Spleenvent Friday: Feminism-as-happiness-destroyer Edition

Novice blamer here. What’s the difference, in practise, between equality and liberation?

Liberation from dudely oppression would improve my happiness level, certainly, but thats a bonus not the mission.

Shades of a striking detail in the utterly, genuinely horrific book ‘The Good Women Of China’ (Xue Xinran). The book is based on her time as, I think , the first radio journalist to address the issue of women’s oppression – not directly, of course, but just by telling the stories of real women who wrote to her in their thousands. While factually true, it’s doing them an injustice to say that they are all stories of horrific abuse, because the book is beautifully written.

ANYWAY, one chapter is about the women of Shouting Hill, a very remote community with no access to electricity, media etc. There are fewer women than men (a truly puzzling anomaly), so that the women are shared by the men and made to marry several at once so that no man forgoes his divine right to get laid. They are also so poor that – again, obviously – there’s no money for sanitary towels etc, and they have to use some kind of local leaf that goes rigid and cuts their inner thighs to bits, so they walk slightly bowleggedly. So far, so typically shocking-yet-not-uncommon. But the author noted that these were the only women she met in all of China that answered ‘yes’ to the question ‘Are you happy?’. Which goes to show that the question is so subjective as to be meaningless.

[Do I get the Twisty Faster award for longest time to get to the point ever? If not, I definitely deserve one for not putting a winky emoticon at the end of that sentence. I am FOR emoticons. There, I said it.]

Mooska, it’s all about expectations. The people who suggest that feminism makes women unhappy (without any evidence, and contrary to all evidence) are actually saying that women should lower their expectations so they can be content with their lot in life. One can increase happiness by improving their lot in life, or by lowering expectations. The Heritage Foundation clearly prefers the latter for women.

What’s actually happening is that more and more women are finding, in feminism, a way to articulate what it is that pisses them off, instead of living with vague feelings of annoyance. The more women that speak up about sexism, the more women feel like they *can* speak up about sexism. The conservative women of the Heritage Foundation confuse correlation with causation.

Let’s see: men own 99% of everything and get 90% of world income. Women do 2/3 of the work and get 10% of the world income. The richest women in the world would be obliterated if the men stood against them: their numbers and riches are too few to be a concern. I suspect the patriarchy is merely toying with us by giving us a crumb here or a cookie there, a pat on the head and condescension. The patriarchy treats women as less than children and merely as the means by which to produce children for their purposes. Women do not exist as human beings in this world of men. Happy? Hah, only hard fought for in a space of my own.

http://www.adweek.com/news/advertising-branding/inspirational-makeup-ads-reveal-rather-conceal-womens-true-selves-156639

“This isn’t about vanity; it’s about freeing oneself from ridicule and living a normal life.”

Because we should be putting on more makeup to spare others our signs of humanity and being fully Beauty2KCompliant! The only time we’re allowed to take off our makeup is when trying to sell other women on the powers of our makeup. Also, sadly, freeing ourselves from ridicule and living a normal life is not really possible when living under the Global Accords.

@Twisty: Ahh, ok. That makes sense, and also sounds fantastic.

It’s not just men of the conservative right-wing that are convinced women were happier under the traditional patriarchy. Men of the libertarian right and the Marxist left, as well as anarchist men (who claim to be neither right nor left), are all equally convinced that feminism makes women unhappy.

The libertarian right claims feminism has made women unhappy because it’s made men retreat into their caves and not want to get married anymore – and when men don’t to get married, women get unhappy.

Marxists hate feminism because the evil capitalist system is making men unhappy, and women can never be happy while men are unhappy. So women need to keep making the sandwiches and pouring the coffee while their working class Che Guevaras plan the revolution. (The fact that no people’s revolution in history has ever made life better for women is of no consequence.)

And anarchists hate feminism, partly because anarchists hate everything, but mainly because feminism’s one true goal is to create as much bureaucracy as possible and that makes anarchist men unhappy. Because about 99% of anarchists are men, it doesn’t really matter what makes anarchist women unhappy.

roesmoker – the male version of that ad campaign is of a heavily tattoo’d man covering it all up and you would never know he was tattoo’d.
Such a different perspective from the young women with vitiligo and acne as he CHOSE his skin! Somehow I don’t think we will be seeing men with vitiligo and acne advertising dermablend any time soon!

I love a good Spleenvent! It’s balm for the soul.

@roesmoker, also this

“Covering themselves allows people to see through their imperfections and see who they are inside.”

That’s some empowerfulizing BS right there. I’m going to go out on a limb and note there’s probably nothing anyone can do with makeup that causes people to see who they are inside. But it is useful for blending in with the herd. Which they kind of imply with the name Derma-Blend.

I just watched Mad Men – Season 1 episode 1. I’ve never watching this show before but a female friend of mine who works in advertising (and gets sexually harassed on the reg told me to watch it). At first I thought it was showcasing how shitty things were for women back in the day… but every scene had a man in the center of it. In the lift a group of dudes sexually harass an uncomfortable young woman, but the camera follows them! The men drive the story. The first episode failed the Bechdel test, and even in the scenes that featured women )(talking to men) they always talked about men (the psychology adviser talks about Freud, the lady-client talks about her daddy [oh ho ho still daddy’s little girl despite playing in the big bad world of corporate advertising]}. The sexually harassed lady in the lift beds the most obnoxious of her harassers when he shows up menacingly drunk on her doorstop – one final humiliation in a series of humiliations – she’s harassed in a lift, she’s harassed in the doorway, she’s told separately by two women to wear a shorter skirt so her boss can perv on her, she’s slut-shamed and roughly pap-smeared by a doctor, she’s rudely rebuffed by her boss – all this harassment took place in the reality of ONE DAY.
I WONDER IF PEGGY IS HAPPY?!

Yes, ew_nc. ABSOLUTELY! Some of the shit that passes for news coverage of women seems so freaking obviously misogynist! And yet if I point it out, I’m just wallowing in victimhood!

And another spleenvent: I’m tired of being told that there’s no more sexism, women have all the privilege, white people are being marginalized, and native/indigenous colonization “happened so long ago oh well it’s a shame but what can you do?” by the IDIOTS around me. Gaaaah.

ew-nc women are such an anomaly in positions of power that you only have to refer to their first names for the whole world to know who they are.

@Lab Rat: Hmmm. Musicians “Sting” and “Bono” come to mind. As well as “Slash,” who I think is also a musician.

@Shelby: good, if unhappy, blaming.

I’m so happy I found my misery at I Blame the Patriarchy!

Not a spleen-vent, but I was wondering if any Blamers have read Laura Bates’s new book, “Everyday Sexism”? The buzz is good, but I’ve not heard from any rad fems about it.

TwissB – yeah, can you believe that shit? The other day, AI’s buddy, Nick Kristoff, Tweeted about working with Pastor Rick Warren to stop sexual violence. I was dumbfounded – a creepy godbag women-in-the-home-only preacher is who you choose to work with on sexual violence?

I follow(ed) another liberal white dude on Twitter, Harold Itzkowitz, until recently. He posted something about Woody Allen being “delightful” in some role, so I replied that I doubt that Dylan Farrow thinks Woody is delightful. I got a snotty response about how neither of us know what really happened and that Allen wasn’t convicted in a court of law. I asked if he required a legal conviction before he believed any abuse victim’s story and got promptly blocked by him. I swear, save me from liberal white dudes just as much from the conservative ones. They’re all cut from the same cloth.

Amnesty International? Is saying that? One more place that’s never getting a dime from me again. What is wrong with these men?

I am so tired of the disingenuous claims that no one should judge Woody Allen because none of us can know what really happened. It reminds me of a story I read recently about a guy who wasn’t sure that the earth is actually 4 billion years old because he “wasn’t there when it happened.” People stoop so stupidly low to defend their indefensible stances. People want to keep watching their Woody Allen movies – so they “don’t know if it really happened”. The earth dude wants to believe that god created the world a few thousand years ago, so he “wasn’t there when it happened”. People claim that sex work isn’t abuse because they are so attached to the idea of hot fuckable women who just LOVE being exploited, and stoop even lower to claim that johns and pimps can really care about the well-being of these women.

I came across a couple of posts recently on the sex-work-is-just-work shtick. Whatshername-Grant and Katha Pollitt’s response. I was blown away by Grant’s article, and not in a good way. She writes about what sounds like a bunch of roommates figuring out the schedule for who’s going to cook dinner and clean the tub. I assume she’s not lying. I assume that’s what her experience really was. I don’t know about webcamming, but for physical sex workers how can she be such a soulless unfeeling dogpile to be unaware that her world is not the experience of 99% of sex workers?

(I want a cookie for not putting the last bit in bold blinking red all-caps.)

And the other thing that boggles my mind. It’s like the fracking studies saying it’s totally safe while people can light a match to the water coming out of their taps. How can anyone who knows how to tie her own shoes not wonder why, if sex work is just work, there aren’t equally many men out there servicing women?

Link please Quixote! I used to really like this male musician called Twin Shadow but then I read an interview with him where he just came off as a total douche, I think it was on pitchfork and he says something along the lines of there’s this gender revolution going on, women are doing prostitution on webcam now so its SAFE!
I’m like dude, you’re really setting the bar low there on a revolution.
If its so safe why do these women have their wishlist gifts delivered to a PO box rather than their house? Why do they use fake names? Why do they hide their identity? Why are there articles online advising these women in how to avoid stalkers?
This is more than just hiding it from mum and dad and your future/current employer.

I wonder if “xTwissB” is a typo that landed my post in Moderation. I am trying to let those interested know that Change dot org and Abolish Prostitution Now offer opportunities to communicate opposition to Amnesty International’s pro-prostitution initiative and support for the paradigm-changing Nordic Model.

Gaa. Too many links? Mention of filtered words? And with Twisty off who knows when it’ll get out of mod. I’ll try just linking to Pollitt’s. A link to Grant’s is at the end of her article.
http://www.thenation.com/article/179147/why-do-so-many-leftists-want-sex-work-be-new-normal

@TwissB AI wants to legalize pay-per-rape? Thanks for letting me know. Should I shoot myself now or wait until I get home? Oh, I am home.

@Veganrampage. Don’t shoot yourself, please. Instead use the Abolish Prostitution Now statement-to-AI website to tell AI to quit demonstrating its contempt for women’s human rights and human dignity. Then go to the smug Avaaz web site that is endorsing the AI proposal and blast their hypocrisy as well. Note the outrageous justification for all this is that removing any legal restraints on pimps and users is done out of tender concern for the safety and welfare of the women and children they abuse! Same urgent call to action goes to Quixote, Lab Rat and all the other radfems out there who recognize how basic prostitution is to maintaining patriarchy. Reminder: Amnesty International defended FGM as a “cultural practice” (just like prostitution ,y’know) until backlash made them give up that idea. Their secondary lie is that decriminalization is needed because it is the police, not the kindly customers, who are responsible for violence against so-called sex workers. When even Der Spiegel publishes a long article about the huge, dehumanizing prostitution business resulting from legalizing prostitution in Germany, it’s clear that abuse is becoming painfully visible. Western world leaders are paying attention, so act now.

For reality of prostitution and a send-up of the “Pretty Woman” myth, see Rachel Moran’s “Paid For.” The sexploitation industry is trashing her for the book and for her activism on behalf of establishing a Nordic Model law in Ireland.

“and yes, I am bitter.” THAT is what I am feeling. When someone says I am too upset about “that stuff” or whatever I can only say that the question should not be why am I upset…but rather why are you not upset by this shit?!?! (of course dudes are the most common offender)

I think that the diffference between equality and liberation is where there is a strong divide at times between what feminism appears to be (to women and men) and what it really should be. Liberation satisfies the privileged as well as the oppressed peoples issues…equality satisfies nearly no one. If only people could better understand the difference and see the benefit perhaps of fighting for liberation there could be some real change…I dare say that in my lifetime I will never see. But hey, a gal can dream about living on Savage Death Island at least! Damn you Patriarchy!