Tag: gender

takedown thursday: the supremacy of sex hormones

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Monkeys: the best way to study gendered behaviour in humans! (Picture of this lovely white-faced saki monkey courtesy of Como Park Zoo and Conservatory)
Monkeys: the best way to study gendered behaviour in humans! (Picture of this lovely white-faced saki monkey courtesy of Como Park Zoo and Conservatory)

Oh dear. Over at the Irish Times, William Reville has written a very enlightened article about how letting kids play with whatever toys they want is social conditioning and the equality “agenda” and sex hormones and some other stuff. Honestly, it’s all a bit disjointed. In any case, I’m supposed to be in bed, but as soon as I read this, I got a rage headache and I felt in my bones that the only way to make it go away was a healthy dose of snark. And then I realised, that yes, yes, it is time.

It is time for another Takedown Thursday.

Attention male readers. How would you like it if Michael Noonan introduced a tax on men in reparation for the violence that men have visited on society over the ages?

Well, such a law was proposed by a radical feminist/green lobby in Sweden, where they take gender equality seriously. Unfortunately, I think they are getting it very wrong.

Attention all readers. Just in case you were wondering, this proposed law has fuck diddly squat to do with the rest of the article. However, it was important to shoehorn it in there because feminists (and also environmentalists?) are evil and probably involved somehow.

This law was never close to being enacted,

BUT IT WAS STILL VERY IMPORTANT TO MENTION IT.

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thank you for your concern

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Concern troll of the week
Concern troll of the week

Susan Venker has a lot of ideas about what women need to do to be happy. Most of them involve marrying young and giving up their jobs and their income to raise children and do housework. She likes writing articles about how all the successful driven women out there are going to be sooooooo sorry that they pursued careers instead of focusing on settling down with Mr. Right and how they are going to be sooooooo lonely when they realise that all the “good” men out there actually want submissive little housewives because BIOLOGY OR SOMETHING.

Her entire outlook on life is stupid for a variety of reasons.

Primarily:

  1. She lives in a heteronormative bubble. She is going to be shocked when she discovers that gay and queer and trans* women are a thing now.
  2. Marriage is no longer the pinnacle of female achievement.
  3. Very few of these bright successful women she’s so worried about are going find marital bliss with a man who wants a glorified servant/fuck toy combo.

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the interrupted text

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Cornmarket Street, Oxford, UK - photo by andreisss
Source: andreisss

I was reading Captain Awkward a couple of days ago, and nodding along sympathetically with this post and 500+ comments relating similar stories. While many of the situations sounded familiar, I remember feeling glad that I had not had an unpleasantly forced encounter with a strange man in a long time.

And so, as punishment, the universe smacked me in the head with a textbook case.

I am walking in a busy shopping area and I want to send a text message. Because I am physically incapable of walking and texting on a crowded street, I move away from the general fray and stand by some railings where I am not obstructing anyone. After a few moments I realise there is a guy standing a few feet away, staring at me. I keep my eyes locked on my phone.

“Hard day?” he says.

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here is my soft perspective

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"Your new soft pink boardroom decor, courtesy of soft pink lady board members!"
“Your new soft pink boardroom decor, courtesy of soft pink lady board members!”

Last week, I moved to Oxford, which involved a lot of driving in the car with my mother, which in turn meant a lot of listening to the radio. I love Irish radio. We are a nation of excellent talkers.

However, last week on Irish radio, there was a moment of epic genderfail and I said several words that I would never normally say in front of my mother.

Don’t get me wrong, I hear a lot of genderfail from mainstream media outlets on a regular basis. As I have previously discussed, living on Feminist Internet can be an insulated experience and I am frequently startled by the levels of stupidity I encounter outside it. On Feminist Internet, even in the heat of disagreement, people understand the basics; for example, vague stereotypes are not a good starting point for productive debate.

This incident of genderfail was particularly infuriating because it came from a successful businesswoman who was trying to advocate for other businesswomen. To do so, she resorted to ridiculous generalisations about Women: The Monolith that would have been shouted down on any reputable feminist blog or forum within seconds.

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I get all the girls

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I'm totally a Hannah.
Totally a Hannah.

I just watched the first two episodes of the new HBO series, Girls.

First off, I acknowledge that any show featuring a main character who is a 24 year-old publishing intern with a major in English Lit, currently writing her memoirs in essay format and having a casual sex thing with an actor is … already hitting scarily close to home.

There’s also been a lot of backlash against this show (which I, obviously, have to work hard not to take as backlash against my life personally.) A lot of it, despite being wrapped up in palatable words like “shallow” and “unnecessary,” still reeks of my favourite flavour: MISOGYNY!

Honestly, I’m not going to even address the RARRR-GIRLS-DOING-THINGS-NO-ONE-WANTS-TO-SEE-THAT bullshit, except to say that it is getting tiresome wading through the same old thinly-veiled “arguments” any time a woman makes something about and/or for women. That said, some of the backlash is totally legitimate, such as the almost total absence of characters of colour except in incidental, stereotyped background roles. I hope this is something Lena Dunham et al take into account when introducing new characters.

Apart from that, I enjoyed my viewing experience immensely and apart from the aforementioned creepy parallels, here are some things I really relate to:

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that girl

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So here is a thing.

This is a picture of me being a modern young lady by drinking wine on a vintage exercise bike.
This is a picture of me being a modern young lady by drinking wine on a vintage exercise bike.

I am a modern young woman. I think. I am practical. I pick most of my clothes based on how easily I can move in them, which has gradually devolved into never wearing pants. (Ever. Seriously, leggings and ambiguous long top/dresses forever.) I put my money where my mouth is when it comes to feminism, quite literally, in the sense that I won’t let a guy pay for my dinner. Unless I’m paying next time. I am confident. I have the audacity to actually like my body, even though I don’t have a flat stomach and my thighs are kind of massive. I don’t obsessively shave bits of myself that don’t really need shaving. (I mean, honestly, it’s WINTER.) My body occasionally makes strange noises and odours and I don’t apologise for that. I can hold my own. I can take a joke. I have my own goals and ambitions and plans, and none of them involve getting married any time soon. Or indeed, maybe ever.

So this is what I’m like. While I can’t imagine myself being any other way, part of me knows that, at some point, it was a conscious decision. At some point, probably when I was around 14 or 15, I made a value judgement; I didn’t want to be that girl.

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