season of the bitch

thoughts on Hurricane Gustav up at GlobalComment. (thanks again, Natalia)

I’ve got my own thoughts on the nomination, and they’ll be up later. But for now, WOC PhD (as usual–she’s one of the best bloggers out there and I’m so glad she’s returned to regular posting!) has an excellent rundown of Sarah Palin, plus some bonus analysis of Hillary Clinton’s misplaced comments.

It’s the anniversary of a lot of things, but right now the one topmost in my mind is Hurricane Katrina. With Gustav shooting New Orleans the death look as I type, I can’t write any more about Obama or Palin. All I can do is hope that it doesn’t happen all over again.

I have a picture of the French Quarter as my background on my laptop right now and on my Twitter page. I miss New Orleans all the time, but never more so than when she’s threatened.

There’s not much we can do about Gustav yet, but there are places you can donate that are still trying to rebuild New Orleans from Katrina, which struck three years ago now.

And cross your fingers, knock wood, and pray to anything you might believe in that Gustav fizzles before it causes any more destruction.

My Private Casbah and WOC PhD have more.

I have some fun and some serious for you this morning.

1. Publius on Obama’s economic policy and reasons to be excited.

2. Ren’s posts on Feministe. All of them. Because she lays it all out there: treat sex workers as people, please. It ain’t friggin’ hard. Or shouldn’t be.

3. Prof BW has a call to arms: Blog Action Day on Poverty. I’ll be trying to do this. You should too.

4. And some fun, as promised: BFP has Lita Ford, Joan Jett, and Joan and Bruce Springsteen duetting. Yay!

So I recently wrote an article on the 20th anniversary of the Sandman for Comic Foundry magazine. It will be in the next issue, so pick it up.

I made an excellent playlist to listen to while I was re-reading and staring at interview transcripts and writing, and though I can’t share my actual music with you, I thought I’d share my list, anyway. Isn’t there an option on iTunes somewhere that you can make a playlist and people can download things if they want them? Or is that just wishful thinking on my part?

Anyway, list below the fold. Because it’s really long. But I put in some pictures, too. » Read the rest of this entry «

h/t Natalia Antonova.

Reasons: Pipeline (in case that’s intercepted the alternative is Russian pipeline), NATO (’our former in our very soft South underbelly can’t be part of NATO’), and personal dislike of our President Saakashvili by Russian Prime Minister Putin.

Then there is Kosovo - “if they should get independence, why shouldn’t the Ossetians?” - the thinking goes.

Then there is Iraq - “if US can hang whomever they dislike, why can’t we?”

Go read it all. Now.

“I say a boring word like woman takes all the fun out of being a girl.” –Foxglove, “Death: The Time of Your Life”

Granted Neil Gaiman wrote that line, and he is definitely a guy, a straight white British guy for goodness’s sake, but I’ve been trying to think of where I read it for months now, every time I see these humorless ‘radical feminist’ arguments for some sort of vanilla world where there are no gender signifiers—which, by the way, are totally Western gender signifiers like lipstick and high heels that they’re always fighting, and not any sort of universal perception of women as weak and in need of protection constantly.

I mean, the idea that to “smash the gender binary” we have to all dress in some sort of clothing that provides no hint of the pleasing curves of our bodies, that doesn’t in any way decorate the bodies we were born with—some sort of religious asceticism that says we can’t mess with the bodies God (the Goddess, in those conversations, and often a specific Goddess that, well, wouldn’t even know what to do with those Western gender signifiers if she ran across them, but sure knows what to do with people who don’t take her seriously) gave us… Yeah.

That’s just the outward coating anyway. The lipstick, the clothes, the hair, it’s just the wrapping, and not the problem. The problem is that with the external perception “Woman” comes all sorts of other perceptions about what that woman is like, what she can and can’t do, and whether or not she’ll fuck you, quite often.

And those ideas come whether or not I’m wearing makeup, when I’m in a man’s top and vest or in a dress and heels, when my hair is short or long.

The idea, especially, that gender is a construct, a choice, a game (an idea I like, personally, a Game of You like Neil said, again, because I’m just on that kind of trip right now), would seem to preclude some sort of need to protect Biological Woman from invasion.

If you want to break down the idea that certain traits come with certain genders, why do you always want to embrace the male signifiers? To me, sometimes, I see the idea of not shaving, of not wearing skirts, as just an embrace of the things that have always been coded male and powerful, rather than any sort of re-empowering those things coded feminine, and so how does that help us any?

These thoughts, of course, have been prompted by another round of what Queen Emily called the Trans Wars. To me, well, it seems pretty damn obvious that when you’re terribly concerned about the biology of the people who call themselves women, you’re probably the one actually upholding, reifying, policing gender binaries.

I mean, I look at it two ways: One is that it ain’t my life, ain’t my gender, so who the hell am I to tell someone that how they feel is wrong, that who they are is wrong? Basic empathy for human beings can get you so much further sometimes than reading books.

And two is that if you’ve got to be an asshole and try to theorize about people’s lives, well, this still doesn’t make any sense. How is the idea that your gender doesn’t necessarily match your body anything but a plus for people who want to get rid of the gender binary? How is the thought that we aren’t trapped by our biology anything but a cheering one for feminism?

Is your oppression so important to you that you have to police it too? Is your feeling of victimhood such an important identity that you have to protect it from outsiders? Or is it just that if you set up impossible goals, you can safely assume we’ll never actually reach that happy vanilla genderless utopia where we all wear what, togas? and no one has kinky sex, or any sex at all really because that might imply gender roles or objectification, oh my? And that way you just get to complain away, continue feeling like a victim, and tell anyone who doesn’t feel like a victim, or who feels like the wrong kind of victim, that they’re wrong?

I don’t feel like we’re getting anywhere by sitting in a corner whimpering about how beaten down we are. I feel like we get somewhere when we fight back. Or sometimes when we get together and laugh, have a drink, and realize that life can still be good. Thinking about how I’ve been fucked over never made me feel strong, but putting on sparkly makeup and dancing on a bar sure has. Yeah, poor deluded me, performing for the patriarchy, right?

See, Foxglove, who said that quote, above? She’s a lesbian. And a rock star. And yes, a character on a page and in Neil Gaiman’s head (and drawn so pretty by Chris Bachalo). Clear-eyed gaze and all. So who’s she performing for when she puts on her tight skirt?

Maybe she’s just doing what makes her happy. So was Wanda, back in A Game of You, when she left behind Alvin and moved to New York. And even though when she died her family tried to force her back into being Alvin, well, Barbie (oh, Barbie you supreme tool of oppression, blonde busty doll) scrawled her real name in hot pink lipstick on her grave.

I’m not trans. And I’m straight. I like men (quite often too much). And even my gender performance is drag. After years of jeans and T-shirts suddenly I wear red lip gloss every day and dresses and skirts, dresses and skirts, and I like it that way. It’s my armor and war paint and the noise that high heels make is much more satisfying to my ears these days.

And I was treated like a stupid little girl and had more assumptions made about my competence, skill, and sexual availability when I wore jeans and no makeup and worked on bicycles all day.

Policing our presentation doesn’t help. You really want to smash the binary? Fight the idea that how we look has anything at all to do with how smart we are, how competent we are, how strong we are. Fight the idea that women can only get anywhere by being just like men.

I’ve got another quote for you, this one snagged off the Twitter of a friend of mine.

“Sexiness and professionalism are both drag. The problems arise when people confuse them for honest attributes.” –Molly Crabapple

Oh, and Lisa, as usual, has much, much more.

It’s been a bit since I’ve done this, since I’ve been unholy busy, but here it is.

1. La Lubu has a comment on Octo’s Feministe post that says a lot of what I was trying to say below far better than I did. Octo also linked to this post at La Lubu’s blog that, well, yeah. Because without the basics, we can’t do any of it.

2. And Octo yet again has a thought-provoking post, this time on individualism. She’s seriously on a roll over there, and instead of freaking out because she’s violating lefty dogma, take a minute to think about it. Then think about what La Lubu said. Then…synthesize?

3. Hilzoy on why John McCain gets scarier every day.

4. A post at Racialicious about the true purpose of satire.

5. Emily about the latest round of trans wars (do we really still have to have this discussion, people?) but more importantly, again: A woman is dead, and her killer got off.

6. Debi has a round-up of things you can DO. She has lots of other goodness, too, including a big kiss-my-ass to everyone who’s treating her like a wayward child. Rock on, Debi. And thanks for the Arcade Fire.

7. The Jaded Hippy actually went to see Tropic Thunder to tell us all about it. Frankly, no matter how much Robert Downey, Jr.  was involved, I wouldn’t have been interested in that movie before I heard anything about protests about its racism and ableism. And she’s aware that she’s white and able-bodied. Something to think about, especially in terms of the successful-satire post above.

8. Finally, I’m stealing this quote from Pop Feminist.

“We have lost the relative strength and security that the old moral codes guaranteed our loves either by forbidding them or determining their limits. Under the crossfire of gynecological surgery rooms and television screens, we have buried love within shame for the benefit of pleasure, desire, if not revolution, evolution, planning, management–hence for the benefit of Politics. Until we discover under the rubble of those ideological structures — which are nevertheless ambitious, often exorbitant, sometimes altruistic–that they were extravagant or shy attempts intended to quench a thirst for love. To recognize this does not amount to a modest withdrawal, it is perhaps to confess to a grandiose pretension. Love is the time and space in which ‘I’ assumes the right to be extraordinary. Sovereign yet not individual. Divisible, lost, annihilated; but also, and through imaginary fusion with the loved one, equal to the infinite space of superhuman psychism. Paranoid? I am, in love, at the zenith of subjectivity.”

- Julia Kristeva (1987)

So while I’m busy, I share with you this post, from a favorite novelist of mine. Madame Emma Forrest, on why relationships are beautiful.

Someone asked me a while ago what I wanted from a relationship if it wasn’t traditional marriage and kids. This is as good an answer as I can think of.

I posted this video the other day when I had too much going on to really explain the thoughts going through my head. It was a synthesis of my teenage dream-come-true interview with Neil Gaiman (yes, Neil fucking Gaiman, buy the next issue of Comic Foundry to read all about it) and talk about Iggy Pop, and my beloved Pop Feminist’s question Can Women Be Part of Counterculture? and Octo’s post on Feministe about “Sparkle.”

And so before I went out I posted Siouxsie. With her short-cropped hair and Egyptian-queen makeup, her shorts and vest and skinny boyish body are genderfuck supreme here, especially singing an Iggy Pop song where she takes on the male power-role—she isn’t the passenger, someone else is. She’s going to take him for a ride.

She’s got both masculine and feminine aspects here, of course. She’s glittery and glam and made-up but in skinny boyclothes, taking on the male role. When she dances, she does high kicks with the boys from her band, she covers Budgie’s eyes, and mostly you have to stare her in the face—each time she moves, she keeps her eyes on you.

» Read the rest of this entry «