Welcome to the 22nd Carnival of the Feminists!

Without further preliminaries, let me proceed immediately to the first topic:

Feminism and Fat.

Jax, of Making it up tackles the fraught relationship we are encouraged to have with our bodies, which affects both fat and thin alike, in Size, fashion and discrimination. She worries that “somehow it’s not feminist to be happy about being thin” and goes on to recount a recent experience on a skirt-buying expedition with her daughter, which proved to be an eye-opener (and will no doubt strike a chord with many parents): “How do we expect women to grow up valuing all the sizes that we can be, accepting each other for what we are, when it would appear we expect all six-year-olds to be the same size? So we are already telling many of our children that they are too big, too small, too thin or too tall”.

Molly, of Molly Saves the Day in Fat shamers take note rightly draws attention to a phenomenon that is sadly inescapable in the lives of those of us who exceed a culturally-prescribed size norm, that of being showered with unsolicited advice and comments, often from random passers-by: “To me, the worst thing about this ‘I’m just trying to be nice’ fat shaming is that it does seem, generally, to be filled with good intentions. The people engaging in it don’t seem to think about the fact that they wouldn’t be so nosy, or so quick to judge, about almost any other trait – physical, behavioural, or mental. Fat-shaming is so much a part of our culture that even the person being made to feel ashamed or condescended to is supposed to feel grateful, not offended”.

Finally, from Natalie Bennett at Philobiblon, we have Chew on this, Ms Hewitt, which disputes the lazy assumption on the part of sanctimonious politicians that fat is a personal problem (which conveniently absolves them of responsibility for getting to grips with such thorny issues as poverty). On her transition to a healthier diet than the one she was brought up on, she writes: “But what has changed is not fundamentally me, but aspects of my environment. I got the right messages; I was provided with the chance to exercise; I was given the right food supplies that I could afford. None of those things are individual; none of them are broadly available to the British public”.

Before moving on to the second topic, I would like to include three posts on the more general issue of appearance. Margaret Ervin, of Basket of Eggs, recalls her reaction to a remark made by a man on her red hair being set off to perfection by her blue dress in Owning Beauty. Again, she tells of an unwanted appraisal, not from what Bartky refers to (drawing on Foucault) as the “panoptical male connoisseur” who “resides within the consciousness of most women”, but a flesh and blood one, who happened to be walking by: “I told the story of walking down the street and being told to smile, commanded in fact to ‘Smile!’ I talked about how that often happened to me. ‘Smile!’ Why did these men think they had the right to tell me to smile? I had plenty of reasons not to smile. Did they want me to look more decorative? Why were they telling me, a perfect stranger, to please them?”

Ann Bartow, of Feminist Law Professors provides us with a salutary (and tongue-in-cheek) reminder of the pettiness of the fashion industry’s imperative to shift more products off the shelves by fostering a perpetual sense of insecurity in consumers in Your Eyebrows Were Too Thick! Now They Are Too Thin!: “But what if you don’t have the patience to grow out your eyebrows, or they are naturally on the thin side? Must you leave the house in a hat that falls mid-retina to hide this appalling facial deformity? Not necessarily, because luckily, there are plenty of NYT advisers ready to help you solve your horrible eyebrow deficiencies if you have adequate time, motivation and expendable cash”. The ludicrousness of it all reminds me of the charming György Pál (1960) version of The Time Machine, in which the protagonist, George, watches the hems on the shop window mannequin’s dresses rise and fall at incredible speed as the seasons fly by.

Holly, of Self-Portrait as…, deals with the subject of breast implants and male mammary fixation (and the range of women’s responses, from pride in corresponding to the ideal, to shame at not and the cleavage between them – sorry, I couldn’t resist, please forgive me) in Just as God made ME: “One day I listened to Muriel and Jane, a couple of my well-endowed friends, decry a survey they’d just read in some women’s magazine, in which the majority of men questioned said that any woman with a B-cup or smaller should get breast implants – these men felt that way even after being told that implants can harden to the point that they feel like baseballs, making certain kinds of physical contact painful if not impossible”.

Topic Two: Feminism and Faith

Since I issued a personal request for the following submission, it seems only appropriate to mention it first. Hugo Schwyzer of the eponymous blog eloquently and passionately advances his arguments on the compatibility of adherence to religious belief and feminism in Faith and Feminism, whilst urging us to move beyond the cardboard cut-out, cliché-ridden language of suspicion and antagonism: “In a way, evangelical Christians and feminists are both largely defined – at least in the public imagination – by their enemies. It’s very easy to caricature either group. The secular left tends to see all evangelical Christians as intolerant, homophobic, jingoistic Republicans; many on the right tend to see active feminists as shrill, angry, humourless, godless liberals. The public pronouncements of leading figures in both movements are regularly quoted out of context in order to reinforce an image of extremism. And of course, both ‘feminists’ and the ‘religious right’ are regularly invoked as dangerous spectres in fund-raising by both conservatives and progressives” [emphasis in original].

Eteraz in Why Muslim Honour Killings Why writes powerfully, uncompromisingly and poignantly about a phenomenon, which feminists surely must engage with: “Having said all that, it should be absolutely clear that I think the ‘honour’ that undergirds the murder of women like Ghazala Khan is a bastardisation of honour. In a properly exercised act of honour, the only person who could judge Ghazala’s honour was Ghazala herself. Yet, instead, all around the Muslim world (and parts of India and China), we find others (usually men) judging the honour of everyone around them, ascribing what they think is an inadequacy in another, to a loss of their own honour, and then, instead of exacting corrective behaviour upon themselves (as a truly honourable person would do), they exact vengeance from those they find inadequate. It becomes a Darwinian pain cycle with the strongest (men) punishing others (women)”.

I would now like to turn to two honest and contemplative posts by Sage of Persephone’s Box. In Those Pagans Were On To Something she meditates on the appeal and relevance of the church (she describes herself as a “recovering Catholic) in spite of some rather obvious deficiencies: “I say I’m recovering from the church because I think it’s poisonous. Christianity is a brilliant philosophy, but I haven’t seen many of Jesus’ ideas implemented at this church. The hierarchical power structure, archaic rules over birth control and divorce, intolerance, and inequitable behaviour towards women are just a few toxins Catholicism leeches out into its prey”. Amen to that, sister!

In the companion piece, Hate the Religion, Not the Religious, she broaches the subject of the relationship between faith and morality (in a manner reminiscent of Richard Dawkins in his documentary The Root of All Evil?): “I actually think that rejecting God can allow for a more sincere morality. We can be good without threat of punishment or loss of rewards. In fact, can we really call someone ‘good’ who only acts kindly in hopes of eternal salvation? I’m much more inspired by those who do what’s right for the sake of what’s right without expectation of fame, fortune, or spiritual longevity” [emphasis in original]

Another superlative post written by a former Catholic appears on Mind the Gap!. In Thoughts on Catholicism and Resistance, Winter acknowledges the role of organised religion in forming her personality and nudging her in the direction of feminist politics. After a careful examination of the ideology (the epitome of the virgin-whore dichotomy), she shows how its messages can be used for practical (and positive) ends in keeping with the believer’s life goals: “Some feminists are not going to like me for saying this, but I am grateful to the church for giving me a much-needed reason to resist when my peers were telling me that I must have sex by the time I was 14. The reason to resist should have come from feminism, but the only feminism that was available to me was the sort that says young women will have sex, therefore the best thing to do is provide plenty of contraception and show them how to get abortions. I wasn’t happy about that either. This is why I think many feminist responses to the Christian abstinence movement are over-simplistic, insofar as they fail to see any attractions within that ideology and view the young women who sign up to it as passive victims of patriarchy” [emphasis in original]

Demonstrating that women are mobilising an active resistance to the Catholic hierarchy, challenging the dead weight of male authority, the Reverend Astrid Joy Storm interviews Jean Marie Marchant, secretly ordained as a priest under a pseudonym. The opening couple of paragraphs certainly grab you by the (metaphorical) short and curlies!

At Culture Kitchen, Lorraine treats us to an incisive, witty and irreverent critique of the church’s impulse to regulate human sexuality, seeking to stifle desires of which it does not approve in Crushing on the King of Kings, inspired by a radio broadcast: “I live out in the country, so ‘Christian stations’ are as frequently encountered as roadkill woodchucks, and usually, I pay them about as much notice. But some woman was talking about her sexual purity, and I couldn’t help it. It just about made me cry. I did not hear the preceding discussion, so I wasn’t sure about what exactly the nature of this woman’s sexual ‘sin’ had been, but I listened in rapt fascination and a sick feeling in my stomach as she recounted how she carried around her ‘brokenness’ for ten years, until the night, in darkness because she didn’t want him to see her face, she confessed her sin to her husband” (I break off the quote here with a suitable cliff-hanger, paragon of wickedness that I am).

Concluding on this theme, breaking ranks at My Left Wing fires a devastating broadside against spiritual authority in The Stained Glass Ceiling: “Spiritual authority is one (man’s) vision imposed on all others, winning pre-eminence through guile, mass mobilisation, and acts of verbal violence. The spiritual authority dictates reality, recording their vision on the world as if people were blank tapes”.

Rainbow

This final section comprises submissions not explicitly related to the announced topics in all their colourful splendour.

Taking marriage as a starting point, Bitch Lab, in Spinster cat ladies aren’t black, provides us with a brilliant illustration of how we are all (and the privileged sociologist is far from immune to the influence of ideology) caught up in a web of social relations where various forms of oppression intersect. For any study to retain credibility, race, class and poverty with all their attendant nuances should never be dwarfed by gender in critical analysis to the extent that they drop out of view: “This isn’t to say that women who aren’t white and middle class don’t think about marriage and weddings, just that the pressure isn’t there in the same ways. And, it’s to say that there are other kinds of pressures which shape the way people decide to live their lives, what opportunities are open and which are closed, what tools of resistance they have at their disposal, what cultures and languages they speak, and even what languages of individualism are encouraged and even available to them”.

At Vee Levene’s Insipid Missives, Vee expertly dissects two articles, exposing their respective subtexts in Porn chic for women and girls. Denouncing the way ruthless marketers sink their claws into tender young (female) flesh, Vee adeptly steers us back into the territory of objectification and sexualisation of pre-pubescent bodies. Taking issue with a glib comment in an interview that, by emulating models through the fashions that they wear, girls are actively articulating “views”, Vee questions what these might consist of: “The ‘view’ of the knowledge that the best a woman can do is be appearance-based and as unnatural as possible, for the purposes of competing with other women and pleasing men? Since when does fashion (especially mainstream fashion) even begin to encompass the range of ‘views’ and opinions any individual – no matter what age – has? And in a case like this, with marketers insidiously targeting the most impressionable of the population; how can these ‘views’ be considered anything other than societal influence?”

Verbify at Signifying Nothing gets to grips with a discussion of courtship by Cassandra de Benedetto at Modestly Yours in oh fer christ’s sake. The quoted passages make for depressing reading indeed, furnishing proof (if any were needed) that many women prefer submission to male authority (to the extent that they accept the male claim of ownership over their bodies) to the autonomy that feminism offers: “In Cassandra’s view (…) a woman is not capable of going through life, of surviving, much less thriving, without a man looking out for her, wiping her nose, holding her hand as she crosses the street, cosigning car loans, calling her boss when he threatens her. To Cassandra, a woman without a man is, well, nonexistent” [emphasis in original]

Melissa, at Mobwhorelog condemns the self-serving nature (especially on the part of parasitical whore-prospectors) and class-based myopia that permeates much of the writing on the sex industry even amongst feminists in What’s empowering about whoring (question mark), a challenging, provocative and intelligent piece that challenges complacent assumptions. In Melissa’s words: “It is not for our supposed slavery but for our freedom that I am fearful that sex workers will never find the stigma we’re stuck with lessening. What the most outspoken of sex workers represent, the very few who can risk being open, is not fucking, but freedom. Not ‘freedom of choice’, or some abstract ‘freedom to come’, but freedom to live honourably alongside society. No, not outside society, but right in it – and by contrary rules”.

Marcella, at abyss2hope, summarily dismisses the fatuous conclusions drawn from the results of a survey in her succinct, but excellent Feminist Rape Crisis Over?, providing us with a salutary reminder that we cannot repeat the message about male violence often enough. Her own verdict, steeped in irony: “If it weren’t for victim-blaming and feminist-bashing, you might not know some people realize that anyone but small children and dead women are raped and that rapists are anybody except gays, illegal aliens, minorities and Muslims”.

Antiprincess, at I shame the matriarchy, in a harrowing piece of personal testimony, succeeds admirably in her undertaking to re-connect the often belligerent and impassioned torrent of words that is living feminist debate to the “human experience” of dreadful spousal abuse: “Feminism did not shield me, because the Patriarchy wasn’t beating me. A human being was beating me. He was, his fists were, both true and real. He was not a figment of the collective imagination. He was not a concept, a generalized sort of shorthand to symbolize centuries of suffering. He was a fellow human being”.

Concentrating on another aspect of women’s right to control their own bodies, Roni, at Goddess Musings, judiciously laments the exclusion of teenage girls from prescription-free access to the morning-after pill in Not good news at all, a stirring battle-cry: “So I ask you all to remember the young women who have been left out of this revolution. I know, even getting one condom out of this administration would be a victory, but we cannot give up. We cannot let this partial victory be also a partial victory for all the anti’s who want all young women to grow up without access or knowledge to reproductive health services”.

Amanda, at Ballastexistenz in Wow. Stuff about the anti-political nature of therapy confirms something I have always suspected (although my own experience of psychologists are utterly trivial in comparison to hers), namely, that in most instances therapy is all about taming and squeezing the recalcitrant client into a pre-determined mould, about forcing you to conform to social definitions of normality, reconciling you to the circumstances, which are causing you acute pain and distress in order to improve your “functionality” as opposed to tackling the root causes (the aforementioned circumstances) themselves. All that therapists teach us is to bottle up/suppress our anger rather than release it more fruitfully. Thus, as Amanda so perceptively explains, therapy is directly inimical to political action, narrowing the focus to the individual, “repairing” a “defect” instead of interrogating the iniquities of an unjust situation. A dazzling assault on the tyranny of experts, the literature cited also makes it a treasure trove for anyone interested in the dangers of avoiding confrontation as well as the corrosive effect therapist-dependence has on genuine human interaction. One brief excerpt ought to suffice to whet the reader’s appetite: “Therapism makes it so that friends don’t actually have to do things for each other, there are professionals for that. It makes it so that if one person is assisting another person more at any given particular amount of time, this can be considered ‘co-dependent’ rather than a part of the natural ebb and flow of a relationship. Aside from encouraging selfishness, therapy seems to encourage an incredibly superficial kind of friendship wherein if any problems arise for your friends, you aren’t expected to help in dealing with them, you’re expected to tell them to go to a professional”.

On the literary front, Nina, at Queer Cents, skilfully interviews author Amy Guth about finances, feminism and her debut novel Three Fallen Women in Ten Money Questions for Amy Guth: “I wrote Three Fallen Women at a time when I was seeing a few people around me unable or unwilling to enforce their personal boundaries in various ways. I think most of us learn this lesson through trial and error, sure, but suddenly I was noticing a lot of people who didn’t seem to have a grasp in that direction at all. The more I saw this, the more I started noticing things people were enslaved to. Food, pain, drama, clutter, money, misery, people, rotten partners – it was everywhere! So, I ended up writing a lot about the freedom that comes from setting boundaries and practicing self-reliance and ended up doing it through the mouthpiece of these characters”.

Sandy, at the imponderabilia of actual life, treats us to a detailed, balanced and thoughtful review of Get to Work: A Manifesto for Women of the World by Linda R. Hirshman. The following passage will hopefully give you a flavour of the critique: “Personally, I think that restructuring both the family (dividing household and childcare tasks more evenly) and the workplace (to be more ‘family-friendly’ is much more radical than Hirschman’s suggestions, which leave the corporate underpinnings that devalue the private sphere totally unchanged. In fact, encouraging upper-class parents to employ lower-class women to care for their children and clean their houses strikes me as downright conservative” [emphasis in original]

A tangible and thought-provoking illustration of how women’s participation in remunerated employment at the top end is given at the Workplace Prof Blog in New study Stresses Importance of Women in Senior Management Positions to Reduce Gender Gap in Income.

Nursepam, at 21st Century Lesbian Trailer Trash, ponders the implications of Louann Brizendine’s book in A Woman’s Brain: “There still remains within our culture the dichotomy of The Other. Us and Them. And it is alive and well in the idea of the superiority of the masculine.
This is where the causes of feminism, racism and homophobia converge. As long as we insist on putting our energies into deciding which is better, and then subjugating the group(s) who are Other than ourselves, we take our energies away from saving the planet and the human race as a whole”. A resounding endorsement to those sentiments!

Jpfbookworm, at Official Shrub.com, ventures into the realm of etiquette and dining in Sexism on a Plate (Classism, too), assessing a phenomenon I have (thankfully) not yet encountered (it is annoying enough when I eat out with my partner, whom I support financially, and the waiter always brings back the credit card I have deposited on the saucer alongside the cash tip for him to sign the slip before cringing with embarrassment when the Hungarian smiles and passes the pen to me) of menus with a blank space where the prices should be: “Quite obviously the practice of assuming that a man will pay for a woman’s meal is a sexist one, whether that assumption takes the form of handing the check to a man, or giving a woman a menu without prices”.

In drawing to a close, I would like to strike a more light-hearted note – we have, after all, cogitated on life, the universe and everything to borrow Douglas Adams’s phrase. Firstly, from Audrey at Talking Pony we have Sex for Money, which admittedly examines the very serious issue of the options open to “a twentysomething woman with a top-notch degree”.

Finally, Madeleine at Mad Kane allows us to take our leave of this edition with a smile on our faces, with her superb and hilarious parody of those quizzes we like to while away an idle minute or two with in Those Unspeakable Meetings.

The next Carnival will be hosted by Lingual X at Lingual Tremors on 20th September.