dammit, kactus.
Did y'all know lesbians have a special "clear-eyed gaze?" Neither did I. I must've missed that in the Official Coming Out Package. Well, it's my own fault. After having so many pencil-stab-related-injuries from reading, uh, Certain People and Places, I'm just grateful my eyeballs function at all. Damn, though. The things you learn.
"Fanny, you're looking a little bloodshot today. Have you been thinking about cock again? Tsk. Tsk."
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You mean you *haven't* been following that amazing amazing...I really don't have a word for it.
Just when I was starting to get bored of reading womensspace, in barges Satsuma.
cliff notes?
Satsuma wanders in and talks about how married straight women are oppressing her, and how if straight women weren't straight and/or breeding, they wouldn't be poor, but instead they would be so rich that the money combined with the womb-energy would blast the icky mans into outer space. She writes dozens of long spammy aggressive screeds on her lesbian superiority.
The married straight women object. Flamewar ensues.
The best part of this episode is that it gave Mary Sunshine, my favorite of course, a chance to shine. "I want men to not exist, never to have existed" or something like that.
She's expressed such sentiments before. But is she working on the virus?
Find out next episode.
JB Sproull is also awesome. She thinks that if womb-en just squeeze their eyes and strain hard enough, they'll start parthenogenesis.
oh yeh, luckynkl had that one, too. great stuff. you're a mutant, mandos, and the last of a dying breed. sorry, dude.
my basic impression of that thread: Satsuma = unholy cross between Sonia Johnson and Tony Robbins. also mostly tl:dr.
Most of womensspace is "tl;dr" yet somehow I find myself at the bottom of a comments page preparing to shower the smarm and hypocrisy off.
Satsuma's just plain classic, though. She's not bound by patriarchal concepts such as "consistency" or "basic respect for other humans."
yeh, I meant Tangelo herself, mostly. the whole thing is, well...yeah. what it is. *blinks at it*
You know, in all my mirth at the rest of it I almost missed this bit:
It is this delightful look that says I AM SERIOUS, and the word serious is sacred to me. I am a deadly serious woman, and I try to use my mind to the fullest extent possible in the world.
damn straight. witness my seriousness! and also deadliness!
{:-|
look, if that's not a clear colon'd...uh, eyed emoticon then I've never seen one. and you know cause why? SERIOUS. VERY, VERY SERIOUS.
LESBIANISM=SERIOUS BUSINESS.
Serious lesbian is serious.
Oh this is wonderful!
And satsuma and Heart are so right.
Lesbianism is about women exchanging clear-eyed glances across the smoke and confusion of an indifferent malestream world, it's about women touching empathetic foreheads in the midst of a Michigan forest, it's about joining tentative fingers as the chorus of "We shall overcome" swells from their fragile but oh-so-powerful breasts...
"Hey, are you looking at my tits, sister? Jeez, you're just like a man, objectifying my body. You know what I long for - old style lesbianism, like it was before it got pornified and objectified and degraded. And let go of my hand, you slut - I don't want people thinking that we're...you know..."
I thought it was about doin' it with girls? Who knew that serious lesbionic business was all about the clear-eyed gaze.
Does this mean if I convert to lesbian full-time, I can get rid of my bifocals? If so, maybe yall should start advertising that on TV! :P
i take zaditor every morning, wait five minutes, then put in my contacts. however, i still don't seem to be seeing clearly enough. i must've grinned at my dog stretching or something. maybe i'm not getting serious enough. i mean, lesbian gaze clarity serious. *skips off to take her life more clear lesbian gaze seriously* oops ~ i mean, MARCHES MILITANTLY OFF, grim-faced and SERIOUS. salute.
Apparently, there's a male blogger who repeatedly quotes Satsuma on his blog. Who is this person? Is he funny? Or dysfunctional himself? I'm hoping for the latter, because in the greater scheme of things, it would be even more entertaining.
We need popcorn! Bring me popcorn!
I bet she means this person:
http://feministhypocrites.blogspot.com/
who seems to be identifying as a straight woman, but who the hell knows. some dedicated rubbernecker.
Mmm, a little too obsessive, and very shallow readings of womensspace, I must say. Meanspirited, not entertaining, and not enlightening. Pretty humourless too.
You see, what fascinates me about Heart&crew is the beating around the bush, so to speak. At least part of the definition of "women's space" is negative: a place where there are no males. If you are going to elevate it to a philosophy of life---separatism, in some form---you should at least take some time to cash out the implications of taking that position.
For instance, some of them (like Heart) have grown sons who are fathers. Or will be. Unless their sons were using the "spoon and qtip and separate rooms" conception method, presumably their sons---I hate to say it---(will) have penetrated a female.
Satsuma and Mary Sunshine say that this is a "desecration of the female soul." OK, then, ... where do we take this?
um, i thought we already established that partheogenesis is on the agenda. yer obsolete, dude. get used to it already.
blogs otoh may or may not be part of the Brave New World.
oh, but btw mandos, if you want to weigh in on the subject of separatism -and- talk to a bunch of Bizarro World-Margins menfolk, you got your chance here:
http://www.feministcritics.org/blog/2007/11/17/kiukus-post-about-separatism/
enjoy!
Well, I mean, barring parthenogenesis, of course. Some of the separatists have their heads screwed on straighter. For instance, I appear to have an unorthodox view of Lucky: actually, odd as her views may be, she often has her head screwed on straight.
I guess "straight" is a loaded word here, but whatevs.
But, you know, it's clear that for better or for worse, womensspace style separatism cannot accept contact between (adult) male and female bodies, as such. In real life, how can a separatist even talk to a son who has fathered children the normal way? Who has desecrated a female body?
Fine fine, you've been pushing feministcritics at me for a while now, so I commented on that thread. I think most of the commenters are going down the wrong path, attempting to show that men have more to do with women than violence in one way or another. There are ways for separatists to get around those kinds of arguments. The right argument is a careful analysis of the utopia being proposed.
I don't know - the right argument to me would be noting that the separatists have a utopian view of the world, and end the discussion right there. All the people who've promised heaven on earth after the one villain that's responsible to all evil is eliminated have failed. Marxists, social Darwinists, Islamists, European fascists, most radical postcolonial leaders - all have created societies that were by and large worse than those they replaced. Laissez-faire capitalists did create better societies, but only because of general economic growth, and the real successes of capitalism have come from compromising with labor.
I thought you guys utilised echo location to see each other? So what's with all this crap about clear eyes then, everyone who's anyone knows that Real lesbians use their mighty gaydar to navigate this cruel veil of tears. And as such people are also well aware I'm sure, the only way to gain your pro-woman feminist political lesbian gaydar is to forgoe the vile q-tip phalluses of patriarchy's aural oppression and allow the natural build up of the sapphic waxes to occur.
Duh.
Laissez-faire capitalists did create better societies
Surely you mean furniture, not societies? Or are you doing that thing people do where they blame the plow and scientific medecine on their Cause d'Jour?
I don't know - the right argument to me would be noting that the separatists have a utopian view of the world, and end the discussion right there.
I disagree, because I think that utopias are worth discussing. Essential thought-experiments in taking certain variables to the limit.
All the people who've promised heaven on earth after the one villain that's responsible to all evil is eliminated have failed. Marxists, social Darwinists, Islamists, European fascists, most radical postcolonial leaders - all have created societies that were by and large worse than those they replaced.
I know this is a popular line, but I think it reverses the actual causative direction. These radical movements were themselves products of the policies of the powerful, and it's not clear that all of them created something worse than what they replaced. For instance: it's not clear that Russia would have been a better place under the czar.
In fact, these movements may just be outcomes of "nonutopian" policies just as much as their consequences may have come from applied utopianism.
For example,
Laissez-faire capitalists did create better societies, but only because of general economic growth, and the real successes of capitalism have come from compromising with labor.
And these compromises have been forced out of fear that the workers might try to implement the worker's paradise. Radfems frequently say that the very act of imagining that women can live without men is what has propelled some of the gains of women in the past few decades.
And their probably right. I mean, flawed as the Sensitive New Age Guy might be, he emerged as an attempt to better accommodate women's needs in relationships, at least in theory, and in the hopes that women wouldn't run away.
I disagree, because I think that utopias are worth discussing. Essential thought-experiments in taking certain variables to the limit.
I think Alon was more especially talking about the real world attempts at applied utopianism, which marx gave a chewing out in the sections of Manifesto dealing with the opposition to the communist parties of the time. This isn't surprising because by that point both america and france had both done the applied utopian thing to no good end really, and in post-revolution germany Marx probably couldn't have thrown a rock without hit a utopianists or two. The key problem with utopianism of this kind is that you can't make, ex nihilo, a utopian society, because there's always baggage and utopianism often becomes an attempt to paper over an essnetial failure to even acknoledge the socio-economic problems that caused the troubles in the "old" society (and "old" gets brcaketed by the sarcasm bunnies because utopian societies are never really all that new when you get right down to things).
They also tend to require a shit load of force to make work during the short term, and as a result end up winding down and imploding in the long term, laissez faire utopianism no less than socialist utopianism.
BTW, this feministcritics experience is confirming the reasons why I prefer to, um, pay more attention to the various stripes of feminists than their critics. The debate far more quickly veers into a dead end. But I guess with some kinds of feminists, it doesn't veer into a dead end, exactly, but it keeps running on the hamster wheel.
Mandos: "At least part of the definition of "women's space" is negative: a place where there are no males."
That's not quite right - some men can post there and welcome. Male pro-feminists who hate transsexuals, for example, Heart's sons (using "Women's Space" as a handle - that always gets me), Mandos himself, though not for long, obviously.
Or were you referring to the radical feminist earthly paradise and not the internet one? I'm pretty sure Heart's sons would have residential rights there, too.
As would John Stoltenberg, and so on---Heart says so, quoting Daly, I believe.
per implications: mandos, did you notice that wossname out and out said that genocide might be necessary if y'all don't let us go quietly? it was kind of awesome.
I did, but I'm not willing to let myself, at least, be derailed by it. I mean, boil it down, and it's just standard violent-revolutionary talk. I didn't take it, btw, as kill all men---just go to war until men Let My People Go.
However, the feministcritics people are not better than tedious MRAs, what with talk of "sewers".
I think it's really funny how kiuku loves me though. I guess she missed Twisty's referendum.
Mandos: "However, the feministcritics people are not better than tedious MRAs, what with talk of "sewers"."
euehe! (that's an Italian "disapprobation" vocal signal such as Tony Soprano sometimes makes - I'm not quite sure how to represent it phonetically)
I'm a feminist critic in the sense that I post there fairly regularly and approve of what the bloggers are doing. I don't, of course, agree with the knee-jerk anti-feminism of many of the commenters, some of whom are indeed aggressive, silly and illiterate. A blog with as liberal a moderation policy as FCs has is bound to attract its fair share of such people, though.
I noticed that Belle herself, in her walk-out post, exempted the bloggers themselves from her condemnation - and rightly, in my opinion. Besides the five of them, there are a stack of other good commenters on the blog: Infra, Tobias, Mandos etc.
By the way, I've lost count of the number of people who've decried FCs as "no better than" this or that, said that they couldn't stand it another moment, declared that they were leaving, actually left, and then returned to it. So think on.
eh. well, -some- of the bloggers. ballgame's fine, Hugh seems perfectly decent and reasonable, RE obviously is a pal. Daran...I have nothing against him, nice guy (sincerely), I think, but...i dunno if it's "can't" or "won't" or what, there seems to be a more or less permanent failure of communication on this stuff, to me.
TS, I'm sorry, but speaking of passive aggressive. this just pushed me right over the edge:
It is unlikely that feminists like Ampersand will defend kiuku's views, at least not in public.
right. in private, though, he's a gleeful Female Nationalist, complete with plans for genocide of males if it be necessary. too bad the Margins people don't know; they think he's a mustachio-twirling
PornLord. sinister, sinister Amp! (don't forget the kiddie pr0n)
and jams, don't even get me started on that plonker.
yeah, normally i wouldn't have stomped out of there so quickly, but--you're right, Tom, I -have- gone through that more or less in there before, and -every- single time i feel like i've practically been maneuvered into taking a position that isn't mine just so they can argue against it.
no, that's the polite version. i feel like i've entered the Clueless Zone, a region of fog, squelch, and general irritation. easy to get in, hard to extricate oneself. i don't have the patience, i really don't.
"feminism turned me into a newt!!"
marvelous. enjoy your pond or whatever it is. c'ya.
Eh, you and Jams. When are you two crazy kids going to stop arguing long enough to realize that you're in love?
They turned me into a newt too...
(looking shamefaced and shifty)
...I got better.
Burn 'em anyway! Throw 'em into the pond!
p.s. Strongly disagree about Daran. Nobody knows how to kick a beehive over like Daran.
Belle (on Ampersand)
"right. in private, though, he's a gleeful Female Nationalist, complete with plans for genocide of males if it be necessary. too bad the Margins people don't know; they think he's a mustachio-twirling PornLord. sinister, sinister Amp! (don't forget the kiddie pr0n)"
What're you going to do? Ampersand is just all things to all people. I mean the breadth of his appeal is astonishing.
Yeah, he is... on the blogosphere, he probably has the highest ratio of cross-party appeal to moderation. It's easy to have people on both sides think highly of you when you're Matthew Yglesias.
And these compromises have been forced out of fear that the workers might try to implement the worker's paradise.
Sometimes... but usually not. Usually they were hammered out as compromises among pragmatic business owners, patrician reformists, and labor.
The actual policies that arose out of trying to snuff out labor radicalism were pretty much horrible - for one, they created urban renewal. As early as the 1860s, reformists in New York advocated policies of slum clearance as a solution to the poverty of Five Points, contrasted with the socialists' solution of unionization and higher wages. That didn't work; after they demolished Five Points, the poor just relocated to new tenements in the Lower East Side.
Then they began advocating rapid transit as a way of enabling the poor to live away from Downtown Manhattan. But they were also very worried about urban party machines, so whenever Boss Tweed seemed to be interested in a subway, they backed away. A subway, they said, would promote suburbanization and zoning and home ownership, which were supposed to improve the working class's lives. Eventually New York did get a subway, but by then Upper Manhattan was too urbanized, so people just relocated to tenements further north.
That in itself was just power politics. But then came the automobile and Robert Moses, and suddenly it was possible to enable people to live much further away from city centers than ever before. Neighborhoods deemed too dense were destroyed, and replaced by project towers; neighborhoods that stood in the way of highway projects were razed to make room for roads. At the same time the federal government began subsidizing suburban construction and middle-class home ownership, so the white middle class could move away while the underclass remained in inner cities.
The riots of the 1960s were of course directly caused by black disillusionment with the slowness of civil rights, as well as a racist backlash. But those cities were majority black to begin with because of twenty years of a war on the cities, created by and large by reformers who hoped that that way they could end poverty without spending money on the poor.
Meanwhile, programs that evolved out of direct compromises with labor, rather than ill-fated fears of socialism, tended to directly improve working class life: the forty-hour workweek, quality control, minimum wages, unemployment benefits, minimum incomes, environmental protection...
The riots of the 1960s were of course directly caused by black disillusionment with the slowness of civil rights
Just to nit pick, they were directly caused by incidents of police brutality, huge miscarriages of justice and other things that largely centered around the justice system being one of the main tools through which the conservative counter-cultural backlash of the 60's* was perpetrated itself against non-white people - Which of course means that the civil rights movement, at any speed, was thence the essential cause of the riots, because it pissed white privelaged folk off and therefore indirectly led to the quite criminal justice system and police forces that were one of the major hall marks of the 60's for the non-white, non-middle classes.
That is, if you really absolutely must get reductionaist about it.
* bcuz this no longer happens of course.
Sure, but a few years before, even lynchings elicited nonviolent responses. A lot of things changed between 1955 and 1967: the Civil Rights Act failed to magically bring complete equality, the nonviolent civil rights movement had run out of steam, inner cities were a lot blacker, speculators had discovered redlining, community policing was weaker, crime rates had started soaring...
Actually there were violent responses to lynchings Alon, especially in the more extreme and nasty cases such as the tulsa riots.
There's never been passive acceptance of being murdered, and while some white people see all black people as merely various shades of maroon, there will be people who are pretty much forced to resorting to violence in response to the shit that gets dumped on them and theirs.
Admittedly someitmes the violence will end up aimed at Korean liqor stores, but seeing as its christmas time and all, I should probably point out that, like christmas gifts, it's really teh thought that counts more than the executions.
And in large black majority areas* the violent ones may even not end up being buried in a mass grave for the effort along with their children and family. If they're lucky and don't do anything too threatening of course.
* which only really began to exist during the 40's as the ghettos bloated and led to that weird cisurban urbanisation, as areas of cities started to function as whole cities had done previously and suburbs and eventually exurbs evolved from the resulting mess this created.
And now Jams has left too.
FCs seems to be the blog of choice for walk-outs these days.
i went and looked. didn't see his exit, but apparently Octo and I are Princesses! who flounced off! awesome! TIARA PLEASE
These big exits are really getting out of hand. It's as if people only ever turn up at FCs these days in order leave and say that they're never coming back (so don't bother pleading). If everybody clears off who's going to be shocked when I storm out? I'll have to make do with a giggle from Kiuku, I suppose.
Jams left after the comment that upset you was struck by Hugh, and Daran, hoping to avoid the need for further discipline, suggested he (Jams) might like to moderate his tone.
I was too hard on Octogalore, by the way. Wish I hadn't been.
By the way, why have you been posting so little to your own blog in the last month or so? Not pressure of study, I hope.
Thanks. Well, a bit, life stuff in general, including study (final on Tuesday, starting new class on abnormal psych, which should be a snap, all things considered); and I had bronchitis for about a month in October-ish; between that and the changing seasons which affect me so (I R delicate), yeah, slumped a bit. also i've been putting a lot of online energy into various offblog endeavors.
and you? have any good pudding lately? You Brits with your puddings and your Torchwood which you won't even make available on DVD yet.
anyway i think as far as storming out & dwama goes, y'all are still beat by the Margins saga. I noticed kiuku really -is- half convinced you're Satsuma now, which is kind of awesome. I know some people think it's Heart herself. It's better than daytime drama, almost made up for by the not-entertaining transphobic bile she spews on a regular basis.
this stuff though...gold.
In fact Kiuku was threatening to go to the Margins and denounce Satsuma as an impostor: "and I know who it is - it's a so-called feminist-critic troll called Tom Nolan, who isn't as clever as he thinks he is and GAVE HIMSELF AWAY." I almost told her to go ahead and do it, but as my identity is not a secret and my address could be fairly easily discovered, I decided that the less I had to do with those nice ladies over at The Margins the better.
By the way, I was half convinced that Kiuku was a put-up job herself. When she started going on about genocide and our wonderful sisters in the Khmer Rouge in that airy way of hers, I had one of those "hey, wait a minute! Am I being had?" moments - but her psychology, I've decided, is too perfectly rendered for her to be a plant.
FCs is always going to have trouble attracting and keeping female feminists of any stamp. There's a dilemma with regard to differentiated criticism and undifferentiated criticism. If global criticisms are made: "feminism is X", then a lot of feminists are going to say, "I don't do/say/think X! This is bullshit!" On the other hand, if specific criticisms are made: "feminism of a particular stripe, as exemplified by Mary M. Quitecontrary, is X" then the response will often be: "You needn't think that I'm going to denounce my sisters in the movement for the likes of you! I see your game, you're trying to pick us off one by one and bring us over to your side!" Hence Octo's very pointed show of solidarity with Kiuku at the end there.
A class in Abnormal Psychology? The long time you've spent in the gendersphere is going to seriously warp your ability to know abnormal when you see it, you know. After a conversation with Kiuku I look at Heart and think to myself, "Mmm. Well, she's pretty normal." And all this on-line hectoring has bad side-effects on real-life socializing. I've been reproved recently for addressing paragraphs at people during interludes of what should be light chit-chat.
Sorry to hear about the bronchitis. I have a weak chest myself, a sign of approaching old-age I think, and spend a lot of winter evenings coughing and spluttering.
I'm getting some good pudding tonight, as it turns out: plum pudding from some college supplier (a Norfolk farmhouse, apparently). Should be good.
Anyway, know that when you can blog it means a lot to a lot of people. You weren't short-listed for being obscure.
aw, thank you, I really appreciate that.
so here's a question: why is it called plum pudding when it has no actual plums? for that matter, why not make it with actual plums? or would it be more like prune pudding then, and thus nasty?
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