carvedangel.net

…from someone who is capable of explaining this sort of thing better than i can. (warning: more feminazi shit.)

i seem to be repeating myself on here a bit lately, so if i’m doing it again, pardon me.

anyway, on the daily kos community, last june, there was apparently some kind of war that is now referred to as the “pie fight.” (which is aptly named on a few, rather ironic, levels.) anyway, i wasn’t around for it, and didn’t really give it much thought til it was mentioned in the “cheers and jeers” segment today. so i followed the link to see what all the fuss was about.

now here’s where the repeating myself bit comes in. i’m not sure whether i’ve mentioned this on here, but not too long ago, i was following a thread on dk, and learned that many “progressive” men aren’t nearly as forward-thinking as they claim to be. it’s not okay to be racist, and it’s not okay to be elitist or anti-poor, but it is certainly alright to ogle women and objectify them, and anyone that says differently is a bitch and a whiner.

what. the. fuck.

it was around that time that i began to suspect that dk, like just about every group or society of today, is just a big boys’ club. and looking back on the time of the pie fights has only reinforced my belief. people who would almost certainly decry an ad depicting something like little sambo, become forcefully and belligerently angry when a woman complains about not feeling welcome due to an ad featuring two bimbos throwing pies at each other. (i remember this ad being on tv, and also remember duly rolling my eyes at it. but i expect that sort of thing on tv, not at a place where i should feel welcome to share my thoughts on progressive issues with people that are supposedly of a like mind.) i find that men often become defensive when women question the appropriateness of ads like these, or porn. of course, the first thing out of their mouths, inevitably, is that we’re puritanical. (i should be fair, at this juncture, and point out that a couple of women on dk were saying this as well. i think i’ve mentioned before, in my post about raunch culture, that women only say things like that so that they seem cool or more desirable to men. way to sell the rest of us out, ladies.) hey, for some women, that may be a good argument. there are a lot of people all over the world with hang-ups about sex. unfortunately for this lame argument, i’m not one of them. while i’m not as kinky as some, i am not vanilla. i have an appreciation for sex and for the human body. but when someone’s using a woman’s body to promote the idea that we’re here solely to pleasure or serve men, or that we’re juvenile and brainless, and our worth is only related to how our bodies look, then yes, i get pissed. it has nothing to do with being a puritan. it has to do with living as a woman every day of my life, and whether i’m allowed to feel like a safe, valuable member of society.

it’s also a sore subject, thanks to the powers-that-be in this country today. these people – mostly white men – want to take my body and my sexuality away from me. by mocking us for expressing our concerns, and making us to feel even more stupid and useless, you are just as bad, if not worse, than they. you are worse because you claim to be above that. you claim that we all, as human beings, have rights. but, like our forefathers, it’s obvious that some of us have more rights than others. and women, apparently, don’t have the right to speak out when they feel oppressed, because it might make some of you menfolk (and women in denial) uncomfortable.

well boo-fucking-hoo to that.

i’m not going to stand idly by while men try to take everything from me. as if it’s not bad enough that i work harder for less money, they also want to claim dominion over my uterus. they want to tell me how many kids i should have. they want to tell me whether it’s appropriate for me to have sex. they want to tell me that, if i weren’t happily married to a man, i would not be allowed to have sex with other women. and now “progressive” men, supposedly on the side of women everywhere, want to tell me to shut up, because they don’t like what i have to say.

maybe you’re not as enlightened as you think you are. well that’s your problem, and you need to stop trying to make it mine. maybe you need to wake the fuck up so that my daughter doesn’t have to put up with your son’s bullshit. so she doesn’t have to feel unsafe based on what she wears, because some asshole thinks it’s his right to do what he likes with her. so she doesn’t have to go into a job interview knowing that, if she’s interviewing with a guy, it’s all about how hot he thinks she is, and not her resume, that gets her the job. so that she can expect the same salary at that job that a man would get. so that she’s not expected to work full-time, raise her own daughter, and do all the drudge-work at home as well, because her husband’s job pays better than hers does (and so must be more difficult). own up to the fact that there’s a part of you that’s still fucking backward, and fix it, so my future generations don’t have to deal with it. don’t lash out at me because i make you question your much-vaunted ideals, and call you on the fact that, deep down, you’re reluctant to give up the power you think you should have over women, just because you were born with a dick.

i’ll sum up here by quoting a couple of comments i came across while reviewing the pie fight debacle. (and, no, i won’t be leaving dk over this, like some women did. there’s no running from this sort of thing. it’s everywhere, and you have to fight it where you can.)

Understanding the Difference
There are a number of posts in this thread that ask if we would be equally offended by some beefcake ad or an ad portraying men as morons or whatever. Some such ads might also be inappropriate for this site but I think it is important to appreciate the critical difference: the commercial representation of women as sex objects (in porn, advertising, and pretty much everywhere else) is a central mechanism in the reproduction of the dominant ideology that justifies womens oppression. The ubiquitous presence of these sorts of images creates a general climate in which (many? most? all?) men feel free to treat women as subordinate — whether this means harrassing them on the street, refusing to consider them for certain jobs, rape or just disregarding their contributions to a conversation (the latter being the most relevant to DKos).
We live in a society characterized by profound inequality between men and women that is maintained in part by a web of habits and ways of thinking that we are often entirely unconscious of but that is profoundly influenced by the mass media. If we are serious about creating a world in which people are not systematically oppressed on the basis of their sex or race we have a responsbility not to cooperate with the processes by which we are inculcated into accepting that oppression, and certainly not for a little more ad revenue!

The sorts of images of women that are tolerated in different spaces has a lot to do with the degree to which women feel welcome to participate as equals. I would suggest that one of the appeals of fundamentalist Christianity is its appearance as a relatively “safe” space for women, this in spite of its obviously patriarchal ethos. If ads like this continue to appear at DKos I can guarantee that they will chase away a lot of women (and a few men), not because our sensibilities are “delicate” but because we don’t want to cooperate in promoting oppression.

…

I don’t think the world works in such a simple mechanical way. You are absolutely right that there are other mechanisms by which women’s subordinate status is reproduced and those can include enforced modesty and sexual repression. But in THIS society I would argue that the commodification of women’s bodies and sexuality is central (though obviously sexual repression is part of the mix here as well).
I don’t think porn CAUSES rape. I do think that porn is one expression of a generalized pattern of sexual degradation of women in mass media that reinforces the tendency of men to view women as objects that can be possessed and that when men view women in this way that they are more inflict unwanted sexual attention on women up to and including rape. In a similar vein I don’t think the portrayal of Blacks as sambos in the mass media of the late 19th/early 20th century CAUSED lynchings, but I think its perfectly reasonable to think that it contributed to an atmosphere in which they were more acceptable and therefore more likely to occur.

Women enjoy greater equality in this society compared to other societies not BECAUSE of the commodification of their sexuality but IN SPITE OF IT. Women enjoy greater equality in this society because they have fought for it. The relatively recent explosion of sexually degrading imagery of women in popular culture since the womens movement of the 60s/70s should be regarded largely as part of the male backlash against feminism.

Obviously this is complicated territory. The ubiquity of porn is ALSO connected to the breakdown of a system of puritanical sexual repression that was a major source of misery in its own right.

We should oppose the promotion of degrading images of women at DKos not simply because it will drive women away, but because it is wrong and harmful to all of us.

christopher day – daily kos

[edit:] by the way, guys, your argument that men aren’t portrayed well by the media either is irrelevant. it doesn’t affect your lives the way it effects ours. the world expects us to be hot and servile. you aren’t the ones being oppressed on a daily basis, so quit trying to turn the argument around (like you always do) and make it about how you bravely face everything popular culture throws at you. when you have to put up with half the shit we do on a daily basis, then maybe you can talk.