the ch!cktionary

1 Sep 2010
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The Patriarchy Wants A Lesson On Privilege 101

I’ve spent the better part of the morning following along in a debate between robot-heart-politics (a favorite blogger of mine) and a white, male reader of hers who “has trouble believing someone was oppressed just because they said so”. robot-heart-politics provided a bunch of studies demonstrating institutional biases against women in the maths and sciences, which the reader deemed “insufficient” and lacking in scientific rigor. What the reader wants is “a quantifiable model for white male oppression”. Not only is this impossible to produce (for reasons I’ll go into below) but it’s also highly unreasonable to expect an oppressed class to school a privileged class on what constitutes discrimination. I mean, really? I don’t expect gay people to prove to me, a straight person, that there’s actually homophobia. I don’t expect poor people to prove to me, a Harvard grad, that hunger and poverty are widespread problems. And if someone asked me, as an Asian person, to “prove” to them that racism exists, I would laugh all the way back to Chinatown. Marginalized groups are not responsible for explaining their marginalization to you. If you are actually concerned, you would take the initiative to do some research yourself instead of showing up at some oppressed group’s door step demanding a list of citations for things (racism, sexism, etc.) that are proven time and time again in the real world.

But back to why a “quantifiable” model doesn’t work:

1. No perfect model exists to measure this kind of thing and if a model like that did exist, a grad student would be the one inputting variables and determining which are important enough to include and which aren’t. And humans — especially overworked grad students — are prone to making errors, using their personal judgment, and being biased by the agendas of the lead researcher, etc. I don’t know what the White Male Reader’s academic background is, but a lot of social science is murky and vague and inconclusive and doesn’t purport to offer definite, hard answers. This is not chem lab. But as he’s already said, “But to me, if it can’t be quantified using rigorous analysis it doesn’t exist. Sorry!” Um, okay, so then a lot of things don’t exist in your mind. Can someone quantify my love for my dog versus my love for my partner? If they can’t do that, does this mean that I don’t actually have these feelings? Not everything in the world can be quantified. And even if it can and even if it bears the name of some academic journal, it doesn’t mean that it’s the Absolute Truth. (You think the editors of academic journals aren’t prone to personal biases when it comes to which papers they accept?) What you’re asking for is impossible to produce, even if the world’s leading academics work on it.

2. The “epistemological rigor” demanded by robot-heart-politics’ reader is a much higher standard than what is asked by even the criminal justice system. If a bunch of children claim abuse, say at the hands of a religious institution, do we ask them to offer airtight proof? Even if no one was around to witness said abuse? Even if they only have their memories and personal experiences? And when they come back with others who had shared experiences, do we write off all their stories as “anecdotes” that don’t prove a greater trend — that trend being that institutionally, there is a problem that needs to be addressed? At the point where hordes of people start coming forward with their own horror stories, it’s time to shut up and listen, no? You have here a bunch of folks who, yes, are citing their own anecdotes of discrimination, but who constitute such a large group that I find it hard to believe anyone could ignore that these are institutional problems. By demanding undeniable proof and refusing to listen until you receive said proof, you’re essentially telling oppressed people to spend time proving their oppression or else be taken for liars and/or crybabies.

For more on privilege, read this fantastic post by robot-heart-politics.

24 Aug 2010
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A Particularly Odd Trespass of Personal Space

Is peeking under women’s umbrellas the new catcall? Because this happened to me yesterday in Brooklyn as I was crossing the intersection of Metropolitan and Bedford. I was so utterly outraged that someone would look under my umbrella, lick his lips, and say, “Oh my”, that I couldn’t even find the composure to ask the guy what the fuck he thought he was doing. I guess he wanted to see the head that went along with the body he’d presumably been checking out from afar? I have no idea.

So next time you are scurrying about a major urban center, face hidden from view, happy as a clam, please realize that at any moment, a creepazoid might stick HIS HEAD under YOUR UMBRELLA. Be prepared. Nothing is sacred anymore.

17 Aug 2010
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“Long before I consciously identified as a feminist, and even while I was calling myself a good Southern Baptist girl, I preferred the term ‘Ms.’ to ‘Miss’ simply because I didn’t want any part of anything that encompassed both Miss America and Little Miss Muffet.”

— Shelby Knox, “Is it ‘Miss’ or ‘Ms’? Does it Still Matter?”

Like Shelby, I cringe when a stranger calls me “Miss Chen”. It sounds infantile, even belittling, since the title strikes me as unbearably girlish. And while I have no problem copping to the fact that I am, in fact, pretty young, I’m resentful that my male friends get to be men all their lives and treated and referred to as such (with the catch-all “Mr.”), while my title depends on whether I get hitched. Sadly, I’m stuck with the “Miss” label until I’m 1) married and/or 2) wrinkly. The latter is inevitable, and the former is, well, not part of my game plan.

How do you guys feel about Ms. versus Miss? I always use “Ms.” when it comes to airline tickets and the like, but I’m fine with being called “Miss Lena” by friends. When non-acquaintances call me “Miss Chen” though, it totally rubs me the wrong way and comes off as really presumptuous. Perhaps the difference is that I know my friends have benign intentions?

Interested in the history behind the title? Refer to Shelby’s post (linked above) for a brief history lesson on the evolution of “Ms.” from its origin in the 1767 to its emergence during the second-wave as “a title for women, like Mr. for men, that was free of reference to age or marital status.”

17 Aug 2010
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What Were You Wearing When You Were Sexually Harassed?

Jezebel had an interesting post up last week that discusses how there’s really no rhyme or reason to why women get sexually harassed. The victim-blaming set might like to point fingers at skanky wardrobes, but when women donning sweatpants, parkas, and stained shirts are still being catcalled, grabbed, or outright assaulted, it kind of demonstrates this behavior isn’t provoked by women’s clothing choices, but rather, by the appallingly high tolerance society has for misogyny. I’ve always cringed at the claim that if only I’d dress more conservatively, then I might not be the target of unwanted attention. First off, I don’t give a damn how other people dress on the street and I certainly don’t think the outfit they chose before they walked out of the house that morning justifies my attempt to intrude on their physical space. And second, as the Jezebel poll indicated, it really doesn’t matter what I wear anyway, because no woman is immune from these types of comments unless she seriously works on cultivating the best possible “bitch face”. (This is a mini-project of mine.)

I’ve had notoriously bad reactions to street harassment in the past. When my 18-year-old self was groped on a bus en route to an internship in Los Angeles one summer, I actually grabbed the guy as he was exiting at my stop and kneed him several times on a major intersection. When I was 21 and living in Beacon Hill, the preferred residential community of Boston’s wealthy senior citizen population, I was informed by some dudes in a BMW at a stop sign that I had “dropped [their] cocks in [my] mouth”. I was horrified that this was happening in a neighborhood that I had formerly considered pristine and also horrified that someone’s grandmother might have overheard since they were practically yelling at my friend and I down a major pedestrian road (Charles Street). So I kicked their car in a knee-jerk reaction. This led to one of them chasing us down the block, threatening to call the cops, and accusing us of being crazy bitches.

Do not get me wrong. I don’t typically attack random dudes; this is restricted for the worst offenders. Usually, I ignore guys, tell them I have a boyfriend, or if it’s a non-lewd compliment, say thank you and move on. Given that I’m pretty relaxed and don’t go around yelling my pretty little head off like some feminist caricature, it usually means that something extremely offensive was said or done in order for me to lose it (as I did in the above mentioned scenarios). But though my friends (and readers) are generally supportive and very “You go, girl!” about it — even if I just totally put my personal safety on the line (a stupid thing I would not recommend) — I never cease to be amazed by the people who are outraged, simply outraged, that I would fight back with a disproportionate response. One time, I blogged about the topic of retaliation against sexual harassment and the only comment I received was the following:

You are SOOOOOOO full of sh!t. This, “non-violence” stance coming from the person who violently kicked a car because she had been catcalled. You’re lucky you didn’t get the crap beat out of you- you certainly deserve it. Still a piece of sh!t after all this time. No maturation.

So apparently, it’s perfectly acceptable to be yelled at, followed, groped, or otherwise pursued despite my growing disinterest, discomfort, and concern for my personal safety, but if I dare retaliate, then I am the Bad Evil Crazy Woman. Do you know why people think that the few girls who do fight back are crazy? Because there are practically none of us and everyone believes that when a chick gets pissed, it’s because of PMS and not, say, systematic harassment. We’re just emotional. There’s nothing political about our personal rage!

Most of the time, I think the fringe groups of second-wave feminism were completely off their rockers. But then I read comments like the one above and think, “Hmm, separatist communes with no dudes and compulsory lady-love? Not such a bad idea, perhaps.”

4 Aug 2010
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Musings of an Inappropriate Woman: My feminist agenda. What's yours?

Check out Aussie feminist/journalist/pop sociologist Rachel Hills’ follow-up to my post on my feminist agenda:

Last week, Lena Chen wrote a post entitled ‘What my feminist agenda looks like’, in response to this post on Feministe, and to comments that it was outside feminists’ jurisdiction to care about issues such as poverty, class, race or disability.

It got me thinking about what my own feminist agenda might look like. I went to a school where liberal feminism was pushed down our throats with the same enthusiasm the final year syllabus was (which is to say, with great enthusiasm). We could be leaders! We could do anything we wanted! We would rule the world! It wasn’t a message that overly appealed to me: not just because it was elitist, or even because I didn’t particularly know what I wanted to do, but because it didn’t resonate with anything I actually cared about.

Feminism really started to interest me when I was in my later years of high school and early years of university. I started to read Germaine Greer and old issues of Bust magazine, and found that feminism - much like the theorists my lecturers were introducing me to - provided a framework for articulating things I instinctively knew but had never had the words to express myself.

So with that in mind, this is the feminist agenda that best encapsulates what I care about, and what my work is geared towards.

- A feminism that shows how the personal is influenced by the political and the social. That questions conventional wisdoms around sex, gender, race and class - eg, men have a biological need to chase women, earning more money makes you a better person - and the ways in which they are constructed as true and normal.

- A feminism that appreciates subtlety. That understands that politics happens on a micro level as much as it does through big organs such as government, the military and the media - and that usually these organs are shaped less by a desire to fuck people over, than by a different set of values and understandings about the world. A feminism that is willing to engage with these values in order to change them.

- A feminism that doesn’t set up a false dichotomy of good feminists vs evil anti-feminists. That cares as much about encouraging self-styled progressives to engage with and confront their own privilege as it does about drawing attention to external boogeymen. As they say in Avenue Q, “everyone’s a little bit racist/classist/sexist sometimes”, and ignoring it doesn’t many it go away.

- A feminism that is more concerned with challenging sexism, racism, classicism, homophobia and transphobia than it is with shaming sexists, racists, classists, homophobes and transphobes. That plays the ball, not the individual.

- A feminism that carves out new language to describe and make sense of problems that currently have no name. (As I am trying to do with The Sex Myth.)

- A feminism that engages with the substance of people’s everyday lives. That identifies the issues different groups are engaging with, and applies a sociopolitical lens to them in a useful way. (As I try to do with my women’s magazine articles.)

It’s far from perfect - but hey, as we’ve covered here before, I’m not perfect either.

What does your feminist (or broader political) agenda look like?

29 Jul 2010
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“As a queer, femme, sometimes female trans* person, as a disabled person, as a mentally ill person, as a poor person, I can state with utter certainty that feminism as a movement has done fucking nothing to help me. Has in fact harmed me directly and personally. I have seen how feminism treats women like me and non-white women and various women whose lives do not fit a very narrow definition of woman and oppression. Non-white women are expected to be grateful — and to display appropriate gratitude — for a movement that failed to consider their lives and experiences and needs and did nothing much for them. Trans* feminine folk are ejected from women’s spaces because we make real women uncomfortable; trans* masculine folk are welcomed into those spaces because their genders aren’t considered real either and there’s a wildly objectivising fetishism of their identities and bodies in certain circles. Sex workers and illegal substance users are, ah, strongly discouraged from participating in feminist events (You can support us from over there. In the dark. Where no one can see you. Where there will be no expectation of reciprocal support.). Disabled people find community meetings and events inaccessible and are shamed for not participating as currently non-disabled folk do — going to meetings and street protests is real activism; writing blogs and being present on-line is not.

We have very different needs. We tend to need things rather low on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs: food, water, shelter, security of body and family and health. The fraction of women in the population of CEOs of Fortune 500 companies is of very low importance to me. I need help to stay alive — as does everyone else I’m just more obvious about it — and the feminist movement isn’t going to get me that. The disability rights movement is and a good portion of feminism doesn’t give a shit about disability rights. Nice words maybe but not to the point of, y’know, doing shit. We’re still bitter about the disability tent at the Beijing women’s conference being inaccessible.

So yeah. If y’all still haven’t worked out the connections here, we say “fuck feminism” because feminism has been saying “fuck you” to us for a long, long time.

You want to flounce? Flounce. Take your wounded privilege and good riddance.”

— kaninchenzero at the aforementioned Feministe thread (via withnoapology:chelle-shock:dorianisms:thecurvature)

29 Jul 2010
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What My Feminist Agenda Looks Like

After wading through the 300+ comments on yesterday’s controversial Feministe post, I did some thinking about what my own feminist agenda consists of. When you identify so strongly with movement, it can be very hurtful to hear someone say “Fuck it!” in response. But I didn’t get offended because I saw where the writer, Maia, was coming from. Mainstream feminism, particularly the second-wave, has a tendency to treat women as a class in themselves without any regard for the fact that they are differentiated by race, class, sexual orientation, ethnic and national origin, etc. Take for example the issue of the glass ceiling, which has dominated mainstream feminist discourse for decades. What do poor women care about an extra woman CEO or two? Doesn’t that just mean that now there’s a woman in charge of organizing the exploitation of those less well-off? Gender equality does not always equate to progress, not when it serves only to benefit those who are already at the top.

One of you guys commented on my follow-up entry (“Why Saying ‘Fuck Feminism’ Can Be Productive”) with this:

You have no proof that our feminist sisters in history were “racist, classist, and ethnocentric.” They simply couldn’t - and shouldn’t have been expected to - fight every single battle. They fought on behalf of WOMEN, without any attempt to exclude particular groups of women. They can’t fight for women AND for all socioeconomic ills at the same time. You can only tackle one agenda at a time. A good life lesson in general.

I’m not going to regurgitate all of Women’s Studies 101 here, but the third-wave arose from the fact that many women felt excluded or even thrown under the bus by second-wavers. The struggle for contraception and reproductive rights allowed White women to choose to not have babies, while their minority counterparts found themselves having to defend their right to motherhood (see: forced sterilization, the purposeful placement of abortion clinics in “urban” neighborhoods, etc.). Mainstream feminists were considerably less concerned with the racist implications of arguments like, “Abortion reduces crime and encourages social stability.” The history of homophobia within feminism is pretty well accounted for (see: Lavender Menace and everything Germaine Greer has ever written about transwomen). And let’s not even get into issues like female genital circumcision, which Western feminists can cry outrage at, all while ignoring the part we play in causing poverty abroad — a far more pressing issue confronting women in the Third World.

I reject the argument that feminists can’t fight for women and for poor, queer, disabled, and non-White people. Because guess what? Many women are poor, queer, disabled, and non-White. For them, being part of the latter means many more disadvantages and much more discrimination than just being a woman. A feminist agenda has to recognize that women are not simply all oppressed in the exact same way because they share a gender. A feminist agenda has to recognize that some women are oppressors themselves, that the advancement of some women may come at others’ expense, that gender oppression is particularly damaging for women who are already disadvantaged in other ways, that these disadvantages are not side concerns but of primary importance. A feminist agenda only concerned with “women” as an abstract class of people is not a feminist agenda I can stand behind.

28 Jul 2010
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Why Saying "Fuck Feminism" Can Be Productive

I’m a feminist and I often think “Fuck Feminism”. I’m glad Maia is gutsy enough to say it out loud (in this latest Feministe post), even though her point seems to be lost on the outraged commenters.

Feminism, like many progressive social movements (LGBT rights included), is not always concerned with the issues affecting poor women, women of color, disabled women, queer women, the list goes on. And the list includes, to some extent, women like me.

I say this as a woman of color born to working class immigrants, neither of whom know anything of the feminism I embraced during my years at an Ivy League university where I felt like the odd girl out because of the money I didn’t come from. I can call myself a feminist and accept at the same time that mainstream feminism didn’t and still doesn’t represent women like my mother. I can call myself a feminist and sometimes think myself “Fuck feminism!” because I don’t agree with its elitist brand of progress. Sometimes, I feel like I’m drowning in privilege because of who I associate with, where I live, what I do for fun. But though I went to Harvard and fulfilled the supposedly obtainable American Dream, I’m not under any illusions that this is because of feminism. Feminism made it possible for women to go to college, but the women they were concerned with were not women like me. The second-wave sold us the idea that little girls can do anything boys can do, but the only people who can do anything they want in this country are the people with money.

“Fuck feminism!” doesn’t mean that gender equality isn’t important, but it does mean that society and even progressive movements value some people more than others. It means that those with the luxury of time and the luxury of capital can set the agenda that women like my mother don’t even have time to read. This is a fact that has gone unacknowledged for far too long within the Feminist Establishment. And if it takes someone shouting “Fuck feminism!” for everyone to wake up to it, then I’ll be there shouting it with them.

28 Jul 2010
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Anonymous asked: Have you and Patrick talked about long term plans as a couple? I know you don't necessarily believe in marriage but do you see yourself with him for a while?

You think I’m staying in frigid-ass Boston for the next two years just for shits and giggles? The Roomie is definitely a major factor in how I’ve decided upon my future plans. Part of the reason why we moved into our current apartment (less than a year ago) is because I started living with him and Hamlet, which necessitated much more room than our then-one-bedroom. Now that I’ve graduated, I’m not going to the ditch the dude and dog and leave them with extra closet space while I seek my fortune in warmer climates. And besides, I would miss the two boys terribly. So I’ll be in Boston the next couple years as Patrick finishes his PhD and where we go afterward remains a topic of discussion but I can really only speculate at this point.

This is the reason why I’ve never understood the supposed “magic” of marriage. I don’t need a ring on my finger to make a commitment to someone (and this goes for friends as well as lovers). In my relationship, not being married or ever aspiring to be married doesn’t get in the way of making long-term plans with each other.

27 Jul 2010
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I should give credit where it’s due. Though I came to many conclusions about weight loss and body image on my own, Patrick was a great source of support and knowledge when I started exercising and some of that borrowed knowledge is in the previous post. Like me, he doesn’t have any medical expertise, but he picked up a lot of health-related knowledge from rowing crew competitively in Germany and at Yale. And given that I’ve had plenty of wacked-out ideas about diets in the past, I’m glad that he was a voice of reason and taught me that moderation (rather than deprivation) is the best path.

Related: Competitive athletes are also subject to all kinds of ridiculous body requirements. The Roomie, for example, used to only weigh 165 pounds (he’s 6’ 2”) because he had to meet the weight limit for the lightweight team. Which is insane because he’s twenty pounds heavier now. Though the last post focused mostly on women’s beauty ideals, they’re not the only ones who are susceptible to unhealthy ideas about their bodies; men are too. Another reason why a strict criteria for how we look doesn’t serve anyone’s best interests.