Humorless

One of the long time accusations toward feminists, at least white ones, were that we are humorless. Even a comedian I love a great deal, George Carlin, made a joke along this line - I believe the 'joke' was, 'Imagine Elmer Fudd Raping Porky Pig.'

Two things make that joke more funny than other rape humor, which is to say not much. One, the figures are not only fictional but cartoons. Two is that it is rape of a man by another man, which carries an additional "they deserve" it weight than even rape of a woman by a man.

"You deserved it" is the implicit threat of rape. Usually the "deserved it" is justified by a presumed poor decision on the part of the rape victim/survivor. Just about anything is a poor decision by this rubric: wearing too much clothing or too little; going out or living along; letting a male friend sleep over; being someplace in public; having male friends; touching male friends. You'll note the entire previous list presumes the victim/survivor is female, implicitly if nor explicitly. That is largely because, for all intents and purposes, only one form of male on male rape is acknowledged - prison rape - and there the "you deserved it" is being a criminal. Or, rather, being prosecuted by a court of law, which is not necessarily the same as being a criminal. Male on male rape outside of prison is barely ever mentioned, and female on male rape is considered a joke by a distressingly large number of people.

I'm not touching racial or sexual orientation issues very much; a lot of this is because I'm not sure of them, but I will note in passing that there is history of accusations of rape being used as a "you deserved it" for murdering black men, which is unacceptable, and that men of color are disproportionately sentenced to more and longer terms in prison, which opens them up for a higher likelihood of rape. I'm sure there are many more intersections, such as appearance and fat biases, and caregiver rape of their clients which is under-reported and also often used as a punch line.

Recently, someone I find quite funny and appealing and even a bit hott made reference to a longstanding joke about a "rape van" with pokemons and lolipops in the glove compartment. It stems off of a recent addiction of mine, Repo: the Genetic Opera (if you like dark, love music, and can handle a bit of gore, this movie may be for you), specifically something said by TZ, one of the two authors and an actor in the movie, about the presumed target audience and their presumed attitude toward women (I htink; I can't find anything on the original instance). I haven't yet decided, outside of this post, how I'm going to address the comment by TZ (if at all), and I didn't have the ovaries to talk to FAH (funny, appealing, hott) person who made the reference, but someone else did and he rapidly dropped it without any sign of defensiveness, which should be normal but is phenomenal.

At least some of my hesitancy was that old insult about humorless feminists. I consider myself rather funny and witty, and I had accepted wholesale that being a humorless feminist was a horrible, awful thing to be, but I've changed my mind.

I'm ok being humorless in some things.

Rape isn't funny.

Jokes about rape carry an implicit "you deserve it" which is unacceptable to anyone, male of female, because at the end of the day the "you" includes all of us.

I Will Never Be a Radical Woman of Color Feminist

I said this sentence in therapy and she said it would make a good blog title.

It makes a good blog post, too, I think.

I'm not a big fan of essentialism in general. Within my experiences as a white feminist, it is a daily irritant. Discussions on whether Thinking or Feeling as personality traits on the Myers-Briggs personality test turn into claims that there can be psychological essentials because men develop muscle easier (and then presumably are stronger than women, which is why there are no female fire fighters, blacksmiths, and why the military is easier on females). Just to cite a recent example of blinding rage. The continued claim that men and women unfortunately born in non-consistent bodies can never be actual men and women would be another.

However, there are identities to which I will never be privy and for which I can never know what it's like. To an anti-essentialist like myself, this is a bitter pie to dig into. I can feel my lip curling. (Did you know disgust was one of five emotions we think are universal with universal expressions? Now you know.) And sometimes this impossibility means that I cannot adopt identities despite finding them wonderful, interesting, and enviable. A part of my anti-essentialism I must also own to is that, as a white liberal who has grown up I can be anything I want to, this smacks of being told no in a very stern voice, and as a rule I don't like that very much.

But, I will never be a radical woman of color feminist.

I'm still teasing out the differences in my mind. I know there are these two things, one I like and one that I don't, and that there are bits and pieces all over the place with them, but I think it will take me being reconciled to the second (since I don't like it, let's call it the antithesis) until synthesis can arise for me personally.

Or I could read the synthesis on an awesome blog.

The second sounds easier - get to work! ;)

The obvious victims are men, but women exist unseen and unspoken of

This about the Indian workers who were brought in to Tulsa, Oklahoma to work who were held as ill-treated slaves. The details are even more horrifying that the broad strokes; above and beyond paying them, $2 an hour, they were told to clean toilets, fed half of an egg omelet for breakfast, and the vegetarian Hindus were denied milk, which led to many of them beginning to eat meat to survive. And to top it all off, the owner said he thought he was doing the Indian men a FAVOR because people were starving in India, so you can add blatant racism on the caliber of the rationals about owning black slaves because they're inferior.

A local priest gave up his home for them, and a local lawyer paid out of his own pocket to continue the suit against the company on behalf of the men.

And what struck me, especially in light of the recent discussions about what are feminist issues, is that it's this sort of racist mindset that leads to self-justified ill-treatment of women of color. And even in this specific case, the Indian workers borrowed so much money to come that they took out loans and borrowed from their families - which affects their wives and female children. And the way this fell out, some of the men have brought their women and children to the US.

And, more rootlike, these sorts of injustices are the same as the ones we fight against on behalf of women. As fall-out form this case, there is now a pathway for how to deal with human trafficking of this kind in the US; my understanding is that women tend to be trafficked more than men, so they are likely to gain benefits from this precedent. The racial biases against the workers would affect Indian women, too, in addition to the sexism they're going to face. There are so many ways in which this, while not directly a feminist issue, butts up against and will shift feminist issues.

Childhood to Adulthood: The Liminal State and You!

In the recent debates about raising the consent age of porn to 21, I found some interesting quotes and assumptions. They are typified in the following statement at Alas! A Blog: "I notice you’re avoiding the suggestions I gave for why some 18-20 year olds may be less mature, i.e. what it is about college that creates that liminal state."

This statement assumes two things. The first is classist and racist - it assumes all people will go to college. I leave that one as an exercise for the reader, at least right now. What interests me is the second premise - that there is something inherent about college that creates a liminal state.

For people who haven't taken anthropology or psychology, a liminal state is an "in between" state where something is neither one thing or the other. Traditionally (I use the word fairly loosely; request clarification if you need it), liminal states were meant to be temporary as a person transitioned from one status in a community to another (or from one place to another; shamans (athro. meaning) undergo liminal states constantly as they move from world to world to world). US culture, as well as many other modern, Western cultures, have some examples of the brief, ritualistic liminal state; weddings are one; funerals another. However, the coming of age liminal state has been stretched and stretched and stretched until it encompasses years.

Biologically, humans develop incredibly slowly as compared to other mammals (and, indeed, other animals). Humans are born undeveloped so we're small enough to not kill our mother on the way out, and it's two years - or so - before we can even walk. If you look at our closest cousins, you can see the amount of time needed for aging from dependant to independant shrinking as you leave the hominid family and skitter off to other mammalian branches. It's a striking picture of eventual biological result in terms of mobility, language, and tool using skills trumping the temporary need for extra work on the part of adults.

As would be indicated by the slow development of humans physically, the brain has been analysed and found to have a similar slow rate of growth. Around puberty, the frontal lobe - the part of the cortex associated with planning, logic, reason, and abstract thought - begins it's huge spurt of growth and it doesn't cap off until around age 21-23, when we currently assume human brains stop developing (there is some significant evidence that humans who continue to learn continue to have brain development throughout their life and that late age learning can re-start this process, but the research is in its infancy).

These biological realities, puberty in particular, has informed the cultural development of humans. Almost all traditional cultures have the coming-of-age around puberty. Even in US culture, some subcultures continue to have Rituals associated with that age - the Jewish bar mitzvah is a good example of such with the bat mitzvah as an interesting commentary on gender equality in the Jewish community. However, without the social significance placed on such a ritual across the board, it is largely inert in terms of power. The 13 year old before hand has the same reality as the 13 year old after, except ofr some slight shifts in his or her religious community. The ritual has no teeth; the liminal state between child and adult doesn't work.

The US liminal state between child and adult is currently five years long, arguably eight. Rights and responsibilities are introduce gradually, and usually with no relation to each other. For the purpose of discussion, I'm going to use the word "teenager" for someone in the liminal state between child and adult; culturally, one is considered a teenager when one is thirteen or so, and this teenager label continues until one is about eighteen, with a couple hang-on rights for a later age. The timing of rights and responsibilities for teenagers varies surprisingly widely across European culture and its colonial offspring, and i personally think there are too many confounds to use any of these as data for when rights and responsibilities "should" be introduced due to the significant cultural differences even within European culture and its colonial offspring. Here I will be considering US rights and responsibilities timing alone, but I'd welcome comments from other European cultures or colonial offspring given specifics on which you're talking about.

In the US, the rights go roughly like this: right to marry w/parental approval (and have sex with spouse) (12 and up), right to have sex with another teenager (13 and up), right to drive on public roads (15 1/2 and up), right to work with parental approval (16 and up), right to marry (16 and up), rightt o leave school (16 and up), right to have sex (18 and up), right to sign a contract (18 and up), right to enlist in the military (18 and up), right to work (18 and up), right to drink (21 and up), right to rent a car (25 and up w/credit card).

Most of these rights have been put in place recently. Up until the 1900s or so, for example, children could work. In fact, the industrial revolution rested, in large part, on the shoulders of the 5 to 13 set from poor families who had little fingers, would accept a pittance to help their family, and would never think of suing if they lost a few fingers or toes. The life expectancy for chimney sweeps was 15; in other words, they were expected to be DEAD before we would now allow them to legally work.

The laws restricting child employment were put in place to protect these children; somewhat ironically, they made children a burden instead or a help, financially speaking. Outside of family businesses, like farms or restaurants where children can work for the family but not be paid and thus not violate the law, children and teenagers became all but unemployable unless it was under the table (and I've not heard much about under the table being big from the point these laws were put in place on; it makes me wonder if the burden, for once, was placed on the businesses and not the employees - perhaps due to the fact that throwing a child in jail for working never goes over well; if only the same standard were held for immigrants and illegal immigrants).

What this means is that older children couldn't be pulled out of school and put to work to support the family or provide childcare for younger children. Also, with the ascendance of the nuclear family, childcare from the previous generation was/is in steep decline, leaving the entire burden for supporting all children on the parents alone, and a single parent if one of the two decides to leave. What this indicates is an extension of the dependancy of children into teenagehood in order to protect them while simultaniously increasing the burden on the parents to provide for their increasingly dependant children/teenagers.

The educational system, as well, is primed toward keeping children dependant. Vocational Tech is the only tract which even begins to prepare a teenager for adulthood via giving him or her a means of self-support, and it carries the stigma of both intellectual inferiority and low class prospects. No matter that a skilled mechanic or plumber can make quite a lot of money; I would argue that it is the capability for work alone which causes the stigma to be attached; humans tend to value what is most costly in terms of time/money to maintain; a largely empty education aimed at getting more education is such a social indicator, and currently the liminal period of junior high and high school is aimed at being a baby-sitting center while leaving the teenager with no adult prospects, currently not even the ability to REASON, on the other end of the ritual.

College extends the liminal state further; unless the teenager/adult is going it alone (which I, for one, didn't), college is paid for largely by the parents and it is well nigh impossible to get colleges to not take into account the money the parents have without making oneself independant of them legally and formally at 18, instead of the informal adult-but-can-still-be-claimed-as-dependant that I was under until I was 22. The desire to extend the age of consent for being in pornography until 21 does fall solidly within the informal liminal state of the US, then. However doing so, like the limits on drinking, brings into sharp relief some of the values of our country.

An eleven year old can't consent to anything and is not even considered a teenager, but he can be tried as an adult in a court of law if he does something bad enough (English ruling). Teenagers are increasingly being tried as adults. In 1997, the Juvenile Crime Control Act was passed to make it easier to prosecute teenagers as adults. This moved the minimum age possible to prosecute teens down to 14 from 15 in the USA. In other words, before a teenager has the right to do just about anything besides have sex with another teen or marry with parental approval, said teenager will be held accountable, as an adult, for crimes deemed "heinous", usually involving murder or attempted murder. In addition, the timing of the right to legally drink after the right to legally go to war is an interesting one. Adding in the right to consent to be in porn just highlights that death is considered less of a problem than sex or alcohol.

The liminal state imposed on humans by European culture and it's colonial offspring is unrealistic, illogical, and reactionary. Instead of introducing rights, rational thinking, and awareness of consequences, it insulates children and teenagers until they do something "bad enough" to have that protection removed, or if they're poor or have the wrong skin color and do something kind of sort of bad.

Personally, if Garance Franke-Ruta really wants to shut down Girls Gone Wild (and I agree, it's idiotic) one would think that a legal requirement of paying each person who appears on a tape for public sale receives a percentage of the earnings, say 1%, will do wonders for shutting the whole thing down. If 100 people are recorded, suddenly the company is making no money at all. For some reason, that puts a HUGE smile on my face. You'd have to make it specific to video tape sales, so as not to hamstring news programs and daytime talk shows, but the idea is workable and it places the restrictions where they BELONG, on the person doing the exploitation, not on the exploited. (This is my rational for why companies employing illegal immigrants should be targetted while the illegal immigrants shouldn't be as well, btw, and why prostitution should be regulated so that the prostitutes are the most protected while their customers/employers are under heavier restrictions to see to their employee's welfare).

By the way, that's why I don't agree with the comparison between abortion rights and the right to be video taped for a t-shirt; abortion rights is removing legislative power from the bodies of women; I'm not a huge fan of adding more legislative power to the bodies of women, no matter how high minded the goal. In both cases, the removal of legislation allows for individual independance while the adding removes it. Target the exploiters, not the exploitees; history has shown that well-meaning laws are easily turned into increased restriction of the rights of the exploited (yes, I will try to back this up if you ask, but I really don't want to).

I also think the US education system and laws surrounding teenagers need a major overhaul, but I don't see that happening any time soon.

To come back to the initial quote, though: "I notice you’re avoiding the suggestions I gave for why some 18-20 year olds may be less mature, i.e. what it is about college that creates that liminal state." IMO, there is nothing inherently liminal about the college state alone. The entire teenage years are within a liminal state, with the cap off at either leaving school formally, HS graduation, college graduation, or graduate school graduation. Within that liminal state, individual teenagers may mature earlier or later (from what I've seen, the poorer you are the earlier you mature), but in terms of the critical social expectations which shape the post-liminal adulthood state all teenagers are equally expected to be children/teenagers and thus are not treated as adults and thus have no motivation to behave like adults.

Extending the liminal stage doesn't make it more final in any sort of way, it just makes it longer.

As a side note, spiritually undertaken liminal states are very different and often quite, quite brief. European culture and it's colonial offspring also have the longest liminal state I have ever read about anywhere; this does not endear it to any anthropologists I've read who have studied it.

From Elsewhere, giving it a home here

I posted this at Renegade Evolution's place, but thought I should give it a home here, too. And correct some spelling and grammar. *ninjaeditor*

Personally, I see THIS as the problem. There is a madonna/whore complex. Real women are affected by it. It permiates a lot and pops up often when you least expect it.

The question begged then is, how do we make it less powerful? Well, no, that's secondary - sometimes I think the first question SHOULD be (but often isn't) what feeds into this false dichotomy.

I personally think a lot of first wave feminism did. There was a perception that women were "more moral" and many sufferegettes (if I'm remembering my history right) banked on that as a reason why they should get the vote - they would serve as a moral backbone for the countries since the menz couldn't.

Ironically, THAT angle is very insulting toward men. Oddly enough, they were some of the biggest supporters of it. 8(

So we have virgin and whore.

Virgin is: moral (whatever that's been defined as this year), natural (ibid), nurturing, asexual, non-violent, and now (via first wave feminism) intelligent, successful, and ambitious. Viewed positively, she is the "angel of the household and the boardroom". Viewed negatively, she is Hilary Clinton. Her power hinges on being beautiful, remote, and untenable in reality. She is celebrated as the superwoman and fails by drinking, desiring sex, or somehow being out of step with what is "moral" or "natural".

The whore is: immoral or amoral (whatever that's being defined as this year), unnatural (ibid), aggressive, sexual, violent, loud, takes up space, demanding, powerful, and self-sufficient. Viewed positively, she is strong, sexual woman. Viewed negatively, she is the object upon which people play out their fantasies of dominance, consumption, and violence. Her power hinges on being an outsider, on shock, manipulation, and sexual allure. She is celebrated as the actress and fails by showing vulnerability or unattractiveness.

Any virgin can and does become a whore by disagreeing with the "people in charge", whomever they may be. And the gods help those who aren't attractive or who are overweight; there's no room in either archetype for either of THOSE traits.

I'd argue that many of the "positive feminine traits" celebrated by many woman's rights and feminists groups fall under "virgin". The woman who breastfeeds her child and doesn't shave and expects other women to do the same, for example, is fitting into the "natural woman" aspect of the virgin. The women who scan agression as "masculine" and nurturing as "feminine" are coding the "whore" as both undesirable and not even female. And so on and so forth.

But I'm still left wondering, how do we break this false dichotomy? Honestly, there are things off of both lists that I WANT and that I try to embody, and that's my small way, but I find myself wishing there were bigger ways to act.


FWIW, I'd say the male examples are the effeminate and the macho man - for any MRAs out there who want to explore their own untenable archetypes that are used against them to control them. Sometime I want to get a listing of the characteristics of those archetypes and see if they scan to virgin and whore the way I think they will. ^^