I want equality in more than my workplace.

[justira]

Found this via unfunnybusiness over on journalfen. Should be sleeping/eating/thesising but thought this should be shared:

I want equality in more than my workplace. I'd like it in the park, in the elevator, in my experience at McDonald's, when I get my car fixed, when I go to a fancy restaurant, when I want an abortion, when I want my birth control, when I walk down the street at 4 AM slightly drunk, and when I go to the fucking movies. Is it too much to ask that people recognize my equality at all times? Do I have to decide when I get to be human and when I get to be a receptacle for the male fantasy of "all she needs is a deep dicking"? Oh wait, no. The men get to decide when I get my quaint little equality that I'm always caterwauling about.

Yes.

I'm not familiar with the site this was posted at; not really saying anything on the topic there or the ensuing argument/wank, but... that one paragraph, that I like.

Comments

[shuraiya.livejournal.com]

..............IRA ARE YOU A BOY in reference to the tag, lol

[owlmoose.livejournal.com]

This is excellent. Really the whole rant this paragraph is from is excellent. Thanks for the pointer.

[justira.livejournal.com]

WHAT YOU DIDN'T KNOW.

Naw, I just can't seem to handle being serious for more than 5 minutes. That or my tags are a defense mechanism against the kind of hilarious amounts of unfunny there is out there =P

[shuraiya.livejournal.com]

NO I DIDN'T

WAIT ARE YOU JOKING I'M SORRY I'M DOPED UP ON MIDOL RIGHT NOW AND CAN'T DETECT SARCASM RIGHT NOW

also nice use of MY ICON fuck yeah it's such a good one ♥

[justira.livejournal.com]

No ma'am, I gots girl parts. My penis tag is a way of being facetious re: all them men-peoples out there, because it really is pretty grand having a penis in our society -- compared to, you know. Not having one.

I secretly think feminist thoughts, I just don't bring the srs bzns too often, at least not while I'm at school. I get basically all the serious business I can handle from my various classes -- like my class on torture last semester. FUN TIMES. A great learning experience, but depressing as hell.

[shuraiya.livejournal.com]

That's what I thought, you sneaky bitch. And I agree entirely, men have the power in our androcentric world and it's just like, lol, YOU HAVE TITS AND A VAJAYJAY? TOO BAD, SECONDARY CITIZEN ALSO YOU ONLY MAKE 80 CENTS TO THE DOLLAR.

I have more and more feminist thoughts lately, especially after my Women and Religion class last semester-- it was one half religious studies and one half women studies, and really was lots of fun and depressing. I try not to be too vocal or srs bzns about it either, because the label of feminist has such a negative connotation. 8( Your class on torture sounds about as fun as the class I wanted to take on the Holocaust, haha! 8D;;

[justira.livejournal.com]

I think my class on torture was one of the most valuable experiences of my academic career. The professor is amazing (and is on my orals board for my thesis, urk), and besides being a scarily comprehensive expert of violence in general and torture in particular (he's been called on to testify for the Gitmo trials and such) his main goal in the course was really to get us to think critically about the world and our assumptions. Granted, that's the stated goal of the entire school I go to, but usually in a pretty broad way; that prof really took us down to the basics and tore them down for us.

It's one of the great... ironies, or tragedies, of the women's movement that "feminist" smacks of a pejorative. Isn't that just sad?

[justira.livejournal.com]

No problem. I thought Cimorene hit the points pretty well, but that last paragraph, well. Someone over on JF joked that if feminism had an anthem, that paragraph is when it would start playing, with a nice flag-waving montage in the background.

I do think some of the other commenters in the original post on Jezebel did a better job directing the guy's attention to the fact that a big part of why he was Not Getting It was because he was sitting on top of his male privilege. A lot of people still can't recognize it when their privilege is being pointed out to them and read it just as... I don't even know. Hostility towards their beliefs or character, as opposed to cumulative frustration with a system where half the population can comfortably sit there and not realize that they're sitting on the backs of the other half =\

Like they said over there: reading and talking about your own privilege is hard.

[shuraiya.livejournal.com]

Wow, that's incredibly. What kind of university do you go to? I wish we had such classes! The best world learning or whatever class I ever took was my End of the World class, it was the shit. XDDD

It really is. It kills me that being a woman or that something having a feminine quality is thus deemed as bad or inferior.

[owlmoose.livejournal.com]

Someone over on JF joked that if feminism had an anthem, that paragraph is when it would start playing, with a nice flag-waving montage in the background.

I saw and loved that comment. Also the comments about putting it on a t-shirt, although it's maybe a little long for that.

Privilege is a hard concept to grapple with, no doubt about it. No one wants to hear that they benefit from privilege, especially people who face oppression in other ways (white women, gay men, people in poverty, etc.) But it's there, and you can't ignore it. I haven't read the Jezebel thread yet, maybe I should go take a look. Did the guy come around at all?

[justira.livejournal.com]

Mm, can't say, I didn't read the whole thing, just caught some parts. I did catch that at one point the Nighthawk fellow against whom the rant was directed said this:

"Ma'am you seem like a nice person. But do not presume that I am a privileged person."

I haven't checked to see if people trying to sit him down and explain how it doesn't work that way ever got through to him.

And yeah, I'm... still not that great at seeing my own white privilege, for example. I know RaceFail '09 had a lot of... well, fail, and rehashing of old material. But, for example, deepad's I Didn't Dream of Dragons (http://deepad.livejournal.com/29656.html) still pointed out to me ways in which I am just oblivious. I didn't participate in that race discussion, and I'd seen many of the arguments/linked posts before, but I did learn something from it that I think is very valuable. I learned that I will never be done seeing new ways in which I'm privileged, and that in many (most?) cases I will need help, need someone to point in out for me, and I learned that I can see this about myself and accept it and try to learn more and see as more. I think the most important thing that whole discussion drove home for me was that I should never, ever stop listening.

[justira.livejournal.com]

I go to Reed College, in Portland, OR. We are a certified weirdo/hippie/nerd school and I will love/hate this place for life.

Currently I am in hate mode, since the rough draft of my thesis is due in um, four days. So I have a couple hundred pages of writing. And then the final draft. And then I get to defend it to an orals board. Basically I want to kill everything right now =P

Also the reason I'm STILL NOT DONE with, uh, VARIOUS PRESENTS I owe people. Also, I checked my email records and I was totally the last one to send an email! YOU DROPPED THE BALL CLAIRE. YOUR TURN.

[shuraiya.livejournal.com]

I'VE HEARD OF REED.

Hahaha! WELL YOU NEED TO WRITE THAT HUNDRED PAGES.

Also, I'm a dick and I will send you an email. |D

[ash-mantle.livejournal.com]

Hey, Ira, how're we doin'? Mind, I know how we're doing because of reading the thesis due in four days bit. Anyway, I would make silly comments about how one might acquire certain appendages, for a proce, in reference to a tag - I am not unapproachable with certain offers - but since we're being serious for five minutes I guess I have talked to too many people who are old enough to remember living in a world where they jailed the gays and women had a lot less than eighty cents on the dollar so I'm torn between urges to stamp out gender bias and urges to remind people to be patient in remembering, you know, how much worse it could all be and urges to end this sentence.

Whew. So, yeah. There's something to be said for patiently eroding the new semi-ironic gender bias. And there's a lot to be said for railing against any god-damn dinosaurs who still live in the culture of the early twentieth century and make like that's okay here in the western world. Perhaps with an actual railgun.

Or perhaps by giving them some Howard Zinn and depriving them of all other forms of entertainment.

[ash-mantle.livejournal.com]

Note that I cannot spell the word 'price.' Ever.