Cracker: Get it Off
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To be really brief, it requires information ('you can freely choose between A and B, but I'm not telling you what they are'), and it requires freedom from non-logical non-inherent consequences.
and therein lies the problem - it requires freedom from consequences. you can have all the information in the world, but when the opportunity cost is low self-esteem because your boobs aren't big enough, then you are going to ignore the information and go ahead with the surgery. if the opportunity cost of doing the housework when your partner doesn't is being a solo-mum & having to do it anyway, then you shut up and do it. information doesn't help.
i'd also like to make clear that i am not judging strippers or other women for how they might dress or how they act. what i am judging is a society which creates the conditions that mean women feel the need to do these things or behave in these ways.
and one final point: the fact that a couple are sitting in the audience and enjoying a strip show is irrelevant. it's not whose in the audience and how happy they are feeling that's at issue here, it's what's happening on stage. it's a sad indictment on the human race that that we have, in our long and chequered history, enjoyed wathcing people being fight each other to the death; have enjoyed bulls being slowly and painfully killed by matadors; have enjoyed watching roosters peck each other to death as a sport; have enjoyed watching women have sex with animals; and many other variations. again, i know that these are very different to stripping etc. the point is that if audience enjoyment is based on exploitation, then it doesn't seem in any way right to me - even when it's women watching other women and loving it.
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I have enjoyed reading your posts, Anjum.
i would like to think that we could create the space for women to express their unhappiness with sexual images & exploitation without having to take the kind of flak they do currently (not here on PAS, of course!)
That's very positive of you, but even here on PAS, when some of us have been trying to express our worries, we have been told that we are making (invalid) generalisations...
But back to thinking about choice.
There's a fascinating passage in Hobbes' Leviathan about freedom.
Fear and liberty are consistent; as when a man throweth his goods into the sea for fear the ship should sink, he doth it nevertheless very willingly, and may refuse to do it if he will: it is therefore the action of one that was free: so a man sometimes pays his debt, only for fear of imprisonment, which because nobody hindered him from detaining, was the action of a man at liberty. And generally all actions which men do in commonwealths, for fear of the law, are actions, which the doers had liberty to omit.
Hobbes, Leviathan, Chapter 21: Of the Liberty of Subjects
In other words, even if you throw all your property overboard because the alternative is dying, throwing them overboard is a freely chosen action.
If you are inclined to agree with Hobbes, then I suspect that you are going to be less inclined to worry about whether or not people in the sex industry, or strippers, or even just girls wearing raunchy clothes, have made a free choice.
If you think there's something dubious about Hobbes' claim, then I think you are going to be more inclined to worry about what constitutes consent. That's what's driving my concerns about consent. I'm just not so sure that it's always freely given.
Part of the problem is, when it comes to sex and sexuality, the choices we make can have rotten consequences (and fabulous ones too). The problem is that unlike lots of the other choices we can make (where to live, what type of work to pursue, what sort of food we eat), sexual choices can be very intimate. Sex can be just a casual and fun transaction, but it can also be one of the ways we get closest to another person, and reveal ourselves most intimately to another person. We can be very vulnerable through sex, and the sexual choices we make can have enormous consequences. And of course, what may be one person's fun can be another person's anguish. All of which tends to explain why we can be deeply ambivalent and worried about raunch culture and strip clubs.
Another thought - raunch culture makes things very difficult for boys and young men too. I'm told that many, if not most, teenage boys and young men think / fantasize a lot about sex. And at the same time, here are (some, not all) girls wearing incredibly sexy clothes, sending a heap of signals that they are sexually available. So what's a young man to do? Yet some of those girls may not really want to be sexually available - they just like the clothes, or feel that they have to wear the clothes in order to fit in. The young man propositions them, and gets turned down, or comes on too strong, and the young woman feels forced into a situation she doesn't really want to be in (in the worst cases, we call this rape). Now of course this is not what happens all the time, or even a lot of the time, but I assume that it happens at least some of the time. What a terribly confusing and risky position for young men to be in.
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What a terribly confusing and risky position for young men to be in.
meh.
just lift the taboo on masturbation. girls thinking that it's "grubby" is counter-productive.
all that energy has to go somewhere.
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Who said girls think it's grubby? Afterall, they do it too.
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and women do it even more.....
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I have something twee to add before going off to make pancakes and have a weekend.
There's a war between the rich the poor
a war between the man and the woman
(de do do, de do do)
Come on back to the war....Go Leonard Coen.
Great discussion, don't know about the term `consent` in these contexts tho.
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Having said that, I couldn't think off too many political reporters down here who would read that and not think it was referring to them, with a smug smile on their face. They're a breed unto themselves.
Damien you are sooo going to get lynched (again?) the next time you show up at 3.2
;-)
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"The young man propositions them, and gets turned down, or comes on too strong, and the young woman feels forced into a situation she doesn't really want to be in (in the worst cases, we call this rape)."
The 1970s Feminist "All Men are Rapist". Isn't accepted today as valid and is simply insulting. The "She was asking for it" defense has no standing either.
I recently heard on TV the "Women can't rape" claim - admittedly from a victim of rape - but I simply don't accept that. Sexual violence in lesbian relationships exists.
Far better we examine the various power relationships, like I/O saying he knows past strippers who contribute to PA, making sure they know he knows - a little emotional blackmail goes along way.
Deborah I do value you're input but still scarred from 1970s rhetoric.
Emma
They're all friends & family who've had breast reductions, one or two had their backs fused too. So more physical health than finacial. -
That's very positive of you, but even here on PAS, when some of us have been trying to express our worries, we have been told that we are making (invalid) generalisations...
That's unfair, Deborah. It's a bit hard to have a meaningful discussion if I can't make an observation to the contrary.
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Damien you are sooo going to get lynched (again?)
d., you do know how small this town is, don't you?
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An elite sports women.
I'm left thinking of Mata Hari "Harlot, yes, but traitor, never" (although I'm not calling her any names - greater good & all that).
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/section/4/story.cfm?c_id=4&objectid=10459723
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Thinking back about all the times I got my kit off at her age - photos were taken, but I never got paid.
Xmas doo at Addington Raceway was obligatory to run the track nude (of course boozed). -
we now have this weird mishmash that's neither oppression nor enlightenment
I've spent two days rambling when this is all I really wanted to say. Thank you, Heather.
does that mean that all this "empowerment" is so much hot air?
Ditto, Che
so you could argue that women or men have all kinds of choices, but that argument always overlooks that the range of choices is extremely limited. usually we're given the impression of freedom of choice, but in fact...
Ditto, ditto, Che
It took me a long, long time to realise that my mother nagged me about my weight because she really thought I would be happier thin, and because she had her own body image problems
I hear you, Emma, but in my case it took no time at all for me to figure it out. I love the woman, but why would you tell a 14 yr old "If you were skinny, I'd buy you any clothes you liked." Luckily, I was far too in love with myself to let stuff like that sink in too far. It irks her greatly, even now, and she's mellowed hugely, that I could be happy with as much body fat content as I have. She's always trying to shut me up around my two nieces when I go on about fat facism etc. And I just laugh at her when we're all having a naked female only swim, and she tells me the girls don't want to see a fat body naked. Ah, the battle is large, but there are more ways to win the war than the traditional ones, eh?
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Daleaway - "are we all playing let's pretend?"
Speaking for myself: not really. Kinda sorta. Yes in the sense that all kinds of rules of society could be characterised as mutual "let's pretend", including gender, which I believe is socially constructed.
Describing someone as their preferred gender when I don't see it that way may be a polite fiction, but it saves a great deal of awkward, inaccurate, periphrastic and quite probably hurtful verbiage. Likewise I don't see how treating a transsexual as they wish to be treated really hurts me, so I do. There may be contexts where making fine distinctions really matters, and then perhaps I wouldn't play let's pretend, but if your hypothetical FTM wants to use the same changing rooms as I do I couldn't care less.
I do think that using a transsexual as an example of their adopted gender is peculiar, maybe oxymoronic, and not really providing great evidential force. Using Georgina Beyer in this case seems a bit problematic to me too.
I'd be interested to know how Che thinks his theory of group identity (you can't proclaim yourself a member, other members have to acknowledge you) works out here.
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I hear you, Emma, but in my case it took no time at all for me to figure it out. I love the woman, but why would you tell a 14 yr old "If you were skinny, I'd buy you any clothes you liked." Luckily, I was far too in love with myself to let stuff like that sink in too far. It irks her greatly...
*weeps* Man, my mother was a great deal more subtle than that (are you sure you want to eat/buy/wear that?) but yeah, she still can't quite get over the fact that I'm comfortable how I am, and that I've been comfortable ten kilos heavier, and uncomfortable ten kilos lighter. (Extended illness, she thought I looked great.)
But if it's our mothers who screw us up, that makes it really easy to put right for our daughters. That's why, while I understand social conditioning as a reason, I'm reluctant to accept it as an excuse. There's only one other comment on my body that sticks in my mind from my teenage years, and that was my bio teacher pointing me out in class as someone well designed to survive an ice age. Thanks, dude.
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I'm told that many, if not most, teenage boys and young men think / fantasize a lot about sex.
great irony.
I'm sort of with your Hobbesian argument over freewill. There's is a basic asymmetry - the sex industry is predominantly staffed by females. Yes, many women do choose, but why don't as many men "choose" the same career? (and that's "as many" - there are male strippers and gigolos but far fewer, and I don't believe that the numbers would even out if society were more "liberated".)
The "All men are rapists" is a very annoying unifem-type argument but there is again an asymmetry, most rapists are men (and again I don't think the numbers would even out if society were more "liberated".)
At this point I would probably say something about evolution but it's Sat night and there's things to do apparently.
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That's very positive of you, but even here on PAS, when some of us have been trying to express our worries, we have been told that we are making (invalid) generalisations...
That's unfair, Deborah. It's a bit hard to have a meaningful discussion if I can't make an observation to the contrary.
I feel really snippy about this, Russell, because reading back through the thread, virtually everyone was making a huge effort to avoid generalisations. They were saying, "This is my experience...", "This is my concern...", offering evidence to the contrary, clearly demarcating where their concerns lay. People have been incredibly careful with their language. I have tried to be especially careful with mine, and each time I posted, I made it clear that I was talking about issues of consent. That's a long way from making generalisations.
So from my point of view, it's really hard to engage in a meaningful discussion if I get dismissed as just making generalisations.
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"The young man propositions them, and gets turned down, or comes on too strong, and the young woman feels forced into a situation she doesn't really want to be in (in the worst cases, we call this rape)."
The 1970s Feminist "All Men are Rapist". Isn't accepted today as valid and is simply insulting. The "She was asking for it" defense has no standing either.
Sure. I think this is one of the downsides of raunch culture, that the sexual terrain has beocme very confused. That's the sort of thing a mature (ahem... middle aged?) adult can, or ought to be able to cope with, but a kid in his late teens?
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Some of them are. I enjoy the occasional times I still go and pick my son up from Western Springs. There is no uniform, so everyone dresses as their favourite youth cult. There are a few Paris Hilton wannabes (and it looks dodgy), but a hell of a lot more goths, alt-girls, sporty types, etc.
I have always thought that it must be very hard to be a goth in NZ. Fine in winter, when you can lurk indoors, but it must be very hard to keep up that pasty white skin in summertime.
Sure, kids are experimenting with their identity at that stage, and no doubt that's a large part of what's going on with raunch culture too. It's also why, if I'm trying to work out where raunch culture fits on some sort of sexuality / sex industry scale, it comes right down at the end, where frankly, even if I don't like it, if that's the way they want to dress, well, whatever.
I get annoyed though, when I go into Pumpkin Patch or Just Kids to get clothes for my primary school age girls, and find flimsy crop tops, and fake fur. WTF?
(I also get annoyed that they only make easy-fit clothes. I can make them fit my skinny little girls by pulling the clever elastic waistbands in, but they look ridiculous. No one makes clothes for skinny children any more....)
But this is not just about teenagers experimenting with identity. Like Anjum (?) said upthread, there's a whole set of messages about the sexual availability of women that go along with it.
It's tricky though. I choose my clothes carefully, so that I look and feel good in them. I like wearing knee length skirts and medium high heels, because I know the combination makes my legs look good. I avoid low cut tops, because actually, unlike Emma, cleavage is something that I missed out on in the genetic stakes. I like clothes that emphasise my waist, which is not too bad at all, even though it's not as firm as it was pre-children. So what's the difference between that, and dressing in raunchy clothes?
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I have to agree with Deborah, on this one, Russell. She has made very valid points, none of which have been generalisations. I certainly may have made generalisations, but then no-one has ever explained to me, after 43 years on this planet, and having spent 41 of them arguing vehemently sometimes just for the sake of it, why exactly generalisations are such a bad thing. I even went and had a look just to see exactly what the word means. This is what thesaurus.com has to say about it
So which of the three definitions are we looking at? An idea or conclusion having general application? I still don't get it. Someone help me out here. Why is generalisation a bad thing? -
I should have said - why are generalisations such a bad thing in a context where one is talking about gobal concepts - eg gender and sexual politics
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__That's unfair, Deborah. It's a bit hard to have a meaningful discussion if I can't make an observation to the contrary.__
I feel really snippy about this, Russell, because reading back through the thread, virtually everyone was making a huge effort to avoid generalisations.
But you put me in the difficult position of making it appear that I'm being insensitive or dismissive simply by disagreeing with you.
But I was also referring to what daleaway said here too:
Music is huge with the younger generation - far more so than when I was their age - and it's become almost entirely a nasty soup of male hormones. Much of it is plain malevolent towards women.
That's not even near true. Yes, some of what's in the singles chart (T-Pain's puerile 'Bartender) meets that description, but if you take a look there you'll also see Pink, Fergie and Gwen Stefani. Pink's song is 'Mr President' and even the Fergie song is about young woman sadly farewelling her boyfriend because she's off to pursue her life goals. The Plain White T's 'Hey There Delilah' is some guy in a band telling his girlfriend to just stay in school and they'll be together soon enough. The highest entrants on the album charts are the High School Musical soundtrack and the new Katchafire album.
So, yes, I thought saying that modern music is "almost entirely a nasty soup of male hormones" and "malevolent towards women" was an unwarranted generalisation.
I won't back through it all, but yes, I did observe that the kind of dressing you were concerned about was, from my experience, far from universal among young women.
I won't go on, but I get wary when one generation despairs of the moral state of a younger one because it dresses or acts differently. I thought you and anjuman and daleaway were actually being quite negative about young women at times.
But feel free to disagree :-)
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stephen said:
I'd be interested to know how Che thinks his theory of group identity (you can't proclaim yourself a member, other members have to acknowledge you) works [in gender politics].
nah, my theory is one of nationalism and cultural/ethnic identity. it could play out in relation to gendered identity, but i'm never applied it.
and a slight pedantry from me. the theory is "i can proclaim myself a member of any group, but other members have to acknowledge me to make that proclamation valid".
a tangible example of that is my maori ancestry. by virtue of descent i can claim, ko te ati awa toku iwi au. ko whakarongotai toku marae au.
but, because i'm physically, linguistically, and culturally pakeha, that claim will meet resistance.
as i say, how that type of subjective claim could play out in gender politics? i dunno.
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and a slight pedantry from me
Please, Che. Pendantry ...
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yes i russell, i completely disagree. i'll say it again. i'm not judging individual women and how they dress or behave. i'm judging the societal pressures that push them into making unhealthy choices, that fail to provide decent female role models, that make them feel they need to have invasive surgery that interferes with the natural functions of their bodies and can cause lifelong pain (ask women with heavy breasts about the constant back pain - then you'll understand why michael's female relatives had breast reduction surgery for health reasons). if i want young girls to widen their horizons, to love who they are without having to resort to a surgeon's knife, to see themselves as human beings that deserve more than spending their energy trying to fit into the mould that fuels male sex fantasies etc, and you see that as being negative to young women, then we are clearly talking past each other. and it's exactly the point i made earlier - that it's almost impossible to fight against raunch culture without taking the flak.
look at the examples you've given above. fergie of the "my hump, my hump, my hump, my lovely lady bumps"? all three fit into the predominant raunch culture image. so when they do sing the serious stuff, if embeds the notion that you have to be like that to be taken seriously. yes, there are some exceptions. but we talk in generalisations because that's what is predominant. when the majority of what you see is otherwise, then the exceptions tend to have little impact.
But if it's our mothers who screw us up, that makes it really easy to put right for our daughters. That's why, while I understand social conditioning as a reason, I'm reluctant to accept it as an excuse.
see, this would work if i, as a mother, were the only voice my daughters hear. but throughout her normal day, they are getting so many more message telling her something different, that my voice tends to get drowned out. i have to compete with television ads, billboards, music videos, magazines, etc. ok, at the age they are, i can protect them from night clubs and red light zones, but that's about it.
i'm constantly being told by my 15 year old that no-one thinks like me, that i'm old-fashioned, that she doesn't want to be different, that she wants to be like everyone else. i still keep pushing the message that who she is is more important than how she looks, in the hope that it will get embedded into her subconscious and pop out before the time that she's considering doing some major damage to her body.
for every person who is like jackie, who can withstand the pressures of the cultural frame in which she lives and come out whole & happy, there are many that can't and don't. the consequences for the ones that don't are severe enough for us to question whether the images women are constantly bombarded with are healthy for the individual women and for society as a whole.
my concern is not, russell, about how many girls are dressing to fit the raunch culture image. it's about how that culture is effecting their self-esteem, their choices, and their ability to achieve. i'm not interested in their moral state; i'm interested in their physical and mental well-being.
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