Baby Gender Mentor Mentality

Just when we thought that things couldn't get much tougher for today's pro-choice activists whose cause is under attack, the Baby Gender Mentor test comes along to profoundly shake the foundations of our beliefs. The BGM can supposedly determine the gender of a fetus as early as five weeks into pregnancy - about as early as other tests can determine whether or not a woman is even pregnant!

If do it yourself gender tests become available in drugstores alongside the fertility and pregnancy tests, what will be the outcome? Will women resist or submit to family and social pressures to give birth to a boy? Sure we all know about the son-preference of certain cultures, but will not the West's own brand of male chauvinism and privilege come out to shine? "You have to worry so much more about a daughter!" "Boys and men just have it so much easier in this man's world." What is to be made of the fact that the test can detect gender so early as to facilitate first trimester abortion? Terms like "family balancing" only mask or worse, sugarcoat the gravity of femicide.

Don't worry, I'm not about to proclaim leadership of UofT Students for Life. This hasn't made an anti out of me. But I predict that if testing the gender of your baby becomes as accessible as a bottle of Aspirin, the pro- and anti-choice are in for an historic showdown.

Wish I May, Wish to Keep the Right...

I suppose since their hero Stephen Harper is occupying himself with bullying Atlantic Canada and the no-fly list, Canadian anti-choicers are rallying their troops again at CBC's charming little "Great Canadian Wish" contest.

Once again I'm in disbelief as to how much time these assholes have to try to strip away the rights of Canadian women.

Sorry Tories, we still got Henry :)

Female Chauvinist Pigs (FCPs) Part II

Since my last entry kind of trailed off as I got lost in my thoughts about FCPs, I thought I'd give it a rest and come back to it a couple of days later. And there's one other thing that Levy discusses in her book that I think is important to consider: the phenomening of Uncle Tomming as applied to FCPs.

Taken from the title character of Harriet Beecher Stowe's abolitionist novel, the concept basically describes a person who occupies a marginalized/minority position and conforms to the dominantly held notions about how they should behave in order to "get ahead" with those that marginalize them. Levy argues that this is what FCPs are doing in the context of female sexuality, whether or not they are consciously choosing to conform to rather than resist images and stereotypes of the sexual female being perpetuated by popular media outlets like MTV and Playboy.

What disturbs me about this (more than the fact that it seems to be "follow a path of least resistance" brand of feminism, if you can call it any kind of feminism!) is that according to Levy, many women truly believe that Uncle Tomming is a version of, or substitute for a truly liberated experience of female sexuality. (While some women may be genuinely excited by visiting stripclubs or looking at the pictures in Penthouse, surely not all of the women who appear on Girls Gone Wild videos would race to the phone to order them after seeing the late night infomercial). An argument has been made that women are exercising their agency when modeling for or starring in pornographic images in and films, giving them exposure (pun intended!) and financial gain by capitalizing on this industry. But ask yourself: even if the participating women see this as exciting and liberating, how many of the men who buy the "lad mags" or the GGW videos are doing it in the name of women's lib?

Instead of a newly liberated expression of female sexuality in which women can enjoy erotic pleasures as "one of the boys", their participation in these outlets is viewed by the boys as for them. This does nothing more for the women's movement than set it back several decades.

Female Chauvinist Pigs (FCPs) Part I

So, I just finished reading Ariel Levy's Female Chauvinist Pigs that I picked up from the library. After the heavy theoretical readings of a fourth year women's studies class that I finished last month it was an easy, breezy read. This I thought was fantastic, because the book is easily accessible to anyone who doesn't have training in women's/equity/area studies or related disciplines, but anyone interested in the topic.

Levy questions the validity of the idea that women's participating in the current trend of raunch culture (Girls Gone Wild; women buying "lad mags" like Playboy; women attending strip clubs with female strippers etc. - basically anything that involves women buying into the popular established masculinist view of women and their sexuality) means that women have finally achieved equality with men and may experience and enjoy their own sexuality the same way that men do. To do this she examines the history of the women's movement, pinpointing specifically the time in the second wave when some women chose this path to sexual liberation, and others continued the struggle to have a differently experienced way of female sexuality recognized as valid and equal to the popular notion of men's sexuality. Levy clearly places herself in latter camp, questioning why, if women's sexual liberation has truly arrived, we are seeing the perpetuation of the conservative culture first implemented during the Reagan era (she mentions specifically the United States but I would argue that this is happening more widely in North America. A topic for a later post!) and which continues in this day and age of the popularity of George W. Bush, Fred Phelps, and the dearly departed Jerry Falwell.

How are Female Chauvinist Pigs damaging the women's movement instead of contributing to it? (Personally, I don't see what's so sexually liberating about making out with your best girlfriend for the first time ever, stinking drunk at a foam party with half your clothes off while some horny, slimy frat boys you never met before in your life gawk greedily). By not only buying into the notion that women's sexuality is not only similar to but divergent to men's (and here I'm not even opening up the question of how narrow and problematic the experience of male sexuality is according to FCPs and the males that love them) and at the same time, rejecting the advances made by feminists during the past 100+ years that women experience sexuality in ways that are not necessarily conflicting, but rather different, than do men.

The long section that Levy devotes to discussing the pervasiveness of raunch culture acceptance among American girls of high school age shows how far the problem has progressed - girls are reaching puberty and are trained to look and behave in a certain way which will attract men. The revolution towards our way of thinking cannot start once we are out of high school or in college, it has to start from the "ground up".

I remember as an adolescent girl (albeit one with a "latent" feminist tendency) spending hours agonizing over why the boy I liked didn't like me - were my boobs big enough? Did I show them off enough? Did I wear enough makeup? How could I better show off my body to get him to notice me? This came so naturally that I never or rarely questioned why I felt that I had to change myself so much just to win a boy's affection.

How familiar is this story, and more importantly, how many women change this way of thinking at some point? We can't obliterate all the aspects of raunch culture (note how pervasive it is in, say, American Apparel's work environment and advertising strategies), but in addition to the tired old adage of "teaching our children differently" we can refuse to buy products from brands that use Female Chauvinism in their marketing, we can spread the word about how damaging these images are to all women (like a few months ago when I got several notifications in my inbox about the horrific American Apparel ads).

More thoughts to come later.

Class: The (Mostly) Invisible Oppression

One of the things that inspired me to start this blog was how frequently I noticed that class is ignored (or, what I suspect happens more frequently, it is forgotten) when thinking about and discussing issues of oppression. This really struck me when I partook in what I consider my "initiation" into e-activism, in my moderating of this group protesting the students at Ryerson University who wanted to start a "White Culture Club".

If you go to school in Toronto (or even if you don't) you probably remember the controversy that started when some Ryerson students started a Facebook group called "I'm a White Minority at a Toronto University". The group was quickly shut down though the students continued to communicate in related Facebook groups, and their student council's stance against a physical "White Culture Club" further galvanized their resolve.

The issue? That students of other self-identified cultural and racial backgrounds could start groups, such as the "South Asian Students' Association" or the "Black Students Association". If these students could form groups based around cultural and/or racial labels, what would be harmful about white students doing the same thing? At the same time, many of these students (though not all) vehemently denied harboring racist sentiments and/or intentions.

(An aside: it was suggested countless times by myself and others that an alternate strategy would be to establish cultural groups such as "Irish Culture Club" or "Hungarian Culture Club" or whatever. These ideas were always rejected.)

Amongst those students who did not consider themselves racist (although I disagreed with their self-assessment, as their actions spoke louder than their words!) an overarching frustration which caused them to want to "celebrate white culture" was the feeling that "white" students were missing out on opportunities, particularly in the university environment, where there are scholarships, internships and so on which are frequently geared towards members of certain historically (and currently) marginalized groups. When this came up, I tried to point out that what they're actually talking about experiencing is classism, not "reverse racism" ("I can't qualify for this or that scholarship because I'm white! That's discrimination!"). I would bring up the fact that education has become a privilege for the wealthy, as opposed to a right that should be available to everyone regardless of economic status. Still, these students refused (or were unable) to see that they were experiencing marginalization based on class rather than race.

This got me thinking: Why is class such an under-considered form of oppression? We are all subject to "being classed", regardless of race. It is so universal yet it can be so invisible. Is it because "race" is so visible? Or is it because "race" and "racism" are so much a part of our everyday lives and personal narratives that we are trained to think along its lines more than those of classism?

What do you think?

Axe Deodorant

You better be fucking kidding me.

That's right, because women are animals that helplessly follow and maul any pheromones on men from which they get a whiff.

Oh wait, that's offensive to the animals.

Three Waves Of Feminism

On a forum that I moderate and in which I have (proudly) become known as the resident radical feminist, another member asked me to elaborate upon the "waves" of feminism to which I frequently refer in my postings there. Since most people do not take courses in Women's Studies, Equity Studies or another social science and therefore may not have the background, here is a short and non-academic summary of the three distinct feminist movements of the 20th century.

The First Wave: This era of feminism lasted from about 1900-1920. It is characterized by the suffragette movement which was concerned primarily with women obtaining the right to vote, rather than having their political preferences represented by their husbands/fathers. Other aspects of this era of feminism include causes we would now consider "right-wing", that is, anti-abortion and for prohibition of alcohol. Don't let groups like this fool you; Susan B. Anthony and the others who were against abortion opposed it because it would allow men to have extramarital affairs and keep them secret (since in this pre reliable birth control era, babies were a frequent product of extramarital unions), rather than due to some perceived personhood bestowed upon the unborn fetus. These women opposed alcohol because their husbands often "drank away" their paycheques thus depriving the woman of income with which to care for (often numerous) children.

The Second Wave: This era began around the same time as the Civil Rights movement in the US, and occurred throughout the 1960s-1970s. This is the era of Gloria Steinem, Germaine Greer and Simone de Beauvoir - the one that my mother was raised on. Bra-burning has become a symbol of this supposedly "radical" brand of feminism - a feminism which asked for women's work both in and outside of the home to be recognized as equal to that of men, and asked for a woman's right to sovereignty over her own body. The pivotal 1973 case of Roe v. Wade in the US ushered in a new era of women's reproductive rights, while Our Bodies, Ourselves taught women what they didn't learn in Biology 101 about their genitals and how to enjoy them. This era of feminism has been critiqued for its privileging of white middle class womens' needs over those of others, which is what led to...

The Third Wave: This era began during the 1980s and is arguably the one in which we currently live. In response to concerns raised by groups like the Combahee River Collective (their statement can be found here) that the movement was not meeting the needs of women of colour, lesbian women, transgendered women, disabled women, and working class women among others, the feminist movement as it had been known until this point began to splinter and separate into several smaller groups, many of which formed and pursued its own specific mandate and cause. The idea of the "universal sisterhood", of all women sharing a bond and common interest inherent to their gender was seriously questioned since the most visible movers and shakers of the feminist movement up until this point had been white middle class women. Oppression between groups of women was explored, and the idea of "equality" was complicated so that it was no longer between "women" and "men", existing in a dichotomy of "good" and "bad". This era has been marked with major theoretical breakthroughs and the adoption of ideas like postructuralist theory in discussing and writing about feminism.

There, in a nutshell, is the nature and achievements of the three main "waves" of feminism during the past 100 years. Have something to add? Please expand upon my thoughts in the comments.