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1. Donna
   October 17th, 2006| 1:12 am

   Whassamatta with these women! Get back in the burqa so that Lindsay and Marc can speak for you and save you!

2. bitchlab
   October 17th, 2006| 1:19 am

   ahh hell. that made me bustagut and I actually snorted!

3. ilestre
   October 17th, 2006| 7:39 am

   In response to UK former Foreign Secretary Jack Straw’s comments on how muslim women should take off their veil to “improve communication” and the ensuing flood of racist comments made at UK muslims for, well, being responsible for anti-muslim racism, the admirable Salma Yaqoob asks Why don’t white feminists support Muslim women by respecting our right to make our own choices?

4. dwayne m
   October 17th, 2006| 8:19 am

   ilestre pointed us to Why don’t white feminists support Muslim women by respecting our right to make our own choices?

   The whole essay is quite good but I’d like to highlight the following which, I think captures the recursive thinking lurking beneath a good deal of these ‘dark night of the soul’ Western complaints about Muslim styles of dress:

   A case in point is the irony bypass undergone by Allison Pearson who complains that it’s “not a nice sensation” to feel judged for wearing your own clothes in your own country. Yes, precisely. Only she isn’t referring to Muslim women, who are being judged relentlessly for wearing their own clothes in their own country. She clearly hasn’t grasped that Muslim women are British too, most of us having been born here.

   Indeed, she not only declares the veil to be “downright intimidating” but claims that Muslim women are victimising other women with their dress: “A fortysomething mother in a practical Boden skirt and short-sleeved top sitting on a train opposite a woman in the full veil can suddenly be made to feel as tarty and sexually provocative as a Page 3 girl.” But wait: “…the veil also implies a submission that is upsetting when women here fought so hard to be free.” So, according to Pearson, Muslim men oppress Muslim women (who as a result are pitifully submissive), who then intimidate and oppress other women - all through the veil.

   [...]

   Astounding.

5. Josh Jasper
   October 17th, 2006| 9:28 am

   Not much to add on this issue, but I do ahve this related observation -

   I’ve been having a discussion in my journal about the British “Race Minister ” calling for a woman teacher wearing the veil to be fired.

   I get comments like “what if her co worker was deaf and needed to read her lips”, or “what if she got transfered to a class of teens her religion called adults, andnthen she would be veiled in front of the students and Oh N0EZ1!”

   Fucking hell. *I* sometimes get cranky at things done by Moslems in power, mostly because I lived near Malaysia for most of my teens and early adult life, and the Sharia police in Northern Malaysia sometimes bust young couples in public parks for holding hands, and engage in similar acts of asshattery. But I’m certianly no more anti-Islam than I am anti-Christian because of Jerry Falwell.

   My friends and aquaintances, putativley liberal, harbor some rather upsetting anti-Islamic ideas. I’m betting Helen Caldicott has some anti-Islamic ideas as well.

6. jaywalking: cartoons about a way of life
   October 17th, 2006| 9:28 am

   Raised Fists

   Bitch/Lab’s post today inspired me to create this image. Perhaps we can create our own campaign around Afghan Women’s Resistance. This image isn’t the greatest I admit….If someone is willing to help pull together pertinent info I’m happy to…

7. chabert
   October 17th, 2006| 10:00 am

   Oh and speaking of fascism, here is something I have been thinking of throughout this, from Male Fantasies, by Klaus Theweleit;

   Let’s review the mode of production of our writers’ [The Freikorps novelists] language once again. It too cannot be grasped simply by revealing its “unconscious” contents. It is not primarily characterized by its specific use of a typical symbolism, nor indeed by any kind of expression; we are not even dealing here with projection.

   Making clear what the language cannot do is revealing in itself. It cannot describe, or narrate, or represent, or argue. It is alien to any linguistic posture that respects the integrity of its object or takes it seriously. The language seems just as incapable of forming “object relations” as the men who employ it. (The language neither lies nor tells the truth; those are irrelevant categories.)

   What does it do then? It consistently employs the postures mentioned above (e.g. “narration,” “argumentation”), but only as empty shells. It seems to me that the process that is really specific to it is a different one, a process of transmutation. The linguistic process is inherently a process of production, one that appropriates and transforms reality. What is striking about our male writers is that the particles of reality taken up in their language lose any life of their own. They are deanimated and turned into dying matter. They are forced to relinquish their life to a parasitic, linguistic onslaught, which seems to find “pleasure” in the annihilation of reality. Reality is invaded and “occupied” in that onslaught. The language of occupation: it acts imperialistically against any form of independently moving life.

   It is above all the living movement of women that forces it immediately into a defensive-aggressive stance. It either screens itself against their existence (e.g. wives, “white” mothers, and sisters), or destroys them (e.g. proletarian women, “rifle-women”, and erotic sisters and mothers). The emotional force and sexual intensity emanating from women seems unbearable, incapable of being worked over by this language.

   Mechanisms of defense and attack are not the only things at work in that language. (Projection is a simple defense mechanism.) In relation to the self, those mechanisms act as survival mechanisms. In relation to objects, they act as annihilation mechanisms. Both these latter are coupled together, operating in one and the same action. They are two effects of a single process.

   Human productions as a rule invest their objects with life. It is the living labour of the artisan that allows a table to be created from a tree, the living worker’s living labour that forges a tool out of raw metal; the “mother’s” living labour that enables a newborn infant to become a person. The production of our men acts conversely. It divests social products, both people and things, of the life that has entered into them, especially in war. Their mode of production is the transformation of life into death, and dismantling of life. I think we are justified in calling it an antiproduction. This antiproduction has a destructive and a creative aspect. It builds new orders from a reality that is devivified.

   The process of destruction is marked by two successive states. “Perception” is followed by an assault. Even perception itself is an act of destruction, since it doesn’t really “perceive” at all. The men’s gaze is constantly on the hunt. We can visualise this process more clearly by comparing it to the operation of a camera. A camera admits light and produces living images. The eyes of these men, conversely, admit nothing. When they catch sight of real movement, they block out the light - the eyes narrowing to mere slits - then emit beams of their own that cause the viewed object to appear distorted. Their eyes operate rather like spotlights. The image that is formed from the sharply illuminated real objects resembles a police photo. In police photos, people appear doomed not to remain much longer among the living, as if they were already under a death sentence. The police photographer acts as if he were going to produce a photograph. In reality, he destroys his subjects physiognomy in the glare of his spotlight. Soldier males train that same gaze on reality. They record the living as that which is condemned to death.

   In its second stage, the destruction is completed. The men turn their weapons on the illuminated object, because it brazenly continues moving around in the spotlight’s glare, instead of quietly crawling off into some corner or taking its own life. Instead of a camera and cutting table (living image and montage), they work with a spotlight and a machete (dead image and dismemberment.)

   Yet like the police photographer, they insist that what they have produced is a photo.

8. chabert
   October 17th, 2006| 10:10 am

   Blackamazon on SCF

   http://guyaneseterror.blogspot.....ation.html

   put me especially in mind of this; in her analysis she detects a variation, the operation is not concluded in orgasmic annihilation but in consumtpion/appropriation, but involves the same devivification, the same perceptual transmutation:

   SC cuts connections, blurs lines and tries to wrest control of various cultural significators so that her characters which aren’t full formed but merely ciphers passing through can be affirmed.

   Whats more she does it AT THE EXPENSE of their humanity ,depth and frailiity. Rather than construct or truly examine ways that they re molded or mold themselves or interact with things to acheive this uselessness or this featherweightness , she establishes it as the center of the narrative and leaves it as if anyone who objected is simply gauche and uncultured or odd for not reveling in it’s beauty.

   SCF does the same whatever the topic whatever the concern it makes a CONSCIOUS effort to severe it from interaction with the world or others. It is as if any weight or concern to it would PREVENT the ability to have adornment while purposelly lightening others ocncerns to market the self ( or central female) as the only thing that matters. While purposely leaching and using anything to affirm it’s existance.

   Whats more is that both the film style and the feminism style has a very nasty undercurrent of if you can’t use pretty shiny,smart things to justify you placement at the center, your wasting away,psychic damage, or literal starvation is unfortunate but not paramount.

   Life should come easy and it is only until you’re made to live it ( which is so mean and so teh fault of patriarchy/foreignersor meanies/POC/peasants) andwhen you are it isn’t because a world exists OUTSIDE OF YOU but simply the world is intruding on you as you ( special white women ) are the center of the universe.

   It’s a feminism taht ultimately has such little confidence in itself that it msut be made pretty by the starvation of innocents, the ignorance of culture, and seelf immolation to survive.

9. belledame222
   October 17th, 2006| 11:32 am

   >So, according to Pearson, Muslim men oppress Muslim women (who as a result are pitifully submissive), who then intimidate and oppress other women - all through the veil.>

   Well, that makes perfect sense; after all these people say the same damn thing about “sexbots.” Whether liberal or radical; there’s always a line to be drawn somewhere, you know.

   “You’re making us all look bad.”

   and it’s like: it’s nothing compared to the fucked-up PR you’re giving your very own selves here; and it has nothing to do with what you -look- like.

   Piss off, really.

10. bitchlab
    October 17th, 2006| 12:57 pm

    Belledame –

    I’ve been trying to figure out how to describe the double-denial that makes A’s apology text ‘work.’

    There is the persistant refusal to engage BfP on two levels: the US role in colonialism and feminists’ role in desexualizing brown women in order to save white women.

    This denial reveals itself each time A’s raises the specter of cultural relativism (or elsewhere she uses multiculturalism). Before any apology is actually issued, the specter of relativism must be raised:

    “…mandatory burqua (which I also think is vile, and I’m not going to play into the idea that a garment that is primarily worn under threat of death can called a cultural symbol in the same sense that voluntary things like head scarves are cultural symbols)

    The important enemy is not Colonialism, but the specter of multiculturalism and relativism as if anyone embraced relativism in any conversation. The threat is a threat to the ability of WhiteFeminist to monotheistically subsume everything under the sign of Patriarchy and determine what is and is not a cultural symbol.

    ‘That’s not yours; it’s ours to use as we please.’

    The first plain sentence of apology is: “I didn’t bother to estabish why I thought they were hypocrites, though. And I apologize.”

    The apology is only for a failure to fully explain the joke, as if explaining the joke would have forestalled criticism. The “apology” denies BfP’s objections entirely, as if she simply “didn’t get” the joke.

    ‘But you must understand, I am attacking those responsible for the war: them.’

    The text moves from addressing BfP in order to speak past her and speak to another white woman. Which is quickly followed, again, by the specter of relativism and the brave stance WhiteFeminist must take against it:

    ‘I will have to admit that I’m not going to stifle my urge to condemn Muslim fundamentalist men for acting like women’s bodies belong to them.’

    The enemy is the threat of relativism posed by women of color and the threat of desexualization posed by US rightwingers. A virtuous WhiteFeminism emerges brandishing two swords, one to flay the threat of chaos posed by brown women and multiculturalism and the other to flay the rightwingers who are only different from brown men by degrees (not in kind).

    As Foolish Owl keeps reminding everyone, the implicit message is that the Democratic Party is, like WhiteFemnism, absolved of any role in colonialism. It, like WhiteFEminism must brandish two swords to fight the specter of relativism and the repression of rightwingers.

    I don’t care one whit for any of them (religious fundamentalists). . . .

    But the joke came across as a cheap shot at women in burquas, and for this I apologize.

    While the text separates the first line from the next by using the first to close a paragraphy and the second to start a new one, these two thoughts shouldn’t be separated because they mean, ‘I reserve the right to take cheap shot at fundamentalist brown men, but feel I cannot take cheap shots against brown women’ — as if taking cheap shots against brown men is somehow inseparable from taking cheap shots against brown women:

    My intention was to take a cheap shot at the misogynist nags around the world, but if that didn’t come across then it just didn’t, so I’m sorry.

    Misogyny is all the same, the fulcrum from which all moves; there is nothing else. I apologize that you refuse to understand my joke.

    The text must raise the threat of relativism again, this time to speak to the rightwingers who read the site, since that last paragraph is really addressing her (the Democratic Party’s) wars with the rightwing.

    But there is always a confession:

    Imperialism isn’t going to be argued out of existence because imperialists don’t believe their own bullshit.

    All of which is precisely the same dynamics that undergird any internecine warfare within WhiteFeminism. The specter of multiculturalism and relativism (serious thought and understanding) was continually raised as a threat, not because anybody speaking to A was engaged in the kind of relativism A mean, but because it was a ’sign’ for the dreaded ‘choice feminists,’ which is, itself, a floating signifyier slapped on to anything WhiteFeminist doesn’t agree with.

11. bitchlab
    October 17th, 2006| 1:18 pm

    But wait: “…the veil also implies a submission that is upsetting when women here fought so hard to be free.” So, according to Pearson, Muslim men oppress Muslim women (who as a result are pitifully submissive), who then intimidate and oppress other women - all through the veil.

    that article made me sick. an ‘irony bypass’ indeed. Damn! thos male identified patriarchy fuckers are *everywhere*.

12. bitchlab
    October 17th, 2006| 1:42 pm

    Jay —

    I love the poster! I will see about making some sidebar blogdress when I get a chance.

13. Anthony Kennerson
    October 17th, 2006| 1:44 pm

    You know what is so freakin’ funny about all this??

    One of the most passionate appeals for RAWA and their genuine goal for real equality comes from…pass out the smelling salts…a certified sex therapist!!

    This excerpt is from an Dr. Susan Block essay first posted to her website (NSFW, BTW) and then to CounterPunch at the height of the Afghanistan war:

    http://www.counterpunch.org/block2.html

    [...] Obviously, we’re against the Taliban. And for good reason. Though I’m not for bombing them into a Stone Age they’re already in, I don’t have much good to say about this rogue, Saudi-greased, so-called “government” that beheads prostitutes without blinking an eye, even in the dust-laden Khyber breeze. The fact that the Taliban are protecting or pretending to protect Celebrity Terrorist Osama (like Madonna, he now needs just the one name for worldwide recognition) is only the most famous of these fundamentalist religious thugs’ offenses against humanity. Their treatment of women as chattel in the true medieval sense of the word underlies their brutal approach to life in general. This is not to demonize them as the “Other” that we could never be. Indeed, the Taliban serve as a stark warning to us as to where our own society might go if we allow it to be overtaken by our own fundamentalist Bible-bangers.

    So, Jerry bin Foulwill notwithstanding, we’re against the Taliban. Rhymes with Caliban, that brutish monkey-man in Shakespeare’s “Tempest.” But whom are we for, besides ourselves and our oil? Currently, we are flirting with the Iran-backed Northern Alliance, bedazzled by their swashbuckling courage, their sexy fighting pajamas and the simple fact that they’re anti-Taliban (as of now, that is; some of those noble moujahedeen switch sides like I change hats). Wounded as we are and looking for allies on the inside, we’re giving these Northern Alliance guys our hearts, our good press, our guns and our money, hoping against hope that they won’t turn on us like so many we’ve armed before. Odds are they will. Plus, in terms of women’s rights, word is that the Northern Alliance isn’t much better than the Taliban (or the Saudis). In power, they could be even worse.

    Of course, if we want some sort of stability in Afghanistan once we’re done tearing up the place playing hide-and-seek with Osama, we do have to back some homegrown group or other. My suggestion is that we throw our support behind the most democratic collection of freedom fighters in the region: RAWA, the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan.

    Who is RAWA? RAWA is the woman behind the veil, the one that all these Taliban, Northern Alliance, Iranian and Saudi men are desperately trying to hide. RAWA is the Afghan female fighting for the right to show her face, to get an education, to love whom she pleases and to live in some semblance of freedom and dignity. The women and men of RAWA are dedicated to their struggle against the Taliban fundamentalists and their foreign masters. They are determined to establish freedom, democracy, peace and women’s rights in Afghanistan, and to launch an elected secularist government based on democratic values. Most of them live in the Khaiwa camp of Pakistan’s northwestern frontier, a settlement of 500 Afghan families whose women don’t wear burkas and do learn to read, an island of tolerance in a sea of misogyny.

    The stunningly gorgeous land of Afghanistan (that I love so much, having spent an unforgettable month there when I was young) has been battered by foreign invasions and torn by civil wars, like a beautiful woman beaten by her husband and whipped by the religious police. The bombs fall, the winter sets in, the hunger deepens, the terror widens. It is as if the suffering of Afghanistan has become so intense that it is now throbbing throughout the world in all of our individual and collective feelings of anguish and terror. We are all Afghans now.
    

    Now, Block’s essay isn’t all that perfect, since she does tend to focus a lot more on imposing secular democratic ideals…and she probably would be construed by many as simply a dilletante riding RAWA’s coattails to serve her own White liberal agenda. But, at least she does give RAWA a fair hearing and doesn’t attempt to impose her beliefs on them, prefering to allow them to speak for themselves. That’s far, far preferable to me than the know-it-all, we-know-what’s-better-for-you-more-than-you-do attitudes of the more traditional feminists.

    Just putting out an alternative…

    Anthony

14. Nanette
    October 17th, 2006| 2:10 pm

    B|L, excellent dissection of the “apology”. Thanks for doing that. It bothered me from the first but I couldn’t quite articulate why.

    Another thing I’ve noticed - which many others probably have noticed before me, but I’m just now coming to the actual reading of those sorts of sites - as opposed to just skimming… and, well, skimming is actually the term that came to mind when reading most of the material on the MWF sites I’ve been looking at.

    And, I think that is why, besides not having much interest in the sort of topics they do cover, I’ve never really been drawn to those type of sites… most everything is very surface, like a rock skipping over a pond… sort of a regurgitation of whatever news or topic catches someone’s eye, maybe with some analysis but nothing much more than that.

    Hmmm… I’m so bad at explaining things, lol. But, (and of course all the required caveats about how people can do what they want with their blogs, write about what they want, etc etc), for the most part, they are not advocates. They are disseminators… sometimes of others thoughts, sometimes their own. This is why some cannot conceive of learning about new things, in order to write about them, because their only purpose is to put their own thoughts about a certain thing out there and not much more.

    Take the biting beaver thing recently… I was amazed that it took at least a couple of days for someone (and not even one of the “A list” women bloggers) to come up with the thought that… “hey, maybe there are other women out there in BB’s situation. And maybe some of them too don’t have money for an abortion, and don’t have the backup of blogs or family, or whatever. What about we have a campaign to give money to some organization that helps with that?” The action of an advocate, someone able to look at least a little beyond the boundaries of their own lives.

    I think this is also why some have such a hard time understanding (if they are not pretending) the entire burqa thing… to some, RAWA, the burqa, the invasions and occupations themselves, POC/WOC and related things, are there to be used as fillers, as stepping off points for talking about other things, for showcasing more of their own thoughts (stuff they know about and write well about, in some minds).

    And on the other side, you have the advocates… who see the struggle of the women of Afghanistan as part of their own struggle, not as a topic starter, or joke punchline, or tool to use against teh right wing, etc, etc.

    Of course all this goes back to the cultural appropriation as well, but I think it does go a little beyond that, in a way. Maybe even a worse way, not sure.

    I am just thinking out loud and I don’t think one is required to make sense at times like this ;)

15. Nanette
    October 17th, 2006| 2:28 pm

    Of course I could have just said all that much shorter by saying that say, the difference (or one of) between BfP and amanda etc, to my mind, is the difference between advocates and observers.

16. chabert
    October 17th, 2006| 3:13 pm

    bitchlab; you bring out a new explanation for the picture itself: the burqa then, the object of such fear and loathing, conjured like a bogey to be conjured away by the alchemical ritual of petit bourgeois snickering, may emerge here and be the object of such passionate attachment because it too is serving as the terrifying spectre of the ultimate “choice feminism”, the ultimate evil threatening fixed eternal universal “enlightenment fundamentalist” values, values anchored and embodied by the White Woman’s purity, perfectability and virtue. The collapsing of the evils into one - althouse/taliban, orientalbarabrity/choicefeminim - is reminiscent of tactics of anticommunism.

17. Arcturus
    October 17th, 2006| 3:37 pm

    it just seems like it will never be over if each new generation is as entrenched in privilege and ignorance as the one before. They all seem to know theoretically about white privilege and racism and doing dumb stuff… but they can only seem to see it in enemies or, as is more my impression, use people of color as props against these enemies, but don’t know how to confront a friend.

    Sysyphean, isn’t it?

    Again a fascinating conversation here. I’ve been re-visiting some of the old ethno-poetics discussions/debates touching on similar issues: cultural appropriation, co-optation, multi-cultural dreams, what ‘inclusion’ might mean, totalizing representations, unacknowledged imperial moves, whose voice gets privileged, what might constitute the authentic, etc. The connection I’m getting from the burqa convo’s is the construction of one narrative on the erasure of Other’s.

    This is the close to a paper delivered by Nathaniel Tarn at a 1983 conference at USC entitled “Symposium of the Whole” I was re-reading this morning-:

    “A final example to illustrate the extent to which our unconscious will go when it is unaware of how sharp the razor’s edge can be between genuine love and appropriation: at a recent meeting convened by an anthropologist in NY . . . I heard one of the panel members suddenly declare that our poetry had ‘benefited from an immense blood transfusion‘ from the poetries of the ‘primitive and archaic’ worlds. I asked him in considerable horror how he could bear to use such words when so many human beings were being bled, in the flesh, bled in Brazil, in Guatemala, in South Africa, In Indonesia, bled for their lands, their forests, their lakes, their seas - so that we might continue to live in the style to which we had become accustomed. He became extremely irate and refused to look upon the possibility that we might be bleeding such people in more senses than one, or that such a lack of attention had appeared in his words.”

    (”Dr. Jekyll, the Anthroplogist Emerges and Marches into the Notebook of Mr Hyde, the Poet,” Conjunctions 6, 1984)

18. Ravenmn
    October 17th, 2006| 10:32 pm

    Listen, Ms. Bitchlab, I’ve just gotta get this off my chest right now. This linking that you do to all kinds of other people who have fascinating content and incredibly important arguments?

    That shit has just gotta Stop. Right. Now.

    Because, you know, you will never be able to be an A-list blogger as long as you continue to listen to other people and direct your readers to other blogs. How is it that you have missed this important lesson of the blogsophere?

    Well, I wouldn’t do this for everyone, but since your links to my blog have moved me from number 8 millionth in popularity to number 7.999 millionth, I figure I owe you a small bit of my massive wisdom.

    Are you ready? Because this might be painful. Just take a big breath and remember the following:

    1. Blogging is all about me, me, me.

    2. Linking to other bloggers is allowed only if the links are to people who admire me, me, me.

    3. Other bloggers have important points only because they’ve learned them from me, me, me and refer back to me, me, me.

    Are you with me, now, BitchLab?

    Because, you know, this constant linking to other people with other ideas smacks of something called — oh, what’s the word? Damn. I forget. It begins with a D, I think. And there’s some nonsense about being part of something bigger. I think it begins with an M. Mov…..

    Well, it’s not important, after all. Let’s get back to me, me, me, shall we?

    —-

    OK, that’s my sarcastic way of expressing how much I love the way you notice and highlight important words from other bloggers. You rock, B|L!

19. Nanette
    October 18th, 2006| 12:17 am

    Arcturus: (you have the most interesting knowledge collection, by the way)

    He became extremely irate and refused to look upon the possibility that we might be bleeding such people in more senses than one, or that such a lack of attention had appeared in his words.”

    Your post reminds me of a truly horrifying conversation I witnessed (and participated in) on a blog a while ago, although it probably belongs more on a cultural appropriation thread but, oh well.

    A Native American man (who had been a time learning about his own heritage) posted a sort of news piece about a tribe that was just a few deaths from being wiped out completely… no more of those of full blood, few who still knew the language and other things.

    One of his commenters… a very sweet white woman, loves everyone, wouldn’t hurt a fly, is very into spirituality (including that of Native Americans) and so on made a comment that went something like this:

    “Well, but would that be so bad, as long as we are here to carry on the spirituality, to carry on the knowledge? I mean, that’s what matters isn’t it, that the words of Sitting Bull (etc) are kept alive?”

    I was just appalled… omgomgomg she didn’t really say that, did she? I reminded her that these were actual people we were talking about here… not spiritual traditions and dreams that reside in dreamcatchers.

    It just did not compute at all. Not even one tiny bit. Even when I got a bit more direct - I could only imagine in my mind someone smiling with sunny blue eyes, soft, gentle hands with blood dripping from both.

    It seems to me that a good many people consider Native Americans to be cultural artifacts, keepers of some mythical flame as opposed to real live people, in the here and now.

    I think this sort of disconnect infects some of the populations as it relates to other people of color, or of foreigness, especially those who seek that “blood transfusion from the poetries of the ‘primitive and archaic’ worlds.

    Freaky.

20. Donna
    October 18th, 2006| 1:35 am

    Nanette, alot of people think we are extinct, really. There are parts of this country where it is highly unlikely you will cross paths with a person of Native American descent, so when it happens, they will say, “Wow! There are still indians around?” Those people do tend to be the kind like the woman you are talking about, they put us up on the stoic and spiritual pedestal. Which sounds nice but is very unfair, you’re not allowed to be human. The ones who live near reservations are the ones who hate us, after all we are in competition with them, for jobs, lovers, etc.

21. bitchlab
    October 18th, 2006| 8:11 am

    Nanette –

    Your lengthier comment — awww hell. I don’t know why you thought you were struggling. It’s a very articulate summary of some of the issues. There have been a lot of people complaining about the rocking skipping apporach to blogging. piny has been extremely frustrated that he can never really get in-depth, lengthier exchanges going on Feministe.

    brownfemipower and i were talking about this very same thing when the whole burqa incident errupted a couple of weeks ago. i like the way you characterize it as advocacy vs. disseminating.

    the other thing is, it feels more like community b/c the blogs are smaller.
    but more on all this later because i think we should have come intra-blog discussions about all this.

22. belledame222
    October 18th, 2006| 10:35 am

    Yeah, i do think size, uh, matters; after a certain point it’s very difficult to get an in-depth convo sustained. just too many variables going on. someone brings in an axe to grind against someone else and we’re off on a tangent; by the time it’s over, no one’s even read to the beginning of the thread because who has time to read all that? so off-the cuff thoughts on the OP; someone else chimes in, “yeah, I like pudding too,” and then there must be another tangent or six about 1) pudding-dude missed the point entirely 2) but still, that is a good point about the pudding 3) everyone stop being so nasty! stop it stop it stop it!…and so on, and so on, and so on…

    thing is, one can stay on top of that as a mod to a certain extent–so far it’s worked out pretty well at my spot–but i have no illusions that i’d be able to keep this up if i ever got to the size of like Feministe. and if i did try, it’d come off way WAY too heavy-handed.

23. belledame222
    October 18th, 2006| 10:37 am

    of course, as Nanette notes, apparently incurable solipsism on the part of the host doesn’t much help things either.

24. Nanette
    October 18th, 2006| 7:33 pm

    Donna:

    Those people do tend to be the kind like the woman you are talking about, they put us up on the stoic and spiritual pedestal. Which sounds nice but is very unfair, you’re not allowed to be human.

    Exactly. Magical people, who are only there for your benefit, sigh.

25. Nanette
    October 18th, 2006| 7:44 pm

    the other thing is, it feels more like community b/c the blogs are smaller.

    Yes, I think that’s a good part of it. I was at one of the dkos satellite scoop blogs for a time, but just not at comfortable. I find I much prefer going to small to medium personal (or small group) blogs, as it’s far more interesting. Each with their own personality and quirks and, importantly, room to talk. Well, and a blog host that talks back (not particularly to me, but that participates in comments at all).

    I love finding new gems - now I just wish I had the time to read them all, sigh.

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