tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-80897647775532411432024-03-13T11:40:38.606-04:00What A Radical Notion!This is a blog about the radical notion that women are people. I also like some other radical notions, like that words mean things, or that sometimes things are connected to other things, or that context is real.J.A.http://www.blogger.com/profile/09227973090683882732noreply@blogger.comBlogger11125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8089764777553241143.post-67454688847295359672013-01-18T14:45:00.000-05:002013-01-18T14:46:03.626-05:00A Case for Domestic Feminism<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-NZ">This post was originally called "<a href="http://toofatforourpants.blogspot.ca/2012/01/reclaiming-domesticity-long-play.html" target="_blank">Reclaiming Domesticity</a>", written for Too Fat For Our Pants on Radio One 91FM on January 16 2012. I have edited some parts slightly. </span><br />
<br />
<span lang="EN-NZ">This post was a response to a blog by <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-new-domesticity-fun-empowering-or-a-step-back-for-american-women/2011/11/18/gIQAqkg1vN_story.html" target="_blank">Emily Matchar in the Washinton Post</a>, and a reply by <a href="http://www.usnews.com/opinion/blogs/Jamie-Stiehm/2011/12/05/new-domesticity-is-a-step-backwards-for-women/comments" target="_blank">Jamie Stiehm in US News,</a> which struck something of a nerve for me. Matchar
writes about the “new domesticity zeitgeist” which she sees sweeping up
her female friends: women learning to knit, sew, bake bread, grow
vegetables, keep bees. Stiehm’s concern is that the
revival of traditional skills and an appreciation of homesteading is
fetishized nostalgia and a glorification of domesticity, and that the
renewed valuing of those skills also necessitates a return to the
slightly-more-extreme gender imbalances that accompanied them. She
worries that women will run back into the kitchen, thinking
it’s all a bit of fun, and will unwittingly wind up trapped there just
like their grandmothers. She worries that any return to
performance of those tasks will also initiate a return to defining women
by those tasks, to a cultural acceptance that women aren’t good for
anything outside the kitchen. She's maybe right to be skeptical of "privileged domesticity"- though I suspect a little undercurrent of hipster-bashing, the rebuttal to which I turn to <a href="http://www.buzzfeed.com/sadydoyle/taylor-swifts-tragic-war-against-hipsters" target="_blank">Sady Doyle</a> - but she doesn't recognize that the ability to dismiss the doing of domestic chores is itself a privileged position.</span><br />
<br />
<span lang="EN-NZ">I do not intend this to be a defense of women's performance of domestic labour, but the labour itself: I believe the work is undervalued because it is performed by women, and that simultaneously the (still mostly) women performing the work are undervalued for their performance of it.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-NZ">At
the heart of Stiehm’s disapproval of Matchar’s article is her
unexamined and unstated assumption that being in the home is bad for
women, and that returning there is against our best interests. I’ve
often thought that this was an oversight of second-wave feminism,
which, instead of rejecting the notion that domesticity is exclusively
woman’s domain, or that women are best suited to domesticity, rejected
domesticity itself. What should have been - and started
out as - a conversation about the undervaluing of the work performed in
the home (think of the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selma_James" target="_blank">Wages for Housework Campaign</a>),
and the relationship it bears to the undervaluing of the gender doing
most of that work, became instead a conversation about getting women out
of the home and into the workplace, which has from there turned into a
conversation about women struggling to balance work and family. Now, I am in no way suggesting that women should leave the workplace and return to the home. But
that work is still performed primarily by women, and women being a
lesser social class than men, the work they do is also seen as lesser. If
we can bring some value to the work women are doing while we’re also
trying to simply value women as a social class, that makes it easier for
that work to stop being so gender-segregated. If we can
acknowledge that the work itself is necessary and important, then the
workers also become so, and it becomes easier for men to take on more
domestic tasks, which makes it easier for everyone to balance work and
family. </span></div>
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<span lang="EN-NZ">First-
and second-wave feminism fought to break down gendered barriers to
entry in the work place and offer women the choice to work or to stay
home. Not to rehash all the compelling and obvious arguments against the mantra of "personal choice", but the
ability to choose represents a level of privilege which is simply not
available to most women: a proliferation of various options is, itself, a
privilege, in addition to indicating membership in a particular social
class. And this particular conversation is doubly let down
by a narrative of personal choice because it was very clear that the
only truly feminist choice to make was to leave the home, which was the
seat of oppression, and enter the workforce. Rather than
trying to bring power to the work done by mostly women all over the
world, rather than acknowledging that the problem wasn’t the work, but
the lack of value assigned to it specifically because of the gender
doing most of it, the work itself became symbolic of that oppression. Escaping the oppression of being confined to the domestic sphere meant escaping domesticity altogether.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-NZ">It’s
a racist narrative because the women who have the least options open to
them, the women who couldn’t possibly decide not to go to work once
they had children, or who have jobs with less security and less flexible
hours and lower pay, are <a href="http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/women/report/2008/10/08/5103/the-straight-facts-on-women-in-poverty/" target="_blank">disproportionately represented</a> by black, Hispanic, Aboriginal
peoples all over the world, Maori and Pasifika people here in New
Zealand, and globally in general anyone who’s not white. So
framing the decision to return to domestic skills and knowledge as a
step backwards for women, as is so often done, marginalizes and silences
all the women who never had the choice to leave the home or return to
it in the first place. More than that, it paints them as
the kind of women we shouldn’t want to be: if being empowered is wrapped
up in the ability to exempt oneself from the tasks of cooking and
cleaning and growing food, the implication is that all those women who
do perform those tasks are not empowered, because the tasks are not
powerful. And I think that contributes to the harm being
done to those women, and therefore the harm that’s done to everyone who
identifies as a woman. </span></div>
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<span lang="EN-NZ"> The
idea that domesticity is anti-feminist was seized upon and perpetuated
by marketers of products like processed food, which were meant to be
freeing women from the tedious drudgery of cooking, at the same time
that women were continually being told that keeping house was the
greatest possible achievement for a woman. Housework is both anti-feminist and the pinnacle of femininity: we’ve always been good at conflicting narratives. And
certainly some women were freed from tedious drudgery, but it happened
not by sharing a workload more evenly or valuing the work so that it’s
less drudgery, so that both parties in the household appreciate the
importance of dinner and what it takes to make, but by outsourcing the
tasks to McCain and Betty Crocker and everyone to whom they outsourced. It’s like an STD ad from the 90s – you’re having sex with everyone he’s had sex with. Food
companies created a market by selling specifically women on products
which were unhealthy, which were economically, environmentally, and
socially expensive, and they specifically used the language of female
empowerment to do so. Feminism became another market,
another avenue for capital absorption, part of the post-war spatial fix
defined by suburbanization. I think there’s a whole other show in there, a feminist reading of the second spatial fix.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-NZ">Just
as an aside, many of those products which were meant to make the
keeping of a house a simpler, less labour-intensive task in fact had the
opposite effect. Things like dishwashers and vacuum
cleaners are time savers, to be sure, but they also raise the bar on the
acceptable level of cleanliness for a house. So less and
less dirt is tolerated anywhere, to the point that now we’re being sold
anti-bacterial disposable counter-wipes which eliminate 97% of germs,
like we can’t even have microscopic dirt. Your house now not only has to be clean, it has to be sterile. That’s not liberation from housework, that’s a company manufacturing a market for a product that isn’t needed and
co-opting the language of either feminism (“you don’t have time to do
housework, you’re a high-powered woman on the go!”) or motherhood (“we
know you care about your family too much to let them anywhere near
germs!”).</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-NZ">Though
I don’t see the feminist analysis used often these days, there is most
certainly an aspect of political resistance to this domesticity
zeitgeist. Partly it represents a growing awareness that
our way of life is finite, that we do not exist in a post-industrial
economy but have simply outsourced our industry to poorer countries. One
of the side effects was that we ceased to value those production skills
in favour of consumption ability, which is of course a highly
class-based project which excludes huge numbers of people, the majority
of whom are female. Part of the political aspect of
adopting more traditional ways of life, like homesteading and
small-holding and more ethical and local eating habits, the resurgence
of farmer’s markets, is an acknowledgement that being able to live in
any other way is a luxury and an anomaly in human history, and one that
is subsidized by people, mostly women, mostly in poorer and browner
places.</span></div>
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<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-NZ">It’s
also an acknowledgement that even aside from the exploitative
underpinnings of the entire western way of life, the financial crisis is
alerting people to the flimsiness of a consumption economy and the
inherent problems with the perpetual growth paradigm. I
think this has prompted people who are able to begin learning skills to
survive in an economy which requires less consumption and greater
production, as well as an environment which necessitates it. Some of
this renaissance of domesticity is simple survival; this way of life has
always been expensive, and many people who were previously able to
afford it are now not, and so are being forced to adapt. Sometimes that adaptation takes the form of making more and buying less.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-NZ">Finally,
though the first two points are reason enough for me, there is the
simple fact that all these systems of food transport, factory farming,
processing, outsourcing of labour, all the systems which have granted
some women freedom from the work of sustaining themselves, are based on
the assumption of cheap and abundant fossil fuels. And those are just not going to be around anymore. We
are absolutely going to have to start performing domestic tasks,
whether we like it or not, and so we might as well begin to talk about
how necessary and valuable those skills are. And if we can
do that, we can also begin to talk about how necessary and valuable the
(mostly) women who perform them are, as well. If
anything’s a step backwards for women, it’s an absolute refusal to see
worth in the work that is done by women all over the world, to insist
that domesticity is “nostalgia”, that it is distasteful, or that it is
something to be avoided. Steihm and those who agree with
her are only succeeding in favouring their own privilege over the
pursuit of true gender equality, for all women, everywhere.</span></div>
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<span lang="EN-NZ">Many
women are relearning tasks their grandmothers knew, but as this return
to domesticity has roots and ties to political resistance rather than
simple nostalgia, there are also many men. The trendiness
of homesteading is useful for prompting discussions about the value of
this work which has always been performed almost exclusively by women,
and by extension therefore the value of women as a social class. And
I recognize the problems with what I’m saying, here: like it took men’s
interest in domestic chores to start talking about them as valuable,
productive work, and I don’t at all want to encourage that. But
I do think that an increased awareness in the male social consciousness
of the energy, intelligence, and skill required for this kind of
voluntary labour can only benefit the class which most often performs
that labour. And I also recognize that I’m attempting to
raise the worth of women through their connection to an increasingly
valuable skill set, rather than raising the value of the skill set
through an increase in the value of women, but I’m not sure they’re so
different – or at least, they’re not incompatible. Either way, what interests me is a shift in the way we value work altogether.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-NZ">Because
it’s not enough for me to have women and people of colour succeed in a
system which was created with only one social class, white men, in mind,
which is what we’ve been aiming for; I want a system which is designed
to be equal. I don’t want us all to agree to only value
the same things that the economic system values, as those are not
representative of the full range of human experience, and success means
embodying and exemplifying the traits that the economic system values –
selfishness, cold rationality, efficiency. I don’t want to
try and fit into the parameters of the market; the market is a human
construction, its parameters should include all of humanity. I don’t want women’s success in a man’s world, I want a new world which is for everyone. I know that sounds idealistic. But
listen, we’ve been ten thousand years with more or less the same power
structure, as far as gender relations go, and a good few millennia as
far as race relations go, so it’s ridiculous to expect that everything
would be equal after a century’s work. Social change takes time, and it’s ok that we’re not there yet, but it’s only ok as long as we keep talking about getting there. </span></div>
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J.A.http://www.blogger.com/profile/09227973090683882732noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8089764777553241143.post-11416006777508062992013-01-18T13:51:00.001-05:002013-01-18T13:51:06.893-05:00Migrating!Hey! I'm going to be migrating some of the posts from my radio blog <a href="http://toofatforourpants.blogspot.ca/" target="_blank">Too Fat For Our Pants</a>, so that I can close the comments over there. I have no idea how to pre-date them for when they were originally written, so they'll just go up in whatever order I post them in. J.A.http://www.blogger.com/profile/09227973090683882732noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8089764777553241143.post-17160983636497250612012-12-17T15:23:00.002-05:002012-12-17T15:24:43.939-05:00On Walking, Biking, and Victim-Blaming: An Explicit Connection<style type="text/css">
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This article took me some time to
write, and in the course of the time that I began writing until it
was publishable half a dozen more accidents involving pedestrians and
cyclists hit by cars surfaced in the news. For a while I tried to
keep on top of the latest ones and update the first paragraph
accordingly, but there are <a href="http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/public/cyclesafety/article3313260.ece" target="_blank">simply too many</a>, which goes some way
towards proving my point in the first place.
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<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.portcoquitlam.ca/Assets/Pedestrian+Safety+-+ICBC.gif" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="180" id="il_fi" src="http://www.portcoquitlam.ca/Assets/Pedestrian+Safety+-+ICBC.gif" style="padding-bottom: 8px; padding-right: 8px; padding-top: 8px;" width="200" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Hey, I wonder how fast that car's going.</td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><br /></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><br /></td><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><br /></td></tr>
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On Monday morning of last week, 6
people were struck by cars in Toronto in the span of an hour, all
while legally crossing or waiting to cross the road. That seems like
a lot – and it is, it is a lot, a <i>rash –</i><span style="font-style: normal;">
so surely there was some connective factor this morning? Something to
learn from so many violent interactions in a single morning? Indeed,
says traffic services Const. Clint Stibbe, the common factor was
“<a href="http://www.cp24.com/news/six-pedestrians-injured-in-rash-of-morning-crashes-1.1072760#ixzz2EfYzsMAx" target="_blank">dark clothing worn by pedestrians</a>”. If those pedestrians had
been wearing lighter clothing, then, they may not have been struck by
the cars that struck them. What if they had been younger, if they had
not been pushing a stroller? Did
they make sure all the cars were going to stop at the crosswalk
before they started walking? Did they? And if, as <a href="http://www.thestar.com/news/gta/article/1300251--hume-police-response-to-pedestrian-hits-clothing-advice" target="_blank">Christopher Hume</a>
asks in the Toronto Star, Monday's pedestrians were all crossing
legally, “why should the colour of their clothing make a
difference?” Indeed.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-style: normal;">So, to
summarize the coverage: </span><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">a
person is the victim of a violent act, </span></span><i><span style="font-weight: normal;">a
crime</span></i><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">,
and in the aftermath of that crime we ask each other what the victim
did or did not do to invite the violence on themselves. </span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-style: normal;">This
is <a href="http://www.shakesville.com/2007/01/dear-ladies-please-stop-getting.html" target="_blank">victim-blaming</a>, pure and simple.</span></div>
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<a name='more'></a><br /><br />
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<span style="font-style: normal;">Because I am a feminist who is primarily
engaged in analysis of media and domestic spaces, I read a lot about
violence against women, and lately the narrative parallels between
the way we talk about pedestrian and cycling injuries and deaths and
the way we talk about sexual assault and domestic violence have
become simply too grating to ignore*. This is not to say that the narrative itself is new, just that it newly occupies more than its fair share of brain-space, and not just, it seems, for me: Hume again touched on this very
briefly when he mentioned the Toronto police officer's comment which
sparked SlutWalk, but I would like to take it further and examine the
constructs at work when we have conversations in the aftermaths of
tragedies on any scale. An enormous amount of information is
taken for granted, in this and in everything, and what we accept as
'normal' dictates the jumping-off point for the questions we ask when
'abnormal' things happen. <a href="http://radtransfem.tumblr.com/post/37262843257/positioning-the-moment-of-analysis-taking-oppression" target="_blank">Lisa Millbank</a> suggests we first ask, “Who
are the actors in this situation? Does my positioning of the point of
analysis erase any actors, mistake their </span><i>actions</i><span style="font-style: normal;">
for background (essential) </span><i>reality</i><span style="font-style: normal;">?” So when we ask what a pedestrian had on her back, or a cyclist on his
head, which actors does that erase?</span></div>
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<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-style: normal;">When
we ask what a woman was wearing when she was assaulted, the essential
realities we accept are these: first, that men are sexually violent
because of extreme, uncontrollable sexual arousal; second, that men
are </span><i>incited</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> to
violence by the sight of a woman dressing provocatively precisely
because of the uncontrollable aspect of male sexuality; third, that
it is possible to avoid sexual violence by behaving in a certain way
and that women should therefore behave in that way at all times. </span>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-style: normal;">All of
these essential realities are myths. <a href="http://www.google.ca/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=2&ved=0CDsQFjAB&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.middlebury.edu%2Fmedia%2Fview%2F240951%2Foriginal%2FPredatoryNature.pdf&ei=MWLPULuhF8OU0QGDlYDwAQ&usg=AFQjCNFAXBB_FK-0oaGF5lb1gSJAzS92gg&sig2=JbT3G7E4eW9AtOjTlDr77Q&bvm=bv.1355325884,d.dmQ" target="_blank">Most men are not rapists</a>; rape
and sexual assault are about power and control and a culture which
eroticizes dominance; women are very rarely raped by a stranger on
the street, as the <a href="http://www.911rape.org/facts-quotes/statistics" target="_blank">vast majority of rapes</a> and assaults are
perpetrated by someone the woman knows; and finally, because of these
truths, we know that it matters not one jot what women are wearing
when they get assaulted. Women are raped wearing sweatpants at least
as often as they are raped wearing miniskirts; <a href="http://www.shakesville.com/2007/01/dear-ladies-please-stop-getting.html" target="_blank">the common factor is the men raping them</a>. Our essential reality, then, involves denying or
ignoring the actual facts about sexual assault, and it is only by
denying that reality (and, as I'll get to in another post, by denying the victim full humanity) that we are able to wonder what the woman did.</span></div>
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<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-style: normal;"> In
the same way, we accept horrible stories about pedestrian and cyclist
deaths as inevitable, and we ask questions about how the injured or
killed could have prevented the accident. Two weeks ago in my
hometown, a <a href="http://www.therecord.com/news/local/article/824409--pedestrian-struck-killed-in-uptown-waterloo" target="_blank">German exchange student</a> crossed at a marked crosswalk and was killed
when she was struck by a car. After an investigation, the official
statement was that “at this time police do not believe speed or
alcohol to be contributing factors in the collision.” So what are
the essential realities we're accepting? Speed, first of all: of
course speed was a factor; if that car had been doing 10 km/h Amelie
Lindberger would almost certainly not have died. But in this town, in
this country, city speed limits are 50 km/h, and the car was
traveling within the speed limit. When the police say speed was not a
factor, what they really mean is that “</span><i>speed in excess of
50 km/h was not a factor</i><span style="font-style: normal;">”. A
certain level of speed is taken for granted, as a facet not worth
examining, implying, in the meantime, that we have no power to
address that essential reality, and must focus on the actions of the
victim, who was also behaving within the rules of the road. So the
road, operating completely as it is designed and intended to run, produces the outcome
of a 21-year-old student getting hit so hard that she clears an
intersection. At no point has anyone asked whether the rules
themselves might be a problem.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-style: normal;">Additional
requirements are placed on cyclists, superfluous to “follow the
rules of the road” (again, no conversation is forthcoming about the
efficacy or validity of those rules, nor any awareness of the fact that they were drafted primarily for cars, not bikes): wear bright clothing, some of
it should probably be reflective, you could have a flag, and of
course, wear a helmet. Make yourself look different to do this
dangerous thing. But what are we assuming is actually dangerous about
cycling? Where does the danger in the act arise from, in our
essential reality? When we ask whether a cyclist was wearing a helmet
when they were struck by a car, we accept, first, that riding a
bicycle is </span><i>inherently</i><span style="font-style: normal;">
dangerous, that the act of moving on two wheels is itself a dangerous
undertaking; second, that a helmet is a significant mitigating factor
against the dangers of cycling; third, that the cars on the road are
the ones with the real right to be there, that roads are designed for
cars and if cyclists want to use them too they better take
precautions, so that the cyclists or pedestrians are the ones with
the responsibility not to be hit. </span>
</div>
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<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-style: normal;">For
legislators, helmets seem to make intuitive sense, and they have the
added appeal of not requiring any actual change in order to
implement, because they require individual cyclists to take
responsibility for their own head. Just like telling women to keep an
eye on their drinks instead of addressing rape culture, telling cyclists to wear a helmet is a
way of seeming to address a real, dangerous problem without actually
addressing it at all. The <a href="http://www.vehicularcyclist.com/fatals.html" target="_blank">impact of helmets on overall biking safety</a>
are inconclusive at best, while the effects of mandatory helmet laws
on the number of people riding bikes – the absolute best way to
make cycling safer for everyone – are definitively negative, as helmets are a barrier to entry for a number of reasons, and fewer people bike when they're required (there is a great deal of information and statistical breakdown of Ontario numbers <a href="http://www.mcscs.jus.gov.on.ca/english/DeathInvestigations/office_coroner/PublicationsandReports/PedestrianDeathReview/DI_Pedestrian_Death_Review.html#when-occur" target="_blank">here</a>). Helmets are effective if you fall off your bike and hit your head on
the curb, of course, and if we believe that this is the primary
danger in moving around we would also want pedestrians to wear
helmets. Many people slip and fall in the shower, so certainly
wearing a helmet in there would help decrease shower-fall-deaths.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-style: normal;"> </span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-style: normal;"> That
last is a bit facetious, but only a bit: you could theoretically fall
and hit your head at any time, so wearing a helmet all the time would
prevent some number of injuries and deaths. Your head is always safer
inside a helmet than outside of it, which is why people assume it makes sense to legislate helmet use - it would prevent some injuries of a specific kind. But placing the emphasis on
helmets, as though wearing one makes a cyclist impervious to injury,
as though your head is the only place you get hit, as though falling
off your bike is the most significant risk to a cyclist, ignores what
is dangerous about cycling. The act of riding a bicycle is not itself
a dangerous activity; the danger comes from the cars on the road with
you, and the speeds they are traveling. </span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<a href="http://humantransport.org/sidewalks/SpeedKills.htm" target="_blank"><span style="font-style: normal;">Data shows that speed is </span><i>the</i></a><span style="font-style: normal;"><a href="http://humantransport.org/sidewalks/SpeedKills.htm" target="_blank"> factor in determining whether or not a collision will be fatal for the cyclist or pedestrian</a>, and it is impossible for me to imagine a
situation where traveling more slowly would not be a factor in
whether or not there even is a collision in the first place. If
you're hit by a car doing more than 40 mph</span><span style="font-style: normal;">, you have an 85% chance of death, whether you're wearing a
helmet or not. That most interactions happen at intersections and crosswalks –
that is, the place you are legally meant to be engaging with other
types of traffic – indicates that there is a more systemic problem
with the way the streets are organized.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-style: normal;">Furthermore,
the perpetuation of these myths in the way we talk about pedestrian
and cycling deaths </span><i>directly prevents</i><span style="font-style: normal;">
the having of evidence-based conversations and the drafting of laws
or traffic codes which target the perpetrators and </span><i>which
could save lives</i><span style="font-style: normal;">. It also means
that, because we assign some of the blame to the victim, we cannot
assign all the blame to the perpetrator, so legal recourses to action
are difficult and traumatic, and the sentences are shockingly
few and light. Like <a href="http://www.deseretnews.com/article/865568494/Man-who-killed-2-pedestrians-sentenced-to-5-days-in-jail.html" target="_blank">this one</a>, and <a href="http://www.cyclingweekly.co.uk/news/latest/532460/suspended-sentence-for-driver-who-killed-karl-austin.html" target="_blank">this one</a>, and <a href="http://www.theday.com/article/20110531/NWS02/110539906/1047/rss01" target="_blank">this one,</a>
</span><span style="font-style: normal;">and in fact there are too many to link to, so just check out <a href="http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Canadian_Criminal_Sentencing/Cases/Dangerous_Operation_of_a_Motor_Vehicle" target="_blank">this handy, horrifying list</a></span><span style="font-style: normal;">. </span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-style: normal;">I don't at all want to minimize the trauma experienced by
victims of sexual violence, or the pervasive, low-grade fear of
assault experienced by women everywhere, and I do recognize that
there is a qualitative, malignant difference between these narratives
– it is the difference between experiencing violence because of
what you </span><i>are</i><span style="font-style: normal;"> versus
what you </span><i>do</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, and that
difference is all and fundamental. When you arrive at your
destination and get off your bike, you are released from the dangers
of cycling in a way that people who experience sexual violence never
are (and this is for another post, but you're also, as a cyclist,
most likely to be a white male, meaning that once you get off
your bicycle you are the active recipient of significant privilege. Indeed, being physically capable of walking around or riding a bike in the first place is a privilege).
But I do want to elevate the discussion of cyclist and pedestrian
deaths, because in addition to being a woman moving in the world, I
am a bike-rider moving through the streets, and cultural, narrative change takes time. It is my hope that by making the connection to sexual assault, this conversation will benefit from the immense, incredible work that has been done to get victim-blaming recognized in the first place. The fact that I can use the phrase victim-blaming, and many if not most readers will know exactly what I mean, is because of the work done around sexual assault. It is my intent to honour that work while broadening its structural application. And, though this is also for another post, the drivers of most vehicles involved in pedestrian or cyclist collisions are white males between the ages of 16 and 54: there is certainly much to be said about a culture of aggressive masculinity and where driving fits on a continuum of male violence which also includes sexual assault.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
So. J<span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-style: normal;">ust
like the assumptions about sexual assault, these ideas about
car-pedestrian or -cyclist collisions are based on half-truths and outright myths refuted by easily
accessible, quantifiable data, data
which are routinely ignored or misrepresented in order to maintain a
status quo which is dangerous and violent.</span> I feel low-grade, pervasive fear while I'm riding my bike; fear
that someone won't signal and will turn into me (People! Signal your
turns! What's wrong with you?), or that I or my partner will be
struck during rush hour, or that I will forget to pay attention to the parked cars in my focus on the moving ones, or any number of other scenarios that never
cease running through my mind that all involve violence and death and which are daily validated by close calls. I
side-eye cars on the road the same way I side-eye men I don't know
walking behind me on the street, and for the same reasons: </span><i>Because it's always
possible that something will happen, because the consequences for me are
devastating and potentially life-threatening, because I will be at
least partially blamed for any incident that occurs, and because
justice is unforthcoming. </i>
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<span style="font-style: normal;">* I
use “she” for victim and “he” for perpetrator in this article
not with the intention of erasing male victims of sexual or domestic
violence, or those who do not conform to a male-female gender binary,
but because it's far and away the most statistically likely scenario,
and also the area I know the most about. </span>
</div>
J.A.http://www.blogger.com/profile/09227973090683882732noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8089764777553241143.post-91795613370160768012012-12-07T12:34:00.001-05:002012-12-07T12:35:09.542-05:00Oh, You Have a Degree? Then You Must Have a Job!Laurie Penny had a piece in the <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/dec/04/rent-debt-young-people-homelessness?fb=native&CMP=FBCNETTXT9038" target="_blank">Guardian</a> yesterday, in which she discusses the enormous amount of fear and stress young people feel about their student loans and their prospects for employment.<br />
<br />
This is something I know.<br />
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><img height="142" id="il_fi" src="http://blog.hubspot.com/Portals/249/images/get-a-marketing-job-inbound.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; padding-bottom: 8px; padding-right: 8px; padding-top: 8px;" width="200" /></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Oh, is THAT what I'm meant to do!</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
Penny writes from London, where I have struggled to live before, and I know how difficult it can be (homeless! In January! In <i>Camden</i>!). Though I live now in Ontario, the path my country and province are following is the same as London - increasing ideological austerity even in the face of <a href="http://qz.com/28535/proof-that-austerity-measures-are-making-european-economies-worse-not-better/" target="_blank">concrete evidence</a> that it is fiscally reckless and harmful for almost everyone. Though, as with everything in our mess of a hierarchical system, it is most harmful to the people who have already been harmed by it - that is, single parents (mothers, usually), people with disabilities, people in industries with low job security, marginalized racial groups, people without homes, and on and on. The poorer you are, of course, the harder austerity measures hit.<br />
<br />
<a name='more'></a><br />
<br />
I am one of those people who lives in fear of how I will pay my student debt, which, combined with my partner's debt, is an amount of money which is not absolutely large - smaller than some of my (employed) friends' mortgages, for example - but is absolutely insurmountable for us. It is insurmountable because in spite of - or, I'm coming to think, because of - our postgraduate levels of education, neither of us is able to find work.<br />
<br />
I recognize that our education is an indicator of privilege - we are both white, Canadian-born, from middle class backgrounds - and that as such we are likelier to eventually become meaningfully employed than other people who may be in a position similar to ours (I cannot tell you how distasteful I find it to be reassured how "employable" I am). I also recognize that although I feel a great deal of despair and anxiety over our current position, if I'm completely honest with myself, I'm also taking for granted that it will be temporary. That something will happen, sometime, because it just has to, because I can't imagine that our potential as productive members of society would be stalled so early and unfairly. Believing that you have the right to fulfill your potential - now <i>that's </i>privilege.<br />
<br />
But even acknowledging all that, these are the facts: we owe a great deal of money, which we spent getting degrees meant to help us get jobs commensurate with our levels of education, and so the loans we took out were to be considered investments. The availability of those jobs in any <a href="http://oncampus.macleans.ca/education/2011/01/17/whatever-happened-to-tenure/" target="_blank">meaningful sense</a> has <a href="http://ocufa.on.ca/2012/data-check-the-disturbing-decline-in-tenure-and-tenure-track-positions/" target="_blank">declined dramatically</a>, and they would likely not have existed <a href="http://blogs.nature.com/news/2012/11/leaky-pipelines-for-canadian-women-in-research.html" target="_blank">for me</a> in the <a href="http://ocufa.on.ca/2012/data-check-women-still-underrepresented-in-canadian-universities/" target="_blank">first place</a>. Because of the combined pressures of unemployment and high levels of personal debt, we currently live with my mother, a retired teacher, and we are extremely fortunate to have somewhere to go, because we couldn't possibly pay rent. To ameliorate this problem, we collect social assistance from <a href="http://www.mcss.gov.on.ca/en/mcss/programs/social/index.aspx" target="_blank">Ontario Works</a>, which provides us with between $950 and $1030, depending on how many dance classes I taught that month, for the two of us. This *just* covers both our monthly student loan payments and almost nothing else. (It is beyond my comprehension that people are expected to live off this benefit - take a look <a href="http://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/city_result.jsp?country=Canada&city=Kitchener" target="_blank">here for mean cost of living</a> in Kitchener. Needless to say, it is way more than the amount of the benefit.) The kicker is that the system, in its infinite wisdom, does not recognize us as a possibility: there are no considerations for university graduates needing assistance and so we are not eligible for any skill-up programs, and the employment counseling is all but useless - more than one person has said "the expectation is that you have a degree, so you must have a job" <i>verbatim</i>. But the real harm of our being invisible within this system - and the reasons for one's invisibility have a great deal to do with what kind of harm is caused, so that harms to us are still relative to our privilege - is that <i>we are not allowed to use social assistance money to pay our loans</i>. Seriously. When we are audited, and we will be, they will discover that our loan payments are being made, and since we couldn't possibly be using Ontario Works money to pay them, they will assume that we're getting money from somewhere and not telling them about it, and they will cut off our assistance. I have no idea when that will happen, or what we will do when it does. <br />
<br />
So we look for work. And looking for work is a deeply humiliating experience, made more so when the jobs that are available for you to apply for are jobs you do not want. I don't mean as a matter of preference - "this job isn't perfect; this job doesn't pay enough" or whatever - but as a matter of economic disenfranchisement. Every job I apply to that asks for a level of education or experience which is less than what I have is a job I'm potentially taking away from someone with the right level of education or experience, or the right kind of education or experience. That I'm applying for serving jobs at all is a problem; that I've got a master's degree and 10 years experience in service and <i>still not getting hired</i>, because everyone else applying for that job also has 10 years experience and a master's degree, that many of us are not even listing those master's degrees on most of the resumes we hand out, indicates a systemic failure of sweeping scope and complexity.<br />
<br />
There's a sort of wrinkling-down that comes along with my applying for serving jobs, or my partner - a PhD! - training at a call centre, which he's currently doing: If there are no jobs which require our educations available, we have to apply for jobs that don't require our levels of education, and eventually a master's degree becomes the standard level of education for any entry-level job. It has already happened with bachelor's degrees - every job wants one, no matter how irrelevant it may be to the task at hand - and it is slowly happening with master's degrees, already considered not to be a terminal degrree. If having a postgraduate degree becomes the minimum standard for low-security, low-paying, mostly part-time jobs, then what are people with bachelor degrees to do? What about people with only high school? I have a feeling that those in the skilled trades will fare better, but what about people who didn't graduate high school? If the jobs that have required little to no education are being taken by people with degrees, what's left for people without them? That's without even talking about how our participation in the workforce is held ransom for the price of university, a structure which requires people to assume an enormous burden of debt to attain a degree that will enable them to work at a job that might make no use of their degree at all.<br />
<br />
In addition to the very real economic hardships it encourages and deepens, this represents a dramatic wasting of human capital. It is unconscionable to accept these kinds of diminishing returns on such an institutional scale, and it is undermining any hope for the<a href="http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2001/0205.florida.html" target="_blank"> creative class </a>that is supposed to trumpet our shift into future-economy (I have my doubts about the viability of this model in the first place, but it's an academic point at this juncture anyway). The hollowing-out of job security and the neo-liberal emphasis on a flexible labour market (translation: we want to be able to fire you more easily) has placed undue pressure on those who remain within it, <a href="http://toofatforourpants.blogspot.ca/2012/01/deregulation-and-culture-of-overwork.html" target="_blank">as I've written about elsewhere</a>, meaning that the work they do is of lower quality, and personal lives and health suffer as a result.<br />
<br />
I have a wishlist: <br />
<ul>
<li>A shift in educational culture to one which does not assume that university follows high school in the same way we assume that high school follows elementary school - not only does that not leave any room for discussions of who is excluded from participation in the university system, it encourages people to take whatever, usually something in the social sciences or humanities, because they're expected to go to university. It's kind of like wanting a tattoo and then deciding what it's going to be, rather than being so invested in an idea or image that you feel you want to carry it around forever. This shift would also require: </li>
<li>A shift in educational culture which does not posit polytechnic or college training as somehow lesser-than a university education - they serve different functions, and as long as we keep assuming that everyone should go to university we are closing doors to people with interests that lay outside of the university purview. Meaningful policy would include major increases in the availability and prestige of apprenticeships as part of post-secondary education. This is of course related to:</li>
<li>A broader cultural shift which ceases to privilege certain types of knowledge over others, a structure which allows us to define intelligence as the ability to thrive within the particulars of the university system. Or put another way, an acknowledgement that getting good grades means only that you're good at getting good grades, and is not necessarily a referendum on one's intelligence.</li>
<li>Obviously, a better and more comprehensive social assistance program which is capable of addressing people in changing or atypical situations. This would need to be accompanied by an acknowledgement that people on benefits are not there because they are lazy, that "culture of entitlement" is a complete myth designed and borne out by cynical political ideologues, and a genuine effort to remove the shame and stigma from collecting benefits.</li>
<li>A minimum wage and social assistance levels which are tied to inflation and costs of living. Like, <i>obviously</i>.</li>
<li>My most fervent wish, and at the broadest level: a cultural shift away from the absolute privileging of the work performed in the economic sphere over any work performed without monetary compensation, and perhaps even a shift away from the <a href="http://www.iaffe.org/" target="_blank">separation of economic and domestic spheres</a> altogether. </li>
</ul>
That should get us started, anyway.<br />
<br />
<br />J.A.http://www.blogger.com/profile/09227973090683882732noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8089764777553241143.post-55853251160353983132012-12-06T11:00:00.000-05:002012-12-06T11:02:50.805-05:00December 6 1989 Day of Remembrance Today marks the 23rd anniversary of the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89cole_Polytechnique_massacre" target="_blank">Montreal Massacre</a> at the École Polytechnique, when a man "fighting feminism" killed 14 women and injured 10, as well as accidentally injuring 4 men who were caught in the crossfire. It is a testament to how much work still remains to be done on the issue of male violence against women that when I sat down to write this post, nothing more than a link-roundup, I didn't even know where to start. In the aftermath of Kasandra Perkins's murder and Jovan Belcher's subsequent suicide, there seems to be no end to the mournful and outraged and bone-weary discussions of male violence against women. <br />
<br />
If you're in the KW area, I hope you can find time to attend <a href="http://www.sascwr.org/news/waterloo-regions-december-6th-vigil/" target="_blank">Canada's National Day of Remembrance and Action on Violence Against Women</a> this evening. There are candlelight vigils tonight in pretty much every town in Canada, so take a look at your local paper to see what's going on around you.<br />
<br />
Specific to the Montreal Massacre:<br />
<br />
<ul>
<li>Julie Bindel in the <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/dec/03/montreal-massacre-canadas-feminists-remember" target="_blank">Guardian</a> on how the events of that day impacted the Canadian radical feminist movement</li>
<li> Supriya Dwivedi in the <a href="http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2012/12/06/supriya-dwivedi-remembering-the-montreal-massacre-is-a-vigil-worth-holding/" target="_blank">National Post</a> on the validity of the vigils that will be held today (there aren't many comments yet, but a likely tw for when they start to appear. This is the National Post, after all)</li>
<li>Stephanie Levitz in the <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/2011/12/06/montreal-massacre-anniversary-parliament-hill_n_1131645.html" target="_blank">Huffington Post</a> on the Canadian long-form gun registry, which was sparked by the Montreal Massacre, and which the Conservative government is in the process of dismantling (oh, goody!)</li>
<li>Lynda Muir, director of the Women and Children's Shelter of Barrie, in the <a href="http://www.thebarrieexaminer.com/2012/12/04/is-canada-any-safer-for-women-since-montreal-massacre" target="_blank">Barrie Examiner</a> on how little progress has been made on violence against women in Canada. </li>
</ul>
On Kasandra Perkins and naming male violence against women:<br />
<ul>
<li> Rob Okun at <a href="http://msmagazine.com/blog/blog/2012/12/06/i%E2%80%99m-mad-as-hell-at-conventional-manhood/" target="_blank">Ms. Magazine</a></li>
<li>This <a href="http://crunkfeministcollective.wordpress.com/2012/12/03/remember-their-names-in-memory-of-kasandra-cherica-others/" target="_blank">great post</a> at the Crunk Feminist Collective</li>
<li>Meghan at <a href="http://feministcurrent.com/6806/we-aint-sayin-she-a-gold-digger-on-kasi-perkins-as-the-catalyst-to-her-own-death-holding-the-media-accountable/" target="_blank">Feminist Current</a></li>
<li>Jill at <a href="http://www.feministe.us/blog/archives/2012/12/03/if-you-only-read-one-thing-about-the-kasandra-perkins-murder/" target="_blank">Feministe</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.whataboutourdaughters.com/waod/2012/12/3/the-crucifixion-of-kasandra-perkinsvictim-blaming-black-mate.html" target="_blank">What About Our Daughters</a></li>
<li>Amanda at <a href="http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2012/12/04/jovan_belcher_murder_suicide_don_t_blame_football_brain_trauma_for_the_crime.html" target="_blank">Slate</a></li>
<li>Shawna at <a href="http://msmagazine.com/blog/blog/2012/12/03/kasandra-perkins-deserves-better/" target="_blank">Ms. Magazine</a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.cbc.ca/sports/story/2012/12/02/sp-athletes-domestic-violence.html?cmp=rss" target="_blank">CBC</a> looks at the history of famous athletes and domestic violence</li>
<li>Jamele Hill at <a href="http://espn.go.com/espnw/commentary/8705353/time-end-silence-domestic-violence" target="_blank">ESPN</a> (definitely do NOT read the comments on this one)</li>
</ul>
<br />
<br />J.A.http://www.blogger.com/profile/09227973090683882732noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8089764777553241143.post-81170173130760064622012-12-04T12:13:00.001-05:002012-12-04T12:13:16.658-05:00Makeup For Babies! Super Great!In <a href="http://whataradicalnotion.blogspot.ca/2012/11/is-there-place-for-men-in-feminism.html" target="_blank">my last post</a> I mentioned a speaker at a conference about domestic violence showing a picture of himself as a 3-year-old, looking, sure, adorably rough-and-tumble, and using it to illustrate that "all children are at equal risk for being abusers" and that gender difference hadn't set in yet. That little boy, he asserted, did not even know he was a little boy! He was just a gender-neutral small person!<br />
<br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-XPchQAk3kdY/UL4ZQzg4_tI/AAAAAAAAAEI/Hw9_VtE2KfA/s1600/fisherpricepurse.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="146" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-XPchQAk3kdY/UL4ZQzg4_tI/AAAAAAAAAEI/Hw9_VtE2KfA/s200/fisherpricepurse.jpg" width="200" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Girls like purses because they used bags to gather berries.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
Wrong. Oh, oh, so wrong; I wish he was not so wrong. But he is so. Wrong.<br />
<br />
It was an offhand remark in the conference, and I didn't address it at the time because it seemed like a derail, but the more I think about it, the more it sticks in my craw. How dare this guy not know how early this messaging starts? Before babies are even born we're talking about them in terms of their gender, buying pink blankets for girl babies and blue blankets for boys, as though the baby zirself will be confused as to what their genitals look like if they don't have the label of a blanket. That may seem like a small thing, coloured baby blankets, but they are illustrative of the way we treat humans differently based on whatever colour blanket they were born into (whether they fit in it or not). Because there is makeup for babies, and because makeup for babies is almost not even the most egregious example of this kind of shockingly early gender manipulation. Makeup! For <i>babies</i>!<br />
<br />
<br />
<a name='more'></a><br />
<br />
Here to tell us more is <a href="http://www.thealphaparent.com/2012/11/makeup-for-babies.html" target="_blank">AlphaParent</a>:<br />
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
This may sound like a sensationalist overreaction on my
part; these products are aimed at babies after all, and babies have no concept
of gender, let alone objectification. However it is the introduction of beauty
paraphernalia into the baby’s everyday world, its familiarization and <b>indoctrination</b> at an
unconscious involuntary level that enables these toys to set the foundation for
such issues. Even before their first birthday babies can assimilate messages
presented to them. Psychologists have discovered that babies know,
explore, observe, and learn more than we would have ever thought possible. In
some ways they are smarter than adults. Several studies show that even the
youngest children have sophisticated and powerful learning abilities (<a href="http://www.teach-the-brain.org/forums/printthread.php?t=940&page=2&pp=40" target="_blank">Gopnik. A</a>).</blockquote>
Read the whole post to see an alarmingly huge and still-perfunctory list of a bunch of highly gendered toys for children under the age of three, for both boys and girls. Overwhelmingly, the message is that boys make things ("My First Toolbox") and girls buy the things that boys make and look pretty while doing it.<br />
<br />
Toys and messages like this work in a few different ways. First, of course, there's the simple fact of teaching a child that she's for looking at, or he's for building things, and that there are no other options for gender, and few others for how that gender presents (a girl can also be <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Cleaning-Trolley-Working-Vacuum-Accessories/dp/B0092UZ4R8" target="_blank">for cleaning</a> or <a href="http://www.hasbro.com/easy-bake/en_US/shop/browse.cfm" target="_blank">cooking</a>! Boys could <a href="http://www.toysrus.com/search/index.jsp?kwCatId=&kw=guns&origkw=guns&f=Taxonomy/TRUS/2254197&sr=1" target="_blank">shoot things</a>! Choices to choose from!). As AlphaParent points out, young children learn things early, and are capable of assimilating messages far more complex than these ones.<br />
<br />
Secondly it reveals the belief that these are interests <i>innate to children because of their gender</i>. That toys for children under the age of one would be so strongly gendered highlights the fact that toymakers thinks there is something about being a girl which biologically or evolutionarily (ugh, ick) dictates her preference for pink, for sparkles, and for any and all aspects of domesticity. Companies like Hasbro believe - or pander to the belief, and I don't think it matters which - that girls are fundamentally <i>designed</i> for housework and baby-raising, and boys are designed for active adventures and building and destroying things.<br />
<br />
These toys work the same way all pop culture works: it simultaneously illustrates and reinforces underlying social messages. Parents learn to put their female babies in pink (my father had my ears pierced at about 6 weeks - an Italian tradition, at least in our family, but also, by his own admission, a way to make sure people knew I was a girl), so that strangers know to call her beautiful, or their boy babies in blue so strangers know to call him strong. Toy companies didn't create the gender dynamic, but they insist on its relevance and accuracy, thereby perpetuating and legitimizing age-old tropes of gender essentialism. Those tropes stay with children all their lives, as they do with us all, and are used to justify the status quo which systematically offers men and boys greater and more meaningful choices and opportunities, and which situates male power in action and female power in attractiveness.<br />
<br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; margin-left: 1em; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://www.crossingguardconsulting.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/27.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="150" id="il_fi" src="http://www.crossingguardconsulting.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/27.jpg" style="padding-bottom: 8px; padding-right: 8px; padding-top: 8px;" width="200" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Oh, a sexy nine-year-old! Seems fine.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
In addition to the simple fact of heavily gendered toys for small children, it is worth looking at how the messages to each gender have changed over the last few years. It's too much to cover in one post, but there's a lot more to be said here about how gendered messaging dovetails with the increasing sexualization of younger and younger girls, which starts with things like Makeup for Babies and the insistence that being attractive to men is the highest achievement for a woman. While I think that has always been true of the messages we give girls - being beautiful has never NOT been a thing demanded of women - what constitutes "being attractive" has started to slide down a slippery slope, as it were, so that <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2010/apr/16/children-clothing-survey-bikini-heels" target="_blank">high heels and thongs for 8-year-olds</a> are now a thing you can sell in the shop and <a href="http://www.thehollywoodgossip.com/videos/dance-moms-showgirls-routine/" target="_blank">9-year-olds are doing burlesque</a>. The reasons for the slide are complex, but have something to do with the increasing pornification of our sexual habits, which rely heavily on eroticization of male dominance; bolstered by <a href="http://facilegestures.com/2011/04/01/evolutionary-psycholog-gets-gender-wrong-again/" target="_blank">bat-shit crazy evo psych nonsense</a> that insists we were right all along about gender roles, because of lizard-brain; combined with the sort of <a href="http://www.ontheissuesmagazine.com/2011winter/2011_winter_Douglas.php" target="_blank">enlightened sexism</a> that makes people talk about all this stuff like it's super fine and great because sexism is dead anyway! These messages exist on a continuum that starts early, and My Pretty Purse and makeup for babies are just the beginning.<br />
<br />
What's next? <a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-412195/Tesco-condemned-selling-pole-dancing-toy.html" target="_blank">My First Pole Dancing Kit</a>? Oh. <br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />J.A.http://www.blogger.com/profile/09227973090683882732noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8089764777553241143.post-18188574176123300092012-11-26T14:33:00.000-05:002012-11-26T14:37:17.089-05:00On Men's Place In Feminism: Part One (Probably)<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><img alt="Congratulations, Maureen! You are the fourth winner in the Feminist Ryan Gosling book contest.
I’m giving away one more book this week - check back to see if you’ve won!" class="shadowed" height="125" src="http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_mdvp9km5qg1r4vn34o1_500.jpg" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" width="200" /></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Give me back that hammer.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
About six weeks ago, I was fortunate enough to attend a conference
about how to engage male allies in the fight to end gendered
violence, namely violence against women. I was there as a
volunteer-in-training for the very awesome <a href="http://www.sascwr.org/">Sexual
Assault Support Centre</a> of Waterloo Region, which boasts one of
the very few <a href="http://www.maleallies.org/">Male Ally </a>programs
in the country*; a program which, it turns out, is at least as
comprehensive as the programs espoused by the speaker of the
conference, <a href="http://www.rusfunk.com/">Rus Ervin Funk</a>. Go team!<br />
<br />
<br />
<a name='more'></a>That conference happened to coincide with the latest round of
debates over <a href="http://www.hugoschwyzer.net/" target="_blank">Hugo Schwyzer</a>, a discussion about the right of this one
character to proclaim himself a feminist and speak to and for
feminism that flares up with some regularity (<a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/02/exile-in-gal-ville-how-a-male-feminist-alienated-his-supporters/252915/">here's
some background</a>). This time it was mostly contained in this
article at <a href="http://persephonemagazine.com/2012/10/15/deconstructing-hugo-2/comment-page-2/#%21prettyPhoto">Persephone</a>**
and this one at <a href="http://www.xojane.com/issues/hugo-schwyzer-controversy">XOJane</a>,
but the reappearance of his name and the discomfort I felt at this
conference conflated to make me think more broadly about men's place
in feminism, especially when they appear to be leading.<br />
<br />
First: I think we can take it as a matter of necessity that men must be
involved in ending the violence for which they are mostly
responsible, and that more generally they must be involved in ending the sexism for which they are also
mostly responsible. As a matter of practicality, ending abuse and
violence in the lives of people of all genders requires men to step
up. End of.<br />
<br />
As a matter of philosophy, though, I find it deeply troubling. It makes me very uncomfortable that men's voices are <i>required</i>,
though I also believe less in equality than in liberation, which would
of course include men. I also think it's important here to recognize
that it is a matter of privilege for me, as someone
not suffering from, and statistically less likely to suffer from,
intimate partner violence, to talk theoretically about how men are
involved and how it makes me feel to have men involved. But as anyone
involved in direct care knows, sometimes you have a different fight
on the ground than you do in theory; I can both continue to try to
engage men to end violence and sexism as a way to save women's lives,
while thinking and feeling deeply troubled by the continued upholding of
male voices as the important ones.<br />
<br />
<br />
And I was particularly troubled by this man at this conference,
though not for the reasons I had thought I would be, before I went.
Or at least, not only for the reasons I had thought; that is, I was
troubled not only by the ways he didn't get it, but also by the ways
that he did.<br />
<br />
The things he didn't get were seemingly minor: a photo of himself
at 3, a well-cared-for blond boy next to a scruffy dog and a mud
puddle, which he used to illustrate the point that at 3 years old, we
are equally likely to abuse or be abused, and that gendered messages had not yet begun (<a href="http://archpedi.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=203703" target="_blank">NOT</a> <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/may/06/gender-imbalance-children-s-literature" target="_blank">TRUE</a>. <a href="http://www.childhelp.org/pages/statistics" target="_blank">Obviously</a>.);
a
story about getting his men's groups to help out at a shelter and the
trials he experienced trying to “convince the women there that we
were OK”; his oddly petulant delight at “fooling” a feminist
march that he and his men's group had attended to support, but that
appeared very sinister to the women in the march (and duh; a phalanx
of shouting men approaching a feminist rally has rarely boded well
for the women on the scene); a tendency to situate men's
responsibility to end male violence in terms of fatherhood or
husband-hood, as in “how would you feel about your daughter being
beaten up” and “raise your son to be the kind of man you'd want
your daughter to date”, which is all very heteronormative and
man-as-protector and also implies that one can only be against
violence if they can relate it happening to someone they love, not
just because people should have the right to not have cultural and
legal structures set up to facilitate their abuse whether you can
relate to them or not. In the grand scheme of horrible things that
people say
about women, domestic violence, and feminism, my issue with these may
seem pedantic, but they indicate to me all the tiny crannies that
privilege sluices into, clouding our view, and how hard we
have to work, how vigilant in our language, we must be, to fight it.<br />
<br />
But what really got me were the things he said that were things I
would have said if I'd been leading that workshop, or even if the
Sexual Assault Support Centre had been leading the workshop, I was
surprised to discover. Things like telling the upstream parable,
talking about education and involving teenagers (though mixed in with
that was a lot of “you've been doing it wrong and that's why men
aren't receptive”), even his totally correct and necessary
assertion that violence against women – indeed, all violence
committed by men – is rooted in sexism. I'm glad he knows these
things, and I'm glad he's talking about them, but ... I <i>know. </i><span style="font-style: normal;">And
in a room two-thirds full of women, in a room at least half full of
direct-care workers, </span><i>we</i><span style="font-style: normal;">
</span><i>all knew. </i><span style="font-style: normal;">We knew better than he did. He literally
did not say one thing in six hours that I – and everyone at my
table – did not already know. And without any kind of
acknowledgement that we had all been doing work just like this, and
talking about these ideas, for </span><i>years,</i><span style="font-style: normal;">
it was pretty uncomfortable. And not for him.</span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-style: normal;">Maybe there's no way around that,
and who knows how I would have felt if he were trying to introduce
something new to the discourse, but it did make me think: maybe
there's just no way that this situation isn't going to be problematic. It will always be at least a
little condescending, at least a little 'splainy, at least a little
offensive. Because what's offensive, of course, no matter what he got
right or wrong, is that we needed him there at all. That we should
require, after all this time, a man's voice, no matter how clumsy, to
make credible what women have been talking about with nuance and
compassion for </span><i>a century, </i><span style="font-style: normal;">is
terribly sexist. And any real understanding of privilege would have
led Mr Funk, and any other men who talk about these things, to say
something like this:</span><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<br />
<span style="font-style: normal;">I think it’s really important
for me to own that a big part of the reason for [<a href="http://riotrite.tumblr.com/post/35869108510/misandry-isnt-real-dudez" target="_blank">this
post on the myth of misandry's</a>] popularity is my privilege as a
guy. That’s huge. So many women replying to this are saying “I’ve
been saying this for years” and they are completely right and </span><i>that
is the whole problem</i><span style="font-style: normal;">. When I
talk about this stuff, a lot more people are willing to listen for
the sole reason that I’m a guy. That IS misogyny! (emphasis mine)</span></blockquote>
Yep.<br />
<br />
<br />
*This post is written by me as a feminist critic, not as a volunteer, and
has nothing whatever to do with the views of SASC or their Male Allies.<br />
<br />
**
Oh my god, this article. The mansplaining! I've been on the fence about
Schwyzer before now, and I hate the term "mansplaining", but this just
killed me: <br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<b><i>What would your response be to claims that you’re “mansplaining,” in particular with the article on facials?</i></b><br />
HS: The simplest definition of mansplaining is when a man explains a
woman’s experience to her. That article on facials has been severely
misrepresented. If you read it, I’m not telling women they need to let
men cum on their faces. I’m explaining a couple of different theories
about why men like doing it, and how it grew to be so popular. (Worth
noting: I never get to pick my own titles or my own images for my
pieces.) I say it very clearly in the piece: “No one should be obligated
to endure humiliation for the sake of someone else’s longing for
validation.” A lot of readers ignored that, perhaps deliberately.</blockquote>
He
mansplains his response to a question about mansplaining! Argh! I can't
even. I'm off the fence now, and off Schwyzer. Also read that article
about facials <a href="http://ca.jezebel.com/5875217/he-wants-to-jizz-on-your-face-but-not-why-youd-think" target="_blank">here</a>. No surprise to me that it's on Jezebel. J.A.http://www.blogger.com/profile/09227973090683882732noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8089764777553241143.post-32780878532089007762012-11-01T12:06:00.002-04:002012-11-01T12:13:34.720-04:00Is This Feminist? And Other Relevant QuestionsOh, <a href="http://femen.org/" target="_blank">FEMEN</a> and your <a href="https://www.google.ca/search?q=femen&hl=en&prmd=imvnsu&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ei=mIySUOykNeTD2QWG-oDICw&ved=0CAcQ_AUoAQ&biw=1024&bih=483" target="_blank">feminist boobs</a>. Your uniformly thin, smooth-skinned, whole, mostly white, two-breasted naked torsos are just so subversive, and lard knows there's no other way to get the media to pay any attention to you!<br />
<br />
Guh.<br />
<br />
But this post is not about FEMEN, necessarily, because lots of people have been saying whatever I would say about them for years now. Read <a href="http://www.thefword.org.uk/blog/2012/10/femen_al_jazeera" target="_blank">here</a>! And <a href="http://therealsgm.blogspot.ca/2012/10/femen-because-they-really-bug-me.html" target="_blank">here</a>! And <a href="http://toofatforourpants.blogspot.ca/2011/06/slutwalk-porn-and-future-of-feminism.html" target="_blank">here's</a> what I wrote about Slutwalk, and <a href="http://feministcurrent.com/5952/on-hookup-culture-and-an-imagined-sexual-liberation-hanna-roisins-boys-on-the-side/" target="_blank">here's</a> what I wrote about hookup culture, in which you could just replace the actual subject with "FEMEN" and voila! Reconstituted. In the immortal words of everyone's favourite spinster aunt: <a href="http://blog.iblamethepatriarchy.com/2012/08/23/spinster-aunt-is-informed-that-pussy-riots-carpet-doesnt-match-drapes/" target="_blank">If the liberal peen is keen, the result can only demean</a>. There's no need to add to the list of criticism - in fact I can't believe that such interesting, thoughtful, and patient analyses have arisen out of this SAME. TIRED. SHIT. <b>Update: <a href="http://feministcurrent.com/6619/there-is-a-wrong-way-to-do-feminism-and-femen-is-doing-it-wrong/" target="_blank">Meghan Murphy totally beat me to it this morning</a>!</b><br />
<br />
<a name='more'></a><br />
<br />
I do want to talk about some of the criticism of the criticism, though - specifically the hedging and refusal to get into a debate about who's "doing feminism wrong". Many of the posts I've read on the subject have included a disclaimer somewhere in the article - even the Al Jazeera English's <a href="http://stream.aljazeera.com/story/future-feminism" target="_blank">The Stream interview</a>, which sparked this recent round of debate, had a number of prominent feminists making this point, notably the leader of FEMEN International Inna Schevchenko and Chloe Angyal of <a href="http://feministing.com/">Feministing.com</a>, who both said something along the lines of "Now, I know that it's a tired and unproductive argument to be tearing
each other down and arguing over who's doing feminism properly, and I
have no wish to rehash that debate."<br />
<br />
No. No!<br />
<br />
This is a silencing tactic. It is a way to make genuine criticism seem like a petty distraction from the overall goal. It's a way to dismiss and undermine the validity of the conversation happening around the incident, whatever it may be. I can't help but notice that the women who are most vocal
about the unproductivity of the is-this-feminist debate are often the ones doing the things
being criticized. It's a derail, a distraction, a way to point the
criticism they don't know how to deal with - or that they simply
disagree with - back in on itself, and therefore avoid having a real
discussion. If we're focusing on critiquing what other women are doing, their logic goes, we are detracting from critiquing what's being done to women.<br />
<br />
There are a couple things wrong with this:<br />
<br />
First, women are steeped in the same patriarchal ideas as everyone else, and some of those ideas are going to be internalized, so that a lot of the time <i>what other women are doing </i>and <i>what's being done to women</i> are one and the same thing. We cannot talk about one without talking about the other, and situations like this one with FEMEN, where the argument is about the use of a heavily fetishized part of a highly objectified body, are particularly rife with internalized ideas of womanhood and sexuality. We get those notions from the culture we grow up within, and so it's hardly revelatory that some of those cultural ideas MIGHT HAVE made their way into other things, and it is certainly worth examination.<br />
<br />
Second, there are totally right and wrong ways to do feminism, and it has happened in the past that feminists have themselves done things that are not necessarily furthering to the feminist cause. That's because people are humans, and humans aren't perfect. We must be allowed to make mistakes, yes, but also we must be able to talk about those mistakes without being accused of divisiveness, and we must be able to take criticism for our actions in the same way. No one likes to be told they're wrong, of course, but we must have the
courage not only to be wrong sometimes, but also the fortitude to take
being told that we're wrong with grace and to grow from it. <a href="http://radtransfem.tumblr.com/post/33837896964/thats-not-feminist-and-other-heresies" target="_blank">As RadTransFem points out</a> oh so eloquently, there are lots of thoughtful ways to talk about what may or may not further that feminist cause, and that we certainly must talk about that, at length and in depth. It is absolutely possible to establish some parameters, through a broad and intersectional analysis of what exactly is being said by whom, where we overlap, and where we diverge. And doing this, it must be said, in no way discounts the fact that feminism is not a monolith, that there are lots of different ways of doing feminism, but we cannot simply accept that something is feminist because "I'm a feminist and I did it." What's unproductive is to think that discussing the ways we perform our feminisms with one another is unproductive.<br />
<br />
<br />J.A.http://www.blogger.com/profile/09227973090683882732noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8089764777553241143.post-68802461055488236522012-10-25T12:16:00.003-04:002012-10-25T12:28:21.811-04:00In Defense of Using "Douche" as an Insult<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-LTS32uZV4c0/UIloaQLv4ZI/AAAAAAAAAD4/YjdtyR4pc8w/s1600/douche.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-LTS32uZV4c0/UIloaQLv4ZI/AAAAAAAAAD4/YjdtyR4pc8w/s200/douche.jpg" width="200" /></a>I recently read <a href="http://canbebitter.wordpress.com/2012/10/16/st-this-feminist-says-that-she-shouldnt/" target="_blank">this post</a> on Can Be Bitter, in which the author dissects the meanings behind some commonly-used insults, namely <i>douche, slut, motherfucker, </i>and comparing vaginas to sea-creatures. I'm totally on board with the opening - that language is important, that the words we use reveal and reinforce cultural ideas that we share and which may be harmful or oppressive, and that we should therefore be aware of what the hidden meanings of the words we use. I like the suitcase metaphor - as in, think of each word as a suitcase full of all kinds of cultural and personal assumptions, and in order to communicate effectively with one another we have to all know most (but not all) of what's contained in those suitcases. (Quick aside: this is why "It didn't mean anything, it's just a joke!" is not a defense. If it actually didn't mean anything, it would not have been a joke, it would have been a series of disconnected nonsense words. It's only a joke <i>because </i>it means something, and because everyone who gets the joke knows what things it means. I'll probably write more on this later, but for now <a href="http://www.wired.com/magazine/2011/04/ff_humorcode/all/" target="_blank">this</a> is a pretty interesting article.)<br />
<br />
<br />
So I think it's really important to acknowledge the ways our words are used and the meanings we may or may not be aware of when we speak, and to take the harm those words and meanings can cause very seriously. Whoever said "sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me" was, quite frankly, a total idiot. <br />
<br />
The purpose of this post is to defend the use of one of the words discussed in the post at Can Be Bitter, not in denial of what the words means, but because of it. The author points out that <i>douche</i> is an insult primarily because it is a thing that is used in the vagina, which obviously makes it gross and terrible and something no one would ever want to be associated with. And that's true, for sure, but it's also true that douching in itself is a pretty oppressive and dangerous practice, and for me that makes it a pretty damn apt insult for a certain type of behaviour.<br />
<br />
Consider:<br />
<br />
<ul>
<li>Douching, first, is the act of squirting corrosive, flower-scented chemicals up the vagina, also known as <a href="http://blog.iblamethepatriarchy.com/2005/12/29/clean-and-fresh-country-baby-powder-flowers/" target="_blank">Patriarchy-In-A-Box</a>. It is based on the idea that vaginas are dirty and gross and something to be embarrassed about. <a href="http://www.forbes.com/sites/annedoyle/2012/06/17/warning-to-womendont-say-vagina-in-the-michigan-house-and-dont-sit-at-men-only-table-in-philadelphias-union-league/" target="_blank">Just like this</a>.</li>
<li>Douching is a harmful, unsafe practice that denies the actual function of female sexual and reproductive organs, and uses that denial to assert male control over them. <a href="http://slog.thestranger.com/slog/archives/2012/10/24/gop-rape-advisory-chart" target="_blank"> Just like all of this nasty business</a>.</li>
<li>Douching is also about selling women products they don't need to fix something that isn't wrong with them. I can't find a link to ALL OF ADVERTISING EVER, so use your imagination. Or go watch some tv. No, wait. Don't.</li>
<li>Douching is a symptom of the idea that female bodies exists for male pleasure. <a href="http://feministcurrent.com/6608/the-end-is-nigh-and-the-proof-lies-in-breast-cancer-awareness-campaigns/" target="_blank">Just like this</a>.</li>
</ul>
<br />
It turns out there are a lot of people (mostly male people, but <a href="http://2012.talkingpointsmemo.com/2012/10/linda-mcmahon-emergency-contraception-hospitals.php" target="_blank">not exclusively</a>) exhibiting dangerous, oppressive desires to control vaginas and the things that happen there. Douches, one and all!<br />
<br />
*Photo credit: <a href="http://gawker.com/5404734/the-gray-lady-and-her-sad-shared-empty-bag-of-douche" target="_blank">Gawker</a> <br />
<br />J.A.http://www.blogger.com/profile/09227973090683882732noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8089764777553241143.post-21121214731862239932012-10-20T12:53:00.000-04:002012-10-20T12:53:39.125-04:00Some Thoughts About Reddit, Doxxing, and the Anonymity of ImagesIn case you haven’t heard about it
yet, <a href="http://www.forbes.com/sites/deannazandt/2012/10/11/internet-wars-over-womens-bodies/" target="_blank">here’s some background</a> on the Reddit-<a href="http://www.tumblr.com/tagged/predditors" target="_blank">Predditors</a>
series of events.<br />
<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-7JVZljNsyBU/UILWHtTwElI/AAAAAAAAADo/m3RnH3jVQsU/s1600/118220-anon.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="180" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-7JVZljNsyBU/UILWHtTwElI/AAAAAAAAADo/m3RnH3jVQsU/s320/118220-anon.jpg" width="320" /></a>I’ve been reading a lot of pretty
great analysis that goes well beyond the obvious “uh, if posting
photos of non-consenting women in public is free speech, then me
calling you an asshole for doing it is also free speech”, and
there’s been a ton written about putting r/creepshots, <a href="http://www.vancouverobserver.com/blogs/feminista/why-isnt-anyone-talking-about-misogyny-involved-amanda-todds-life-and-death" target="_blank">Amanda Todd</a>,
and <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/soraya-chemaly/12-year-old-slut-meme-and_b_1911056.html" target="_blank">12-year-old Slut Facebook pages</a> in the context of a society that
is often actively hostile to women and girls more generally. I have
some general-ish thoughts about the nature of online anonymity, why
we value it, and who benefits from it, so here they are.<br />
<br />
<br />
<a name='more'></a> </div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
First: The irony! Are we all being
punked here? Outrageous.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
The Rest: Lots of people think it’s
totally fine and cool that technically legal photos of non-consenting
women were posted on a site with the specific intent of getting off
on that lack of consent (I shouldn’t have to outline why, exactly,
fetishizing non-consent might be a problem. Right?). Because those
voices have been very, very loud, and in the aftermath of <a href="http://gawker.com/5950981/unmasking-reddits-violentacrez-the-biggest-troll-on-the-web" target="_blank">AdrianChen’s outing of Violentacrez as Michael Brutsch</a>, the mainstream
discussion of the Violentacrez/Reddit issue has become, in many ways,
a conversation about whether or not internet anonymity is a thing
that should continue to exist at all. Many who believe that Chen was
right to out Brutsch are pinning the ability of trolls to act the way
they do on that blank face, and lots of people, with lots of the right reasons, are calling for the end
of anonymity altogether. This has lead of course to discussions of the potentially serious
implications of outlawing anonymity when we begin talking about political
dissidence and the dangers of speaking truth to power. But I think
the main problem with this line of discussion is that it constitutes an attempt to make one
Grand Sweeping Statement about the internet that will then govern all
online interactions: either anonymity is bad because it allows people
to be trolls so it shouldn’t exist
at all, or online anonymity is the only thing between civilized
online commentary and innocent people being thrown in jail for making <a href="http://shitharperdid.ca/" target="_blank">Stephen Harper memes</a>. This is...not productive.
Obviously.
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Then there’s the broader question of
the true extent of online anonymity - after all, it was pretty easy
for the admin of Predditors to come up with the names of the posters
on r/creepshots from legally and freely accessible public
information, cross-referenced with information revealed under
pseudonym (the site was shut down, then reinstated when it was discovered her sources were all public access), and it’s how Brutsch was identified. I type my name and
email into the internet a hundred times a day, and I bet you do too;
our acceptance of other peoples’ online anonymity or pseudonymity
is, in most cases, really just a piece of digital social etiquette.
We agree to keep each other’s secrets, most of the time. <a href="http://inthesetimes.com/duly-noted/entry/14036/michael_brutsch_violentacrez_and_online_pseudonyms/" target="_blank">As Lindsay Beyerstein puts it at In These Times</a>:
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Online pseudonymity is largely a social courtesy. We all agree not to
reveal the pseudonyms of the people we meet online, even though we
probably could. A pseud is like showing up at your local with a paper
bag over your head and insisting that nobody knows you. In fact, they
know perfectly well, or they could easily find out; and either people
play along, or they don't.</div>
</blockquote>
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<b><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">I am wary of insisting that anything on the internet is fair game for anyone, which is perilously close to insisting that if you're in public you're public property (the argument that many disgruntled Redditors are making); my point is that there must be - and are - social controls that demand we respect the request for anonymity even though it is so flimsy. I
don’t think that outlawing anonymity on the internet altogether is
a very good idea, as many people benefit from that anonymity even
when we’re not talking about being disappeared by a hostile
government. Particularly people who identify with a marginalized
group, and who then write about their identification with that group,
are notoriously subject to harassment and should most certainly have
the option of writing anonymously. Sometimes – probably more often
than most people realize – words you write on the internet about
your experience as a gay man, a black woman, a disabled parent,
whatever, have real consequences offline that are often threatening
and dangerous. Michael Brutsch is only learning something – sort of
– that many, many writers and participants have known for a long
time. <a href="http://scatx.com/2012/10/16/power-on-the-internet/" target="_blank">As Jessica over at scATX</a> put it: “The fear of doxxing is not
one that is shared equally and people who are targets of it are much
more likely to be people who are part of the groups that are already
targeted offline.” </span></span></b><b><span style="font-style: normal;">
</span></b>
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<b><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">Outing
already happens. Marginalized people speaking out about their
marginalization are already subject to the threat of being outed, as
a way to keep them from speaking. It is threatening. It is also
telling that for all these people have been speaking up about this
stuff for a pretty long time – </span></span></b><b><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;"><b><span style="font-style: normal;"><span style="font-weight: normal;">h/t to Deanna Zandt for reminding me of <a href="http://bitchmagazine.org/article/from-the-archive-wack-attack" target="_blank">this little kerfuffle</a></span></span></b> – it’s only now that a bunch of cis hetero white
guys’ fun is being threatened that the conversation reaches
mainstream levels. <b>That is telling</b>. That says something about <b>who</b> we
think should be allowed to benefit from anonymity and why, and what
happens when those covenants are overturned. It says that we do not
actually care about true anonymity, we care about protecting those in
power and helping them to stay there. Once again, this is no surprise
to anyone with any kind of platform who already writes about these
things.</span></span></b></div>
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<br />
For the record: I absolutely
believe that public naming and shaming is a very, very effective way
to end the kind of bullying, hatemongering, and
rape-culture-perpetuating garbage that exists on the internet and
finds footholds in Reddit subgroups that gradually ascend to
mainstream appeal. Victims and targets of harassment and/or
oppression are often subjected to the added indignity of having their
grievances dismissed or disbelieved, especially if they are
confronting the person who grieved them in the first place. In the
same way that bystander intervention or male advocacy are key
strategies to ending violence against women, ending online violence
(and yes, violence is exactly what we’re talking about) requires
people who are not the direct targets make their disapproval known. Sometimes, perhaps as a last resort, that means the person or
people engaged in the violence get their <b>real names</b> attached to the <b>real things</b> that they <b>really said</b> to or about other <b>real people</b>. That
doesn’t mean slander, it means holding people accountable for words
and sentiments of their own, which they publicly expressed on the internet, where they
will live forever in glorious technicolour.
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I also think that outing in this way –
an adamant and explicit connection between and online and offline
person – has the happy by-product of reminding us that the internet
is comprised of real people at keyboards. There’s far too much
temptation to see what happens online as being somehow less real,
hence the distinction between Real Life™ and the Internet. That
distinction silences victims, minimalizes abuse and violence, and
truncates our ability to talk seriously about the kind of places
we’re building in the ether. Any discussion about how to solve the
problems that take place on the internet therefore has to ask the
same questions we ask when we’re trying to solve a Real Life™
problem – and that means talking about power and privilege, who has
it, and how its being wielded. That seems obvious, but it flies in
the face of some very powerful internet mythology: the idea that
online, all content is created equal, and people cease being human
bodies with histories and instead become some kind of postmodern, posthuman construction of ones and zeros that is both
equal to and separate from all other constructions on the web and
their real-life avatars. This is a long- and highly-cherished idea,
and one that banks on an enormous amount of unconscious privilege –
it’s the <a href="http://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm" target="_blank">tyranny of structurelessness</a>, a digital construction of
the “I only see people” brand of liberal philosophy. Believing
that requires you to have never been the subject of oppression
because of your race, class, gender, orientation, ability, religion,
or anything else. Accepting even the possibility of complete agnostic
neutrality rests on your identification with the default construction
of personhood, which is the same default on the internet as it is in
life.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0cm;">
I find this aspect of the Reddit case
particularly compelling – at least one of the responses in defense
of Creepshots has been that because the photos of women and girls are
unnamed, they are less of an invasion of privacy, anonymity is preserved as you can’t
easily Google likenesses. But women’s
names have never been ours in the same way that men’s names are
theirs – women move from the father’s name to the husband’s
name, usually, and that expectation is implicit right from birth – and images of women have always been considered public
property in the way that images of men have not (mostly because when we say <i>public</i>, we also mean <i>male</i>). Women are by and
large expected to identify wholly with and attach our sense of self-worth to the image we present, and so a photo of
a woman, even if the name is not attached to it, perhaps feels more personal to a woman than a similarly unnamed photo of a man (not having lived as a man, I couldn't say for sure. I welcome comments from anyone who may have experienced both sides). Women have always
been expected to perform our identities, to make ourselves image, to judge ourselves by the
reception our image receives from others, and therefore perhaps we identify more
heavily with images of ourselves. In many ways, as this dustup is making so clear, physical women in
offline life are treated and responded to as though we were images. </div>
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Though even if it weren't the case that women identify more strongly with images of themselves that with their names or than men do with images of themselves (all of which is just speculation on my part), Lilli at <a href="http://excrementalvirtue.com/2012/10/13/thoughts-on-free-speech-logic-and-violentacrez/" target="_blank">Excremental Virtue</a> has this to say: </div>
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these are PHOTOGRAPHS. These are the objects police use to identify
criminals. These are things that explicitly and routinely constitute
evidence. They are precisely the opposite of anonymous—they are vehicles
of anti-anonymity. </div>
</blockquote>
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Yep.</div>
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*photo attribution: destructoid.com </div>
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J.A.http://www.blogger.com/profile/09227973090683882732noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8089764777553241143.post-82489005712234949482012-10-15T17:05:00.001-04:002012-10-15T17:05:31.682-04:00Hi, I'm New Here.Hi! Welcome! <br />
<br />
<a href="http://whataradicalnotion.blogspot.ca/p/about-me.html" target="_blank">Here are some things that describe me</a>. I will probably write mostly about being those things, and some other things, and what that means for me in the world. Anything I write that is not directly about being those things in the world is still kind of about being those things in the world, if you know what I mean.<br />
<br />
As one of the <a href="http://whataradicalnotion.blogspot.ca/p/the-base-assumptions.html" target="_blank">Base Assumptions</a> of this blog (and, you know, feminism) is that the personal is political, I will try my best to be unflinching in what I write here. There is a lot about me that is not likeable, but I will try to be brave about that, because I think it's important to examine the ways our individual lives are impacted by broader social structures. I also think it's important to illustrate that the process of situating your life and your decisions in cultural context does not automatically rob you of agency, or whatever, and that we will get nowhere if we can't at least agree on that. I believe in recognizing my own privilege, and I will do my best to ensure people who belong to a group with which I do not identify will be able and encouraged to speak for themselves here, especially when discussing issues that impact those groups more directly. I believe that listening to marginalized voices of all varieties is
necessary to move the struggle for meaningful equality forward, and that
likewise - or therefore - those voices and stories are often ignored. Also, though, I will try to be careful in identifying the line, insofar as that's possible, between listening to stories and relying on anecdotal evidence, which is subject to that most pernicious of effects, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias" target="_blank">the confirmation bias,</a> and I will try to make sure that the speech here is based on fairness and openness. I will likely discover that this is much easier said than done (foreshadowing!).<br />
<br />
I hope to build a safe space here, like the many online spaces that have made me feel safe and welcome, and from which I've learned so much. I hope to add my voice and the voices of whatever community hopefully forms here to a vitally important conversation about power and its manifestations, and I expect to learn a great deal here too.<br />
<br />
And we're away!<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />J.A.http://www.blogger.com/profile/09227973090683882732noreply@blogger.com3