Aug 16

Sex and So You Think You Can Dance

When So You Think You Can Dance first started, they had one winner. In season 9, they decided to have two winners: one male and one female. I thought it was because they realized the odds were stacked in favour of male dancers since most of the viewers/voters were female (and, presumably, heterosexual) (and, presumably, not voting for dance ability as much as for sexual appeal). However, in the preceding eight seasons, there were four female winners and four male winners. The runner-ups were a bit more skewed, with two female and six male.

Then I read in an interview about the change, this comment: “Girls dance totally differently than guys.” Yeah, if that’s what their choreographers demand. (Who may, in turn, be providing, what Nigel Lythgoe and the other producers demand.) I have to say I am so very sick and tired of almost every dance being a presentation of the stereotyped (i.e., gender-role-rigid) heterosexual romance/love/sex scenario, right down to the music, the costumes, and, of course, the moves.

But now, they’ve reverted to one winner – suggesting that sex is irrelevant to dance. Does that mean they’re going to make the dances – the music, the costumes, the moves – as sex-independent? Not likely.

Pity. Because I, for one, would love to see more like Mark Kanumura’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” audition piece and Mandy Moore’s “Boogie Shoes” (the latter was, like the former, pretty much just asexual fun with music and movement despite the gendered costumes – cutesy skirt/dress for one, long pants for the other, pink shoes for the one, blue shoes for the other – yes, yes, we must must MUST separate, distinguish, the girls from the boys, the patriarchy depends on it, the subordination of women depends on it!). (And that’s another thing: would they PLEASE stop calling 18-30 year-olds ‘girls’ and ‘boys’?)

They (the So You Think You Can Dance people) really should make up their minds. If sex is important to what they want to be doing, then they should have best male and best female dancer awards, continue to pair in male/female, and continue to insist the males look and dance in a hypermasculinized way and the females look and dance in a hyperfeminized (which in our society means in a pornulated way).

If sex isn’t important to what they want to be doing, then they should have best dancer award, and pair at random – actually, since the heterosexual mating concept would no longer be the central motif, they wouldn’t have to be limited to pairs at all – and let the dancers dance with strength, balance, coordination, musicality, and skill, with beauty, drama, fun, and quirkiness, regardless of their sex.

Aug 10

I’m not a feminist. Feminism is so over. We live in a post-feminist world.

It used to be that men pressured women to have sexual intercourse with them.  And despite the fact that it meant risking years of unhappiness for us (unwanted pregnancy, unwanted children), for ten seconds of bliss or relief for them, we’d do it.  How stupid was that?

Of course, without the weight of the patriarchy, fewer of us would’ve done it, but still.  (And by ‘the weight of patriarchy,’ I include the social bit of being raised to yield to men and the economic bit of having to marry one in order to have children.)

But now?  Nothing’s changed.  Damn right you’re not feminists, as all you young things proclaim with revulsion.  Because you’re still servicing men.  Only now it’s with blow jobs.  You’re still trading your pleasure for theirs.  (Your clitoris isn’t in your throat.)

When a boy makes a girl come and keeps his own pants on, when a boy becomes popular (or a professional) because he knows what to do with his hands and his tongue, then you can say it’s so over. 

Jul 30

Parents furious? Please.

http://baltimore.cbslocal.com/2013/01/15/parents-furious-after-young-boys-suspended-after-playing-with-imaginary-weapon/

I’d be uncomfortable around any child who enjoyed pretending to kill–anything.

Especially if that child was going to grow up to be a man, was going to be flooded with testosterone for several years.

I’d also be uncomfortable around any adult who considered that behavior “a game”.

 

 

Jul 25

Bare Breasts: Objections and Replies

[I wrote this piece back in the early 90s when Gwen Jacobs did her thing (yay, Gwen!), but apparently it all still needs to be said.  A couple years ago, I was ‘spoken to’ by a neighbour for taking my shirt off on a hot summer day when I was out kayaking.  Most amusingly, I was ‘spoken to’ again when I did the same thing just last year, post-bilateral-mastectomy.  Which brings to mind Twisty’s hilarious “Cover ’em up if you have ’em and even if you don’t” comment.]


In response to the moral outrage about women going shirtless in public, I offer the following. Continue reading

Jul 23

“Royal Male”

Noticed the headline while I was standing in the check-out at the grocery store today: “ROYAL MALE”.

Right.  It could have half a brain, but hey, as long as it’s MALE.

 

Jul 20

Impoverished (male) Scientists

To read the science journals, one would think animal life consists of nothing but predation and reproduction, both thoroughly competitive in nature.  The absence of any capacity for pleasure, or at least for non-competitive pleasure, is frightening.  Lining a nest with warm and soft material is not for comfort, but to “increase the survival rate of offspring” and arranging for others to watch the baby during long and deep dives is not from affection but to “maximize reproductive success”.

This is of concern for two reasons.  First, to judge by my own life and that of the dog with whom I live, that view is, to say the least, narrow and thus incomplete.

Second, what does it reveal of the scientists?  Do they really see nothing but predation and reproduction – nothing but competition for food and sex?  If it’s true that we see what we want to see, well, why do these people want to see nothing but that?  Is it a projection of their own view of life?  How awful –  how impoverished one must be –  to see life – to live life – as nothing but a competition – and, worse, a competition for nothing but food and sex.  Or does it provide some sort of vicarious satisfaction?  Either way, there’s the possibility of an ever tightening and dangerous circle: if that’s all we think there is, that’s all we’ll see, and if that’s all we see, that’s all we’ll think there is.  Socializing not as a reproductive strategy, but for companionship; playing not as practice for evading a predator or capturing prey, but for fun; lying in the sun not to regulate one’s body temperature, but simply because it feels good – why are these things so unthinkable?

Or perhaps these things are thinkable, are visible, but are considered unimportant, trivial.  What a value system that reveals!  Not only that food and sex are more important than beauty and laughter, but that competition is more important than cooperation.

These are our scientists.  These are the people who are collecting information, amassing knowledge, constructing our view – or rather, imposing their view – of the world.  Surely a little more responsibility, a little more maturity, is called for.

 

Jul 14

Making Kids with AIDS

[I wrote this piece a while ago, but have since then, seen the same sort of denial of male agency.  Apparently kids are found in pumpkin patches.  Yeah.  Or the stork brings them.  What are you, six?]

[Quite apart from the point about AIDS.]

What has been glaringly absent in news stories about children with AIDS in Africa is comment about why there are so many children with AIDS.  “We are going down,” a woman says, “Theft will go up, rape all over will be high.  People –  ”  Wait a minute.  Back up.  “Rape all over will be high”?  And that’s just one more unfortunate circumstance beyond their control, is it?  What, as in ‘boys will be boys’? 

Excuse me, but when someone knowingly infects another person with a fatal disease, he’s killing her.  And if someone takes away someone else’s right to life, I say he forfeits his own.  And not only is the HIV-infected rapist guilty of murdering the woman he rapes, he’s guilty of murdering in advance the child he creates (whether he himself is HIV-infected or whether he rapes an HIV-infected woman).  There’s something incredibly sick about knowingly creating a human being that will die, slowly and painfully, because you have created it.

So, the solution?  Drugs, yes.  But the kind vets use when they put an animal down.  (Or, if mere prevention rather than justice is the goal, castration.  At the very least, vasectomy.)  I mean, let’s have some accountability here!  Those 20,000 kids with AIDS didn’t just appear in a pumpkin patch one morning.  Someone made them.  With a conscious, chosen, deliberate act. 

Jun 30

This is your brain. This is your brain on oxytocin: Mom.

I think many women realize that their children make them vulnerable; their love for them holds them hostage.  So many things they would do (leave?)—but for the children.  I wonder how many realize that their imprisonment is physiological.  And, in most cases, as voluntary as that first hit of heroin, cocaine, whatever.

‘But I love my children!’  That’s just the oxytocin talking.  You think you love them because you’re a good person, responsible, dutiful, and, well, because they’re so loveable, look at them!  That’s just the oxytocin talking.

All those women (most of them) who didn’t really want to become pregnant, but did anyway (because contraception and abortion weren’t easily available, and sex was defined as intercourse), and then claimed, smiling, that they wouldn’t have it any other way, they love their children—just the oxytocin talking. 

Continue reading

Jun 22

Every Man, Woman, and Child

There’s an interesting phrase.  Man, woman, and child: those are my options, are they?  Identifying oneself by one’s sex is a prerequisite for adulthood: if I don’t want to identify myself by my sex, as either a man or a woman, I’m left with identifying myself as a child.  How interesting.

Actually, it explains a lot. Continue reading

Jun 11

Short Men

I recently watched, with horrified amusement, a tv program about short men who choose to undergo excruciatingly painful surgical procedures (which basically involve breaking their legs and then keeping the bones slightly apart while they mend) in order to become a few inches taller.

Asked why they would choose to undergo such a drastic, and excruciatingly painful, procedure, they said things like ‘Do you have any idea what it’s like to go through life as a short person?  To sit in a chair and only your toes reach the floor, you can’t put your feet flat on the floor?  To not be able to reach stuff on the upper shelves in grocery stores?  To be unable to drive trucks because you can’t reach the pedals properly?  To have people always looking down at you?  Do you know what that’s like?’

Well, yes, actually I do.  I’m a woman. 

Oh, but that’s different, I suppose.  Why?  Because we’re supposed to go through life inconvenienced?  Feeling subordinate?

Ah.  That’s the real problem.  These poor guys can’t take their rightful place over women.  (As one man, 5’6” before the surgery, explained, “I’ll be a better father and husband and son.”  Yup.  Sure you will.)

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