What We Stand For

It's very difficult to get a fish to understand that water is wet. Some would say impossible. Especially because the only way to achieve this, really is to hold the fish out of water for a while, but the shock of it makes the experience less than instructive, for the most part.

Looking at the kyriarchy is like that. We've swum in it, breathed it in, and when we are made aware of it for the first time, it makes us acutely uncomfortable. This happens because it is the first time we starkly realise that life isn't fair, that the individual is not as in control of his/her on circumstances as much as we would like to believe. It's also the first time we're made to think about our own privilege and realise that there are things we've gained in life because we belong to the right groups and classes. The first time is never an instructive moment, because it's very difficult to push past the gasping horror and discomfort at it all.

We understand that, and we keep blogging, because hopefully, the more you see these things, the more the discomfort will subside. Ideally, the discomfort will give way into outrage, into an attitude of "What can we do about this?" Before that though, we need to look at some of the assumptions the people who find their way here are making.

With that, I'm now going to respond to a comment made by someone who is still operating from a position within the kyriarchy.

The comment:

Xavier said...

Does Slutwalk plan to take a stand against false rape accusers?
Or are all rape accusations supposed to be viewed as completely true?

The short answer is no.

The long answer, is no, because we don't have to. Before I delve into why we don't have to secure that front, let me turn that question around a little. Do we regularly ask if a stand needs to be taken against people who report being burgled? Who report being robbed? Who report being assaulted? These are all crimes that involve one party aggressing another, yet we dont feel a pressing need to get up in arms about these charges.

Rape, on the other hand, seems to get everybody all fired up.

This persistent attitude that "the bitch is lying" means that the cost for a woman to allege rape is very high. This is particularly true if the case is taken to court, where the accuser's past sexual history is dredged out as a possible defense (to properly see how absurd this is, think of someone being mugged - the person whose wallet was stolen is never asked about the many times they've walked that route with a wallet on their person and then being treated as a liar for it). This is so traumatic that in the UK, 97% of accusers attrition out of their court hearings. Take that statistic, against the well-researched figure that only 5.9% of all rape allegations are false and you see why we don't have to take a stand against false rape accusations. I'll even spell it out for you in case you haven't quite been able to follow along: we currently live in a society where the default is to treat anyone alleging rape as a lying slut. The stand has already been taken. (See also: Rape Culture)

This default stand is harmful and disenfranchises victims of sexual assault. And there are many of them. And they deserve better.

International Burn A Koran Day

Oh chickadees. Haven't we been over this before with the whole "Draw Mohammed" fiasco? Haven't I already explained why "protests" like this are really just thinly veiled excercises in xenophobia and racism?

Obviously I need to go over this again.

By violating objects and ideas that are held sacred by marginalized populations with an eye to upholding your own privileged hegemony you are doing harm. You are doing harm by normalizing and celebrating violence (for the violation of the sacred is a form of violence) against an entire population of people. You are doing harm by courting a negative reaction from this population that will then add to the fire that caricatures Muslims as reactive and unreasonable. You are doing harm by using your position of privilege to publicly deride an already marginalized population.

Sure, I realise this time this display of ignorance and prejudice is being organized by a fundamentalist non-denominational church in Florida (that has previously joined with the Westboro Baptist church, a punchline in and of themselves, to protest homosexuality) so commenting on it is like shooting fish in a barrel, but the Poultrygeist over here just sent me a link to the goddamn Facebook page for the "event" and over 1200 people have liked it.

Thank you humanity for this current fail that I may use it as an education tool. Hopefully. And I pray to whoever the fuck cares to listen that this time MY LESSON WILL STICK. Yours in faith, Cat.

P.S. If you are tempted to leave a comment about how no one has the right not to be offended and this is all about free speech, please read the comments on the "Draw Mohammed" post first, as I've spelt out a reply to that quite clearly. If you want to continue the conversation, by all means, but just make sure you read that first. I really don't like repeating myself.

No You're Racist, and Sexist and I'm AWESOME

You may have noticed a cute new webpage floating around the internets called "I Write Like" (not linking). It's a page with a text box where you have to copy and paste (or compose on the spot) a few paragraphs, press a button and you'll get a something you can paste on your blog or Facebook to let everyone know which famous writer you write like. (In case anyone was wondering, I got Margaret Atwood - YAY! - and Dan Brown - kill me now.)

If you've heard of the website, you may also have caught wind of the kerfuffle around the fact that when it first launched, there weren't any female writers in the database of writers you could resemble. A week or so later, there are now 3 female writers (to 37 male writers) all of whom are lily-white. Now I understand that this is just a silly-for-fun website for people to feel briefly thrilled that their name can be used in the same sentence as a famous (or infamous) author (sorta Nicholas Sparks vis-a-vis Cormac McCarthy style), but representation matters, even in trivial things.

Representation matters because our actions are shaped by our environment. Our environment primes us on levels so far below our consciousness that even if we are asked about our motivations, we come up with narratives that, while consistent with how we view ourselves, have nothing to do with reality. A website that uses only white, initially all-male writers to represent how the internet writes, well, the implicit message isn't even all that subtle there.

So people start to comment. Some people cut and paste female writers' texts into the boxes and lol-sob at the male writers they are called instead. Eventually tea berry-blue wrote to the guy who runs "I Write Like". She describes the disheartening and miss-the-point exchange well, but what I want to talk about specifically is this:

Tea,

Thanks for your reply. I’ve added more writers into the database
recently. But I *absolutely* will not add people into the database due
to their race or gender. I will not search for lists of white, black,
Asian, Hispanic, or any other types of people that you _took care to
differentiate_. All people are equal to me, and equality means not
looking at skin color or different types of chromosomes.

I think the question is closed.

–
Dmitry Chestnykh
I Write Like

In other words, it's the I don't think people are different...and since you seem to, YOU'RE SEXIST and also racist.

Honestly, if everyone was so damn equal, why did you only have one kind of person represented? If everyone was all the same to you, then your sample should have approximated what the sampling of writers out there was really like. Include writers like Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison, Amy Tan, Candace Bushnell, George Eliot, A. S. Byatt, Zadie Smith, Helen Fielding, Monica Ali, Stephenie-frikking-Meyer, Jhumpa Lahiri, Miriam Toews, Tamora Pierce, Holly Black...I could go on. That's just off the top of my head and includes a nice sampling of award winning authors, classics, pop fiction, all women, some of colour. NOT THAT HARD. If gender and race were non-issues for this person, then why the glaring omissions?!

It's because it does matter. And I want to make it very clear that I'm not blaming Dmitry Chestnykh for it in the least. Like the rest of us, he grew up in the same damn world we all did. A world in which whiter is better and where men are main characters. I was talking about priming earlier yeah? Well, we've been primed our whole damn lives to not notice that despite the actual diversity of the world around us, the white male is always the assumed default (Tasha Fierce breaks down the assumed default even in activist circles here). A world in which the only people who don't notice race or gender are the only ones who are the default, and therefore are privileged enough not to. It is also, ironically, a world where we are taught that racism and sexism are bad and that you are a bad person if you're racist or sexist. So people are scared to talk about race or gender. First because any time a light is shone on privilege it does get pretty damn uncomfortable. Secondly because it's as though noticing that people are different qualifies you as some sort of reprobate.

But of course everyone notices race. It starts when we're children, mainly because our parents don't talk about it. It's the same for gender too. Noticing it and talking about it and discussing the deleterious effects of it is how we can fight this shit. It's the opposite of being racist or sexist.

Let's recap. We're not all bad people just because we've grown up drinking the Kool Aid. We're not bad people for noticing differences and diversity. It's not racist or sexist or any-other-ist to make an effort not to under-represent entire populations of people. People that exist in this amazingly diverse and challenging world of ours. The same people whose lives are made worse because we are assumed to be uninterested because we're not talking about it. And while it can be awful to get called out, particularly if you already make efforts to not be racist or sexist, listen because we all have something to learn. Don't just fling it back and start name-calling.

Update: Shakesville's SKM Biblio-vore whose blog can be found here did a quick experiment on "I Write Like", plugging authors' actual works into the engine and seeing what comes out. Interesting and insightful!

I'll Be There For You

While you're at school, life is delineated into neat chunks bookended by expectations that need to be met. Assignments and projects with set deadlines, exams to be completed on un-moving dates. Always something to shoot for, always something to move toward. This is piss-poor training for real life, but it's the only training we get.

So I'm not all that surprised that once we leave school and are technically free agents (although if you asked me, I'd assert that true freedom doesn't strictly exist and that our actions are bounded by our circumstances and environments, but that's for another day)we still continue the slow, slightly cyclical grind of trying to get to that next milestone and mark off the next thing on the big to-do list of life. As a result we get on this hamster wheel of mundane routine, an opiate of sorts, locking us into a pat, comfortable life getting us to accept the status quo. Combine this with the undue importance placed on the individual (Barbara Ehrenreich calls this "the cult of the individual" near the end of this illuminating and intoxicatingly animated speech) and what we have is an entire population of people trapped in their single-minded pursuit of the next hurdle. Individually ensconced in the same patterns of thought that got them there in the first place. Embedded deeply in the Matrix (or what we like to refer to around here as the kyriarchy).

Distracted by the small things in front of us, it's damn difficult to look up and see the institutional injustices and when we do see them when they're splashed all over the news in an effort to erase them from our public consciousness *cough* (not that it was really there in the first place - which of us learnt about Operation Coldstore in history class? It should be right there alongside the emergence of Singaporean government. Quite a glaring omission, amongst many others) it's so terrifying and ugly and disheartening that it's easy to bury your head right back down in the sand, re-mire yourself in the day-to-day reaching for the next-thing-in-life.

Many of my friends don't want to talk about the things we talk about on this blog. They don't want to hear that hospitals discriminate against fat people - staff in this example (in the interest of your own mental health you may want to avoid the comments on that) or that being oppressed can cause entire populations to birth pre-term and low birth weight babies. I can't really blame them. Outrage is upsetting and the realization that you as an individual is ineffective against these large institutional forces can really ruin your day, your month or even your year (sorry).

Yet I continue to start these conversations. I subscribe to many, high output blogs that chronicle the march of the kyriarchy on our personal rights and freedoms. I hang out with the rest of the animals on this blog and in between watering sessions, which I must note does include a substantial amount of mirth, and discuss these things at length. I do this because this is how us the individual will affect the changes we want to see. If we get enough people talking about it, enough people upset, enough people aware of the gross injustice perpetuated daily just because that's the way things are then things will change. It will be gradual, halting, frustrating and sometimes seemingly futile. But it's not. I'm a firm atheist, but I do have faith in this.

Don't keep your head down, eyes blinkered to the next expectation you feel you must meet. Look up, look around, get mad, join the movement. Reassess what's important to you. You may benefit from the status quo in some measure. We all do, everyone possesses some privilege in some form (admittedly some more than others) and that's the lure of it. That's the bait in the trap we keep falling for. Ignore it. Unplug from the Matrix. Let's get in some ambulatory robots and talk about the things that matter.

Drawing Mohammed

I hope it goes without saying that I think Draw Mohammed Day (scheduled initially for the 20th of May 2010 and then rescinded when the progenitor of the idea got freaked out by the responses to it) is an unmitigated bad idea.

"But Cat!" you say, "You blaspheme right along with the best of them! Isn't this just organized blasphemy?"

Christ on a cracker. Have we taught you nothing here at the Barn?

You do not piss on ideas that other people hold dear. Now, I will defend to the death your right to free speech and I do not think that the violence committed against cartoonists who have depicted Mohammed is justified in any way. But that being said, it wasn't a very nice thing to do now, was it?

To me, the situation at hand is not about blasphemy or free speech. It's about privilege, racism and xenophobia. This is the Western world uniting to do something deliberately incendiary towards a group of people often caricatured and marginalized within their societies.

Muslims are not an empowered group in the Western world. That should go without saying. The ghettos they are corralled in in Europe (a breeding ground for discontent, and a whole other post), the rhetoric flung at them in America post-9/11 (that has ended up affecting not just Muslims but any dark-skinned group that wears turbans), the carefully crafted news segments portraying violent and loudly unintelligible foreigners that splash across our consciousnesses - this is the position they occupy.

This is the position, underrepresented and over stereotyped, from which they are to respond to any actions taken to deliberately cause affront to symbols they hold dear.

OF COURSE SOME OF THEM WOULD FREAKING FLIP THE FUCK OUT. Not that I condone that response - but seriously, all sorts of populations lose their shit when confronted with things that contradict closely held values. We're just not constantly telling their stories as part of the "villan" bit in our societies' narrative.

This "Draw Mohammed Day"? The cartoonist, Molly Norris, has said that "this is not meant to disrespect any religion, but rather meant to protect people's right to express themselves." Fuck you Molly. Really.

Because this isn't about freedom of expression. Not by a long shot. This is about adding to the cultural drumbeat of "Muslims as bad, irrational and violent. Look! They're responding angrily to my wanting to draw something!" that's been building for a long time now. Shame on you. Shame.

Visiting the Doctor While Fat

It seems like everytime I have something to say, it's because I've read something excellent that Melissa McEwan of Shakesville has written (I do read other blogs, really). This time, it's her post on going to the doctor while fat.

It's very well documented that up to 50% of doctors harbour a widespread bias against fat people. And we also know that men have to be a whole lot fatter than women before they're classed as fat, so this is a problem that disproportionately affects the fairer sex (as if we didn't have enough to deal with). In fact, the folks at Shapely Prose have a whole blog dedicated to collating stories of doctors offering misdiagnoses and all around disastrous advice on account of fat: First, Do No Harm. The stories therein are all from women. Granted that could just be how the blog readers skew, but I find it rather telling nonetheless.

Not one to be left out, here's my story.

I have been on many diets. The first one I embarked on was shortly after I was tagged for the TAF club in primary school and my parents thought they should do something. The last one I was on is the one I want to talk about. Oh, there were many in between, like any good fatty I've gone through periods of "eating well", "lifestyle changes" and even the goddamn Atkins diet (I have never ever wanted a piece of toast quite as badly as I did back then, and I can't even tell about you the mental torture involved in avoiding a lovely hot bowl of chicken porridge when you're sick). But the last one, the last one was the one where I was going to do it right. I wasn't going to be part of the 95% that gain back all the weight and then more. I decided that I would pay for a program that was presided over by healthcare professionals. You may have heard of it - the Dr. Bernstein diet.

Sure, I did the research beforehand. I read the forums where people on "maintenance" talked about gaining back the weight (people I assumed were cheating and just wanted to maintain the veneer of doing well). I read about how some people experienced hair loss and how others stopped getting their period on the diet (but you are monitored throughout the diet by health professionals!). I read all about these things, but I wasn't going to be one of them, it was going to work well for me. Of course it was. I was going on a Diet. This was going to Change My Life.

The diet involved keeping your caloric intake between 400-900 calories a day. Only that's not how it was framed. Rather, there was a list of foods that you were allowed in the quantities they were allowed in. And there were foods on that list you were discouraged from eating too often (to give you some idea, you weren't allowed things like carrots and peas, and if you wanted an apple, it had to be a small one). I did really well on it, then I ran out of money and couldn't continue the program, and I wasn't comfortable restricting my food intake so drastically once I wasn't under the constant care of health professionals (you get to talk to a nurse for 10 minutes a time three times a week) so I went to the "maintenance" phase. I'd already lost 30kg, so I was feeling pretty good about myself. I still read as "fat" but was probably closer to "plump".

The maintenance phase is where you can start "eating sensibly". Which any good dieter knows involves small amounts of carbs and smaller amounts of fat and lean protein portions the size of your palm. Two months in, I started experiencing episodes of chest pain. Not scary heart attack chest pains, more like I was wearing a bra that had been crossed with a boa constrictor. So I went to my doctor about it and was diagnosed with boobs that were too big. *cough* So I was sent away with a prescription for some massage therapy and was told to work out to strengthen the muscles in my back and chest.

So I did. But the episodic pain kept coming and it was worse each time. Twice I went straight to the emergency room because all I wanted was morphine to stop the pain (and also my partner was pretty freaked out that I was having such severe chest pains). Each time a report was generated, sent to my doctor and each time I was told that they were muscle cramps (obviously the first thing the ED did was to rule out a heart attack). I kept working out (which really helped with carrying the groceries home, I can't recommend it enough if you are able to fit it into your life) and I kept going to those massage appointments that are far less pleasant than you imagine. In fact, they hurt like hell. But not as much as those waves of pain that kept hitting me at random moments.

Eventually I worked out that if I chewed over-the-counter painkillers that contained codeine it'd dull the pain enough that I could just sit around and ride it out without having to keep presenting to the harassed emergency department staff. All for having boobs that were too big. What a burden to bear.

Except it had absolutely nothing to do with my impressive knockers. And I assure you that they are quite impressive.

I'd gone to Canada over school break (God bless the universal health care availabe in Canada...) and I got the now familiar pain again. Only this time it didn't go away. I'd made it through an entire bottle of Mersyndol (not recommended) over three days and it was still there, and more insistent with time. I'd lost my appetite and I was impossibly itchy all over despite the absence of any dermal symptoms. Then one night, like a knife through the fogged pain-haze was a bright, white stabbing pain, unlike anything I'd ever experienced in my life. This time, I called an ambulance.

Some laughing gas and some more morphine later, I was discharged and told to visit the GP the next day. Knowing that this could not possibly be big-booby-itis, and knowing that my original doctor was unlikely to reverse a diagnosis she'd held onto for the past three years, I went to my partner's father's doctor (who came highly recommended). That doctor took one look at me and panicked. He quickly scribbled a report, told me that I was severely jaundiced and made me assure him that my next stop after leaving his office was a hospital emergency room. He told me to stay there till I was admitted.

For the past three years, I had been experiencing gall bladder attacks. This time, the gallstone had moved and by the looks of things (i.e. bright yellow) it had lodged itself in my common bile duct. I was in liver failure (also explains why I was so damn itchy, hyperbilirubinemia would do that to you).

I needed my gallbladder out, and to complicate things, the surgeon also had to look for the stone that was stopping up my pipes. I think I was given the choice between being sliced open end-to-end and a laproscopic procedure. I can't remember, at this point I was on a morphine and benedryl drip. There was something about having to wait longer for laproscopy, I think. So I chose to be gutted. A week later and there was still no improvement. That's how long it took the people at the hospital to realise that instead of being a lazy fatty who was not invested in getting better, there was a second stone that was missed.

I will have you know that once the second stone came out, I did all the rehabilitative things they had me do. Twice and with enthusiasm.

So there's my story. I'm fat, I have large boobs, clearly my body couldn't support it despite having supported it all this time. Obviously the diet I was on was an unmitigated good and couldn't have caused anything like episodic pain consistent with a gallbladder attack (P.S. this is actually the #1 reason for gall bladder issues in young women).

I'll leave you here for today, but do remind me to tell you guys about the time where I presented at a doctor's office because I had violent diarrhea for the past three-four days and was given the "you should lose weight" talk. Oh and that time I went to ask a "family health professional" about whether my birth control pill was adequate contraception for someone of my heft and got a long lecture about health and weight loss instead. And and and and and and and there is so much more where this came from. Buy me a drink and I'll tell you all about it.

A Rant, If I May

Doing my blog rounds this morning has been rather frustrating, to say the least. I mean I guess it's my fault that I subscribe to so many angry feminist type blogs, but today has been more demoralizing than most.

First, there's Amanda Palmer's Godwin-fail (NB: the link at the bottom of that post has very graphic images of KKK lynchings, do excercise care if you decide to click over) [Edit: I just realised that Godwin has to do with Nazis and not the Klan. Whatevs, it's Friday...], which breaks my heart not because I have been any fan of hers at all but because of the chorus of people in comment threads everywhere (pretty much since the Evelyn/Evelyn debacle) talking about how she was such a feminist role model for them. And feminist role models are far and few between. And when one of them fails this hard and this consistently it's heartbreaking.

Next, there's the studies done on campus rapists about how, contrary to the dominant narrative of the decent, upstanding boy that just made a mistake, a small percentage of repeat predators are responsible for a staggeringly large proportion of rape cases. The follow-on from that, of course, is how rape culture works to preserve this myth and allow these serial predators (who are well aware of the machinations of rape culture and how it will protect them, even if they don't explicitly know what it's called) to keep raping women. All the while college-aged women are constantly given daft "rape prevention tips" which completely obscures any and all perpetrator responsibility.

Finally, there's the post that hits close to home (and what I intended to spend the meat of this post discussing, apologies for the lengthy preamble) about the dismissal of needs.

I'll wait while you go read it. The comments on the post are worth your time as well.

The reason this issue bothers me so much is that I do hearing tests on children who are having academic issues at school, or behavioural issues at home, or both. The idea is that before any of the other developmental services can swoop in and do their thing, sensory deficits have to be ruled out in case the "fix" (which is a problem I'll leave for another post, another day) is as simple as hearing aids or properly fitted glasses (not that hearing aids are analogous to spectacles because in many cases they don't restore normal hearing, but again, another post, another day, probably another blog too).

But what many parents in my clinics fail to understand is the difference between hearing and listening. You can have perfect hearing but if your brain can't parse and process the sounds your ears are so perfectly delivering to it, then there's no way you can make sense of the soundscape.

The world is a noisy place. Where there are computers, there's the tapping of keyboards and the whirr of processor fans. Where there are people, there are the shuffling-fidgeting noises, multiple conversations, footsteps. Then you have the sounds people don't even notice: hums of fridge motors or air conditioners, the low babble of conversations in the next room, that ubiquitous piped music in retail stores that are supposed to sublimnally enjoinder us to slow down, look at the displays and buy buy buy. That's all sounds that a neurotypical brain can filter out. Those are the same sounds that mix and mumble and tumble through things these children with processing issues actually WANT to listen to, but cannot.

I have met so many parents that cannot wrap their heads around this. When I explain that while the hearing is fine, that the problem the child likely has is a listening one, they smirk and nod and say to the child, "See! I knew you were just not listening to me!". And the hurt I see on kids faces really breaks my heart. I want to be their ally. I want to explain to their carers, the people on which their world depends that they do WANT to listen, but they cannot. I want to explain that there are many things they can do to make it easier for their child to listen, to parse that confusing, jumbly, noise their brain is presenting to them - without making it sound like concessions you have to make for a willful and "broken" child. To let them know that needing captions on TV is a valid and sound strategy and that they should encourage their children to assert themselves and ask for what they need from this noisy world of ours in order to make sense of it. Like asking for repeats. Like asking for repeats even if they get teased about being deaf, or get chastised for not paying attention the first time, or any of the other terrible things that happen when you ask for something already once given.

I suppose it's a little like trying to explain to a fish what water is, exactly. Most people don't have to think about listening. It's easy. Their brains filter all "irrelevant" sounds out before they've even noticed them. They can tune into speech and know exactly what words that stream of uninterrupted phonemes translates into. Not everyone can do that. Don't dismiss the needs of others just because you don't have those same needs.

Blog For Choice: Trust Women

I remember being about seven and asking my mum if abortion counted as murder. I don't know where I had first heard the word abortion and was probably really fuzzy about the concept (as you would imagine a seven year old to be) but I know the question was sparked due to a Sunday School lesson on the Ten Commandments. The Sunday school teacher was trying to impress upon us that even if we didn't think we were sinning, we well could be. She used the typical examples of a white lie, she asked if we ever wanted a friend's stickers (OMG guys, do you remember sticker books in primary school? No? Just me?) really badly, she even asked what we did with the rest of our Sundays once we got home from church (although she never really explained what keeping the Sabbath holy entailed...just implied heavily that watching TV wasn't part of the deal).

So it got me thinking. Which other commandments could be violated by otherwise well-meaning people? What about the one about not killing - does it extend to animals? Does it extend to plants? I started thinking about whether it was ambiguous when it came to people, and that must be how I chanced upon abortion.

My mother lit up like a tree on Christmas and enthusiastically took the opportunity to explain that yes, abortion is murder. That god (it was capital-G God back then) was clear on not killing people, and babies even in the mother's womb were people. Not satisfied that her answer was comprehensive enough, she then started telling me about the IUD and how it prevents tiny babies from holding on to the mother's womb (no, seriously, she even mimed grippy motions with her hands at this point) and how that was abortion too. She told me that there was a couple at church (a well-respected couple that I admired quite a bit at the time) who used the device, and that's why their only son was in a wheelchair - as punishment for all the little babies they killed with the IUD.

I'm gonna pause here for a bit so you can appreciate just how fucked up that was.

As amazingly ableist and scientifically inaccurate that was, it was my first introduction to abortion (and contraception, really). I understood that it was wrong, and that there were no circumstances under which it was ok. My mom took the opportunity over the years to use abortion as a method of slut shaming. She told me about how my dad's colleague's wife procured an abortion because the due date conflicted with a planned trip to Japan (and why those godless people were cursed with only one child). She told me tales of classmates who had abortions every other month while bitterly discussing how they were popular anyway and were quite mean to her. She told me these stories with an aim to impress upon me how the world has a dirty, unseemly underbelly, how even people who appear good HAVE ABORTIONS and therefore ARE MURDERERS. Sort of like this:

Slowly, after each of these narratives, after each consequence and moral was revealed, I began to realize that underpinning all of these fables was the throbbing drumbeat that to be a good woman all the choices you make must be externally transparent - that onlookers will be judging you for what you do and blaming your misfortunes on your transgressions. And the worst, the absolute worst action you can do is to kill your "baby" because there is nothing in the world that can justify MURDER. Because there is no one in the world who would give you the benefit of the doubt, who trusts you to make the right decision for yourself and your family. Because if you have an abortion, you are automatically discredited as an active, responsible agent.

Because the world at large does not trust women.

I trust women. I trust that decisions are not made lightly. I trust that women are the only people who can know everything about their individual circumstance and with the information they have can be trusted to make the best call for their lives at the time they have to make it. I trust women and that's why despite my mother's best efforts, I am pro-choice.

Skin Lightening Creams Work - But They Also Cause Permanent Damage

Pam Spaulding from Pandagon has a piece up that delves deeply into the phenomenon of skin-lightening creams, the racial politics behind it and the quite terrible consequences for long-term users of such products. A quote:

This whole melanin thing is quite complicated, and cultures around the world are obsessed with it, as human beings follow natural inclinations to categorize and organize things, including people. The assignment of other humans into easy visual cubbyholes by those in dominant cultures makes it infinitely easier to give political and economic power to (or withhold from) whole classes of people. It all spirals down into a pitiful morass of bigotry and insane systems of repression that are also accepted and perpetuated within those populations deemed racially "inferior."

Her jumping off point is a New York Times article that is also well worth a read. We have discussed this here before in a piece by the Poultrygeist wherein a reader asks about the efficacy of such creams (qualifying zirself for my patented missing the point award, but that's a story for another day).

Public Consensus Does Not a Fact Make

In the new year (HAPPY 2010 EVERYONE!) let's try to remember that despite all the wishy-washyness of the past decade that there are things that are right and there are things that are wrong and that we have the tools to distinguish between them.

From the blog Bioephemera comes a lovely reminder that science is not a democracy and that the wisdom of uneducated hordes can and does wreak havoc on real people. A related point is that the status quo as determined by those who buy into oppressive stereotypes too leads to real world harm.

It's a brand spanking new year, and for those who are miscounting, a brand new decade. Take care out there and be nice to each other ok?

Short Answer: Yes, Long Answer: No.

A very wise man who I constantly regret having lost contact with once cautioned me that if I ever felt like I completely understood something, I assuredly did not. He said to visualize the knowledge you have as the area of a circle. Circumscribing that circle is everything you are aware of not knowing and beyond that are things you know so little about that they may as well be non-existent (to you, anyways). The larger your area of knowledge, then, the deeper your understanding of what is left to understand.

Adding to the idea that a narrow worldview gives one a sense of having all the answers is a recent study (aptly titled "Unskilled and Unaware of it" [link]) documents how those who are more unskilled, concurrently lack the skills to properly evaluate themselves. From the abstract:

People tend to hold overly favorable views of their abilities in many social and intellectual domains. The authors suggest that this overestimation occurs, in part, because people who are unskilled in these domains suffer a dual burden: Not only do these people reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the metacognitive ability to realize it[...]Paradoxically, improving the skills of participants, and thus increasing their metacognitive competence, helped them recognize the limitations of their abilities.

In other words, this problem is not insurmountable. The more you know, the more you know you don't and the less of an idiot you will appear in the process.

So the point I'm trying to make (and I will admit it has taken me some time to get here) is that if you feel like you have some prescriptive advice that will completely revolutionize a movement or if you think you have an overarching theory of something (see: xkcd:Revolutionary) you probably don't and it would be worth hanging around a little more to educate yourself by listening to the people who have been at it longer than you have. Yes, occassionally it's true that it takes a fresh perspective...but incredibly rarely and it's the height of hubris to just assume that you've struck upon it.

This is particularly important as it applies to being an activist and an ally. Having your consciousness raised is typically such a mind-blowing experience that it is tempting to think that you now understand all about oppression and how it works in the world, afterall if you understand systemic racism/sexism/ableism/enter-ism-here, then you understand systemic everything right? Now that you can spot misogynist tropes in adverstising you can also see how racial stereotypes are used as shorthand for all manner of unflattering things and how transphobia is used to police the gender binary and and and and and and...

...and how could you possibly if you've just heard about all these issues? Let's not forget that we were all raised in this world, this kyriarchy, that up until we were made aware of these issues in the first place we accepted the status quo as right and true. That undoing that will take much more than a single a-ha moment. Don't forget that we live in a world where this bullshit is largely accepted at face value despite the frankly towering absurdity of it being even remotely true.

I want to stop for a moment and explicitly state that I do not think I know everything or that I am in some hallowed position where I can see all that I do not know about and am therefore the perfect activist and ally. All I want, really is for all of us (often me included) to try and be better allies by listening and participating in the communities we are vested in supporting. To de-centre ourselves, to remove ourselves from the James Cameron's Avatar version of activism (where it is you, the privileged who should lead the poor oppressed people to victory). Tami (from What Tami Said) has an excellent post up about how to be a good ally which is very worth reading and essentially boils down to the point I'm trying to make - it's not all about you, listening and being still is vital, and if you think you have something just absolutely revolutionary to say, by all means share it (afterall, that's what participating in a community means) but have the wherewithal to be gracious when you aren't well received, with the attitude that you may not know best.

I think sometimes, even the best of us, with the most noble of intentions, needs reminding.

Should've Had One

I'm always pretty uncomfortable looking at displays of indigenous artefacts in museums. Unless the collection was curated by the people in question who also have full rights to all the items (which, I don't think I've ever encountered and I am a museum junkie), I just feel like I'm gawking at the end result of a dispossessed diaspora. Not cool.

The display I was at the other week was no exception. To add insult to injury, the places of origin on the labels accompanying each item had names like "New Ireland" and "New Britain" - clearly not what the people who actually lived there called the land.

I mention this to my partner (who very early on in our relationship proudly showed me a picture of his fairly recent forebearers as colonists in India) and he deadpans,

"Well, it's their fault - they didn't have a flag."

And sure enough, I look around and that is exactly what is missing from the display of frankly every other object that could conceivably be found within a community of people.

What it Says About You

Today I witnessed a discussion about whether differing viewpoints on LGBTQ rights should be a dealbreaker in a heterosexual relationship. Points such as "it only affects us by extrapolation/if our kids turn out to be gay" and "it's an intellectual disagreement" came up.

So, I write to offer my unsolicited advice.

If I have to explain to someone why people whose sexualities fall outside of the one man-one woman norm should also be granted the same legal rights to marriage and adoption, then that someone to me isn't someone worth spending time with. LGBTQ (and everything in between) rights is not a subject for intellectual discourse because anyone arguing against the provision of such rights are arguing against the humanity of the people involved. It is also a stunning display of privilege that is frankly acutely unattractive (since when were your rights brought up over drinks as a point of intellectual debate?).

Monogamous hetereosexual people may feel that they are not affected by whether those who fall into other categories are seen as full people under the law. But that's not true. Their humanity is affected by the opinion they hold on whether a person's humanity can be decided by referendum. I'll make it simple for you - it can't. My humanity is not up for discussion, neither is anyone else's and if you feel differently then I question how much you have considered the world around you and how much you have decided that you, by virtue of an accidental alliance, should be entitled to so much more than anyone else.

A few weeks ago Senator Diane Savino spoke eloquently of how us heterosexual folk have squandered our right to marry by constantly making a mockery of the institution of marriage itself. She followed it up with a breathtaking description of the very human people who are denied this by an arbitrary and cruel standard enforced by prejudice and by nothing else. If you can, please take the time to watch it now (full transcript here):

A quote from the video:

You know I’ve also been lobbied, quite interestingly, on this bill by people on both sides. I’ll tell you one funny story. I was on 6th avenue in Manhattan, I was in my car, I was driving, make a left turn onto 52nd street, I was stopped at a light, I had my window open. And a young man on a pedicab stopped and stuck his head in the window of my car, which I thought was kind of strange. But he recognized the senate license plate on my car and this was right during the week that the assembly was taking up the vote earlier this year.

And he said to me, "Excuse me, is there going to be a gay marriage vote in Albany this week?"

And I said, "Yes, the assembly’s going to take it up, but the senate probably won’t take it up any time soon, I’m not sure when."

And he said, "Are you going to vote for it?" and I said, "Yes I am", and he said, "Why?"

And I said, "Because I believe that people should be able to share their life with whomever they want and the role of government is to administer that contract that they agree to enter into."

And he stopped and said, "But they’re changing the definition of marriage."

And I said, "Don’t get so excited about this marriage stuff." I said, "Think about this, we just met, you and I right here at the stoplight. You stuck your head in the window of my car. Do you know tomorrow we could go to City Hall, we could apply for a marriage license, and we could get married, and nobody there will ask us about the quality of our relationship or whether we’ve been committed to each other or any of those things. They will issue that marriage license and we can get married."

And he said, "Yes, that’s true."

I said, "Do you think we’re ready for that kind of commitment?"

And he stopped and he said, "I see your point."

Human rights shouuld not be up to a vote, neither should they be subject to discussion. I would not piss to put out a fire on someone who disagrees - they have demonstrated to me how they feel about the humanity of others, leaving me free to disregard theirs.

If We are First Taught to Mistrust Ourselves...

Nearly a month ago there was an article in the Straits Times about a woman who was literally set on fire at a slimming centre as part of a procedure. As in she was told to lie on a table, a towel soaked in rubbing alcohol was draped over her stomach and the beautician whipped out a lighter and set fire to the towel.

From the article:

Once the towel was set ablaze, Madam Lee felt a sharp pain around her abdomen.

"I can't remember much of the incident. But I was in so much pain, I couldn't even talk," she said.

Staff at the centre managed to put out the fire, and she was sent to a nearby clinic where she was given medication.

"One employee even asked me, 'Really that pain?'" Madam Lee said.

Her medical bill of $40 was paid by Geneva. She was given another $150 for follow-up medical treatment. When contacted, the owner of Geneva said the centre no longer performed the treatment.

So they set someone on fire, express disbelief that it had been an "uncomfortable" experience and give her a little less than $200 for her trouble.

A proprietor of another slimming centre, when asked for comment had this to say:

Ms Catherine Koh, the owner of Beauty Forever Sal0on, said: "Now that the market is bad, the centres will try to think of all kinds of ways to get customers, so customers have to judge for themselves what is safe."

In other words, we will continue to expose you to hazardous situations because you are willing to pay for it. The harm that befalls you can only be the fault of your poor judgement.

How did an adult woman allow herself to be set on fire? In her own words:

'They didn't really explain the procedure in much detail,' Madam Lee said. She did not probe further.

It was only when the therapist whipped out a lighter that she felt slightly alarmed. 'But the employee kept telling me that she was here with me, so I shouldn't be scared,' she added.

Why didn't she ask for the procedure to be stopped? Why didn't a grown woman, "judge for [herself] what is safe"?

How could she?

How could she when as a fat person she is told that she is unhealthy and at risk for all kinds of debilitating and life-threatening diseases even though she is able to walk long distances carrying heavy groceries? How could she when as a fat person she is told that she is smelly and takes up too much room even though she practices excellent personal hygiene and smells better than the skinny bloke on the MRT who is, incidently, using two seats? How could she when as a fat person she is told she is unattractive and unlovable even though she has a (presumably) loving husband and family? (I must add that it was her children's cruel comments that pushed her to seek slimming treatments, so I do wonder about how loving the enviroment is - that being said, friends and family of the fat get messages daily about how loving a fat person means encouraging them to lose weight...just 5% makes a difference!)

As fat people we are taught to mistrust our own experiences and subsitute it for all the negative narratives we are fed daily in many small ways about our personalities, habits and loved ones. As fat people we are told that by virtue of what we look like we are all manner of disgusting and abhorrent and that to earn, to deserve the space we take up in this world we have to prove that we're trying to be good, that we recognize we are fat.

We are asked whether we're really hungry, to think about why we're eating, as though we cannot trust what our bodies have to tell us. We are told that all we need are 800-1200 calories a day to function even though when we adhere to these diets (it's a lifestyle change, y'know) all we can think about is food and all we do is feel guilty that we're still hungry and unable to gather enough energy to hit the gym (or walk home from the bus stop, for that matter). We never realise that the problem is with the diet and not with ourselves because we have been taught that as a fat person our lived experiences are a by-product of dysfunction and that we must be punished, punished, punished into submission, into that unsustainable smaller size and punished again when it all comes back.

We live in this miasma of fat shaming that discredits us and forces us to question our own judgements. How then are we supposed to "judge for themselves what is safe"? How then are we supposed to figure out that we don't all deserve to be set on fire afterall?

In Which the Cat Reads Internet Comments (Episode 1)

I was reading a link about feminist children's books that I stumbled on as part of a linkfest from one of the blogs I read. I like children's books and I don't think they get enough credit as good literature (and before you levy the curmudgeon charge, I will say that this is not entirely the fault of best-selling 'Young Adult' swill that floods the public consciousness - but I suppose it is, largely).

I digress. What I meant to be getting at is I expected an entirely uncontroversial article in which a few book recommendations are made and the commenters (who were invited to add to the list) would indeed make their own recommendations, hopefully with some anecdotes about whether it was well-received by the children in their life(ves). A little naive, perhaps.

I should have known that the word "feminist" would bring out the angry, dismissive, reductive hordes, even if all we were discussing were books that somehow subverted the prevalent, pervasive and ultimately restrictive and repressive gender stereotypes.

What a stupid idea. Let kids be kids, and let them find their own way without overly protective parents inflicting PC bollocks on them.

The phrase "PC bollocks" is all you need to know about this poster. The resentment of the fact that his/her privilege is occasionally brought out into the light of day is oozing out of my screen and threatening to void the warranty on my computer. Honestly, this is a plea for allowing the status quo to stand uncontested and I have no patience for that. Anyone who is arguing for a world riddled with intersecting oppressions does not deserve this world (or discourse, really). Also, you know what happens when people "Let kids be kids, and let them find their own way" in this fucked up society of ours? This fucked up shit.

All of these books work on the premise that feminine instincts are bad and that the best thing is if all girls behave like boys. What rubbish. What's so wrong with being feminine? Why would we want to be violent & aggressive? There's a lot of strength in being gentle and kind. It would be best if we had books that showed that you can be whatever type of person that you want to be and that being gentle & kind is a very good thing.

Short response: Graarrgghhh! Piss off you nonce!

Long response: Congratulations! You win the Cat in the Cream's daily missing the point award! Not to mention, the conflation of "feminine instincts" (which is a way of guilting women into mistrusting science and reason as well as blaming them for missteps if I ever saw one) with behaviour qualifies you for the the bonus "Consistency Fail" medal! Feminists do not believe that males are "violent & aggressive". That would be gender stereotyping. Feminists do not do that. Books that emphasize the "strength in being gentle and kind" (and heaven knows there sure are enough of them out there that you hardly have to look at a very short list of books in a newspaper article to find them) do not "[show] that you can be whatever type of person that you want to be" BECAUSE THEY SHOW THAT YOU HAVE TO BE GENTLE AND KIND WHICH IS REALLY JUST ANOTHER WAY OF SAYING THAT YOU HAVE TO BE PASSIVE AND SUBMISSIVE AND PUT OTHERS ABOVE YOURSELF.

I'm pretty sure that's the default message we're giving girls, so I have to wonder why this person had to drop in to defend it at all. Oh wait, I do know. Idiot.

Why do these stories have to be "feminist" and what the hell is "gender studies" for a three year old anyway. Some of these stories just talk about girls doing stuff which don't involve being passive and waiting to be swept away by Prince Charming. That's not feminist that's just neutral.

Wha (sic) teach your daughter that you're already under a patriarchical (sic) yoke from year dot? Good grief, why does anyone want to teach their daughters that men are oppresing (sic) them especially when so many modern laws are so feminist in nature? I'd rather just teach that girls are free to choose to be something other than a princess.

Anyway, good list apart from "Girls Will Be Boys Will Be Girls" which sounds downright confusing for children rather than merely subversive.

Let's being with "That's not feminist, that's just neutral". I bet this person also says things like "we live in a post-feminist world" at parties while card-carrying members of the patriarchichy (heh) nod sagely. It is feminist because the dominant paradigm says otherwise. I'd also like a list of the laws which "are so feminist in nature" - I have a feeling that they actually only meet this person's definition of "neutral".

Exposing children to subverted stereotypes is not "[teaching] your daughter that you're already under a patriarchical (sic) yoke from year dot". The hopeless desperation this describes is a little heart-breaking (it seems to imply, to me at least, that the writer feels defeated by the patriarchy and the patriarchichy). I understand the need to shelter children from the uglier bits of the world, but is trapping them in restrictive categories that brutally punishes transgressions really the way to go about that? The confused query of the following mother says the answer is "no":

What do I do about my son's addiction to pink, and high heels? He's two. I'm assuming he'll grow out of it, but against my better judgement find myself pushing 'boy's' toys on him. He has no interest though, he just wants to read about Princess Poppy (there's a rubbish series of books if there ever was one)

I know I'm preaching to the choir (well, I hope so, at least) when I say that exposing children to examples of all genders going about their lives, doing fantastical things, and in various roles is unequivocally a good thing. It may not strictly be the case in reality, but this is one damn good way to go about changing it.

Maybe one of these days I'll even write about books written for the children's market that have characters who do not fall into gender stereotypes. For now, I'll leave you with this (hardly exhaustive) rant.

“Everyone’s a little bit racist, right?”

Sure. But what are you actually trying to say?

Every so often I decide to court my family history of high blood pressure and heart disease by engaging in a conversation about race and racism with friends in a casual setting. (Once I tried to do it at work, but that just made everyone really uncomfortable and it was awkward for at least an hour after the conversation had evaporated into the ether so I’m probably not going to do it again.) First you get the “No one’s really racist anymore, I mean I have [insert minority] friends.” Then after you provide a rough overview of the effects of systemic racism you get the shrug and the, “Well, so everyone’s a little bit racist, really nothing you can do about it, I mean it’s how we were raised right?”

Ahhh. The Carrie Prejean excuse. The “I’m so intellectually cloistered and slothful that I haven’t looked past the preconceptions my parents held and have unquestioningly accepted them as my own” excuse. The “I’ve consistently shown that I’m smarter than this, but I still think it’s a valid excuse” excuse. The “You can’t rebut this so I’m going to use it” excuse.

Like hell I can’t rebut this.

Discussions of race understandably make people nervous and frankly I blame the “Racial Harmony Day” level of discourse that we’re presented in schools. It frames racism as an attitude held by an individual and posits that racism can be countered if you eat enough foods from other cultures. It doesn’t teach that the power of racism is in the fact that it’s institutionalized, ingrained and practically invisible. It’s this more sinister (but in turn more accurate) model of racism that gets to hide behind the henna doodles and misplaced bindis, the stiff Chinese collars and the just-for-a-day songkok. It’s because no one sees the man behind the curtain (again, apologies for anthropomorphising the kyriarchy) duping all of us into believing that as long as we have [insert minority] friends, we can address any and all “race-related issues”.

It’s because of this complacency that we allow ourselves to tell racist jokes, to share Russell Peters videos and to guffaw at Tokyo Breakfast (guilty as charged). Sure, some of us are laughing because we understand this to be a send-up of the respective stereotypes, but given the Archie Bunker effect (see Mary Beth Oliver’s lecture on race in the media where she points out that some people were laughing at his bigotry and other were laughing with) and the frankly piss-poor understanding of racism-proper it’s just irresponsible to tell and laugh along with these jokes unless you have explicit knowledge of your crowd’s level of awareness. But how to bring it up without actually ending up calling all your friends and co-workers racist (the one sure way to impugn their honour, y’know)? Jay Smooth breaks it down very well:

So yes. Everyone’s a little bit racist because we all participate in a racist society where we are subtly conditioned through regular rewards for upholding the order of things. But that’s not an excuse to stop talking about it. That’s not an excuse to not examine your own actions and eliminate those which may be contributing to the unhealthy race-smog we breathe in daily. That’s not an excuse to change the subject whenever someone tries to point out that you’ve done/said/laughed at/been complicit with something racist. In fact, that everyone’s a little bit racist is why we need to be pushing this conversation into every social circle we’ve got because this shit has got to change.

Get out there and consciousness-raise! Fly my pretties! Fly!

You're Not a Feminist, But... BUT WHAT?!

I love the bit of the day where the sun has a deep yellow tinge and the shadows gradually get longer, but only when you’re not looking. Just yesterday I was sharing a bottle of crisp white with some friends to celebrate the late afternoon (uninterrupted by mosquitoes, would you believe?) when the topic of this blog came up.

”Nah, I’m not a Feminist”

Immediately my eyebrows raised and drew together. What a rude way to crash into my sun-soaked wine-haze. What do you mean – not a feminist? You mean you don’t believe in gender equality? You think it’s ok that women are disproportionately affected by poverty, unemployment and poor access to medical services? Are you cool with the fact that violence against women is normalized in most media and that it’s consistently used as a weapon of war? No problems with the devaluation of work traditionally done by women? Utterly happy with the glass ceiling, the wage gap and the comparatively high cost (both monetary and physical) of looking “professional” in the workplace?

Uh huh.

I continued to look at her with what I hope was a skeptical expression (but may have had elements of contempt, I didn’t have a mirror handy) hoping to shame her into a qualification like “but it’s sure swell that I was allowed to have an education”. She got the hint and followed up with

”Well, maybe feminism is ok but I’m not a dyke. I ain’t shaving off all this hair. I just got it done.”

Wait, whut?

Pointedly running my hands through my hair (cut and styled less than a week ago, natch) I said, “I’m a feminist and I don’t quite understand why you would have a problem with dykes.” She shook her head, “Nah, I’m not a dyke,” and looked away. Just like that the conversation was over. I’m still not sure the exchange made any sense.

I understand that the term “Feminism” is loaded with many scary connotations thanks to the alarming amount of backlash the movement has endured since its infancy (which I suppose is a testament to just how threatening a paradigm shift would be to the patriarchal overlords). But to conflate it with lesbianism just so you can also take advantage of assumed homophobia is rather despicable, even for someone who isn’t comfortable marching lockstep with our combat boots and Birkenstocks. Here’s a few examples, couched in appropriately infantilizing language (so as to be non-threatening, y’know) of just what we can thank the feminist movement for.

Not a feminist? What an idiot.

Your Underlying Assumptions are Showing - I Don't Like Them

Via the No to Rape blog comes this frankly appalling article from The New Paper.
What the article is implying is that when it comes to the issue of marital rape, some consideration has to be given to those who are sex addicts and therefore are unable to restrain themselves. The article reports (if that is a word one can use in when referencing the particular brand of journalism The New Paper is known for) on Lili, a woman who was manipulated back into a marriage with a man she had fallen out of love with like this:

When she left the marital home, he called her repeatedly to cajole her to return home.
“He said he wanted me to come home to look after the children.
I told him that I would come home only if we had no more relations as husband and wife. He said okay,” she said.

Seriously. “Cajole”? How about emotional blackmail? How about using the children as ransom? How about not something any decent human being would do? Cajoling is something you do to get a cat you’ve never met before to come to you to receive some pets. Not something you do to another human being you’ve hurt enough that they’ve made the decision to leave their family. Have we got that right? Thanks. Just had to get that out of the way.

Of course once she returned, he raped her repeatedly. The rest of the article is a discussion of people who are sex addicts, treatments and diagnoses. My question is, if this article is intended to raise awareness of sex addiction, why set it against the backdrop of marital rape, why call the frigging article “Evil Hubby or Sex Addict”? First off, that’s just sloppy writing. Second, the dichotomy is irrelevant in the case of marital rape. Third, calling rapists (even marital rapists) evil doesn’t help the dialogue surrounding the perception of rape as it makes it something “decent” people don’t do. In this rape culture that we live in, rape is committed not by people who are “evil” implying obvious malicious intent, but rather by people who accept the idea that as men, they are entitled to sex from the women they are with – who by virtue of being women are now obliged to service them in exchange for the attention they receive. Until that idea is firmly centred in the public discourse, more substantial discussion cannot proceed (for more examples the fallout wrought by this kind of flawed thinking, see the Magical Chicken’s earlier headdesk).

The main issue I have with the spurious article is the question of the criminality of marital rape in instances where the perpetrator is a sex addict. Sure it was never mentioned outright in the article, but if you open an article describing sex addiction in a rather sympathetic light with a story of an abused wife (and then casting doubt on her judgement with a few rhetorical questions at the close of her story) then what you’re basically saying (given the backdrop of the rather public No To Rape campaign) is that you really shouldn’t criminalize marital rape because there may be sex addicts.

We live in a country where the death penalty is meted out for possessing a week’s supply of hard drugs. Maybe we shouldn’t, because of drug addiction. (As an aside: I do oppose the harsh penalties the Singapore courts deal out for drug offenses, and the death penalty in general, but that’s a whole other post.) You know what is illegal in most countries in the world? Theft. But there are kleptomaniacs out there! Maybe we should stop prosecuting thieves. I am not making these arguments to minimize drug addicts or kleptomaniacs or even sex addicts. These are populations with issues that require professional intervention and will have more difficulty operating in this world whose gatekeepers (although, anthropomorphising the kyriarchy does feed into some misconceptions that hamper the dialogue around oppression, for more see this post from the now dead ProcrastinatioNation) fiercely police the boundaries of what is acceptable and who wields power. That being said, the actions committed by any member of those populations as a result of their condition cause hurt and harm to real people, some more so than others. That cannot be waved away and it isn’t waved away for the arguably lesser crimes of drug abuse and petty theft.

The bottom line is: Marital rape is inexcusable. Regardless of your personal addictions or your sympathies toward addicts (who are not undeserving of those sympathies, mind), forcing another, autonomous human being to relinquish control and ownership of their own bodies is wrong. That’s all there is to it and it’s a simple concept. To oppose the No To Rape campaign is to deny that women are autonomous human beings with a right to the bodies they inhabit and that’s what we need to be focusing on. Too long has the discussion of rape given rapists the benefit of the doubt. Let’s start talking about getting rapists to understand that rape is never acceptable. To see what flipping the dialogue looks like, go here.

Fat Fashion is a Feminist Issue

Rendering populations invisible is a powerful silencing tool. It is a very handy way to make voices illegitimate, an easy way to discount the powerful truths being uttered by mouths you don’t even have to acknowledge are speaking.

The inestimable Melissa McEwan at Shakesville has written a post about shopping while fat and it resonated deeply with me. Not being able to find clothes that fit is a frustrating and energy consuming and demoralizing experience. Just recently I was trying to find a bridesmaids dress (the only criteria was that it had to be purple) in a shopping centre three-blocks-big that has been hailed since its grand opening as the fashion capital of Victoria. At 95kg and 167cm (I think that’s about right, I don’t make a habit of weighing myself) I can usually fit into the largest sizes stocked by straight-sized stores and the smallest sizes stocked by plus-sized stores. You know what though? Through the whole mall there was only one plus-sized store and it was stocked with only 2 items: strapless empire-waisted colour block dresses (to create an optical illusion, y’know) and shapeless over-large tunics (to hide your awful body, y’know). All the other stores from emergent designers to the names that draw celebrities to front-row seats at New York/Paris/Milan fashion week didn’t have clothes I could even try on. As in the garments were so small there was no chance of it making it past my substantial chest, or over my generous hips – even fully unzipped.

I’m not even that fat.

The bigger department stores embedded in the mall did carry formal wear in larger sizes (16-24) but you know what? They were so sombre and boring and tent-like that even my 72 year-old grandmother would eschew those styles for something that “wasn’t so old”. The message was clear – if you have to wear something you fatty-fat-fat-fat at least have the decency to wear something that hides your fat. It will make you look larger overall, but at least we won’t have to see any offensive jiggle-flesh or whatever it is you actually look like, because we designers actually don’t like to look all that closely. I’m not even inferring this from the styles available in the meagre selection us “bigger folk” get to paw through on our shopping trips. For reference, a quick Google of Karl Lagerfeld’s opinions of fat people (which I will neither quote nor link to, thank you very much) or Anna Wintour’s fabled disdain of fat (ditto).

Hiding us fat people away in sloppy garments is a way to make us invisible. Denying us vibrant colours (black is so slimming, y’know) is removing our visibility. Withholding from us the near-universal experience of a shopping day with friends by turning it into a day fraught with mental-health-minefields limits our social activities.

If you’ve ever sat next to a fat person on a plane or on public transport you would have seen them try desperately to make themselves narrower by folding their arms and pressing their legs together in an effort to not take up too much room – the psychological fallout from the constant messages that we need to hide, be hidden away, that we are taking up more space than we should really be allowed to. Maybe you haven’t noticed. Maybe you’re one of those people that look at the fat person on the chair and think “oh god ewww, I hope I won’t have to touch that if I sit down next to it” and not realise at all that we don’t much want to have our thighs touch yours either, thanks very much. (As an aside, I find the biggest offenders in the you-take-up-more-public-space-than-you-should are the men who sit with legs spread far apart. I’ve always wondered if it makes them feel like they have big penises. If any of you are reading this now, let me just say that it’s not fooling anyone.)

Sure the oppressions fat people face in their daily lives cannot solely be attributed to the dearth of flattering clothing in appropriate sizes. But it’s just one more thing we have to deal with and it’s one more way we’re made to feel invisible, less-than, not worthy of public space.

For more discussion of fat, fashion and being fat at the public, head on over and read the (highly recommended) folks at Fatshionista.

A Feminist Walks into a Pole...

...and says, "Ouch".

One of my best friends is getting married soon and as part of her Hen's celebrations a few of us trooped into an introductory pole dancing class.

Certainly this post could be a dissection of how our festivities involved honouring the male gaze and how the men's (so-much-more flatteringly named Stag's night) involved some rather misogynistic undertones (multiple strippers descending on the Buck with the aim of "humiliating" him) but I'd rather focus on what was done amazingly right.

I braced myself before entering the class. For one thing, I'm fat so I'm already being told in many small ways daily that there's no possible way anyone would want to see me in any context approximating sex. For another, I'm a feminist. I didn't know if I could safely withstand 90 minutes of flinging myself at a hard phallic object with the goal of titillating some generalized male stereotype.

Amazingly, it wasn't like that.

The first thing that blew me away was that the instructor unobtrusively left out the gender of the assumed audience. She always spoke of "the person you are dancing for". As in "make sure you stand right in front of the person you are dancing for so your bum is in their face when you bend over". No gendered pronouns, no awkward linguistic acrobatics to get around it. Also, the hypothetical audience was only referenced in the lap dancing portion of the class - i.e. where it was strictly relevant. Dropping the gaze (male or otherwise) from her patter took the element of sexual objectification out of the moves we were doing.

The other was that there was no body shaming at all. She never talked about toned bodies (even though there was a heavy focus on fitness, more on that later). She tried to stay with moves that most bodies that have a normal range of motion can do. When she ventured into harder territory (for example for moves that required far stronger core muscles than this fat cat possesses) she took pains to ensure that these were moves typically tackled in later weeks of classes and to not be bothered if we were unable to execute them perfectly. She even offered alternative moves to the ones she was demonstrating so we could all finish the routine she was teaching us when it came time. We all had fun and revelled in the movements our bodies could make, which is important (but sadly lacking) in any fitness class. Most of all, she was liberal with her compliments (never singling out any one person) and she sounded sincere the whole time.

Where she did foray into talking about "looking sexy", she made it all about the way you held your body. She demonstrated the quintessential look-at-me look (shoulders back, boobs out, knees cocked so that the bum is primed) and said, "standing this way radiates confidence, and that's hot". Sure it fell a little bit into 90's era GIRL POWER! but since there was no mention of how the actual body in question needed to look the idea was anyone could be that hot. It was inclusive. Something I certainly did not expect it to be.

The pole-dancing-as-a-workout fad has been around for several years and since this class was designed to be a sampler for all the classes offered at the centre, there was some talk of fitness. The instructor never once ventured into "reduce and tone" territory, however and spoke mainly the muscle groups that are key to pole dancing. Again, greatly body positive.

I do have some problems with the pole-dancing-as-a-workout, mainly that it feeds into the larger porn culture that is ultimately hurtful (bikini waxes, sapphic tendencies [Ed: what I meant was girl-on-girl action with the focus on a male audience and not that lesbians/bisexuals enjoying their sexuality are automatically part of porn culture. Phrase redacted due to ambiguity.], etc.). The idea that keeping "healthy" is a moral obligation in tandem with the increased pressure on women of all ages to be sexaaay has given women an excuse to be "hot and slutty" via pole dancing without having to worry about actually being slut-shamed. Framing pole dancing as something even YOU can do is tangled in all kinds of gendered messes including the issues surrounding professional pole dancers, the restrictions of performative gender/sexuality and the norming of sexual objectification (see here for more). Oh and of course there's the kiddie stripper poles. Acknowledging these issues does not a discussion make, but these issues have been hashed over by people more eloquent than I and I intended this piece to be a way to demonstrate how even mired in of all these issues - Pole Dancing Class, UR DOIN IT RITE. So I'll leave it at that.