I'm doing better! and feminism.

[gement]

It's come to my attention that I often write to wail and then fail to follow up. Look, I'm following up!

I'm feeling pretty well now. I got to see my mom on her way out to her next paid working vacation in the Carribean. (This is me shaking my fist. I am not in the Carribean.) L and I took her out on the town and went to Babeland.

This prompted me to buy a copy of Cunt, which I first saw on xiadyn's bookshelf yeeeaarrs ago. It's an interesting read; I've never read any of what I've heard called "hot feminism" before. Y'know, the stuff that talks about the patriarchy, how we were once revered as sex goddesses, and how if women ruled the world there would be no war... It was neat actually reading a full book, because it let me see the nuances behind the oversimplifications I just wrote.

My version, in case you've ever been rubbed the wrong way by those generalizations, is this: "Our culture's self-perpetuating abusive power system is currently slanted firmly toward men keeping power. This has less to do with men than it has to do with the structure, but the practical fact is that 95% of the assholes in charge are men, and the other 5% are trying very very hard to act like they are so they'll fit in. This is not about all men; most men aren't in much power either, though there's still often a slant.

"The power structure abuses people and creates sick sick sick cultural effects. These are very easily diagnosed by looking at the symptoms apparent in the ways women are treated. What we're trying to cure here is the cultural mindset that supports the structure. This will benefit men, women, everybody. It's an abuse intervention for our culture. Starting with redressing how women are treated is an easy and obvious way to do it. If we cure enough of the craziness that women are treated well, another effect will probably be fewer international abuses.

"The word 'cunt' has nowhere to go but up. All the wedges that the power structure uses against women revolve around our cunts, and the first step in taking our power back is loving our bodies and reclaiming this word."

I'm glad I read the second edition, which has the hundred-page afterword covering things like trans issues and sexual assault of men. The exclusion of those things in the main book had bothered me, because I didn't know if she consciously thought they weren't important. Turns out she'd just been reading the sorts of feminist literature that leaves it out. She was emphatically grateful for having been corrected and informed.

The strongest thing I took away from this book was realizing how strong a tribal affiliation gender is for some people. I've always identified more strongly with "geek" than "woman," long before trans issues even crossed my radar. Reading the perspective of someone who feels more comfortable in the company of women because they're women was really news to me; I had an intellectual awareness that people felt that way but I couldn't grok it before. For other women who feel that way, this must be a really powerful rallying cry.

I'll stick with rallying for the underlying social change, but it was really interesting.

---

In other news, I led a class discussion on book banning. It was so much fun! Wow it was fun. We worked quite hard at bringing in a selection of books that might bother liberal librarian types:

• Racist tracts (The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam and the Crusades, which has a TERRORIST on the cover was my favorite, but we also had Tim McVeigh's bedside reading and the Protocols of Zion.)


• Creationist textbooks


• Sex books (The Ethical Slut is about polyamoury and Lost Girls is intensely pornographic; we also brought in some of the classic kid sex manuals.)


• Vapidism! Someone found a teen novel about being popular and shunning losers; it was really appalling.


• Dangerous instructions... we failed to bring in real copies! I ended up finding citations online for "Killer Commando Techniques," "We Can Make You Talk," and books on manufacturing meth, but they were not to be found in library collections locally. I asked in the UW Chemistry Library for books on making bombs and drugs. It turns out they were constantly stolen, so she put them in a side room, but then no one was ever using them, so she put them in off-site storage. So they are, for effective purposes, gone unless you want to make a special request and wait several days.

We also brought in some classic challenged kids' books, like My Two Dads' Marriage (whee!), And Tango Makes Three (gay penguins!), Captain Underpants (very unpleasant portrayals of authority figures), and Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark (we're still trying to figure out, but it was one of the top ten challenged books of the 1990s).

It was fun. A lot of fun. I've been accomplishing more things since I wailed, and I was very thoughtfully kidnapped to the zoo on Sunday. I'm getting through it.

Comments

[gement.livejournal.com]

Hugs are welcome! I got the idea for the discussion because I remember when my brain first twitched with wanting to stop an idea. I was in the public library surfing the nonfiction section on gender. I picked up a book with an interesting title, and started flipping through it.

It turned out to be 300 pages explaining that, biologically, men just have more aggression and competitive spirit to work out, so Title 9 is stupid because girls don't need sports the way boys do. Among other things.

I wanted to march up to the librarian and ask why this pack of lies was on the shelf, lying in wait to misinform people. Thenk I said, "Oh. This is how it happens." I've been thinking about it ever since, and I was glad to inflict it on my classmates.