Take a look: “Police in England and Wales consider making misogyny a hate crime”
It’s about time! Let’s see this WORLD-WIDE!!!
Sep 08 2016
To My Philosophy Professors – by chris wind
Another poem from chris wind – thought this one especially apt since it’s September and students are back at university…it’s from her book dreaming of kaleidoscopes
To My Philosophy Professors
Why didn’t you tell me?
When I was all set to achieve Eudamonia
through the exercise of Right Reason,
When I was eager to fulfil my part
of the Social Contract,
When I was willing, as my moral duty,
to abide by the Categorical Imperative
When I was focussed on Becoming,
through Thesis and Antithesis to Synthesis–
Why didn’t you correct me?
Tell me that Aristotle didn’t think I had any reason,
That according to Rousseau,
I couldn’t be party to the contract,
That Kierkegaard believes I have no sense of duty
because I live by feeling alone,
That Hegel says I should spend my life
in self-sacrifice, not self-development,
That Nietzsche thinks I’m good for pregnancy
and that’s about it–
Why didn’t you tell me I wasn’t included?
(Perhaps because you too had excluded me
from serious consideration;
Or did you think I wouldn’t understand?)
(I do. I do understand.)
1987
Aug 28 2016
Boy Books
Boy books. You’re thinking The Boys’ Book of Trains and The Hardy Boys, right? I’m thinking most of the books I took in high school English.
Consider Knowles’ A Separate Peace. Separate indeed. It’s set at a boys’ boarding school. The boys are obsessed with jumping out of a tree. This involves considerable risk of crippling injury. And yet they do it, for no other reason than ‘to prove themselves’. Now my question is ‘What are they proving themselves to be – other than complete idiots?’ We don’t get it.
They are also obsessed with going off to war. While this again involves risk of injury, it could, at least, be done for some lofty and heroic reason. But the reasons for the war are not once discussed. So it seems to be just another peer pressured ego thing: ‘My dick’s as big as yours.’ Again, we don’t get it.
Consider also Golding’s Lord of the Flies and Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. In all three, a major theme is the loss of innocence – not through the discovery of evil in the world, but through the discovery of evil within. The boys discover their heart of darkness, their capacity for cruelty. Well, we can’t identify with that – after all, we didn’t spend our childhoods tearing the legs off harmless flies and putting fish hooks through live frogs.
We especially can’t identify with the feelings of pride, which lie just beneath the pretensions of horror, that accompany this discovery. For make no mistake, in forests and on farms, and on foreign battlefields, killing is still the rite of passage, the test of maturity, for boys to real men. Hands up, does anyone else see this as sick?
Let’s go back to Lord of the Flies for a minute. Again, all boys. Plane-crashed on an island, their task is simple: co-exist. They must figure out how to live with each other. They can’t do this. Instead, they figure out how to kill each other.
Would girls have done any better? Well, yes, I think they would have. Would they have splintered into rival groups? Probably. Would they have picked on the fat ugly girl? Sigh. Probably. But they would not have killed the pig, especially like that, laughing about its squeals of pain. (Especially not with all that fruit around.) And the little ‘uns would’ve had lots of mommies to look after them. And at the end, they would not have been discovered smeared with blood and war paint. Instead, they probably would have been found on the beach singing and doing the Macarena. (And the really horrible thing is that many men reading this won’t see that as unquestionably better.)
So don’t tell me these novels are universal. They’re not. They’re boy books. By boys about boys. And I’m a girl. Was a girl. I can’t tell you the effect Lord of the Flies had on me. First of all, I had to change sex to even be a part of the world. Read that sentence again. Then I saw myself as seven parts Simon, two parts Ralph, and one part Piggy. And I saw my options: insanity or death. Quite the education.
But even when the theme is universal, we get boy books. Consider Richler’s The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz. Duddy wants to buy some land. As a person, I can identify with that. Unlike much of the previously-mentioned novels, this is not a boy thing. But still, Duddy is a boy. Very much a boy. So there’s not much else I can identify with.
However, also unlike the previously-mentioned novels, this one has a few female characters in it. Actually, so does A Separate Peace: one is Leper’s mother and she is just that – Leper’s mother; the other is Hazel Brewster – the ‘town belle’, a mere object to be observed and perhaps used by the boys. Yvette, in Duddy Kravitz, is seen, by both Richler and Duddy, as either sexual or secretarial. Am I supposed to identify with that?
Consider Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451. Now I can really identify with saving books, with perpetuating the intellectual heritage of civilization. But the five men Montag meets at the end who are doing just that are just that – five men. So are the thousands of others: “Each man had a book he wanted to remember…” Where am I? What was I supposed to be wanting? (Another television wall – recall Mildred, Montag’s wife.)
I’m so thankful for Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. For Scout. She’s one of the two main kid characters. She’s a girl. A spunky girl. A girl who runs, and thinks, and feels. There I am!
(But, alas, she doesn’t have a mom. She has a father and a brother; if she had a mom, if there were an adult woman like her, like her dad, that would even it up a bit – Scout wouldn’t be the female minority in her world. But that would be too much, I guess. Equal representation is going too far.)
And I’m thankful for Laurence’s The Stone Angel. It’s about a woman. An old woman. A feisty, sarcastic old woman who embraces her inner bitch. I wanna be Hagar when I grow old.
But what do I want to be when I grow up? There’s this huge void between Scout and Hagar. Why? What the hell happens to girls when they turn thirteen? I’m an adolescent, was an adolescent, presumably discovering and creating my identity. If I stay within the boundaries of the familiar, the apparently possible, I – Where are the girl books? Where are the books set at girls’ boarding schools? Where are the books about ‘girls only’ islands?
And what would happen if boys read them – what would happen if adolescent boys experienced Gilman’s Herland and Tepper’s The Gate to Woman’s Country instead of Golding’s Lord of the Flies? (and Fitzhugh’s Harriet the Spy, and Newman’s A Share of the World and McCarthy’s The Group and…)
Maybe, eventually, instead of boys and girls, we could have kids, and then people; kids, and people, would read kids’ books, and people’s books.
[Hell Yeah, I’m a Feminist is a feminist blog, often radical feminist (radfem), always anti-gender and anti-sexism.]
Aug 27 2016
AI Indeed
So I first heard of the movie Ex Machina when I read a review (by Chris DiCarlo) in Humanist Perspectives—and was so disgusted that I wrote a letter to the editor. Why? Because the reviewer had revealed his own misogyny by failing to address the elephant in the room: the fact that the body the guy created for his AI was that of a female, a sexy female, a young female, is what—mere coincidence? The picture they’d chosen to accompany the review (no doubt, the one chosen to promote the movie) showed her bound. In fishnet.* Her pose was right out of a BDSM scene. Not worth mention? As I said in my letter,
That you failed to remark on any of this disturbingly telling. It indicates just how much men have come to expect to see women as young and sexy. Apparently it’s the norm, it’s normal, to pornify women, to present their bodies as sexually available.
Well, fuck you.
(Have you heard of sexism? Feminism? Check it out, why don’t you.)
The letter was not published. The editor wrote back and said,
I don’t know if this changes anything, but Chris had nothing to do with the selection of photos for the review. That was done by a woman who helps me with the onerous task of laying out the magazine.
—a comment that opens up a whole ‘nother area worth investigation. How is it that people think that if a woman does X, it must be okay? This notion informs the currently popular misconception of feminism as indiscriminate female solidarity. (As a commenter said recently in response to one of my posts on BlogHer, implying that I was not a feminist, “My feminist sisters support all woman in whatever choices they make…” At the very least, that stance would be rife with internal contradictions.)
But onwards. Does it change anything? No. As long as the image is from the movie, then the movie is evidence of the normalized pornification of women, and DiCarlo still ignores that elephant in the room.
If the AI had been black-skinned and called ‘boy’ and given menial tasks and whipped, I suspect it would have been noticed. I suspect DiCarlo would have made at least passing mention to the implied racism.
But—and I’ve just watched the movie. Not only is “Ava” sexy woman-child (there’s even a ‘play dress up’ scene), the guy has a hall full of closets of similar AIs. He’s not making AIs. He’s making fucktoys. He actually tells his (male) guest that they have fully functioning holes. We see him using said holes for his apparent pleasure. The guest realizes that the guy has created Ava to match his porn file. (What the hell is a porn file? Oh.)
All very unremarkable, apparently.
There was one promising line—the guy insists that consciousness is gendered. But the claim isn’t really challenged. And it becomes clear that he has come to that conclusion because his ‘source material’ (his ‘blue book’) for Ava comes from a net cast wide upon the world-as-is. That is, he’s just grabbed all the sexist sociocultural conditioning in the world and built something from it. No wonder, Ava.
Ex Machina is just another movie that objectifies women. It just pretends to be about AI, but it’s not even a little bit past Asimov’s I, Robot.
Is it redeemed by the fact that Ava escapes, after killing the guy (and leaving the guest imprisoned, facing the same outcome)? Not really. Because she does so by sexual manipulation (“I want to be with you,” she tells the guest in her soft, little-girl voice. “Do you want to be with me?”). (“Yes,” I imagine the guest replying. “I’d like the girlfriend experience, please.”) That’s apparently what the script writer and director believe intelligence is, at least when female-bodied.
And she escapes into the forest wearing high heels—fuck-me heels. Though, okay, that’s probably all that was available to her, and we do see that she takes them off. But she doesn’t throw them away. Once in the real world, does she choose instead Doc Martens, loose pants with pockets, a comfortable sweatshirt, and a jacket? No. She remains sexualized. Artificial intelligence indeed.
*Right, okay, it was actually metal mesh, I get that. And the similarity to fishnet is also mere coincidence? (If you think so, you are too naïve for words. Certainly too naïve to be writing movie reviews.)
(You know we’re laughing at you, right? [When we’re not screaming at you.] You who investigate artifical intelligence but are too stupid to recognize your own immaturity, you who have conferences on “The Future of Humanity” with all-male panels, you who publish special issues called “Speaking of Humanism” featuring nothing but male faces…)
Aug 18 2016
What if it were convention …
What if it were convention for men at the workplace to wear their shirts with the sleeves rolled up and the top few buttons undone, and to wear make-up that accentuated their jaw and cheek lines?
Would they start obsessing about the muscularity of their forearms? Would they get chest hair implants? Would they consider facial reconstruction surgery?
And would women ever take them seriously?
Aug 18 2016
Blood & Oil
[since I’m at it — posting about tv that happened oh, a year ago…see June 1 post]
About a year ago, the weather reports became dramatic. Forecasters started talking about “extreme weather events” with voices and gestures that rivalled sports game commentary, making droughts, wildfires, floods, tornados, and high temperatures all so—exciting. My god, I realized one day with horror, they’re making the evidence of our imminent death into entertainment.
There was no mention of short-term, let alone long-term, implications for things like, oh, food and water… There was no mention of why our weather is changing. No mention of who’s to blame. (The oil industry for providing the supply, and not telling people about the consequences of use. The media for agreeing to censorship on that point [whenever any public interest group tries to put out an advertisement informing us, the media refuses to sell them airtime]. And most Americans and Canadians for allowing their worldview to be formed by forementioned censored media.)
I imagined the world actually ending as people continued mainlining television, utterly oblivious. And that was bad enough.
Then I saw the trailers for the new tv series, Blood & Oil. Oh my god.
They’re making oil sexy. They’ve got Don Johnson, they’ve got two bare-backed supermodel female bodies, they’ve got a phallic fire-gushing oil rig. They’re making it exciting (at least to the male brain), what with the sex, the fire, and the blood.
Why? Why have the oil companies commissioned a tv series that makes oil sexy and exciting?
Do they think too many of us are limiting our fossil fuel use? Carpooling? Reducing air travel? Turning down the heat during these colder winters? Not turning on the air conditioning during these hotter summers? (Like residential resource use comes anywhere close to the unbridled industrial use…) (Just for example, it takes 4.3 barrels of water to produce one barrel of oil from tar sands mining, and once the water’s used, it’s radioactive, toxic, pretty much useless.)
This is decade zero. We’re halfway through. Decade zero. And we’ve already pretty much eliminated the possibility of staying under two degrees. Given what we’ve already done, we’re certain to reach 1.5 degrees. Certain. Cause and effect. It’s a done deal. (To stay under two degrees, we need to limit our carbon dioxide concentration to 450ppm. We hit 400 ppm in 2013. And we’re adding 2-3 ppm every year. Do the math.)
So what’s the point, now, of encouraging us to maintain, even to increase our use of fossil fuels?
Are they trying to distract us, play a little pretty music on our way to the gas chambers? (No, that’s the least plausible explanation. They clearly don’t care about us. And there is no need for oil in that pretty little music.)
Do they really not know they’ve already guaranteed the end of the world as we know it? (According to Naomi Klein’s research, if we don’t get our emissions under control by 2017, “our fossil fuel economy will ‘lock-in’ extremely dangerous warming” [This Changes Everything, p.23].) (And “under control” means leaving 80% of the claimed oil where it is. Underground.)
Are they trying to hasten our death? Move the predicted date of extinction from 2100 (we’ll be at five degrees by then) to 2050? (Watch the insurance companies. Watch what riders, exclusions, they start attaching to our policies. Refusing to insure for damages and injuries resulting from nuclear accidents will be the least of it.)
Are they trying to rush the return on their investment so they can buy one more company before we all die? Guarantee their ticket to ride on the shuttle to the new world—on Mars?
Have they forgotten that the free trade agreements they paid our governments to sign guarantee that their profits trump the planet? (Never mind that the $775 billion in subsidies that they’ve received from taxpayers make their profits ours.)
Or are they trying to minimize the likelihood that someone, someone, will eventually go all vigilante for justice and target them with a semi-automatic.
Or did Hollywood come up with the idea all on its own? Could they really not know what they’re doing? (Just like they don’t know they have single-handedly desensitized millions of people to violence, to harm, injury, pain, death.) (Ah.)
Given the facts, Blood & Oil is the equivalent of making heroin or the plague exciting. And making vomit and pus sexy.
Jul 25 2016
Men, Women, and Fairness
Men, Women, and Fairness
It’s not that men aren’t fair. It’s that they don’t even think about fairness. When Linda Babcock and Sara Laschever (Women Don’t Ask) asked people whether they deserved what they wanted, women typically responded with something like “…my training—what is really engrained in me—is that you’re never quite deserving of what you might want” (58).
Men, however, said things like “Um, sure, I deserve the things I want—yeah” (58) (he obviously hasn’t really thought about it) and “Interesting question! … The sense that I deserve something is not a sense that I carry with me, generally. Do I deserve this, or deserve that?” (59)
The authors summarized, “Where women are often preoccupied with ascertaining what exactly they deserve, it doesn’t really cross Mike’s mind to consider whether he deserves something or not—this approach isn’t relevant to his thinking” (59).
Which explains this: “Because Linda hadn’t asked to be promoted, the dean never even thought of her—she was off his radar” (64).
So, it’s not that men aren’t fair to women. It’s that they really just don’t think about it.
*
“It turned out that only 7 percent of the female students had negotiated [for a higher initial salary] but 57 percent (eight times as many) of the men had asked for more money” (2). Why? I suggest it’s because men think their wants are needs; it’s because men think what they want is important; it’s because men think they’re entitled to get what they want; it’s because men think they’ll get what they ask for (and they’re right), and women don’t (and they’re right).
*
“…modern Western culture—strongly discourages women from asking for what they want” (14). So true. women are taught to be generous and to give (not to get). Women are taught to defer to people.
“‘…as a man I have been raised with this sense of entitlement, that I should get what I want. And I almost think that societally women are conditioned that you don’t always get what you want’” (74).
*
“‘We don’t accept from women what we do from men’” says Roberta Nutt, former chair of the Psychology of Women Division of the APA (94). Yes, yes, there you go!
“You might think that women also need to be assertive to negotiate successfully—able to present strong arguments, defend their interests and positions … Unfortunately, research has revealed that assertive women are less well liked … This means that an assertive woman, no matter how well she presents her arguments in a negotiation, risks decreasing her likeability and therefore her ability to influence the other side to agree with her point of view” (96). Proof!
*
Regarding an instance in which a man asked for more money out of a discretionary fund and the woman didn’t, she says, ‘This fund—I never knew of its existence … It had never been publicized … There is no application procedure…’ (20). How is it the man knew about it and the woman didn’t?
*
“‘…his father had taken them [the boys] out and … taught them how to tip—basically, taught them how to slip the maitre d’ money for good tables or give some money to the guys who were in the band to play a good song… how to circumvent the system’ to get what [they] wanted” (34). Yeah, my father didn’t teach me that shit.
Jul 14 2016
Portia – by chris wind
Remember The Merchant of Venice? This is “Portia”, from Soliloquies: The Lady Doth Indeed Protest by chris wind, another one of my favourite authors. (posted with permission)
If I’m the one with the property
You’d think I’d be the buyer
Not the bought;
A lot of faith my father has in me:
He distrusts my ability to judge, to discriminate—
A decision made by chance,
A decision inevitably and ultimately irrational,
Is preferable to a decision made by me.
But no, you say,
The decision was not to be by chance
But choice, and thus reveal the suitor’s character—
That is, he who chose lead would be wise,
To forsake appearance, and realize its irrelevance;
True, but you forget the inscription:
To choose lead, to choose ‘to give and hazard all’
Is to my mind not wise,
For its foolish risk (all!);
Is it not better to choose silver,
And ‘get what one deserves’?
It seems to me a mature perspective;
So, to judge by appearance
(And thus forsake appearance)
Or to judge by words
—That is the choice.
Words have meaning,
And unless the words be false or deceiving,
Is it not better to judge according to content,
Than to judge according to form
To substance, rather than pretence?
So if it was to be a test of character,
’twas thus a poor test,
For who was to guess what my father intended:
The form did contradict the content;
And so choice becomes chance, after all.
That I am not allowed to choose
Is in principle, intolerable,
But in practice, just as well—
For there is really not a one worth choosing:
A prince who boasts of his precious Porsche
And can fix it himself;
The County Palatine, who believes
A real man never smiles;
Falconbridge, a pin-up boy
With a mind as two-dimensional;
A Scottish Lord interested in nothing
But a good fight;
An alcoholic (the duke’s nephew, yes);
The Prince of Morocco, a blood-thirsty Rambo;
And Bassanio, attracted by wealth and beauty,
Willing in a moment to sacrifice his wife for his friend.
There is not one.
If I so despise men,
Why did I disguise as one?
’twas not my choice:
Shakespeare (a man) created my costume
(And that of Viola and Rosalind),
And in his cowardice, he refused to challenge the reality
That to be able to interact
Without having to defend against
Sexual or romantic intentions,
One must be male;
That to be taken seriously,
And to be exempt from compliments that essentially trivialize
One must be male;
That to be effective at an endeavour
Of the intellectual arts,
One must be male;
That to be dominant, influential, powerful,
One must be male
In patterns of appearance, behaviour, speech, and thought
—Patterns of thought?
But didn’t I put forward
The feminine concept of mercy over justice?
Didn’t care and compassion win over fairness?
No, look again:
The Duke first pleaded for mercy, not I;
My case was won on a technicality,
On the letter of the law.
(Though it is worth mention
That recourse to such a legal loophole
Was my last resort.)
The masculist mode won out;
But this is not surprising in a masculist court.
Where there is no challenge,
There can be no change.
For when the disguise is finally revealed
It is not recognized
That to be what I was (what I am)
One can be female—
It is recognized only that I am female.
And their response concerns only themselves—
Relief, that they won’t be cuckolds.
Jul 14 2016
“The Adult Market”
What’s adult about humiliating another person?
What’s adult about hurting another person?
What’s adult about forcing someone to do something she doesn’t really want to do?
What’s adult about doing sexual things to children?
We should call it what it is. The psychopathic sociopathic misogynist market. The sick fucks market.
(I’d intended to be more specific, but I’m concerned that the psychopathic sociopathic misogynist dudes would like that. Plus, merely describing these things repulses me.)
Jun 28 2016
How many times?
Men are incredibly selfish and irresponsible. Every time they have sexual intercourse without a condom, they prove it.
Because every time they have sex without a condom, they risk making someone else’s life a living hell for twenty years (that’s what it’s like to be a parent against one’s will). All for ten minutes of their own pleasure/relief/whatever.
And every time they have sex without a condom, they risk creating a new human being. That will require food and water, and a computer and a car, and so on and so on. (All for ten minutes of their own pleasure/relief/whatever.)
How many times does a man have sex without a condom?
I rest my case.
fiction
