we need better sex-ed!

yeah!!!!

The theme for this Sex Ed class shifted from the “You’re going to be a fat, knocked up 15-year-old with visible, terminal lesions all over your nether-regions’ to ‘You’re going to go away to college, be sexually assaulted by a masked assailant who will never be caught, and subsequently be left for dead in a trash-filled alley.” (There was, of course, another variation, in which the aforementioned masked assailant was replaced by the captain of the football team and “left for dead in a trash filled alley” was swapped out with: “And there’s no use reporting it because no one will believe you, and it will only serve to further ostracize you from your peers.”

it is weird to me that sex is something you’d need education for! however, i feel like the way contemporary american society views sex, female-bodied people having hetero sex need to know what is what, like a lot.

What does it mean to feel “so femme”

Irene actually spotted this on my computer before I did: How Do You know You’re Not Transgender?

I think it’s a pretty interesting question, one that I’ve been grappling with a lot after hearing Irene’s awesome thesis presentation. And the answers proved to bring on only more questions which I’d love to hear your thoughts on. Also a brief disclaimer: I think for me it’s difficult to ask these questions and keep my cisgendered privilege in check, so with that I suppose bare with me and call me out when I’m wrong, and trust I’m interested in making it right:

A lot of the answers in the feministing article I read were things like “I know I’m cisgendered because I’m so femme” Which gets me thinking a lot about gender. Is gender about femme vs masculine identities? I am female sexed according to doctors and I’m comfortable with the parts I’ve been given, but am I femme? I’m not butch or masculine, people certainly read me as a woman. But If I was sexed male, I don’t think people would still read me as femme, minus a heart necklace and the occasional skirt (although even the skirts are a recent thing for me). I feel if I were sexed male, people wouldn’t necessarily pick up on a feminine identity. I like getting into arguments, I have a low voice, I wear a lot of sweatshirts and jeans, I have great spacial relations. Even as I list these somewhat masculine qualities, I wonder what is really a masculine quality. I feel lost in trying to figure out what is what. This whole gender game feels pretty fuzzy to me.

There was a time when gender was no so fuzzy to me. When I was younger (maybe 7 years old?) I remember having this moment in realizing I wasn’t fitting in and attributed it to not dressing femme enough. I decided the main culprit was the fact that my hair wasn’t long enough for a pony tail which for some reason I read as the ultimate in female presentation. I remember coming back from a hair cut, looking in the mirror crying. When my mom asked me what was wrong I told her I looked like a boy with short hair, she tried to reassure me I looked like a girl. But I didn’t, at least I didn’t look like all the perfect girls with the straight blonde hair, and skinny bodies who ran in dresses on the playground.

I’m left wondering pretty seriously what is femme? What once seemed so clear to me as a kid is so confusing to me now. If I may, let’s talk about my mom, my favorite female role model of course. She’s female sexed, she reads as a woman. But I can probably count on one hand the number of times I’ve seen her wear a dress. I don’t think I’ve ever seen her in heels. For as long as I can remember she’s had short hair. But she does wear make up, listen to Barbara Streisand, Bette Midler, and Carol King, and I’ve seen so many lifetime movies with her I can’t give an accurate estimate.

What makes her femme? What would it take to push her to a different category? And would it matter? Is femme/masculine identity inherently connected to personality? How/ How not?

And how is this all related to a feminist identity? What aspects of myself are femme? What are masculine? Isn’t it anti-feminist to call my spacial relations a masculine trait? Is it limiting to suggest that a heart necklace is feminine to all the butch/masculine folks out there who like hearts?

I don’t think I am transgendered, but I also don’t think it’s such an easy answer. Sometimes I think I might have a more femme self which for body size/confidence issues I haven’t always felt comfortable with (I imagine most people have felt similarly perhaps for other reasons race/ability/etc). I think I’ll always feel like a woman, but I’ve had moments when I’ve felt less than–times when I couldn’t find the gendered clothes to reflect who I am in my size, or I felt like even in the right clothes I was just pretending–that everyone knew I wasn’t really a pretty girl in a dress, that the real munzi was something less femme, less pretty, more practical somehow. Gender expression confuses me to no end. I don’t feel like a man, but I don’t completely know if I understand what it means to feel like a woman or why I might feel like that on somedays and other days feel less so. I think I just feel like munzi, and that’s all I got for now.

you got the swag?

Swagger Like Us: Should Women Be More Like Men or Not?

For decades, women have been told just to get ahead in an unjust system — but should they be amplifying their aggression to mimic successful men?

more about PETA

Feministing has some thoughts on PETA, thought y’all might be interested:

020517.html

sometimes commercials are great.

Adorable Bunnies Campaign For Emergency Contraception – Bunny Emergency Contraception Ad – Jezebel

Because bunnies are cute, and reproductive access is sexy.

Vodpod videos no longer available.

more about "Adorable Bunnies Campaign For Emergen…", posted with vodpod

health care bill, etc.

this article really doesn’t say much about most of the issues we are concerned with here on GA, but this one paragraph is revealing. what i like about alternet is that it at least bothers to insert some feminist analysis into the news.

While the bill doesn’t come close to fulfilling the promise of the sort of universal, single-payer coverage favored by progressives, it will, according to the Congressional Budget Office, create access to health insurance to 32 million currently uninsured Americans. But the victory came at the expense of a further erosion of women’s reproductive rights, even as it proscribed discrimination against women in premium costs and gender-specific pre-existing conditions.

gaga associates with cool people: another reason why i love her

I know I’ve been kind of binge-posting lately, but I thought y’all might find this article interesting.

detail.asp?page=1&id=26601

badass

I know not all of us are on the Lady Gaga fan train, but I think this article is a fine example of a positive quality of Lady Gaga: she sometimes picks  really rad people to work with. This article is about Heather Cassils, the person Lady Gaga makes out with in the prison yard, who speaks at length about her dislike of binaries, disappointment with The L Word as a queer T.V. show, and her personal performance art.

The interviewer, Noah Michelson, also shares a good point with Cassils about the implications of having such a new face making out with a pop star,

It really speaks to the idea of visibility. When you think about the way queer women are presented — even in 2010 — we never see images like you and Lady Gaga making out… Whenever I see truly queer representations, especially embedded in such a mainstream moment like “Telephone,” I think of kids in the middle of Kansas who maybe aren’t exposed to anything, and then they see this Lady Gaga video, and they start asking questions. Even something as fluffy as a pop music video can be hugely influential.

On all that plastic shit you throw away every day

So I have these causes that I talk about. Veganism… Anti-racism… Feminism… Fat Positivism… Sex Positivism… Environmentalism… And you know there’s always this tipping point in my mind. Someone or something gets me more or less climbing on board with the cause, then there’s this ultimate point that flings me completely on deck. Like there’s no turning back. It’s just so obvious that this is a problem I need to change my life to start recognizing. Do you ever have a moment or witness an event or learn a fact that completely freaks out to the point of life-alteration? I’m going to give an example, in case you weren’t expecting it:

The Great_Pacific_Garbage_Patch, to those of you who are unaware, is a heap of plastic garbage floating in the Pacific Ocean that is roughly the size of Texas. If you had any idealistic visions of our garbage disposal system, I would say now is the time to start poking some holes. This is a result of our relentless production and consumption of plastic things that we throw away every day without a thought. This fucking scared me. I mean, learning about global warming a few years ago was terrifying. I started doing things everyday that I thought helped reduce my contribution to it. But this garbage heap struck me hard. I made some pretty firm resolutions: No more Taco Bell soda containers. No more going to the grocery store and “ughhh. forgetting” my reusable bags. No more tampon applicators. No more water bottles (but I was on that wagon a while ago). And I’m happy about it. I can’t not do it anymore… it’s the way I live, it’s part of my daily schedule. I think I’m a fucking asshole if I don’t. How can you when you know this information? How can you explain it away? Nowadays, I can’t really bear to buy anything new, for fear of contributing more “stuff” that will ultimately end up in the garbage. And I know I’m not perfect… I still buy frozen fruit in plastic packages sometimes… I still buy plastic-wrapped bread loaves all the time… much of our food preservation system is based in our trust of plastic. There just seem to to be some plastic-wrapped things that are so simple to eliminate and I pull my hair out every time my dad comes home from Stop & Shop grocery-shopping with 20 new plastic bags telling me he can’t be bothered to use a few of the 100+ recycled tote bags he’s got stored under the sink. Sometimes I can accept his disagreement with my feminist beliefs, but I really think this is just stubborn idiocy.

So… anyway… this is what I want you to know when I say that the below commercial made me want to weep with joy. I can’t even care about the consumerism of a commercial… if one company is making the leap to reduce a shit-ton of plastic in the world, not only that, but making it compostable… I am a happy bean.

EDIT: munzi recommended a pretty great video about The Story of Stuff (www.storyofstuff.com)–it has cute little cartoons and an exasperated lady telling you WHY THIS CONSUMPTION NEEDS TO SLOW THE FUCK DOWN. So, umm, enjoy. It just changed my life. Again.

Teeth: Biting off more than you would ever want to chew? No hetero.

The tagline is "Every rose has its thorns." eheh heh heh?

So I just watched the movie Teeth. This is one rich film for a feminist. I highly recommend watching it. If you want to watch it before I give away the plot, I know you can find it for free at Surfthechannel… or you could, like, pay to watch it. Not like I did, but I’m all for that. SO now, DON’T READ FURTHER.

Okay, spoilers commence here. And, another warning: I’m gonna be talking about rape and sexual assault so, TRIGGER WARNING. This is how I saw the movie.

Teeth is the story of girl in high school who is a teenage advocate for The Promise Ring and boils in her repressed sexuality. She meets a guy at one of her speeches about the values of abstinence and immediately they hit it off–they have that special something. This girl lives at home with her mom, dad, and step-brother (?) who is basically the most misogynistic, horrible, sexual-assault-y dude ever. Her parents seem to be, like, the sweetest people everrr. So, after a particularly disgusting encounter with her brother which ends with him saying something like “you know who you’ve been saving yourself for, all this abstinence bullshit… you want me” the girl storms out of her house and decides that she’s gonna risk her “purity” and go out to the swimming hole with cute guy she met at the abstinence meeting. They dive into the water and (arguably) it’s adorable and romantic and I couldn’t help but want them to get some cause hey, they’re both just so darn conflicted and repressed. They kiss and feel guilty… kiss and feel guilty… then the girl swims further down the swimming hole into the cave where it’s rumored that kids “…you know” (subtext: have the sex). She climbs up onto a ledge in the cave where someone had already laid down a sleeping bag. Oh dear. Boy swims after her but she tells him not to come up there. He says “I’m freezing” in the water and climbs up anyway. They sit together and it’s still cute cause they don’t want to make moves but they can’t seem to help themselves and they get to kissing and touching and mounting. Then the girl stops them and says, “let’s go back down.” The guy says okay. BUT SUDDENLY. He mounts her again and starts pulling off his underwear saying things like “let me just try this” and then shouting at her, “I haven’t jerked off since Easter!” and she repeatedly says “NO! I’m SAYING NO!” It is horrifying transition from cutesy first love to a full-on THIS IS RAPE scene. After about a minute of wrestling and violence, the boy ultimately penetrates her. Then we hear a slicing kind of noise. The boy screams and, with difficulty, pulls himself free, gushing blood. A large portion of his penis drops to the rocky ground. He continues crying/screaming and jumps back into the water. This girl has teeth in her vagina (“vagina dentata”) that are apparently activated by non-consensual penetration.

So if that gives you an idea of what the movie is like… I’m gonna skip around through the rest of the things that I found interesting/disturbing/questionable about the movie.

Every male character besides the rather sweet papa turns out to just want to rape our protagonist. After the incident at the water hole, the girl goes to the gynecologist, who, after examining her, gives a furtive glance and seemingly decides that, since she’s never been to the gyno before, she won’t mind if he lubes up his hand and starts fisting her. She is severely uncomfortable, says so, and after a few thrusts, we hear the slicing noise. The gyno shrieks, four fingers fall to the floor, and as the girl escapes the room, the gyno starts screaming “VAGINA DENTATA! VAGINA DENTATA!” After this, the girl approaches another “nice guy” from school who proceeds to drug her and coerce into having sex, but she’s too drugged to feel threatened (thus, no castration this time). She has sex with him and they both smile and they both orgasm and it almost seems nice if it wasn’t that HE RAPED HER. She wakes up the next morning, has more sex with him, but, mid-thrusting, this guy answers his phone and he says “Hey. Yeah, doing it riiiight now. She’s right here.” He looks at her and says, “Say something.” She is disgusted, says, “no.” and asks him what’s going on. He tells her he made a bet with his friends over whether he could fuck her. After a few more words exchanged, he shrieks and, once again, a penis is severed. There is one more instance of this. Then an implied one in the end of the film. I will say that, from my point of view (and as far as I could see on other reviews of the movie), every person dismembered by the vagina dentata seemed to really “deserve” what they got–the penetrators were rendered utterly detestable.

I wonder about the “female empowerment” of the vagina dentata concept, when obviously any woman put in those situations in our world does not have this power over the penetrator. However, is the fear and discomfort that this film provokes in (reportedly) many penetrators an empowerment in some way? That maybe more people will think twice before they just compulsively penetrate?

I wonder about the genre of this movie and how it excuses certain plot points. For example, as a horror movie, I could say something like, “well, in most horror movies, women are disgustingly shallow characters and are nearly always humiliated in a graphically sexual/violent way, so it’s cool that this one is turning the tables.” And thus I justify the feminist goal of this movie. BUT this is a movie about the oft-ignored topic of rape, and the even more ignored topic of female defense against rape. Are women, as targets of the rapes portrayed, supposed to take heart in that there’s one story about a girl who has the magical power to exact justice on her rapist? What is valuable about this story to feminists and/or rape victims? Is this movie really made for these people? Or is this another kind of band-aid movie… a movie that makes everyone feel good about rape because, in this case, justice was served? I’m torn. I hated the rape scenes, but I learned, through the movie, to start feeling okay about them because I knew those fuckers were about to get their dicks handed to them.

I’m starting to hate feel-good movies.

There is also the sort of subplot about abstinence education. This is perhaps the most intellectually stimulating part of the movie. Our protagonist goes to a school where the sex-ed teacher cannot even bear to say the word “vagina” and the school textbooks have huge stickers pasted over the anatomical drawings of vaginas. It is made very clear that this is a misogynist community. What is the value of having a rather campy horror movie with pretty clear implications that abstinence-only sex education is, at best, painfully ironic? Afterall, the protagonist starts out as a fairly confident spokesperson for The Promise Ring.

So, after this long-ass post, do y’all have any thoughts?