The Right Choice

Judith Warner watches pro-choice and pro-life activists revisiting Roe vs. Wade in a push for Obama’s attention and concludes

“What we are waiting to hear from Barack Obama,” Campolo [a democratic pro-life activist] said on Tuesday, “is that he … sees this as a moral issue and an issue of conscience.”

Let’s hope Obama doesn’t take the bait. Or better yet: let’s hope that, as he seeks out new religious allies (the problematic Jeremiah Wright becoming a much more distant memory), he pushes hard to redefine the moral high ground in the abortion rights debate. Sanctifying life – without care for the living — is little more than a morality play.

Mannish

We talked about different perceptions of female anger here, and here is a matching post @ Jezebel

Most of the criticism thrown at Hillary Clinton was that she was too mannish somehow — similar to the way in which similar criticisms were levied at Margaret Thatcher later in her career. What is it about standing up to men that makes a woman “mannish,” and why is that a bad thing? To the contrary, while Clinton may have worn pants the entire campaign, she made it a point to eschew the black pantsuits for which she had become known in Washington for ones in a variety of jewel tones and earthy colors. Her hair was always impeccably colored, it was rarely out of place and a relatively flattering cut. She never forewent make-up or jewelry like certain bloggers I see in the mirror every morning, and I have, more than once, seen her in a pair of cute kitten heels that I coveted. But, still, “mannish” was how she was tarred. If she’s mannish, I’d hate to see what women would have to do to be considered womanly.

Oh Mr. Darcy!

Maureen Dowd observed last week in her NYTimes column:

The odd thing is that Obama bears a distinct resemblance to the most cherished hero in chick-lit history. The senator is a modern incarnation of the clever, haughty, reserved and fastidious Mr. Darcy.

Maddening

Hysterical (see the pun?) new study

Most employees — male or female — would hesitate to yell at their superiors, but new research provides new evidence that women who show anger in the workplace are viewed as less competent — while men are not.

In three studies, 463 men and women between 18 and 70 years old watched video of actors pretending to be job seekers or employers. The participants then wrote down which applicants should get the job, the type of responsibility they could handle and how high their salaries should be.

“We found that the women (on the tapes) who were judged as angry lost out in every category,” says Victoria Brescoll, an assistant professor at Yale University’s School of Management. [...]

“When women express anger at work, no matter what they do on the job, they can be seen as ‘out of control’ or are viewed in a negative light,” Brescoll says.

Girly Girl

Newish series on the always fabulous Jezebel blog (I loves you Tracy Egan), under the heading “What it feels like for a Girl”, using fellow blogger Gavin McInnes to demonstrate some facets of “What it feels like for a Girl”. Currently we have a report on Makeup (daytime) and Makeup (Nighttime) as well as walking in high heels and the followup, really walking a mile in high heels. Earlier they got yet another blogger to get his sack deforested.

Tiresome

Zwicky @ the Language Log is tired of the same ol’ sexism masquerading as science. This time it’s about the New Scientist cover story:

Oh, spit! Here we go again, with reports of previous studies of anatomical and neurological differences (critiqued in a long series of postings here) interpreted as establishing categorical differences between the sexes and so echoing “common knowledge” in a crude way. I haven’t the heart to reflect on yet another chapter in this story.

"Sexual Pseudoscience"

Language Log as usual debunking strange and unproven claims. Very readable Article here. Here’s the synopsis:

Let me summarize the evidence in one simple sentence: There is no functionally significant difference between boys and girls in auditory sensitivity.

Emanzipation

Zwei Zitate aus Leben und Abenteuer der Trobadora Beatriz nach Zeugnissen ihrer Spielfrau Laura von Irmtraud Morgner

Der Soldat vergaß nicht zu erwähnen, daß Manöver und Rüstung entbehrlich wären, sobald die Ausbeutung des Menschen durch den Menschen in allen Ländern abgeschafft wäre. “Und die Ausbeutung der Frau durch den Menschen.” sagte Beatriz. “Wie”, sagte der Soldat. Sein Unverständnis erklärte sich Beatriz mit den idealen Zuständen seiner Heimat.

*

Als neulich unsere Frauenbrigade im Espresso am Alex Kapuziner trank, betrat ein Mann das Etablissement, der meinen Augen wohltat. Ich pfiff also eine Tonleiter rauf und runter und sah mir den Herrn an, auch rauf und runter. Als er an unserem Tisch vorbeiging, sagte ich “Donnerwetter”. Dann unterhielt sich unsere Brigade über seine Füße, denen Socken fehlten, den taillenumfang schätzten wir auf siebzig, Alter auf zweiunddreißig [...] Wegen schlechter Haltung der schönen Schultern riet ich zu Rudersport. Da der Herr in der Ecke des Lokals Platz genommen hattem mußten wir sehr laut sprechen. Ich ließ ihm und mir einen doppelten Wodka servieren und prostete ihn zu, als er der Bedienung ein Versehen anlasten wollte. Später ging ich zu seinem Tisch, entschuldigte mich, sagtem daß wir uns von irgendwoher kennen müßten, und besetzte den nächsten Stuhl. Ich nötigte dem Herrn die Getränkekarte auf und fragte nach seinen Wünschen. Da er keine hatte, drückte ich meine Knie gegen seine, bestellte drei Lagen Sliwowitz und drohte mit vergeltung für den Beleidigungsfall, der einträte, wenn er nicht tränke. Obwohl der Herr weder dankbar noch kurzweilig war, sondern wortlos, bezahlte ich alles und begleitete ihn aus dem Lokal. In der Tür ließ ich meine Hand wie zufällig über seine Hinterbacke gleiten, um zu prüfen, ob die Gewebestruktur in Ordnung wäre. Da ich keine Mängel feststellen konnte, fragte ich den Herrn, ob er heute abend etwas vorhätte, und lud ihn ein ins Kino. Eine innere Anstrengung, die zunehmend sein hübsches gesicht zeichnete, verzerrte es jetzt grimassenhaft, konnte die Verblüffung aber endlich lösen und die Zunge, also daß der Herr sprach: “Hören Sie mal, Sie haben ja unerhörte Umgangsformen.” “Gewöhnliche”, antwortete ich, “Sie sind nur nichts Gutes gewöhnt, weil Sie keine Dame sind.”

"Yeah, Right."

Judith Warner is bitter

Righteous indignation is so easy, so pleasant, when you can sit back and fling it overseas.
I had that edifying experience on the D.C. Metro Wednesday morning, reading in the Times about the Muslim women in France who are going to cosmetic surgeons for hymen replacement surgery so that they can bleed as seeming virgins on their wedding nights.
It’s a practice that has, apparently, become relatively common in the immigrant communities of Europe. But, of course, it seems like hair-raising news in a country like ours, where a young woman’s right to do with her body as she sees fit has, for decades, been enshrined as perhaps the most essential part of her God-given human dignity.
As my 11-year-old says, Yeah, right.

Clintonian Feminism

Maureen Dowd spake thusly

The Wall Street Journal reported back in March that some women were worried that “the resistance to Senator Clinton may embolden some men to resist women’s efforts to share power with them in business, politics and elsewhere.”

It’s a reasonable fear. Every fizzy triumph of feminism I have covered — Geraldine Ferraro’s selection, the Anita Hill hearings, Hillary’s co-presidency — ended up triggering awful backlashes. In the end, feminism sputtered out as a force.

Hillary has brought back that old feminist religion, at least for now.

Obit to a wondrous Campaign

Gail Collins in the NYT

Clinton is very much a product of the generation that accepted a certain amount of humiliation as the price of progress. [...] She would never let her daughter, or anybody else’s daughter, think that she quit because things got too tough. And she never did. Nobody is ever again going to question whether it’s possible for a woman to go toe-to-toe with the toughest male candidate in a race for president of the United States. Or whether a woman could be strong enough to serve as commander in chief.

Her campaign didn’t resolve whether a woman who seems tough enough to run the military can also seem likable enough to get elected. But she helped pave the way. So many battles against prejudice are won when people get used to seeing women and minorities in roles that only white men had held before. By the end of those 54 primaries and caucuses, Hillary had made a woman running for president seem normal. [...]

For all her vaunting ambition, she was never a candidate who ran for president just because it’s the presidency. She thought about winning in terms of the things she could accomplish, and she never forgot the women’s issues she had championed all her life — repair of the social safety net, children’s rights, support for working mothers.

Teilen und Herrschen

Guter Artikel bei missy:

Es sah so aus, als sei die „Dritte Welle“, wie die aktuelle Frauenbewegung in den USA genannt wird, auch in Deutschland angekommen. Endlich äußerten junge Frauen sich zu einem Thema, das lange Zeit als uncool/unsexy/unwichtig geächtet war: Feminismus. [...]

Stattdessen beobachten wir – zusammen mit dem Rest der Bundesrepublik – jetzt mit zunehmendem Ärger und Enttäuschung den öffentlichen Generationenkampf, der derzeit in den Medien inszeniert wird: JUNGE gegen ALTE FEMINISTINNEN bzw. DER NEUE gegen DEN ALTEN FEMINISMUS.

Dabei verhält es sich angeblich so: Die neuen Feministinnen sind hedonistische, geschichtsvergessene Girlies, die Emanzipation mit dem Tragen von Lipgloss und Stilettos gleichsetzen, sich nur für ihre eigenen Karrieren und Beziehungen interessieren und Pornografie und Prostitution „total geil“ finden. Die alten Feministinnen verstehen keinen Spaß, sind total unlocker, was Pornos und gekauften Sex angeht, kämpfen gegen die Verschleierung der muslimischen Frau und wissen nichts von den Problemen der jungen Generation.

Als wäre es nicht schon schlimm genug, dass ein Großteil der Berichterstattung die vielen verschiedenen feministischen Positionen auf dieses Schema reduziert, befeuern auch einige der Protagonistinnen selbst diese Klischees. [...]

Muss das wirklich sein? Im Grunde ist es doch so: DEN FEMINISMUS als homogene Bewegung hat es nie gegeben, nicht Anfang des Jahrhundert während der „Ersten Welle“, nicht in den Siebzigern und nicht heute. Immer schon haben Feministinnen im Laufe der Geschichte viele verschiedene Positionen zu allen möglichen Themen vertreten. Es gibt die, die von einem grundlegenden Unterschied zwischen Männern und Frauen ausgehen und jene, die schon die Konstruktion eines solchen Unterschiedes sexistisch finden. Es gibt Feministinnen, die Pornografie als frauenfeindlich einstufen und andere, die es politisch finden, selbst in Pornos mitzuspielen. Feministinnen aus der weißen Mittelklasse kämpfen gegen ganz andere Probleme als Migrantinnen, lesbische und transsexuelle Feministinnen gegen andere als heterosexuelle.

Diese Meinungsverschiedenheiten und das gegenseitige Abarbeiten aneinander machen das Arbeiten manchmal verdammt anstrengend. Aber sie sind notwendiger Teil des Feminismus und wir wollen sie nicht missen. [...] Wenn wir uns nun einreden lassen, es handele sich um ein Generationenproblem, hält uns das nur von wichtigeren Aufgaben ab.

Die Wahrheit ist: Wir wissen zu wenig voneinander. Die Zwanzig- bis Dreißigjährigen sind schlecht informiert über die Geschichte der Frauenbewegung und tappen deshalb allzu oft in die gleichen Fallen wie ihre Vorgängerinnen in den Siebzigern. Die ältere Generation sieht wiederum nicht, dass junge Frauen heute auch politisch aktiv sind – auch wenn dieser Aktivismus andere Formen annimmt als damals. Einige von uns arbeiten nach wie vor an den Themen, die schon für die „zweite Welle“ aktuell waren und es immer noch sind, wie etwa das Recht auf Abtreibung. Für andere ist es wiederum politische Arbeit, in einer Band zu spielen, eine Zeitschrift wie Missy herauszubringen, ein Frauenkulturfestival zu organisieren oder ein Buch über eine 18-Jährige zu schreiben, die sich passioniert mit ihren Körperflüssigkeiten beschäftigt.

Invisibility

Interesting statement in the post:

“Western stereotypes surrounding the hijab – the scarf that covers the neck and hair of Muslim women – include the assumption that women are wearing it because of subjugation and religious indoctrination. Some argue that such coverage is used to make women subservient and invisible. But what really makes them invisible is assuming that the women who choose to wear the hijab, the abaya or anything else did not make the choice themselves.”

It does gloss over important issues, but the point is well worth making.

(via)

Race & Gender

Maureen Dowd points to a fascinating, -if saddening- case of (overcoming?) race and gender and the consequence of that.

Barack Obama is going to get down if it kills him.

[...] Checking out what the vets were drinking, he announced, “I’m going to have a Bud.” Then, showing he’s a smart guy who can learn and assimilate, he took big swigs from his beer can, a marked improvement on the delicate sip he took at a brewery in Bethlehem, Pa.

Obama is also doing his best to impress hoop-crazed Hoosiers with his passion for basketball. On Thursday night, in shirt and tie, he took on an eighth grader named Aaron at a backyard picnic in Union Mills in an impromptu game of P-I-G. “You know, he’s tough,” Obama laughed about his 14-year-old opponent. “He’s like Hillary Clinton.”

The lioness of Chappaqua is hot on the trail of the Chicago gazelle, eager to gnaw him to pieces, like a harrowing scene out of a George Stubbs painting.

Proclaiming that the upcoming elections in Indiana and North Carolina would be “a game changer,” Hillary and her posse pressed hard on their noble twin themes of emasculation and elitism.

Cherry-bombing the word “pansy” into the discourse, Gov. Mike Easley of North Carolina said Hillary made “Rocky Balboa look like a pansy.”

Paul Gipson, president of a steelworkers local in Portage, Ind., hailed her “testicular fortitude,” before ripping into “Gucci-wearing, latte-drinking, self-centered, egotistical people that have damaged our lifestyle.”

James Carville helpfully told Eleanor Clift of Newsweek that if Hillary gave Obama one of her vehicles of testicular fortitude, “they’d both have two.”

and later

Obama, on the other hand, may seem esoteric, and sometimes looks haughty or put-upon when he should merely offer that ensorcelling smile. But he is very well liked by his Secret Service agents, and shoots hoops with them. And I watched him take the time one night after a long day of campaigning to stand and take individual pictures with a squadron of Dallas motorcycle police officers on the tarmac.

It must be hard for Obama, having applied all his energy over the years to rising above the rough spots in his background, making whites comfortable with him, striving to become the sophisticated, silky political star who looks supremely comfortable in a tux. Now he must go into reverse and stoop to conquer with cornball photo ops.

Alice Walker on Obama

Alice Walker offering her well-reasoned two cents on Obama, Clinton and Whiteness. I’m glad to’ve been able to read it.

I made my first white women friends in college; they were women who loved me and were loyal to our friendship, but I understood, as they did, that they were white women and that whiteness mattered. That, for instance, at Sarah Lawrence, where I was speedily inducted into the Board of Trustees practically as soon as I graduated, I made my way to the campus for meetings by train, subway and foot, while the other trustees, women and men, all white, made their way by limo. Because, in our country, with its painful history of unspeakable inequality, this is part of what whiteness means. I loved my school for trying to make me feel I mattered to it, but because of my relative poverty I knew I could not.

I am a supporter of Obama because I believe he is the right person to lead the country at this time. He offers a rare opportunity for the country and the world to start over, and to do better. It is a deep sadness to me that many of my feminist white women friends cannot see him. Cannot see what he carries in his being. Cannot hear the fresh choices toward Movement he offers. That they can believe that millions of Americans –black, white, yellow, red and brown – choose Obama over Clinton only because he is a man, and black, feels tragic to me.

When I have supported white people, men and women, it was because I thought them the best possible people to do whatever the job required. Nothing else would have occurred to me. If Obama were in any sense mediocre, he would be forgotten by now. He is, in fact, a remarkable human being, not perfect but humanly stunning, like King was and like Mandela is. We look at him, as we looked at them, and are glad to be of our species. He is the change America has been trying desperately and for centuries to hide, ignore, kill. The change America must have if we are to convince the rest of the world that we care about people other than our (white) selves. [...]

But most of all I want someone with the self-confidence to talk to anyone, “enemy” or “friend,” and this Obama has shown he can do. It is difficult to understand how one could vote for a person who is afraid to sit and talk to another human being. When you vote you are making someone a proxy for yourself; they are to speak when, and in places, you cannot. But if they find talking to someone else, who looks just like them, human, impossible, then what good is your vote?

It is hard to relate what it feels like to see Mrs. Clinton (I wish she felt self-assured enough to use her own name) referred to as “a woman” while Barack Obama is always referred to as “a black man.” One would think she is just any woman, colorless, race-less, past-less, but she is not. She carries all the history of white womanhood in America in her person; it would be a miracle if we, and the world, did not react to this fact. How dishonest it is, to attempt to make her innocent of her racial inheritance.

I can easily imagine Obama sitting down and talking, person to person, with any leader, woman, man, child or common person, in the world, with no baggage of past servitude or race supremacy to mar their talks. I cannot see the same scenario with Mrs. Clinton who would drag into Twenty-First Century American leadership the same image of white privilege and distance from the reality of others’ lives that has so marred our country’s contacts with the rest of the world.

And yes, I would adore having a woman president of the United States. My choice would be Representative Barbara Lee, who alone voted in Congress five years ago not to make war on Iraq. That to me is leadership, morality, and courage; if she had been white I would have cheered just as hard. But she is not running for the highest office in the land, Mrs. Clinton is. And because Mrs. Clinton is a woman and because she may be very good at what she does, many people, including some younger women in my own family, originally favored her over Obama. I understand this, almost. It is because, in my own nieces’ case, there is little memory, apparently, of the foundational inequities that still plague people of color and poor whites in this country. Why, even though our family has been here longer than most North American families – and only partly due to the fact that we have Native American genes – we very recently, in my lifetime, secured the right to vote, and only after numbers of people suffered and died for it.

When I offered the word “Womanism” many years ago, it was to give us a tool to use, as feminist women of color, in times like these. These are the moments we can see clearly, and must honor devotedly, our singular path as women of color in the United States. We are not white women and this truth has been ground into us for centuries, often in brutal ways. But neither are we inclined to follow a black person, man or woman, unless they demonstrate considerable courage, intelligence, compassion and substance. I am delighted that so many women of color support Barack Obama -and genuinely proud of the many young and old white women and men who do.

Imagine, if he wins the presidency we will have not one but three black women in the White House; one tall, two somewhat shorter; none of them carrying the washing in and out of the back door. The bottom line for most of us is: With whom do we have a better chance of surviving the madness and fear we are presently enduring, and with whom do we wish to set off on a journey of new possibility?

The Right Girl

NYT on an interesting phenomenon

“I cannot tell you how many of the e-mails that we got from last year’s ‘Work Out’ reunion that were women saying, ‘I am married. I have never looked at another woman. I have a huge crush on Jackie,’ ” Mr. Cohen said.

The audience for “Work Out,” which returns to Bravo on Tuesday for a third season, grew by 25 percent last season, according to Nielsen Media Research, to 659,000 viewers, the median age of which is about 36.

“I’m from St. Louis,” Mr. Cohen said. “When I go home a lot of times I’m amazed by the suburban married women that are coming up to me and saying, ‘I’m in love with Jackie Warner.’ ”

This, women of St. Louis, is not news to Ms. Warner.

“They get crushes,” she said in her office at Sky Sport & Spa, her penthouse gym in Beverly Hills with sweeping views of the city and the Hollywood sign. “I have hard-core women that get major crushes. I have women that send me — this is the weird thing — I have women that send me photos of themselves with their husbands and three teenage boys or whatever — I’m just giving you an example — with a love letter attached.”

Other women, said Ms. Warner, who has trained the likes of Paul McCartney and Anne Hathaway, hit on her during training sessions. Those who can’t afford the $400 an hour fee have joined social networking groups such as “If Jackie from ‘Workout’ hit on me, I’d definitely reconsider my sexuality.”

As a woman with the moniker LibbytheCute put it in the interactive magazine Zimbio.com. “I’m straight. Very straight, and even I would seriously consider batting for her team.”

"Good Female Fiction"

Ludicrousness at ABC, in this NY Times article

Kendall Hart “is a very aspirational character for women,” Mr. Frons said. “She’d come from a trailer park and had built up a cosmetics company, and we felt that was the stuff of good female fiction.”

Y’know. Not good writing or useless stuff like that. Asprational Characters. Right-o.

Orange Prize sexist?

Times online

The all-women Orange literature prize is still needed, despite women winning prizes in fair competition with men, the organisers have said.

The Orange prize longlist, published yesterday, includes Anne Enright’s The Gathering, which won the unisex Booker a few weeks ago. In the past two years, women have won both the Booker and Costa literary awards.

The novelist A. S. Byatt told The Times that the Orange was a sexist prize, saying that she was so critical of what it stands for that she forbids her publishers to submit her novels for consideration. “Such a prize was never needed,” she said, noting that many works of literature were by women.

John Sutherland, the academic, said that ghettoising women writers did them more harm them good. Anita Brookner, a Booker winner, has dismissed positive discrimination and is also believed to have declined having her novels entered for the Orange.

Harriet Hastings, project director of the Orange prize, shrugged off the criticisms, maintaining that it was international and had no need to justify its existence: “Although major prizes have been won by women, the value of the Orange is as a celebration of women’s fiction.”

[...]

Kirsty Lang, chairman of this year’s panel, denied yesterday that the Orange was positive discrimination, saying that most readers are women, and prizes are to attract readers. (via)

If you know me I have strong opinions about the policies of the Nobel committee and have been known to scream at people who decry political aspects of that award (both attacking Jelinek’s and Lessings’s awards as being politically correct awards that should belong to MEN such as John Updike (*retch*) or Philip Roth.). But an award just for women? I dunno.

Lafontaine Zwei (ach du lieber Himmel)

Oh Gott. Fürchterlicher Unfug bei SPON von Christa Müller, Ehefrau von Oskar Lafontaine:

Die andere Gruppe bestünde aus Radikalfeministinnen: “Die kämpfen nur für die Frauen, die eine berufliche Karriere anstreben.” Müller schüttelt den Kopf: “Das ist doch dummes Zeug, die Mehrheit der deutschen Frauen will gar keine Karriere machen.”

[...] Früher sei sie durch die feministische Bewegung beeinflusst gewesen. Da habe auch sie die Erwerbstätigkeit der Frau ganz nach vorn gerückt, um nicht vom Mann finanziell abhängig zu sein. Später jedoch habe sie erkannt, dass nicht für alle die berufliche Karriere im Mittelpunkt stehe: “Die große Mehrheit der Frauen will sich neben einer Teilzeitarbeit oder sogar vollständig der Familie widmen.” Würde ihnen dafür ein Erziehungsgehalt gezahlt, dann wären sie auch unabhängig vom Mann: “Insofern ist meine Idee ein feministisches Projekt.” [...]

Sie sieht das als Lebensaufgabe: “Das ist so wie im Kampf gegen die Genitalverstümmelung, da muss ich mich wohl auch bis zum Ende meines Lebens engagieren”, sagt sie. [...]

Christa Müller vergleicht den Kampf gegen die Beschneidung mit jenem gegen die Fremdbetreuung: “Diesen Vergleich wage ich, denn bei der Genitalverstümmelung handelt es sich um Körperverletzung, bei der Krippenbetreuung in einigen Fällen um seelische Verletzung – und die ist manchmal schlimmer als Körperverletzung.”

Aber wer von einer “Reproduktion des asozialen Milieus” spricht ist ohnehin Träger fragwürdiger Einstellungen.

Feminism & Language

A well reasoned mini-rant on the log attacking a common and tiresome position on feminism and how it destroys language.

[David Gelernter's] claims are apocalyptic. Although English “used to belong to all its speakers and readers and writers” it has now been taken over by “arrogant ideologues” determined “to defend the borders of the New Feminist state.” A major “victory of propaganda over common sense” looms: “We have allowed ideologues to pocket a priceless property and walk away with it.” The language is on the brink of being lost, because although the “prime rule of writing is to keep it simple, concrete, concise”, today “virtually the whole educational establishment teaches the opposite”. This is the mild part. Soon he gets more seriously worked up, calling his opponents “style-smashers” and (I’m not kidding) “language rapists”, and claiming that “they were lying and knew it” when they did what they did.

What, then, is the terrible thing that the style-smashers have done? The following is (and I stress this) a complete list of all the facts about English usage he cites:

* Some writers now use either he or she, or singular they, or purportedly sex-neutral she, instead of purportedly sex-neutral he, to refer back to generic or quantified human antecedents that are not specifically marked as masculine.
* Some people recommend the words chairperson, humankind, and firefighter over chairman, mankind, and fireman.
* Some try to avoid using the phrases great man when speaking of a great person, or using brotherhood when making reference to fellow-feeling between human beings.

[...]

Gelernter insists on the beauty and clarity of “Shakespeare’s most perfect phrases”, calling them “miraculously simple and terse”; [...]

Gelernter huffs and puffs a lot about the use of he or she, but this is only a prelude to something more serious: a furious condemnation of singular antecedents for they (“a student who lost their textbook”). In his telling of the story, the feminist language terrorists weren’t content with imposing he or she on us, a phrase that is merely clumsy; worse was to come when grammar itself “collapsed in a heap after agreement between subject and pronoun was declared to be optional”, i.e., they was permitted to have singular antecedents.

But his ignorance of the history of English literature on this point is breathtaking. It is quite clear that he has no idea Shakespeare used they with singular antecedents [...]

Gelernter also specifically singles out Austen for praise: “The young Jane Austen is praised by her descendants for having written “pure simple English.” He obviously is not aware that Jane Austen is famous for her high frequency of use of of singular-anteceded they [...].

Gelernter thinks singular they was invented by post-1970 feminist “ideologues”, rather than a use of pronouns having a continuous history going back as far as a thousand years. One might think it remarkable that someone this ignorant of the history and structure of English would nonetheless presume to pontificate, without having checked anything. But not if you read Language Log. We have noted many times the tendency to move straight to high dudgeon, skipping right over the stage where you check the reference books to make sure you have something to be in high dudgeon about. To take a random example, when Cullen Murphy accused three word-sense usages of being modern illiteratisms, Mark Liberman showed that in fact all three were the original meanings from long ago. And then a couple of months later Mark found John Powers had made an exactly analogous mistake with three other words. People just don’t look in reference books when it comes to language; they seem to think their status as writers combined with their emotion of anger gives them all the standing they need.

Election and Feminism IV (rant)

It’s not yet clear which prejudice will infect the presidential contest more — misogyny or racism.

Well. I have written on this topic thrice before. This is a difficult issue. Both the racial as well as the gender divide appear to be at work here and both blacks as well as women have repeatedly complained of expectations of loyalty to Obama/Clinton based on their gender/race. For those weirdos who think like that the situation of black women appeared to be particularly fascinating. CNN reports

Within minutes of posting a story on CNN’s homepage called “Gender or race: Black women voters face tough choices in South Carolina,” readers reacted quickly and angrily.
Readers want media to focus more on the candidates and how they feel about the issues not their gender or race.
Many took umbrage at the story’s suggestion that black women voters face “a unique, and most unexpected dilemma” about voting their race or their gender.
CNN received dozens of e-mails shortly after posting the story, which focuses largely on conversations about Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama that a CNN reporter observed at a hair salon in South Carolina whose customers are predominantly African-American.
[...]
An e-mailer named Tiffany responded sarcastically: “Duh, I’m a black woman and here I am at the voting booth. Duh, since I’m illiterate I’ll pull down the lever for someone. Hm… Well, he black so I may vote for him… oh wait she a woman I may vote for her… What Ise gon’ do? Oh lordy!”

For a while it appeared as if voters were divided along two tough lines of bigotry, so that, for instance, analysis seemed to show that whole ethnic or racial groups could be expected to vote for/against Obama because of his race and because of his race only. see for example this early February analysis:

Yesterday’s primary voting laid bare a profound racial and ethnic divide among Democratic voters, with African Americans overwhelmingly preferring Sen. Barack Obama and Latinos largely favoring Sen. Hillary Clinton.

In this discussion Bill Clinton’s infamous remarks fit squarely:

Clinton reminded reporters out of the blue that “Jesse Jackson won South Carolina twice, in ’84 and ’88. And he ran a good campaign. And Senator Obama’s run a good campaign here. He’s run a good campaign everywhere.”

This is of course as close to a slur as Clinton could allow himself to get. And everyone noticed the inappropriateness of this remark and of similar remarks, even Internet comedians mostly stayed away from that, unless the souce was downright hostile to Obama’s campaign. Putting down Obama because of his race wasn’t permissible.

However, it seemed easily permissible to riff on Hillary’s gender. Comparing her to Tracy Flick, for example, as in this collage, or discussing endlessly the degree to which Hillary Clinton is feminine enough and whether her tears have won her New Hampshire, and no, it’s not suddenly a better idea just because the Clintons embraced it themselves after winning. In case you’re interested, here‘s a piece that explains the difference between the polls and the surprising outcome.

If this post sounds confused, well, that’s because the whole issue has become really strange. On the one hand the racist hatred that tricks even pollsters and then, on the other hand, stuff like this:

In a webcast, prestidigitator Penn Jillette talks about a joke he has begun telling in his show. He thinks the thunderous reaction it gets from audiences shows that Hillary no longer has a shot.

The joke goes: “Obama is just creaming Hillary. You know, all these primaries, you know. And Hillary says it’s not fair, because they’re being held in February, and February is Black History Month. And unfortunately for Hillary, there’s no White Bitch Month.”

This last quote, as well as the quote at the beginning of this muddled post is taken from an insightful article by Maureen Dowd, which doesn’t answer that question though.

So. Where are we? To clear this up: no, I am not telling people to vote for the person who is most discriminated against. That’s absurd.

No, this is about the astonishing extent to which misogyny has become a part of our culture. Or (to turn again) is it about misogyny? To a certain extent, sure. Many of the journalistic instincts, how to ‘explain’ results best, are more or less sexist and insulting. Yet, as Stanley Fish has pointed out here and here, Hillary Clinton-hating contains elements of sexism but is an all-out attack on her person and that of her husband. So, isn’t it about sexism after all?

I am, again, not so sure. The fact that she has become such a widely hated person has to do with anti-Clintonianism that simmered still in the public. However, that does not explain the vehemence, the furor, which accompagnies these Anti-Clinton attacks these days. It just doesn’t. I say her gender is not the only but it is the central part of Hillary-bashing. And the worst thing about this is the fact that it is not recognized as offensive, especially compared with racism. Dowd relates an interesting anecdote:

Elaine Sirkis, 77, an Obama supporter, confided that she just isn’t sure she’s ready for a woman president. Betty Conway, 83, a Hillary supporter, confided that she just isn’t sure she’s ready for a black president.

As Conway walked away, Sirkis smiled sheepishly. “I’m sorry,” she told Berman sweetly about her friend. “She’s a bigot.”

I am pretty sure that this situation is not reversible. Isn’t that sad? Misogyny is still normal, a smaller offence, good clean fun, as they say. Boys will be boys. Ah doesn’t it make you want to puke?

Mister Good Enough vs. Ross & Mr. Big

Found this on the always delightful Jezebel blog

Why It’s OK To Settle For Mr. Good Enough. Sounds like the sorta assertion that might get the readers talking/chatting/generating the old ad revenue, eh? Well that’s a story in the latest issue of the Atlantic Monthly by a single mom (Lori Gottlieb, pictured) who dares to advance the iconoclastic argument that Rachel would have been better if she’d just married the orthodontist. I’m not kidding! She ACTUALLY POSES THE QUESTION: “Do we feel confident that she’ll be happier with Ross than she would have been had she settled down with Barry, the orthodontist, 10 years earlier? She and Ross have passion but have never had long-term stability, and the fireworks she experiences with him but not with Barry might actually turn out to be a liability, given how many times their relationship has already gone up in flames.” Oh, and forget searching for Mr. Big; as Gottleib points out, “Some time after the breakup, when Carrie ran into Aidan on the street, he was carrying his infant in a Baby Björn. Can anyone imagine Mr. Big walking around with a Björn?)

Okay, so far be it from us to dispute a self-help manifesto constructed on the basis of possible alternate conclusions to popular television series, but what’s author Lori Gottlieb smoking? [...]It’s sort of refreshing how honest she is, even though hers are thoughts any 28-year-old has already probably had in advance. But then you hit a sentiment like this:

After all, wouldn’t it have been wiser to settle for a higher caliber of
“not Mr. Right” while my marital value was at its peak?

And think, wait a minute, something’s not right with his lady.

Damn right, too.

Machen Sie sich mal frei!

SPON über eine Entwicklung in Schweden

“Bara Bröst” heißt die Gruppe – “bloße Brust”. Ungewöhnlich für eine Feministinnenorganisation, doch tatsächlich ist das ihre Mission: Sie wollen sich entblößen dürfen. In Schwimmbädern. Männer dürften dort schließlich auch oben ohne herumlaufen. Das sei diskriminierend, ausgerechnet im liberalen Schweden.

Jetzt feiert “Bara Bröst” ihren bisher größten Erfolg: Die erste öffentliche Schwimmhalle hat nachgegeben – im nordschwedischen Sundsvall. [...]

Die Frauen feiern ihren Erfolg, denn sie haben monatelang dafür gestritten. Im Herbst hatten die Aktivistinnen damit begonnen, gruppenweise Schwimmhallen in schwedischen Städten zu stürmen. Ohne Oberteil. [...]

Die Aktionen endeten jedes Mal mit einem Rausschmiss durch die Bademeister: Die fürchteten, dass gerade die männlichen Gäste abgelenkt würden. Daraufhin zeigten die Frauen die Bademeister bei der staatlichen Antidiskriminierungsbehörde an – die sich weigerte, die Anzeige aufzugreifen.

Warum unbedingt oben ohne? Die jungen Frauen sehen den Zwang, ihre Brust zu bedecken, als Symptom der Übersexualisierung von Frauenkörpern. “Es ist diskriminierend, dass Frauen ein Oberteil an der Badebekleidung haben müssen, während Männer mit freier Brust baden dürfen”, sagte die Aktivistin Sanna Ferm der Sundsvaller Lokalzeitung “Dagbladet”. Beim Schwimmen sehe man den Busen ja gar nicht, argumentierten die Frauen. Die Aktionen sollten eine öffentliche Debatte anstoßen und dazu beitragen, dass weibliche Formen endlich sexuell “entdramatisiert” werden.

Wow. Amazingly sexist. I’m throwing up.

Wow. This…just leaves me speechless. Talk about misogyny. Wow.

Lynn Peril

New discovery. Lynn Peril, author of two very interesting-sounding books: Pink Think and, most recently, College Girls. These days she joined the ranks of us bloggers. Check out her blog. Why don’t you start with her fascinating post on the pink/blue ‘divide’.
(am I patronizing you? a little bit maybe. Ah but you still like me, don’t you?)

Oooh I want to see this movie! io9 on "Teeth"

io9 (p)reviews Teeth, here’s an excerpt which explains why I want to see this movie at least as badly as PTA’s current movie:

the main character in the movie Teeth has developed a special power that allows her to survive high school. Deep inside her vagina, Dawn has a set of shark’s teeth that will bite off anything she doesn’t want in there. [...] But Dawn’s “adaptation,” as she calls it, isn’t just a grossout thrill. It’s the perfect vehicle for expressing the emotional truth of teenage sexual awakening. (Spoilers and dick chomping ahead.)

Dawn’s mutant puss is her only source of power in the small, conservative town where she lives beneath a nuclear power plant and goes to a school where concerned parents have put giant gold stickers over pictures of the female anatomy in her textbook. Active in her local church chastity club, where she gives passionate speeches about virginity being a “gift,” Dawn is a sexual innocent. And sexually repressed.

Inevitably, when Dawn starts to fall off the virginity wagon she does it with a guy who turns out to be a jerk. Instead of the heavy petting she’s ready for, he tries to go all the way. And when Dawn resists, he knocks her head against some rocks and proceeds to have his way with her. Luckily, her puss never sleeps and we get our first glimpse of the extremely graphic results of Dawn’s evolutionary advantage.

FeMale Geeks

Now, I know this bit is slightly older but, just in case you haven’t read it yet, here‘s Sir Tim Berners-Lee on discrimination in the male oriented geek culture:

The inventor of the world wide web, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, has called for an end to the “stupid” male geek culture that disregards the work of capable female engineers, and puts others off entering the profession.

[...]

According to Berners-Lee, a culture exists where women can be put off a career in technology both by “stupid” behaviour by some male “geeks”, and by the reactions of other women.

“It’s a complex problem — we find bias against women by women. There are bits of male geek culture and engineer culture that are stupid. They should realise that they could be alienating people who are smarter and better engineers,” said Berners-Lee.

Engineering research facilities that interview candidates based only on how many papers they have had published also risk adding to the problem, according to Berners-Lee, because of an apparent in-built bias against women.

One academic went through a sex change, submitted the same papers under both identities, and found that papers were accepted from a man but were rejected when they came from a woman, said the web inventor. This bias is unaccountable, but adds to institutional bias, he said.

via she’s such a geek

Gendergruscheln im Studivz

Offenbar ist es so, daß, wenn man beim Studivz die Datenschutzeinstellungen so ändert, daß man keine personalisierte Werbung mehr bekommt, man folgendes gefragt wird:

Bist du dir sicher? Denn wenn du das Häkchen stehen lässt, bekommst du für dich interessantere Werbung. Wie z.B. nur Frauen bekommen Werbung für Lippenstift, nur Männer sehen Werbebanner für Fußballvideospiele.

How often I think about Sex

I have a list of articles on Language Log that I wanted to talk about concerning the stupidity of most pop science treatments on the so-called difference between man and woman. I may have voiced some disparaging comments of my own here and there and in other articles as well. The following excerpts are taken from an older Language Log article (please read the whole thing. It’s short and very readable).

On page 91 of The Female Brain, Dr. Louann Brizendine writes (emphasis added):

Males have double the brain space and processing power devoted to sex as females. Just as women have an eight-lane superhighway for processing emotion while men have a small country road, men have O’Hare Airport as a hub of processing thoughts about sex whereas women have the airfield nearby that lands small and private planes. That probably explains why 85 percent of twenty- to thirty-year-old males think about sex every fifty-two seconds and women think about it once a day — or up to three or four times on their most fertile days.

This striking different in rates of sexual thoughts is also one of the bullet points on the book’s jacket blurb — but there, female sex-thought frequency is downgraded from “once a day” to “once every couple of days”:

* Thoughts about sex enter a woman’s brain once every couple of days but enter a man’s brain about once every minute

Whatever the exact numbers, it’s an impressive-sounding difference — scientific validation for a widespread opinion about what men and women are like. And this is interesting stuff, right at the center of social and personal life, so you’re probably wondering about the details of the studies that produced these estimates.

in the following part of the article Liberman reviews her cited sources and, having done that, comes to these conclusions:

Adding up this study’s tally of undergraduate male sexual thoughts, we get 4.5 male urges + 2.5 male fantasies per day on average, for a total of 7 sexual thoughts, or one every (24*60*60/7 =) 12,342 seconds. Compare Dr. Brizendine’s figures: “85 percent of twenty- to thirty-year-old males think about sex every fifty-two seconds”. That’s more than 237 times hornier — even if the other 15 percent never thought about sex at all, the average frequency would still be at least two orders of magnitude greater than Jones & Barlow report. (And they sampled male undergraduate psychology students, who must surely be near their life maximum of sexual consciousness.)

How about the female numbers? Jones and Barlow’s student diaries yielded 2 female urges + 2.5 female fantasies per day on average, for a total of 4.5 sexual thoughts per day. That’s 450% greater than the “once a day” that Brizendine cites in the book’s text, and 900% greater than the “once every couple of days” rate in the jacket blurb. Not that the average self-reports from the “47 female undergraduates” in Jones and Barlow’s 1990 American sample should be taken to stand for the nature of all women in all times and places — but this is still 47 more women than we’ve been able to connect with Brizendine’s estimates, at least so far.

Note also that the Jones and Barlow numbers for women amount to one sexual thought every (24*60*60/4.5 =) 19,200 seconds. But you’re not going to sell any books by writing that “Men think about sex every 12,300 seconds, while women only have a sexual thought every 19,200 seconds”.

It’s always somewhat irritating how easily people (i.e. readers) swallow the “hey I’m right, cuz see, it’s scientific” ‘argument’. Science. mainly because it’s such a heavily specialized field right now (not that this kind of misuse wasn’t common in earlier days as well, remember Edward Long?) , is easily misused and I as a reader have a strong mistrust against people who base outrageous claims on ‘science’. I am sometimes suprised that other people aren’t and that all these bad science books sell so well. And the funniest thing about it is that many natural scientists, who should know better, who can see their sciences being misused and trivialized on a daily basis, often do not behave in a better way whenever they write about, or make use of, fields like literature, philosophy or theology. Oh, well.
And how often do I think about sex? As they say: that’s for me to know and for you to find out.

Election and Feminism III

Interestingly the voters in affluent and more educated circles flocked to Obama, a vast majority of them, apparently, while blue-collar neighborhoods voted solidly for Clinton. This opens all kinds of possible interpretations about class divides. Gender, Class and Race, dammit, we don’t even need the Republicans this year to make this an intriguing election.

Election and Feminism II (updated)

Ah. This is the first entry I had written with respect to this topic and I notice I promised to elaborate when more sober. Well, that’s obviously not going to happen tonight, no sir. But I did find a short but interesting and very readable op ed in the NY Times, which I will shamelessly quote the best parts of now, but do please read the whole piece, as the author’s making some more valid points fully worth your attention.

Gender is probably the most restricting force in American life, whether the question is who must be in the kitchen or who could be in the White House. This country is way down the list of countries electing women and, according to one study, it polarizes gender roles more than the average democracy.

[...]

So why is the sex barrier not taken as seriously as the racial one? The reasons are as pervasive as the air we breathe: because sexism is still confused with nature as racism once was; because anything that affects males is seen as more serious than anything that affects “only” the female half of the human race; because children are still raised mostly by women (to put it mildly) so men especially tend to feel they are regressing to childhood when dealing with a powerful woman; because racism stereotyped black men as more “masculine” for so long that some white men find their presence to be masculinity-affirming (as long as there aren’t too many of them); and because there is still no “right” way to be a woman in public power without being considered a you-know-what.

[...]

But what worries me is that he is seen as unifying by his race while she is seen as divisive by her sex.

What worries me is that she is accused of “playing the gender card” when citing the old boys’ club, while he is seen as unifying by citing civil rights confrontations.

What worries me is that male Iowa voters were seen as gender-free when supporting their own, while female voters were seen as biased if they did and disloyal if they didn’t.

What worries me is that reporters ignore Mr. Obama’s dependence on the old — for instance, the frequent campaign comparisons to John F. Kennedy — while not challenging the slander that her progressive policies are part of the Washington status quo.

You, my dear readers, see me equally worried about these things. Of course, the author’s simplifying the situation, race has played a major role for instance in discussions of Oprah’s involvement in the campaign. But it’s an op-ed, not an academic essay. And broadly speaking, she’s right. And we do have cause for worry.

PS. Fresh off the NYT Caucus blog which I’ve been monitoring tonight while reading and drinking are these oddly fitting statements:

Our colleage, Michael Powell, sends this in from Clinton HQ: “In the end, the tear was almost a galvanizing moment. It shook a couple of voters of their mental fence and solidified others in support of Mrs. Clinton. Elaine Marquis, a receptionist from Manchester, went back and forth, but she was leaning to Mrs. Clinton when that moment came. Someone asked a personal question and the candidates eyes misted. “I think it was absolutely wonderful,” Mrs. Marquis said. “Women finally saw a woman. Perhaps a tough woman but a woman with a gentle heart.”

Jim Neilsen, a 68-year-old retired sociology professor, has been in the Clinton camp for months. He said that voters are finally seeing a woman who has real emotions. “It did not bother me, I loved it,” he said. “I was moved.”

PPS. Even fresher off the same blog, please look at this picture. It could very easily be used as an illustration of the op-ed, couldn’t it?

Marco W. und die junge Schlampe (Marco II)

Also. Ich habe ja hier schon ein paar Bemerkungen über Marco W. dahingeknurrt. Einen Aspekt habe ich vergessen, der auch in enormer Weise irritierend ist und von einem aktuellen SPON-Artikel gestützt wird

Ein Wort noch zur Familie des angeblichen Opfers, das mittlerweile traumatisiert sein soll – kein Wunder bei der aufgehetzten Stimmung in seiner Umgebung. Wer eine 13-Jährige unbeaufsichtigt in eine Discothek lässt und nicht darauf achtet, wann und mit wem das Kind zurückkehrt – Marco brach schließlich nicht gewaltsam in das Hotelzimmer des Mädchens ein, sondern wurde bereitwillig mitgenommen -, verletzt seine Aufsichtspflicht. Er oder sie, die Mutter, die im Türkei-Urlaub dabei war, darf sich dann nicht wundern, wenn Jugendliche eine solche Freiheit ausnützen.

Alle Schuld auf einen 17-Jährigen abzuwälzen, dem in der Aufregung vielleicht etwas passierte, was er gar nicht beabsichtigt hat, und die Medien dann mit einer Horror-Story zu füttern, um vom eigenen Versagen abzulenken – das ist unanständig.

Es ist ja gut, richtig und, äh, korrekt, die Täter- und Opferschaft der an einer möglichen Straftat Beteiligten zu klammern, solange gerichtlich nicht geklärt ist, ob eine Straftat vorliegt und welche Straftat genau. Aber faszinierend ist es doch, daß bei jeder Erwähnung von Marcos Anklage die “dünnen Beweise” betont werden, aber man ganz schnell dabei ist, von einem “angeblichen” Opfer zu reden. “Angeblich” geht auch als Ausdruck weit über den normalen Rahmen hinaus. “Angeblich” bedeutet eine Vorverurteilung des Opfers und tatsächlich folgt im zitierten Teil auch eine richtige Verurteilung der Eltern von Charlotte, die ich in den letzten Tagen tatsächlich häufig von den Guten Deutschen gehört habe. Faszinierend daran ist, daß nach meiner Kenntnis des türkischen Strafrechts auch Marco nicht in der Diskothek sich hätte befinden dürfen, mithin ein Rundumschlag gegen beide Eltern berechtigt gewesen wäre.
So wie es ist, findet die Diskussion gefährlich nahe an der “she was asking for it”-Grenze statt. Sie hat ihn doch angesprochen, sie war doch zu knapp bekleidet, sie war doch in der Disko, ihre Eltern haben doch ihr unsittliches Verhalten erlaubt, klagt die doch an. Irritierend. Irritierender aber ist, und dies läßt auch die ganze gegenwärtige Diskussion um Kinderrechte in einem etwas anderen Licht erscheinen, daß dort offenbar der sexuelle Mißbrauch von Kindern flugs umdefiniert wurde in: harmlose Handlungen mit einer ziemlich nuttigen jungen Frau. Deshalb griffen die ganzen alten Vergewaltigungsargumente wieder. Das kennen wir doch alle zur Genüge und eigentlich sollte uns allen davon schlecht sein. Es ist, vorsichtig gesagt, unangenehm, daß die sogenannte “Schlampen”-Verteidigung (wild aus dem Englischen paraphrasiert) immer noch greift. Das, mein lieber Spiegel, ist wirklich unanständig. Die faszinierende Mischung aus Frauenfeindlichkeit und Nationalismus, die hier die Umdeutung von Charlotte nicht als Tochter, sondern als Frau, die fast auch schon als Täterin durchgeht, ermöglicht. Siehe auch die Altersnivellierung im zitierten Abschnitt, in der Marco und harlotte kurzerhand zu jugendlichen vereinigt werden, wobei anderswo Marcos Jugendlichkeit eines der lautesten Argumente für die behauptete türkische Willkür ist, also etwas schützenswertes. Charlottes Kindlichkeit kann das nicht mehr sein, da sie in den Stand der Jugendlichkeit erhoben wurde. Dankeschön, kann ich da nur sagen.
Ich habe in den letzten Tagen im Internet eine Diskussion geführt, in der, in alter rassistischer Manier die ‘Nachteile des Islams’ aufgezählt wurden in einem Atemzug mit einer Verteidigung des armen armen Marco W. Interessant ist, daß es aber genau dieselben traurigen Gestalten waren, die im weiteren Diskussionsverlauf voll in die frauenfeindliche Bresche gesprungen sind. Traurig.

Election and Feminism

Lately, what with a woman running, and Oprah making a pitch for Obama and discussions of Clinton’s male behaviour in the discussions, the gender asoect has become sort of intriguing. I will write (mostly quote) more about this in the following days. See for instance, today’s NY Times:

The politics are complex; even as rival campaigns seek to peel away women’s votes from Mrs. Clinton, they are often careful to acknowledge and pay tribute to the broader significance of her candidacy. “Women, I think, should take pride that Senator Clinton is running, the historic nature of her race,” Mr. Obama, of Illinois, said in an interview Thursday. “That’s a genuine sign of progress.” He said he tried to convey to his two daughters every day “that you’ve got the same opportunities and shots as everybody else.”

But he quickly moved on to make the case that the candidate’s sex is not, and should not, be the deciding factor. Women, he said, “can look at a whole series of issues and know, ‘You know what? This guy’s going to fight for us, partly due to biography.’ Because I know what it’s like to be raised by a single mom who’s trying to work and go to school and raise two kids at the same time, doesn’t have any support from the father. These are issues I’m passionate about.”

Moreover, he argued, his leadership offers the best prospects for delivering on that agenda.

The gender factor is rarely addressed head-on by Mrs. Clinton’s rivals.

More tomorrow when I’m more sober.

Mario Barth, Leander Haußmann und der ganze Kladderadatsch

Nachtrag zu diesem post von, äh, gestern. In einem SPON Interview faßt Leander Haußmann (ohne den ich auch gut klar käme) heute gut die (verquere und dämliche) Logik hinter Barths Dünnschiß zusammen:

Ich glaube, an bestimmten Dingen ist einfach was dran. Das bewerte ich gar nicht negativ oder positiv. Ich kann mir nicht vorstellen, dass es Zufall ist, dass meine Tochter mehr vor dem Spiegel steht als mein Sohn. Das muss doch irgendwo verankert sein. [...] Es gab zuerst die Säugetiere, irgendwann Affen und dann wir. Das war ein langer Prozess, davon muss ja noch was übrig sein in uns. Wenn sich ein Mann nach einer Frau umdreht, dann ist das einfach sein Urinstinkt, da kann er nichts für. [...] Eva Herman ist mir völlig egal, aber die Debatte ist interessant, weil man über Eva Herman einen Stellvertreterkrieg führt und sie sich hervorragend dafür eignet, dieses Thema ins Boulevard zu bekommen. Auch hier haben wir Tabus und die sind tatsächlich, da muss ich Eva Herman in gewisser Weise zustimmen, in den sechziger Jahren im Zuge der Emanzipation aufgetaucht. Aber was man darüber vergessen hat, ist, dass die Gleichstellung der Geschlechter noch lange nicht die Unterschiede zwischen ihnen aufhebt.

Ganz großartig. Obwohl ich vermute, daß Leander Haußman hier Witze macht, ist dieser schlecht durchdachte Unfug ja im Grunde schon Allgemeinwissen. Wenn man es anders sieht, muß man sich rechtfertigen, erklären, warum man denn jetzt kein moderner Postfeminist ist, und warum man immer noch “die selben alten Grabenkämpfe” führt wie die “68er”. Gottverdammt. So. Jetzt bin ich wieder stinkig und der Haußmann hat es wohl nicht einmal verdient.
Übrigens, auf die pro forma Frage des Spiegels, ob Haußmanns Tochter ihr Mädchenverhalten nicht von “gewissen Vorbildern” erlernt haben könnte, sagt Haußmann: “Dafür ist sie zu jung”. Entweder das ist wieder ein (bitterer) Witz, oder er meint tatsächlich nur Paris Hilton, Hillary Duff oder so. Ich rate zu einem Blick ins Kinderfernsehen oder in Kinderspielzeugläden. Bittesehr, ein paar schöne Hinweise, wo seine Tochter vielleicht auf Mädchen gedrillt wurde: Hier zum Beispiel, hier, hier, hier, oder hier. Selbstverständlich läßt sich das ganze auch auf Jungs ummünzen.

Das ist alles so verdammt verdammt ärgerlich und den Menschen schwimmen die Felle weg und wenn dann ein paar einigermaßen schlaue und gebildete Menschen, die zumindest ins Auge fassen “aus dem Fluß zu steigen” (finde grad keinen link), eine Veranstaltung machen die (juhu!) zwei Vorträge zum Thema Gender hat, verschwenden sie zumindest einen an einen der blöderen Denker zum Thema (das wird ganz gut von ihr selbst demonstriert, bitteschön, ein Manifest zum Nachlesen). Ach.

Menno.

Wonder Woman (very cool)

[if I weren't almost finished...(he said whistfully)...hell, there is a fine paper in this]
Today’s online edition of the NY Times on a bit of interesting news

Ms. Simone was talking about her rise from hairstylist to online commentator to professional comic-book author. This month she added a new title. With the publication of issue No. 14 of Wonder Woman, which hit stores two weeks ago, Ms. Simone has become the regular writer of that amazing Amazon’s super-adventures, published by DC Comics. She is the first woman to serve as “ongoing writer” (to use the industry’s term) in the character’s 66-year history.

It’s an assignment that will only increase Ms. Simone’s profile. It’s also the latest move by DC Comics to push Wonder Woman, the company’s third-ranked hero, behind Superman and Batman, into the spotlight.

During a telephone interview from her home in Florence, Ore., Ms. Simone was effusive when discussing Wonder Woman. “She’s just the best kind of person,” she said. “She was a princess who didn’t need someone to rescue her. I grew up in an era — and a family — where women’s rights were very important, and the guys didn’t tend to stick around too long. She was an amazing role model.”

Broder über Barth

Da haben sich die zwei richtigen getroffen. Broder schreibt einen dämlichen Artikel über den dämlichen Barth. Gegen Ende schreibt er

Dennoch bleibt der Aufstieg von Mario Barth zum Superstar ein Mysterium. Die perfekte Vermarktungsmaschine, die hinter ihm mittlerweile brummt, kann die offenkundig bestehende Nachfrage ja nur bedienen oder allenfalls befeuern, aber nicht selbst schaffen.

Die Antwort liegt auf der Hand: wenige ‘Comedians’ bedienen so sehr und so ausschließlich das gleiche menschenfeindliche Klischee vom Mann und der Frau die vom Mars respektive der Venus kommen (eine Art Kommentar dazu schrieb ich hier). Und das hätte Broder doch auffallen können, schließlich verdankt er seinen ‘Erfolg’, in jüngster Zeit jedenfalls, ebenfalls nicht seiner Brillianz, sondern der Tatsache, daß er seit einigen Jahren unermüdlich ebenfalls immer wieder die gleichen menschenfeindlichenKlischees bedient. Gut, in seinem Fall sind es andere. Das ist aber auch schon alles.

It’s Britney, Bitch! (2)

Ha. Nicht zu fassen. Ein Artikel in der faz, den ich nicht ärgerlich finde, über “the legendary Ms. Britney Spears”. Gut, sich über die breite Berichterstattung über die Person Britney zu beschweren und dann selbst dazu beizutragen ist sicher nicht wohl überlegt, aber wenn man sinnvolles sagt, darf man das. Die beiden relevanten Passagen sind folgende:

So etwas steht inzwischen nicht mehr nur in bunten, sondern auch in seriösen deutschen Blättern. Komisch, dass es so oft junge Frauen trifft, Paris Hilton oder der jungen amerikanischen Schauspielerin Lindsay Lohan ergeht es nämlich genauso. Pete Doherty dagegen ist eher die Ausnahme von der Regel, außerdem ist das Image des suchtkranken englischen Sängers eher das des letzten ungezähmten Rockrebellen.

sowie

Es ist fast unmöglich geworden, unbefangen über die amerikanische Sängerin zu schreiben, weil einfach zu viel Ressentiment im Raum steht, das erst mal weggeräumt werden muss. Britney Spears ist zum Politikum geworden, wer sich zu ihr äußert, bezieht Partei – weil es auch eine Frage der Politik ist, einer jungen Mutter das gleiche Recht auf Eskapaden zu gestatten wie zum Beispiel einem Robbie Williams. Und da gibt es eben eine Partei, die duzt.

Faszinierenderweise ist es auch diesem Artikel, bis vielleicht auf Teile der zaghaften Andeutungen in den zitierten Passagen, nicht gelungen, das Level von Reflexion, das ein Lied wie Piece of me vom aktuellen Album bereits erreicht hat, zu übersteigen. Dass man mit sowas Geld verdient. Pfff.
Ich möchte schließen mit der Bitte um einen Dubstep oder Breakcore remix des Albums. Wenn das jemand liest der sowas macht oder erfährt, daß sowas gemacht wurde, bitte benachrichtigen Sie mich.

Guess I can’t see the harm
In working and being a mama
And with a kid on my arm
I’m still an exceptional earner (B. Spears, Piece of Me)

9/11 and Feminism

In a recent book review of Susan Faludi’s new book The Terror Dream (I like her book Backlash a lot, polemical and wrong as it may be in parts)Michiko Kakutani points out its many many logical flaws, starting with

To begin with, the reader wants to ask: What disappearance of female voices? What “bugle call” to “return to Betty Crocker domesticity?” Since 9/11, Hillary Rodham Clinton has become the leading Democratic contender in the race for the White House, with a good chance of becoming the first female president in history; Katie Couric was named anchor of the CBS Evening News; and women like Lara Logan of CBS and Martha Raddatz of ABC have been reporting from the frontlines of the war in Iraq. Ms. Faludi asserts that the 9/11 widows “the media liked best” were the fragile, dependent ones, “who accepted that their ‘job’ now was to devote themselves to their families and the memory of their dead husbands.” But even she has to acknowledge that the so-called “Jersey Girls” (Kristen Breitweiser, Mindy Kleinberg, Patty Casazza, and Lorie van Auken) played “an essential role in forcing the creation of the independent 9/11 Commission,” and helped strong-arm “top White House officials into testifying before the commission.”

Kakutani does say that Faludi explains that these women were the exception to the rule but it doesn’t seem to bother her. Nor the fact that Faludi points out that in places central to the frontier myth, women have been underrepresented or excluded, as the stewardesses who boiled water on Flight 93 to throw it on the terrorists (nice nugget, there, as a fighting action it’s in conflict with the myth but broken down in its component parts, it’s actually pretty similar to women who in frintier times prepared the means with which men fought. Curious conflict there)

She writes that post-9/11 marketing efforts “had succeeded in darkening the image of the sexually liberated single woman,” even though “Sex and the City” remained a hit TV show in the years before and after the attacks.

It would have been nice of Ms. Kakutani to have recalled Backlash a little bit better and the part of it, which was itself at the time not new, but it was for the first time presented in a nationwide nonfiction bestseller (we all would love for Irgigaray and Butler to sell big but that’s not going to happen, is it), which discusses the so-called ‘emptiness’ of the career woman. Much of what Ms. Faludi has written about that is admirably compatible with Sex and the City (I’ve written some remarks about that show in this short essay of mine as well)however, that show, for whatever reasons, did run out in the years when the infamous War on Terror began (does Kakutani presume that this process is exact? The second the myth begins everything is being adjusted? Those things take time), which could provide material for a neat discussion of the closeness of the show to the myth and the reason for its incopmpatibility with the similar problematic surrounding the stewardesses on Flight 93.
The most striking part of Kakutani’s criticism of Faludi’s book, as well as the most telling, is this one:

And she writes that television and other pop culture manufacturers dispensed “the consolations of a domestic idyll where men wore all the badges, and women wielded all the roasting pans,” even though high-profile shows like “Scrubs,” “CSI: Miami” and “The Osbournes,” which had their debuts in the year or so after 9/11, hardly illustrate this theory, and television has more recently seen the emergence of shows (like “Damages,” “Saving Grace” and “The Closer”) featuring feisty middle-aged heroines as tough-talking lawyers and cops.

Granted, I don’t remember enough of Backlash [and I don't find my copy. Anybody who's willing to buy me a new one is welcome! ] to retrieve from memory to what extent Faludi has understood the gender/sex divide, but what’s interesting about these new shows, as well as about Scrubs is that these shows work with a strong sense of what “masculine”/”feminine” is and of how masculine/feminine a man/woman should be to be normal, which makes shows like these hasten to show that, looking at The Closer, for instance, despite being a “tough cop”, Chief Brenda Johnson is still very feminine, she may fulfill the gender role of a man, down to her behaviour at home, but ‘deep down’ she’s still a woman, an insidious argument if I ever saw one. If that show wasn’t so enjoyable… Point is that although Faludi’s arguments abour rebuilt attitudes should not be taken too literally, these arguments are indeed forceful and they describe a troubling development.
However, Kakutani may be right about one thing.

Ms. Faludi’s overarching thesis in this book rings false too. In fact, her suggestion that the 9/11 attacks catalyzed the same fears and narrative impulses as those unleashed by our frontier ancestors’ “original war on terror,” leading to a muffling of feminist voices and a veneration of “the virtues of nesting,” runs smack up against her own “Backlash,” which suggested that similar assaults on women’s independence were being unleashed in the 1980s — a time not of war or threat but a decade that witnessed the fall of the Berlin Wall and the coming end of the cold war.

It might, after all, not be due to the horrible specter of 9/11. How people behaved in the face of 9/11 might have been due to what they were thinking all the time. Maybe it’s just that with faminism it’s as with civil rights, people no longer look too closely at what’s happening if they are so afraid some muslim Terrorists might destroy their homes and their ‘freedom’ that they don’t notice the infringement of said freedom by their own elected government and nonelected media.

Thea Dorn

Bei Menschen, die in einer Sache etwas Richtiges sagen, bin ich immer maßlos enttäuscht, wenn sie dann ärgerliche Sachen auf anderen Gebieten erzählen. Und selten kommen gut und schlecht so oft im Doppelpack wie beim Feminismus. Thea Dorn ist eine der wenigen Menschen in Deutschland, die ein großes Publikum hat und trotzdem quasi reihenweise sinnvolle Dinge über den Feminismus zu sagen hat. Ob sie über Eva Hermann oder über den Feminismus allgemein spricht, es ist immer ziemlich genau und zutreffend, was sie zu sagen hat, aber wenn man sie nur ein bißchen läßt, sagt sie im Anschluß immer noch etwas über den Islam. Der scheint ja ohnehin heute in jedes Diskussionseckchen zu passen, neuerdings auch in die Anti-Pauli-Hetze der Welt . Bei Thea Dorn fängt das dann bei wohlfeilem Muslim-Bashing an und hört damit auf, daß man in der Bücherfernsehsendung die man ganz anständig moderiert, dem unsäglichen Herrn Broder Zeit, Raum und Lob für seine wirklich übelriechende Dummheit gibt. Diese Menschen, die Schwierigkeiten mit komplexen Sachverhalten haben und dann gerne den anderen die Beschränktheit vorwerfen, die sie selbst zur Schau tragen. Beim Herrn Broder ist da schon nichts mehr zu hoffen. Aber Thea Dorn? Womit wir beim Ausgangsärger wären. Wieso können Menschen, die sich bei einem wichtigen und schwierigen Sachverhalt vernünftig aufführen, das nicht auch bei anderen tun?
Furchtbar, das.

Wollstonecraft’s Vision

Mary Wollstonecraft’s 1792 treatise on the “Vindication of the Rights of Women” has held up remarkably well, considering the advances that feminists have made in the decades since. She emphasizes the rationality of women and their ability to be able to be strong enough to “rise in the world” without having to marry first. The fact that ground gained in the 1970s and 1980s in terms of feminist insights has been lost in the past decade has lent her arguments new power and demonstrates the longevity of gender stereotypes.

The text insists on destroying myths about women, the most damaging of which is the idea of feminity as being inherently “pretty” and of all women being a “frivolous sex”, not to be taken seriously. Wollstonecraft naturally realizes that she herself will be judged by that standard, which explains the vehemence of her attack against these stereotypes. In order to offset herself better against that myth she eschews a polished style so as not to make an impression of prettiness. Wollstonecraft wants to be seriously considered, as a “rational creature[]“, someone to be reckoned with as an adult, i.e. a person who can adequately discuss serious matters.

Thus she refutes the myth of women being unable to shine in any area of expertise apart from childish hobbies. However, she never denies that women are doing useless and childish things: “they dress; they paint and nickname God’s creatures.” Yet even though her disapproval is tangible, she does not berate women for adhering to these gender roles. Instead she chooses “to persuade women” to behave in a different fashion and condemns society for binding women to certain gender roles. It is a veiled attack, part of it directed against “writers”, part of it against an education system which teaches women to be caricatures of women. She doesn’t yet have the critical vocabulary developed in the 1970′s and 1980′s to describe the problem in a more exact way.

This is not to say, however, that she isn’t astonishingly modern in her criticism. Her recognition of the fact that women are made ‘women’ by their education is heavily reminiscent of modern ideas of sex and gender. Meanwhile, the most baffling connection between Wollstonecraft’s text and current attitudes towards women is not a theoretical one.

Rather, it becomes uncomfortably clear how far back the recent rollback in feminist matters has taken modern Western society. Since the mid-1990′s a new generation of women celebrate what they call their ‘womanhood’, emphasizing their ‘feminity’ and their differenece from men. The entertainment and advertising industry has catered to that impulse, providing TV Shows, hundreds of women’s magazines and books about women being from Venus and men being from Mars.

An American feminist was attacked in the NYTimes recently for decrying this harmful development in a style that was to the reviewer woefully indicative of a 1970′s frame of mind, replete with 1970′s vocabulary and concerned with 1970′s battles. The feminist complained that ‘choice’ these days has been perverted to also mean ‘choice to be feminine’, ‘choice to not work and be ‘married” and such things. It has been fashionable again to refute women’s rationality in favor of their ‘intuition’ and “libertine notions of beauty.”

As early as 1792 Mary Wollstonecraft recognized the trap which ‘feminity’ has become for women and she has decribed its contours in a precise way. Even though she is vague as to the construction mechanism of that trap and even though she continues to make problematic assumptions about the role of women in society, her text is still, 214 years after publication, remarkably forceful. This is not due to a stagnation in society and ideas about women but to the massive rollback which feminism has suffered in the last decade. Wollstonecraft’s attempt to “point out in what true dignity and human happiness consists” deserve to be read anew and to be read seriously.