You’re not alone, La Lubu

As much as I hate myself for meta-blogging – this post makes me want to jump up and shout, “you are absolutely not alone!”

To clarify, even though I’m bouncing all over the place right now (without caffeine buzzing through my veins, even), I see myself as complicit in a lot of the stupid crap that turns feminism into a pointless pissing contest. I also believe that this pissing contest is responsible for why the word “‘feminism” rarely enters into a lot of the challenges we face in this world today. In the BBC article on maternal mortality rates in South Asia that I linked to earlier, the word wasn’t mentioned by women who are actively working to cut down on thousands of these largely preventable deaths. Why? Well, if I were to take a guess, I would say that this is because so much of what passes for mainstream “feminism” has become divisive and abstract. Because it’s being treated as a blanket that so many people, many of them well-meaning in their own right, are pulling in different directions – trying to get warm ahead of the rest, some even going as far as suggesting that they’re really trying to keep everyone warm – and their efforts are simply not being appreciated. Continue reading “You’re not alone, La Lubu”

And a *shrug* is in order here

(Picture property of I Can Has Cheezburger)

Unless you’re a lit-geek or a giant homophobe looking for more evidence that teh gayz are taking over the universe, the Dumbledore outing was a pretty much a non-story. If I wasn’t a lit-geek, I probably wouldn’t be addressing it on my blog. There are more hot pictures to put up, frankly – Ingrid Bergman, Nicole Kidman, Gina Gershon, et al.

Nevertheless,

What’s sad about this non-story is that the text itself seems to be of little consequence, it’s the politics of the thing that count. One the (excellent) forum over at the Barrowdowns, I used to participate in fierce discussions involving issues of supremacy within the interpretation of text – how much weight should a reader’s interpretation carry? When the writer issued a strong statement such as, for example Tolkien talking about how he “consciously” revised The Lord of the Rings into somewhat of a Christian text – does this require the reader to view the book as a Christian work? How much room do we make for ourselves when we pick up a particular book and struggle to interpret it?

Questions in a similar vein are really the only ones worth asking now that Dumbledore has been “outed” by J.K. Rowling. For me, at least. The new stories, meanwhile, are just empty buzz – fodder for Bill Donohue, various “concerned mothers,” and so on. (Naive?) People have claimed that this is some sort of advancement of gay rights, and while I do hope that Rowling’s revelation may inspire some people to re-think the issue of homosexuality as some sort of terrible, taboo subject only to be spoken about in a screeching voice with Beethoven’s 5th playing ominously in the background, I somehow doubt it.

The fact that a fictional character’s personal life can be a headline on the BBC really does make Dumbledore come alive in a way that’s rare for literature in general. Dumbledore is a presence as immediate for us as, oh, I don’t know – Britney Spears (with better grammar and fashion sense). Once again, good news for lit-geeks everywhere (and please, don’t inundate me with shrill cries that “but Harry Potter is not LITERATURRR!” – I don’t care), but not exactly the cause célèbre it’s been made out to be.

As for J.K. Rowling’s motives – I’m sure she means well. In fact, I know it. But, and this simply needs to be said – the control she is trying to exercise over her text and, by extension, the reading public is a little too intense for my tastes. Can’t we, the Potter readers, dream a little too?

P.S. Lookie lookie, Rebecca Traister pretty much just said everything I did.

Post me some pictures of Beautiful Women

One of the most popular posts in the Russian blogosphere (hipsters have warned me to stay away from the word “blogosphere” – I warn hipsters to stay away from me) as of late was a simple “post pictures of women you consider beautiful” on some dude’s LiveJournal. The author later revealed that he was betting on a bottle of Hennessy – in order to determine whether his readers prefer blondes. Statistically, they did not, and he won.

The user has moved on to requesting pictures of pretty men (not because he’s “interested,” you see, but just because the lovely ladies asked) – and I am in my element there. It seems that almost everyone in Russia loves Johny Depp and Hugh Laurie – but where the hell are David Tennant, Naveen Andrews, or, for that matter, Chekhov? I was the first to post their pictures (though not before darling boyfriend’s).

However, the question of pretty women is something I rather thought I’d participate in on my own turf. So, I’m going to list some of the women I find fetching, and perhaps you can post pictures, or links, in the comments section. Or else just tell me that I have no taste (but please don’t hurt my feelings too much today, I’m all alone, trapped in Ukraine without Boyfriend, and want to cry enough already).

Here we go (with apologies in regards to copyrighted stuff, et al – not that I think anyone is going to sue me just yet, but still):

Bette Davis:

betty

Mummy:

Mama

Women in uniform (these are Soviet soldiers of the WWII era):

soldiers

Michelle Yeoh (ever since Crouching Tiger, baby):

Michelle

Vasundhara Das:

vasundhara das

Niloufar Pazira:

Niloufar Pazira

And, of course, Monica Bellucci:

monica pregnant

Fruit of thy womb

This article on the BBC made me think back to Joss Whedon’s question (I’ve quote it on this blog before): ” What is wrong with women?

I mean wrong. Physically. Spiritually. Something unnatural, something destructive, something that needs to be corrected.

How did more than half the people in the world come out incorrectly? I have spent a good part of my life trying to do that math, and I’m no closer to a viable equation. And I have yet to find a culture that doesn’t buy into it. Women’s inferiority – in fact, their malevolence — is as ingrained in American popular culture as it is anywhere they’re sporting burkhas. I find it in movies, I hear it in the jokes of colleagues, I see it plastered on billboards, and not just the ones for horror movies. Women are weak. Women are manipulative. Women are somehow morally unfinished. (Objectification: another tangential rant avoided.) And the logical extension of this line of thinking is that women are, at the very least, expendable.” (emphasis mine)

Perhaps your experiences have been different than mine, but I’ve met waaaay too many people who fetishize the risk and suffering often associated with child-bearing. And this goes back to Whedon’s question as well – perhaps what’s really wrong with women, historically at least, is just how scary the reproductive process can be. It’s so scary, in fact, that the human race has learned to disassociate from it – by framing women as inferior and/or by focusing disproportionately on how pain experienced by women in childbirth is so beautiful that it should not in any way be tampered with (I’m not knocking natural childbirth here – but guarding against infection, for example, is a good thing, this we can all agree on).

Considering that giving birth has become relatively safe in developed countries not so long ago, and that it continues to be unsafe for many women on the African continent, in South Asia, and elsewhere – perhaps we have yet to un-learn the discomfort we feel on the subject. Whedon talks about popular culture – and it’s a fact, while torture-porn such as “Hostel” rakes in millions, a live birth would send people running from the theater (I remember the screams of horror, pure horror, at the end of “Doctor T & the Women,” for example). And it’s no wonder that women are labeled as “morally unfinished” – this almost works as a defense mechanism against their scary, scary nature.

I could get all philosophical on you now and talk about how, perhaps, our unconscious ambivalence about existence in general leads most world societies to be hostile toward women – because women are the ones who bear children. I could, but I’m not going to. Maybe because this would be too much of an excuse for all the terror and injustice in the history of this miserable little world.