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 »
[...] Admin’s Note: This is something I have been wanting to post for a while, but I was inspired by a big old blog fight among feminists this past week. The fight started in a debate over bikini waxing, but the larger issue is social class and standards of beauty and femininity. I was on the outskirts of it, so I missed much of the controversy, but I just had to get my two cents in now that I finally figured out whats going on. My primary exposure to this debate was over at Bitch|Lab’s spot. I left this comment on her blog, which basically sums up my feelings about the femininity issue: I’m completely and utterly tired of hearing the word choice bantered around like it is the be all and end all of feminism. A week long moratorium on the word would be nice. It might get some folks to think outside the box. [...]
Alas, a blog » Blog Archive » Social Class, Feminism, and Choices: A Little Piece of My Story
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
"I hereby nominate Bitch | Lab for the role of my inadvertent theory djinni." Â Prosphoros
"The sanctimonious Bitch | Lab, a multi-degreed asswipe (with) a tedious blog of regurgitated theory..." Â Amanda Marcotte, Pandagon
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.
If I may shamelessly blogwhore for a moment, please read this post for a possible antidote:
http://pluckypunk.blogspot.com.....-arms.html
But damn, what if a fellow feminist is transphobic, we don’t call them out on that? We do.
do we? Been to the world o’ crap comments recently?
the choice to have exactly one outfit to wear in public in order to afford the cheapest of groceries
Why do you need to afford groceries? You can Choose to be anorexic you know.
That’s why blowjobs are teh EEVIL you see, it’s the calories, you’ll be swallowing bits of skin flakes, and then there’s the sperm, which is just so fattening.
oh, have you been reading Pony? People who can afford to eat so much have no business crying poverty. Also, anyone can exercise, including quadraplegics, so there’s no excuse. For “pimping your blog,” or maybe it’s for being “fat.” Same thing, really.
also, anal sex is a patriarchal plot. and it’s feminist or at least o.k. for a radical feminist to go around mocking sex workers for -their- photos, on account of mumbo dogface to the banana patch.
and she and the other radical feminists, p.s. are “coming to get” me! i’m so excited. where will they take me? i hope not one of those fancy microbiotic restaurants, i’ve nothing appropriate to wear. maybe just a nice long march along the beach or something.
bless her spring-loaded, waterlogged little head.
Bd, where is pony saying this? It’s early in the mroning and I haven’t gotten my pissed on yet–that’s as good a place to start as any, I suppose.
Thank you for this post. I just bury my head in the sand when these fun feminist things get goin. As someone who teaches WS, it bores the hell out of me when my students want to waste the whole semester talking about these girlie, beauty, weight loss pressure things. I am trying to talk about the economy or Hurricane Katrina and they are bored. But, if I pop in “Killing us Softly,” they get all fired up. While they sit there thinking about how many calories they have eaten and when they can burn them off, the only thing that catches their attention is how unfair the media is toward their body image and the pressure, oh, the pressure. It just bores the hell out of me. (Yes, I am feeling snarky).
did i hear you suggest that academe is not a meritocracy?
i don’t know about you, but where i come from, students get grades based on their intelligence and hard work. it has nothing at all to do with their class, race, sex/gender, home life, politics, looks, dress . . . etc. it’s all about what they learn. just the facts, ma’am.
that said, i admit i have struggled with this. what exactly are grades supposed to DO? who do i help if i just give everyone As? and in the cases of elite institutions, the grades don’t fucking matter anyway, do they? case in point: look in the white house. if you go to yale or harvard and get a 2.0, everyone says, well, but you went to yale/harvard. if you go to podunk small college (or state u) and get a 3.8 or 3.9, everyone says, well, but you went to podunk state. and if you get a 2.0, they say, eewww, even at podunk? that, my friend, ain’t about the grades at all.
i don’t have any illusions about the purity or fundamental integrity of academic grading. i hate (personally speaking, psychologically, in my soul) the process of assigning grades and i hate (politically speaking) the economy it represents/in which it participates. but what do i do about it? help me out here.
the other thing about elite schools is that (more) kids show up there wanting and expecting to do well (and those students mainly understand doing well as directly related to learning). i know whereof i speak, even if i am generalizing too much. here at podunk small college (PSC), we get many more kids who don’t understand the least bit of the value of the education, even if they understand the value of the degree (which they often do not). we are fighting a whole culture here in Small Backwards State of undereducation and undervaluing of education. their parents don’t have college degrees and they themselves don’t understand the point, unless it’s to party for “free” for four years and thereby have a better shot at a higher-paying job.
we recently had to let go of a student my former dept chair and i both tried hard to rescue. we probably did it wrong. but we got him more than one second chance. and it’s because we recognized the situation he was coming from and what a degree even from podunk small college could do for him. we tried hard to keep him here long enough for him to figure it out, too. but we couldn’t get HIM to take hold of it.
conversely, we get students who think they’re going to law school, but they can’t show up for class. ever. they can barely put together sentences, much less two or three in a row. they drop logic (which i teach). LOGIC. LAW SCHOOL.
i’m not trying to set up some kind of reduction to absurdity of your argument. it’s just that we confront these scenarios every day around here. and i don’t know what to do about it. but i am not convinced that grades are the problem any more than that grades are the solution (which they clearly are not).
we have almost no racial-ethnic diversity here on campus. all white. we have more women students than men, but the faculty is overhwelmingly, disturbingly white men (like me, btw — although i like to think that they are mostly *not* like me; or, rather, that i am not like *them*). but in terms of economic, political, social, and academic background, we have a very broad range of students, indeed, many at the low end (we give astonishing amounts of aid — and as an institution we cannot afford it), even though some kids drive audis around campus (i am not fucking kidding). those aren’t the good students, either.
but it makes the whole thing even more bizarre. it’s strangely monoculture in some critical ways, and yet stratified in other important ways.
ok, i guess this isn’t going anywhere. or if it was, i lost sighht of it. how much do i owe you for my hour of therapy?
Kactus: fortunately or unfortunately, the quotage was emailed to me (from another former radical feminist who’s now pretty much just watching all this with much incredulity and popcorn) without a link. classically vile, though.
and you know, i feel torn about the beauty, etc. etc. stuff: sure, i get that it’s important to people, too; it’s just, you know: how many times do we (”we”) have to have the same tiresome arguments about -crap-? can’t people just own their own damn consciousness raising? because honestly i think if as much time were spent on “learn the distinction between Me and That Other Person, as in we R two different people” as it were on blah blah PATRIARCHY blah blah, we could get through this a lot quicker.
…oh, and she apparently got it from someone else. so maybe she didn’t know the link either. may be ’s well, at that.
But here’s the actual post in all its toxic glory, if you really need to get steamed:
“Amp has posted pix of his family, in various permutations. Here’s the deal AMP: eat less. Yes. If you have enough money, you and your child, and your female partner(s) and any other people you have depicted on your website who are grossly overweight–if you have enough money to be so fucking FAT, you have enough money not to be a PIMP.
It takes easily TWICE the realistic food budget to get that fat and stay there. Unless you are in a wheelchair, a quad or a para who cannot exercise (and even they can as Rick Hansen proved over 20 years ago) you have no excuse for your weight: for spending hundreds and hundreds of dollars a month MORE than necessary for sustaining life on your food addiction, and then crying too poor not to whore out your blog.”
o yeah, and elsewhere: I am a “john,” apparently.
These comments, and zuzu’s, saddened me as well as enrage me.
BL, you are kinder than I. I don’t waste my time as Feministe except to read piny’s stuff. The few times I’ve been there I’ve variously gotten pissed, saddened or bored.
What strikes me most about 99% of the posts and comments is how out of touch with their own breath each poster/commenter is.
Yours in the work.
In line with your statements about this economy requiring stratification (which it does–to keep wages low and workers in line), it has been suggested that most people in the U.S. are one paycheck away from panic. In fact, most of us are a month-with-no-income away from homelessness. I read somewhere that being “middle class” is having a SIX MONTH buffer between you and financial disaster, which makes the vast majority of us “working class,” at best, especially these days.
Also, in considering the unemployment statistics, one has to include not only those in prisons and jails, but those in the military (many because they couldn’t support themselves any other way), those who have stopped looking out of discouragment (they don’t hit the radar), and those who are working fifteen hours at a fast food joint and aren’t included in the stats either.
Argh….
*grinds teeth ominously*
R. Mildred –
oh ferfucksake. As someone who destroyed my metabolism as kid with exercise bulemia — back in the days before the word anorexia was common (let alone bulemia) — I have a rusty jack knife for THEIR eyes right now.
I stay away from this topic b/c I’ve seen that trying to discuss it, even in lefty forums, gives me a serious frickin’ case of wall head. (As EL knows, Lyle McDonald is the god of weight lifting. While he holds ppl accountable for gluttonage, he is also perfectly aware that there really are some people with metabolisms that fight them every step of the way in the weight maintenance and weight loss game. But try telling that to anyone hellbent on advancing a social theory that includes denouncing people for fatness. You show them evidence that people are getting fatter in all countries where industrilization, autos, and sedentary work lives are introduced — zip! flies right under their fuckin’ feet. Show them study after study — wheeeeeeeeeee!
Anyway, pony has revealed herself, repeatedly, to be a vicious person. She’s well-aware of Amp’s deal and she didn’t care. To advance her freakin’ case, she shoved a knife in his heart anyway.
To get all macro-structrual on her ass. Pony, here’s a clue: part of the problem is, in the US, our economic policies have meant that, over the decades food for USers has become more and more affordable. So, the logic is pretty much bullshit anyway.
And the idea that anorexia will help someone achieve anything just boggles my fucking mind. Fuckme, I have work to do, but I’d like to take some of the disussions from Misc.Fitness.weights on USENETS and print them out, crumple them all up into a big wad of paper and shove them in her mouth.
Belledame–i can’t (well, yes, i can,) believe that post! he had to make that sale b/c he was too selfish (and all those other things fat people are) to stop eating/being “grossly” (emphasis on gross) overweight? i mean damn, now my fat ass is worried that my “fatness” is going to be blamed for yet something else. wtf–do people just really not take a moment to think? hateful mf!!!
ugh.
and, in my own admission-of-banal-ness, i was kind of struck by zuzu’s equation (not right word, but…) of bikini waxing w/hair straightening. maybe b/c i don’t know the history behind bikini waxing and i do know much of that behind hair straightening. i mean, bikini waxes have a relatively recent history while we’ve been lauding and trying to approximate white norms of beauty for centuries now.
and i do understand the commonalities. but c’mon! i guess my biggest issue is that non-straightened hair is much more visible (heh) than pubic hair–thus the rejection of natural hair is more immediate, more widespread than that of hairy bikini lines. and there’s something pressing in the back of my mind that, when white women get bikini waxes, they’re trying to fit a standard of attractiveness defined largely by their own (racial) “group” where as hair-straightening involves trying to meet a standard of some other group–damaging in a different way, imo, especially when the “joke” is, we’re never really going to look like them. finally, i get the idea that once waxing is done, it’s done. yeah you have to go back, but when you leave said wax-place, you get the stamp of approval. hair straightening is only the beginning–you have to avoid water, too much sun, new growth, nappy patches, rough edges–etc. in other words, the stamp of approval lasts for approximately that first day after the salon and then the real fight begins. and it’s intergenerational–somehow i don’t think white moms and grandmoms obsess over their offsprings’ pubic hair grooming the way black moms and grandmoms obsess over hair straightening–”when to start? press or perm? god please let her have “good” hair!!!”
a trivial rant, i know, and i don’t mean to get into “which one is MORE hobbling” but it was on my mind. and yes i realize have generalized and placed bikini waxes into the realm of “white women’s things” but that’s my experience.
Bitch is good at posting, but in fact I don’t actually have a good clear class analysis of stuff. It’s just that my family of origin is thrifty, and so after years of going to the bakery thrift store, and buying clothes from the goodwill(I’m wearing one of my finds today- a 3.99 shirt), how the non thrifty middle class spends is always a shock to me.
elle, I think you’re right on about the hair straightening. My hair would never go straight. Not to mention, it’s also a work place issue in many places, whereas brazilians would only be required of sex workers.
the other thing about hair-straightening vs. bikini wax is, unless you’re in a very specific line of work, not having a bikini wax is not gonna hurt your career/money-making opportunities on accounta you don’t look “professional.”
slip, Shannon just said the same damn thing, of course.
>To get all macro-structrual on her ass. Pony,
While you’re explaining that to her, I’ll just be over here explaining quantum physics to my cat.
I started to see the hair straightening thing come up, but at that point I was pissed. When I’m pissed, I really can’t read. Seriously. My mind can’t comprehend the words. So i left a “this is all a lot of bullshit” comment and went back here to rant so as to avoid derailing the train — choo choo — of the godamned track.
Had I comprehended the point of all that? Oh. My head would have exploded. Waxes are the *result* of an economy which requires ever more frickin consumption (of services in particular) in order to stay on a freakin’ even keel. There is a reason something once done by only the wealthy becomes THE standard — trickles on down to the middle-class and sometimes lower — such as with nail salons.
But it’s a process of recontainment — because there’s a new standard that will emerge to set the boundaries of *distinction* between those who have the *right* kind of nail jobs and those who don’t.
That is decidedly not what goes down with hair straightening and racialization in this freakin’ country.
just fuckmedead already!
also, wax: ouchy, but not really that big a deal longterm I don’t think. whereas the process for hair straightening–that’s gotta involve a fuckload of strong chemicals, doesn’t it? I remember just when we were discussing the possibility of doing it to -my- hair, probably a different process but still sounded incredibly unpleasant and frankly not worth it. “relaxing” is not the word, i don’t think.
I used to get sores in my head from relaxing(my scalp is sensitive) but I chopped off the relaxed hair two years ago. Some people gradually snip the relaxed ends. Also, once some ladies tried to put a relaxer on my cousin’s baby’s head when she was about 4 or so, and well, she had a really red irritated head for a while.
Changeseeker –
re: the military thing, yup. Oh, what was it? Bowles and Gintis who wrote about schooling as “warehouses.” While there were plenty of idealistic movtives behind public schooling, a lot of it was also propelled forward by people who were freaked out by all the “gangs” on the streets during the late 1800s and early 1900s.
thud.
The military similarly warehouses people, keeping them out of the unemployment stats.
With Doug’s research, he had to navigate the world of neo-classical economics, which meant that the also had to figure out a way to measure how people in jail are actually productive (e.g., create goods that circulate in the wider society, which offsets somehowerother, details I’ve forgotten)
From Henwood:
thank y’all… i was woried that i was getting too… something!
and, in my own admission-of-banal-ness, i was kind of struck by zuzu’s equation (not right word, but…) of bikini waxing w/hair straightening. maybe b/c i don’t know the history behind bikini waxing and i do know much of that behind hair straightening. i mean, bikini waxes have a relatively recent history while we’ve been lauding and trying to approximate white norms of beauty for centuries now.
Jesus, people, it’s not like I pulled it out of my ass. Shannon got on Jill’s ass for spending $40 on bikini waxes and in the same comment, said she chose not to spend $40 on her hair like other women do (including women in law school). How is it a sign of decadence and snobbery to spend $40 for a wax and not $40 for a hair process? How is it a sign of snobbery and decadence to spend $100 for a pair of stilettos and not $100 for a pair of Doc Martens?
And, sorry, I still don’t think that Shannon was right to try to guilt-trip Jill by demanding to know where she got the money for waxing while she’s in law school. The problem is not that she has sufficient disposable income (or, more likely, student-loan funds) to spend on something Shannon deems trivial, the problem is that she feels pressure to do it at all. And she would feel that pressure regardless of whether she could only afford disposable razors and Wet ‘n’ Wild.
Shannon –
heh. well, that’s the beginning of class analysis! The flipside is for people who gasp that you wear clothes from a thrift shop.
I remember having to fill in for my mentor. He’d become ill so I had to put together a lecture on a sociological understanding of property. Long story short, I had a few examples to illustrate, the way a real estate agent will tell you to prepare your house for sale by doing whatever it takes to make it appear neutral to the potential buyer. e.g., they always advise that, if you’re going to paint, choose neutral colors. Something is more valuable, in other words, if it appears to not actually be used. Which also is why you are supposed to clean so as to make it appear as if no one ever sat on the sofa.
Then I mentioned something about shopping at Sally’s Boutique — to illustrate, again, the way value depends on whether something’s been used — and a gasp of shock and horror spread across the lecture hall. I was taken aback. They’d never heard of such a thing. And one of them actually complained in her evals that she’d actually had to learn that an instructor was standing in front of their lecture forum wearing clothes from The Sally.
Teaching Jonathan Kozol’s Savage Ineuqalities was also an eye-opener. They’d write reaction papers after each section. I had never known that there are actually people who grow up who don’t know poverty exists in this country.
I can’t even imagine what people must have thought during Hurricane Katrina. Well, not much. The entire exercise just revealed that, in spite of all this, they’d read it and still advance the argument that it was their right to have two olympic sized pools, 2 football stadiums, and a television and radio production set because they *need* that to compete to get into the best universities. So, fuck equalizing school funding. It’s their problem.
blah.
I wasn’t trying to guilt trip her. I just had a sticker shock reaction. I didn’t see Jill breaking down the fact that women are under pressure from pornification, but I may have misread it. Maybe I should say porn creep instead of pornification.
elle, I was wondering about that. I don’t know the race of the author but I had the feeling she was talking about white girls straightening their hair, which is a whole different thing than black girls doing it. Tell me if I am wrong, because if she is a black woman, I am really going to pass out, because I thought everyone knew that arguement.
zuzu –
I didn’t notice that Shannon demanded anything. I noticed that she made an observation:
She simply made an observation: i notice that Jill has enough money. Which suggests to me she’s pointing out the social location of the speaker — including Twisty — and her own social location and how that might matter to our perceptions of what we think counts and how feminist politics proceeds.
I read that thread or some thread, where some jackass ranted about how twisty is always focused on sex issues and doesn’t go after the earth mother and its use as an ideal of womanhood as an instrument of oppression.
i laffed. Oh, this person missed the “Cute kids. Now Dead” memo when she spouted off about how no one can afford to breed, not because they don’t have money, but b/c they are going to destroy the earth thru overpopulation.
So, I started correcting that guy. But it turned into a rant that went something like this.
Yes oh yes, let’s go on and on about how it’s so great that we have someone in BlogLandia to do our thinking for us. whheeeeeeeeeeeeee.
She reminds us to not get bogged down in thinking that pink toolbelts are Teh Awesome. She reminds us that waxes are Teh Oppressive, that sexbottery is the 3vo1, yadda yadda yadda. She reminds us not to become those choice feminsits out there (who i have utterly no clue b/c no one, yet, has ever shown me a feminist who actually thinks liberation is in a pink fucking tool belt)
Examine your choices! Damn it. Well. Yes. Let us do that.
What is offlimits — what never gets “examined” — is, oh, going out to $$$ dinners 2 or 3 times a week. Who’s being oppressed there, hmmm? What kind of crap wages were paid to get that meal on the fucking table and then cleaned up after, hmmmm?
Who’s being oppressed to keep the frickin public johns of Austin clean for the fotographin? hmmm.
Let’s not talk about the people getting sick in silicon chip factories to make our computers or being exploited to create just about anything thought of as “not about women’s oppression”
Before anyone flies into a rage about how I *hate* twisty, it has NOTHING to do with Twisty for me, because I’ve actually frequently called for an end to the obsession with Twisty. primarily because leaving it in her lap, takes the focus off the gigantic lap of Mainstream White Feminism — the majority of the feminist blogosophere. The majority of freakin feminism. Wanna see some blindness to race / class issues? Some transphobia? Just hit up the women’s studies list for a bit.
But by god, at least I don’t have to listen to peple ranting on about how we have to EGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGZAMINE OUR CHOOOOOOOOOOOY-CES.
Because if we actually “examined our choy-ces” in a more expansive way, we might actually get really fucking uncomfortable with that issue. It’s uncomfortable enough re: the sex issues, but then to stop and think about all of it? At that point, you start to realize that — goshes — you can’t actually change the world one choice at a fucking time. You can’t actually change the world by not eating $$ meals. That to do something about it requires so much more.
Which is PRECISELY why i think the examine your choices bullshit is the most vicious thing ever injected into feminist social struggles. It removed the focus from collective engagement and expanding our knowledge of women’s oppression, and zeroed right in on the ones who “matter” in mainstream society: white and middle- and upper-middle class.
I _know_ for a fact that Jill is very aware of these issues. I don’t know how she responded to the issue, if she did at all. BUt I know she’s well aware of what white and class privilege buys people: the privilege of not having to think about how their social position shields them from having to ask certain questions ALL the time. As I’ve said elsewhere, the luxury of this privilege is the ability to CHOOSE when to focus on aspects of racial and class and often sexual identity. It is as if that identity is a cardigan sweater you can put on and off as you decided. The identities of women who are not white, straight, and middle/upper class generally do not afford them that luxury — they don’t drop class out of their way of thinking about feminist social struggles becasue they can’t: they are reminded daily. They don’t drop race from their view of the world, b/c they are reminded daily.
One of the reasons why these discussion sare unproductive — at least from my view (and I don’t know how other critics of MWF feel) — is not that talking about sex/body/gender stuff is frivolous. It’s important. It’s the notion that politics has become one big wank off where politics has been reduced to consumption of status symbols that display one’s feminist politics for all to see. (Because, please, fucking spare me: pube fashion has been around since the 70s for christ sake. Back then, though, you were shamed for being anything less than “natural” by letting it be all bushy. Im agine that. Natural is socially constituted as well as a Brazilian wax job is.
Please. Jill giving up the joy of a monthly wax is not going to change the fucking world. It’s not going to eliminate women’s oppression. Just has bush fashion in the 70s changed jack.
I inject into these discussions a reminder that our feminist foremothers did not intend the personal is political this way and it’s called trolling, derailing, sockpuppetry, and astro-turfing. Yeah! I’m on Carol Hanisch’s payroll.
(not that zuzu has accused me or anyong of this, but it appears to be a meme. yes.)
And the idea that anorexia will help someone achieve anything just boggles my fucking mind.
She’s trying to colonise people for Anorexia, this requires 1) making people feel crappy about themselves and hteir body image, which in turn 2) validates her life choices because the people she’s trying to shame are of course crappy in relation to herself.
It’s part of this thing that all the oppressive systems do whereby they teach the oppressed to only be able to find validity by first invalidating someone else first. It’s one of the more sneaky techniques because while the proles are competing with each other for literal wages, they also need validation emtionally, and the class system especially sets things up so invalidating other members of the proles is in fact inherently neccesary to achieve lift and social mobility.
Imho.
RMildred
Just call it the Playtex Lift and Separate Function. heh.
Moksha,
Evil_Fizz asked why Shannon referred to straight hair as the holy grail and before Shannon could explain what she meant via black experiences, some commenters jumped in explaining it in terms of the demand for white women to have straight hair (which I honestly didn’t know about!), so i think they misunderstood or didn’t see Shannon’s post.
zuzu,
“How is it a sign of decadence and snobbery to spend $40 for a wax and not $40 for a hair process?”
because, in some contexts, that hair process is constructed as ABSOLUTELY CRUCIAL to being perceived not only as attractive (which I suspect is the case with waxing), but as professional, mainstream, and non-threatening in the wider world and as good and non-radical (because there are myriad reasons black families don’t want their children to stand out as radical and testing the status quo) within our own communities. it means that you have identified some integral part of yourself as evil, as your nemesis, and that you have taken steps to “tame” it, “correct” it, chemically alter it to make it more acceptable. imo (and i emphasize that!), it is a statement to the world in a way that a waxed or non-waxed bikini line never can be.
Shannon had a point up thread–i have known little black girls as young as two who have been subjected to “Just for Me” and “PCJ” and all the so called milder relaxers (which still require that you protect your hands with gloves, mind you) and i know mothers who superstitiously beg people with “good” hair to rub their pregnant stomachs, who ruminate on having children with other race men, who pull their little girls’ hair back so tightly that the scalp develops bumps and the hair breaks just so those kinky edges don’t show. are there terms like “chickenhead” and “nappy-headed” and “wit yo bald headed self” and “tight as a fist” and “rolled up looking like a buncha ants” flung at women with hairy bikini lines? if so, i doubt they could be nearly as hurtful to the self-esteem and psyche.
which is why the two are so very different in my mind.
i will be the first to admit that i have real issues with this, zuzu, which is why that stuck out to me.
ok, BL after that last post, I’m feeling even worse for derailing.
sorry!
She simply made an observation: i notice that Jill has enough money. Which suggests to me she’s pointing out the social location of the speaker  including Twisty  and her own social location and how that might matter to our perceptions of what we think counts and how feminist politics proceeds.
She framed her observation in a way that put Jill in the position of having to justify spending $40 on waxing — going so far as to mention that law schools in TN don’t allow students to work. While Shannon says above that she was expressing sticker shock and had no intent to demand to know where Jill gets the money, the effect is the same. And the answer, really, is the same: why do you need to know?
Also, I’d read that right after reading some completely unhinged comments using women who can’t afford shoes as a club to beat women who wear heels — without recognizing that oh-so-correct flat footwear costs money, too. As do dinners out in Austin and sportscars. I’m sure I brought some of the baggage from reading those comments into my response to Shannon.
elle, I understand that in some places, hair-straightening is a necessary tool in the kit for making yourself socially acceptable. Shannon apparently finds it optional, which tells me that in her milieu, it’s not such a crucial tool.
elle –
eh? i thought you were on topic. I was just about to write a “hellyeah” in reponse to your discussion of hair straightening.
so: HELLFUCKINYEAH! Compañeras!
Oh. just dawns on me. you were pointing at my comment about derailing? yes? if so, no: I’m not that interested in policing discussions unless they take us off the focus on race, which happens all too often. I happen to think it’s a fascinating kind of poetry when threads wander. In your case, that wasn’t derailing since it was keeping the focus on the general concern: what conversations in the mainstream leave out of the analysis.
I was talking about how a comment like Shannon’s will be seen as derailing. Belledame raised it on the thread about anonymity I think. If we bring a slightly different analysis to bear — one more attentive to race, class, sexual minorities — it’s called derailing. (or trolling, sockpuppetry, etc.)
“Or your head looks like little men hiding behind bushes with their fists balded up.”
What was the first thing that racist white men attack about Cynthia McKinney’s hair? Her hair made her guilty before many even knew the charges:
http://mediamatters.org/items/200603310005
Not to further derail this fascinating topic, but Pony’s smackdown of Amp as described by Belledame really tickled me…since one of Jabba the Fat-Ass Oxycontin Addict’s (aka EL Rushbo Limbaugh’s) favorite tropes that he brings out against poor and Black folk is “if poverty is such a big problem in America, why are there so many ‘poor’ people with fat guts?”
Quite an irony — but ohh, so typical) that a self-identified radical feminist would channel a Far-Right activist talk show host when it comes to shaming someone for his lack of suitable income.
And on this “we must QUESTION OUR CHOICES” thing: I find it quite fascinating that people who don’t even want to take the risk of really challenging their own privileges and actually working to CHANGE THE FREAKIN’ SYSTEM are more concerned with the “choices” of those lower than them….as if they would get more legitimacy by policing the latter to fit their middle-class ideology and objective.
I mean, from what I’ve seen as a working-class Black man, neutering your personality and your choices merely to get into the “middle class” hasn’t worked so well anyways, since the people who make the rules will simply find other means to keep you down….so why really give a flying fuck about how they think?? As long as you feel right and harm no one else, why in the hell should someone who doesn’t know you decide how you should feel about yourself??
If all that energy wasted on overanalyzing other people’s asthetic choices could be better spent in fighting the real institutions of inequality….a hard thing to ask, I know.
Anthony
Chasingmoksha @ #33:
Actually, the “ghetto slut” smack from Neal Boortz (another “libertarian asshat” radiohack) is what they attempted to lynch CMcK with first (appropos the Duke rape incident that occured simultaneously with her predicament). Her ‘do was just a trigger for the real bigotry against her political views and her activism against the Right….and her race.
Anthony
That is what I was ipplying. He used her hair. Do I need to put it in fancy and academic terms to be in agreement?
Anthony –
i’m confused in re: your response to Chasingmoksha.
why is what you said a correction to what you thought Chasingmoksha implied?
Sorry….not meant to be a correction, but more of an amplification of C’s point. Yeah, Boortz did use CMcK’s hair, but as more of a metaphor for his overall opposition to her policies in general.
Didn’t mean to imply a disagreement that wasn’t there to begin with. My apologies.
Anthony
Anthony and Chasingmoksha –
I actually *do* think that it’s an important issue — that the issue about her hair was raised in a specifically sexualized way that involved pushing her sexuality *down* the social class ladder.
Know what I mean? Trying to flesh this one out — though I’m sure someone has to have written about this already.
oh, yah, i remember that. Boor(tz). ick.
elle, I understand that in some places, hair-straightening is a necessary tool in the kit for making yourself socially acceptable. Shannon apparently finds it optional, which tells me that in her milieu, it’s not such a crucial tool.
Except socially acceptable means employable or eductable.
Except socially acceptable means wether or not you get acceptable social contacts .
Except socially acceptable can mean teh difference between being treated as a human and a dog.
Except socially acceptable can and will be todl to you teh difference between getting a fair trial and not.
Shannon may not straighten her hair ” but she is not ” apparently finding it optional” . Shes makinga choic ewhich has DANGEROUS and life altering circumstances to her lively hood .
It’s not a ” crucial l” fucking ” tool” its an enforced beauty norm that CAN NOT BE CIRCUMVENTED for women of black descent.
And rather than adress the problem you had with Shannon you went off on some trivial weel wlell stuff.
The idea taht shaving your bikini does or does not make you fun is not just ” troublesome” it’s divisive its smug ( a word I use ALOT when it comes to MWF) and it plays directly into the ,
SEE I”M NOT ONE OF THOSE KIND OF WOMEN
bad word choice actual mindset dont know dont really care it was what is said
so rather tahn stadn up and say my choice my body wee
to which i dont necessarily disagree
It was a post that placed her brand of feminism and feminity at odds with every one else
ANd yes when we talk about teh ability to do taht priovilege is a facto and that goes EITHER WAY do teh DOC marten thing doesnt wash but shows a nice arrogant assumption that a person who protestes to this tee hee commodity fetishism woe is me bullshit is of course some boot stomping nut.
SOmething that has oddly not been really mentioned.
—————–
Bitch You gave you all you did! But sometimes strikes arent as important as seriosulsy strolling up adnd going
WHAT TEH FUCK?
>that said, i admit i have struggled with this. what exactly are grades supposed to DO? who do i help if i just give everyone As? and in the cases of elite institutions, the grades don’t fucking matter anyway, do they? case in point: look in the white house. if you go to yale or harvard and get a 2.0, everyone says, well, but you went to yale/harvard. if you go to podunk small college (or state u) and get a 3.8 or 3.9, everyone says, well, but you went to podunk state. and if you get a 2.0, they say, eewww, even at podunk? that, my friend, ain’t about the grades at all.
i don’t have any illusions about the purity or fundamental integrity of academic grading. i hate (personally speaking, psychologically, in my soul) the process of assigning grades and i hate (politically speaking) the economy it represents/in which it participates. but what do i do about it? help me out here.>
Oh thank you for this. I hated it too. especially for creative writing; at least for something like, I don’t know, math, it’s a lot more straightforward: turn in x number of assignments + get x number of correct answers on these exams + attendance=grade. it’s really preparing people to jump through hoops as much as anything else; but, at least it’s consistent, more or less.
but i mean. “express yourself! yes, you -are- creative, really! don’t be afraid! –sorry, that one sucked; F.”
well. i ended up simply basing it on first whether they turned the assignments in more or less on time; and finally just whether they did the damn things at all. surprisingly even that much, there were enough people who couldn’t seem to manage it that i felt like i wasn’t just giving everyone an “A” (gasp, the horror).
Many black women do go natural zuzu, but it is risky in many places. Maybe zuzu got mixed up because I always think from my black base where the politics of black hair are really obvious, and so I didn’t explain a lot.
I haven’t seen those other comments, but it is in fact easier to find foot hurting heels than a good practical pair of shoes down south. Although yesterday I got a nice pair of boots for 7.99 at the goodwill.
>And on this “we must QUESTION OUR CHOICES†thing: I find it quite fascinating that people who don’t even want to take the risk of really challenging their own privileges and actually working to CHANGE THE FREAKIN’ SYSTEM are more concerned with the “choices†of those lower than them>
Well, that’s what’s so fascinating about all this (well, fascinating in the sense of -chew on my own eyeballs-, yanno): I also keep finding myself going, ehm, exqueeze me, but what is this “we” shit? Wtf are you talking about, finally? Because I -so- don’t relate to this.
which, well, i talked about that on my blog just now, the menmenmen thing.
but also: well yah, a lot of assumptions going on. I mean: o i dunno. i hate the way so many people can’t seem to tell where they end and the other person begins; but i also marvel at how ENDLESSLY fascinating this shit is to so many people. High heels! Lipstick! Yea or nay?
and I’m like: finally, Some People. Just take the fucking things -off- then; or don’t. Show, don’t tell; and perhaps the world will follow, yeah-yeah? Oh, it’s a media problem? Want to start a letter-writing or boycott campaign for such and so? Terrific. Want to complain about it for your very own self? Knock yourself out. But please. Enough with the attempts to raise -nagging- to a political tactic. it. isn’t. working. not on the macro level, not even on the micro level; primarily all you’re doing is pissing people off. so knock it off.
Bitch,
You know I love you and you know I couldn’t agree with you more.
At the same time, I wish I hadn’t gone to your blog today. I don’t know how much more I can fucking stand.
This really does remind me of Hurricane Katrina, and the brainless wonders who asked why the people didn’t leave, not even considering they had no car, no money, no place to go. I just find that alot of white people just assume that everyone has the things they take forgranted.
Even discussing $100 heels vs $100 flats. WHA??? I’m with Shannon, I get shoes at Goodwill. I’m not sure why we are supposed to commiserate with WMF on how they WASTE their money on stupid shit, whether it’s expensive shoes or a bikini wax. And even if you do spend $$$ on shoes, it’s still better to get the flats, you can wear them to more places, for more reasons, and with more outfits.
We’re supposed to be understanding of how society makes them impractical? And we’re the idiots because we don’t fall for that garbage because we can’t afford it. Being poor really helps one learn to prioritize.
primarily all you’re doing is pissing people off. so knock it off.
Ahh but you see to a blogger all they see is the loud explosive reactions, because they don’t know how many people are reading them and so the habit becomes to think that your posts that get 3 or 4 “that’s neat” comments are teh suck, and the ones that get the huge, 300 to 400 comment battles are of course the good ones.
This is why the blogs with the huge readership and the huge “me too!”ing comments tend to cultivate really boring reheated instahack type posts with little to no additional commentary from teh bloggers themselves, just “{quote} Heh, Indeed.” and then a comments section filled iwth 500 people going “Fuck Bush!” or talking about how wonderfully eloquent Obama is.
At least, that’s my personal experience, and while I don’t personally see issues and think “hey! I could get a good flame war going on this!” I do feel more satisfied by a long thread where a fight has broken out than one with a whole lot of agreement.
yah, if those are really the only options.
still it’s a bit depressing when you realize that yer blogbuds are basically acting on pretty much the same principle as, you know, the dog:
“oh, boy, she’s YELLING AT ME! that means she WANTS TO PLAY! Bark more?!?! BARK MORE!! OKAY! OKAY!…”
and then, too, there’s a difference between Thunderdome free-for-all and a ritualized gangbang, i think.
but, i don’t know, somewhere in there there is occasionally the wacky notion of, like, -discussion.- like, i say something, and soandso amplifies, and hey! new ideas! people actually listening to each other! what a cool–
–woosp, shiny drama eruption! nevermind. WHEEE!!
yes of course i fucking do it too, she said, redundantly.
The Katrina thing really, really pisses me off. I grew up (and remain, unfortunately) Louisiana-poor. It was absolutely no surprise to me that so many people just couldn’t get out. And yes, a lot of them happened to be black. To me, having lived down here my entire life, that wasn’t a surprise. To me, that didn’t say anything about them as people, just that they were too poor to evacuate. But then I start hearing and reading all these sites and reports blaming them for being poor. Suggesting (or outright saying) that they were poor because they were black and well, you know those black people don’t like to work or are on welfare and I was just like…really? I mean, seriously? You have no fucking clue the level of our poverty, do you? That it was assumed that the evacuees were lazy or criminals or just didn’t want to leave or weren’t working…I just wanted to scream. The fact is, the majority of the people who got left behind, regardless of race, did have jobs. They did pay their taxes. They were not criminals. They were poor, that’s all. You can’t raise a family, provide housing and food and a car and all the other things you actually need on a waitresses salary. Or a maid’s salary. Or working in a fast food restaurant. Or doing janitorial work. Poor people aren’t lazy, dammit.
What’s pissing me off now is that the programs in place to rebuild New Orleans are weighted against POCs, women in particular. St. Bernard Parish set up an ordinance that makes it nearly impossible for anyone but the upper-middle class whites to rebuild and return.
“oh, boy, she’s YELLING AT ME! that means she WANTS TO PLAY! Bark more?!?! BARK MORE!! OKAY! OKAY!…â€Â
Heh, Indeed.
:-p
Belle –
in #45
You know, I was thinking that, for the most part, whenever anyone’s asked to see a “choice feminist” who doesn’t actually think through her own choices as is the Twisty Rx for Treating the Symptoms, I haven’t yet seen evidence of a person who’s like this per se.
I’m with Tekanji, the term should be banned from feminist dicussion as just as toxic as feminazi. Though I see it won’t be b/c people have taken off with it; it’ll never die.
At any rate, what it seems people are really *railing against* is the protrayal of feminism in the media. Saturated by shite, shallow media anlyses of these issues, they having created ‘choice feminsm’ just as the media created the hippies and created genX, genY, and whatever the latest buzzwards are. IIRC, all of these concepts were first developed by marketers and then appropriated by journalists often enough.
Why? Because so much of the Snewz is produced on the basis of press releases purposefully crafted to create a social phenomenon that needs to be fed and stoked by products. Meanwhile, feminists get sucked into it all, believing that two representative women in an article represents the world.
Blah. I was *so* not a data type sociologists. The Internets(tm) has turned me into a gol’dang positivist stats lover.
Ok, I asked Belledame a question way this morning and she was gracious enough to answer me, but I got bogged down in real world shit all day long and have just now had time to read and respond. And pony has really pissed me off, so I’m gonna tell y’all a secret about pony.
I think pony is a drinker. An alky, if you will. A middle of the night binger, who then emails people wild emails that surprise the hell out of their recipients because where the fuck did this person come from? And why is she telling me this stuff? And why does she think that out of all the people in this wild world, this particular woman is going to want to hear that?
And that’s all I’m gonna say about that, because I don’t like to gossip. You can take it any way you want.
egil –
dewd, i’m feeling so ‘carrol cox’ right now, i’m laffin’. you should too. heh.
anyway, my not really flip but it will sound like it answer is: grades are not, in and of themselves, a tool of oppression. They are only so in the context of a society that makes them so. No choice but to use them or seek out one of the very few places that don’t have such things — like my alma mater or, IIRC, Evergreen state. Maybe there are more. Even then, you’re running up against the same problem. To get accepted to Cornell, I had to have them convert my transcript, which was 1/2 thick full of written evaluations of what I’d actually done, into a GPA. Which I had to go to each tutor and mentor and have them assign the grade and then re-calculate.
You’ve so known me for years, that you know I could rabbit on about this one forever, so I have no clue which direction to go in.
Mostly, I used the example to illustrate the way a system is embeded in a structure that means an individual choice is going to butt up against a set of normative social practices that will doom that choice to being ineffective at best, counterproductive at worst.
Evaluations from tutors were great. Grades? Who gave a shit. By the time a tutor finished a five page eval, I was off and running on the next course of study. The focus was off the grades and on the sheer joy of learning.
Grad school was culture shock. “Hey, have you gotten back your grades from Bills stats class yet?” // “no, why?” // “Don’t you want to know?” // “No, why?” Everyone else waited by the mailbox biting their nails. (Not putting you down if this is anyone here, just relating the culture shock.)
There’s a larger structure in place that simply mitigates my college’s hippy dippy, British Open University approach.
e.g. one of the things you had to do there was build your own course of study and write and defend to a committe your rationale for taking those courses. Great stuff. But, my undergrad mentor told me that I really had to take some basic courses — like more math. [1]
I kicked and screamed about that.
Mentor: you really should take them.
Me: why? What happened to undermining traditional skooling?
Mentor: Fact is, if you want to go to grad school, that’s what they’ll want to see.
me: So much for unskooling, eh?
[1] I had serious math-phobia induced by an asshole math teacher. In 6th grade, when I scored among the top two in math, he decided to systematically belittle me for such talent becasue I was a girl and girls weren’t supposed to be any good at math.
I’m glad she made me. I got some how to overcome math phobia books out of the library and kicked that in the ass so that I could actually take the GREs without pissing myself silly out of fear. And took the same attitude toward going after UNIX and the new-fangled ‘fusers which scared the every loving hell outta me.
Wow. I must bow to BA and then grovel at her feet for forgiveness. For whatever reason, maybe I was blind at the time, but I don’t remember WS students being this way. When she described her “sex positive” feminist classmates, I couldn’t identify. The description didn’t seem to match the students I encountered.
Most likely, it’s just that they didn’t show this face to me? I dunno, but I’ve read the same thing now from 5 different bloggers who teach women’s studies.
Just wow.
OK. So I kick myself in that ass for wondering why college-educated women are unfamiliar with some of these critiques of a feminism so narrowly focused on body/sex issues. I guess it’s selective retention of what you encounter in the classroom?
I even read you write something very similar a week or two ago and I thought, hhmm. Ok. Well. Yeah. Really?
But this past week, it’s really smacked me upside the head.
I’m completely and utterly tired of hearing the word choice bantered around like it is the be all and end all of feminism. A week long moratorium on the word would be nice. It might get some folks to think outside the box.
In my experience people who talk about choices are the people who have the most choices to talk about.
The rhetoric of choice erases any sort of meso or macro level understanding of constraints on human behavior. It’s this overly individualistic mentality that drives me nuts.
I’m also tired of graduate students complaining about how poor they are, especially when so many of them have the money to travel abroad, have nice cars, and have an alcohol and weed budget in excess of $50 dollars a week. (If you fit this description, you ain’t poor.) Hell, I wasn’t poor in grad school (well not in my PhD program). I got paid $18,000 a year for a grad student stipend and managed to carved enough adjuncts together to make $30,000. Having grown up without indoor plumbing in Appalachia, I felt like I was in hog heaven. I was even able to buy a condo and a car.
My friend told me about leg waxing in grad school (people in southern Ohio just don’t do such things), and she said it was relatively affordable only $30-50 every 6 weeks. I remember thinking that I could get a pack of 15 razors, for $10.
Agreed Rachel. That’s kind of what I am getting at. zuzu says that we shouldn’t be outraged at the things people spend their money on, that we should be outraged that the patriarchy makes them spend their money on these things. It’s definitely a class issue and kind of hard to feel sorry for the poor little rich girls who need bikini waxes and botox when your needing groceries and to pay the electric bill. Fun feminism is great if you can afford it.
Read what Chasing Moksha has to say about this. Kind of puts it in perspective.
personally i think “pony is an alcoholic” is one of the more generous interpretations. as i was saying wrt wacky dinosaur chick,
“a little too much quality time with the paint thinner, perhaps.”
or, you know, she’s just another overripe frootbat stinkin’ up the place.
anyway: i mean, i have no problem with people -talking- about, hey, this is one way in which the System influences certain womens’ consumer choices: the beauty industry, sure, look at it, and how it affects you. Sure. But there’s something about the -way- it often gets talked about (I haven’t even looked in on this particular thread, i don’t think, I’ve been to that rodeo one too many times); like, this is a -universal- problem for all women everywhere; and terribly urgent at that; and what else could there be to talk about?
I mean, there must be a way in which to address this shit which doesn’t say, “you must not ever allude to your privilege, financially privileged women” but at the same time, is a good deal more conscious of, y’know what, deciding whether to buy $100 flats or $100 heels is not exactly the most burning question on everyone’s mind here. and one could probably -still- talk about appearance and pressure and yadda in that context: i.e., the many hidden costs of looking “professional” enough to just go to the damn interview, what “professional” looking really means for people who don’t match the mainstream (white, literally well-heeled, relative femme-presenting, not fat), and so on, and so on.
for that matter:
oh, i could rant all day about how much i loathe corporate wear, even the minimal effort stuff that’s “suitable” for the kinds of lowly gigs i’ve sought out and been in.
@ Rachel S
I heart you.
You put into words what outrages me so much about choice language (g-d, I sound kinda like a fringe element don’t I?).
Your description also crystallizes what poor means for the leg-waxing grad students of the world: they can’t afford things they want but have no problem affording things they need.
For awhile I was living on not to much money. I didn’t have enough to meet my daily expenses, but I always knew I could get a job if I applied myself ~ this is the benefit of an upper-class upbringing.
But for the first time I understood how much more constrained a person’s world became when they could only ever put $5.00 a time in their gas can; or how, while they’d love to save the environment, wal-mart is the only place they can afford to shop.
What struck me at this time is as you say, entire groups of people simply do not have the same choices as I because the choices are not there to begin with. It’s structurally designed that way.
The other thing I’ve been mulling over since yesterday is the mindset of punishment advanced towards poor people.
“Well why do you have satellite/cable/two cars” and my personal favorite “why do you go on vacations???”
As though, somehow, if a person making eight dollars an hour just worked more hours they wouldn’t be poor anymore…..
Blah.
In the balance I’m heartened to learn that Muhammed Yunnus has won the Nobel Peace Prize. He created the micro-lending model to assist women in getting out of poverty (In his book, Banker to the Poor, he has nothing good to say about the U.S. policy of ending poverty by making countries dependent on aid dollars).
In closing, can you or BL recommend good books on some of the points you raised? I’m particulary interested in the constraint of choices, etc.
Thank you.
>You know, I was thinking that, for the most part, whenever anyone’s asked to see a “choice feminist†who doesn’t actually think through her own choices as is the Twisty Rx for Treating the Symptoms, I haven’t yet seen evidence of a person who’s like this per se.
I’m with Tekanji, the term should be banned from feminist dicussion as just as toxic as feminazi. Though I see it won’t be b/c people have taken off with it; it’ll never die.
At any rate, what it seems people are really *railing against* is the protrayal of feminism in the media. Saturated by shite, shallow media anlyses of these issues, they having created ‘choice feminsm’ just as the media created the hippies and created genX, genY, and whatever the latest buzzwards are. IIRC, all of these concepts were first developed by marketers and then appropriated by journalists often enough…>
Oh, well, related to this and also on the TF tip, I dunno if you remember the “Spice Girls” post a few months back? “She blames the Spice Girls.”
which, well, yes, they -themselves- are/were a corporate, shallow media creation;
thing of it is, here’s TF quoting this Daily Mail (British, and o irony, extremely reactionary-conservative paper) article which is basically doing just what you say here: portraying (current, if you prefer, but still) FEMINISM as if it’s all Spice Girls all the time.
and, for that matter, it’s somehow the fault of…well, whoever it is…the Spice Girls -themselves?- the young women who liked them?…for (this would be more TF than Daily Mail I assume) destroying the glory days of feminism. Because there was -nothing shallow- about, say, Helen Reddy, WAVPM for that matter.
or, for -that- matter, elevating “get those damn kids/sexbots offa my lawn” to serious “critique.”
Jay: per books, I keep meaning to read the Barbara Ehrenreich recent releases, “Nickel and Dimed” and whatever the other one is, the middle-class-aimed one, but somehow, i can’t quite bring myself to do it. maybe -after- i get some sort of steady income/structure going here, i think to myself…(o irony irony)
…but anyway, in turn, Jay et al are crystallizing for me just why “choice feminism” is so deeply annoying, especially coming out of the mouths of the likes of TF, used as a way to bash “sex-positive,” really, is what it is;
because then what happens is, some people find themselves defending themselves against this straw-image of themselves, and in doing so, will, perhaps inevitably, allude to, yes, all right, I wear high heels, I -like- heels, what’s your damn problem?!
…because there’s the class thing, yes; but all entangled with it is the neo-puritan quasi-radfem crap, hairshirt feminism, you know. people like g-m-r throwing “classism” at people like Vanessa whilst leaving TF untouched doesn’t help, of course.
…but of course in the minds of the people who’ve been just, finally, fed up with the whole damn thing, hello, more burning issues on my own personal agenda here?just end up mentally lumping -anyone- who ever talks about this stuff in -any- context. shut UP about your damn heels. shut UP about -choice.- SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP…
which in some -other- peoples’ minds can (maybe) make it look like, o okay, these people are attacking me because they -agree with TF and g-m-r. (for example).
the real problem here is the disingenuousness of the people who’ve been framing it this way in the first place.
I mean, in addition to the class-unconsciousness, yes.
But it’d be a lot simpler to address this (look, some of us don’t -have- $100 for flats -or- heels) without the complicating factor of, here’s a handful of people who have no problem hurling around terms like “classism” and accusations of frivolousness and yadda yadda as it suits -their- needs, i.e., actually it’s about their -own- notion of “patriarchy,” and has jackshit to do with class in the -real- sense.
but so what happens is -now- they’ve just reinforced the idea that it’s either hairshirt androgyne grimness or “fun” which is 1) femme and 2) -has to cost a lot of money.-
“false dilemma” is another of those logical fallacies that doesn’t get used nearly enough (everyone always knows “strawman” and nothing else, seems like, sometimes)
…and of course, getting back to the Daily Mail connection: ironically enough even -that- kind of selective “hairshirt” feminism is actually classist itself (which -may- be what zuzu was originally thinking about? i can but speculate, and i’m not going back into the thread, just ’cause), or can be. In the sense that you’ve talked about, BL: how “raunch feminism”=”slut-bashing,” and, of course sexbot–>slut–>”slattern”–> -low-class,- -trashy.-
…which, tying it all back together: that’s of course what “looking professional” (and to a lesser extent, looking “presentable” on the street in a mainstream sort of way) is all about. Keeping up appearances. These days, what this means for -women- is: look “feminine,” maybe sexually attractive (to men, mainstream)…but at the same time, not too SEXUAL. Which also means “white” (or as close as you can approximate); “upper class” (or as close as you acn approximate), and so on, and so on. Things like “bad hair” and “fat” and too-short skirts, too much makeup (or boldly barefaced, even, perhaps) signal “wild, out of control, -corporeal-. which is the “low-class;” which is the “slut.”
so, yeah.
but then you get people like TF uncritically bashing just -one- aspect of this “look,” the most “overt” expression of the “slut,” I guess; and first of all, while claiming to be against “choice” feminism (as in, you may think you have one, but you don’t really, muhahaha, the Patriarchy uber alles!), actually -doesn’t- -really- blame the System, but rather ends up putting the onus squarely back on the women who sport this “look.”
and then, too: everything -else- goes completely unchallenged. Hell, when’s the last time TF even talked about what looking too “butch” does for a woman trying to get ahead? because that, too, is tagged “low-class,” albeit in a different way. manual labor, now: again, it comes back to the body. and of course: DYKE.
but I mean: the only white women I ever see working behind a fast-food counter, here in NY at least, are extremely butch-looking women. Coincidence? shrug.
and then, too: when’s the last time TF or any of that lot had anything critical to say about the pressure to wear a navy suit and pearls? and what -that- signifies?
Belledame –
Well, the real people under attack in that DM article were feminists, like my friend Catherine Driscoll, who examined girl culture — but also phenom. like Madonna, Roseanne’s representation of working class life, etc.
The issue was not about celebrating the message in any of these cultural phenom., but taking a really good look at the way that culture and agency work. How do young girls receive these messages? Are they blank slates upon which culture writes its messages? Or, do they critically respond to the messages in ways that might surprise people.
She and many others tended to work from a Cultural Studies approach to look at the ways people nonetheless exercise agency. CS took issue with an older model of culture which saw popular culture as nothing but junk, bad for people, etc. (I’m simplifying here, so work with me.)
And you can see the connections if you remember that TF’s old blog was not about feminism, but general entries on food, food criticism, restaurants and culture in general. When I first read her blog, she was such a good reader, I went back to the b/g to read the history of her blog — often do that.
Turns out that she thinks popular culture is shite, ppl who shop at WalMart at Teh Suck, blah blah. All of which fits right in line with a very conservative view of the downfall of civilization, taste, refinement, etc.
I wouldn’t say TF’s into hairshirt feminism at all on this model. A hairshirt would punish all enjoyment of anything, and I don’t think that is where she is coming from. It’s more typical of some lefty views — ppl who are basically snobs, don’t like the riff raff banging at the gate, etc. This is pretty much a natural (HA) aspect of the left in general. It’s one thing when it comes from a Henwood, who’s not a hairshirt and wants a world where we all enjoy beautiful things. When it comes from people who don’t actually talk about how to create that world and who is completely unaware of the way such a discourse reinscribes class oppression…. pass me the barf bag.
I’m always confused by this sort of thing. Especially the hair shirt thing, because my definition of fun of way different than well, other people’s definition of fun. I went to the Grizzles game last night because my parents had an extra ticket and saw a woman wearing stiletto heels(and my feet hurt in sympathy). Let’s say those heels were $50. For that price, I could get a board game and a card game and play with others and have hours of fun, or I could get two video games and have hundreds of hours of fun, I could go to 8 movies, I could probably get around 5 movies on DVD, I could get five months of Netflix and on and on.
Just because you’re not wearing the approved uniform doesn’t mean it’s all sackcloth and ashes.
Not to mention, not every girl who takes a women’s studies class is a feminist. They could be trying to fill a gap in their schedule or taking a distribution requirement, which could account for a lot of well, but what if the boys don’t like me! girls.
I’m not a poor graduate student, but the importance of thrift has been impressed on me.
Funk Culture
Donna –
< Lurch moan > I had gone thru the 4 hurricanes, one after the other, here in FL already — so I was totally yanked. I am well aware of how *any* city — and the Tampa Bay area will be flooded badly by a cat 5 — is completely unprepared for such an event. There are 5 metro areas who simply CANNOT even get everyone out. It would have taken something 145 hrs to completely evac New Orleans.
It would take that long to evacuate the Tampa Bay region. Hurricane prediction isn’t sophisticated enough to get the evacutations going. And, given how many hurricanes are predicted to strike a city and then end up swerving to hit another one…. gah. makes me want to shoot myself at how ignorant people were during Katrian.
Even knowing that it’s impossible to evac, these cities do not provide proper evac shelters. It was perfectly possible, we now know, to have evacuated people to safe places *in* NO.
In this region, we have only half the spaces we need. They are not stocked with the supplies they need. They cannot handle the latrine needs. The freakin’ roofs blow off and some of them turned out to be located in places that actually flooded. *rolls eyes* They run out of food just for a two day stay.
WE don’t have the political will power, and businesses won’t let cities shut down 5 days before predicted landfall. They’d freak in tourist areas.
So, when ppl went on and on blaming corruption (which was code for ‘black’), I just wanted to give ‘em all a good swift kick.
BL ,
No bow no grovel.
I hopped i Was imaginingi t and i wa sjuts being ” jealous and bitter” except no.
I think whats happeneing is the REAL problem I ad from when I started bloggig with SPINO ( considered that five finger discounted) which i started railing against.
They announce how FREE and OPEN they are as long as it advances some goal.
Are they have lots of college random sex ? YEP
Are some of them next level into the may have actually orgasmed and dont find masturabtion or lesbianism completely freakis ( as long as you are totally drunk)? Indeed
But also Susie Bright wrote and I agree that if the sex my peers have is what I’m looking forward too I AM gonna reconsider my renouncing my nunning desires for the nunnery.
ARe they also terrified at doing anything or syaing anything that gets them kicked out of the cool corwd? Yes
Are these same women perfectly willing to take loads of shit form males in their millieu ( frat, OR activist) iand bys hit sexual assault, degradation, and complete disrespect? Yep
Can they afford insane amounts or at least significant amounts in expressing this wackiness and bulshit! YES
and that’s why they get studied MS LEVY studied these people when she did he rbook. SHe didn’t study peopel who just liked fucking , she didn’t study reasonbaly quiet but sexually active folks , fuck she didnt study any real extreme subcultures that are emerging ( by extreme I mean more promoting SEX focused than PROMOTING sex focused)
Is there an issue there . OH GOD YES but its not teh sex , or the money, its the myopia and the stupid and the entitlement to not having to do anything out side of what gets you shit you can beat other folks down with
Talk of Katrina prompted me to look up what I’d written:
Rachel –
Yeah. On another thread, I’d said something like, “I’m sick of the language of choice, sick of the *lack* of a language for talking about what “we” need to do together, to change things, or at least change how we blog, etc.”
I’m caught in the middle here b/c the “choice feminist” rhetoric is nothing but a floating signifier — it attaches itself to whatever the speaker wants to denounce as not her kind of feminism, imposing a claim about her opponents commitment to choice that typically doesn’t exist.
At the same time, I see the turn to the language of choice as inevitable, given the constraints on political discourse. It becomes a kind of currency. We can’t agree on the purposes and goals of feminist projects — not in their substance. This would require too much and USers immediately fear a dictatorial, lockstep movement.
The solution is to figure out a neutral way to negotiate — the focuse moves from substance to form, goals to method. In this case, the method is “choice”.
I don’t know if that makes any sense.
It’s like our constitution. We don’t adhere to any particularly notion of what the good life ought to look like. We’ve largely concluded that, in a democracy, there’s no such possibility b/c to do so we would undermine democracy. So we drop examination of the substantive ends of what we are doing, and try to make sure that the indiividual means to those ends are fair. (In politics,then, we have no document fleshing out what the goal of our democrcy is, we have a constitution that describes the rules by which we are to negotiate how to achieve the good life)
To me, the reason so many ppl speak of choice is because we can only agree that we can’t all agree.
I thought this over last night after I posted and to be honest, I don’t think that women who do these things aren’t feminists, but the things themselves aren’t, and I hate that they are somehow trying to conflate the two. I think instead of calling it “fun feminism” they should have just said that we all do stupid things sometimes because we are conditioned to do stupid things sometimes. It’s the defensiveness of their particular stupidity that gets me.
I think they should examine the class/snobbery issues. Some of what they are doing has more motives than fitting in with the patriarchal mode of society, they are also trying to distinguish themselves from the lower classes. In the back of their minds they are saying to themselves, “I’m better than most because I can afford certain brands of clothing, or can wear certain styles of clothing, and get manicures/pedicures, bikini waxing, go to tanning salons, get plastic surgery, pay for top dollar cosmetics, etc”
The same goes for the ones who crap on people who are fat. It’s cheaper and more filling to buy Kraft Mac & Cheese and a package of hotdogs than fresh fruits and vegetables. You’ve got to have a certain amount of wealth and time in order to eat healthy well prepared meals.
Oh yeah, BL, there are certainly many reasons why NO couldn’t be evacuated, including the fact that it hit on a weekend and many people live paycheck to paycheck, they can’t leave until they get their paycheck! But a relatively wealthy person, money in the bank or a credit card with a nice high limit, could have cleared out well in advance. I’m answering those who look at the individual, not at the big picture of the city, state, and feds, as well as businesses. What would it take for an individual to be “responsible” enough to leave on his or her own? Money basically, and lots of people don’t have it! Hell, one time I was so poor I didn’t even have a phone, tv, or radio. So if I was in NO, I might not have even heard the warnings to leave in the first place! These are the things they take forgranted. Everyone has a phone, tv, and/or radio; everyone has a certain amount of money and a car; or a rich daddy or other relatives to bail them out; etc.
Not one of them stopped to think what it must be like for a kid who actually does think a cart full of Walmart brand sneaks is a gold mine. Do they even think about this? Does it occur to them what shitheads they are? Can they look at themselves in the mirror without their stomachs turning in self-loathing.
You reminded me of a lesson I learned from my mother. When we were dirt poor without a phone, tv, or radio and living in a shack; I finally got a job. WooHoo! Anyway one day after work I did all the grocery shopping and then she and I took off to visit friends, when we got back someone had broken into our house and stole the meat out of the freezer. (That was pretty easy since one of the doors and a window wouldn’t lock and the other door you could open with an ID or credit card.) I was so mad! My mom said to me, Do you know how desperate someone has to be to break into a house to steal meat out of the freezer? You have enough money to replace the meat. Be thankful for that and that you don’t have to break into someone else’s house to get food.
Donna –
#74
I love you for that. So true. During the hurricanes of 2004, I’d forgotten to lock one of the doors. I’d just picked up some sterno, which I finally broke down to buy, just in case. People think it’s weird, but spending even $10 on something you might not need — it literally takes me a good while to decide to do that and then I have heartburn, literally, over it. all I can think of is being a situation where, if I just hadn’t spent $10 on this or $20 on that, and oh my god, things wouldn’t be so bad.
it is a curse.
anyway, i went to the drugstore right next to a wooded area where homeless folk live. quite naturally, they grabbed the sterno and canned vegetables from my car.
like i have a lot of right to stomp my feet about that. at least i’m affording rent and the bills. compared to some people, even who have a roof over their head, the idea of stocking the freezer up is beyond their experience. you just don’t have that much money at a time to afford to do that.
*sigh*
i write that and then I think of the turkeys — LEFTISTS — who have dared whine to me about how if those ppl would just budget bla bla bla — my blood boils. because they really have no idea what people actually do.
and when people who don’t have much money dare spend it on anything for enjoyment — oh! the horror.
which was what i was getting at. when you live in a state of deprivation — comparatively — in a society that tells you that what you have is who you are… i am not surprised that a kid would steal a wide screen tv. first of all said kid didn’t have access to the media, so why would he know that he wouldn’t be able to use it someday.
and do the assholes whining have any idea that sometimes just having something like that is, well, an unbelievable feeling of “i have” or the feeling of “fuck you fuckers”.
i’m not condonging it, but to denounce it without noting that it’s not surprising that people will steal anything if they can under a state of crises, just to say, “I have.”
not to mention that, if the beanbrains looked at the research, they’d learn: in any society with high inequality, you have looting. societies with low inequality, no looting.
but no, don’t look at *that* to solve the problem. look at the pathologies of the poor. uh huh.
[...]So. Reading Belle and Bitch | Lab and I started thinking about class and notions of poverty. About how what constitutes ‘poor’ is different for people depending on where they live, how they were raised and exactly how many ‘poor’ people they know. This whole thing started as a spin-off of a post on Feministe that mentioned spending $40 a month on leg waxing while in law school — and I should note I personally don’t see anything wrong with that, if you can afford to do it.[...]
Y’all know I put up that #57 post when there were no comments. Somehow I ended up at #57, y’all have a lot to say.
BL said,
“…it attaches itself to whatever the speaker wants to denounce as not her kind of feminism, imposing a claim about her opponents commitment to choice that typically doesn’t exist.”
Yeah, it I have to admit it wreaks of this pomo, I can do whatever I want sort of mentality. There are no standards no rules, no nothing. WHen my students makes those arguments, I always retort–”What if your choices harm others?” Then, they are like, “Oh I didn’t think about that.”
Rachel –
#77 — The night folks were posting, my hosting providor responded to my trouble ticket by moving the blog to a different server. Your post was there and then it *poof* vanished. So I restored it, but had to restore in real time and was too lazy to edit the database.
your comments were just too important too leave out of the mix, I thought.
Donna –
oh. yeah. I was also referring to the fact that it is literally impossible to evacuate that many people given our lack of a mass transit system, not to mention that fact that people will want to take loads of stuff with them.
So, evacuating by car, even with busses? It would have still meant that evacuation would have had to start about 5 days before predicted landfall. In which case Katrina was a cat 1 and still somewhere near the southern tip of FL so no one really knew for sure where it was going to go.
You really only know when a hurrican is going to likely hit about a day before. You can’t evac that many ppl a day before.
The only solution for Tampa (and our house will be about o of 25 not flooded in this neighborhood), NO, Galveston, Long Island, and the Keys is to build shelters. But the fuckers won’t do it, either. The shelters they do have are not up to code and not stockpiled with what they actually need to keep people fed and safe for more than 2 days. The shelters we do have wil only take care of half of the population who will need shelter. It’s the nature of disaster planning in this country.
Imagine if they had to evacuate for a chemical explosion or something? Tragic.
I had forgot about that part of it. There really is no several days in advance notice except that there is a hurricane coming and we aren’t quite sure where it is going to strike. You can’t very well evacuate the all of florida, the entire gulf coast, or southern east coast, etc when a hurricane is predicted. And if you wait until they can pinpoint landfall with any accuracy it’s already too late.
Donna, I agree with your comments about how some stuff just ain’t feminist. I played Ogre Battle today, it’s a good game, but what does it have to do with feminism? Nothing. I’m wearing a dress. What does that have to do with feminism? Nothing.
oops. i see you were posting a response to my comment while i was off elsewhere drinking beer thinking that my comment hadn’t posted. i still don’t see it, so i can only remember vaguely what i said.
i know you were using it as an example, but i rabbitted off . . . :) it’s something that frustrates and perplexes me.
it’s true that grades are not oppressive in and of themselves. i think that’s clear in the yale vs. podunk example. but, just for example, we’ve got all these students here on scholarships of one sort or another, often state-sponsored stuff, that requires they maintain a certain GPA. does this mean they work harder? alas, often not. it mainly means they (a) worry harder, and (b) beg for mercy, whether that’s in the form of “extra credit” or just a bump. it also means they complain more.
but of course, if they don’t get the gpa, they lose the money, and for many of them they’re out of college. bad.
otoh, i maintain that many of the students we have here don’t belong in college in the first place. that may piss some people off, i suppose, but they don’t understand why they’re here and so they spend all their time drinking and none of their time learning. go join a craft union and learn a skill. or something.
i’m with you on the role of the advisor/mentor. but it’s a tough gig. how did she talk you into it? the “you need it to get into grad school” part worked?
[...] Admin’s Note: This is something I have been wanting to post for a while, but I was inspired by a big old blog fight among feminists this past week. The fight started in a debate over bikini waxing, but the larger issue is social class and standards of beauty and femininity. I was on the outskirts of it, so I missed much of the controversy, but I just had to get my two cents in now that I finally figured out whats going on. My primary exposure to this debate was over at Bitch|Lab’s spot. I left this comment on her blog, which basically sums up my feelings about the femininity issue: I’m completely and utterly tired of hearing the word choice bantered around like it is the be all and end all of feminism. A week long moratorium on the word would be nice. It might get some folks to think outside the box. [...]