For what it’s worth, I don’t like Bitch Lab, I don’t read her, I don’t think she’s very bright, and I think the main thing she piggybacked on recently was a comment thread to a post she didn’t author. Nice appropriation, that.
So: Don’t like Bitch Lab? Join the club, and don’t read her. Read the women she rips off instead. They’re better.
So: Don’t like Bitch Lab? Join the club, and don’t read her. Read the women she rips off instead. They’re better.
05-16-2007
Just go ahead and bitch
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Jesus, QD. I haven’t been around much, lately. I’ve barely been online. I reacted to a single post you wrote, out of context, which read to me as a change of heart.
I have already dropped by, read your response to me, and apologized, twice, for misreading you. I have already backed off. So you’re taking the earlier part, the part I’ve already backed off and apologized on, and putting that front-and-center to show what a villain I apparently think you are?
Look, I respect you and I look up to you, and that hasn’t changed, but I just don’t get this. I missed some things. I apologized for those.
The part that gets me is that I agree with most everything you say here. I just–oh, hell with it.
Darlin,
A might quare dewd such a maseff unnerstan ’bout lack o’ time. onna tha reason I put my response a’you fron ‘n’ center is coz i had sumpina say worthy of a post. post. geddit? heehaw. quare dewd said post. cain’t hep but thinka ma brother delmar. plus, imma egotistical cunt no squirten like that.
i didna see yore’n response ’til afta a posted my post. i love me posts, I do. had i, i probably wouldna dished back the same snark you said you was dishin’a me.
thanka lord tradin’ snark ain’t as time consumin’ as snipe huntin’ huh?
Anyway, to be serious and drop quare dewd for awhile (sorry Delmar!), I’m sorry we had the misunderstanding.
I feel i’ve again screwed up cozza this internet connection lack thereof. what i mean is, it sounded like i was referring to posts i’ve written months ago. was only talking about the recent ones. i try not to expect folks to read my every word. i know ppl don’t. i don’t read others, i couldn’t poss. expect ppl to read every word and have it present in their minds when they criticize my white privilege or whatever. and i certainly don’t think i deserve anything by way of special consideration b/c i’ve supposedly been an ally in the past. i don’t like “ally” anyway. but that’s another post.
so, just wanted to clear that up. was surpsied my crits of valenti were ignored, but figgered that, like a lot of folks, you take the good word of others and there it is. whatever everyone on your list thinks of me in this regard, i have amply demonstrated that i’m incompetent at conveying my meaning, so i’ll carry on.
as i noted elsewhere, my life has been happy without blogging and i can’t balance the two and still have a life or hunt for a job. turns out that my ex boss still has ways to keep me out of the job market, so i have to cast my net far and wide.
watch out for a mighty quare dewd, who might be in a town near you in four months!
“if class identity figures for anyone here?”
Yes.
Should I say more?
I hardly have the time to start.
Reading Capital Vol I at age 20 and grasping “class” as an objective structuring of society generated by the private ownership of the means of production. Learning as well that historically constituted consciousnesses refract and filter our perception and understanding of that objective reality.
At that age, studying German literature and in the life of Goethe recognizing with blinding clarity the life of the middle class intellectual and artist who can aspire to and even join in the freedoms of the propertied classes (back then and over there, the feudal aristocracy). Adding that in our historical conditions, white belongs to the freedom and possibility of freedom.
At the same age, mixing socially with same-age members of the local ruling class, which also happens to belong to the global ruling class, and even has Western European roots. In that company mixing with that global ruling class in the person of German aristocrats turned industrialists.
Being treated like a servant by the Americans with aristocratic prententions and like an amusingly accomplished and not altogether useless plebeian by the aristocrats.
Knowing with dead certainty, that objectively I belonged to those who do not own the means of production and feeling through and through subjectively that the aristocrats and grand bourgeois wannabes can keep their their snotty noses and their empyrean culture. I understand their greatest cultural achievements better than they, because I am devoted to them and know what they leave out, what they unintentionally say with their silences.
Still at the same age attempting a relationship with a working class girl of a certain ethnicity. Finding out the hard way, I might be ready to give what I’ve got for the class, but I can’t date the girls in it.
Today, downwardly mobile. Not entirely by choice, but as a result of national and global class struggles I have watched consciously for twenty-five years and seen the class enemy win again and again, and as a result of my own disinterest in helping organize the expropriation of wage labor as an alternative career.
Working a pink collar job. Working with “the ladies.” Whose sense of proprieties prevents us from talking to each other about many of the matters that concern us most, and whose respect for institutions impedes almost any discussion of class, gender and political consciousness. Wondering why they have not yet realized after these several years that at heart I am just one of the girls.
for the record, I haven’t really critiqued the book so much, seeing as how I haven’t read it. I did participate in some comment threads already talking about it.
…i probably shouldn’t have made the “Feminism 4 Dummiez” comment in that context. I don’t know if that accurately describes JV’s book; I was going off what seemed to be most peoples’ take on its tone, and my general impression of What Sells These Days. and my own slight irritation with what felt a bit (from the excerpts I’d seen) like a reinvention of the Third Wave wheel.
that said, i really shouldn’t say anything else unless/until i read the thing in full, I expect. I never really gave that much of a damn about the cover–although I do get that to go from the flat white tum to critique of “body image in the media” is, well, ironic; and I’ve got no bone to pick with JV personally. as LL notes, a lot of people I respect have bones with the book as well as what they see as patterns (wrt her, wrt what the book represents, or rather doesn’t but purports to, purportedly), and I do take that under advisement.
and yeah, i wish BfP had the/a book deal, too, along with a lot of other people who really don’t get their props, and frankly I think that is a lot of this, and there’s nothing wrong with that. it’s not -envy.- it’s a natural desire for well-deserved recognition that doesn’t seem forthcoming; meanwhile accolades get heaped on this one rather mainstream white feminist who’s by all accounts not written the most in-depth book; and any critiques get received in the framework of “yer just jealous” and “sex negative” and so on and so forth; so, in for a penny in for a pound…
meh.
I think mostly people are about reaching boiling point with the general atmosphere of “play nice and eventually the goodies will trickle down to you; if they haven’t, or they weren’t enough, it’s because you weren’t nice enough,” you know…
as per class as well as JV, I did write that one post after the Althouse/Clinton blowup:
this one.
on a complete unrelated note:
i has kitty picturs
…to add, not just accolades because “oo, strokes,” but: i think, frustration that what feels like could/should be a platform for activism for important work on a number of fronts is going to waste.
Whoa, Dewd, the font is really fux0red now with this new template (which I otherwise LOVE). Shall I take a screenshot? It’s messin’ w/ my eyes! I shall disable CSS for now…
Well, I hate to keep coming back to it, but again I have to ask - so the fuck what? She’s a “mainstream” feminist - so she shouldn’t write a book? She should write a different book? This wasn’t supposed to be an in-depth book - she says so herself. It’s an overview of many different issues facing feminists today, and she provides plenty of references for where people can get more information on a particular subject.
to answer that:
because, I think, there is this perception that there are WOC who -have- been doing more in-depth work, online, blog-style, even, for free; and that not only do they not have the limelight right -now,- there’s no sense that proper due will ever come their way; that there’s deep frustration at feeling like an afterthought or, worse, like raw material for other people to use without proper acknowledgment, on their own way toward the limelight.
rightly or wrongly channeled at JV herself; I’m just saying, this shit has been festering for a long long time, and this would be one of those points where it crusts up and bubbles over.
and now, I’m going to stop talking about the book until I’ve actually fucking read it.
I’m just saying: once again, I think there are reasons why this has become a lightning rod, and it’d be good to finally really air them out. perhaps separately from critiques of the book itself, but this shit is important.
i think, you know, possibly one of the bottom lines here is how taken for granted it is that “mainstream” and “white” go together when it comes to feminism.
people get tired of being reduced to “supporting cast.” especially when some of them may in fact, in certain respects, have more chops than the leading lady. is it fair to blame the leading lady for the casting situation? no; but on the other hand, when people critique her performance, it’s not surprising that “fair” critiques of the craft get all mixed up with the meaner pleasures of going to town on someone else’s performance as well as a larger criticism of her role in the overall story, and what it all says without meaning to (oh, that was a nice walk-on role for the “non-mainstream” actor of color, I’ve seen her before, she’s brilliant; pity she only had two lines and we never saw her again)
It jsut seems to me like JEssica has become a punching bag / whipping girl for a lot of these (legitimate, important) issues. And that’s not right. I mean Belledame, you talk about how feeling guilty doesn’t do any good. So I don’t see this as different. Yeah, it sucks tht such-and-so doesn’t have a book, and I agree that there should be books from more WOC and other marginalized voices, and it’s bullshit that they’ve been treated like outliers for so long… BUT that doesn’t mean Valenti shouldn’t have a book either.
I’m not paying very close attention to this (but more to this than anything else, really, I’m not very attached to what’s going on at all right now) but it seems to me that there are some very hurt feelings from the loss of nubian and that loss came because of people who comment and that includes Jessica V. as well who bears a greater responsibility because these comments were left in blog posts of hers on her blog. What happened to nubian was straight up wrong. This has not been forgotten.
Subsequently, every time this book gets brought up (and sometimes other issues related to Jessica) women of color especially have been treated very poorly in these discussions. I wish I could be more clear and post lots of links and quotes, but I’m going to just let the words of women of color speak for themselves.
I will depart from that in to say that I think sometimes the anger is being directed at the book when the anger is actually at Jessica who did not deal with the issue with nubian well and from what I can see has taken a stance of always being the harmed party in these conversations that come up that are because of other wounds. She’s not seeing the bigger picture and that’s why she has no idea why people are speaking of her the way they are.
And yet still, women of color have been there for her when she was attacked on other issues and I don’t think she acknowledges this.
I’m not going to call her a bad person, but I do think she is way behind on understanding that there is something bigger going on that she would do well to go back and catch up on and I think she will understand a great deal of what’s happening now by looking closely at what happened all those months ago and in the time intervening.
That may not be fair as Amber suggests (for a different reason, though). Would that we could all be Affirmatively Shaming people. That’s going to take time and practice before we get there. What’s happening is very heated and maybe not the best time for people to be practicing new ways of communicating. (Or maybe that’s the very best time, it’s up to folks how they want to deal with it. Remember, Jessica can also be Affirmatively Shaming if she feels she’s being wronged, but from all indications, she’s not doing that.)
I think that a lot of healing would happen if Jessica really struggled to understand the whirlwind of negative feelings toward her and worked to make amends. Or at least made some movements in that direction.
That’s a lot to ask of someone who’s in hunker-down mode and feels besieged and feels she has done her best.
I really try hard not to see these things as personal, but in this particular situation, my perspective has been that it is a personal issue. The solution will need to involve soul-searching, learning, hard work, and swallowing some pride.
Only then, I think, can we actually look at the book as the book. But I think the other stuff needs to be done and is far more important than the book, even if it turns out to be a world-wide best-seller.
I hope this is a productive perspective on the issue and that, if I’m at all close to being right, it happens. I really hope that there can be some healing.
couldn’t agree more Dead Inside. Couldn’t agree more.
Is there another thread where these issues are taken up. It sounds as if there’s something more going on than what I’ve read. I haven’t revisited the threads at PPs and RenEv’s since Sunday. Never was able to get to BA’s place b/c of the sparse access.
I just wrote a long post with a couple of links that made a very poor attempt to illustrate what was going on, but I found myself really disliking Jessica and noticing that you’d been posting in all of them, so you were reading them back then in real-time, so that’s not going to be very helpful for you.
I’m trying to stay away from blogs because I’m not feeling very well about myself or anything else and I’m not being happy about anyone’s successes or helping anyone cope with the ugliness and so it’s all a very negative experience for me.
I really hope that some healing and lessons learned can come out of all of this, but I don’t even feel like that happens anymore. It’ll just keep getting worse and worse until we all give up on each other and it spills out into offline activism, as if it isn’t already harsh enough.
agree.
Amber, I don’t think anyone’s saying she shouldn’t have a book. And, it isn’t -guilt-.
There’s 1) the overall situation, which is not of JV’s doing 2) bad blood with JV wrt nubian and others, which I’m not gonna get into because I didn’t follow that particular blow-up closely enough and I’m reaching saturation point with Other Peoples’ Blog Dramas 3) critique of the book itself.
I did actually spend some time in the bookstore reading FFF, and I just spent over an hour rambling about it and my general thoughts wrt the sitch over at magniloquence’s, (which btw this is a great post: here)
and then wordpress ate it, poof gone. so, I’m not gonna do all that again. just briefly: QD, you were right about Seal Press, thanks for bringing that up. I ended up picking up this book instead, also by Seal Press. I’ll come back to FFF eventually.
Donna has a great post, too. http://the-silence-of-our-frie.....iable.html
Renegade Evolution has a powerful post as well. http://renegadeevolution.blogs.....re-we.html
Sorry these links are getting messed up somehow.