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This is about sex. Specifically, it's about to be parti quatre of the utopia series I started and abandoned a couple of months ago.

I haven't talked about sex and the media yet. And I think they're linked, in a very Venn diagrammy way where they overlap just a tad but influence each other in many ways. This is not, however, a preamble to moaning about how the media is forcing young people to have sex at an early age and corrupting our culture, because that would be a very silly argument for me to try to make.

So. In my happy little utopian view, children would be listened to, communities would be the core concept of governing, and we would all be blissfully divorced from our tendency to see things like gender and sexuality and identity in general as purely dualistic. Would those things resolve the problems I've referred to in the past re: the porn culture [that is, a culture with an emphasis on sex as a commodity and using sexual imagery to promote, well, everything]?

Well, yes - if they were applied to a whole new culture, a group of people completely uninfluenced by events up till now. Not so much so if applied to us as we stand today; Americans particularly have a long, strange history of puritanical mores and sensationalist tastes. It seems like the worst effect of the porn culture thing might also be the easiest one to solve, though - rape and sexual violence could be stopped if we built "don't rape" into the culture (along with the complexities like communication and gender equality in sexual interaction). We're just apparently unwilling to do it now (it's so much easier to argue legal issues like whether what someone's wearing contributes to violence against them, I suppose).

So, in happy little utopia, there would be no notion of violence that looked sexual on the outside. Would there still be sex that looked violent on the outside? That is, would there be bondage, or dominance play, or pain play? I don't know. It's so hard to tell whether that's something people would still want if divorced from the power imbalance of heterosex - which is also, for the most part, the model for all sex.

But I would expect that the lack of duality thing would lead to a much wider range of preferences of any sort, including sexual, being acceptable. I just have no idea what those preferences might be and how much power exchange might be part of them. Or whether sex would even retain its current function if our concept of family were different. Hrm.

Which is also the deal with media. Ideally non-internet media would be about as diverse as the internet, as that's what people would want. It makes sense, really, given the lowered cost of producing many things (movies, tv, even books) digitally or semi-digitally; it could be less costly to produce a wider variety of things. Ultimately, though, I suspect that the whole media-ownership thing would have to change dramatically to see real diversity. Basically, this is the one area where I'm a full-on socialist. As long as the distribution of the more widely consumed media like radio and tv are controlled by companies who answer to shareholders, I'm not sure real change would be possible. I think independent media are the answer, but there's usefulness in having some form of interconnected global medium (the internet being an example of this) so that everyone can communicate.

I'm about to start reading a book that may give me more ideas on this one, though. So stay tuned.

This is about sex. Specifically, it's about to be parti quatre of the utopia series I started and abandoned a couple of months ago.

I haven't talked about sex and the media yet. And I think they're linked, in a very Venn diagrammy way where they overlap just a tad but influence each other in many ways. This is not, however, a preamble to moaning about how the media is forcing young people to have sex at an early age and corrupting our culture, because that would be a very silly argument for me to try to make.

So. In my happy little utopian view, children would be listened to, communities would be the core concept of governing, and we would all be blissfully divorced from our tendency to see things like gender and sexuality and identity in general as purely dualistic. Would those things resolve the problems I've referred to in the past re: the porn culture [that is, a culture with an emphasis on sex as a commodity and using sexual imagery to promote, well, everything]?

Well, yes - if they were applied to a whole new culture, a group of people completely uninfluenced by events up till now. Not so much so if applied to us as we stand today; Americans particularly have a long, strange history of puritanical mores and sensationalist tastes. It seems like the worst effect of the porn culture thing might also be the easiest one to solve, though - rape and sexual violence could be stopped if we built "don't rape" into the culture (along with the complexities like communication and gender equality in sexual interaction). We're just apparently unwilling to do it now (it's so much easier to argue legal issues like whether what someone's wearing contributes to violence against them, I suppose).

So, in happy little utopia, there would be no notion of violence that looked sexual on the outside. Would there still be sex that looked violent on the outside? That is, would there be bondage, or dominance play, or pain play? I don't know. It's so hard to tell whether that's something people would still want if divorced from the power imbalance of heterosex - which is also, for the most part, the model for all sex.

But I would expect that the lack of duality thing would lead to a much wider range of preferences of any sort, including sexual, being acceptable. I just have no idea what those preferences might be and how much power exchange might be part of them. Or whether sex would even retain its current function if our concept of family were different. Hrm.

Which is also the deal with media. Ideally non-internet media would be about as diverse as the internet, as that's what people would want. It makes sense, really, given the lowered cost of producing many things (movies, tv, even books) digitally or semi-digitally; it could be less costly to produce a wider variety of things. Ultimately, though, I suspect that the whole media-ownership thing would have to change dramatically to see real diversity. Basically, this is the one area where I'm a full-on socialist. As long as the distribution of the more widely consumed media like radio and tv are controlled by companies who answer to shareholders, I'm not sure real change would be possible. I think independent media are the answer, but there's usefulness in having some form of interconnected global medium (the internet being an example of this) so that everyone can communicate.

I'm about to start reading a book that may give me more ideas on this one, though. So stay tuned.

This morning, I caught a bunch of what I believe to be really stupid misinformation about children and teenagers on the news. One piece casually dismissed kids on skateboards as a menace to society while it seriously considered whether old people on scooters and motorized wheelchairs ought be able to drive 5mph down a local street. Kids are bad! Old people, who may have more experience but impaired senses, aren't.

And then (or before, whatever) there was a bit about how sexual predators are coming into your home (via the internet), thereby making your home about as safe as the mall. Which is, in essence, true - kids have about a 1:1,000,000 chance of being kidnapped or assaulted by a stranger in the mall, which isn't much higher than the chance of it happening in your house. Of course, if you factor in the possibility of a kid getting sexually abused, they're much more in danger from the people their parents bring home (and the parents themselves) than from strangers. The suggestion touted in this ridiculously badly researched piece was that you try to invade your kids' privacy as much as possible.

GAH!

So, I'm continuing my continuence of the utopia piece, with the bit about education and children (#1 from my original list). The essential tenet of dealing with children is that they must be granted every human right granted adults and granted individuality. As the t-shirt my partner covets said, children must be seen, heard and believed. (narf) But they also deserve what every adult deserves - the basics of life, of course, but also trust and assumption of their competence.

My views on education and rights for kids are based upon (or at least reflected in) those espoused by John Holt and the like, and those theorists have written many books on the subject that I trust you can read if you're interested. Their main idea, and mine, is that the most important thing we can do is educate kids to become better thinkers.

Humans have a strong impulse to learn, and our current system of education and parenting squashes that more than it values it. Education in my ideal world would allow for a lot of different types of schooling, for more freedom for families and communities to interact with children (and for kids to participate in the adult world they want so badly to join), and for a notion of learning that isn't classroom- or youth-bound but rather all about experience. It would not include rote learning, forced adherence to curricula or standards of proficiency in subjects - or, for that matter, subjects themselves.

There'd still be a need for schools for kids to meet at and for teachers who could offer guidance, answer questions & provide approaches for people to select from when they, for instance, wanted to learn to read. I think the single greatest use of teachers and schooling would be in asking questions - not "what's 2 + 2" so much as "why do you think that?". But everyone around you would serve as a sort of teacher in this way.

Kids in happy feministy heaven would also be spared gender bias and all the many million little subtle and not so subtle hints adults send them about the importance of being "normal" or "what girls do" vs. "what boys do" or skin color or any of that other shite. Partially because adults wouldn't have these issues themselves (and so wouldn't, say, treat a baby in blue differently than a baby in pink) and partially because adults would teach with listening and giving real - that is NOT black and white - answers to questions.

Childcare, by the way, would also have little bias of any form, because every child would have a community of chosen family members (all of whom are presumably bias-free, at least in my community) to care for it - those people would generally be of somewhat varied thinking and background. Men and women and those other and in between would all consider themselves equally responsible for childrearing, and this would be facilitated by economic factors as well as the political nature of the community.

This post is (obviously from the title, I suppose) a continuation of the utopia series. This segment is primarily concerned with the community/family (#3) and governing (#6) questions I brought up last time.

There are few ways in which my utopian vision of feministy delight coincides with a sort of "greatest generation" reverence for the 1950s. But there is one:
I really do think the family is the base unit of government and socialization and all that.

I'm not talking about your nuclear family, but about the people you choose to draw around you, the ones you will count on to take care of you and vice versa. In an ideal world, the resources and flexibility would exist for individuals to be geographically close to their family and to live within like-minded communities (of course your biological family isn't always going to be full of like-minded people, but you'd still have your community, your chosen family). It's analogous to the self-governing "hive" idea that Greens and others have talked about over time.

So, recognizing the importance of chosen family, I'd do away with the institution of marriage as we know it (that is, one with a single set of rules applied to all people and limited to two people of opposite gender) and we'd have the ability to define relationships based on a range of commitment levels, presence of kids in a family, number of people involved, etc. If you could prove you were co-resident or co-responsible for a family, your family - however you defined it - would be recognized by the government.

This guarantees people a support network, and also provides a sort of official understanding for a wide range of families - ideally, each family's contract would also include the process to follow if it were disolved, much like a no-fault divorce. Different communities (i.e. those organized around certain religious beliefs) could certainly emphasize marriage and family in the way these exist today, but over time I'd expect the need for that to decline.

Communities, since they'd be based on mutual agreements over - well, whatever - would automatically choose different rules and levels of rules and would obviously live in quite different ways. There's room in my utopia for a degree of relativism, and respect for the possibility that, say - community A doesn't want any men involved, and community B thinks abortion is murder, as long as neither of those communities infringes on the other or violates agreed upon basic rules. But given our new greater appreciation for subtlety and grey areas (see #2, Dualism/Diversity in the original post), most everyone is willing to accept the possibility that the person they're disagreeing with is, in fact, correct. [Also, pineapple is always in season.]

A problem this introduces, of course, is movement between communities and governing at a higher level. I don't think globalization is contrary to a perfect worldish view, but a world focused on the extended family and community could get myopic. It doesn't need to be, though - we may be us-centered in the US today, for instance, but we're moving through the media towards a bigger picture understanding of the individual as both member of a community and a global citizen. I think that's a good thing.

It also introduces a need for a form of representative government, with members of many communities contributing to a baseline agreement of the rules. To tie it to representative government as we know it, communities would replace cities and states/provinces, coalitions might replace countries, and a global sort of super-duper actually powerful UN would be the forum for creating the overarching rules - which I think of as principles of human rights, methods for commerce between communities, and dispute resolution (including, if absolutely and rarely needed, use of military force).

As for the logistics of this - I actually favor compulsory short-term civil service in concept, and I think that's the most effective way to keep a large representative government fueled with non-bureaucrats. Not to mention giving every citizen of age a certain stake in the political process.

The question I posted this week (the best question [from me] ever] on WHB was this:

Your assignment for this week (or however long it takes you - this could be a very complex question): tell the rest of us about your feminist utopia. You don't need to worry about what's realistic or how to get there (although if you have ideas, by all means share). Just think about it. [Read the question & comments]

I intend to spend some more time considering this topic, but in the meantime, here are some general thoughts. I'll expand upon each of these subtopics in subsequent blog posts and link them back here.

1. Children and their rearing and education. This is either first or last logically, because the way we teach children in many ways dictates how society will go, but it's also a result of the world around them. I also have some base ideals of how we should treat children - granting them some real autonomy but also giving them support - that would have to be the foundation of a utopian education system. [Covered in PART THREE]

2. Dualism/Diversity. In my ideal little world, we'd shift away from a that/not that view of people and their differences. This applies to gender, race, sexuality, etc. - pretty much any circumstance in which people might create an us/them division. I've talked about this quite a bit before and so am referencing another post. [Covered in LIBERATION! (August 2003)]

3. Community & Family. Namely, that every family would be able to dictate for itself what "family" is (this also goes for "marriage", though I'd actually do away with that term) and that families in general would be supported by the larger community. Loads to think about here. Also, do I deal with federalism here? Or do I assume a certain homogeneity from community to community? Do I want everyone to agree with me, or is it better to have a wider variety of opinions? Wait and see. [Covered in PART TWO]

4. Sex. The changes cascaded from 1. and particularly 2. would play a big role here. But there's a lot to be considered, things I haven't yet made decisions on - like the role of commodification here, of sexual media and such. [covered in PART FOUR]

5. Media. Maybe it's just because I'm pretty plugged in, but I see more global media like the internet as having the potential to play a positive role in crossing the boundaries of communities and making us a more matrixed world. That, and more independent ownership and production of media would be a good thing. [covered in PART FOUR]

6. Governing. More and more I come to see this as an outgrowth of the social factors I've already mentioned. Ultimately, I don't think hives completely work - they create another that/not that division. But a wide-ranging, semi-global governing structure kinda wants to be representative. This one's a challenge. [Covered in PART TWO]

7. Economics. I'll actually cover this one largely as a subcomponent of each of the other topics, too, but this is the condition on which everything else is based in my mind. Without balancing economic opportunities, equality on any other level is nearly impossible.

I have friends, online and of the flesh and blood variety, who hesitate - or simply refuse - to call themselves "feminist" despite their clear and obvious fitting into the simple textbook definition of the word.

This bothers me, sometimes, because they tend to accompany this self definition with a lower level of direct involvement with the politics of gender issues. And frankly because a lot of lesser mortals do claim the appellation and do get involved and are sometimes a giant pain in my ass.

But.

Why do you have to choose a label to be involved? Really, who decided that? The label may make it easier to belong, but it doesn't affect your individual ability to act. Well, it does - but it doesn't have to. We could just accept other's actions and avoid trying to categorize them.

All of this is by way of introduction. Over the past couple of days, an issue that has been simmering in the various LiveJournal feminist communities exploded not unlike the polenta I cooked last night did (damned electric stove). There were injuries (psychic only, unlike the polenta), but it really came down to the same thing we'd been angry at each other about for awhile.

And it's summed up in labels.

Periodically, an issue pops up and is suddenly everywhere all at once. Over the past week, it's all about beauty and body image. We got into beauty and diet stuff on one of the LJ communities, my colleagues were talking about it, my friends were talking about it, my internet circle were blogging it.

I don't know why this happens. It's possibly just an effect of my own viewing of topics - I see them a couple of times, then they filter everything I see. Or maybe it's the cascade of a topic from one person or group to another.

In any case, it makes complete sense that Alison should be asking about it on WHB.

She'd like to know:

How is your body image?
What do you do to maintain your body image?
How do you cope with medias fixation on what your body image should be?
What do you think of diet plans where exercise (and in fact healthy eating!!) are a side factor of losing weight?
How about the current round of makeover and plastic surgery shows?
And, if you have a negative body image, how does that impact your feminism?[Read the discussion.]

I'll add a question to the list: how much attention should we feminists be spending on body image and events like NOW's Love Your Body Day (which is October 20, by the way)?

I have an idea of my body built more on function and feeling than on appearance. My appearance in mirrors other than the ones in my house tends to freak me out; I frequently don't look like I feel. I feel better than I look in photographs, for instance. It's a positive sort of dysmorphia that a lot of fat people seem to build for themselves. I've been told it's a reaction, conscious or unconscious, against the "bad" things that fat represents, but I also think that it comes - for people of any size - from becoming more kinestheticly at home.

That kinesthetic sense, for me, is more resilient than answers I might give to the "how do I look" question.

When I was a kid, I would weigh myself twice a day, each time sucking in my middle bits and studying the side and front views in the mirror. Same thing every day. I stopped doing that some years ago, after destroying the bathroom scale and dropping it out a window (into a dumpster). That was one of many things I did to get out of the dieting cycle and get rid of the abusive "fat & ugly" language I'd been using about myself since - oh, since I started weighing myself, come to think of it! I should write at some point a list of the steps I took to stop hating on myself; it's a long list, and not everything actually worked, but it might still be a reference for someone looking to do the same thing.

I'm still not possessed of a constant positive attitude towards the appearance of myself, though I'm feeling good enough that I don't want to spend a lot of time on this one aspect of self. Having fun movement in my life helps, as does eating tastily and healthily and drinking loads of water. None of these things, by the way, have made me remotely thinner. I think I weighed between 220 and 230 lbs a bit over a year ago when I started daily exercise, and I weighed 224 at the doctor's office a couple of days ago. That, by the way, was great proof to me that weight is a crap measure of health and that weightloss just doesn't happen for some people. I feel great; I'm still fat. Whatever.

I find it interesting that media involvement with our bodies has actually gotten to a point where there's more than just a message of how you should look - there's also an undercurrent of how you should feel about how you look. Like feminist involvement in the beauty myth has been turned into products telling you to feel good about yourself whatever you look like, made by the same companies who sell you the idea of what you should look like. Argh. There's a positive effect of this, though - I think more and more, people are going to get frustrated and turn to picking out only the personally useful aspects of these products a la the self-styled Atkins dieter who buys no products and is simply no longer eating white bread. That's the only practical personal approach to any media attempts at involvement in your relationship to your own appearance - ignore it. There's also the political approach, which is to counter it, expose lies, etc.

Losing weight is a lousy goal. Most people who take on this goal fail (or they succeed, but success is temporary, as the body is designed to rebound from starvation). Weightloss itself, divorced from the positive effects of eating or exercising healthily, has little usefulness. Why bother? I think all weightloss oriented diet programs are lying to you. People don't change size without changing the way they eat and expend energy on a long-term basis, and even then, it might not mean weightloss.

Makeover and plastic surgery shows make me cry. They are, as much of the body image discussion is, too, about making your physical self an obstacle to your actual life.

Which brings me to the role feminism plays in all this. I am of two minds on this. Feminism has encouraged women particularly (but all people, really) to think of themselves as beautiful and worthy. And yes, one strategy for coping with a culture that emphasizes beauty as representative of worth is to redefine beautiful to include yourself. That makes the observer-dependency of beauty more obvious.

A disadvantage to this, though, is that you end up with people spending just as much time as they might have on dieting or clothing or surgery, but now turning that effort to "why can't I lurve my body?". It can turn, as I alluded earlier, into another demand placed on you. I know some folks who've rejected this and choose to define themselves as ugly or simply not put effort into this; it makes a lot of sense and sure seems to take a lot less time.

Right. So, what feminists need to be doing where body image is concerned is two-fold - first, broadening the norms of beauty to include damn near everyone (understanding that individual people have preferences, but those don't need to suit a cultural norm) and second, questioning the valuation of people as beautiful/not beautiful in the first place. I think we do okay on the former, but the latter really only comes into play in theory and academics.

Over my end-of-summer vacation (which now seems to be aaaages ago), I finally got round to reading Michael Chabon's Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. It is, as many promised me, the sort of book that seeps into your life as you read it. I found myself referencing it as if the characters were real, the way my high school friends analogised the people in our lives with the characters in Mists of Avalon a gajillion years ago.

So it should be no surprise that I started seeing my own relationship to my own media of choice in light of the ideas in the book - thinking about my own escapism, say (escapism, for the 2 of you who haven't already read this book, is pretty tightly wrapped around the plot, the themes, the people - it is, after all, a book about a comic book about a character based on Houdini and Jewish emigrants of 30s Europe). It is interesting to find yourself splitting a day between watching FoxNews covering the RNC and terrorism and reading Hothead Paisan in bed.

I don't think I got Hothead until this year. Hothead is about little girls. What I mean is. If you're fortunate enough to be able to pop open any random media outlet and see yourself, then there's absolutely no way this comic could make sense to you. But if you've been something like a little girl seeing a million representations of what you should be and few of what you are, or something like a little girl learning what rape is, it makes sense. Like all forms of escapism, Hothead speaks to your capacity for childish fantasy but also to the horror of childhood, the amplification of the great scariness of things. You remember being seven and thinking the world would end, right?

[Brief dance break while I explain the premise of Hothead to those of you who don't know the comic. Others forge on ahead. Hothead is a homicidal lesbian terrorist. She drinks coffee, watches tv, and freaks out, ends up doing things like pulling rapists spines out their asses (and other similar grossouts) and evincing a general loathing of men. Her acorn is some combination of an internal demon and television portrayals of women, her alterego is more or less herself sans gun, and her superhero powers seem to be rage and a talent for evading law enforcement.]

Comics and videogames and all the things we know best as "escapist" media are products of their time. They answer needs for fantasy - whether to dodge reality completely or imagine beating that which attempts to beat you. Grabbing a little bit of that fantasy is, I think, good for you. I've said that before. And the Hothead comics are very much a product of early nineties recognition of homophobia and sexism. They're angry, they're media-focused. They still make sense.

No, I don't mean that it makes sense to go butchering people to establish equality and justice for all (superheroes never make sense like that). But they're still a useful escape, where all the shit we're still protesting (to borrow a phrase from a friend) gets taken out with all the violence and anger you might feel.

It's something - not the only thing, hardly, but something - we need sometimes.

How come Helen Keller couldn't drive? Because she was female.

Vic posed an entertaining answer, advocating reverse sexism (sorta). I think she does have a point, that the joke is left over from a time period when women did less driving (whether that's universally true or just a stereotype of its own). It makes sense that this joke might be generational.

A sexist joke of this caliber never killed anyone, but I'm with Kerri - these annoy the hell outta me. They're not only offensive, they're not funny (even worse). I prefer humor of a drier, more sarcastic tone, things based on truth. The "women can't drive" joke is no more true than the "men can't handle household stuff" joke (which gets forwarded around madly as a "share this with all the women in your lives" chain letter waaaaaay too often). Maybe I'm humorless, because I don't find any of that class of jokes very funny; my usual response is "but that's not true!". Cause it's not.

So why do jokes like this stick around? Don't know. It's possible that they're partially results of resentment, or that they're simply representative of what some people think is true. It could just be, as Vic suggested, that stupid old jokes die hard.

Oh, good god. As an attempt to bring into the political fold all those single young women don't, like omigod, ever vote, we now have cheesy takeoffs on Sex & the City all over the place - the latest? Carrie the Vote. A site purporting to seriously encourage women to vote via an excess of cuteness. But at least it links to the National Women's History Project. I guess the intent is good. It's hardly a new strategy - NARAL used Sex and the City to caution people about restrictions on abortion rights just a few months ago.

But at least NARAL's thing wasn't pink. I can't go on without mentioning the eeeevil of the design of this website - seriously, it's hard to even start in on the problems. Things that don't line up! An excess of fonts and colors! A dearth of anti-aliasing in the main navigation images! All that is wrong with "design for girls". Aieee. Now I can move on...

I accept that the website is sarcastic and humorous in intent, playing to a stereotype of single women as shoe-obsessed and basically stupid for jokes (yeah, cause that works). But why only address how "hard" it is for single women to vote? Why are women the problem if we don't vote? Are we all Barbie over here, complaining that "voting is hard" in tinny little recorded voices?

Nope. Don't think so. The issue that keeps single women from voting is the same one that keeps people in general from voting - a fundamental lack of belief in the political process. Several years of withdrawal in disgust and frustration have turned into, yes, apathy. Apathy is a great defense mechanism when things are just too bad to think about.

I suspect, actually, that quite a bit more young women will be voting this year, because of W's stance on the political issue that most of us can closely connect with - you got it - abortion. That is a reason we ought to get out and vote.

But most of the rest of political discourse is, I think intentionally on the part of politicians, family-centered. Not centered on all families, of course, but on the comfortably middle class two-wage family, the slightly less comfortable multi-child union household. Younger and older people's issues are barely even mentioned in many elections (though we do seem to be doing a bit better on the upper end, as more and more people get old). Why, then, is there any surprise that younger people don't vote? It's not exciting; it's not even about you if you're under 30.

There are organizations (i.e. Punk Voter"> and Emilys List) that are fighting against this, aiming to take back the platforms (as if we ever really had them) by mobilizing more people towards a voting revolution. It's a start. People don't avoid voting because it's hard; they avoid it because it seems pointless.

[Link from Utopian Hell, who did an excellent job of pillorying the ridiculous language of the CTV website, thus sparing me the trouble.]

Men's gymnastics have become much cooler than women's gymnastics. I don't know when this happened. I clearly remember the women's version being very elegant and dancelike to watch when I was a kid; the men's, by contrast, being rather repetitive and boring.

Now, the compulsory "dance" moves on floor and beam look silly and graceless. They were designed for women with the bodies of dancers and rhythmic gymnasts, for movement all about curved lines. Today's women gymnasts are serious athletes; they have the broad shoulders and substantial muscles need to do the insane tumbling and leaping that has come to dominate the sport. Those leaps and such are amazing; they require so much strength, but there are still these weird little leftovers - goofy music and poses that make the athletes look like dancing donkeys.

This was true in women's skating during the winter Olympics, too (and of men's skating, to a lesser degree). It's like the sport isn't aware of its own changes, despite the increasing difficulty of the "technical" (read: truly awe-inspiring) side. It's not about feminine beauty - at least not in the same sense - anymore. Move on! Please don't play another patriotic, upbeat floor routine song with the pretense that the tumbling is somehow related.

Men's gymnastics, by contrast, was never about pretty. And has become more compelling to watch because of it - the level of rigor and athleticism is more clearly a test of strength and agility and is just plan cool. Without the barriers of complete dorkiness that the women face, the men's sport started rocking.

On a vaguely related note, I can't resist commenting on the kerfuffle around the beach volleyball dancers. Because beach volleyball wasn't silly enough to match table tennis, the Greeks added dancing women in teeny bikinis between matches/sets/whatever volleyball terminology is. The dancing is incredibly goofy; one really expects Frankie and Annette to pop up.

What's at issue isn't the mockery of turning the sport into a beach blanket movie, but the objectification of women implied by having women in bikinis dancing to entertain you in between episodes of... women in bikinis whacking a ball. Presumably the latter are dressed for comfort and ease, while the former are, like any cheerleaders, dressed to titillate. And I can see the players' point - if there aren't any guys in bright orange speedos dancing about, it makes every woman more an object of sexiness instead of an object of, say, sport.

There's the question of why women playing beach volleyball wear little sporty bikinis while the men wear basically basketball attire [see pictures on athens2004.com], too, which I've heard people talking about the "appropriateness" of. It seems to have less to do with appropriateness or gender than it does with trying to imitate people frolicking on the beach - I mean, they wear hats and sunglasses. At night. So they can... so they can see (in the fake daylight). It's another case of a sport with a seemingly demented need to stay connected to its roots.

Which I don't get. But then I only even watch sports maybe 5 times in the average year (though the other 4 times, I almost never see such weird gender divisions among athletes).

I owe a number of "back responses" to WHB questions. Here's one from a couple of weeks ago, courtesy of Morgaine, cleverly titled "Nature v. Suture".

Buckle your seatbelts, kids - it's a long one. Feel free to play "I Spy" in the backseat while I type.

I. Reproductive options: a) Birth control – what if it might kill you? Make you sterile? b) Abortion- I know a girl who refused to use birth control and had 6 abortions. Any problem with that? (She knew better, she just didn’t care) c) Planned Cesareans – having surgery so you can plan your birth around your schedule. Any conflicts? Is it better for the mother to have a safe surgery or a risky natural birth? Would cutting a pregnancy short hurt the mother? The baby? Would it matter to you if there were increased risk to the baby? Is vaginal birth passé?

I am generally averse to medical intervention. I've encountered a lot of uninformed doctors, and I hesitate to make any decision that will make me more dependent on them.

Birth control's a fairly personal decision, particularly because the effects of current medical birth control options are so individual. I consider it wildly unfair that there are so few comparable choices available to men - the end result being that it's almost always up to the woman in any straight couple to decide how to avoid pregnancy.

Abortion is an acceptable means of birth control in my book. Have I used it that way? Well, no. It's expensive and even the medical (vs. surgical) option is still not a skip through the park, and prevention seems easier to me. But that's me. It's legal, it's up to you, and you shouldn't have to apologize, whether you 'know better' or not.

If I were to have a kid, I have no idea how I'd prefer to do it. There are advantages to a planned, controlled, surgical birth, I suppose. But there are also risks with any surgery (and, from the mamas I know, I understand those risks to be greater and the rewards sometimes less than having a kid the usual way). It seems to me that the least unpleasant and most empowering way to give birth is at home with a trusted midwife and/or doula. But then - I hate doctors, and it would be next to impossible for me to be comfortable through a medically assisted pregnancy.

I think instances of people planning C-sections just for convenience are fairly rare, and even if it's the next big trend, I have a hard time passing judgement on any woman for her approach to bearing kids. I'll wait and snark about how she raises them later. [It's a joke. Really, I'm kidding. I swear.]

II. Breasts – Are any or all of these purely a matter of choice? A necessity? An abomination? Vanity? Any issues of patriarchy, or oppression here?

a)Breast reconstruction- done after breast removal due to cancer, paid by insurance.
b)Breast reduction to alleviate back pain, paid by insurance.
c)Breast enlargement as an elective? What if the only implant available can be deadly? What if the Army is paying the bill? What if she's doing it to make more money or get a raise? Or because her boyfriend wants her to?

Can you guess how much it pisses me off that the military will pay for your breasts (well, sorta), but won't even LET you get a freaking abortion on your own dollar while you're active duty? That's demented, and totally in line with what I was saying on LJ earlier this week about giving the government more money to spend - making sure Army doctors have "practice" at plastic surgery is not a good use of the $.25 that probably cost each of us this year.

Back pain due to breast size can be treated with exercise as well as surgery, to an extent. To a degree, you could grow your breasts with exercise instead of surgery, too. Surgical alteration of breasts, no matter how much it may seem like an individual choice, is actually a series of "individual choices" that add up to support for a very narrow definition of "normal". Women are supposed to have two breasts of a certain size, shape, and quality in order to be attractive - this is an issue of tremendous concern for the women who get various breast surgeries, and it is cultural, not personal.

It may be your individual choice, but particularly when the intent is cosmetic it contributes to the porn culture and narrows other womens' choices each time one woman goes the surgery route.

III. Beauty hurts

Women in China used to be subjected to foot binding, which was a cruel and painful practice that crippled women permanently.

Right now, on the East Coast, women are paying doctors to have bones removed from their feet so they can fit into expensive designer shoes. Any problem with that? Do you ever buy shoes that don't fit because they're pretty ? Or on sale?

That is positively whacked. I have never met a pair of shoes that cute. Seriously, though, I think this is a class issue. As plastic surgery and personal trainers have become more the purvey of middle class folk, it seems like a subset of the wealthiest Americans looks for other more creative/expensive ways to make appearance a class indicator. It's a sort of consumption I find offensive and just - whoa, so utterly out of touch with the world.

Shoes should be both pretty and comfortable at least for their purpose. Most high-fashion designer shoes are neither. But yes, I've at least bought shoes that weren't tremendously comfortable based on my belief that they'd break in comfortably. They're like itty bitty sculptures, shoes are.

Which is, by the way, exactly the appeal of the broken "lotus blossom" feet of Chinese aristocrats during the brief time that was in fashion. Binding gave the foot a distorted sculptural form that was considered very beautiful. Our attitude about shoes, the use of heels to make "shapely" calves - not as extreme, but of the same color as Morgaine's examples.

There are some positives here, at least - no doubt in part because women have been working and "practical" for some time, there's more of a sense that your shoes - practical vs. silly - are something you're free to choose. In daily situations, it's as normal for a woman to wear comfy flats as teeter in heels. It's progress.

IV. Genital surgery. Little girls in Africa and the Middle East are systematically mutilated. Our government does not see this as a human rights issue. Women in America pay doctors to 1) create a false hymen 2) modify their labia for aesthetic reasons and 3) tighten their vagina to make sex more pleasurable for their (male) partner. Women are also known to have genital piercings done. Bikini wax, anyone?

I struggle with the implication in Morgaine's post that one government should intervene in what is considered accepted practice in another's society. I agree that the practice of "female circumcision" is barbarous, but violating another's sovereignty is also a human rights issue. One society's definition of barbarism is not the same as another, and there are, whatever you may think of them, rules about interference. It's a complex issue that could be seen as a colonialist intrusion on one hand or as a failure to intervene on civil war against women on another. And, as Karl pointed out, we still think of it as normal and ordinary to circumcise infant boys, a painful process even parents rarely have little choice in (not to mention the kid). What if we were a less powerful nation and the rest of the world decided abortion was barbaric and wrong?

From what I understand, genital surgery isn't always for a partner's pleasure - it can make sex more pleasurable for the woman getting the surgery, too. Seems like a huge amount of risk, but if the reward was going from painful to delightful sex...

On the other hand, I think all aesthetic surgeries fall under the "maintaining a narrow standard of normal" thing I mentioned above. Waxing to an extent does the same. Piercing is something I don't think even belongs in a group with the rest of these - yes, it's about aesthetics, but it's not about "normal". That gives it a very different context - taking it from defining what all women should be to what certain women are (whatever that is).

Brigitte's question on WHB: does objectifying men bring us closer to equality?

I was watching "Best Week Ever" on VH1 a few nights ago and they were discussing the recent release of a male equivalent to the "Girls Gone Wild" series. If equality really is about evening things between men and women, is it a "good" thing that men are being sexually exploited and objectified more and more in the media? Or, as the suffragists suggested, is the ideal equality men achieving a level or morality comparable to that expected from women. In other words, are men supposed to be as "good" as women, or are men supposed to be as debased as women for things to be equal?

Ah, Best Week Ever. Fun show.

I think the treatment of men as sexual objects is a logical result of gains made by feminism combined with our porn culture (that is, predominance of the use of sex to sell things & the sale of sex). Women are more sexually assertive than they had been in the past. Sexual "attractiveness" continues to used to sell everything, and women are increasingly the larger consumers (in the US and most western countries, at least). So the male object becomes more of a product. This trend is much more complicated than just the result of two intersecting forces (the rise of gay subculture is certainly also a contributor, as is the growth of the fitness/diet industry), but I don't have enough knowledge about those other factors to do them justice.

Is this a good thing? In that this is a sign that women are considered more powerful in the world of consumerism and are seen to have independent sexual initiative, I actually do think that objectification of men is a positive sign. I also hold out hope that with most of the population subject to absurd "beauty"/health/diet standards (which is very related to the objectification question), frustration with and resistance to these things will increase. So yes, it's a good thing; it's development in one aspect of our culture that needed a change.

Is this where we want to be? Well, no. Evaluating everyone on a standard of appearance and sexuality is a bad plan. It's a sign that our culture's a bit out of balance - and particularly combined with our weird moralism around actual sex and our bodies, is strangely schizoid.

I assume because it's out of balance, that there will eventually be a swing in a different direction - not, I hope, towards the "new modesty" extreme that a few small subcultures promote, but maybe towards a balance between the desirable sex object and other values. And maybe the people held up as physically "ideal" will actually be remotely attractive.

As a side note, there was often an undercurrent of "Women are the supercoolest because they're so sweet and good and pure" in certain suffragist arguments for equality - alluded to in the original question. Idealizing only the "good, feminine" qualities of people, regardless of gender, is also not equality and is not realistic. I'd be fine never hearing that take on "equal" ever again.

This week's
WHB topic is sexism at work - how institutions perpetrate acts of sexism, based on an article about gender disparities in Boston police accomodations.

Basically, there is no comfy lounge for the female sergeants (4 of 27 seargents), and it's a problem. It is a problem for any similar institution (i.e. the military) - how do you provide equal accomodations for the women on the forefront of gender integration? It's awkward, apparently - women's quarters on ships, for instance, always seem to be either horrid or palatial when compared to similarly ranked men's accomodations.

The simple, obvious solution to me is for us to get over our heterosexual prudishness and expect men and women to act like grownups and shower in close proximity if they have to. No special treatment for women. No half-assed "eh, I guess we HAVE to deal with you" treatment, either. But I guess world peace is as likely to successfully happen tomorrow as we are as a culture to be able to step away from our "naked women = sex. must! have! sex! also, sex = evil." mindset.

So, it's unfortunate and expensive, but I think the best recourse in this situation is for these police folk to complain (and, egads, sue) until they have a comparable place to plop their butts.

In a series of related questions, House9 asks us to consider our own experience of institutional sexism:

Have you experienced gender discrimination on the job?
How do you perceive the current status of women in the workplace?
Do you think lawsuits are the way to go to improve things, or would you recommend other strategies for counteracting sexism, institutional* and otherwise, at work?
Do you know of any movements in your area to fight workplace sexism?

I really haven't experienced equivalent sexism in the workplace. There are a few things - I've been on HMO plans that cover drugs like Viagra, but not birth control (not anymore), I've worked for companies that provided maternity leave only for a short time with no unpaid leave (somewhat biased against women) and no equivalent leave for new dads (very biased against men). It's hard to say if there's much pay inequity at my current company, because it's not like I know what other people make. We're all presumably paid within a certain scale given our tenure and experience, but I don't have proof of that.

I have worked for a small company where the women were universally paid less than the guys - mostly because we were all hired into much more junior positions (a form of sexism itself, as many of the guys with the "better" jobs were hired straight out of college). But again, it was never really clear who made what. That's a problem for employees - they don't know how fairly or unfairly they're being paid (and honestly, as long as you're making an amount you're okay with, you don't care much what others make), so I suspect wage discrimination isn't discovered until the employer breaches trust in some other way.

It seems like the variety of lawsuits around this kind of stuff have helped somewhat - they made inequality something that could cost you as an employer, essentially raising the stakes economically, which CEO's can relate to.

Unionizing in certain contexts probably helps, too. As does anything that educates people about various forms of workplace sexism - companies seem to do better on sexual harrassment education than anything else, though.

As for local movements, I really don't know of any. Hmm. Have to look into that one.

What is feminine [web] design?

Others' thoughts on this question (following on my earlier gender post) have made me wonder whether I was looking in the wrong place for this definition.

That is, maybe there aren't specific elements that make a design "feminine", but there's a difference in expressiveness (see Absent Student for some thoughts on that). To put everything in Weimar-era German terms (because we can):

Masculine design is Bauhaus, emphasizing form and function. Except, if you believe your personal economist, the function is the website itself, not its content.

Feminine design is Dada, emphasizing expression and the destruction of form. Eh, maybe not. Maybe it's flat-out expressionism. Or worse yet, romanticism. Ugh. I don't really want to be Schiller or Goethe.

Or we could skip the thin-stretched comparisons to any form of modern art at all and talk about the thing itself instead of things that are like it. If you insist.

Put in web terms, a well-chosen feminine site design will be built around the site's content - possibly even the site's author or persona - and a similarly well-chosen masculine design would focus on the functionality of the site (and possibly the technical emphasis of the author).

Your gender does not necessarily play a role in which design style suits you best. I like to think that my preference for expressive but functional visuals has more to do with my identity as an artist than my identity as a woman.

However.

Our beliefs about what is "feminine" versus "masculine" affect our personal expressions of gender. Both women and men are socialized (or, if you'd like to erroneously wink wink believe, born with an innate preference for) to different types of expression. There is both a tendency to encourage certain types of emotion and to enforce certain types of expression. Put simply, boys aren't supposed to cry, and girls aren't supposed to be mad or ugly.

Kids, this is why we still need feminism. Well, this among other reasons that ought to be glaringly obvious.

Not only are boys not supposed to cry, but our culture leans towards men expressing energy and ideas and women expressing emotion or themselves. That's not to say "all boys" or "all girls" express only certain feelings only certain ways. No person of my acquaintance has ever diligently followed these gendered behavior rules; anyone who did would be somewhat freakish and hard to talk to.

Gender roles, though, do unconsciously limit our behavior and understanding of others. They also color our preference for expression and its medium, to an extent. That's why, as Absent Student says, women and girls frequently seem to dominate journalling communities while men seem to dominate in the techblogger communities. We're just expressing the things we're "supposed to".

Still. There's no rule that you can't take a functional, technical approach to describing your life on a journal, or get really emotional and passionate about issues or objects on your blog. Actually, a number of the LJ feminists I read have largely built their online personas on the latter; I do quite a bit of the same.

If there is a subset of the blogging community that disdains journalling sites and the design style associated with them, there is an at least equally large community of journallers who aren't interested in the Who's Who of blogging - if they're even aware of it enough to be actively uninterested. Right? And if the Who's Who are mostly men, and the journallers are mostly women, what difference does it make?

Well, there is the issue that diversity in any community can help it thrive, shake it up a little intellectually. And a group that lacks representation from women or any other subgroup limits itself in this way.

To me, though, the big difference is that the Official Media Representation of the Blogging World is drawn mostly from that Who's Who. The depiction of the internet is therefore focused on this alternate source of news, the blog, and forgets the feminine (not necessarily female) side: the gorgeous, self-involved poetry of journallers. It seems a devaluing of yet another "women's" medium - not so important in and of itself, but damned depressing in a long historical line of dismissals of women's media.

Besides. In forgetting/marginalizing the online journalling medium, we also negate the beauty of design that emphasizes equally poetic (even florid sometimes) visuals. Spare and functional isn't the only visual elegance on the web, and news and technology aren't the only topics being discussed.

I'm starting to feel really silly categorizing my blog entries. It's as if, each time I select from the list, I'm randomly selecting one of the items when every possibility is somewhat valid.

Which is to say. This is in part my musings on our response to design, and in part a theory on inequity in design and our response to it. It isn't just about geekery (as it's design in all forms) or just about media (though it's sort of essentially about the medium and means of conveying a message) or just about gender (though I'm thinking a lot about the difference between "masculine" and "feminine" versus "male" and "female" and our failure to separate these things from each other).

Yeah. Let's rethink my entire category system later.

Now, let's talk about the fractal explosion of ideas about gender and design that came from my reading of this comment from Eris's blog: overtly feminine style signals diminished credibility to many.

There are, of course, many perspectives one could take on this. There's the possibility that "feminine" stylings don't equate in people's minds to a less credible product; there's the possibility that they do. Speaking of which, for the rest of this discussion, let's assume your product is information, and the "femininity" is in your visual presentation only - there are other "gendered" cues in language and organization.

So, what is a "feminine" design element?

The problem with "feminine" as a word is that, divorced from your perception of what women as a group are and/or want, it doesn't have a lot of consistent meaning. We have ideas about what it means to be "feminine" (soft, nurturing, enduring, devouring) that contradict each other.

But. I think we do mean something specific when we talk about design being feminine. I'm simply not sure what it is.
It could be a pale color palette and swishy fonts (web design)
It could be floral patterning (gift wrap)
It could be smaller, more curved, and available in a wider range of colors than its "rugged" counterparts (backpacks)
It could be hot pink and scripty and Venus-symbolic (feminist t-shirt)
It could be what a variety of people are touting online as "feminine web design" (example 1 : example 2 : example 3)
It could be the sort of brand identification of products like tampons or Oprah or "women's television".

From those examples, we could say that "feminine" design is strongly visual but also non-confrontational. It's frequently ornamented, not necessarily floral (though there are many extreme examples of that), and is rarely spare and minimal. It favors the figural and human over the abstract. Pastels are definitely a theme, but dramatic or extensive use of any colors might be construed as feminine.

Okay, fine. Given those criteria, I'd say this site is a good example of "feminine" design. It's not ragingly floral and scripty, but its palette is colorful and its main graphic element is figural (and pink/red in and of themselves are instand "feminine" cues).

Let's assume we're agreed on this definition of "feminine" as far as design is concerned.

There are aspects of "feminine" design, then, that diminish usability on the web. Our eyes read certain fonts better, for instance, and scripty fonts are not among them. Color, used in excess, can become a distraction for the eyes (not to mention issues of colorblindness and contrast for various folk). The same is true of graphics.

Yes, shockingly, feminine design, misapplied, is as hard to deal with as any other form of bad design. Perhaps more so. But why would that in and of itself result in dismissal of content presented in (good or bad) a feminine visual style?

I'd theorize that it's because "feminine" styles in general are considered less reasoned, less rational, and less intelligent. Western society values rationalism. While we can now, for the most part, accept that women aren't inferiorly soft, emotional, and instinctual, we still seem to think that emotion and instinct are negative. It comes into play with debate style as well as design on the web. And - because we frequently confuse the feminine with the female, the masculine with the male - it often results in women being dismissed and excluded.

Which brings me to the next idea: are women at a disadvantage on the internet?

Well. It depends. Every internet community is its own bubble. There are certain bubbles that are considered representative of the entire blogging world by other media, and those bubbles consist of more recognized male voices than female or genderqueer voices (they also consist of more straight than queer, more white than other colors, more middle class than poor, etc.). The figures known for pioneering web design and development are predominantly male. You have to look to find the women.

That is not equity. It's analogous to the wage gap between women and men. You can argue that the inequity is by choice, not design of the system, you can be happy or unhappy with it, but there it is, still - inequity.

But, step outside those certain bubbles, and you're in a community of, say, exclusively female Pinoy bloggers between the ages of 20 and 25. There is a bubble for nearly every subset of internet-connected person.

I'm coming from a rather odd place on this one, because I consciously and intentionally don't exist in an online environment that dismisses "feminine" styling, as it is overwhelmingly female (though not particularly feminine). The people I hang with out here are talking about gender and sexuality as a continuum and debating radical versus liberal politics and calling each other on our privilege and are generally on a page about the fuckupitude of the How Things Are (though given to disagreement about the degree and nature of that fuckupitude). So, when I run into bits of sexism elsewhere in the blogosphere, it's always a bit of a surprise that we're still so simpleminded. Oh, I say to myself, are those people still talking about how women are versus men?

Apparently, they are.

In reading the comments and links the spun off Eris's blog entries on gender disparity in the web design bubble [also, see the follow up on Eris's site, if you're interested], I saw people going back to the "women and men have brains that function differently" argument, for instance. It's an argument that I don't have a ready refutation of anymore, because I see it so rarely in my bubble. [Note to self - revisit books filled with studies proving this brain function thing dubious at best.] I saw a few guys arguing that inequity didn't exist, because they didn't believe it existed or because reverse inequity existed in some other way in some totally unrelated context. Dude, that is such an emotional, feminine way to argue your point. Tee hee.

It seems such a basic tenet of polite living that, if the majority of people belonging to a group you don't belong to attest to feeling their group is excluded or dismissed, then you ought to listen to them. I don't believe most discrimination, sexism included, is intentional. I'm not even sure equity is always desirable, but I do think we need to develop an awareness of these gaps.

So, it bothers me that a person can say "yeah, if my site design looks too female, no one will believe my words" amid a discussion of gender inequity and no one will even acknowledge that. Is it tacit agreement? Disregard because she's female? I don't know.

I don't believe women are underrepresented in the blogosphere overall (certainly not if the predominantly female bubbles I come across are to be taken as a cross-section), but I do suspect we're underrecognized in the concept of blogging, just as we're underrepresented in the tech world in general (although, again, not so much in my own tech career).

Is this a problem? I think so. You may think otherwise. It's not an easy problem to solve, though - affirmative-action-style promotion of a few women by the "cool kids" bubble is only a symbolic nod, and confronts the symptom (underrepresentation) but not the systemic issue (association of the feminine with inferiority and females with the feminine). And systemic issues are usually solved one person at a time.

Fortunately, there are an awful lot of smart women and men having this conversation about sexism on the web. They'll get there eventually.

In the meantime, I suppose I ought to step out of my bubble more often.

A woman who has dropped out isn’t even a slacker or a loser or a beat poet or a romantic or a drifter. She is hardly worthy of mention at all... (from lilyrepublic)

I've been meaning to respond for awhile to this, and the entry behind it. It sparked a lot of thinking for me.

It seems that the path of legend for women is blank. Not blank, but relatively so. Lily talks about failure as her specific example, but there are missing legends for women's success, too. There isn't a female Jack Kerouac, but there isn't a female Horatio Alger, either. There just aren't that many legendary ideas of women.

There are, of course, iconic literary figures. But most of them seem defined in cohesion or counterpoint to men, to marriage, to being a "proper" woman. And entirely too many of them are Jane Austen characters (literally or in essential similarity). The companion of the drop-out, the failure, the artist who just needs to discover himself, the savantish baseball league inventor, the rogue, is I just just the loose woman. Or the reformed loose woman. Some woman defined by her sexuality or lack thereof.

Yeah. That's weird.

There are sources other than popular legend for better icons. There are some good religious/mythological archetypes for women to look to. There's a whole subset of Jungian feminists focused on just that sort of thing. There are wandering women in myth; you could think of Demeter as a sort of righteously angry beat poet, par example.

What the television tells us, though, is another thing.

The popular sitcom format is a formula. It's a formula for holding your attention well enough to sell you things while creating a feeling of entertainment. It's designed not to provoke thought (there is television designed for that, it's just not sitcoms) but to be consistent. You get relaxation out of it. Advertisers get a semi-captive audience.

So, in order to be consistent, this type of tv has to present the simplest image possible. Men are stupid at household stuff and don't remember their kids' names. Women entertain notions of elaborate projects and end up dependent on men. Kids, most of the time, are the least stupid people on your tv. It makes you feel better about yourself, not just with the Schadenfreude, but (as I mentioned in reference to chick lit some time ago) because people being stupid and surviving and continuing to be loved means that you can survive and stay lovable. [I should really get a job professionally reading things into things. I'm very good at it.]

So, sitcoms are the worst and silliest we are (assuming, of course, that the sitcom even remotely represents your social and economic situation). But advertising is aspirational. In between scenes of people failing at everything and making the worst choices possible, you watch ads that target what you'd like to be. Ads geared at women tend to show them perfectly thin and perfectly balancing every aspect of their lives cause we're kinda obsessed with that as a culture - women as jugglers, the body as a project. And probably women in focus groups knowingly chuckle at these ads... don't I wish? they might think.

Advertising is odd. It enforces these ideas of what we're supposed to be by showing us what people in focus groups say they want or wish they could be. It makes sense. Products associated with our "best" selves seem more desirable.

Who is the "best" woman from a pop culture perspective? Is it a beautiful one? One attached to someone successful? If so, maybe the romantically failed and redeemed woman is found in the Cinderella story. Maybe she's the girl who takes off her glasses over the summer to become a cheerleader in the fall. Maybe she's defined in relation to someone else. It seems sad to think of women as defined not as successful or failing but as with someone failed or successful.

Definitely weird.

Earlier this week, Salon published an article about a report that the US government was slowly and stealthily removing information about women's health and status from various government websites.

You can find the report itself online at National Council for Research on Women's website (report is available as as PDF).

My initial reaction was "OH GOD, NOT BUSH AGAIN", but reading the report made me a bit skeptical. The report itself is couched in such political terms that it loses credibility in my eyes. It sounds as much like a diatribe as like a research document. Couldn't they keep the alarmism in the abstract and make the rest of it more factual? I mean, it reads like someone's blog posts, and someone only slightly more fact-oriented than I (have you ever seen me quote a statistic?). I like to write this way, but if I'm reading research, I would rather see a list of instances of specific information removed or altered and how they might impact people than a list of impacts with some vague references to some things that happened. Parts of the report do that, parts are just spastic.

[Edited after the fact to add... Also of note is that, while every feminist group or mailing list I belong to was Up In Arms about it when the news first broke, I haven't heard word one from anyone on this since. Isn't that odd? It's almost as if we colluded on this one.]

Are here. I'm such a dork, I actually designed a little photolog to organize them into a story. ;)

I wish I'd had a camera Saturday night at 9:30 Club. Did anyone else get pictures of that crowd? It was BEAUTIFUL.

I had intended to post Saturday night, but it just got so chaotic over here. And then I had intended to post last night, but I fell asleep.

I took like 70 photos, all pretty mediocre, but I'm in the process of creating a March photo log [edited to add pictures and Sunday's story/photolog] from the ones that came out okay. Sadly, the best picture I took, a photo of tirani flipping off a sign exhorting us "wicked jezebels" to "repent or go to hell" was interrupted by some NARAL signs - the end result looks like she's really really angry at the Washington Monument. Oops. I'll post it anyhow.

It was amazing to get a glimpse of a mosh pit composed almost entirely of teen women on Saturday night. I mean, ASS KICKING. Also, some seriously hot women in that crowd. That we managed to get there after what turned out to be a four-hour road trip (twice what it should have taken) and to hook up with as many people as we did also astounds me; snidegrrl, belladonnalin, zorah - you all rock. AND we managed to meet up (briefly) with Roni and Cinnamon on the way in.

It was amazing to see the seas of people all around the Mall yesterday. And that we managed to keep our little posse; including snidegrrl, tirani, kitty_pitchfork, bizarrojack, Ms. Nine and unlinkable others (all of whom seemed really confounded by the blog/Livejournal concept) together throughout the day - much thanks to Ms. Snidegrrl's kitty umbrella. And the folks in suits and ties standing around the edge of the March path cheering us on and making thumbs-up gestures. So many different people and messages, speakers and marchers both. It was astounding, really.

The whole weekend had the feeling of a long, chaotic & exhausting party. And also, that what we were doing was so important, that we were so strong we couldn't help but move forward.

It's amazing this morning to wake up to everyone talking about their March weekends. That's one thing about this March, it felt so technologically connected... despite the cell network overload that meant you'd call someone whose phone was on, and get their voicemail. How many blog posts are there about this weekend, I wonder?

This can hardly even describe the intense experience of the March. I don't think the pictures will even do it, when you see them. I'm just so glad I was there.

Rarely do so many words come up so short.

There is a Curves gym on one of the alternate routes between work and home.

When I first saw this, and the advertisements for it, I was intrigued. The gym sounded like a great way to avoid some of the irritating side effects (emphasis on appearance, crowds, general lack of helpful attendants) of most gym environments while getting the same basic experience. The initial advertising locally spread a pretty simple message, that it was a place where average and fat women could work out together and encourage each other. That sounds cool, right?

So I did a little research, looked around internet boards and sites related to Curves, where I found a decided focus on weightloss. I also found that Curves isn't just a gym. It's a very regimented, repetitive (as in, you do the same things every time) workout.

It's also only one workout, not aligned to your individual body or objectives - be they health, strength, or weightloss. That, to me, seems like something that would take the fun out of going to a gym. A workout also ought to be aligned to your particular goals. One trains for something, after all, and the training needs to reflect the something you strive for. Even if your goal is just baseline "get me off the sofa" fitness, you'll likely be more successful if you strive for something.

But that something could just be fun, right? So, if Curves couches a simple workout in an environment that makes it fun and accessible, that's a good thing. If your life isn't active, at least you'd be doing something to get moving, and having fun makes you likely to stick with it. In that, I've always thought a gym like Curves could be a fun, random addition to my overall exercise scheme. Something different to do whilst meeting people.

But that breaks down with the whole weightloss message of this particular gym. When you say "amaze yourself" with the implication of "...by losing weight and keeping it off!" and you aim that message specifically at women you're doing two things that make me very, very angry.

You limit the power women are granted by refocusing us on our appearance. I still think there's an aspect of the woman-only gym that is empowering, that is recognizing that the world of gyms and strength training is male-dominated and seems difficult for a woman to enter on her own. There's a value in single-sex spaces where people can encourage each other (though there's an added complexity of fitting transfolk into this) and engage in things that are "unwomanly" or "unmanly" without reproach. But Curves focuses that encouragement on weightloss, putting what could be this hugely empowering swell of women working out without regard to things like appearance and sweat and being "good" into an envelope of "how many pounds did you lose this week". Why are most women's gyms about weightloss and appearance? Because women are about these things?

Of course we're not, but when we buy these products, we send the message that we are. Even if your individual franchise didn't push that message, you're still buying it at a corporate level.

The argument against this is that Curves is actually pushing health, not weightloss. Sorry, honey, but if you're measuring my outside, you ain't measuring my health. Weight and size aren't inversely related to health. I know various media sources have told you that, but it isn't true. [Read Dean Edell's Eat Drink & Be Merry, Glen Gaesser's Big Fat Lies or stop by show me the data, for instance, if you aren't already familiar with the data on this one.] If you sell weightloss as "health", you're lying.

There's a recent final chapter to this that I came upon in this month's Bitch - which is that the guy who started Curves uses his profits to push abstinence-only sex education and anti-abortion clinics. I admire people who put their money where there mouths are, but I don't want my money ultimately going where his mouth is. Particularly when his mouth was already making out with the weightloss industry.

I do think it would be useful to have more fitness services available to beginners, whether that be new fat-friendly gyms or just adding certain "beginner only" areas or times to existing workout spaces. Gender segregation might be nice sometimes, too - especially considering how self-conscious we seem to get about exercising or sweating and hanging out all over the place. And lacking the ideal, I guess Curves seems like a well-publicised second (or fifth) place alternative. But I've finally decided that I just can't deal with Curves' approach.

Edited at various points to add relevant links on the pro-life/pro-choice thing. Which, by the way, was NOT the original intent of the post. I still believe there are more anti-feminist things about Curves than just being anti-abortion. Like the attitude towards women and beauty. Like the misunderstanding of what "health" is.

Seriously, people. I don't care how liberal the franchise may be, you're still buying a brand that chooses to associate itself with weightloss as health, and by accident of its owner, has also associated itself with denying reproductive rights. Is your workout worth that? It's up to you. In my mind, the Curves brand is anti-feminist, and was well before the pro-life contribution thing came out. But it's a complex issue - for many of you the experience is feministy even if the brand isn't, and I won't tell you what to do.

Poundy's April 2004 posts - well-written and peppered with links to articles and detail around the pro-life thing.
The Snopes piece - full of news references and stuff.
Curvers for Choice - if the pro-life thing is the only issue that bugs you about Curves, this may make you feel better.
Feministe on the subject (actually, it's Cinnamon, not Lauren) - one of the most reasonable, non-reactionary blog posts on the subject, posing a viable solution for you Curvers.

I've heard arguments that drag performance is analogous to blackface or other ethnic imitation before. Morgaine brought it up on WHB last week: la.

I think it's too simple to say men in drag demean women. I think it's way too simple to say gay men in drag demean women. And what about women in drag? What about drag as performance art?

I'll grant this article one point. There is an implication of gender inequity in the idea of straight men dressing comically as female stereotypes. To borrow a cliched image that I've never seen played outside a sitcome, there's the Powder Puff football cheerleader (Powder Puff football, if you haven't watched as much TV as I have, is when the high school cheerleaders and football team trade places, to much ensuing hijinks). A large man dressed as a cheerleader is funny precisely because he's clearly not a woman. And there is certainly inequity in the range of female stereotypes that we're all familiar with - namely, that it's pretty easy to pick up on "slut", "virginal bimbo", etc., but male stereotypes can be a little less obvious (and generally are based on media icons more than "types"). But the Powder Puff cheerleader also has a counterpart - the girl acting out the role of big jock boy. Are they 100% equal? No. It's pretty clear from the cultural result of feminism (women acting more "masculine" but men not acting loads more "feminine") that we think being a boy is better. So they can't be equal.

But I think our response to both is very similar.

The second before you begin to laugh, your body tenses much like it does the second before you decide to run away. Not to get all sociobiology on you, but to make the point that we laugh about things that are strange or challenging. I think we laugh at "normal, straight" people in drag because they convey simultaneously the image of what we think they are and what we think they're not. And on some level we realize the boundaries between are and are-not are artificial.

Drag as art and drag as an element of queer identity are a whole other story. I think a lot of queer identity is caught up in appropriating supposedly other-gendered behaviors, and drag can be a magnification and exaggeration of that. It's not even so much imitative of women as taking on an opposite, non-man, identity. To be queer and in drag is to declare I AM NOT WHAT YOU THINK. As a part of identity, or as part of a performance, that can be very powerful. It can also be silly and excessive, but it's a part of queer culture I'm personally quite fond of. Drag seems to say "Call us sissys? Fags? Well, fuck you, we ARE sissys and fags, and we're so fabulous we don't give a damn if you're sorry." It creates a problem for a straight community that is uncomfortable with sliding gender, and a problem for a gay community that wants to be seen as part of normal.

Why isn't drag part of normal? Why isn't over the top gender behavior normal? Not easy questions.

It's odd to me that the article Morgaine referenced cites Judith Butler but doesn't bring up the question of women in drag. Butler's "Female Masculinities" (which I've read only about a chapter of) talks quite a bit on that subject, and on the long history of women dressing in men's clothes - or otherwise "masculinely" - as a similar phenomenon to men-in-drag-as-queerness. That is, women in drag are also claiming an identity as "other", not appropriating man-ness, but appropriating ideas of what is masculine. The drag king thang seems a lot like it's queeny counterpart - kinda complicated, kinda challenging.

And that does not demean me.

You can so tell that Alison is a teacher sometimes. In a good way. This week on WHB, she asks how we'd run a feminist magazine, if we ran one.

Like Brigitte, I think of running a feminist media outlet (although I've always thought television, not print) as something I'd love to do with my future millions. It's not something I'd take on now, when I'd have to solicit investors and advertisors in order to get by, but if I had enough money on my own...

The principles I'd apply to my television network could also be applied to a magazine. It's primary goal would be to make people feel in touch with a network of others, and to motivate them to act (politically, primarily).

1. Represent "regular" folk. Get political contributions from people whose political experience is mostly voting and getting involved, not politicians and theorists. Let people tell their own interesting stories. Kim mentioned this, too. Don't go crazy touching up or dressing up people for photo shoots - show them as they are, and as they're comfortable. I think we'd all feel more beautiful, more intelligent, more informed and more connected if we were exposed to the array of other people out there.
2. Give readers a wide range of perspectives. While I have a very particular political slant, I don't think I'd want the magazine to have that. What I'd like it to do is show many sides of issues that are being discussed more flatly in other media, and also draw attention to issues that other media might be ignoring. Basically, I'd like to point out things we ought to care about and help people understand how global issues affect them, but without creating the sense that there's only one side to any question. To do that, we'd probably spend each issue dealing with only a handful of topics, so we deal in detail with our subject matter. This is a damned complicated world; I'd like to have a magazine that gave people more tools to think for themselves.
3. Provide a lot of resources for readers to take action. When we profiled an issue, I'd want to include information about what you could do to get more information, or to get involved on either side of the issue. You know those 10-page "Where to Buy" sections in the back of women's glossies? I'd do something like that, but with a network of sources and ideas.
4. Be gender-neutral. Also. Be queer-neutral, sex-neutral, size-neutral, race-neutral. While I see this magazine as aimed at people of more or less my generation, I'd like it to be accessible to a lot of different people. It should feel more like a thinking person's magazine than a women's magazine. Ideally, it would appeal to people like me, 12-year-old girls, and men in their sixties, but I think I'd let that come later as the audience grew.
5. Design the magazine in a way that promoted all of the above. It would be a pretty substantial departure from the format of feature articles vs. columns vs. blurbs that most magazines follow. Whatever topic we focused on, I'd want to give equal weight to each aspect of it, and each contributor - with the exception of the resource list and advertising, I'd imagine the design of each issue flowing almost like a chaptered narrative, with each question a chapter, then with two opinions on question X presented visually near each other, contrasting slightly.
6. Seriously limit advertising. I think I'd be willing to have small businesses and DIY folk advertise in the magazine, but I'd want to keep advertising more of a service to those people than a revenue-generator that the magazine depended on (we'd obviously be basically non-profit, relying on my investment, actual sales & possibly donations). I'd like advertising to function only as a way to call readers' attention to products or ideas they wouldn't otherwise hear about.

That's pretty much it. I'm not diametrically opposed to celebrities being involved - I mean, ultimately, they're another breed of regular folk. But I wouldn't let their publicists dictate how they appeared in the magazine - they'd be as straightforward and unairbrushed as anyone else, and their opinions would be given no more weight that anyone else's.

I think it's pretty easy to see feminist influences almost anywhere. Not all of them are for good. Roni a