The Republic of Dissent

Taking a stand against sex

Sentences of the morning, which made my weekend palatable from Laurie Penny:

Some people can't seem to understand the difference between taking a stand against sexism and taking a stand against sex, but it's a distinction that we must make if we want a women's movement that's smart and brave and useful.

The unbearable futility of the erotic capital and of feminism

Nichi Hodgson 's 'review' of Catherine Hakim's Honey Money: The Power of Erotic Capital made me laugh to tears. Sugar except:

The reason women have failed to capitalise on their erotic capital, says Hakim, is the fault of feminism allied with Christian conservatism. Puritan Anglo-Saxon feminism, including post-feminism, Hakim claims, is "profoundly uncomfortable with sexuality, and frames it in a relentlessly negative perspective." As such, "feminists have been so brainwashed by patriarchal ideology that they have been quite unable to understand how sexuality and erotic capital can be sources of erotic power." Feminism has established a "false dichotomy" between beauty and brains.
While I doubt Hakim would recognise a post-feminist if fondled by one in a bi-curious flurry, she seems to be blaming mind-body dualism on feminists, despite identifying "Western thought" as its source elsewhere in the book. She also seems to have missed the point of what feminism has ever wanted from sex. A minority of radicals excepted, all feminists have ever asked for is women's stake in imagining and enacting sexual desire. Employing your erotic capital may be sensible opportunism but it's also pretty boring manipulating men whose sexual fantasies are predicated on the script for a "Girls Gone Wild" episode; depressing too, if these same men constitute your pool of potential life partners.(...)That erotic capital enhances professional, market-place performance makes perfect sense. But applying it to personal, intimate relationships overlooks one very important point. You don't need to be living in a tree house and swapping sacks of millet for acorns to want to leave commercial transactions at the bedroom door. In the Anglo-Saxon West, now that we don't need to marry to preserve family fortunes, secure male heirs or find someone to "keep" us, some things are worth more than erotic capital­-love, for example.

My view on Hodgson's take of Hakim is that it is unnecessary and a further indication that too many still don't understand that there is a difference between feminism and femininity and that feminism is to women's identity and rights (I have an deepening aversion for the term women's rights) what socialism is to liberalism/progressivism. It is tiresome even though often comically entertaining to see women still elevating and generalizing their personal views and differences as if speaking as a woman or as feminism means speaking for women and representing some other than an individual and therefore limited (and often irrelevant) viewpoint.

Symbols and illusions

Sentence of the day from Zoe Williams:

Prominent women do not necessarily pursue the rights of women generally, and it is almost worse when they pretend to (Lagarde said once: "I feel accountable to the community of women. And I don't want to fail because of them.") than when they don't (...)

You don't say! I have to admit that Williams puzzles me (she would bug me if her arguments were convincing) because she is stuck in the 1960s for she is still under the impression that women are a caste and that feminism is its only true religion.

Feminism, ambition, and diversion

Another great point from Chris Dillow whose writing I find addictive (it is both a good and a bad thing):

So, far from applauding ambition we should, in most cases, oppose it.
Of course, everything I’ve said applies to men’s ambition as well as women’s. So why pick on feminism? In one big sense we shouldn’t. But there are two things that worry me.
One is that this particular form of feminism helps to legitimate ambition. And people are never more ruthless than when they believe they have right on their side.
The other is that feminism - in this sense - is a diversion. In encouraging women to climb up hierarchies, it deflects attention from the question: should our economic and political life be structured hierarchically at all?

Feminism is always a diversion because it has refused to evolve and to widen its perspectives on gender.

Les femmes sont des hommes comme les autres

Sugary excerpt of the day from Kay Hymowitz's article on Sarah Palin and Feminism:

Other feminists defined their movement in such meaningless generalities as to surrender to the conservatives at the gate. “Feminism to me means equality for all women and regard for women’s choices,” the legal journalist Dahlia Lithwick ventured in the Slate forum. Elsewhere, phrases like “women’s progress,” “women’s interests,” “policies that move women forward,” and “goals that benefit women” also appeared in the public discussion about the meaning of feminism.
But the Palinites have drawn big question marks around language like this. What does “equality” mean? Is it equal opportunity, as the newcomers would probably say? Or equal results, as many feminists appear to believe? Does it mean women’s choosing how to run their lives, just as men do? (Grizzlies.) Or does it refer to absolute parity between men and women? (Liberals.) How can both sides claim the feminist mantle with such different understandings of government’s function and of women’s progress?
And these divisions don’t begin to address the biggest bone of contention of all: abortion. The writer and movie director Nora Ephron answered the what-is-feminism quiz simply by announcing: “You can’t call yourself a feminist if you don’t believe in the right to abortion.”

This debate about feminism and women's issue is fluffy and therefore irrelevant because feminism is dead. Women should stop thinking that they represent all women or saying that others do.  People may not like it , it may be too complicated for the American way of doing politics but women are individuals. The problem with Feminists, Palin and America is that it doesn't understand that women aren't a homogeneous group and can disagree without it putting in question their women. It may put into question their level of sophistication and of education or whatever else but not their femininity. 

Feminism and sex

Sugary excerpt of the day, which I will not comment because it makes grin even though I don't agree with it totally, from Jennie Bristow:

Feminism has always had a contradictory attitude towards sex, combining demands for sexual liberation with a prudish, pursed-lips disapproval of heterosexual relationships. The focus on the problem of men has always concealed two fundamental truths: that men and women have far more common interests and problems than those that divide them, and that men and women like each other.

Gender as a nonnegotiable gift

Sugary excerpt from the New York Times' portrait of Priscilla Shirer, a female woman evangelist in Baton Rouge:

Shirer and many conservative Christians believe that the Bible defines gender as a divinely ordained set of desires and duties inherent in each man and woman since the Garden of Eden. Gender is not an act or a choice, but a nonnegotiable gift. To these Christians, the story of Adam and Eve’s creation granted man authority over woman, and they understand the New Testament teachings of Paul and his comrades — in particular, that wives should submit to their husbands — not as cultural relics of the first century but as universal teachings that Christians apply today.

In an era when sexual liberation has saturated American culture, when women are climbing the corporate ladder and bearing fewer children, and mainline churches are ordaining women and homosexuals, conservative evangelicals are escalating their counteroffensive. Many call themselves complementarians, signaling their belief that God ordained complementary — not identical or flexible — roles for men and women.

Well, my reaction is only in America ! That isn't quite accurate only in America, Afghanistan, Iran, and Saudi Arabia. I know that  many Americans don't like to believe their fundamentalists can be identical or as disturbing and dangerous to the ones of other countries as if they were more sophisticated and superior because they were Americans and  America is after all a great nation (an opinion that I share), but that reluctance is solely based on foolish pride and snobbish chauvinism. In fact, one could make the argument that because America is as great as it is, its fundamentalists are worst, scarier than those of say a nation like Afghanistan (I'm not yet willing to go that far). What will happen to the US when/if its government and more importantly, its judiciary cannot ensure that there is an unconditional separation between church and state? The future doesn't look good.

Quand ça ne change pas, le hic est ailleurs

My reaction to reading this from Paul Sagar is no, you don't say!:

The claim or insinuation that campaigns for women’s rights and equality are rooted in a lack of family to cater for (“no homes”), rejection by men (“no husbands”) and infertility or barrenness (“no children”) are apparently as old as the hills yet very much alive and kicking.

Unfortunately, Sagar misses the mark by focusing on the omnipresent reality without asking the key questions about the the issues 'women's right' and feminism and what it says about them that they haven't been revolutionary or even solely effective in accomplishing their aims! To be blunt, I'm tired of the same realities being examined as if the convenient acknowledgment of their unsavoriness were enough to change it or to make one feel good for not being part, at first glance, of the problematic and everlasting statu quo. Assez de bons sentiments et un peu d'actions please!

The bad side of fluff

Sugary excerpt of the best review I have read of Sex and the City 2 written by Lynne Miles  (h/t), which I hope convinces the right people to stop beating a dead and decomposed horse:

(...) it hasn’t gone unnoticed that SATC has never been great on race issues. Women of colour have been noticeably absent from the series, something which the first film tried to correct with the inclusion of Jennifer Hudson (not especially well). But SATC2 is breathtaking in its attitude towards the Middle East, and to Muslim women in general. The treatment of Abu Dhabi as a kind of Arabian-nights style theme park raises an eyebrow. The cultural appropriation is cringe-worthy. The portrayal of anyone brown there as either Qu’ran-wielding fundamentalist, cowering wife, or a some sort of ‘poor but wise’ character to allow Carrie to demonstrate her benevolence made me wince. By the time the four Manhattanites are staring at a Muslim women wearing a niquab, first slack-jawed then openly sniggering as she eats a plate of fries, I had my head in my hands with mortification.

Barbie girls

Quote of the day from Lori Rotskoff:

In the early 1970s, when role models for girls in male-dominated professions were sorely lacking, proponents of gender equality successfully lobbied toy makers and educational publishers to design products depicting diverse career options for girls. They strongly believed that early play experiences would make a difference in kids’ future aspirations.  So they worked actively to shape the material culture of childhood.
Back then, Barbie was so anathema to feminists that it would never have occurred to them to collaborate with Mattel. But times have changed. Over the past three decades, commercial toymakers have perfected their absorption and co-optation of liberal feminist ideals; Barbie’s latest career makeover is just one recent example. So today, many women’s groups are apt to adopt the strategy: “if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.” We can interpret these Barbie dolls as “compromise formations” (to use an old grad-school phrase) because they represent an uneasy combination of traditionally feminine beauty standards with forward-thinking advocacy to enhance women’s economic and professional status.

Elena Kagan, Careerism and feminism

Another scintillating proof that it takes a Canadian or an American living in Canada (distance is essential) such as Gil Troy to make poignant and astute analysis of America and Americans:

The football great Rosey Grier sang It’s All Right to Cry, encouraging boys to show their emotions, too, because “crying gets the sad out of you.” A pre-disco Diana Ross sang When We Grow Up, reassuring youngsters, “Well, I don’t care if I’m pretty at all/And I don’t care if you never get tall/ I like what I look like and you’re nice small/ We don’t have to change at all.” Alan Alda and Marlo Thomas performed William’s Doll, with William ultimately being vindicated after being taunted by his friends: “a doll, a doll, William wants a doll.”
All this delightfully iconoclastic feminist propaganda paved the way for an unmarried 50-year-old woman to become what she dreamed of becoming.
And yet, Ms. Kagan’s résumé seems too perfect. She may have forgotten the essential message of Free to Be … You and Me’s title song: “Every boy in this land grows to be his own man. In this land, every girl grows to be her own woman.” This woman, who posed in judicial robes for her Hunter College High School yearbook, may have been too calculating in climbing to the top. She has taken remarkably few public stands, entered into surprisingly few public controversies for a woman of her prominence and power.

I have to admit that I'm starting to be troubled by the fact that I don't know anything substantive and relevant about Elena Kagan that would tell me not that she would be a competent justice, but rather one that would be in the mold of Justice Stevens and stop the US Supreme Court's worrisome tilt to the right. Vacuity here is starting to become dangerous because it means two things. The first is that being on the left on legal issues and expressing those views is a bad career move. The second is that the right has won when it comes to the Supreme Court politics for Liberals and moderates (non Conservatives) have to guess when it comes to a Supreme court nominee that is appointed by a Democratic president and to trust that the judgment of the president is infallible

To resist feminist guilt

The sugary quote of the morning is from Libby Purves on the complaint that there aren't enough women in the new British government

The phone rang: another periodical’s editor wanting a why-oh-why rant about the dearth of women in the new Cabinet. Four out of 23 gives us a female percentage one-third that of Spain, half that of France and the Netherlands; in the EU only the Portuguese Cabinet has a smaller proportion of women.
Well, a girl likes to oblige and I come of a liberated generation, fists poised to smash the glass ceiling in the conservatory of life. But after a few seconds’ thought I sadly replied: “Sorry. Just realised: I don’t care.” Feminist guilt flared and swiftly receded. There have been women in Cabinet and the great offices of state, there will be others. No law bars the door, there is no quota against us. Tokenism is anathema.

I've just realized that having women in government is less important than enacting policies that not treat them as sheep. In short, the power of symbols is always limited if their goal is to stop the conversation on real issues, by making people feel good about their own 'tolerance' and superiority.

When feminists ally themselves with bigots

Quote of the day from Haroon Siddiqui commenting on the recent controversies around the Niqab in Québec:

We are witnessing an unholy alliance of leftist feminists, right-wing bigots and Quebec nationalists. That's why Lucien Bouchard, former PQ premier, publicly warned his party last month against playing identity politics, something he said René Lévesque would never have approved of. Picking on Muslim women smacks of hypocrisy or, worse, the pathology of "bigots and chauvinists who, like bullies, direct their vitriol toward the weak,"

Feminism and troubling personal choices

Ilham Moussaid who became known as the veiled candidate of one of the French extreme left party to the last regional elections on Feminism and her choice to wear to veil:

For my part, I'm not submissive: it's a personal choice. I'm a feminist. I fight for women's rights with my women comrades. I fight for equality between men and women. I fight for the right to abortion, the right to contraception. It's true they see it as a symbol of oppression but unfortunately they forget that there are women who wear it out of choice. A certain number of women are obliged to wear it, of course, I don't deny that, and I'll fight for these women. But you can't say that all those who've chosen to wear a headscarf are submissive. It's not true. Once it's a question of personal choice you can't say the person is being oppressed, as these feminists argue.(...) For me, being a feminist means defending the right of women to have control over their own lives. I have control over mine and I've made this choice but it's not respected. These feminists don't respect it because I haven't made the same choice as them. My response is that there's not just one way to be a feminist; there's not just one way to be a woman. We can't all be alike. We need to concentrate on what unites us, on the fight for equality between men and women, and not to say we should all dress the same way, that you can't wear a headscarf because otherwise you're not a feminist. I think that shows a lack of respect. I don't feel represented by feminists who say that the headscarf is always a question of obligation. There are a lot of feminists who agree with me, who see that I'm fighting the same battles as them, and they support me.

I'm all for Moussaid's right to make the personal choice to wear the veil or even to be submissive. I'm just wondering since when feminism has become the sole ideology/movement/whatever else it has become acceptable to affirm a woman right to be whoever she wants be even it means displeasing other members of the same sex or ignoring the constraints/so-called obligations of gender .

Burka, right wing ideology and feminism

Mona Eltahawy on the ban of the Burqa/burka,right-wing Muslim Ideology and women's right(hat tip: Norm Geras):

I abhor the rightwing Muslim ideology behind the veils but I equally abhor the political rightwing xenophobes of Europe. The European political right – be it President Nicolas Sarkozy, his ultra-right rival Jean-Marie Le Pen (who did alarmingly well in the first round of those regional elections) or Dutch provocateur Geert Wilders – do not give a rat's ass about Muslim women or their rights: they are merely using the issue in an attempt to win votes.
The racism and discrimination that Muslim minorities face in many countries — such as France, which has the largest Muslim community in Europe, and Britain, where two members of the xenophobic British National party were shamefully elected to the European parliament — are very real. But the silence of the left wing and liberals isn't the way to fight it. The best way to support Muslim women would be to say we oppose both the racist right wing and the niqabs and burkas which are products of what I call the Muslim right wing. Women should not be sacrificed to either.

My disagreement with Eltahawy comes from the fact that I don't view women as victims or particular creatures that have to remain clean, pure, and always make good choices. I consider that they have the right to be whoever they want to be even if it means becoming an object and making disturbing choices. My point on the burka/burqa/niqab debate is simple, women are instruments to fight Islamic ideology or to promote secularism, they are normal individuals whose rights to individuality should be judge by the usual criteria used in a society to decide when individuality becomes criminal and dangerous to a society. I'm not against a burqa ban in France and elsewhere in the name of feminism, because I don't think that women's rights (whatever that expression means) is the issue, but that the right of women as human beings to define their womanhood and their femininity is in question. I'm still waiting for somebody to tell what is the male's equivalent of the burqa to reconsider my position.

Suspicious powerful women

Sugary excerpt of the best article I read last weekend, which was Siri Agrell's on Martha Stewart, a new book by her former best friend and what it says about other powerful women who are perceived to have more than they deserved:

Stewart, along with the subject of this year's other two other hot, hardcover take-downs – Oprah Winfrey and Angelina Jolie – occupies a strange space in our collective opinion of successful women. All three seemed born for the spotlight: talented, driven, camera-friendly; each embodies a contradiction that makes them as polarizing as popular.
Stewart built an empire by creating inviting home environments, but personally generates the warmth of a frozen pot pie. Oprah is marketed as the everywoman's best friend. But her success has turned her into one of the world's richest people, elevating her beyond the reach of mere mortals and allowing her Midas touch to impart untold wealth to a variety of disciples. And Jolie, the beauty with a Hollywood pedigree, created a brand of super celebrity by revealing just the right amount of skin and bizarre personal information and then cloistering herself in a world of international philanthropy, Brad Pitt and their brood.
We are drawn to these woman, but we are suspicious of them. They can't possibly be as poised, as nice, as attractive or generous as they present themselves to be. And publishers are certainly betting that there is an audience for their public dissections.
(...)You could tell me that Martha Stewart eats kittens to stay young, that Oprah heats her African school with furnaces that burn nothing but money, and that Angelina Jolie can actually levitate during sex, and I would simply shrug and say, yeah, I suspected as much.

My take on the subject is that people, particularly women tend to view powerful women, who appear to have it all with suspicion because it has ingrained within humanity that women because of their gender are imperfect,, inferior to manliness. The implication from this omnipresent assertion of the inferiority of femininity is that to become powerful, women by waling on others, especially other women by robbing them of what is or was supposed to be theirs.

Self-harm

Quote of the evening, which I find appallingly stupid from Elizabeth Farrelly:

Harm to women is too often now self-harm: witness the resurgence of young female smoking (thinness despite cancer) and of stilettos (elegance despite musculoskeletal ravages). Witness, also, nanotech cosmetics, smoothing as flattery, and as sinister.

Alpha females

Minette Marrin on Alpha females, motherhood, and womanhood:

That’s how alpha females behave. They push out babies along with policy papers and tour the interview circuit proudly bearing breast pumps. One prominent headmistress went back to work only a few hours after giving birth to her third child last month, commenting that this would show her schoolgirls what woman is capable of.
It struck me as irresponsible; pregnancy and childbirth usually involve extreme hormonal upheavals and physical demands, even when all is well. It’s not for nothing that for the first few weeks after childbirth women have not been held responsible for their actions in law because they are often not themselves, so to speak.
That’s to say nothing of the psychological needs of mother, baby and other children or of the developmental and emotional needs of children after the first few months. Are these needs really best left to childminders and crèches? Most women don’t think so.
(...) There is nothing new about alpha females giving their babies over to other people to look after; that has always been the price of great success, and successful women have taken it for granted. With the best of expensive childcare, it seems to work well.
However, I have come to feel strongly that it isn’t what most women want. I did hand my own first baby over to a full-time nanny so I could go back to a job in television with foreign travel. But before long I realised, like countless women, that what I most wanted was to be with my baby and work part-time from home, which I’ve done ever since.

Oh boy, I have never understood, why what woman does ought to be done by others, and why women are so easily rattled others are taking different roads,  Motherhood is such a difficult thing already to be about anything else than personal choice and for judgment to be acceptable. To be fair, Marrin's point is that Alpha females are dominating feminism and thus, making it less attractive for other women. I don't disagree, but why should feminism be for every woman.

Men as a homogenous mass

Quote of the early afternoon from Laurie Penny:

It’s true that too many feminists point the finger at “men” in general—as if “men” were no more than a homogenous mass of beer-swilling, crotch-scratching sexists.

Soliciting, gender and race

Cath Elliott and Thierry Schaffauser on the reason why soliticiting should be criminalis5a :

Criminalisation of soliciting is a sexist law and it's one that concerns all women, because any woman who goes out at night without being accompanied by a man can be suspected of soliciting. All women should have the right to occupy public and nocturnal spaces, legally, and without fear of harassment or violence.
Criminalisation of soliciting is also racist. It's frequently used, for example, to arrest migrant sex workers/prostitutes and deport them. Victims of trafficking deserve our protection; they should have the legal right to choose to live in the UK for as long as they want, and they should not face deportation back to countries where they run the risk of being re-trafficked by those who trafficked them here in the first place.
Soliciting shouldn't be an offence and it shouldn't be classified as antisocial behaviour. If society doesn't want sex workers/prostitutes working on the streets, then measures should be taken to provide those who are at risk of sexual exploitation with better economic options, routes out or professional reorientation, and harm-reduction help when they suffer drug and other addictions. Repression is never a solution: it only pushes those who are among the most vulnerable away into more remote and dangerous areas.

I have the strong suspicion that the arguments of Elliott and Schaffauser although they evoke both race and gender would never be listened to in the US because it is a religious country, which still views sex through a moral narrow prism, which for example why Tiger Wood is no longer the one.

The Islamic republic of Canada ?!

Lysiane Gagnon on the recent expulsion from a French class in Quebec of an Egyptian immigrant who was wearing the Niqab:

In Quebec, most agreed with the decision to expel the niqab-wearing woman, including constitutional lawyer Julius Grey, who has defended the right of inmates to smoke in prison and the right of Sikh students to wear ceremonial daggers in class. “Accommodation should not lead to separation,” he said.
Yolande Geadah, an Egyptian-born writer, said: “There is no possible compromise with people with such inflexible attitudes.” Raheel Raza, a Pakistani-born Muslim women's rights activist, said: “When we come to Canada, we're not coming to the Islamic Republic of Canada.”
The irony is that, last fall, Egypt's top Islamic cleric said students and teachers at Cairo's Al-Azhar University would not be allowed to wear face veils in classrooms and dorms on the grounds they had “nothing to do with Islam.” The education ministry later barred the niqab during exams, to prevent students from sending others to take the tests. Although an Egyptian court subsequently ordered a stay on the Al-Azhar ban and overturned the education ministry's decision, we have to ask ourselves: Should Canadian colleges be more tolerant of Islamic fundamentalism than Cairo's universities?

Wow, in what world do we live in to make the argument that a woman becomes dangerous and infectious because of what she wears? And how convincing is it for Lysiane Gagnon to argue that Canada must be as open on the so-called woman's issues as Egyptians?  Did I miss a big part of this movie not to be able to understand why the body of a woman can never be fully their own, but an instrument to make either a political or a religious point? I'm forced to realize that Islamists and feminists agree on at least a central issue : a woman is what she wears.

The Burqa and the 'emancipation' of women

I agree with Thomas Hammarberg on this:

Prohibition of the burqa and the niqab would not liberate oppressed women, but might instead lead to their further alienation in European societies. A general ban on such attire would be an ill-advised invasion of individual privacy. Depending on its precise terms, a prohibition also raises serious questions about whether such legislation would be compatible with the European convention on human rights.

I do think that the debate is that simple. Do women have the right to make all the choices available to everybody else even if it means that some view that choice as an affirmation of inferiority or simply submission? I'm yet to hear a single convincing argument that would justify it is something other than  'benevolent' and self-satisfying paternalism to argue that women can never freely make the choice to wear a piece of clothing especially if it is agreed that a woman is never defined by her body

The failure of Madonna feminism

Charlotte Raven argues that New feminism, whose heroin was Madonna, failed:

Sad to report, feminism had reneged on its responsibility to present uncomfortable truths. It had become a mirror of the moment.
Ten years of ego inflation has had a predicable impact. We are hyperconfident, hypersexual and hypercandid about our readiness to do whatever it takes to secure top billing. We're still longing to experience the ecstasy of success. This feels elusive, even to those at the top of the professional ladder. Wolf would be disappointed to see female CEOs fantasising about the moment when they will be elevated to the next level. "What women want" is no longer a mystery. In our age, it isn't a fulfilling job or happy home life, but promotion in the broadest sense.

I think that "this" is the problem with feminism or rather feminists. They never start to see women as individuals, but always as part of the group who must do everything in their power to help the advancement of the majority, rather than to make their own choices and to live their own lives. The point is that I don't that Madonna was ever a feminist icon, she was a woman's icon who made the simple point that it was alright for a woman to be be an island and to decide that they want to rule the world by doing things the way. The lesson wasn't about femininity, but about individuality, which is a great thing for I'm kind of tired of the "woman" question, which in my opinion is solely a gender question for the issue is always about the becoming, the being, the dasein. 

The French's favored fear

I agree with Patrice de Beer this:

(...) the burqa (like the hijab before it) may be less a genuinely important issue in France than a blanket shrouding more fundamental problems - ones that that French society is unable or unwilling to solve.
There are, after all, other ways of addressing the realities of disaffection and refusal of which such Islamic symbols are seen as the expression (...). If, for example, more serious measures were undertaken to ease the integration into French society of young people of non-European origin (many of them Muslim); if an invisible (and often visible) “glass ceiling” that blocks their access to jobs they are qualified for were lifted; if there were more non-white business executives, top civil servants, or MPs elected from within metropolitan France (at present there is just one in this category). So often, politicians (especially but not only from the government side) prefer to pre-empt criticism for their inaction in such areas by projecting blame for France’s defects onto outsiders/immigrants/others (and Muslims above all).

Feminism as the essential ally of Patriarchy

Quote of the morning from Jim Pollard, which shows that we are indeed in a postfeminist world:

When I was a student in the 1980s, feminism was the “ism” du jour. The women’s groups sliced up injustice, while the men’s groups pondered the ethics of masturbation in low, guilty voices. Feminism did change the way we related to each other—the personal became political—and we assumed the world would follow. It hasn’t.
But it has done wonders for men. It’s not only that sex is more open and—since no modern woman wants to be labelled “unliberated”—more frequent and varied. More important is the economics. Going Dutch means single men carry home a fuller wallet from a date, while those in couples are no longer sole breadwinners.
True, feminism has given a tiny minority of highly-educated women better jobs. But what else? Huge divorce settlements? Only in the handful of cases that make the tabloids.(...)It seems that feminism may have helped the patriarchy in a similar way. Relationships between men and women may have loosened up, but the underlying economics have remained much the same. Isn’t that what feminists should be talking about?

Welcome to the postfeminist world

Midge Decter asserts that the Woman question has been answered badly by feminism, which is therefore passé. I don't disagree with her conclusion, I just disagree with her logic, her assertions, and suppositions particularly when she writes this:

The primary appeal of the women’s movement, then, lay in the message that everything that troubled her was somebody else’s fault. How could any thinking or spiritual discipline designed to help her carry the burden of freedom stand against the siren song of her victimization?
The result of that question is history. There is no need to expand upon what everybody, most of all she herself, knows: a quarter of a century of agitation on her behalf has left her emotionally and intellectually worse off. Especially intellectually. All the demands for unneeded preference in admissions and hiring, all the absurd litigation, all the efforts at speech control and thought control, and most important, all the programs to manage and “improve” the behavior of the men in her life, whether husband, boss, roommate, or date, have left her more disaffected and more mentally self-indulgent than before.
Moreover, just as feminists gained a following by promising that women were non-responsible for their lives and everything in them, so movement spokesmen have extended the principle to cover the content of their own ideological development. Angry with men? say the feminists when it is pointed out to them that relations between the sexes, always delicate, are now almost paralyzed with mutual distrust, we were never angry with men. Hostile to motherhood? Never. Denigrate homemaking? We never for a moment even dreamed of doing that. We have only been saying, give women the option. And so on. It is as if the Marxists, faced with the grinding poverty of Cuba and Nicaragua, were to say. Capitalism? We’ve never been opposed to capitalism.

Fascinating, but narrow arguments, which lead inevitably to the realization that feminism has failed/is failing to achieve its objective. My take of this issue is that feminism is too restrictive and more often than not unusable because in its own way, it reaffirms the limitations of gender without trying to overcome it by asserting as Judith Butler would say that it is an imperative to undo gender, rather to make it an obsession.

Femininity as political bling bling

Elizabeth Day had a worth-reading portrait in the Guardian of Rachida Dati, the Former French Justice Minister and now member of the European parliament . Here is what I thought was the sugary excerpt:

There is part of me that wonders whether Dati will be offended to be asked about her appearance, but this turns out to be entirely wrong. She is only too happy to talk about her clothes. "For a long time, 'femininity' has been synonymous with 'triviality', but that is not the case at all," she says, her gold hoop earrings shaking slightly as she nods her head for emphasis. "Femininity is part of being a woman. It is part of my identity to preserve my femininity."

Later, Dati tells a story about having her photograph taken in the street earlier in the day "and when we looked at the picture there was a line of teenage girls behind me and all of them had their eyes down, looking at my shoes!" She laughs, her brown-black eyes lighting up with unexpected enthusiasm.

It is difficult to imagine a British female politician expressing the same unabashed candour about a love of fashion. When, two years ago, Dati attended a French state banquet in a slashed-to-the-thigh midnight blue evening gown, it prompted a period of rueful questioning in the UK press about why our own female MPs were so sartorially uninspired.

In Westminster the consensus appeared to be that in order to be taken seriously, it was best not to draw attention to the fact one was female. Dati does not approve: "I've always been like this, even when I was 15, 20, it was always important to me to be well-dressed. It's important for me to hold onto my femininity because it's authentic to me and, you know, I was asked not to. I was told by my predecessor [at the Ministry of Justice], Elisabeth Guigou, a very pretty woman, that it wouldn't be long until I gave up my high heels. Well, I never wanted to do that."

Something about that excerpt troubles me because I suspect that Dati can only even go there because she is "attractive" and that therefore she has the ability to use her femininity as political bling bling knowing full well the risks and the advantages especially when she is aware of the dangers of the perception that she was Sarkozy's Beurrette (Arab) and that she never deserved to be France's Justice minister. The point here is simple, but has to be carefully made because the context here is everything, which Elizabeth Day forgets to emphasize: Rachida Dati had no other choices but to be very feminine and to care about her physical appearance, her chic clothes, her jewelry, all of it when it became an acquis to those who mattered (King Sarkozy and his court) that she didn't have the substance to be a political figure. I'm Sarah Palining her, to the contrary, I argue that she reached the top also because she was a symbol and that, thus, she has to keep on being a symbol to remain visible, relevant, and attractive. It's unfair, but life is too often tough, brutish and bitchy for ambitious women. Dati is smart and is using all the tools that she has not to become disposable the most potent of which is her femininity. What bother me is she gets praised for being feminine because it is seen as proof of substance and of courage when it isn't, for that matter, it is also not a proof of frivolity, lack of sophistication, dumbness, or inculture. Nowadays, femininity is political bling bling, it is a little bit like the American flag that American politicians wear on their suits/clothes to wear their patriotism on their sleeves (Obama refused for a long time to do that until he decided that he would rather be president that a principled senator trying to educe American on the unimportance of symbols).

Sisterhood

Quote of the early morning from Henning Mankell:

There are many things you can say about the need of assistance in Africa. But one thing is absolutely sure, that we have to see to that the women of Africa who have such enormous responsibilities and no influence at all, have much more influence. Sometimes I get a little angry asking myself where are all the feminists in the West who should really help their sisters out in Africa. But it is not only a feminist question; it’s a question of humanity.

The Madonna-whore combination and the moralization of sexuality

Sarah Boyes on the legacy of the feminist movement and on what I believe to be its contradictions:

These aims weren’t revolutionary and often unabashedly so (many women came to feminism through explicit disenfranchisement with labour movement sexism), but they could have a piercing core. There was, importantly, a canny rejection of a whole array of expectations about how women should be, which have today (more the act of the rejection than the expectation) become part and parcel of cultural discourse. For instance, feminists rejected:

‘The Unbeatable Madonna-Whore Combination. Miss America and Playboy’s centerfold are sisters over the skin. To win approval, we must be both sexy and wholesome, delicate but able to cope, demure yet titillatingly bitchy. Deviation of any sort brings, we are told, disaster: “You won’t get a man!!“‘ (3)

This was often followed by a more subversive attempt to challenge to the underlying assumptions of a society that pitted people against one another in a bid to succeed, and put one, man, at the top. Such aims were limited, and perhaps in some ways were always meant to be.

(...)Indeed, it’s this ambiguous legacy, seen most clearly in the superficial tension between choice and moral prescription, especially around the family, which points towards a deeper lack of direction that comes through in the present day – where it seems there’s been a return to more conservative gender roles albeit updated - the ‘yummy mummy’, the WAG, even Michelle Obama is considered a sort of fashion icon. Complaints about ‘ladettes’ letting it hang loose, even imitating the boorish behaviour of blokes, is on the rise; dismay or disgust at big-breasted celebrities and attendant ‘raunch culture’ seems to be gaining ground; stories of women not reaching the glass ceiling due to the prevalence of ‘male bonding’ in the workplace pepper the press; concern over the ‘negative body image’ of young girls has become popular; older women aren’t getting enough time on telly, females have only recently been allowed onto Navy submarines, there aren’t ‘enough’ women in the cabinet – or as Engle gently finds, women of a certain class still tend to shoulder the domestic burden, even when they earn as much as their husbands. Even though we’ve got past the point where we know a porn star can have a PhD, one of the most perplexing moments of the films is the wry little smile given by a number of wives as Engle asks their husbands how much share of the washing they do, whether they clean the bath after getting out, are they a feminist? Is this any different from the working wife who doesn’t know her children’s shoe sizes or think she should have to? Does it matter?

I have always wondered why sexuality is tied up to morality especially when it comes to women and that any attempt to use it or to gain control of it make one a whore? It seems to me that beyond all the feminist mambo jumbo, the real issue remains whether sexuality ought to be used to define a woman or to make a judgment about her moral compass. The trouble seems to be that nowadays, complexity is out the window, there is the overwhelming accepted principles that women cannot be certain things, and there are certain combination that are not possible for a member of the second sex to have, it isn't possible to a sexual being and to be smart and cultured, it isn't possible to be Madonnalike and conservative and moreover, it isn't possible not to be a feminist and not to be confused or solely  under the domination of the patriarchy. In other words, the fact that feminism still comes down essentially to straightening women out and separating the good from the feeble explains in part why it is as relevant and as alive a movement as socialism.

Motherly warriors

Two questions come to my mind when I read these arguments from Mary Eberstadt against the inclusion of mothers in combat, are we really in 2010? Do women really still have to live for their children as soon as they become mothers::

Nevertheless, it needs to be said: The argument that “women, including mothers, have served in the military, therefore women, including mothers, should serve in the military,” remains a blatant non sequitur. Of course women have, and can, and will serve bravely in all walks of life — including in combat and other violent situations if necessary. As news stories emphasized, for example, the murderous rampage by Major Nidal Malik Hasan at Fort Hood, also in November 2009, was interrupted by the courageous intervention of a female soldier — Sergeant Kimberly Munley, who charged him at point-blank range and fired her weapon till eventually he went down. Sgt. Munley, incidentally, is also a mother. Where was it ever written that men have a monopoly on courage, and if it has been, who knows so little as to believe it? The history of humanity and its literature and art abound with examples of extraordinary valor exercised by mothers in particular — typically, on behalf of their children.
In fact, for that very reason, the ideological fervor over the years by feminists demanding women in the military betrays a bizarre kind of anxiety on the part of those exhibiting it. The literature advocating for female soldiers is shot through with breathless, romanticized insistence that women can indeed behave like men — changing truck tires, crawling through mud, urinating standing up, and killing and wounding as necessary. It is a pattern of protestation that raises questions of its own about the convictions of just such advocates. Did feminists and their allies think somewhere deep inside that women couldn’t do these very things — and more?
Yet again, however, this question of whether certain people can tote guns and endure physical discipline and die for their country too is not the same as asking whether they ought to. Many children and teenagers, for example, could work competently through the workday doing menial labor — as many did throughout the centuries leading to relatively recent laws protecting them from child labor. But most people today would not champion that fact to invalidate the laws against child labor or truancy. And for those who might object that this analogy conflates women with children, consider a few more examples of activities that American law puts the brakes on, even though all involve potentially consenting adults: drugs, prostitution, gambling, suicide, assisted suicide, selling oneself into slavery, having sex in public. In all kinds of ways, the law imposes limits on what consenting adults can do.

An awaited return to traditions

No Comment necessary to this pompous assertion by Terence Blacker who seems inebriated by his beliefs in the absolutism of the laws of nature concerning gender:

The idea that, in spite of feminism, the emancipation of the market and a more grown-up attitude among most men to domestic life, an increasing number of woman now yearn to be at home and are pining for a male breadwinner is difficult to take too seriously.

Unlawful intimacy

I'm listening to a great program from Radio Four on Rape and current attitudes toward it  (hat tip: Feminist Philosophy). What has baffled me so far (I'm not done listening) is the suggesting by the only woman on the panel that there ought to be a different category for "a sexual assault" that does not happen on street and where the woman is attacked by a complete stranger. She suggests the use of the express "unlawful intimacy."  Another illustration of the power of language, why not just use the expression rape rape rape rape to suggest that the guy isn't a barbarian and the girl might just be impure, stupid, manipulative, or simply unaware rouée .

The ideological warfare over women's bodies

Unconvincing and creepily artificial arguments against the Burqa (burka) from Alice Thompson in the London Times:

Face time, face-to-face, losing face, all these phrases show how we rely on scrutinising each other’s reactions, as do concerns about Botox and facelifts. The burka is not an invisibility cloak, it’s a passive- aggressive statement, a rejection of the community. The person wearing it is signalling that either she or her family wants her to remain apart from society. It implies that wearers believes that British men may become dangerously lecherous if they see their faces and that British women are too provocatively clad. Like smoking, wearing a burka doesn’t affect just the wearers, but those around them, who may feel shunned. With full-body tattoos, face piercing and a hoody, you can still smile to show that you are a friend.
(...)That doesn’t mean that Britain should ban the burka in public places. We don’t want the police stripping off women’s outer garments in the street. The French have gone too far by prohibiting the wearing of a full veil on public transport.
But we should make it clear that people should not be allowed to cover their faces when it impinges on others, That includes women working in schools, hospitals, courtrooms, shops and the service industries.

Yeah right...! In today's modern societies, don't we have the right to be loners and to say "fu*k you" to the majority as long that we don't harm anybody? How come these types of belittling and paternalistic arguments are only used when women are choosing a path that a society believes is wrong not only for her, but for their ideas of what she ought to be? It reminds  me of what too many parents do when their daughters want to assert their individuality in ways, which shock their value system or which they believe which have her labeled and thus scarred for life (she will never be able to get married). In any case, Thompson undermines her own arguments by rejecting a ban on the burqa, which shows that like me, the sight of a woman in burqa makes her feel uncomfortable, but that unlike me, she cannot tolerate/accept that discomfort because she believes that women can't be individuals, but should always be selfless and think about others. I'm tired of the idea that a woman's body is never solely her own, but instead always a vessel or symbol. When I see a woman with a veil, I have to remind myself that she has the right to do as she pleases with her body as long as she isn't engaging in obscene behavior. It seems to me that all of the discussions about the burqa and about whether to ban it in France and elsewhere just show that women are still the main instruments in an ideological, political and religious battlefield where the main combatants don't really care about their self-hood, but solely the preservation of their own misogynistic,but comfortable traditions.

She deserves all the crap she gets

The fact that so many are willing to jump on Palin and to accept sexist attacks on her by using stereotypical refrains such as "she deserves it," "she did it to herself," "she objectified herself so others are allowed to do the same," "she is ripping what she sow" shows that in our world, the dominant opinion is that it's okay to attack bimbos if they are bimbos and to  forget that discrimination, demeaning treatments are unacceptable no matter what the person they "punished" did or is doing. In other words, sexism isn't about the goodness or the purity of the victim, but about the ethics of the sexist and of the people agreeing with her/her.  Situational ethics have always been problematic to me because they justify the unjustifiable by too often putting the burden of proof on the object of the attack to show that it doesn't deserve be attacked, to prove that s/he is good enough to be defended. Sugary excerpt of Lindsay Beyerstein's post arguing that Newsweek's cover is wonderful because it exposes the real Palin's problem (hat tip : 3quarksdaily):

There's nothing scandalous about Palin showing some skin, or wearing Spandex. But this cover image is deliberately styled to make the then-governor of Alaska look like a Vargas pinup girl. Unlike the other images in the series, this one references her status as a governor. As she poses like a swimsuit model, she's clutching one icon of political power--the Blackberry--and leaning on another. The theme isn't Sarah Palin, athlete. The theme is Sarah Palin, Sexy Governor. (As in: one of those dime store Halloween costumes: sexy cop, sexy lady bug, sexy sanitation worker...)
Predictably, Palin complained that Newsweek's use of the image was sexist. Yes, the image was plucked from its original context. The whole point was that the picture was appalling it its original context. Newsweek is holding this picture up to the world and asking: Who does this? 
The bottom line is that Palin's a clown. She doesn't get a pass because her chosen clown persona is stereotypically feminine.
She caricatures herself. Day in and day out. Good for Newsweek for pointing and laughing.
The story is about why Sarah Palin is a problem for the GOP. The picture answers the question. She's a problem because she's a freak with no judgment who regularly makes a spectacle of herself.  Obviously, she's a potential problem for America because she's an incompetent leader who supports terrible policies. But that's not Newsweek's question.

I wonder whether we can go there with race, whether we are willing to say that some Blacks who use race solely to guilt others and for profit can be depicted using racist imagery. Would it have been acceptable for Newsweek to do a cover with Jesse Jackson or Al Sharton in a plantation or just chained as Charles Barkley was on a cover for a sports magazine a few year ago? I wonder why so many women are unwilling to defend Palin on things that they would usually find offensive just because they think that they would be legitimating her.  Why has Sarah Palin stopped to be a woman for too many women to become an object or rather her political views? I thought that we live in an era where the consensus was that women were people too and that thus, there was no need to attack their gender to attack their beliefs. Are we still living in an America where people, most specially women think that despicable bitches deserve to be beaten, rape, humiliated, belittled just because they aren't good people or don't believe in the right things? Apparently, we do.

The invisibility of objects

Interesting, insightful, but I'm afraid this sugary excerpt from Brett from Harry's place a bit problematic:

I find it particularly upsetting when, in the heat of summer, I see Muslim men wearing fashionable and season-appropriate clothing while their wives trail behind in a black tent. But, if some adult women choose to be oppressed in this way, that’s their business, not mine. But it is curious that primarily male Islamists - though of course often fronted by fundamentalist women - have made it a “human rights issue” to “defend” this “right”. Only a fool would believe that this is out of genuine concern for women’s rights rather than a means of providing an acceptable cover for perpetuating patriarchal domination. Acceptable, that is, to the confused cultural-relativist faux-liberal mindset.
I have noticed an escalation in these demands. First there was a call to “defend” the hijab. Now there is a call to do the same for the niqab - which covers the whole face, effectively cutting a woman off from society in the most basic way - and, I’m pretty sure, a demand to accept the full burqa, Taliban-style, can’t be far off.
To repeat. I think a consenting adult should be able to wear what they like subject to reasonable limits, but I won’t pretend there is anything innocent about the niqab. I won’t pretend that it is merely a neutral item of cultural apparel and is in no way designed to oppress and exclude women.

For some reason, this line of reasoning takes me to Sartre's play No exit and to one of its characters Estelle who wanted to a being in itself, a mirror, an object. To be upfront about what bugs with the current debate on women, the so-called women's rights, feminism, islamism, and whatever is precisely the idea that a woman's choices are never truly her own. No woman is an island. A bitch is just a bitch but a BITCH and moreover a veiled woman whatever her situation, her dasein, is an Estelle. That to me is a problem because it is patently obvious that in any society, no matter how civilized/modern, a woman who makes the wrong choices, who stands out, who rubs people the wrong way, who provokes, who shames/humiliated/dominates/infuriates/manipulates/submits/ easily, too easily becomes an object or rather a being swallowed by nothingness.

Family

Agnès Varda on Family and her feminist principles:

I think we need to have a nest of something which is family, and whenever it goes very well—some families don’t get on that well—but we need the idea of family—the concept more than this one and this one. It’s peaceful to think about the family as a group. I totally believe in extended families, and the good friends I have—I see them all the time. We choose our family—the family of what we believe in, people who share our opinions—it can be political, it can be artistic, it can be a position, as feminism. I quit seeing some people who were saying bad things about women; I don’t even want to meet them or see them.

Well, a least she tries to practice what she preaches.

Something useful should follow lamentations

My only comment from this sugary excerpt from Yasmin Alibhai-Brown is ah, ok because it is depressingly funny and I have to admit that I have trouble taking it seriously not because what she is asserting isn't true but simply because after a while when one hears the same sad story over and over  of Cinderella, her step sisters, mean people, the cruel world, it is difficult not to come to the conclusion that it isn't about gender or even about egalitarianism and that it isn't just in the Kingdom of Denmark that something is rotten. Because I'm a tender soul, I'm not saying that Alibhai-Brown should stop whining but simply start to be useful or at least provocative. Here is a suggestion, she should write a column on Sarah Palin and the fact that she is the epitome of the unsavory reality that the most effective misogynists in modern societies are women. Sugary excerpt :

Ours is the age of verbal debauchery and libertine sexism. No wonder so many mourned the passing of Keith Floyd, a brilliant but excessively self-indulgent TV cook and an anti-hero who, from all accounts, failed his women and children.
And so they mount, unpleasant examples of lionised famous men, dead and alive, for whom women are but dishes on their polished tables. The new hagiography of Alan Clark gives his fans yet another chance to relish the old rogue, a racist, poisonous predator. Roman Polanski, who was convicted of raping a frightened 13-year-old, a criminal who has too long escaped punishment, is defended by various artists – including Martin Scorsese and Harvey Weinstein. And now the American TV host David Letterman has told the world he had sex with women who worked on his programmes. Power can be an aphrodisiac. But did some of those who satisfied his lust do so because they felt they shouldn't refuse? He is still laughing. They might not be and the revelation will hardly reassure the woman he married this year, mother of his five-year-old son.
Blokes have never had it so easy and most women still don't get a place at the top tables. Those who do are then punished for their audacity.

It's always about exploitation

Sometimes, in spite of himself and I would say by pure luck if I wanted to be needlessly mean, Nick Cohen gets things almost just right:

According to the received wisdom of our times, we are living through a phenomenal feminist advance. Women have stormed the bastions of male privilege and cracked, if not smashed, the glass ceiling.
But the success of women is based on exploitation of women. The households of privileged families and a large proportion of the middle class could not function without the labour of servants fleeing the Brezhnevian tower blocks of eastern Europe, Asian slums and poverty and oppression the world over. Our social structure would collapse were it not sustained by shadowy legions of women, living outside the law as illegal immigrants or living outside the welfare state in the black economy.
Stern left-wing writers in the 20th century told their readers that their wealth depended on the exploitation of far-flung colonies. Lectures on how our clothes and trainers come from the sweatshops of the east remain a standard of liberal journalism today. But the line between the rich and the poor worlds does not run between north and south or east and west but through British homes, touching the most intimate aspects of family life – the care of children and the happiness of marriages. Small wonder there is a gap between public pronouncements and private behaviour.

Giving Brigitte Bardot a second look

For some reason, I've never been able to like Brigitte Bardot or to look at her as someone other than a racist old and bitter woman who loves animals more than she loves certain types of people. I think that it is due to the fact that I didn't live during the times when she was the sexiest woman in the world and that I hate with an Heathcliff-like passion her most celebrated movie And God created Woman. However, I'm tempted to give Bardot a second look after reading this from Agnès Poirier, whom I have no trouble liking:

In 1958, Raymond Cartier, then editor of Paris-Match, dedicated eight pages to an investigation of "le cas Bardot". He summoned psychologists, anthropologists and sociologists to try to unpick the roots of the Bardot phenomenon, and to ask what lessons could be drawn about "the modern crowd's psychology and the evolution of today's mores" that could be used in helping to turn back the tide.
He scrutinised in particular the events in Philadelphia, Cleveland, Providence and Memphis, where cinema managers were arrested for showing And God Created Woman and judges in wigs and robes showed up in delegation to express their outrage at its licentious nature. Would Bardot be banned from American screens? Paris-Match psychoanalysts proceeded to delve into her comfortable childhood and upbringing in the smart 16th arrondissement of Paris, near the Eiffel tower. She lived in a seven-room apartment with an older sister, a nanny and parents whom she spoke formally to, using the term "vous" rather than "tu". The family cat Crocus, "having become as bourgeois as its owners, didn't even think of devouring" the birds that lived in a little white cage.
Eight pages later, Cartier concluded: "Bardot is immoral, from head to toe." Agreeing with the American censors of the east coast, he declared: ban Bardot.
Faced with the bourgeois backlash, French intellectuals suddenly understood that there was much more at stake than just the lovely curves of a young star. In a 1959 essay about Bardot called The Lolita Syndrome, Simone de Beauvoir foresaw Bardot's entire life with its upheavals and triumphs. She called Bardot the "locomotive of women's history", and compared her irruption into French society with existentialism, presenting Bardot as the first and most liberated woman of postwar France.
De Beauvoir wrote: "When Marlene Dietrich exhibited her silk-wrapped thighs while singing in her husky voice, she was casting a spell . . . Brigitte Bardot doesn't cast spells; she acts. Her flesh doesn't have the generosity that symbolises passivity. Her clothes are not fetishes and when she undresses, she reveals no mystery. She simply shows off her body, which is in constant movement. She walks, she dances, she moves. In the hunting game, she is both hunter and prey. Males are an object for her, as much as she is an object for them. This is precisely what hurts males' pride." It was clear to all that Bardot, like Albert Camus's stranger, experienced the world through her senses.
Nowadays, feminists both in Britain and the US would shriek in horror at the thought that Bardot might be heralded as the emblem of the liberated woman. But that is just how designer Nicole Farhi remembers her: "Bardot was totally liberated; it was extraordinary to see, especially at a time when no women were allowed to be, and it was all the more unusual that she came from a bourgeois family. It was fantastic to see that she could just throw conventions away. She lived the way she pleased, she dressed the way she wanted; in that sense her freedom was very provocative."

Almost there, but not quite

I agree with the last part of this statement even though I hates the way Katha Pollitt frames the issue, but if feminists were innovative and problem-solvers, feminism wouldn't be as dead as socialism:

If women's equality is the great cause of our time--and I hope it is--we'll get further by acknowledging it as a challenge no country has yet fully met rather than by framing it as a Western crusade.

Unsavory truth

Sugary excerpt of the day:

In the twenty first century, some women have to be enslaved and imprisoned in the household so that others can be freed from it. An unpleasant, but a tried and tested truth.

C'est compliqué

Haideh Daragahi on Iran, its uprisings, Shadi Sadr and women's rights:

In the Western media's interpretation of the presidential election and its aftermath, Iran is caught up in the rivalry between political factions within the religious power elite. But irrespective of differences of interest and opinion, none of the factions have openly questioned the Islamic dictatorship as a system. Two weeks ago, when Rafsanjani, the heavyweight political figure and super capitalist, chose to take an openly oppositional stance towards the supreme leader Khamenei in his Friday sermon in Tehran, the gist of his message was that the religious social structure was in crisis and should be saved.
Shadi Sadr articulates a third voice which, despite the barbarism of the security forces, was heard loud and clear in the demonstrations and discussions throughout the country in the weeks following the elections. Her horizon lies far above the bickering about the number of votes cast in favour of this or that candidate of this or that faction of the power elite. In her article she outlines a direction - for the opposition struggle in general and the women's movement in particular - that corresponds to the new political reality.
One of her arguments addresses the very real threat that the women's struggle will be bypassed if the new social movement succeeds. Here she is bearing in mind the bitter lessons of the history of women's struggle as well as the fate of Iranian women's rights after the 1979 revolution. In the current protests two factors have been conspicuous: the age and the sex of the participants. Women and the youth have been at the forefront of the protests on the streets. Shadi Sadr regards these two social groups as the forces of the future.

Meaningless nothingness

There was a time when nothingness could be philosophical and cool (when existentialism was revolutionary and Sartre could still read what he was writing), this conversation about third wave feminism (who knew that existed) just proves that today nothingness is not only meaningless, but annoying and maddening. Just listening to this conversation, made me want to take my pencil and stab myself just to make sure that ennui didn't kill me while I was listening to it (the feeling was so enjoyable that I thought I would spread the joy by posting the video). Is it just me or do American women have a unique way of reminding us that feminism is dead?

The market can't be the solution to all problems

An impossible task:

The task for modern feminism is therefore to devise a market-based response to inequality rather than a mandatory one.

I'm wondering two thing when I read this quote. The first is what would a market-based response to inequality be and what would it have to do with feminism, which is either an empty or rather super-charged word to mean very different things to very different people. The second is whether the expression modern feminism isn't a oxymoron.

Something other than a prostitute

I somewhat share this sentiment expressed from Rebecca West:

I myself have never been able to find out what feminism is. I only know that people call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat or a prostitute.

Illiberalism and the ban of the Burka

For some reason I can't seem to stop quoting Norm Geras or even to disagree with him so I will stop trying especially when he is expressing perfectly my sentiments on France, and its potential ban of the Burqa:

(...) Banning the burka itself is an indirect way of getting rid of such coercion, and the cost to individual freedom, the freedom of those who wear the burka by choice, is a price that must be paid - by them. OK. Then say that - but acknowledging the illiberal nature of the measure, illiberalism for the greater good so to speak. And, even saying it, one must first produce the evidence that amongst women wearing the burka the proportions are as they need to be, between those forced or pressured and those who wear it by choice. If these proportions aren't heavily weighted in the direction of establishing that there is coercion at work, then Oliver and others of his view have no case.
Another question that I'll just mention in passing. Does the law need to intervene in this matter at all? Why may it not be dealt with by the influence of education, social criticism and the like? Many in Western societies find it an obstruction to interacting with people if their faces are hidden. There is nothing to stop those who feel this way from expressing their preference as and when appropriate.

Sarkozy and the Burqa

Neil Clark on Sarkozy and his willingness to put the Burqa at the center of the French political debate:

The secret of Sarkozy's success is that he knows how to spot a vote winner. While the left sought to focus on the underlying causes of the riots which plagued Paris in the autumn of 2005, Sarkozy, as Minister of the Interior, simply sent in the riot police and denounced the rioters as racaille or 'rabble'.
Faced with the impact of the global recession, he ditched his flirtation with Anglo-Saxon capitalism and adopted more traditional dirigiste Gaullist policies - in the process completely wrong-footing the left.
Now it seems he's played another trump card by announcing on Monday the establishment of a commission to consider banning the wearing in public of the burka - the garment worn by some Muslim women which covers the entire body, including the face.
His argument for doing so is not just that the burka represents an assault on French secularism, but that it is degrading to women. By championing the rights of women, Sarkozy is able to pose as the defender of the founding principles of the Republic. He also gains kudos for dealing with a hyper-sensitive political issue head-on. And here's the really clever part: he manages at the same time to expose divisions on the left. 

This debate about the Burqa frustrates me because it is clear that it isn't about the burqa, but about something else, about identity politics, defining/redefining what it means to be French and what/who cannot become French. I don't mind having such a debate, but it isn't cheap to confine it to the interdiction of the Burqa of French society when the issue is about finding the balance between liberty and religion, all religions not just Islam for after all, if as Sarkozy asserts the Burqa is about foreign traditions and cultures, then what is the problem? Can women wear the Burqa if they assert that they do it just because they like it, just as they would wear fur or a thong?

Femininity, empathy, and the law

Hmmmmmmmmh?!:

Women need to avoid the temptation to claim that they bring some special superjudicial quality of sensitivity to the bench or that it's somehow natural for women judges to be empathetic while it's equally natural for men to be dispassionate and reasonable. What women do bring to the courts are diverse views and experiences, and that is more than enough. It's enough to say that the court lacks women. It's a mistake to say women will necessarily increase the court's capacity for empathy.

This woman's work

The best post I've read all day is from Gitl Wallerstein-Braun on Judaism and Feminism. It is short, on point, and interests so no comments are necessary. Sugary excerpt:

As a busy mother of eight children, and a full-time carer of my elderly mother-in-law, a survivor of Auschwitz, I could not get used to the community. Neighbours, for decades, just gazed through me, as if I were made of thin air. There was no way or where to return. I realised that just to keep my thoughts positive, I must learn English and pursue education to make something of myself. Thus, I was lucky to find my way to the wonderful world of contemporary art.

Silly games

I find the G20 London to be a silly affair especially because it shows that the leaders (I'm using the term loosely) of our world are not, yet, up to the challenges that are crippling the lives of less privileged. They are obsessed with their political future and paralyzed by the fear of being the losers of what they view as the game to remake the economic system. A good example is this French-German ploy during the summit to matter so not to let Obama and Brown take the lead. I believe that Merkel's partnership with Sarkozy is temporary; it is mostly about showing the new king of the world that Germany is as, if not more, important than Britain to the United States. Sugary excerpt from an article in the Independent on the situation

The Franco-German intervention throws down the gauntlet to Mr Brown and Britain's chairmanship. At best, it will have precipitated much nocturnal redrafting; at worst, it risks a final communiqué even more diluted than the drafts already in circulation, or even – a prospect almost unthinkable – no significant agreement at all, either on fiscal stimulus or on regulation.
The outcome today could yet surprise. Nothing at such gatherings can be excluded, especially when the summit brings together as many divergent interests as this one and has been prepared against so fast-moving a backdrop. Yet it looks very much as though Gordon Brown's great hopes of laying the foundations of a new world order are destined to be cut down to size – and with it, his own political legacy.
But the last minute, and very public, démarche from the leaders of Europe's two biggest economies also casts the whole project for global economic management in a different light. The combination of a new and untried President in the White House, a rising China, a friendlier Russia and a more vocal Franco-German alliance marks a signal change. Yesterday, the United States and Britain seemed suddenly a little smaller, China a little bigger, and Continental Europe a force to be reckoned with.
By tonight, an agreed international plan of action along US-British lines might have shown this incipient redistribution of power to be illusory. Anything else, however, and we may be looking at the outlines of a very different future.

Obama will soon realize that he has to break Sarkozy and Merkel up if he wants to avoid these types of power-grabbing schemes, which will hurt him the most because he is supposed to change things and that he can't afford to be outplayed and outfoxed for the risk is to have his title as the leader of the free world to be undermined