Which gender are you?

[82_28]

Well, it's gonna be "good luck with that" as far as Star Wars. I tried on the opening of ticket sales to get some. They sold out in seconds.

[backtoiam]

^ love it

That reminded me of an episode of "Friends" too. I have often wondered what would happen if this many crazy people actually lived in the same building.

[Elvis]

Well, it's gonna be "good luck with that" as far as Star Wars. I tried on the opening of ticket sales to get some. They sold out in seconds.

d'oh!

[Luther Blissett]

82, I thought all/most of your posts in this thread were satirical!

[82_28]

Jesus, Willow, tell the souls who have gathered here something they don't know. You can't keep explaining the same thing (I guess you can if you want) over and over. Many people have spoken up here and everywhere else where you can read something on the Internet.

Hey, I'm getting a lot from what Willow has been saying, and I think the back-and-forth between Willow and Slomo is good.

And remember 82, few people have your wide-open heart, and some people do have it worse than others. So just chill the fuck out.


Not all readers may be aware that I know 82_28 in 'real life' (we met through the forum), and I hope it's okay to say, that I've never met anyone quite like him, and I'd go anywhere—'bad' neighborhood, dark street—with him along and feel safe because he has this vibe of peace and acceptance that puts people at ease. One exception to that, I'm thinking, might be a roomful of feminists. I can see how that could get dicey.

But as far as I know, 82 is still my, er, date, for the new Star Wars movie later this month.

Oh, thanks for the nice words, Elvis (I love you BTW). But sometimes being peaceful and someone who accepts/respects all comes to a point where it becomes something people think you're "gaming" them. That is precisely what bums me out. For an example there was this girl I saw for a short time and the night before we went to her mother's house because she was going in for cancer surgery. It was the first I had met her mom. I felt the fear and told her along with her best friend to come into the bar and let us know what was going on. She didn't show up. So I said fuck it and took a bus all the way to West Seattle because I had to know her family was alright. Two transfers. After work, tired as fuck and didn't want to do it, but I was thinking I was needed in some form so that I could lend support. Then I was screamed at for being some sort of "stalker". . .

It took me an hour to even knock on her door, since I didn't want to be "that guy". Everything's over and understood now. I was just worried.

[backtoiam]

But sometimes being peaceful and someone who accepts/respects all comes to a point where it becomes something people think you're "gaming" them. That is precisely what bums me out.

Writing on the internet will do that in a heart beat. Black and white text doesn't have that friendly smile and playful tone of voice in person backing up the speech. Its real easy to piss somebody off in writing.

[tapitsbo]

82, I thought all/most of your posts in this thread were satirical!

I thought it was *your* posts that were a form of dryly ironical satire.

[guruilla]

So since RI has become my new home away from home, and since this thread has become the main crucible for a deepening of understanding of our shared social reality and how it infringes on our internal sense of the real and the true, I've spent some time getting educated on the subject of feminism, as it stands today. Slomo recommended Karen Straughan, so I watched this video last night. There are some good points and some pretty startling facts, and her presentation seems to me restrained, sober, intelligent, & credible.



Then there's this:

Janice Fiamengo, who teaches in the English literature department, tried to give a public lecture on men’s issues, equality and rape culture at the university on March 28. But as shown in an hour-long YouTube video, she was repeatedly interrupted by a group of about 30 students shouting and blasting horns.

Representatives from the Canadian Association for Equality (CAFE), which organized the talk, tried to quell the crowd, but they eventually called security. The talk was moved to another room, but somebody pulled the fire alarm, which effectively shut it down.

Fiamengo, a self-proclaimed radical feminist-turned-anti-feminist, said she advocates for equality.

“Feminism is now seen as a kind of proxy for women, so to question any tenets of feminism is seen as attacking women,” she said. “I think it’s become a totalitarian ideology that isn’t really interested in equality at all.”
http://www.metronews.ca/news/ottawa/201 ... -talk.html

I also wanted to share this, which I think is at least worth considering as an example of how a possible war against female sexuality might not be mutually exclusive with feminism, or with some aspects of it.

Full disclosure, I know Holly Grigg-Spall personally and had her on my podcast earlier this year (here).

Sweetening the Pill

JANUARY 31, 2014
Holly Grigg-Spall’s book Sweetening the Pill does an amazing job uncovering the harmful effects, questionable history, and medicalized misogyny of hormonal birth control (HBC). She points out that both the pharmaceutical industry and modern third wave feminism have downplayed the harms of HBC and have equated use of the pill with liberation. As she says,

Contemporary feminism is enamored with consumer choice and has fully accepted it as a substitute for freedom. (p 61)

In discussion of this book I want to start by talking about my own experiences on the pill. Then I’ll mention the book’s critics, and finally I’ll cover a few of Grigg-Spall’s points.

My own experiences with HBC began in my teens when I began taking it for acne. I remember that once I started taking it, it took me about a month for my over-the-top emotional hormone swings to lessen. I recall going dancing in a club once and not being able to calm the intense pendulum of joy, anger, depression and more that kept swinging over me under the flashing lights. It was a feeling of being totally out of control.

Once my emotions leveled out, I was very good at taking the pill once per day at the same time every day. My friends and I used to sing what we called the tumbleweeds song about our uteruses. We’d imagine our wombs to be as empty as the ok corral prior to a gunfight, and sing ♪ oh e oh e oh, wah wah wah ♫ as our baby-free theme song. We thought it was funny. Our bodies were not at risk of fertility. They were under our control, and would not rebel against us.

I stayed on the pill for a decade at least.

I discovered radical feminism in 2011 and, like so many of us, it changed my life. My thinking was altered on many issues and continues to grow and expand the more I learn. About that same time I decided to go off the pill. The last straw came when doctors thought I had had a pulmonary embolism, which is a condition made more likely by HBC. A CT scan indicated that it was actually pneumonia, but that was a very scary experience for me. I decided to finish my pack and be done with the pill.

Over the next year as my body detoxed from the pill I developed acne all along my jaw/chinline that hadn’t been there before. Large bumps protruded on my face, which was embarrassing as I was well past adolescence. I also experienced weight gain, which I was told wasn’t a *real* side effect of going off the pill. It was frustrating not to believed when I reported my symptoms.

Before Grigg-Spall wrote her book she kept a blog regarding her experiences. Many other women came and shared what had happened to them while using the pill or getting off of it, and it was a place for women to be able to discuss their reactions to the pill in a place free from pharmaceutical brainwashing and the liberal feminist gag-order on women discussing our own biology.

Now that Grigg-Spall’s book was published in November 2013 there has been a concerted effort to discredit her findings by misrepresenting her positions. My belief is that the pharmaceutical industry is threatened by Griggs-Spall’s book and that discrediting her is a way to maintain the status quo. I also contend that rejecting the pill goes against sex-positive/mainstream feminism, which is why there’s push-back as well from its representatives.

Liberal feminists have called her book “dangerous” and use name-calling techniques in attempts to push Griggs-Spall to the margins of feminist discourse. As many of us know, being insulted and told to keep quiet are tools used to keep us away from discovering truths and maintain the status quo. Grigg-Spall is referred to as a “crank” (how feminist!), and potential readers of her book are warned that discussing female biology and women’s experiences is inherently “essentialist”. The cherry-picked, decontextualized quotes this critic uses to make her argument are an obvious attempt to contort perceptions of the book and Grigg-Spall’s positions. There are several critiques of this book that have similar tones and I found the pro-pill apologism quite transparent.

What these reviews leave out is the long-overdue feminist analysis of the pill that Grigg-Spall offers.

I was fascinated by Grigg-Spall’s discussion of the “dark side” of the pill. Apparently data collected from Bayer concentration camp experiments was used in developing the pill (p 31). The pill has negative side effects for women ranging from promoting bone loss (p 63) to blood clots to depression, etc. The World Health Organization (WHO) has classified the pill as a class one carcinogen alongside tobacco and asbestos (p 59). Apparently, Depo Provera is currently used in sex offender rehab programs to decrease sex drive (p 68).

These are just some of the negative aspects of HBC that third wave feminists and pharmaceutical companies routinely downplay.

Grigg-Spall also critiques the way HBC is set up as a solution to worldwide “population control” when the real issue is global inequality and poverty. The pill is a capitalist solution to this, and not a feminist one. We let women down when instead of seeking just societies we sell them injections or oral contraceptives. She quotes Betsy Hartmann who calls population control a “substitute” for social justice that holds back the emancipation of women.

Real reproductive choice relies on women having control over their own lives and equal power to men and this can only come with economic development. Developed nations are uninterested in providing aid for such countries, because they are active in their exploitation via cooperation with corrupt governmnents and via the corporate power wielded over those countries. The people are purposely kept poor so that developed countries (or at least their corporations) can become richer. (p 81-82)

This helps make sense of the fact that the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s strategy for helping women in Africa and South Asia involves giving millions of these women the Depo Provera shot. The Gates Foundation partners with Pfizer, who makes the Depo shot (p 80). This is business as usual, and profits are being made in the name of “population control”.

Grigg-Spall also emphasizes the importance of female biology in discussing these issues. After all, as women “our experience of life is connected to our biology.” As she says,

Taking the pill might be seen as an act of trying to get beyond femaleness. As femaleness in our culture is understood in the negative, escaping its confines is good and progressive. Any dislike we develop of being female and of having a female body is rooted in the history of female bodies being seen as problematic and in need of male control (p 104).

Such claims have no doubt been the source of the liberal feminist claims that her book is “essentialist“. I find this accusation very suspect, as it asks us to stop speaking about our own experiences living within our female bodies. Many women are not comfortable with our bodies as they change in puberty, as they alter with pregnancy, or as they age. It is important that we are able to recognize and discuss these changes amongst ourselves without being considered “essentialist”.

Within feminism, essentialism has always referred to the feminist objection to conservative claims that the male gender stereotypes are natural for men, and that female gender stereotypes are natural for women. For example, the idea that men are better at math and women are natural caregivers. These are obviously anti-feminist claims that link our biology up with sexist behaviors that are expected of us.

These days, however, merely recognizing the relevance of female biology to our own lives is now castigated with the same “essentialist” label. This is an entirely inaccurate characterization, since the bodies we live in are obviously relevant to our experiences as women. Discussing biology was never the problem with essentialism. The problem was linking our bodies up with sexist stereotypes.

Not only is this new definition of essentialism an incorrect interpretation of the original meaning, but it asks women to stop discussing our actual lives. Feminism is about our experiences as women, so telling women they aren’t permitted to discuss these experiences is anti-feminism full stop.

I certainly believe that Grigg-Spall is correct in her observations about HBC. Women are expected to have sex “like a man” and to believe that our biology is in no way relevant to our sexuality. To me, this is as removed from our actual experiences as my cartoon uterus theme song is from the workings of my body. I’ve covered just a few of the brilliant insights that Grigg-Spall presents in her excellent book. At the very minimum, her book encourages women to see the pill from a different perspective and to become more in tune with what is happening with our own bodies. I encourage all feminists interested in reproductive freedom, misogyny in medicine, or critiques of “choice”/”sex positive” feminism to give it a read.
https://smashesthep.wordpress.com/tag/h ... igg-spall/

[slomo]

^^^^^ I know more than I will say about oral contraceptives and negative health outcomes. It's one of the many strands of thought that led me to question the existing narrative (feminist or otherwise) about sex.

Re: CAFE, I remember that event, and it's why I'm cynical about the folks I'll simply call neo-Jacobins.

And thank you for embedding a Karen Straughan link, she's about the same place I am on the issues, maybe even a bit more on the anti-feminist side than I would be. But to make the same arguments she articulates, judging from the way some RI members are acting, you'd think I had suggested murdering all girl babies.

[guruilla]

^^^^^ I know more than I will say about oral contraceptives and negative health outcomes.

Are you legally bound to silence? Or just practicing social self-preservation?

[slomo]

^^^^^ I know more than I will say about oral contraceptives and negative health outcomes.

Are you legally bound to silence? Or just practicing social self-preservation?

Social self-preservation.

[guruilla]

How do "we all know how unreliable and even untrustworthy Freud was (especially around sexual abuse of children)."? Feminism.

Absolute rejection and repudiation of Freud's theories were central to feminist criticism from the very beginning.

It may have been central to feminist criticism, but a psychological understanding and a naming of trauma and its effects could not have happened in the way it did without Freud, because his work was foundational to psychology, period. Parsing the positive from the negative contributions of Freud would be a thankless, not to say impossible task, and seems entirely unnecessary, unless someone were trying to assign special credit to certain individuals or a whole movement in order to somehow validate it. I can be grateful for pioneers in the field of trauma and abuse who were feminists and who were motivated by a desire to address an intolerable reality for women, but does gratitude mean I must be an advocate of feminism or speak only of the good points? I don't follow that logic, & it seems to be mixing up two related but separate strands: the historical deeds and influence of individual feminists, and the roots, branches, and fruit of feminism today.

See Millett, Greer, and countless others, but most particularly, Florence Rush: "She electrified a New York Radical Feminist Conference on Rape in April 1971, winning a standing ovation for her speech on what was then a startling new concept: Her theory, inspired by evidence she had collected in a facility for delinquent girls, identified familiar males — fathers, stepfathers, older brothers, uncles, neighbors and family friends — as the major sexual abusers of children, and traced the toleration of such abuse to the beginnings of history and cultural/religious customs. Family abuse had been ignored by the reigning Freudian psychologists of the day, who preferred to theorize about seductive children and girlish fantasies."
"Freud cautioned the world never to overestimate the importance of seduction, and the world listened to Freud and paid little heed to the sexual abuse of children. His theories, surrounded by scientific aura, allowed for the suppression and concealment of the sexual exploitation of the female child.”

These critiques were fundamental to explorations of the central role of trauma in oppressive systems such as the patriarchal family, and provided the philosophical and cultural shifts out of which the child abuse survivor movement grew.

Regarding Freud's position on the sexual abuse of children, some here might not be aware that, contrary to the popular belief, Freud didn't actually deny that sexual abuse of children was widespread; in a way it was even worse: he ended up denying that it could possibly be as harmful as he had at first supposed, and even argued that children were at the very least complicit with the "seduction" (& he himself was likely abused).

Ever since Jeffrey Masson wrote his book The Assault on the Truth: Freud’s Suppression of the Seduction Theory,19 there has been a widespread misconception that Freud backed down from maintaining the reality of childhood sexual abuse. The truth is exactly the opposite. Freud continued all his life to state that sexual abuse of children in his society was widespread, insisting in his final writings that “I cannot admit [that] I exaggerated the frequency [of] seduction,” that “most analysts will have treated cases in which such [incestuous] events were real and could be unimpeachably established,” that “actual seduction…is common enough,” that “the sexual abuse of children is found with uncanny frequency among school teachers and child attendants,” and that “phantasies of being seduced are of particular interest, because so often they are not phantasies but real memories.”20 What he actually “backed down” from was his initial idea that hysteria could be caused by sexual abuse, since, he said, “sexual assaults on small children happen too often for them to have any aetiological importance…”21 That is, it was because children were so commonly sexually abused in his society that Freud thought that seduction could not be the cause of hysteria. Otherwise, nearly everyone would be a hysteric! The only opinion he changed as he gained clinical experience, Freud said, was that further information now became available relating to people who had remained normal, and this led to the unexpected finding that the sexual history of their childhood did not necessarily differ in essentials from that of neurotics, and, in particular, that the part played by seduction was the same in both cases.22

The truth is that Freud and most everyone else in his society knew very well what I have since confirmed by my research into the history of child assault: that the overwhelming majority of all children throughout history were sexually abused.26 [...]

The Emotional Life of Nations by Lloyd deMause
http://psychohistory.com/books/the-emot ... f-history/

It haven't been able to check out all 34 pages of this thread, but I took the poll.
I am one of the Alchemical Androgynes.
I am a transwoman in transition, but a rather large and ugly one, so realistically, I am like some baffling mythological beast that people see out in the wild but just can't wrap their heads around so they pretend it's not there. Are there any other trans Riggies (haven't read the whole thread) out there?

I started reading Jeff's blog around Katrina and was on the first discussion board, too. I've never posted a whole lot, but I check the board regularly, especially when Strange Things happen. I really value the insight and intelligence of the community. cheers!

Hey battleship. I think this got passed over in the rapid-fire posting, and it just struck me today as a bit of a grim irony that everyone is throwing their ideas back & forth about transgenderism and yet none of us took the time to respond to your question. To answer it now: you are the first TG, transitioning or otherwise, to speak out on this thread, and I think I can speak for everyone here if I say I hope you won't feel shy about speaking out some more.

[Project Willow]

How do "we all know how unreliable and even untrustworthy Freud was (especially around sexual abuse of children)."? Feminism.

Absolute rejection and repudiation of Freud's theories were central to feminist criticism from the very beginning.

It may have been central to feminist criticism, but a psychological understanding and a naming of trauma and its effects could not have happened in the way it did without Freud, because his work was foundational to psychology, period.

I disagree. Look up the name Pierre Janet. Study the history of dissociative disorders and schizophrenia. Freud's theories dominated precisely because they were instrumental in obfuscating awareness of trauma. They served patriarchy, which must obscure awareness of trauma or it risks falling apart.

Parsing the positive from the negative contributions of Freud would be a thankless, not to say impossible task, and seems entirely unnecessary, unless someone were trying to assign special credit to certain individuals or a whole movement in order to somehow validate it. I can be grateful for pioneers in the field of trauma and abuse who were feminists and who were motivated by a desire to address an intolerable reality for women, but does gratitude mean I must be an advocate of feminism or speak only of the good points? I don't follow that logic, & it seems to be mixing up two related but separate strands: the historical deeds and influence of individual feminists, and the roots, branches, and fruit of feminism today.

Your entire contention is ignorant of the fact that the dominance of Freudian theories negatively impacted women and men for half a century, and by negatively, I mean in rates of suicide and frigidity, among women especially. Taking down Freud was essential to female liberation, and essential to illuminating the role of trauma in our lives.

My point is not that you should be an advocate of whatever manifestation of feminism is prominent today, but that your refusal to study the subject and its history leaves you in a position of pissing on the people upon whose shoulders you stand, and ignorant of an ideology that could provide you with great insight about where we are today, and how many female people view the world. On a purely intellectual level, there is no honest argument for rejecting something you do not as yet possess a full understanding.

[guruilla]

My point is not that you should be an advocate of whatever manifestation of feminism is prominent today, but that your refusal to study the subject and its history leaves you in a position of pissing on the people upon whose shoulders you stand, and ignorant of an ideology that could provide you with great insight about where we are today, and how many female people view the world. On a purely intellectual level, there is no honest argument for rejecting something you do not as yet possess a full understanding.

Obey, or be quiet? Talk about the killing mother!

You express here an informed opinion which you then prop up by telling me that it is the correct one, and that I am insulting you and countless others for not going away and doing the necessary study to know that it is the correct one, before coming back and agreeing with you.

Some argument! Who's pissing on whom here?

I don't agree about Freud. Sorry. If you like, I can tell you which books to read so you will understand why.

[82_28]

Willow, quit telling Guruilla or anybody for that matter what they "should" be thinking. Number one it is not cool. I personally don't give a fuck about what other people are and I do not hold grudges. But I will freely point out glaring inconsistencies at will. Sorry, PW, but you are the poster girl for being inconsistent.