Category: feminism

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"Having Boobs Sucks."

I never expected my quote of the day to come from South Park, but there you go: Having boobs sucks.
It was the single funniest South Park I’ve ever seen. That it happened to completely explain sexism made it even funnier. If I taught Sex Ed in high school, I’d show it to my classes.

Short version: a girl named Bebe, who’s in the the South Park class starts to develop breasts. Boys go wonky and can’t figure out why Bebe seems so cool all of a sudden & they never noticed it before. Other girls start to call her a slut, simultaneously. Bebe hates new attention, asks mom about it, who encourages her to use her breasts as power. Bebe asks mother, “Mom, what’s 6 x 8?” Mom replies, “Honey, 6 and 8 are two different numbers.” (It’s somewhere in here she says, “Having boobs sucks.”) Later, after boys have become neanderthal, beating each other up and mumbling about tatas, Bebe – after failing to convince a plastic surgeon to give her breast reduction surgery – comes to school wearing a box. Boys behave normally, can’t figure out why she doesn’t seem so cool anymore. School guidance counselor explains the power breasts have over male minds. Jealous girl shows up with new implanted breasts; boys mock her in order to regain control over breast mastery of their brains.

(Though the show where some kids from NYC call the South Park kids “queefs” and the SP kids don’t know what it means was pretty hysterical, too. Really, I’m very ashamed of myself.)
* the picture on top is Betty as an SP character, and the other one is me, as same. Make yourself into a SP character at SP Studios.

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Not a Feminist?


The images come from a UK feminist group (out of Cardiff, Wales,to be specific) that’s put them together to raise awareness especially among younger women who sometimes takes the rights a previous generation (or two) have earned for granted.
I’d love a t-shirt (and/or a button) that says this, too:

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I hate you like a sister…

Since I can only use the word companionship so many times, I decided to look up synonyms to vary my word choices.
So as I’m reading the differerent shades of meaning for companionship – like fellowship or hospitality or partnership – I come across this entry for fraternity:

Main Entry: fraternity Part of Speech: noun Definition: brotherhood Synonyms: Greeks, association, camaraderie, circle, clan, club, companionship, company, comradeship, fellowship, frat*, guild, house, kinship, league, letter society, order, organization, set, society, sodality, union

Antonyms: sorority
Source: Roget’s New Millenniumâ„¢ Thesaurus, First Edition (v 1.2.1) Copyright © 2006 by Lexico Publishing Group, LLC. All rights reserved.
* = informal or slang

and it surprised the hell out of me. Sorority is the opposite of fraternity? I’m a firm believer in the existence of mean girls but I think that’s overstating the case for them, no? Surely sororities are also about camaraderie and companionship, fellowship and society.
I’m not sure if I think this is funny or disturbing. Or both.

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Sexism for $200, Alex

Just now on Jeopardy, in the “About the Book” category, the clue was (something like)

Found at the beginning of the book, it can run to several pages, and includes thanks yous to editors, agents, grant-making institutions, and wives.

And people think I’m whining when I say that “author” = “man” in a lot of people’s minds. Saying to yourself, “well that person is just sexist” works sometimes, but it’s the ongoing, subtle, water torture chipping away that really gets to you after a while.

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Ben Barres, My New Hero

So someone is finally using transness as the last tool in the feminist toolbox, and I’m pleased as punch. Ben Barres, a PhD in various types of biology at Stanford, has written a response to Larry Summer’s views on women in science and gotten it published in the journal Nature.
Barres is an FTM who is recounting some of the experiences he’s had as a female scientist, and more recently as a male scientist – just to demonstrate the difference to people who don’t seem to get it:

Once (at MIT), he was told that a boyfriend must have solved a hard math problem that he had answered and that had stumped most men in the class. After he began living as a man in 1997, Barres overheard another scientist say, “Ben Barres gave a great seminar today, but his work is much better than his sister’s work.”

– but not only that, he’s actively working on getting female scientists more awards and grants:

Last year, Barres convinced the National Institutes of Health to change how it chooses talented young scientists to receive its Director’s Pioneer Award, worth $500,000 per year for five years. In 2004, the 64-person selection panel consisted of 60 men — all nine grants went to men. In 2005, the agency increased the number of women on the panel, and six of the 13 grants went to women. Barres said that he has now set his sights on challenging what he perceives as male bias in the lucrative Howard Hughes Investigator program, an elite scientific award that virtually guarantees long-term research funding.

Quite a few major papers have covered his editorial, and if anyone out there has a copy, I’d love to see the full text.
Thank you, Ben Barres!

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They're Not Just Surprised Women Can Count, Either

In response to my post of earlier today, a friend writes:

Just to let you know, black folks get this one all of the time. He is so “well spoken” and “eloquent” as if the assumption that you are black that you cannot be well spoken. Think about it, when was the last time you heard of a white male or female thought of as well spoken? There is a tacit assumption that all white folks, both male and female of a certain class are inherenlty able to use the english language. While it is of course the exception not the rule for black folks.

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Melinda Gates

The good news: there’s an article in today’s NY Times about Melinda Gates, who largely runs the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
The bad news: the tone of this article, which in talking about Ms. Gates’ accomplishments, seems to sound a little like, “look! we found a horse who can count up to 10 with his hoof!”
Why is this acceptable in this day and age? Why is it so astonishing that a woman with an MBA from Duke who married an equal is smart? Or that her husband respects her intelligence and engages her at a very high level?

But to portray Mr. Gates as the analytic strategist and Ms. Gates as the humanizing influence, the nurturing woman, would be a stereotypical distortion of their partnership, former foundation officials said.

Well then why bring it up at all?
And where’s the profile on the woman who just left the Foundation to run CARE instead? Do we only report on smart, successful women who happen to be married to famous guys?
Thanks to Joanne for the article. There’s a reason I can barely stand to read the papers some days.

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You Talkin' To Me?!

For the years I was the most androge/genderqueer (though of course I was often simply called “freak”), I had no idea I was, until I realized that when someone called out “young man, you dropped a glove,” or “homeboy was out pretty late tonight” types of comments, they were talking to me. The odd thing is, I don’t remember any sense of “you’re talking to me?!” when that happened. Maybe the first comment was so obviously directed at me that there was no question, so I wasn’t surprised when it happened after that. I don’t know. It was harder for me to adjust to being called by Betty’s last name – I didn’t change mine – and more than one waiting room receptionist has called it out more than once.
I don’t like having to tell people not to call me “Mrs. Your Husband,” because they treat you like you’re intentionally complicating their lives somehow. But I just had another friend change her name upon getting married, and for the life of me, I can’t understand why anyone would do that. And please don’t repeat that “sometimes it means a lot to the husband” excuse to me; if it’s that important to him, let him change his goddamn name.

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"Man Laws" Ads Force Woman To Hunt Down Ad Execs – Story at 11.

As if Anne Coulter hadn’t pissed me off enough, I ended up seeing coverage of the crap she’s spouting inbetween offensive commericals.
(1) The Tostitos commercial, where three guys are looking out the window eating Tostitos and commenting on the work gang below, and how three guys standing around and one guy working wouldn’t cut it in the corporate world. They pull back the camera to reveal a woman working feverishly on a laptop, who then announces, “I got it” and while the guys are high-fiving, she smiles weakly.
Fucking hysterical.
2) Then there’s the “Man Laws” of Miller Lite, which, I kid you not, has been written up by The New York Times as an attempt to atone for the “catfight” commercial they did a couple of years ago.
Are they shitting me? One of the “Man Laws” is that men only clink bottles toward the bottom, as otherwise their saliva might mix and Burt Reynolds claims that would “qualify as a kiss.” WTF?! How exactly is this supposed to be better than two women wrestling over “tastes great / less filling”?!
I can’t even talk about the “you poke it, you own it” one.
Betty is watching the NBA finals, too, which means I’m going to hear this crap every freaking time a game is on. Did someone say Worst of Both Worlds? Except this is like worst of all worlds, now: Betty en femme, drinking beer, watching sports, while sexist, idiotic commercials play. Woohoo. I’m loving life, really.