alexandraerin | Entries tagged with feminism

Imagine you're the proud of parent of a baby boy. He's been washed and weighed and tagged and checked for emissions standards compliance and everything else that they do with new babies and everything's going great, but then your doctor comes into the room with a heavy note of concern in his eyes.

"I don't mean to alarm you," he says, "but your son has a slight... abnormality."

Your heart lurches downward. Your stomach lurches upward. Abnormality? That sounds serious... that sounds dangerous.

"It concerns his genitalia," the doctor continues, and you know you should feel relieved... it's not his heart, it's not his lungs, it's not his immune system or his brain or anything that's likely to be debilitating or worse. You're glad it's not... whatever the problem is, you're sure you wouldn't trade it for any of those, but still... your son has abnormal genitals?

It gives you pause, to say the least.

"Please, Doctor... just tell us what's wrong," you say.

"Oh, nothing's wrong, per se," the doctor says. "It's just... well, his penis is slightly larger than we like to see. As you can imagine, a boy's penis is very important to his psychosexual development, his self-image. Any... irregularity... in that area can have serious repercussions later in life. It can affect behavior, self-esteem... there's even some correlation between an outsized penis and certain sexual lifestyles. I know you'll love your son no matter what, but as a loving parent, wouldn't you want him to have as normal a developmental experience as possible?"

"Of course!" you say. "But what can be done?"

"There is a surgical technique... a relatively minor surgery, if we do it while he's still young... where we cut away a portion of the penile shaft, and then reattach the tip to what remains. It's very safe, believe me. He won't remember a thing."

"But... won't that impair his... function?"

"Oh, no," the doctor says. "It's the glans, the head, that's the important bit, and we preserve that. There's no loss of nerve function."

"How can you be sure?"

"He'll tell us that himself," the doctor says. "We'll schedule annual follow-up exams, during which I'll manipulate your son's penis and pelvic area in a variety of ways with a vibratory tool and ask him to rate how it feels. This way we can be sure his sexual development is perfectly normal."

"Wonderful!" you say. "When can this surgery take place?"

...

Can you imagine yourself having that conversation?

Can you imagine any parent?

Would you believe me if I told you that such a surgical procedure (and its follow ups) exists in the United States and is actually practiced on little boys whose parents are so desperate for them to have "normal" genitals that they allow a doctor to mutilate them and then masturbate them at repeated intervals?

Of course you wouldn't. Because it's not true. It would be a ridiculous, unimaginable, and completely inconceivable thing to do a child.

As long as we're talking about boys, that is.

(And of course, if the "abnormality" is something other than "unusually large penis", then surgical intervention in an infant of any sex's crotch becomes much more conceivable for many doctors and parents.)

I got everything on my list yesterday done except for Tribe, because I saved that for last and underestimated how much relaxation and enjoyment I'd get in a single day. So it became my first priority this morning, and will be so again tomorrow. Most of Tribe to date was written as the last thing I did before going to bed at night, but that only works when I'm leading a very boring life.

Something to file in the overstuffed drawer labeled "lessons I keep learning and forgetting": blogging/journaling helps me write. Any time I'm bottling up feelings and biting back words, writing becomes orders of magnitude harder. Having a blog post in me and not letting it out because I feel guilty for doing one kind of writing before I've done the other sort just leads to less writing, period.

Anyway, as I've mentioned a few times, I'm in Florida with my parents. Unlike most of my trips that are kind of busy-busy-busy (including my last trip to Florida with them), this one is very relaxing and low-key. I think my folks felt I needed a bit of a getaway. So while I had originally planned on doing at least a meet-and-greet while I'm here, I think I'm going to make this trip into "me time" and catch up on the 2.5 Rs: Reading, wRiting (that's the .5) and Relaxing. My trips never end up being very relaxing or very productive, and among the reasons for that are the fact that I've always got a lot of things planned and that I never have very much alone time during them. So the next few weeks are going to be a "recharge" period, where I just do what I love in a beautiful place and don't stress out over things.

Florida folks, don't despair... I will be back here, and the next time I am I'll get something lined up for you all before I arrive.

I said in a blog post that Elena Kagan's nomination to the Supreme Court would prompt some people to talk about how many women have been nominated in recent times (that is, contend that too many women are being nominated)... but of course, the Institutional Isms don't need to be quite so bald-faced as that to get their work done. There is at least one blog post out there talking about the impact of a "motherless" Supreme Court. The blogger is quick to point out that he doesn't think Kagan should be disqualified for not having children, he just wants us to think about what it means when none of the women on the court are mothers.

Now, again, there are two women on the court now. One of them, Ruth Bader Ginsberg, does have children, but his scenario is that Kagan is confirmed and Ginsberg retires in the next couple of years (not unlikely), leaving us again with only two women on the court again. With two women sitting on a nine-member body, he wants us to consider their parental status. Is that honestly meaningful? It's not as though there is a huge trend of women who aren't mothers being appointed. Two out of four. Given the stigma against women who choose not to have children, I doubt there's going to be such a trend. Couple that stigma with the stigma against women with children who choose to have a demanding, high-powered career and we begin to see why only two of the ten justices who have been seated behind the bench since Sandra Day O'Connor supposedly shattered the glass ceiling have been women.

This issue of how many of two (out of nine, again) woman justices are mothers is a smokescreen. Even if the person raising it is sincerely and passionately interested in it, all he's doing is raising a big noxious cloud that will impede women like Elena Kagan and give cover to the people who would rather not see a woman seated at all.

This is the evil twin of the "eveyrthing women choose to do is empowering" meme... anything a woman does can and will be used against her in the court of life. Everything is fodder for public discussion and dissection. The "double standard" that afflicts women isn't one standard for men and another for women, it's two standards for women, so no matter which measurement one strives to live up to, one still gets hammered for failing the other.

(See: stay-at-home versus get-a-job, loose-slut-who-sleeps-around versus frigid-bitch-who-won't-sleep-with-me, and any other reductive dichotomy to which women are subjected.)

Three women have sat on the Supreme Court in its entire history. Two of them are serving on the nine-person body right now. Another one is about to be nominated. Anybody want to start the countdown until people start complaining about "affirmative action" because of two women being nominated/appointed (hopefully) in a row? You know it's going to happen... or rather, is probably already happening.

Never mind that women make up roughly half the population, and never mind that our government is meant to be representative of We The People.

And of course, nobody blinks when two men are appointed to the same body in a row, or if a succession of men hold a top-level leadership position. That's not suspect. It's just... normal. Business as usual. A succession of men isn't even seen as a pattern. If a series of left-handed men, or red haired men, or men of any one particular non-white race/ethnicity were appointed to the Supreme Court one after another, it would be remarked on with varying degrees of seriousness.

"Man" is the unremarked and unremarkable assumed default... especially for leadership positions, but for humans in general. Iconographically speaking, we're expected to let a generic male figure stand in for humanity as a whole if needs be. An icon that is female is expected to stand for women.

But... I'm borrowing trouble. Grousing about complaints that I fully anticipate but haven't yet heard. That's never a good thing. Instead, I'll just congratulate Elana Kagan. I'll have to do some reading before I know if I'm in favor of her confirmation or not, but this was my first reaction and I had to get it off my chest.

Dear men,

Like you, I didn't have to deal with the same expectations, programming, pressure, and other suchlike baggage that cisgendered women deal with. This isn't to say that I got none of it, just that the circumstances of my birth and upbringing mean that I necessarily received less of it. We're all exposed to the same social forces, but they don't touch us all equally or push us in equal directions.

If you think of yourself as a liberal dude, as a modern man, as a feminist ally, as pro-woman, and you disapprove of the beauty standards pushed on women by mainstream society and reinforced by the media, by peer pressure, by the expectations of the workplace, and so on, this is a good thing, as far as it goes. But "as far as it goes" should not extend so far as disparaging random women you see who for whatever reasons have "given in" to those standards... and those reasons aren't likely to be apparent to you in the time it takes you to glance at them and judge them.

When you say things like "women who wear makeup are obviously masking low self-esteem" or "When I see women dressed like that, I assume they're vacuous and vapid" or otherwise make it clear that you feel comfortable dismissing the worth or intellect of a woman based on how much time and effort you perceive that she spends on keeping her appearance in line with the mainstream beauty standard, you are not being an ally of women. You might think you're sending the message that women should be free from the shackles of the media-driven beauty industry, but you're only one voice in a very complicated song, and the real message you're sending is that no matter what a woman does for herself, it is wrong and she will be judged for it.

The most radical feminist in the world who still lives and works interacting with society has to pick her battles in order to get anywhere in life. The most fiercely independent women still internalize aspects of patriarchy. You, cool dude who does what he wants and doesn't give a damn what society says, still conform to more superficial standards than you'd probably care to realize... you just don't have to worry about well-meaning "allies of men" coming along and judging you for them.

You can't know what any given woman would be risking or giving up if she decided to reject the mainstream standard in favor of conforming to yours. You don't know why she's doing it in the first place. Possibly you mean well, maybe you think you're doing her a favor, but what you're really saying is "If you're not brave enough and strong enough to take the scorn of the rest of society and all that comes with it, you can have some from someone who claims to respect you instead."

Sincerely,
Alexandra Erin.

( A note to commenters. )

Preamble:

It doesn't surprise me that there are people who are against BDSM.

I mean, it doesn't surprise me that there are people who aren't into it. Andrea Dworkin is supposed to have said that it's amazing that anybody isn't into it considering all the signals we get from society, but really, as somebody who's into BDSM, I'm consistently baffled by its existence, and that's without getting into specific kinks which may seem more or less outre compared to each other.

I could explain the ways in which certain things appeal to me, but to try to answer a greater why... why me, why these particular things, why not him or her, why not these other things... it both beggars and buggers the imagination.

So, allowing that there are people who aren't into BDSM, being opposed to a form of sexual expression that doesn't trip one's triggers is hardly outside the realm of human experience. And to people who don't enjoy BDSM, elements of it can trip a lot of other triggers. Triggers labeled "OW!" and "GROSS!" and "INAPPROPRIATE!"

All in all, I can't really say I'm shocked that there are people who are against BDSM. I'm not overjoyed, but I'm not shocked. There are things people oppose fervently on more obviously frivolous grounds, right?

Amble:

What does surprise me about some of the most vocal critics is how downright sadistic they are. I don't mean in the sexual sadomasochistic sense. I mean in the sense of being a bully... the essential bully, a typical schoolyard bully type bully.

I just got told by a woman who fancies herself a crusader for women's rights a little story about men trolling for what sound like abusive relationships on Craigslist, under the guise of BDSM. And I agreed with her that some of it sounded abusive and that I would not have anything to do with those men and I would caution anybody who was thinking of contacting them to try to clarify their intentions first, making sure they weren't already "in character". I don't know from Craigslist. Maybe it's the norm to initiate a scene in the first ad. But it sounded sketchy to me.

And her response? Rather than seizing on common ground to build an understanding, she came back with:

"But you people believe that if it's consensual it's okay. How can you say it's wrong when it's not against BDSM morality?"

Now the answer to that is that "BDSM morality" (or better, BDSM standards... my morality is my morality, and while it governs my sexual expressions they are not part of each other) require more than "WELL SHE SAID IT WAS OKAY." The prevailing community standard is safe, sane, and consensual. If the activity is safe and it is sane, then it can be consented to meaningfully. If it's not safe and it's not sane, consent means nothing.

But that's beside the point. Look at how she responded.

D'you ever see the episode of The Simpsons where Lisa becomes a vegetarian and the kids are taunting her and saying she loooooves vegetables and somebody (I think one of the twins) asks her if she wants to marry a carrot, and when they keep badgering her she grits her teeth and mutters, "Yes, I'm going to marry a carrot." and the other kids skip away singing that as a refrain as if they'd proven some great and telling point about the folly of vegetarianism?

That's what I pictured in my head when I read that. That and dumbass jerks at my high school, after I came out (identified as a gay male), asking me "SO IF YOU'RE GAY THAT MEANS YOU WANT TO SUCK MY DICK? BECAUSE GAY GUYS LOVE TO SUCK DICK AND I HAVE A DICK SO YOU WANT TO SUCK IT, RIGHT?"

Bully tactics.

That's what so much of the radfem posturing on BDSM (and other unapproved sexual practices) is. It's a high school mentality. They're not reaching out to anybody outside their circle. They're not engaging anybody. They're not changing minds. They're saying outrageous and provocative shit about the uncool kid nobody's going to stand up for and they're slapping each other high-five.

And yes, we are that kid. Part of the justification for the non-consensual abuse that gets dumped on us is that we're supposedly part of the system, mainsteam, uber-Patriarchy... but BDSM characters in pop culture are stock: stock punchline for a comedy, stock victim for a drama, stock villain for an action piece.

We're in the same box as all the non-Patriarchy approved sexual variations. No, we aren't oppressed in equal measure, but we are lumped. Social liberals often say "c'est la vie", social conservatives lump us in with Teh Gay, nobody really wants to deal with us, and being "outted" can be a source of embarrassment and the ruination of family and career.

BDSM doesn't fit the standard model, at all. Feminist theory acknowledges that society does train girls to be sexually available, to submit to sex, but this is not the same thing as submitting in sex, much less to a partner of one's fully conscious choosing. In the heteronormative model, women are consenting to heteronormative sex, which is not BDSM, not even male-dominating-female flavors of it.

This is the reality that radfems ignore in order to feel guilt free, in order to feel like they're making a bold stance instead of joining in with the rest of the mob.

Post Amble Bran (With Two Scoops Of Amble In Every Box):

Earnest feminist opposition to BDSM is one of the things I've let consume me as a person, because I'm not the sort of person to experience a desire blindly without picking it apart, because I've had a hard time reconciling some of the things that excite me in fantasy with my beliefs as a feminist in reality, and because unlike most women I was socialized as a male and I have the ability with minor variations in my presentation to go out and be accepted as male or female... I'm aware of how my experiences differ from the typical woman's and I worry over whether I'm "qualified" to judge where the line is between harmless fantasy and destructive misogyny.

It's the sort of thing that can eat at me just fine without any outside help, in short.

And when I see somebody who identifies as a feminist, and/or as a progressive, I don't expect them to try to erase my identity. I don't expect them to practice slut-shaming, to divide the world into Good Women With Good Desires and Bad Women With Bad Desires that must be repressed for the good of society. I don't expect them to rob me of my agency in defining my sexual relationships. I don't expect them to define my sexual relationships.

And so I try to engage with them, I try to reach out. I try to argue. I try to reason. I try to scream "I am here, I feel this, I EXIST. I have always been like this. I have always felt these things. I don't know how it started but it wasn't taught to me. I don't know where it came from but I know it is here now and I know it is mine."

I've never been good at walking away from arguments. I've never been great at picking which hills are worth dying on (precious few are, on the internet.) I've gotten better at that, and it's helped my time management immensely, but this has really been the one last topic that keeps grabbing me, for all the reasons outlined above... but what I'm realizing now is that the vocal opposition isn't the same thing as earnest opposition.

The pages I keep tripping over and the people I keep arguing with, aren't being earnest. The woman who threw the Craigslist question at me wasn't new to this argument... she had to have had "safe, sane, and consensual" explained to her before, and she just didn't care. She wasn't willing to examine her premise or even adjust her tactics. It doesn't matter what I say, "LISA'S MARRYING A CARROT!"

They are looking for an easy target. They're looking for someone lower on the hill than they are to throw dirt clods at and they're seeing us.

The word for this kind of behavior is "sadistic", in the non-sexual and non-consensual sense.

And every time I go back to them to try to argue, I'm giving my consent to them anyway. I'm giving into a masochistic impulse in an unhealthy and non-productive way. I'm not being safe and I'm not being sane.

So I'm done with it.