This song is about the bait-and-switch that women are presented with by the femininity imperative. Because femininity is a lot of work. It is, to be frank, a real pain in the ass. If we weren’t so used to it, we’d realize that the things we are expected to do in service of perfect femininity are basically humiliating. That’s what interesting about this video–Beyonce looks extremely hot and sexually appealing, and she also seems pathetic. She is a caricature of femininity, prancing around the house dusting in an ass-showing french maid outfit and bending and sighing and fanning herself over a car engine. It’s ridiculous. She heightens femininity to an absurd level, showing us how bizarre it is. Of course, we don’t do all of the things she doing at once, thus avoiding the kind of absurd hyper-femininity on display in this video. But by going so far over the top that we smile and kind of pity her, she demonstrates how absurd all femininity is, at its core. Is the femininity performance that average women engage in before a night out at the club really so different from what she’s doing here?

And THEN. The fun part is that, after all that, after all that effort and humiliation, it doesn’t work? After all that? That’s why Beyonce’s indignation and anger in this video is perfect. She’s throwing a tantrum, almost, throwing things around and flouncing on the floor, as if to say, WHAT THE FUCK?? YOU DON’T WANT THIS? I did everything I was supposed to do, I cleaned and cooked and pranced and paraded around in bustiers and wore extremely sexy makeup! And still! Nothing? I played by the rules and the rules were A BIG LIE.

[...]

I was thinking earlier this week about the psychological effect that performing femininity must have of women, because in its purest form, it is not only humiliating, but kind of disturbing. I am thinking specifically of two videos that are getting a lot of attention, which present performances of femininity by people that are not adult women. One is deemed to be hilarious, the other disturbing.

The first is the Army Telephone video, where a bunch of military guys serving in Afghanistan do a video interpretation of Lady Gaga’s Telephone video.[...] You smile and laugh, and you think, man, those men are kind of awesome, because they are so funny! Would you ever think this about women doing these exact same things? You wouldn’t even notice. It’s of a piece with how women move through the world every day and how they are constantly presenting themselves as over-sexed sex objects in pop culture. It’s not even close to noteworthy.

The second is a dance performance by a bunch of 7-year-old girls in the style of Beyonce’s Single Ladies video. [...] The discomfort isn’t because what the outfits reveal, but what they allude to. The lace, the stockings, the corset lacing on the “bodice” are, it seems, too much like what adult women wear when they are trying to evoke maximum sexiness. Doing this dance and wearing these clothes is, in our cultural estimation, firmly in the territory of not appropriate.

I think it’s pretty telling that when femininity is performed by non-standard actors, we either get really uncomfortable or laugh our asses off. It’s not just a bait-and-switch, as the Beyonce video so effectively argues. It’s a bait and kick-you-in-the-face. It’s toxic.

I’m with you on the problematic nature of gender performativity, and your analysis of Beyonce’s song/video is spot on…but sometimes sex workers get really sick of everyone’s “pity” and sympathy. It often comes off as condescending- as if we couldn’t possibly make choices for ourselves that make sense for us, so you girls who know better just have to feel sorry for us. All women who identify as female perform their gender- not just sex workers. Save your tears for yourself, maybe? The sympathy-for-strippers gambit reminds me a lot of when the teenage virginity brigade “pities” women who “give up” their precious maidenhood before marriage.

Also, I know a lot of strippers and other women who’d resent the idea that men are buying “access” to dancers’ bodies. That language comes a little too close to sounding like rape apologists’ justifications for why strippers get assaulted, to me. Exotic dancers perform for men, they don’t give men “access” for a fee.

Many documentary photographic projects that deal with trans issues exploit the genders of their subjects, pointing to an "otherness" or inappropriately exoticizing their bodies. "A Series of Questions" seeks instead to make visible the transphobia and gender-baiting that can become part of everyday interactions and lives, forming a fuller picture of the various lived experiences. In so doing, this work contrasts with the dehumanizing approaches that predominate the images made of transgender and transsexual people, which often focus solely on their trans status or use them to further a specific point about social construction and gender.

Boy, we tell ya! We spotted this picture and thought it couldn’t get any worser...until we spotted the one below of him turned around!!!

Pop the top and peep fruity-pops’ backside

The sole purpose of posting these images was to hold this man up to ridicule and the Bossip commenters did not disappoint.

Socially we are very invested in maintaining the gender binary and the moment someone does not perform gender to match the constructed norms they are disciplined. How does this man posing for a picture really become threatening, unless we have decided that certain bodies are abnormal specifically to maintain underserved privileges?

Gender is something that is a concern for everyone because we are all disciplined. Women can be attacked for not being suitably feminine, gay men are called swishy and effeminate, the trans community faces various marginalizations including but not limited to discrimination in employment and housing, and even heterosexual cisgender men can quickly find themselves the center of ridicule, the moment they admit they are not he-men.

We spread the social lie that everyone is allowed to pursue happiness as long as it is not damaging to others, but clearly this is not the case. Even though we know that the gender binary is a false construct and damaging to so many people, we continue to perpetuate it in many aspects of life.

Gender continues to be a very important area to organize around, specifically because it effects millions of people across the globe everyday. And when we ignore it’s significance because it may not seem readily apparent, we set the stage for our own maginalization.

As my mother explained to me, I felt a familiar sadness inside of me. She told me that she eventually decided she couldn’t go through with it because it would be too big of a shame on her, and she didn’t want to commit a sin, even though giving birth meant gambling with financial ruin. She had internalized the shaming of women who had abortions that it impeded her own decision-making process. Certainly, she wasn’t forcefully coerced into having an abortion (or coerced out of having one), which I find dominates discussions about abortions, and for good reason. But, the culture of shaming matters too. I don’t want to live in a world like this. If it did not break several laws of the universe, I wish I could have been there to support my mother, comfort her, and tell her that whatever decision she made, to terminate or not to terminate, had to be made for what was best for her, not for what other people thought of her.

Often, you see anti-choicers relaying stories from ‘abortion survivors’, or those whose mothers made the decision to not abort (therefore everyone should). Do they want to hear my story? Unlikely. They don’t want to accept that they forgot about my rights after I was born. Every day, I have to live with the fact that my mother felt shamed out of getting an abortion. This was not a choice. The option was there for her, but she did not take it, even though she wanted to, because of the rhetoric and stigma surrounding abortion – sinful, devilish, shameful. While she says now that she doesn’t regret having me, I cannot be anything but pro-choice. I do not take pride in being the product of a forced pregnancy.

But transcultural traffic is hardly such an egalitarian affair. You say: "That there is a small but growing awareness of the literature of other cultures is, in my opinion, a liberty that only occurred because of humanity's continued struggle for "enlightenment" but this flies in the face of a vast body of historical evidence that cultural currency has been a tool of capitalist trade and colonial enterprise. Furthermore, by whose standards are you defining awareness of such literature "small"? There are many Indians who will tell you about Rustam and Sohrab, about Laila and Majnu--stories not actually from our subcontinent. And as Fatemeh Keshavarz points out, Iran has a long history of translating books into Persian.

[...] I do not understand how you can consider writers to be a proletariat worthy of defending against the elite excesses of their readers. Racefail was primarily about the impact of books on readers and how we saw the world, whether we aspired to write ourselves or not. Critiquing a book's faults because we find it hurtful, offensive, unresearched or otherwise lacking in craftsmanship is something we do in our free time, without payment, out of a sense of community with others who may have struggled against the same issues. To demand that such criticism place the needs of supporting authors above our own needs as readers devalues us.

One last thing - you say in the beginning of your essay that ethnocentrism is "a flaw that a lot of cultures fall prey to (Germany being the primary culprit during World War II)".

I strongly urge you to reconsider this statement. Germany was certainly not the primary culprit of ethnocentrism during World War II, given the glorification of the British Empire and the neo-colonial national pride of the U.S., or indeed, any of the ethnocentric strains within the patriotic anti-colonial movements in large swathes of Asia and Africa. If Germany is to be accused of being the primary culprit of practising anything, it is Anti-Semitism and genocide on an industrialised scale never seen before, though both have happened before and since in many other nations and cultures.

the_future_modernes

‘In this entire store, there is no skirt for me?’ I said. ‘You are joking.’ I was very suspicious and thought that the saleslady just might be too tired to help me. At least I could understand that. But the lady added a condescending judgment, which sounded to me like an Imam’s fatwa. It left no room for discussion: ‘You are too big!’ she said.

‘I am too big compared to what?’ I asked, looking at her intently, because I realised that I was facing a critical cultural gap here.

‘Compared to a size six,’ came the saleslady’s reply.

Her voice had a clear-cut edge to it that is typical of those who enforce religious laws. ‘Size four and six are the norm,’ she went on, encouraged by my bewildered look. ‘Deviant sizes, such as the one you need, can be bought in special stores.’

[...] ‘I come from a country where there is no size for women’s clothes,’ I told her. ‘I buy my own material and the neighbourhood seamstress makes me the silk or leather skirt I want. Neither the seamstress nor I know exactly what size my new skirt is. No one cares about my size in Morocco as long as I pay taxes on time. Actually, I don’t know what my size is, to tell you the truth.’

The saleswomen laughed merrily and said that I should advertise my country as a paradise for stressed working women. ‘You mean you don’t watch your weight?’ she inquired, with more than a tinge of disbelief in her voice. Then, after a brief moment of silence, she added in a lower register, as if talking to herself: ‘Many women working in highly paid fashion-related jobs could lose their positions if they didn’t keep a strict diet.’

Her words sounded so simple, but the threat they implied was so cruel. I realised for the first time that maybe ‘size six’ was a more violent restriction imposed on women than the Muslim veil. Quickly I said goodbye so as not to make any more demands on the saleslady’s time or involve her in any more unwelcome, confidential exchanges about age-discriminating salary cuts. A surveillance camera was probably watching us both.

Yes, I thought as I wandered off, I have finally found the answer to my harem enigma. Unlike the Muslim man, who uses space to establish male domination by excluding women from the public arena, the Western man manipulates time and light. He declares that in order to be beautiful, a woman must look 14 years old. If she dares to look 50 or, worse, 60, she is beyond the pale. By putting the spotlight on the female child and framing her as the ideal of beauty, he condemns the mature woman to invisibility. In fact, the modern Western man enforces one of Immanuel Kant’s 19th-century theories: To be beautiful, women have to appear childish and brainless. When a women looks mature and self-assertive, or allows her hips to expand, she is condemned as ugly. Thus, the walls of the European harem separate youthful beauty from ugly maturity.

Western attitudes, I thought, are even more dangerous and cunning than the Muslim ones because the weapon used against women is time. Time is less visible and more fluid than space. The Western man uses images and spotlights to freeze female beauty within an idealised childhood, and forces women to perceive aging – the normal unfolding of the years – as a shameful devaluation. ‘Here I am, transformed into a dinosaur,’ I caught myself saying aloud as I went up and down the rows of skirts in the store, hoping – to no avail – to prove the saleslady wrong.

isiscaughey

You know, I'm disturbed by how often the male characters who treat people (especially women) like crap are the fandom darlings. They become the woobie who can do no wrong, because he's deep, he has layers, he's had bad things happen to him, he's misunderstood (especially by all those evil female characters). They often have huge communities devoted to them and metric tons of fic describing how wonderful and perfect they are. I'm not trying to criticize people for loving the characters they love. We all have our preferences, and deeply complex characters are interesting, and often feel more real.

What's really bothering me here are the gender politics that go on in fandom, and the double standard between the way female characters are treated versus male characters.

Let's take Tony DiNozzo from NCIS. Yes, I like him too. He is a complex character, he's had some wonderful moments of heroism, and he has struggled with some tough times in his life. But let's be honest: he's rude, he's dismissive, he bullies people, he objectifies women constantly, and he also tends to blame women ("it's always the wife "). Before anyone jumps in to accuse me of misunderstanding poor Tony, let's take a step back and deconstruct things a bit.

Take some time and really, truly, and honestly think about this: if Tony was instead a woman, let's say Tonia, what would you think about her? When she constantly objectified men while simultaneously dismissing and blaming them, how would you feel? When she bullied, belittled, and tormented Tim, would it seem just as funny (because, after all, she really does love Tim like a brother, right)?

But what does it matter if we bash female characters? They're only fictional, after all. I'll just say this- I don't think it's a good idea to spend a lot of time disparaging and despising women, even if they aren't real, as that's the sort of thing that can become a habit.

bcbgrl33

Thus fandom became infatuated with this pairing, bashing anyone who was not for Ten/Rose. With the intrusion of this Black woman- who was just as capable and intelligent, if not more so, than Rose- fandom went nuts. No one could replace their Rose; thus, Martha was made by fandom to feel unwelcomed and unworthy of any of her accomplishments in the season, especially in comparison to Rose, the epitome of femininity and pureness.

What really ticked off a lot of Martha fans was that her very real feelings toward the Doctor (bolstered by the Chemistry between David Tennant and Freema Agyeman) were downplayed or seen as intrusive towards the poor Doctor, who was 'clearly' just trying to get over Rose, his true love. Her feelings towards the Doctor were seen as petty, annoying, and uncalled for by fans. He was supposed to be with Rose and their was no 'evidence' to support Ten/Martha ship. The writers helped fuel this idiotic thinking by writing her as worthy of only “One Trip”, so as not to seemingly replace Rose.

[...] With that being said, I love love love Uhura as well because she helped save the world with her inteligence, was assertive and clever, and on top of being incredibly skilled at what she did, she gets the guy. What's more to love? But inspite of her positive attributes, all of these are downplayed by fandom in both communities. It just seems that whenever their is a strongly written Black female character and a hint that they are sexual or romantic towards the Lead, there is a loud, vocal protest from fandom (as you can see with the backlash between Uhura and Martha). It is the same stuff different year.

inkstone

I do think, however, that these videos are a good illustration of how the criticism of WSJ's editorial is justified at times. Because, to be honest, there's a part of me that says the Big 3 remaining so static -- I mean, the order shuffles occasionally but it's always One Piece, Naruto & Bleach -- can't be healthy in terms of artistic creation and story innovation. And I say that as someone who just got into One Piece and totally understands now why it's so popular in Japan and really admires the structure & execution of the plot. That can't be good for the manga industry, you know? Since I'm fairly sure part of the reason the current Big 3 are the current Big 3 is very strongly tied to multimedia franchises and marketing. In other words, if there's not a strong component for multimedia opportunity, it's not going to take off.

And from a creator standpoint, that... is really problematic.

inkstone

What got me to thinking about this? I was hanging out recently with this girl I used to date before I transitioned. We had a few drinks, shared a few laughs and caught up on old times. It was nice. Then when the time came to say goodnight, she moved in to make out with me. And that's when she cast me in my prior sex role - without even a second thought.

When I say "cast me in my prior sex role," I'm not referring to the kiss. I mean, I am in fact attracted to men and generally consider myself hetero, but that doesn't mean I have an aversion to kissing another woman. So the kissing was no biggie. It was the hugging part that got to me. In fact, it caused me to abruptly end the embrace due to my overwhelming feeling of awkwardness.

The reason? She automatically threw her arms around my neck. And that meant that mine wound up around her waist. So, there we were, the two of us locked in a hugging position normally assumed by a couple who relates to one another based on a traditional male-female dynamic.

[...]

The fact that the position is so common and unquestioned makes me think it's due to the ingrained perception that men are the dominant sex by default. It seems that many women themselves still believe this at some deep-rooted level, so they tend to reach instinctively for the neck.

Reaching for the neck is in fact loaded with meaning, in my opinion, with the significance being that women's bodies generally tend to be much more objectified than men's. So when a woman (or someone who takes on a traditional female role in a relationship) reaches up to place her arms around her partner's neck, she is leaving her body open and available to her partner's touch -- surrendering it to her partner's hands. Also, if she has to stand on her tippy toes for it, she is that much more in a vulnerable -- or submissive -- position.

It is a horde of people thinking they have a right to decide where you belong with only an ignorant impression of your gender proclivities and expression with zero understanding of your internal sex. And their opinion is to be given credence over your own. Transpeople undergoing Harry-Benjamin style therapy for “permission” to transition know this feeling very well. It is humbling, infuriating, and leaves you feeling powerless and adrift.

And for her there’s no point at the end of it, just the threat of the removal of everything that has brought you joy, the threat that all of this can be taken away because you were suspicious. Now the public and an arbitrary standard noone fully understands can remove the one passion that has defined your life and remove from you the dream of a little girl (to compete, perchance to medal in the Olympic games, to bring honor to your country and family, and most importantly to yourself).

Gone in an instant.

So when the test came back that she is in fact a form of intersex, a condition that is inconsistently ruled upon, that giant maw of uncertainty grew wider still as well as increasing the amount of vitriolic speculation amongst the public over how much advantage it has given her (and little examination over the possibility of none above the rest of her nongendered abnormalities).

Thankfully, her country is fighting for her, though she has already dropped out of her next race as the rumors continue to fly and as the deliberating bodies continue to put her training and competitions on hold until they decide what to do with the rest of her life.

And again, not hyperbole, if she is found to be “too manly” for the arbitrary standard (testosterone levels and receptors, something not similarly examined or enforced in male athletes outside of doping laws), she will be barred from competing in female competitions as well as likely male competitions. She’d be struck out from that euphoric moment of dreaming of an Olympic medal she has worked her entire life training for to never being able to run in a competition again.

As such, this should only surprise the terminally devoid of empathy.

Caster Semenya has been placed on Suicide Watch and yet another paper reporting on it decides her gender for her declaring her “proved a hermaphrodite”.

The world is trying to enforce their ideas on gender on her, a deliberative body will decide if she’s “too secretly male” to compete as she always has without incident or complaint for 18 years, to decide if she will ever be allowed to run at a moment most athletes begin the fevered dream and focus that they might be able to make a run at an Olympic gold medal, perhaps even being considered a favorite.

But hey, she “may” be allowed to keep the one gold medal she won though her competitor “may” also be awarded one as well you know to make clear what they think of Caster.

And so, this bright beautiful young butch woman is under suicide watch.

I end with this quote from lawmaker Butana Komphela, from the South African sports committee: “She is like a raped person. She is afraid of herself and does not want anyone near her. If she commits suicide, it will be on all our heads. The best we can do is protect her and look out for her during this trying time.”

No shit.

It’s time for the IAFF to get over themselves and accept the reality of gender in this world, the incongruity of sex and stop creating the type of world where they are pushing a strong woman to the brink of death “figuring out her sex for her”.

And it’s time for all of us to stop thinking ourselves the only real arbiters of someone’s real sex entirely from ignorant assumptions of gender performance.

voz_latina

And that’s even assuming that a transperson intended the prefix “cis” to mean something bad, which of course it doesn’t, but it’s your option as a cis-person to choose to even recognize any intention there at all. As a cis-person, you will never, ever have to worry about that intention beyond the mere personal hurt feelings you have about that. Transpeople are always, always having to be keenly aware of the intentions of cispeople, scrying into our words like fucking tea-leaves to see whether we are going to fuck with their human rights. So to construct this artificial world where all things are theoretically equal, to erase that very real oppression that transpeople must live with — whether you are paying attention or not — simply so you can somehow draw a parallel between the momentary twinge of discomfort you might have felt at having a word used to describe you, and the vast yawning abyss of crushing oppression that transpeople deal with, is infantile entitlement at best, and intentionally silencing at worst.

And here’s another thing: Most cispeople don’t even know what the fuck that word means. By and large, they’ve never heard of it. It only exists in the vernacular of a very small segment of the progressive movement, and that in itself is informative: That’s how de-voiced the transgendered populations are. Their words have not even approached the public consciousness. They are still in the very early stages of building their movement and ciswomen like me can live their whole lives without ever having to worry about what the “cis” part of that means. That’s fucking privilege.

[...]

Nuclear Unicorn and I have come to the table of friendship together because 1) we like each other, and 2) we recognize that we are stronger in our struggles together than apart. I am so grateful everyday that I can pick up the phone and call her and we get each other. I don’t have to explain to her what time it is. But here’s the thing: I have a loaded gun that the Patriarchy has given me. I am a cis-person; it was issued to me at birth. That gun sits on the table between us. It is a gun that, if I ever chose to use it, could totally destroy her life, or at least injure her grievously. It is a gun that I will always have forever, even if we leave the table of friendship. If, 20 years from now, Nuclear Unicorn and I have long since parted ways and, say, she goes on to become some famous author and chooses to not be out about her transition, I could cock and fire at her with a few strategic phone calls… or just casual careless babbling to people I don’t know well. There is nothing that will change that until society chooses to take the bullets out of that gun by giving Nuclear Unicorn her full human rights and social dignity, so that if I decided to pick it up and fire it at her, it will have no bullets in it, and I will look just as stupid and offensively bigoted as KKK members seem to us today.

kialio

kialio

"That man over there says that women need to be helped into carriages, and lifted over ditches, and to have the best place everywhere. Nobody ever helps me into carriages, or over mud puddles, or gives me any best place, and ain't I a woman? ... I have plowed, and planted, and gathered into barns, and no man could head me -- and ain't I a woman? I could work as much and eat as much as a man (when I could get it), and bear the lash as well -- and ain't I a woman? I have borne thirteen children and seen most all sold off to slavery and when I cried out with my mother's grief, none but Jesus heard me -- and ain't I woman?"

kialio

"Because diagnoses of hysteria represented, in part, a professional articulation of womanhood, it was a gendered - and gendering - discourse. Medical studies by Mitchell and George M. Beard suggested, further, that nervous diseases (on the continuum from dyspepsia to insanity) were also race- and class-specific: Women of color, they concluded, lacked the extreme feminine sensibility and degree of cultural refinement marking the developed neurasthenic.(7) The racial coding of hysteria (and related disturbances of the nerves) as a middle-class white woman's disease meant that it was not simply a condition of "modern" women, but also functioned as a condition for womanhood and modernity in Victorian America."

A pesar de la clara evidencia de que AOE puede prevenir la ovulación pero no detener el proceso de implantación una vez que éste ha iniciado, por lo que “no provoca un aborto”, el debate en Honduras se centró primordialmente en la AOE como abortiva.

“Esto es motivo de indignación para las mujeres en todas partes y una afrenta a los derechos humanos de las mujeres”, aseveró Indyra Mendoza, Coordinadora de la Red Lésbica Cattrachas en Honduras. “Las mujeres tienen el derecho a decidir si quieren un embarazo y cuándo tenerlo, y necesitan un acceso asequible a toda la gama de servicios anticonceptivos, los cuales deben incluir la anticoncepción de emergencia. Éste es un año electoral en Honduras y estaremos haciendo campaña para asegurar que las mujeres puedan reclamar inmediatamente el acceso legal a la AOE”.