***my photos of the march***

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.

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.

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 asks us to think about Britney Spears vs. Christina Aguilera this week. Think of it as feminist comparative literature.

If it weren't obvious from my inserted comments when I posted Roni's question for the week, I don't think being skanky or freaky or anything other than specifically anti-woman disqualifies a person as a feminist. So I reject the notion that Christina might simply be too trashy to stand up for women's rights. Hee.

Are either of them feminists?

It's pretty much impossible to judge what their personal politics may be through the layers of hype and editing that surround them. The nature of celebrity is that celebrities are inherently more icon than person in our experience of them. They're ideas. Given that, sure, there are aspects of Britney and Christina's images that are at least pro-woman if not feminist. They are positive role models for little girls, basically, if in nothing else in that they're female and successful. It doesn't sound like a lot, but recognition of girls as a powerful market is also a recognition of girls' power, given the whole capitalism thing. The challenge is for girls to use that market power.

Beyond the economic test, though, how do these two celebrities stack up as feminists? Well, neither of them seems to substantially wield her celebrity to champion women's rights. Yes, they're both all about girls rocking. But, as Ms. 9 pointed out, what have they done for the right to choose? Or healthcare? Or the ERA? Or any feminist or pro-woman legislation, for that matter? Not much that I know of.

The pop princesses could be raising awareness of feminist issues in general (for instance, domestic violence, sex education, other things that might impact the demographic of their listeners directly). But they're not doing that, either, as far as I know. [Again, it's entirely possible that Britney and Christina as people are heavy contributors to feminist causes; that's just not a part of the media image of them, not part of their icons.] As politics go, these two are not feminist icons. They have pretty much zero political implications.

But there is more to feminism than laws and issues. There's the geologic pace of social change to deal with, for instance. As much as the concept of "girl power" is maligned as inactive and apolitical, I think its impact on people's beliefs is much greater than any legislation could provide. That does not mean we don't need to work both angles (the law and the minds of people). Just that there is also a place for the diluted "girls kick ass" message of pop music, Buffy, and others.

There are scads of examples of pop's dilute but positive influence, and I think Christina Aguilera is undoubtedly one of them. Take the lyrics to her song with Lil'Kim - "Can't Hold Us Down". It's supportive of young women's voices and sexuality. Is it practical? Political? Challenging? No, but it does have an unapologetic feminist slant to it, as does a lot of Aguilera's music. That kind of voice in the popular culture is useful to young women; it's bolstering.

At the same token, neither of the pop princesses really step outside of the prevailing beauty ideals. They're both super thin and busty, and generally fit all the definitions of "sexy". They may sing songs about how they're powerful women and everyone is beautiful in every single way, but they still maintain a certain image marketability. Eventually, though, they part company. Not only are Christina's lyrics more obviously girl-power-inducing, but she seems to publicly claim more of her own power.

Examples:
1. Britney appears on stage with a snake, or her pants falling off. Her explanation -basically, we didn't realize it would be so provocative... I didn't know. Whatever.
2. Christina makes the "Dirrty" video, which let's get real, is one of the closest things you can find to porn on the teevee before 10pm. Her explanation - basically, so what?
3. They both make out with Madonna. Christina - yeah, I kissed Madonna. Britney - oh, no, it was MADONNA's idea.. I mean, I didn't even know... blah blah.

Basically, they've engineered their images so that Britney is the sweet girl next door whose albums every parent would let their 10 year old have (cause she's so unchallenging) while Christina is the new Madonna, queen of sexual agency and dance beats. In that respect, Christina really does seem like an icon of girl power, while Britney's image is at most a curt nod to powerful femininity.

That's not to say I'd kick either of them out of the strange bed of politics. Just as Bust's cover of Kelly Osbourne touted independence with a picture of a girl whose life is entirely a result of her daddy (but whose potty mouth and attitude have empowered itty neopunk girls the world over), I think there might be positives to selling feminism - the real, solid, political variant - with the trappings of girl power. If Wonder Woman and Madonna were entrees into feminism for my cohort, why couldn't the pop princesses do the same for young girls today?

The comments on one of my friend's LJ posts got me thinking about how we choose to educate our kids (among other things). Her post is actually about gender assumptions and childrearing, but she brought up a question a lot of you parents (and potential parents) could help me answer.

What is the best way to educate children if you don't want them indoctrinated to think things like "girls are pretty", "boys are strong" and "everybody good is thin and white and has exactly one mommy and daddy"? I'm not talking about - despite what some people may immediately think - using your child as a political tool; rather, I'm thinking about protecting our kids so the choices they make aren't based on the "norm" but on what they want.

I tend to think that homeschooling is the answer (for a variety of reasons), but I don't have kids or even plans for them. So, I'm curious. For those of you who've given this more thought, what do you think are the best schooling options for your [real or hypothetical kids]? And why?

[This was originally posted to my livejournal. But hey, it's relevant.]

Is living together a balancing act for most cohabiting couples? Or do they accept a certain imbalance by default?

Brigitte posted a WHB question on the subject last weekend, which I am just now getting to respond to.

It seems like my personal experience in this is atypical. Why, I wonder? So many feminists I talk to have this feeling of "ack, I do so much" in their home lives - that they bear more of the housework, more of the nuturing, and they're discouraged by this.

Ordinarily, if I saw my life being different from others', I'd assume it was because I tend not to make a lot of assumptions about how one "should" live (well, I do, but only in my head, not in the choices I actually make). But I have to assume that other feminists examine their choice of partner and living arrangements just as I do. So, it's not assumption on their part that women are supposed to be the caregives that drives this imbalance in their lives.

Is it the culture? I think it might be. Namely, there is still a cultural perception of women as secondary that can result in either more or less freedom for any given woman. There is the freedom to truly choose any profession, including staying at home, for instance. And there is also the double-edged assumption that women will need and ask for time off to balance family concerns - which means women are penalized less than men might be for the same action. But there is also the tendency for women to make less, in part because of this assumption, which then reinforces the assumption that women are the most likely to do more at home (because they have time to, because we expect them to). I think a lot of families make their decisions on household duty split based in part on whose job is most rewarding (economically or otherwise) or time-consuming. In a dual professional home, there's a good chance the man gets the rewarding but time-consuming and inflexible job. And the woman gets shafted.

But I don't believe this is universally true. And I do think it's as much about the choices that are(n't) available to men as those availabe to women.

So. A lot of our culture enforces a certain household stupidity on men, which is really silly. Boys ought to be taught to do their laundry and be encouraged to babysit and all that Suzy Homemakery stuff. It's about self-sufficiency. And girls ought to be taught that home stuff is supposed to be shared, not that it's a sign of how much mommy loves you.

That seems to have worked on us. My partner had an independent, divorced dad who taught him all those household things (cooking, laundry, all that). I had two parents who split cleaning and kid duties and made me join them. I'm sure my parents had to negotiate, but they did a pretty good job of modelling that there's not a lot daddies only do (except perhaps cars and science) or mommies only do (except, um, social studies?). Of course, it helps that both of us are the sort of people who only deal with the unpleasant household stuff when it seems too out of control/messy/whatever. The rest of the time, either it's part of someone's routine or no one does it. We're cool with that.

But just because it comes easily to us doesn't mean it couldn't come with more effort to others - say, as it did out of the necessity of my mother's career in my parents' house. Rather than focusing on the vows of marriage and relationships, I think it might behoove us to pay more attention to domesticity. People should discuss this stuff in advance, make an agreement and revisit it. It requires attention and maintenance, just like any aspect of a relationship. And no, no one ever attains 100% perfect balance all the time. You pick what you care about most, and focus on balancing that.

There was more to the question, about gay couples and (my inferrence) other beyond-hetero families. I can't really answer that. Honestly, it's not something I talk to my gay and otherwise friends about, nor something I research. I have a suspicion that poly families, as much as they seem to be deliberate and considered around other issues, might be particularly good at negotiating this one. But it's only a suspicion.

I picked up a copy of The Atlantic Monthly at an airport last week out of curiosity over the cover article, "How Serfdom Saved the Feminist Movement". You'll have to leaf through a copy yourself to read the whole thing, but there's an interview with its author on the Atlantic's website, which serves almost as an abstract for the article proper.

The article itself is actually a massive book review, with a narrative that circles around several semi-recent works on the topic of the nanny as feminist icon/problem/whatever (of these, Domestica looks to be the strongest example). In any case, the article does a decent job of presenting multiple perspectives on the shaky practice of wealthy professional women hiring nannies to maintain their careers and the class issues this brings up. While it's clearly targeted at the Atlantic's wealthy professional demographic (and written by someone who is part of same), it takes to task some of the "oh, poor me" schlock written for that demographic recently, which I have to admire.

One thing that I found unsettling, though, is the presentation of the nanny-as-member-of-household concept as preferable to the modern disenfranchised nanny. Flannagan implies throughout the article that it's better to be secure in one's old age than to negotiate for oneself in the present, thus a Reconstruction-era nanny/mammie had things better than your immigrant nanny might. It's a very white, privileged view to take, particularly as most of the books reviewed/cited don't consult the domestic workers who are their subjects as to their personal preferences.

I'm curious, for those of you who have kids or have cared for kids (or have thought about either) - how much does class enter into the picture in your own childcaring interactions?

I was sent a link this weekend from a mysterious lurker who essentially challenged me to explain the automatic annoyance he felt upon reading this essay/book/whatever.

And lo, I felt the same annoyance. Or rather, I felt some annoyance, same or not. The reasons?

One. The author is not up to the historical task he takes on. He views, as is entirely typical of those who write unresearched treatises, history through the lens of his already decided conclusion: women have a historical need to hide sexuality, and have for thousands of years. Well, not so true. Women were thought the uncontrolled, sexy gender for many hundreds of years of recorded Western history. Before that, what? We don't know. But he misses what is very clear from solid readings on women's sexuality, gender, marriage and power through history: the notion of woman as asexual and passive is Victorian, and as Kerri pointed out, only the "correct" social norm, not necessarily the prevailing attitude. This is the most glaring inconsistency when one compares his "book" with other readings on the same subject, and I think it's symptomatic of a misreading of history on his part.

Two. He fixates on the female as other, like yet another theory of biological determinism. He may believe differently than other determinists, but he's clearly approaching things from a Mars v. Venus perspective. As a result, he generalizes his experience to all men and women and consequently does a disservice to both women and men. I consider that a very thin premise upon which to build a book, but it has worked for a lot of people. His commenters certainly seem willing to go along with the idea of men and women as wildly different; though they disagree on exactly how and by what means, no one seems to question the validity of the difference. But how can you write a book that purports to but a historical context around sexual interaction and not question that?

Three. There are a number of supposedly "feminist" aspects of his opinions that I'm supposed to accept just because he calls them feminist. Well, I don't. He reads, for example, the icon of "Victoria's Secret women" as sexually liberated, while most feminist readings see those touched-up, passive figures as an example of fixation on the female as eagerly receptive and unrealistically squooshed into male fantasy form, not liberated and not active in her sexuality. He borrows feminist words, but I don't think he gets it.

This applies to men, too. He assumes certain "typical male" expectations and desires from his presumably male audience; honestly, some of the things he attributes to his audience are insulting to them. And I fear that his advice will come from this same place - not asking men and women to both consider where they get short shrift in the How Things Are, but assuming that women bear the burden, while also assuming that the inside of a woman is in line with some sort of universal male fantasy.

Fourth. It's a style thing. The didactic "advice-book" style he takes is irritating when the content it wraps around is social/cultural history. It might be fine for the advice part of his book, but it makes me want to smack him down when he uses it to discuss (sometimes erroneously) history.

Furthermore, his entire essay is based upon the idea of a male-defined notion of feminine "sexiness", which he embraces as fact, not as cultural norm. It would be more interesting to see him question this norm, or at least attempt to explain its origin, but he never goes there.

I remember my own introduction to this dichotomy. I was working with employees of a health care institution who spent most of the day dressed in sexless hospital clothes resembling pajamas. Then one year I attended their Christmas party. The same women appeared in little black dresses cut mid thigh and held up with spagetti straps. Gold bangles clanked on smooth, well-tanned arms and breasts strained against push-up bras and underwired camisoles... a glimpse of the hidden world women usually keep under lock and key, even from themselves.

The little black dress, the heels and jewelry are all part of a cultural norm. But a person may feel sexy in a tee and jeans, in "sexless" baggy clothes, in a wide range of stylistic choices. Quite a number of women feel awkward in those little black dresses, just as many men feel awkward in tuxedos. I think he mistakes one style of "provocative" dress or behavior for the definition of sexy, and he's shortsighted in this.

[Edited to add - Oh, now I see. I suspect Chapter 11 of the book explains it all. If the same thing happens to you repeatedly, you might assume a commonality between the other parties involved (other than the obvious - yourself). You might concoct somewhat elaborate theories about it. Just as I mentioned in the comments about sociobiologists, what you saw in the world might be influenced by what you already believed.]

This is in a way a reply to Karl's post on the "angry grrrl club" by way of my own blog. I can't comment on his blog, and anyway, I suspect I have more than a comment box in me today, and things to say that aren't just about Karl's post or even just about the others who commented on the source of his frustration, this week's question about men turning misogynist in the presence of feminists.

It's interesting to me how much responses to the question brought up this undercurrent of "men don't like us". Part of it was, I think, simply semantics. When you respond to a question about how some men act, you end up using words like "men" to refer to the subset of men you were asked about, not all of them - but it sure sounds like all of them to a listener.

If I were an outside observer on the site for this one question, I might think that feminists believed men to be to a one ready and willing to attack others to prove, preserve, protect and uphold their sacred masculinity. Because a lot of the responses came from the assumption that men (or at least many of them) believe that feminism is an attack on men, an attempt to steal their marbles. When we assume people are threatened by our views or just us in general, though, I think we create that threat for ourselves. If the first time someone made a stupid, sexist remark that bothered you, you then decided they were a schmuck, they'd continue to act like a schmuck out of hurt that you thought they were one to begin with. So, when feminist women deal with not feminist men, we may well approach each other with a certain quantity of preconceptions that make us act like asses, especially if we're family or friends.

In other words, I see where Karl was coming from in taking people to task for busting on the men/boys in their lives while simultaneously wondering why we face hostility from these guys. Maybe we face hostility because, when we wonder where they're coming from, we're already belittling them in our heads. Of course, if they started out belittling us, it's hard not to respond defensively, but defensiveness breeds. Mitosis.

Maybe some men really do hate feminists. Maybe some women do, too (and many of those women also call themselves "feminists", but that's a whole other story). And maybe some people who express chauvinism and anti-feminism at times are acting stupid because they're confused or embarassed and don't want to admit it, or just because they know it will piss me off.

What I'm trying to get at is that sometimes we all argue really stupidly, and it would be real swell if we'd stop.

I like the language of this quiz. It's like it started out reductive, as most of these quizzes are, and then the author started thinking better of things. It feels edited in an interesting way.

Oh, and I'm either bell hooks or Gloria Steinem, depending on which not-really-me answer I give on the sexuality question. Which kind of makes sense - I don't think Steinem's a sell-out and I'm a big fan of taking feminism to the street. What's a movement without legs?

Ooh! I feel like a part of meme history.

In February of last year, I happened upon someone else's top ten list of feminist influences. As far as I know, she was the first one to post this list. And then I posted my own list which Zaedryn then picked up on and posed as a question for F-word. Since then, I see it pop up in new places occasionally, sometimes apparently random and others attributed to F-word. So imagine the excitement when Feministe brings up the meme again, with a twist - identifying how your influences have changed.

I mentioned the first time that the list probably changed daily, and I don't think I was wrong. Today's list, in no particular order:

1. Fat activists. Marilyn, who made fat a clear feminist issue for me. Tish, who made it personal, and Paul, who armed it.

2. Dirty hippies. Specifically, the people I hung out with in college, who gave me a safe environment for the sexual experimentation that would help make me a decisive, sex-embracing grownup.

3. Men. Still my partner, who is an unflagging reminder to just go and do the things you need to do, and all my male friends, who remind me on a daily basis how sexism sucks for men, too.

4. Gay artists. Tony Kushner, my best friend from high school, and Bill & Mary professor Tom Heacox, all of whose specific contributions to my activist root I've been reminded of lately.

5. Independent media. Websites. Zines. Ms. Bitch. Michael Moore. It's good to know that there are some media sources who recognize their audience's desires for truth, balance, and a little bit of fun.

6. Speaking of fun - the humorous side of the media, like The Onion (you remember The Onion, don't you?) and the Daily Show. Their whole liberal humor thing cracks me up all the time, and that gives me more energy to fight stupidity.

7. Bloggers. Everyone I read offers some version of inspiration, be it personal or political. It's good to know there are so many people like us spread over the world.

8. The subset of bloggers who also participate on the WHB site in whatever way. They're particularly exciting when they challenge each other, not so much when they come to verbal blows as when they ask questions.

9. The casts of our last few plays, who remind me to use my reserves of energy and drive, and who bring a nice wacky semi-political edge to discussions at parties.

10. The March for Choice, which impresses me with its mobilizing influence on so many other feminists - and others who don't consider themselves feminists but support choice.

How about you? What are your influences and how have they changed?

Look at this! Wouldn't it be great to see more pictures of women having unembarassed fun?

Never mind the size thing, even - how often do you see women of any size willing to be wild in front of a camera (barring, you know, "Girls Gone Wild" video series)? Personally, I take it as an inspiration to go be raucous.

The picture is from a Groot Gat Godin (roughly Big Bottomed Goddess) beauty contest that Paul posted on earlier this week. Now, it is a little odd that everyone's so white, but it doesn't take away from the pleasure of watching them have a good time.

A study from the GAO reported by Reuters last week finds that the wage gap continues, and is attributable to the mommy track. Women are still making 80% of what men make in the US, adjusting for education, marriage, job, etc.

The wage gap was attributed partly to differing work patterns between the sexes, with women being penalized for their frequent dual roles as wage earners while caring for home and family.

While the Reuters summary doesn't tell us anything explicit about the makeup of the group studied, it does point out some findings about men with children (they earn 2% more than men without kids) and women with children (they earn 2.5% less than their childless counterparts) that I thought were interesting.

It's common for various post- and anti-feminists to assert that a wage gap attributed primarily to women's role in the family wasn't a wage gap at all.

It's a paradox. If women are consistently faced with making less than their male partners, who is likely to do more of the child care? If women are assumed to make less and assumed to do more of the child care, are they likely to suddenly start making more? I don't think so.

Back to the post- and anti-feminists. They seem to have two arguments that "prove" the existence of a wage gap is women's "fault".

1. That women are wired to care for children. Men, coincidentally, are wired to be more aggressive and ambitious. Thus, women are more satisfied by family and will choose family over work, while men are driven to be successful and see their family role as primarily economic.

   This argument is loaded with such obvious sexism on both sides, such notions of biological determinism and the ineffability of gender, that I expect it to be followed with some statement about the sanctity of marriage and why gays shou