Tagline: Little Light
Wondering why Queer Dewd? Wondering what happend to Bitch | Lab? Read Why Queer Dewd and Shame Affirmative.
Skip all this. Take me straight to the comment form »
Leave a comment, a trackback from your own blog, or subscribe to an RSS feed for this entry.
"For what it’s worth, I don’t like Bitch Lab, I don’t read her, I don’t think she’s very bright, and I think the main thing she piggybacked on recently was a comment thread to a post she didn’t author. Nice appropriation, that. ... Don’t like Bitch Lab? Join the club, and don’t read her. Read the women she rips off instead. They’re better." - Ilyka Damen
"Speaking as a progressive radical Leftist feminist  supporting Black man, I say: BRA FREAKIN' VO! Ms. Bitch."  Anthony Kennerson
"Your blog warms my pervy queer heart. \m/" Â The Phrophet Lilith
"It's visually delicious and pensively random. Or maybe, it's deliciously visual and randomly pensive." Â Dave Harper
"Quite a good blog for a little edgy whitty sort of humor." Â Mr. Linuxhead
"Bitch Lab ... really hits (Daily Kos) where it hurts by mentioning the fact that he's raking in some $480,000/year in advertising revenue and should not be presenting himself as if he were leading an Alabama bus boycott." Â Jackson Free Press
Note: This blog is a natural product. Slight variations in spelling and grammar enhance its individual character and beauty and are not to be considered flaws or defects.
Hmm, interesting. I don’t think I fit neatly into any of those groups. Surprise, surprise… I can’t be typified! I think I’m sort of an amalgamation of the Movement Legacies and the Advocates. The thing that rubbed me the wrong way about the description of the Movement Legacies was the part about their belief that discrimination is rare. Don’t know what’s up w/ that.
Amber: re. discrimination being rare…
I remember a psychology course discussing internalizing and externalizing failure or abuse; if I remember correctly, assuming “failure” - which discrimination could translate into, since you’ve “failed” to get a job or secure a loan - as a single external interpersonal issue leaves the locus of control in you. A random misfortune or a misfortune whose circumstances you can control are easier to deal with than a misfortune which you blame on a gestalt and unchangeable personality flaw (like being female?), or worldwide truth. If you blame tripping and falling on gravity or your own clumsiness, you’ll recover more slowly from the hurt than blaming it on a shoe coming untied.
Which is partially why kids often assume that their parent’s divorces are their fault.
Anyway, people who largely leave the locus of control in themselves tend to score more highly in … um… was it reslilency or lack of depression? I can’t remember for sure. But I do remember the prof talking about race, and how there were different approaches to emancipation which allowed people to be effective even when presented overwhelming evidence that society was discriminatory. One of those ways was singling out discriminatory individuals and not society, which worked best when working from within society’s framework. It is also possible to interrogate all of society without suffering, but usually from a different cultural perspective or ingroup. So that there is some immediate environmental control.
Now, that was all, like, 9 years ago. So I’m sure I’m misremembering some of it. But there’s my arm-chair, badly remembered, Social Psych contribution.
I’m 52.4% pure, according to that test… but I almost stopped at that ‘ancient wisdom’ section. What the hell does drinking tea have to do with it?
The survey’s group divisions are intriguing, in part because, like Amber, I’m not sure where I’d fit in - does that mean we are free-floating ‘choice feminists’ and we don’t even know it? (wink)
And wouldn’t it be better, if we are going to talk about ‘Choice Feminists’ to talk about actualy examples of people taking the position we’re discussing, especially if a source is online?
Well, but then nobody can build a strawfeminist, BL! Geez!
It can’t be entirely an accident how bloody successful the coinage was been (in about 9 months), & how elastically it’s used (much more broadly than even Hirshman intended). It’s an invitation to Kulturkampf among women, there being no preference, no mannerism or matter of taste, that can’t made the basis of an invidious social distinction, always drawn under false color of feminist critique. Twenty years ago it wouldn’t have caught on so easily; it would’ve been thought bizarre.
What I want to know is how we can get “choice feminism” put into the same box as “feminazi” — especially since the origin and purpose of the two terms are very similar. It is not a term that feminists should use. I mean, unless we want to make ourselves look worse to outsiders. But forgive me if I question the feminist motives who deliberately engages in actions that do nothing but make fun of other feminists.
I’m not even sure what people mean by “Choice Feminism.” When someone says, “My body, my choice,” is that bad? What is wrong with saying, “Feminism is about making sure that women have more choices”? Why is it so important that everything I do, I do because I’ve thought through whether it is patriarchal or not? That’s what bothers me. I sit down, make a table of pros and cons about the decision to wear make up. I decide that I like wearing make up. I realize it’s serving some patriarchal norm of beauty, but I like it nevertheless. So, I decide to wear make up. I don’t say it’s feminist. I just say, “This is me. I like to wear make up.”
I do not understand how this has just improved society in any way at all. Can anyone explain why the demand for navel-gazing is so important?
I just think ‘choice feminism’ is shorthand for “not my choices”. Maybe it’s a symptom of good thing: we have enough choice floating around out there that we’re beginning to be individuals, instead of Woman Stereotypes I, II, and III. I mean, when we’re all stuck permenantly in the kitchen, and told by society that our husbands wouldn’t be such beatin’, cheatin’, hurtin’ drunks if we were just better at wife-ing, then there’s a basic need shared by (many) women to get the hell out of that cultural and legal zeitgeist. I may be a stay-at-home parent (for now), but I sure as hell couldn’t live for more than 2 seconds without wanting to explode in the airless atmosphere of French’s “A Woman’s Room”.
Now, we all have more freedom in our stories; and so we’re writing different chapters. We’re having more experience in the world, and so we’re individuating our responses. I think that’s pretty good, actually: no one expects Al Franken to want a similar to Rush Limbaugh just because they both share XY chromosomal patterns.
There are things that we mostly can come together on, I think… Legal equality, abortion rights, destruction of shame around sexual and physical abuse. Other than that, we may very well dislike each other. There’s no reason for us all to like each other and our lives merely because we share XX.
I am too sick to expand on this but what Arwen’s talking about happened to be a good part of what I found in my ethnographic research on long-term unemployed. I put it in different terms, drawing on the way the concepts are deployed in soc, but it’s typically the same thing. In soc, we’d focus on how the ‘myth of meritocracy’ militates against social structural understandings of one’s fate, etc.
but, yeah, people who are unemployed for a long time and people who are on welfare will often basically even ‘lie’ to themselves, sometimes portraying themselves as purposefully choosing to be in the situation of unemployment or being ‘on the dole’. I puzzled and puzzled when people who’d been out of work and weren’t like to find any said that they were ripping off the government, collecting benefits they didn’t deserve. Surely, they were joking I thought: there aren’t any jobs. Their own freakin’ employments counselors, etc. etc. agreed that there was no work to be found for some of these folks — unless they moved and took severe pay cuts.
they lied to themselves and to me and everyone else because they preferred to appear to have control over their lives. They’d rather be thought a welfare cheat than an also ran in an economy where they say it’s your own damn failure that means you’re unemployed — even in the midst of a severe recession and widespread plant closings! Even as when I was growing up — where there literarlly weren’t any jobs to be found for 100 miles and people survived by bartering and going into severe debt. They preferred to tell fibs about their situation.
other thing that’s related — the socially acceptable response. in survey research, people often tell researchers what they think researchers want to hear. another phenom, name i’ve forgotten, is where people like to say, “Oh, everything’s great with *my* doctors, but the health care system in this country stinks.” This is another aspect of individualism, according to the researchers who study this stuff. In the US, people feel it’s very important to appear successful — always. So, to a survery researcher, a stranger, you might just well tell him or her that you’re doctor is great b/c, if your doctor isn’t, then this means you have been a failure and haven’t gone out and found the best one. Don’t admit that you might be constrained by $. Of course, your doc may actually be great. But the point here is that researchers have tested this to find this individualistic reponse tendency among USers.
Some recent uses of ‘choice feminism’ get away from some of its original sense of self-deception or sour grapes. And anyway, those things are hardly the exclusive preserve of ‘choice’ feminists. It’s true, so much of what we tell ourselves about ourselves, individually & collectively, the way we construct ourselves, really is a necessary palliative, a way of evading or negotiating with brute facts. We do it so comprehensively – right down to the ground – that it’s child’s play to pick out discrete instances, to justify whatever political agenda. I’m sure Hirshman’s right that there are elite women who prefer to elide the awkward reality of the constraints on their choices. All of us do, including anti-choice-feminist feminists.
Bullies & know-it-alls know this, & take pleasure in puncturing other people’s illusions. Political people should be more careful, & more humble. The point is to afford people something better, & the only good reason I can see to take away someone’s illusions, to make her see her world plain, is if it helps her change it.
That goes equally for an unemployed worker who tells herself (or me, anyway) she’s gaming the system, a loser who tells herself she’s a rebel, a Cravath Swaine associate who tells herself she wants to leave her career to take care of the quintuplets. Also for some feminists, ‘choice’ or otherwise. People don’t lie to themselves about things they know how to fix. If you don’t know some solution that they don’t see, don’t intrude. And don’t assume that everybody who doesn’t live her life the way you’d live it must necessarily lying to herself & in need of kibitzing. She may have reason to think your version of enlightenment involves illusions of its own.
KH:
“And don’t assume that everybody who doesn’t live her life the way you’d live it must necessarily lying to herself & in need of kibitzing. She may have reason to think your version of enlightenment involves illusions of its own. ”
beautiful.
51% (shrug)
Choice feminism makes the cover of The New Republic (Oct 2 issue, publ. Sept 21). Innaresting review article (of Flanagan, Hirshman, & Steiner’s edited book, Mommy War) by James Wolcott, “Meow Mix.”
“Never before have women been so obsessed with other women’s choices”
“People don’t lie to themselves about things they know how to fix.”
!!