Friday, September 30, 2005
Slut. Whore. Pussy. Bitch.
American society hates women without end. Our very language reverberates with misogynist nomenclature. We manufacture mascara, inject collagen, implant silicone. Even our celebrities reflect our anti-woman wrath; pop culture jargon codes feminine skepticism and masculine enmity in celebrity proper nouns. Just hearing the name Lil' Kim conjures a gaudy Black Barbie, posable and disposable, discarded behind prison walls like a chocolate covered mini Mattel mannequin outgrown by today's youth. Martha Stewart manifests for your mind's eye a tyrannical iron maiden, her pale, wrinkled face a bizarre tragicomedy mask, porcelain, frozen, inscrutable, a psychotic symphony of corporate marketing genius and matronly domestic virtue. The dainty socialite Paris Hilton presents idle privilege's poster child, America's number one party chick, a boisterous bukkake bulimic with more money than God and about as many scandals worldwide.
Cindy Sheehan symbolizes both modern woman's maternal rage and Victorian woman's eternal frailty. With every protest, every speech, every televised tear shed and every sound-bitten question asked, Mrs. Sheehan discards independence for visibility, sheds autonomy for popularity - according to the fair and balanced conservative character assassination machine that discredits her daily. Many liberals who share her aims and decry her tactics share in the "Sheehan as anti-war movement pawn" dogma; they envision the middle-aged grieving mother as too emotional, too biased, and too meaningless to offer useful perspectives on American foreign policy. To protest is to hate American fighting men, so these detractors believe, and of course, men matter more in modern America. Incidentally, this is the reason the very concept of sexually integrated military forces jar the national psyche; so accustomed are we with the mental picture of the synchronized, efficient, unstoppable United States Armed Forces - replete with good-natured twenty-something Teutonic Easy Company squarejaws, awash with towheaded, azure-eyed Steve Rogers superpatriots from the last simple, good v. evil American military conflict, World War Two - that G.I. Jane fries our fragile synapses. Ben Affleck channels the Greatest Generation's triumph; Kate Beckinsale's only there to give Benji someone to do. Women in combat confuse and scare our basic sexual precepts past usefulness. Hard, simple, exact, distinct sexual roles for men and women calm the American public, because then we don't have to think. We just react, strut, act, creep in this petty pace from day to day. But in the last syllable of recorded time our outdated misogyny may deconstruct, and these traditional ideologies and longstanding beliefs will klaxon gender heresy; the current national schism over the eternal role of women in American society might soon cease with a coronation, not a cataclysm, an inauguration, not a revolution. She's the woman you love to hate, so say it once, with feeling: "Mr. Speaker, The President of the United States, Hillary Rodham Clinton!"
To love themselves, women the world over developed feminism, "a diverse collection of social theories, political movements, and moral philosophies, largely motivated by or concerning the experiences of women, especially in terms of their social, political, and economic situation", according to trusty Wikipedia. Feminism challenges our old-school sex prejudice, secures gender equality while promoting women's rights. Diversity, equality, democracy - our global capitalist revolution requires cold, corporate calculation, unencumbered by the irrational prejudices that undervalue the labor and ignore the inventiveness of half the human population. Feminism is necessary. And with every online discussion and blog comment I make, I declare myself feminism's enemy. I am the villain of the piece.
Enter Iago. Recently, I've noticed a trend in my online blog comments - I'm never feminist enough. More than the lack of a uterus or mammary glands or long hair, I appear antagonistic to the concerns and perspectives of feminist writers I converse with, like an internet Ishmael Reed without the book deal or the academic infamy. Case in point: the minor brouhaha over Angel's recent masterpiece, Baby Wars. Read the concise, effective prose and the comments, and you notice one repeated and disheartening feminist flaw - how easy it is to attack and discredit other feminists. As soon as Mother Superior DruBlood invaded with her matronly black robes and her unbreakable yardstick of procreative feminist discipline, it was Shirley Chisholm v. N.O.W. all over again. Drublood's anger, palpable and sarcastic and mean, hemorrhaged through the computer screen like a saturated Tampax, and nearly poisoned an incredible discussion on parental rights v. public decorum with irrational mommy toxic shock syndrome. Cheap shot? Yea, probably, but I was far from the only person who disagreed with DruBlood's stereotypically premenstrual sarcasm and vitriol during the exchange. Other bloggers spoke on the parents v. non-parents clash sparked by Reappropriate.com; Tekanji, longtime blogger at Shrub.com, gave her twenty cents in a powerful common ground defense of personal choice feminism, while Cheshire (Nykol) over at Marginal Notations waxed philosophical about Marxist theory's defense of public motherhood. Still, Drublood, La Femme Nikita of the La Leche League, penned the harshest criticism of Baby Wars. There's more Amazon animosity here, here, here, and here. Like Paul Wall, Angel's got the internet going nuts.
I drove slow, homey. My best netiquette, my most easygoing prose, and I'm still the sexist pig, the misogynistic bastard, the patriarchy's Colin Powell, made for television Technicolor wearing my richest sienna Stepin Fetchit Max Factor, preaching false truths on military intelligence for patriotism, posterity, and Halliburton profit. Even in drag, we coon so crackers don't have to. Throughout this weekend's debates - parental control of unruly children in public settings v. non-parent arrogance and intolerance towards families, pro/con public breastfeeding, possible sexist and classist oppression of mothers and children by the patriarchy, cultural preferences toward childbirth as sole path to life-fulfillment, etc. - no matter my personal support of and belief in gender equality and sexual social justice, I was always the oppressor, the woman-hater, Mister Charlie. Why? I'm the anti-O.J., the bizarro Kobe. I don't respect White women.
Today, I live and breathe amongst White women I despise; every passing day another lesson in impossible tolerance for those who benefit as they complain, who win as I lose. It's my most irrepressible racial prejudice - I can't stand White women. My job interviews would often fail when my Meryl Streep interlocutor instigates interrogation; and any overview of my online feminism struggles must grapple with this lifelong impropriety. I know where it starts - respect. Sexual politics belie racial conflicts, and I have the hardest time shaking the idea that your average college-educated, professional White woman respects Black men. Why would they? - we beat out wives, infect our girlfriends, rape our daughters, and call all bitches and 'ho's. Black men aren't just sexist - we're the sexists all men wish they were. Our audiovisual phantasmagorias, broadcast on cable staples MusicTelevision and Black Entertainment Television, offer the entire globe the syncopated blueprint on big pimping girls, girls, girls, half-naked, oiled, easy, with eyes big as saucers and the best breasts money can buy. At any hour of the day in mainstream America, you can turn on a television and immerse yourself in African American sexual terrorism, prepackaged and commodified, Videos Ready to Arouse (VRA's) from perverse private sector emergency marketing companies like Interscope and Island Def Jam. Consider the testosterone fervor of Curtis Jackson, a.k.a 50 Cent. If one believes the incessantly repeated video imagery of rap music's number one corporate superstar, Jackson wakes up every day surrounded by alluring video hoe hedonism. Women of all backgrounds, all races, all classes, envision him as the hardest, Blackest sexual dynamo rap's offered since LL Cool J, and if you listen to his lyrics, women believe the truth. The downside? No matter how socially conscious, White women see a little 50 Cent in all brothers, sometimes a nickel, sometimes a quarter, sometimes the full Kennedy. And every dimepiece around wants to make change.
Black men never leave the auction block. If you believe the published laments and spoken fears of professional, college-educated African American women and their White male counterparts, Black men, following either centuries of race-sex-class oppression in the White supremacist, patriarchal Victorian West or their innate animal lusts, desire White women above all other sexual concerns. The highest example of female beauty for a Black man in this stereotype is a White woman, and all Black men who can afford Missy Anne's cream cheese daughters in our liberal-capitalist present-day endure strong sociocultural urges to taste the other White meat. This racist Negro caricature enjoys such widespread refrain that women of color often adopt elements of Nicole Kidman Whiteness - processed long straight hair (sometimes blond), lighter skin, blue, green, or hazel contacts, eating disorders, weight loss, political apathy, etc. - to Stepford themselves into corporate mainstream perversions of their natural ethnic womanhood to attract the opposite sex within their own races. The oddly standardized Bratz offer comedic animation of this 'neo-whiteface for sexual competition' phenomenon; every low-budget, trailer-trash Million Dollar Baby in the country offers sexual attraction to a higher degree than a woman of color, especially a Black woman, to hear some sistas tell the tale. Whether or not you buy this Terry McMillan argument, realize the dilemma: Black women brighten and lighten and Whiten to attract Black men. Affluent, wealthy, professional Black men, who benefit and suffer from centuries of racist White fears of sexual potency and orgasmic promise, may choose with crass impunity what degree of White femininity and Black social ostracism they are willing to accept; in college, the most depressing example of cynical Black male interracial dating was the brother who spoke of dating Latina women to secure "all the sista's booty, none of her looks". No matter how disgusting his perspective, the sexual economics of Cornell's social scene supported his misogyny. Non-Black women, searching for cheap thrills and cheaper dick, screwed brothers without dating them, fucked brothers without knowing them. It was all about Benjamin, baby, and no matter what trust-fund, private school, Jack & Jill Black aristocracy spawned him, the cornrowed, Ivy League campus gangstas I knew ignored racist denigration for sexual gratification, and loved every hot, slimy, sweaty second.
The sad thing was that we all looked alike. Black Cornell, obsidian mirror of every recent survey of higher education's racial politics, offered a drastically woman-heavy environment; I heard once that Black women outnumbered Black men there at a ratio of six to one. Couple this with the aforementioned fanatic demand for African American Express throughout the female population at the nation's largest Ivy League University, and even the most socially inept, flustered, unattractive Black man becomes Usher Raymond, and suddenly has a confession to make. Except me. I met Angel my second day on campus, never looked back; we were together, inseparable, close, faithful - and it never mattered. For many sisters on the Hill, I was that nigga, the sellout who hated Africana in word and deed and mind, no better than any low-budget MTV rap hoodlum in a annoying club video with Patsy Paleface shaking her bony absentee ass on Total Request Live. Every brother that treated those women wrong, that climbed into young Kimberly Elise's bed smelling of her sorority sister, that abandoned his alluring caramel-mocha girlfriend for some Jessica Alba rip-off, was more desirable than I, who did not agree with, date, or even know my fellow Negroes. It pissed me off. Mike Lowry and Angel watched me on more than one occasion curse out some overweight Angie Stone impression for daring to impose suspect Blackness upon me if I didn't define my race through my penis. It didn't matter: Uncle Tom Negroes do exist, even at age 21, and I was lumped in with all the rest, those Bryants with clipped vocal tones and muted Polo sweaters, those Kwames who discuss patent law on the impeccably manicured sixteenth green of the Robert Trent Jones Golf Course at Cornell University in Ralph Lauren khakis and Titleist caps, those varied Apprentices, overeducated, articulate, whitewashed, ambitious, who bed Sun Li to lust Elizabeth, who desire money, power, and respect yet sacrifice life, liberty, and happiness, who advertise a Tenth talented and anonymous and foreign to their own communities, who disarm racist fear with mild-mannered sycophancy, who cede humanity to increase productivity - these corporate globalists, these chromium constructs, these plastic people - they are my perversion. They offer home.
Home is where the hatred is, moans modern griot Gil Scott-Heron, as he instructs a faintly snoring Kanye West, magical child prodigy, in Defense Against the White Arts at Hogwarts University. White feminists have to hate Black men in our shared United States of America. More than the hypersexual Mandingo stereotype they both despise and desire, more than the Supermasculine Menial aggression that both arouses and alarms, White feminists hate the attentiveness other men, especially White men, pay the Black Man That You Fear. Remember the alpha plantation philosophy, the original Black Code: the White woman must always remain the center of attention. In 1869 debates within the American Equal Rights Association over possible feminist support of the Fifteenth Amendment, that grants suffrage to all Black men but refuses women the vote, raged acrimoniously between two of the organization's founders, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Frederick Douglass. Stanton shared acidic, divisive, and inflammatory elitist hatespeech to oppose both second-wave European immigration and freedman's suffrage, often in the most unapologetically racist dogma possible. A Stanton quote from the period: "We prefer Bridget and Dinah at the ballot box to Patrick and Sambo." In January 2004, during filming of the Real World: San Diego, Jacquese, personally offended by an inebriated Robin's public altercation where she shouts racial epithets at random passersby, calls his roommates together for a frank discussion on racial interaction, when Robin, her diva radar blinking, explodes into a tearful tirade on a past rape incident involving Black men. Blame skillful editing or cynical camera-grabbing, but Jacquese's hopes for respectful race conversation shatter when the hefty, busty Robin implodes in an oddly defensive "I'm not a racist for calling them niggers, really! I can say that 'cause niggers raped me!" emotional meltdown of loud, hacking sobs and shrill, banshee screams. Her crocodile tears flowed over her damaging rape memories, yet staunched the attention deficit threatened by rational thought.
In George W. Bush's America, rational thought declares jihad upon false oppression and compassionate conservativism, decrees fatwas against both enemies of the state, and awakens in a cold, gray, unyielding eight by eleven foot concrete cell, extraordinarily rendered somewhere within the coalition of the willing yet without due process of law or the Geneva Convention or simple human decency, for brutal, gut-wrenching, inhuman torture that casts Abu Ghraib as Club Med, a lonely enemy combatant characterized as criminal by his own government, forgotten by his family and friends, and lost to even the most inquisitive and determined Starbucks-caffeinated Woodward and Bernsteins amidst a black and white carbon-copied Freedom of Information Act tempest of self-conscious bureaucratic negligence, your tax dollars at work. Paleoconservative culture war attacks on civil rights and feminist legislation and legal precedents abound without comment, if the overwhelming support for the nomination of relative unknown Judge John Roberts for Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States of America delivers meaningful indication. In our era of base anti-intellectualism, we have not the luxury of emotion-as-oppression; today's stalwart identity politicians and boisterous feminist thinkers can ill afford to promote selfish special treatment as necessary anti-oppression public policy. We must be citizens, not partisans, democrats, not anarchists. I call it the Rev. Al Sharpton Rule: as moral indignation increases, available audience decreases. This is why Rev. Al's rhetorical skill and color certitude know not parallel in our public discourse, even though he never speaks directly on any policy proposal or specific fact. In glowing, flowery, collegiate language historical debate masters Cicero and Henry Clay would've murdered babies to possess, Rev. Al devolves into a mewling Neanderthal any public speaker willing to share a podium with him, ally, enemy, or innocent bystander - yet Black America's latest race leader can not articulate a specific political proposal to achieve any of his pro-Black platform. Rev. Al can't talk rising interest rates, but he knows poor people. Rev. Al can't discuss racist immigration policies, but he knows Haitians. Rev. Al can't convince Democrats of affirmative action's benefits, but he knows Black people. Rev. Al Sharpton - living proof that personal experience does not constitute oppression.
American language fails our populace with similar bombast. In this discourse, I've exposed my personal bias against White women, but even I realize that the term "White women" is too broad, too expansive, too diverse to accurately reflect my longstanding prejudices. Our race speech drowns in the ancient words and antiquated thoughts of past eras and prologue politics; today's diasporic, globalized, commercial racism cannot be confined to national boundaries or unspecific rhetoric. Take for example, the aforementioned Baby Wars. Angel talks about rich parents who drive seven hundred dollar asshole-mobile strollers to run rampant over everyone else's personal space in rude and condescending fashion to rub their radiant social procreation fulfillment complexes in everyone's faces; these parents allow their loud, unruly children to squeal and moan and cry in public spaces ruled by special decorum - movie theaters, airplane cabins, special events - where their progeny's wails just piss everyone else off. Sometimes, these parents publicly revel in the perfect human beauty of their chosen creations by breastfeeding; this raises some concern for general public conditions of non-nude propriety, because in the United States, rightly or wrongly, it is considered socially unacceptable for women to appear topless in public, not to mention illegal. But in all the comments on small child public behavior and public breastfeeding on all the blogs that have talked on these issues this past week, one incredibly important observation continually escapes notice, a fleet-footed Gingerbread Man who avoids the holy hotplates of a convent kitchen.
I speak heresy: all the mothers who breastfeed in public are White! Caucasian, Euro-American, either buzzing White Anglo-Saxon Protestant royalty or assimilated immigrant stock, but in street-level terms, White. Never in my life have I stumbled onto a young mother of color on a park bench or in a franchise restaurant or at a shopping mall with one nipple naked, one breast bared, to feed the angelic ambrosia of mother's milk to a hungry babe. Never. No poor Vietnamese immigrants outside of family bodegas in Chinatown, no middle class Filipinas on the white summer sands of Virginia Beach, Virginia, with oversized Jennifer Lopez beach towels and muscular, bronzed, spiky-haired young fathers in tow, no wealthy African American thirty-something Tracee Ellis Ross doppelganger who holds a cherubic, racially indistinguishable newborn mildly rocking on her Rocawear denim jeans, smiling, happy bourgeoisie Madonna and Child - none ever breastfeed in public. It just doesn't happen. Reasonable racial minority women don't randomly remove clothing in public in any sense; even if our disparate cultures smiled on such maternal exhibitionism, on some minor, minute level, the most counterculture and iconoclastic women of color among us fear mainstream backlash, and shudder at the thought of losing face from a indecent exposure charge. Do you think twenty-two-year-old Syreeta Jenkins from Brooklyn's Marcy Projects really wants to test the anal cavity-plunging NYPD's sensitivity towards young Black mothers? Tawana Brawley's lies resonate loudly today, especially after the Diallo case. So who does a La Leche lament benefit? When the digital thunder struck, and the internet's guerilla feminists launched their Tet Offensive upon the online Saigon at Reappropriate.com with matured mammaries held high, and stormed the instantly foreign non-parent rhetorical strongholds spraying milky ammo upon childless, sex-positive feminist positions, I was caught unawares, a crossfire casualty, and wondered how Ho Chi DruBlood could've possibly instigated such intra-feminist online violence. But at first, I didn't understand the lonely fury of the Desperate Housewives, the rage of a privileged class.
Our homegrown Teri Hatcher terrorists threaten reprisal between their wistful walks down Wisteria Lane; these manicured mothers with immigrant mammies and absentee children present a demographic that begins with privileged Whiteness but includes indifferent middle-class membership and narrow leisure-feminist fanaticism. The later-day descendants of plantation matriarchs and First Lady formality, Desperate Housewives, arrogant beyond human measure, exude stereotypical 1960's traditional nuclear family ignorance of issues as American as chitterlings, kimchee, quesadillas and venison. For the Desperate Housewives, feminism must be drained of its color to mean anything. Think about it: If Darth Drublood wants to physically nourish her small Stormtrooper in the action figure isle of the local Wal-Mart DeathStar, she's more than welcome; there's no need to threaten cauterized dismemberment by scarlet lightsaber if a random servant of the Empire offers a quizzical look or disapproving stare. There is no disturbance of the Force. But let's be honest and forthright on the issue - before assertions of widespread feminist benefit and healthy de-sexualization of women's breasts and females in general from female breastfeeding, we should remember the major beneficiaries of a widespread American social embrace of this controversial issue - the Desperate Housewives.
Notice oppression's extreme makeover: once the concept of an unjust or excessive exercise of power by a powerful prejudiced interest against a particular identity-based group, the Desperate Housewives redefined oppression to reflect conservative antagonism towards Jackie O's orgasmic freedom, cultural gender equality, and female charity case affirmative action in education and athletics and business. Now, oppression as a social phenomena based on societal denial of individual personal choice because of powerful interest prejudice against unchanging, natural, and unalterable group identities is not lost, but rather consciously sacrificed, to characterize all sorts of countermovement perspectives and oppositional speech as total, unreasonable, irrational evil. Notice the difference. The intrinsic minority (a social group based on a shared inherent trait, like racial minorities, or the poor) becomes synonymous with the behavioral minority (a social group based on shared behaviors and personal choices, like religious denominations, or vegans) in a slow marketing campaign where social movements from behavioral minority groups, often populated with highly privileged people, claim the histories, organizational strategies, and rhetoric from social movements from intrinsic minorities, to cement general social support and national cultural acceptance for their group members' personal choices. This was never more true than with the American Civil Rights Movement, still robbed and pillaged and raped today to serve other folks' agendas. The result? The conservative majority (all those who do not consider themselves a member of an oppressed minority, or do not want to consider themselves as such) disregard the sometimes reasonable sociopolitical concerns of oppressed intrinsic minorities, as they can not tell the difference between the real concerns of the disadvantaged, and the concerns of groups trying to deny others the American right to judge and critique and disagree with others' personal choices. Everyone isn't oppressed.
Some people are just inconvenienced. Our immaculate ivory matrons are, in my opinion, most guilty of this "oppression dilution" problem, and feminism's general relevance suffers as a result. Think about it: if the de-sexualization of women's breasts in America's patriarchy is a feminist goal, then what explains the absentee feminist defense of Janet Jackson after her Superbowl 'wardrobe malfunction'? Ain't Janet a woman? Justin Timberlake, the most non-threatening male since Carson Kressley, rips Janet's bodice and exposes her breast to the television cameras (read: simulated male violence toward a woman results in public female nudity), and afterwards Ms. Jackson's reputation bleeds out from millions of media paper cuts and camera slashes as reporters, pundits, and 'experts' demonize one of America's best entertainers as a harlot, a streetwalker, a common whore. If ever there was an opportunity for bold discussion of the feminist desire for breast de-sexualization, 'Nipplegate' offered the silver platter special. But Michael Powell's Federal Communication Commission scores political points with the Puritanical Moral Majority and other right-wing immorality groups by extracting large fines from the corporate media outlets that produced the halftime show, all without a peep from the feminist hordes. Yet again, America unites in unceasing disgust for Black people (public reaction to Hurricane Katrina's New Orleans rape stories is a recent example), but this media lynching against a self-made feminist entertainer lives and breathes and dies without comment from feminists, and we all should know why.
And we do. It's the same reason Helen Zia never tires of relating her stories about her troubles at Ms. Magazine, why sharia law in the Iraqi constitution incenses Max Factor feminists on K Street, but rampant female-driven poverty-stricken single-parent families in SouthEast DC never trouble their sleep - Desparate Housewives care for no one but themselves. Orientalized racism against traditional Asian American cultures force our suburban pals to think of Zia's people as sexist laundrymen only, and our Alexandria, VA pals only consider Black people when they chastise thirteen-year-old Zack about buying a Snoop Dogg album. And in case you were wondering, any legal principles that disenfranchise women anger these people politically, but like all good-natured White activists, it's easier for them to speak with Virgin Mary certitude on other people's backyards then Agent Orange their own weeds.
Angel and Tekanji spoke eloquently on their blogs that the current state of public decorum where men can remove their shirts and women can't offers unfair advantage to men, and is an unjust and unequal social convention. I can understand that. But public breastfeeding, in my opinion, clouds that issue, because it introduces a second action into the equation, one that both sexes can not perform. Here, the Desperate Housewives want to saddle a laudable sociopolitical goal - ending public nudity difference between men and women - with minor, controversial, small, and hotly contested pork - public breastfeeding. To me, that's anti-feminist: it reinforces the idea that to be a feminist, and a strong woman, one must have a domestic, child-rearing focus, it forces people to respect other people's parenting practices without conscious thought, and it promotes the "me-first" anarchism that degenerates feminism into a identity politics redistribution of wealth/ privilege/ power pyramid scheme with the Desperate Housewives cast as the lucky ones. Isn't the real feminist concern encouraging more breastfeeding and pre-natal care for racial minority and poor women - not where women breastfeed, but that they do? Think about it: if feminists are really serious about linking the struggles of young mothers and child-care within feminist concerns, why don't more feminists speak out about racial disparities in pre-natal care, and the fact that fewer Black mothers breastfeed than any other group? Instead of fighting so that Brooke Shields and Catherine Zeta-Jones and Madonna can pop a tidy out outside the hand lotion sales at Bath & Body Works?
No, social disapproval of public breastfeeding is not an oppression. Deal with it: we start calling that oppression, we should devote resources toward fighting it, and frankly, I'm not interested in wasting time and energy and money so that privileged White women can get more of what they want. You don't see brothers walking around with "Free Kate Moss" white tees, do you? Not when Black women are infected with HIV at astronomical rates, and that the rates of HIV infection in the African American community has doubled over the last decade. You want a feminist debate, a real feminist issue? "A 22-year-old woman who has sex with multiple men in an area with very low HIV prevalence, such as a Georgetown bar for well connected young people in D.C. politics, probably has less chance of getting infected than a 22-year-old woman who had sex with only one man in a poor D.C. neighborhood with a very high HIV prevalence," said Adaora A. Adimora, an associate professor of medicine and an adjunct professor of epidemiology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Think about that: you can live the Biggie Smalls lyrics of Lil' Kim's debut album Hardcore, as a pretty young White woman with a college education and a decent paying executive assistant gig in Georgetown and be less likely to contract HIV than a pious, God-fearing, churchgoing young Black woman working ten-hour shifts at Long John Silver's for minimum-wage who is sexually active with one man. This is the Sex in the City no one hears about.
I know the war I'm desperate to win.
American society hates women without end. Our very language reverberates with misogynist nomenclature. We manufacture mascara, inject collagen, implant silicone. Even our celebrities reflect our anti-woman wrath; pop culture jargon codes feminine skepticism and masculine enmity in celebrity proper nouns. Just hearing the name Lil' Kim conjures a gaudy Black Barbie, posable and disposable, discarded behind prison walls like a chocolate covered mini Mattel mannequin outgrown by today's youth. Martha Stewart manifests for your mind's eye a tyrannical iron maiden, her pale, wrinkled face a bizarre tragicomedy mask, porcelain, frozen, inscrutable, a psychotic symphony of corporate marketing genius and matronly domestic virtue. The dainty socialite Paris Hilton presents idle privilege's poster child, America's number one party chick, a boisterous bukkake bulimic with more money than God and about as many scandals worldwide.
Cindy Sheehan symbolizes both modern woman's maternal rage and Victorian woman's eternal frailty. With every protest, every speech, every televised tear shed and every sound-bitten question asked, Mrs. Sheehan discards independence for visibility, sheds autonomy for popularity - according to the fair and balanced conservative character assassination machine that discredits her daily. Many liberals who share her aims and decry her tactics share in the "Sheehan as anti-war movement pawn" dogma; they envision the middle-aged grieving mother as too emotional, too biased, and too meaningless to offer useful perspectives on American foreign policy. To protest is to hate American fighting men, so these detractors believe, and of course, men matter more in modern America. Incidentally, this is the reason the very concept of sexually integrated military forces jar the national psyche; so accustomed are we with the mental picture of the synchronized, efficient, unstoppable United States Armed Forces - replete with good-natured twenty-something Teutonic Easy Company squarejaws, awash with towheaded, azure-eyed Steve Rogers superpatriots from the last simple, good v. evil American military conflict, World War Two - that G.I. Jane fries our fragile synapses. Ben Affleck channels the Greatest Generation's triumph; Kate Beckinsale's only there to give Benji someone to do. Women in combat confuse and scare our basic sexual precepts past usefulness. Hard, simple, exact, distinct sexual roles for men and women calm the American public, because then we don't have to think. We just react, strut, act, creep in this petty pace from day to day. But in the last syllable of recorded time our outdated misogyny may deconstruct, and these traditional ideologies and longstanding beliefs will klaxon gender heresy; the current national schism over the eternal role of women in American society might soon cease with a coronation, not a cataclysm, an inauguration, not a revolution. She's the woman you love to hate, so say it once, with feeling: "Mr. Speaker, The President of the United States, Hillary Rodham Clinton!"
To love themselves, women the world over developed feminism, "a diverse collection of social theories, political movements, and moral philosophies, largely motivated by or concerning the experiences of women, especially in terms of their social, political, and economic situation", according to trusty Wikipedia. Feminism challenges our old-school sex prejudice, secures gender equality while promoting women's rights. Diversity, equality, democracy - our global capitalist revolution requires cold, corporate calculation, unencumbered by the irrational prejudices that undervalue the labor and ignore the inventiveness of half the human population. Feminism is necessary. And with every online discussion and blog comment I make, I declare myself feminism's enemy. I am the villain of the piece.
Enter Iago. Recently, I've noticed a trend in my online blog comments - I'm never feminist enough. More than the lack of a uterus or mammary glands or long hair, I appear antagonistic to the concerns and perspectives of feminist writers I converse with, like an internet Ishmael Reed without the book deal or the academic infamy. Case in point: the minor brouhaha over Angel's recent masterpiece, Baby Wars. Read the concise, effective prose and the comments, and you notice one repeated and disheartening feminist flaw - how easy it is to attack and discredit other feminists. As soon as Mother Superior DruBlood invaded with her matronly black robes and her unbreakable yardstick of procreative feminist discipline, it was Shirley Chisholm v. N.O.W. all over again. Drublood's anger, palpable and sarcastic and mean, hemorrhaged through the computer screen like a saturated Tampax, and nearly poisoned an incredible discussion on parental rights v. public decorum with irrational mommy toxic shock syndrome. Cheap shot? Yea, probably, but I was far from the only person who disagreed with DruBlood's stereotypically premenstrual sarcasm and vitriol during the exchange. Other bloggers spoke on the parents v. non-parents clash sparked by Reappropriate.com; Tekanji, longtime blogger at Shrub.com, gave her twenty cents in a powerful common ground defense of personal choice feminism, while Cheshire (Nykol) over at Marginal Notations waxed philosophical about Marxist theory's defense of public motherhood. Still, Drublood, La Femme Nikita of the La Leche League, penned the harshest criticism of Baby Wars. There's more Amazon animosity here, here, here, and here. Like Paul Wall, Angel's got the internet going nuts.
I drove slow, homey. My best netiquette, my most easygoing prose, and I'm still the sexist pig, the misogynistic bastard, the patriarchy's Colin Powell, made for television Technicolor wearing my richest sienna Stepin Fetchit Max Factor, preaching false truths on military intelligence for patriotism, posterity, and Halliburton profit. Even in drag, we coon so crackers don't have to. Throughout this weekend's debates - parental control of unruly children in public settings v. non-parent arrogance and intolerance towards families, pro/con public breastfeeding, possible sexist and classist oppression of mothers and children by the patriarchy, cultural preferences toward childbirth as sole path to life-fulfillment, etc. - no matter my personal support of and belief in gender equality and sexual social justice, I was always the oppressor, the woman-hater, Mister Charlie. Why? I'm the anti-O.J., the bizarro Kobe. I don't respect White women.
Today, I live and breathe amongst White women I despise; every passing day another lesson in impossible tolerance for those who benefit as they complain, who win as I lose. It's my most irrepressible racial prejudice - I can't stand White women. My job interviews would often fail when my Meryl Streep interlocutor instigates interrogation; and any overview of my online feminism struggles must grapple with this lifelong impropriety. I know where it starts - respect. Sexual politics belie racial conflicts, and I have the hardest time shaking the idea that your average college-educated, professional White woman respects Black men. Why would they? - we beat out wives, infect our girlfriends, rape our daughters, and call all bitches and 'ho's. Black men aren't just sexist - we're the sexists all men wish they were. Our audiovisual phantasmagorias, broadcast on cable staples MusicTelevision and Black Entertainment Television, offer the entire globe the syncopated blueprint on big pimping girls, girls, girls, half-naked, oiled, easy, with eyes big as saucers and the best breasts money can buy. At any hour of the day in mainstream America, you can turn on a television and immerse yourself in African American sexual terrorism, prepackaged and commodified, Videos Ready to Arouse (VRA's) from perverse private sector emergency marketing companies like Interscope and Island Def Jam. Consider the testosterone fervor of Curtis Jackson, a.k.a 50 Cent. If one believes the incessantly repeated video imagery of rap music's number one corporate superstar, Jackson wakes up every day surrounded by alluring video hoe hedonism. Women of all backgrounds, all races, all classes, envision him as the hardest, Blackest sexual dynamo rap's offered since LL Cool J, and if you listen to his lyrics, women believe the truth. The downside? No matter how socially conscious, White women see a little 50 Cent in all brothers, sometimes a nickel, sometimes a quarter, sometimes the full Kennedy. And every dimepiece around wants to make change.
Black men never leave the auction block. If you believe the published laments and spoken fears of professional, college-educated African American women and their White male counterparts, Black men, following either centuries of race-sex-class oppression in the White supremacist, patriarchal Victorian West or their innate animal lusts, desire White women above all other sexual concerns. The highest example of female beauty for a Black man in this stereotype is a White woman, and all Black men who can afford Missy Anne's cream cheese daughters in our liberal-capitalist present-day endure strong sociocultural urges to taste the other White meat. This racist Negro caricature enjoys such widespread refrain that women of color often adopt elements of Nicole Kidman Whiteness - processed long straight hair (sometimes blond), lighter skin, blue, green, or hazel contacts, eating disorders, weight loss, political apathy, etc. - to Stepford themselves into corporate mainstream perversions of their natural ethnic womanhood to attract the opposite sex within their own races. The oddly standardized Bratz offer comedic animation of this 'neo-whiteface for sexual competition' phenomenon; every low-budget, trailer-trash Million Dollar Baby in the country offers sexual attraction to a higher degree than a woman of color, especially a Black woman, to hear some sistas tell the tale. Whether or not you buy this Terry McMillan argument, realize the dilemma: Black women brighten and lighten and Whiten to attract Black men. Affluent, wealthy, professional Black men, who benefit and suffer from centuries of racist White fears of sexual potency and orgasmic promise, may choose with crass impunity what degree of White femininity and Black social ostracism they are willing to accept; in college, the most depressing example of cynical Black male interracial dating was the brother who spoke of dating Latina women to secure "all the sista's booty, none of her looks". No matter how disgusting his perspective, the sexual economics of Cornell's social scene supported his misogyny. Non-Black women, searching for cheap thrills and cheaper dick, screwed brothers without dating them, fucked brothers without knowing them. It was all about Benjamin, baby, and no matter what trust-fund, private school, Jack & Jill Black aristocracy spawned him, the cornrowed, Ivy League campus gangstas I knew ignored racist denigration for sexual gratification, and loved every hot, slimy, sweaty second.
The sad thing was that we all looked alike. Black Cornell, obsidian mirror of every recent survey of higher education's racial politics, offered a drastically woman-heavy environment; I heard once that Black women outnumbered Black men there at a ratio of six to one. Couple this with the aforementioned fanatic demand for African American Express throughout the female population at the nation's largest Ivy League University, and even the most socially inept, flustered, unattractive Black man becomes Usher Raymond, and suddenly has a confession to make. Except me. I met Angel my second day on campus, never looked back; we were together, inseparable, close, faithful - and it never mattered. For many sisters on the Hill, I was that nigga, the sellout who hated Africana in word and deed and mind, no better than any low-budget MTV rap hoodlum in a annoying club video with Patsy Paleface shaking her bony absentee ass on Total Request Live. Every brother that treated those women wrong, that climbed into young Kimberly Elise's bed smelling of her sorority sister, that abandoned his alluring caramel-mocha girlfriend for some Jessica Alba rip-off, was more desirable than I, who did not agree with, date, or even know my fellow Negroes. It pissed me off. Mike Lowry and Angel watched me on more than one occasion curse out some overweight Angie Stone impression for daring to impose suspect Blackness upon me if I didn't define my race through my penis. It didn't matter: Uncle Tom Negroes do exist, even at age 21, and I was lumped in with all the rest, those Bryants with clipped vocal tones and muted Polo sweaters, those Kwames who discuss patent law on the impeccably manicured sixteenth green of the Robert Trent Jones Golf Course at Cornell University in Ralph Lauren khakis and Titleist caps, those varied Apprentices, overeducated, articulate, whitewashed, ambitious, who bed Sun Li to lust Elizabeth, who desire money, power, and respect yet sacrifice life, liberty, and happiness, who advertise a Tenth talented and anonymous and foreign to their own communities, who disarm racist fear with mild-mannered sycophancy, who cede humanity to increase productivity - these corporate globalists, these chromium constructs, these plastic people - they are my perversion. They offer home.
Home is where the hatred is, moans modern griot Gil Scott-Heron, as he instructs a faintly snoring Kanye West, magical child prodigy, in Defense Against the White Arts at Hogwarts University. White feminists have to hate Black men in our shared United States of America. More than the hypersexual Mandingo stereotype they both despise and desire, more than the Supermasculine Menial aggression that both arouses and alarms, White feminists hate the attentiveness other men, especially White men, pay the Black Man That You Fear. Remember the alpha plantation philosophy, the original Black Code: the White woman must always remain the center of attention. In 1869 debates within the American Equal Rights Association over possible feminist support of the Fifteenth Amendment, that grants suffrage to all Black men but refuses women the vote, raged acrimoniously between two of the organization's founders, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Frederick Douglass. Stanton shared acidic, divisive, and inflammatory elitist hatespeech to oppose both second-wave European immigration and freedman's suffrage, often in the most unapologetically racist dogma possible. A Stanton quote from the period: "We prefer Bridget and Dinah at the ballot box to Patrick and Sambo." In January 2004, during filming of the Real World: San Diego, Jacquese, personally offended by an inebriated Robin's public altercation where she shouts racial epithets at random passersby, calls his roommates together for a frank discussion on racial interaction, when Robin, her diva radar blinking, explodes into a tearful tirade on a past rape incident involving Black men. Blame skillful editing or cynical camera-grabbing, but Jacquese's hopes for respectful race conversation shatter when the hefty, busty Robin implodes in an oddly defensive "I'm not a racist for calling them niggers, really! I can say that 'cause niggers raped me!" emotional meltdown of loud, hacking sobs and shrill, banshee screams. Her crocodile tears flowed over her damaging rape memories, yet staunched the attention deficit threatened by rational thought.
In George W. Bush's America, rational thought declares jihad upon false oppression and compassionate conservativism, decrees fatwas against both enemies of the state, and awakens in a cold, gray, unyielding eight by eleven foot concrete cell, extraordinarily rendered somewhere within the coalition of the willing yet without due process of law or the Geneva Convention or simple human decency, for brutal, gut-wrenching, inhuman torture that casts Abu Ghraib as Club Med, a lonely enemy combatant characterized as criminal by his own government, forgotten by his family and friends, and lost to even the most inquisitive and determined Starbucks-caffeinated Woodward and Bernsteins amidst a black and white carbon-copied Freedom of Information Act tempest of self-conscious bureaucratic negligence, your tax dollars at work. Paleoconservative culture war attacks on civil rights and feminist legislation and legal precedents abound without comment, if the overwhelming support for the nomination of relative unknown Judge John Roberts for Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States of America delivers meaningful indication. In our era of base anti-intellectualism, we have not the luxury of emotion-as-oppression; today's stalwart identity politicians and boisterous feminist thinkers can ill afford to promote selfish special treatment as necessary anti-oppression public policy. We must be citizens, not partisans, democrats, not anarchists. I call it the Rev. Al Sharpton Rule: as moral indignation increases, available audience decreases. This is why Rev. Al's rhetorical skill and color certitude know not parallel in our public discourse, even though he never speaks directly on any policy proposal or specific fact. In glowing, flowery, collegiate language historical debate masters Cicero and Henry Clay would've murdered babies to possess, Rev. Al devolves into a mewling Neanderthal any public speaker willing to share a podium with him, ally, enemy, or innocent bystander - yet Black America's latest race leader can not articulate a specific political proposal to achieve any of his pro-Black platform. Rev. Al can't talk rising interest rates, but he knows poor people. Rev. Al can't discuss racist immigration policies, but he knows Haitians. Rev. Al can't convince Democrats of affirmative action's benefits, but he knows Black people. Rev. Al Sharpton - living proof that personal experience does not constitute oppression.
American language fails our populace with similar bombast. In this discourse, I've exposed my personal bias against White women, but even I realize that the term "White women" is too broad, too expansive, too diverse to accurately reflect my longstanding prejudices. Our race speech drowns in the ancient words and antiquated thoughts of past eras and prologue politics; today's diasporic, globalized, commercial racism cannot be confined to national boundaries or unspecific rhetoric. Take for example, the aforementioned Baby Wars. Angel talks about rich parents who drive seven hundred dollar asshole-mobile strollers to run rampant over everyone else's personal space in rude and condescending fashion to rub their radiant social procreation fulfillment complexes in everyone's faces; these parents allow their loud, unruly children to squeal and moan and cry in public spaces ruled by special decorum - movie theaters, airplane cabins, special events - where their progeny's wails just piss everyone else off. Sometimes, these parents publicly revel in the perfect human beauty of their chosen creations by breastfeeding; this raises some concern for general public conditions of non-nude propriety, because in the United States, rightly or wrongly, it is considered socially unacceptable for women to appear topless in public, not to mention illegal. But in all the comments on small child public behavior and public breastfeeding on all the blogs that have talked on these issues this past week, one incredibly important observation continually escapes notice, a fleet-footed Gingerbread Man who avoids the holy hotplates of a convent kitchen.
I speak heresy: all the mothers who breastfeed in public are White! Caucasian, Euro-American, either buzzing White Anglo-Saxon Protestant royalty or assimilated immigrant stock, but in street-level terms, White. Never in my life have I stumbled onto a young mother of color on a park bench or in a franchise restaurant or at a shopping mall with one nipple naked, one breast bared, to feed the angelic ambrosia of mother's milk to a hungry babe. Never. No poor Vietnamese immigrants outside of family bodegas in Chinatown, no middle class Filipinas on the white summer sands of Virginia Beach, Virginia, with oversized Jennifer Lopez beach towels and muscular, bronzed, spiky-haired young fathers in tow, no wealthy African American thirty-something Tracee Ellis Ross doppelganger who holds a cherubic, racially indistinguishable newborn mildly rocking on her Rocawear denim jeans, smiling, happy bourgeoisie Madonna and Child - none ever breastfeed in public. It just doesn't happen. Reasonable racial minority women don't randomly remove clothing in public in any sense; even if our disparate cultures smiled on such maternal exhibitionism, on some minor, minute level, the most counterculture and iconoclastic women of color among us fear mainstream backlash, and shudder at the thought of losing face from a indecent exposure charge. Do you think twenty-two-year-old Syreeta Jenkins from Brooklyn's Marcy Projects really wants to test the anal cavity-plunging NYPD's sensitivity towards young Black mothers? Tawana Brawley's lies resonate loudly today, especially after the Diallo case. So who does a La Leche lament benefit? When the digital thunder struck, and the internet's guerilla feminists launched their Tet Offensive upon the online Saigon at Reappropriate.com with matured mammaries held high, and stormed the instantly foreign non-parent rhetorical strongholds spraying milky ammo upon childless, sex-positive feminist positions, I was caught unawares, a crossfire casualty, and wondered how Ho Chi DruBlood could've possibly instigated such intra-feminist online violence. But at first, I didn't understand the lonely fury of the Desperate Housewives, the rage of a privileged class.
Our homegrown Teri Hatcher terrorists threaten reprisal between their wistful walks down Wisteria Lane; these manicured mothers with immigrant mammies and absentee children present a demographic that begins with privileged Whiteness but includes indifferent middle-class membership and narrow leisure-feminist fanaticism. The later-day descendants of plantation matriarchs and First Lady formality, Desperate Housewives, arrogant beyond human measure, exude stereotypical 1960's traditional nuclear family ignorance of issues as American as chitterlings, kimchee, quesadillas and venison. For the Desperate Housewives, feminism must be drained of its color to mean anything. Think about it: If Darth Drublood wants to physically nourish her small Stormtrooper in the action figure isle of the local Wal-Mart DeathStar, she's more than welcome; there's no need to threaten cauterized dismemberment by scarlet lightsaber if a random servant of the Empire offers a quizzical look or disapproving stare. There is no disturbance of the Force. But let's be honest and forthright on the issue - before assertions of widespread feminist benefit and healthy de-sexualization of women's breasts and females in general from female breastfeeding, we should remember the major beneficiaries of a widespread American social embrace of this controversial issue - the Desperate Housewives.
Notice oppression's extreme makeover: once the concept of an unjust or excessive exercise of power by a powerful prejudiced interest against a particular identity-based group, the Desperate Housewives redefined oppression to reflect conservative antagonism towards Jackie O's orgasmic freedom, cultural gender equality, and female charity case affirmative action in education and athletics and business. Now, oppression as a social phenomena based on societal denial of individual personal choice because of powerful interest prejudice against unchanging, natural, and unalterable group identities is not lost, but rather consciously sacrificed, to characterize all sorts of countermovement perspectives and oppositional speech as total, unreasonable, irrational evil. Notice the difference. The intrinsic minority (a social group based on a shared inherent trait, like racial minorities, or the poor) becomes synonymous with the behavioral minority (a social group based on shared behaviors and personal choices, like religious denominations, or vegans) in a slow marketing campaign where social movements from behavioral minority groups, often populated with highly privileged people, claim the histories, organizational strategies, and rhetoric from social movements from intrinsic minorities, to cement general social support and national cultural acceptance for their group members' personal choices. This was never more true than with the American Civil Rights Movement, still robbed and pillaged and raped today to serve other folks' agendas. The result? The conservative majority (all those who do not consider themselves a member of an oppressed minority, or do not want to consider themselves as such) disregard the sometimes reasonable sociopolitical concerns of oppressed intrinsic minorities, as they can not tell the difference between the real concerns of the disadvantaged, and the concerns of groups trying to deny others the American right to judge and critique and disagree with others' personal choices. Everyone isn't oppressed.
Some people are just inconvenienced. Our immaculate ivory matrons are, in my opinion, most guilty of this "oppression dilution" problem, and feminism's general relevance suffers as a result. Think about it: if the de-sexualization of women's breasts in America's patriarchy is a feminist goal, then what explains the absentee feminist defense of Janet Jackson after her Superbowl 'wardrobe malfunction'? Ain't Janet a woman? Justin Timberlake, the most non-threatening male since Carson Kressley, rips Janet's bodice and exposes her breast to the television cameras (read: simulated male violence toward a woman results in public female nudity), and afterwards Ms. Jackson's reputation bleeds out from millions of media paper cuts and camera slashes as reporters, pundits, and 'experts' demonize one of America's best entertainers as a harlot, a streetwalker, a common whore. If ever there was an opportunity for bold discussion of the feminist desire for breast de-sexualization, 'Nipplegate' offered the silver platter special. But Michael Powell's Federal Communication Commission scores political points with the Puritanical Moral Majority and other right-wing immorality groups by extracting large fines from the corporate media outlets that produced the halftime show, all without a peep from the feminist hordes. Yet again, America unites in unceasing disgust for Black people (public reaction to Hurricane Katrina's New Orleans rape stories is a recent example), but this media lynching against a self-made feminist entertainer lives and breathes and dies without comment from feminists, and we all should know why.
And we do. It's the same reason Helen Zia never tires of relating her stories about her troubles at Ms. Magazine, why sharia law in the Iraqi constitution incenses Max Factor feminists on K Street, but rampant female-driven poverty-stricken single-parent families in SouthEast DC never trouble their sleep - Desparate Housewives care for no one but themselves. Orientalized racism against traditional Asian American cultures force our suburban pals to think of Zia's people as sexist laundrymen only, and our Alexandria, VA pals only consider Black people when they chastise thirteen-year-old Zack about buying a Snoop Dogg album. And in case you were wondering, any legal principles that disenfranchise women anger these people politically, but like all good-natured White activists, it's easier for them to speak with Virgin Mary certitude on other people's backyards then Agent Orange their own weeds.
Angel and Tekanji spoke eloquently on their blogs that the current state of public decorum where men can remove their shirts and women can't offers unfair advantage to men, and is an unjust and unequal social convention. I can understand that. But public breastfeeding, in my opinion, clouds that issue, because it introduces a second action into the equation, one that both sexes can not perform. Here, the Desperate Housewives want to saddle a laudable sociopolitical goal - ending public nudity difference between men and women - with minor, controversial, small, and hotly contested pork - public breastfeeding. To me, that's anti-feminist: it reinforces the idea that to be a feminist, and a strong woman, one must have a domestic, child-rearing focus, it forces people to respect other people's parenting practices without conscious thought, and it promotes the "me-first" anarchism that degenerates feminism into a identity politics redistribution of wealth/ privilege/ power pyramid scheme with the Desperate Housewives cast as the lucky ones. Isn't the real feminist concern encouraging more breastfeeding and pre-natal care for racial minority and poor women - not where women breastfeed, but that they do? Think about it: if feminists are really serious about linking the struggles of young mothers and child-care within feminist concerns, why don't more feminists speak out about racial disparities in pre-natal care, and the fact that fewer Black mothers breastfeed than any other group? Instead of fighting so that Brooke Shields and Catherine Zeta-Jones and Madonna can pop a tidy out outside the hand lotion sales at Bath & Body Works?
No, social disapproval of public breastfeeding is not an oppression. Deal with it: we start calling that oppression, we should devote resources toward fighting it, and frankly, I'm not interested in wasting time and energy and money so that privileged White women can get more of what they want. You don't see brothers walking around with "Free Kate Moss" white tees, do you? Not when Black women are infected with HIV at astronomical rates, and that the rates of HIV infection in the African American community has doubled over the last decade. You want a feminist debate, a real feminist issue? "A 22-year-old woman who has sex with multiple men in an area with very low HIV prevalence, such as a Georgetown bar for well connected young people in D.C. politics, probably has less chance of getting infected than a 22-year-old woman who had sex with only one man in a poor D.C. neighborhood with a very high HIV prevalence," said Adaora A. Adimora, an associate professor of medicine and an adjunct professor of epidemiology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Think about that: you can live the Biggie Smalls lyrics of Lil' Kim's debut album Hardcore, as a pretty young White woman with a college education and a decent paying executive assistant gig in Georgetown and be less likely to contract HIV than a pious, God-fearing, churchgoing young Black woman working ten-hour shifts at Long John Silver's for minimum-wage who is sexually active with one man. This is the Sex in the City no one hears about.
I know the war I'm desperate to win.
28 Comments:
At 10/01/2005 05:01:00 AM, nykol said:;
James,
You make it sound as if everyone speaking about the breastfeeding issue were white except for Jenn. How rude. I am both black and bispanic and grew up in POVERTY in NYC. I "wax philosophically" not because I'm a clueless, disconnected upper class white woman (as your post seems to imply) but because I choose to do so with a particular endpoint in mind.
As someone coming from the perspective of medical anthropology, I am fully aware of the racial and economic inequality involved in breastfeeding and that is part of the reason I do research in this field and actually promote of breastfeeding. That's exactly why I chose my field. Did you ever even consider why minority women don't breastfeed as much? Or in public? Perhaps they are socially conditioned to do so by a white, puritanical, patriachal structure with the implicit statement being they are not healthy enough, they don't have the resources, and they should be ashamed of their bodies for various stupid, racist and sexually charged reasons. I'm not fighting for the white woman here. For me, the feminist movement can often still be irrelevant. I grapple with the privilege and elitism of the feminist movement that excluded (and still) excludes the minorites and the poor. But it is useful for some things. And it is useful for normalizing the hypersexualized aspects of the female body. I'm not going to get into a breastfeeding fight with you. It's useless and tiresome. But I do take issue with your implicit statement that not only trivializes my viewpoints, but ignores the fact that I am black, hispanic, and lived in poverty and I can still defend breastfeeding in public. Don't mask that in your post.
At 10/01/2005 08:35:00 AM, tekanji said:;
James, I understand your rage and frustration, but I think that the only one who was calling you "not feminist enough" was Dru. And, well, she levied the same complaint on me (as you noted) because I call myself childfree. There are two possible reasons why she did not comment on my blog: 1) She refuses to believe that my words will ever have merit; 2) She realizes she was an inconsiderate asshole but is too stuck up to ever admit it and, I don't know, apologize to me, so she wouldn't dare come on my blog to discuss my post.
On marginal notations, you and nykol had some fundamental disagreements. She questioned the feminism in your positions, but I didn't feel that she was questioning you in terms of your feminism. As feminists, we don't always have to hold a feminist position on everything, and it's ok (I think) to discuss the relative feminism in a position as long as we don't conflate that with the feminism of the individual.
I know it's your style to be shocking and in-your-face, but when you said, It's my most irrepressible racial prejudice - I can't stand White women, I must admit I was hurt. I, at least where most privilege is concerned, am a white woman. Just as my criticism with elizabeth on Jenn's breastfeeding thread was about her saying "all women's breasts are for feeding babies", so here am I upset that you imply that you hate all white women, not just the ones who are part of the horrible problems you discuss.
I have often said that feminism is about the intersections of oppression. Racial oppression is often the biggest intersection, because it is still so prevalent in our society. Many of the problems you attribute to white "women" (hypersexualizing black men to the point where they're "the sexists all men wish they were" to name one) is not a woman thing, it's an oppression thing.
Do you honestly believe that negative stereotypes about black men's sexuality and sexism are the provience of white women? Please. I've seen the same stereotypes trotted out by white men, non-white men, and non-white women. In fact, in my Japanese literature class we studied Yamada Eimi, a popular Japanese novelist, who had a penchant for elevating black men up onto a sexual pedestal - they were primal, sexual, and earthy. The Othering of people who are different from us is something that all humans engage in, not just white women.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that I don't like feeling picked on, especially by someone I respect, because of a huge problem of society, not just the white women in it.
Also, re: Janet Jackson. I think it's unfair to say that the whole fiasco "live[ed] and die[ed] without comment from feminists". I wasn't in the blogsphere back then, but I know in my personal circle we talked about the idiocy and injustice surrounding the backlash against her in the incident. And if you think the feminist national response wasn't good, well, welcome to modern feminism. The media doesn't give a shit about us unless it can turn it into a story about those "crazy lesbian man-hating feminists".
Think about it: if feminists are really serious about linking the struggles of young mothers and child-care within feminist concerns, why don't more feminists speak out about racial disparities in pre-natal care, and the fact that fewer Black mothers breastfeed than any other group?
To be fair, I've seen discussions like that in some feminist LJ communities I've visited. Since I tend to avoid talk of mothering and breastfeeding, unless it's in a greater social context (such as governmental policies), the only relevant community I can think of is boob_nazis. Unfortunately, they aren't an overall positive example - they aren't feminist exclusive, and most of my experience with them has shown that they tend to engage in Dru-esque tactics against people who have ideological disagreements with them.
Just one last criticism: You made a lot of generalizations about what feminism is and isn't, mostly accusing it of being a movement for middle-class/upper-class white women. While there are several branches of feminism which still cling to these notions, I don't agree with using that kind of divisive argument on all feminism. Third-wave feminism (the umbrella term for a plural set of ideologies that modern feminists hold) is about acknowledging intersections of oppresion. That means that we have a duty to think about the kinds of points you brought up about race and feminism. If you feel that some third-wave feminists aren't living up to their end of the bargain, then by all means call them/us out on it, but using the blanket statements "feminists this" or "feminism that" when discussing these problems is engaging in the same discourse that has succeeded in discreting our movement in North American society. I can't support that.
I know my post was pretty much all critique, but I do want you to know that I hear you on your problems. I don't have time to get into it now, but if you want I'm more than happy to discuss the points you brought up (like the Othering of black men and the continued stigma of interracial dating), although I suspect we'd both be preaching to the choir on the matter.
I guess, if you walk away with only one thing from my post, let it be this: I like you, James. And I respect you. I may disagree with your feminist positions, and maybe even question them. I would expect you to do the same for me. But, when it comes down to it, I see our debates as going on within the feminist movement. Just because one vocal asshat who likes to question other people's feminism says you're not a feminist, doesn't mean we all feel that way.
At 10/01/2005 08:51:00 AM, James said:;
Nykol, thanks for reading.
I realize one can defend public breastfeeding and not be a Desperate Housewife. That's totally cool. I just think that public breastfeeding advocates need to speak publicly on who currently does that, and who wants less stigma attached to it now.
I wasn't pulling anyone's ghetto pass; I wasn't even being sarcastic when I said you were "wax(ing) philosophically". I was being up front that you wrote a good post. I wasn't trivializing anything you said.
Further, let's not get into being rude. It's not going to help anything. This post was designed to reveal some things I couldn't say about these issue on other people's blogs without being divisive. Here, I was willing to talk about it; Nykol, do you disagree that the people who most benefit today from less stigmatized public breastfeeding are White women? If so, why?
Otherwise, please calm down about my supposed trivializing of your viewpoints. It's not happening here.
At 10/01/2005 09:29:00 AM, James said:;
Tekanji,
Dru tossed the "not-feminist" label around to lots of people, you and Jenn more than me.
But let me be up-front. I am prejudiced. Much of this post was designed to expose where my personal biases cloud my judgment on political issues.
This post was very much concerned with why my personal prejudice can be a liability; it wasn't meant to hurt anyone. Do I hate all White women? No. But do I see the White woman (the political group or demographic) as an obstacle first to anti-oppression movements, or as a beneficiary of oppressive policies? Yes. But that's not the problem - the problem is that I operate with such bias in the first place. I wanted this post to speak to those issues.
No, negative stereotypes about Black men's sexuality are everyone's province, not just White women; my post speaks on Black women and White men who buy the same arguments. That's not really the point though; the problem is that stereotypes involving Black male sexuality are justified in some public sense by the elevation of White women as the most pristine femininity. I've never come across a feminist theorist or activist who spoke about that privilege as detrimental to all groups. The only strand of base human nature I'll concede here is that no one wants to give up the privilege they think they have.
At any rate, I am not picking on you or any other White woman here. Drublood may have gotten scratched, but I'm not picking on anybody. Still, I'm reluctant to blame society for the reactions of political groups, or my own. I could easily call my bias toward White women inconsequential, and be very wrong for doing so. Bias matters, and I'd be kinda hypocritical to speak on it in others without first examining it in myself.
At 10/01/2005 07:09:00 PM, tekanji said:;
James, thanks for your reply.
Just one thing:
the problem is that stereotypes involving Black male sexuality are justified in some public sense by the elevation of White women as the most pristine femininity. I've never come across a feminist theorist or activist who spoke about that privilege as detrimental to all groups.
Discussing the black male/white female aspects of those in their entirety, the only time I remember is the days in my Japanese fiction class where we were discussing Yamada Eimi, like I noted above. Although I daresay that my feminist prof (and the feminist, though sort of off-base, author we read who critiqued Yamada's work) was informed by theory that discussed those sorts of stereotypes.
I have to say that many feminist groups I belong to have lots of discussion on the so-called "pristine femininity" of white women, although perhaps since many of us are white we don't see it so much as "privilege" but rather as "bondage" (and not the good, kinky kind). I feel that elevating any group onto a pedastal is just putting a cage around them, gilded or not.
But maybe I'm misinterpreting what you mean and letting my own feelings about compulsory femininity intrude. My general interpretation of what "pristine femininity" means is that one is elevated to a level of femininity to the point where they are seen as an "ideal" female. This can be seen in some cases with Asian females, as well, especially since they are seen as "submissive" and "cultured".
Is that what you meant, or is my head so far up my ass that I'm totally missing your point?
At 10/01/2005 08:17:00 PM, James said:;
Tekanji,
The 'pristine femininity' is both privilege and bondage; White women have been completely caged by the Victorian girlishness Western men have and still ascribe to them. Women lost agency, labor control, and in many cases, the idea that working for themselves was important. But with increased leisure time, and the highest possible social standing, we're not exactly talking about maximum security incarceration. I'm not trying to say one person's oppression is less important than another's but the social construction that posits White females as the closest to 'ideal beauty' possible places that demographic in a more privileged position than other female groups. Third-wave feminists like yourself know that already; 'me-first' Desperate Housewives try to forget it, and that's what happened in all this debate on public breastfeeding as a feminist issue. For example, it's trivial at this point, but I noticed that no one really took issue with my assertion that women of color aren't seen breastfeeding in public. To me, that's an important example that displays why 'me-first feminist' calls for more acceptance towards that activity are really minor-league attempts to increase privilege for so-called Desperate Housewives.
Still, my overall point was that with White women imprisoned as the models of all things virtuous, innocent, and good, Western men established an endpoint for their social (and sexual) spectrum of goodness and virtue. The photo-negative is my demographic, the Black man. But that's all history - my issue today was that I rarely see feminists attacking this racist and sexist perspective, sometimes because it benefits them.
At 10/02/2005 09:31:00 AM, Liz said:;
First, I don't think I've ever actually seen anyone breastfeeding in public. I've had friends and family do it in front of me (or in my presence) and I have to say that unless I was actually staring, it wasn't actually easy to get a glimpse of actual nipples.
Second, I find it interesting that to you, the connotation breastfeeding has is some sort of angelic, pure, mother-love kind of thing that of course fits into the "pristine femininity" of white women (sort of a madonna with the babe at her breast kind of holiness). For me (and I think for many others), it has connotations of an earthy physicality that is almost the opposite of pristine.
And doing it in public seems like it could be an attempt to demonstrate that yes, women are physical creatures, and childrearing is a messy endeavor that takes place in the real world and not in some idealized bubble. It seems like an attempt to break out of that pristine femininity, out of that antiseptic, plastic vision of white women.
And if black men are the metaphorical cultural opposite, then this ought to be a good thing for them, too. It's working towards a happy medium, maybe.
Interesting post.
At 10/02/2005 06:59:00 PM, tekanji said:;
I see what you're saying, James. I know that I don't tend to focus on the intersections between racism and sexism in my discussions unless it's about Asia, but that's because I try to stick with what I know. And even with discussions about Asia I have to be careful, because I come from a wholly outsider perspective; my knowledge is a combination of theoretical and anecdotal, with the latter based on my Asian Canadian friends, and to a small extent my limited travelling to Asia (China and Japan, really). I guess it remains to be seen if my perspective changes at all when I go to live in Japan this April.
For example, it's trivial at this point, but I noticed that no one really took issue with my assertion that women of color aren't seen breastfeeding in public.
Again, I can't speak for anyone else, but I didn't agree nor disagree because frankly I really don't have any experience with the racial breakdown of instances of public breastfeeding.
Like Liz, I haven't really ever noticed anyone breastfeeding in public. The only time I saw it was when my eldest sister was nursing her first (and later second) child, but she always either used the breastfeeding shirts or draped a blanket over the head, so I wouldn't have noticed if I hadn't actually been there talking to her at the time. So, again here, all my opinions on the matter are from theories and discussions (anecdotal evidence).
Although this whole discussion did bring up an interesting point with me: when I think of the "entitlement parents" (ones who convey the impression, rightly or wrongly, that they don't take their jobs as parents seriously) I've heard stories about, and once or twice enountered, I automatically think of white women and men. It's probably my "assumption: white" kicking in, but it is nonetheless an interesting point in light of your assertion that the parent and breastfeeding debate failed to properly address minorities.
At 10/03/2005 02:03:00 PM, Karlos said:;
Damn, I thought about saying something on the Baby Wars post, but I decided to leave well enough alone. Glad I did; y'all crazy. I spent the weekend hiking, drinking Oktoberfest beers with my friends, and beating on my new drumset.
Anyway, I just wanted to ping ya, J, to say "what's up." We haven't talked since Christ was a Corporal. I don't think I even have a phone number for you right now, but if you gave me one, I'd use it.
Peace, slick.
-Agent K
At 10/03/2005 04:24:00 PM, James said:;
Liz, thanks for posting.
I don't believe breastfeeding has any special angelic connotation; it doesn't need such Madonna-esque visuals to be inappropriate for public situations. Still, the clamor for accepted public breastfeeding among the Desperate Housewives I mention does not dismantle traditionally oppressive 'pristine femininity' for the White motherhood demographic.
During this recent debate, shown in some of the links given earlier, public breastfeeding advocates often posited themselves as the main (or only) caregivers society has to offer, completely ignoring fatherly contributions even among middle-class and higher economic states. Child-rearing was often the sole province of caring females.
If anything, the earth-mother image and the pristine femininity image trace each other perfectly; both social constructions propose Woman (cast for most Americans as the White woman) as the virtuous, the caring, the moral, the motherly, the beautiful, and discard state-of-nature masculinity as nasty, brutish, and short, totally devoid of virtue and caring and morality, only concerned with conquest and destruction.
I do not believe Desperate Housewives challenge this imposed imagery; rather, I think they think they benefit from the idea of the White woman as chalice of the moral good, and use this to achieve political aims. In this light, public breastfeeding does nothing to challenge any prevailing notions about White mothers at all, and does not affect Black men in any way.
Tekanji,
When I think of entitlement parents, I too think of White parents first - rich White parents. People who have enough money to ignore the needs of their fellow man. I wrote about the end result of their absentee parenting once before; check my Big Kids post for details.
What I think it means is that none of us are exempt from societal norms and judgments involving individual identity. "White" is our American self-image default; it's probably our oldest national semiotic self-hate. I think we only disservice ourselves when we try to hide its omnipresence, as many of the Desperate Housewives tried recently.
"I guess, if you walk away with only one thing from my post, let it be this: I like you, James. And I respect you. I may disagree with your feminist positions, and maybe even question them. I would expect you to do the same for me." - Tekanji
I like you too, Tekanji. And I respect you enough to abide by this without hesitation. E-hugs!!!
At 10/03/2005 09:32:00 PM, tekanji said:;
Aww! E-hugs right back atcha! ^_^
I'll try to get to reading the post soon; right now my brain is too fried to do much more real thinking. And your posts always require real thinking. You need more fluff, James. Fluff, I tell you!
When I think of entitlement parents, I too think of White parents first - rich White parents.
You know, I think of entitlement parents as rich (well, middle class and rich) parents as well. I even wanted to mention that in my previous post, but apparently forgot to.
Okay, I probably have more to say on this issue, but when I typed "Oooowooowooo" as part of my post, I decided maybe I am a bit too tired to actually do any more real thinking.
Off to bed for me!
At 10/21/2005 06:28:00 PM, jaimie said:;
As usual, your writing is excellent and provoking. It's the same Jaimie from the Dining Room Table, but with a new blog. Check it out and tell me what you think. I've been gone for a while, but still reading you. You are a very intelligent man...
At 10/21/2005 06:33:00 PM, jaimie said:;
And, by the way, I am a black female and I breastfed my daughter for 14 months, despite several black women who didn't understand and didn't give me support. My friends understood though-it tended to be the older women who snubbed their noses at my insistence to nurse my daughter. When I decided to breastfeed, it was my friend who told me that we were the race who were least likely to nurse our children. I can't understand this-it is soooo much easier than putting together a bottle. And if scientists are right, our children will be healthier for it.
At 10/24/2005 06:33:00 PM, solitaire said:;
Brotherman!
I haven't been ignoring you. As usual, it takes me a bit to digest 'Jamespeak', haha! And I saw the Marilyn Manson and was like, "aaaaugh!" Almost screamed out loud in the newsroom. That wouldn't have been good, huh?
Alright, you jump back and forth on some themes but there's something that you addressed and I'm glad that you did. It's something that I have wanted to blog on for a LONG time but haven't. But want to, and will now. I know I'll come off as some angry, fanatical Black woman with a grudge but that's how the world sees me anyway, so what?
The issue of you not dating a Black woman...there were some issues raised here and I think they were very valid points. Am I questioning YOU, after reading about you and reading about Angel? Maybe. Much more in the vein of 'no', since I think the both of y'all are great. I guess I'm biased 'cause Angel is Canadian and all. What if she wasn't? What if she wasn't 'so intelligent', for lack of a better phrase (not trying to insult you, sis!), would I still feel the same way?
The Black consciousness that you said has disappeared is something that is definately sad. Very, very sad. This consciousness has streamed into 'mainstream rap', where the Black woman is an example of a white man's wet dream...big ass, big boobs, no clothes and sexually promiscious. She walks into the boardroom with the Old Boys Club and she's lusted over in the same way... because we're just like the video girls. No matter if we graduated from Yale or Harvard with our high-ass degrees, they just see our high-ass and think it immediately translates into sex, sex and more sex.
Oh, there's an exerpt from a brotherman on his new book... the myth of the Black man and his, ahem, huge YOU KNOW WHAT I AIN'T ABOUT TO SAY IT (laughs). I thought of you instantly when I read it. Oh, that didn't come out right!! OH DANG. Ok, I thought of you in the sense that you make some arguments here that sounds like what the brother is saying.
I hope you ain't offended! (runs away)
At 11/04/2005 08:24:00 PM, Jgracefully said:;
I lost the link I used to get here a while back, but it's good to see you're still verbose as ever...I mean, this blog is homework I have assigned to myself.
Once this cush wears off, I'ma read this bitch, too.
You need to visit Atlanta, James.
At 11/07/2005 09:36:00 AM, Bullet Proof Diva said:;
LOL @ Jgracefully..I concur with that!
umm, as fantastic as this entry is, and however outstanding your writing is, I certainly don't expect to be kept waiting an ENTIRE month for new stuff.
James, don't make me beg! At least give me your thoughts on THE BOONDOCKS new show on Cartoon Network. Did you see it?
At 11/10/2005 11:40:00 PM, Jgracefully said:;
This post has been removed by a blog administrator.
At 11/11/2005 12:22:00 AM, Jgracefully said:;
Okay, Jimmie...I done read it now.
One thing: could you post clearly defined thesis statements and outlines w/your blog? I'm still somewhat lost in the prose at this point, and I'm not sure whether you're feeling pimpish about the over-sexualization of our culture or not.
I'm a vanilla quadroon w/ass length straight hair, so I ain't even gon' front like I mind brothers being color-struck. Plus, I got the top and bottom of the Venus Hottentot, which reeeeally seals the deal. O-k-k-kaaaay??!
I've dated so many professional athletes in the last few years that my parents now refuse to wear ANY team jerseys, in order not to offend any ex's that still hang around and send sneakers. It's so sad, too...they approach so innocently...then BAM! The question: "Wha'chu mixed wit'?" I've heard it every way imaginable, yet it always has that remarkably familiar ring of patronization that I've experienced since kindergarten. There's a "twang" to that question; like too much lemon in the Kool-Aid.
Hey, it's a tough job being the mixed-breed, but somebody's gotta do it; I love the attention - who wouldn't?? It doesn't drive me Mariah-crazy 'cause I chalk the whole deal up to a ridiculous rationalization I picked up (quite irrationally) that aliens are weeding out black people. Follow me, now: let's say, for arguments sake, that those alien-abducted hillbilly folks are right and Martians are actually skinny w/those big heads and eyes. Whaaaaat if...in the fuuuuuture...all races are absorbed and due to the cult of the thin and light-skinned, we all end up eventually - tall, skinny, white-ish, and booty-free??? Is it CRAZY??! I dunno. I swear on my first unborn seed I actually subscribe to this notion in my mind somewhere, though I dare not admit it socially! Asians eyes ain't even tight as they used to be, nah'mean?? It's alien-evolution, dog. Real talk.
*shame for that revelation/moving on innocently*
How'se about a little vernacular for your girl, though, man?? A blog-breakdown for dummies, if you would. I ain't saying I'm dumb...I just don't like to think so hard all the time. I gots ni'ccas to date and shit. Gyrating to do.
At 11/15/2005 05:16:00 PM, aplomb said:;
As usual, Excellent work!! I had to sit down with a pen and pad to read this blog and here are my comments:
Hillary Clinton-My sentiments exactly, to me she took being the first lady to the next level!
"We coon so crackers dont have to"-CLASSIC, just classic..
"White women who benefit as they complain"-I thought I was the only one who saw it that way, thanks for taking the words right outta my mouth.
"African American Sexual Terrorism"-THANK U, because u never see other music genre's video's looking like that, its a shame...
"Taste the other White Meat"-After I read "Why I love Black Women" by Michael Eric Dyson, I cant even get mad about this subject...I no longer feel like a beautiful Apparition, not worthy of acknowledgement by men of my own race..i know that I am a child of GOD and am beautiful regardless, so I just pray for them...
"Racist White fears of Sexual Potency"-Reminds me of the Isis Papers...good book
"Breastfeeding"-I breastfead my daughter until she was 7 months, simply because I thought it not natural to put chemicals into her when my breasts fill up anyway, plus it was cheaper, but each and every time I had to whip it out...i did so in the bathroom when I was out in public!
"Privilidged Whiteness"-Dam J, just DAM, get outta my head!!! lol
And after reading that last sentence in this blog, the bombs went off in my head!! You have once again so eloquently hit the nail on the head with each and every poion you made, especially the last sentence...and that coming from a BLACK MAN, makes me appreciate that last statement even more, I never knew men would notice it as we as black women do!! Keep up the good work James!! Come to my church and preach this dang blog...lol
At 12/07/2005 10:40:00 AM, Anonymous said:;
Has any person of pastiness ever come up to you and asked you what they could do for you?
At 2/02/2006 11:24:00 PM, Anonymous said:;
You say you're not a misogynist, but you refer to Dru Blood as "premenstrual" for getting angry at you, blame women for men's reactions to us, get offended that strip clubs and porn (generally aimed at sexually titillating a male audience) aren't as socially accepted as breastfeeding in public (that must be why they're so difficult to find), apparently can't imagine a situation in which women would be naked without a specifically sexual or maternal purpose in mind, and despise all White women because a few turned you down for jobs.
You complain that you're really trying to be nice and women are still calling you on it when you say sexist things. The horror. Would you accept this argument from a white woman who said racist things? That she's really, really trying to be nice?
Oh, right. No, you wouldn't, because white women are just innately malicious and despicable. Oh, and we're all wealthy. We're all housewives, too. And even though you hate us and don't want to be around us at any time, you know what we think and feel about everything.
At 2/05/2006 08:45:00 AM, James said:;
Anonymous,
I believe my commentary is a tad more sophisticated than what your comments suggest.
Try again. After reading.
At 2/05/2006 05:43:00 PM, James said:;
By the way Anonymous, when's the last time you tried to articulate your innate prejudices in public?
At 2/12/2006 04:16:00 PM, Anonymous said:;
wow - just found this blog, and was into it for a good 5 paragraphs or so before you nosedived into lets-explore-my-prejudice-against-white-women banality.
I followed all of your links - thought Jenn made a really great post and rant that I can get behind 100% - I enjoyed the discussion between her and Dru - but although I am rigidly childfree myself, I didn't find Dru to be the seething monstrous breeder bitch you made her out to be here. But then again you do assume she is white, and as you so laboriously detail, you hate white women off the bat.
You know what was more interesting to me? I too hate the rich white apolitical-yet-politically-correct (they are always careful to maintain that appearance) consumer-driven and race/sex/class- oblivious Desperate Housewife type as well. I especially hate the DHs who are also breeders and feel a need to shove it in your face. But, curious, I skimmed through some of Dru's other postings and didn't find a DH lurking there either.
Yes - she rudely questioned someone's feminism because they said they were childfree and then didn't even read their excellent post. I've had the same done to me for calling myself childfree. She was wrong. Yes, she was rude at times and so blinded by her personal reaction as to miss the valid points in the thread. She was wrong. Yes, she defended using the word oppression (which I agree with Jenn, does not appy at all) for what more aptly would be described as inconvenience, annoyance, prejudice. But your post...your post is riddled with a seething hostility towards any and all 'white women' in general and towards Dru in particular that goes beyond her instigating rudeness.
I find a lot of value in discussing one's own prejudices and exploring them with other people, and I think you're very courageous to have posted this.
But on the other hand, jeez louise, you seem to be writing from the stance of i *heart* my prejudice and want to keep and cultivate it and here's why. Um, yay, I guess?
With the exception of the naked-hostility nuggets lodged within your post, I'm thankful for every point you're raising about rich-straight-white-women's concerns being valued and aired in our society more than the concerns of poor women, women of color, or lesbians. It's wrong. It is still happening. And it needs to be addressed in all mediums, including righteously angry rants like this. I can get with righteous anger. But damn if I don't leave your post, even with all those great points summed up in the arresting closing paragraph, with a single sad thought: strike another one up for Divide and Conquer.
At 2/13/2006 12:16:00 AM, James said:;
Anonymous,
We're already divided.
White feminists can never have a useful and mutually beneficial coalition with politicized minority groups, simply because White feminists benefit too much from the current power structure to effectively challenge the status quo, in my opinion. No, I'd never confuse DruBlood for a rich woman, but I found her scathing disregard for all other opinions outside her own a useful flashpoint in the broader question of coalition building and White feminist tunnel vision, and wrote about my perceptions of these issues. I am prejudiced, and I do not apologize.
Often, when people discuss their prejudices, its in a context of self-loathing, a tearful reminder that they are not exactly the good person they thought they were. They talk, they cry, they hug, they move on. They ignore the emotion they've shed, they commit the same transgressions as before. They learn nothing. I do not run from my hate; quite the opposite, as you'd gathered, because I still find my prejudice towards White women logically justified to some degree. That is not a positive. Yet modern feminism has no remedy for such minority misogyny.
Modern feminism ignores the reasonable qualms male minority race activists - people with an axe to grind against White patriarchy - have toward a philosophy and social movement that shuts out ethnic feminism in leadership and in theory, while its proponents continually ask for and assume shared ideology against an oppressive "Whiteness" they define as a straight White male phenomena. Some liberal White women assume that their Whiteness fades because they are paid seventy cents to every dollar that their White male coworkers earn. Sorry. No. All the unemployed Black man sees amidst cubicle nation are White folk with good jobs. He knows he ain't got one.
So yes, the false assumption is that people like me and people like DruBlood were ever in collusion in the first place. I'd rather defeat the soft bigotry of low expectations held by both Trent Lott and Naomi Wolf towards my demographic; a vote for John Kerry won't take any Desperate Housewife off my shit list.
Thank you for your intriguing and well-written comment.
At 8/30/2006 10:39:00 PM, Anonymous said:;
I read most of your post and the part about black women not nursing their babies in public is silly. I nursed my babies in public and never saw nothing wrong with it. In fact, the lady that headed the breast feeding classes in our city, was a black woman who also nursed her babies wherever she happened to be. Please deal with the ignorance and hatred you have in your heart concerning black women. I pity you my brother.
At 11/12/2006 05:16:00 PM, Ann said:;
James, your "hatred" is not hatred. It is an understanding that white people, men and women, still rule in this world, and they have done a royal job of fucking up and running this country into the ground, not to mention everything they come into contact with.
And yes you are right, white women of the first wave of feminism had so much hatred of seeing black men win the right to vote that they cut their own throats by siding with white men aainst the 15TH Amendment.
White women are not "caged" or in a "prison" than any one would like to fool themselves into believing.
Because of white men's hatred of black women, white women were spared the cruelty and viciousness of rape on a daily basis.
Because of white men's hatred of black women, white women did not have to suffer having their bodies treated like living toilets, outhouses and used kleenex for the most grossest syphilis/gonorrhea rapes that white men committed against helpless black women and GIRLS.
Because of white men's hatred of black women, white women did not have to suffer having children, and sex, forced on them just because of the color of their skin or their race.
White women benefitted from the debasement and degradation white men dished out to black women for over 400 years.
So, pardon me, while I do not feel sorry for white women having an eel the size of a Western Diamondback because a black man reacts NORMALLY towards them as is to be expected.
Just becuase the white man put white women up on a pedestal does not mean every brainwashed male should believe the white woman is the supposed ideal, pristine woman.
She is not.
She never has been, and never will be, and no amount of blah-blah-blah, and boo-hoo-hoo will ever convince me that she is anything in anyway "better" than anyone else, much less a black woman.
Pull-leese!
If anyone is the ideal woman it is black women. With all the sick and sadistic shit black women have survived in this country, white women of all people should get down on their knees and ask for God's forgiveness for their sitting by on their asses for over 400 years and doing nothing to stop the beast-rapists of their race form destroying black women with their penises.
Oh, I guess my "hatred" of white men is coming through loud and clear.
Well, if it is, it's because I live in America.
Fear, loathing and contempt will do that to you when the women of your race are treated as less than human just because some race of men decided it was okay to treat a race of human being in a way that I would not treat a dog that bit me.
But, then again, that's the "Master Race" for you.
They know it all.
And still believe the lie that they are above God's justice and punishment.
Go head, on, Ms. America.
Keep on pretending the world is what you think it is.
At 1/08/2007 06:46:00 AM, Jennifer said:;
Modern feminism = white women bitching when they have little to bitch about.
I know it's far more complex than that, but feminists just make me not fucking care. After all, they only come to us for help and discuss "our" interests when their numbers are low. Fuck 'em.
No, social disapproval of public breastfeeding is not an oppression. Deal with it: we start calling that oppression, we should devote resources toward fighting it, and frankly, I'm not interested in wasting time and energy and money so that privileged White women can get more of what they want.
AMEN, brother!!!!
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