Tag Archives: Homophobia

This Is How You React When Someone Finds Your Stupid Little Joke Offensive (And You Know They Might Be Right)

1 Nov

From the Archives

 

“Really, With the Gay Jokes?” “The Rape-Joke Double Standard.” “Has The Onion Gotten Too Mean?” These are the headlines to just a few of the several articles appearing this week about comedians and conscience. All of them make excellent points, but the problem with trying to explain why a joke is offensive is that it instantly kills the mood. Culture critics aren’t professional comedians and thus they almost always end up being viewed as the more uptight of the two, even if their arguments are rock-solid.

And yet, the best comedians are pretty good culture critics, as Dara Ó Briain proved years ago at the Theatre Royal in London. Amidst his cracks about the idiots who ask you to remove your shoes in their home, the idiots who confuse astronomy and astrology, and the idiots who think the IRA had uniforms, he talked about a time when he was the idiot:

Last year I told a joke, and this is not a good joke, I have no excuses.  It is a terrible joke, but it was about the musical Billy Elliot. And “What was the composer’s inspiration for Billy Elliot? Elton John – do you think he saw a little of himself in Billy Elliot?”

I know. It was rubbish. I didn’t mean it as an attack on Elton John, or as an attack on the gay community. I meant it as another joke in the glorious tradition of jokes involving the word “in.” As in, “Do you have any Irish in ye? Would you like some?”

Okay, so he explained he didn’t intend to trash homosexuality. But he didn’t leave it at that. He went on to talk about the backlash from the LGBT rights alliance Outrage, who said the joke contributed to a culture of hatred against gay men in Britain. Ó Briain explained:

And the thing is, your initial reaction is when somebody does a complaint like that is to get all tough and say, “It’s only a joke, for Jesus’s sake, relax.” Swiftly followed by arguments about civil rights and comedy’s obligation to say the difficult thing and freedom of speech. Which is a fairly lofty point to bring in to back up something as bad as that joke about Billy Elliot. You wouldn’t go to Strasbourg to the European Court of Human Rights with that as your argument: “Oh, my lords and ladies of the court, Elton John? Do you think he saw a little of himself in Billy Elliot?”

He went on to clarify his political stance, emphasizing that “there is no pedophilia-homosexuality relationship at all,” showing he was brave enough to break character as a comedian despite the risk that always carries of losing the audience. He then addressed that risk as well:

And some people think it’s very politically correct of me, but then, I’m Irish. And if anyone’s benefited from a good dose of political correctness on this island, it’s the Irish. Remember the good old days with all those jokes about how stupid we were? And then a memo went around some time in the Eighties, when you [Brits] all said, “Oh, Jesus, we’re not doing jokes about the Irish anymore? Okay, fine.” And it just stopped. And thank you very much. A bit overdue, but thanks very much nonetheless.

He went on to tell a joke about a bunch of drunk Irishmen, reveling in the fact that he was allowed to tell it and the British weren’t. He then said, “But again with the whole Billy Elliot thing, the reason I backed down so fast on that was because I received one letter of support.” Removing the letter from his pocket, he proceeded to read the message sent by a group of conservatives in Northern Ireland who applauded him for taking a stand against the forces of sodomy. “If you ever use the phrase ‘forces of sodomy,’ it had better be a gay heavy metal band that you’re talkin’ about!”

It’s rare that comedians are brave enough to admit that their joke was a fail. But I’ve never heard a comedian own up to it so fiercely and admit the ways in which he’s personally benefited from the political correctness movement. By changing his target from the group he originally attacked to himself, Ó Briain proved not only the sincerity of his regret but the breadth of his comedic skill.

And I’ve said it once and I’ll say it again: Whenever comedians insist that any criticism of their work is an indictment of all comedy, it sets the bar for comedy so low that no comedian need ever try to be original. Ignoring the “PC police”—i.e., anyone who doesn’t live with the privileges they do—they can simply regenerate old stereotypes, mining the minstrel shows, the frat houses and the school yards, and if no one laughs at this, it’s simply because we’re all too uptight, right? Wrong. We don’t refrain from laughing because we feel we shouldn’t. We refrain because, unlike the repressed who giggle away in awe, we’ve heard it a thousand times before and we know it’s far from unique. And isn’t unique what every comedian, entertainer and artist strives to be?

Or, in the words of another Irish comic, Ed Byrne: “I see comedians making jokes about fat people being lazy, and I just think, well, they’re not as lazy as comedians who get easy laughs by picking on fat people.”

 

Originally posted May 12, 2013

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The Year In Review

30 Dec

Hidden Object(Image by Hans-Jörg Aleff used under CC license via)

 

When I launched Painting On Scars at the beginning of this year, I had loads to say and almost as much worry that few would be interested in issues of disability and physical difference.  As the year comes to a close, I look back and see that the posts about ableism and lookism have generally been the most popular, followed by my spring article about family planning, reproductive rights, and privacy.  This hasn’t been the only surprise.

Lots of people find this blog by googling “dwarf + woman + sex.”  I have no idea who these people are.  They may be fetishists, they may be researchers, they may be women with dwarfism.  Your guess is as good as mine.

Since March, Painting On Scars has been read in over 100 countries.  To the surprise of few, no one in China reads it.  To the surprise of many, at least one person in Saudi Arabia does.  So have people in St. Lucia, Jordan, and Benin. 

Thanks to blogging, I’ve discovered there is a considerable online community committed to combating ableism with its own terms and tropes such as “supercrip” and “inspiration porn.”  I love such communities.  I also love bridging communities.  Because responses to my blog have shown me, perhaps more than anything has, that I want to talk to everyone.  And I really don’t care what your label is. 

I don’t care if you consider yourself Republican or Democrat or feminist or anti-feminist or religious or atheist or socialist or libertarian or apolitical or intellectual or anti-intellectual.  Well, okay, I do take it into consideration.  Somewhat.  But there is rarely consensus when we ask that everyone define these terms.  And none of them carries a guarantee against nasty personality traits like narcissism and defensiveness and aggression and cowardice.  Novelist Zadie Smith noted that we are told every day by the media and our culture that our political differences are the most important differences between us, but she will never be convinced of that.  When lefty comedian Jon Stewart was asked earlier this year if there’s anything he admires about right-wing hardliner Bill O’Reilly, he said, “This idea that disagreeing with somebody vehemently, even to the core of your principles, means you should not engage with them?  I have people in my own family that make this guy look like Castro and I love them.”

This is not to say that it’s all relative and I see no point to social justice or politics.  On the contrary, difference continues to be marginalized by the tyranny of the majority, as evidenced by the fact that the number one Google search term that has brought readers to my blog is “freaky people.”  And far too many kind people will more readily lash out at a person or group whose recognition demands they leave their comfort zone, rather than the forces that constructed and defined their comfort zone.  Well-intentioned friends and parents and bosses and classmates and leaders and partners and siblings and colleagues are capable of the vilest selfishness when they are scared of a power shift.  (As the Christian activists pictured above acknowledge.)  This is heart-breaking.  And it is not okay. 

But on the flipside, people are constantly smashing the prejudices I didn’t even know I had about them.  Every day friends and family and strangers demonstrate strengths that highlight all the mistakes I make, proving to me that politics are tremendously important but they will never be the most important element of a human being.   That may be a political idea in itself, but regardless of the divisions, most people on earth do seem to believe deep down inside that everybody matters.

And that’s what makes the struggle for social justice worth it.  If you are friendly and well-mannered and generous and honor your commitments and don’t let your self-doubt make you self-centered and try to listen as much as you talk and are honest about your problems without fishing for compliments and are big enough to apologize when you’ve screwed up, I respect you and admire you and am humbled by you.  I want to do the best I can because of you. 

 And since you’ve read this far, it’s more than likely you’re good at listening.  Thank you and happy new year!

 

 

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Dragging Entertainment Into the 21st Century

21 Oct

(Via)

 

This week, humor site Cracked.com features a great article by J.F. Sargent titled “6 Insane Stereotypes That Movies Can’t Seem to Get Over.”  Alongside the insidious ways in which racism, sexism, homophobia still manage to persevere in mainstream entertainment, Number Two on the list is “Anything (Even Death) Is Better Than Being Disabled”:

In movie universes, there’s two ways to get disabled: Either you get a sweet superpower out of it, like Daredevil, or it makes you absolutely miserable for the rest of your life. One of the most infamous examples is Million Dollar Baby, which ends with (spoilers) the protagonist becoming a quadriplegic and Clint Eastwood euthanizing her because, you know, what’s the point of living like that? Never mind the fact that millions of people do just that every day…

Showing someone using sheer willpower to overcome something is a great character arc, and Hollywood applies that to everything, from learning kung fu despite being an overweight panda to “beating” a real-world disability. The problem is, this arc has some tragic implications for the real-world people who come out with the message that they are “too weak” to overcome their disabilities.

The result is that moviegoers think that disabilities are way worse than they actually are, and filmmakers have to cater to that: For example, while filming an episode of Dollhouse where Eliza Dushku was blind, the producers brought in an actual blind woman to show the actress how to move and get around, but the result was that “she didn’t look blind,” and they had to make her act clumsier so the audience would buy it.

Even in Avatar, real paraplegics thought that Sam Worthington’s character was making way too much effort transferring from his chair, but that’s the way we’re used to seeing it in movies. It’s a vicious cycle, and it isn’t going to stop until either Hollywood wises up or people with disabilities stop living happy, fulfilling lives.

I’ve examined Hollywood’s ableist problems several times before and there are still plenty to dedicate an entire blog to.  But, like The Daily Show or The Onion, Cracked has a long history of excellent social critique embedded amongst the fart jokes and it’s awesome.  Especially when considering that not only mainstream but alternative entertainment all too often can’t seem to let go of the tired stereotypes.  That Cracked is a site not officially dedicated to politics or social activism suggests that the comics writing for it believe calling out the industry for its embarrassing ineptitude is just common sense.

 

 

   

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When It Comes to the Sexes, Ignorance Is Bitterness

1 Jul

 

“Men and women can’t really be friends, can they?”  In the wake of Nora Ephron’s passing on Tuesday, there’s been a revival of this When Harry Met Sally question.  And you can probably guess what my answer is.  With no disrespect intended to the late feminist, I’m really hoping this is one of her contributions to pop culture whose staying power will erode with time.  It’d be easy to dismiss it as no big deal, nothing more than a cute gimmick, but an excellent NY Times piece from earlier this spring asserts what I have always suspected: Our society’s lack of faith in cross-gender friendships signifies its traditional lack of faith in men and women being able to understand each other.  And that’s a big deal.

According to tradition, men and women view each other as the Other and only meet for the sake of mating and family, hence the cultures wherein women were banned from being seen with any man who was not their husband or relative.  Western pop culture promotes vestiges of this in its assumption that any regular contact with a member of the opposite gender will lead to you falling for them, especially if you’re a guy.  As Jeff Deutchman writes in this several-volume Slate article, “It’s called having no standards.”  When Harry Met Sally says, Fine, maybe as a guy you don’t fall for every woman who crosses your line of vision, but it’s your only motivation for maintaining a friendship with one, and attraction will always poison friendship.  Oh, puh-lease.

“Only worth it if I get laid” may be the rule for a Hollywood character, but it is a very bleak view of the other gender.  Friendship may be impossible if you are set on maintaining that view, but in that case, too bad for you.  And everyone else around you.  I’ve seen friendships survive unrequited love, illicit feelings, romantic trysts and break-ups, and go on to rival any sisterhood or buddy bond in depth.  Men and women can sure as hell be friends, and I don’t mean friendly chit-chat at dinner parties.  I mean call-up-and-confide-your-deepest-fears, ask-for-advice-on-your-most-serious-problems, make-you-laugh-in-a-way-almost-no-one-else-can friends.  Instead of Harry and Sally, they embody Jerry Seinfeld and Elaine Benes, or Emma Morley and Dexter Mayhew, nurturing an allegiance that says “So what?” to any sexual tension, past or present.  They are anathema to the “Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus” folklore, just as international relationships are anathema to racist myths. 

It is true that men and women are culturally conditioned to think and behave differently, just as Germans and Americans are culturally conditioned to think and behave differently, as are New Yorkers and Texans, Berliners and Bavarians, Long Islanders and Upstaters.  But there is always far more variation in the thoughts and behaviors within cultures than across them.  Our traditional categories ignore this, suppressing any details that throw themselves into question, no matter how critical.  Arguing against male-female understanding by emphasizing the traditionally recognized differences is disingenuous because it relies on an extremely narrow, heteronormative perspective. 

Social conservatives often cite hormonal and genetic differences as wedges between men and women, straights and gays, but such arguments are cherry-picking the facts to prop up the antiquated gender binary.  In a New York magazine article on transgender children appearing last month, a theory presented by Dr. Jean Malpas breaks down the concepts of sex and gender into not two but four parts, visually represented on a stick-figure:

  • Biological Gender: your chromosomes and genitals.  Indicated on the stick-figure’s crotch.
  • Sexuality: your romantic attraction to others.  Indicated on the stick-figure’s heart.
  • Gender Style: sometimes called Gender Expression, your preferred self-presentation in matters such as fashion, posture, speech patterns and hobbies. Indicated by a circle around the outside of the stick-figure’s body.
  • Gender Identity: your innate sense of being male or female or androgynous, regardless of biology or style or sexual interest.  Indicated on the stick-figure’s brain.

We are so much more complex than Harry and Sally, and so much deeper than they give us credit for.  Just as an international relationship requires at least one if not both partners to be bilingual, a cross-gender friendship requires at least one if not both friends to be intellectually curious, empathic and uninterested in the stereotypes they have been taught regarding both their own gender and someone else’s.  Indeed, the author of the Slate article claims that cross-gender friendships work best between individuals who are “less gendered.”  (Guys who are unafraid to enjoy movies like The Joy Luck Club, no matter the risk of looking effeminate; women who are unafraid to make asses of themselves, no matter the risk of looking unladylike… )  Bonding over common experiences is easy.  Considering a different point of view despite cultural pressures signifies genuine respect, the very sort needed to fuel any kind of progress.  This is why having close friends of all kinds of gender identities, styles and sexualities can be so awesome. 

Friendship, unlike politics, requires the participants to not just listen to each other but hear what the other is saying.  As a woman who wants a career, I am still expected to juggle it with almost all the responsibilities of childcare because mothers who focus more on their success than their family are negligent.  Many guyfriends are sympathetic to this, while pointing out to me that with or without a family, they are expected to focus more on their success than their emotional fulfillment.  Discussing such ambivalent feelings with friends of the same gender identity can be very helpful, but peer pressure can impede it.  Discussing such feelings with a romantic partner is very important, but it carries the burden of how these feelings will affect the relationship.  Discussions that take place outside of a romantic relationship are more likely honest than resentful because the problem can be identified without having to be solved right away.  That’s what friends are for.   

But it receives little support from tradition because Harry and Sally insist that straight men and women are doomed to fall in love, and traditional notions of love have very little to do with respect.  In passionate romance, possessiveness trumps respect, and while overt jealousy may now be seen as uncool, the tendency for men and women to break off along gender lines at parties seems to correlate directly with the number of monogamous couples.  Pursuing a new friendship with a man your husband doesn’t like—who isn’t gay—can still be judged as inappropriate.  But it’s a double standard, because many men and women strongly dislike their partners’ same-gender friends, yet to try to quell such friendships would be seen as Yoko Ono tyrannical. 

As partners, we should understand that cross-gender friendships more often indicate open minds than loose morals.  Navigating the complexities of life-long commitment is where men and women need to be able to understand each other most.  People whose primary or only close communication with the other gender is through their partner are more likely to assign misunderstandings to their partner’s entire gender.  (“Women are incapable of being on time!”  “Men can’t be trusted for the life of them to buy Christmas presents!”)  The more opaque we consider the Other to be, the less likely we are to try to understand their perspective, as well as the perspectives of those who don’t fit into our stereotypes.  It’s no coincidence that the cultures that place the most restrictions on male-female interaction afford the fewest freedoms to women and LGBT individuals.

But things are getting better.  Cross-gender friendships are more accepted now than ever before because men and women of all gender identities are communicating and understanding each other at record levels.  Not only are new mothers freer to nurture an identity outside the home, but new dads are more likely to hug their children and tell them they love them now than at any other time in modern history.  Attraction and the possibility for it will probably always complicate relationships—and politics and life—to some degree, but open dialogue continues to prove that the Other is never as impenetrable as we have been told.  In the words of researcher Kathryn Dindia, “Men are from North Dakota, women are from South Dakota.”  Our friendships are both the cause and the result of this.

 

 

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Celebrating Even What’s Long, Long Overdue

12 May

Equality, Difference(Image by Nikole Handel used under Creative Commons license via)

 

“Justice is what love looks like in public.”

—Cornel West

Unless you’ve somehow managed to ignore all Western media except my blog this week, you know that Obama has become the first sitting U.S. president to voice full support for marriage equality.  As expected, opponents of the cause are united in their outrage, while supporters are split between those who see a social victory and those who see mere political calculation. 

I understand the cynical/frustrated reaction.  When it comes to any issues of equality and civil rights, the idea that At last the president considers you a full human being! can feel like ice cold comfort.  The idea that you have to “wait” for a majority to grow to accept you as you are, that support for your rights is considered politically “risky” or “courageous” is supremely depressing.  The idea that you should be “grateful” to anyone for believing that the way you were born is as valid as the way they were born can be soul-crushing.  I love my parents to pieces, but I don’t like thinking I should thank them for not dumping me in an institution or an orphanage at birth, as so many other parents of dwarfs have done.

But to see the struggle toward justice only in these harsh terms, however true they may be, is to ensure that the entire process will be nothing but painful.  It is the right of any disenfranchised person to do so, but they should always understand that when others celebrate, it’s comes from self-preservation, from the need to transform pent-up fury into explosive joy when an opportunity finally arises.    

When Obama was elected, it would have been entirely valid to view the historic moment only as a cruel reminder of America’s long history of injustice: What kind of a nation takes 230 years to consider someone with a certain skin color electable?!  But very few Obama supporters—black or white—saw it this way.  When the votes came in on November 4th, 2008, when the state that had only 41 years before fought all the way to the Supreme Court to keep interracial couples apart ended up swinging left and ensured that night that the next president would be the son of just such a couple, we were shocked.  And the shock felt fantastic.  All the exhausting work that went in to combating those 230 years of injustice had to come out somehow and most felt they had little choice about the tears streaming down their face.

That’s why I’ve found myself beaming at this week’s headlines emblazoned above the president’s likeness.  I did the same in the summer of 2003 when my radio told me that nine judges had just ruled that gay men and women were no longer allowed to be arrested anywhere in the United States for simply being gay.  Sure it was sickening to consider that just two decades before, nine judges had ruled the other way, upholding Georgia’s right to imprison two men who had been happened upon in their own home by a police officer.  But as I stopped my car to take it all in, I reveled in the fact that, no matter the political calculation or nit-picking bureaucracy involved, bigotry had lost that day.

Whatever his personal beliefs, of which we will never be certain, President Obama has just placed himself on the right side of history.  If one interprets this in the most cynical way—i.e., that he only did it to fire up his base and win votes—it’s our democracy in action, indicating that the majority is leaning toward equality.  (And thank god he didn’t use that phrase “I’ve learned not to judge gays and lesbians,” a cop-out that implies there is something morally ambiguous to judge.)  Bigotry is an inexcusable force that has been obstructing equality for far too long, but it’s losing the battle.  And I can’t think of any better reason to stop, if only just for a moment, and celebrate.



 
 

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The Gender Police

5 May

(Image by Stephen Alcorn © 2003 http://www.alcorngallery.com)

 

Last Sunday, Pastor Sean Harris of the Berean Baptist Church in Fayetteville, North Carolina gave a sermon on gender:

So your little son starts to act a little girlish when he is 4 years old and instead of squashing that like a cockroach and saying, ‘Man up, son, get that dress off you and get outside and dig a ditch, because that is what boys do,’ you get out the camera and you start taking pictures of Johnny acting like a female and then you upload it to YouTube and everybody laughs about it and the next thing you know, this dude, this kid is acting out childhood fantasies that should have been squashed.

Dads, the second you see your son dropping the limp wrist, you walk over there and crack that wrist. Man up. Give him a good punch. Ok? You are not going to act like that. You were made by God to be a male and you are going to be a male. And when your daughter starts acting too butch, you reign [sic] her in. And you say, ‘Oh, no, sweetheart. You can play sports. Play them to the glory of God. But sometimes you are going to act like a girl and walk like a girl and talk like a girl and smell like a girl and that means you are going to be beautiful. You are going to be attractive. You are going to dress yourself up.’

Harris used the sermon to voice support for an upcoming proposed amendment to the state constitution that would define marriage as between a man and a woman.  North Carolina law already prohibits same-sex marriage.  The constitutional amendment would simply make it ever more so, as well as ban same-sex civil unions.  Update on 9 May: The amendment passed.

The hostility Harris invoked is one of the absolute best arguments for the opposition.  Play his sermon on a loop next to the 2010 study finding American children of lesbian parents report the lowest rate of abuse and repeat: Who’s advocating happy, loving families here?  But it should concern not only those who believe in same-sex marriage or non-violent childcare, but anyone who believes in equality and a non-threatening approach to character development.  Because, unfortunately, Harris was merely saying directly what children, teens and adults are told stealthily almost every day.  

In the 2007 documentary For the Bible Tells Me So, religious scholars and sociologists conclude that the reason socially conservative religious groups target same-sex marriage so passionately is because it disrupts patriarchy.  Indeed, Harris’s rant embodies the two most arbitrary, constricting rules for heterosexual women and men in dating that endure today.  That is, nothing is worse for a guy than seeming effeminate, and nothing is worse for a woman than being ugly.

Most readers may agree that these rules exist but certainly not to the extreme that Harris advocates.  Rarely does Western society openly invoke the violent, threatening imagery he did.  But these rules take various forms, often masquerading as indisputable facts about innate gender differences, and are reinforced in films and magazines, and as mantras in everyday conversation. Many of the following probably sound familiar to you:

1) Women constantly want to constantly shop the way guys constantly want to get laid.

2) A woman should ultimately let the guy pursue her lest she emasculate him and, in any case, she should want to be pursued.  Because every woman is a princess and every guy is a hunter.

3) Guys can’t be sexually assaulted by women.  They can only be grossed out by the advances of ugly women.

4) She can play sports or join the army, but she needs some makeup to be attractive and should always take care of her looks more than a guy should.

5) But she shouldn’t wear heels if it makes her taller than her man.

6) While many men can expect conventionally attractive women to overlook their gray hair, baldness, wrinkles, and/or chubbiness for their success or sense of humor, a woman cannot expect a conventionally attractive man to do the same for her.  Beauty and the Beast was about the woman seeing past her lover’s looks, not the guy! 

7) Guys don’t cry, but women do.  A lot.  Because guys use assertiveness to get what they want, while women show their vulnerability to get what they want.

8) Guys don’t cuddle with each other.  That’s gay.  But women cuddling is either sweet or hot.

9) He’s castrated if she asked him out, she’s physically stronger than he is, he earns less than she does, he takes her surname, or she talks more than he does at parties. 

10) And he’s gay if he’s interested in dresses, skirts or makeup.

11) Or if he enjoys books or films about women’s experiences.

What silliness. Exiling the very real horrors of LGBT persecution to the peripheries for just a split second, how many of you nearly choked yourself laughing at Harris’s order to “get outside and dig a ditch because that’s what boys do”? 

Nothing should be off-limits to anyone unless they honestly, independently have no interest in it.  Most of us are probably disinterested in or uncomfortable with some of the aforementioned behaviors, but the disinterest should arise from self-awareness, not authoritative training.  And I’ve met enough self-aware, self-confident individuals to know that these behaviors do not fall along gender lines, but personalities. 

My neighbor loves ponies as much as she loves repairing cars.  My husband’s buddy plays rugby and knits.  My guyfriend loves arranging flowers and wearing skirts as much as he loves target-shooting and watching Formula One.  I love arguing politics and watching figure skating with my mom and dad as much as I cringe at discussing shoes or watching football.  All of us are encouraged by our partners, demonstrating that our fears of persecution for such gender-bender are usually reinforced not by the opposite sex but, as Ashely Judd so eloquently pointed out last month, by our peers. 

Many men try to talk their girlfriends out of wearing makeup, while many women are supportive of—and often intrigued to the point of being attracted to—men who adopt traditionally feminine activities.  (If it weren’t the case, “Too bad he’s gay!” wouldn’t be the famous expression it is.)  Despite this, women thrust ludicrous beauty standards upon themselves, making catty comments about each other’s supposed failures, while men police one another with gay slurs.  That these cultural rules bear so much repeating signifies that they are indeed rules, not facts.   A glance at history and across cultures demonstrates that they are fashions.  That enforcing them requires scare tactics—“You’ll never get laid!” “You’ll never land a man!”—should land the final blow to their credibility.

 

 

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Female Privilege

14 Apr

(Rates of violence worldwide, used under CC license via)

 
 
Recently at Feministing, Cara Hoffman wrote about violence that targets men, setting off an angry debate. Most commenters rightly supported the idea of feminism openly discussing the ways in which men are specifically victimized, but there were some who said this had no place in the movement. Such a women-only approach to feminism is indeed sexism that, like male chauvinism, will never be successful as long as it is determined to concern itself with only one half of the population. The hero and heroine gender tradition oppresses men, women and those who identify as neither. As women, we should never be so insecure as to ignore anyone’s true disenfranchisement or to deny the privileges patriarchy automatically bestows upon us.  

Yes, being female comes with certain privileges under patriarchy. (And no, I don’t mean Phyllis Schlafly’s you-get-your-restaurant-meals-paid-for-so-be-happy-staying-out-of-the-workforce sort of “privilege.”) Privilege is granted by society to certain people based on things we had absolutely nothing to do with: our gender identity, our ethnicity, our sexuality, our physical traits, our mental capabilities, our class background. That is why any privilege—like any form of disenfranchisement—is the essence of injustice. 

Men face oppressive double-standards in dating and the family unit that I will address in a later post, but, in the wake of the arrest of Trayvon Martin’s killer, I want to focus for now on prejudices against men that are truly life-threatening. Beginning at the personal level, my husband has been beaten up twice by strangers. My brother and several guyfriends have been attacked outside clubs by strangers. Others were shoved down the stairs and slammed against lockers in school by bullies. I’ve never once been challenged to fight as they have, just as they have never experienced sexual harassment as I have. Of course far too many women are beaten by both men and other women, just as far too many men are sexually assaulted by both women and other men, but my personal experience and my husband’s are representative of the increased risk each of us face for certain kinds of attack in our society. There’s no need to try to decide which is worse: the threat of sexual assault or the threat of coming to blows. Both can end in the worst possible way, both are always inexcusable. Both target people based on their apparent gender. 

As a woman, I am far less likely to be challenged to fight or to be suspected of violence by authorities. As a woman, I am automatically more trusted to be around children. As a woman living in the United States and Europe, I have never been asked to die for my country.  As a woman, I can express more affection to a member of my gender without fear of gay bashing than a man can. As a woman, I can buy products of any color without fear of gay bashing. As a woman who’s not physically strong, I don’t have to worry as much as a man does about being picked on by bullies looking for an easy target. As an achondroplastic woman, I’ve always been less likely to be confronted by an assailant looking to engage in dwarf tossing than an achondroplastic man is. As a woman, I am permitted to choose emotional fulfillment over professional success without being considered a failure. This is why homeless women attract less contempt than homeless men. And part of why men are three times more likely to commit suicide than women. 

In a previous post discussing female sexuality, I quoted Chloe S. Angyal’s point that traditional gender roles consider sexuality a no-win situation for women, that any type of behavior we choose can be seen as an invitation to sexual assault. For men, the same Catch-22 can apply for men regarding violence. Looking tough? You’re a threat that needs to be knocked down. Looking vulnerable? You’re the perfect victim to pounce on. If you are identifiable as a minority through your appearance or behaviors, you’d better make sure you avoid the wrong parts of town, which, in some cases, may include your entire home town or country. Or shoot first. 

Like the virgin/whore cycle with which women are encumbered, men are confronted with the brute/wuss standard from the earliest of ages. You’re a monster if you use your fists to solve your problems, but you’re a sissy if you can’t. Non-violent young men must endure society’s suspicion that they are prone to be violent while at the same time enduring their own vulnerability as a victim of violence. The reality of violence against women can never be denied or downplayed, but neither can violence against men, who are 2 to 4 times more likely to be killed by violence than women. Because of the pressures of the traditional model of masculinity, men are far less likely than women to seek help after being threatened or assaulted. 

Most violence enacted upon boys and men is by other boys and men, and this proves that, as with violence against women, the solution is not to condemn a gender, but to condemn an attitude. Googling “female privilege” results in some very creepy websites, wherein men rage about women who won’t sleep with them after they held the door for them, and patriarchy relies on this polarization of the genders for survival.  Despite what so many of those misogynistic websites claim, women who identify as feminists demonstrate less hostility toward men than women who embrace traditional gender roles because we know that those traditions screw everyone over, including men.  That’s why we unite with men against them, taking them apart bit by bit, non-violently.    

  

 

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Four Tiers of Fear

31 Mar

 

“How DARE you call me a racist!” 

We’ve all heard that one before, and it’s becoming ever more frequent with the debate over Trayvon Martin’s death.  Marriage equality opponents have been adopting the same tone over the past few years, claiming “homophobic” is now an insult.  In the video posted above, Jay Smooth makes an excellent argument for shifting the focus from criticizing actions instead of people in order to spark more productive dialogue about racism and this can be applied to any discussion about xenophobia. 

But outrage at any charges of xenophobia is not only an issue of grammar.  This outrage usually relies on the assumption that “racist” or “homophobic” automatically denotes a Neo-Nazi level of vitriol.  (This is why it’s frequently accompanied by the protest, “Some of my best friends are black/gay/dwarfs!”)  The outrage silences any discussion about the more insidious forms of chauvinism, and this is the very discussion that needs to happen, because the most insidious forms are the most ubiquitous. 

Most people who harbor transphobic, racist, ableist, sexist, lookist, ethnocentric or homophobic views are not Neo-Nazis.  Most would never physically harm anyone, and as Jay Smooth demonstrates, most would never admit to being xenophobic.  My theory is that chauvinism appears in society today in four different forms:

***

1. Violence: Both organized and individual violence, though of course the more organized, the more terrifying.  (The Southern Poverty Law Center reports this month that hate groups are on the rise in the United States.)  A hate crime should not necessarily be punished more severely than any other case of assault or murder, but its designation is an essential counter-statement by society to the statement the violence was intended to make.  While the most horrific form of xenophobia, violence is also the least common.

2. Overt Animosity: Harassment and disrespect that falls short of violence.  It’s insulting someone to their face, knowingly using slurs, arguing in earnest against someone’s human rights.  It’s refusing to hire, date or talk to someone because they belong to a certain ethnic group, or because they do not belong to a certain ethnic group.  It’s parents disowning their children for being gay, trans or disabled.  It’s the guy I witnessed at the mall yesterday who tapped a Chinese woman on the shoulder, closed his eyes and babbled, “Ching-chong-chang!” before dashing off.  It’s the Yale Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity’s pledge, which included the chant, “No means yes!  Yes means anal!”  It’s the New Orleans cop saying Travyon Martin was a “thug and… deserved to die like one.”  Because the intention is either to provoke or dismiss the victim, it’s extremely difficult to find a constructive counter-argument.  Beyond ignoring such provocations because they are beneath us, our only hope is to appeal to any capacity for empathy the offenders may have when they are not in a provocative mood.  Such cruelty always stems from profound personal insecurities.         

3. Covert Animosity: Disrespect behind someone’s back.  This usually occurs when the speaker thinks they are surrounded by their “own kind,” and thus unlikely to offend anyone present with their slurs or jokes.  We’ve all heard at least one relative or coworker talk this way.  Often an environment encourages such disrespect and the peer pressure to join in is high.  Often someone will insult an entire minority privately but be utterly decent when meeting an individual from that minority.  A friend of mine once dismissed a boy band on TV as “a bunch of fags” just hours after he’d been raving to me about my awesome neighbor, who he knew is openly gay.  Sometimes this behavior is excused on the grounds that the speakers are from “a different generation,” an excuse I rarely accept since those with more progressive views can often be found in the same generation.

4. The Xenophobic Status Quo: The stereotypes and privilege that surround us.  Most of us have some of these prejudices without knowing it because we have been bombarded with them from birth on.  It’s the invisibility of minorities in the media and the social segregation in public that causes us to stare when we see certain people.  It’s the jokes that rely on the assumption that all heterosexuals find gay sex, intersexuality or transsexuality at least a little gross.  Or the assumption that physical disabilities, mental disabilities and physical deformities are always tragic and sometimes morbidly fascinating.  It’s the virgin/whore standard to which Western women are still held, leading us to comment far more on the appropriateness of their clothes and promiscuity than on men’s.  It’s our collective misogyny, homophobia and transphobia that converge to make us wonder why a man would ever want to wear a dress, but not why a woman would want to wear jeans.  It’s the prevalence of chauvinist expressions in our language (e.g. “Congressman,” “flesh-colored”) and of chauvinist traditions in our books, films and legends (e.g. our god is a white male) that makes them difficult to avoid and easy to reiterate.  It’s our demanding transgendered people wait for the rest of us to “get used” to the idea of their transitioning instead of questioning our belief in the gender binary.  It’s our view of every person who belongs to a minority not as an individual but as an example representing that minority with every move they make.  It’s the assumption that a difference upsets normalcy in lieu of the concession that normalcy is a delusion.  The privileges bestowed by our society on some members at the exclusion of others, rewarding those who have done nothing but be born with characteristics considered “normal,” are perhaps the most insidious reinforcement of these prejudices.

***

There is a danger to placing too much emphasis on the differences between the four tiers—I never want to end up in a conversation where people’s actions are excused as being “only Tier 4 sexist”—because all four tiers feed off each other.  They don’t exist in a vacuum.  The non-violent ideas of covert animosity and the xenophobic status quo provide confrontational people with a means of choosing their victims.  Conversely, regularly seeing society’s long tradition of hate crimes and public humiliation both in our history books and in our everyday news is what leaves us all dangerously unsurprised by the less belligerent forms of disenfranchisement many of us help perpetuate. 

Yet it is important to distinguish between these manifestations of fear in order to avoid the assumption that only violence and overt animosity qualify as xenophobia.  That assumption lets millions of people off the hook.  You don’t have to belong to the Westboro Baptist Church in order to have homophobic views.  You don’t have to belong to the NPD or the BNP or the Georgia Militia in order to have racist views.  You don’t have to wait in a dark alley for a stranger in order to commit rape.  You don’t have to threaten someone in order to to make them feel unwelcome.  Our society has been built on many xenophobic assumptions, making it very easy for all of us to pick some of them up along the way.  The fight for equality aims to make it more and more difficult, but it needs to be able to recognize its targets and use tactics suitable to each. 

I make these distinctions in the hopes of facilitating the conversation on chauvinism.  Yet it should come as no surprise that chauvinism is difficult to discuss because, in the words of Jay Smooth, it’s a system that has been designed to insult and subjugate.  In other words, it’s hard to speak politely about the idea of being impolite. 

 

 

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When It Comes to Sex, Fair Is Fair

17 Mar

Boy Toy(Image by Ian used under CC license via)

 

Disclaimer: This post is going to talk a lot about sex, so for my relatives out there, don’t say I didn’t warn you.

***

I was recently walking around Tokyo’s Electric Town, a sensory overload of video game stores, electronics boutiques, and maid cafés.  Wait, what?  The young women outside these cafés were dressed in lacy maids’ outfits, complete with fishnets, platform shoes and cat ears on their heads.  Addressing their customers as “Master,” they apparently serve them on one knee, providing spoon-feedings and massages to those willing to pay extra.  These cafés were everywhere.

The guy accompanying me probably sensed my feminist judgment before I voiced it.  “So, what would have to change for you to be okay with it?” he asked. 

Quite simply, half the cafés would cater to female customers, hosted by provocatively dressed, eager-to-please, teenage-looking boys.  Half the people on the street in Tokyo are women, but the maid cafés offer them only work, not service.  No wonder nerd women feel so alone.  But it’s not fair to single out Electric Town.  Every well-known naughty incarnation of sex from the Playboy Mansion to token event dancers embodies the same problem: Whether selling dominance or submission, it’s all for the straight male customer.  In Delusions of Gender, Cordelia Fine has identified one of the panes of the glass ceiling to be the not uncommon tradition of businessmen bonding by going to strip clubs together.  The most a straight female customer can hope for at such venues is to be bored, however much her partner may hope she’s taking down notes. 

Just as the word “doctor” or “lawyer” almost always causes a listener to envision a man, the word “escort,” or “stripper” evokes a woman.  Girls are aware of this from the earliest of ages.  Many have argued with me that the lack of lascivious fare catering to female clients is indicative of supply and demand; women aren’t as interested in commercial forms of sex, so there aren’t any.  It is true that the demand may not be overt enough for the market to notice, but this is not because it is non-existent.  It is because, like the demand for non-heteronormative sexuality, it has been discouraged for millennia. 

Men are animals, they can’t help it, goes the traditional view.  But women are not and thus they should only be sexual when satisfying men’s desires, either by playing the role of the virgin he wants to have a family with or the whore he wants to have fun with.  Yet if women’s sex drive is indeed naturally lower than men’s, why are so many societies so concerned with suppressing it? 

Around the world from Kuwait to Kansas, authoritarians go to great lengths to reduce if not altogether prohibit female sexual expression.  Over 92 million girls have undergone genital mutilation in Africa alone in order to reduce their libido.  American evangelical Christians oppose mandating the HPV vaccine for pre-teen girls, arguing that reducing the fear of cervical cancer will increase girls’ promiscuity.  In Haiti, Jordan, Syria and Morocco, “honor” killings and crimes of passion in instances of adultery are still legally permissible (only) when it is a female who has had pre-marital or extramarital sex.  A 2002 U.N. report found legislative provisions allowing for partial defense of “honor” killings in Argentina, Ecuador, Egypt, Guatemala, Iran, Israel, Peru, the Palestinian National Authority, and Venezuela.  Let me repeat: Politicians, religious leaders and parents endorse scaring women with the threat of murder, others with the threat of cancer, to control their sexuality. 

I’m sure this sounds outrageously antiquated to most readers, but aside from the fact that it is a grave reality for women in many cultures, vestiges of this machismo endure in secular culture.  Guys still try to insult each other by attacking their mothers’ sex lives, and women’s bodies and promiscuity are still discussed far more than men’s.  Have you ever heard anyone say, “Your dad’s a whore”?  Or heard a guy who won’t put out described as “frigid”?  Chloe Angyal summed it up beautifully at New York’s Slutwalk this past October:

The idea behind the word “slut,” and the beliefs and behavior that it justifies, is alive and well.  This idea says that sex decreases a woman’s worth.  This idea says that a woman who steps outside the bounds of acceptable femininity by enjoying sex, or seeking sex, or having a lot of sex, deserves whatever sexual violence is done to her… This idea says that almost anything a woman does, says, wears or is, can be used to justify that violence. Are you confident and outgoing?  That could have been construed as flirting, and that is practically consent.  Are you shy and reticent?  You should have been confident and outgoing enough to firmly say “no.”  Are you considered attractive by the standards of our culture?  Well, you know how men get around pretty women.  Are you considered unattractive by the standards of our culture?  What man would force himself on an ugly woman?  You must have asked for it.  This idea sets up a no-win situation, where no woman is pure enough to be blameless.

However, as women’s scantily clad bodies are condemned in Congress and in churches while being used to advertise everything from ice cream to phone companies, I suspect it’s not only the suppression of female desire at work.   When I imagine men being marketed as boy toys, the first obstacle that comes to mind is homophobia.  I’m sure you can just hear the shouts of “Yuck!  Sick!” that would erupt if male butts were given as much attention on television as female breasts are, or if guy-on-guy action were insinuated in music videos as frequently as lesbianism is.  Men who dislike the self-objectifying performances of Mick Jagger or Robbie Williams or male ballet dancers usually call them gay slurs.  I feel safe in assuming similar insults would be hurled by many male Star Wars fans had the master at Jabba the Hut’s palace been a madam who enslaved Luke Skywalker on a chain in a pair of golden briefs.  In 2008, a study found nearly 40% of women appearing in films wore sexually revealing clothing, compared to 7.8% of men, proving that straight women put up with sexy representations of their gender with the same frequency that straight men are shielded from it.  The homophobia behind these cultural patterns is the very same that restricts gay sexuality to the gay district.  And it is often to these corners that lusty women go.  Sex and The City was addressing a real problem when it encouraged women to watch gay male porn in order to see men that are truly sexualized. 

However, as discussed in my last post, sexualization comes at a price when it is the result of overwhelming demand, not free choice.  The American Psychological Association says a person is sexualized when their “value comes only from his or her sexual appeal or behavior, to the exclusion of other characteristics; [when] a person is held to a standard that equates physical attractiveness (narrowly defined) with being sexy; [when] a person is sexually objectified—that is, made into a thing for others’ sexual use, rather than seen as a person with the capacity for independent action and decision making.”  Self-objectification is a free choice an individual can make only insofar as that individual has never been pressured into it.  Bombarded with the media images cited above, women are taught to self-objectify from girlhood on.  Even the professional dominatrix, no matter how powerful, is fulfilling a male customer’s requests.  The beauty standards embodied by these sexualized models result in women and gay men suffering from eating disorders at far higher rates than straight men.  In Cinderella Ate My Daughter, Peggy Orenstein writes:

I object—strenuously—to the sexualization of girls but not necessarily to girls having sex. I expect and want my daughter to have a healthy, joyous erotic life before marriage.  Long, long, long before marriage.  I… want her to understand why she’s doing it: not for someone else’s enjoyment, not to keep a boyfriend from leaving, not because everyone else is.  I want her to do it for herself.  I want her to explore and understand her body’s responses, her own pleasure, her own desire.  I want her to be able to express her needs in a relationship, to say no when she needs to, to value reciprocity, and to experience true intimacy.  The virgin/whore cycle of the pop princesses, like so much of the girlie-girl culture, pushes in the opposite direction, encouraging girls to see self-objectification as a female rite of passage. 

Reciprocity is the key word.  If you want your girlfriend to accompany you to a maid café, you’d better be willing to follow her to a Fantasy Boys’ Strip Tease.  If you want her to learn a naughty routine to add some spark, you’d better learn one for her.  If you want your wife to be fine with you sleeping around, you’d better encourage her to have affairs.  If you ask for oral sex, you’d better be willing to give it.  And don’t you dare make your daughter wear a purity ring until marriage if you won’t demand the same of your son or your own self.  Indeed, if the social pressure that urges women to submit were diverted to straight men, the resulting dialogue would reveal a great deal about how much free choice really enters into it. 

Studies in sex-positive feminism and BDSM culture reveal that many self-confident, consenting individuals are interested in the sex industry, but without the gender disparity pop culture promotes.  And while it is true that many women have no interest in commercial forms of sex like pornography or strip clubs, nor do many men.  Whether the red light district is silly or sexy is a matter of taste.  Whether it is male chauvinist is not.  In the words of one YouTube commenter—a rare source of inspiration—“this is what music videos would look like if women ran the world.”

Look ridiculous?  In the words of Nadine Gordimer, “So many sensual moves are, if you set yourself outside of them.”  It’s no more ridiculous than the song it parodies or the cat ears donned by the Electric Town maids.  If every second maid were replaced with men posing like Bret and Jemaine do, I’d find nothing wrong with Electric Town, except for its carbon footprint. 

 

 

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Working with the F Word

12 Feb

audre lorde rough paper background by Starving ArtistIf you’ve explored this blog, you’ve heard me toss around that lovely word “feminism.”  And I bet a few of you cringed, rolled your eyes or ignored it: “Feminism is the idea that men and women are equal.  We get it.”

Traditional gender roles inflict thousands of double-standards on women and men, and I’ll discuss them in greater detail soon.  But feminism is so much more than that.  Despite the “fem” in feminism, women’s rights are neither the limit nor the core of equality.  As Gloria Steinem recently said, it’s about challenging hierarchies.  It’s about saying, “You’re not the boss of me!”  There is no other word for opposing all hierarchies based on characteristics about which we have no choice: our ethnicity, our sexuality, our race, our gender identity, our class background, our physical traits and capabilities, our mental capacities.  There should be.

Because chauvinism is the common enemy.  Feminism started off aiming to liberate women.  And that includes poor women.  And women of every possible ethnic background.  And in every country.  And women with physical differences and disabilities.  And women with mental disabilities and psychiatric disorders.  And women who are attracted to women.  And women who are attracted to both genders.  And women who transition into their sex.  And those who transition into another.  And those whose biology or sense of self does not correlate to either male or female.  And those who are men.  As a woman with achondroplasia, how could I ignore anyone who is screwed over for the way the way they were born?  As a woman with achondroplasia who chose to undergo controversial limb-lengthening procedures, how could I condemn anyone forced to make deeply personal decisions directly linked to their identity?  And the questions logically expands to: How could anyone?

Do “human rights” or “egalitarianism” adequately imply opposition to any manifestation of chauvinism?  Labels are so problematic.  Internet and library searches for “egalitarianism” usually produce discussions of class and poverty, while “human rights” tends toward macrocosmic, international issues of war, poverty and suffrage.  In effect, these terms can be narrower or broader than feminism.  Yet there are advantages to redefining a well-known term like feminism rather than trying to invent and disperse a new one.  When self-proclaimed feminist Amanda Palmer defended a project objectifying conjoined twins, Sady Doyle at Tiger Beatdown gave her the lecture of a lifetime that sums it up better than I’ve ever heard:

… this “feminism” thing: it’s not for some people, it’s not for you specifically, it’s not a fun little badge you get to slap onto your actions when it suits you. It is a system of carefully worked-out thoughts, which has been developed for many, many years by many thousands of people, and one of the most unavoidable parts of this system, which we can’t get away from if we are thinking for even a second with any ounce of intellectual rigor or honesty, is that everybody matters. Everybody matters precisely as much as you do. Which is why you don’t get to use them as a means of gratifying yourself with attention when the attention is good, or deny them the right to be heard or respected when the attention is bad.

Feminist history is stained with instances of female chauvinism, racism, ethnocentrism, classism, homophobia, transphobia and ableism, and continues to be by the likes of many.  And we’ve got to keep calling that out with the same vigilance we accord any issue.  As the xenophobic view claims that multiculturalism and universal human rights are inefficient and the only battle worth fighting is your own, a non-violent society only functions when based on the concept of reciprocity.  Despite the structures in place that assume otherwise, everybody’s health, job, relationships, sex life, family, and happiness matter exactly as much as yours do.

That’s what the F word means to my husband, my mom and my dad, my sister-in-law, my closest friends, my favorite teachers, and me.  And if that still makes you cringe, if you still find the label too problematic, leave me a well-thought out argument in the comments.

 

 

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