order to understand why they did what they did and, on that basis, to make a recommendation to the court regarding sentence does not go … as expected.
What Happened to TomTom, like many men, assumes that since pregnancy is a natural part of being a woman, it’s no big deal: a woman finds herself pregnant, she does or does not go through with it, end of story. But then …
Aiding the EnemyWhen Private Ann Jones faces execution for “aiding the enemy,” she points to American weapons manufacturers who sell to whatever country is in the market.
Bang BangWhen a young boy playing “Cops and Robbers” jumps out at a man passing by, the man shoots him, thinking the boy’s toy gun is real. Who’s to blame?
ForeseeableAn awful choice in a time of war. Whose choice was it really?
Exile (full-length drama) Finalist, WriteMovies; Quarterfinalist, Fade-In.
LJ lives in a U . S. of A., with a new Three Strikes Law: first crime, rehab; second crime, prison; third crime, you’re simply kicked out – permanently exiled to a designated remote area, to fend for yourself without the benefits of society. At least he used to live in that new U. S. of A. He’s just committed his third crime.
What Happened to Tom (full-length drama) Semifinalist, Moondance.
This guy wakes up to find his body’s been hijacked and turned into a human kidney dialysis machine – for nine months.
Aiding the Enemy (short drama 15min)
When Private Ann Jones faces execution for “aiding the enemy,” she points to American weapons manufacturers who sell to whatever country is in the market.
Bang Bang (short drama 30min) Finalist, Gimme Credit; Quarter-finalist, American Gem.
When a young boy playing “Cops and Robbers” jumps out at a man passing by, the man shoots him, thinking the boy’s toy gun is real. Who’s to blame?
Foreseeable (short drama 30min)
An awful choice in a time of war. Whose choice was it really?
What is Wrong with this Picture?
Nothing. There’s no reason women can’t be the superordinates and men the subordinates. But life’s not like that (yet).
Minding Our Own Business A collection of skits (including “The Price is Not Quite Right,” “Singin’ in the (Acid) Rain,” “Adverse Reactions,” “The Band-Aid Solution,” and “See Jane. See Dick.”) with a not-so-subtle environmental message
Rot in Hell A soapbox zealot and an atheist face off…
