Posts by Deborah
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Don't fuck with the Janeites -- they eat Trekkies for afternoon tea.
Hmmm.... maybe that's why I find myself gnawing on my fingers around 3.30pm each day. 'Though if I had to choose, it would be Jane every time.
A Maggot by John Fowles, anyone? SF or literary? I would say both, but then I happily do both. 'Though not Iain M Banks, which I find tedious. However I have enjoyed many of Iain Banks' novels.
But SF culture might exist outside of literary culture, because some of SF culture is weird. Much as I enjoy Star Trek (one excellent weekend, in company with dear friends, we watched the first five Star Trek movies on video, and then on Sunday evening, we went to see Star Trek VI on the big screen... we were the only people in the theatre who got the Kobayashi Maru joke), I have never, ever dressed in a costume, or gone to a convention, 'though I do admit to having played 500 with ST:TNG cards. I can understand why some writers want to distance themselves from the wilder shores of SF. But rejecting it entirely seems ungrateful to me. I'm sure that The Handmaid's Tale played better just because people were already sensitized to the idea of alternate future realities. And I (somewhat vaguely) recall a story of Islander's, in which whales were working on a subsonic (?) wave that could be used against whalers (or perhaps human beings in general), if necessary. Those flights of imagination are possible because of science fiction (NB: I'm well aware that Islander does not reject SF).
(Edited to fix my grammar... exits quietly with chagrined look)
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Perhaps they are by good writers, writers who have readers rather than fans.
But I am by any measure, a fan of Jane Austen. I read at least one, and usually two or three or four, of her books every year. I get the movie adaptations on DVD. I read criticism. One Fringe show that I am planning to go to this year is Jane Austen's music (soprano and pianist singing songs from the collection at Chawton). I think it is entirely possible to be a fan of a literary writer.
Unless you wish to argue that the divine Jane is not a good writer. In which case you will have Craig may have words with you.
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Hi! Back from the internet-less Kangaroo Island, and I've caught up on a week's worth of thread. Some thoughts on various things people have been saying.
Regarding infertility: Been there, done that, and it's bloody awful and sometimes I still cry about it, mostly if I happen to hear some particular songs. I'm one of the lucky ones - we have three beautiful girls, including twins. But it still hurts.
Regarding twins: @Recordari - one egg or two egg twins for you? We've got one egg twins, which is not what you'd expect given fertility treatment where two egg twins are much more common.
Regarding theory vs practice: The personal is political, neh? Part of what goes on with theory vs practice is considering the experience of this man here, and that man there, and the other chap over there, and thinking about the similarities between them, and drawing out the patterns and the common experiences. As soon as you do that, you're doing theory. More than that, the choice that men may now exercise, albeit with some difficulty some times, to be primary care givers, or even to be caregivers at all, in many ways came out of feminist theorising about the value of caring work.
Regarding sex and gender: it's a fairly common idea that gender /= sex. Sex is the physical manifestation, and gender the social role, which may be expressed in many varying ways, and which may or may not coincide with the usual sex associated with that gender. Eg. male sex is usually associated with being a man (gender), but not always. If we think that gender is determined (wholly) by sex, then we have no way of understanding transsexual people. Sex = physical, gender = social, and for good reason, sex and gender are correlated, and often causally related, but not always. That's why is sensible, and informative, to think about gender in social terms (eg. the "provider" role that men are expected to fill, and the "carer" role that women are expected to fill). So I buy into Giovanni's contention that gender is to a large extent, socially constructed (based on physical vs social understanding of sex and gender).
Regarding breast vs bottle feeding: Damn straight, it's possible to feel as though you are a failure if you can't go the woo way. I say this in relation to breastfeeding my elder daughter, but then not being able to breastfeed my younger daughters, and feeling absolutely rotten about it. And the reason I could not feed them was because I did not get the breastfeeding support I needed, in a hospital which claimed to be part of the Baby Friendly hospital initiative. So a head-nod to whoever it was up-thread who said that the critical issue was support to be able to breastfeed, not just rhetoric (I would use 'tautoko', but that feels just a little like cultural stealing to me, 'though that may be a bit damned precious).
Regarding birth: I had three vaginal births, but all with epidurals, the second because my obstetrician, who was a midwife before she became a doctor, felt that things went wrong too quickly with twins, so she wanted to be ready to jump if necessary. This was a good thing - the girls were both posterior, which makes for a long and difficult second stage. (The baby comes out head first, but face up, which makes the pressure on the cervix and the angle through the birth canal all wrong, for want of a better way of putting it. But they come out facing the heavens, so they are "stargazers".) My elder daughter was posterior too, and after twenty-four hours in fruitless labour, and epidural was my friend. But we still had a ventouse (and having read your story, Ben, I'm having a quiet little 11-years later OMG-thought, and a thought or two for you and your family and your lad), and forceps, and it was a couple of years before we stopped worrying. So highly interventionist, but I was fine with that, because although I wanted to go as low-intervention as possible, and my midwives / obstetrician were fine with that, my overriding goal was babies safely born.
Regarding names, for pregnant partners: I was not amused when my husband referred to me as the great white whale when I was at term with my twins.
Regarding boys and men who are raped: As I have argued elsewhere, no means no, and not-saying-yes means no, and the only thing that means 'yes' is "Yes". Anything else is sex without consent, and that is rape. We need to have that understanding of rape, if we are to make sense of the claim that men can be raped too. Sex where a boy is involved, and by 'boy' I mean a child under the age of consent, is rape, because by law, a child under the age of consent simply can not consent to sex. He, or she, can't say yes. Perhaps if we start to take notions of consent seriously, we may make much better progress with respect to understanding and supporting boys who have been raped. Or perhaps if we work harder on understanding and supporting boys who are raped, we may make much more progress with respect to understanding notions of consent. And here I nod my head to Steven, who has done so much to alert me to these issues.
Regarding rape as a feminist issue: I thought that the import of what Danielle said was that more women are raped, and that makes rape a feminist issue. Think of it this way. Yes, men are raped, and yes, women are raped. As it turns out, more women are raped than men. Why? Why is it that women are more likely to be raped than men? As soon as you ask that question, you are engaged in a gender analysis. And that is a good thing to do! We need to understand the differences, and the similarities, between the rape of women, and the rape of men. If we don't, we may not find the most effective ways to combat rape of women, and rape of men. I don't know the stats, but I'm willing to bet that more women are raped than men are raped, for reasons of physical power alone (NB - speculation). That immediately suggests one way in which the rape of men and the rape of women may differ significantly, and failing to understand the difference could be problematic. I think that rape is a feminist issue, just because the incidence of rape differs between men and women. But it is a feminist issue that does not concern only women. I don't think we should read "feminist issue" as meaning "women only", and I don't think Danielle meant it that way.
Regarding prostitution: Fark!! I know very little about prostitution. For my (untutored) part, very roughly, if a woman freely consents to sex work, then you go for it, girl. Mutatis mutandis, for men. But free consent is absolutely critical. Otherwise, it's rape. With respect to the Bindel column that Russell linked to, what disturbed me was not so much the column (y'kno, wev, does this really add anything), as the comments, and the idea, expressed in some of the comments, that men are entitled to sex. WTF?!!! No one is entitled to sex. If you can persuade someone that zie would enjoy having sex with you, then that's great. But no matter how much you may want it, you are not entitled to sex at all. I find the attitude of entitlement very disturbing.
Regarding March: @Danielle - thinking of you.
As for Kangaroo Island. It was very pleasant, if internet-less. But I gave a very jaundiced response to the question about scenic beauty. No, I did not find it beautiful. It was just more burnt Australian hillocks. Where was the mountain, or at least decent range of hills, that ought to be at the centre of any island? We did see some lovely gum forests, and a beautiful cave, 'though it was not the match of the Takaka caves in Golden Bay. The beaches were nice enough, but give me the Coromandel, or the black sands of Taranaki any day.
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Feck! PAS ate my comment. Excuse me while I retrieve what I can and recreate the rest.
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BenWilson, it's worth remembering that your whole experience of being so involved in caring for your children has at least in part come about because of feminism. At its best, although feminism prioritises as better life for women, it not not meant to be better than men, just better than the lives women have now, and ideally, better for everyone. Y'know - the "patriarchy harms men too" thought.
I think Giovanni is right: anger was, and is, needed to act as a catalyst for (at least some) changes. I doubt that we would have Women's Refuge and Rape Crisis and other such institutions without a powerful starting point, and the basic emotion of anger may have been that starting point.
With respect to carrots and sticks, the wonderful Mary Wollstonecraft argued for education for women, as a matter of justice (stick), but she also offered a powerful carrot: educated women would make better wives and mothers (carrot). One of the essay questions I sometimes set for my students is "Do Mary Wollstonecraft's prudential (carrot) arguments undermine her ethical (stick) arguments?"
Anyway, I hope you're all having a lovely time. I would love to join in and play some more too, but we are busy packing to go to the beach for a week, sans internet.
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But shooting possums from the upstairs sundeck sounds like fun...
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Excluding boys is bat-shit crazy, all by itself, but on top of that piece of crazy, it's asking (some) women to deny a part of themselves. I happen to be a mother of daughters, the most wonderful, lovely, gorgeous girls in the world, of course, and they are an integral part of my identity. I don't mean that I am lost in them, or that I identify only as a mother. But they mean so much to me. I could no more walk away from them that I could fly to the moon. It would mean denying a fundamental part of myself. I know that not all mothers feel this way, but many do, including lesbian and/or radical feminist mothers of boys. I imagine that if I had sons, they would be just as precious to me, just as much part of my understanding of myself, as my daughters are.
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That stance is just being anti-HUMAN.
Yes. There's radical, and then there's hate.
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BenWilson said:
The way I see it, male responsibility for feminism ends at "giving woman an equal chance", and the rest is the job of women, to seize those chances, to make good on them, and the flipside of this empowerment is taking the responsibility for failure too.
Okay, but that's a huge job, ranging from rethinking gender roles with respect to childcare, to eliminating the type of discriminiation that sees women paid less than men with equal qualifications and experience, to valuing caring work more (typically gender-aligned, 'though of course, you can always find men working in caring roles too).
And he also says this:
I think this has happened, and continues to happen. Which actually means it's the job of women to sort out the extreme feminists, to put them in their place, to decide what position to take.
Hmmm... which they are doing. Plenty of feminists have roundly rejected large portions of the thinking of people like Mary Daly. She was kind of not known widely any more in feminism, and her thinking had been marginalised, to the extent that at least one major feminist blogger was unaware of her transphobia.
But I don't see why men shouldn't participate in this, even if only to say that x, y, z, view is problematic for whatever reasons.
I would love to stay and keep talking, but I have a critically important appointment to get my hair restored to my preferred colour...
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TracyMac mentioned Mary Daly upthread. Sady at Tiger Beatdown has an excellent obituary: Acts of Contrition: Feminism, Privilege, and the Legacy of Mary Daly.
ETA: A post from Queen Emily at Hoyden about Town about feminism and transphobia: The legacies of trans-exclusive feminism (aka why are you angry?).