One more thing about sex positivism

And it will probably be my last, as the whole topic is pretty polarizing.

I know this post from The Pervocracy has been linked before, in particular on a contentious piece on Feminitse, but I think it's one of the better ones I've found elucidating sex-positive feminism in simple, non-judgmental terms. Right away, this stood out:

"If you treat sexy women with disgust and pity, you're not protecting their rights; you're just gleefully participating in their public humiliation. (You're also often attacking them on a subject that's highly intertwined with culture, class, age, and even body shape. Not everyone who looks "sexy" to you is doing it on purpose, much less doing it to serve the patriarchy.)" (emphasis mine)

I bolded that last part because for a movement that at least gives lip service to intersectionality, there's very little intersectionality in practice. A big part of why I've become apathetic to feminism lately is that I can't always pretend to be on the same page as someone whose experiences differ wildly from mine, and while it's certainly true that the feminist blog world is varied, the public face of contemporary feminism -- the ones granted guest appearances on MSNBC and the like -- is straight, white, cis, and middle-class.

This reminds me of something Julia Serano said in her book, Excluded:

"... diversity is something that is routinely touted, albeit only within certain parameters. Usually, when people talk about 'striving for diversity,' they are rather specifically talking about displaying a mix of people of different races, ethnicities, religions, classes, genders, sexual orientations, ages, and/or abilities. In other words, these the handful of different traits that 'count' toward imparting diversity onto an organization or movement... what concerns me is that these are not the only traits that exist."

Not only are those not the only traits that make up how one experiences the world, they overlapp, influence each other, and become muddied. For example I know how people with class privilege think and act because it's presented as the dominant or "correct" experience, and since classism is the "ism" I'm most microtuned to notice, everything else I do is filtered through it. Gender roles, for example, are always "classed" to me. Pink and lace say girly, sure, but for me they also say (relatively speaking) money. I don't know if the reason I don't like "girl stuff" is because of some innate trait in me that says "Pink? No thank you," that I didn't have a lot of girly things growing up because they were expensive and I've since trained myself not to want them, or the feminist catchall, internalized misogyny.*

How does all this factor into sex positive feminism then? It's often presented as sexy straight girls who like a lot of PIV sex. Now, there's nothing wrong with that, and sexy straight girls who like PIV sex shouldn't be shamed for it, but it's an incredibly naive stance to take, particularly when a lot of sex-poz thought comes from queer theorists like Patrick Califia and Carol Queen. It's unfortunate that it's gotten somewhat of a tarnished reputation (pun intended), because there is a lot of good there once you get past some of the stereotypes.

*I would never deny that internalized misogyny is a thing, but it's often over-simplified.

A few book links

I found these over on Jezebel's groupthink (which is the best part of Jezebel these days.) They're supposed to be like Pandora, but for books. Pop in your favorite books or authors, and get recommendations:

What Should I Read Next
Literature Map
Booklamp

I think Literature Map is my favorite (I seem to remember a music site that had a similar "six degrees of separation" vibe), but it needs to be updated. I kept getting JT Leroy as a rec, which seems odd given the whole "fake writer" scandal happened more than half a decade ago.

Currently Reading

Kate's Butch Please series for Autostraddle

I really liked the piece on misogyny in lesbian spaces:

"Oftentimes when I am in a place occupied by butches and men, masculinity becomes a kind of currency. Butches start talking about how they've "fucked more girls" than the men, "gotten more pussy" and are "better in bed." Their sexual partners become objects rather than humans. If there are women in the room, their objectification seems to be a bonding mechanism for the butches and men, laughing about who has the best ass, the best tits, who they'd fuck or not fuck. I can show a picture of my girlfriend to a man and know I will get instant respect from him based on her attractiveness. I know that because I've done it in the past, and that respect felt good to me, like my masculinity was confirmed by "the source." And that, my friends, is unbelievably fucked up. The patriarchy barters and trades with women as currency, and in those moments, we are doing the same thing."

Alex Ross in The New Yorker

Alex Ross wrote a lengthy piece in The New Yorker this week that deconstructs the history of gay culture, including camp and the role of women:

The trickiest component of gay-male culture is the role of women in its midst. Feminist critics have long detected misogynist mockery in drag acts and in gay men’s howling response to melodramatic scenes that were not intended to be funny, such as Joan Crawford’s verbal annihilation of her aloof, ingrate daughter in “Mildred Pierce.” Halperin, like many before him, sees a more complex identification at work. Crawford maintains a flawlessly high pitch as she gyrates between “feminine glamour” and “feminine abjection,” and the typical gay male viewer may feel at home at both extremes: so many gay kids work at presenting a perfected surface to the world, and so many are hounded by the fear that some grotesque exposure will tear it down.

It's a great essay, touching briefly on his own coming out. He writes:

My primary political moment happened when I wrote long, lugubrious letters to my closest friends, finally revealing the rest of me. In one, I came out in a footnote on the seventh page, amid pompous but heartfelt quotations from Wallace Stevens: “The greatest poverty is not to live / In a physical world, to feel that one’s desire / Is too difficult to tell from despair.” Harvey Milk always said that this was how the revolution would happen: one lonely kid at a time.

As much as I can recommend reading the piece in its entirety --  especially if you want a sort of primer on LGBT history -- it's a pity that the history of gay culture is often a history of gay men's culture. Granted, Alex Ross is a gay man, and speaks from his own experience, it's sad that the accepted narrative of LGBT history is one that often excludes women and trans people.

A.L. Kennedy on The Myth of the Suffering Artist

(Via katherine st asaph)

It's a few months old, but writer A.L. Kennedy wrote a fantastic piece for the Guardian on the "myth of the suffering artist:"

I have been trying to write for at least a quarter of a century, and I can say very firmly that in my experience, suffering is largely of no bloody use to anyone, and definitely not a prerequisite for creation. If an artist has managed to take something appalling and make it into art, that's because the artist is an artist, not because something appalling is naturally art. (emphasis mine)

This can't be stressed enough, especially in an era where a lot of women feel it's necessary to show themselves at their most vulnerable, to open up a wound and bleed for the audience. I'm not suggesting is vulnerability is a bad thing -- this isn't really about vulnerability, per se, but the idea that suffering is beautiful, and one can only make great art through suffering.

Links & Bits: 7/27/12

From The Daily Chicana: Remembering My Brown-Skinned Dolls.

Madeline from xojane talks about being taller than her man.

Shakesville discusses the penalties handed down to Penn State.

Rethinking the Feminist Canon

Normally I don't support lists that name and catalog influential women by their flaws, but given the number of feminists who can't seem to comprehend that women's rights don't begin and end with middle-class, white, hetero, cis women,  this post from New Wave Feminism is indispensable.

She says, "google does a terrible job at providing me with the type of critiques I’m looking for. So I figured I might as well crowd-source and ask people what feminist did they once look up to but realize was not looking out for you? Everyone has that “I bought all her books & watched that documentary she made and wound up being terribly disappointed” story, or that “I don’t understand why everyone likes this person when they erase my reality” story."

The obvious offenders like Mary Daly and Janice Raymond have been critiqued and deconstructed at large, and even the most inveterate feminists admit that their work was flawed to the point of irredeemability, but where exactly do you draw the line, I mean, where (the collective) we have to remove her work from the feminist canon, ignoring the impossibility of such as task? Or, as is often the case now, stop subscribing to, reading, and supporting her blog?

Links & Bits: 6/8/12

Bitch Magazine gives us Ten Songs About the Patriarchy.

Kenda James talks about race and cosplay.

Ms Magazine, in a multi-part series, talks to trans feminist bloggers. (Part One , Part Two , Part Three )

Links: Heatwave Addition and Two Days Late

The editors at xojane show how some best-selling lipsticks look on a variety of skin tones.

Pop Culture Pirate has a photo collage of a young Elvis fan in the 50s getting a haircut in honor of her idol.

Queerty explains why Adam Lambert's #1 album  is a big deal.

The Rumpus interviews Alice Bag .

What's problematic about "problematic?"

Like any good ostensibly feminist blogger, I'm currently obsessed with the site "Is This Feminist?"  (Feministe and Jezebel deserve co-credit for leading me to it.) Here's an example:

"This woman is doing science. IS THIS FEMINIST? 

'Science,' as a narrative of knowledge, prizes a phallocentric adherence to logic and mastery, breaking things down into discrete parts and seeking to name and control their interactions, rather than viewing them as an intuitively connected, interdisciplinary, feminine whole. This woman is adopting and reinforcing a masculine-supremacist view of intelligence which encourages women to rely on externally defined “facts” and academic credentials, rather than heeding their own inner wisdom. A true feminist simply knows the cure for Alzheimer’s disease, possibly because it’s yoga. PROBLEMATIC."

And this one, which I laughed out loud at, as I recently wrote that if I removed everything from my Ipod that was at all ideologically imperfect, I'd be left with nothing but one Le Tigre song, and even that's debatable. Damn.

"This woman is dancing in a club. IS THIS FEMINIST? 

What is she dancing to? Are the lyrics sexist? Does this sexy tune exclude the experiences of asexuals? Dancing to Le Tigre may not be enough. One of them is married to a guy who used to have sexist lyrics in his music, which makes their beats triggering for some. PROBLEMATIC. "

If you've spent any time in the feminist blog world, or Tumblr's Social Justice blogging circle, you're probably rolling your eyes at the giant, all caps, "PROBLEMATIC." This word is the bane of my online existence, and I use it too often myself. Everything that's not ideologically perfect is, or has the potential to be, PROBLEMATIC. Ideally, I don't have an issue with calling out those things, but when problematic is nothing but a placeholder for something else -- bigotry, homophobia, etc. -- shouldn't those words should be used instead?

Links & Bits: The Atlantic tackles Jack White's "Woman Problem"

Remember more than a year ago, when I said that an article that claimed that Jack White was some sort of highly evolved rock dude because he did the unspeakable and promoted music made by women left an unexplainable bad taste in my mouth? Maybe this is the explanation:

In one of his first ever on-the-record comments about gender, White told Josh Eells in the New York Times magazine recently that he doesn't want to define roles for the women he knows: "I've always felt it's ridiculous to say, of any of the females in my life: You're my friend, you're my wife, you're my girlfriend, you're my co-worker. 'This is your box, and you're not allowed to stray outside of it.'"

White's a famous control freak, and in his songs, women are constantly threatening his control, forcing him into playing the role of victim.

But as White avers in the same interview, he often stretches the truth with reporters, and his statement makes more sense in the context of his music when it's flipped: What White really seems to dislike is when women choose their own boxes. He's a famous control freak, and in his songs, women are constantly threatening his control, forcing him into playing the role of victim. His response? Vitriol.

(Via The Atlantic)

Feminist Rock Archive

A while back, The Guardian's Alexis Petridis linked to an online archive of feminist rock from the 70s and 80s. If you think that feminist rock and punk starts with Patti Smith and ends with Le Tigre, well, there's a whole wealth of music that directly addresses women's issues, and you've probably never heard any of it. Petridis says:

"There is a well-worn narrative about women in rock, centring on Patti Smith and Blondie; the women's liberation archive offers a parallel, alternative history. For the most part, these acts existed utterly apart from the mainstream, distributing their own music and facing their own unique challenges. "Nothing ever rhymed with patriarchy," laments one songwriter."

The site is called The Women's Liberation Music Archive, and it focuses on feminist music in the UK dating from the 1970s through the early 90s. Their mission is "to research and document the feminist bands, musicians and related projects of the 1970s and 80s, creating a collection of written and oral histories and memorabilia. This will include photographs, videos, recordings, discographies, gigographies, lyrics and musical scores, press clippings, posters, weblinks and manifestos that testify to the creativity of the Women’s Liberation Movement (WLM) of that time."


To be honest, the punk rock dilettante that lives inside me groaned a little when I heard that there was an online repository of feminist-inspired folk rock (note: it's not all folky, but a lot of the music smacks of the time it was originally released enough that it's practically encased in amber), but it's a pretty fascinating read, even if you don't like a lot of the actual music.

Links & Bits: 4/6/12

Carrie Nelson writes about performing bisexuality (as in the Katy Perry "I kissed a girl" kind that has nothing to do with a woman's actual sexuality).

The Frisky's Sally McGraw talks about ditching her scale.  I concur. Truth: I have no idea what I actually weigh, as I haven't looked at a scale in over a decade. I'm a tallish, sturdy girl, so that number, even at its lowest, will never be that low, so I just focus on how I feel and how my clothes fit.

Quote of the week goes to Shakesville's Melissa McEwan: "I really hate the pejorative term "slactivism," which necessarily implies there's a hierarchy of activism, some of which is more valuable than other kinds."

Links & Bits 2/10/12 (The "Why are we still making 101-level mistakes?" edition)

Feministe put together a list of links about asexuality for their (mostly) sex-positive community. The links were great and informative, the discussion that followed was just disappointing. A handful of people I've come to respect, and whose contributions keep me reading Feministe, sort of missed the point and ultimately derailed the comment thread, either asking 101-level questions, or by making it about them.

(TW for rape, graphic images) And boo to Jezebel for posting this story (and its images)  without an initial trigger warning. It's been corrected and further pixelated, but really, what what were they thinking?

I'm not pointing these things out to shame either site, but because I've come to expect -- or would like to expect -- more. Even with Jezebel, who has a long-standing history of race and class fail. Although it isn't an explicitly feminist site, and doesn't advertise as such,  it's been number of women's gateway to feminism and responsibility comes with that.

Read This: Letters to My Brother (Out Magazine)

I meant to link to this the other day, but Out Magazine  published a heartbreaking letter from James Clementi to his brother, Tyler, the Rutgers student who killed himself over a year ago after being bullied by his roommate:

"I always thought that, between you and I, you were the stronger one. That’s why, as protective as I felt toward you, I never worried that much. I saw the best parts of myself in you. Of course, we looked like twins, albeit six years and a foot and a half apart. But -- let’s face it -- you were better. Where I dabbled (pretty pitifully) in painting, you devoted hours of every day to the violin since you were eight, then picked up the piano, and even taught yourself the freaking harmonica. Never one to be outdone, when I was biking a mile, you were unicycling two. Where I was shy, you were fearless. When I tiptoed out of the closet at 22, you were out and proud at 18. 

I remember asking if you had a boyfriend, or if you wanted one, and you scoffed at me. “I just want to hook up.” That’s what you said -- and that’s fine -- but I think maybe you didn’t see how much more you deserved. 

Sometimes I wonder who that guy was, the one in your dorm room. He doesn’t matter. You were so young, and there were going to be others. But in that moment, what did it mean for you? Were you bored, scared, over it, into it, what? Everyone knows their first, but who ever thinks of their last? I’m sure you didn’t even realize that it was the final time you’d be close to someone. He shouldn’t matter, but being the last gives him a strange importance. Did he make you happy?"

Links & Bits: 12/30/11

Rose from Autostraddle reviews  Jeffrey Eugenides's new book, The Marriage Plot.

xoJane's Jessica deals with conflict  by responding to hate mail.

Maia from Alas, a Blog writes about change and accountability for real.

Links & Bits: 12/23/12

Avital Norman Nathan from Bitch Magazine finds some kid appropriate, but cool-enough-for-the-adults music.

Global Comment's Emily Manuel asks "Why does the media still refer to 'Bradley" Manning? The curious silence around a transgender Hero."

Anita from Feminist Frequency lists her top ten creepy christmas songs.

Happy Whatever-You-Celebrate-Or-Not Day! This is my favorite holiday song -- yes, I have a favorite holiday song -- courtesy of the Replacements:

What Is Vocal Fry?

Since I know a little bit about the phenomenon known as "vocal fry" (or fry register), I thought I'd comment on the rash  of articles published this week on the "trend" of young women talking with creaky, growly voices.

To clear up a few misconceptions, it's not a speech impediment. Science Now  describes it as:

[...] a low, staccato vibration during speech, produced by a slow fluttering of the vocal cords (listen here). Since the 1960s, vocal fry has been recognized as the lowest of the three vocal registers, which also include falsetto and modal—the usual speaking register. Speakers creak differently according to their gender, although whether it is more common in males or females varies among languages. In American English, anecdotal reports suggest that the behavior is much more common in women. (In British English, the pattern is the opposite.) Historically, continual use of vocal fry was classified as part of a voice disorder that was believed to lead to vocal cord damage. However, in recent years, researchers have noted occasional use of the creak in speakers with normal voice quality.

The best example I can provide is Marge Simpson's exasperated creak, "Oh, Homer!"

Some people say it sounds like burping, which I guess it sort of does at its extremes. J.D. Sumner, bass singer for Elvis's backing band, used fry register to hit his lowest notes.



Depending on who you ask, it's either a terrible thing that will wreck your voice for ever, or perfectly acceptable if taught properly. (YouTube has plenty of clips -- just google vocal fry or fry register). Joanna Newsom periodically dips into fry, but the most cited example in pop singing is Britney's growly "Baby, Baby," in "Baby Hit Me One More Time."

I'm not all that familiar with vocal fry as a trend among young woman other than as a possible counterpoint to the "baby speak" of Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian. Frankly, I haven't noticed any more than usual, but I haven't set foot on a college campus in more than a decade. Frankly, I think too much has been made of women's speech just in general: our voices are too high and "shrill," therefore, our bosses do not take us seriously enough; or our voices are falsely low and gravelly, hence, manlike. We really can't win, can we?

Links & Bits: 11/25/11

Colorlines gives advice for talking about race at the holiday table.

Paste Magazine details a day in the life of Me'Shell NdegeOcello.

Baseball's new bargaining agreement prohibits discrimination based on sexual orientation.

Bitch Magazine recently featured artist Francesca Woodman.

Links & Bits: 11/18/11

Samhita from Feministing talks a little about mansplaining.

Tiger Beatdown's s.e. smith asks, "What's Your Slavery Footprint?"

Mac Pogue for Bitch Magazine wrote a nice feature on writer Gloria Anzaldúa.