Autistic, ADHD, bi, enby, they/he, GenXer
Finished #reading Introducing Feminism: A Graphic Guide, by Cathia Jenainati and Judy Groves.
An illuminating introduction to a topic I know relatively little about (though most of the “big names” were familiar). A brisk canter through a (somewhat US-centric) history of feminism, from Jane Anger’s reinterpretation of Genesis in Her Protection for Women (1589), the struggle for women’s suffrage and property rights in the 19th century, the “second wave” of the sixties and seventies, and then various strands in contemporary feminism (socialist, Marxist, radical, psychoanalytic, eco, and so on). There is also an interesting discussion of how black feminists have critiqued what they see as the white middle-class assumptions of much “mainstream” feminism.
A couple of things I’ll be taking away from this book. First, the “useful definition” of patriarchy provided by Chris Weedon, quoted at the start of the book:
Patriarchal refers to power relations in which women’s interests are subordinated to the interests of men. These power relations take on many forms, from the sexual division of labour and the social organisation of procreation to the internalised norms of femininity by which we live. Patriarchal power rests on social meaning given to biological sexual difference.
Second, I liked bell hooks’s call for women (and men) to say “I advocate feminism” rather than “I am a feminist”. Whether that’s right or wrong in the context of feminism isn’t for me to say, but I think it can be usefully applied elsewhere.
So, I’m glad I read it (it’s only £1.69 on Kindle), though in general I still prefer the Very Short Introduction format to the “Introducing…” graphic guides, when it comes to getting a brief introductory overview to a subject.
Finished #reading The Last Men on Top, by Susan Jacoby.
This is a “Kindle Single” I bought ages ago but hadn’t got round to reading. It consists of three essays previously published by Jacoby looking at what she calls “the grateful generation”: the generation of men born between 1910 and 1935, the last generation of men to reach maturity before the arrival of “second-wave” feminism; the men depicted (and simultaneously glorified and demonised) in Mad Men.
Essentially, Jacoby’s argument is that the old pre-feminist order, in which (at least for those in the middle class) the expectation was that the man would work as sole breadwinner and the woman would stay at home raising the children, was damaging for men as well as women. This is her father’s generation, and in the first two essays Jacoby depicts how unenviable her father’s life “on top” was - though equally how crushing things were for her mother, forced to abandon her career when she became pregnant, spending years drinking too much in the afternoons out of sheer boredom. A further essay, “Phallocrats”, highlights the damage caused to many relationships by the mutual ignorance of men and women of the “grateful generation” about sex, especially female sexuality.
Jacoby is not romanticising the era of the “last men on top”: there was an undoubted bonus to being born a white man, and many men exploited this at the expense of the women around them. But, she argues in a closing reflection, this was also the generation that started to put their daughters, as well as their sons, through university, and to give young women jobs that would have been as solely for men at the start of their own careers. I suppose her position can be summed up as: “don’t hate the player, hate the game.”
Jacoby concludes:
When you are always supposed to be the one on top, there is never any time for rest. It is no denial of feminism, or of the wrongs that women endured, to look back in sympathy at the imperfect efforts made by men of another generation to cope with unsettling change in what were supposed to be the best years of their lives. Let us now take a moment to praise these not-so-famous men, who tried, as best they could, to meet the future instead of to stubbornly keep their gazes focused on the past.
Started #reading Introducing Feminism: A Graphic Guide, by Cathia Jenainati and Judy Groves.
Oh, I love this. On smuggling the first #VotesForWomen petition into parliament in 1866. From Introducing Feminism: A Graphic Guide, by Cathia Jenainati and Judy Groves.
English: American Literature and Culture, Wayne State University
"Will you forgive me if I apologize?": The consequences of reading Twilight and The Hunger Games as feminist literature for young adults
STUDY: people feel miserably on Monday mornings, cheerful on Saturday nights.
The “No Shit, Sherlock” Research Institute once again pushing back the boundaries of scientific discovery… ;-)
Via jtotheizzoe:
Twitter as a giant global mood ring
By analyzing global tweet content, a pair of researchers from Cornell are using the social networking tool to analyze the world’s mood throughout the day.
For example, most people wake up in a good mood, which falls steadily throughout the day, and they get happier as the week rolls on.
(via Not Exactly Rocket Science, more graphs there)
The Modern Moral Order asks a lot of us: “Our age makes higher demands of solidarity and benevolence on people today than ever before. Never before have people been asked to stretch out so far, and so consistently, so systematically, so as a matter of course, to the stranger outside the gates.” How do we manage to do it? Or how could we?
“Well, one way is that performance of these standards has become part of what we understand as a decent, civilized human life.” The mechanism then becomes shame: to not meet these expectations is not only to be abnormal but almost inhuman. […] This has to also be seen in light of Taylor’s earlier analysis of the sociality of mutual display and the self-consciousness it generates. So what we get is justice chic.
However, this kind of self-congratulating, enlightened concern for the other is also susceptible to fatigue: “Before the reality of human shortcomings, philanthropy – the love of the human – can gradually come to be invested with contempt, hatred, aggression”. While I’m motivated to help the poor and vulnerable and even the undeserving because of their inherent dignity, I’m at the same time quietly patting myself on the back, recognizing my moral superiority. So over time it becomes frustrating that these other humans do not exhibit the same enlightened other-regard: What’s wrong with these people? “The tragic irony is that the higher the sense of potential, the more grievously real people fall short, and the more severe the turn-around will be which is inspired by the disappointment.”
James K.A. Smith, How (Not) To Be Secular, pp.126f.. Quotations within the text are from Charles Taylor, A Secular Age, pp.695-697 (page references removed for clarity).
Or, as Linus put it, more succinctly:
Finished #reading Girl Meets Boy, by Ali Smith.
This book is a JOY to read. It’s short (160 pages of wide-spaced type), a novella rather than a novel, but in that brief space it manages to be life-affirming, cheering, moving, thought-provoking and informative.
It’s a retelling of Ovid’s Iphis and Ianthe, and tells the story of two sisters living in Inverness, Anthea and Imogen (or Midge). Each of them works (albeit only briefly in Anthea’s case) for the horrendous marketing-agency-cum-bid-for-global-domination, Pure, with its staff of uniformly shaven-headed men (who “all looked like they were maybe called Keith”).
There are strong thematic parallels with Smith’s most recent novel, How To Be Both, including gender fluidity, feminism, love and sex. The mood and setting are more reminiscent of the “London” section of HTBB, but the themes of gender ambiguity and women working in a male-dominated world echo the “Italy” section. It’s lighter, simpler and less tricksy than HTBB, though, so worth trying even if you couldn’t get on with HTBB (you poor, benighted soul, you ;-) ).
Smith also has a serious message among the uplift and romance, though. The book provides a painful depiction of overt homophobia, in both its naive/thoughtless/ignorant and aggressively intentional forms. And there are also some facts that Smith wants the reader to take away with them. It would be spoilering to say exactly how these come about in the story, but I’m sure Smith would want the message passed on even to those who don’t get round to reading the story (she attributes the statistics to the Womankind website, in 2007):
dogs confused by confused cats against feminism
credit: susanlanders
—
Confused Cats Against Feminism is a project of We Hunted the Mammoth:The New Misogyny, tracked and mocked.
Literally LOLing.
Evansville Press, Indiana, February 5, 1912
it’s a leap yeap
My nightmare: making a typo that people are still talking about over a century later
Happy leap yeap!
The typo heard round the world
