Greetings

whatmakespistachionuts:

The male type is characterised by a detached, if not outright dysfunctional, sensibility: retreat from a perplexing and frustrating emotional world into an intellectual domain in which their precocious facility with words and images affords them a degree of mastery and skewed self-understanding. “Girls” are then somewhat unfortunately positioned as gateways into the abandoned realm of sensual and emotional connection, and alternately idealised as muses/sex-goddesses and denigrated as (variously) narcissists, seducers, trivial beings, neurotic leeches, etc. (Dworkin’s inventory of misogynist stereotypes remains one of the most comprehensive and deeply-felt). Duncan Thaw’s alternating attraction towards and contempt for Kate Caldwell is exemplary here, as is his delirious observation that “men are pies that bake and eat themselves, and the recipe is hate”.

Young female intellectuals (again, I’m talking about the characters one encounters in books, such as the memoirs mentioned above) seem to have problems not so much with “boys” as with themselves: boys are a nuisance insofar as they behave unfeelingly and unpleasantly, rather than because they represent an unattainable connection with some inaccessible reality. It is a matter of reconciling, or finding ways of living with not being able to reconcile, one’s full and contradictory humanity with the simplified and diminished humanity encoded as “femininity”; resisting (rather than transcending) confinement, the “women’s room” of narrowed scope and lowered expectations. The problem is then one of knowing what to do with oneself, where to put all that stuff for which there appears to be neither place nor name.

—Dominic Fox

some thoughts on ecofeminism, radical feminism, essentialism and transfeminist thought

radtransfem:

I find it interesting and sad that radical feminism and ecofeminism are so commonly described as essentialist, given that to my knowledge they are the two feminist tendencies with the most explicit critiques of “essences”. Radical feminists challenge the existence of a female “gender essence”, which encodes women’s oppressed condition, and argue instead that women’s situation is created through social structures and women’s own resistance to those structures. And ecofeminists challenges the existence of a special “human essence” that inheres most strongly in white men and is linked to rationality, transcendence and control over the nature realm (understood as the realm not possessing that essence).

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anneboyer:

do you think men will sit together in groups of themselves talking only to themselves? do you think that when women talk men will interrupt women?  do you think men will explain to women what the women already know? do you think men will act as if the women said nothing at all? do you think that women will sit quietly and say nothing unless asked directly? do you think women will dismiss argument and abstraction out of self-protection or exasperation at the way they are excluded, ignored, and punished? do you think there will be women who insult themselves or pretend to be stupid? do you think there will be women who will just sit there and watch? do you think that women who do not sit there and watch will be understood to be crazy or shrill or angry or foolish or unserious? do you think that there will be women who will be brilliant, original, and vital, whose brilliance and originality will be understood to be mad?  do you think men who are not briliant, original, and vital, will be understood to be so? do you think that women who do not sit quietly but have effectively watched the men and taken notes and made extensive preparations to behave in ways to please them will please them and then be used to excoriate the other women? do you think you think there are women who will worry under these social conditions that to be respected is a nightmare like being mocked? do you think that women will know the boundaries which circumscribe their behavior and know full well the social consequences of exceeding these boundaries? do you think women will not be divided about how to be in the boundaries? do you think there will be a fumbling struggle for solidarity? do you think there are women who will worry about their clothes, their bodies, how to obscure these bodies, how to neutralize? do you think there are men who have never once worried about how to present themselves neutrally? do you think there will be many aggressions, minor and major, of ommissions and attentions, of arrangements of bodies, of voices which speak or are silent, of ideas not said or said, of judgments made or not made, of occlusions and dominent visions, of sexual aggressions, minor and major?