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.

Quand on est con....

This sugary excerpt from Gary Younge is infuriating because it shows that people who have grand theory about identity politics without acknowledging its frivolity are cons:

Thinking of identities as being part of a fixed hierarchy is a terrible mistake. Being gay and black doesn’t mean that person has it twice as bad as a straight white woman. That’s the kind of mess some white feminists got into with the 2008 presidential debates between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. They suggested that somehow a black male candidate had it easy, and that it was much worse to be a white woman candidate, which is just crazy. Not that it was more difficult for Obama than her. It’s just that the terms of the discussion weren’t helpful to either of them.

One of the many reasons this is an obstacle is that identities aren’t fixed in place and time. Their meaning and relevance is always shifting. As much as anything, this book is an attack on essentialism, because one thing essentialists have always tried to do is suggest there is a fixed notion to who and what we are. Actually, we are many things to many people while also being one thing to ourselves. Whatever else is said about Hillary Clinton, no one questions her being born in America or claims she is a Muslim. They have certainly said other things – demeaned her on the basis of her relationship with her husband or etched out every laugh line, crease and wrinkle – but identity should not be a competition. And if it is made a competition, then everybody loses.

Hey Younge leave Hillary Clinton alone, isn't Black the new president ? So deal with it and explain to us one more time why the One had to be the One.

Gender, politics and reality

Citation du jour from Marine Le Pen, the leader of the French far right party Le Front National:

I believe that it's easier for a man to lose his grip on reality. As a woman, and a mother, you have a close relationship with reality.

I don't agree, with Le Pen for most women in politics are politicians(which isn't necessarily a bad thing) and become women when it is in their personal interest.  Politics, nowadays, has very little to do with reality. People don't want politicians to tell them the 'truth' but to make them feel good, while telling them what they want to hear. It is especially in the US and in France.

Women, men, and writing about sex

Something about this passage by Monique Ruffey bugs me:

(...)sex is still riddled with social stigma and taboo. Church and state still patrol what is deemed OK, moral, loving and safe. Anyone who chooses to write about sex will attract stinging criticism from the moral right and so, relatively speaking, sexual memoirs are still rare. And they are mostly written by women.

Men, by and large, leave this subject alone. Somewhere it's a given that men don't have anything too reflective to say about sex, or they feel silenced by feminists. Where is the male Suzanne Portnoy, the male Melissa P? What men will write honestly about their highs and lows, their triumphs, their sexual sorrows? What man is brave enough to express himself freely about his desires? Few. My guess is that male sexuality has been so heavily associated with violence that men suffer an even stronger taboo than woman. Best keep quiet.

Really? I must be living  in a different planet than Roffey for it seems to me that the problem about sex or rather about your sex life is that you have to be able to view it about than a pornographic and a solely pleasurable/carnivorous experience, which makes it a challenge difficult for both sexes, but particularly for men. I may be wrong, but I doubt it.

Rape and perfect victims

Good summary of the DSK Affair:

The lesson here seems clear:  if you think you’ll get raped and want to bring a case about it to trial, try to live a blameless life.

Of course, the above sentence is troublesome, but it reflects a disturbing reality. I never believed that DSK would be convicted. What troubles me is that behind my certitude was solely the realization that it would have been extremely difficult for the accuser to be clean enough to convince a jury that a man  whose 'status' and 'identity' give him the presumption of decency and thus makes it hard believe that he could just snap and rape.

The issue isn't about class (it is but not in the traditional sense) and race, but one of gender and to  see it one needs only to imagine what would be happening if the roles were reversed.  Let me say it more clearly and bluntly: DSK could afford to have a 'past,' a less than perfect  sexual history, the accused could not afford to have any problematic past history and to do dumbt and dishonest things before and after the incident. I'm not talking here about DSK's guilt or innocence and that is what bugs me for it doesn't matter whether he did it or not for the central issue is and always was the ability of the accuser to be the perfect victim and the fact that she is far from perfect dooms the case.

I'm not implying that she is a victim of her past, but rather that who she is much more than what she did killed this case for there was always going to be something to make her not credible. That said, the District Attorney should let DSK go already especially if he doesn't believe his own witness.

Honestly, I have to say that I hope that she made the whole thing up, it would make what is happening less vile. I hope also that DSK is an innocent man; my problem is that I know that the accuser's lies don't make her necessarily an impostor (in the sense that she made the whole thing up), but that it doesn't matter. In spite of my own tribulations, I do not believe that anybody ought to have her/his life destroyed when there is reasonable doubt and there is undoubtedly more than reasonable doubts in this case. What bugs me is that those doubts have become reasonable because of the accuser/victim, but that's the way the American judicial system words and it has already shown its shortcomings.

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.

Slutwalkers and dress code

Oh  boy, Abigail Ross-Jackson steps in it

Of course there is absolutely no justification for rape. Whether a woman is wearing jeans and a t-shirt or a corset and a miniskirt, her clothing should never be seen as an invitation to sexual assault. But to suggest that clothing is not an invitation to anything is bizarre. The way we dress and express ourselves is, to a large extent, about attracting attention – whether that of potential partners when dressing up for a night out or of potential employers when smartening up for a job interview. The idea put forward by some Slutwalkers, namely that women should never be judged or looked at because of what they wear, is crazy. What kind of bubble do these ‘sluts’ think they live in?

I wouldn’t want to live in a world defined by Slutwalkers, one in which women can wear whatever they want but men are not allowed to react.

I'm confused by Ross-Jackson for it seems to imply that dressing a certain way for a woman is a provocation that creates certain responses from men, which are legitimate and 'natural.' My only question is whether she would make the same point about a child, that is  argue that the way a child dresses will provoke inevitably certain reactions, which are legitimate and own to be expection.  In short, are men really slaves to their passion and even if they are, does the legitimation of a reaction to a provocation means that nothing is forbidden.?

Shoot the Slut

I agree almost completely and for different reasons with Amanda Marcotte on this:

We’re in the throes of a cultural bout of misogyny, and its focus is on sex. And the people who pay the highest price are women whose access to abortion and contraception is threatened by this national game of “Shoot the Slut”. 

The word 'slut' is in need of a re/definition and an explanation of why being a slut is the worst thing that a woman can be.

The Vagina Cartel

Belle Waring just made my week summer by stating this about some men's belief (Anthony Klavan in this instance who doesn't have the culture to be sexist in an original and thought-provoking manner) that there is a such a thing a 'pussy vagina cartel' designed to control their access to sex:

Now, it’s very likely that I’ll be assassinated by a crack team of female ninjas before I can hit “post” (they are all hot 22-year old Japanese women who may also subject me to intensive questioning, should anyone in the Valley be at a loss for movie ideas.) But I am about to reveal a huge secret here: OPPEC. That is, Other People’s Pussy Economic Consortium. Note that the “People” who own the pussy in this case are the women themselves, contrary to traditional usage. But think about it: women, taken as a whole, have control of all the pussy in the world. That is some valuable assets right there. What could be more natural than the formation of a cartel?
So, yeah, we have bi-monthly secret meetings and stuff. Sometimes pussy output among married women has to be steeply ramped down to allow for appropriate levels of sluttiness among college students. (...)So, yeah, but at the end of the meetings some situations have to be handled, usually in large classes because it would take too long. Often something comes up like “53-year-old, divorced, former warbloggers who appear to have forgotten the existence of Iraq and now lurk on MRA forums and troll Pandagon” and all the ladies hit this one button in unison “BZZZZT,” and that’s it. No pussy is distributed to these guys at all.
As to why proven assholes continue to get showered with pussy, one must remember that the decisions are to an extent emergent from the mass of women, in a dictatorship of the proletariat kind of way.

Oh boy man jesus God gender is making sex uncool! Too many men people can't accept that just like French cuisine, it involves some know-how (yeah, there is some learning involved for there has to be more than bacon to a meal) and that nature isn't queen in those matters.

Class, gender, and exhibitionism

Sugary of the day from Belle Waring slamming down Megan McArdle's arguments in favor of giving rich exhibitionists in hotels the benefit of the doubt:

She elides the fact that you, as a woman, know when you’re being flashed vs. when you accidentally walk in on someone who hasn’t heard your knock. Really. Big difference. A man showing you his penis on purpose has a certain way about him, let’s just say. Do I really have to go there? He is likely (thought not certain) to be visibly sexually aroused. And sauntering around looking at you weird, with his penis in his hand as often as not. This is not the behavior of the startled guest who shouts—”wait—don’t come in!” and begins pulling the sheets around himself in a fit of embarrassment. I honestly would have thought, here is a class of rich people whom not even Megan McArdle would defend! I begin to suspect the null set is involved.

I always find it fascinating that more often than not it is women making unbelievable arguments in sexual harassment and sex crime cases. To me, that fact show how icky and hard, it is to identify with the victim of a sex act no matter how believable she is because nobody wants to believe that not only shit happens, to put it bluntly, that it can be sexual and can place in the woman in a position where she is possessed/touched/harassed without having caused the situation.

In short, women are tougher on women victimized sexually because it is both empowering and reassuring.

We need to talk about French machismo and chauvinism

Sugary excerpt of the day from Isabelle Germain on l'affaire DSK:

(...) in France, the media reaction to the attempted rape charge confirms that when a rape or sexual assault is reported, the alleged perpetrator quickly morphs into victim – and vice versa.
The news of Strauss-Kahn's arrest for allegedly assaulting a housekeeper at the hotel where he was staying immediately prompted astonishment: how could this successful politician take the risk of committing an offence that could lead, in the US, to 30 years behind bars? Conversely, was this in fact a political conspiracy, contrived by his powerful enemies? Friends and allies were certainly quick to rush to his defence: Bernard-Henri Lévy has vouched for his good character and Robert Badinter, husband of prominent feminist Élisabeth, insisted on French radio that he had been unfairly and deliberately "destroyed before any trial". Either way, the spotlight focuses on the potentially ruined politician, and not his alleged victim.

Fast comment: when you listen to French media discussing l'affaire DSK, the US is described as a moralist and unrefined country too influenced by religious zealots and feminists and whose barbaric judicial system is in the middle ages!

One of the greatest French contradiction has always been that it wants both to stand apart and to set the norms for civilization. I can't even imagine what would be happening if the shoe wee in the other foot, no actually I can imagine with how pleasure the French press would be saying 'Hey this is France not America, get over it!'

That said my love for France is eternal! It is something greater and stronger than both of us!

Women and wusses

This sugary excerpt from Gideon Rachman is the best remedy to the headache I feel after a short weekend :

There has been a certain amount of sniggering about the fact that it was Obama’s female advisers who were most prominent in pressing for military intervention in Libya, while the men hung back. Amongst the interventionists were the evocatively-named pair of Power and Slaughter – that is Samantha Power on the National Security Council and Anne-Marie Slaughter, who recently stepped down as head of the Policy Planning staff at the State Department and tweeted effectively from her new perch at Princeton. And then there was Susan Rice, the US ambassador at the UN and, finally (and decisively), Hillary Clinton.
The implication of all this is that it was the women who turned out to be the real men – prepared to get tough – while the men were wusses, who hung back. In this account, Obama is cast as the hesitant king, with Hillary as Lady Macbeth, hissing – “Infirm of purpose, hand me the dagger.”

Ahhh I wish I could take all of this seriously, but I cannot because we are in 2011 and that I am over gender. That said I think the bigger point of Rachman's point is about Obama and about the fact that America needs its commander in chief to be firm and to look in command when it is 'at war.'  Obama  doesn't look in command because it is obvious that he knows that the Libyan intervention os problematic for America because it increases the  uncertainty  and the instability in a region key to its strategic interest.

 

Women as human shields

Sugary excerpt of the day or rather of the night from Juan Cole:

Note to Muslim-hater Bill Maher, who should know better: It is not true that women cannot vote in 20 Muslim countries, and please stop generalizing about 1.5 billion Muslims based on the 22 million people in Wahhabi Saudi Arabia, the only place where women cannot drive and where men can vote (in municipal elections) but women cannot. It would be like generalizing from the Amish in Pennsylvania to all people of Christian heritage and wondering what is with Christianity and its fascination with horses and buggies.

I have to admit that I have stopped watching Bill Maher years ago because I couldn't take him seriously. He is exactly like the people he criticized, arrogant and fanatically persuaded to be on the right side except that his views are  seen more fashionable and more 'cultured' (some forms of inculture in America and elsewhere are tolerable/fashionable than others when they lead to more palatable conclusions).

Bill Maher doesn't care about the status of women in the "Muslin world," to use an expression that I hate. He is using it to make a cheap point to win an argument that isn't about women, but about a group of people he considers as savages.  My own point here isn't that there is no there there, but to make the assertion that consistency matters when being self-righteous.

I will not foolishly assert that women in America are not privileged compared to others or that foreign countries especially those in certain parts of the world have a 'woman problem.' I will just argue that saying that isn't saying much for the question remains what is the ideal, what are absolute and universal values, and to stop using women as human shield, as props to win ideological wars.

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. 

The Sarah Palin fantasy

Alex Massie affirms with too much satisfaction and guile for his statement to be true that Sarah Palin is done:

Palin is tarnished goods at the moment. More than any other would-be candidate in the prospective field she needs to build an inevitability strategy. She lacks the chops to win a policy battle (or even the appearance of one) and needs instead the kind of whirlwind operation that whips up a storm in state after state. That requires massive enthusiasm and persuading people to ignore their suspicion that she cannot win a general election. Unfortunately that also creates a collective action problem for Palin: people might vote for her if they think other people will too. But they don't think other people will and so they won't either.

I have to admit that I don't understand the rationale of Massie's assertions for Sarah Palin never begun. She has always only been the witch that liberals needed to convince themselves that they were good and that Obama was the best s*it !

To the contrary of many, I have never thought that Palin was stupid or that she was an abomination, I thought that she was likable enough as Obama once said arrogantly and with spite of Hillary Clinton, but that the problem was that she was never as good as her defenders thought that she was and more importantly as bad and evil her detractors believed. Palin is a legitimate political figure, but saying that doesn't mean much for she has yet too become real rather than a fantasy in the mind of her friends and her foes. 

Is Sarah Palin done ? Of course, she isn't. She just isn't real, that's the problem. Sarah Palin doesn't exist. Elle n'existe pas !

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.

Betraying the tradition of the Enlightenment

I agree with Brendan O'Neill on this:

(...)The great irony of the French government’s restrictions on the burqa in public places, and to a certain extent the Belgian government’s restrictions, is that they have been presented as being in the tradition of the Enlightenment. This is about liberating women from oppression, they say, and therefore it is a good, Enlightened, Voltairish thing to do.

In fact, banning a religious garment is counter to the spirit of the Enlightenment. What these authoritarians forget is that the Enlightenment sprang from a defence of religious liberty. The Enlightenment has its origins, not in any attempt to censor certain minority religious symbols, but in a belief that minority religions, even ones we consider ‘heretical’, should be protected from state intervention, censorship and oppression.

So in calling for the state to restrict a certain form of religious expression, these pseudo-Enlightened censors are doing something that the original men of the Enlightenment would have considered pretty outrageous.

'Africa' and Vile psychologization

I found the following sugary excerpt from Brendan O'Neill vile :

It isn’t because they have been brainwashed that many Africans choose not to wear condoms. It could be because, in a continent where there are still high levels of infant mortality, they want to have as many children as possible, since children are frequently needed to work on the farm, earn money and care for older generations. Or it could be because they want to express their love for each other in the most intimate way possible, without a sheath. Or – and I know this will be hard for the Home Counties humanists to comprehend – it could be because in countries where life is short and expectations low, people have different attitudes to risk than we in the West do. There are many reasons why Africans – both Catholic and non-Catholic – might choose not to wear a condom, and they are not irrational. And, of course, there’s the very basic fact that in very poor countries with little medical infrastructure, diseases spread faster and have worse consequences than they do in the developed West, with or without papish propaganda.

First, I don't know who O'Neil is talking about when he talks about 'Africans.' Second, I wonder why the behavior of some people from the african continent is analyzed as the norm for all, as something that all those people  do because they are from there. In short, in an attempt to make a fair point, Brendan O'Neill took a shortcut, which led him to the middle of nowhere for after reading him, he succeeds in doing only one thing, which is forcing people who come from the same geographical location the same who act a certain way, by implying that the action in question is conditioned mysteriously in part by that strange place, where nothing is the same, that isn't part of history, where gravity doesn't function, where people are particular, a place that is the Babylonia of culturalists and of tribalists: Africa.

What is most disturbing and distressing is that it never occurs to O'Neill that the 'Africans' he is talking about are just people like him and their behavior have nothing to do with a supposed and nonexistent Africanness, but their own individuality. I mean why and where guys would get the idea that having children and sleeping with a lot of women without protection is a sign of manliness as Harvey Mansfield would say?  Eh oui, a lot of people from the heart of darkness are just Harvey Mansfield's disciples  and believe selfishly, in a manly manner, that they are such masterpieces of nature that they need to breed as much as possible to create 'little thems' to make the world a better place. The foolishness of unapologetic and deified manliness are universal.

Powerful narrative

Sugary excerpt of the day from the always pertinent Jennifer Thorpe:

One of the most powerful narratives we have of women, is of women as a victim — a victim of circumstance, a victim of violence, a victim of her own femininity. Women are distanced from their own sexual desire in public discourse, and are essentially seen as “the weaker sex”. This is one of the most disabling narratives we have. When we view a woman who has experienced sexual violence, or is a prostitute, or has experienced domestic abuse, or is poor as a victim rather than a survivor we to talk about her in an extremely limited fashion. We also only allow her access to an extremely limited way of talking about herself, or accessing public space.

I'm left wondering what makes a narrative powerful nowadays, the fact that it sounds true and touches one emotionally, or something else. The trouble with powerful narratives is that they are capable of stopping deep thought, analysis, and any kind of much needed self-introspection.

Prostitution as a well-respected profession with an established code

One of the reasons why I love reading Chris Dillow is his amoral approach to complex subjects as this sugary excerpt shows:

The allegations that Wayne Rooney paid £1200 a time for sex brings a well-respected profession into disgrace. I refer, of course, to prostitution. In selling her story, Ms Thompson has broken the code that prostitutes, like priests and lawyers, do not divulge their dealings with clients.

I'm not offended by the idea that prostitutes are comparable to priests and lawyers. However, I'm disturbed by the notion that their clients more than sex when 'hiring' them.

Comfortable explanation for sex inequality

Sugary excerpt of the day is from Cordelia Fine:

We look around in our society, and we want to explain whatever state of sex inequality we have. It's more comfortable to attribute it to some internal difference between men and women than the idea that there must be something very unjust about our society.

Women and rape victims

Fascinating point from Merav Michaeli on the case that made international headlines about a case of rape by deception in Israel  which turned out to be false by an 'Arab' of an 'Israeli Jewish' woman:

We women are educated from the beginning not to listen to ourselves, not to believe ourselves and certainly not to believe women who say they have been raped.(...) we should know better. After all, every woman knows on the deepest level that there is no such thing as going up on the roof of a construction site in the middle of the day with a man you just met for wild sex and then lodging a complaint against him.
We must no longer fall into these places. Our only way to protect ourselves from men closing ranks in cases of sexual assault and harassment by accusing the victim of "consent" and vindictiveness is to believe in each other. Always to believe in each other. For each of us to remember the reality of our lives and to know that we are all real victims.
We must have faith in each other that is beyond the shadow of a doubt. That is the true meaning of believing in ourselves.

The difficulty of androgyny and gender-neturality in literature

Fascinating:

(...) today the “dominant masculine” no longer applies in grammar, and still no gender-neutral pronoun thrives. It turns out that it’s not just the conservatism of the pronoun system that’s blocking the gender-neutral pronoun. It’s also the fact that the speakers of English seem content to muddle along without this particular innovation. Even before the generic masculine started its decline, singular they was always an option, both in speech and, despite the tongue-clicking of purists, in serious writing as well. More recently, writers seeking to avoid the generic masculine have been plugging in the coordinate he or she, him or her, his or her(s), sometimes choosing slashed forms instead, he/she, him/her, his/her(s), despite long-standing objections that such constructions are cumbersome, especially when they’re repeated several times.

In fact, despite the almost universal condemnation of the coordinate he or she by supporters of gender-neutral pronouns, the rule books now opt for he or she and not an invented word to replace the generic he. Students who once were taught that the masculine pronoun must always be used in cases of mixed or doubtful gender are now taught instead to use coordinate forms, not for gender balance or grammatical precision, but simply because that’s the new rule. Those writers who question the rule, who realize that multiple he-or-she’s just don’t make for readable prose, won’t seek out a new gender-neutral pronoun. Instead they’ll recast some sentences as plural, and for the rest they’ll just take their chances with singular they. After all, if you, which is also gender neutral, can serve both for singular and plural, why can’t they do the same? In any case, after more than 100 attempts to coin a gender-neutral pronoun over the course of more than 150 years, thon and its competitors will remain what they always have been, the words that failed.

The issue of gender irks me less in English than in French for I have made the recent realization that it is easier to be gender-neutral in the former than in the latter. I had always assumed with foolish pride that French was a less sexist and gender-oriented language than English. My opinion changed when I decided that two of the main characters, Andrea and Leah, of my novel, L’Empreinte des Choses Brisées, weren't going to have a gender..I had read and loved Jeanette Winterson's Written on the body and thought unconscionably that it would interesting to try to write a story in French with gender-neutral characters without the issue of gender-neutrality being the main aspect of the story. I didn't realize how difficult that decision would make the story very challenging to write. In French, masculine pronouns are gender-neutral for characters are presumed to be male if the writer doesn't use the female pronoun elle or doesn't assert their gender. My point isn't very compelling, but it is that French is such a specific and a precise language that gender-neutrality is almost impossible to achieve because masculinity is assumed not only to be the norm, but to be all encompassing.  To be frank, I'm not sure that I succeeded in making my characters gender-neutral for most people so far who have read the book assumed with a disturbing certainty that my characters can only be women in spite of the fact that I keep asserting that I don't know their gender, for they never told me what it was. In short, French makes androgyny and gender-neutrality difficult,.

As Eluard, I believe that words don't lie and that it has forced me to realize that in fact, language says a lot more than it should about gender and its place within a society. The argument isn't that language frames one's mind or conditions one's thinking, but rather that it mirrors most societal conditions and what has always been believed about gender.

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!

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.

Contraception and fanaticism in Congo

Once in a while Nick Kristof gets things right:

In rural parts of Congo Republic, the other Congo to the north, we found that even when people had heard of contraception, they often regarded it as unaffordable.
Most appalling, all the clinics and hospitals we visited in Congo Republic said that they would sell contraceptives only to women who brought their husbands in with them to prove that the husband accepted birth control.
Condoms are somewhat easier to obtain, but many men resist them. More broadly, many men seem to feel that more children are a proud sign of more virility.
So the pill, 50 years old this month in the United States, has yet to reach parts of Africa. And condoms and other forms of birth control and AIDS prevention are still far too difficult to obtain in some areas.

One of the most appalling facts about the  limited use of contraception isn't used in Congo and other African countries is the role that American evangelism plays in strengthening old beliefs that women are breeders and not contraception isn't just bad, but evil. The point isn't here that the problem has been imported or is being created by American evangelists, thus making the issue one of identity or one of eternal victimization but rather that that imported fanaticism is making an already catastrophic situation  worst by convincing well intentioned, but limited people that ignorance, poverty, and anti-intellectualism  are not just bliss, but also close to Godliness.

Most tea-partiers are women

Thought provoking fact:

HERE's something of note about the tea-party movement—it's full of skirts. Over half (55%) of the people in the movement are women, according to a recent Quinnipiac poll; many of the organisers are women; and the movement's most prominent person is, of course, Sarah Palin. 

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

Men as the best representatives of the artistic idea of women

The quote of the morning is from Ian Buruma's review of  William T. Vollman on Japanese Noh Theater, Kissng the Mask:

Adornment is everything; what leads men on in their never-ending chase after female beauty is less a matter of biology than of art and performance. And no performance of femininity is more stylized, more artificial than Noh. (...)Some believe, in defense of the great art of men playing women in Noh, Kabuki, or in pre-Communist days the Chinese opera, that men can represent the allure of female beauty better than women can. For the idea is not to mimic reality but, as in a Chinese painting, to express an idea of reality, an abstraction almost. Men can represent the idea of women better, because they can take a distance from the real thing and reinvent it as art.

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.

Genital mutilation and culturalism

Another example of the dangers and absurdities of culturalism:

At the end of last month, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) issued a revised policy statement on female genital mutilation (FGM) called "ritual genital cutting of female minors," suggesting that the federal and state law in the US should permit paediatricians to offer a ritual "nick" of girls' genitalia as a compromise to appease the cultural needs of their immigrant clients.

Soon, in the name of the divinity of culture, honor killings will be allowed. May be it is time to assert that there isn't such a thing as culture.In my view, no 'cultural compromise' is palatable if it comes at the costs of Lockean Liberalism

The obsessive quest for the perfect body

Susie Orbach on the "femininization" of the male body image:

Men's magazines today resemble Cosmopolitan of 20 years ago. They encourage guys to reach for the same rotten solutions to the problems of living that have been endlessly proffered to women. Transform your body, use male moisturiser, make up, get rid of those man boobs, see yourselves as a diminutive pouting strutting yet vulnerable boy/man whose ideal body is ever shrinking. Aspire to that and distinguish yourself by your ability to sculpt a body as the fashionistas imagine it. Separate yourself from the diverse physicalities so magnificently captured by Spencer Tunick in his bodies of flesh. Make a new body. Make a new self.
It's working. Boys, young men, men of all ages are being captivated by the new visual grammar which pushes men to pout and posture. The more it is there, and the more we succumb, the larger will men's girths become and the bigger the profits of those companies praying on transforming men's bodies. Don't do it, guys. Reject this new uniformity. Dare to be as physically robust and varied as you always were. Don't fall into being the latest bait in the breeding of body insecurity.

In short, skinny, when it comes to both genders, is the old and the new black. The necessary conclusion here is that the gender works because it is marketable and that societal norms when it comes to women and men subsist when they are not in conflict with the market.

The American male escape fantasy

Quote of the evening from Naomi Wolf:

One of America’s last competitive cultural exports, it seems, is the postadolescent male escape fantasy.
(...) men all over the world tune in to American-made fantasies of male bonding and male escape – escape from the bonds of work and domesticity, and, if only for a youthful period of the male lifespan, from long-term commitment to women themselves.This fantasy, derived, no doubt, from American history – from westward expansion and Manifest Destiny, from the Gold Rush and a settlement policy that valorized staking a claim to the wilderness and subduing it – is powerfully appealing to men in general, and to many women as well.

Defining 'wife'

No comments necessary. (via)

Demography and political power

Sunny's advice over at Pickled politics on the ways for minorities to have more power in a liberal democracy:

After a while the race and the religion doesn’t even matter: it comes down to numbers. If your numbers or clout is large enough then the establishment will pay lip service. Perhaps the mistake Latinos in the US made was to tilt too far towards the Democrats… removing the Republican incentive to avoid pissing them off. Although it looks like Republicans are paying the price already.
Perhaps what I’m trying to say is that the only way a minority can get over the bigotry is either by expanding in large numbers, or getting very close to the establishment. 

There are two major implications of Sunny's advice and both of them bug them. The first is of course that it is acceptable to view having children as a means to an end, especially a political end. Children, thus become little things to enlarge a group giving them limited room to acquire an individuality. The second implication is that identity politics is so supreme that women should see as their mission to expand the numbers of their group by having more children. Women who are part of the minority group thus become essentially breeders since the objective is to have little ones to make their 'people' more powerful. How disturbing !

Being unfu**able

The sugary excerpt of the day from Jessa Crispin:

The other lie, which you will hear from your male friends, is that a woman can get laid whenever she wants. This is meant to be comforting, I think. A woman permits and denies access to sex, and all she has to do is want it bad enough. Bad enough to make the effort, of course. One can't just have a line of men appear on your doorstep just by trying to attract them all The Secret-like, although Craigslist can come in handy for that. But it, too, is a lie. There is such a thing as being unfuckable and female, whether because of weight or lack of femininity or age or poverty or that desperation you start to emit in waves after a few years without anyone trying to get into a dark corner. Because if you are unfuckable — and let's use the right word here — if you are a hag, you have no voice.
(...)There are no ugly girls, no old hags in popular culture. Every week we are supposed to pretend like Tina Fey is ugly on 30 Rock, that America Ferrera was hideous even beneath the glasses and the braces on Ugly Betty, that every homely girl is a pair of contact lenses, short dress, and good haircut away from being prom queen.
If that is the epitome of public ugliness, well, then the actual hags are way below the line of visibility. Women are allowed to have some power, but only if they're hot.

Crispin is mostly right, but I don't think that there is such a thing as an unfuckable woman, there are just women who think that they are unfuckable because sex appeal is supposed to be about beauty and hotness, when it isn't. But then again, the main point is that women's sexuality is defined by their desirability and thus their objectification.

Freedom, gender, and the fear of rape

Sugary excerpt of the morning from Jennifer Thorpe:

The saga around the gender testing of Caster Semenya rocked our foundations last year. Suddenly we weren’t sure what the boundaries for man and women were. We were forced to reconsider the nature nurture debate, but it remained a theoretical one as the protections for her dignity prevented us from knowing the results of these “gender tests”. The result would not have been able to answer the question though. Caster Semenya might not tell us whether her test revealed that she was female, or male, but she might be able to tell us what it means to be a woman, having been subject to such scrutiny herself.
Perhaps she might tell us that women in South Africa don’t have it easy. It’s hard to feel free when you must constantly evaluate your surroundings waiting for a rapist to strike. It’s hard to be free when the crime of rape is one of the only crimes where the burden of proof is on the survivor because of a problematic definition of rape that talks about consent, rather than coercive circumstances.

A choice about choice

Good point about abortion in the US from Stuart Derbyshire:

Perhaps now is the time for the pro-choice lobby to recognise that Roe vs Wade was a mixed blessing. For the past 30 years, it has been the Supreme Court, and not broader society, that has made the necessary decisions about abortion. Justice Blackmun’s majority opinion in Roe focused on abortion as a privacy right (the ability of patients and doctors to pursue clinical decisions without fear of interference from the state) and the right of clinicians to practice their profession. In contrast, the rights of women to control their bodies and their destinies did not feature in the 1973 opinion. Roe effectively took the power to decide about abortion away from society and gave that power to the Supreme Court. Thus began more than 30 years of legal wrangling and posturing over abortion that has increasingly pushed everyone but lawyers and judges to the side.
In an important sense, the battle for autonomy over fertility was lost in 1973 rather than won because the battle shifted away from women’s autonomy to decide their life course as equal citizens and towards influencing nine Supreme Court judges. Women need access to abortion to have control over their own destinies rather than having their destiny dictated by a biological accident.

The trouble of course comes the particularity of the American context. America is a religious country and for that reason, even those who are in favor of abortion (especially politicians who want to get elected) are always ambivalent about the right of the woman to control of their body if it is proven that what she has inside of her is a living thing. I don't think that Roe vs. Wade will ever be overturned because it is not necessary to do so to make it impossible for women to make an increasingly difficult and socially unacceptable choice to have an abortion .

Manly men and shrill strident hag bitches

I agree with Ophelia Benson on this:

Being considered strong and tough is not all that unpleasant even if the people who consider you that detest you. Being considered a shrill strident hag bitch is a whole different thing. (...) women can’t win no matter what they do. Either they hang back and don’t get the top jobs because they didn’t grab for them, or they grab for the top jobs and spend the rest of their lives as shrill strident hag bitches.

The war on terror and its pervasive effects on gender

Quote of the morning from Gita Sahgal:

Torture was seen as something that primarily applies to men and not to the more routine ways in which women experience harm. Thus, the 'war on terror' has had a very profound effect on women’s rights. Yet there is really very little analysis of what has happened. So much commentary has concentrated simply on what Bush or Blair said about women’s rights at one time or another to further their own instrumental agenda, that we have simply ignored the areas where advances in women’s rights have been undermined - either because of a fundamentalist backlash to enforce what they consider their cultural and religious rights, or by human rights professionals who, as they see it, are trying to protect the purity of the human rights framework.

Libertarians and freedom

Good point from Chris Dillow :

Some libertarians seem to think that only the state infringes freedom - hence the claims that women in the 19th century or peasants in medieval Europe were “free” in some meaningful sense. But surely Mill was right when he wrote that public opinion can exercise “a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression.”

One must wonder whether freedom is ever real if it isn't informed and whether that fact matters. In short, how free do we had to be to be free and what determines that reality one sense of it or something else. Although I disagree strongly with the assertions that women were as free in the nineteenth century as they are supposedly today, I wonder what elements should be considered here and whether the focus here shouldn't be the individual, but rather the legal and social structures of an environment.I'm sure that they were a few 'privileged slaves' who felt content and would have argued that they felt free, but that doesn't mean that slavery is a form of freedom.

Congo as the rape country

Frightening:

Sexual violence has become increasingly pervasive in the east of the Democratic Republic of the Congo where civilian rape has risen 17-fold in the past few years, says a report released today by Oxfam.
The study found that 38% of rapes were committed by civilians in 2008, compared with less than 1% in 2004. "These findings imply a normalisation of rape among the civilian population, suggesting the erosion of all constructive social mechanisms that ought to protect civilians from sexual violence," it said.
Armed groups, including the army and Congolese and Rwandan militias, have raped tens of thousands of women in Congo. But the report, Now, the World is Without Me, said about 56% of sexual assaults were committed by armed men in homes in the presence of the victim's families, including their children. About 16% reported were in fields, and 15% in forests. Incidents of sexual slavery were reported by 12% of women surveyed, with some held hostage for years.

I'm just wondering why, if women and their rights are so important, a war isn't been fought to liberate them in Congo or at the very least to enable them not to live with the fear of getting rape.

'Women's rights' as a pitiful justification for wars

Johann Hari on the use of 'Women's rights' (I hate the expression by the way because it implies that women are so particular that Human rights aren't for them) to justify the Afghan war:

The other arguments that used to be used to justify the war have become a polite after-cough. Women's rights? My friend Malalai Joya is the most popularly elected woman in Afghanistan. She has been expelled from the parliament and silenced in the media for pointing out that "things have not improved for women," because the occupiers have "transferred power to fundamentalist warlords who are just like the Taliban."

I'm always annoyed or amused depending on the eloquence of the ones making the argument when people argue with a straight face that a war is fought to liberate women when all one has to do is to look at the fact that women's bodies are still the subject of a vicious ideological battle in the US for example to see that 'men' are never going to fight for the rights of 'foreign' women to have the same rights that they have when they aren't willing to do the same in their own backyard.

Free Amish women

Quote of the day from Bryan Caplan:

How free are Amish women compared to other American women?  I say they're just as free.  (...) If the Amish used threats of violence to keep their women in, it would be a terrible crime.  As matters stand, though, the plight of Amish women strikes me as objectionable, but far from awful.  I vacation in Pennsylvania Dutch country without losing sleep over it.  When an Amish girl marries an Amish boy, she knows what she's getting into - and her voluntary consent is meaningful despite her Amish upbringing.

Something is rotten in Québec

Another 'veiled' woman taken away from a French class in Montreal:

One morning recently, a young Muslim woman whose face was hidden by a religious covering was pulled out of her government French class near Montreal and told to unveil or leave the course.
But, while Ms. Ahmed was portrayed in media accounts as difficult to accommodate, Aisha, as she has asked to be called to shield her identity, didn’t make waves.
According to former classmates and officials at the suburban centre she attended, the young woman was a model student who placed no demands on others and even teamed up with male students for class assignments.

I'm just wondering if the burqa/niqab/hijab/islamic veil is the biggest threat to Quebec society. It is of course a rhetorical question for history shows that it is easier to pick on women when a society has no easy answers to complex identity issues and yet feels threatened by change whether perceived or real. I'm just waiting for the Quebec to show its manliness to the end and deport these women from their province to show that they mean business instead of once again, using them as political tools.

Angela Merkel, the woman

Sugary excerpt from Tony Paterson's portrait of Angela Merkel in the Independent:

We know that Merkel occasionally bakes cakes and that she is environmentally conscious; that she uses energy-saving light bulbs. There are few anecdotes that offer glimpses of her personality. She let this slip when she appeared in the Chancellor's office to see the unveiling of a portrait of Gerhard Schröder, her predecessor and erstwhile enemy: "I knew I'd see the day on which Schröder was strung up," she quipped. She is reputed to be terrific at mimicking other politicians, but she never shows off this ability in public. Her political speeches are uninspired, some would say crushingly boring. They are usually delivered with a deadpan expression in a near-monotone. The content is more akin to a university lecture than a message designed to kindle the enthusiasm of the average man or woman on the street. At her rallies, many of the supporters are women; most say they have come to see her because they admire her.

Those sentence bug me. They show that no matter how powerful a woman becomes, she has to be pinned down as a woman first so as not to escape the dictatorship of gender.

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,"