Posts by giovanni tiso
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One would think this ought to be a slightly bigger story than it is. Surely there's a minibar angle in it somewhere?
Hah!
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The Bechdel test:
Yes, and it's a pass for SATC, at least in the olden days.
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See, the concerning thing about how I spend my days is that I can not tell if you are being sarcastic or not.
I was not being sarcastic. (Oh, reaaallly? And so forth, ad libitum.) (But really, I wasn't.)
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The thing is, gender discrimination hurts _everyone_. It's not just a women's fight. And if there are men willing to stand up and say "I am a feminist", then more power to them.
I might just have to concede the point, you make a pretty tight case.
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You don't need to be gay to support gay rights. There are people who died to uphold the rights of groups - racial, socioeconomic, religious, based on gender or sexual orientation - that they didn't belong to. Yet anyone can be a black rights activitst, but to be a black activist you probably need to be black. On one level it's just semantics, yes (Larry Wilmore on Louis Gates - and I'm paraphrasing: "That whole episode, the being arrested, was great for him: he hadn't been black in thirty years!") but on another it recognises that the subjects of identity politics are also real.
One of the most vilified actions of organised feminists historically has been the creation of women-only spaces, which I'm all for. And they recognise that in some circumstances it makes sense to distinguish and it makes sense to exclude. And that "let's all get along" is very often the answer, but not always.
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Possibly more than slightly tangential, but today this post from one of my favourite blogs has been going round and round in my head, sparking a lot of 'yeah, maybe, I dunno, maybe'.
That post built up to a rather cracking finale.
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Nevertheless, it feels weird to see people telling other people they they can or can't be feminists directly underneath a post that contains:
Should we just accept that then? It sounded to me more like a starting point for discussion than the end of the argument.
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Now, I have never experienced doing the same work for a lower rate of pay, but that doesn't mean I'm not a feminist
You know what it's like to be a woman in a world where these discriminations still exist, though, right? And besides your feminism will be inflected by your different experience of these things, and you live in a better world because earlier feminists won some battles - with help from some men. They fought so you didn't have to have that particular experience.
I'm no essentialist. I'd also say that the chap with a twig and berries working next to your mum experienced gender discrimination, and that it was valuable - it could have made him a supporter of your mum's rights. But I'm still reluctant to make that final step and to identify. I still see it as problematic.
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I can imagine what it is like, too. It's not even very hard
Experiencing and imagining are quite different things.
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See, what happens when you buy into this wholesale is the extremely frustrating conversations I had with feminists at university
I sympathise with you, but surely not all appeals to experience have to be used as bludgeons, but also for what they can contribute. I consider myself lacking in the knowledge of what it is like to be a woman, even if being a woman is a tremendously complicated business, hardly a narrow set of swtich-like characteristics (no penis, yes uterus, and so forth), and I get that it makes me less qualified to speak about certain things but also that it makes women more qualified to speak about them. And seeing as feminism, in however broad a way you want to look at it, is also about the right of women to speak for themselves, I'm quite happy to accept that their utterances on the subject have inherently greater value than mine.