So, for everyone who doesn’t know, I am a teenager. (Hey! If anyone is inclined to make comments that reference that fact, know that they will be deleted with no small amount of flourish and satisfaction if they do not take into account certain things.) As such, and as you may have noticed, I am somewhat concerned with such teenagerish preoccupations as the shaping of identity. I want to talk about the significance of the teenager’s social place during this time of coming into one’s own, and how that process is thereby affected.
I want to talk about the ways in which identities are denied.
It’s what happens when non-monoracial people are told they are really this, that or the other, rather than really being whoever they think of themselves as. It happens every time queer people are told their sexuality is a lifestyle choice. It happens when people are told they are faking being disabled. It happens when trans women are told they are really men – oh, all the time.
It takes some kind of extraordinary arrogance to declare an identity for someone else. This is an attitude that says, ‘My perceptions are more important than your lived experience.’ ‘My comfort in my ability to correctly assess people overrides the truth.’ It is extraordinary what lengths humans will go to in order to make the world in line with their screwy ideas about the people in it. As for ‘the truth,’ that’s the thing. The truth is that someone’s identity is whatever they hold it to be. Asserting your idea of what a person is over theirs says that it’s okay for everyone to weigh in on and locate and decide it as an objective truth. And almost inevitably it’s an “impartial” outside observer who has the right idea, and they locate the truth of someone’s identity quite outside the grasp of the individual concerned. There is no good reason why your ideas about what a person is like, or what people with an identity are like, should trump the experience and history and, you know, understanding of their own being, of the person with said identity, no reason at all. Forcing your ideas about what a person is onto them is presumptuous and bizarre; how on earth do you think you know better about a person and their life than they do? [click to continue…]
I know it seems like we do this a lot, but it’s time to start wringing your hands again about women who go to college. Apparently there are too many of us! And now we can’t get boyfriends!
North Carolina, with a student body that is nearly 60 percent female, is just one of many large universities that at times feel eerily like women’s colleges. Women have represented about 57 percent of enrollments at American colleges since at least 2000, according to a recent report by the American Council on Education. Researchers there cite several reasons: women tend to have higher grades; men tend to drop out in disproportionate numbers; and female enrollment skews higher among older students, low-income students, and black and Hispanic students.
In terms of academic advancement, this is hardly the worst news for women — hoist a mug for female achievement. And certainly, women are primarily in college not because they are looking for men, but because they want to earn a degree.
But surrounded by so many other successful women, they often find it harder than expected to find a date on a Friday night.
Fifty-seven percent female feels “eerily like a women’s college”? Really?
The line “And certainly, women are primarily in college not because they are looking for men, but because they want to earn a degree” is also an instant classic. Way to go, New York Times.
Needless to say, this puts guys in a position to play the field, and tends to mean that even the ones willing to make a commitment come with storied romantic histories. Rachel Sasser, a senior history major at the table, said that before she and her boyfriend started dating, he had “hooked up with a least five of my friends in my sorority — that I know of.”
These sorts of romantic complications are hardly confined to North Carolina, an academically rigorous school where most students spend more time studying than socializing. The gender imbalance is also pronounced at some private colleges, such as New York University and Lewis & Clark in Portland, Ore., and large public universities in states like California, Florida and Georgia. The College of Charleston, a public liberal arts college in South Carolina, is 66 percent female. Some women at the University of Vermont, with an undergraduate body that is 55 percent female, sardonically refer to their college town, Burlington, as “Girlington.”
It’s “Girlington” because it’s 55 percent female? I think something else is going on here, and it’s not “there are too many ladies around.”
I went to New York University, which does skew female. And yes, my female friends and I joked about the dearth of single straight men on campus (NYU is also pretty LGBT-friendly and pulls in a lot of gay students). But when you look at the actual numbers of women vs. men on campus, it’s not so unbalanced that dudes are pulling five chicks a night. It seems to be a problem of perception more than statistics — if there are roughly equal numbers of men and women in a room, or if there are a few more women than men, we perceive the situation as thoroughly female-dominated. The same phenomenon happens with race. We’re used to seeing men (and white men in particular) as the standard; we’re used to them dominating higher education and the workforce. When we up the numbers of non-men in a situation where men have traditionally made up large majorities, the perception is that no more men exist – even though men are nearly half of the room.
So I am hesitant to believe that “Thanks to simple laws of supply and demand, it is often the women who must assert themselves romantically or be left alone on Valentine’s Day, staring down a George Clooney movie over a half-empty pizza box.”
It gets even worse than that, though, the Times warns. Not only are college women lonely, they’re also “hooking up,” as the kids say, in an effort to find love: [click to continue…]
Katie Drummond over at Slant/Truth gives Hilton’s piece a great take-down, pointing out that while official eating disorder diagnosis rates may not be skyrocketing, a lot of women engage in disordered eating without having a diagnosed eating disorder. But Hilton isn’t just concerned with what she deems “hysteria” over super-skinny models; see, she’s worried that for all of our obsessing over skinny girls, we’re actually really fat. Obese, even! And don’t you know that being obese is unhealthy? [click to continue…]
A guest post by Kate. Kate is a freelance writer and full-time law student. Follow her @itscompliKATEd on Twitter.
Superbowl ads are sexist. This is well trod ground: Marketers objectify women and play up stereotypes in order to sell things to (heterosexual) men. But we knew this year was going to be special. This year there was going to be some extra anti-feminist flavor. This year, there was going to be Tim Tebow.
We’ll come back to Tim and his anti-choice ad in a second. But for now, let’s take a look at the companies that decided that it would be a great idea to isolate half the population from their consumer base.
There were fewer half-naked women and dick jokes this year. Instead, the 2010 Superbowl Ad Mantra seemed to have one common theme: “Feeling castrated? . . . by women? Man up.”
Dodge Charger: Man’s Last Stand
A male voice-over starts with a first person monologue of the mundane life of the American male (“I will walk the dog, I will have fruit for breakfast”), as the ad cuts to shots of men staring blankly, blinking at the camera.
“Yeah, life is boring,” you think, “a car could fix that.” But then there’s an eerie crescendo, and it becomes clear that this voice isn’t just listing his gripes with the world, he’s listing his gripes with a person — and not just any person, a woman: “I will say yes, when you want me to say yes . . .I will take your call, I will listen to your opinion of my friends. . . I will be civil to your mother.” Simultaneously the voice-over seems to be getting angrier as the shots get tighter, finally focusing on the twitching eyes of a man in a suit. “Because I do these things, I will drive the car I want to drive.”
The ad is actually frightening. Not only because the voice-over gets more incensed as the tasks get more mundane (putting your underwear in a hamper? you mean being an adult? you think you deserve a car for that?), but because it’s maybe the most explicit misogyny I’ve ever seen in a Superbowl ad. “Feeling emasculated by your wife?” the ad seems to be saying. “Reaching your boiling point? We know you probably want to hit her, but buy a car instead.”
Oh, and did I mention that a television serial-killer (Michael Hall who plays Dexter) does the voice-over? That’s not creepy or violence promoting at all.
CNN contributor Erick Erickson is right — watching Tim Tebow tackle his mom during a Super Bowl commercial last night really inspired me to give up the whole thinking-thoughts thing and get back in the kitchen. It’s a shame I’m too ugly to get a date, because now I have all of this food and no one to give it to. How many brownies do you think 14 cats can eat?
This weekend Focus on the Family Plans plans on running a Pro-Life advertisement during the super bowl. From the moment that this was discovered, it received national attention. Groups like NOW and the feminist blogosphere waged a real effort to challenge this threat to women’s reproductive rights. The Center for Reproductive Rights wrote a letter to CBS pointing out that Ms. Tebow lived in the Philippines at the time of her supposed choice and therefore her only real option was to have the baby because abortion was and still is illegal there.
At the same time that this battle is being waged, another is going quite unnoticed. An anti-abortion group in Atlanta is targeting Black women by putting up billboards stating that Black children are an endangered species.
In January, a storm blew up over cover art for new young adult novel Magic Under Glass by Jaclyn Dolamore. I haven’t read the book, so I’ll not summarise it, but you can read about it if you click through to the author’s website. The book’s main character, Nimira, is explicitly described in non-white terms – ‘dark,’ ‘brown skin’ – as you can read over at Charlotte’s Library. Here’s what was released as the US/Canada cover.
Enjoy. Not exactly a music video, but I think better.
Now you know the deal — set your MP3 player to shuffle, and post the first ten songs that come up.
1. Spoon – Mystery Zone
2. Timbaland and Magoo – Up Jumps Da Boogie
3. Rhett Miller – Hover
4. Carmen Rizzo feat. Deer Tracks - Shadows Ramin Sakurai (SBL) Remix
5. Maxwell – Get to Know Ya
6. Feist – Mushaboom
7. Lyle Lovett – My Baby Don’t Tolerate
8. Des Ark – Jesus Loves You (But Yr Still Coming Home With Me Tonight)
9. Santogold vs. Switch and FreQ Nasty – Creator
10. Lykke Li – Time Flies
Scott Fujita. I mean, damn — an outspoken, feminist, gay-rights supporting dude who loves his grandma? Chose to play in New Orleans after Katrina, and gives a lot back to his adopted city? And he sounds pretty humble?
Fujita has spoken out before in favor of abortion rights and gay rights.
“It’s just me standing up for equal rights,” Fujita said. “It’s not that courageous to have an opinion if you think it’s the right thing and you believe it wholeheartedly.”
The Tebow ad suggests that Tebow’s mother was advised about having an abortion when she was pregnant with him, but chose instead to give birth.
The issue resonates with Fujita because he was adopted, and Fujita said he respected Tebow for standing up for what he believed in.
“The idea of focusing on the family — who wouldn’t agree with that?” Fujita said. “But the means of doing so, he and I might not see eye to eye all the way.”
When Fujita was born in 1979, his biological mother, he said, was in her teens and she gave him up for adoption because she did not have the means to raise a child.
“I’m just so thankful she had the courage and the support system to be able to carry out the pregnancy,” Fujita said. “I wouldn’t expect that of everybody.”
He and his wife have twin daughters. Those girls sound like they’re going to be raised by a great dad.
This new feminist anthology about sexual violence features essays by Feministe bloggers Jill & Cara. Support Feministe by buying the book through this link today.
Tried and Tested
The authors of this website have hand-selected these titles because we believe they may be of interest to a feminist audience.
Consider them for gifts to friends, family, or yourself! We do receive some income if you choose to order these titles based on our recommendations. All funds help support our costs to provide this space.
