Feminism

[thefncrow]

That might just be school book depositories.

[Apple Cider]

Turns out I actually have a copy of the PDF sitting on my harddrive so whomever wants it, let me know. 

[Mawd]

I'd be really keen to read that if you don't mind.

[Apple Cider]

Private message me an e-mail and I will send it!

[MrHoatzin]

This thread grows so fast, I'm so proud. Maybe this was mentioned but maybe not.

 

Speaking of historical examples of counterpatriarchy and some societies around ancient Messopotamia, it is important to bring up what is going on in west Kurdistan right now. I was kinda late to the freaking-out-about-Kobane party but observers who've been paying attention for the past couple of years are calling it an armed social revolution led by women. In the west media it has largely been covered TMZ-style "28 Sexiest Freedom Fighters of the Levant" but there is some real cutting-edge feminist experimentation on going away with the capitalist nation state, seen as the source of the bondage of women and permanent barrier to peace, in the region and in general.

 

 

My trek through learning about this stuff started with Dilar Dirik and I've yet to really make sense of how all of this stuff works on the ground, but it sure looks fascinating. And it's happening live.

[Apple Cider]

This is great, thanks for sharing.

[clyde]

Björk's album is out on itunes. She addresses some interesting feminist issues in an interview.

http://m.pitchfork.com/features/interviews/9582-the-invisible-woman-a-conversation-with-bjork/

This is a great read from my perspective since I view her as the most significant musician of my generation and some of it is about how she doesn't get all due credit because of her gender.

[Apple Cider]

I was going to link that here so I am glad someone beat me to it. Her proddings at what it means to be a female auteur and get no credit is so meaningful. 

[Bjorn]

Sometimes I think this thread should just have its own The Toast rss feed built into the side of it:

Misandrist Lullabies

 

When Johnny comes marching home again
Hurrah! Hurrah!
We’ll give him a women’s welcome then
Hurrah! Hurrah!
The men are gone and the boys have fled
The ladies will collect their final head
When Johnny comes marching home.

[Merus]

Mallory Ortberg is going to go far, I think. With the quality and range of the material she's been contributing to The Toast, I wouldn't be surprised if she was acknowledged a few years from now as one of the world's finest living satirists.

 

Edit: it's a distraction to my point here to note that she is the editor of The Toast and probably has a stake in it, which is nice and all but I'm saying she deserves to be a colossus bestriding the world. I guess that's unlikely because that would involve the establishment saying that a woman is funnier than most men.

[Apple Cider]

To all of those who messaged me about the PDF, reminder to myself I will send it tonight, this week has been fucking crazy at work and I come home and forget to do everything.

[Griddlelol]

Björk's album is out on itunes. She addresses some interesting feminist issues in an interview.

http://m.pitchfork.com/features/interviews/9582-the-invisible-woman-a-conversation-with-bjork/

This is a great read from my perspective since I view her as the most significant musician of my generation and some of it is about how she doesn't get all due credit because of her gender.

 

It's a shame I really don't like her music, because she's a really interesting person.

[Bjorn]

Meet the ‘Radical Brownies’ – girl scouts for the modern age

 

The Radical Brownies have their own badge system, including one for “Radical Beauty” and an “LGBT ally” badge. The girls also earned a “Black Lives Matter” badge after learning about police accountability and attending a civil rights march in Oakland.

[SuperBiasedMan]

Meet the ‘Radical Brownies’ – girl scouts for the modern age

This sounds amazing!

 

Also I am tickled that the article begins with "not all girl scouts".

[Mawd]

Hey thanks for that pdf; I'm keen to check it out tomorrow. :3

[Apple Cider]

No problem. It was really crucial for me to understand just the mechanics are behind many forms of abuse, including from friends.

[Bjorn]

Sarkeesian posted a big update to the Tropes Kickstarter page yesterday on the history, goals and evolution of FemFreq, and it's quite an interesting read. 

[Merus]

(it bothers me a little that a lot of the people affected by GamerGate are doing victim support and advocacy instead of what they were doing. It feels like they're unable to do the fairly reasonable thing they originally set out to do. It's bullshit that a games designer like Zoe Quinn can't dedicate all her time to making games, or Anita Sarkeesian can't make those quick five videos she intended and move on to something else.)

[Apple Cider]

As a jump out of the Life thread with the discussion about dating sites, let's maybe have a rap sesh about cultural mores, specifically revolving around the idea women are expected to put up with boundary violations, that assumptions about their desires is okay, and their feelings in the matter are secondary. It's a pretty difficult thing to acknowledge, admittedly because it's something I find really ingrained. But it's one of the reasons why it's so hard to interact with men, for me personally.

 

A lot of resistance to this line of thought is like, "Oh what, so I'm not even ALLOWED to LOOK or TALK to women" but in some ways, that is not something you are owed in life. Granted, taken to the extreme, it feels very "unfair" but underpinned to this is maybe why this feels unfair. I do not feel like it is my right to be able to interact with anyone, really, but I even had to be pretty into feminist thought to recognize this pattern of thought. For a very long time, I felt like I was here to acquiesce to the attention of men, even so much that it was tantamount to how I felt about it. It's a pretty wicked socialization to not only teach someone that their own feelings are not paramount but rather that this behavior is a way to be validated (as men's attention makes you "worthy".)

 

It's hard, even now, to tell dudes who are creeping on me to go fuck off, because innocuous violations get me labeled something nasty, and more intense violations risk the threat of violence or worse. See: Telling a guy not to leer at me or get into my personal space, etc. 

 

I even used to have a lot of anxiety about this because I've had shitty stuff happen to me while out and about on like, public transit.

[SuperBiasedMan]

I think a significant complicating factor in explaining this is how differently (cis) men and women will experience being subject to gaze. Men don't have a constant presence of watching, so the idea will seem harmless, innocuous and even complimentary. While the reality for women is not a positive experience.

Frequently men do seem to respond in a way where they're dismissive of the negative aspects because of the assumption that it's easy to brush off, not realising that it gets exponentially harder when so many male encounters are tainted with this. I was plenty guilty of this. Not really perpetrating the problem but failing to grasp it just because I hadn't personally lived it.

[Apple Cider]

Well, yeah, that's the obscuring factor of privilege - if you don't deal with that kind of socialization or behavior, it's extremely hard to understand why it is a problem. But the pushback is just so loud, I want people to at least consider why they think they can make demands on people in that sort of way. Granted, there's definitely relationships and extenuating factors that obligate you in some ways socially but the less we have people not thinking critically about this, maybe that obligation will be reduced significantly.

 

I know it's hard to cover all base on these sorts of more abstract discussions but getting at some unchallenged, unquestioned behaviors feels like a good place to really think critically. 

[Deadpan]

You've said some good things in the Life thread. I've added some things of my own now and maybe they were also okay. I can sort of understand the desire to crack open monogamous relationship models (as an unchallenged norm, not as a concept), but the idea of doing so by forcibly confronting people with other models whether they like to or not is very ehhhhhhh.

 

This is a very important subject in general I think. It's not as comfortably far away as stuff like the pay gap, because most people flirt with other people at some point in their lives, and that often makes it a bit awkward to talk about for them, I guess, but it also means it's not as far out of reach for changing. I can improve my approach to interpersonal stuff far easier than I could change laws or policies.

[Apple Cider]

Yeah, things that are pretty embedded and fundamental are the hardest to change, especially when they are hard to quantitatively analyze. I did like your thoughts in the Life thread, btw! It's been hard today putting together how I feel because I am in the middle of a really serious brain fog, but you nailed some of my feelings on the head. Respecting others boundaries, particularly women's, is very hard when we live in a society that actively encourages innocuous transgressions of that regularly. 

 

I have my own critiques of monogamy but I have my own critiques of men in relationships, regardless of what they are because you still carry that baggage with you. Being into kink or polyamory doesn't shield you from being misogynistic, abusive, or just generally a butt. Relationships are not immediately radical if you don't do internal work to root out problematic behaviours. 

[MrHoatzin]

I feel the need to clarify that I am in no way arguing that women have a duty to submit to dudes breaking boundaries, which I feel sideways accused of.

[Apple Cider]

The line of inquiry was better suited for a more general take here, I felt. However, if you permit me to be blunt, I do felt like you were not recognizing my point as valid and instead being incredibly snide to me for daring to be set as "looking for friends" on a site and personally noting anecdotes from many kinds of couples (mostly messaged by the male partner of them, though) that disregarded this setting. Granted, by the end of it, you were not the only person implying how confusing it is, but you definitely seemed to take my noting of pretty unvarnished facts as somehow a broad indictment of all poly couples with men in them, which is wasn't. It was me despairing that many people see bisexual women, regardless of their actual wishes, as sexually available particularly for threesomes. If this was not the case and I misread what you wrote, then I do apologize, but your tone read that way to me. 

 

However, I mostly am just interested in hashing out a more general pattern of behavior over here that stemmed from the conversation.