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MP: Feminism 2010 (Spring Issue) – Deadline March 21, 2010

Feminism 2010: One decade into the new millennium, what have we gained? What have we lost? How do we
shape feminism for the next decade? MP Journal is seeking academic papers, book reviews, and other well-written inquiries on the subject of feminism in the coming decade. Submissions may be in any accepted academic format such as MLA, APA, Legal Bluebook, Chicago Style but must be consistent throughout and thoroughly and carefully edited. They will be considered only with the attachment of a 50 word bio and CV and if submitted before midnight on March 21, 2009

This is something I feel abnormally strong about and it’s also something I see at least once a day or more. People using the term “rape” in conjunction with whatever just happened in their game.

I hate, with a passion, the use of the term “rape” when applied to video games. I see it all the time. We raped that team. We raped that boss. That quest just raped me.

No, you didn’t. No, it didn’t.

I realize the defense of the term is the same as the defense of using the term “gay” to mean something stupid or worthless. It’s just a word. It’s just how people talk. It doesn’t mean anything. There have been pages upon pages written, add campaigns launched, viral videos released about the term “gay” and I’m there, but I want to talk about this word for a second.

The problem is that the word rape does mean something and it means something very personal to a lot of people.

When you say you’re going to “rape” that boss, what exactly do you mean?

Are you going to leave it unable to sleep when it is dark, forcing it to either totally rearrange it’s sleep schedule or burn every light in the house just so it doesn’t start hallucinating from exhaustion? Are you going to leave it crying in the shower, washing it’s body over and over again and talking itself down from a ledge? Are you going to leave it unable to have any relationship with another human being for years? Unable to have an untainted, unafriad sexual relationship for the rest of it’s life? How many times a month will it wake up screaming after you have gone? How long will it take that boss to regain it’s sense of bodily automony, or it’s ability to feel present in it’s own skin? Is that boss going to so afraid to leave the house that it will fail out of college? Will it be unable to care for it’s own children properly? Will it scream every time someone comes up behind it? Will it blame itself for the horrible things inflicted on it? Will it spend years in therapy afterwards trying to connect the dots again? Is it going to continually wonder if it can go on social outings armed? Will it be subject to a battery of humiliating and dehumanizing tests and questions when you are done? Sometimes, and for no reason, will it suddenly lash out, punch, hit, kick, scream? Is it going to randomly and viciously flash back to the date of your encounter, sometimes in public? Is it going to have violent fantasies of cutting the tainted parts of itself off it’s body? Will it competely lose regard for it’s own safety, well being and health and regularly seek out other violent relatioships or will it just decide that it’s done with humanity as a whole and become it’s very own jailer? Exactly how many years of therapy will this boss need when you are done? Will you be leaving some of their vital organs so badly ravaged that they will never again work properly?

I didn’t fucking think so.

We all know what rape is. Rape is a forcible and violent act and it’s committed by people who I believe are missing a pretty decent part of their humanity. Rape is a decision. It’s deciding that you don’t care if she says no/is possibly not even awake/is so terrified of you she can’t say anything. It’s saying, in no uncertain terms, I don’t care about you or your humanity.

In terms of saying “I’m going to rape that boss,” I have one thing to say. What the fuck is the matter with you? You want to align yourself with a rapist? You think that’s an admirable quality? To take something vital and special from another human being and not give a flying shit about the aftermath? Really? You might be tossing the term around casually, but it’s not just a word. It’s possibly my biggest fault in life that I believe that people are generally good and I am aghast at hearing people set the rapist up as some paragon of power and virility. Give me a break. Because that is what you’re actually saying. And what you’re not saying that people are hearing is, “I’m a giant asshole.”

The next time you find yourself wanting to mention that you’re about a rape a PvP team, I want you to stop and I want you think about survivors of sexual assault as whole and telling them, “Hey, what happened to you is just a little word and besides, I’ve almost got enough points for some things made out of pixels.”

Stop trivializing people’s very real and very acute pain. “Rape” is not just a word. In the time it took me to sit down and write this, ten women have been raped somewhere in the world. Ten people have had someone damn well try to end their lives without actually killing them. Ten woman who’s pain you are piggybacking for a cheap laugh.

I would like to believe in humanity and goodness against all evidence to the contrary. Stop making it so hard.

So I spent a night babysitting and generally hanging out with Loving Child (you might recall she is the one who was very concerned with my skinned knee).  I don’t like to sit in front of the TV all night, so I try to find art projects for us to do in between reading books and being the two coolest chicks on the planet.

She wanted to draw a picture of us, which I agreed to because it’s actually a really good opportunity to help them start filling in the blanks in their world and helping them solve problems on their own (That’s a tree!  Hmm, it’s a really good tree but it’s missing something.  Oooh, leaves.  You are so clever, you figured that out on your own).  She also wanted to draw a picture of her and Mommy.

Anyway, LC sits down and draws us together.  Head, hair, eyes, nose, mouth…awesome for a four year old to recognize all those parts.  A triangle for a dress, standard.  Lines for legs and…at the feet, triangles with no bottom.

I asked her to tell me about the feet and she looked at me like I was so thick–it was really endearing.

“*Sigh*  Miss Jolie, those are high heels.”

She has never seen me in a pair of heels.  Heels are not what you wear to kindergarten.  Heels are not what you wear to babysitting a child whose greatest joy in life is climbing to the top of the refrigerator.  She has seen me in flat Mary Janes, fuzzy Muppet looking boots, and converse (she loves the converse).

She drew her and mommy and again, high heels.  I have seen Mommy in a pair of heeled boots exactly once and she almost fell down the steps and laughed at me that she never wears these ridiculous things and can’t walk right.  While I admit I don’t spend the weekend with my telescope trained on their house, I did see Mommy twice a day every day for nine months and no heels.

Then she drew a pair of high heels on herself.  I know this child has never worn a pair of heels, not even for dress up.

I was thinking this could be a problem solving experiment, so I pointed to my feet and said “But, LC, I’m not wearing high heels…” and then I pointed her feet out to her.

“*Sigh* Ladies wear high heels.”

I mean, she said this like I knew nothing about the universe.  Those of you who have children or work in education or have ever been around children know that tone of voice.  It’s the tone of voice used to signal the default of the universe.  People have skin.  Duh.  Your hair is red, Miss Jolie, what the fuck is wrong with you?  This Just Is.

I feel the need to mention that this is a pretty feminist household.  I don’t quite know that mom burns her bra, but she kept her last name, loves LC’s strong will and encourages LC to master her environment in a way that’s really common only for boys*.  Mommy is actually really chill and I happen to like her a lot.  I don’t know Daddy very well, but he’s always polite and he seems like a very sweet guy. This is a child who has turned to me and, out of the clear blue, said, “If someone’s not nice to me, I’m not marrying him.”  This is not a household where I’d expect a lot of gendering to happen, because it’s just plain old not how these people roll.

It’s certainly not coming from me, either.

She’s a little young to be flipping through the pages of Vogue.  She hates the Disney Princesses except for Alice, who stands flat on the ground.  I was almost tearing my hair out trying to figure out where we got the idea that not only do adult ladies wear high heels, so do four-year-olds.

If it’s not coming from the house and it’s not coming from the teachers and it’s not coming from Standard Four-Year-Old Media…is it a societal default?  Are we so inundated with pictures of women wearing stiletto heels (it’s also fair to note that all three of us were wearing lipstick, which is something else I can attest that we never do) that FOUR-YEAR-OLDS have picked that up as the feminine default.  It’s so insidious, too, because I know most of my girls with children have sat down and had the conversation that girls can do anything boys can do and they can wear pants and be doctors and you don’t have to do anything you don’t ever want to do to make someone love you.  Now we have to sit them down and explain to them that we also don’t have to wear shoes that pinch?  Somehow this is being presented enough and in enough media that a child could get their hands on that we actually have to discuss footwear now.

Ladies wear high heels, duh.

Is there a single thing we don’t have to straighten out?  Is there any default notion that children have of the world that, as feminists, we don’t have to address and correct?

*Mommy has also taught LC all of the proper names for the parts of her body and there is no bodily shame going on, either.  There is no Down There/Private Place going on.  In fact, at one point during the last school year, LC had either a UTI or a yeast infection and told me she can’t learn her letters today because her vagina hurts.  That’s a fine excuse not to do something in my book.

Since I already applied for a PhD, I’ve been sort of floating.  I enjoy having more of a direction and having a big project to bite into.  Also, since I’ve read every book in the house, I spent my Christmas gift cards on mostly pop media.  I could argue about the redeeming value of that, but I won’t.  Instead, here’s what I’m messing around with and why it sucks or rocks.

Games!

Aion

I get very curious about anything that is lauded as The Death of Warcraft.  It never is.  People scream about it all day and it never happens.  Warcraft will be the death of Warcraft.  But anyway, here’s the deal with Aion. It’s very pretty.  The graphics are stunning.  It’s also a rather hard game (and I picked a class that basically blows until level 25).  While it does set up your ability rotation for you, the quests are hard to complete, death comes at a penalty (and you can die a lot), and the learning curve is pretty steep.  The interface is clunky (buy a skill book, click the book to learn the skill, hunt down the new skill in your MASSIVE LIST OF SKILLS and hotkey it.  Wtf.  Why?) and the crafting system is so painful, I gave up.

I give a C+ right now, but if it doesn’t shoot itself in the ass a la Warhammer, it will probably be better in about a year.

Movies!

Teeth

The horror (I use the term lightly, I found it funny) movie about vagina dentata – men on the internet are aghast.  Screams of male exploitation and victimization.  One outraged boy posts on the forums “NAME 1 MVOIE WHERE THE VICTIMS ARE ALL FEMALE.  JUST ONE!!!!!”  For the record – Silence of the Lambs, The Descent, and Captivity (not counting the murder of the actual perpetrators in order for a female to escape).  Others are upset that their penises are being used for cheap laughs.

Boo.  Hoo. Hoo. Gentlemen.  No one gives a damn when it’s us.  Also for the record, the women in Teeth aren’t treated much kinder.  It guess it sucks when your gender is represented as a load of monstrous ninnies.  Welcome to the last 2000 years.

At it’s core, Teeth is a black comedy and it poses a question that should scare the crap  out of anyone who is a member of a privileged or ruling class…how will it feel when a subjugated, objectified minority begins to fight for it’s own survival?  Teeth frames this around biological evolution, but social evolution can function in much the same way.

And furthermore, that scene at the gynecologist is hilarious, as is the little “chomp” sound effect.

Books!

Twilight: New Moon

Zzzz.  Significantly less glorifying of domestic abuse, since Edward only has about 50 pages to his name, and significantly more bad writing.  The Meyer formula is 300 pages of navel gazing followed by 25 pages of actual story.  And poor Bella still gets her behavior hung over her head, because if she makes Jacob mad and he turns into a werewolf and rips her fucking face off…that’s her fault. Oh, okay.

White Tiger

Unfortunately, the social climate of India is not something I know much about, even though I enjoy Indian literature.  Still, White Tiger is deftly written and poses the same question as Teeth – what happens when the oppressed becomes the oppressor.  It asks as much from the reader as we do from it, especially if we find ourselves cheering Balram on as he becomes what he is supposed to hate.  The writing doesn’t lend itself to much artistry and analogies are clunky…but it still works.  Not a page turner, but deserving of the Man Booker Prize none the less.

Snuff

I can never get away from Chuck Palahniuk.  I know his writing is sexist.  I know it’s faux subversive.  I don’t even give a shit.  I love this man.  Besides, he gave me a tiara.

Snuff is the usual Chuck fare, this time centered around a 600 person gang bang film (being made to atone for the fact that a porn star was a bad mother. Oh.  Boy).  We never actually hear much from her, but she’s set up as bad and naughty and wrong, so…what else is new.  At least her male counterpart isn’t treated much better.

This time I did not see the Palahniuk Twist (do he and M. Knight Shamalan have, like, a warehouse they visit where they pick a twist?) coming and I can usually figure his books out about halfway in.  The story was not bad and I did want to know how it ended (the ending is so over the top and goddamn ridiculous, I had to read it four times to know if I read it right).  A lot of it, however, seems like a way for him to list his Very Clever Porn Titles (The Importance of Balling Earnest, anyone?).

B+ when I give him extra credit points for giving me a tiara.

The great question that has never been answered, and which I have not yet been able to answer, despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is “What does a woman want?”
-Sigmund Freud, Letter to Marie Bonaparte

“Ye goo fulle nyse, I wolle nott lye;
Butt there is one thyng is alle oure fantasye,
And that nowe shalle ye knowe.
We desyren of men above alle maner thyng
To have the sovereynté, withoute lesyng,”

(You good sir, I will not lie;
but there is one thing that is all our fantasy,
And that is what you shall know now:
We desire most from men,
From men both rich and poor,
To have sovereignty without lies.)

-Sir Gawain and the Dame Ragnell

My lige lady, generally, quod he,
Wommen desiren to have sovereynetee
As wel over his housbond as hir love,

(”My liege lady, generally,” quoted he,
“Women desire to have the sovereignty
As well upon their husband as their love…”)

-Chaucer, The Wife of Bath’s Tale

Some women are attracted by the strong, protective type. Some women like a quiet poet who will read with them. Some women want an active man who will bike and hike. Some women want a smart guy, to do crossword puzzles with and share long conversations.
-romanceclass.com

The researchers’ results may surprise you! What women want is driven primarily by ancient DNA from their female ancestors.
-Whatwomenwant.org

1. Someone who will listen without telling them what they should do, (or should have done).
2. Shoes that are: cute, practical, match certain outfits and go with certain seasons.
3. Someone to move furniture around so you can see how it will look. This is associated with (4)
4. The need to redesign, paint or otherwise change your internal surroundings every 5 months or so because you are “sorta bored” with how it looks.
5. The need to have people lie to you about your clothes and/or personal appearance, i.e. How do I look?
6. The ability to watch an entire television show, including commercials, without changing the channels. (This applies to FM radio use as well).
7. The time and energy to go to a mall or shopping district and shop for hours with no destination in mind and no time restriction. The ability to stop and ask for directions if you are not sure where to go.
8. A movie or book that you know will end badly, Kleenex to cry into during and afterwards, and a man who will not say that was “pretty stupid” when you admit to doing this.
9. A sporting event that will end on time and a ride home that includes no postgame wrap-up on the radio or by SO.
10. Flowers, at most times of the year, for no reason, and without a reminder. THIS IS IMPORTANT.
-Email Forward

—

After all this, I have a single question.

How are we going backwards?

I am currently putting in my applications and sending my test scores out.

I’m going to be a big jerk, and I’m putting all my numbers (as in cash money) down here to discuss exactly how prohibitive this system is. People talk all the time about loans, a 30k a year tuition in state but let’s just talk about getting into the door of a four year institution.

On average, people apply to ten colleges. The application fee runs from 50$ to 125$, so I’m going to charitable and say it averages at about 80$ each, as I’m finding the 50$ universities are few and far between (I’d like to right now give my props to Emory University, which waives fee if you apply before a certain date) and let’s count the postage to get your transcripts mailed.

800$ To send in the paper.

The GRE costs about 150$ and I had to pay that twice, for the general and subject test. The SAT is around 75$ but let’s assume you’re taking a subject test because three free college credits means you can spend a year doing silly things like eating, so 150$ for the SAT. You can send that score to four places, but oh, we’re applying to ten. So let’s add another 130$ onto that.

280$

You’re going to need a study guide, because I double dog dare anyone to take those tests cold. In fact, the computer based GRE doesn’t even list the instructions for questions anymore without asking the computer for them, because they figure you’ve been up the ass of the Princeton Review for nine months.

100$

And…hmm…you’re gonna need the gas to get to the test center. I live in a major area and the tests were always somewhere totally ass backwards. I drove to each place twice, once the night before to find it if I could. You’ll need index cards, too. I have a stack of index cards for these tests that is about as thick as my OED twice. You might want coffee, because those cards aren’t going to study themselves. You might want a hot pocket.

How about we say 50$ for incidental costs?

Let me add that. I’m sure I’ve got half the numbers wrong because I suck and fail, but whatever.

You are looking at about 1230$ just to get in the door. This doesn’t mean you got in. It means you sent a letter that said “Please?”

The current minimum wage, unless I’m mistaken, is 7.25/hr.

This is division. It’s hard for me.

About 170 hours at a minimum wage job just to apply to college. Of course, that 7.25 is before taxes…so let’s call it 200 hours at a minimum wage job to get in the door of a four year university.

Five weeks of paychecks to do nothing but ask for higher education. This is assuming, of course, that you don’t need any of that money for anything else, like food or shelter or clothing. This is also assuming that you work forty hours a week and don’t do other things, like go to high school.

To be fair, there is usually a way to waive fees. I know because, well…I don’t hide where I came from. Occasionally, the fee waiver is standard. You send bank statements, tax returns, swear up and down you don’t have a swiss bank account and are living in poverty for kicks and they say yes or no.

There’s a stack of tax math, too, to do before you can even fill out the form but I believe the poverty index is $10,830 for a single person household (if anyone knows how they actually come up with the number that makes you poor, please tell me. I’m dying to know). That works out to about 5.20 an hour for a forty hour a week job, so even if you are a single parent with a minimum wage job living just about in a box, you’re not quite poor enough.

Some of these waivers involve phone calls with financial counselors who would like to fiscally index your life for them, to make sure you’re not faking being poor (and don’t you come in here and Welfare Queen me to death, because I am too educated to buy that line and you ought to be, too). If you bought tampons, they want to know about it.

So you can also work for five weeks and be humiliated over the phone.

Have you ever looked around at the world and gone “What have we done?”

(As a funny side note, Princeton alone asked me for the fiscal status of my parents to help determine my PhD funding. I am twenty-nine years old. Really? You think my mommy buys my clothes, too? Then a friend of mine mentioned that lots of kids from money don’t actually have to work and are dependent on their parents and given the population of Princeton, it’s not that strange of a question. Except for the other 99% of us.

Furthermore, the only options they had for parents’ relationship to one another was Married, Divorced, Widowed. I literally had to call Princeton and tell them that my parents were never married, so what box do I tick? If they wish one another dead, is widowed close enough? I don’t want to guess and get thrown out of Princeton for falsifying my application.

They are divorced by the way. Which is news to all three of us.)

Given that I’ve finished my testing and I’m five years too late to every pop culture phenomenon, it was about time I picked up a copy of Twilight.

Not a fan.  I will probably finish the rest of the series because I finish what I start but…no.

It’s also got the distinction of something I would probably not expose my hypothetical daughter to, because I’m seriously disturbed at what kind of behavior Meyer considers an acceptable marker of your One True Love.  He’s stalkery, obsessed, never listens to a word Bella says and he throws her around like a laundry sack.  Anything Bella says no to he cheerfully does anyway or forces her to do.  He regularly drags her around physically, often by the wrists.  He threatens to kill her, and while I see the point that he’s a monster so of course he can kill her, I don’t necessarily think he needs to be hanging it over her head the whole time.  Half of the book is him making the point that he will hurt or kill her if he wants to, but she’s okay with that, because she’s in love with him.

Oh, okay.

What really interests me is the fact that Edward and Bella are exceptionally chaste.  I hear that changes after they get married, but for the time being, they hold hands.  Except he blames her for his lack of control.  He gives her little peck kisses but when Bella kisses him back, he flies across the room and berates her for being too eager which will cause him to lose control.  Of course, that’s not his fault.  She’s not being “good.”  So, as per usual, a woman’s dangerous sexuality is at fault and will cause a man to lose his control and she will be responsible for whatever happens.  In this case, it’s being eaten, but if you don’t recognize that rape culture song and fucking dance by now, I feel for you.  As long as she’s a good girl…he won’t be forced to hurt her.  What the unholy fuck.

I never thought I would say this, but I much prefer Lestat.

You know, I should be asleep.

Before I get to the serious stuff, let’s do the alice thing.  And yes, I do have an Omega necklace.  It was made by Brighid’s Forge and it is absolutely stunning workmanship.

Now that that’s done, let’s talk about prostitutes.

So on my nine millionth viewing of Paris is Burning, which I watch just because I love Miss Dorian so damn much, I was nodding my head along while Venus was talking about the use of sex as currency.  She says, give or take, “If a regular woman wants her husband to buy her a washer and dryer set, in order for him to buy that, she’d have to go to bed to him to give him what he wants in order to get what she wants.  So in the long run, it all ends up the same way.”

Theoretically, yes.  It does end up the same way.  I know married women who will throw up their hands a scream at the idea that do anything akin to prostitution, since they are in love and all that, but bollocks it.  You hear the same argument a lot, about bartenders, waitresses, anyone who sexes it up a tiny bit to make a living.   Women’s bodies are used as currency and they are status symbols for their partners.  The end.  Even if your husband is a terribly nice fellow who buys you things without pointing to his pants.  Socially, it does end up the same way.

Except it isn’t the same way at all, unless incidents have recently started occurring in a vacuum and I missed the telegram letting me know.  Assuming that it all does “end up the same way,” the social repercussions surrounding these acts vary differently based on the position of the actor.  When suburban housewives end up murdered and mutilated, everyone gives a damn.  When those women, arguably performing the same acts as prostitutes go missing, the whole world stops to cover it and won’t rest until they are found.  Their sex trade (the most covered women are also generally very beautiful according to some standards and to see how that functions as a currency, try reading The Beauty Myth) basically ends up in a zero sum game.

When actual sex workers are killed (like Venus, actually), no one has given a damn since 1835, and he was aquitted.  In fact, we even go so far as to rename the crime since, you know, dead prostitutes won’t garner much sympathy.  This functions in literature in much the same way.  The majority of Blow Your House Down focuses on the women fearing for their lives because no one actually gives a fuck about how they end up.  They are also wives and mothers in that book, but their main function as prostitutes completely overshadows that.

So while I salute the attempt to level the playing field, let’s stop kidding ourselves here.  A housewife is not a prostitute by virtue of her discursive and socio-normative positioning, even if she is sucking dick for a Dyson.