Beyond Feminism

Tee hee! Har Har!

I know, I’m being mean.

Feel free to copy, past, print and … ehm… laugh.

YAY for socks and YAY for hairy legs!

Who wants to join in the challenge? All you have to do is let the world know that you have body hair like a normal human being and that you are not ashamed of it! Let’s kick femininity up the arse with our hairy legs! 

Anyone brave enough to take a picture of her be-knickered crotch with pubic hair springing from the sides?  

I have been reading, listening and watching Noam Chomsky lately (yes, I am a baby lefy feminist taking her first steps into the field of ideas). And because I believe strongly in passing the wisdom on, here I give you tiny snippets of his thoughs. If you can read the whole articles, that’s good and if you read his books, that’s even better. But if you can’t, like me, for whatever reason, then I strongly advice you to read this quotes, or, if you can’t, read my emphasis of them. They have clarified lots of things for me.

From “The Spectacular Achievements of Propaganda”

“The people in the public relations industry aren’t there for the fun of it. They’re doing
work. They’re trying to instill the right values. In fact, they have a conception of what democracy ought to be: It ought to be a system in which the specialized class is trained to work in the service of the masters, the people who own the society. The rest of the population ought to be deprived of any form of organization, because organization just causes trouble. They ought to be sitting alone in front of the TV and having drilled into their heads the message, which says, the only value in life is to have more commodities or live like that rich middle class family you’re watching and to have nice values like harmony and Americanism. That’s all there is in life. You may think in your own head that there’s got to be something more in life than this, but since you’re watching the tube alone you assume, I must be crazy, because that’s all that’s going on over there. And since there is no organization permitted—that’s absolutely crucial—you never have a way of finding out whether you are crazy, and you just assume it, because it’s the natural thing to assume.”

From “What Makes Mainstream Media Mainstream”

“”The universities, for example, are not independent institutions. (…) It’s dependent on outside sources of support and those sources of support, such as private wealth, big corporations with grants, and the government (which is so closely interlinked with corporate power you can barely distinguish them), they are essentially what the universities are in the middle of. People within them, who don’t adjust to that structure, who don’t accept it and internalize it (you can’t really work with it unless you internalize it, and believe it); people who don’t do that are likely to be weeded out along the way, starting from kindergarten, all the way up. There are all sorts of filtering devices to get rid of people who are a pain in the neck and think independently. Those of you who have been through college know that the educational system is very highly geared to rewarding conformity and obedience; if you don’t do that, you are a troublemaker. So, it is kind of a filtering device which ends up with people who really honestly (they aren’t lying) internalize the framework of belief and attitudes of the surrounding power system in the society.”
“When you critique the media and you say, look, here is what Anthony Lewis or somebody else is writing, they get very angry. They say, quite correctly, “nobody ever tells me what to write. I write anything I like. All this business about pressures and constraints is nonsense because I’m never under any pressure.” Which is completely true, but the point is that they wouldn’t be there unless they had already demonstrated that nobody has to tell them what to write because they are going say the right thing. If they had started off at the Metro desk, or something, and had pursued the wrong kind of stories, they never would have made it to the positions where they can now say anything they like. The same is mostly true of university faculty in the more ideological disciplines. They have been through the socialization system.”
“Okay, you look at the structure of that whole system. What do you expect the news to be like? Well, it’s pretty obvious. Take the New York Times. It’s a corporation and sells a product. The product is audiences. They don’t make money when you buy the newspaper. They are happy to put it on the worldwide web for free. They actually lose money when you buy the newspaper. But the audience is the product. The product is privileged people, just like the people who are writing the newspapers, you know, top-level decision-making people in society. You have to sell a product to a market, and the market is, of course, advertisers (that is, other businesses). Whether it is television or newspapers, or whatever, they are selling audiences. Corporations sell audiences to other corporations. In the case of the elite media, it’s big businesses. “
“The next thing you discover is that this whole topic is completely taboo. If you go to the Kennedy School of Government or Stanford, or somewhere, and you study journalism and communications or academic political science, and so on, these questions are not likely to appear. (…) If you look at the institutional structure, you would say, yeah, sure, that’s got to happen because why should these guys want to be exposed? Why should they allow critical analysis of what they are up to take place? The answer is, there is no reason why they should allow that and, in fact, they don’t. Again, it is not purposeful censorship. It is just that you don’t make it to those positions. That includes the left (what is called the left), as well as the right. Unless you have been adequately socialized and trained so that there are some thoughts you just don’t have, because if you did have them, you wouldn’t be there.”
“(…) By manufacturing consent, you can overcome the fact that formally a lot of people have the right to vote. We can make it irrelevant because we can manufacture consent and make sure that their choices and attitudes will be structured in such a way that they will always do what we tell them, even if they have a formal way to participate. (…)”

We all need some sweetness every now and then.

Spas seem to be all the rage lately. Every now and then one of them will appear on the news for the sole merit of having come up with a brand new gimmick to “treat” people with. Some time ago, it was stones. Now, I love stones as much as the next witch apprentice, BUT this use of stones seems to me to corrupt the whole principle of stones. Then it was chocolate. Now I think it’s immersing yourself in a bath tub of wine or something like that.

Oh, how I love laughing at the ridiculous practices of the ubber rich!

You’ve probably heard about this book, “The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism”. Maybe you’ve already bought it and read it 3 times. But in case you haven’t, or can’t for a number of reasons, I’ve just found this talk by her outlining the theory of the book, from December-ish last year. It’s in handy mp3 format and here’s the link, courtesy of KGNU Independent Community Radio. All you have to do is right click on it, select “Save Target As” and save it! How neat is that?

Link to mp3 file, Naomi Klein’s “The Shock Doctrine”.

PS: pass the knowledge on!

This idea sounded better in my head. Oh well.

Here’s a depiction of how women were distributed in the hierachical structure that is patriarchal society* BEFORE…

And NOW…

I tried to show how things have changed. Well yes, they have, but mostly for those on top. You know, the ones who were already A-OK-ish.
There’s a big reason why the people at the bottom of the structure are sistematically ignored by feminism. Yes, it is, partly, because feminists who have time to engage in feminism are usually from the top themselves. But also, because the only way to move the people at the bottom UP is to move the people at the top DOWN. And yes, the very feminists who are at the top are not very likely to work towards moving themselves down. But also, because in order for that to happen, we would have to bring “teh left” into the table. And “teh left” is, like, not cool. It’s a dirty word. It’s not gonna make you very popular. And it’s definitely not gonna help you sell “cool” books.

Constructive criticism welcomed!

* not to scale, not scientific, not researched, not… that good.

I don’t like talking about Sex Education. I don’t agree with the current idea of “sex” or “education”, so much less with “sex education”. But many bloggers do, all of them american, and for a good reason: the only sex education in american schools consists of “no sex” education. Which sucks. But everyone already knows it sucks, which is why blogging about it seems pointless. It’s yet another example that it’s not “the people” who have “the powerz” but a tiny, tiny group. The US is* the only industrialized nation with a “no sex” education policy. This, of course, has a huge impact on the rest of the nations of the world, because the US is “teh Nation”. Let me explain: the US has got it effed up, so comparatively, the other industrialized nations seem to have gotten it right. Which is NOT true. I have suffered “sex education” and it’s far from perfect. Why, it’s infinitely better than “no sex” education and infinitely better than “no (sex) education”, but it’s not the best we can do. “Comprehensive”, as it’s called sex education limits itself to what a vagina does and what a penis does and how to avoid catching aids. Yeah, that’s right, two people are reduced to their reproductive organs and the encounter is in turn reduced to “do whatever as long as you are safe”. For some patriarchal reason beyond the limits of human or even feminist understanding, talking aobut a penis entering a vagina is more acceptable than talking about the feelings attached to that penis or that vagina. The result? The tacit condoning of one of modern society’s highest principles: “whatever rocks your boat”. Which doesn’t leave radical feminists, or anyone with the tiniest grasp of the complexity of human nature, remotely satisfied.

So my plan for action is the following: dump all the previous ideas about “sex” (and “education”, for that matter) and let’s start again from scratch. With the help of feminism, of course.

* probably. Am not sure, but it’s a safe bet.

This would be much funnier if it were less true.

Now, who thinks this stuff is good enough to appear on a feminist zine? Any ideas which one would be willing to publish it?

I don’t know why on Earth I read The F Word. I end up whipping myself up into a fit of rage at their nonsensery. Here’s the latest post that shoot my annoyance-meter well above the “let it be” level.

It starts with the following:

“The NSPCC(…) are saying that schools should teach more about relationships in sex education.”

Except, they aren’t saying that, at least not just that. Here’s what they actually said in the news article:

“Advice on emotions and relationships should be made a compulsory part of sex education in schools, the children’s charity NSPCC says.”

Oh, those pesky emotions! I would have let it be were it not because the news article that this post is concerned about is titled

“‘Emotions’ urged in sex education”

Oh, those pesky emotions again! Again, I am not picking on this for fun, I do have a point, which will be made clear further down.

Now, this suggestion by NSPCC is in turn a response to the recent data, from Childline, that claims 50 children a day ring them up saying they feel pressured to have sex.
Let’s pause for a minute on that. 50 children A DAY ring them up saying they feel pressured to have sex. The experienced feminist will notice 2 things upon being confronted with this news. One, the savvy, “one eyebrow reaised” reaction that can be summarized by “So?” or by “Next they’ll be telling us water is still wet”. The other will be the following educated guess: “I bet which gender most of those children are”. Indeed. This is the natural consecuence of a pornulated sick society. Children are force fed sex at every turn, and since this is a patriarchy that tells us sex is domination used by males over females, the ones doing the pressuring are most likely to be boys. And when we look at the actual news article we find precisely that: 5,985 girls and 503 boys in an 12 month period. This experienced feminist is good!

Kate Smurthwaite isn’t all that happy with this idea of teaching about relationships AND emotions along with sex. Why? Well…

“The first thing that frightens me is that if the syllabus is expanded out to include relationships, what is the risk that the facts of biology will be lost? I think children have a right to understand how their bodies work in factual scientific terms.
(…) It’s also difficult to understand how children will react to hearing the facts of biology lined up next to what can be nothing more than advice about relationships. I think a clear line needs to be drawn between the facts of how the human body works and advice about how to deal with the stresses and strains of relationships.”

Yes, she continues to omit the “emotions” part. Again, it’s difficult to let it pass when Sue Minto, from Childline, said:

“(…) children needed information about peer pressure, relationships and love, as well as help developing skills to make the right decisions about sex.”

Love? Damn it with those pesky emotions!

By now you have probably guessed what my problem with this post is. In fact, Kate hit the spot right there when she said “a clear line needs to be drawn between the facts of how the human body works and advice on…”
Kate seems to have bough in to the patriarchally supported idea that the mind and the body are two separate entities. That emotions are not worth a damn because, well, because the menz have said so. And that individuals can be separated from each other because there’s no such thing as society. Note to Kate: there’s only one entity here, the human being, and I’m not even sure where it begins or ends. There is no “mind” on one side and “body” on the other. There’s a whole made up of everything. Body, soul, mind, heart, and yes, relationships. All relationships, not strictly romantical ones, are not something we can “choose” to have, they are an essencial part of our human nature. So when you refer to “how the human body works” you simply HAVE to include all those parts. They are not orbiting around our bodies; they are the stuff we are made of.

And if I may just pick on Kate’s post once more, because I just cannot ignore this bit:

“I think children should be taught that they have human rights, and that one of those is the right to make their own decisions about sex (or this could be covered under the women’s studies addition to the national curriculum that I’ve been talking about forever).”

Update: sex and relationships are only the interest of women studies. Because, you know, women=sex and relationships are something only women want.

See what I mean? There’s a very thin line between thinking about humans in binary terms, mind-body, sex-love, reason-emotion AND the final association of women with one term and men with another. Needless to say, women are associated with whatever term is regarded as inferior. And Kate has crossed that line.

Once more, people: emotions are not bad or “female”. They are a part of our humanity, no matter how much patriarchy wants to devaule them and dump them on women’s shoulders.

Note: I hope I didn’t sound too bitchy. I like Kate and her work and I have nothing against her.