My tie-collecting, fiestaware-buying brother in law never answered my questions when I was doing research, but finally now, in public, he’s addressed my having asked them, even if he still hasn’t actually answered them.
And then started thinking. Interesting where he took relatively simple questions about marriage & relationships & gender roles, no? To Paul the Sexist Apostle and the Ephesians.
(He made it into the book anyway.)
Screwed-up His Courage
Ah, another inspired headline from The Onion: Area Man Finally Works Up Courage To Sexually Harass Secretary
After having nearly resigned himself to another seven years of unspoken requests for sexual favors, Winters seized an opportunity to express his feelings Monday morning, offering to help Davis “get to the important stuff” as she bent over a file cabinet. Later, as further proof of his commitment, Winters suggested that he and Davis discuss a possible promotion at his beach house over the weekend.
(Thanks to Ronnie Rho for the RSS.)
See Jane Sand. See Jane Paint. Paint, Jane, Paint!
Two enterprising women named Jane are gearing their home self-improvement business to – other women. I’m pretty sure there isn’t much more we need guys around for after this. I’m’ sure we’ll pick up drinking beer and burping along the way.
I’m kidding, kidding. But with the way some women seem to see guys as more like impregnators/mortgage payers, I’m not that far off I don’t think. It’s just a slippery slope to Amazon culture.
Not Barbie, Skipper
Lisa Hix wrote a nice rant about having an A cup for the SF Chronicle in response to hearing a show where a plastic surgeon waxed enthusiastically about implants. She points out that there are in fact health risks (including possibilities of hematoma, infection, deformity, toxic shock syndrome, plus the usual risks of anesthesia, the chance of losing sensation, decreasing the likeliness of breast cancer detection or the inability to nurse) but moreso points out that having an A cup is having a breast, and tires of the kind of talk that somehow equates A cups with not having breasts at all.
As a former A cup, I can tesitfy that you do in fact have breasts when you have A cups. I really enjoyed having A cups. I miss them.
I’ve found my recent re-sizing something to think about. For starters, I’ve been finding it harder to find nice bras now that i’m a D cup, much as I had a hard time finding ones when I was an A cup. The difference is that with a D, you absolutely do not want to compromise on support – in fact, you can’t. But I also had a moment of revelation while reading the beginning of Gerrie Lim’s book about the porn industry, which had more than one reference to pendulous D cups within 10 pages, and so caused me to think, “Huh, who knew? I’ve got pornstar-sized breasts now,” but the idea didn’t thrill me; I took it more like I would someone telling me I had the perfect size foot for shoe fetishists. Basically, I don’t care, because they don’t do me any good. It might have mattered some when I was 25 and single, but I’m not sure I would have cared then, either. That’s not to say I don’t enjoy them; I do. But I’d enjoy them more if I could take them off when I want to go to the hardware store or the grocery or to do other errands, all those times when I don’t want to be looked at. Not wanting your breasts stared at by every guy on the streets is exactly why you can’t sacrifice support at this size: if you do, they bounce more, which is not really what you want unless – ba rum bump! – you’re a porn star.
I find myself wearing a sports bra most days now, actually. Mostly I’ve realized that I’m glad I don’t get to choose, since both sizes have pros and cons, and the only real advantage resides in being one of those grow-up dolls that enabled me to change sizes with a quick, full rotation of one arm.
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.
Victor/Victoria
Tonight I finished my last revision of Chapter 7, and coincidentally Victor/Victoria was on PBS, and I happened to catch it right from the beginning. People will be surprised to hear that I’ve never seen it before. (Though no-one should be, I keep saying that I just don’t like movies, and I think I saw Chariots of Fire that year instead, because I really do see only a few a year.)
I can see how utterly shocking this movie must have seemed in 1982 when it was released. But I can’t see Julie Andrews passing at all; I mean she’s Julie Andrews! The hills are alive and all that.
But the romantic subplot (or is that the main plot?) with James Garner is – well, dumb. But at least it’s not one long homophobic joke… except it is. There’s also just something creepy about the way it’s all so ‘demimonde packaged for the suburbs’ too, which is beginning to tire me. The scenes of them trying to navigate public spaces as a gay couple are hurting my brain.
“I guess the problem is that we’re not really two guys.” UGH. My crazy bet is that she’s going to choose to drop the act and become properly gendered so they can be together. Am I right? (It’s not over yet, still on while I’m typing.)
And why a Polish count? Are Polish folks just considered genderqueer or something? I’m starting to think so. I have very little idea as to how this movie was received, and I’m sure most of you have seen it, and I’d love to hear your thoughts, initial reactions, etc.
Boys' Dolls
According to this week’s Harper’s Weekly Review,
British scientists found that playing with dolls can help improve Alzheimer’s patients’ communication abilities.
So maybe we should let the boys have a shot at them, too, no?
Jeff & Esther
I mentioned Esther Williams to a wife of a crossdresser not long ago and she looked at me blankly – silly me, assuming everyone knows the story of the million-dollar mermaid and her crossdressing movie star boyfriend.
“Jeff Chandler was standing in the middle of the bedroom in a red wig, a flowered chiffon dress, expensive high-heeled shoes and lots of makeup,”
she said about her near-husband, Jeff Chandler, Hollywood hunk.
Here’s a great review that talks about the genderedness of it all that originally appeared in Salon, and I find it interesting the way he ties in her LSD trip, the recognition of her own animus, and how her acid-induced knowledge of her male self makes a crossdressed husband especially horrifying.
I wonder if the acid is required, since otherwise I fall into the same category of being aware of my animus, except I didn’t scream. Not even once.
No Sissy Stuff
I was just watching a documentary about Gene Kelly, who my mom always loved & who I came to love watching as well, and they mentioned that in 1958 he did a TV show called Dancing: A Man’s Game which basically showed how the movements and timing of sports were much the same as the movements and timing of dancing.
Interestingly, Kelly wanted to be a Pittsburgh Pirate, and only accidentally (or incidentally) became the dancer and movie star he was.
Still, the documentary asserted that Kelly is the one who re-defined dance to include not only athleticism but a blue-collar masculinity, evidence by his own quote:
I didn’t want to move or act like a rich man. I wanted to dance in a pair of jeans. I wanted to dance like the man in the streets.
Betty did a part a long time ago where he had to leap up on a desk and sing wearing a pair of jeans; his character was a union organizer, and it was the actual musical called The Cradle Will Rock (that the Tim Robbins movie is about). & Yes, it was probably my favorite part he ever did (though in a three-way tie with Algernon and Macheath).
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!