Feminist unicornspotting

[Disclaimer: you could easily replace the word "male" with "some women", or strike it out altogether, in most of the MFU comments posted below, and many of their points would stand. This I fully concede.]

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Today I happened upon an ancient livejournal thread (at Male Feminist Unicorns - not endorsing all sentiments expressed there, by the way) that touched on some interesting feminist themes. Here are some excerpts and highlights:

"I have to admit, I love the idea of gleeful little girls microwaving Barbies to death."

-A Prominent Male Feminist

This article is getting a lot of discussion on blogs at the moment. I have to say that while the sentiments of women about Barbie, however I may disagree with them, are pretty much understandable, I am disturbed by the glee some males are taking at the idea of "Barbie mutilations."

What I find many are reluctant to examine (especially having come forth with their own reaction that torturing Barbie is just da bomb) is the idea that maybe what girls are doing, here, is not so much acting with aggression towards the expectation that they should be feminine, but perhaps they are re-enacting violence towards women they have seen in the media or played out in real life. I've found that women have been far more likely to think of this as a possibility than have men, even most men calling themselves feminist.

Why the jump to the conclusion that "torturing" Barbie is a positive sign? I can only read this as "girls today hate and torture in effigy a certain type of women. This means they are learning to properly despise this sort of woman just as we, liberal men, despise such women [bimbos, bitches, put your offensive word of choice in the box]. This is a positive sign because it means that girls today, unlike previous generations, are learning to Think Like Men which means equality is nigh!"

Bingo.

Male feminists have taken good, strong feminist criticisms of Mattel (or whatever the company is), the male-run business that *created* and *markets* Barbie, and turned them into criticisms of *Barbie*.

I mean, actual *feminist* criticism was always about "hey, Mattel, you're creating a completely unrealistic view of women through this toy. Cut it out."

Male feminists have turned it into "Barbie is a bimbo bitch." So, of course the women who don't want to be treated like Barbie the bimbo bitch distance themselves from her.

Once again, feminist criticism of men are turned into hatred of women. Dude, Barbie is a *victim* of sexism, not a *purveyor* of sexism. She, more than any other woman has *NO* control over how she's made. Her looks, more than any other woman, are controlled by the *men* who make her. Why is she the celebrated object of derision? Oh, that's right. Any excuse for woman hating.

Bingo again.

I can only read this as "girls today hate and torture in effigy a certain type of women. This means they are learning to properly despise this sort of woman just as we, liberal men, despise such women [bimbos, bitches, put your offensive word of choice in the box]. This is a positive sign because it means that girls today, unlike previous generations, are learning to Think Like Men which means equality is nigh!"

Yes - you know, while thinking about this and wondering why male feminists like that image of the gleeful girl so much, I think it's just another facet of objectification - glorifying the strong/punk woman. Suicide Girls mixed with Lara Croft with a little dominatrix thrown in. The creation of cute-but-tough little fuckable minions in the war against women (but you know, just the gross kind! so it's not misogyny).

Bingo yet again.

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The second half of this comment gave me some pause, initially, but it's a very pointed criticism. In the end, I agree: this ability to shunt "strong women" into the "fuckable" pool seems to be a function of the (general- yes, I'm generalizing) male ability to fetishize just about anything, so long as someone they find suitably attractive is doing it, wearing it, or saying it. It's widely acknowledged that women who trangress normative femininity are punished, and that this most often takes the form of being socially shunned, slandered, abused. But punishment can also take the form of a looping back, so that the traits in women who are deemed transgressive, the "masculine" or "unfeminine" ones, are transformed once again into just another sexy feature of the womens' girliness and desirability. (The thinking might go something like this: "Oh, isn't it cute when girls try to act strong and tough? It just makes them seem even more girly and little and weak and feminine...")

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This operation is, of course, a way of ensuring that women cannot be considered strong in their own right, cannot enchroach on male status, and, most importantly, cannot challenge their own subaltern status in any meaningful way. In Lacanian terms, I imagine the looping back operation I've described is expected to naturally follow when women "bear" the phallus, which is supposed to be a disjunctive and jarring image... The woman wearing a strap-on only draws attention to what she naturally has down there, or more properly, what she does not have— that is, her lack of phallus.

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Conceiving of women and their relationships to power using the Lacanian loopback operation is an effective means of adding feminists to the collective spankbank, in much the same way mothers have finally been portrayed as sexy, sensual creatures in popular culture, but mainly in the role of MILFs in hardcore porn— or perhaps (if the botox is invisible enough) as predatory cougars. It's also a handy method of silencing uppity women who take an "aggressive" or active role in expressing their opinions, needs, or desires. What better way to make a woman who wants to be taken seriously shut down and drop out than to reduce everything she says to her girlish figure and/or hormones and/or utility to the rapacious male sex drive?

This is terrain that the radfems mapped out for us long ago- a feminist message that should be loud and clear, I'd think. But it seems to be getting drowned out as more spectacular messages and images flood the new mediascape.

Wtf

Anyone else noticed this trend in advertising where suddenly, it's considered witty to reproduce racist tropes and uncomfortable, racially coded social situations by putting the white person in the position of the "disadvantaged" and some brown people in the dominant one?

Or, as in the case of the cavemen of the epic Geico ad campaign, using an overtly ridiculous non-existent "savage" in the form of contemporary cavemen in order to make fun of the "politically correct" demands of social justice movements- a sort of pre-emptive strike against anyone who might object to the ways in which minorities are still portrayed as 'naturally' inferior to whites. I go back and forth between thinking of the Geico ads racially, and thinking of them as a sort of petulant reaction against feminism- men are so confused now, they don't know their role anymore, now that women (and other former slaves) are making demands.

A sort of surreal, evo-psych reading of the ambivalence/angst of modern men. What a predicatment! Men, still essentially cavemen underneath the hip outfits and psychobabble, have been pussy-whipped into social insignificance as their privilege slowly slips away.

Ethicist heal thyself

I can't resist linking to this; a former grad student recounts being cyber-harassed by the same Slovenian Lacanian/Marxist who thinks it's hilarious to make fun of black people and women academics when they seek inclusion in such heroic events as conferences on Marxism. From a comments section at Bitch, PhD:

Umm...I've got a few. In grad school at UCLA, I received an unsolicited email from a famous visiting scholar (Slavoj Zizek if you care) detailing all the filthy sexual acts he wanted to perform on me. The professor (Kenneth Reinhard) in whose seminar he was lecturing admitted he had given him my email address, and immediately asked me how this was going to affect him personally. My supervisor, a famous feminist artist (Mary Kelly), pretended to be shocked but also told me I would miss this kind of male attention when it was gone. The following year she invited Zizek back as a keynote speaker for a conference on ethics.

Why am I not surprised?

Infinite limits

The dérive (with its flow of acts, its gestures, its strolls, its encounters) was to the totality exactly what psychoanalysis (in the best sense) is to language. Let yourself go with the flow of words, says the psychoanalyst. He listens, until the moment when he rejects or modifies (one could say detourns) a word, an expression or a definition. The dérive is certainly a technique, almost a therapeutic one. But just as analysis unaccompanied with anything else is almost always contraindicated, so continual dériving is dangerous to the extent that the individual, having gone too far (not without bases, but...) without defenses, is threatened with explosion, dissolution, dissociation, disintegration. And thence the relapse into what is termed ‘ordinary life,’ that is to say, in reality, into ‘petrified life.’ In this regard I now repudiate my Formulary’s propaganda for a continuous dérive. It could be continuous like the poker game in Las Vegas, but only for a certain period, limited to a weekend for some people, to a week as a good average; a month is really pushing it. In 1953-1954 we dérived for three or four months straight. That’s the extreme limit. It’s a miracle it didn’t kill us.

—Ivan Chtcheglov, from a letter to Guy Debord

NFW

It's a little bit sad how excited I was by some of the information contained in this video. The real fun starts at 3:50.

A little help from...

As one of the ladies in question, as described in this article about the science of haggery, I've never really thought twice about why I prefer the company of gay men. It just seems so obvious why, really.

SWPL: Mad Men

Haha. I can't stand that show.