Does the legacy of Riot Grrrl live on in your District of Columbia? Tell it to Sara Marcus and Cat Tyc, currently planning a video installation on riot grrrl called "Girls to the Front" to accompany Marcus' upcoming book of the same name. Marcus and Tyc are looking for people of all genders and ages whose lives have been changed by riot grrrl and "punk-rock feminism." "The point isn’t to wax nostalgic," they write. "It’s to acknowledge and celebrate the countless ways that the legacy of Riot Grrrl is still very much alive in all of our lives." Here's how to contribute a video to the project:

It doesn’t have to be anything fancy. If you don’t have access to a real camera, you can shoot it on a cell phone or a laptop.* And short: 1–3 minutes is plenty.

In the video, tell us some or all of these four things:

1. Who are you?

2. Show us your life. (This means whatever’s important to you: art, work, family, home . . . anything.)

3. How did you first hear of Riot Grrrl (or punk feminism, or whatever)?

4. How has it shaped who you are today?

Camera tips:

Feel free to use different shots and angles for different questions. Make sure you’re well lit—natural light (like sitting by a window or outside) is always best—and make sure there’s minimal background noise. Have someone else hold the camera if possible, so you can just concentrate on telling your story.

*If you don’t have any way to shoot video, just send us a photo of yourself that portrays something important about you, and email us your answers to the questions. We’ll fit you in.

Technical stuff about how to send the video to us:

Don’t worry about editing the video before you send it to us, unless you really, really want to, because we’ll be editing it on our end.

Before sending, you need to export the file into a Quicktime file. In iMovie, you can do this from Share – Export using Quicktime. In Final Cut, you Export – Using Quicktime Conversion. A box will pop up and you should click options to adjust the codecs to these specs: H.264 video setting at 640x480 pixels. You can find where to adjust these settings in the same box that asks to name the file & where you want to save it to under Options.

If you don't have Final Cut or iMovie, you can also just record your testimonial on your web cam (using Photo Booth on a Mac, or your computer’s built-in camera software on a PC—look in the Programs list for something that looks like the name of a camera, for instance on my Dell it’s under “Dell Webcam”) and upload it directly.

After it’s done, please send to girlstothefront@gmail.com via YouSendIt (www.yousendit.com) which is a free and easy way to send files.

You can find this call online, and pass it around, by going to the book’s Facebook page: http://bit.ly/cLSPku.

Last month, Wheelock College University of Pennsylvania professor Mary Anne Layden hit Capitol Hill to explain how pornography "robs men of their masculinity, of their psychological health, of their self-respect, of their greatness . . . of themselves." Now, Layden is back to explain the effects of pornography use among women: It gets them raped.

From a Washington Times story on the new trend of pornography "addiction" among women:

"The more pornography women use, the more likely they are to be victims of non-consensual sex," said Mary Anne Layden, professor of sociology and women's studies at Wheelock College in Boston. "The earlier the male starts using pornography, the more likely they are to be the perpetrators of non-consensual sex."

The story never mentions that rape thing again. It doesn't offer up any evidence or statistics in its defense. (In fact, it never uses the word "rape"—just the skeezy "non-consensual sex"). In a response, psychologist David J. Ley attempts to figure this all out:

This is a staggering statement, and a frightening insight into the rebirth of the "blame the victim" argument against rape. . . So a female victim testifying her assailant is going to be asked about that time she downloaded a dirty movie to watch? And that has what to do with the immoral, narcissistic, selfish and angry acts of the man who violated her rights? The only way this has any kernel of truth is that highly sexual women are more likely to report use of pornography. Highly sexual women are also likely to report greater numbers of partners, and somewhat higher risk of an incident of sexual abuse or rape, possibly as a result of situations of date rape. But it's not the pornography, and it's not even the women's sexuality. It's the act of person who violates the rights of another.

Layden's assertion is both victim-blaming and perpetrator-excusing. Pretending that porn is responsible for creating rape victims and perpetrators—that it robs men of "themselves" and robs women of consent—shifts the blame for sexual assault away from rapists (the few) and on to every man and woman who watches porn (the many). The implication is that the perpetrator and the victim deserve each other.

And since almost every man admits to looking at porn—and only some women admit to the same—the burden for avoiding "bad" behavior falls largely onto women. Notice how, in Layden's statement, women are faulted for the quantity of porn they consume, whereas men are faulted for the age at which they begin watching porn. Presumably, a woman can control the amount of porn she consumes, but a man can't control the fact that he was initially exposed to pornography at a young age.

Under Layden's model, all men are potential rapists—but some women are good enough to resist making themselves into rape victims.

* Porn performer Aurora Snow is also filing updates from the Stagliano obscenity trial. Her take: The prosecution hates fun:

Opening arguments began yesterday, and as a performer I was stunned by the prosecution’s description of what made the material obscene. From my point of view, the prosecution’s lack of contact and knowledge of what we do in adult entertainment seemed laughable. Oh no, there are close-up shots of pussy? Oh, the horror! If this were not such a serious matter, it would be a pure farce of cardboard bad guys picking on others for having more fun than them in life.

* Feminist running tally: Score one for Playboy, Chloe Angyal says.

* Remember that "conscience rule" the Bush administration squeezed through in its lame-duck period, allowing workers in federally-funded facilities to refuse to provide services they found morally objectionable? Yeah, Megan Carpentier noticed that Obama never repealed that.

* Silvana at Tiger Beatdown on the fun and frivolity of fashion! Unless you're fat:

For fat women, clothes are supposed to be about making people forget that you’re fat. “Hiding” “flaws.” “Smoothing out” your “shape” (i.e. your fat). “Emphasizing” your “assets” (at least you have big boobs, fatty). “Defining” your waist (because, hey, at least you can make one part of you look smaller than the other parts). It’s all code for: Don’t look fat. The advice isn’t too different for thin or average women. You also want—surprise, surprise!—to not look fat. And for a long, long time, I bought into that. I bought the idea that my body wasn’t acceptable and I had to use clothing as best I could to try to make it acceptable.

* The D.C. Attorney General's Office has dropped all charges against Lt. Dan Choi in relation to his "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" protests outside the White House last Spring.

Photo via walid.hassenein, Creative Commons Attribution License 2.0

Yesterday, I appeared on WNYC's "Soundcheck Smackdown" to debate the merits of the floundering 2010 Lilith Fair tour. I took the "it kinda sucks!" position; Marisa Meltzer presented the opposite viewpoint. I'm a big fan of Meltzer's book, Girl Power: The Nineties Revolution In Music, so it was fun. Bonus: at the end of the segment, Meltzer calls out a dude listener for his "patriarchal" dismissal of our youth. The online comments from listeners are interesting, too: Everything from "is there something a little creepy about women of necessity having a commonality, simply based on gender determinism?" to "Younger women have a tendency to be entirely embarrassed of anything explicitly labeled 'feminist' or 'women only' . . . that territory [is] just shy of absolute taboo." Listen here.

According to the New York Times, the District of Columbia has the lowest pay gap between male and female workers in the country, compared to the 50 states. From NYT: "in the District of Columbia, the median weekly wage of full-time women workers is 96.5 percent of that for their male counterparts, far and away the most parity in the country." The U.S. average is 80.2 percent; Louisiana women are trailing the rest of the country, making only 65 percent of men's wages. Some other local stats: Virginia women make 80.4 percent of what Virginia men do; Maryland women make 87.3 percent. Of course, in this contest, we're a tiny urban area competing with states filled with urban, suburban, and rural areas—so this is likely more a triumph for cities than it is for the District.

Photo via George Eastman House

* Scientific American's Jesse Bering debunks feminism:

The IAT was designed to assess people’s “hidden” beliefs about minority groups. If you ask folks in, say, a straightforward interview format, most will tend to report explicitly that they’re not racist, or that they don’t think obese people are stupid or that those with handicaps are dull. Obviously such views aren’t exactly okay to say aloud or to even acknowledge having as a fleeting thought. But the IAT presumably flushes out people’s unconscious (implicit) negative associations with such social outliers.

Although administration of the IAT varies, the basic idea is this. Participants see randomized combinations of negative and positive words at the top right and left corners of a computer screen (for example, in one trial, they might see “lazy” on the left versus “hard-working” on the right). Then words representing different social targets appear in the middle of the screen (for instance, “black” in one trial and “white” in the next) and participants are asked to rapidly decide—by pressing the e key for the left side or the i key for the right—which of the two words at the top of the screen it belongs with. In some cases, the participants are instructed to match the social target with the stereotypical concept; in other cases, they’re told to associate the social target with the non-stereotypical concept.

So implicit bias is said to be evidenced by faster reaction times when stereotype-consistent words are paired with a marginalized social group (e.g., black-lazy) relative to other groups (e.g., white-lazy), and slower reaction times to pairings of positive words with the marginalized group (e.g., black-intelligent) relative to the comparison group (e.g., white-intelligent). The idea is that, when asked to match positive concepts to words describing marginalized outgroup members, participants’ latency of response captures a dragging of their cognitive heels because they’re working against the grain of their inner bigot.

So guess what happened in Jenen’s IAT study when college-aged men and women were asked to match the category “feminist” with either positive or negative words? The most pertinent findings were that the participants were significantly slower to associate positive words (“happy,” “joy,” “peace,” “wonderful”) with the feminist than they were negative words (“awful,” “evil,” “nasty,” “terrible”).

Bering takes these results to mean that the feminist movement has been hijacked by "the most obnoxious, peevish and humorless feminists," turning it into "a term loaded with negative stereotypes of the kind exemplified by [the] sour and overly vigilant, accusatory, men-are-brutes outlook on life."

So, can we also use the IAT results to conveniently ignore ingrained racism and instead accuse lazy people of "hijacking" the black community? Or does the poor view of the feminist movement instead reflect the work of people like Bering, who are invested in framing feminism exclusively in negative terms?

* The Washington Blade's abandoned National Press Club newsroom remains abandoned.

* On acronyms:  Michelle Rhee chooses the term "LGBTQ" for her Blade op-ed.

* SAFER Campus covers the latest in cutesy nicknames for sexual assailants: In L.A., serial rapist and murderer is known as "The Grim Sleeper."

* Seed Magazine reviews Sex at Dawn, a husband-and-wife team's take-down of human monogamy:

When we think of the first swinger parties most of us imagine 1970s counter-culture, we don’t picture Top Gun fighter pilots in World War II. Yet, according to researchers Joan and Dwight Dixon, it was on military bases that “partner swapping” first originated in the United States. As the group with the highest casualty rate during the war, these elite pilots and their wives “shared each other as a kind of tribal bonding ritual” and had an unspoken agreement to care for one another if a woman’s husband didn’t make it back home. Like the sexy apes known as bonobos, this kind of open sexuality served a social function that provided a way to relieve stress and form long-lasting bonds.

Photo via Nationaal Archief

* Nancy Schwartzman talks about having her rape debated on camera for a potential new "feminist" series:

I was told that the 30 second trailer of my film would be used to “kick off” the conversation and we’d go around one by one, with some guidance from the moderator, and discuss the multidimensional and complicated topic of rape. We’d use smart, snarky analysis of a real—not imagined, not whined about, not exaggerated, not falsely claimed—problem.

Instead, egged on by the producer, participants—not the moderators—were encouraged to take what they saw in the trailer and the one sentence synopsis of my rape (she consented to vaginal sex, and then was raped anally) and debate. It didn’t occur to me that a producer would structure a conversation around my film when no one had seen it, nor was it ever articulated that my body parts and my rape would be at the center of this debate.

* Want more on Olivia Munn and What She All Means? Sady's got it.

* BuzzFeed unearths Rachel Maddow's yearbook photo, where she appears with long blond hair, pearls, and no glasses. Maddow can now rest easy knowing that some dude on the Internet would "tap that!"

* D.C. attorney Bruce Stovell is suing LeBron James and James' mother Gloria "seeking to prove that he is the father" of the NBA player. Stovell claims he impregnated Gloria at a D.C. bar in 1984, then urged her to ensure that the fetus "plays basketball." He's also looking for $4 million in damages.

* New vaginal gel may help combat HIV.

* NOM's hetero-happy summer bus tour will be shadowed by counter-events organized by Freedom to Marry. The marriage rights group will  respectfully disagree with NOM's "one man, one woman" message at every stop the NOM bus makes. Unfortunately, no actual gay bus will be stalking NOM's anti-gay bus across the highways of this great nation.

*  Fugitivus [via Figleaf] on rape victims who drop charges, refuse to participate with investigations, and decline to testify:

I am sure that in this wide, wide world of people, there are rape victims out there who truly want nothing more than for their rapists to go free without punishment, without retribution, without justice. That’s their right. But I don’t think I’ve actually heard any of them. Instead, what I hear is, “I just want this whole thing dropped. I don’t want it prosecuted. Every time this gets brought up I get harassed.” Or, “I don’t want this prosecuted. I don’t want to be called a slut in court.” Or, “I don’t want this prosecuted. I could never win, I don’t have the money, and nobody would believe me.” Or, “I don’t want this prosecuted. He would kill me. His friends would come after me.” Or, “I don’t want this prosecuted. I can’t stand to see him every day in court.”

None of those statements can be reasonably boiled down to, “Rape victim doesn’t want her rapist to come to justice.” They can be reasonably boiled down to, “Rape victim suspects pursuit of justice will feel worse than getting raped did.”

I think it can also take forms like these: "I don't want this prosecuted. It's not something to ruin another person's life over." Or: "I don't want this prosecuted. He says it didn't happen that way, and maybe it didn't." Or: "I don't want this prosecuted. I'm not worth all of this attention."

* Olivia Munn talks to Salon about posing for Playboy (among other things):

I don't find myself to be the kind of person who is easily swayed. I could see what this guy was doing. But if I pose for Maxim, I know that if my nipple accidentally slips out, they can't publish that. With Playboy it's different. I understand that the criticism is: "Yeah, but she posed for it anyway." Well, that's like saying, "Oh, you were asking for it cause you dressed a certain way."

* Georgetown Girl collects the views of women who say "I'm not a feminist, but . . ."

* Jamelle Bouie on "acting white":

as a nerdy black kid who was accused of "acting white" on a fairly regular basis, I feel confident saying that the charge had everything to do with cultural capital, and little to do with academics. If you dressed like other black kids, had the same interests as other black kids, and lived in the same neighborhoods as the other black kids, then you were accepted into the tribe. If you didn't, you weren't. In my experience, the "acting white" charge was reserved for black kids, academically successful or otherwise, who didn't fit in with the main crowd. In other words, this wasn't some unique black pathology against academic achievement; it was your standard bullying and exclusion, but with a racial tinge.

Relevant to this blog's conversations on geek feminism and male-dominated nerddom: Restructure! argues that misogyny in geek spaces is a product of the construction of geek masculinity, which sees itself as a necessarily male rival to the Alpha male "jock" identity:

Most male geeks believe that they are subverting traditional masculinity by reclaiming and self-identifying with the term “geek”. For most male geeks, geek identity is defined partly as a rejection of the “jock” identity. According to the traditional high school male social hierarchy, jocks are high-status males and male geeks are low-status males; jocks are alpha males and male geeks are beta males; jocks are masculine and male geeks are “effeminate." Thus, when a man proudly self-identifies as a “geek” in response, what he is doing is redefining what it is to be a man, redefining geek identity as masculine.

Typical male geeks argue that to be a geek is to be masculine by interpreting the scientific, mathematical, and technological achievements of overwhelmingly male persons as definitive proof that science, math, and technology are inherently male and define maleness. Such male geeks typically argue that there are innate differences between male and female brains that make success in science, math, and technology exclusive to men. Thus, arguments and studies that suggest otherwise are perceived as a direct attack on the masculinity and male identity of male geeks. According this male geek worldview, if women are equally capable in science, math, and technology, then male geeks lose their claim on masculinity and become low-status, beta, and “effeminate” males once again, because there would be nothing left to separate male geeks from women. Thus, male geeks—much more than non-geek men—tend to be emotionally and socially invested in maintaining the idea women’s brains are hardwired against understanding science, math, and technology to the same extent as men.

The piece makes me curious about the relative experiences of women in geek vs. jock cultures. Does the inherent gender-segregation of the jock's world (at least in the traditional athletic sense) preclude arguments over who should be let into the club, or merely exacerbate disputes over the natural hard-wiring of women and men?

Photo via katybate, Creative Commons Attribution License 2.0

* At Slate, Emily Gould argues that feminist blogs are motivated by jealousy:

It's a prime example of the feminist blogosphere's tendency to tap into the market force of what I've come to think of as "outrage world"—the regularly occurring firestorms stirred up on mainstream, for-profit, woman-targeted blogs like Jezebel and also, to a lesser degree, Slate's own XX Factor and Salon's Broadsheet. They're ignited by writers who are pushing readers to feel what the writers claim is righteously indignant rage but which is actually just petty jealousy, cleverly marketed as feminism. . . . The vibe is less sisterhood-is-powerful than middle-school clique in-fight, with anyone who dares to step outside of chalk-drawn lines delimiting what's "empowering" and "anti-feminist" inevitably getting flamed and shamed to bits. Paradoxically, in the midst of all the deeply felt concern about women's sexual and professional freedom to look and be however they want, it's considered de rigueur to criticize anyone, like [Olivia] Munn, who dares to seem to want to sexually attract men.

Really interesting points here, except for that "petty jealousy" part, where Gould's piece descends into misogyny. Poorly-researched Internet link-bait is poorly-researched Internet link-bait—and I've yet to find a comments section anywhere that's teeming with "progressive thought and rational discourse"—but apparently only "jealousy" is to blame when women are behind this. Gould doesn't offer any evidence to support the jealous theory, so perhaps she is just jealous? She is a woman writing linkbait about other women on the Internet!

* The DC Trans Coalition announces the formation of the National Coalition of State-Level Transgender Organizations, which will build a nationwide grassroots network on trans issues.

* Zack Rosen of The New Gay reminds bachelorette parties at gay bars: "I'm a person first, sodomite later":

Three nights ago I was walking down DC’s U Street, the east end of which holds several gay bars, with a couple male friends of mine. Granted many of us were wearing tank tops but I don’t think that precludes kind, humane treatment. Some girls who I don’t think were lesbians were stalled drunkenly at the alley next to Nellies, checking their phones and twiddling their Mardi Gras necklaces, when one decided to annoy the everloving crap out of me. ARE YOU GUYS GOING TO NELLIES? She screamed, in a volume usually reserved for running alongside the train taking your loved one to the Korean War. I mumbled back that no, I was going to Town, a megaclub down the street. YOU’RE SO CRAZY!!!!! she screamed back, as if singing “What a Man” to a deaf person.

I hate when people say “you’re so crazy.”

* Fugitivus gives some advice on suddenly finding you're a feminist:

A reader recently emailed me asking for some advice. She’s having her feminist “click” moment, and now finds that she is incompatible with almost everybody around her. Suddenly, the presence of rape apologism, racist jokes, sexist sneering, and other such Socialization Aids is inescapably fucking gross instead of invisibly malforming. She finds she can’t talk to anybody without finding out they believe something that is offensive, oppressive, and/or horrifyingly inhumane. She asked me, to briefly summarize: What the fuck do I do now?

* At Yes Means Yes!, Thomas MacAulay Millar on safewords and consent in BDSM, via Clarisse Thorn:

Some folks may have come across the term “consensual nonconsent.” It’s one of those terms with multiple meanings. Some people use it to describe any situation where the bottom is saying “no, don’t” but has not yet safeworded — a usage I find less than useful. Others use it to describe roleplays of nonconsensual situations. The last common usage, though, is that which I like to describe using Hunter S. Thompson’s phrase, “buy the ticket, take the ride.” It means that the bottom consents to be in a situation I’ve just described, where the top decides if the bottom needs to stop, often but not always around specific activities, and usually (wisely) heavily negotiated.

Photo via George Eastman House

In response to my break-down of all the ways that Playboy tried to get a look at Olivia Munn's areola, Zelda Lily's Sarah Arboleda submits, instead, that Munn is perhaps just a lying, bitchy idiot with a bad publicist who regularly "flaunts" her "female sexuality" and thus deserves only our mockery. Arboleda:

Let’s say Playboy called you up and asked you to be their cover model. Would you be shocked and disgusted to learn that they expect you to be naked in the pages of a magazine that has specialized in nude photos for over fifty years? Really? I’m a vegetarian. It’s like if I walk into a restaurant called “Joe’s House of Meat” and demand to know why Joe doesn’t have tofu stir-fry on the menu. I don’t walk into places called “Joe’s House of Meat.” If Olivia Munn wants to keep all of her clothes on, she probably shouldn’t agree to pose for Playboy.

. . . let me get this straight: an enormous contract was drawn up where every detail of your exposed flesh was pre-approved up to and including the crack of your ass, and your agent or manager was not on-set to make sure that this lengthy and thorough contract was honored? Really? If that’s the case, why bother with the contract at all? Either Miss Munn is lying, or she really needs new people.

. . . why does the model/fake news correspondent capitalize so heavily on her female sexuality? Take, for instance, the cover of Suck It, Wonder Woman. More to the point, which of Munn’s career moves have not somehow capitalized on her sexuality? . . . The easy answer is that Munn wants it both ways. She wants to be able to flaunt her junk for money and fame, but is outraged when people claim that she’s only famous and rich because she flaunts her junk.

Some context: Previously, Arboleda had called Munn out for making rape jokes, fat jokes, and jealous-bitches jokes. Fair enough. In the same post, Arboleda also dismissed Munn as a "bikini-clad" "Maxim model with bad comedic timing" whose career is "such blatant pandering for money and male attention that it borders on distasteful, even sexist." Hmm. And then there was this: "what I dislike about Munn is that her guy’s girl routine is so clearly an act. If it were genuine, it would be fine."

I get it. We live in a world where flaunting your junk, bashing other women, and acting the guy's-girl is a pretty effective strategy for getting ahead for a very small group of women, and that is sexism at work. But the solution is not to take the women who manage to squeeze some personal benefits out of that sexism and to tear them down in the most sexist ways possible. Believe it or not, even women who make careers out of "pandering" to this system are themselves constantly battling misogyny—they're cut down for wearing bikinis, ridiculed for having personal limits as to how their bodies are used, and called "bitches" for not being sufficiently grateful for their role. And until we start turning our attention to all those men who get "famous and rich" by "flaunting" their "male sexuality" in order to "pander" for "female attention," we've got a major social problem here—not an Olivia Munn problem.

Feminism has to be for all women. Even women you think are stupid, naive, or "tragically unfamiliar with the content of Playboy." Even women who walk into the wrong room. Even women with bad publicists. Even women with no publicists. Even women who expect professional photographers and stylists to honor professional contracts without question. Even women who have lied. Even women who have bashed other women. Even women who you think have capitalized on their "female sexuality." Even women who "flaunt [their] junk for money and fame." Even women with cleavage on the cover of books. Even women who sometimes wear bikinis. Even women who don't perform all of these feats of "female sexuality" naturally, even women from whom it's all "an act." Even women you think are bitches. Even women who talk about it.

Sure, most women don't rise to the top of this system like Munn has. But we all participate in it in some way—we've all denigrated other women, or "flaunted" our "female sexuality," or put on some sort of feminine "act" in order to get by. And if that means that we all deserve anything that's coming to us, then that's it for feminism. So let's keep our focus on the institutions that really benefit from this—the ones that are so reliably misogynist, coercive, and plain skeevy that our knee-jerk reaction is to blame women for even discussing how misogynist, coercive, and skeevy they are. Because Munn has provided us the Hot Girl's view from the top, and it looks like a lot of stuffing phallic objects in your mouth and fighting off men who want your nipples, until you get too old and are replaced.

Photo via Gage Skidmore, Creative Commons Attribution License 2.0

* Happy birthday, "post-racial America"! Writing in the Washington Post, Kathleen Parker does not see race. In response to criticism that calling Barack Obama the first woman president was (among other things) racist, Parker pens a column explaining that she can't write racist things, because she is white, and white people have the luxury of not being racist, like black people are:

But I also recognize that my life experience is different from that of most African Americans. And that experience allows me both the luxury of seeing people without the lens of race, but also (sometimes) to fail to imagine how people of other backgrounds might interpret my words.

She also has trouble seeing Obama as "exclusively black" because she has learned that she and the President are eighth cousins once removed—a genealogical "nugget" she had previously intended to write an entire column about.  That detail alone strikes me as a fireable offense.

* Via Figleaf: Holly at The Pervocracy on the douchebaggery behind calling women "females":

I hate it when people call women "females." I have one friend who does it because she was in the military and it was standard practice there, and occasionally I'll say it when I specifically mean biological females rather than women, but 98% of the time it's douchebaggery. Rule of thumb: if you say "females and males" it's okay, but if you say "females and guys/men," you're probably a douchebag.

* Virginia resident Andrea examines U.S. immigration laws through the lens of her attempts to get her British fiancee a visa. In short, they have it easy, and they still don't have it easy:

One of the things I hear a lot in any discussion of people who come here illegally is some permutation of “Well why don’t they just do it legally?” If they know that I’m currently going through the immigration process with my fiance, people will often ask “Doesn’t it make you mad that you’re going to all this trouble and people are just coming over here illegally?” The answers to these questions are, in reverse order, “No, I am thankful that we are able to do it legally fairly easily” and “Wow, you have never dealt with immigration, have you?”

* In Newsweek, Julia Baird tells us to "stop ogling Republican women":

It’s odd to see how some men insist that when women start to grasp power, we should think of them primarily as playthings and provocateurs. Is this the best way to explain their success? They aren’t challenging the status quo. They’re being wild! They’re not trying to lift the ban on offshore drilling. They’re being naughty! When four women beat a field of men on the same night recently, competing for primary and gubernatorial nominations, it was widely referred to as “ladies’ night.” Aren’t ladies’ nights those promotions where women are allowed free entry into bars to provide fodder for the men?

* Scarleteen continues its "queering sexuality in color" series, this time with Dharshi, a 25-year-old South Asian lesbian:

The problem is that the queer community where I live is predominantly white, and tend not have familiarity with issues such as my marriage predicament. Sometimes I do feel pressure from the queer community to come out, as if that will be the solution to all of my problems. I do have some wonderful white gay and lesbian friends though who make an effort to listen and understand. One woman in particular is my mother's age and her advice and sharing of her life experience has really helped me through the hard times. Also when I watch her with her partner and her kids, I feel optimistic that maybe that kind of future is also possible for me. I love meeting other queer people of colour, particularly from the South Asian community, but I don't often get this opportunity.

Photo via Beverley & Pack, Creative Commons Attribution License 2.0

SADY: HI. THIS IS NOT A LATENESS THAT IS MY OWN FAULT. IT IS THAT OF MY COMPUTERIZED CHAT SYSTEM.

AMANDA: I'm just going to give you the benefit of the doubt that you were not too busy feeding your Internet pornography surfing addiction to join me here for this very important Internet pornography discussion.

SADY: It's true! I was... not at all indulging in my shameful addiction to Internet pornography! Because if I were (indulging in my Internet pornography addiction) I would be rendered incapable of interacting with you, a woman! “Are you waiting for a pizza to be delivered?" I would ask. "Or, perhaps, for someone to fix your plumbing? That is the only reason I can conceive of for you not to be having titillating adventures at this moment!"

AMANDA: Well that's too bad! For if you truly were suffering from an Internet porn surfing addiction, I could get you a great gig speaking to groups of conservative audiences about your Internet porn surfing addiction in glorious detail. My very favorite part of the "Porn Harms" briefing I attended last month was right after Shelley Lubben—ex-porn performer, current anti-porn activist—finished her spiel, and one of the old white men running the briefing stood up and informed everyone that he was addicted to porn for 25 years.

SADY: These two storylines connect, I am thinking! It is all very LOST!

AMANDA: Everyone clapped!

SADY: Awwwwww. I mean, I have no doubt — NONE NONE NONE — that there are women in the porn industry who are abused, for whom working in porn was sexually traumatic, for whom being an anti-porn activist seems like the best and most necessary course of action, given what they've been through. It's that whole prayer-meeting aspect to it, though, that freaks me out. Like, a lot of these speakers are clearly people who have spent a LOT of time looking for porn, and specifically for the most transgressive porn they can find! And then they describe the porn, in porn-like terms! In order to demonstrate the evils of porn! Like, the "I once was lost but now have found gagfactory.com, AND AM WILLING TO REGISTER MY DISTASTE" aspect is a little weird. Like a ritual purification, rather than a discussion.

AMANDA: Yeah. I mean, one of the most frustrating parts of the debate around porn is how difficult it is to punch through the dichotomy of Porn v. Anti-Porn. It's often framed as a fight between the "Keep Your Fascist Government Off My Boner" camp vs. the "Bring All the Poor Abused Women to Jesus" camp. And if you're someone who is approaching this from a feminist perspective (and there are a LOT of feminist perspectives on porn, pro and anti and in-between) you're sometimes forced to align with one or the other. Boners v. Jesus, if you will.

SADY: Right. And, I mean, I think it's symptomatic of people seeing that institutions are troubled, and then assuming that the institutions THEMSELVES are the problem, which sort of bars off a more nuanced discourse. Or bars you off from encouraging yourself to take a more nuanced standpoint. But I like to think that we're slowly getting past that. I mean, we're maybe getting to a point where people can acknowledge that porn can express pretty vile attitudes toward The Ladies (and anyone else it sets its sights on) and that those vile attitudes can be expressed on set in ways that hurt people, without having to describe ourselves as "anti-all-porn-everywhere-ever."

AMANDA: Right. And also that porn isn't some big monolithic hate-fuck. It can be a lot of things. And as much as the strange explicit purging of the anti-porn activists freaks me out a bit, pro-porn people who aren't interested in dissecting it at all scare me more.

SADY: Yeah, definitely. I mean, a commitment to not looking at the potential problems in porn is probably way worse, in the long run, than TIRELESSLY AND VIGILANTLY WATCHING A TON OF PORN so that you can point out the problems.

AMANDA: Yeah. And the reluctance to engage isn't something I've seen in the more feminist pro-porn circles, but it's definitely something I've seen in the Get-Your-Fascist-Government-Off-My-Boner circles. Any industry that provides boners can't possibly be problematic!

SADY: Boners are our nation's most valued resource! It's just that it seems to me that the people most qualified to write or speak about porn's effect on women are . . . women who've been in porn? Rather than women who've seen some of it, or read what someone else wrote about seeing it?

AMANDA: Yeah.

SADY: But I worry that, with the Defend the Boners league pressing for those stupid sluts to keep their mouths shut when they're not giving blow-jobs, and the Burn the Tapes crew pressing for the elimination of any non-anti-porn discourse, sex workers who express complicated feelings about porn are being sort of shut out. Not that those folks aren't having conversations and building communities of their own.

AMANDA: Right. And then you have Sasha Grey on Tyra talking about her job and life, as Tyra shakes her head slowly and announces on television that she refuses to believe that Sasha Grey is not a victim of childhood abuse.

SADY: Haha, yeah. Or the cases in which porn stars DO (like a lot of women) have incidences of being sexually abused or assaulted, and everyone is like, "don't you SEEEE? Don't you see that this has clearly driven you MAD? And any of your feelings about the job you do are now INVALID?????" Whereas no-one is saying that to the accountant who was sexually abused growing up. Clearly no-one is like, "the pain and shame of your assault warped you so that you had no other choice but to fall into a life of TAX FORMS!"

AMANDA: Yeah, I mean what sexual assault victims really need is for more people to take away their agency and reduce their options in life, and then to shame them based on their sexual expression, right?

SADY: EXACTLY! I mean, I think a lot of porn discourse—and people who are fervent watchers of porn, and would fight to the death your right to take away their cinema boners, are just as willing to say that people (particularly women) who do porn are sad and deluded and damaged—depends on the assumption that, if it looks gross and un-sexy to me, it must be gross and un-sexy. And anyone who does it has to be stopped or "saved." See: BDSM, and the vast misunderstandings around that. Whereas, if I look at the kink conference you covered, well, I will be honest with you: There were a lot of videos you posted that I was just like, "nope! Not gonna open that one!" There were a lot of things that I consider gross and un-sexy going on there, such as: homemade Harry Potter erotica.

AMANDA: Haha. Right? But crusading to wipe it clean of this Earth, citing The Children, is another position entirely.

SADY: But who am I to come between you and the turgid purple manhood of Severus Snape?

AMANDA: Gah.

SADY: You know? Like: I can say, "I will not jack off to this, and would prefer not to discuss the levels of arousal it produces in you," without singlehandedly trying to ban it.

AMANDA: Yeah. Dan Savage gives some pretty good advice in his column this week to a guy who has been indulging his wife in her daddy fetish. The husband writes in wondering if the fetish is a sign that his wife was abused as a child, and Savage basically says: Maybe, and that's something you should talk about, but it doesn't mean that she now has to deny her safe exploration of that fetish because her sex life has been informed in the past by horrible experiences. It's your sex life. And past abuse doesn't make your safe and consensual adult sex life invalid.

SADY: Right. I mean, I guess the other side, the argument against mainstream porn is that (a) it influences expectations of what sex "should be like," or what good sex is supposed to look like, and (b) it has to use real bodies in order to do so. Which, I feel like we've dealt with (b). Terrible things happen in porn, but that's a reason to look at the terrible things, not ban porn. Terrible things happen in houses, but that's a reason to look at the terrible things, not to ban houses. But (a) still does trouble me, I'll admit. It is a fact that stuff that happens in porn—your anal sex, your spitting on crotches, your facial shots or bald vaginas, what have you—can be kind of uncomfortably enthused over by people who watch a lot of porn. And have picked up, can I tell you, just the WRONG MOVES for accomplishing it.

AMANDA: Right. Like, I've heard a lot written about how younger men and women absolutely expect hairless vaginas. But again, what are we supposed to do about that? (a) Ban porn; (b) talk about how expectations in porn do and don’t translate into real life; (c) make more diverse porn, maybe? Because (a), beyond being dumb, is also impossible. So we have to start thinking about how to accomplish (b) and (c).

SADY: Yeah. I mean, I think the option is actually to become a little more relaxed and less shameful about porn. Rather than, like, watching it on your own, and then expecting your sex life to match up to it, and then responding to efforts to talk about your porn feelings with "lalala, can't hear you, it's DIRTY!" There are a lot of people who are absolutely cool with sex for the 20 minutes they spend doing it, and then feel weirded out and shameful about it immediately after the fact. And I think porn takes a lot of the bullets, when it comes to those folks and their freaked-out feelings. But, if they're talking AGAINST porn, they can be as graphic as they please! I think, is the message here. That all of us should express our desires to our sex partners in terms of lengthy, Old-Testament-style inveighing against sexual acts we were ABSOLUTELY DISGUSTED BY when we saw them last.

AMANDA: I think if Ayn Rand taught us anything, it's that absolutely no thought or discussion needs to go into our darkest dominant sexual fantasies. Just Do It!

SADY: And/or build an entire social order around it!

AMANDA: Right. Or people could just, like, talk about it. What porn needs is more dialogue!

SADY: Can you imagine how much easier porn would be to deal with if it actually included scenes of the date and well-adjusted people undergoing sexual negotiation with each other in a kind and realistic way? "I consent to this," Miranda panted, erotically, "but not the other thing which you mentioned earlier this evening, which is never as much fun as you'd think."

AMANDA: You are seriously crushing some dude's boner right now. But possibly arousing some other dude! So: Even.

SADY: "Your consent gives me such a boner," cried Hans, "which is made but firmer and more sexy by my respect for your stated boundaries!"

Since the strangely explicit anti-pornography briefing "Porn Harms" hit Capitol Hill in June, commentators have been weighing in with alternate perspectives on the state of smut today. Their thoughts—from a defense of "the fuck me look" to nostalgia about a 1978 Penthouse, after the jump:

* GLAA Forum takes on the fervor over porn addiction: "why don't we explore the harm done by some people's addiction to snooping into their neighbors' entertainment choices and bossing them around?"

* A reader of Andrew Sullivan's writes: "The only thing [Gail Dines] convinced me of is that she's got shoddy methodology and her kids must spend an inordinate amount of time rolling their eyes."

* The Good Men Project surveys a couple dozen public figures for their thoughts on porn. Twitter owner Todd Dagres says: “If you have to ask whether porn is good or bad, then you already have the answer. The question is how bad?”

* Bay Windows rejects the feminist take on the "fuck me look":

Dines has more in common with Jerry Falwell than she does with Gloria Steinem. Take, for example, her views on what is termed the "Fuck Me Look" —the sultry come hither look adopted by models since models were first photographed, and which is used to sell almost anything—from cars to mouthwash— no matter how tenuous the product’s actual connection to anything sexual.

Said Dines at a Pornography and Pop Culture conference, "The problem with [the FML] is that males in our culture are socialized in a society in which they are bombarded with the 'Fuck Me’ look, where it offers visual entitlement to ownership of women’s bodies. And what is rape and sexual assault if not taking them up on that offer that she’s offering? The only trouble is that she’s not walking down the street, WE ARE."

Got that? It’s not just genital objectifying hard-core pornography that we need to worry about. It’s now sexy looks that will also bring down civilization as we know it.

* Lifechurch.tv is also leading an online crusade against smut.

* Rod Dreher thinks of the children: "I fear for them all, especially my daughter, trying to find a suitable marriage partner in a world in which so many of their peers will have grown up with widely-available pornography."

* But Time's Joel Stein [via the Good Men Project] says boys will be boys: "What is going on to create such an accelerating and insatiable appetite for porn among men in our country? You clearly have no idea how much of 1985-1989 I spent looking at the same three 1978 Penthouses."

* D.C. Mayoral candidate Leo Alexander only has 700 bucks in the war chest, and $200 of it came from Phyllis Schlafly's Eagle Forum. That's rough, dude.

* Woman marries her partner in D.C., but is denied a name change in her home of Tennessee, on account of her absurd document from the nation's capital claiming her to be married—to a woman!

* The Bilerico Project takes the temperature of gay online media. Zack Rosen of the New Gay submits: "The state of gay online media is, simply, that it exists."

* In the Washington Post, Mark Judge calls for more male teachers in Catholic schools, for feminism:

[T]his is the kind of feminism that can sometimes be best delivered by a man. This year girls basketball team at St. Mary's won the league championship. As a reward the girls on the team got to come to school out of uniform, wearing whatever ever t-shirts they wanted to. The boys, whose team had not done as well, were sulking around school, bristling whenever the girls would brag. I noticed they were whispering to each other, "Yeah, but girls basketball is not a sport." They would never say in front of any teachers, 90 percent of whom are women. But then the sixth grade came into my classroom in the afternoon and, the boys saw me standing in the front and they let themselves go. "It's not a sport!" they cried. They called out, men to man, for validation—"Mr. Judge, girls basketball is not a sport! Right?"

I was surprised. I grew up in the 1970s, and even in those dark ages we would never have claimed that women's basketball was not a sport. Had thing moved that far backwards? Actually, I answered, not only is it a sport, it's a lot more interesting than men's basketball. Men's basketball has become a lot of dunking. In women's basketball there is strategy, jump-shots, thinking.

The boys looked at me suspiciously for a few seconds. But then they seemed to take it in.

* So sorry to bother you, via Feministe: How men and women pitch stories to the Awl. According to the site: "The emails from men are pretty direct. The emails from women are often kind of . . . apologetic!"

Photo via Nationaal Archief

Yesterday, feminist sci fi enthusiast and From Austin to A&M blogger Courtney Stoker graciously agreed to answer this blog's questions on how to reconcile her feminist ideals with her geekier subculture interests. Today, it's time for the bonus round!

A while back, I heard from Joseph Hewitt—English teacher, computer game programmer, cartoonist—on the issue of dude-dominated subcultures. (Attentive readers may remember Hewitt from his Male Studies cartoon published on this blog). Hewitt is also the creator of GearHead RPG, a sci fi role-playing game set "a century and a half after nuclear war" that has spawned an active online community. Now, Hewitt is wondering how to address the dude-centric aspects of that world:

Do you have any ideas about what I can do to make sure that women feel comfortable and welcome in the small corner of a small counterculture that I personally manage? In addition to the comic, I'm also the lead developer for an open source computer game. We have an active fan community and forum. Most of the participants are male.

I think I have most of the inclusiveness basics covered: Don't be an asshole. Call out sexist behavior when it shows up. Don't fill the game itself with fair-skinned bikini-clad vixens waiting to be rescued. As far as I know we haven't had any problems with blatant sexism in the community. However, I know enough to know that I don't know everything. I also know that the sheer number of men on the forum must make it seem like a boys-only club.

It seems like there's a participation gap between the men and women who play the game. The bug reports and feature requests that I get via email show a much smaller gender gap than the forum membership would indicate. I spoke with a fellow developer about this subject and she told me some of her internet horror stories. She said that she's always been treated with respect in our community, but we didn't reach any grand conclusions about the big picture.

What to do when the members of a community are of all genders but the voices in the community are predominantly male?

I asked Stoker, who is also a gamer, if she had any ideas on making dude-dominated countercultures more accessible to women. Here's what she had to say:

I think it's great that this guy is asking this question and seriously implementing what he calls the “basics,” which aren't practiced in most geek spaces. It's difficult to make your space more inclusive, however, because geek women aren't stupid. We know what geek spaces are like, and it's going to take a community-wide shift to get us to feel safe there. Which isn't to say not to try, but only not to get discouraged when your efforts don't seem to be creating the influx of ladies on your forum that you hoped for. That said, here are two guidelines that I think lead to lady-friendly geek spaces (these are also equally applicable in trying to include more people of color, LGBTQI individuals, and disabled folks):

1. Advertise yourself as such. When looking for online communities, I tend only to join those that are either explicitly feminist or women-friendly. Let your community know that you are trying to create a more inclusive space as a reaction against geek misogyny. Make your purpose explicit, and you'll not only scare off the men that will hinder inclusion, but attract women who are more wary of geek spaces.

2. Take women's voices seriously. Ask the female members of your community what changes you should make, and listen sincerely to their answers. Do you have a blog portion of your community? If so, make sure it's equal opportunity. Ask women to participate and take their conversations seriously. Above all, be willing to listen, even if what women have to say makes you feel uncomfortable or challenges your privilege. (Actually, especially if that happens.) The best way to make a community feel welcome is to show that you care what they think and have to say.

Photo via the Library of Congress

Courtney Stoker is a blogger, gamer, and graduate student of Victorian science fiction who describes herself as "a science fiction fanatic of the H. G. Wells/Connie Willis/Octavia Butler/Joss Whedon/Doctor Who/Star Trek variety." In other words, she's a bit of a geek. She's also a feminist. And these worlds: They do not always exist in perfect harmony.

Case in point:

"While sci fi fans don't mind (and often excel at) criticizing their sci fi shows, they are generally only supportive of criticizing that focuses on 'literary' details—plot holes, bad writing, continuity in the canon, inconsistent application of science," Stoker says. "But as soon as you start talking about the bigger structures in a show's texts, like racist logic, sexism, classism, whatever, some douchey white dudes with serious entitlement issues are going to dismiss you."

Indeed. So Stoker, who blogs at From Austin to A&M, agreed to answer my questions on navigating geekdom as a feminist—from the subversive potential of Doctor Who cosplay to the social implications of sexy Star Wars corsets:

—

SEXIST: Sci fi shows are often dominated by white guys—either as lead characters or creators. How can female fans—and other fans who aren't well-represented in that narrative—subvert the perspectives of these shows?

Courtney Stoker: Fan communities have the potential for an extraordinary amount of subversion. The old school stereotype of the sci fi fan is one in which the fan does not think critically about the object of his (obviously, the old-school sci fi fan stereotype is a dude) fandom. The sci fi fan collects and memorizes trivia without adding anything to the story, and this is a marker of his lack of imagination.

I think cosplay is often seen this way as well, by people who are not overly familiar with it. Cosplay (I use this term very broadly, encompassing the related activities of dressing like a character, wearing sci fi show-related items of clothing—even if it's just a Doctor Who scarf with regular clothes— and role-playing as a character) is usually seen as straight-up copying and appropriation, in the same way that collecting is usually depicted as the uncritical consumption of a franchise. Even fan fiction, that extraordinary genre, is sometimes seen by the non-initiated as a sign of a lack of creativity and talent—most fan fic writers even separate their fan fic from their “real” writing. But all three of these activities—collection (of physical items and knowledge), cosplay, and fan fiction—are places where the fan can critically talk back to, interpret, and deconstruct the object of her fandom.

Perhaps unsurprisingly for a graduate student studying English literature, my preferred method of subverting science fiction TV (and the fan communities of which I am a part) is literary critique. I do this through my blog, mostly, but plan on doing academic research later in my career. Critical writing has the upside of being taken more seriously by other fans and non-fans, even in blogging. It's also something I do well, but it can lack the joy of cosplay, for example.

Any act of participation in the creation and deconstruction of the show can be a radical act. By cosplaying, by writing or reading fan fic, by blogging about the (good and bad) choices made by the writers, a fan asserts her importance, her active consumption and interaction with the material. She is not a passive consumer, forced to accept the narratives and values given to her, but a creator and a critic.

All of which is not to say that it isn't important for sci fi shows to get their collective acts together, and start portraying the experiences and narratives of people who aren't white dudes. But a fan who loves these shows doesn't necessarily need to feel guilty about loving them, because she can subvert their weaknesses and actively participate in them.

SEXIST: What obstacles have you encountered in raising a feminist viewpoint in geek/subculture communities?

CS: I should preface this answer by letting you know I haven't been at it very long. I've only been a sci fi fan for a few years. And I stayed away from certain fandoms because of their reputations. I'm a Star Trek fan who doesn't care about canon and finds the original series unwatchable, so I steered clear of ST forums and fan spaces. I love Joss Whedon (LOVE him) and everything he's ever done, but I'd heard horror stories about how horrifyingly sexist those fan spaces are (*cough cough* Whedonesque), so I didn't touch them.

I think the only reason I even tried to participate on Doctor Who fan forums is because a) it had been a while since I've posted on forums, and I forgot how bad and emotionally exhausting they can be and b) Doctor Who fandom is U.K.-based. I have this (entirely inaccurate) fantasy of the U.K., where it's just the U.S., but with more socialism and no Tea Partiers. But being based in the U.K. also meant that the fandom didn't have the reputation that, say, Whedon fandom has. I just assumed that a British sci fi fan community would be feminist-friendly and safe. And I had fallen in love with this show with the breathless abandon of a teenager falling in love for the first time. It consumed my life and I talked and thought about it constantly. I watched all four seasons in the space of two weeks, and was literally sobbing the entire last ten minutes of David Tennant's finale. I hadn't been this passionate about a show since Buffy, and I wanted desperately to share that love with other fans.

Unfortunately, that love and passion made me a little vulnerable. I joined Gallifrey Base, the biggest DW forum out there, with an inordinate amount of trust and enthusiasm, and was promptly crushed for my trouble. I lasted a whole week or two before being told that I was a crazy, over-emotional lady, using my crazy, over-emotional lady problems to ruin everyone's good-natured fun. I avoided forums after that, but still listened to podcasts and found a few Doctor Who blogs that weren't overly upsetting.

I've blogged about Doctor Who and geek culture quite a bit lately, and I'd say about half of the responses I've received have been positive (and a few bright shining ones have been thanking me for saying what needed to be said). The others vacillate between mocking me for being a lady (the implication being that I am silly to talk about feminism or sci fi like I Know Things, on account of my obviously inferior lady-brain), mocking me for being a feminist (usually one Made of Straw), accusing me of inserting my dirty lady-feelings (irrelevant and irrational!) into a discussion of sci fi/geek culture, and determining that I am a Bad Feminist for any number of reasons. It's hard, sometimes, because I only talk about sci fi things because I am a fan. Sci fi is a huge part of my life and my
research. To have members of this community tell me that I am not qualified to Talk About Things on account of being a lady or a feminist is exhausting and disempowering. When I first forayed into this community, I thought that it would be progressive, feminist, and proud of its lady members (and not, you know, for their boobs). It's been a hard let-down.

While sci fi fans don't mind (and often excel at) criticizing their sci fi shows, they are generally only supportive of criticizing that focuses on “literary” details—plot holes, bad writing, continuity in the canon, inconsistent application of science. But as soon as you start talking about the bigger structures in a show's texts, like racist logic, sexism, classism, whatever, some douchey white dudes with serious entitlement issues are going to dismiss you. (It's actually sort of funny, because they can't really, like the rest of the world of douchey white dudes, tell you you're reading too much into the show, or taking the show too seriously, because ten minutes ago, they were posting about insignificant detail x in an episode that aired 20 years ago.) If I complain about the complete lack of plot in Avatar, for example, I'll hear murmurs of consent in a room full of geeks. If I say Avatar is inexcusably racist, however, that same room will suddenly get defensive.

SEXIST: Because these communities situate themselves outside the mainstream, is there any reluctance to recognize that mainstream forms of sexism—like privileging male voices or objectifying women—could be a problem in the community?

CS: Absolutely. Geek communities (particularly, in my experience, geek men) see themselves as outside of mainstream in several ways. They often consider themselves counter-cultural (in the U.S., this seems to be linked to the current trend of anti-intellectualism), progressive, and isolated. Because geeks situate themselves outside of the mainstream, it's difficult for them to either accept that sexism is a problem in the community (this is so patently obvious, however, that only the most sexist of geeks will not acknowledge it) or that sexism in the community is not a special and different case of sexism. The idea that geek sexism is unrelated to mainstream sexism is related to the Growing Up Geek narrative.

In the narratives about Growing Up Geek, geeks often frame their geekiness as a disability; these narratives make it sound like the vast majority of geeks grow up without any institutional power, even when the geeks in question are white, straight, cis-gendered, abled, middle- to upper-class, and male. The responses to the oft-asked, “Why are geek communities so goddamn sexist all the time?” often begin with the special case of Growing Up (a Male) Geek. The narrative goes something like this: Geeks are smarter than everyone else, and ladies like hot, not smart, so geek men have almost no contact with women until they become adults. They're socially stunted and bitter about their lifelong rejection by women, so they lash out at women to make themselves feel better. The cause of their sexism is their sexual frustration, not mainstream misogyny, even though many tellers of the Growing Up (a Male) Geek narrative will admit that male geeks often find the hypermasculine standard of our misogynist culture to be an obstacle to their social acceptance.

The problem with this narrative and how it functions in conversations about geek misogyny is that the hypermasculine standard that leads to geek men feeling disenfranchised while growing up is the result of a patriarchal culture. By becoming misogynists, geek men actually reinforce the sexist standards that lead to them getting beat up or made fun of as kids. Patriarchy is still to blame. And the inability to recognize this, not only by the individual geeks who become misogynists, but by critics of geek culture, makes sexism in these communities difficult to diagnose and counteract.

Secondly, very few geeks who cite the Growing Up Geek narrative are actually that institutionally disenfranchised. It's particularly precious to see white straight dudes complaining about how marginalized they were growing up. While I certainly don't want to disregard these geek men's experiences—undergoing daily abuse, whether verbal or physical, for one's geekiness is certainly disempowering and not acceptable—the experience of Growing Up Geek is not equivalent to a lack of institutional power. And since a lot of the sexism in geek cultures come from the actual media and events—video games, television shows, award committees, cons—the most prevailing sexism is actually coming from geeks who control the media. Talk about institutional power! The Growing Up Geek narrative is, in most of these conversations about sexism, a hand-waving exercise, designed to make women feel sorry for geek men and forgive them for the sexism that is present in their community, while obfuscating the fact that misogyny comes not just from miscellaneous geek assholes, but from positions of power and wealth in our communities and in culture at large.

SEXIST: How do female fans navigate worlds where men are often heroes and women are often objects? How does that dichotomy contribute to the subjective identity of the female sci-fi fan?

CS: Obviously, women are going to internalize the perceptions of women in these narratives, in a similar way that women internalize the impossible standards of beauty depicted by magazine or advertising images or the male gaze found in films. When your favorite media shoves women into refrigerators, sexualizes violence against women, and aggressively objectifies women, it's easy to internalize misogyny.

Lots of geek girls reject everything feminine when growing up, so as to fit in with the boys. Lots of geek women still devalue their own gender by figuring themselves as different from regular, silly, squeeing, stupid women, as one of the boys. These women regularly agree with geek men who , for example, assume that any show with a primarily female fan base must be crap. They regularly agree that women, as a category, don't get or don't write good science fiction, but they are an exception. It's a classic move of the anti-feminist. Sure, Sarah Palin may want power and position, an exception to what she believes is good for women, but only because she's special. She's one of the boys. She hunts wolves from helicoptors! I don't think this is necessarily strategic. While it's difficult, when you're an intelligent and awesome woman, to consider yourself inferior to male geeks, there's a lot of internalized misogyny from the way that women are portrayed in your favorite media. It's a contradiction that's difficult to rationalize.

SEXIST: What do you think about women gaining an entry into sci-fi worlds through the creation of object-heroes? I'm thinking about Femme Doctors in high-heels and corsets, and lady Stormtroopers in halter-tops.

CS: This is where some geek women find their acceptable place in geek communities, because even the most sexist of geek men is going to be okay with women being around as long as they're dressed up like sex objects. Too often, women in geek cultures are only welcomed if they are decoration, sexy versions of the the things geek men love, not equal participants or fellow fans. Forever Geek (one of the very few non-feminist blogs I bother with), for example, has, in the just the past two months, posted with glee about female models naked except for high heels and stormtrooper helmets gracing skateboards, a car wash in which women dressed in sexy Princess Leia costumes washed cars, and Star Wars corsets. Geek communities love women, as long as their members don't have to think of those women as people. And cosplay has become an unfortunate site of, as you so aptly put it, the creation of object-heroes.

I find the femme Doctor trend in Doctor Who cosplay to be simultaneously irritating and wonderful, and that's because it's complicated. Some women do the femme Doctor that you describe—miniskirts, high heels, corsets. Some of this is capitulation to the object-hero trend, a result of internalized sexism and wanting to be accepted into this community. Some of this is also an attempt to reclaim femininity and female sexuality within a community that doesn't often recognize those things as legitimate. While I see value in that, these Doctors also suggest to me that a female Doctor would necessarily be useless decoration, because she sure isn't going to save the world in high heels and a corset.

But that's not the whole picture of femme Doctor cosplay, however. In researching my recent cosplay post (in which I addressed the femme Doctor trend), I actually found more pictures of creative, sensible (and still, many times, sexy) femme Doctor costumes, in which the fans wore clothing in which an actual female Doctor could function. And this manifestation of the Doctor, who is feminine but not a useless object, is, I think, the site of the most potential subversion. These femme Doctor costumes make up for a deficit in the actual show and the fan community, allow female fans to see themselves as the unquestionable heroes of the show, and make it clear that the role of female fans and female characters should not be decoration or objectified sidekick. These fans are not simply eye candy for male fans, but a representation of what a female Doctor, a female hero, could look like, and these cosplays make it increasingly clear that Doctor Who is doing its female viewers (and, frankly, its male viewers as well) a disservice by only including female characters as sidekicks and love interests.

UPDATE: Now with a very special bonus question!

Photo via Forever Geek.

Reader Martin Quinones points us to an online archive of mid-nineteenth-century political cartoons, drawn by dude named John Leech. Head to the "feminism" section for some insight into how women's lib has been screwing up absolutely everything in polite society from as far back as 1841, particularly the lower half of women's bodies—dude hated bloomers.

Players of first-person shooter game Team Fortress 2 have discovered a new accessory to aid them in offing other players: Images of English pin-up models Lucy Pinder and Keeley Hazell. Users are inserting the cheesecake photos into the game's environment in an attempt to distract other players long enough to sneak up and kill them. They call the tactic "Hot Girl Backstabbing," and judging by the confusion of the targets—many of whom linger near the photos for several seconds before getting blasted—the strategy appears to be working. Is this another instance of feminist-inspired simulated murder, or just another way to apply the exploitation of women to gaming? Judging by the players' enthusiastic use of the word "boobies," I'm going to guess it's the latter.

Geek Feminism Blog points to a really interesting exercise that has "seventh-graders  draw and describe their image of scientists before and after a visit to Fermilab." Several of the students modified the gender of their illustrated scientists after a visit to the lab. Others, uh, didn't. Here's the blog's breakdown of the gender results: "Among girls (14 in total), 36% portrayed a female scientist in the 'before' drawing, and 57% portrayed a female scientist in the 'after' drawing. Among boys (17 in total), 100% portrayed a male scientist in the 'before' drawing, and 100% portrayed a male scientist in the 'after' drawing." More cute drawings of scientists at the link.

* A new study suggests that 11 percent of male drivers under 30 are masturbating  on the road. No word on the habits of the ladies, who these days are cleared to both drive and touch their own genitalia—but can they do it at the same time? Get science on this.

* Figleaf supports Lindsay Beyerstein's assertion that Palin is a feminist—-the worst feminist, amirite? Of Palin's contribution to the movement, he writes:

Maybe 10-15 years ago Michael Moore had a television series where he did his Bowling for Columbine/Roger and Me schtick in generally nicely-paced 10-15 minute segments. I didn’t see very many episodes (I’m not sure how many episodes there were) but in one of them he managed to get himself invited on a skeet-shooting trip with the wives of a bunch of conservative Republican congressmen. He seemed to get along well enough with them, and they with him, but at one point he made a leading statement like “you know, I didn’t think women could be so handy with a shotgun. You’re better than a lot of men I know.” There was a little general laughter and one or another of the women said something like “women can be better at a lot of things.” He said something like “maybe some of you could run for Congress, you might be really good at that too.” And the women just sort of clammed up and looked at each other like that was a terrible idea. And that seemed like the point where he wore out his welcome.

Fast forward to today and, thanks in surprisingly large part to Sarah Palin, I don’t think Moore would have gotten the same shocked or embarrassed silence were he to try the same stunt now.

* The Curvature's Cara Kulwicki on the efforts of Australian detectives to derail the investigation of a rape case.

* Thomas McAulay Millar at Yes Means Yes! on "ugly":

some insults appear to be empirical claims, but are effective even when demonstrably untrue. “Ugly” is like that. Antifeminist trolls call even the most obviously conventionally attractive women ugly; and it still has some power, even when used against women famous for their beauty. Why?Why indeed. Because they’re not empirical claims at all. They are claims that assert a truth based in social structure. “Ugly” and “slut” work not because of the truth of the matter asserted, but primarily and often exclusively because there are elements of the culture that work to instill in every woman an insecurity that these things are true. The insult is really a claim about the existence of an insecurity; and the hurling of the insult itself is part of the social structure that creates and maintains the unsecurity. And I know several prominent feminists who admit that some of these insults sting even if rationally they know it’s untrue, for just that reason. It takes a strong woman to really just remain unaffected by it. A lot of women I’ve talked to over the years remember vividly when Kathleen Hanna wrote “slut” on herself in lipstick, because it was a difficult and radical thing to do.

* Sady Doyle is smart, and talks about books.

HANK REARDON, MULTI-MILLIONAIRE INDUSTRIALIST: Who is John Galt?

DAGNY TAGGART, MULTI-MILLIONAIRE INDUSTRIALIST/LADY: I would also like to know the answer to that question!

HANK REARDON: (Slaps DAGNY.)

DAGNY TAGGART: Ohhhh, so sexy!

* Georgetown Girl endeavors to answer the question, "What's a feminist?" She's compiling answers from "students and recently graduated students," "adults," and "female politicians and celebrities." If you're a student, recently graduated student, adult, female politician, or celebrity, e-mail her to participate!

* Molly Ren on the latest in macabre sex toy technology: the sex coffin. "I don’t think I’d react . . . well to being shut inside the coffin. The lid is so heavy it takes both hands to lift, and the act of shutting my friend away “forever” was a powerful visual. I’d struggle and scream inside the coffin if someone shut me inside it—and the opportunity to really struggle and scream against a much larger dom is what excites me about it."

* On Broadsheet, Scientology gets even creepier: coerced abortions, via "intimidation, isolation and forced manual labor for pregnant women who decided to continue their pregnancies."

* And check out Fannie's Room for another reason religion sucks.

Photo by Darrow Montgomery

* A new sex blogger writing for THE LINE asks: Does writing about your sexual experiences veer into non-consensual territory?

how could I write on a blog, about consent of all things, personal details about MY sex life, which of course involve other people? That I’d share without their knowledge or consent? Or course I won’t use their names, but a hookup is (or should be) built on a foundation of trust and communication. Part of that is the assumption (and hope) that one party won’t share private details with everyone they know or go bragging to a vast amount of people—which is essentially what I would be doing by sharing it here. Outside of writing on a blog, in my real life, I want to be open with the people around me – especially the ones I’m sleeping with.

How can I talk about my sexual experiences and not cross the line?

I suppose the obvious question is why the only option presented is to share these details without first obtaining the "knowledge or consent" of his sex partners?

* Emily Nagoski argues that men have higher sexual motivation than women. Commenters get into it on the nature v. nurture tip.

* Amanda Marcotte submits an abbreviated history of anti-feminists who call themselves feminists. From the "'Independent Feminism' Anti-Feminism" section:

Iconic Leader: Camille Paglia

Other examples: Christina Hoff-Summers, Wendy McElroy, Kathleen Parker, Heather MacDonald.

Basic argument: The important work of feminism is over, and whatever movement is left exists primarily to demonize men and the awe-inspiring male sexual spirit.

Classic quote: From Camille Paglia: "You have to accept the fact that part of the sizzle of sex comes from the danger of sex. You can be overpowered."

* The Chicago Tribune thinks Philadelphia Flyers defenseman Chris Pronger plays hockey like a girl. So they gave him a girlie name and put a little girlie skirt on him. GIRLS. THERE IS NO WORSE FATE.

Photo via the Library of Congress

On a department-wide email list for all post-docs, I received an invitation to an event that was not addressed to me. The email was addressed only to women; it invited women to attend a women's scientific society dinner held on the university campus. I understood that I was excluded from the event because of my gender.

This email traffic and the event itself are so far into my post-doc one of the only instances where I have felt discriminated against; this certainly isn't the norm. It would be easy enough for me to ignore this single incident, I suppose, but nonetheless it's rankled me. To me it seems like an example of a disconnect between the ideals of a discrimination-free workplace and the practices that supposedly further this ideal.

To me, this seems like an example of the disconnect between a dude who has never noticed discrimination in science before and the, oh, two whole hours that his voice won't be explicitly privileged in the academy. FSP replies: "I wish I could say that my only experience with 'discrimination' was not being invited to an event like this." [Thanks to Geek Feminism Blog for the tip].

Masculinity: Should we explode it? That's the question posed by Sexist commenters in last week's battle over the M-word and its place in the education of men and boys. So: Should we redefine masculinity to encourage boys to be manly-but-in-a-good-way, or should we blow the whole concept to smithereens in a strangely masculine display of destruction? Let's find out!

Sam wants to hear the positive side of masculinity:

Why does talking about gender and gender relations, particularly with younger/teenage boys, always, always seem to have to revolve around the notion of toxic masculinity?

I suppose this cuts back to the chivalry discussion from last week, but where’s the positive element of the concept here? What is positive masculinity today?

I mean, really, masculinity seems to be less defined these days by what it is, than what it is not supposed to be—not much of “do”s, but a whole lot of “don’t”s.

I want to talk about the dos, not just the don’ts.

Kit-Kat says that even positive traits coded as "masculine" are inherently limited:

Our view of men in this culture right now seems to be so narrow: men are defined by being not-women. To be manly, they must avoid anything that smacks of femininity. It’s so crippling, this warrior-view of manhood. I would love it if men were given more space to be themselves, if the arts and fashion and academics and the color pink and emotions other than anger were not seen to be the purview of women and gays.

Part of the problem in talking about positive masculinity is that there are a lot of traits that we might associate with being a good man, but they aren’t necessarily gender-specific. For example, if I had a son, I would want him to be honest and courageous. I would want him to stand up against injustice and look out for those who are not as strong as him. I would want him to have integrity, and to be willing to sacrifice himself for those he loved. I would want him to treat his romantic partners with respect and care for his children. But of course, I would want any daughter of mine to be the same. If he was interested in athletics or cars or whatever other stereotypical male interest, that’s fine, but not an essential part of being a man.

Maybe it would make sense to say that the problem with chivalry is not any specific behavior associated with it, but that it is predicated on the idea that one must treat women well because men are strong and women are weak. What if we had something like chivalry, a code of conduct towards others, but that was predicated on the idea that one must treat other people well because they are human? That honor is not about controlling others, but about standing up for what is right and sticking to one’s word? I think that might be a good start for talking about masculinity.

Sam says that in masculinity and femininity, "overlap is something to be avoided":

but isn’t what you’re saying exactly the problem with masculinity these days? That there’s really nothing a good man should be/do that a good woman should not be/do?Of course (most) men define themselves by being not women, because, well, that’s what most women want—not women. So whenever one concept changes, the other one necessarily will, too. And if one concept’s range gets larger, the other one will necessarily get smaller if overlap is something to be avoided.

Of course, there’s the question of why men aren’t simply content with being good human beings and want to also be good “men.” Why we need something that only we can do, why we need to be needed. I think it’s because we don’t believe that we will be wanted, because I suppose there is a deeper level understanding that we have always been the expendable sex, and culturally, we really don’t understand why anyone would want men if they’re really as bad as they are said to be in this dialogue—and also, there’s human mating dynamics which almost necessarily involves so much more rejection for the average man than for the average woman.

. . . I think men need a positive discourse about masculinity, and I think feminism needs a positive discourse about masculinity, and—also—a positive discourse about male (heterosexual) sexuality.

kza says down with conformity:

Masculinity can’t really be defined, everyone has a different opinion. Anyone trying to conform to society’s opinion of what masculinity is supposed to be are idiots.

Jess is more into men than masculinity:

"I think it’s because we don’t believe that we will be wanted, because I suppose there is a deeper level understanding that we have always been the expendable sex."

I just can’t understand where this “men only act macho because inside they are scared little boys” narrative came from. You know, dude, a lot of people have low self-esteem—some of them because they are trained from birth to believe that they exist only for the sexual gratification of others (but not too gratifying, mind you!—but we manage not to deal with it via rape and violence. If the performance of masculinity is just a manifestation of male neurosis, maybe men should try, at the very least, a different neurosis for a while. (Try attempting to model your body after an ideal of beauty that is actually not humanly achievable! I hear that keeps you very busy.)

I think you’re actually confusing the problem with the cure. If men engage in male posturing because they are afraid of seeming weak and effeminate (that’s the only interpretation of “expendable” I can force to make any sense), that is because the Dominant Story of Masculinity, as Griffin excellently puts it, tells them that anyone who doesn’t engage in male posturing is weak and effeminate. We don’t address that by taking performed masculinity more seriously.

I’ll have as much positive discourse about men as you want—many men are great, I am even married to some of them (okay, only one). But I’ll pass on the positive discourse about masculinity. I think men deserve better.

MissA says BLOW IT TO HELL:

Further to Jess’s point:Like it or not, hegemonic masculinity (the phrase my profs used to refer to the Dominant Story of Masculinity) is one of the key conceptual devices used to enforce oppression and repression along gender lines. Hegemonic masculinity is what tells men that they are never good enough unless they are “alpha”, beating everybody else at the game of life. It shortens men’s lives by associating manliness with danger, perpetuating the notion that the disproportionate rate of men killed in service, at work, or through crime is to be expected, and not a reason for concern. Not to mention through suicide; because men must be better, they cannot show weakness, they cannot ask for help. And it requires the domination and devaluation of everyone who does not adhere to hegemonic masculinity.

A “positive discourse about masculinity” is like a positive discourse about white supremacy—it does not exist, because it is premised on the domination one group of people by another. Masculinity does not need to be “redefined” as something positive—for much of our history masculinity has had a monopoly on positive traits—it needs to be exploded (as does femininity).

Photo via The Library of Congress

Back in 1977, though, Venice, Fla. police chief Robert Ferry was happy to spell this all out for his fellow victim-blamers, in a column about rape prevention for the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. The article is called "Rape Most Often Crime Opportunity," and it's all about how women "get" raped, because they're stupid like that. Also: Feminism.

He begins:

Rape is far more often a crime of opportunity than premeditation, due to the obvious physiologic involvement. Adult women are cognizant of this fact, yet allow situations of potential attack to develop, seemingly with little thought of avoidance. Why?

Translation: Even I, a man, can not begin to explain why women's brains are so feeble, causing them to get raped so much. Nevertheless, I will try.

All people, men and women alike, dress to be their most attractive. The basics of human nature demand notice, admiration, in varying degrees from those around us. But, rape victim case analyses often indicate many women go overboard in the attainment of these commonly desired goals. Example: the night worker who dresses in peekaboo blouse, see-through skirt, with accompanying cosmetic signals of unattachment, when she knows she must wait 20 minutes for her midnight bus ride home in a questionable neighborhood.

Translation: While rape case analyses always indicate that rapists "go overboard" in their attempts to forcibly rape people, it's much more fun to draw caricatures of slutty women's libbers who confuse and arouse regular Joes through their "cosmetic signals."

Don't many sexual attackers come through open windows late at night? Some do, but how would they gain entrance if common sense precautions were taken by the women alone? One woman was attacked in her third floor bedroom by a rapist who climbed up to her unscreened, open window, using a ladder from her own garage that had been left unlocked. the only way she could have made it easier would have been to leave a key in the front door lock.

Translation: I think rape victims are both dumb and easy, but I have replaced "vagina" in this sentence with "front door lock" in order to protect the delicate sensibilities of the Sarasota Herald-Tribune readership.

The "new morality" and deepening convictions about women's liberation have without doubt done much to increase the frequency of forcible rape.

Translation: Women cause rape!

Law enforcement is in agreement with women having equal rights, but we dislike seeing women place themselves in situations of high vulnerability to criminal attack, when setting out to prove they are equal.

Translation: Law enforcement officers agree that women should have the right to cause rapists to rape them.

Some common sense rules for preventing sexual attack are worthy of every woman's consideration:

- Dress for the occasion or social situation you anticipate.

Translation: Carefully plan your "cosmetic signals" to not scream "rape me!"

- Don't be 'too nice' to strangers, at your door or at social gatherings when knowing you will leave alone.

Translation: Be a bitch! Then read my follow-up column, "Why Go To A Party When You're Just Going to Be A Goddamned Bitch to Everyone?"

- Avoid flirtations, unless ready for any eventuality.

Translation: Never flirt with olde-tyme Venice, Fla. police chief Robert Ferry.

- If you live alone, list only your initials in phone directories and on mail boxes.

Translation: Don't be a woman! If you are a woman, don't let anyone know that you are a woman!

In this listing, it is not the author's intention to oversimplify by presenting only the most obvious. However, since a large percentage of sexual attacks against women involve a seeming disregard of the most common methods of prevention, it was felt utilization of limited space in this manner would hold the most potential value for all readers.

Translation: I am finally wrapping this up now, you dumb sluts.

It may come as a surprise to some that forcible rape, especially where juveniles are the victim, is all too often committed by a close family friend or relative. Baseless trust in all people known to you should not be awarded automatically, on the grounds that "nothing has ever happened before." This particularly where children are concerned.

Translation: Even if you never wear makeup, go by your initials, avoid parties, never flirt, don't take the bus, cover your body adequately, and lock your vagina, you may be raped by a close family friend or relative. This is also your fault, even if you are a child.

—

So. The victim-blaming "tips" I hear in 2010—all those helpful crime prevention strategies presented as "common sense" for women to follow in order to avoid rape nowadays—don't explicitly blame equality between the sexed for rape. But 33 years later, the solution for reducing sexual assaults against women hasn't changed: Tell them to stop moving about the world freely, and then blame them when they do.

* Sady Doyle of Tiger Beatdown welcomes summer, and all the irrational fighting it brings. Kicking off fighting season for Doyle: Tequila-fueled feminist infighting!

Oh, the shouting! Oh, the insults! Oh, the many and various accusations, most of which, in recollection, make no sense whatsoever! I said she had internalized misogyny and cared more about protecting liberal party lines than about human decency; she said I had internalized classism and behaved “like a character from the movie Mean Girls;” I made fun of her for the Mean Girls reference, which didn’t help, and at some point, long after the conversation had transcended the bounds of sense-making, she said that she wanted to talk about how terrible I was with my boyfriend, at which point I got out my phone and started yelling, “Let's call him! Let's call everyone I've ever fucked! Let's ask them how much I hate poor people!” And I would have called them, too (“So, we dated from December of 2007 to February of 2010. During that time, to the best of your recollection, how many hobos did I set on fire for kicks? WHAT DO YOU MEAN IT'S FOUR IN THE MORNING. THIS IS EXACTLY WHY WE DID NOT WORK OUT”) but then I started crying, and the whole thing just went completely off the rails.

As I stood up and walked outside for a cigarette, at this point visibly sobbing, she called out, “I look forward to reading about this on wherever it is you blog.”

Fun fact: I witnessed this summer-opening fight! I was slumped into a booth of some swanky Brooklyn lounge thingy, drinking my millionth beer and attempting to keep it together while some guy explained scuba diving to me. Summer is here!

* Zack Rosen of The New Gay hates lube, and unrealistic, lube-less television fucking:

In season 6 of Buffy The Vampire Slayer, which I am currently watching, a lot of the previously high school-aged characters have a lot of very spontaneous sex. Two people are talking or fighting or waiting for the bus when suddenly, Bam! They are fucking. The show can’t be too explicit about it, so they just show undulating bodies from the waist up, fully clothed, standing against a wall or lying on a table, miming all the faces and sounds of intercourse. As a gay man, I can’t get over this. It just seems so easy. You have the interest in having sex and then you do it. Just like that. No muss, no fuss, no lube.If Buffy wanted to show a realistic depiction of, say, Angel and Spike fucking it would not be so easy. They would fight for a while and then suddenly Angel’s legs would be locked around Spike’s waist while they kissed. Spike would pantomime trying to slip his dry dick in, and then Angel would yell “OW! Spike, are you fucking kidding me?” He might even turn into Angelus from pain and frustration while Spike went tearing around his crypt, looking for a 6 month-old packet of lube that he thinks he picked up at a gay bar and left in the pocket of his other black t-shirt. Angel/Angelus would look at his watch for a while and wonder what kind of sodomite vampire doesn’t keep lube around, for chrissakes. Spike would suggest things like conditioner or spit, and then give up and resign himself to a mutual undead hand job. (And by the way, you can all thank me for not casting Giles and The Master in the above imagination exercise.)

* Megan Fox won't be returning for the third Transformers movie, presumably because notorious asshole director Michael Bay treated her like a huge asshole. Women & Hollywood's take:

Her side told The Wrap that said she walked away because director Michael Bay was “verbally abusive” and had just had enough of his crap.  She’s also talked about how he made her tan so much for the film that’s she’s nervous about getting skin cancer.  Bay is known to be an ass to his female actors, and the article goes on to say that another of the female actors in Transformers 2 Isabel Lucas wouldn’t do publicity for the film because of Bay.But he gets away with this shit over and over because no one has the power—or the guts—to hold this man accountable.  He could never get away acting like this in an office environment.  It’s also probably true that the if the executives who hire Bay and tolerate his behavior acted like he did, they would be in court up on charges.

Photo via The Library of Congress.

If we must turn the art of photography into a sexual metaphor, this is how it usually goes: The camera represents the photographer's phallus. The camera's lens is the artistic extension of the male gaze. Female subjects "make love" to the camera, and by extension, the artist. But what happens when a photography exhibit featuring solely women artists wants to get a little sexy?

(a) NEGATE THE PHOTOGRAPHER'S SEXUAL AGENCY. At Georgetown's L2 Lounge this Thursday, "Art Soiree" will host a photo exhibition of five female photographers. The title? "Five virgins and the camera." Naturally, since the photographers are not dudes, the camera—the phallus in this scenario, remember—will just turn around and penetrate the photographer-virgins, because it can! Instead of the photographer enforcing her sexual agency upon her subjects by wielding the camera, per the traditional sex metaphor, the camera is actually fucking the photog in celebration of her first public exhibition.

(b) TURN THE MALE GAZE ON THE PHOTOGRAPHER. Note the photograph chosen to illustrate this exhibition. No, it's not a work by exhibiting artists Alyona Vogelmann, Emily Clack, Natalya Skiba, Xeniya Kirpichenko or Zanyasan Tanantpapat—it's a thin white lady with no head in a see-through dress holding a camera in front of her crotch. Because even when a woman is taking the photos, we still have to make sure there's a male gaze taking photos of her taking those photos, sexily.

(c) AND THE SUBJECTS? STILL WOMEN. Art Soiree says that its virgin-photographers will be  "capturing emotions, personality and individuality in everyday reality of women’s lives." Sounds great! But again, even when women are photographing other women, the "everyday reality of women's lives" they are revealing necessarily comes down to that old traditional display of submissive femininity: "The vision of hidden weaknesses and the vulnerability that create beautiful and mesmerizing moments."

(d) BONUS! PRETEND THIS IS ALL IN THE SERVICE OF FEMINISM. From the press release: "This Thursday Art Soiree is all about women, celebrating their beauty, elegance, talents, achievements and much more. Come and meet these talented photographers as they share with you their lives through their works, all while enjoying a jazz performance by our female guest
musician." When exhibiting the work of female photographers, remember that a woman's beauty comes first, followed by her elegance, with her talents and achievements—her fucking photography, presumably—bringing up the rear. But wait: The guest musician is "female." Forget about the jazz performance, is she pretty and elegant?

Looking for an alternate perspective on Muslim head coverings? Check out Headscarf and the Angry Bitch, a one-woman show by local artist Zehra Fazal. According to Fazal's presser, Headscarf "is a semi-musical, fully comic exploration of life as a Pakistani Muslim growing up as an American girl in the suburbs." According to City Paper reviewer Mike Riggs, Headscarf is about an "infidel-licking lesbian" persona who sings songs like "The Only Thing I’ll Do Five Times a Day is You." Headscarf rides again this month at Theater J; the press release is after the jump.

Your guide on this tour of "that delightfully mystifying creature known as the Russian female" is Russia Today scribe Robert Bridge, who left the feminizing influence of Pittsburgh twelve years ago to pen faux-anthropological investigations of fucking foreign chicks, finally earn respect for thinking with his "clumsy tool," and sit for this portrait (above).

Bridge's top ten tips for fetishizing Russian women while worshiping your own klutzy penis:

1. Russian women have suffered too long under the weight of not being objectified by American men.

After all, on the western side of the Iron Curtain, the iconic Soviet female—with a sickle in one strong hand and a balalaika in the other—was believed to be more industrious than beautiful, more blustering than blush. Indeed, the practical value of a Russian woman ranked somewhere between a good tractor and a surplus wheat harvest: extremely useful in the right situations (snowstorm, famine, revolution), but certainly not the most likely candidate to grace the cover of a glossy fashion magazine, for example, or win Playboy playmate of the year.

2. You may think that all Russian women are trying to kill you, but at least they will not try to pay for anything.

You are sitting in a trendy restaurant in the booming heart of the Russian capital trying to forget about your jetlag and lost luggage when you are suddenly slapped with the bracing realization that you aren’t in Kansas anymore. Across the table from you is seated an attractive Russian woman, your Internet flame, a deadly femme fatale for all you know. But definitely a Russian woman. . . . Anyways, things get off to a bizarre start at the restaurant. Before you even set foot into the place, ‘Natasha’ lets you open the door for her; in fact, she coolly expects it, and doesn’t even say ‘Spasibo’ as she sweeps past with a violent toss of her blonde locks. Somehow, this gives you a strange sense of male liberation and empowerment, which might just be the world’s biggest oxymoron.

3.  Feminism has robbed men of the sense of purpose provided by owning women.

The svelte Slav at your side expects you to help her with her fur coat, position the chair just right under her awaiting derriere, order the food, and yes, even pay the exorbitant bill without even so much as feigning to open her Gucci pocketbook. Wow, you think, there might just be a purpose on this nutty earth for a six-foot-two stumbling male after all. What the heck is going on here? It’s as if that Boeing 747 that hauled you across the Atlantic Ocean was actually a time machine, transporting you back to the 19th century.

Suddenly the reason hits you: feminism, or rather the glaring absence of it.

4. In Russia, your zany inclination toward "accidentally" assaulting and/or harassing women will not be prosecuted.

In the United States, every action on the part of the klutzy man is liable to be misinterpreted, overanalyzed and even persecuted in a court of law. Even one of our otherwise great presidents, William Jefferson Clinton, was laid low by this ridiculous national pastime. In America, as one wit observed, “when a man talks dirty to woman, it’s sexual harassment. When a woman talks dirty to a man, it’s $2.95 per minute.” Even opening the door and letting her pass first may be the ticket to a ruined night. Eventually, some feminists began to realize that it’s no fun to spend your life walking on glass.

5. The legacy of goat-milking has prepared Russian women for the task of aspiring to have sex with you.

Russia, which was geographically isolated from many of the West’s most famous fits and starts (the Enlightenment, Capitalism and Industrialization, to name a few), developed more or less at its own leisurely pace until at least the beginning of the twentieth century. Thus, painful questions concerning the rightful place of western women in the early industrial system (exposed for its cruelty by progressive writers of the time, like Upton Sinclair, who wrote The Jungle in 1914) were being debated in the West while, half way around the world, Russian women were peacefully picking raspberries and milking goats in the idyllic countryside.

6. On the other hand, in some ways, Communist Russia treated women equally to men. This was bad for men.

Communism, despite some nutty megalomaniacs, made no distinction between the sexes when it came to receiving an education. And upon graduation, Soviet men and women (with some glaring exceptions in favor of the males, easily discernible on May Day on the top of Lenin’s mausoleum in Red Square, and even more visibly in the kitchen) enjoyed equal opportunities. A heavily subsidized educational system, complete with daycare centers for infants and children, gave both the mother and the father the freedom to advance themselves. In some strange ways, communism was a boon for the females and a bust for the men.

7. Russian women do not appear on Oprah.

As it is, Russian women, who deftly use every inch of their femininity—high heels and mini skirts included—to their general advantage, have no desire to ‘lower themselves’ in an effort to obtain equality with men. Moreover, you actually get the sense that Russian women truly cherish the fact that they were born females, and not the victim type that cries daily on Oprah Winfrey.

8. Russion women are forever approaching the splash pool in the Crocodile Mile of oppression.

Moreover, Russian females seem to feel completely at ease with themselves, and more importantly, their femininity. The female body is not concealed like a horrible scar, but rather decorated, accentuated and put on parade for every eye to behold. Nobody will point and stare at a woman in Russia for exposing a bit too much leg. In Russia, if you’ve got it, there is absolutely no problem to flaunt it. An object of male desire? Undoubtedly. But somehow Russian women manage to navigate the slippery road of being attractive without sliding into the wall of oppression. They are at the controls of their womanhood and the miniskirt and high heels only adds to the sense of their feminine powers that no man has been able to fully explain. Oppressed? Don’t bet on it.

9. Russian women will starve themselves for you, restoring your sense of purpose.

The Russian woman sitting across the table from you understands very well the price of a dinner, at least from her end of the bargain. According to female insiders, she will spend at least three hours in front of the mirror applying her makeup, seven hours shopping for shoes, three days finding a dress and five days with little or no food to fit into it. Add to all that the price of a pedicure, manicure and trip to the hairdressers. In other words, don’t be surprised if your date arrives looking like a million bucks.

10. Russian standards of footwear will render your date incapable of traversing home without your assistance, providing you an opportunity to attempt to have sex with her.

So let’s imagine that the date was a stunning success and it’s time to say goodnight to Natasha. First, although the metro (subway) is a very convenient form of public transportation in the Russian capital, as well as in other Russian cities, it is better to blow your last rubles on a taxi ride. Her feet, already bleeding inside of tortuous high heels, will appreciate the thought.

Naturally, throughout the course of the ride, you may be asking yourself: ‘Oh boy, what happens next?’

* Writing in the Awl's Sex Offender week series, Sady Doyle goes long on Rivers Cuomo and why he (and his cute glasses) have messed you up "forever."

* In an attempt to disprove the allegation that teabaggers employed racial slurs against black members of Congress at a rally, Andrew Beibart has agreed to donate $100,000 to the United Negro College Fund if anyone can produce "video and audio evidence that this occurred." Somehow, none of the accused racists attending this rally have stepped forward to donate a bunch of money to this organization. Hmm!

* Is Dita Von Teese a feminist? The answer is complicated, according to this interview with the burlesque performer:

Hmmm. Well, it’s a question that’s posed to me quite often and it’s frustrating, because if you look at the definition of what it means to be a feminist, it’s to have the same rights as a man. If someone tells me that I cannot create, produce, direct these shows and star in them, that that should be for a man should do, then that doesn’t really jive with feminist ideals. It’s kind of an argument I hate even addressing because I think it’s just a stupid thing to ask. I’m sorry, but you know, I get asked it all the time! I’m, like, how can I be anti-feminist if I’m pro-woman and all my fans are women, so if you say it’s anti-feminist and you come to my show, or you come to one of my book signings, and it’s 80 percent women, how do you explain that means being an anti-feminist? A lot of women look to me as someone who is embracing her sexual power and confidence and trying to explain you don’t have to fit into the media’s mainstream image of “sexy.” I feel like the only time someone should call me “anti-feminist” is if they don’t understand what I do and who my fans are and what I’m standing up for. . . It’s not a word I don’t really like to address, you know? It’s not even that I want to call myself that, I just sort of go, “Oooooh!” It’s an eyeballer roller. (Laughs) You know what I mean? It’s like, oh man, it’s a weird question. The word “feminist” is so broad.

* Melissa McEwan tells Dr. Drew to shut up.

* Kate Harding takes down Peter Beinart's campaign to put a "mom" on the Supreme Court, in order to provide a role model for girls who want to snag one of the unlikeliest positions in American government, and also make babies. First point: There's already a mom on the Supreme Court!

Photo via State Library and Archives of Florida

This week in college sex columns: The University of Mary Washington tells students to fuck finals, and just fuck; Georgetown University explains WTF a "Zombie Fling" is, and why it should be avoided; Jaclyn Friedman administers a beatdown to misogynist college columnists.

UNIVERSITY OF MARY WASHINGTON tells you to fuck finals:

Sex Tip: In this edition of The Bullet sex column Sexclamations, Erin Hill advises students to take sexual study breaks to relieve stress: "Although it will consume a bit of your study time, making love to your partner and enjoying his or her presence will boost your mood and help you get a better grip on stress and other activities related to it. You may not find yourself 'in the mood,' but spending time with your partner and getting a few sessions in the sack can ultimately be extremely rewarding and beneficial to you and your partner’s well being."

Life Lesson: You don't have to take your clothes off: "simply holding hands can alleviate stress," Hill writes. Students without hands to hold can also "look at some LOLcats and have a few giggles," or masturbate.

Progressive Meter: Blowing off studying to have sex? Including options for students who don't want to have sex, and those who want to have sex with themselves? A+.

—

GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY wants your relationships to feel like "an icy cool glass of lemonade on a hot July day":

Sex Tip: Hoya relationship columnist Colleen Leahey apprises her classmates of all manner of "fling" they can engage in this summer. According to Leahey, all summer flings are good ideas. Except for the "Zombie Fling," which must be avoided:

This relationship resembles a pesky bee you continuously chase around the room trying to swat, but, at the last minute, feel too bad to kill. It’s that hook-up you absolutely hate to enjoy and desperately want out, but you can’t seem to fully climb down the escape ladder. Out of all the flings, this is the only one I would suggest staying away from, for the complex feelings it typically yields are far from refreshing or exhilarating. If you find yourself with a zombie, get the strength to end things and use the summer as your rebound. There is no better time for a little recuperation than the summer months."

Life Lesson: "Like an icy cool glass of lemonade on a hot July day, the summer fling refreshes the exhausted college student’s mental and physical health."

Progressive Meter: Leahey approves of all summer relationship lengths, of from one week to three months. I'll take it.

—

SEX COLUMNIST EMERITUS and feminist superstar Jaclyn Friedman ain't in college anymore. But campus columnists of the misogynist variety would do well to heed her advice:

Sex Tip: Your faux-edgy pro-rape columns are not, in fact, edgy. "Congratulations. You have written a column encouraging dudes to rape drunk girls, and it's now earning you 15 seconds of internet fame. Well played. I hope you're making the most of your moment," Friedman writes. Unfortunately, your misogyny is boring: "don't kid yourself into thinking you're groundbreaking or even original. People have been telling women who 'misbehave' that they deserve/secretly want 'whatever happens to them' since the dawn of time."

Life Lesson: Do not write faux-edgy pro-rape columns: "please go directly to hell," Friedman concludes. "I have just as much right as any man does to go out and have a few drinks without having a violent felony perpetrated against me."

Progressive Meter: A zillion.

Photo via the Library of Virginia.

This photograph basically sums up the scene at today's "Boobquake" festivities in Dupont Circle, where women bared their cleavage, and people paid attention to them. Feminism! City Paper photographer Darrow Montgomery, who was on-hand to shoot the event in a completely not creepy way, says that Boobquake participants were outnumbered by members of the press. Click through for more photos of the event.

This week, disabled feminist blogger Annaham wrote a piece about dealing with Internet harassment of the international, televised, celebrity-sanctioned, horrible-death-threat variety.

And Salon writer Taffy Brodesser-Akner wrote a piece about dealing with Internet harassment of the if-you-experienced-PTSD-after-a-traumatic-childbirth-then-you-sound-like-a-bitch-who-just-shouldn't-ever-reproduce variety.

And recently, Sady Doyle of Tiger Beatdown wrote a piece about dealing with Internet harassment by loudly and publicly eviscerating the harasser, and then replacing all of their comments with the word "[BONERS]."

And also Awl writer Maura Johnston wrote a piece about dealing with Internet harassment by developing a "thick skin" because the Internet is "pretty much as mean as all of us," no more, no less.

And all of these people are women. And so, in this edition of Sexist Beatdown, Sady and I get to talking about Internet harassment of the you-women-ought-to-employ-your-mouths-for-dick-sucking-and-not-opinionating variety. Come troll, come all, and join us for a conversation which, oddly, does not conclude with Sady and I shutting up and performing blow jobs!

SADY: Hello! And, in related news, I hate you! Because we are on the Internet. Where ladies are hated abundantly!

AMANDA: With much vigor and from many angles! I really, really identified with Annaham's post, mostly about how shit on the Internet does affect me, but I'm not allowed to talk about it because "it's the Internet." But there. I said it, it does.

SADY: INDEED IT DOES! I once spoke to someone who was like, "all you ever talk about is who hates you on the Internet today. And why are you letting it get under your skin?" And I was like, "Because they hate me! I don't care where they are! Being on the Internet makes it WORSE, because I can SEE them hating me, FROM MY BEDROOM!" "I have a phone with e-mail on it! I can see people hating me WHEREVER I AM IN THE WORLD!"

AMANDA: Yeah, or from my office? For my career is located on the Internet.

SADY: PRECISELY. And, I mean, I really identified with Annaham's piece too. It said stuff I had been struggling to say, for like the LONGEST time, but in an actually sensical way that could potentially persuade people. Rather than me being like, "AND ALSO, in the SUBWAY, people are mean!"

AMANDA: For me, it wasn't so much that I couldn't figure out how to say it—though she said it very, very well—but that I didn't want to, because I don't want to tip my hand toward awful, anonymous commenters, or show any weakness, or risk being eviscerated for acting like a victim. It's not that I feel that I've been victimized. I just want to be able to talk about this shit, basically, and there's no space for that. So she's very brave, is what I'm saying.

SADY: Exactly. Because, the thing is, when you talk about Dicks On The Internet Getting You Down—or, worse, snap at one of them—people think you are just hypersensitive, and a whiner, and petty, and whatever. They think it's a personal problem. Whereas, me, I've talked to a lot of ladies who are on the Internet. I'm really into building Internet Lady Community, because it's not so easy. And here is the one way I have learned that you can start a passionate conversation with a lady who works on the Internet: MENTION MEAN COMMENTERS. Because we all get it! In super-intense ways! And at high volume! Every single lady on the Internet gets this thing!

AMANDA: Oh yeah. None of us is immune. And it's not subtle, either. It's obviously—just obviously—targeted at shutting us up.

SADY: Yes. It is not personal, it affects ladies qua ladies, it hurts and saddens, and I believe in ye olden tymes we would refer to this as a "Really Fucking Obvious Feminist Issue."

AMANDA: I know you recently quit the Internet for a weekend, and who can blame you? Because the real world is pleasant? But actually, people who aim personal attacks at us know that it makes us turn away and shut up, even for a little bit.

SADY: Exactly! And you can tell, because it tends to get more intense the larger one's audience is. I feel like I, full disclosure, have been relatively privileged insofar as I do NOT get mean commenters all that often, largely because they can tell I am WAY MEANER than they are. I have developed this Massively Uninhibited Bitch Who Will Cut You Persona. And as much as that might alienate people, I feel like it was a smart decision. Because when posters OTHER than me are at my blog, they DON'T have a rep as someone who will cut off your balls and feed them to you, perhaps in a delicate white wine sauce, and the assholes feel a lot safer.

AMANDA: Well, I know a lot of women who fucking love that persona of yours because we sort of live vicariously through it. But we shouldn't all have to adopt extremely defensive strategies in order to just ... speak.

SADY: Right. You should be able to post a picture of your new hat on the Internet without having to have built up 9,000,000 defensive strategies for when someone calls you ugly. Because they will call you ugly! They just will! Or a slut, if they can't call you that. "WHY ARE YOU SHOWING OFF YOUR PROVOCATIVE TORSO IN THIS FASHION?"

AMANDA: Because can I tell you? This woman on my blog the other day posted a comment about how the arguments that I make are less valid because of how my voice sounds. Because of how words sound when they leave my mouth. And because it sounds kind of like how a lady sounds.

SADY: Hahaha. So, she is just LITERALLY TELLING YOU not to speak. "When you speak, I can't help but notice that you are speaking," is what she says, "and that makes it harder for me to pay attention when you speak."

AMANDA: Right. Like could you perhaps get a surrogate voice, a more manly and patronizing one? Perhaps then my voice (but not my voice) can truly be heard.

SADY: Right. I mean: I think that, when people talk about blogs, they talk about the democratization of voice, and how it allows everyone to be heard. But what they don't talk about, so often, is how (a) We also re-iterate the same structures of rewarding or punishing voices that you see in Actual Real Life Not On The Internet, and (b) How the possibility that ladies might be TAKING to the Internet, and thus might have finally found a forum in which you literally CANNOT SHUT THEM UP by refusing to publish them or listen to them at your party or allow them into your fancy organizations or whatever, scares the shit out of dudes, and thus amps up the harassment to a truly scary degree. Like: I get harassed on the street, told to smile, have my tits pointed out to me, whatever. But on the street I don't TYPICALLY get told that someone should rape me to death. Thanks to the Internet, I can in fact have just such an experience!

AMANDA: Oh agreed. And I certainly don't get the degree of vitriol that some other people get, who are not cis, and not white, and not straight. But good golly do I still get a lot of it! There is just so much vitriol to go around!

SADY: That is the thing! And I feel like, you know: We can talk about the New Niceness, and whether it is a thing (it is probably not a thing) or "Internet harassment" in general, but looking at it: I've written so much that is mean about ladies in the pop culture! But I have NEVER gotten it as hard as Annaham has. And I have to think that it is because she has not one, but TWO marks against her in the Things I Can Dismiss A Person For column. She's a feminist lady, and she's a lady with a disability. And making fun of "feminists" is a time-honored Internet Pastime, but "disabled feminists?" Boy howdy, is that ever an excellent punchline for Amanda Palmer and her delightful comedy routines!

AMANDA: Oh God, I know. International televised harassment for ... what? Not particularly enjoying the way a particular musician she likes is appropriating disability?

SADY: Right. And then, the Internet Douches, well-accustomed to not listening to ladies, ESPECIALLY not listening to feminist ladies, and ESPECIALLY not listening to people who talk about disabled folks getting the short end of the stick, are like: YES. TARGET ACQUIRED.

AMANDA: One of your commenters (you have some really great commenters, along with the bad ones) made a really good point about the difference between criticism and harassment, and how Amanda Palmer and her legion of defenders have failed to recognize the difference. And I feel like that's a common trait of all trolls—just flat out refusing to engage in any kind of subtlety or empathy.

SADY: Exactly. I mean, I did not read the Male Studies Scholar Conference that happened on Sexist Beatdown two weeks ago IN ITS ENTIRETY, but I do vividly remember the gentleman who requested that, next time we spoke, the other one suck his personal dick, that he might be able to tolerate our lady jabber. That is not, "I think the political underpinnings of your work are flawed." That is not, "Okay, good post, but here's the line I have an issue with."

AMANDA: Oh, well I live for this man to tolerate me!

SADY: I forget. Is it your turn to fellate this gentleman? Or mine?

AMANDA: It is what feminism has been striving for all these years. Tell Gloria Steinem that it was just as easy as a blow job.

SADY: I mean, it's so easy to dismiss everyone who criticizes you as a hater or a bad person. So easy! But I've been CRITICIZED, from a lot of different angles, by a lot of people. And it might irritate me. But none of it is people just flat out saying, "fuck or walk, bitches." And that's what the Internet is, for women, a WHOLE STINKING LOT OF THE TIME. Like, maybe if they are Gawker commenters they might wrap it up in some clever allusion to a Baumbach movie, or whatever. But you can still feel it seething, a lot of the time.

AMANDA: Yes. And this is one of the reasons why I love, love, love Feministe's Next Top Troll series.

SADY: Is it not the best?

AMANDA: Because the comments? They never change. It doesn't matter what woman is talking or what she's talking about or what the tone of her argument is. The vitriol is across the board just exactly the same as what I get. And it's fucking hilarious, and I take comfort in it.

SADY: Exactly. In summary, for Troll SEO Purposes: Male studies. Male studies, male studies, male studies. Women tell the truth sometimes about rape. Circumcision! DIVORCE. There. That ought to get them started! Oh, and also: I dislike prog rock, and dudes who make prog rock, sometimes. WHAT DO YOU GOT, INTERNET? WHAT. DO. YOU. GOT.

AMANDA: I can't wait to hear the troll perspective on this. Oh please! Yes. Explain the various ways that voluntarily reading and commenting on my blog oppresses you! Go on! Or perhaps you'd like to argue as to why you are doing me a service, and why I ought to be praising you for your volunteer work in the comments section? I am interested in considering all of these possibilities.

SADY: "One time I was on the Internet, and someone disagreed with me! I politely explained why she was a stupid little girl, and then, she YELLED at me. My oppression, it is intense at times. And yet, I soldier on!" — A Commenter.

AMANDA: In conclusion, BONERS.

SADY: It is a regular BONER PARTY, out there on the Internet. And it makes my lady boners wither away in despair. Though not really! Because also, I keep blogging. At this point, mainly just to piss them off. Do you hear that, Feminist-Blog-Hating Internet? YOU ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR FEMINIST BLOGGING!

AMANDA: The world will never shrink this feminist boner!

Photo via EraPhernalia Vintage, Creative Commons Attribution License 2.0

Yesterday, the controversy unfolding over Alex Knepper's sexual assault opinion columns in the American University Eagle hit National Public Radio. The dialogue between Knepper, AU LGBT and feminist activist K. Travis Ballie, and host Michel Martin touched on Knepper's homosexuality, the politics of sex at drunken fraternity parties, and one important policy point—the lack of a victim's advocate on the AU campus. At one point, Martin asks Knepper, "Do you find it at all problematic, Alex, that you don't date women and yet you're judging their conduct in a situation that you are unlikely to be in?" An odd question for a program that's invited two gay men on to debate the topic, no?

Some guys and gals in the Male Studies set, however, had questions for our kind. A feminist answers Male Studies' most burning queries, after the jump:

Since I can’t think more than one thought at the same time, and I get distracted easily due to my inherent brain defect caused by my penis, could I get your call on whether men bleed when pricked so I can have a certified opinion sanctioned by your division of the sisterhood?

No.

I know of no woman who is raped daily, do you?

Not personally, but in some countries, that's actually legal. However, if you believe that every woman must be raped daily in order for you to care about sexual assault . . . then you are probably a Male Studies scholar.

Are you drunk?

Often!

????? WTF? What does criminal law have to do with this. Are you asserting that women’s studies prevents rape? That male studies would promote rape? That you are clueless?

Women's Studies does help work to prevent rape, but I'm not sure Male Studies does anything other than complain that I have a blog and pave the way for the rise of something called "teleconferencing scholars."

Whose rape is made into a punchline?

Prisoners, among others. And feminists really don't support any of that, trust me.

Who isn’t taken seriously when they claim domestic violence or rape—conversely, who is shoved into prison and subjected to humiliating medical examinations, because women are automatically believed when they cry rape, truthfully or not?

Male rape victims are often not taken seriously (or not heard at all), and that is a serious problem. Also a serious problem? That female rape victims are not taken seriously. And that victims, male and female, are actually denied the right to receive a humiliating medical examination because they are automatically not believed when they cry rape.

Who is convicted more often, receives longer sentences, and with less chance of parole, for the same crimes as women?

Black men.

If you think you have it so hard why not trade places? Have the guys sit at home and play housewife while you get marched off to your death for god and country? Have the guys get in the lifeboats with the kids with you go down with the ship?

This feminist opposes war, the draft, God, and the outmoded gender roles upon which ship-sinking etiquette is based. That being said, I'm afraid that if we actually traded places, I would be forced to sit at a computer and file nonsensical blog comments expressing outrage at outmoded gender analogies that I am unwilling to work to deconstruct, for I am an anti-feminist blog troll, in this scenario. So yes, in this case, women do have it better.

Can you not see that, thanks to feminism, virtually everything is getting worse for EVERYONE except PUAs and people who do not want to be burdened with children!?

Since I fall into the natural category of "Pick-Up Artist and/or person who does not want to be burdened with children," I'm afraid I'm not able to objectively answer this question. Who would have thought that feminism would end up just benefiting me and the writers of misogynistic dating books? Oh well.

Do you really believe Male Studies was established to win the approval of women? You are an idiot. I sure hope you can do something useful, like cook. Because if you can’t, I can only imagine you’d make a lousy wife. What are you good at, anyway? Why don’t you post a picture of your tits?

I don't believe Male Studies was established to win the approval of women, but I do bake a mean zucchini bread, and I imagine I would make a lousy wife. The reason that I don't post a picture of my tits is that despite your stated support of women posting pictures of our tits, you guys actually really despise us when we do that shit voluntarily.

Who said we are here to listen to you? Do you really believe Male Studies was established so that we may listen to the voices of women? Good Lord, your imbecility is breathtaking.

I would never assume that you would come over to my blog in order to listen to me.

Why is it that when the topic is MEN’S issues, MEN’S experiences, and MEN’S lives we (men) are STILL being told to sit down, shut up, and listen?

Probably because the topic is always men's issues, experiences, and lives, seeing as your main argumentative tactic when presented with women's issues, experiences, and lives is to immediately change the subject back to men, and then assert that women aren't allowed to talk about that stuff, so that we ought to sit down and shut up.

Well, I wonder if this posting will make it past the censor?

Yes.

Is the washington city paper even real?

Yes.

Are there any good feminist blogs out there at all?

Oh, yes! I quite like the lady over at Tiger Beatdown. And the folks at Feministing, Feministe, and Jezebel also provide interesting feminist content on the regular. The Ch!cktionary and Scarleteen are always swell for 20-somethings and teenagers, respectively, and you might also enjoy the work of fantastic feminist bloggers like Jaclyn Friedman, S.E. Smith, Cara Kulwicki, Shark-Fu, and C.L. Minou. Thomas McAulay Millar and Hugo Schwyzer provide a much-needed male perspective, though you'll have to ask them if they're sufficiently "male as male." And the bloggers over at Feminist Law Professors may satisfy your obvious thirst for scholarship.

Is there a “Scrotum Dialogues” somewhere that has escaped my attention that just as bizarrely as its sister counterpart worships the male appendage, and which has similarly taken the world by storm that has men everywhere worshipping their dicks and shouting the word “prick” to declare their ownership of their masculinity?

A Google search reveals that a commenter on the blog Too Much Free Time wrote a short scene entitled the "Scrotum Dialogues" in a 2004 comment on a review of the television program Big Brother 5.

Do you consider male homosexuality to be something dirty or insulting, Amanda? If not, why are you imagining that your enemies are homosexuals or attempting to slander them by painting them as homosexuals?

Nope! I am not doing that!

It is unfortunate men have to start building its own collective unity, why where they left on the side of the road, did they not invent and build what constitute the foundation of civilization, did they not discover cures and treatments for diseases, did they not fight so all can live in a free world, they did not leave women and children to fetch for themselves. Why did men accept to be withdraw and denied credit from the same people who they have created a better world?

I have no idea what you're saying.

I think this article is an example of why men cant take feminists seriously. Are you kidding me?

Yes.

Do you wear a drool-cup?

No, I wear a CockBib.

Two important developments in the World of Men this week:

1. A group of scholars, led by a man with the almost suspiciously masculine name of Lionel Tiger, established a new discipline of gender studies: Male Studies. Male Studies differs from the already existing discipline of Men's Studies in that it is devoted to studying the "male as male," as opposed to the "male as Easter Bunny" or whatever Men's Studies is passing off as scholarly research nowadays. Also, Male Studies really fucking resents Women's Studies. Cage match, anyone?

2. Sady Doyle of Tiger Beatdown, the preeminent scholar in the field of Lady Business Studies, invited some men to talk about their experiences for once. Sady's Visions of Manliness series (see A, B, and C) has addressed stuff like the simultaneous marginalization and privilege of trans men, ironically homophobic sports blogging, and how deeply Valentine's Day truly blows. Strangely, none of the posts are about how feminists have stolen their male identity, trampled upon their masculine phenomenon, and overall been super mean. In other words, this is total Men's Studies shit.

In this edition of Sexist Beatdown, Sady and I YELL ABOUT THESE THINGS AND ALSO bell hooks SO JOIN US!

SADY: hello, Fellow Lady Person!

AMANDA: Why hello! I am prepared to speak about the experiences of . . . Men People.

SADY: About which I know, I will tell you, not a whole lot! Like, I have known Men People throughout my lifetime. Sometimes in the sense that they are related to me! Or friends! Or I have known them BIBLICALLY! But also, like, pursuant to the Liz Lemonism critique of Times Past, I feel like I am privileged in 99% of the ways that people can be privileged on this our planet Earth. And it frustrates me — and has been a schism in The Feminist History — that, as a lady who is so very fucking privileged, I'm allowed to concentrate so much on my own Oppression By The Man and not notice that some of The Men are going through their own bullshit.

AMANDA: Right. In the Oppression Olympics, I would not qualify for the finals. I would be disqualified in the first heat. I also am really no good with sports metaphors!

SADY: Well, The Man has staked his claim in those. BASICALLY WE NEED TO TAKE THE QUARTERBACK OF DISCOURSE TO THE GOAL NET OF DISCUSSION TO SCORE A HOME RUN HAT TRICK OF ANTI-OPPRESSION THEORY! Is my understanding.

AMANDA: I plan on blaming all of my deficiencies in forming metaphors, drawing conclusions, and overall making sense on my Oppression today. For the record.

SADY: I intuitively understand you, due to my woman's intuition. But, like, this is a long-standing Beef within the feminist community, in fact. Like, bell hooks covered it along with approximately everybody else.

AMANDA: Yeah, I mean, a distinction must be made between men and The Man.

SADY: Right. We oversimplify. And a ton of feminists have needed to clarify that "when we say 'men,' we mean the Platonic ideal of 'men!' The way 'men' are encouraged to behave and act and such!" And as a person who types the words 'dudes' and 'men' a lot, I am sympathetic. Because we DO need a word to denote all that junk. But, to revisit bell hooks for JUST A SECOND, here is how that works out in practice: Some white feminist ladies walk up to some ladies of color, and are like "join the cause, sister!" And the ladies of color are like, "sure, I've experienced sexism, let's go. On the way, can we talk about how you white ladies are enacting some bullshit that hurts me and also the men in my community?" And then the white ladies are like, "YOU ARE SO MALE-IDENTIFIED. WHY CAN'T YOU JOIN OUR GLORIOUS SISTERHOOD AND IDENTIFY AS A WOMAN FIRST."

AMANDA: Allow me to flip that dynamic around for a second, as I think the distinction between "Men's Studies" and the totally brand new discipline of "Male Studies" helps to illustrate that point. So, "Male Studies" just had its first conference on Wednesday, to declare "Male Studies" a thing, even though "Men's Studies" already exists and is welcoming of all who study men and masculinity. And the reason "Male Studies" has decided to branch off from "Men's Studies" is that Men's studies thinks too much about Women's Studies.

SADY: Oh, dear.

AMANDA: When there is just no reason to segregate these two studies, of course.

SADY: Well, unless you want to teach an entire seminar on barbecue grilling!

AMANDA: And I think feminism suffers from the impulse to segregate the experiences of people and treat our cultural systems (patriarchy, masculinity, femininity, race, class) as separate fields, and I think my work often suffers from that distinction, actually.

SADY: Well, I mean, to be honest, mine does, too. Mostly due to my vast narcissism, and the fact that I write mostly about my own experiences!

AMANDA: Right.

SADY: You could run over my foot with a shopping cart at the Costco, and I'd write this very ideological post that was like, "SHOPPING CART PRIVILEGE: Does It Lead You To Run Over My Foot, and Are You A Monster? Yes."

AMANDA: But it's a very tricky thing to attempt to write about the experiences of others, and that's why your masculinity series is so great! TIGER BEATDOWN PLUG!

SADY: Which is why I try to bring other people into the discussion.

AMANDA: But what about, in addition to bringing in these voices, also writing about issues that don't directly affect us and which we can't talk about from personal experience? I think it's important to do that too, but I think it's a lot trickier.

SADY: Right. And also, you have to be open to getting yelled at! Is my experience!

AMANDA: Agreed!

SADY: Because there's a big difference between "speaking about these things that do not affect me directly" and "speaking FOR these people who are having these experiences because I am A GENIUS and get your experience way better than you do." But, like, it is easy to cross the line?

AMANDA: Yeah. It is. And that's where the productive yelling comes in.

SADY: So you have to be a good listener, ESPECIALLY when people are yelling.

AMANDA: But, so, then I also sometimes get yelled at if I write about how something affects men? I get the "O but what about the menz!!!!!" comments. I don't know why it's written like an Internet cat is saying it, but it is. Even though I write about women a whole lot!

SADY: They are all basically internet cats, those dudes, though. Like, if you write a post about Vajazzling, to use a totally fictional example, and people are like, "did you know some dudes get CIRCUMSIZED??? Monstrous! Your vagina post has inspired me to talk about the ill fates of penises, instead, and at length!' Like, at a certain point, the "WHAT ABOUT ME" posts from dudes are just blatantly obnoxious, and blatantly intended to keep women from writing about their OWN experiences of manliness, ill or well.

AMANDA: Yeah. I have a good friend who is hurt that I don't write on the expectations on men to move furniture for girls.

SADY: OH MY GOD. OPPRESSION! I too am disappointed that you have not covered this topic Amanda! Also: Being asked to open pickle jars. WORSE THAN DEATH???

AMANDA: Well I'm waiting to roll out my big investigative series. On the possible lingering lower back problems.

SADY: "Once I Had To Carry Your Books Up Some Stairs: A Post About Traumatic Experiences, By A Dude."

AMANDA: But, I write about a lot of really minor shit that women are expected to do and about how these very little things are reminders of society's expectations of men and women. And a lot of times men get really pissed when I do that, too! For it is annoying to be forced to think about.

SADY: Right. I mean, here's the thing: I'm a lady who gets called out on my privilege. A lot. As I see it, my job description is: Write about lady stuff, try to remember not all ladies have exactly the same life as I do, listen when ladies with different lives are like "uh, you missed something." So the plague of dudes on the Internet who are like, "WHAT DO YOU MEAN LADIES EXPERIENCE THINGS DIFFERENTLY THAN I DO, SOMETIMES NOT WELL?!???!" Like: I try to listen to people EVERY SINGLE DAY, dude, and I haven't actually had an aneurysm and died yet, so maybe it's not actually that fucking hard. You know? The Internet is not a thousand little knives stabbing you in the face. The Internet is some people talking. In conclusion, calm down.

AMANDA: Yeah. And that's when things get tough, for me, when we start talking about the experiences of men like that. Because it's so obvious how our culture is constructed to make guys like that never have to—and to actually avoid—listening to a woman's experience, just as it's constructed to help white people avoid listening to anyone else, and straight people, and cis people, &c.

SADY: Yeah. But then you have things like "Male Studies," where "The male as male will be permitted to appear in all his complexity as new values are being forged and traditional values that have proven the test of time are affirmed."

SADY: And I get the feeling those traditional values that have proven the test of time kind of involve OPPRESSING THE VAST MAJORITY OF MALES???

AMANDA: Yes. And that traditional man has always been permitted to appear. It's all the other men who haven't. But Male Studies cuts them out of the picture when it devotes itself to "males as males," as if we're only talking about one very clearly defined and biologically determined type of person.

SADY: Right. Because "the male as male" means cisgendered. It means straight. It means white. It means, like, a lot of shit! Actually! As it is commonly employed! Everybody else, if they can even get recognized as dudes, is treated in the discourse as, "well, okay, you're a dude. But a SUBSET of dude. We have trouble imagining you as a character on 'Mad Men,' so, like, clearly you're not a part of the glorious history of The Male As Male to the same extent." But here's the thing. The ominous thing that I always phrase in a manner that brings to mind, like, the James Cameron movie 'Aliens.'

AMANDA: Okay.

SADY: All of those dudes excluded from the discourse of Traditional Old-Fashioned-Swilling Wife-Cheating-On Empowered Non-Chest-Waxing Masculinity? And all of the ladies? Add it up. THERE ARE MORE OF US than there are of anyone else. Which is why we need to start fucking talking to each other more.

AMANDA: This reminds me more of that Beyonce song than Aliens, but I see what you're getting at.

SADY: Like, if we start looking at "masculinity" as this very exclusive concept that has all of these other concepts and privileges packed into it, then we get to my I Went To Liberal Arts College And Have Simplistic Ideas Place where, like... we can create a discourse without you, substantially, Ultimately Privileged People. If we can get over our own bullshit and have each others' backs, we can do a lot. And maybe this conversation needs to take place on THOSE terms. Provided you're okay with getting yelled at when you fuck it up. Also, I have had three beers, because it's hot. THE REVOLUTION WILL NOT BE SOBER!

AMANDA: NO IT WILL NOT. And I will fight to the death for men to gain the right to drink as much as women do without being labeled irresponsible sluts who deserve whatever is coming to them.

SADY: Yes! Also, that person who ran over my foot in the Costco: A MONSTER. I think we need to centralize this issue. Because that hurt.

AMANDA: Kumbayah!

Photo via George Eastman House

Male Studies made its official debut this Wednesday, when a symposium was held at New York's Wagner College to announce the formation of the Foundation for Male Studies. While the new discipline received the support of academics like Rutgers University anthropology professor Lionel Tiger and McGill University religious researcher Paul Nathanson, one contingent of scholars met the news with suspicion: Those working in the very much already existing discipline of Men's Studies.

So, what's the difference between "Male Studies" and "Men's Studies"?

According to Tiger, Male Studies emerged “from the notion that male and female organisms really are different” and the “enormous relation between . . . a person’s biology and their behavior." To the Male Studies set, "Men's Studies" has historically focused far too much on the social construction of masculinity, and not enough on the biological origins and purpose of "maleness." The Foundation for Male Studies states that its focus is on studying "the male as male":

A new academic discipline, male studies, explores the male as male, masculinity, and the lives of boys and men. This consortium brings together eminent scholars representing a range of academic disciplines, including anthropology, education, history, medicine, politics and psychology. Panelists together with teleconferencing scholars with take a fresh look at the male in history and a rapidly changing global culture. The male as male will be permitted to appear in all his complexity as new values are being forged and traditional values that have proven the test of time are affirmed. The consortium will set the stage for additional conferences and academic programs at institutions of higher learning and will support optimal conditions in which boys and men can thrive in all areas of their lives as male human beings.

But according to Robert Heasley, president of the American Men’s Studies Association, Men's Studies has already been performing the work of exploring males as males. "Men's studies came out of feminist analysis of gender, which includes biological differences," Heasley said. "[The Male Studies] argument is that they’re inventing something that I think already exists."

Perhaps the real distinction has a little something to do with that "feminist" thing. The American Men's Studies Association states that "Men’s studies includes scholarly, clinical, and activist endeavors engaging men and masculinities as social-historical-cultural constructions reflexively embedded in the material and bodily realities of men’s and women’s lives." But women's lives don't appear to be of much interest to the Male Studies set. According to Tiger, Male Studies was forged in contrast, not in concert with, feminism, which he describes as “a well-meaning, highly successful, very colorful denigration of maleness as a force, as a phenomenon.” Apparently, Male Studies was formed in order to study this phenomenon without the distraction of also occasionally thinking about women. So now, we need two separate disciplines devoted to studying men, because the first one just wasn't devoted enough.

In this edition of Feminist Dream Phone Sexist Beatdown, Sady Doyle of Tiger Beatdown and I help all the hetero feminist ladies out there find a man! There's been some very Serious Feminist Literature written on the subject of Feminist Dating as of late, covering such important topics as establishing a feminist litmus test and learning to sarcastically accommodate man-children. What is this discussion missing, besides more hamburgers? Personal information about Sady and I, apparently!

Important Note: This Sexist Beatdown will make a lot more sense if you imagine Sady and I throwing sassy hand signals (such as "the hand") at various points throughout the dialogue, inserting the word ". . . girl" before and after each of our sentences, and exiting to the enthusiastic applause of hundreds of single women at the discussion's conclusion. Thank you.

AMANDA: Hellooo.

SADY: Why, hello! First, allow me to extend a brief litmus test to you, to determine whether we may chat.

AMANDA: OK.

SADY: My litmus test is: Rape Culture! Are you a fan?

AMANDA: Fuck, I know this one. I know this. I'm going to go with "not a fan"?

SADY: A-ha! We may proceed!

AMANDA: Great! Can I also request that we make this a speed Sexist Beatdown, because I reeeaaaally need to go eat this hamburger pretty soon?

SADY: Sure! The thing is, my own Litmus Test (which is not so much a Litmus Test as a Litmus GRE, I must admit) is not that much more subtle.

AMANDA: OK cool. So do you have an actual, like, question you will ask a potential boyfriend?

SADY: Personally, I just talk about feminism all the damn time. There are no questions! There are only answers! Answers provided by ME!

AMANDA: Right. Yes. That tends to be pretty effective in weeding out a whole lot of people.

SADY: I find myself a little unbearable. But I, like, hit on a guy and then transition into talking about Dworkin's thoughts on the Tolstoy marriage in “Intercourse” (ACTUALLY HAPPENED; TRUE STORY TIME) and if their genitalia withers at the mention of the name of Andrea D, well, that's when I find out!

AMANDA: And did it? Wither?

SADY: We are dating now! This man and I!

AMANDA: The genitalia doth not wither! I actually haven't been on the market since I became insufferably outspoken on the issue of ye olde rape culture, so I haven't been able to have that really fun experience yet.

SADY: Ha, yeah. Can I tell you it will be TERRIFYING? (Not that you are going to break up with your boyfriend. But! I am going to talk about me now, because that is my area of expertise and interest!) It is the worst part of breaking up. You are like, "but I can't break up with you! I became a FEMINIST BLOGGER! Now I'm NEVER going to get laid EVER AGAIN!”

AMANDA: I have heard, "You talk about rape all the time," from the significant other, who tolerates it. And he's not wrong. I feel like there are feminists, and then there are professional feminists, and if you are lucky enough to get within genital-withering distance of a professional feminist, then you're going to have to listen to a lot of theories about rape. But I imagine it's kind of like a lot of things? For example, I often have to silently log government acronyms in my brain that I will never understand, and it is something that I generally tolerate. But I feel like it's made out to be scarier or more annoying when the shop talk that is boring you to tears on your first date is of the Feminist persuasion.

SADY: Right. Because you have to navigate it. It actually has to be a topic of conversation, like: "Look. Look at me. This lady right here? Feminist. We can't avoid that. Let's talk about how I won't genitally mutilate you over a disagreement, as you may have heard The Feminists enjoy doing from time to time." But when you are not a Professional Feminist, when you are just Regular Feministing It Up, I feel like it is almost harder.

AMANDA: Because it's not necessarily the first thing that a potential partner knows about you?

SADY: Yeah. And because you can't be like, "but actually I know my shit on this topic, enough to get paid for knowing it from time to time." You are just a wacky lady with a cute little hobby of thinking she's a person and stuff, and people don't treat it with the same level of respect.

AMANDA: Oh word. God getting laid is so hard.

SADY: It really is! It amazes me that people ever manage it! And (FOR ME!) I didn't have the same level of confidence, Back in The Day, so I'd try to slip it in there on like the ninety-seventh date and in a very quiet way, whereas now I am like, "oh. Right. I got this."

AMANDA: The only thing I truly remember addressing in previous relationships is the pro-choice thing, which has direct and immediate application to having sex with a person.

SADY: Ha, right. I was very up-front about birth control. Still am! Still talk about it! Because, that is my own personal body we are discussing! But also I would go to ninety-seven Judd Apatow feature films with you and sort of quietly stew and not tell you what was wrong. You know what I recommend though? Is, like, looking around for dudes who do the feminism.

AMANDA: But where?

SADY: Uhhhhh... the Internet? I think a lot of feminist ladies who blog on the Internet date or have dated or are currently dating feminist or political dudes who blog on the Internet. Seriously like three separate feminist ladies I have talked to have been like, "and we met through work." Or, "and we met because of The Blogs." And I totally recommend that! Actually! Because like more or less all your junk is out there already, and that is easier than doing your Missionary Work (ZING PUN BLAM) and trying to convert anybody. So, Step 1: Start feminist blog. Step 2: Meet dude who runs feministish blog. Step 3: Scientifically determine dude is awesome. Step 4: PROFIT??? IN THE ROMANTIC ARENA????

AMANDA: I have this hilarious image of a single lady like walking into a Men Can Stop Rape meeting and being like, "well HELLO feminist allies," all sexy like. Kind of like That Guy who shows up at a pro-choice rally in a "This Is What A Feminist Looks Like" t-shirt in an attempt to get some ass.

SADY: Oh, dude. If they figured it out, it would be OVER. It would be like the weird guy who walked up to you after Women's Studies classes to say you'd Opened His Eyes, creepily, times a thousand.

AMANDA: I think I'm still at a stage in my Comfort With Internet where when I am going out with a person I met over the Internet, I'm really self-conscious about it. Like, "Oh, I'm going to get a drink with someone. YES WITH MY INTERNET FRIEND. WITH MY INTERNET FRIEND OKAY." But I'm realizing that the Internet is becoming more like Real Life now so it's not so tortured. And why not cultivate sex partners that way, I guess! I just wonder if being a feminist and dating requires more of a premeditated campaign than having some other particular hangups and dating... I mean, I think it can just happen naturally, like anything else. Not that the Internet is unnatural! Oh god! Oh GOD.

SADY: JUDGER. Yeah. I mean, I always want to meet people From The Internet if I work with them, to REMOVE that creepy "it's like a friendship, but on the Internet" feeling. Then it's just a friendship. But maybe there should be like a feminist J-Date! Oh, my God, I just became an online dating entrepremillionaire. Just by typing that sentence.

AMANDA: F-Date. F-Fuck.com. There are possibilities.

SADY: YES. GOOD. MARK THE DOMAIN NOW.

AMANDA: It is shockingly unclaimed!

SADY: NO TIME FOR CHATTING! GOT TO ESTABLISH ONLINE FEMINIST-EXPLOITING CAREER!

AMANDA: I only date other professional exploiters of feminism, personally.

SADY: And at last, we discover the true purpose of both feminism and the human desire for companionship: To Make Us Money.

AMANDA: Excellent! So now that we've solved the Feminist Dating Dilemma, I guess I can go eat a burger now?

SADY: You eat that burger, my friend. And I myself will be making some pasta and cashing in harder than you've ever seen. The next time you see me, I will be eating a burger made from a cow cloned for me personally. Because that's how feminism works.

Last week, I interviewed Jaclyn Friedman about fucking while feminist and the tangled web feminists weave when we try to bring a relationship partner into our down-with-the-patriarchy worlds. In the interview, Friedman expressed the desire to establish a dating litmus test that feminists can use to weed out incompatible matches early on in the relationship. Friedman used to screen guys who professed a love for Fight Club, but she abandoned that particular test after she "learned that a lot of smart, progressive, even feminist guy like Fight Club." Is there any shortcut that feminists can use to ensure they're not wasting their time on misogynists? After Friedman bared her dating dilemmas, the feminist blogosphere exploded with insight on the idea of the feminist fucking litmus test. But first, I'll share my own litmus test:

Mine is pretty simple. I don't require people I date to identify as feminist, or be aware of what "male privilege" is, or watch porn with a critical eye, or give even the tiniest shit about gender roles in Superbowl commercials. Of course, I've got some idiosyncratic deal-breakers unrelated to feminism (if you have ever changed your handle or IP address in order to comment multiple times on a blog post, it is probably not going to work out). My dating litmus test is the same one that many have used to consider candidates for the United States Supreme Court: If you don't support a woman's right to abortion, then we can't have sex, ever.

Jill Filipovic at Feministe suggests that it's a lot easier to suggest litmus tests for other feminists to follow than to actually weed out men based solely on principle:

Even getting to the point of “this is a person worth dating in the first place” is… not easy. Any relationship requires compromise and flexibility, sure; but how and where to compromise on the feminism thing is particularly difficult because we aren’t talking about a political issue here, we’re talking about a way of seeing the world. I also watch a lot of women date men who are, to be kind, Not Great, but they want to date someone and Not Great Guy is there I guess. I remember being at one feminist conference or another, and an audience member who identified as a feminist asked a panel of feminist writers what they do about the men in their lives who joke about sexism — she was engaged, she said, and her fiance and her dad love to joke about how she should get in the kitchen and make them a sandwich, ha ha ha, and she told them a bunch of times that it bothers her but that they still do it. And all I could think was, “Oh sister they are not joking, dump that dude and dump him now.” But I’m pretty sure I could have said that and she would not have dumped that dude, now or otherwise. And then I remembered that I once dated a dude who sat me down to watch an episode of Tough Love (“I know you’re skeptical, but he totally helps these girls!”) where host-man tells one of the contestants that she’s so slutty she’s going to get herself raped. I voiced my disgust and he was basically like, “But host-man is kind of right, don’t you think?” And I didn’t dump that dude on the spot either, even though I felt so gut-punched I could barely talk.

Point being, it’s awfully easy to look at other feminist women and think that they are making obviously terrible choices with their love lives; it is much harder to actually find someone who meets all the requirements of a feminist litmus test, and is single and is someone you’re attracted to and is also attacted to you and is someone who you want to discuss things other than feminism with and is in the right place at the right time. So if you want a relationship — and I think that most people really do want relationships — you have to be able to put some things aside. Where and how you put your feminism aside is, for me, significantly harder than he likes cats and I’m more of a dog person.

Andrea Grimes at Heartless Doll doesn't cop to a particular litmus test, but she does say that her feminism has greatly improved her love life. At some point, her standards shifted in imperceptible ways, and it resulted in a quality-over-quantity change to her dating roster:

I didn't self-identify as feminist until a couple of years ago. It was a long process of consciousness-raising through blog-reading, book-buying and news consumption before I finally, at the age of 24, decided that feminism was the way to go. And I definitely did a whole hell of a lot more dating–casual and serious–before I was 24. Is feminism to "blame"? Hard to say. Being in college, and being young generally, put me in a bigger dating pool. I was less jaded, willing to put up with all kinds of shit and fairly serious about seeing what the world had to offer me in the way of dick.

. . . As I've gotten older, I find it much, much more difficult to even crush on anyone. The allure of the deadbeat rock-star-bartender is gone. I no longer want to sleep with a guy just because he looks like Dan Radcliffe. I'm not gazing longingly at every writer under age 70 with a Rolling Stone byline. Having had several long-term relationships and experienced the good and the bad that comes with, I'm much, much less personally invested in finding one again and far more comfortable and happy with myself overall. I fantasize about weddings, not marriage. (I  need to upgrade my Hello Kitty toaster, anyway.)

But while my dating quantity has gone down as I identified as a feminist, the quality of dating has gone way, way up. If I never again talked to most of the guys I slept with before I was 24, I would not much be bothered. But the guys I've met and loved and screwed since will, I hope, remain my friends to some degree or another.

I think being a feminist has made me a better girlfriend, a better dater, a better lover, a better person generally. What's not to like? (Apart from the functional alcoholism and cat obsession.) Indeed, I polled guys I've dated since my feminist awakening, and none of them seem to take much issue with my fierce-ladyness. In fact, it seems to be something they're into. I asked them whether my feminism was a problem, and whether they're more or less attracted to feminists generally.

Merrit Martin from Heartless Doll says forearms first, feminism later:

... when I was dating, I would look for someone interested in learning about the feminist ideals and women's issues I believe in . . . though, to be honest, I'd do that after the first chit-chat and "do I even like his voice, forearms, hair, etc." part. I have to be honest—the physical part is important. I may be fairly traditional in terms of waiting a while before doing the deed, but if I can't even comprehend his P in my V (or at least Frenching a little), there's no point in finding out how he feels about Margaret Sanger.

Natalia Antonova keeps her feminism in perspective:

When I first meet someone, and decide that I adore them, I don’t really consider their politics at first. And while I usually mention that I’m a feminist, I do it in a flirtatious way—“yeah, I’m a feminist. A hardcore one.” . . . I don’t mind being anyone’s challenge, not initially, probably because I believe that initial attraction is always pretty superficial. I don’t even care if a guy offends me at first, because I’ll argue with him, and maybe he’ll argue back, and maybe we’ll discover that we actually have more in common than we realize, or else even less in common than previously thought. I’ve made my peace with the fact that “feminist” tends to be a loaded term, and when it provokes a reaction, I just deal with it, and move on. I don’t even think about it much anymore. It’s a little like being on autopilot.

Whenever I sacrifice my feminism for a man, I do it while remembering that it’s feminism that allows me that choice in the first place.

Viv at Finally, a Feminism 101 Blog has got a litmus test that works on the very first date:

In terms of feminist dating litmus tests, it’s nearly 20 years since I last dated, and perhaps this one isn’t so uncommon now as it was then, but one of my litmus tests was: is he OK about me thinking of something we could go see together, me ringing him up to invite him, and then me organising and paying for the tickets plus paying for the meal beforehand? My experience was that some men found this reversal of stereotypical dating roles confronting. Most were surprised, definitely. My partner of the last nearly 20 years hardly turned a hair (this doesn’t mean that we haven’t had our “why can’t you see this is a problem?” moments at times, but it was a damn good start).

Some Sexist commenters offered up their own guidelines. bellacoker looks for men who have been capable of change:

I have a litmus test, but not about feminism particularly. If the topic comes up in conversation I pay close attention to how potential partners discuss their previous partners, how those relationships ended and how they distribute the blame.

Super bonus points for being able to analyze personal situations critically and admit and learn from their own imperfections. Complete deal breaker for references to how their ex’s are any kind of “crazy,” unless diagnosed by an actual mental health professional in a clinical setting.

Amber looks for men who treat her as an individual:

In my current relationship with a very good man I have taken an incremental approach to explaining what feminism is and how it relates to his life. When we hear a story about “corrective rape” in South Africa on NPR that can become a conversation about the rape culture here. When we see an ad that sexualizes rape, I try to explain how these images normalize violence against women. Why “Law and Order SVU” sucks. Point being, I’ve tried to show him the world through my eyes. There are compromises; the gender roles are a little more traditional than I would like but he passes my personal litmus test of seeing me as an individual rather than filling the role as an archetype for their personal narrative. I’ll take it.

And DB's litmus test sounds awkward:

Potential litmus #1:

his last girlfriend isn’t an idiot (ask for references)

Photo by L Marie, Creative Commons Attribution License 2.0

Last week on the Sexist, readers sounded off on the new Kotex ad that isn't allowed to utter the sound "vuh-jahy-nuh," we parsed the difference between the "vulva" and the "vagina," and one commenter received some Very Special terminology instruction on the meaning of "tampon." Let's do this point-counterpoint style, shall we?

POINT: Censoring the word "vagina" is an absurd and sexist practice. Washington Post columnist Gene Weingarten on the Post's history of not saying "vagina" in print:

On this subject, I’d like to reprise a Comment I once made in this very forum a few months ago:

Meanwhile, I’d like to share a story apropos of the argument about whether women “are” their body parts. Back in the 1990s I was editing a story by Laura Blumenfeld about the then-trendy topic of the female condom. When we were done with it, the story had to be approved by a top editor at the paper, because it was about sex, and The Post was very, very nervous about sex. The editor liked the story, but he asked us to take out the word “vagina,” which he found distasteful. (Er, he found the WORD distasteful.)

Laura and I argued strenuously that you cannot write a story about the female condom without indicating how it is used, and that it is absolutely impossible to explain this without using the v word. And that there is nothing wrong with the v word.

The editor got all huffy and declared that he would rewrite it himself, which he did. And so there appeared the following line in The Washington Post; it is still in the archives: “The female condom lines the inside of a woman.”

Voila! In trying to be tasteful and sensitive, this editor put into the Washington Post a line SPECIFICALLY equating a woman with her ladypart.

COUNTERPOINT: Censoring the word "vagina" is an absurd and sexist practice . . . inflicted against men by those danged feminist groups! Also, forget "vagina!" Why can't I say "pussy"? Jeff lays it all down for us:

Did you ever think that women will complain if the word vagina is used and the networks don’t want letters and calls from thousands of women. It’s why words for male genitals are used routinely throughout every show on TV, but you will never hear a slang word for female genitalia. I have heard balls, nuts, dick, pecker, prick, dickhead, and even cock during prime-time on all channels. Why can’t tits or pussy be used? It’s because of the backlash from women’s groups and many women in general.

Could you imagine how many letters and calls NBC would receive if the show Parks and Recreation used the word pussy. But I heard the word dick and balls during the last episode. It’s ok for mainstream media to be sexist and bash men, use words for male genitalia, portray men as bumbling idiots, but not women.

It’s even ok to show men nude in basic cable shows, but never women. Movies and cable shows even have started showing penises regularly, but a vagina is forbidden. It’s given an NC-17 if they try to show it. Only pubic hair or a boob is allowed because women think showing a vagina degrades them. Even the show Spartacus shows penises every episode, but they won’t show a vulva so they make the women wear merkins to cover them up.

So in the end, blame women and women’s groups for acting like a vagina is so vulgar.

Does "A Vagina Is Forbidden" sound like a catchphrase used to sell diamonds to anyone else? And speaking of the difference between the vagina and the vulva, I, too, am interested in basic cable showing more of the internal canal leading to a woman's uterus. Also, why aren't these ancient Roman women depicted with totally bald genitalia? Sexism!

We most recently revisited the issue yesterday, after a study showed that women who observe public acts of sexism—like sexual harassment against other women—tend to direct more anger at men in general. The study demonstrates (among other things) that when men sexually harass women, they also hurt men who are not harassers. Pointing out ways that sexism affects men can provide men with a valuable access-point to feminist issues. It can also be seen as an invitation to throw a pity party for male victimhood.

As one commenter on the story wrote, "Here we go again. The poor menz! They have to experience the suspicion/scrutiny of women who have been put down, kept down, abused emotionally, fiscally, professionally, sometimes physically, yadayadayada." I don't think this is about feeling sorry for men; I think it's about recognizing that men can be valuable allies in working against women being put down, kept down, harassed, and abused. Is it fair that women have to first show men how sexism affects them in order to get them to care about how it affects us? No. But it sure is helpful.

So without any further ado, I'd like to introduce the first installment in a new Sexist feature: Interviews with experts on the subjects that most vex us around here. First up: Thomas MacAulay Millar, my favorite feminist writer who is also a man. Millar, which is not his real name, is a New-York based attorney and feminist writer. You may remember him for his essay condemning the comodification of sexuality, "Toward a Performance Model of Sex," which appeared in the Yes Means Yes! anthology last year, or from his work on the wonderful Yes Means Yes! blog. Below, Millar on the beginnings of a feminist man, how to find feminist access-points for boys, and what it's like to be a feminist with male privilege.

What personal experiences in your life contributed to your identification as a feminist?

TMM: My mom was a feminist, and raised me to understand that the world was unfair in big, structural ways, so I was in large part raised with it. She wasn’t an overtly ideological parent. She just believed in telling me how things really were, and I drew a lot of my own conclusions. I remember her telling me that my cousin (who was an evangelical), terminated two pregnancies. She was a clinic protester. But when it was her life, she thought it was different. Another cousin was molested, and when she wouldn't stop complaining, she was sent away to live in another state. (Eventually, she sued her abuser and got some justice.) My mother would tell me the parts of the stories in real life that people try to hide from children. I can't possibly thank her enough for that. I mean I literally can’t, because she died a decade ago. I thanked her a lot for being a great mom, but never enough.

As I got into high school, I started seeing issues like sex education and reproductive freedom through lenses heavily influenced by my women friends. I took my first women's studies class in high school, read some Steinem and some other feminist writing in high school. My mother had a bunch of feminist writing around the house that I read. And I started to see GLB issues through the prism of my friends' lives, and to see sexuality and sex education as my friends and I developed.

In my teens, too, I began a long process of growing into BDSM and figuring out what that meant for identity, and one of the early things I figured out what that there was a sort of mainstream position that wasn't overtly anti-sex in my area, but that was sort of very pro-partriarchally constrained models of sexuality, and that I was necessarily a dissident to that, and that I was therefore a natural ally to anyone else who didn't feel the official model fit them. So, in my mind, the idea especially around sexuality and gender expression that dissenters and dissidents should be in solidarity with each other developed early. So it was a pretty direct line from there to being active in college on choice and GLBT issues and doing my first minor in women’s studies. And also, people telling me when I said stupid things and learning from that, rinse, repeat.

I think most importantly, I began to hear one story after another about how women — mostly my women friends, and also some relatives — were molested and groped and raped (some men, too, but I didn't become aware of that until later). Women friends told me they had been raped, and not infrequently they had never told anyone else. The thing that stuck with me then and still does is how little space they had to safely process and heal. They felt that they couldn't say what had happened, let alone talk about how they felt, without being judged and shamed. And I think they were right about that, sad to say. They couldn't tell people. The reactions they would have gotten from parents and peers would have done damage. So they stayed silent, which is a very hard way to deal with trauma. Unfortunately, that's not something I see changing. Women I know are still telling me that they were raped, or that something happened that was rape but that they can't label, and that they have not or cannot talk about to anyone else. And I have a daughter and that scares the shit out of me.

How can we get more men and boys interested in the feminist movement?

TMM: Well, we can bullshit them and tell them that it's all upside, and that fighting for their relative privilege in an awful system that's no good for them doesn't have any benefits. But they'll quickly realize that's not true. And we can tell them that there are no downsides to participating in a movement where they have to confront their privilege and change how they do things. But they’d quickly find that that isn’t true.

You can’t sell a movement to cure structural unfairness to the beneficiaries of the unfairness unless there’s already a point of access. That means they have to really have a grievance against the way things are, for themselves or for people they love. But there are a lot of those. There are a lot of guys whose sister has needed an abortion, or whose wife was raped, or whose brother is transitioning, or who feel that the masculinity imposed on them is crushing them. If someone who knows that guy finds that point of access, like a pinhole in the patriarchal curtain, and starts pulling at it, eventually the hole gets so big that they accept that it’s not a matter of stitching the hole, it’s a whole panel or whole curtain that needs to be replaced. (And roman shades would look better in this room. Also, this paint is kinda tired. Let’s see how far I can stretch this metaphor ….*snap* Oops.)

. . . Or we can get them young and try to build into them a sense of fairness that is actually fair, and not one based on a set of artificially assigned roles based on two categories. I’m working on that. I’ll let you know how I did in about twenty years.

How does male privilege affect the way you approach feminist issues?

TMM: First, it means I don’t know everything and my personal leanings and experiences are not a trustworthy guide. I just have to accept that I’m going to be wrong and mess things up, and be gracious when people tell me what a schmuck I am. Because I am.

Second, it means forever keeping one eye on the dynamics of speaking for. In some ways it’s easier, as an affluent educated able bodied cis het white man, because I don’t have to think about the relative issues of when I’m privileged and when I’m not. I’m virtually always in the advantaged side of the structural issue, so I can keep the “I have an unfair advantage” light permanently on.

It’s something I talk about with friends a fair amount. In writing, a lot of what I do is talk about what something means for men, how men should read or deal with something, what it means as a parent, etc., where I’m interpreting my own experience and the experiences I have a better handle on, in light of the dynamics I’m talking about.

But I don’t do that with everything. Some of what I write is overarching theorizing, like Toward A Performance Model of Sex. I realize I don’t have any kind of omniscience, and my privilege informs what I write. I think there are three things I can do about it. I can decide that my understanding is so constrained by the limits of my experience and the dictates of my privilege that I should just shut up (some posts have ended their lives in the delete folder for that reason); I can try to learn and educate myself and improve and beat back my own privilege, which I’m forever trying to do and never fast enough; and I can put what I can out there and try to be as humble as I can about the limitations of it and then not get defensive when people move the discussion forward by pointing out the flaws in what I’ve done. I’ve edited a lot of posts to say, “I messed up, see comments.”

Do you think there are some feminist issues that are more readily accessible to men and boys than others?

TMM: There are things that should be feminist issues that are more the province of men and boys. Masculinity and manhood are becoming contested terrain, and that’s important. The most common discourse on masculinity reads to me like this: “I don’t know what it should look like. What we have is terrible in the following ways, and we should fix it. But I don’t know what it looks like when it gets fixed.” I have both so much and so little to say about that. Masculinity isn’t just “what men do,” but it is bound up with manhood. So we need women in that conversation, both those interested in masculinity and those that in some ways perform it. And we need people who reject binary identifications like “man” to weigh in. But mostly, whether cis- or trans-, the folks we need to help define masculinity are the people who perform it most, and that’s people who identify as men.

Also, there are angles and spaces that men have on feminist issues, where their understanding may be deeply limited by privilege, but where their position in the structural distribution of power is such that they can do more to make change. Men can do feminist work, even if they don’t apply the label to it, if they use what’s at their disposal to do the fair thing. Just as one example, George Tiller was a great hero for reproductive self-determination, not because he freed himself from male privilege, but because he was a doctor who would do that work, under the most terrifying circumstances. I know a guy who says the most awful shit, often to wind me up. But he also once physically intervened to prevent several men from raping a woman who was so intoxicated she didn’t know who she was with or what was going on. Security wouldn’t act, so he just started throwing punches. It worked, at significant cost to him which I won’t describe. That’s not a guy who self-identifies as feminist, but it was a deeply feminist act.

Less dramatically, just calling out rape jokes and rape-apology is something where guys’ views can influence other men a great deal. A guy who mentors younger women colleagues and makes sure their work is considered on its merits may not identify as feminist, or may have a very poor ability to check his own privilege, but that guy can to a lot of good with what he has, where he is.

So I guess I’d say that we need men to be situational allies where they can be, even if they are not (yet) able to make broader connections. Getting them to understand and see the unfairness of a specific situation or act is the first stage. If that creates the gateway for that guy to see those kinds of dynamics as pervasive, and pervasively unfair, great. If not, one person doing the right thing in one situation is better than not.

Are men in the position to play any unique roles in the feminist movement?

TMM: Leaving aside doing what we can with what we have where we are, because I don’t think that’s what the question calls for, I think the primary area where men have something specific and important to bring to feminism is in defining men and masculinity.

Those issues ripple through a lot. To take a particular class-specific issue, for example, take an opposite-sex couple with the same degree, working, say, as lawyers. They may have met in law school, gotten BigLaw jobs, proceeded on parallel tracks through the associate years, and then … that world is not perfect on treating women equally, but I see the social dynamics as the real hold-back. It’s very difficult for both partners to be driven professionals. They can pay for childcare solutions that leave them both free to work long and irregular hours and to travel, but many folks don’t want to do that for a lot of good reasons. Usually, someone takes a step back in professional responsibilities to parent. It’s almost always the woman. Some folks will tell you it has to do with women’s innate desire to mother, but I’m very skeptical of those explanations. Some people want to parent more than others, but I’m not going to accept anyone’s glib generalization that because it’s true for them, it’s an innate sex difference. Instead, I think it has a great deal to do with men’s unwillingness to take that step back. How men see their selves and role, and how their female partners will see them, and how they think their female partners will see them, is all about masculinity.

Of course, it’s more often the case that by the time a middle-class opposite sex couple decide to have kids, they are already in different careers with different compensation, and whoever makes less money becomes the parent with less professional responsibilities. And that has everything to do with the social construction or gender and work roles, tracking of women, conflation of some work identities with masculinity and femininity, etc.

All that is a narrow and class-bound analysis that leaves a lot out; a full treatment of just that example is a book topic. But that’s just one of many ways that construction of masculinity flows through work and distributional issues and other things that seem far removed from the direct performance of gender. I don’t think we can fully understand how much about masculinity is assumed until men start trying to take it apart, examine it and refashion it. And it’s principally men’s job to do that.

E-mail interview has been condensed. . . . a tiny bit.

Following my post on vajazzling last week, I received several responses from commenters who were concerned that I was questioning a woman's sacred choice to vajazzle.

While I appreciate commenters' willingness to engage with feminist talking points (you know how we love choice), I'm afraid that responding to the new trend of women applying heat-activated crystals to their pubic mounds by simply concluding, "A woman's choice! A woman's choice!" only functions to preempt discussion about just what women are choosing. In this instance, defending "choice" without question discourages women from making informed choices for their pubic mounds. So let's talk vajazzling.

Listen: Vajazzling is no stranger to the feminist talking point. In last week's post, I floated the following equation:

Sexual Repression + Capitalism + Sexism = Vajazzling

I think it would be appropriate to add "Pseudo-Feminism" to the list of Vajazzling's contributing societal factors. But first, let's tackle the good old fashioned anti-feminism at play here: Capitalism will find a way to exploit any weaknesses in our society, and sexism is one of them. Take Liz Lemon's analysis of Valentine's Day from 30 Rock: "Valentine's Day is a sham created by card companies to reinforce and exploit gender stereotypes." You could say the same thing about the cosmetics industry, plastic surgeons, and Vajazzling technicians.

When it comes to personal appearance, it's no coincidence that femininity is marked by performance, while masculinity is just as often defined by men not performing things. Shaving your body hair is feminine; not shaving is masculine. Plucking, waxing, or bleaching stray facial hairs is feminine; growing a few days of stubble is masculine. Applying makeup is feminine; not painting your face is masculine. Dying, styling, blow-drying, and curling your hair is feminine; keeping a low-maintenance hair cut is masculine.

I suspect that this is because women are encouraged to achieve societal power through their appearance and sexuality, while men are encouraged to achieve power from . . . reaching real positions of power, like running companies and governments. Sure, women who are very successful at performing femininity can gain some real power, too. Maybe there's a two-year window there where women can translate their success in this field into posing for Playboy, or shaking in a music video, or stripping, all of which can translate into money in the bank—until they get a little bit older and fall out of favor in those industries. Maybe some women can aspire to be trophy wives and get their social validation by being married to a successful man. The majority of women won't be able to make a career out of performing femininity. And yet, we're still shaving and waxing and plucking and dieting and padding and inflating and cinching and painting and dyeing and surgically trimming our labia and, now, vajazzling like it's our jobs—even as we have been successful in claiming real power as Senators and CEOs and lawyers and doctors and journalists. In these fields, the performance of traditional femininity can either help us or hurt us—either way, the focus is back on the way we look instead of our qualifications. The societal investment is the appearance of women is still going strong.

Why is that? Well, for one thing, capitalism hates to lose a consumer. And at some point, it figured out that this feminism stuff that was helping to put women into positions of power could also be used as a tool to sell things (girl power scholars place the exact date ar0und 1994). The interesting thing is that feminist ideals like choice and personal empowerment are now being used to sell the exact same things that sexism was shilling—like corporate-made supergroups of scantily-clad women with inconsistent musical talents; vice-presidential candidates with anti-woman policies; and expensive and elaborate personal grooming procedures like Vajazzling.

So when Jennifer Love Hewitt appears on television to shill for Vajazzling, she doesn't say, "Ladies, Vajazzling is great because the guys love an uber-feminine, totally infantilized vagina." That would be too obvious. Instead, she insists that women Vajazzle for themselves. "After a breakup, a friend of mine Swarovski-crystalled my precious lady . . . and it shined like a disco ball," she announced. "For the ladies: I was feeling awful, I had been through a horrible breakup. And I was like, oh, this is just awful, and I need something to make myself feel better. And it was the one thing I hadn't tried after a breakup, so I gave it a try. And it's great!"

I don't doubt that Hewitt truly loves having her vagina Vajazzled just as much as she loves promoting a friend's Vajazzling business. Many women do find personal fulfillment in obsessing over their appearance They really, truly like to apply lipstick and slip into a pair of high-heels and have doctors cut off parts of their genitalia, because that's what makes them feel sexy. No man is forcing these women to perform these behaviors (although that happens, too). In fact, there's evidence that men are often mystified by these activities. We love it because we live in a society that values us for loving these things.

This is where the "a woman's choice!" defenders come in. How could we possibly deny women the choice to engage in these behaviors, if that's what they love? Look: I don't begrudge women who make the choice to perform the behaviors of femininity. I perform many of them myself, on a daily basis! Resisting engaging in these things is almost impossible. But I don't kid myself into thinking that I just love wearing lipstick because I was born that way, or that I shave my legs because I have somehow independently decided—without any influence from my culture!—that that's the way I personally prefer my legs to look.

It's a sexist world. We just live in it. For women in this world, the choice not to convert our bodies into a tool for the beauty industry to exploit is the one that's seen as odd, different, and weird. For us, the simple choice not to invest the time, money, and concern into shaving our armpits is the one that marks us as somehow less of a real woman. But really, the choice not to shave is the one that requires more energy for women, because we stand to be dismissed as dirty, masculine, man-hating hippies if we abstain. When the "woman's choice!" advocates argue that deciding to Vajazzle or not Vajazzle—for that truly is the question—is just a matter of personal taste, they are putting their fingers in their ears and talking really, really loudly in an attempt to deny the culture in which these choices are made.

For women, the choice is not between a preference for looking "natural" or a preference for looking "groomed." The choice—if you take a look at what is really going on—is between challenging sexist beauty standards and receiving negative attention for leaving the house looking like "a man," or just giving in and shaving our pits because we have more pressing shit to deal with right now than singlehandedly dismantling sexism today—like keeping our jobs. Remember those?

For now, the more extreme performances of femininity, like breast implantation, vaginal "rejuvenation," and Vajazzling aren't considered the norm for women. I'm not going to be met with shock when I remove my pants and reveal to my sex partner that I haven't converted my pubic mound into a shiny disco ball. But these days, it wouldn't be out of the ordinary for him to be shocked that I'm not perfectly waxed. The body hair ship may have sailed, but vaginal modification is at a point right now where we are still in a position to fend off the tide. And my greatest fear is that someday, we will wake to find that our girls are being routinely Vajazzled upon puberty, and realize that we never stood up to say, "This shit is fucking ridiculous."

Photo via Tsar Kasim, Creative Commons Attribution License 2.0

Last week, I wrote a guest post for ladyblog BFF Tiger Beatdown on the many break-up songs of the Magnetic Fields. The Magnetic Fields have figured out a fun little trick that allows them to keep churning out interesting tracks in the heavily clichéd relationship-ending genre, which is: Keep the clichés, but filter them through an unflaggingly cynical world-view. Voilà: Songs that speak to the human experience while constantly reminding you how pathetic that is.

As it turns out, the cynical treatment also works to provide musical commentary on two genres of particular Sexist concern: the pseudo-feminist anthem and the girl fight anthem. Below, the Magnetic Fields take on empowering Playboy and girls beating up girls.

[youtube:v=0OA3ozYhgFs]

Pop music's greatest pseudo-feminist anthems succeed by providing a false sense of female empowerment—without the power. Last year, Playboy covergirl Joanna Krupa inspired feminist suspicion when she attempted to re-cast as the experience of posing naked in lad mags as an empowering, feminist act. Translating that pseudo-feminist sentiment into song, "The Nun's Litany" provides a ringing endorsement for expressing female sexual freedom as obtained by sex industry performance. In the song, our nun lists off a series of positions that she's itching to shed the habit for:

I want to be a Playboy’s bunny
I’d do whatever they asked me to
I’d meet people with lots of money
And they would love me like I loved you

I want to be a topless waitress
I want my mother to shed one tear
I’d throw away this old, sedate dress
Slip into something a tad more sheer

I want to be an artist’s model
An odalisque au naturel
I should be good at spin the bottle
While I’ve still got something left to sell

I want to be a cobra dancer
With little Willie between my thighs
I may not find a cure for cancer
But I’ll meet plenty of single guys

I want to be a brothel worker
I’ve always been treated like one
If I could be a back-street lurker
I’d make more money and have more fun

I want to be a dominatrix
Which isn’t like me, but I can dream
Learn S&M and all those gay tricks
And men will pay me to make them scream

I want to be a porno starlet
For that I’ll wait ’til Mama’s dead
I’ll see my name in lights of scarlet
And get to spend every day in bed.

I want to be a tattooed lady
Dedicated as I am to art
Characters bold, complex and shady
Will write my memoirs across my heart.

The difference between Krupa and our exhibitionist sister? "The Nun's Litany" acknowledges that aspiring to be Hugh Hefner's ideal sex object is indeed empowering—for a woman who has heretofore derived her power from an institution that forces her to live a life of sexual repression.  Real power lies somewhere beyond the virgin/whore dichotomy (or in this case, the nun/dominatrix dichotomy)—in jobs where your power doesn't expire after the age of 23.

[youtube:v=vuENHA1l_K0]

"California Girls," also off the album Distortion, is the Magnetic Fields' catfight anthem. "California Girls" is about hunting down young, blond, tan traditional beauties and bludgeoning them to death. Please, briefly take joy in the misery of women who succeed at meeting America's narrowly-defined traditional beauty standards:

See them on their big bright screen
tan and blonde and seventeen
Eating nonfood keeps them mean
but they're young forever
If they must grow up
they marry dukes and earls
I hate California girls

They ain't broke, so they put on airs,
the faux folks sans derrieres
They breathe coke and have affairs
with each passing rock star
They come on like squares
then get off like squirrels
I hate California girls

Looking down their perfect noses
at me and my kind
Do they think we won't
well, never mind

Laughing through their perfect teeth
at everyone I know
Do they think we wont
get up an go?

So I have planned my grand attacks
I will stand behind their backs
with my brand-new battle ax
Then they will they taste my wrath
They will hear me say
as the pavement whirls
"I hate California girls."

Here, sarcasm works to creep a bit of shame into the song's blonde-bashing Schadenfreude. At one show, Magnetic Fields frontman Stephin Merritt reportedly said of "California Girls": "This is a song about media literacy. And feminism."

If the song is actually speaking to feminists, this is what it's saying: Beating up women who succeed in sexist pursuits—like, say, Playboy covergirl Joanna Krupa—is easy. And satisfying! In the end, however, we're not improving the station of women. We're just fighting amongst ourselves while Hugh Hefner continues to relax in his geriatric sex mansion built on the bodies of young, tan, blonde bunnies. "California Girls" proves that the cultural obsession over catfights goes far beyond the straight guy's sexual fantasy.

"Principles 101: Feminism, Manhood, and You" [PDF], a guide to Men's Rights Activism from Manhood101.com, contains tips on everything from restoring your manhood to fighting feminism to . . . brushing your teeth twice daily. (Thanks to a reader for the tip).

Seven golden style tips for the Men's Rights Activist community, after the jump.

1. SPEECH. "Many people make the mistake of not speaking because they have no new information to convey," the guide laments. " They fail to realize that new information is not as stimulating as how you experience things." Let's see how this applies to the realm of picking up women:

Bad pick-up line:

“Hello, how are you?”

Good pick-up line:

“Wow . . . I like how your hair is straight in some places, and then there are these little strands that curl off of it. They remind me of some fashion magazine cover where the hair is perfectly arranged like a little piece of art, but since you’re here in person, I feel like I’m talking to the cover in real life. I want to touch your hair and feel how soft it is. I picture it smelling like coconuts or something sweet. Your hair is making me think dirty thoughts. I want to tug on it and kiss your neck. I have a crush on your hair. It gives me a nice ‘ahhhhhh’ feeling deep inside like when you eat a warm chocolate chip cookie right out of the oven.”

2. BODY TYPE. It's OK if you're short, but DO NOT BE FAT:

First, you must recognize the difference between a disorderly physical appearance and the symptoms of a disorderly life. Being short is not under your control. You were born that way. Being fat, however, is under your control.

Being fat is a result of disorderly eating habits. Although people today claim that discriminating against fat people is wrong, disorderly conditions should be discriminated against, especially when a person has control over their disorder. Smoking, obesity, bad hygeine, decaying teeth and other symptomps of a disorderly life are naturally offensive to others. You should do whatever is necessary to rectify such disorderly conditions.

3. FOOTWEAR: Avoid stylish elevator shoes.

[B]eing short is not unattractive in itself, as are many other perceived shortcomings society arbitrarily invalidates you for possessing. The problem begins when society attaches an undesirable assocation to your height. Because society invalidates you for being short, you believe yourself to be unattractive. This belief causes you to become anti-social and express unattractive social behaviors. . . . . The solution is not to change your physical characteristics, rather you must change the negative associations made with those characteristics.

. . . Stylish elevator shoes, plastic surgery and laser hair removal are not the answer. The solution is twofold; you must develop a functional perspective regarding attraction that emphasizes your ability to create order, and you must break the dysfunctional, negative associations held by women.

4. BODY LANGUAGE. Pretend as if you are human.

When appropriate, use your hands and arms to enhance what you're saying. Drawing with your hands or using gestures to indicate something relevant reinforces what you're attempting to express.

5. DRESS: Men who can properly exercise their authority do not require pants.

Being stylish is unnecessary (not to mention a pointless preoccupation with a dysfunctional social expectation). Having an orderly appearance should be your only focus where clothing is concerned. Properly exercising your authority can accomplish much more than a pair of designer jeans. Being unable to create orderly social interactions is what prevents most men from attracting women. Not lack of fashion sense or good looks.

6. HYGIENE: Although women are more stimulated by power than physical appearance, you still have to brush your teeth, dude.

Studies show that facial symmetry is attractive. If your eyeball was an inch lower, it would break your facial symmetry, causing
disorder to your appearance. This would be a major breach of your natural physical order.

Order in any form, whether in nature or in our physical bodies attracts us. This is why an orderly appearance is important. Granted some men were born with deviated septums or crooked teeth, but thankfully, women are more stimulated by the order generated from exercising your male authority.

However, this does not mean you should neglect your physical appearance entirely.

It's important to practice good hygiene because it maintains an orderly physical appearance. Brush your teeth at least twice a day. Shower. Shave if necessary. Comb your hair or cut it cleanly.

7. STARING ETIQUETTE:

Look directly at people instead of staring at them out of your peripheral vision.

Photo via Migraine Chick, Creative Commons Attribution License 2.0

The death of feminism ain't news. Feminism has died a thousand deaths by this point. But wait a second: Today, someone is killing feminism in a totally new way, and this time it involves something called a "diamanté phone cover," whatever the fuck that is. This, according to Nina Power in her book "One Dimensional Woman." Power writes:

Stripped of any internationalist and political quality, feminism becomes about as radical as a diamanté phone cover. [Jessica Valenti] ‘truly believes’ that feminism is necessary for women ‘to live happy fulfilled lives’. Slipping down as easily as a friendly-bacteria yoghurt drink, Valenti’s version of feminism, with its total lack of structural analysis, genuine outrage, or collective demand, believes it has to compliment capitalism in order to effectively sell its product. When she claims that ‘ladies, we have to take individual action’, what she really means is that it’s every woman for herself and if it is the Feminist™ woman who gets the nicest shoes and the chocolatiest sex, then that’s just too bad for you, sister.

That's right, everybody. You know that sparkly, fun-loving, chocolate-coated feminism that's so popular among capitalists nowadays? Not familiar? Well: It is killing feminism! And how: By making it accessible to more women. Wait, what?

Valenti herself has already responded to Power's critiques on behalf of non-humorless-feminists everywhere, and her points are quite reasonable, particularly when you consider the fact that she's responding to a person who has just compared her to a yoghurt drink. "First of all," Valenti writes, "why anyone wouldn’t want feminism to be the latest must-have accessory is beyond me—because that would be awesome." Agreed.

Join Sady Doyle of Tiger Beatdown as we draft an application for inclusion in the Real Feminists Club, bedazzle our feminist credentials, and attempt to get to the bottom of this feminist yoghurt drink analogy once and for all. I'll tell you one thing: There better be some fruit at the bottom of this sucker.

SADY: Hello! I have chosen to make myself accessible! In the name, of course, of FEMINISM.

AMANDA: On to it!

SADY: Yes! Are too many of the kids today into it? Should we make it harder for them? SHOULD THERE BE A WRITTEN APPLICATION? Such are the questions before us now.

AMANDA: I have to admit, I found the whole accusation that Jessica Valenti is not a serious feminist a bit ... puzzling. If Jessica Valenti is a fluffy feminist, then what are we? Are we like marshmallow feminists?

SADY: I am a pure spun sugar feminist made of glitter and twinkles. I am the feminist that floats upon the air, so lightweight am I. And this is the thing, the thing that gets me kind of so angry: For years and years and years upon years, people have been like, "Well, of course The Patriarchy will attack us for being humorless and dour, but that is a harsh stereotype and a lie!"

AMANDA: Hah!

SADY: And, yes: Yes it is. So why is this lady suddenly piping up to tell Jessica Valenti to keep it down over there and not have so much fun?

AMANDA: Well: I understand the general argument. If people accuse me of being "too serious" about feminist issues—which they do, whenever I write about harassment or assault or rape or whatever—the appropriate response would not be to just sexy up my sexual assault coverage. However! There are issues related to feminism that are, in fact, not depressing at all! Like, when feminism happens, and then we can all have sex with whomever we want to when we want to without being assaulted or called whores. This is, indeed, a sexy development! And I fail to see the harm in celebrating that.

SADY: Right you are! It is extremely sexy. And, I mean, I think there's a line between "feminism that is accessible"—let us say, YOU, for I am in a complimentary mood this evening—and "feminism that is so very accessible that it is even accessible to people who are not feminists because it is not actually feminism at all" —let us say, Sarah Palin. And I think that a lot of people are just trying to figure out where that line gets drawn. I understand the calls for more "seriousness," insofar as they are asking you to "seriously" think about the issues in question. But I do not understand "seriousness" insofar as it is like, "I am sorry, this must be written in some modern super-language, for I can read it even without a post-graduate education in Ladyology."

AMANDA: Right. Like if you're a teenager who happens to not identify as a feminist, which is the group Valenti was largely writing her book for. I think one of the arguments against the happy-go-lucky feminism was actually like, Oh No! If we pretend that feminism is a wonderful happy thing, these women will be sorely disappointed when they become feminists and realize that there are like, some serious issues to deal with as well. Again ... I fail to see why the soft pitch ends up being a bad thing. If a girl decides she's interested in feminism because she understands what Valenti has to say about the more "girl power" type stuff, and then she ends up realizing why it's important to support feminism for ALL women, what is the problem?

SADY: Right. And, I mean, there is something to be said for the gateway drug. The only problem is if the kids don't get past the gateway. Like, let's just point out that I am not talking about Feministing or Valenti here, because they have in fact always managed to cover the hard stuff as well as the basics—more of the hard stuff than I have, in fact, because my goal is basically to be the Skittles of feminism—BUT. There is, in fact, something to the idea of "consumerist feminism" or "lifestyle accessory" feminism. Which is, I do think there are some ladies whose involvement with feminism is exclusively confined to their own problems, which they elevate to the position of WORST PROBLEMS IN THE WORLD, even though they are like, "a guy won't like me unless I shave my personal regions" or "I worry that women nowadays are taking the pole-dancing classes, which is gross!" Which: nothing to be said against those problems! Mandatory bodily presentation or the idea that women are always sexual and that "sexual" equals "sex industry performance" at all times are things we can talk about! BUT, it's when we get stuck there, because then feminism becomes sort of obsessively, exclusively personal, and you're not thinking about anything else.

AMANDA: Agreed. I'll reiterate that presenting Valenti as the representative of that kind of feminism is whack, however. I mean, Nina Power compares Valenti to a "friendly-bacteria yoghurt drink.” What the fuck does that mean?

SADY: I have NO IDEA. It reminds me of those Activia commercials, though. And, on the overpersonalizing-feminism thing, can I say? I think that's a line everybody has to walk, and I fall on the wrong side of it sometimes. If by "sometimes" you mean "A LOT OF TIMES." But I think that this is the thing, like the core problem with the argument insofar as I understand it: she IS CONFLATING "accessible" with "shallow."

AMANDA: Yeah. I’ll tell you one thing that's not going to make feminism accessible to the masses: Feminist infighting! I realize I may be implicating this very Sexist Beatdown by saying this, but feminists arguing about who is the bestest feminist? Not particularly riveting to non-feminists.

SADY: BUT I WAS GOING TO GET THE BEST FEMINIST AWARD! WHY ELSE WOULD I BE DOING THIS.

AMANDA: But since Nina Power is concerned with feminism becoming too accessible, perhaps this was her plan all along! "I know. I'll write a book dedicated to feminist infighting that makes absurd claims about several well-known 'accessible' feminists. That's sure to throw them off their work of making feminism more accessible! At least for a few blog posts!"

SADY: True! Now we can all quote Serious Theory at each other until we fall asleep. Also, in the morning, there might still be some sexism? But whatever! I get Cixous!

AMANDA: I get Yoghurt.

SADY: Um, OK. Lightweight.

Photo via love♡janine, Creative Commons Attribution License 2.0

Listen to the extremely defensive wind-up to this Dr. Laura question, from a mom preparing to enter the workforce: "With so many layoffs happening, what do you do if there is barely any income being brought in by your husband and you are forced to work?" Dr. Laura Schlessinger, staunch defender of women making careers out of making babies, finally figures out how stay-at-home moms can pursue their careers (if sheer poverty absolutely forces them to do so): Just bring your baby to work! Meanwhile, your unemployed husband . . . does what exactly?

Behold the final paragraph of Katie Roiphe's latest New York Times Magazine Book Review story on the lost art of freaky sex writing pioneered by the "Great Male Novelists" like Updike, Roth, and Mailer:

Why don’t we look at these older writers, who want to defeat death with sex, with the same fondness as we do the inventors of the first, failed airplanes, who stood on the tarmac with their unwieldy, impossible machines, and looked up at the sky?

In other words, why don't we sit around praising the "unwieldy, impossible machines" (or, you know, penises) of these white, heterosexual guys who are still writing masturbatory prose about lesbian threesomes involving strap-ons, after all these years? Is it because:

(a) The feminists! They have ruined everything!

(b) The pr0n on the Internets! It has made us more likely to watch a short video depicting lesbian threesomes involving strap-ons, instead of reading some white heterosexual dude attempt to describe it for us, in words!

(c) Those danged marginalized groups! People other than old, white, heterosexual men have taken a stab at the whole sex-writing thing, and it turns out they actually have some interesting shit to say about it!

(d) The impotence of old white dudes! Those old dudes can't get erections anymore, I hear!

Find out in this edition of Sexist Beatdown, featuring Sady Doyle of Tiger Beatdown and myself, chattin'. After a brief holiday hiatus, Sexist Beatdown is back—and now with new and improved capitalization! Same amount of exclamation points, however!

SADY: You know, I believe it is time to discuss the DUDES OF TODAY! And more specifically, whether they are all huge pusses who refuse to write sexy strap-on scenes for Katie Roiphe's entertainment. The DUDES OF YORE (and ALSO TODAY, although they are older now) did not have this problem!

AMANDA: They did not. Though they do have a different problem, which is: They will not stop writing like it's 1960, and some females Katie Roiphe has observed are just livid over this!

SADY: Right??? I mean: first of all. I think SOME of Roiphe's concerns about the Dudes of Today, which have been repeated in many a forum and in my own personal mind, are valid. There is a creepy quasi-sensitivity about some of the DoTs she mentions, which freaks me out. I think of Kunkel's "Indecision," which has the dude protagonist making these big speeches about how the girl he's dating does not deserve him, due to his aforementioned Indecision about her, which does not prevent him from being, in fact, a douche. Or this Dave Eggers essay, about how he won't use the word "fuck" to describe the tender and glorious act of making love. Which sounds like THE WORST PICKUP LINE IN THE WORLD, actually. It sounds like a guy who TOTALLY wants to fuck, but tells you he will never use that word because it is so disrespectful, so that you will, you know, fuck him. Yes, sexism continues, even among the DoTs! But it is less overt than the Dudes of Yore, which (I think???) is why Roiphe is mad about it.

AMANDA: Right. The striking thing about this essay, to me, is that it outright states that its concern is with the "Great Male Novelists of the last century" and their male heirs. It’s also explicitly concerned with female readers, and feminists, who reject the sexual narratives in these works. But Roiphe never makes the obvious point that there are options beyond the Great Male Novelists ... like Great Female Novelists, who also do The Sex. She basically limits the discussion to, "Why don't women appreciate these classic male, heteronormative sexual narratives that treat women like cum dumpsters?" when the answer is ... pretty obvious.

SADY: Yuh huh. I mean: I think I mentioned this to you, when you were talking about it earlier in the week. And Bitch blogs (yay for Bitch Blogs) mentioned it also!

AMANDA: (Yay!)

SADY: BUUUUUUT: Did she somehow miss that ladies write sex scenes nowadays? Even FEMINIST ladies? The first person that springs to mind is Michelle Tea, who writes these very funny, detailed, daring sex scenes, about fisting and hitting people with the chain whips off bicycles and all sorts of nonsense. Or—this one was brought up by Bitch—Mary Gaitskill? You can find some sex in Mary Gaitskill! And this stuff is often interesting, and has new perspectives, in ways that the Great Male Sexy Time Authors stopped being a long time ago. Like: the problem with Roth's "hot lesbian strap-on threesome" scene is not that it includes lesbians, or a strap-on. It's that it is very obviously a straight dude's IDEA of how mystical and magical and shamanistic and pervy threesomes including strap-ons are. You can find better ones written by people who know a damn thing about it, these days! Thanks to Feminism, ruiner of sexy times. (For boring dudes.) [Note: Roiphe eventually explicitly acknowledged the sex writing of female and gay writers—in an interview after the fact. -Ed.]

AMANDA: Sure! And I think Roiphe acknowledges that to some extent—though she blames not the oppressively hetero male perspective, but rather the fact that these hetero male sex writers just can't get big erections anymore. Which is weird! But, you know, a theory! But my favorite part comes at the end, when she says this: "Why don’t we look at these older writers, who want to defeat death with sex, with the same fondness as we do the inventors of the first, failed airplanes, who stood on the tarmac with their unwieldy, impossible machines, and looked up at the sky?" So, basically, Roiphe is concerned that readers today don't bow down before the phalluses of the Great Male Sexy Time Authors enough. That we don't honor Updike and Roth and Mailer enough! I mean, given that she doesn't even deign to mention a female author, I think we honor these men quite enough, actually!

SADY: Okay, and here we enter the area that caused the MOST perplexity for me, which is: WHAT WORLD IS SHE LIVING ON WHERE PEOPLE DON'T FALL ALL OVER THEMSELVES TO PRAISE PHILIP ROTH AND JOHN UPDIKE??????????

AMANDA: A world ruined by feminists.

SADY: Or where criticizing DAVE EGGERS or BEN KUNKEL or, jesus, JONATHAN SAFRAN FOER is somehow taboo????????? People criticize those dudes all the time! Roth is treated like a national monument! WHAT HUH WHAT WHERE WHYYYYYYYYY.

AMANDA: I think Roiphe presents a really interesting (if extremely contentious) discussion, and then decides to end it with: "People are too critical of literature!" She basically just tells women to stop thinking so much and just honor the great works of men without comment. What?

SADY: Oh, yeah. And I really appreciated large parts of her argument. I forgot that one line in "The Corrections" about the lady being "still beautiful" at thirty-fucking-two, which did in fact cause me to throw the book across the room when I read it initially. Mostly from that book I remember the couch-fucking! Dude fucks furniture. It's kind of wacky.

AMANDA: Yeah. She's right about that stuff. And perhaps the part at the end where she tells us to honor these great pilots of Ye Olde Sexytime, she's speaking to the new crop of Great Male Unsexytime Writers, and telling them that they are more derivative of these earlier authors than they will admit.

SADY: But, I mean, the "sexual ambiguity" she seems to have such a problem with, the idea that people no longer believe key parties and talking about the naughtiness of watching a girl jack off or—shock!—jacking off themselves is, IN AND OF ITSELF, a symbol of Man's Ultimate Freedom From Social Mores, I kind of . . . don't have a problem with? I mean: the sexual revolution, it had Consequences! Including feminism, yeah. But also: a lot of fucked-up relationships, which, as DFW mentions in the very essay she quotes, men of his generation were probably witnessing as children. Or, you know, they were young in the '80s when AIDS became a rising concern.

AMANDA: Right, and we talked about this earlier in regards to college sex columns, but you don't have to be some sort of radical to talk about sex anymore. A lot of people talk and write about sex, and some of them are hyper-conservative, or worse, boring.

SADY: Ha, RIGHT. I mean, there WAS A TIME when talking or writing about sex—graphically, grossly—was actually a way of challenging rules about what writers, or people, could and could not do. Now, it is an art form practiced and cultivated by Tucker Max. Yes! You have sex! So do the rest of us! Say something new about it, other than the fact that it involves human lady vaginas, because otherwise I may get a case of the ZZZZZZZZZZs.

AMANDA: Yes! Our favorite. And the fans who defend Tucker Max, the college boys who are likely unfamiliar with the Great Sexy Time Authors of Yore, ultimately defend him on the basis of Freedom of the Press. They act like people who dare to critique Tucker Max are "censoring" his "opinions," and are therefore both dictatorial and prude. And that may have been the case in the past, but it's just not a relevant argument anymore. The sexual exploits of the late-20's upper-crust white American frat boy are not being censored by anybody! Tucker Max does not need to spread his literary seed in order to finally speak truth to power for all the man-children like himself. It has been done, people got over it, and now people like Tucker Max and Katie Roiphe are pretending like we need to pay attention to the "problem" of not really valuing this narrative as exciting anymore. Well ... as much as we used to. Because, of course, Tucker Max is a best-selling author.

SADY: Right! I mean, I think the age in which you could daringly place a smuggled copy of "Tropic of Cancer" or "Lady Chatterley" on your bookshelf, so that people would know you were a rebel and sexual and literary sophisticate, ended a LONG TIME AGO, actually? And now, I mean: the issue with Updike writing a scene where a dude delivers his special package all over a lady's face, or Roth and the mystical shamanic strap-on of power, is not that these scenes are shocking to us, and not that ANYONE would EVER try to censor them. It’s just that they are these very flowery, elaborate, pseudo-highbrow depictions of things that are just not that surprising because at this point everyone in America has seen them actually depicted, on film. It's the false daring that makes them boring. And they read like they were taken from studying film, not life. Although if Updike actually had a thing for face-jizz, I would prefer not to know.

AMANDA: I agree—it's the pretentiousness of it that makes you not want to just put it down but also throw it away, and I'm not sure that really has much to do with feminism, but rather just being a person who reads books.

SADY: yeah, precisely. I mean, Roth still has the power to get up my nose, which might in fact be evidence of why he's good at what he does, but also, I get these letters from fellow feminists that are like, "Give Roth another chance! He's great!" I think mine might be a minority vote, actually. And I think placing the entirety of the responsibility for why we seem to have moved away from this depiction of sex on Feminism, and mean feminists who want to take your literary weenie away, just places an unrealistic power in the hands of Feminism. We can't have done this all by ourselves! We're still working to get people settled on the "Ladies should be able to have abortions" thing!

AMANDA: Right. It's pretty hilarious that Katie Roiphe actually believes that the feminist position is more celebrated than that of the Great Male Novelists, or that our oppressive "feminist" anti-sex culture is to blame for churning out somebody like Dave Eggers. I refuse to take responsibility for that one.

Photo via flickr Commons

Remember James Chartrand, the female blogger behind "Men With Pens" who adopted a male pseudonym in order to earn respect, feed her kids, and pen privileged tirades against the feminist mommy-bloggers who "try to shave the balls of all males who dare to visit the blog"? Well, Chartrand has got some more scandalous revelations for the blogosphere today: Chartrand identifies as a feminist.

The F-word admission came courtesy of Taylor Lindstrom, an employee of Chartrand's who is described on the Web site as "the team’s rogue woman who wowed us until our desire for her talents exceeded our desire for a good ol’ boys club." In a post titled "Taylor's a Feminist—But So Is James," Lindstrom explained Chartrand's many feminist reasons for adopting a male pen name:

(a) The pay gap hits older women harder than it does younger women (Chartrand is 38, Lindstrom is 25).

(b) Unlike "Taylor," Chartrand's given name was obviously feminine, which affected her ability to avoid stereotyping.

(c) Chartrand was a single parent who had to make enough income to feed both herself and her family, which further justifies her decision to use a male pseudonym.

Makes sense. But then we get into the final section of Lindstrom's feminist manifesto: "Why Feminism Is Pissing Me Off." Lindstrom writes:

There have been a few blog posts and articles out there suggesting that James should have taken one for the team. That women have a responsibility to one another to keep fighting, to bust through the glass ceiling, to rip equality out of the hands of the men who are still (jeez, STILL) trying to keep it from us.

James didn’t help women, they say. He just stopped fighting.

Well, they’re right. He did. I can’t say as I see the problem with that.

The whole point of the feminist movement was that women should have the right to choose where their priorities lie. They should be able to choose to have a career, to live independently, to vote and own property and make mistakes and get famous and all the rest of it.

If they want to, though, they should also be able to choose to live exactly the way women had been expected to live for centuries—at home, taking care of the kids. They have the right to choose that life if they want to. And no one gets to tell them that they HAVE to get out there and hold down a job because women still don’t have equal pay in the workplace.

No one gets to tell a woman she has to do ANYTHING just because she’s a woman.

This part makes no sense. Let me clear something up right now: Feminism is about choice for women. The feminist movement is about working to open up all of life's choices to all women.  It's about making sure that women have equal opportunity to pursue any education, career, or higher office, and to earn equal pay and respect when they do so. It's about allowing women to make their own reproductive decisions, whether the decision be to use birth control, to have an abortion, or to have a lot of kids and to raise them as a stay-at-home mom.

That being said, simply being a woman who makes choices for herself does not constitute a feminist act. Lindstrom seems to believe that choosing to do whatever she wants to do— whether it helps other women or not—makes her a feminist, and deflecting all criticism about her choices makes her some sort of double-whammy feminist (sound familiar?).

It doesn't. It just makes her a woman who has benefited from feminism.

Feminism is about working to make these choices available to all women—not just wealthy women, not just white women, not just straight women, not just cisgender women, not just women who adopt an absurd masculine persona in order to access male privilege.

Is adopting a male pseudonym particularly anti-feminist? I don't think so. But James Chartrand's male persona did more than simply not help women. It also hurt them—see her infamous testicle-laden tirade about how she respects women who blog, as long as they don't "wield their feminism like a spiked mace" and "try to shave the balls of all males."

I'm glad that Chartrand has decided to come out as a woman. Here's to hoping she'll eventually reveal herself as a feminist, as well.