Posts by Jolisa
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Well I think at least round here, it's been badly enough argued to be associated with two things
- false dichotomy - it's shoes OR political activism, you can't have both
Wait, what? Who at PAS ever said you had to be barefoot or boringly shod to be an activist? That would indeed be a very bad argument.
- psychic powers - the ability to determine a person's motivation for doing something either without asking them, or while ignoring the answer they give you.
Surely it's never about a single motivation - that, again, would be a really bad argument. Rather, it's about acknowledging that behaviour is motivated (or instigated, or inhibited, or prevented) by many factors, some of which we are conscious of, and others of which we are not. Some of which are simply in the air (OMG shoes, I love them), and others of which are deliberately placed there (OMG shoes, I just saw an ad for Zappos, and now I crave a new pair of sparkly purple shoes, even though I don't need one).
Which doesn't ipso facto make it a doddle to identify those motivations in others, or ourselves, although when the behaviour seems to run counter to enlightened self-interest, you may be on the track of a certain degree of false consciousness (what is the matter with Kansas, for example?). Doesn't stop people trying to make sense of patterns, though.
NB just my working definition; not authorised by Head Office or Party Central or anyone, really. Here's your official definition over here, which ascribes a great deal of intentionality to the system -- false consciousness is not that which we happen to have, it is that which is perpetrated upon us, for reasons. Capitalist reasons, mainly.
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deleted duplicate post
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I don't feel like I'm treated as a responsible autonomous adult when I'm told what my dress, hobbies, and sexual habits should (or more to the point shouldn't) be. Does that make the women who tell me those things Not Feminists? Because I think they'd be startled.
Golly, who are these women?? I dunno if they're feminists or not, but they sound a smidge deficient in the etiquette department, not to mention the persuasiveness stakes. Do they doorknock, or do you meet them at social events, or what? Seriously.
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I think this definition by Stef hits the spot
Feminism - free to fuck up. Your life, your decisions, your responsibility. Just because you are an autonomous adult.
I don't think I need more than that
But with respect, Raymond, you need a hell of a lot more than that to get to the point where that definition makes any sense. Women martyred themselves, went on hunger strike, made exhibitions of themselves, for example, for the right of latter-day women to be free to fuck up the vote.
And my mum was not allowed to have a bank account in her own name when she got married, so all her purchases had to be signed off by my dad (to his credit, he was appalled).
And only in my lifetime has it become relatively easy to deal with a contraceptive fuck-up. Just to give a few examples.
Y'know? I see the beautiful simplicity of the line, but feminism, for me, aims at more than just some fundamental freedom to make a mess of your own life. Especially given that for so much of history -- and still now, around the world -- women have not been allowed a life, a decision, a responsibility of their own, nor been treated like autonomous adults. Women have pretty much been forced to live with the results of the fuckups of other autonomous adults.
Which is why so much of early feminism was about freedom (or protection) from as much as freedom (or protection) to: freedom from violent drunken husbands, freedom from forced marriage, freedom from rape in marriage, freedom from the effects of venereal disease (a biggie for the Victorians), freedom from the inevitability of childbearing, and so on and so on.
And also why so much of feminism has been -- and continues to be -- about collective action, rather than individual freedoms.
As a utopian principle, sure, "the freedom to fuck up" has a certain ring. Yeah, we've come a long way, baby. But in practice? We still have a long way to go.
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Oho, so that's what y'all get up to at these "Great Blends" I never manage to make it over for.
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OK, clearly I can't help myself, one more:
If we agree about the dodgy bits of Lindy West's review, as Emma said...
I not only found that repulsive, I found it try-hard. Most of the column is well-written, but that just clanged. It was like she was trying, really hard, to be offensive.
i.e. all mouth and no trousers, then the more interesting question for me is, why was it so compulsively, reflexively retweeted? To get all jargony, what the hell cultural identity was being interpellated in that frenzied moment, both en masse and at the individual level?
PS: another vote for One-Dimensional Woman as intellectual yeast (ta Giovanni!), but the book about feminism that really did it for me in the last couple of months was Virginie Despentes' stunning King Kong Theory.
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Kept me up past my bedtime, they did.
Oh, just spotted this. Yep, Gracewood Sisters: keeping people up past their bedtime since, ah, 1970-something. Ask our mum.
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the TL:DR treatment.
I read all the way to the end, Deborah. I love your philosophical rendering of the question.
Also, this is now longer than Emma's original post, which is RUDE
I didn't read it as rude, but then it occurs to me that I might have missed a crucial memo about forum etiquette, despite having been online for eleventy-million years. In which case, I have graphomaniacally erred more times than I can count. I can only plead that each time, I was seduced by the luxury of actually finishing a thought all the way to the end (something that does not often happen IRL).
Will fall silent for a bit and practise saying things in sentences rather than paragraphs.
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Emma, ta for the links to Megan's review and follow-up - those are great! Now I feel as though someone else saw the same movie I did.
The one point I'd quibble with would be the Miranda/Charlotte chat about how hard motherhood is, and their final exchange: "How do the women without help do it?" "I have no fucking idea."
On paper, yes, it's totally patronising, and I was bracing myself to be offended. But in the theatre full of women where I saw the movie, this wasn't received as a kiss-off, so much as a saluary toast, and it was greeted with a palpable warmth and a scattered chorus of "Yes!' and "Amen!" and "Thank you!" And even I felt strangely affirmed.
I don't pretend to know how this worked, but I'm interested that it worked that way... in fact, I wrote several hundred words on the film as latter-day commedia-dell'arte or indeed a Pantomime-with-slightly-too-many-dames ("OH no you didn't!" "OH yes you did!" "He's behind youuuu!" "Cheat on Big!") before deciding the world didn't need yet another SATC White Paper on the State of Feminism(s), and going back to tinkering with the dozen or so other unfinished blog posts that litter my laptop...
On the subject, my clever sister did a nice job, I thought, of teasing out part of what was so very wrong with how the Samantha character was treated.
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I'm afraid rape gags are something I get very dull and humourless about
Oh, me too.
and I expect to be slapped hard if I did around here.
I expect so!
That line in the review was wildly offensive. But so was the entire frame of the review, right down to its horrifically auto-misogynist concluding line. If I were to get all theoretical about it (which I just can't do well, since it's two hours after my bedtime), I would say she was attempting to, I dunno, hyperbolically desublimate the mutual sexual and economic violence of the marriage contract, and the whole Orientalist-capitalist-complex, as sunnily depicted in the film.
Which I think is where the horrified reader giggles and gasps, if any, come from. Not a woman making a rape joke - but a woman making such a violent rape joke about this exceptionally silly movie! What the hell?? It's incongruous, and weird, and funny-peculiar, which for some readers at some moments, can slide into involuntary funny-haha.
But that's a debate for another day, at least for me. (Note: Rape jokes, in general, not OK. Theorising about rape jokes, when feeling mentally and spiritually strong, occasionally good exercise. Which is to say, am feeling iffy about even pursuing this subject, and not really planning to take it any further.)