The WOW links this week brought to mind a well-worn feminist trope I’d never been exposed to until my daughter went off to college and undertook to educate her old Ma with some of her assigned readings on “the Male Gaze.”
At the simplest level, this concept posits that half of us are raised and groomed to be constantly aware of ourselves as aesthetic product, as consumable goods. The other half are raised to be the consumers of that product. Still. Today.
Consider, for example, the high heel, now higher than ever. An hour standing in such shoes and the balls of your feet feel like they are raw meat. Twenty years of such shoes and you are heading for significant arthritic impairment. And yet women love their heels. The Carrie Bradshaws of the world (there are a lot of us) line the floors of our closets with multi-colored iterations — birds of paradise trapped to adorn our feet, lengthen our legs and allow us to float through life on our tiptoes: casual ballerinas.
We have so intensely internalized the concept that being visually consumed is appropriate that gross physical discomfort becomes a small price to pay for the luxurious feeling of looking desirable. The ability to function, to move, to self-defend, to concentrate without pain — all tossed aside for that luxury.
Just a tad insane, n’est-ce pas?
Now, on the other hand, consider the Santa Barbara mass killer from a few years back. That stupid, violent man-child was an extreme manifestation of the second half of the equation: the psychological destruction caused by teaching boys that they are the fit and proper consumers of girls. This mindset stunts our male children’s ability to relate fully, responsibly, maturely and emotionally with the female portion of the human race.
A corollary of the consumer mindset is that a boy never, ever, wants to be “like a girl” because the boy is the actor, not the acted-upon; the boy is the buyer, not the consumable good. (Said mindset, one might additionally note, is the foundation for yet another under-appreciated feminist trope: “Rape Culture.” Yes, Virginia, there really is a Rape Culture.)
So, as you peruse the offerings of this week’s War on Women, please contemplate to what degree the acculturated Male Gaze contributes to the dysfunction displayed on both sides. Is this a mindset that needs to be continued as some necessary titillating constituent of our sexual interactions?
What would the world be like without it?
* * * * *
Thanks to Besame, mettle fatigue, noweasels, ramara, Tara the Antisocial Social Worker and Crimson Quillfeather for supplying the grist for this week’s mill.
Women’s Health vs. Appearances
A report from last week from Reuters Health via Medscape informs us that in the west African country of Mauritania, heavier girls are likelier to marry well and sooner, making force-feeding from childhood a common practice.
Rights group Equality Now considers it closely linked to child marriage because it accelerates puberty and makes younger girls appear more womanly. The practice of force feeding is known as “gavage” — a French term used to describe fattening up geese to produce foie gras, a delicacy produced from their enlarged livers.
It can leave young girls with diabetes, hypertension or heart disease for life, said Youma Mohamed, a rights activist....
"Mauritanian men often see large girls and women as more desirable...They take it as a sign of wealth and that a girl will make a good wife," Aminetou Mint Moctar, head of Association des Femmes Chefs de Famille, a local women's rights charity, said in emailed comments.
While drought has left many families short of food to fatten girls, some are turning to "chemical gavage", with girls buying drugs such as corticoids – steroid hormones – to get bigger... "These are pills meant for animals, which can be even more dangerous than eating too much food," said Mint Moctar, whose organization has called for force feeding to be criminalized.
[Gavage] is now less widespread in cities as working women need to be mobile so "they aren't as interested in putting on weight", said Mohamed. "Having a job and earning an income allows them to stand up to their families and make their own decisions."
Teenaged girls starving themselves in the US and being force-fed in Mauritania. As the Cowardly Lion might ask: “Am I a [Wo]man or am I a goose?”
On-line Sexual Harassment of Women in the Public Sphere:
A terrific article from The Conversation considers the abuse women take for daring to offer public opinions or to appear in public discourse.
In 2016, The Guardian analysed abusive comments posted on its articles. Of the “top ten” most abused journalists, eight were women. The other two were black men. Of the top ten least abused, all were men.
Women in the public sphere have also drawn on the hashtag #mencallmethings to highlight the abuse they receive from men for daring to contribute to public discourse or to occupy positions of power. This type of misogynist abuse is so tediously predictable that one researcher has even developed a “rapeglish” tool that automatically generates strings of abuse.
The article identifies narcissism and the ever-popular motivator, misogyny, as prime forces behind this phenomenon. In her concluding paragraphs, the author suggests: “. . . men’s online abuse of women is fundamentally about power and reasserting the dominance of a particular type of masculinity.” ‘Cuz we gotta keep smacking those bitches down.
(If you have a moment and find yourself suffering from a dearth of MRA troll attentions, click the article’s link to this rapeglish tool. But be warned — the randomly generated rape threat it produced for me was a bit too graphic to post here without a strenuous trigger warning.)
The Never-ending Abortion Battle:
And the twitterverse offers us yet another stunning quote — a real gobstopper — from a forced birther:
I don’t know, Representative Lockman. If you have the right to dribble offensive senseless political inanities from your blow hole why shouldn’t I be free to use my superior alacrity to beat your naked pate with a newspaper, repeatedly and without cessation? At least my pursuit of political expression doesn’t result in the loss of anyone’s freedoms.
More Gestation Issues
Pregnant, uninsured, and adrift: a splendid and horrifying article detailing the total lack of tender mercies shown pregnant women prior to Obama-care — a non-system we are now in danger of slipping back into.
We are a country with the highest maternity costs by far and with the highest C-section rates by far, yet the very folks who want to make sure every pregnancy is carried to term are the ones most intent on forcing pregnant women to pay every dime of the $20 to $40K it costs to bring a child into the world.
And while we’re on the subject of forced motherhood . . .
Unionizing Grad Students Look to Reduce the Motherhood Gap
When a third or fewer Harvard academics are women, and 38 percent of those women have no children, the Motherhood Gap is in play. Feministing reports:
A growing body of research suggests that the gender pay gap is, as law professor Julie Suk calls it, “largely a motherhood gap.” Raising kids takes a lot of time and resources, and women put in most of it. Women spend almost double the time on housework and child care than men, and are more likely to take time off from their careers to raise kids.
[Snip.]
Paid leave programs enable women to stay in the workforce, and affordable childcare would make it possible for graduate students, especially women, to parent without taking a step back in their academic careers.
That’s where unions come in. The labor movement has long fought for workplace policies, like paid family leave and fair scheduling, that make it possible for workers to have a family without being penalized by their bosses. Graduate students have made family policy a key part of their campaigns, and they’re getting results.
When even the best educated among us are still trying to cope with the perceptions that leave women with the lioness’s share of work about the house, how long will it take for the Motherhood Gap to be closed across the rest of the employment landscape?
The #MeToo “What About the Menz?” Backlash, Part I
Just a dang minute there, Missies. Though 80 percent of surveyed women claim they have been sexually harassed, the American public just isn’t buying it. As reported in Romper, 31 percent think false claims of harassment are a MAJOR problem, while another 45 percent think it is a minor problem, and 51percent fret that this whole #MeToo thing is going to prove challenging for working men who, I guess it is expected, just won’t be able to figure out how not to sexually harass their female co-workers.
The questions that boggle the mind and demand an answer: Why do so many of us think men are incapable of treating female co-workers the same as they treat male co-workers? And why is the jeopardy the men face — due to their lamentable inability to treat women professionally — the problem we should be focusing on?
And “What About the Menz” Part II
Continuing on the vein of hapless harassers, why the sudden spate of articles on the comeback aspirations of some of our former favorite celebrities?
Jezebel informs us the Hollywood Reporter is doing its best to suggest that it’s time to consider redemption for a number of these sexual miscreants — including Louis C.K., Charlie Rose and even Kevin Spacey — with writer Stuart Miller nudging forward the opinion that some offenders are less offensive than others:
The consensus is that while [C.K.’s] behavior was clearly wrong it was not at the level of a Harvey Weinstein, James Toback or Bill Cosby. Comics and club owners alike agree with Gilbert Gottfried’s opinion that “there are different levels of misbehavior” and the public understands the difference.
Meanwhile, Vanity Fair reports on Matt Lauer’s rumblings of a “public comeback.”
How about instead we get articles about the women they harassed, and what's being done to repair THEIR careers?
Meanwhile in the #MeToo Movement
And check out Time’s piece on Burke too.
A Lot of Young Men “Get It”; Too Many Old Ones Don’t
Young men often fill this old broad with hope.
Take, for example, Jade Perry’s friend, Max Buzone. When disapproving high school officials told Jade to change out of her mini-skirt or else, she traded clothes with Max.
Jade’s mother, Amy Lubchansky, reports that no one scolded Max about his skirt being too short because, as we all know, it is only the female leg that is distracting.
Male legs are not for consumption.
(Although, it should be mentioned, some of the FaceBook comments below the fold indicated their female writers found Max’s legs pretty distracting.)
Can we put that Male Gaze idea back up on the blackboard? Why exactly are Jade’s legs verboten but Max’s legs a matter of perfect indifference?
Why do our young men need to be protected from being attention-snared by bra straps or bare midriffs or too much leg?
Is this stuff hardwired into the male brain? Or do we have some hope that Max’s generation will have a different kind of gaze, and that Jade’s generation will not have to exist as consumable goods?
Undercutting Sex Traffickers In South India
South India's 'Tollywood' Film Industry is taking the fight to sex traffickers who use the Industry to lure young women into sex slavery.
South India's popular Telugu film industry - known as Tollywood - has produced six short anti-trafficking films in what is described as a first from an industry often used by traffickers to trap aspiring actresses in brothels.
Tollywood churns out more films than its globally popular counterpart Bollywood and has major influence in the Telugu-speaking states of Telangana and Andhra Pradesh.
The six films - dramas designed to deter young men from buying sex - were made by some of Tollywood's biggest production houses as part of a 'Stop Demand' initiative by anti-trafficking charity Prajwala and the U.S. Consulate General in Hyderabad.
"Nearly 30 percent of the girls trafficked are lured by opportunities to model or act in films," said Sunitha Krishnan, founder of Prajwala.
"(Roping in) Tollywood is important. They are opinion makers...”
Horrifying statistics reported in the article: some 200,000 women and children are coerced into prostitution every year, and of the estimated 20,000,000 sex workers in India, 80 percent are believed to have been pulled in by threats or force.
The producers hope that awareness of this sexual slavery will persuade young men to stop buying sex.
Giving Women Taking a Chance at Bat
And 149 people are alive this week because Tammie Jo Shults would not be stopped from becoming one of the Navy’s first female fighter pilots.
Heavy.com assembled the facts about Nerves-of-steel Shults. In 1979, when Shults tried to attend aviation career day at her high school, she wasn’t allowed to go because they didn’t accept girls. In 1982, she discovered the Air Force had admitted a woman to become a pilot, so she applied after graduation from college. The Air Force wouldn’t take her, but the Navy did. She was one of the first female fighter pilots in the Navy’s history, and the first woman to fly F-18s. She later became an instructor.
Says Shultz of her time in the Navy: “In AOCS (Aviation Officer Candidate School), if you’re a woman (or different in any way), you’re a high profile; you’re under more scrutiny,” and chances for women to gain knowledge from other aviators were limited. “In VAQ-34 (the Tactical Electronic Warfare Squadron), gender doesn’t matter, there’s no adgvantage or disadvantage. Which proves my point – if there’s a good mix of gender, it ceases to be an issue.”
And since we are mulling over the notion of women with wings —
First Man Person on Mars
A columnist for the Guardian asks: Wouldn’t it be fitting and fair that the first person to step onto that manliest of all manly planets — Mars — is a woman astronaut? Share the glory with other half of humanity?
Then maybe at long last we can retire that fatuous “truism” that men are from Mars, blah blah blah.
Finally, an action item from UltraViolet:
Subject: Don't let Jeff Sessions block survivors from getting asylum
Trump's attorney general, Jeff Sessions, wants to reverse a longstanding practice of granting asylum to refugees running from domestic and sexual violence.
If Sessions doesn't get any pushback, he would be sending thousands of women back to potentially violent deaths. Women like "L.C.," who fled Honduras with her daughter after 16 years of being beaten and raped by her husband, and after being threatened with kidnapping by a powerful gang.
But Sessions does not have the final say. This administration has repeatedly walked back decisions that have caused national outrage--it has rescinded cabinet nominees and unpopular rule changes repeatedly. If a huge outcry breaks out in response to this racist, sexist, and plainly violent plan to turn away domestic and sexual violence survivors, we can stop this administration from going through with it.
Will you add your name to protect survivors who need asylum?
https://act.weareultraviolet.org/...
Thank you!