I recently finished the Purity Myth by Jessica Valenti. It was amazing, definitely a 5 out of 5.
Valenti writes in a way that I like, sarcastic humour and viewing issues from both sides. Let’s start with a visualization: A world were women are not judged because of whether they have sex or not but whether or not they are good people. Sounds pretty good to me. Though the “Virginity Movement” (to use Valenti’s term) wouldn’t have it that way. They believe in retro gender roles. Surprisingly they don’t really want to get rid of the hypersexualized culture, or rather they could not exist without it. Our culture gives women one of two places, virgins or whores. No inbetween, no grey area, just black and white based on sex. Sounds like fun doesn’t it?
She spends a good amount of time talking about abstinence-only education. Did you know that over 80% of Abstinence-only programs contain lies (all her stats are for the United States).
The strangest thing is that though her book focuses on the United States and seemingly ‘radicle’ right wingers I can see the things that she talks about. I grew up in a WASPy little town and to this day I am still startled when I find out that some of my friends aren’t virgins (though after the initial shock it doesn’t matter). And I didn’t even go through the indoctrination that some people go through, just through my interactions with culture. Even my sister, who goes to a Catholic High School, receives an abstinence-only education. This means that she has no working knowledge of birth control, or even avoiding STIs, should she ever need it. Can’t say for certain if they lie, though.
Women need to be judged on moral character, not on sexual character.
As some of you may know one of my friends and I started what we call NeckTie Tuesday. Basically the premise is that on Tuesdays you wear a necktie to question the gendered (and classed) representation of it.
Necktie Tuesday was started because of a coincidence. Both my friend and I decided to wear a tie on the same day. So then we decided that through ties and looking awesome we could start a feminist revolution. Of course we were really only expecting a total of 7 people to join. To our surprise we have over 30 members on our Facebook group. Not many but it’s a start.
The thing that I noticed about my friend and I is that we tend to be much more confident while wearing ties. Like having that thing around our neck makes us a little more likely to say what we are thinking. It actually gives me so much confidence that I have been wearing them to my exams.
So this raised the question. Why? Why does it give us this confidence? What about that piece of fabric is powerful?
For me ties have always been a gendered thing. Only men wore ties. Women were to wear dresses (much to my mother’s dislike I refuse to do that anymore). When I think about ties I generally end up thinking about powerful, rich, white men who get to do or say whatever they want to. So to me by putting on a tie it’s like I get to indulge in a little bit of the power and confidence not normally afforded to me.
Maybe it just ends up gendering the tie even more.
But in the end I think that even when I take off the tie, even if I’m not noticed as much I still get to say what I want to and sometimes I am even heard.
So I got up today and went to check my email. When I did so I saw this:
I thought that this article would be very interesting. My answer to the question “Men or Women?” was automatically women. I thought it might be talking about abortion of female babies, feminicide in export processing zones like those in Northern Mexico, or maybe even violence against women in general.
I was wrong. When I clicked the link up came a video from Fox News discussing how males are the disappearing “gender”.
I put gender in quotes because sex and gender are different things. The easiest way to describe the difference is that sex is between the legs and gender is between the ears.
The titles at the bottom said things like:
Common Chemicals Feminizing Entire Male Gender
Study: Male Humans and Animals Vanishing due to chemical exposure
Then there was a selection of pictures entitled: Male Gender in Danger?
Not sure If you can see it but yes all of them are 'wearing' lipstick
As pointed out all of the pictures are wearing lipstick. Because what is the first thing feminized males do run to the local Shoppers Drugmart and purchase lipstick, especially when they are ferocious wild animals prior to said feminization.
At one point you can hear the other news anchors in the room laughing. The woman who is reporting this tells them that it isn’t funny. The laughing man say “No it’s not funny and you’re a woman. For the men in the room it’s really not funny.” As in “How could you possibly understand? You’re just a woman”.
The study in question found male deer with deformed sex organs, alligators with low testosterone and hermaphrodite polar bears.
But the biggest question was not about what we could do to reduce chemical usage for the good of the environment? This question is asked at the end but not for the good of the environment but to stave off the long term effects on males.
Luckily since I’ve started school I have been able to get a new family doctor because I no longer live in the same area as my old family doctor.
She was a piece of work. Her skills when it came to me telling her I was cutting was to tell me to “stop it” like it was just that simple. I often questioned her ablity to be a doctor (not because she was female.
The thing that I disliked most about her was the fact that she used to have a sign in her office basically saying in a round about way that she did not support abortion.
I was just informed by my younger sister today that this doctor now has a more direct sign which tells people not to ask her about abortion or viagara or cialis if you are an unmarried man.
To me not even giving information about a legal procedure should be illegal. I respect the fact that she does not wish to carry out the procedure but she should be legally bound to give *all* available options to a patient whether they conflict with her sensibilities or not.
It is doctors like her that lead to women being so desprite that they will do *anything* to get rid of a baby.
And the whole no erection help for the unmarried thing… I’m pretty sure that they are big boys now and they can make their own decisions. Who is she to dictate who can or cannot have sex?
Now this probably wouldn’t matter as much except that because of the shortage of doctors here the only way for anyone to switch doctors is by moving. That means if you are a pregnant woman or an unmarried man you are stuck with this woman imposing her morals on you.
This just really bugs me and I wish that there was something that I could do about it…..
So I was going to post this a while ago but have been overloaded with school. So I’m doing it now.
Forbes.com recently put out their evaluation of countries and their policies for women.
The Global Gender Gap Report measures the size of the gender gap—the disparity in opportunities available for men and women—for 130 countries in four critical areas: economic participation and opportunity, health and survival, educational attainment, and political empowerment. A country’s rank is based on the overall score, which is expressed in a percent. The score represents how much of the gender gap the country has been able to close. A score of 100 per cent would represent perfect equality. The majority of the data come from various non-government organizations, such as the International Labor Organization, United Nations Development Program and the World Health Organization. – From Yahoo!
Norway was ranked number one for women with a score of 82%. Finland, Sweden, Iceland and New Zealand ranked 2nd through 5th.
Where is Canada? you may ask. Surely we ranked in the top 25? No. The top 30? No. We earned 31st place. Disgraceful. We got 71%. We even ranked behind the United States who came in 27th.
Our ranking was hurt by poor educational attainment and by low political empowerment. I mean look at our House of Commons right now. Not many female faces there.
And the Ivory Tower? Still mostly an Old Boys Club.
Education here actually widens the pay gap between women and men. Women with post secondary education earned 75% of what their male peers did. By 2005 it had dropped to 68%. (From the Canadian Labour Congress)
And yet we stand by and watch as the government takes away funding, as it seeks to oppress us. Something must be done. Something can be done. We must make our voices heard from the streets of small towns to the offices of the Prime Minister. We are citizens. Laws need teeth. We should no longer fear demanding our rights from employers. We should have protection, not even special protection, just the protection provided to every citizen by our government.
Stand up. Make yourself be heard. You are not alone.
I was at the little food shop run by the Student Union today. I was busy using my debit card and the cashier (a female) who was helping me told the next customer “It will be quicker to go to the next cashier because I am still helping him (pointing at me).”
I thought this was weird but brushed it off. Then the debit machine was being weird, just took a long time. When it finally went through I mentioned that I was worried and the 2nd cashier (a male), not the one who was helping me, told me that it was their fault not mine. Then the woman standing beside me said “Oh ok, so we can yell at you (pointing to the cashier) and not him (pointing to me)”.
Now let me just say this, I don’t blame them for this slip up of gender pronouns. I am wearing a tie and my fedora today (yay for Necktie Tuesday). Also I had a pea coat and a scarf on generally obstructing the shape of my chest. My voice was also a little more hoarse than usual as I have a bit of a cold. Overall I might seem more male than I usually would.
I did find it strange that they were both talking about me in 3rd person and that neither of them would look me in the eye. Almost as though I was different and separate, only the guy would look at me and talk to me. I’m not sure it was because everyone thought I was a man or that it was because everyone thought that I was trying to be a man.
More than anything this incident makes me mad because it just shows the pervasiveness of gender in our culture, right down to our very language. There are no pronouns for those of us who don’t “perform” gender “properly”, to use one of Judith Butler’s ideas (though not her wording). One must either be male or female or else you just end up sounding pretentious using words like ‘one’. I believe that our culture (and others) needs an actual unisex pronoun, instead of just using the masculine as such. By using ‘he’ as unisex it erases the femaleness of an object making it completely male.
This can be seen with adrogenous things, my favourite being the trickster Loki ‘he’ actually has both masculine and feminine aspect but by labling ‘him’ ‘him’ the maleness overcomes the femaleness. Thus ‘he’ loses an important aspect of ‘his’ character.
I firmly believe that in order to have a good relationship with anyone you must first love yourself. Well at least like yourself a little bit.
There’s so much presure on women to please everyone else around us. The thing is we have no control over how other people feel. We must do what makes *us* happy. When we are happy it is easier to help others to be happy and to see what we are doing that is only hurting ourselves.
A big proponent of this discourse is porn. It’s all about pleasing the man. The orgasms are fake and most things are done to please not only the man in the film but also the male viewers. To me, sex, like relationships, should not just be able pleasing one person it should please both parties invovled. Mutual give and take.
Also a good relationship is built on communication. Another thing that mainstream porn seems to lack. Instead we are shown that abuse is ok. That we are only valued for our bodies, that our minds have little or nothing to do with it.
To the women out there I say explore! Learn how to love yourself. Teach others to love you. Talk to them. Tell them what is on your mind. Find someone who listens to you and that you listen to.
Success is liking yourself, liking what you do, and liking how you do it. ~ Maya Angelou~
So that last post is an example of the generally excepted history of the vote for women. What I didn’t acknowledge was that the Dominion Elections Act only allowed white women to vote.
In fact many of the suffragettes were upper class, white women who felt that their morals would help to uphold the country.
So being my white self I assumed (wrongly) that I should go and find out when the African Canadians got the vote. So I went searching and searching and searching. And I didn’t find anything. But I did find out about Indo-Canadians, Chinese Canadians, Japanese Canadians as well as some certain European Canadians.
But wait? you say. Is this really feminist? In my opinion, and in the opinion of other feminists (though not all), yes. Race is intertwined with gender.
So here is a history of enfranchisement in Canada.
1900 – The Dominion Elections Act sets rules for voting. It sets it up so that the requirements to vote federally are the same as the provincial requirements. This bars minorities from voting. This included visible minorities, women and aboriginals.
1917 – The War Time Elections Act opened up the vote to some women, mostly those who had relatives fighting the Great War. Unfortunately this act also took away vote rights from “enemy aliens” naturalized after 1902. This include German Canadians and Ukcranian Canadians.
1920 – The Dominion Elections Act is amended to include “all Canadians over 21″. This does not include Aboriginals or anyone else that is excluded from provincial elections. This means that Asians and Hindus (what they called Indo-Canadians back in the day).
1938 – The Dominion Elections Act is revised but still retains the portion that those barred from voting provincially are barred federally as well as that Aboriginals are barred from voting.
1947 – In BC an act allows ”every” Canadian to vote except Japanese and Aboriginal peoples. It also stripped Doukhobors, Hutterites, and Mennonites of their right to vote unless they had served in the armed forces.
1948 - Part of the Dominion Elections Act is repealed and Japanese Canadians are finally allowed to vote.
1955 – The Federal government allows the Doukhobors to vote. As of 1955 only Aboriginals were still barred from voting.
1960 – Aboriginals are allowed to vote without having to give up their treaty or renounce their status.
The CBC has some very interesting videos documenting enfranchisement in Canada (Click here).
Even now that I have included this time line of when minorities got to vote I still feel like that it really doesn’t cover the whole big idea. Just because these people are now allowed to vote does not mean that discrimination against them stopped. It wasn’t even stopped after Canada tried to become a multicultural society. In fact multiculturalism has its own problems.
Just because we have a view of ourselves as accepting does not mean we have always been so, nor are we always that way now.
Don’t get me wrong. I happen to love Disney Movies, but they aren’t very feminist. I bring up Mulan in particular because I am watching it right now.
It does raise questions about gender roles. Or maybe not questions, it points them out. How odd that the gender roles of ancient China mirror those of today, with a few exceptions (I hope?). But generally Women are still expected to have children and men are still expected to the protectors.
Yes I know that generally this is just historical fact but for me there is not enough questioning of these “facts” to make it seem like it is anything more than just “this is the way it has always been but maybe you can break away from it”.
The first song is all about how the women are hoping to bring honour to their families by marrying a good husband. The songs in the army are about being a man. There are two extremely strict genders in this movie. Men are not women, or girls, they are brave, they fight, and women who are weak stay at home. There is no space for someone like Mulan who doesn’t fit. She cannot please the matchmaker and so tries to become a man. Once it is discovered as a woman she dishonoured and left in the mountains. She fits neither into the role of male or female.
But wait! you say. Mulan runs away from home, poses as a man and saves China. There must be something feminist in that. At least showing girls that they can do anything. Well… yes and no.
Yes in that she over comes many obstacles and is finally triumphant.
No in that she does what she does only out of duty to her father. Selflessness is generally regarded as a female trait. She is not allowed to just be herself in the army. Instead of having to get all dressed up and go to the matchmaker now she must perform to the standards of the Chinese army and be sufficiently “man enough”.
Still she does redeem herself. But when does this redemption happen? Only after she has returned to her role as woman. Once again the reward she receives is honour for her family which she promptly gives to her father. More selflessness rhetoric.
I believe that her return to womanhood is important, as well as her love interest in the Captain Li. It shows that deep down, despite everything she is just a girl and eventually she will learn her lesson and return to “normal”. I believe that this is amazingly illustrated in the Grandmother’s final question of “Will you stay forever?”. As if it doesn’t matter that Mulan obviously exhibits military skill she will get married and raise a family just like every other girl.
Grandmother’s last statement also shows that though Mulan may have challenged society its values have not changed. Mulan is a national hero but yet it is still not accepted that a woman will do anything but marry. She is an anomaly. Nothing more.
To me this movie seems to have less of a rhetoric of “Look girls you can do anything” and more so “Yes girls can do anything but eventually they will recognize their true womanhood and conform”.
This is a sad sad rhetoric for our time. What we need is someone to challenge and change societal values. Someone who is more than an anomaly but part of a larger movement which critically looks at gender roles and revises them, perhaps even making them more fluid.
I recently finished the Purity Myth by Jessica Valenti. It was amazing, definitely a 5 out of 5.
