Once again, the stuff I’ve been reading lately. Use the comments thread for discussions of these links, providing other links, or just saying whatever’s on your mind. And please, if you want to stick in a link to your own work, don’t be shy.
The Ninth Carnival of Feminists.
So much good reading! (Many of the following links were swiped from the feminist carnival, of course.)
Norman Finkelstein & Shlomo Ben-Ami Debate
Ben-Ami is an Israeli historian and former Foreign Minister (during Barak’s administration); Norman Finkelstein is an American professor known for harsh criticism of the Israeli government. The “debate” isn’t much of a debate – the two actually have a hard time finding areas of strong disagreement until rather late in the interview, and Ben-Ami doesn’t seem like much for forensics – but it’s fascinating reading. Ben-Ami, with his twin perspective as a historian and an insider during the Camp David and Taba negotiations, is particularly interesting.
Capitalism Bad; Tree Pretty responds to a recent post by me regarding Israel and Palestine.
Holocaust Denial Among Leftists
Interesting essay by someone who became involved with an anti-Holocuast-denial community because he was arguing against pseudo-lefty Holocaust deniers – but then found that his refusal to refrain from criticizing Israel meant he couldnt’ be part of the anti-Holocaust-denial community.
Struggling With Identity Politics
bell hooks Lecture
Never Say Never… summarizes a bell hooks lecture she attended: part 1 and part 2. Interesting stuff; if you’re not familiar with hooks, this could be a quick, easy introduction, and if you’re already a hooks fan, then you’re sure to enjoy it.
T&A Advertising Debated By The French
Dangereuse Trilingue discusses (in English) a debate going on among some French bloggers, set off by T&A ads for a webbrowser:
Can Someone Oppose Same-Sex Marriage Without Being a Bigot?
Terrorists Have Their Own Talk Shows
New To the Blogroll: Den of the Biting Beaver
Ultra-smart, angry radical feminist blog, posting against pornography and rape and just generally kicking ass. This blog stands out from the crowd. I particularly liked this recent post about masculinity and rape.
Women and Patriarchy
I can’t even begin to summarize this post, which is about if women can be blamed for participating in patriarchy, but also touches on the near-rape aspects of Girls Gone Wild, bullying, homeschooling, and on not living in a vacuum. Go read it.
Feminist Television Studies: The Case Of HBO
I haven’t read this yet, but it looks interesting so I’m blogging it to preserve the link. There’s an article each about The Sopranos, Six Feet Under and Sex In The City, but nothing on Deadwood – probably Deadwood didn’t exist when they wrote it.
Rapists Are Terrorists. Rape Is Terrorism.
Also a great post, from another recent addition to the blogroll, “I’m Not a Feminist But…”
You’re Invited To a Pimps and Hos Party
Debate: The Value of Open Acceptance versus The Value of Leaving Labels Behind
Male Afghan Parlimentian Dismayed That Female Parlimentians Travel Without Male Escorts
New Study Shows That TV Doesn’t Make Kids Dumber
Take that, books!
Welfare Agencies Taking Assets From Their Wards
The New York Times reports on welfare agencies using inherited social security payments due children to help cover their budgets – which can leave orphans broke and homeless the day they turn 18. I blame anti-tax activists who’d rather give a huge, unneeded tax break to millionaires than give orphans minimally decent support.
How The Republicans Will Win In 2006: Declare Victory in Iraq
Mind on Fire (male) asks, Is There A Place For Men In Feminism?
Self-Portrait As… (female) says “yes there is.”
But men have got to lay off the dumb questions and expecting pats on the back.
The Soapbox (female): A Resounding YES!
Rad Geek (male): Congratulations on Washing!
Den of the Biting Beaver (female): In THIS movement you are just another person.
Amp, um no. A hearty and resounding bullshiitte.
There is nothingultra-smart about the Den of the Biting Beaver. What is posted there is same old same old, not particularly well-written, long, rambling, borrowed from other places, and especially abjectly *heterocentric*.
And that last is why I think so many like that place and want to shout its whereabouts from the rooftops while ignoring, for example — or banning — brilliant women like Ginmar, funnie, and char. The Den is popular because BB is het and her man is all over, not only her blog but the internet. You can’t go *anywhere* without encountering the arrogant, self-righteous, and sometimes misogynist pontificating of BB’s So Dim/Dubhe.
So you like that place. And Rich likes it. And all the het men like it. And the het women.
Well, ya know what? If you want brilliance, there are much, much better places to find it. If you want what makes you feel comfortable — hurrah! some radfems are actually het and their boyfriends write more than they do, and say stupid things just like me! — then you’ll like the den.
Sorry, BB. I know you mean well. But this is a real issue.
Heart
Cheryl, until you said so I had no idea that she was heterosexual, so that’s certainly not why I liked the posts I read. And I’ve never even heard of her or her bl0g before today, so I doubt it’s as omnipresent as you imply. At least, not in the places I hang out.
I haven’t read much by Char lately (if she has a blog, I’m not aware of it). I agree that Funnie and Ginmar are brilliant. (I wasn’t aware that Ginmar is ignored; I had thought she was one of the most prominent feminists on all of livejournal. But I’m not very up on livejournal, so I might be mistaken.)
Hi Cheryl,
I am not very familiar with the Biting Beaver, but I have some questions about the nature of your objection:
Is it that you object to the ideas expressed on her blog? Or is it that you think Amp tends to promote mediocre heterocentric blogs at the expense of excellent non-heterocentric blogs? Or is it both?
And if you object to the ideas expressed on Biting Beaver’s blog, could you expand on that? Specifically, as a het feminist blogger (who writes a lot about het stuff like male-female dating and male-female marriage), I am also curious to know more about the phrase “abjectly heterocentric?” Does this phrase refer simply to someone who writes primarily about issues of interest to people in male-female relationships? Or does it refer to someone who writes with the assumption that all the readers are straight? Or does it refer to someone whose heterocentric point of view leads him or her to conclusions that are antithetical to the interests of gay people?
Any info. you can provide would be most appreciated!
It’s really great to see you going to bat for the banned feminists, Cheryl. Better late (and highly selectively) than never, I guess.
Amp, that’s interesting that you just learned about the Den. I apologize for being unduly crabby — I think in part I’m still fuming over some things (having to do with rape) that were posted over on Twisty’s blog a couple of weeks back (not by BB but by her partner, Dim/Dubhe). I assumed without checking that the blog entry you linked to was one I remembered Dubhe having written about rape, and I also figured (unreasonably– sorry!) that you must have seen that thread on Twisty’s blog, and so I thought, “Great, here we have Amp’s endorsement, once again a male feminist gets approval and a pass for some really unfortunate statements around rape, whereas feminist women get banned for being too impolite, how aggravating.” I shouldn’t be presuming you read where I read– again, I apologize for my overall grouchiness.
I now see, having actually gone to the link, :-o, that it’s something BB wrote more recently. It’s interesting– it is kind of an example of what I mean. I think the “rape is violence or control not sex” position is, again, a heterocentric position, and a male-friendly position, really, reflecting a certain male-centeredness. It brackets rape off from heterosexual sex in a way that doesn’t reflect the reality of most women who are rape survivors or most men who rape. It also has the (usually-unintended) effect of bracketing battering off from heterosexual sex in a way that doesn’t reflect the reality of most women who are battering survivors or most men who batter. If rape is about violence, not sex, then certainly battering isn’t about sex, it’s about violence. When in fact, far and away, battering is sex-specific, something sexually done to women by men. In other words, the “rape is violence not sex” position is not a radical position, but it’s offered up as one. I just think it’s easier for people to get behind and get excited about something that offers itself up as radical feminism (whether it is or not) if it is male-centered (and het-relationship-centered) in these (and other) ways, and if it’s a man who identifies as a feminist who is doing a lot of the talking. This perturbs me. Hence, my crabby post. (And again, I apologize for my excessive crabbiness.) Dubhe and BB do a lot of good feminist work, and that’s all for the good. I just get frustrated over the way the presence of a man in the picture allows for a certain voice on the internet and a certain kind of approval (and passes of various kinds) that feminist women aren’t usually afforded (unless they spend a lot of their time, again, focusing on or talking about men in ways which are positive or favorable or sympathetic.)
Heart
Simply stunning.
Alsis.
On December 28, 2005, during the week Ginmar was banned, I posted this in a guest blog entry to Alas:
“A couple of days ago, Ginmar posted to my boards, alerting me to the treatment she was receiving here and to the fact that she had finally left Alas. I read her blog, then came here and read the various threads she’d described. ”
In my next post I said:
“… My post today is me, standing up for Ginmar. And against the bannings of radical feminist women including Paige and funnie. I think we deserve a spot here, certainly if mens’ rights activists and antifeminists, do. ”
*****
This thread went 360-some posts worth, most posts of which were directly or indirectly related to ginmar’s banning.
A year ago, February 2005, when paige and funnie were banned, I started this thread on my boards as well as participating in the Alas thread(s) around their banning. So I sure did go to bat for paige and funnie at the time they were banned, both here and on my own boards, and I went to bat for Ginmar when she was banned, both here and on my own boards.
Happy Feminist, I wrote a post this morning that I think answers some of the questions you asked there, but it’s awaiting moderation. I’m saying that because this post might go through and I don’t want you to think I’m ignoring you!
Ampersand, you might already have seen it, but I thought I’d mention PZ Myer’s post, We’re all Dakotans, in which he tries to take a long hard look at the laws etc. of Minnesota.
I think it is very important for everyone, and especially men, to try to do that once in a while. Try to understand what barriers there might be to women deciding to either avoid pregnancy or having an abortion. And when the barriers have been identified, everyone should work to tear them down.
Apology accepted, Cheryl. Thanks.
I don’t agree with the “rape is violence or control not sex” position for several reasons. It seems empirically doubtful. And it creates a false dichotomy; for many rapists, rape is about sex, but that doesn’t mean it’s not also about control. And I also agree with the critique of the position you provide here.
Edited to add: Actually, I’m not sure I fully understand your position, and in particular how you’re defining heterocentrism (why is saying “When in fact, far and away, battering is sex-specific, something sexually done to women by men” not heterocentric?). I think that one problem with the “rape is about violence not sex” view is that it can falsely reassure het men that as long as they’re not turned on by hitting women, that means that nothing they do could be rape. If that’s the kind of thing you’re getting at, then I agree.
(I’m not sure, by the way, that BB ever said “control not sex.” She said rape was about control, but I think that’s different in an important way from saying that rape is about control not sex.)
There are aspects to BB’s post that your analysis doesn’t discuss. The majority of her post wasn’t arguing that rape is about control not sex; it was arguing that rape is to a great extent about masculinity (and power and control are, in turn, about masculinity), and men’s need to maintain masculinity – an approach which isn’t, in my view, heterocentric. It was those aspects of her post that account for my enthusiastic linking.
Thanks Cheryl!
No, no, Cheryl. You don’t get to wiggle out of it that easily. My point was that once upon a time, bean and myself (and several others) were banned from another feminist board and you refused to get involved, though you had once gone on record as stating “No feminist should ever be banned” from feminist boards. Oh, wait. You did get involved. You came to bean’s home board at the time and justified the fact that we had been banned.
I would like to know, just for the record: Are you sorry about that now ? If the same thing happened today, would you stand up for bean, for myself, for the others ? I don’t mean only in this case, with a male as board owner. I mean on a space where the board owner was female, not male ?
lol… what melodrama! veeery eenteresting!
I’m pretty sure that’s a different Lucky than the one who was banned many times from the boards in question. Just in case anyone’s wondering.
* * *
I have a lot of sympathy for my friend Alsis’s position; her banning at Ms was unfair, and while I don’t remember what Heart in particular did, I do remember that few if any of the “women must never be banned” crowd gave Alsis or Bean even a teaspoon of support.
Nonetheless, I don’t want to make “Alas” a place for reviving conflicts that happened years ago.
Out of fairness to you, Heart, you can make one post here defending or clarifying how you responded to Alsis’ and Bean’s bannings (but please don’t make counter-accusations against Alsis). After that, I’d really like it if this subject was dropped here on “Alas.”
I respect you both, and what’s most important to me here is that both of you (Alsis and Heart) feel that I’ve treated you fairly. At the same time, I’d rather not have an extensive debate about what happened years ago take place here, if I can avoid it. (Especially not since it could derail what I think is a more interesting conversation about possible heterocentrism in how many feminists discuss rape.)
So let me know if either of you feel I’m treating you unfairly, and especially if you have a suggestion for how I can better handle this current situation.
Alsis, I don’t think it’s true that I refused to get involved when all those people were banned from the Ms boards. I think in fact, I objected to the bannings of feminists on the Ms boards when they happened. As for the Strife, what I remember is char being banned by bean almost immediately and Jeanne being relentlessly trashed and flamed for weeks on end there, including by you, even though she never registered there and never posted. I don’t remember what I posted to the Strife about the bannings now (and I did a search and came up with nothing), but I do know that the treatment char and Jeanne received figured prominently in to what I felt like saying there, or not, and to the fact that I didn’t stick around there myself.
Amp, as to BB’s post about rape, I know what her views are because I’ve read others of her blog entries about rape. I’m not inclined to say more than I have about that for a bunch of reasons. I just wanted to register my objection to your having endorsed the Den while having banned a number of radical feminists from Alas. That is problematic to me in a bunch of ways, some of which I’ve talked about.
As to your saying you’re glad I think you’ve been fair to me– huh. I think it’s more like, I have been willing to play nice when I’ve posted here (something other radfems have not been willing to do, and I completely understand their reasoning and support them). Similar to the reasons I’m objecting to your endorsement of the Den in light of your having banned radical feminists from Alas, I’m bothered by your suggesting I think you’ve treated me fairly. Something like: “See, Heart thinks I’ve been fair,” (subtext: “So I must have had good reason to ban all those other radfems.”) And along the same lines, “See, I’ve endorsed the Den,” (subtext: “So I must have had good reason to ban all those other radfems.” )
Well, that’s enough.
Amp, you wrote:
What BB says pretty close to the beginning of her post is:
While this does not quite mean that rape is not about sex, it does separate the issue of control from the issue of sex, nor does she say anything anywhere in the rest of her post that I could see that suggests she does not agree with the position in the above statement. Personally, I think a lot of what she says about pornography implies that somewhere in her she believes that rape is precisely about sex, but that is an implication that I may be reading into it. One of the reasons I have always thought that Dworkin’s book Intercourse was so brilliant is that it forces you to confront on so many different levels not only that rape is about sex, but also that, in a patriarchal culture, you cannot avoid the fact that heterosexual sex is also about rape, and that the issue is not, therefore, that men and women shouldn’t have sex or that every act of intercourse is therefore rape, but rather how you account in your relationships for the patriarchal power dynamics inherent in all aspects of all heterosexual relationships. An essay I wrote that was published in Salon tells a personal story that is relevant here. I know I have linked to this essay before on Alas…I forget which thread…but the experience brought home to me very powerfully, in a way I had never felt it before, how much heterosexual sex in a patriarchal culture is about rape and, therefore, how much rape cannot help but be about sex.
You also wrote:
Actually, I thought Cheryl’s statements…and am I right that Cheryl is also the same as Heart?…made it pretty clear that what she meant by heterocentric was a point of view solicitous and comforting of, and therefore comfortable for, men. To say that battering is sex-specific because it is overwhelmingly something men do to women, it seems to me, is only heterocentric if you your statement renders invisible that battering that does go on in the gay and lesbian communities, which is different. And now that I’ve written this out, I can see what your confusion might have been. Personally, I have always preferred the term heterosexist for things like the rape-is-not-about-sex position, because its relationship to the term sexism reflects its investment in male dominance, while heterocentric has always seemed more appropriate for things like the point about battering because it is talking more about a point of view rather than a desire to perpetuate male dominant ideology.
(shrug.) I’ve spoken my piece, Amp. I just get tired of Cheryl’s grandstanding sometimes, since I have a fuller picture of what conditions she offers support under than do some others here, perhaps. That doesn’t invalidate by any means much of the commentary she offers, but it still gets on my nerves.
Leave this up or take it down. Your choice. :/
Sorry in advance if you have already linked to it, but Rachel E. Sullivan has an informative post about “Race, Porn, and Interracial Relationships” (though the results are sadly unsurprising). The attacks on Aura Bogado by Hustler (with the support of Susie Bright) come to mind.
Richard Jeffrey Newman: Actually, I thought Cheryl’s statements…and am I right that Cheryl is also the same as Heart?…made it pretty clear that what she meant by heterocentric was a point of view solicitous and comforting of, and therefore comfortable for, men.
I think what you’re describing there would be what I would call “male-centered” as opposed to heterocentric– I think I also used that term, “male-centered,” in my earlier post. ( Although, I also think that where you find heterocentricity, you usually find male-centeredness as well). By “heterocentric” I was referring to arguments which proceed out of an assumption of het relationships and sexuality as normative. When someone says rape is violence or control, not sex, it is too often a way of exempting the whole issue of heterosexual normativity from feminist scrutiny (and now that I’m thinking about it, I think I should have used the term “heteronormative” instead of “heterocentric”.) (I also wanted to say that I think the idea of rape *as* violence and not sex was an important contribution to feminist theorizing about rape, in that just the idea communicated how deeply women believe and know and have learned that there is nothing sexy about rape. That was huge. I just agree with Andrea Dworkin and others that the fact that there isn’t anything sexy about rape doesn’t mean rape is violence, not sex.)
As to what I said about battering, I think that battering is an outworking of heteronormativity in intimate relationships, whether it is happening in het relationships or in gay and lesbian relationships, because battering has to do with the perpetuating of gender hierarchy, male (dominant)/ female (submissive), in intimate relationships regardless the sex of the partners. And again, a better word for me to use would have been “heteronormative” as opposed to heterocentric.
I like the distinction you’ve made between the word “heterosexist” as a critique of male dominance, whereas “heterocentric” makes more of a statement about a point of view, although I’d also have to say that a heterocentric point of view is heterosexist (!).
And yes, I’m Heart and Cheryl as well, sorry for any confusion!
Heart
Heart wrote:
Huh indeed. I don’t think that’s what I said, and it’s certainly not what I meant. I’m sorry I failed to make myself understood.
What I meant was, it is important to me that you not feel I’ve treated you unfairly; so if you do think I’m treating you unfairly regarding discussing the Bean/Alsis bannings, I’d like it if you could let me know and suggest a different way I could handle the matter.
I wasn’t saying anything about what you feel; obviously, I don’t know what you feel. I was letting you know that if you think I’m treating you unfairly, then I’m open to suggestions.
Let’s me see if I’ve got this down: First I was linking to BB because she was married to a man; then, when it turned out that wasn’t true, you switch to claiming I’m linking to BB in order to send devious messages. The truth is that I linked to BB’s posts because I liked the posts.
The “subtext” you’ve assigned me isn’t what I think at all. In particular, the bannings of Ginmar, Funnie and whatshername were the furthest thing from my mind until after I wrote this post, when you reminded me of the bannings in comments.
Amp, I think my posts here speak for themselves, and I’m going to let them speak for themselves, other than to say that whether or not you knew BB was het and married, the heteronormativity in the post you linked to is unmistakeable. I think your endorsement of some radical feminists as against others (whom you’ve banned) bothers me. With that, I’ve said my piece.
I just saw your post, alsis. I think all of us who have been posting in the same venues over the past five years could, as you’ve done, invoke some sort of arcane knowledge of one another we supposedly possess in a cheap shot kind of a way, which is what I think your last post, however apparently civil, was all about, just pure ad hominem. This exceeds my one-post limit, it’s true, but that last post of yours was unfair, and I hope either this response of mine stays up, or both of ours come down.
Heart
Gotta speak up for Spokane here. As of the last time I was there, it had an enormous bookstore and a great vegetarian restaurant. What more is there?
This puzzles me – because I’ve banned some radical feminist posters, it’s wrong for me to link to any post written by a radical feminist, ever?
Heart:
You’re right. I was typing quickly–my son was calling; Curious-George-related homework–and therefore distractedly; I guess I jumped to the end of what I was thinking, which was that what you’re calling heteronormativity, in the case of talking about rape, ends up protecting men’s interests (I know that you are talking about a broader range of interests when you talk about heteronormativity, but I was focusing on men.)
There’s something interesting here: This makes complete sense to me thinking about it from a female perspective, i.e., that one could distinguish the violence of rape from the “sex in rape” (if that makes sense) for the reasons you cite and, at the same time, hold Andrea Dworkin’s position that this does not mean that rape is not also sex/about sex (which I think is what you meant: the syntax of your summary of Dworkin was a little complex). What is it that makes sense to me…I just realized I wasn’t clear about that: That this position is not heteronormative.
If, however, I put the same words in the mouth of a man, it is not so straightforward for me that it is not heteronormative: As the object of rape, a woman can and should distinguish between the violence perpetrated upon her from the the sexualization of the violence, for the purposes of making clear that what happened was violent and not erotic, or “sexy” to use the word you used (as someone who was sexually abused as a child, I identify with this strategy, because it was important for me as well). For a man to do the same thing, however, is for him to separate the sexual use of his body as a form of violence from the sexual use of his body, and in a patriarchal culture, for him to do that…whether he has commited rape or not…is for him to sidestep the ways in which this patriarchal culture is a rape culture and in which he (we) is invested in that culture whether he wants to be or not.
In other words, for women to take the position you outline is one thing; for men to take it feels to me like a cop out.
This is a bit of an aside, but,
Heart
You mentioned that there were a great many other sites you would recommend over BB. I’d be particularly interested in which sites you’d suggest and I am generally looking for more radical feminist blogs (excepting Twisty’s blog, ginmar’s blog, Vociferate and Angry for a Reason as I already know about them).
Thanks.
Cheryl, I didn’t start this round. You did. Here’s an oh-so-“civil” pointer: Your shit stinks as bad as or worse than that of all other humans. If you don’t want that brought up, don’t pontificate as if you thought your shit smells like roses. It doesn’t.
You ban who you want in your own space at your discretion. So does Amp. Your hands are not clean. You don’t give a shit about a feminist’s lack of safety in feminist-friendly space, unless you can show up a man you dislike by pointing it out. Let one of your own in-house bullies play those kinds of games, and you disemble.
Let it go, or be prepared to be called on your hypocrisy. Period.
“while ignoring, for example … or banning … brilliant women like Ginmar, funnie, and char.”
??? Heart, you mentioned ginmar being banned during the week of 28th Dec 20055. You might want to update your reading a bit – ginmar has posted to that blog within the past week or two.
Sheena, I believe that was a reference to my having banned Funnie and Ginmar from “Alas.” I don’t know why Char was mentioned; I don’t recall having banned her from “Alas.”
Cheryl is confused –on purpose, I presume– because bean threw Char off the board bean used to run on ez. Cheryl’s rosy POV of herself and Char as Great Martyrs neglects to take into account that Char had viciously and nastily insulted another regular on that particular board;Using language at least as inflammatory as the stuff that allegedly got bean and me thrown off Ms.
Some feminist animals are more equal than others, don’t you know…
Kinda like when a woman who has been married 3 times, has born 11 children, and lived 50 years as a heterosexual starts complaining about heterocentricity, thinking that she is representing the lesbians in the audience. Irony much?
Richard Jeffrey Newman: For a man to do the same thing, however, is for him to separate the sexual use of his body as a form of violence from the sexual use of his body, and in a patriarchal culture, for him to do that…whether he has commited rape or not…is for him to sidestep the ways in which this patriarchal culture is a rape culture and in which he (we) is invested in that culture whether he wants to be or not.
In other words, for women to take the position you outline is one thing; for men to take it feels to me like a cop out.
I think you’re right and that these are really good thoughts. Would that more men would think more and more deeply about what is theirs, meaning men’s, to define and theorize and talk about, even, and what has to belong to women, i.e., the spaces in which it makes sense for men to say less and listen more and speak really, really carefully.
Amp, I’m saying, if as it turns out you begin to accumulate a new group of radical feminists to endorse after having alienated or banned quite a few so far, well, that does not sit well. How long before some of the new group come on here, run afoul of the civility police or some such (although this thread is certainly about as UNcivil and nasty as any I’ve seen anywhere in a long time, and it’s not radical feminists who are guilty, is it), get banned; in the meantime you keep endorsing women who identify as radical (who actually may not be, but that’s a different topic) as though, or giving the appearance, that you are not having the ongoing problems with radical feminists that you clearly have had and are having. You know? I’m not trying to be mean here, I’m being frank. This is how I see it. This troubles me.
Hey Lorenzo, I’ll come back and provide you with a list of good radical feminist blogs. Good to read you. ;-)
I don’t think anybody’s shit doesn’t stink, yours included, alsis and Q-grrl, but who cares about that? So what? The difference between you two and me, or one difference is, fighting with you doesn’t appeal to me. I think it is a useless and stupid waste of time. So I won’t. I will say, Q-grrl, that damn right, that’s me you’re talking about right there, three husbands — count them, one, two, three — and 11 kids, all but three of them grown now, and four grandkids, the oldest 11, and I’ve lived to tell the tale, I’ve survived, I’ve kicked male supremacist ass in ways nobody else has so far, and today I am stronger and better and happier and more hopeful than I’ve ever been in my life. I am very, very proud of who I am, and I am who I am because of the life I have lived. I lived by my own lights, I acted on the basis of my best understanding, always, and when the time came for me to kick ass, I did, and it went quite well. I think your long-term dedication to behaving llike an internet asshole around radical feminists who have offended you for some reason really does not become you.
With that out of the way, I think a whole lot of het women (and men) better get busy and talk sa whole lot about heteronormativity because that is a *feminist* issue — a *feminist* issue, not a lesbian issue or gay issue only — and nobody needs to be a lesbian to challenge heteronormativity every time she sees it. The sex of who you love is neither here nor there, really; what matters is a woman’s (or man’s) commitment to the end of male supremacy, her or his willingness to *think* deeply about heteronormativity in relationships as the problem that it is. Being het doesn’t mean a woman (or man) has to be heterosexist, heterocentric, heteronormative, or male centered. Feminist work is work that all of us can do, and should do, regardless the sex of who we love.
So, that’s enough.
Heart
Sorry for the formatting problem there, this sentence was Richard Jeffrey Newman’s:
In other words, for women to take the position you outline is one thing; for men to take it feels to me like a cop out.
[I think I’ve fixed the formatting problem –Amp]
I think your long-term dedication to behaving llike an internet asshole around radical feminists who have offended you for some reason really does not become you.
Pot, kettle, black.
Cheryl, has it occured to you that one reason why you’re encountering some hostility from your sister feminists is because of the BS you and your crew have doled out to us in the past here? Because quite frankly, you and your crew have acted like complete assholes to us in the past. We’ve seen you and your Margins friends repeatedly dismiss us like so much frivolous trash–what was the term you used? The “fun kind of feminists” who like porn? That right there tells me you perused maybe one or two blogs and read just a few posts.
We’ve seen you and your allies swoop in and declare that we’re not doing anything particularly meaningful (which begs the question as to why you come here to shake your fingers at us–real meaningful, that), and demands for respect for “real” feminists (ie, you and the Margins folks) who’ve done “important” work while the rest of us get tarred as cowardly and lacking integrity (see–the Andrea Dworkin thread for some of that bullshit). Pretty ironic, considering the fact that one of the “cowardly” posters in that thread does work that makes her the target of harassment and worse from batterers and MRA fuckwits, and another works with battered women and immigrant women. (Those are just two I could tell you about off the top of my head.)
Nope, what we saw were demands for cred from us, as if you were the artisocrats and we were the lowly serfs (and it’s reminiscent of the treatement we get from supposedly progressive men). Not one apology for jumping the gun, only more fingers wagging in our faces. Who the fuck needs that? Not me, and if that’s your idea of sisterhood–us bowing and scraping while you act like “internet assholes”–well, I’ll pass, thanks.
Women like Qgrrl and Spicy and Bean and Alsis and CrysT–and the other women who post here and blog elsewhere–are fully deserving of respect. Many do participate in activism outside of blogging, but you’d have to know us and actually read our blogs and give us the time of day to realize that. Instead, you and your buddies have preferred to come here and trash us every so often, which doesn’t make me all that eager to back you up when you want to take Amp to task. So you think he shuts women down. Frankly, so have you folks.
You don’t have to post here, or read here. While I–and Qgrrl, and Bean, and Alsis, CrysT, and others–have taken Amp to task on different occaisions, and butted heads with him, we’ve managed to do it without trying to establish ourselves as the winners of a “more feminist than thou” pissing contest. The fact that you “real” feminists have deemed such a pissing contest as a valid use of your time is ironic on several levels.
And the fact that you make sweeping (and ignorant) assumptions about us, our level of involvement, and our integrity, while expecting to be exempt from such judgement in kind, is yet another irony.
As long as we’re arguing about whose cred is more credible, and whose feminism more feminist…the other side has time and energy to steal a march on us.
South Dakota, anyone?
And that of course had nothing at all to do with the muddy middle and pseudo-progressives that would prefer that we just sit and smile while the right wing take our rights away, as we need to compromise and make sacrifices.
[passes Sheelzebub a New Seasons brownie]
Cheryl gets a great deal of her core POV –the part that most exasperates other feminists when it’s not infuriating us– into her use of the word “becoming.” As if my disgust with her agenda and tactics here were of no more consequence/had no deeper meaning than a dress that makes my ass look too wide or a tacky hair-dye job. “Not becoming.” How very old-school mother-daughter of you, Cheryl. What’s next ? Maybe you’d like to remind me to floss more often and to not slouch so much, too ?
Get a clue. You’re not my damn mother. I’m nearly forty, and I don’t even listen to that sort of patronizing static from my actual biological mother any more. Not for a long, long time.
Yes, it’s only we poor little lost sheep on the margins of the Margins who need to worry whether or not our tactics are “becoming” or not. Those who are part of your flock do not. If you and yours want to hunt the big game (ie– men) and painfully wing a few female bystanders over and over in the process, tough shit.
Well, I don’t like being winged on your little jaunts, Cheryl. Frankly I’m fucking sick of it. Obviously I’m not alone in those feelings, either. So just stick to discussing feminism and shut the fuck up about your poor little dear friends who were so cruelly and undeservedly cast off from this space, as if it were the be-all and end-all of feminism and as if they didn’t have a score of other spaces in which to do their thing. If I had a dollar for every time you showed your own hypocrisy in this fashion, I could stop looking for work tomorrow. Just knock it the hell off.
Richard, I know you’ve actually read BB’s post, as you quoted from it, so I find your agreement with Heart over it somewhat bizarre. Your discussion of the various terms relating to heterocentricism was interesting, but has no relationship to BB’s post, as BB simply was not doing what Heart accuses her of.
First note, BB is a woman, so men taking the position she is explaining is pretty much irrelevant to a discussion of her post, in which she is explaining her position.
Second note, BB’s post was all about how men are raised and trained by rape culture, and was all about how rape exists as a predictable result of that training, and how rape is simply a part of a continuum of men’s behavior within rape culture. So it is hard to see how it lets men off the hook, or fails to acknowledge the Dworkinian relationship between rape and sex. Also, it explicitly states that it should not be read as letting men off the hook.
Third note, it seems weird to say that rape (something men do) is something that men need to shut up and listen on. What it is like to live under constant threat of rape in a rape culture? Yup, that is something men should shut up and listen on. The experience of being raped and what constitutes rape, likewise. Why men rape, what of our training leads to it, how all our training is the same training of rapists, how our behavior exists within a continuum that includes rape? All that is something that men are pretty well situated to talk about. Not that women aren’t well situated to talk about it too, but men are also. I think men’s unwillingness to talk about these things is more of a problem than our over-eagerness to do so (although certainly matched by our eagerness to shut down women talking about these things), so claiming that we should shut up and listen seems distinctly the easy route. It lets you say, “Oh yes, men are trained like that, how wise!” rather than, “Here is how I have been trained.”
Charles:
Frankly, I think you need to go back and read my posts again. In my original post, I was responding to Amp saying that BB never said rape was about violence/control not sex, and I quote a spot where BB seemed to make a version of that distinction, i.e. that rape was about violence/control and the chosen weapon was sex. I then went on to say that I thought BB implied in the rest of her discussion that rape was about sex, but that she never actually came out and said it. My point, in other words, was that Amp had perhaps missed something in the post that would in fact support Heart’s critique, but also that the subtext of BB’s post at least implied that she holds a view…i.e., that rape is about sex…that Heart clearly feels she (BB) does not. And so, in fact, I was actually disagreeing with Heart, or at least suggesting that Heart’s critique might have been too hasty.
I also wonder where you understand from my posts that I believe men should shut up and listen?
[Emphasis mine in both cases]
If she implied that rape was about sex, how did she do that without ever suggesting that she didn’t agree with the statement that rape was not about sex? Your recent version is an accurate description of BB’s post, but it isn’t an accurate description of your previous description of her post.
You took the simplistic statement that BB was attempting to explicate, and used that to support Heart’s claim that BB was making the simplistic statement in a manner that let men off the hook, and then went on to parse the terminology of how she was letting men off the hook, without ever challenging the idea that she was letting men off the hook. While you didn’t emphatically join in the trashing, you joined in the discussion in seeming agreement, without ever challenging the trashing.
Well, when Heart praised you for taking that position:
I didn’t see you object.
Of course, no need to object the general sentiment, but on the subject of what men have to say about their training under rape culture, I don’t think that the conclusion men should reach is that talking about their training, and the ways in which it relates to the idea that rape is sex used as a weapon of oppression and control, is something on which they should fundamentally defer to women, which is what BB was talking about, and is what therefore you were saying was a cop-out position for men to take, and therefore Heart was saying it was good to see a man recognizing that men should talk less, listen more, and talk very very carefully about (which I paraphrased as shut up and listen, which is harsher, but not any less true).
Also,
Now, the position Heart is outlining is the position that BB was taking, right? And BB was talking about how men are trained to be rapists, and how that relates to the idea that rape is about control, with sex as the means of expressing that control. So, you are saying here that talking about how men’s training leads us to use sex as a weapon of control over women (and therefore to rape) is a cop out when men say it.
Now, clearly, I am being excessively uncharitable in my reading of you, and none of that is what you meant, since you now respond with bafflement to my having read you that way. As far as I can tell, you somehow failed to notice that your discussion of this subject was within the context of a completely unfair reading of BB’s post, and that your pleasant terminological discussion with Heart would be read in that light.
Fair enough, I retract my accusations against your posts. You were having an interesting terminological discussion about heterosexism, hetero-centricism, male-centeredness, etc, which had nothing to do with BB’s post. But I hope you now have a better sense in what light they could reasonably be read.
For clarity — and I think I alluded to this in one of my posts, but I can say it again — my response to the post Amp linked to was informed by another post bb wrote about rape last week entitled “The danger in thinking rape is sex.” I have never said that bb intends to let men off the hook because I don’t think she does. In fact, I think she tries really hard not to. I think the position she has taken, though, has the effect of letting men off the hook, in that, again, it brackets sex off from rape in a way that doesn’t reflect the experience of most rape victims. When we are raped, it is our sexuality that is violated, and it is violated in a way that it is not violated when we are beaten but not raped. Having said that, when we are beaten by an intimate partner, that is *also* a violation on the basis of our sex, something that also gets obfuscated when we say that rape is violence and not sex. If the latter is so, then pure violence, as in battering, is not sex either– except that it *is* in the sense that it is about, again, heteronormativity, male dominance as against female submission. Insisting that rape isn’t sex but is violence has the effect of exempting the whole continuum of heterosexual intimacies from feminist scrutiny, and that’s a problem, because heterosexual intimacy is always already suspect, no matter what, just because men and women do not yet enjoy the same degree of power in the world. IOW, there is a certain s/m-ness about *all* heterosexual intimacy, inequalities of power, which feminism has always sought to confront, call out, illuminate, challenge, in the interest of ending gender, ending heteronormativity, heteronormativity meaning the way intimate relationships are regulated under male supremacy so as to maintain inequalities of power: dominance and submission, maleness and femaleness, one-up, one-down relating, and just this idea that it is difference, maleness as opposed to femaleness, that makes sex sexy. If rape is violence and not sex, the suggestion is that all of the other intimacies in het relationships are sex and not violence, and that just isn’t so. There’s a lot of violence that flies under the radar in what passes for sex in het relationships every single day because it isn’t viewed as rape. Well, if rape isn’t sex but is violence, then what are all of these day to day violences which are part and parcel of so many het relationships, small violences, small coercions, lesser pains and injuries and sufferings to which women give something that passes for “consent” and which do not rise to the level of rape? These are both sex and violence, just as rape is both sex and violence.
I apologize in advance for the thickness of all of this and for any lack of clarity or repetitiveness, I just don’t have much time right now.
Sheelzebub, I think you’re referring to my sig line in other places, “I’m a radical feminist, not the fun kind,” which is something Andrea Dworkin said in an interview with Off Our Backs a long time ago. I found it, loved it, and have used it as a sig line for years. I’m not sure I said that everybody who approves of pornography is the fun kind of feminist– I think that very very often, feminists approve of or endorse or participate in some way in porn because they haven’t really thought deeply about it. That was certainly true of me. When I first met Amp and bean on the Ms boards, I was a pro-porn feminist and argued the pro-porn side. It was, in fact, mostly bean’s posts which got me really thinking about my position, and eventually, changing my mind, and I’ve always appreciated bean for that and have said so many times. It’s true that over the years I have come to really and truly hate pornography– all it is, means, and does– and I can’t apologize for that, but I’m certainly not talking out of some sort of moral high ground place as though I haven’t myself struggled with the issues around porn; I definitely have.
As to swooping in– well, here’s what I can say. Paige is banned, funnie is banned, Lily is banned (something I didn’t know until recently), and ginmar is banned. Those are four good feminist wimmin banned that I know of. So far, I’m not banned, and so when a woman I believe has really worthwhile things to say gets banned because she isn’t civil enough in the way she says it, because she insults Amp or is just a really mean battle-axe from hell or whatever, yet courteous misogynists post on like they have good sense because they are assholes to women courteously, in general, I’m going to show up and speak up. I think that’s really, really wrong. I think it was wrong every time Amp did it, even though I understand his reasons and sympathize with how crappy it feels to get shat upon in ways that feel unfair. Hell, that’s happened to me right here in this thread and it pisses me right the hell off. It’s bullshit. But I wouldn’t ban a feminist woman for it. And I don’t think Amp should either. So yeah, I’m going to register my objections; that’s an important part of my own feminism. In this case I registered my objection because the banned remain banned, yet new, as yet-unbanned radical feminists are endorsed and approved. Again, that seems wrong to me, because the only difference between the latter group and the former group is that the latter group hasn’t yet insulted Amp. I mean, honestly. That’s just wrong. Well, I think so.
Well, I just don’t have more time, but did want to say these few things.
Heart
[Edited by Amp to fix broken link]
Heart,
Your link to the other BB post is broken.
[It’s fixed now! –Amp]
I totally agree with what you say in terms of the problems of a pure ‘rape is violence not sex’ argument, it just didn’t seem to me that what BB was saying in the post that Amp linked to was at all that sort of argument (actually, even the starting point wasn’t the same, since it was ‘rape is about control, sex is just the tool,’ which still acknowledges that rape uses sex, and that sex can be used as a weapon of control, and, since most of the post was about how all men are trained to think of sex as a weapon of control and power, it didn’t seem to me to be obfuscating the relationship between ‘normal’ het sex, control, and rape, but instead was highlighting exactly that), but that is just my take. Like Amp, I don’t have much familiarity with BB’s writing, so I accept that there may be other things she has written that would lead you to read her in a much less charitable light.
Heart, you’re conflating two things I don’t conflate, which is my “endorsement” of a feminist’s writing and whether or not I can deal with interacting with them on “Alas.” But these aren’t the same things at all.
For example, I can’t deal with Funnie on “Alas.” But I still “endorse” her as a person; I don’t question the worth of her thinking, or that she’s a good, smart person. And her commitment to feminism – and to many things I believe in – is simply, obviously beyond reproach. It just happens to be the case that I find it impossible to deal with her.
Also, your post seems to imply that every feminist on “Alas” who has criticized me harshly has been banned. Perhaps that isn’t what you meant, but for the record, it’s far from true.
For example, I can’t deal with Funnie on “Alas.”
You’re not all that witty in real life, either.
Ba dum bump, ting!
But, Amp ! Your blog is clearly the definitive board on feminism. Any woman who can’t post here might as well have had her computer carried off and hocked for cheap cigars or something !!
Well, at least Cheryl just flipped me another dollar. Now that the bucks are rolling in, I think I’ll splurge tomorrow and buy myself a pair of socks at Goodwill or something.
Heart,
I apologise for misreading your posts about which feminist women are banned ““ I hadn’t realised you were referring to Alas.
I’m still not entirely sure why you have taken quite such a dislike to the Den. I understand that you disagree with the sex/rape position, but I’m surprised that the disagreement caused a reaction that could lead onlookers to think she must have kicked your dog or something. If she’s made the cardinal error of being writing something which Ampersand likes (“the potential friend of my enemy is therefore my enemy”), I don’t quite understand either. After all, both Ginmar & Lily have commented at the Den, IIRC positively, but you’ve placed the greatest value (albeit negative) on a man’s commendation.
Your first post here said:
“And all the het men like it. And the het women.”
Not everyone who posts in the Den comments threads has stated their orientation, so that’s quite an assumption you’ve made there.
I’m also quite puzzled that out of all the interesting & worthwhile links Ampersand added here (Welfare Agencies Taking Assets From Their Wards, bell hooks Lecture, etc), this was the only issue you mentioned. I know that your posting priority isn’t to keep the internet safe from feminist women, but some onlookers might get the wrong impression.
I’ve been giving the matter some thought, and I think this thread hasn’t gone in good directions. In particular, I’m worried that having so many folks criticize Heart may have created a “gangpile” effect, even though I’m sure none of the critics intended that to happen. Regardless of if the criticisms are legitimate, having a lot of them piled up at once can be overwhelming and feel unfair.
Please, folks, don’t use this thread to attack other feminists anymore. We’ve gotten that out of our systems (I hope) – let’s move on to different topics.
Although discussing other feminist’s theories (like saying you agree or disagree with what BB wrote, and why) is fine. Just don’t discuss other feminists personally.
Thanks.
I’m sure none of the critics intended that to happen.
I be honest, I don’t care what happens. It’s fucking galling to be reminded over and over again that one Just Doesn’t Rate. Call it a “gangpile” if you must, Amp. But I was personally relieved to hear from Sheelzebub and a couple of others. It’s helpful at moments like this, because then I know that I’m not just imagining the vibe Cheryl gives off in this space and elsewhere. Perhaps it’s different to you precisely for the same reasons that Robert’s attitude doesn’t affect you the way it affects me and some other women: Your interest in feminism isn’t the same as ours;The same things aren’t at stake for you as for us.
For the record, I’ve enjoyed my brief visits to the BB a lot. I remain in the dark as to why Cheryl is treating it the way she is. Does every last radical blog in the galaxy have to take exactly the same approach that Cheryl does on the Margins before it’s legitimately about radical feminism ?
To be blunt: It just smacks of territorial pissing to me. Particularly her criticism of a male partner posting in the space. Doesn’t Cheryl have a husband who posts on feminist issues ? Okay, fine. He has his own space for doing that, but so what ? Every radical feminist space has to be woman-only before it can have any cred at all ? Also, since when does it make sense for a het woman to criticize another blog just because some het women like it ? Are those who like the blogs that Cheryl hasn’t vetted for her perception of proper conduct suddenly a less highly evolved form of het woman than she is ?
Now, you can call all this an “attack” or a “gangpile,” and snip it to high heaven, or whatever, but it is no more an attack on Cheryl’s character than those she makes against you virtually every damn time she shows up here.
Sheelzebub and Charles, it’s Dim/Dubhe’s posts I take issue with, far and away more than bb’s, as I said in my first post. Dubhe says things that are really just all around over the top, he says them all over the place, not just in the Den, and he gets away with it in large part because of his connection with bb– because she gives him room to say them and space to say them. This is a 24yo het white guy. Please. I think that a whole lot of men who fancy themselves to be profeminist like to see that, as I also said in my first post: a ha! Finally a radical feminist woman we can get behind– her male partner is all over the internet saying the same kinds of stupid things most anti-feminist men say. (And I know Amp said he was not aware of Dubhe’s participation, which surprised me since Dubhe is quite the presence in the Den.) bb strikes me as someone who is working out a lot of things for herself — and I think that is absolutely fine, we’re all doing that, really, and we always will be — but her posts reflect the connection she has with this guy who has a whole lot more work to do than she does. So it irked me to see Amp’s endorsement — though I did apologize for being overly grouchy — especially in light of the bannings of women who do great work and who really have worked hard not to be male-centered, though they may have been het. As I also said (why do I have to keep repeating myself, gah), I have been fuming over some really asinine stuff Dim said over on Twisty’s blog recently, including saying to a feminist woman, “What if I said to you, hold on a moment while I rape you,” or “When I get home I’ll cut off your tits.” (my paraphrase.) Yeah, he said that. I immediately and vigorously called him out on it, as did at least one other radical feminist, and he never apologized. Instead, he basically stomped off feeling sorry for himself. He gets away with this stuff because, again, of his connection with bb. And what he said caused conflicts between feminist women, and I *hate* that but that is *usually usually usually* what happens whenever a feminist’s male partner enters the picture like this. The guy says and does things that cause problems, and then feminist women square off against one another for all manner of usually-complicated reasons, and the men say, “Look, those feminists can’t even get along with each other” and they come out smelling like a rose, when if they’d just get the hell out of the picture, the women would get along just fine. It is, after all, women’s connections with men — or not — which have historically been our stake in the system (or not), how we have been treated has depended on our connections with men, it’s those connections that have privileged us as women (while unconnected-with-men women are marginalized), and for that ever to end, our connections with men have to change in ways that are significant, including on the internet. And so (in answer to your question, sheelzebub), that’s why what Amp wrote about the Den caught my eye (as opposed to the other links posted.) What happens around bb and Dubhe matters to me because they do identify as radical feminists and what they write and do affects all the rest of us who identify that way. It’s all connected, we’re all connected, we can’t not be.
Amp, I do hear what you’re saying, and I also am not unsympathetic to the way it feels to get clobbered in your own space. Any of us who has our own spaces know how really aggravating that is.
As to my personal situation, I would like that not to be a topic for discussion. What I will say is that it is my experience that men who truly are allies to feminists in the ways that matter most are often the quietest men, standing way back, getting the hell out of the way, something which is often a really hard thing for them to do and which usually costs them a *lot*. This has certainly been true of Rick.
Heart
As to my personal situation, I would like that not to be a topic for discussion.
Um, but didn’t you just write three chapters on bb and Dubhe and their personal situation? Sauce for the goose, no?
Ok, normally I don’t leave my little area of the blogosphere to comment on anything people are saying, and BB and I are certainly am not in the habit of acknowledging personal attacks on either of us… but I would like to simply post the link to the Twisty comment thread Heart mentioned to give folks the context of my statements.
http://blog.iblamethepatriarchy.com/2006/02/05/may-we-live-long-and-die-out/#comments
Thanks,
Dubhe
Charles:
I think your reading of me is not uncharitable; I think it is a misreading, and while I do not want to get into an extended argument over this, since it seems we fundamentally agree on a lot of things, I do want to set the record straight. The original, full text of the post you partially quote back at me is this:
So BB says, quite explicitly, that rape is not a crime about sex, that sex is the weapon of control. That is a distinction very, very close to the rape-is-violence-not-sex distinction. I also think that the implication of much of what BB then goes on to write is that rape is about sex, but she never says that. So she says one thing and then implies another, but–because she states at the outset that rape is not about sex (and I would add that her next sentence says something about how she just assumed that people “got it” by now)–there is no way to know if the implication I see in the rest of the post is there intentionally or not. And if what BB wants to get at is a radical critique of rape–and I don’t think her discussion of male training, important as it is to talk about again and again and again is either new or radical–then the difference between what she says and what she implies is something that needs to be worked out. You choose, in the reading that I am guessing is yours based on your posts here, to give BB the benefit of the doubt in this; I do not.
I don’t have time to continue this right now. If I have the chance, I will come back later and respond to the rest of what you said about my post.
No, Cheryl. You’re not getting off that easy. From the first time I saw you and your crew swoop in here, you all derided us as “the fun” kind of feminists in your criticism of Amp. Pre-banning, BTW. Your words–you derided the blogs that Amp links to, the bloggers who post here, as “the fun” kind of feminists who like porn and aren’t threatening to men. Again, your words. Dismissive, and in all too many cases, wrong.
You want to criticize Amp for banning people from his blog, go ahead. I really don’t give a shit. I also don’t give a shit about whatever quarrel you had with him or anyone else from the Ms. Boards. But as Alsis pointed out, this place isn’t Grand Feminist Headquarters.
And in the AD thread you got in our faces and preached to us about how we should learn some integrity since we don’t post with our full names–after we’d been accused, quite wrongly, of “gossiping” about her. We’ve heard unending amounts of bullshit from you and your crew about how we’re not really doing anything. You have expressed frustration in the past in frustration over the fact that none of us “fun” feminist bloggers linked to you, the Margins, whatever–but why would we when you don’t link to us, you don’t pay us any mind except to lecture us, and you dismiss what we do out of hand, if you even bother to learn what we do? I didn’t want to point trolls in your direction, but after I was treated to more dismissiveness and arrongance from your camp, I wasn’t all that jazzed about connecting with you all.
As for BB, my post to you said exactly zero about your take on her or her partner, so I don’t even know where that came from. My post was in response to your complaints about Qgrrl’s attitude towards you, about her being an “internet asshole.” Again, pot, kettle, black. You and your clique have acted an awful lot like the closet misogynist “progressives” we deal with every day, and have acted like royal internet assholes to us–and I’m not talking about Amp, I am talking about US, feminist women, whom you and your clique have dismissed, derided, preached to, and lectured.
Amp, I didn’t see your post about not “gangpiling.” I don’t see what I’m doing as gangpiling–but I’ll refrain. Your blog and all that.
Oh, I skimmed the part where I was an internet asshole. Yeah, so you going around gatekeeping on blogs/boards that aren’t yours, me calling you on your *rampant* hypocrisy… that’s me being an asshole. Look, Heart, the people you slay most with your words are other women. Historically (what 6+ years), women have been dead in your scopes when you go on a tear. You reamed me, and other radical feminists, right up the ass when *WE* called *YOU* on your heterocentrism, your asskissing of heteronormative values (3 Husbands; 11 Children). You want to believe that these are private issues; you want to believe that you are so sacrosanct that you cannot be judged for your heavy embrace of all.things.patriarchal. But you have done this. You have benefited for over 50 years for doing this. And then you turn your viper tongue on women who make choices not nearly as embued in patriarchal privilege as yours were. But I’ve said this before, and you’ll retort that it is Lies! damn Lies! But it isn’t. You want to claim a common experience with me as a lesbian — after all your heterosexual privilege. Sorry sister, I’m not gonna do that. I’m going to make you sweat it; to make you think about it; to have you fucking have to acknowledge that lesbianism isn’t just some damn title you throw around your shoulders to become more politically holy than others. And cut this bullshit division you do between the radical feminists and all the sundry feminists begging for crumbs from your lap. You are probably one of the single most hierarchical feminists I’ve ever met. It simply boggles the mind — and I think women/men here are fully within their rights to tell you to take a hike. Go prey on someone else.
Can we talk about Israel and Palestine for a while? I learned a lot from the Finkelstein-Ben-Ami debate post and from the comment responding to the Tree Pretty post, because being a relatively young non-Jewish American, I didn’t pay much attention to the historical basis of the conflict. Plus, the media tends not to get into nuances much, and after having read that post, I think the whole issue is a big ball of nuance.
Is Finkelstein right, that under international law Israel has no claim on Jerusalem? Or is Ben-Ami right, that technically the borders can be adjusted to let Israel keep West Jerusalem? If Jerusalem has to be split up in order to win peace, similarly to Berlin after WWII, how long would that solution last? With the Wall that’s going up now as precedent, I think it’s very likely that Israel would duplicate the East German Zone, but with reverse intent (keep out invaders, not keep their people in), and that would be too weird and awful and sad. What would happen to the Israeli Arabs who are not Palestinians and who currently (apparently) have 2nd class status as citizens?
Charles, to finish my last post, you wrote:
Neither Heart nor I, as fas as I can tell, ever said that men should “fundamentally defer to women” when it comes to talking about how men are trained to be men in this culture; nor did I or she ever say that men should just shut up and listen. What Heart was talking about was that there are contexts in which men should, as you put it, “talk less, listen more, and talk very very carefully” (which is very good advice; I recently had my head handed to me on this blog because I got so wrapped around my own head that I missed the point where I should have stopped talking and ended up sabotaging a discussion about rape), and what I said was that the notion that rape-is-violence-not-sex means one thing spoken from a woman’s point of view and another thing when spoken by a man, and I stand by that distinction. I said nothing about the substance of BB’s post, nor did I refer to it by implication. This was a discussion, as you indicate you understand, that started in response to Amp’s request for clarification about Heart’s use of the term heterocentric.
You also wrote:
I’m not sure if I should read that as dismissive or not…”pleasant terminological discussion,” “interesting terminological discussion,” as opposed to the really important stuff in BB’s post…but it comes awfully close to sounding that way, and so I have one more thing to say: There is a big, big difference between saying, as you do, that […] “rape uses sex, and that sex can be used as a weapon of control” and saying that rape is sex, that (heterosexual) sex is control. My point in what you call the “pleasant terminological discussion” was that men need to come to terms with the latter and that the former is, when men say it, a cop out precisely because it is a way of avoiding having to deal with the former.
(Note to Amp: In a previous post, I linked to an essay I wrote on Salon.com that I think relates to this discussion. That link appears to be broken.)
Wow. I’m blown away by this comment thread. I guess we do have a lot of left over issues from the Ms. boards. This was a very sad thread to me. What do you *want* anyway? What is there to be won here?
To be honest, it isn’t left over from Ms. It is on-going. It isn’t about winning; it’s about not being used.
Word, Q. Tara, I don’t want to live in the past, either. But IRL, when I deal with people in the present who have crossed, belittled or failed to have my back in the past, I take that into account in my present dealings with them. I’d be a fool not to IRL, and the same applies here.
Richard,
I think we are pretty much in agreement on the actual content, and since both of us are doing partial quoting to score points (and we’re doing it in the middle of a low-grade flame war), I think I’ll drop it. Just to be clear though, the important context you seemed to be not noticing was the flame war here, not the specific content of BB’s posts.
Lee, as far as I understand it Finkelstein is right, but this is quite a muddled issue, so it’s hard to say.
Jesus H. Christ on a pogo stick, this thread, to any new/young/seeking feminist is just absolutely devastating.
Absolutely devastating. And we wonder why so many women don’t want to identify as feminist, let alone try and engage in feminist discourse.
Yup, because young women are stoopid and can’t differentiate between personal conflicts and the overall movement to end women’s oppression.
It’s precisely because young women aren’t stupid that the nature of this personal conflict – over essentially who gets to speak with an authentic voice, fought with personal attacks and call-outs, that will be particularly disconcerting.
Most young women I know (and btw do I count at 31?) are too smart to waste time wading into such a quagmire, and will just walk away, which is a great loss to feminism. Instead of young and older women working together, we risk many thinking that feminists can’t walk the talk, and to identify as a feminist is to invite yourself into the middle of a circular firing squad.
They may walk away from Alas, A Blog forever, but if they automatically translate the “quagmire” here to the feminist movement as a whole then I doubt they’ve got the chops to really embrace any political ideology, least of all feminism.
As a young woman who learned most of her feminist politics in on-line forums, I can tell you the level of argument occassionally found here (and earlier on Ms.) was what I found so appealing about feminism – or more importantly, what I found so appealing about feminists. It’s brave discourse and it makes it point more concisely that anything you’ll find in academia. It may not be pretty and polite and sugar and spice but it’s rife with wisdom if you’re willing to get over your personal desire to have everything be nicey-nice and actually pay attention.
I’ve spent the last 10 years on various internet boards, and learned lots. I’ve seen it get far uglier than this, and I’ve been lucky enough to be part of some ‘places’ that have managed a terrific level of both insightful discourse and mutual respect. I’ve been paying attention for a long time.
But what I’ve seen the most, particularly because I’m Australian and the (english speaking) internet is still dominated by Americans, is that blogs, boards and permutations thereof start out with terrific promise, full of bright and gritty people willing to talk, and yes, stick it out if things get a little rough. Then, over and over, by a whole variety of means sites disintegrate into myopic and vicious infighting dominated by past incidents at other sites, be they physical or virtual. More often than not these fights are highly personal and revolve around various little American-based cliques and organisations etc. – like the Ms board, by the sounds of it.
Well there’s a whole world of us out here, and watching this and wondering – is it even worth participating? – is a question that more and more frequently just gets answered flat out with ‘no’. Which is a damned shame because half the fucking point (or if you prefer, opportunity) of the internet is to let people from other countries and places talk to each other, share ideas and robust discussion etc. Instead it’s rapidly becoming, especially with regard to movements like feminism, one giant sand box where every part is wet with pee.
You shouldn’t have to have “chops” to get involved with a movement you feel attracted to and/or passionate about – least of all feminism.
And I don’t know what academia you’ve been involved in, but in my experience it’s just as vicious as anything you’ll see on the web, albeit couched in different language sometimes.
Right–point taken. I shall shut up like a good little girl for the sake of the movement, lest we seem divisive. Even if the very people we’re calling out have been damn divisive to quite a lot of activists in the community. Echoes of closet misogynist “progressive” men, and all that.
Look, three feminists called another one out on her hypocrisy and her ridiculous tendency to pee in every corner of feminism. You said that territorial pissing was a big issue for you, yet anyone calling her or her co-horts out on it is apparently a bigger issue. How very odd.
I think, at the age of 23 who has been browsing the feminist blogosphere for a few months, I count as a “young feminist” so I will put in my two cents here.
I started reading Alas just before Ampersand had to institute new policies to keep every thread from turning into the same argument. A lot of the things I read – here and in other blogs – have aroused a passionate response in me, but as I see the arguments that people have, I do start to wonder, is it really worth it? Is it worth me putting myself out into the fray? I’m still finding my footing as far as my own philosophy goes. What “camp” do I fall into? Do I have any real feminist “cred”?
But for one thing, it’s been damned useful for me just to be listening and learning. And while reading threads of arguments within the movement is sometimes disheartening, it’s nothing compared to the rage and sadness I feel when I read about what’s going on in South Dakota, or the latest bigotry from fundamentalists and their buddies, and all the other injustices that don’t go away when I leave my computer screen.
Sheelzebub wrote:
And honestly, we’re not standing before the Senate with a petition, or marching before CNN’s cameras;More’s the pity. If we can’t thrash these things out on a pro-feminist board on the internet, where can we thrash them out ?
Arguments don’t present a perfect and flawless public face, it’s true, but since when did everyone stifling their difference and all marching in lock-step all the time present a perfect and flawless public face, either. Hell, that’s the Gold Standard of MRA’s who dis feminism: “You bitches are all clones marching in lock-step with no minds of your own blah fucking blah…”
The idea that feminism can’t be worthwhile to a new generation if we’re arguing certain aspects and personalities is absurd. It’s like me saying that once in awhile when I was a kid, my parents had a big argument, so obviously all hetero partnerships are a total sham and need to be kicked to the curb post-haste– and forever.
As another young feminist (22), I resent the implication that young feminists are going to read these arguments amongst feminists and not want to be part of the movement. We’re not stupid, we’re not weak, we are capable of critical thinking, and we’re certainly capable of holding our own in internet debates. Also, being a young feminist doesn’t make you a new feminist. I’m a life-long feminist raised by feminist parents. I am familiar with different schools of feminist theory. Please do not presume to speak for me.
Word, Dorktastisc. Debate, no matter how heated yet always demaocratic, is simply essential when you fight for equality and liberty, especially in places that support this fight.
(Lorenzo, I don’t mean to answer for Heart, but do you know Genderberg? It’s not a blog, though most of the writers you listed participate in the forums there; this is a great anti-sex business site.)
Lord no, you don’t seem divisive, it’s not at that lofy height. It’s just another example of a bunch of people fighting out their personal differences for all the world to see. My point is simple – you’re not in a private meeting room, you’re on the web for all to see. Does the setting fit the discussion?
Real debate on issues and areas of contention is great, and usually fails to get so very personal on both sides. There’s a big difference between lockstep and perhaps thinking about whether a very personal dynamic needs to be played out on the blogs you frequent, probably contributing to locking new people out, or in private email, or another forum.
And by ‘you’ I mean everyone here arguing about those good but bad old days. This is at least the third thread I’ve seen hijacked by it. I’m being all blunt and divisive etc. and daring to say – get the fuck over it already, or take the fight somewhere else. Ampersand provided about 30 different and interesting links on this thread, and virtually all that’s been talked about is past grievances. How stupid is that?
You’re the converted. I pointed quite specifically to those who think about getting involved, are all new, and run screaming for the hills back into the safe arms of patriarchy where at least things are comfortably numb. Now we can either deride them all, all million upon million of them, or we can have a look at what each of us are doing to invite those women ( and men) in.
That would be easy enough, if Cheryl would quit constantly whinging about her banned buddies and about how every other Radical Feminist is wrong, wrong, wrong for not conducting herself as Cheryl would. Perhaps you’d like to take that up with her, myriad.
Then talk about them, who’s stopping you ?
Don’t talk to me about stupid. Every woman in this thread who has taken issue with Cheryl here has also held forth here and elsewhere at length on many, many other subjects. If you haven’t noticed that, or want to pretend that you haven’t, maybe you should look in the mirror before you call our arguments “stupid.”
But they aren’t past. They’re ongoing. All of the people who feature in them continue to be conspicuous, active presences on this board and on related boards. This isn’t meant to whine about ancient history, but to point to how long this conflict has gone on. The grievances are also directly related to this space, as you must have noticed. Where else can they be fought out?
On the moon, piny. Presuming that there’s no internet access there yet. :/
“Being killed by your own comrades” are not empty words in my fam. After all, it is only the ultimate silencing (“shut up already! or they’ll find out we’re divided!”), all this for the superior good of getting “converts”, read: blind ‘n’ deaf propaganda robots. If “those who think about getting involved” are looking for a reason to “run screaming”, the fact that this pro-feminist blog is run by a man should matter a lot more than the sane openness of instra-feminist conflicts (for the record, I say this as a pro-feminist man who appreciate Amp’s writing a lot, but think that the position of a man in a partiarchal world should never go unquestionned when it comes to gender issues).
It’s not about sides alsis39.5 – ie ‘who has taken issue with Cheryl’, and I can’t even begin to tell you how uninterested I am in being drawn into the spat. And I really don’t appreciate you trying.
Or perhaps you and others could try ignoring it, if your real concern is the good of the forum? I’m not interested in solving your differences, I’m interested in restoring some balance to this space, and yes I’m daring to point out that there are other interests on this board other than those locked in this particular grievance.
Yep, everyone has comments in other threads, and wasn’t it much better reading? – I think so. I also really doubt that you’re being anything other than stubborn when you say ‘what’s stopping [me]] or anyone else talking about other stuff – oh I dunno, perhaps 60+ comments of increasingly personal attacks and ‘you said’ ‘no I didn’t’ ‘did too!’ back and forth?
Hi piny,
I take your point, but it’s clear to blind Freddy that this is not a disagreement, that third time ’round and counting, is going to be resolved. It looks increasingly like those involved aren’t the slightest bit interested in resolving it. Which is why I’m suggesting that the “merits” of fighting over this space in this space have now been well out-weighed by the disharmony and thread hijacking it brings to the place. I honestly don’t care where they take it, except to suggest somewhere where other’s don’t care!
There’s also the issue of what the fight’s about, namely, behavior that would by the same logic be much more likely to cause people to run screaming.
myriad:
I submit that one of the reasons it’s possible to have good threads is because nobody’s expected to be perfect all the time. People disagree, they get angry, it comes out. That’s not some kind of plot to drive you mad. It’s just being human.
I don’t recall any Feminist Ten Commandments that said Thou Shalt Always Take One For The Team. Besides, I’ve always hated team sports.
Team sports behaviour, applied to socio-political movements, usually looks like an Leni Riefenstahl movie (the black and white period).
I don’t think that I’m buffed enough for politics then, and that’s not even taking the whole Hebrew thing into account. :p
Well goodness knows I’m not shy: read this!
Myriad, I understand completely why you wrote what you did, and I liked the imagery of the circular firing squad too. Not that I’m telling you anything you don’t already know, I’m sure, but you could have made that comment in conversation, everyone might have agreed with it at some level, and then moved on to why it can’t be or shouldn’t be stopped or policed, said ‘it’s a pity’ and on we would go….(another biscuit, anyone..?)
I’m reading and writing from Australia too and I once made the mistake of quoting Christina Hoff Sommers on a predominantly radical feminist board, just to point out how some statistics had been distorted, according to her research published in the book ‘Who Stole Feminism?’ I never at any stage bought everything Sommers wrote in the book, and was very much ‘not’ in her camp overall, although I do have some criticisms of some radical feminist/lesbian-feminist sexual politics and also quoted Sommers in relation to that. (I consider myself a partly liberal, partly second wave, partly third wave, even partly radical feminist….not an ifeminist or a libertarian feminist.) I was very new to the internet at the time (early last year), and I had ‘no’ idea of Sommers high profile in the States. Wow, did I have to fight for my feminist cred after that! I didn’t handle the heat at all well, and I did actually ask myself whether it was worth it to keep engaging on the net. The context of a whole person or whole – even ‘lifetime’ – perspective is ‘so’ missing here. It’s easy to score an ‘own goal’, if you know what I mean, and feel like you’re having to ‘explain’ yourself at a very basic level.
Overall, obviously, I do think it’s worth it. I learn a lot, and I hope one of the things I’m learning is how to ‘be’ on the net, both in giving and receiving information and arguement.
Anyway, I hope you’re having a good day…: )
Myriad:
In case you overlooked it, Heart stared with:
Here is a woman, Heart, who claims to support all women — to the point that she castigates other women for being less supportive, especially if they love the men in their lives. The very first thing out of her mouth is nothing but a low-down slam about a woman’s blog simply because that women shares her blog with her male SO and Heart tends to to think that the SO doesn’t know his place, so to speak.
Regardless of past differences, this action on Heart’s part is *more* than open for criticism, if not condemnation. But, considering past differneces and the way that Heart has pilloried lesbians (especially Butch lesbians) in the past and has denied her own heterocentric life choices, her comments above are beyond the pale, and totally unacceptable to me. If Heart doesn’t like Amp, doesn’t like what he has to say, doesn’t like the choices he makes, she needs to stay away. I don’t see her going to SYG and laying into the men over there like she does the posters here. Heart is most likely to attack pro-feminist men, transsexuals, or feminist women who choose to think for themselves. All the while denying her own complicity in choices and lifestyles that really aren’t that different from the rest.
You can take the woman out of fundamentalist Christianity, but you can’t take the fundamentalism out of the woman. Secular fundamentalism, especially when applied to feminism, is appalling.
I’d pay out my life savings, if I had a life savings, just to see the phrase “Circular Firing Squad” abolished in liberal-left circles. The main problem with it is that it presumes that everyone in a given argument stands the same distance from all others in the “circle,” has the same level of armament, and so on.
And that just isn’t so. I know that as a straight married woman, I come to the table with more privilege than Qgrrl, and perhaps more than bean, too. Since bean is straight but not married. Hell, even if we were all straight married women, there’d be plenty of other issues coming into play: Seniority, class, education, the list is endless.
The phrase also implies that somehow expressing displeasure with any aspect of another’s behavior is a form of “assasination,” and that just isn’t so.
I take your point, but it’s clear to blind Freddy that this is not a disagreement, that third time ’round and counting, is going to be resolved. It looks increasingly like those involved aren’t the slightest bit interested in resolving it. Which is why I’m suggesting that the “merits” of fighting over this space in this space have now been well out-weighed by the disharmony and thread hijacking it brings to the place. I honestly don’t care where they take it, except to suggest somewhere where other’s don’t care!
…I just had a discussion like this on/about a community I belong to. Basically, someone was behaving inappropriately and stifling discussion, and I and the people I talked to about it (it’d been a running, Oh, God, not AGAIN for a few months), decided to confront him for the following reasons:
1) The behavior is inappropriate, full stop. It deserves criticism.
2) Even if calling this person out doesn’t cause this person to reevaluate their conduct, it may still cause them to knock it down a notch. Bullies depend on successfully intimidating people; when their authority is challenged, they often back down.
3) Other people reading would be less likely to accept this person’s words as gospel.
4) Other people who had felt intimidated might feel supported.
5) Other people who had felt annoyed would understand that it’s not just in their heads.
6) The inappropriate conduct itself was stifling–a discussion could not really happen as long as it was left alone.
alsis39.5 wrote:
Point taken, alsis. I didn’t think about this with any depth, just as an image, and your comment suggests it might be a well-used phrase although I’d never heard it before. Or maybe it’s just one you wouldn’t like to see take hold, for the reasons you stated.
Cicely, it’s a very well-worn expression in these parts, especially if you’re a booster for 3rd Parties, like me. I can think of several other cliches’ along those lines that I’d shop, but I’ll save those for another day. ;)
I was thinking the other day in relation to this thread and BB’s comments in the Den about rape as control, what should we make of male on male prison rape where the perpertrators insist they’re heterosexual, or those intances of young male on elderly woman rape, which is uncommon maybe, but certainly not as rare as hen’s teeth. I’ve heard about it from time to time over my whole adult life. We’ve just last week had a case reported in Melbourne where a male ‘carer’ may have raped four elderly – even old – women at an aged care facility. At least one and maybe more of these women were in their nineties. I can see ‘control’ (and sex) in the prison scenario, but I hardly know what I see in the other case, except straight out misogyny writ very large. Does anyone ever ask these rapists what was going on in their minds?
Then does it make more sense to see rape–the subjugation of someone else’s body on the most intimate level– as both a means of enforcing patriarchal control and the logical effect of that control? We’ve sort of been edging around this knot of sexuality/violence/sexuality/power. It seems to me that rape is both violence communicated through sex and sex conceived as violation.
Because I doubt there was much going on in their minds.
Thanks, alsis. There’s something else I’ve learned. :)
Piny wrote:
This does make sense. Male on female sex in general has a history of being ‘conceived as violation’, since for the longest time women (ladies) weren’t supposed to enjoy it. And if the anecdotal evidence (I think it was Charles who provided) is true – that a very high percentage of women (up to 50%) don’t actually enjoy intercourse, intercourse could *still* be widely conceived, albeit privately, as violation. What out lesbian has never heard a man ask incredulously about lesbian sex ‘but what do you *do*?’
Maybe some sexologist needs to publish a survey on this – women’s anonymous responses to the questions:
Do you enjoy sexual intercourse with a male partner?
If not, do you discuss this with your partner?
Do you feel obligated to allow it regardless of how you feel about it?
Maybe this has already been done, but I’m not aware of it if so.
myriad:
Sure; why not? This is a movement, not a conspiracy; and as far as I know Barry is operating this blog as a forum for discussion, not as a recruiting tool for new feminists. This kind of concern for keeping heated disputes underground in the name of maintaining public appearances seems wildly out of place.
myriad:
Young women undecided about feminism are not the infidel and we are not converts in possession of a dogmatic faith. Nor are they wilting violets whose special needs need to be catered to in order to bring them into the fold. They’re people like you and me and everyone else here, and if you have reasons (as you apparently do) for holding on to feminism in spite of what you see as destructive personal dynamics among some people involved in it, then you can expect that they may very well see those reasons too. Or if they don’t, then we need to think about making those reasons stronger and more apparent, rather than how we can suppress debates and disputes within feminist forums.
I don’t think that the argument here is unreasonable or destructive, but frankly, even if it were, it’s important to keep some perspective. If this is the harshest and most destructive in-fighting that folks have to deal with, then we’re pretty well off. Just to pick a couple of exmples off the top of my head, I haven’t seen anyone yet accuse someone else of being part of an menacing lesbian conspiracy to take over the women’s movement, or a CIA infiltrator trying to co-opt and disrupt radical feminism. Feminism wasn’t destroyed by much harsher and higher-stakes internal conflicts than this one, and I don’t think that this one is going to finish it off, either.
cicely:
This is a good point, but I don’t think that the conception of intercourse as violative is even private in the first place. It’s pretty explicitly proclaimed when people (mostly men) write or talk about intercourse as a form of possession (a man “had her,” “took her,” etc.) or force (a man “nailed her,” “screwed her,” “hit that,” “penetrated her,” “rammed her,” “pounded her,” “banged her,” “fucked her,” etc.) or accomplishment against resistance (a man “scored,” “got lucky,” etc.). That men use these terms with regularity and confidence, while also declaring intercourse is the gold standard for sex itself, the realest or perhaps only kind of “real” sex out there I think it’s no surprise that sex is widely conceived as permeated with violation and control (and that violation and control are seen as shot through with sexiness); also that many women would experience intercourse as unsatisfying, perhaps even violative, when so many men are approaching intercourse on these kinds of terms, and being very emphatic about the right and duty of Manly Men to do so.
Rad Geek wrote:
True. The ‘othering’ as well as all the rest that’s implied in these expressions is definitely something to discuss. (as in ‘how far from here to rape?’) The above sounds like conversation between men ‘about’ women too. i.e. men bond in using this kind of language about women. The ‘important’ relationship is actually with each other. (which is why ‘women’s problems’ are really ‘men’s issues’, and why the world needs feminist men.) I have perhaps once in my lesbian life felt that a lover was likely to perceive our experience with the above kind of mentality, regardless of whatever dominant/submissive dynamic we were engaging in. Sex other than with this one woman always felt like an equal and shared experience, not any kind of ‘real’ conquest or othering. I make this point because my life experience doesn’t add up to d/s relating being abusive in any way. Therefore I don’t make a direct connection between consensual d/s relating, in which both parties are enthusiastic participants, and rape or other forms of sexual abuse. I understand that others do.
Men maintaining that intercourse is the gold standard is definitely something that needs to be addressed. I’m always amazed at those depictions on tv where there’s no foreplay of any description, just straight intercourse, and everybody’s happy. I guess it happens, but every time…? I don’t think so. Maybe there are time constraints in drama shows, but doesn’t pornography, which is supposed to be about sex , also maintain this mythical and male dominant standard? Maybe that’s one reason why women apparently prefer romance novels to porn.
I see I’ve tipped the lid on the can of some controversial issues, but I’m kind of wanting to stay on the subject of ‘what is rape an extension of or an expression of? in and amongst all this.
Totally unrelated to anything else upthread: Amp, I think this (see, esp., the last line) would suit your drawing style to a ‘t’.
Pingback: Southern Discomfort » Marginalia: A link farm-ish thing, #1.