feminism

Chris Brown, Porn, Rape, and Feminism

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2013-10-09 Chris Brown

This is a fascinating perspective on the infamous Chris Brown. It turns out that Chris, at age 8, had already watched enough porn that he was “hot to trot” and (according to his own account) had sex for the first time. The girl in question was 14 or 15 which, as Olivia Cole (the author) points out, makes the encounter a rape. Cole then says she knows other men who have recounted similar stories, and then drops this pretty profound question:

We know some of the behavioral signals that occur when girls have been raped. Depression, promiscuity, unexplained anger, anxiety. These are words we use when we describe the ways victims behave. It’s interesting that I have seen these same symptoms in young boys—alongside me in class when I was a child, in boyfriends as I got older, in men beside me on the bus in Chicago—yet no one looks at male anger and male promiscuity as symptoms of anything. These are just classic male behaviors. “Boys will be boys,” and boys sleep around. Boys have bad tempers. Right?

Wrong.

What if we have been normalizing male rape victims’ symptoms for centuries?

What if, indeed. The one thing Cole doesn’t mention, that I think is important, is the role of pornography in this story. Would a young, 8-year old boy have been looking for sex without already having imbibed a dangerous amount of porn? Probably not. So I don’t think this is a problem that has been going on “for centuries.” It could be a new problem, however, and one that will only get worse as more and more young men have their minds and souls warped by early exposure to readily accessible porn.

Divine Feminine: Early Polytheist Israel Includes Goddess Worship

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File:Hecht Museum, Israel – figurines 004-crop.JPGYahoo News posted on an interesting archaeological discovery in Israel that continues to add evidence that monotheism in Judaism was a late development in its Biblical history, and that one of its most prominent deities was the “wife” or consort of Yahweh. This prominent Jewish goddess was named Ashera, who also had a place in the pantheons of older cultures as well, dating back to the ancient Sumerian and Ugaritic myths.

For those familiar with the work of Margaret Barker and other similar Biblical scholars, this is not breaking news. The worship of multiple (including female) deities, pre-dating the first temple period has been researched and written about for a long time. But the additional evidence, of course, does make it increasingly hard for those who want to claim the root of the monotheistic, Judeo-Christian thought  reaches back to the dawn of time instead of the revisionary, Deuteronomist scribes in King Josiah’s day, will have difficulty contorting around this kind of information. As a Mormon who takes Joseph Smith’s teachings about a “Heavenly Mother” and his King Follett sermon seriously, this already synthesizes with my religious worldview.

Sex Selective Abortion is… Feminist?

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Ann Furedi, who argues that English law already allows sex-selective abortion.
Ann Furedi, who argues that English law already allows sex-selective abortion.

Sarah Ditum writes for The Guardian “as far as I’m concerned, it doesn’t matter why any woman wants to end her pregnancy. If it’s to select for sex, that’s her choice.”

That’s a radical enough opinion that most people will be repulsed by it without further comment, but further comment is warranted to really explore the tragic, schizophrenic, unscientific, and ultimately misogynistic logic behind it. First: there’s the routine set of mental contortions necessary to deny that abortion is, in fact, the killing of a living human being. No matter how much Ditum may talk about ending pregnancy or refer to the unborn human being as “what’s growing inside you,” the reality is that the sex of your unborn child is determined at conception. It does not “end up as a man or a woman.” He or she (not it) starts out that way. It couldn’t very well be a sex-selective abortion if the gender-fairy didn’t arrive until birth, now could it?

Secondly, Ditum admits that sex-selective abortion couldn’t really be covered by current English law because ostensibly abortions are for the sake of the mother, and the specific sex of the unborn human being shouldn’t have any impact one way or the other on the mother’s health. Then she considers the global perspective:

But what about when a pregnant woman lives in a society that gives her real and considerable reason to fear having a girl? The kind of society where dowry systems mean an inconveniently gendered child could bankrupt a family, or one where a livid patriarch deprived of a male heir could turn his fury on both mother and daughter? In those situations, a woman wouldn’t just be justified in seeking sex selective abortion; she’d be thoroughly rational to do so.

This is a micro-version of the entire feminism/abortion debate, and it illustrates perfectly this plain, simple, uncontestable fact: elective abortion is acquiescence to patriarchy. What does Ditum think you should do in an oppressive society that denigrates the value of women? Clearly the solution, as Ditum states quite frankly, is not to stand up for women’s rights and dignity, but rather it is to enable that oppression. Go along to get along, that’s Ditum’s motto when confronted with rank oppression.

It’s really hard for me to tell the difference between what Ditum calls feminism and what any reasonable person would call collaboration. Rather than stand up for women in need, why not just kill them so as not to rock the patriarchal boat? Apparently feminism really is just code for “concerns of upper-middle class white women” these days, and when it comes to the entrenched power interests of the patriarchy goes, the old saying applies: “If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em.”

India’s Powerful “Abused Goddesses” Anti-Domestic Violence Campaign

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2013-09-15 Abused Goddesses

As Buzzfeed reports:

The campaign simply and effectively captures India’s most dangerous contradiction: that of revering women in religion and mythology, while the nation remains incredibly unsafe for its women citizens.

Haunting, but worth viewing. Also: another uncomfortable reminder of the extent to which feminism in the West has been co-opted as a battleground exclusively for the concerns of politically powerful upper-middle class married women.

The Modesty Wars

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I initially wrote this post as an irate response to this post from By Common Consent, but I decided to let it simmer for a few days. I knew that Angela C, who wrote that BCC post, didn’t really deserve to be singled out as the target for my ire when she was really just the straw that broke the camel’s back.

So, instead of tackling her post point-by-point, I want to get to what really fundamentally bothers me about the modesty wars. I guess I should start by defining the modest wars.

If you’ve never heard of the phrase that’s OK because, as far as I know, I just made it up. It refers to the odd feminist-vs-feminist battle between social conservatives and social liberals that centers primarily on modest dress. The conservative view is that immodest clothing is intrinsically sexually objectifying and therefore disempowers women. Probably the best proponent of this view comes from Caroline Heldman’s TEDxYouth talk.

The liberal response is basically that an emphasis on modest dress is the problem, not the solution, because it teaches both boys and girls to objectify their female bodies in the first place. Apparently liberals believe that, without specific training, no man would ever objectify women by ogling their bodies and that no woman would ever notice this and respond to it by intentionally inviting such objectification in exchange for leverage. Nope: that dysfunctional co-dependency is all thanks to capped-sleeves.

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“Anything You Can Do…”: Feminist Superhero Revolution Starts at Marvel Films?

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Captain Marvel Vol 7 5With recent rumors cropping up (emphasis on rumors!) about the possibility of Battlestar Gallactica actress Katee Sackhoff being in the running for the possible role of Carol Danvers, aka Captain Marvel, in The Avengers: Age of Ultron, feminist comic fans can have a peg to hang their hopes on. There have been a number of compelling female characters in recent superhero films, from Peggy Carter in Captain America, to Pepper Potts in Iron Man, to Catwoman in Dark Knight Rises, but even those characters had problematic elements with the portrayal of their characters. And the above characters also played chiefly supportive roles in the narrative to the male protagonist.

Things are looking a little rosier, though, with the future of the Avengers. In addition to this (albeit speculative at this point) inclusion of Captain Marvel, Joss Whedon, who has a history of writing compelling women in past projects, has already went on record about adding a little more gender diversity to the mix in the Avengers sequel, with the announcement that Scarlet Witch, one of his “favorite” characters (I think she’s fantastic, too) will be joining the team for the sequel, along with her brother Quicksilver.

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Orson Scott Card and His Imitation of Fox News: Paranoia? Hyperbole? Satire?

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After reading novelist and political commentator Orson Scott Card’s bizarre “thought experiment,” titled “Unlikely Events,” I really am quite mystified. In the article he plays a “game” in which he imagines President Obama becoming a fascist overlord ruling with an iron fist over America and being a figure akin to Hitler. Although he tries to reassure his readers that, of course, he doesn’t believe this stuff, and that he’s just wearing his hat as a “fiction” writer, yet he still also insists that “it sure sounds plausible, doesn’t it? Because, like a good fiction writer, I made sure this scenario fit the facts we already have — the way Obama already acts, the way his supporters act, and the way dictators have come to power in republics in the past.” He says that “the writer’s made-up characters and events must seem truthful. We must pass the plausibility test.”

But then Card shovels in comparisons to Hitler and every other dictator he can think of. When people start comparing their ideological rivals to Hitler, they have shown their refusal to speak with nuance and distinction. They have immediately lost the argument, in my mind. He then throws in a huge number of broad generalizations and hyperbolic statements such as this:

Obama is, by character and preference, a dictator. He hates the very idea of compromise; he demonizes his critics and despises even his own toadies in the liberal press. He circumvented Congress as soon as he got into office by appointing “czars” who didn’t need Senate approval. His own party hasn’t passed a budget ever in the Senate.

In other words, Obama already acts as if the Constitution were just for show. Like Augustus, he pretends to govern within its framework, but in fact he treats it with contempt.

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Should Women Be Allowed to Go to College? Feminists Unsure

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2013-08-21 o-alma-mater

This headline is much more provocative than the blog post that inspired it (O, Alma Mater), so let me explain why I think it’s warranted. In the post, Anne-Marie Maginnis responds to the idea that women who earn Ivy League degrees and choose to be stay-at-home moms are wasting their degrees. She cites a recent article in The Guardian:

Any Harvard Law School degree obtained by a woman who then chooses not to use it in any sort of professional capacity throughout most of her life is a wasted opportunity. That degree could have gone to a woman who does want to spend her entire life using it to advance the cause of women—or others in need of advancement—not simply advancing the lives of her own family at home, which is a noble cause, but not one requiring an elite degree.

The quote is ostensibly about advanced degrees at elite schools (not “college”) and specifically about stay-at-home moms (not “women”), but the truly alarming thing about the argument–which Maginnis exposes immediately–is that it assumes that women aren’t worth educating for their own sake. If you take it seriously, this brand of feminism says that a woman’s value–her right to be educated–is dependent on her usefulness to the capitalist machine. So much for liberalism, in pretty much every sense of the word.

Monday Morning Mormon Madness: Modesty and Feminism.

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Check that alliteration out! That’s a 5 in a row and 5 out of 7. Don’t try this at home!

Anyway, here’s my weekly post for Times And Seasons, in which I jump into the fracas over (former Power Ranger, current swimwear designer) Jessica Rey and her comments about bikinis, modesty, and empowerment.

2013-06-24 Jessica Rey Power Ranger

This one is definitely less heavy on the Mormon terminology and more universal in scope, although it does address more the concerns of religious (not necessarily Mormon) social liberals and social conservatives. I’m going to turn comments off on this thread, so feel free to weigh in over there if you’d like.