Tag: feminism

Bono, Glamour, and Posthumous TransBaptism: Welcome to the 1950s, 2.0

 

No posthumous messing around with my life by people who never met me, please. I am who I am, not who you think I wish I were.

It’s true when I’m talking about Mormons, who practice posthumous baptising of the dead, and it’s true when I’m talking about transactivists, who are now busily running around “baptizing” dead people into the church of trans.

Carrie-Anne Brownian outlines a few examples in her excellent article,  Transing the dead: The erasure of gender-defiant role models from history. Brownian says:

Women such as Joan of Arc, Mulan, Carson McCullers, Radclyffe Hall, Mountain Charley (Elsa Jane Forest Guerin), George Sand, and Queen Hatshepsut of Egypt, to name but a few, are now being claimed as transmen.

Why? Because they took male names, dressed in men’s clothing, or did men’s jobs. And the only possibly explanation, say the revisionism activists, is that they actually were men, on the inside.

Or maybe there’s a simpler, less sociologically trendy explanation, one that doesn’t include exploiting dead women who can’t defend themselves. Brownian says:

For much of recorded human history, even into the twentieth century, women who wanted to serve in combat, travel or live alone, work in most professions, get published, compete in sports, or conduct research felt compelled to disguise themselves as men.  That didn’t make them transmen; it made them girls and women with no other options in a patriarchal, androcentric world.  No one would have, for example, published George Eliot, or taken her seriously as a writer, had she used her birth name of Mary Ann Evans, just as Kathrine Switzer had to sign up for the Boston Marathon as K.V. Switzer as recently as 1967 because women weren’t allowed to compete.

For the life of me, I can’t understand why more feminists aren’t up in arms over this insanely sexist revisionism. Isn’t it possible that some people are just strong and tough and good at fighting and writing and running and working hard . . . while being women? Weren’t we fighting for acceptance of that very idea? Is this where 21st century progressive thought has brought us: the idea that any women who isn’t filmy, frilly creampuff, with a baby in one arm and a perfume atomizer in the other, must actually be a man?

How is this feminist? How is this anything other than the worst kind of reductionism and objectification?  How is this good or even fair for women in any way? And why aren’t they ashamed of themselves for digging up the dead? Who does that?

Oh, how progressives love to point a quivering, defiantly un-manicured finger at conservatives for trying to put women in a box, for trying to mute and quash and erase them by confining them to rigid little gender roles. And they’re not wrong. I’ve had my say about this more than once.

But look what’s happening now. We say we want to embrace the in-betweeners, those men and women — somehow, it’s usually women — who don’t fit comfortably into narrow gender boxes. But as soon as we begin, we discover to our horror that it’s kind of hard work. It doesn’t make viral headlines to say things like, “There Are Some Traits Which Many Women Exhibit, And Other Traits That Many Men Exhibit, But There Is An Awful Lot Of Overlap Even Among People Who Are As Straight As Straight Can Be; So Maybe Gender Is About More Than What You Look Like Or How You Act; Maybe It Has To Do With Your Soul OH CRAP, THAT MEANS THERE IS A SOUL And That Means Maybe I Should Put My Wang Away.”

And women. Get. Erased. Again. I said “wang” because boy oh boy, it’s always men who benefit from the transing of non-frilly women. Guess who just got named one of Glamour’s Women of the Year? Bono. Bono, the man who is not a woman.

Okay, more accurately, he was awarded a “Man of the Year” award at the Women of the Year Awards. Now, I think Bono is actually a good guy with good intentions. And no, of course Glamour magazine doesn’t matter. It’s just another place for rich people to get dressed up and give each other prizes.

But if we’re really so worried about the example we’re providing for our children, let’s start with deciding not to tell them that we can’t even fumble through a bogus Woman of the Year ceremony without looking to a man for help. The Onion called it back in 2007 with Man Finally Put in Charge of Struggling Feminist Movement. Great. Great. Thanks a lot, progress. I hate to think what will happen after Bono dies. Maybe they’ll decide that he was actually a raccoon, and the world just wasn’t ready to handle it.

And what’s even more terrifying is when, rather than looking to straight men, we come full circle and decide, one more time, that being a woman is all about the shoes, the dress, the pleasing voice. The whole Caitlyn Jenner insanity was worth getting upset about — not because it marked some acceptance of sissified men, but because it showed how ready we are to say, “This is all a woman is.” We were so ready to just erase women, to tell them that anyone could be what they are, as long as there’s enough lipstick and collagen involved.

As Brownian says:

In the brave new world of the transactivists, everyone is a collection of rigid sexist stereotypes, and any deviation from this 1950s-style binary must really be the opposite sex.

Transactivist revisionism, she says, is making the 21st century “like the 1950s 2.0.”

Here’s an idea that came straight out of my lady brain, so you may need to brush some of the common sense off before you’re ready to handle it:

There’s nothing wrong with saying “I don’t know.”

Gender is confusing. Sex is confusing. Maleness and femaleness are mysterious, and they’re not getting less mysterious just because women can now vote and be doctors and stuff. Our roles are not always clear-cut. Sometimes you think you’ve gotten to the bottom of it, and then you discover an exception to your new rule. It doesn’t mean there aren’t rules; but it does mean they are mysterious, and mysteries are truths that keep on opening up and opening up, as long as you keep looking.

So if you don’t know what it all means, can you just . . . shut up? I know shutting up doesn’t help you sell magazines or makeup lines, and it won’t get you celebrity as a specialist or a theorist or a reality TV star, but at least it’s simple.

You don’t know what it means to be a woman? Just say so, and then go do something useful with your life, like digging ditches or baking bread. Or defying your Islamic persecutors even though it means giving birth in a Sudanese prison while under a death sentence. You could do that. A woman did that, without even being even kind of a man.

That’s hard, too. I don’t know if I could do it. But if you can’t bring yourself to stop making the lives of living women worse with your nonsensical, misogynist, transprogressive yapping, at very least you could leave the dead alone.

Image: MipsyRetro via Flickr (Creative Commons)

Even dems fed up with creepy, handsy Uncle Joe Biden

Joe Biden wants the presidency so bad, he can taste it. He makes little suckling sounds in his sleep, just thinking about the seal of office. There’s a well-polished statue of Justice on his desk, and Justice’s face is permanently molded into that frozen mask of polite endurance as she waits for another intimate encounter with handsy, handsy Uncle Joe, the creepiest VP that ever veeped.

It’s so hard to know what to do with Joe Biden. It’s not possible that we’ll actually elect him in 2016, is it? Is it? We did intentionally put this sub-competent, thin-skinned, narcissistic, death-dealing clown in office, twice, on purpose, so anything could happen.  But I feel like a weary country doesn’t need to deal with a commander in chief who got elected mainly for the free pass for a four-year game of grabass.

Again.

1024px-Bill_Clinton_closeup_at_dedication_of_WWII_memorial,_May_2004

At least I was more of a boob man. The “ear, hair, and upper arms” thing is just weird, Joe.

It is encouraging that left-leaning sites like TIME and Gawker are beginning to notice that it really, truly isn’t cool for Biden the perv to get away with macking on captive women — and old women, and young women, and very young women — like a portion of meat up for his inspection, to sniff and to snuzzle, stroke and tenderize.  As Gawker says,

[A]sk yourself this: if this were any other male politician, would we be so quick to add it to the meme pile? Try this: look at all of those photos and imagine, say, Paul Ryan’s face instead of Biden’s.

Yeah, he’s a gold mine for comedy, but how the HELL are we supposed to say with a straight face that women have choices, women aren’t property, women shouldn’t have to put up with being manhandled without their permission just because the manhandler is in a position of power — and then do nothing but smile and tee-hee over Biden? Because ladies, we all know this face, right?

stephanie carter joe biden

This is the “Ugh, ugh, ugh, my nerves are going to jump right out of my skin if he doesn’t move his hands soon, but I don’t want to make a scene, so I guess I’ll just deal until he decides he’s had enough.” What was Stephanie Carter supposed to do, jab him with her hatpin? The focus was meant to be on her husband, the cameras were rolling, and so she just. had. to deal.

We women know this look because we’ve all employed it while enduring unwanted touching from a boss, a teacher, our best friend’s dad, a priest, an interviewer, a social worker, a football star — anyone who assumes we will be flattered by his attention, and who knows that everyone will blame us, not him, if we turn it into a scene.

I have teenage daughters — three of them. They need to know this kind of thing is bullshit.

As  Karol Markowicz says in TIME:

The phrase “boys will be boys” has been used historically to excuse bad behavior by men with a shrug instead of with punishment. But in 2015, things should be different. We don’t allow bosses to rub their secretaries’ shoulders, smell their hair, or look them up and down and exclaim “holy mackerel!” all things Biden has done to daughters and wives of people with much less power than he has.

And here’s the really astonishing subhead to her essay:

The only reason Joe Biden gets away with getting handsy with women is because he has a (D) after his name.

Yuh think? People are still mocking cloddish old Mitt Romney for his infelicitous“binders full of women” line, but left wing feminists on the prowl for misogynist microagressions everywhere somehow just can’t muster anything more than a weak giggle when it comes to Biden.

Well, maybe that’s starting to change. It’s not supposed to matter what your politics are: Droit du seigneur isn’t supposed to be part of 21st-century America; and it’s nice to know that even if a good portion of America doesn’t recognize Obama/Biden policies as being anti-woman, at least they can tell when the joke’s over and it’s time for creepy Uncle Joe to keep his clammy hands to himself.

***

Yes, we still need feminism.

I used to wonder why any 21st-century woman would call herself a feminist.

Feminism has become something utterly toxic. Maybe the word once stood for something useful and good, but feminism today means abortion on demand and without apology; now it means contempt for virginity, contempt for children, contempt for motherhood. Why would any right-thinking woman even want to use that name, when it puts you in such dreadful company?

And anyway, why do we even need feminism anymore?  Aren’t we done?  There once was a real need for the movement. Long ago, women truly had to fight for basic freedoms. But now we can vote, now we can own property, now we have as much as a men do in the way our lives go. We can go to school where we want, work where we want, wear what we want, travel where we want — and if we want to stay home and raise babies, assisted by female doctors and respected by our enlightened husbands, then feminism has won that right for us, too. It’s a golden post-feminist age, if we play our cards right.

In the past, when someone questioned the need for feminism, I would think of my mother, my grandmothers, my great-grandmothers, the way they lived and how they struggled.  My mother tells me of how she was suffering through a difficult labor. The male doctor, irritated, responded by strapping her down and injecting her, without her consent, with a drug that left her pain intact, but made her unable to cry out. “She feels better now,” she heard the doctor say, and she couldn’t argue with him, because she couldn’t form words.

So that’s why we needed feminism. Because unless someone told them otherwise, there would always be men who treated women like vessels, like nuisances, like inferiors, like property — and women, because they are the vessels of life, needed to fight back against this treatment. They needed to demand justice.

But no more, right?  The women’s movement was necessary, but it’s done its work.  Thank you for your efforts, suffragettes. And now we can rest, because we are all set.

Well, think again. I’m 39 years old, and feeling it. I read the blogs and comments of younger women, and I know that they’re living in a different world. Now, when I wonder if there is still a need for feminism, I look to the future of women, not the past.

When I was in college, there were a few cads and perverts on campus. But there was no such thing as nonstop porn — violent porn, available for free, 24 hours a day, on tiny devices that could be carried in your pocket.  There was no such thing as generation of men who thought of themselves as decent guys, and who expected their girlfriends to act out that porn which is normal normal normal.  There was no such things as websites dedicated to teaching guys how to drug their dates into submission, or how to trick their reluctant girlfriends into getting an abortion. There was no such thing as mainstream retailers like Target ads featuring a girl whose entire vulva was Photoshopped away, to make her trendy thigh gap gappier. There was no such thing as feminist who vehemently defended sex-selective abortion. No such thing as women live-blogging their abortions, gleefully posting pictures of their bloody baby’s remains and calling it liberation. No such thing as women selling eggs to get through college — selling their bodies to make it through college. No such thing, at least, as these things happening and progressive people calling it . . . empowering.

This is why we need feminism. Because someone needs to fight back, to tell these people, men and women: STOP. This is not what women are for. This is now how it’s supposed to go. This is not how life gets carried on. This is no life, for women or for men.

And if you think these outrages only exist in the godless secular world, you are sheltered indeed. Men and women in some Catholic circles believe that marital rape is impossible, because the marriage debt means that women never have the right to say “no.” They believe that if men use porn, it’s the woman’s fault for not being compliant or submissive enough. I know a woman whose priest told her that it’s a mortal sin to refuse her husband sex even one time, for any reason.  I know women who’ve gotten an annulment after enduring years of rape and physical and emotional abuse, and the congregation shuns . . . the woman. And her children. Because marriage is sacred.

This is why we need feminism — yes, still. This is why we need it more than we needed it twenty years ago.  Yes, the movement went astray. Yes, some evil people call themselves feminists, and do dreadful things in the name of feminism. So what?  People do dreadful things in the name of democracy, and people do dreadful things in the name of beauty. People do dreadful things in the name of Christ our savior. That doesn’t mean we abandon the name. That means we rescue it, we rectify the misuse.

When I call myself a feminist, I don’t mean that I break out in a cold sweat when McDonald’s asks me if I want a boy toy or a girl toy in my kid’s happy meal. Some people use “feminism” to mean “being upset all the time” or “getting revenge on men” or “stamping out everything that makes women seem feminine.”  So what? I don’t use it that way. Neither did John Paul II.

Yes, we still need feminism. A lot has changed in the world, but there is much more that never will change. Women will always need men in a particular way — just as men will always need women in a particular way. Barbara Valencia said it well in a recent Facebook conversation:

Left to their own devices, human beings will always drift back into oppressing and abusing one another. The strong will dominate the weak, the weak will in turn manipulate the strong. It’s like a bad wheel on a stroller that will always send the thing veering off the sidewalk into traffic if an extra counter force is not applied in the opposite direction. Christianity is supposed to be that counter force, so is feminism. Indeed, the reason why JPII’s theology is so compelling is because it uses feminist ideas and “completes” them.

It’s not about men or women being more important than the other; it’s about learning how to work in harmony. Ever hear a choir practice? Constant tuning, constant correction.

Maybe sometime in the future, we will be able to retire the word “feminism.” Maybe there will no longer be any need to struggle against injustices that men (and women!) perpetrate against the feminine. But that time is not now. That time is not coming soon. We need feminism. Yes, still.

Tweaking Sleeping Beauty

Here’s an enlightening though spoilerific commentary on the new Disney princess movie, Frozen.  Gina Dalfonzo liked the movie well enough (not everyone did), but thought the denouement of Prince Hans was unnecessarily cynical and harsh. She says (REMEMBER, I SAID SPOLERS):

The naïve and lonely Anna has fallen in love with and become engaged to Hans in the course of just one day. As her other love interest, Kristoff, tells her, this is not exactly indicative of good judgment.

However, there is something uniquely horrifying about finding out that a person—even a fictional person—who’s won you over is, in fact, rotten to the core. And it’s that much more traumatizing when you’re six or seven years old. Children will, in their lifetimes, necessarily learn that not everyone who looks or seems trustworthy is trustworthy—but Frozen’s big twist is a needlessly upsetting way to teach that lesson.

I haven’t seen the movie, but this article caught my interest because it’s about something that niggles at me:  how to tell lovely, romantic stories to the kids, without giving them dangerously stupid ideas about love?

Disney is doing penance for decades of promoting the idea that a kiss between a strange man and a vacant, helpless young woman can signify true love — and that is a worthy effort.  Maybe once upon a time, it was okay to show a princess who liked being macked on by strangers in her sleep, because everyone knew it was just a story, la di dah.

But today?  Listen, I’m no “rape here, rape there, rapey-rapey everywhere” anti-princess zealot, but people today are so clueless, so utterly innocent of a basic understanding of virtue, that we have to be really careful.  We can’t assume that mom and dad are teaching kids what love and marriage are really about.  I recently read an article by a teacher after the Steubenville rape.  She said that her students had learned that you’re not supposed to have sex with someone who says “no.”  But a sleeping girl isn’t saying no.  To them, this was a dilemma.  How are they supposed to know if she consents or not, if she’s not even conscious?  No one had told them (probably out of fear of imposing outmoded standards of morality) why it was important to gain consent. Consent, to them, was just a secret password to gain sex, and in its absence, that had no idea what they were supposed to think.

Anyway, you read enough things like this, and you can’t quite bring yourself to tell your four-year-old that a stranger and a sleeping girl just enjoyed “true love’s kiss.”

PIC Sleeping Beauty figurine with prince under skirt

But I think it’s stupid to tell girls, “Prettiness is slavery!  Romance is for suckers!  Love will always let you down!  Don’t you dare put on a sparkly crown!”  So I tell my daughters stories about beauty and love and caroling birds and shimmering gowns — but I tweak them.  Here is how I adjusted Sleeping Beauty:

The bad fairy, the curse, the spinning wheel, the 100 year’s sleep, blah blah blah.

Here’s the part where I started to improvise:  the prince is wandering around in the woods because all the princesses in his territory are boring, and just want to talk about shoes and hair and parties.  He sees the castle overgrown with roses, with no sound but the humming of bees, and hacks his way through out of sheer curiosity.  When he makes his way through the sleeping castle, he finds the princess at its center, fast asleep, and she is lovely.

Worn out from all that hacking, he sits down, and before he knows it, he starts to talk.  He talks and talks and talks, about all the things that he’s interested in, but nobody in his kingdom wants to hear about.  He pours his heart out to her, because he know she’s not going to spill the beans, because she’s asleep.  Then he goes back outside and, unable to make himself go home quite yet, he camps in the courtyard.

The next morning, he comes back, and talks some more.  At first, he was just thrilled to talk to someone who didn’t laugh at him or interrupt.  But gradually, he begins to wish with all his heart that she could answer back.  Her face is so intersting, even in sleep, that he wants to know what she thinks.

That night, when he lies down in the courtyard again, he dreams that she is awake, and tells him everything on her mind — and it is marvelous.  The next day, he comes back again, and so on and so on.

After a few weeks of this, he shakes himself and decides he can’t pursue this fantasy any longer.  Back to real life; time to face the petty and puerile girls in his own kingdom, and settle for one of them so he can further the royal line. Facts are facts:  better a third-rate reality than a gorgeous fantasy.   So he goes back one last time to say goodbye to her.  He leans over to take one final look at her lovely face, and her breath smells so nice that he can’t help himself:  he plants a chaste little kiss on her rosy lips.

And she wakes up. And says, “Oh, were you going somewhere?  We were having such a nice conversation!”  Bafflement ensues, and gradually it turns out that, just as he has been dreaming of her, she has been dreaming of him.  His words found their way past the enchantment and into her subconscious mind, and, in her dream, she answered him back. They feel like they know each other, and they do — because they are so perfectly suited for each other that their dreams conversations were identical.

So then they get married.  The princess wears a shimmering wedding gown, and then they have eleven children.  The end.

Now, I realize this is more or less the naked fantasy of a 38-year-old woman:  True love is someone who will sit there and listen to me talk!  So sue me.  I still think it’s better than “And as soon as their eyes met, they knew they were in love, and got married the next day.”  Bah.  I fell in love like that once, and it took me two years to realize that the guy just found me convenient, and treated me like poo.  I like my version because there is a romantic dream that really does come true — but they have to work their way up to it.  It preserves the idea that the kiss is a magical turning point, but the fellow has to earn it, and she has to have some reason to return his affections.

So, to sum up, I don’t  shriek and turn blue at the very mention of the word “princess,” and I am so done with the edgy new takes on princess culture.

PIC Snow White kids house husband nightmare

I think little girls need to hear about silvery ballgowns and falling in love while birds sing overhead, especially when the world tells them that you can either be pretty like this:

PIC Monster high dolls

or accomplished like this:

PIC Nancy Pelosi face

but nothing in between.  But I can’t quite swallow the “strangers–>kiss–>happily ever after” line, either.

How do you handle it in your house?  Does the whole princess thing bother you?  Do you make it work somehow?  Or what?