While I’m gone…

Leave me a comment explaining what you do with your pubic hair, in the spirit of hair-acceptance and appreciation of variety, and also because, as you might have noticed, I’m into giving other people (even if my audience is fairly small) the opportunity to get information that I could have used but didn’t have when I was in The Wonder Awkward Years. When I found out about how girls are “supposed” to shave their pubic hair I got all worried about whether or not I should do it and how and so on, and I was embarrassed to ask any of my friends if they did and how important it was and how not to end up with an itchy bumpy red crotch. My crotch is red, mind you, but that’s from the totally awesome pubic hair that I leave there. I never understood why some people thought “firecrotch” was an insult. One time a guy asked a redheaded girl if she was one, and she said she didn’t know because she always shaved. Riiiiiight. She just sits at home with the razor waiting for a hair to poke out so she can shave it before it’s long enough to see. Lack of firecrotch pride, right there. Although I get that it’s a gamble to admit that you are one, because guys can just decide they’ll use that as fodder for sexual harassment. On the other hand, one time I was at a bonfire party and a guy made fun of a redheaded guy by calling him firecrotch, and I loudly said that everybody loves fire, and everybody loves crotches, and so firecrotches were just even better. They conceded that I made a compelling argument. I trim mine a little, though, because I find when the hair grows all the way out it gets in the way, gets caught in my panty elastic, annoying stuff like that.

And you? Everyone is welcome to answer no matter whether you do nothing to it, wax it all, or shave it into designs; the only responses I don’t want are men saying “oh, I shave my bikini line all the time, haha,” which is their way of saying “A conversation that isn’t about me? I cannot accept this. I must make a joke that isn’t even funny just to highlight the fact that I am excluded from this subject,” which is what most guys I know invariably do if girls in his presence start talking about anything that usually only applies to females. However, men do sometimes shave or trim or make a conscious choice not to and they are welcome to talk about themselves. (Surely after my recent posts I don’t have to tell them that they are not welcome to tell women what they want women to do with their crotches.)

Sweet.

Venus of Venus Speaks kindly tapped me for the Excellent Blog Award, which means I have to find 10 more blogs to tap. I’ll be thinking about it over the next two weeks, while I will not be blogging (which means I might need even longer, because I probably won’t be reading blogs either). I’ll be in Italy and Prague. You may commence jealousy. I’m thinking of trying to find one blog for each of several categories:

1. Feminism

2. Anti-Racism

3. LGBTQ Issues

4. Physical Disability

5. Mental Disability

6. Fat Acceptance

7. Religious Freedom/Separation of Church and State

8. Vegetarianism/Veganism/Animal Rights

9. Anti-Imperialism/Anti-war

10. Humor

Your ten main food groups, from Feministing to Lolcats. Except I’ll be looking for smaller blogs. (Of course there are more issues in the world, and blogs often cover more than one of these, but this is a good start.) It’ll take a while, but I hope the wait will be worth it.

Also, if anybody wants to explain to me how to get that image in my sidebar, that would be pretty awesome. Edit: figured it out.

Hairy-legged feminists

I have worn pants every single day since I’ve been in Paris, because it’s cold and I don’t have boots (which help if you wear a skirt). I don’t shave my legs when I’m not going to be exposing them, so I haven’t shaved the entire time. That’s like 3 months. It’s not a feminist statement, it’s just that I’m not motivated enough to shave unless I have to do so for other people.

Sometimes, when you mention feminism, people say something about hairy legs, and we feminists go “No! It’s not about that! We shave! Feminism is just about…” and so on with a much more accurate definition of feminism that ‘an ideology that requires women to be hairy’. “I don’t hate men” and “I shave my legs” are put in the same category of things you have to make sure people know in order to be taken seriously.

That is ridiculous.

I have no desire to shame people who shave. Next time I wear a skirt, I’m pretty sure I will. We have to deal with patriarchy, and if I ignored everything patriarchy wanted of me, no one would take me seriously, and I’d be a feminist pretty much all by myself. That may work for some people, and that’s great, but it won’t work for me, neither for my life as a woman nor for my attempts to get my friends to be more egalitarian. It’s a compromise.

However. The people who pointed out that the leg-shaving expectation is sexist were right. I haven’t done my feminist homework so I don’t know who they were, but I agree with them on that much. It is indeed quite sexist. It tells me that I can’t be pretty unless I change the way I look first. (Something to keep in mind next time someone who likes to benefit from the exploitation and objectification of women tries to spin it as just sex-positive or artistic: “Really, you just admire the beauty of the female body? Including its hair?” Because if he says hair or any other natural things about the female body are gross and only admires the beauty of the plastic surgeried made up shaven female body, no Enlightened Award for him. Not that true sex-positivity doesn’t exist.) It tells me that a part of my body that is natural and not dirty, is dirty. I should not have to shave if I don’t want to, and clearly, I don’t. Maybe I would every once in a while for my own sake, as it does feel nice, when I don’t get razor burn. But mostly, no.

The fact that we are so accepting of people’s horror at the thought of hairy-legged feminists is disturbing. Do we think they’re right? Do we think there’s any defense for someone who would throw out a person’s argument based on the fact that they choose not to remove harmless hair from their legs? That’s insane, not to mention an ad hominem feminam argument, a fallacy.

Why do people freak out at the idea of a woman who doesn’t shave her legs? Shouldn’t it only matter to her and maybe her partner? Are all the people who talk about hairy-legged feminists talking about their partners or women they want to date? I don’t think so. I think if I chose not to shave my legs and let them show, I would get comments, maybe just behind my back, from people, male and female, who had no interest in dating me. Why is it any of their business? How could my leg hair possibly offend someone who has no reason to be anywhere near it?

It’s sexist

They would consider it their business because it would be me refusing to be put in my place. It’s related to what I talked about in “thinking through a personal experience” where I said that guys have no right to judge me just because I’m there. People have no business standing in judgment over the attractiveness of my legs unless they’re my boyfriend, who is indifferent to leg hair. But men in patriarchy require that I try to live up to their standards, to impress them, to please them with my appearance, regardless of whether we’re in any sort of relationship. If I don’t, I face harsh criticism – not just them saying “I don’t want to date you” but them attacking my credibility and denying me respect as a person. That’s not ok.

It’s heterosexist and cissexist

Also, since men are NOT supposed to shave their legs in patriarchy (which makes the hairy-legged feminist stuff even funnier, because feminist men exist), women not shaving transgresses the rule that men and women must be opposites. It’s kind of hilarious that we can convince ourselves we’re so opposite when we have to make ourselves different by changing our appearance.  But it’s one example of a whole spectrum of things people can do that don’t conform with gender roles (eg, cross-dressing, sex changes, homosexual relationships) and the vicious responses they get from people who are completely unaffected by gender non-conforming behavior except insofar as it challenges the notion that humans only come in two opposite flavors, which is a big component of patriarchy.

Yep, it’s even racist (ethnicity-ist?)

The thing is, I bet I could get away with it if I told my friends that my soft, faintly strawberry-blond leg hair really wasn’t all that bad.  But I’d like to see someone with coarse black leg hair try that.  People will say that’s just because mine shows up less and can be felt less and so is more like it’s not there, it’s not that they just prefer the hair of people with my coloring.  That may be true, but the results are the same.  If you believe that leg hair is unfeminine, and that more noticeable leg hair is more unfeminine, and that the less feminine a woman is the less acceptable she is, and that women of certain ethnicities have more noticeable leg hair, you’re going to be prejudiced against those women.  And this hair texture and color is not confined to the hair on their legs, so these hirsutially (made that up) challenged women either have to spend a considerable amount of time and money making themselves “acceptable”, or resign themselves to being criticized.  Better option: we all stop coding body hair as masculine and stop requiring people to fit gender roles.

I know that making fun of hairy women is very socially acceptable in the US, but doing so is built on a foundation of pure assholery. Point that out to people who do so; they may not realize their “argument” is based on assholery, they’re just used to it, so don’t tell them they’re the worst person in the world.  But it’s just stupid for us to accept it as if it’s in any way legitimate.

“Actually, I’m a feminist and I do shave my legs, but are you really saying you wouldn’t think my ideas were worth listening to if I chose not to shave? And what’s so bad about a woman not shaving? Does that cause breast cancer or something?”

“It’s just gross.”

“Then don’t touch their legs. It doesn’t make them gross as people.”

You can’t get every point across to people who don’t get that things like leg-shaving are cultural constructs or to people who think the gender binary is self-evident but can’t explain why. But you can say something. And we can and should support women who exercise their right not to shave, rather than implying that we, too, think they’re crazy.

In case you’re not thoroughly convinced yet

Victim-blaming is bad.

Dear googlers

Dear googler who found my site by searching “black people want to be number one race”,

I’m going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume that’s a line from a speech I don’t know about that you were trying to find in order to show your privilege-blinded friend that there are still people in the world who are amazingly racist against black people. Keep up the good fight.

Fondly,

J19

Dear googler who found my site by looking for “girly science fair things”,

I can’t imagine how many hits you must have gotten, since all science fair things are girly. How will you ever choose what to do your project on?

Keep studying,

J19

Dear googler who found my site by searching for “abortion hurt”,

I’m assuming you’re either considering an abortion and want information or have had one and need support. I sincerely hope you find what you seek, and I recommend the Planned Parenthood website for the former. It won’t lie to you, unlike some people who like to try to scare people out of abortions by telling them it’s much worse than it usually is.

Best of luck,

J19

Dear googler who found my site by searching for “human freaks men with two penises”,

Good luck with that thesis you’re putting off. And thanks for reassuring me that if someone searches for that, they’ll find my blog. Whew.

Peace,

J19

PS all: I can’t see who did this, just that someone did. Rest easy.

Edit:

Forgot this one.  I’ll actually give a serious answer in case anyone in this situation comes by.

Dear googler who found my site by searching “do guys know if you’re a virgin”,

Technically, no. They might think they do, but there is no virginity test – you can bleed more than once or never, you can have no blood but discomfort and stretching more than once or never. But listen read carefully. I don’t care if you have sex, or at what age, or with what toys, or in a box, or – well, no don’t have sex with a fox because foxes can’t give informed consent. But I’d rather you not get hurt unnecessarily, and if you do have hymenal issues (try to put a finger in your vagina. Keep adding fingers until it hurts/won’t fit. Less than four? You probably will), and a guy doesn’t know that, you are going to experience more pain than you need to. You shouldn’t have to do that to be liked! You should have enough power in the sexual situation to be able to be honest and to require that you are treated properly. If you’re trying to pull off a lie, you’ll probably be nervous (which is likely for your first time anyway), and nervous means tense and tense means it will be more difficult.  You need to be in control of how fast and how deep you go until you’re all nice and stretchy, at which point you share control. At least make sure to be REALLY aroused before you start actual intercourse – when you get really aroused, your vagina makes some lubricant (still a good idea to use extra, probably water-based) and opens up considerably on the inside, both of which make it more comfortable for you.  And at all times, hymen or no, you have the right to stop a sex act whenever you want, even if he hasn’t had an orgasm yet.  Also: nothing wrong with buying a sex toy and stretching yourself out solo. On the other hand, if you’re trying to pretend you ARE a virgin when you’re not, just say you were born without a hymen or stretched it in gym class.

Take care,

J19

Thinking out a personal experience

On Friday I was walking through the metro station with my sister, and my parents were a little further behind us. We walked through a crowded area and a guy leaned in towards me and my sister, I think more her but I was right there too, and said “Beautiful baby”. It sounds awkward because it was; he was clearly not a native speaker of English. I’m assuming French because it would upset me more if a guy felt like he owned the world enough to do that in a country he didn’t even live in. Anyway. White guy, in case you get any ideas.

I know it doesn’t sound like the worst thing in the world to say to someone. But it came off kind of taunting, and the way he leaned in at us…I don’t know what it was, actually, I can’t tell you for the life of me what was going through my head, all I know is that I looked him in the eye and said “Fuck you.”

Then I kept walking and he started to yell something at me that was still like, in line with what he had said before, and then changed his mind and said “Fuck you” and kept yelling but I haven’t the faintest idea what he said. It was just starting to dawn on me that I had said the F word in front of my family and they were going to be terrified of me using the metro now…

My mom caught up to me and started lecturing me on how you never say anything back, and he’s still behind us, he’s getting on this train, quick get in, and when we got off, look, he’s back there, quick let’s leave. Ok, so maybe I didn’t think that through. Chances of getting hurt in the middle of a crowd in the hall of the metro station are slim; chances of getting followed by a pissed off misogynist and raped in an alley, perhaps not so slim. Fortunately there were no more run-ins.

But I started thinking. First, about why I reacted that way to such a seemingly harmless thing. I didn’t have the impression he was going to do anything else. I had been on the receiving end of this sort of thing twice earlier that day and not been overly offended. I didn’t like it, but those two times, it was from two members of a capoeira group, and I was smiling at them to say “good job”, not knowing how to say that in Portuguese, or really in French, for that matter. One of them did a kiss thing at me. Another one said “beautiful” when he walked by me. Maybe this is unfeminist, but I forgave them for it on the grounds that they probably thought my smile invited it. I found them…entitled, let’s say. Like they assumed I would take their approval as a welcome compliment; like they thought it was totally fair for them to try to trap women into being sexual in some way with them (this I gathered from watching them grab a couple of female spectators and dance with them during a routine a little later; the girls were very reluctant, but they were smiling, it gave you the impression they were just embarrassed. I don’t know).

But then the guy in the metro…maybe three’s my limit for one day? Maybe I was subconsciously worried for my sister more than myself? Maybe he just came off more harass-y about it than the guys before did. I think that last one is true, but the others are still possibilities.

The other thing I’ve been thinking about is whether my reaction was so wrong. And what it means if it is. My boyfriend said it’s normal, welcome to the life of European women. (He was kind of relieved since he thinks I’m generally way too nice to guys who hit on me.) My parents think it was absolutely horrible, because it puts me in danger. I personally think “fuck you” was not the best choice. But I’m kinda glad I said something. One thing I was thinking about afterwards was about an idea I had, an unresearched one, while thinking about street harassment. The idea is that a lot of guys seem to think 1) these are welcome compliments, we’re just dying for male approval of our appearance at all times, and 2) you can pick up women this way. I don’t think that’s the whole story of street harassment, I think a lot of it is about exerting power through sexuality, not unlike rape, but still…I thought maybe some of it, anyway, was based on the myth that we like it. So maybe that was subconsciously going on in my head and I decided to show this guy that actually, we don’t. (I read an article about bottom-smacking in Italy, which can now get you sent to jail [hooray], and most of the guys interviewed said it wasn’t a big deal, socially acceptable, while all of the women interviewed said it was a bad thing. Not at all a representative sample, but it made me think, anyway.)

What concerned me the most was what my mom said. Basically the idea is to be silent and never stand up for yourself – to accept verbal harassment – because the threat of physical harassment is behind it. This may well be the smartest thing to do, and I certainly would not fault anyone for doing so. But it’s pretty telling, isn’t it? This is about the threat of rape being hung over women’s heads to keep them in their place, to keep them silent and submissive, to remind them that they are there to be seen and judged by men rather than to act. I’m not trying to make a big deal out of this one incident, I’m saying if this is the rule for how to handle all incidents of street harassment – and it gets way worse than this in some places – that’s the kind of society it makes. Which is something I already knew, but I guess it didn’t really make sense to me until Friday. And I can feel that it won’t make sense to a lot of other people, if people who don’t already get it happen to read this.

Then again, you could look at it the way she did, which was that you don’t respond to bullies because that’s just what they want.  There’s something to that…but I don’t think that’s enough.  Because nobody is telling these guys they’re not supposed to act this way.  And there are always kids who get beaten up even without talking back to the bully.  Not that I think every woman needs to decide to talk back, I just think society needs to start saying street harassment is not ok.

I’m gonna give one more stab at an explanation of what’s wrong with street harassment. Because I know if anyone who doesn’t already get it reads this they’ll think I’m against all flirtation and feminists hate sex blah blah blah never mind the fact that I blog a fair amount about how consensual sex of all types should be more accepted than it is.

I am not walking down this street or this hall in the metro station to display my body for you. I happen not to dress very “provocatively” – which is a shitty victim-blaming term anyway – but even if I did, it wouldn’t be for the sake of some guy who crossed my path for a second on my way somewhere more important. Get over yourself.

I am not here, on the earth, for you to judge me. I’m not waiting to see what number you hold up. If you think you get to judge me, my appearance or anything else about me, and you don’t even know me, and I haven’t entered any competitions, you are a self-centered entitled asshole. If you think I will appreciate your display of assholery just because this time it confirms that I win in the context of patriarchy, which still means losing because patriarchy treats me as less than human, you’re steeped in male privilege and clearly think too little of me to be mistaken for someone who would give me a worthwhile compliment.

You are welcome to approach me if you would like to offer me the opportunity to engage with you. But it needs to be an offer, not something you yell and back up with threats so that I have no choice in the matter, so that you can show me how you have power over me, so you can intimidate me, so you can force your desires or your judgment on me. You need to not corner me, you need to not follow me when I walk away from you. You need to not tell me I’m mean when I say no, because you are not so universally desirable that the only reason a person would want to leave you would be for the sake of being mean, and because you know perfectly well that when you say that you’re trying to manipulate me into staying, and my opinion matters, it shouldn’t be about trapping me into doing what you want.

And it needs to be about a dialogue, meaning two-way, meaning you treat me as a human being with thoughts and feelings and agency. You don’t have to go Oprah on me, you just have to talk me like a person you’d like to get to know (or even if you just want sex – which you’re not going to get, but you can’t know that ahead of time – you still have to treat me like a person that gets ASKED for consent, that has an opinion that is valid, a whole person who is about more than sex even if that is the only part of me you’re personally interested in), a person who you want to hear something back from after you’re done expressing interest.

The “male gaze” is one of the things I’ve learned about sexism that bothers me the most, at least from among the things that affects me personally. To those guys, a woman is an object, not only in the sense of objectification-women-are-pieces-of-meat, but in the sense of the object of the verb. Not the subject. The gaze only goes one way. The judgment, the desire, the decision, are only relevant in the male. I know it’s real and not just an academic feminist concept because it explains why I see myself from the point of view of men so much, instead of from the point of view of myself. That’s a pretty shitty feeling, when you can’t even get away from the sexism in your own head. I’m working on it though.

I hope that makes things a little more clear.

Also: check out Female and Breathing on my blogroll, and she has links to Holla Back NYC and other sites that deal with this issue.

hooray

So last semester I was in this discussion group at school where we talked about race.  We watched I think two parts of an apparently three part series from PBS on how race doesn’t have any biological basis.  I was going to try to recreate what I learned from it by retelling some stories and trying to find similar studies online, but fortunately, ABW linked to Karnythia and one of her commenters knows the website for the series.  I’m going to read their background reading and try to synthesize some ideas and make a post out of it, but in the meantime, this is really cool.

Privilege

I’m thinking of submitting this to The Angry Black Woman’s Carnival of Allies, you may want to write your own submission.

Privilege is going to be an important concept to grasp for anyone who’s going to read my blog, and it’s something I’d like to flesh out a definition for, so here we go. I’m going to talk mostly about white privilege with respect to racism against black people, although there are many other types of racism and many other types of privilege. I’m going to ask you to first read this through and just think about it in relation to me and/or in the abstract. Think about whether you think this response is appropriate coming from someone in the group oppressing you, if you feel yourself to be in an oppressed group. Then, unless you’re a completely unprivileged queer atheist disabled fat mentally ill poor undocumented transwoman of color, read it again and apply it to yourself and your type(s) of privilege.

Clearly I think certain groups are oppressed. But the corollary of that claim is that other groups are privileged. For example, if people of color are oppressed, white people are privileged (via ABW). (Let’s be clear that racism didn’t end with slavery and people who have long been dead; this is about us, now.) It’s a lot easier to swallow the first part than the second part if you belong to the privileged group. Pity isn’t too hard of an emotion to work up, but guilt sucks. Not as much as being oppressed sucks, though.

My story

I’m white and I grew up soaked in white privilege. That’s different from growing up soaked in explicit racism. I heard some racism, but it was whispered and usually looked down upon. But I did grow up in a white neighborhood, and I belonged to a white country club, and I went to schools that had some black kids, but not a whole lot, and we tended to stay fairly separate. There was only one black person in the gifted program in my elementary school. At my high school graduation, I saw a lot of black people who I didn’t even recognize. And of course, the mainstream media wasn’t about to fill in the blanks for me on the lives of people of color, except for the cribs of a few rappers.

I believed in equality. But I didn’t really know black people, so I didn’t identify with them. That meant I didn’t need to examine whether or not I really felt that they were just as normal and just as human as me. Racism and other types of oppression can affect you without you even noticing it – for instance, I’m not only racist, I’m also prejudiced against women, despite being pretty much obsessed with feminism. I can’t get some of that subconscious “Men=Normative” to go away. So I’m suspicious of anyone who says they’re totally not racist (or whatever-ist) at all. It’s much more helpful to admit that we are and go from there.

Another result of not really knowing black people and not really living in their world was that I didn’t hear about how racism affected their lives, so I was able to think racism was over just because I didn’t see it. When I did think about people of color, I would more or less extrapolate my experiences to imagine what theirs were like. Since my life was free of the effects of racism and seemed to fit the idea of meritocracy pretty well, I figured theirs was similar.

I didn’t know that even in black families with the same income as my family (which were probably rare because they probably had less chance of getting the education my dad got), black people had less wealth than my family had, and that the difference in wealth was due to the accumulation of racist government policies and white privileges.  I didn’t know that the kind of cocaine more commonly used by black people was punished 100 times more harshly than the kind more commonly used by white people. I didn’t know that black women try to change their appearance to look more like white women because they’ve gotten the message that black is ugly. I didn’t know that the reason other races have their own special clubs and magazines and TV shows and so on was because they didn’t feel welcome in ours, and I was completely unaware that my clubs and magazines and TV shows and so on weren’t just general, they were white. I didn’t realize that if I was able to see white as general it was because of racism – because I saw white as the Norm, because I had no trouble momentarily forgetting about the existence of people of color, because I saw people of color as the Special Case, the people that would only be on a TV show if it was expressly trying to prove it wasn’t racist, and that PC stuff is so annoying, isn’t it? (Let it be known that calling something PC does not count as a real argument on this blog. You can say it, but get ready to be criticized.)

Privilege of Better Treatment

Privilege includes a lot of things – it includes how I get messages that my skin color is prettier than others, it includes how people assume I’m well-behaved, it includes how I can call the police and expect them to actually help me (potentially not in the case of rape and DV, but if I’m robbed, you betcha, and even in the cases where they often assume women are lying, they’re a lot less likely to assume I’m lying than to assume that of a woman of color).  It includes how I have connections with rich people that can help me get good jobs, it includes how my parents and grandparents have home equity that can give me a head start financially, that black people were systematically excluded from getting.

Privilege to Ignore

But what makes privilege so dangerous is that it includes the luxury to ignore. As Kate Harding said: That’s what privilege is. It’s the option to ignore nasty shit that doesn’t directly affect my own life, my career, my relationships, my bank account, my social standing, my housing situation, etc. I can ignore people of color; they can’t ignore white people. I can ignore racism; they can’t. And when I ignore them and I ignore racism, I make the institution of racism stronger, because I cover for it. I can swear up and down that it’s not there because I don’t see it, then sit on the pile of advantage I have and yell down at black people that they must not be working hard enough.  There aren’t a whole lot of people in the US anymore who are willing to openly say they hate people with a certain color of skin, but there are plenty of people who are willing to ignore what happens to people with a certain color of skin, and if there’s no listening to what people of color are saying, no awareness of the long history of institutionalized racism, no acknowledgment that it was more than “hard work” that got white people where they are today, and not even much concern for what it’s like to be a person of color because they’re not your friends or really on your radar, can you really be so surprised that racism is still around?

This is important. It means that although I can ignore racism, I cannot opt out of it altogether. I can feel like it doesn’t have anything to do with me, but I am already part of it. It doesn’t matter if I haven’t burnt any crosses on people’s lawns, I’m still part of it.

Privilege to Ignore + Privilege of Better Treatment = Entitlement.

When I don’t know that the privileges I get, the way people think better of me and treat me better, are in fact based on my skin, I assume that I earned them and that I am entitled to them. Then if someone tries to take them away, I get mad. I think I’m being robbed of rights, being penalized for something I didn’t do, but that’s just because I don’t see that I am doing something – perpetuating racism – and that I’m losing privileges, not rights, and that I have to give up those privileges in order for other people to have their rights.

Guilt

Now let’s walk through the analysis of guilt together, because this is where people get all freaked out.

There are two kinds of being guilty. There’s being guilty in a court of law, where ignorance of the law is not a defense against being found guilty, where guilty means you committed the crime. That’s guilty, the state. Then there’s guilty in terms of morality, where ignorance is a defense because you’re judged not on what you did but on what you intended, and where things that are out of your control are not held against you. That’s guilty, the emotion.

I only need to feel guilty, the emotion for things I had control over, times when I knew better. In those cases, guilt is a healthy sign that I’m not a psychopath (meant literally) or a hypocrite (believing in human rights only for my group). It should lead me to think and to try to do better. But that’s really my deal. Speaking as a feminist on male privilege for a sec, I frankly do not care how you feel. I care how you act. I don’t want revenge (see my posts on prison), I want results.

So whether or not I’m guilty, the state (actually did something to help racism) matters more. But there’s no need to get all freaked out about how I couldn’t help it and that’s not fair, because it’s not about revenge, it’s not about the kind of guilt that makes you sulk and hate yourself. It’s about taking upon myself the responsibility to improve. It’s an asymptotic kind of motion, I can’t just snap my fingers and be perfect, but I have to keep in mind that it affects other people’s lives whether I get it right or not (whereas my good intentions don’t really help them much). So I have to work on it.

From Negative Motivation (avoiding guilt) to Positive Motivation (creating change)

If I can see past guilt, the emotion and care about guilt, the state, I’m shifting the issue from being my personal problem about clearing my conscience and reputation (because let’s be honest, sometimes it’s less about how I feel so bad and more about how I look bad) to a problem about how other people are suffering. My conscience will always be involved in my personal thoughts about it, but in order to actually be helpful, I need to be motivated by the fact that people are oppressed and that is unacceptable, not by the fact that I don’t want to be criticized or to have to feel uncomfortable. I have to be motivated to move towards change rather than just trying to flee guilt.

Now what I have to do is stay in that I’m-not-the-center-of-the-universe mindset when I mess up and get called out on it, as is inevitable if I’m really trying in the first place (which I haven’t been doing enough, in case you were wondering). When that happens, if I get defensive and forget all about how my privilege means my racism detector is defective and thus I’m not the best judge of this, I’m going back to caring more about my comfort than about justice. Remember: being oppressed hurts more than feeling guilty or being wrong. It may be hard to believe in the moment, but it’s true. So what I have to do in those times is shut up and listen to the people who know racism from the other side. Be warned: just because someone belongs to the group in question doesn’t mean they’re right (see: female anti-feminists). But since I know my racism detector is defective – and only in one way, it only underestimates racism – I know that I should give extra credence to whatever a person of color says about racism being present somewhere that I didn’t see it. It may be wise to just think about it for a while and not say anything at first. Then I’ll probably have questions. Finally, in the vast majority of cases where I will be the one who was mistaken, I should apologize, fix my mistake as well as I can, and move on (via ABW again).

Ok, your turn.

PS: I hope to write a post about anger soon, which is another controversial emotion, like guilt, but on the other side of the oppression. I also have a draft going on how race is fake but racism is real; I know that sounds obvious, but people continue to argue as if it’s not.

PPS: Link to your favorite blogs by women of color in the comments. Clearly I find The Angry Black Woman’s blog pretty useful (and I swear I’m not sucking up by linking to it all the time, it just had related stuff).

bad assumptions people make in deciding what’s fair

I just read a thread on Feministing in which one commenter said that if a woman falsely accuses a man of domestic violence, she needs counseling, not jail, and another commenter replied that if the falsely accused was the first commenter’s son or friend, the first commenter would feel differently.

It reminds me of when I asked someone what she thought of the death penalty and she said she was against it until she had kids.  Thinking about how she would feel if someone killed or tried to kill one of her kids, she decided she was for the death penalty.

Arguments like these are treated as valid.  But they’re only valid if you assume that punishment should be commensurate with the anger the victimized person or their relatives feel.  In other words, they rely on the assumption that the purpose of the criminal justice system is for the state to carry out revenge on criminals.  A lot of people accept that assumption.  But if you accept that assumption, you have to give up on the idea of inalienable rights.  Personally, I’m kind of attached to those.

I’m basically just rehashing my prison rape post from a different angle, but so many people act this way and it’s so counter-productive and destructive that I have no problem saying it once a week until someone happens across my blog and changes their mind.

You can’t have your revenge and a safe, fair society, too.  You can take out your (totally justified) anger on someone, but then you have to acknowledge that you’re contributing to the cycle of crime and weakening the human rights arguments that can be used to keep more people safe.  Because revenge is not conducive to rehabilitation, and it often involves at least an implicit violation of human rights.  If you give the gov’t the power to suspend human rights, you’ve given the gov’t the power to suspend human rights.  Your argument that they’re unconditional is GONE.  Only good people get protection, and good is defined by the government, which, last time I checked, isn’t free of bias or corruption (any government).

So which is more important to you?

I also have a theory that people don’t worry much about things they think couldn’t possibly hurt them.  By not worrying about it, I mean they don’t mind if it will hurt other people; it’s easier for them to be callous.

Examples:

The person who thinks he or she will be abstinent until marriage who opposes legal abortion and/or accessible birth control and/or comprehensive sex ed.

The US citizen who’s ok with human rights violations of immigrants.

The modern person who doesn’t think the genocide and rape in the Bible was that bad because it happened so long ago and that’s just the way things were then.

I personally think it’s only fair to judge these things from the point of view, as closely as we can approximate it, of the people who are at risk in these situations.  It could have been you.  It’s not, but it could have been, and if it were, would you mind?  Would it hurt?  What makes you think those people have less feelings than you, need less than you?

This is closely related to the idea of privilege.  I’m working on a draft on that.

what to do with virginity

Just doing my part to spread pobre habladora’s cool new way of talking about having sex for the first time, discarding your virginity. So that it’s at the very least an active process, even if still riddled with problems.

Like what, J19?

So glad you asked.

Like how we have this idea that penile-vaginal intercourse is Real Sex, and so that’s what makes you lose your virginity. As if the clitoris, the only body part in any human being that is explicitly and only there for the purpose of sexual pleasure, has nothing to do with sex. Ha! This is not only great for perpetuating sexism, but it helps prop up heterosexism, too. People assume – in the face of evidence of real, meaningful, satisfying, exciting sexual experiences of homosexual and queer couples – that non-heterosexual sex can’t be Real Sex – based on the very shaky theory that penile-vaginal is the only possible Real Sex. (“Oh but that’s the only way to get pregnant, and pregnancy is The Point of sex!” Tell that to someone who got knocked up from semen on her thigh, and then explain to me why humans continue to have sex when the female is pregnant and after menopause and when they’re sterile and, well, when they’re a homosexual couple. And then study bonobos.)

Like how we have this idea that there’s a clear line between virginity and whoredom lost virginity. My friend said she learned in Anthropology that the !Kung (the ! means you click your tongue against the front of the roof of your mouth) people don’t have a word for virginity, and people explore their sexuality from the time they’re young, and it’s more of a spectrum than a now-you’re-a-virgin, now-you’re-not thing. (This is a common theme; my culture needs to get over its obsession with binary categories.) Really, do you think someone who’s had sex is all that different from the way they were before?

Like how we base the whole thing on a piece of tissue that isn’t even always there to begin with. And seriously, it’s just a little membrane. There’s no need to psychoanalyze the meaning of it. It’s not a gate. It’s not a treasure. It’s a little membrane that didn’t open up all the way while the fetus was developing. (Natalie Angier’s Woman: An Intimate Geography made it clear to me that making body parts into metaphors for their owners or seeing them as microcosms of their owners is stupid.  Although I did smile when she talked about ovaries as pearls.  Highly recommended book, in any case.)

Like how since that membrane only exists in women, we put much more emphasis on female virginity than male. Except that’s not the real reason, is it? I don’t think so. But people use it as justification, anyway.

Like how virginity is associated with purity, even though sex doesn’t make you dirty (ok, there are bodily fluids, but those wash off). If it were about the potential for infection, we would demonize handshakes, too, but we don’t.

Like how the emphasis on purity and virginity for women leads to things like foot binding, genital cutting, locking women up inside, giving them false information about contraceptives, refusing to give them contraceptives, maltreatment of prostitutes, double standards for cheating, killing, etc.  (Note how the East and West issues are all in the same list, because anyone who thinks it’s ok to mistreat prostitutes has no business looking down on cultures who mistreat other women on the same basis.)

Like how it’s glorified in absolute terms, even though those who glorify it generally do accept sex within heterosexual marriage. This either means they aren’t thinking things all the way through, or they really do think married women have lost some value. For instance, no woman can live up to the ideal of the Virgin Mother. I mean unless she adopts, but I don’t think you quite get ideal status if you skip the pregnancy.

How about we discard the entire notion of virginity? Do what you want to do if whoever you’re doing it with can and does consent; don’t do what you don’t want to do, whatever reasons you may have for not wanting to. But just call it whatever it is. I’m tired of the word virgin and all its unwarranted connotations.

Edit: I just read the article that Pobre habladora linked to, The Hymenization of Virginity by Jessica Zaylia. I’m with her on everything except the claim that boys are never subjected to invasive virginity tests. I’ve read online that in South Africa there are virginity tests for males that involve the examination of body parts – sometimes it was like, knees or something, but I think there was also a test that had to do with the foreskin of the penis. I don’t know if that’s true, but there it is, anyway. I’m sure the vast majority of those tested in the world throughout history have been and are female, though. Neither male nor female virginity tests can prove presence or absence of virginity, of course.