Daily Feminist Reads

Lots of feminist-y stuff out there today, good and bad. Check it out:

1. Gloria Steinem on “chick flicks.” And damn is she good:

After all, if you think back to your school days, much of what you were assigned as great literature could have been dismissed as “chick lit.” Indeed, the books you read probably only survived because they were written by famous guys.

Think about it: If Anna Karenina had been written by Leah Tolstoy, or The Scarlet Letter by Nancy Hawthorne, or Madame Bovary by Greta Flaubert, or A Doll’s House by Henrietta Ibsen, or The Glass Menagerie by (a female) Tennessee Williams, would they have been hailed as universal? Suppose Shakespeare had really been The Dark Lady some people supposed. I bet most of her plays and all of her sonnets would have been dismissed as some Elizabethan version of ye olde “chick lit,” only to be resurrected centuries later by stubborn feminist scholars.

Indeed, as long men are taken seriously when they write about the female half of the world — and women aren’t taken seriously when writing about themselves much less about men or male affairs — the list of Great Authors will be more about power than about talent.

2. Amanda on how Details magazine hates men. And women. I would say they hate women a whole lot more. Amanda is more optimistic than I am, as she seems to think that Details is insulting men by assuming that many of them get off on controlling, violating and otherwise injuring women. But as far as I can tell, a whole lot of men do get off on controlling, violating and otherwise injuring women (see: the pro-life movement; most pornography; sexual assault and intimate partner violence rates and laws around the world). Call my cynical, but I suspect that pro-feminist dudes are a distinct minority. Hence articles like “Is it OK to Demand Anal Sex?” Amanda is right on:

They paint a dreary picture of how terrible men are in such vivid detail I had to pinch myself and remind myself that I know plenty of men who don’t exhibit the behavior portrayed in this article. The ostensible subject is anal sex, but it’s really more about men who see sex primarily as a way to abuse women and shore up their own egos through domination. As you can imagine from the use of the word “demand”. No, it’s not really okay to “demand” any sex act. The very idea of demanding in ostensibly consensual relationships between adults is loathsome. As you can imagine, the rest of the article posits that women are alternately games of “Whack-A-Mole”, and men who penetrate the most orifices somehow win and that women are essentially restaurants where men can order off a menu, except you know, they don’t pay.

(…)

Straight men who are into kinky stuff on any level, pay attention. Guys like the ones described in this article are The Enemy. They value kinky acts only because they think those things degrade women and they want to see women degraded because their own weak egos depend on it. Because there are so many guys like this, it’s hard for women not to wonder if a guy wants to do kinky things so he can lose respect for you and start treating you like dirt. So women are reluctant to do a lot of stuff they might otherwise want to do—like anal sex—because all they can think is, “Is he laughing at me and thinking I’m a dirty whore because I did this? Does he think he ‘won’? Is he going to treat me like shit?” So not only are these guys assholes to women, they’re assholes to guys who are not assholes to women.

3. Violet Socks on why ECT is a feminist issue — and why women who undergo it are often ignored. A New York woman is being forced to undergo electroconvulsive therapy against her will, and her story is getting almost no play. Head over there, read about it, contact state officials, and spread the word.

4. Now that Jane has gone under, there’s a still-not-as-good-as-Sassy magazine void to fill. Missbehave is trying to do that. Unfortunately, they make me want to hit something:

“We’ve got the illest troop of girls together,” Samantha said, a gold “MISSBEHAVE” nameplate necklace hanging from her neck. “And we like, let it rip. We speak our fuckin’ mind. But we are not fuckin’ feminist by any means.”

Indeed, Missbehave is fairly unabashed in both its hipsterdom and its seeming viewpoint that girls — its writers and its audience, presumably — are obsessed with getting boys to like them and don’t really want to read anything else advising them otherwise.

Wow! Sounds so edgy and different! Thank God there’s finally a woman’s magazine that tells me how much I need a boyfriend and what I can do to get one! And thank God they aren’t all feminist about it.

5. North Carolina GOP representative David Almond has demonstrated his Moral Majority values by exposing himself to a female employee, chasing her around the room, and yelling “suck it, baby, suck it.”

6. Jesselyn at Daily Kos tells the story of how she got pregnant after taking Plan B — something she may have been able to avoid if she had been able to access the drug earlier.

7. Brownfemipower has a post up about connecting communities at a time where divisiveness runs through even like-minded groups and traditional activist organizations seem shockingly out of touch. She ends with a question:

And so in the spirit of using media to empower our own, I ask this question–what are the most pressing issues in YOUR community? What are the issues that fall under the radar of the politicians, the policy pushers, the money makers, the fundraisers? Be real here–sure the war in Iraq is huge and important–but in your specific community maybe the issue is not so much the war, but the fact that men are coming home brutalized and ripped from their humanity, and for some reason, the incidences of spousal abuse have sky rocketed since the war began.

Or, maybe as a commenter noted on a different thread–sure, poverty is a big deal, but what really is driving the community insane is that there’s no speed bumps on the local roads and the kids have no place to play because cars are going to fast through the community.

Or maybe spousal abuse is a huge problem, but the real issue is that housing costs so much in the area that women can’t afford to escape the abuse.

Or maybe, like my community, your community is a sister city of a largely rich white city and that rich white city drives the cost of living in your community through the roof while at the same time stealing all of the local investment and jobs.

Tell it like it is–big or small, complicated or easy–put it out there.

Let’s figure out for ourselves what’s really going on.

Head over there and join the discussion.