Showing posts with label women. Show all posts
Showing posts with label women. Show all posts
Wednesday, September 21, 2011
Quote of the Day
"Openly loving women, in a society premised on oppressing women, is prolly one of the most radical things you can do."—Renina.
Tuesday, September 20, 2011
Rhetorical Question of the Day
Should the title of this article really be "In early Obama White House, female staffers felt frozen out," or should it be, say, "Obama responds to female staffers' complaints about being frozen out"?
Because, first of all, it isn't that the female staffers "felt" marginalized, but that they were actually marginalized. And, if the rest of the information in the piece is accurate, once Valerie Jarrett laid it out for Obama that known misogynist assholes Larry Summers and Rahm Emanuel were marginalizing women (if only someone could have warned the president!), Obama made a genuine effort to change that dynamic, which is a more important story and a more honest headline than what the WaPo offers.
Because, first of all, it isn't that the female staffers "felt" marginalized, but that they were actually marginalized. And, if the rest of the information in the piece is accurate, once Valerie Jarrett laid it out for Obama that known misogynist assholes Larry Summers and Rahm Emanuel were marginalizing women (if only someone could have warned the president!), Obama made a genuine effort to change that dynamic, which is a more important story and a more honest headline than what the WaPo offers.
Monday, September 19, 2011
Number of the Day
1%: The percentage of the world's wealth held by women, despite the fact that they comprise 40% of the world's workforce.
Friday, September 16, 2011
There Are Just SO MANY Ways to Be a Bad Mother
Here's one that everyone who's anyone an asshole is talking about this week:
Victoria "Posh" Beckham was out and about this week with new daughter Harper, and she was wearing her signature high heels, thus allegedly proving she obviously has no regard for her daughter's safety.
Maybe because I am not a mother myself, or possibly because I'm not a self-important dipfuck who uses my own experience as a benchmark against whom everyone else on the planet is measured in a perpetual game of negative judgment I play in a void of self-esteem, I fail to comprehend the reasoning at work here. I understand it goes a little something like, "That bitch is gonna trip in those shoes and kill her baby," but the logic, such as it is, really broke down for me when I took two nanoseconds to contemplate the fact that Victoria Beckham routinely wears heels that are frequently described with words like "precarious" by people who don't share her affinity and talent for wearing them.
I guess what I'm saying is: I have no reason to suspect that Victoria Beckham isn't precisely as proficient in towering heels with a baby in her arms as she is without a baby in her arms, or that she's any more likely to trip while wearing shoes she wears all the time than she is while wearing ballet slippers.
That deduction didn't exactly tax my brain, disabled by its ladyness even though it is. So I suspect that maybe the criticisms of Posh are not really about Posh at all, but about a familiar commentary on motherhood and womanhood, and how women must, at all times, sacrifice evidence of their womanhood, their femininity, to the altar of motherhood. Nothing, of course, makes a woman a more terrible mother than putting herself first, or even the appearance thereof.
I also suspect that the criticisms are a reflection of many people's inability to see past their own experience so that they might credit others with experiences they don't have. Sure, I look at Victoria Beckham's shoes and see a pair of ankle-breakers, but I am not Victoria Beckham. It really doesn't matter that I would be likely to trip in those shoes, because she isn't.
This is a small thing, or seems like it, in the scheme of all things. But it's emblematic of a culture in which we are increasingly hostile toward other people's individual experiences and capabilities, because the only way to judge them, the only way to wield our sanctimony like a weapon of destruction, tearing someone else down because it's so much easier than building ourselves up, which takes time and energy and self-reflection and honesty about our own flaws, the only thing that makes engaging in the harsh cultural pastime of ad hominem criticism, is to fail, deliberately and utterly, to see the targets of our judgment as unique human beings, with their own particular set of circumstances that may be very different from our own.
Maybe it would be a bad idea for you to walk in stilettos while carrying an infant. That doesn't mean it's axiomatically bad for Victoria Beckham to do the same.
To ignore even these little differences between people is to deny other people's individual humanity.
So casually do we engage in such a brutal denial, when we say, even obliquely, the world should be just like me.
Victoria "Posh" Beckham was out and about this week with new daughter Harper, and she was wearing her signature high heels, thus allegedly proving she obviously has no regard for her daughter's safety.
Maybe because I am not a mother myself, or possibly because I'm not a self-important dipfuck who uses my own experience as a benchmark against whom everyone else on the planet is measured in a perpetual game of negative judgment I play in a void of self-esteem, I fail to comprehend the reasoning at work here. I understand it goes a little something like, "That bitch is gonna trip in those shoes and kill her baby," but the logic, such as it is, really broke down for me when I took two nanoseconds to contemplate the fact that Victoria Beckham routinely wears heels that are frequently described with words like "precarious" by people who don't share her affinity and talent for wearing them.
I guess what I'm saying is: I have no reason to suspect that Victoria Beckham isn't precisely as proficient in towering heels with a baby in her arms as she is without a baby in her arms, or that she's any more likely to trip while wearing shoes she wears all the time than she is while wearing ballet slippers.
That deduction didn't exactly tax my brain, disabled by its ladyness even though it is. So I suspect that maybe the criticisms of Posh are not really about Posh at all, but about a familiar commentary on motherhood and womanhood, and how women must, at all times, sacrifice evidence of their womanhood, their femininity, to the altar of motherhood. Nothing, of course, makes a woman a more terrible mother than putting herself first, or even the appearance thereof.
I also suspect that the criticisms are a reflection of many people's inability to see past their own experience so that they might credit others with experiences they don't have. Sure, I look at Victoria Beckham's shoes and see a pair of ankle-breakers, but I am not Victoria Beckham. It really doesn't matter that I would be likely to trip in those shoes, because she isn't.
This is a small thing, or seems like it, in the scheme of all things. But it's emblematic of a culture in which we are increasingly hostile toward other people's individual experiences and capabilities, because the only way to judge them, the only way to wield our sanctimony like a weapon of destruction, tearing someone else down because it's so much easier than building ourselves up, which takes time and energy and self-reflection and honesty about our own flaws, the only thing that makes engaging in the harsh cultural pastime of ad hominem criticism, is to fail, deliberately and utterly, to see the targets of our judgment as unique human beings, with their own particular set of circumstances that may be very different from our own.
Maybe it would be a bad idea for you to walk in stilettos while carrying an infant. That doesn't mean it's axiomatically bad for Victoria Beckham to do the same.
To ignore even these little differences between people is to deny other people's individual humanity.
So casually do we engage in such a brutal denial, when we say, even obliquely, the world should be just like me.
Wednesday, September 14, 2011
Dame Gwyneth Paltrow Thinks My Life Is Meaningless
Not only am I fat, which obviously makes me human garbage, but I am also not a mother and have no plans to be one, which, no doy, renders my life a hollow shell with no "real meaning."
And, you know, it's not just gross and offensive to women who cannot have children, and to women who choose not to have children, but it's also gross and offensive to the millions of women around the world who are not fortunate enough to have a choice about motherhood at all, the women for whom motherhood is not a carefully planned option in a lifetime of available options, but an inescapable fate, by virtue of forced marriage, rape, lack of access to free or affordable birth control, lack of access to safe and/or legal abortion.
Motherhood is not always a blessing. And, for many women, choosing to not be a mother is one of the most radical, self-defining, meaningful acts they will make in a life full of meaningful acts.
It is evidence of privilege to not know these things.
Speak for yourself, Gwyneth Paltrow. Please.
[Related Reading: Nope!]
Paltrow is so "happy" that her good friend Jay-Z and his wife Beyoncé are expecting and admits that becoming a parent really puts everything in perspective.Someone needs to introduce Gwyneth Paltrow to the concept of "I language." It's fine and dandy if she finds motherhood to be her "biggest blessing of all time," the thing that gave her life "real meaning" and rendered all of her previous achievements relatively insignificant, but it is gross and offensive to universalize that experience and thus suggest that any woman's accomplishments pale in comparison to motherhood, that every woman's life is devoid of "real meaning" unless and until she becomes a mother.
"I think motherhood is the biggest blessing of all time and it give your life real meaning," she points out. "It's always interesting when you're a woman with success and you've achieved a lot, and then you have a baby and you realize everything you thought was an achievement really is nothing until you have a kid, and I think that will be [Beyoncé's] experience."
And, you know, it's not just gross and offensive to women who cannot have children, and to women who choose not to have children, but it's also gross and offensive to the millions of women around the world who are not fortunate enough to have a choice about motherhood at all, the women for whom motherhood is not a carefully planned option in a lifetime of available options, but an inescapable fate, by virtue of forced marriage, rape, lack of access to free or affordable birth control, lack of access to safe and/or legal abortion.
Motherhood is not always a blessing. And, for many women, choosing to not be a mother is one of the most radical, self-defining, meaningful acts they will make in a life full of meaningful acts.
It is evidence of privilege to not know these things.
Speak for yourself, Gwyneth Paltrow. Please.
[Related Reading: Nope!]