Links about sex, gender, race and politics - what else did you expect?!

[greenie_breizh]

I should be working (story of my life, ha) but I'm happy with how much I got done this morning so I'm going to take 10 minutes to write that post I've been meaning to write forever. First, some links! Wonderful!

- Black-Grrl Power: Willow Smith and Sesame Street: an article on black hair, started by the recent Sesame Street video featuring a black girl puppet singing about how awesome her hair is. It's a good article, and a nice reminder that racism takes forms that white people sometimes can't even fathom.

- Why Decriminalizing Sex Work is Good for All Women. It's kind of old news by now, but at the end of September, the Ontario Supreme Court struck down Canada's prostitution law (read news article here). Because it is likely to set a precedent, it's a huge step taken towards decriminalization (not to be mistaken with legalization!) of sex work in Canada. And in these Tea Party ridden times, that's almost unbelievably progressive and fantastic. So I'm just going to gleefully quote: "Whore stigma is one clue that anti-prostitution ideology is about more than just violence against women—it’s specifically about femininity. In this sense, arguments against transactional sex are a defense of both the gender binary and of heterosexuality. This is why men and transgender sex workers are invisible in prostitution debates. This is why changing laws is just the beginning, not the end, of a longtime struggle for basic human rights for sex workers."

- A post by Dan Savage on a manifesto written Episcopal Bishop John Shelby's decision to no longer debate the issue of homosexuality in the church with anyone. More than this decision (which has positive and maybe negative sides), the reason I'm posting this is Bishop Shelby's words on "fair-mindness", which is a discourse currently used by media outlets to justify airing the views of profoundly homophobic parties: "In my personal life, I will no longer listen to televised debates conducted by "fair-minded" channels that seek to give "both sides" of this issue "equal time." I am aware that these stations no longer give equal time to the advocates of treating women as if they are the property of men or to the advocates of reinstating either segregation or slavery, despite the fact that when these evil institutions were coming to an end the Bible was still being quoted frequently on each of these subjects. It is time for the media to announce that there are no longer two sides to the issue of full humanity for gay and lesbian people." This is an incredibly powerful statement, and a serious challenge to the way we tend to think about 'freedom of expression'.

- Two links (1, 2) to galleries of photos from Saturday's Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear in D.C. There are many signs amongst these that I feel ambivalent about, but there are true jewels in there, too, including this one, this one, this one, this one or this one. My all-time favorite, though, is this one which I found on Lemonde.fr (#5): "I masturbate and I vote (but not usually at the same time)." And then of course I have a special fondness for geeky signs. :) I have my ambivalence regarding the Rally (most of which has to do with the way that it idealizes moderation, as if this particular political stance - because it is one, whether people like it or not - didn't have its own problems, and consequently the way that rhetoric around the rally has tended to lump together right-wight extremism and left-wing radicalism, which I find infinitely problematic) but in the midst of all the Tea Party insanity absurdity, it does feel good to see people come out and point out the ridiculousness of people who embrace their willful ignorance and refuse to debate reasonably.

- And to finish, a link shared by shadesofbrixton: a sexual attraction chart. Very neat, not without its problems obviously, but I love the sheer complexity of it. :)

As usual, this has taken me WAY longer than I expected, so I'd better make myself some lunch and go back to the 200 pages I'm supposed to read before 4pm. Haha...ha.

EDIT: I forgot! I went to see The Social Network the other night - I went in being slightly unconvinced but I was truly blown away by the quality of that script. Great, complex characters and super tight dialogue, I did not see those 2 hours go by at all. What did everyone else think?

Comments

[themegs.livejournal.com]

I am bookmarking the Dan Savage and Bishop Shelby links. It fills me with so much naive hope.

I'd found the sexual attraction chart before. I am a total 7. Usually C7. It's just very interesting to see it visualized that way.

[fan-elune.livejournal.com]

These geeky signs are made of so much awesome, and I wish I could hug the hell out of that bishop, seriously. He is made of so, so, so much awesome, and it's about time someone from the Church (a Church?) said all that stuff.

[shiraz_wine]

I loved The Social Network until the very end, when it closes on Zuckerberg waiting for his ex to friend him on Facebook. I thought that cheapened the movie a bit. Even though Zuckerberg definitely did some questionable things to his friends and the Winklevi twins, I was glad that the movie also chose to highlight his genius. Because no matter how people feel about Facebook, no one can deny that it was revolutionary and it has created technology that didn't exist before. The people who bitch about Facebook are the same ones who also bitch about Google, but these are the companies that are changing the technological landscape, for better or worse.

Also, fun fact: the entire opening sequence of Zuckerberg walking through campus to get to his dorm after he leaves the bar is the the Johns Hopkins campus. It was a little disconcerting watching him walk through "Harvard", knowing that I walk through that same campus all the time.

[tanisafan.livejournal.com]

I loved so many of the Rally signs I've seen in the past few days, but I hadn't seen that puppy. Oh, my heart <3.

The more people review The Social Network on my flist, the more I want to go see it *g*. Damn it, now you've gone and made me impatient! :D

[lounalune.livejournal.com]

I find the call for moderation and the lumping together of right and left wing of the "Rally to restore sanity" problematic. However, what I find most problematic is the disablism of the title. I don't know whether there are any mentally ill people in the Tea Party Movement, but what I know is that mental illness is not its cause. Which is why I'd also appreciate you not talking about "Tea Party insanity". Thanks.

[greenie-breizh.livejournal.com]

Fair enough, thanks for pointing it out. I guess to me - and please do educate me, because I don't know as much about disablism as I should - "sanity" or "insanity", as it were, wasn't a mental association with someone who has a mental illness, it's trying to put words on a phenomenon that seems quite literally in-sane to me (see below). But you're right that insanity/mental illness is an association that we make too easily, and we do so at large in society, so I should be more careful about the use of those words. I'd like to hear suggestions for what other word(s) I could have used? I'll be thinking about it. And I'll probably come up with something ridiculously long. :)

I'm trying to figure out what would be better language for a political movement which is again pretty literally in-sane or un-reasonable - aka they take pride in their lack of knowledge and their refusal of evidence, they embrace the impossibility of reasoning with them.

It's difficult because I'm very aware of the assumptions that come with claims of reasonableness and this argument (you're being unreasonable) as been used very effectively to discredit marginalized groups, particular women (but really any minority making claims that challenge the status quo and the way it maintains privilege). How do we talk and criticize this extreme anti-reason, anti-intellectualism movement and point to the problem of their argument being steeped in religion and common sense assumptions about what should be, without echoing the kind of arguments that have been made, or are still being made, against us?

[lounalune.livejournal.com]

The primary meaning of sane is healthy, especially concerning the mind (at least, the OED says so). So the association between insane and mentally ill is not „made all to often“, it is actually founded. Of course, the word insane is now quite pejorative and would not be used in a respectful context to describe mental illness, just like the r-word would not be used to describe a learning disability. That doesn't make it any less disablist. You describe the problems of „unreasonable“, but of course the various words pertaining to mental illness – insane, crazy, hysterical, etc. - are used to dismiss women and minorities in exactly the same way, with their disablism being an added perk.

As to the question of alternatives... well, what you are doing, and of course that is for the sake of economy, and because you know that your readers mostly agree with you, is dismissing the Tea Party without getting into detail. Still, absurd might be a less loaded word than unreasonable. Other adjectives that, in my opinion, fit the Tea Party quite well would be extreme, bigoted, intolerant, ignorant, close-minded. Trying to avoid disablist vocabulary does have the interesting effect that you have to think more precisely about what you mean.

Here are a couple of blog articles on the subject that you might find interesting:
Melissa McEwan's I Write Letters to Jon Stewart
Monica's Jon Stewart Rally to Restore Sanity at the Crozier Center for Women (which was linked at FWD, by the way)

[greenie-breizh.livejournal.com]

The primary meaning of sane is healthy, especially concerning the mind (at least, the OED says so). So the association between insane and mentally ill is not „made all to often“, it is actually founded.

Gotcha. I guess I have an instinctive resistance to understanding sane as "healthy", I find it so problematic, but then (unfortunately, maybe) I don't get to decide how words are used medically...

Thanks for the suggestions of other words! (This day my brain is a little overused, apparently, that I couldn't think of anything except along the lines of intolerant.) I like absurd, it gets more at what I was trying to get at, I think, than some of the other ones. I struggle with ignorant because it suggests these people just need to be educated, and obviously the problem is more complicated than that.

Thanks for the link! I'll have a look. You might like Thirteen Ways to Look at a Rally (http://tigerbeatdown.com/2010/11/01/thirteen-ways-of-looking-at-a-rally/). I can't even remember where I found it, but I thought it raised tons of good points.

[greenie-breizh.livejournal.com]

Out of curiosity, what do you make of the word insane when used in a positive sense, aka "this party was insane" for "this party was awesome" ?

[lounalune.livejournal.com]

I tend not to react to it as viscerally as to negative uses of insane, but it's still annoying to have insane mean over-the-top, exagerated, extreme... Even when it is extremely good. You might want to check out FWD's ableist word profile on crazy, because the issue of the word being used for positive things is raised as well. It's crazy but not insane, but that doesn't make a big difference.
Thanks for you link, by the way, it was nice to read the observations of someone who was there. It mostly confirmed the suspicions I had seen raised on the webs before the event. *sigh*

[greenie-breizh.livejournal.com]

Thank you, I'll check out that link for sure! And that makes sense, about crazy being problematic even when used positively, I was just curious because I couldn't think of another word where this kind of thing happened. Some words get reclaimed, of course, but this is very different.

I'm glad you enjoyed the link - I just thought it was a really good, thoughtful piece and it touched on almost everything, it really resonated with me.