Posts Written by wollstonecraft
By wollstonecraft • 14 years ago

feminist values: calling on people to have some thoughts (and share them)

This post is cross-posted from my blog Future Feminist Librarian-Activist. You are welcome to hop on over and comment there or here. I’d love to hear from you either way!
My girlfriend Hanna and I have been talking lately about feminism and feminist politics, comparing our very different experiences with various incarnations of feminist theory and feminism as a political movement. One of the things that we’ve been talking about is the question of hypocrisy: if someone (a feminist in this case) critiques a certain behavior, beauty ritual, book/song/movie, word/phrase, cultural belief, etc. and yet still engages in (possibly even takes pleasure in) said behavior/ritual/belief, does that make the person hypocritical? Or are they just being pragmatic or realistic? And if so, does that mean that there’s no point to engaging in critical feminist analysis, if in the end we all end up pragmatists: does that mean that the status quo wins out in the end anyway?
There was a time in my life when I would have answered with an unqualified “yes, absolutely.” I will always remember the conversation I had about shaving my first year taking college classes (I was seventeen) when I had just discovered theoretical and political feminism as something that — rather than being of historical interest — was of living, breathing political relevance. I had this Creative Nonfiction professor (whom in retrospect I would say I had a huge crush on) whom I ...
By wollstonecraft • 15 years ago

File this under “patriarchy* hurts men too.”

Stupid headlines like this irritate the hell out of me:

“Report: Boy-heavy China Faces Impending Crime Spike.”

This was a story in the Boston Metro (free transit newspaper) today that my housemate and I noticed while riding the T out to Harvard Square. The entire text of the article reads as follows:

China’s budding gender gap — inspired by decades of one-child-per-family law, and the resulting rise in baby-girl abortions and infanticides — could develop into an increase in violent crimes, a new study reports.

With 32 million more young men than women, and the imbalance only growing, sociologists worry about a coming spike in crime, when men take out their frustrations on an increasingly wealthy population.

The report paints a grim picture ...

Stupid headlines like this irritate the hell out of me:

“Report: Boy-heavy China Faces Impending Crime Spike.”

This was a story in the Boston Metro (free transit newspaper) today that my housemate and I noticed while riding the ...
By wollstonecraft • 15 years ago

Whither the women?: Female friendships in science-fiction/fantasy

This past week, I took a break from academic reading to enjoy the fourth installment of the Mercy Thompson series, Bone Crossed , by Patricia Briggs. The series, if you haven’t already encountered it, is a fantasy series centered around a young woman who works as a car mechanic and happens to be a walker raised by werewolves. At the beginning of the series, Mercy is trying to avoid her supernatural past as much as possible, a goal that becomes increasingly untenable as she is drawn deeper and deeper into local politics and relationships with a cast of characters both human and non-human (and, often, somewhere in between).

I’ve been looking forward to this book since the last ...

This past week, I took a break from academic reading to enjoy the fourth installment of the Mercy Thompson series, Bone Crossed , by Patricia Briggs. The series, if you haven’t already encountered it, is ...
By wollstonecraft • 15 years ago

Reading Enlightenment Smut

Last Tuesday, in my intellectual history class (“The Modern Imaginary”), we discussed Therese Philosophe, a bawdy, “forbidden best-seller” of pre-revolutionary France. The novella is an erotic novel and philosophic treatise in which the titular character, a young woman named Therese, recounts her sexual and philosophic coming-of-age to her present lover, the unnamed Count. Not having previously read any one complete example of Enlightenment-era pornography, I had few pre-conceptions about the genre when I sat down to read Therese.
This is an anonymously-written work, published in 1740s, tentatively attributed to a marquis named Jean-Baptiste de Boyer and was a runaway best-seller, according to translator Robert Darnton. Yet even though the author is likely male, and his understanding of the pleasures ...

Last Tuesday, in my intellectual history class (“The Modern Imaginary”), we discussed Therese Philosophe, a bawdy, “forbidden best-seller” of pre-revolutionary France. The novella is an erotic novel and philosophic treatise in which the titular character, a ...
By wollstonecraft • 15 years ago

Why does it have to be either/or . . .?

. . . Can’t it be both/and?

(community member Bethany L. has also posted on this story)

Meghan O’Rourke, over at Slate’s xx factor blog has a post up, The Sexual Fluidity of Women about this weekend’s article on sexuality research and women’s desire in the New York Times Magazine . In the post, O’Rourke argues that the implicit question of the article is this: "Are contemporary women doomed to experience a schism between what their bodies lust for and their minds tell them they want?"

Don’t you just love it when questions and answers are framed in terms of what "women" (as a single corporate entity) experience or desire? The article itself, which appears to be an ...

. . . Can’t it be both/and?

(community member Bethany L. has also posted on this story)

Meghan O’Rourke, over at Slate’s xx factor blog has a post up, The Sexual Fluidity of Women about this ...
By wollstonecraft • 15 years ago

“No Shit” Headline of the Week

The "no shit" headline of the week award goes to National Public Radio for this story :

Study: Tolerance Can Lower Gay Kids’ Suicide Risk

Gay, lesbian and bisexual teens and young adults have one of the highest rates of suicide attempts — and some other health and mental health problems, including substance abuse. A new study suggests that parental acceptance, and even neutrality, with regard to a child’s sexual orientation could have a big impact in reducing this rate.

The study, published in the journal Pediatrics , found that the gay, lesbian and bisexual young adults and teens at the highest risk of attempting suicide and having some other health problems are ones who reported a high ...

The "no shit" headline of the week award goes to National Public Radio for this story :

Study: Tolerance Can Lower Gay Kids’ Suicide Risk

Gay, lesbian and bisexual teens and young adults have one ...
By wollstonecraft • 15 years ago

Christmas (Un)cheer

Not that I expect anything different from Pope Benedict, but c’mon dude. It would be nice if around the Christmas holidays you could show a little more compassion and demonstrate that you’re not completely out of touch with real-world problems. But no.

Gay groups and activists have reacted angrily after Pope Benedict XVI said that mankind* needed to be saved from a destructive blurring of gender. Speaking on Monday, Pope Benedict said that saving humanity from homosexual or transsexual behaviour was as important as protecting the environment.

And a note to the TimesOnline: why oh why have you decided that now is the time to re-hash this tired old story about inter-generational feminist conflict?

“One of the most unappealing things about ...

Not that I expect anything different from Pope Benedict, but c’mon dude. It would be nice if around the Christmas holidays you could show a little more compassion and demonstrate that you’re not completely out of touch ...