"Juggling the personal with the political isn’t easy in a biased society. We are, even the most diligent of us, influenced by gender, race, and other identities. And we make personal and professional decisions based on a variety of needs and pressures. Judging each other without acknowledging these influences is uncharitable at best and dishonest at worst. A tiny top and a traditional marriage should not be enough to strip a woman otherwise committed to gender equality of the feminist mantle. If we all had pundits assessing our actions against a feminist litmus test, I reckon not even Gloria Steinem and bell hooks would pass muster. Women must be allowed their humanity and complexity. Even self-proclaimed feminists. Even Queen Beys."
— All Hail the Queen? by Tamara Winfrey Harris
"This is what sexism does best: it makes you feel crazy for desiring parity and hopeless about ever achieving it."
— “They’ll smear you.”
"The talkativeness of women has been gauged in comparison not with men but with silence. Women have not been judged on the grounds of whether they talk more than men, but of whether they talk more than silent women."
— “Favouring” the Girls
"Read women’s work. Write about it. Celebrate it when it’s worth celebrating. Point out the flaws. Point out the weaknesses. Challenge women to do better. To bring more thinking into their work. Enlarge your discussions into the public sphere. Say thank you to the women who have cleared a little path for you, but don’t make sacred cows either. Throw your hooks back through time and dig up a woman’s texts. Respond to them in your own. Bring these voices forward. Jam the networks with women’s voices. Don’t apologize. Just take up space. And do it well. Do it very, very well."
— from “An Interview with Sina Queyras” on Canadian Women in the Literary Arts.
"While there are more female characters on screen today, fewer stories are told from a female character’s perspective,” the center’s executive director Martha Lauzen said, most likely because the man in charge was busy that day. Forging ahead adorably, she then added that the majority of the female characters who did make it on screen were younger than their male counterparts, less likely to be seen as leaders, and more likely to be “identified by their marital status,” leaving the crucial factor of whether the audience was interested in having sex with them yet to be determined by a more in-depth study, you know, once the boys get around to it."
— from “Women still not being treated equally in movies, according to study conducted by women who totally would say that” by Sean O’Neal.
"
“If feminists really cared about equality, they’d be addressing all the inequality that faces men. Like, why do feminists only care about breast cancer and not prostate cancer? Why aren’t feminists advocating for single dads? Why won’t women sleep with me when I’m a really nice guy and I’ve made a particular effort to be nice to them, particularly? Until feminism can answer that, I’m afraid I don’t really see it as being legitimate.”
This is the last bastion of the misogynist’s argument – their self fancying checkmate, if you will. What these people are basically saying is that, despite the overwhelming evidence of entrenched sexual, physical and ideological oppression of women, the only way feminism can really be fair is if it first identifies and solves all of the ways in which the patriarchy also oppresses men.
To be more specific, women who agitate for their own liberation are only allowed to do so once they’ve fixed all the things that make men sad, thus making them stronger and even more powerful.
"
— from “How to spot a misogynist,” by Clementine Ford.
But being a lady (much as it may sometimes feel like it) is not sports. There’s a difference here at a molecular level—there aren’t a whole lot of identifiable Basic Rules for Being A Woman (which is what makes magazines like Cosmo so laughable in the first place).* The editors of ladyblogs don’t simply manage a bunch of content around a particular topic. They’re also, in some sense, attempting to define that topic as they go along—one that’s, by its very nature, impossible to completely pin down.** There’s a valid question here: whether or not, by setting these blogs up in the first place, “empires” like Gawker Media are attempting to commodify female experience by oversimplifying it to the point where issues of gender are given the same weight as issues of what Mark Sanchez is up to on Twitter.
— n+1’s “So Many Feelings” and the Way We Talk About Feminism on the Internet by Emma Healey
This Maisonneuve article addresses so many of my concerns about “So Many Feelings,” but I wish this could have been done without outright attacking the n+1 writer. I enjoyed the “so many thoughts” the original Fischer article provoked. Many writers make the mistake of exaggerating a situation (in this case, implying that ladyblogs diminish women’s issues until female online conversation becomes “the world’s biggest slumber party”) in order to present a hard-to-articulate kernel of truth (that there is a problem with the way our online media handles women’s writing). Healey warns that Fischer may be accidentally promoting the trope of the “humourless feminist,” but we should be equally wary of playing into that of the catfight.
(Source: maisonneuve.org)
