Monk

I have not turned-on to any so-called reality-TV show, but Camillie Paglia has a wonderful take on "Real Housewives".

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[T]hese shows are archetypal bitch fests! I read a few months ago that Gloria Steinem hates "Real Housewives of New Jersey" and would be glad to picket it. Well, there’s the big difference between Steinem and me. She sees the show as a distortion of women, while I see it as a revelation of the deep truth about female sexuality. Right there is the proof of why feminism has faded. Those second-wave feminists had a utopian view of women — they constantly asserted that anything negative about women is a projection by men. That’s not what I see on "Real Housewives"!

It’s like the Discovery Channel — sending a camera to the African savannah to watch the cheetahs stalking the gazelles! What you’re seeing is the primal battles going on among women. Men are marginalized on these shows — they’re eye candy, to use Obama’s phrase, on the borderlines of the ferocity of female sexuality.

-- Camille Paglia

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It's too bad we don't see her more on the cable chat shows on news and politics. She is a real firecracker.

Madonna brought her eye-popping MDNA Tour to L.A.'s Staples Center on Wednesday night, where she dedicated a song to Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani child activist shot in the head and neck on Tuesday by a masked member of the Taliban.

Dressed in a leather skirt and black beret, the music icon took a break from the evening's theatrics to tell the sold-out crowd of 18,000 that it was time "to have our serious chat."

"This made me cry," Madonna said. "The 14-year-old schoolgirl who wote a blog about going to school. The Taliban stopped her bus and shot her. Do you realize how sick that is?"

"Support education! Support women!" she shouted, to the crowd's cheers of approval.

Yousafzai, one of the most outspoken and influential advocates for girls' rights to education in the Middle East, remains unconscious in a hospital since the shooting. Pakistani Taliban spokesman Ehsanullah Ehsan said of the assassination attempt, "Let this be a lesson," and pledged that the Taliban would try again to kill her should she survive her injuries.

-- ONTD

Nicholas Kristof also has an account of the Islamist assault on girls' education.

( Read more... )

Porn is about male fantasy. The fantasy is that women like everything you do to them, as man.

So how does this translate into real life? Women spend a lot of time and energy trying to please men. We learn early on that we are being looked at – that we are to be looked at. That we are performers. It took years before I actually started enjoying sex. YEARS. I think what I enjoyed most about sex, when I was younger, was the feeling of being desired. The actual sex part was super boring for the first while.

We learn, as girls and women, that the performance is more important than the actual feeling.

-- Facials, feminism, & performance: On f**king men in a patriarchy

Victoria's Secret comes out with a "Sexy Little Geisha" outfit.



And, oooh, the controversy:

The negative reactions began several weeks ago. On Racialicious, Nina Jacinto took Victoria's Secret to task for essentializing Asian identity and reducing "Eastern" culture to a stereotype of exotic sexuality. "It’s a narrative that says the culture can be completely stripped of its realness in order to fulfill our fantasies of a safe and non-threatening, mysterious East," she argues. Done at the corporate level, "it’s a troubling attempt to sidestep authentic representation and humanization of a culture and opt instead for racialized fetishizing against Asian women."

Cripes, we are not grade-school children! Can't we have a little fun sometimes? How can people have such a rarefied attitude and remain tolerant of the extreme economic inequality that people really have to live under?

(Source: ONTD)

“The End of Men”? This is not a title; it is a sound bite. But Hanna Rosin means it. The revolution feminists have been waiting for, she says, is happening now, before our very eyes. Men are losing their grip, patriarchy is crumbling and we are reaching “the end of 200,000 years of human history and the beginning of a new era” in which women — and womanly skills and traits — are on the rise. Women around the world, she reports, are increasingly dominant in work, education, households; even in love and marriage. The stubborn fact that in most countries women remain underrepresented in the higher precincts of power and still don’t get equal pay for equal work seems to her a quaint holdover, “the last artifacts of a vanishing age rather than a permanent configuration.”

-- Jennifer Homans at The New York Times

Thus begins what I am glad to say is a rather negative book review. I also think of Naomi Wolf's new release, "Vagina", in which Ms. Wolf celebrates the goddessness of women. In the light of all this feminist consciousness-raising, one can get the idea that men are just freeloading rapists-in-potential, neanderthals clumsily smashing things as we stumble around in this exalted feminine civilaztion.

Ms. Homans notes that Rosin's argument rests on how well women have been doing in the 'new economy', but the economy has a way of changing again and again, and what seems promising today can become tomorrow's bitter illusion. As Ms. Homans concludes her piece:

And I can’t share Rosin’s rosy faith in the global economy. Revolutions, economic or otherwise, have a way of disappointing women. They tear down the old, women step in and make strides, and as a new order sets in the strides disappear. Are Rosin’s Plastic Women genuine victors, or are they — or will they become — unwitting victims? Will the women who are so diligently training themselves as pharmacists today be as flexible and confident when the winds of the feckless global economy turn against them? How flexible can a woman be when she has been training for something for years and suddenly it is blown off the map by the “new” economy? Ask the men who are ended.

When it comes to revolutionary talk, I liked it better when people were focusing on the 1% versus the 99%, about trying to get at that obscene wealth that is being hoarded at the very tippy top of our human hierarchy and trying to make life fairer and more decent for the rest of us, but I guess some revolutions are not meant to be, just as I suspect that it will always be men at the very top and in charge.

Naomi Wolf apparently has made another daring foray into feminist theory with a new book, "Vagina: A New Biography". A promising title, though I might change a word. After reading some of the quotes from the book, however, I was left wondering if this was a joke, and I am yet unresolved on this critical point. Joke or not, we shall keep a few of these delightful points for our own edification or amusement, depending on your perspective and mood.


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2.Your vagina makes you a goddess. Or rather, "The Goddess."
"Throughout this book, I will be referring to a state of mind or a condition of female consciousness I will call, for ease of reference, but also for the sake of the echo, 'the Goddess.' [...] I am carving out rhetorical space that does not yet exist when we talk about the vagina, but which refers to something very real."

3.Foreplay is called "the Goddess Array."
"The autonomic nervous system prepares the way for the neural impulses that will travel from vagina, clitoris, and labia to the brain, and this fascinating system regulates a woman's responses to the relaxation and stimulation provided by 'the Goddess Array,' the set of behaviors a lover uses to arouse his or her partner."

4.The vagina can control the mind.
"Once one understands what scientists at the most advanced laboratories and clinics around the world are confirming — that the vagina and the brain are essentially one network, or 'one whole system,' as they tend to put it, and that the vagina mediates female confidence, creativity, and sense of transcendence — the answers to many of these seeming mysteries fall into place."

5.The vagina evolved to help women reach nirvana.
"The mystical or transcendental potential of female sexuality [...] allows women to connect often, and in a unique way, even if just for brief moments, with experiences of a shining, 'divine,' or greater self (or nonself, as Buddhists would say) or with a sense of the connection among all things. Producing the stimulation necessary for these mind-states is part of the evolutionary task of the vagina."

6.Uteruses can think.
"I experienced some of the 'thoughts' of the uterus myself."

-- Naomi Wolf, "Vagina: A New Biography"

At this unprecedented moment, women are no longer merely gaining on men; they have pulled decisively ahead by almost every measure. Already "the end of men"—the phrase Rosin coined—has entered the lexicon as indelibly as Betty Friedan’s "feminine mystique," Simone de Beauvoir’s "second sex," Susan Faludi’s "backlash," and Naomi Wolf’s "beauty myth" have. ... Rosin reveals how the new world order came to be, and how it is dramatically shifting dynamics in every arena and at every level of society, with profound implications for marriage, sex, children, work, and more.

-- Sully's Dish

Yeah, well, I think most of the money and property and leadership positions are still held by men, not to mention more of the muscles and guns, so I don't think we need to write off men quite yet. Hell, in America, women are having a hard enough time holding on to the legal right to get an abortion and control their own reproductive health. No, baby, men aren't going anywhere. So, why don't you run your cute little butt to the refrigerator and get us another beer!

Here is a feminist thinker trying to bring back a little more realism into the quagire of feminist thought and political correctness. And bear in mind that Ms. Hakim is a senior lecturer at the London School of Economics; we are talking way above Naomi Wolf territory in the brains department.

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In a typically razor-sharp exchange of dialogue which establishes – yet again – that The Simpsons provides the most coruscating illumination of contemporary mores, Lisa says to her grade school teacher that "Good looks don't really matter", to which Ms Hoover replies: "Nonsense, that's just something ugly people tell their children." Stripping away the layers of irony from this statement we can reveal the central premise of Catherine Hakim's book, which is that not only do looks matter, but that they should matter a great deal more. Furthermore, the people who tell young people – and in particular young women – that their beauty and sex appeal are of little importance are themselves ugly, if not physically then at least morally. For, as Hakim sees it, it is an "unholy alliance" of wannabe patriarchs, religious fundamentalists and radical feminists who have – in Anglo-Saxon countries especially – acted to devalue what she terms "erotic capital". In Hakim's estimation, for all young women, and in particular those who are without other benefits – financial, intellectual, situational – an entirely legitimate form of self-advancement should consist in their getting the best out of – if you'll forgive the pun – their assets.

-- Will Self for The Guardian

Ellen Goodman sees a silver lining in all this dark-cloudy Palin business, as the conservatives are finally making it into the twentieth century with respect to the place of women in society:

Let us remember that Republicans had long targeted working mothers as the centerpiece of the culture wars. They ran an entire convention on Marilyn Quayle's line that "Most women do not wish to be liberated from their essential natures as women."

Now their heroine is the in-your-face governor who once said: "To any critics who say a woman can't think and work and carry a baby at the same time, I'd just like to escort that Neanderthal back to the cave."

Hey, wasn't that our line? Weren't the Neanderthals who wanted women to stay in their traditional roles these same conservatives? Suddenly, we are watching the parade of the flip-floppers, patriarchs with pedicures.

Who can forget James Dobson, who blamed the decline and fall of morality on "working mothers and permissiveness," and told us that real women "are merely waiting for their husbands to assume leadership." He now says "I believe Sarah Palin is God's answer."

Who can forget Phyllis Schlafly who said the "flight from home is a flight from yourself, from responsibility, from the nature of woman." She now says that "I think a hardworking, well-organized CEO type can handle it very well."

I'd still prefer that our religion remain apart from government. Wasn't that one of the Satanic temptations that Jesus fought off in the desert, to resist the lure to become the government of the world? for coercion is the cardinal idea in government, and what place can coercion have in Christian love?

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If the lawyer described above had been just as charismatic but named, say, Achola Obama instead of Barack Obama, her goose would have been cooked long ago. Indeed, neither she nor Hillary Clinton could have used Mr. Obama’s public style — or Bill Clinton’s either — without being considered too emotional by Washington pundits.

So why is the sex barrier not taken as seriously as the racial one? The reasons are as pervasive as the air we breathe: because sexism is still confused with nature as racism once was; because anything that affects males is seen as more serious than anything that affects “only” the female half of the human race; because children are still raised mostly by women (to put it mildly) so men especially tend to feel they are regressing to childhood when dealing with a powerful woman; because racism stereotyped black men as more “masculine” for so long that some white men find their presence to be masculinity-affirming (as long as there aren’t too many of them); and because there is still no “right” way to be a woman in public power without being considered a you-know-what.

-- Gloria Steinem for The New York Times

Yesterday, Billy Kristol; today, Gloria Steinem. It looks like the Times is more self-conscious about hosting a diversity of viewpoints. I like it.

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