Posted by Bitch Lab at 2:57 pm and filed under Racism & Race, So 1998 ::
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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.
So: Don’t like Bitch Lab? Join the club, and don’t read her. Read the women she rips off instead. They’re better.
So: Don’t like Bitch Lab? Join the club, and don’t read her. Read the women she rips off instead. They’re better.
10-12-2006
Just go ahead and bitch
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OK, I’m sure I’ll feel stupid for not figuring it out myself, but what does MWF stands for exactly???
Ohhhh… Mainstream White Feminism? That’s it, right?
yuah. just added two footnootes for explanation. i didn’t want to explain inline so as to not muddy up my metaphor.
you know, sometimes the Art! the Art! much more important than being clear. HA! (self ironic joke — and I”m not sure if I sure be offended on behalf of myself or not.)
Middle-Class Identity-Political Liberal Feminism?
Argh….
Sweet little jesus, why, WHY, did i follow that link to Hugo’s blog? Why do I keep doing that to myslef?
That insipid discussion on heels and lipstick, in addition to the burqa one, AND the ‘What feminism as done for me’ meme (you’ve seen that one? soooo fucked up. because of course, feminism is just about me, me, me, ME, ME, ME, dammit) is too much.
Thanks for suggesting the ban on WMF. I do need a break from it!
Not having a lot of exposure to the WMF in general, and trying to avoid it as much as I can, I feel sooooooo tired right now.
re the meme - well, insofar as enlightened self-interest is a good thing, I don’t think it’s such a dumb question in itself.
I answered it. it was fun.
I think feminism can give women as individuals a personhood - a ME, an inviolable self - that maybe was denied in the past.
Maybe. I could be wrong. too much ME can be pretty toxic.
Hold up….Titty rubbing?? Double dildos?? MWF action???
Please tell me you didn’t sell your domain name to World Wrestling Entertainment. Miz B??
Oh, I’m sorry…just caught footnote [2]. Uhhh…never mind…
Actually, after this week of Teh Feminist Sex/Race Wars, the WWE actually seems almost tame in comparison.
BTW…you left out the liplock….you can’t have good HLA (Hot Lezzie Action) without lips locking up. No good competent “raunch culture” flick can be without one or two.
Anthony
(A bit giddy from starting a nice 8-day paid vacation today….WOOt’s!!)
Antiprincess:
re the meme. Well, like pretty much anything, i agree that the meme is not inherently stupid. But the context in which it takes place, and the responses that people give to it make it, for the most part, very annoying to me.
I haven’t seen your response to it (it’s on my list of ‘to read’ now though), but most of the answers to it that i’ve read were depressingly similar in their white-middle-class-hetero privilege and inability to acknolewdge said privilege.
Sure, abortion is cool to have on demand (and i’m pretty happy to live in Canada where it is a non-issue for most people), but what makes it really great here in Canada is that you don’t have to pay for it either. And women have free (or almost) access to extensive health care. And access to relatively cheap day care for children. And I could go on. (this is not to say of course that all these great social institutions have not been going down the drain in recent years with the push toward privatization.) This is what feminism has done for me. Not only giving me abortion. But giving others before me a way to think and act toward making these social politicies possible.
My point is that, ya, great, feminism has done a lot for me. But more in terms of giving me a vocabulary and a point of entry into a critique of the fucked up system in which we leave, and into politics and actions for change. So, it’s not so much about what feminism has done for ‘me’ per se, or what feminism has ‘given’ me (education, abortion, right to vote, blah blah blah), but what it has opened up for me so that i can relate differently with others.
Make sense?
So, no, the meme is not stupid in itself. It only becomes so when people make is so. And, well, from what i’ve seen (i could be wrong of course), most responses to it were coming from the MWF crowd. Need I say more?
Heh. I couldn’t figure out the MWF thing either. I kept saying to myself, “Married White Female, huh?”
I’m just not on the ball these days.
OK. So i updated it again damn it. Y’all made me give up aesthics enjoyment of the undisturbed visual of MWF on MWF in order to be clear.
Are you happy now? hmmm? *grin*
I just enjoyed it so much that, with the typography the page displays on my screen (yours may be different) it looks like the acronym MILF.
HEY teh WWF features shirtles men as long as i chaneg before the walkings terotypes and i cna pres smute whne john cen walks on and dhelton teh bubble heiny too IM GOOOOD
It’s so nice to get another shout out from you, Bitch! I am a tadsy bit worried that I am going to wind up disappointing you (and your readers) as I am indeed the archetypal MWF.
The one thing I’ve tried to do at my place from the beginning is to be very transparent about the fact that I am writing based on a very particular set of experiences that are not at all representative of everyone out there. That’s not to say that we (meaning any politically conscious blogger) shouldn’t be making every effort to break out of our own insularity and consider/write about stuff that doesn’t affect us directly.
I like your idea of a break from feminism. Sometime soon, I’m going to pick a block of time and declare a moratorium on writing about feminism during that period. I’m not going to do it quite yet though because I’ve got lots of MWF stuff to get off my chest first.
XOXOXOXO
Noting that you think someone’s reproducing a structure of oppression has nothing to do with being a Big MEEEEEEEEEEENIE and not liking someone’s person.
Continuing over and over again to assert that someone’s reproducing a structure of oppression, and then asserting without support that they’re guilty of being blinded by privilege when they try to defend themselves, has something to do with a determination to dislike them, yes.
I’ll leave it at that. I don’t think I’ll ever agree with you on this. And I strongly object to the tone that you and plenty of others have been taking about this–posting long lectures/quotations about imperialism to “educate” the people who disagree with you (because OF COURSE we’ve never read a book on imperialism before!) and accusing them of being blinded by white privilege (because OF COURSE we’re all white! And OF COURSE being a black/Hispanic American or a white American intellectual interested in postcolonial studies entitles you to speak for Middle Eastern and South Asian Muslim women!). Basically, I call bullshit on all of your posts on the subject. The discussion, including your part of it, has been incoherent and downright offensive, asserting unsupported opinions as if they were facts. I doubt you have a higher opinion of my comments, but oh well.
well darlin, that you think i’m an intelledtual is hilarity on ice. I am able to actually breath now that I can buy both toilet paper and a bar of soap. I haven’t gone to a physician in 15 years becasue I have never had health insurance. I have never worked a job with paid vacations. Going to grad school was a pay raise for me.
I haven’t seen an argument: you have merely asserted that you suspect we are all just jealous or don’t like a person. But this makes little sense in the context of this conversaton, which is nearly a year old.
We, on the other hand, have cited material on the nature ofoppression. It comes from a long tradition of scholarship. Perhaps you disagree. In which case, there *are* other ways to conceptualize what is going on. But asserting jealousy and the like is simply poisoning the wells of discourse.
You came hear under the pretense of having a “productive discussion” claiming you accepted various points. It turns out that you have come her to get people to concede that they are jealous little girls who are filled to the brim with misogyny and we just don’t like Amanda.
you’ve made the assertion several times now; you haven’t extracted the confession.
You are surprised?
You want me to hold a high opinion of you? Well, I’d like to. Right now, it’s hard to draw much of an opinion, for you haven’t said more than I and others are engaged in a personal vendetta agaisnt Amanda or something.
It’s sorta like when you get upset with your partner for forgetting to pick up his socks, you have an argument, and you catch him glancing at the calendar — coz he’s thinking it must be that time of the month. IOW, he thinks your complain is unwarranted andmust be chalked up to irrationality and emotion brought on by PMS.
charming.
Oh, Alon….ahhh, I mean, Grouch…just drop it.
If you just can’t stand the fact that people of color and their supporters aren’t willing to remain silent and call you out on your nonsense, then that’s your issue and your problem, not Bitch’s or mine or BfP’s or Blackamazon’s or anyone else’s.
No one is saying that B|L or BfP or BA is attempting to speak for Middle Eastern or any other people….but that for centuries, Whites (including many White liberals) have attempted to use their privilege to speak on behalf of others…on occasion forgetting to even ask those others for their permission or even their thoughts on speaking for themselves. That is the real issue here.
When you stop trying to lecture people of color on how they should tell their own experiences, then maybe they will begin to hear your point of view. Until then, you will be talking to a whole bunch of hands….some of them with extended middle fingers.
Sorry, Miz B, to but in like this…but this shit is getting beyond old. Never mind taking a break…maybe we should just lock up the subject in a dark cave and then bury it for a year or…a millenia….because that’s just how long it will probably take to resolve this nonsense…if ever.
Anthony
Happy –
I think you are precisely not the stereotype. Yep. MWF, but as Blackamazon said in her latest piece of prose poetry, you were trained in a classic tradition of liberal schooling. As such, you feed the dragon in the cave and you exercise him — the dragon being the desire for knowledge.
If you don’t take the dragon out for some exercise, his butt grows so fat he can’t get out of the cave and there you are, trapped.
I think Belledame tapped into it by describing it as curiosity v. incuriosity.
As for blogging, this is the toughest part about it . They are personal and voluntary. They’re done on our free time. So, we can’t be expected to write outside our knowledge domains all the time. As women, we should certainly accept the gift we give each other and ourselves: taking care of ourself.
So, we have to take all those things into consideration.
Last week, I re-read an interview with a norotoriously difficult to read postcolonial theorist, Gayatri Spivak. She addressed this issue about realizing that, if there is no universal femal experience, not universal woman, then what do we do in a world of radical plurality?
(She’s speaking here of the widespread popularity of multi-culturalism which actually was coming under attack as a tool of oppression.)
she’s getting tough there. She is saying: We can’t all know everything. We can try our damnedest to have a breadth of knowledge. We, as individuals cannot be “the ground of multiplicity” by ourselves.
That Spivak passage reminds me of a train of thought I’ve had, that I’ve had a hard time explaining to others, about Epicurus’s idea that the beginning of freedom is overcoming the fear of death that religion teaches, and accepting mortality. In part, that means to me accepting one’s limitations, and overcoming the fantasy that one can, as an individual, find some God-like point of view form which one can understand everything. Rather, one’s limited, finite, and part of the human community that, imperfectly, allows for wider understanding than lone individuals can achieve.
Also, learning the limits of our own power allows us to see the benefits of working in community. It isn’t entirely on each one of us to make a better world, it is working with others and using our collective knowledge that makes change possible.
Ravenmn –
right on sister! I’m so sick to death of the attitude that collective engagement <> social change is impossible. how defeatist. this is how i see all the rah rah siss boom bah cheerleading for consciousness raising as a process of gazing at your navel, discovering how you participate in patriarchy, deciding if you really do, and then, if you do, go ahead and doit anyway.
What IS the point?
I think the navel gazing is Teh Silliness, if all we do here in cyberspace is say, “I critique thee! but you don’t have to pay attention to me.” Gah. What happened to looking more deeply at the conditions that oppression us and actually getting after *them* rather thank poking at our and others’ navels to get the lint out?
gah
—————–
FO — bringing up the god-like POV is a good one. And I think this has everything to do with what goes on. When people think knowledge is about *having* it by sitting on archimedes’ point, this is the kind of horrible acrimony that can result. you have to be right all the time or seen to lose.
some guy even said something about winning/losing at the punkass thread. wuh?
>Continuing over and over again to assert that someone’s reproducing a structure of oppression, and then asserting without support that they’re guilty of being blinded by privilege when they try to defend themselves, has something to do with a determination to dislike them, yes.>
O I see.
So tell me: why do you hate men so much?
I agree wrt overcoming the fear of death; I don’t however agree that religion necessarily teaches it; I think it can be one way toward that very thing (overcoming).
coming from the perspective of several generations’ worth of atheists/agnostics who are not at -all- good at coming to grips with mortality, imho.
it’s a deepspread problem, and it has more to do with fear of -life- than of anything else. Fear of change, let’s say. Fear of transition, of which shuffling off this mortal coil is of course the ultimate one. Transitioning into -what- is in a way besides the point: it’s the transition itself, I think, that people fear more than whatever they speculate is on the other side.