The various posts of Melissa’s that are being cross-posted as Feminism Friday posts all originally had extensive comments threads associated with them on Shakesville. Since the introduction of Shakesville’s new commenting system (replacing Haloscan with Disqus) the links to the original Haloscan comments threads no longer appear on the Shakesville posts, although the Haloscan threads do still exist off in their orphaned section of cyberspace.

cross-posted by Melissa McEwan , originally posted at Shakesville on November 20, 2007

[Important Note to Feminist Noobs: This is a long post. It contains lots of different, though related, Feminist 101 kind of ideas about misogynist language. Please carefully read the whole post before commenting. If you don't understand one of the points that is made in the post, I highly recommend asking for clarification before issuing an opinion on it. If you make an argument in comments that has already been discredited within the post, be prepared to be thoroughly mocked.]

Andi Zeisler, co-founder (with Lisa Jervis) of Bitch magazine, wrote an interesting piece for the WaPo this weekend on “the B-word,” its cultural connotation, and its reclamation:

Bitch is a word we use culturally to describe any woman who is strong, angry, uncompromising and, often, uninterested in pleasing men. We use the term for a woman on the street who doesn’t respond to men’s catcalls or smile when they say, “Cheer up, baby, it can’t be that bad.” We use it for the woman who has a better job than a man and doesn’t apologize for it. We use it for the woman who doesn’t back down from a confrontation.

So let’s not be disingenuous. Is it a bad word? Of course it is. As a culture, we’ve done everything possible to make sure of that, starting with a constantly perpetuated mindset that deems powerful women to be scary, angry and, of course, unfeminine — and sees uncompromising speech by women as anathema to a tidy, well-run world.

…[Bitch magazine is] not about hating men but about elevating women. But too many people don’t see the difference. And, at least in part, that’s why the B-word is still such a problematic term.

Definitely read the whole thing.

I found it particularly compelling because of its pertinence not only to the sexism surrounding Hillary’s campaign which we’ve been discussing around here recently, but also because in the last week, I had a really retro and disheartening conversation about sexist language—a really retro and disheartening conversation about sexist language that I’ve had dozens of times before.

It began in the comments section of another blog, when I objected to a contributor denouncing a male public figure he didn’t like as an “all-around cunt.” Naturally, I was mocked for pointing out that demeaning and marginalizing sexist language has the capacity to make women feel demeaned and marginalized. I don’t have any relationship with the contributor who used the term, so I emailed another contributor whom I know better to inquire if using the n-word as an insult is considered appropriate at the blog, and if it would have been acceptable for the public figure to be deemed an “all-around faggot.” I was told that anything was allowable “within reasonable limits.” Racial slurs would not be tolerated or defended, but the use of sexist language was acceptable. Which, by my calculations, means that if you’re lambasting a black male public figure, calling him a stupid n—-r is out of bounds, but calling him a stupid cunt is totally cool.

I’d like to point out it’s a trade-off which insulates other black men against collateral debasement, but just debases black women in a different way, along with their sisters of all colors. I’m sure that’s just a coincidence. Ahem.

So, unlike the racial slurs that would not be neither tolerated nor defended, the misogynist slurs that would be both tolerated and defended were thusly justified:

1. The Brits use it.
2. I use it.
3. The guy who used it is “no misogynist.” He was using this term for female genitalia to insult a man, after all, and his intent was not to be misogynistic.
4. Comparing cunt to the n-word isn’t accurate and trivializes the n-word.
5. He can’t “abide” the policing of their comments threads by the PC police (i.e. me).

Quite honestly, I’ve had almost this exact same conversation before with male, self-identified liberal/progressive bloggers at whose blogs I objected to the use of sexist language, which is why I’m not identifying the blogger with whom I had this conversation. It’s far too typical for me to single him out. I was, however, particularly disappointed by the way this conversation went, because I had thought that the person with whom I was speaking would be receptive to hearing how alienating it is, if for no other reason than because it will necessarily limit their audience. I was evidently mistaken.

By which I shouldn’t be surprised, given that, as I said, I’ve had this conversation before, and it always goes the same way. So let me just respond to this point-by-point, since they’re the same responses I inevitably get in such exchanges, and all of them have been raised in the comments of Shakes on multiple occasions:

1. The Brits use it. Some segments of British society are indeed fond of using the word cunt a lot. There are pubs in London where three seconds doesn’t go by without someone shouting “yeh feckin’ cunt!” at his or her mate. And…that really has nothing to do with its use at an American blog about American politics.

It also, btw, has nothing to do with whether it’s intrinsically sexist. There are also bars in America where not three seconds pass without one guy calling another guy a fag. The frequency of its use in specific regional areas doesn’t make it not homophobic—in those areas, or anywhere else.

Relatedly, the attempt to rip misogynist slurs from their roots to try to redefine them doesn’t fly. “I’m using it in the European way” is just a cynical ploy to justify the continued use of misogynistic language that feels good to use. “Asshole” just doesn’t have the zing! of “cunt,” which is why we get these tortured explanations about how “cunt” isn’t being used in the misogynistic way, but in the British or European way, where the word’s ubiquity is fallaciously used as evidence that the word has lost all its meaning.

Throwing around the word cunt as if it has no meaning anymore—or some “new” meaning separate from gender—is ignorant and lazy, and contributes, in spite of all protestations to the contrary, to a culture of inequality.

2. I use it. My using the word cunt to describe myself and a man using it to describe another man are fundamentally different contexts. To pretend that this difference is not patently fucking obvious is what August calls a fabricated belief. No one with two brain cells still knocking together honestly believes that white people using the n-word as an insult and black people using it for any reason are equivalent, nor that a gay man describing himself as a faggot is the same as Ann Coulter describing John Edwards as a faggot. And no one should have the slightest bit of trouble wrapping their heads around the idea that my (or other women) reclaiming the word cunt (or bitch, or other sexist euphemisms) to describe ourselves is not the same as a man using it as an insult.

I love the word cunt, and I’m all for reclaiming it—but reclaiming “cunt” is about a woman wearing it herself and wielding it ironically, which is necessarily as a compliment, not an insult. If I call my girlfriend “a beautiful cunt” for expertly handling a sexist wanker, that’s got reappropriative power. If I call her “a dumb cunt” because she does something foolish, not so much.

There are ways to use words and there are ways to use words—and knowing the difference, rooting out the subversive context from that which simply perpetuates oppression, is not remotely difficult.

And no matter how often women use it in a reclamative fashion, it doesn’t give anyone (of either sex) permission to use it as an insult. The whole “you use it” justification strikes me as a rather pathetic bit of whining; why do you get to use it and I don’t? As if that’s some big coup for the girlz. Trust me—in the whole “undeserved privilege since birth” v. “getting to use cunt” cage match, you’ve got the better end of the bargain. So STFU.

3. The guy who used it is “no misogynist.” He was using this term for female genitalia to insult a man, after all, and his intent was not to be misogynistic. Okay, first of all, let’s pull this apart into two pieces:

A. Intent: If you’re turning part of a woman’s body into a slur to insult someone, the implication is necessarily that cunts are bad, nasty, less than, in some way something that a person wouldn’t want to be or be associated with. That’s how insults work. When cunt is used as a slur, it is dependent on construing a woman’s body part negatively—and it thusly misogynistic, because it inexorably insults women in the process. Specifically using a misogynistic slur against a man can’t be anything but intentionally misogynistic. If you don’t intend to demean women, then don’t use misogynistic slurs. It’s really as simple as that.

B. Not a Misogynist. How often does one have to use misogynistic language before one can be identified as a misogynist? Twenty times? A hundred? An infinite number of times, as long as he doesn’t beat women? During the “cunt/whore” dust-up recounted here, Piny wrote a great post addressing this very question:

I wholeheartedly agree that there is a difference between someone who posts an ill-conceived blackface photoshop caricature and, say, Nathan Bedford Forrest. I will also happily concede that there is a difference between someone who openly identifies as feminist but casually uses misogynistic slurs and graphic misogynistic riffs to deride people–women in particular–and, say, John Knox.

This does not mean that it’s a good idea to restrict “a racist,” “a sexist,” and “a misogynist,” to the very worst of the worst. …[I]t reduces complaints about all of these words to matters of personal affront, such that “sexist” and “cunt” are equated. “Sexist” becomes not a criticism of someone’s demonstrated beliefs, a term like “reactionary,” but an epithet as crude as the slurs to which it responds. It’s mean and unfair to call someone a sexist.

Absolutely spot-on. Also see the except from Pam here, which talks about how reserving these terms for the extremes allows people to “rationalize away such incidents because a real racist burns a cross on someone’s lawn, or ties a black man to the back of a truck and drags him until his limbs fall off.” Reserving “misogynist” (or “sexist”) for equivalent displays of contempt for women means that a guy who flippantly refers to another guy as a cunt (or a bitch, or a pussy, or a girl) can justify it with assertions that he isn’t a misogynist, even if he uses the terms with regularity. Back to Piny:

Then, inevitably, it becomes impossible to describe behavior as repeated and typical, part of a pattern, because there will always be a John Knox whose lack of respect for women is more constant and more obvious. In fact, it arguably conflates extremism with consistency. If my bigotry does not reach a certain level, then it is a negligible component of my persona, even in discussions about bigotry that respond to demonstrations of bigotry.

…If someone cannot be called a sexist unless they either constantly treat women as though they hated them or engage in behavior that even Bill Napoli considers abominable, then little things like using a misogynist slur are automatically trivial. They’re so far from true sexism that they might as well be called feminist.

Indeed.

And the ultimate result of resisting being deemed a misogynist for the use of misogynistic language is that it’s yet another way of giving oneself permission to resist self-examination. As I’ve said no fewer than a nonillion times before, all of us, failing extraordinary effort to examine the narratives of bias—with which we’re all indoctrinated by our culture—in an attempt to extricate ourselves from their divisive grip, will hold prejudices. The only question is whether you allow your own to be unexamined prejudices. Responding to questions about the use of misogynist language with “I’m not a misogynist!” is a near-certain step to burying and making intractable the very prejudices that allows someone to engage in such behavior in the first place. There’s more shame in denying being a misogynist when you patently, undeniably are than saying: “Yes, I’m a misogynist, but I don’t want to be.”

I’m reminded of an exchange I had with Bill soon after he started posting at Shakes. He used something (way less obvious than an overt slur) to which I objected in one of his posts, and I asked him to please remove it. Here’s how he responded: He said, approximately, “Thanks. I don’t always notice stuff like that, and I’m trying to be more sensitive to it, so I appreciate your letting me know.” That’s it. I can’t even begin to tell you how much I respected him for that, how profoundly appreciative I was of his utter lack of defensiveness. And if you want to know what a swell dude he really is, he removed it from the post at his own blog, too. (In other words, he wasn’t just blowing smoke up my ass.)

4. Comparing cunt to the n-word isn’t accurate and trivializes the n-word. I’ve seen a lot of this “slur ranking” lately—JFH did it in comments here just this weekend, although, unlike my correspondent, he decided that the n-word and cunt are equivalent, but probably only because he was rejecting someone’s having compared bitch and the n-word: “[C]omparing ‘bitch’ to ‘[the n word]‘ is not fair. The equivalent to ‘bitch’ is ‘bastard’ or ‘asshole’. The equivalent to ‘[the n-word]‘ is ‘cunt’.”

The ludicrous thing about these examinations of equivalence is that when someone says, “Would you use the n-word in that way?” what they mean is, “Would you use racial slurs in that way?” Parsing whether cunt is the precise equivalent of the n-word is just a way of avoiding the underlying idea. Sexist language, like racist language, is marginalizing and demeaning. Full. Stop. And I shouldn’t have to determine the exact racial equivalent of “cunt” before that point can be made. “It’s not as bad as the n-word, but it’s worse than darkie…” Yeesh.

The internal rankings are equally useless, i.e. “bitch isn’t as bad as cunt.” Women who are marginalized and demeaned by misogynist language take little comfort from the fact that the people who use it only mean to marginalize and demean us “this much” with “this word” and “that much” with “that word.”

And if there are women who say, “I hate being called a cunt more than being called a bitch,” I suspect it’s merely indicative of our being inured to one word more than the other and/or having been given more cultural opportunities for reclamation. It means something that there’s a Bitch magazine at your local newsstand and not a Cunt Quarterly. (Or if there is, it’s a porno.)

5. He can’t “abide” the policing of their comments threads by the PC police (i.e. me). Well, this is what it always boils down to in the end. I’m just too sensitive and I’m trying to censor someone and blah blah blah. In a word, no.

What I am is more sensitive to how misogynist language affects women, because I am one. People of color are more sensitive to racist language (particularly racist dog whistles, for example) than I am; that doesn’t mean they’re too sensitive. When a reader pointed out to me that my use of the word “lame” to mean “stupid” could be offensive to disabled Shakers, it wasn’t that she was too sensitive; it was that I was not sensitive enough. It means that (duh) I still have shit to learn in this world.

Life is hard enough without my unexpectedly smacking people in the face who trust me not to be a jerk, and it’s in that same spirit that I’ve tried to convey how misogynist language is uncool—hey, I don’t want to get blindsided with shit like that from an ostensible ally. When I highlight the use of sexist language at a male-authored blog, it’s because such language is alienating and demeaning and infuriating and I’m operating under the assumption that those bloggers don’t want to alienate, demean, and infuriate their female readers.

But that, as it turns out, usually tends to be a faulty assumption.

Repeatedly, it comes down to this insistence that I’m trying to police their blogs, but they refuse to be censored, man! Which itself is bullshit. It’s not about being censored, but about the refusal to self-censor to make their blogs non-misogynist, as if giving up the use of the word cunt is some kind of creative apocalypse. I’ve got news for you: If you feel like self-censoring to forego the use of misogynist language is a compromise of your integrity, you don’t have much integrity to begin with.

I self-censor all the time. I’m not exactly proud to admit this, but it’s not like the phrase “Bush is a fuckin’ retard” has never entered my mind. But I don’t use the slur—not because I’m oh-so-scared that the “PC police” will come after me, but because it’s not a nice term. That’s reason enough.

And I don’t think I’ve exactly failed to convey my feelings about our less-than-brilliant president without using a word that would unnecessarily insult people I have no desire whatsoever to demean and alienate people who love them. It’s not particularly challenging to expand one’s vocabulary beyond cunt and retard.

But the attitude I routinely get for suggesting such a infinitesimal broadening of one’s horizons is, essentially, “Deal with it or fuck off.”

So “fuck off” it is.

I generally don’t read (so as not to tacitly support) progressive blogs that use misogynist language, even if they’re ideological allies in other ways, because sexism is deeply illiberal. There are plenty of progressive blogs, including exclusively male-authored blogs, that don’t use misogynist language—so I don’t need to read blogs that do.

Plenty of us have managed to figure out that refusing to use language which perpetuates oppression is not enslaving oneself to the language police. It’s just doing the basic work required of someone who doesn’t want to be a fucking asshole.

[This is a crosspost from Shakesville where it was originally posted in October of 2007.]

I was standing in front of a full-length mirror with my leg stretched out, modeling at its end for my own consumption the left half of a pair of kelly green steel-toed Doc Martens knee-highs I had just bought, in spite of their outrageous price tag. "Girl, those boots are hot!" came the voice from beside me. This was St. Nate of the Perfectly Shaped Eyebrows, my coworker and friend, who would, one day, find himself at my parents’ house in the suburbs racing through their kitchen as I screeched, "Get the baking soda!" to help put out a fire I’d started on their deck with the grill. But today he was admiring my boots. And admiring me.

"God damn, look at you!" He pulled my shirt from the back so it clung to my form. This was not a look I felt was particularly good for me, even in those thinner days, and I pushed his hands away, squirming and frowning at myself in the mirror. He raised an eyebrow and frowned back, then turned me around by the shoulders, away from the mirror.

"Bitch, be fierce…"
 

* * *

Nate was one of many people who fall under the "T" in LGBT who have been important to me in one way or another, many of whom have played vital roles in helping me understand and appreciate my queer-brained self, and sort out what it means for me to be a woman. This is, quite obviously, no coincidence. Being myself a person who is, like many non-trans feminists and queers, uncomfortable with, and thusly constantly challenging, the expectations imposed on my sex and gender, I have found it valuable (and, in my personal experience, inevitable) to engage with Ts as part of divining my own self-definition. Which is to say nothing of simple and precious friendships.

The thing about getting together with a group of friends which includes straight, gay, bi, asexual, and trans men and women is that you’re almost guaranteed to have every gender variation in the room and thusly no easily divided gender groups. The group may split into smaller clusters that talk about kids, or sports, or politics, or film, but the divisions aren’t drawn by sex; the ladies-in-the-kitchen, gents-watching-the-game sort of thing is totally, completely, hilariously inoperable. And when you have a group of friends like that, you tend to forget that there are people who don’t believe a man can learn something about being a man from a woman, or a woman can learn something about being a woman from a man—a man who loves men same as you, or a man who used to be a biological woman, or just a man in a dress, like St. Nate.

And when you have a group of friends who—irrespective of individual sex, gender, or sexual orientation—take it as read that all we gender-queer lot are in this together, you tend to forget that there are some people who you’d presume to get that, but don’t.

(Although in this particular case, perhaps we shouldn’t be terribly surprised.)

Realistically, the breadth of allies in a comprehensive challenge to the patriarchy is vast and varied. Though all of us, sans rigorous philosophical exertion, are hapless conduits for every limiting and oppressive archetype upon which the patriarchy depends, conveying the bars of our own cages, very few of us are its unconstrained beneficiaries. Even the average straight, white, middle class American man exchanges privilege for severe limitations on his personal expression and emotional life—and he is encouraged never to examine that devastating trade-off too closely, lest the veneer on the alleged bargain prove thin enough through which to see. We all serve the same callous master, and there’s little to celebrate in being the favored slave—especially compared to a life of freedom.

It is foolish to believe that there is more feminist, gender-queer cisgendered straight women, lesbians, gay men, bisexuals, and the Ts don’t all have in common culturally and politically than that which we do, given the particular restraints and prejudices of the patriarchal structure and its rigid notions of sex, gender, and sexuality conveyed in all its aspects. We struggle to achieve and/or maintain, to varying degrees, autonomy over our own bodies, and, crucially, freedom of choice with regard to what we want to do with those bodies. Life- and identity-changing events hang in the balance for us all—parenting, marriage, gender reassignment, being legally able to keep a job in spite of prejudice.

The only question worth asking is how willing any of us are to secure rights for some of us at the expense of rights for the rest. Because we are in this thing together.

We are natural allies. We must be fierce together.
 

* * *

…Nate stood back and looked at me. "The hair, the fucking indigo eyes—I’d kill for those eyes!—the cheekbones, the tits—my god, those tits!—the ass, the ‘tude…no one brings the ‘tude like you do. Honey, you’ve got it."

So I did. I had a lot of other stuff, too, that Nate left out—things known as "flaws." But fuck it, I thought, as I turned back to the mirror. Since when has darkness meant there’s no such thing as light? I looked at myself again not through a prism of external expectation, but with my eyes alone. The crushing weight of Everyone Else’s Opinion was gone. I felt beautiful—not in a slamming-dress- and-perfectly-executed-hair-and-make-up way, which is itself a distinct kind of allure to which I am particularly ill-suited, being unfit in both manner and form for couture, but in a je ne sais quoi way, compared to no standard or expectation, and offering as its only alternative an absence of the beauty specific to me.

I had what I had, whatever it was, and that was that. Anyone who wanted me to measure up to a measuring stick I hadn’t given them was going to be shit out of luck and sorely disappointed.

And so they are still.

By Melissa McEwan (Crossposted from Shakesville, where it is part of Liss’s ongoing Feminism 101 series)

Sexism is, in fact, not subjective. What’s subjective are individual reactions to sexism, but sexism itself can be objectively determined. (I’ll come back to that in a moment.) Individual reactions to sexism will, naturally, be as vast and varied as the individuals who react—but because there are men, or women, who aren’t offended by something, or don’t find it sexist, doesn’t mean it isn’t. One can always find someone who refuses to be offended by something: That Michelle Malkin wrote In Defense of Internment doesn’t American government-built concentration camps any less objectively offensive or wrong.

So: Toss out the idea that there must be unanimous consent, or even majority agreement, that something is sexist for it to be determined as such. In fact, toss out the idea that sexism is determined by subjective opinion altogether.

First, though, let’s quickly dispatch with the fallacy that there are such things as subjective observers and objective observers. There are two general ways in which this frustratingly pernicious myth is conveyed:

• 1. Feminists (female and/or male) are always look for sexism, so they will always find it, the inaccuracy of which I previously addressed here.
• 2. Those most targeted by expressed misogyny (women) are critically biased against being able to correctly identify it.

The implicit suggestion, of course, is that men are unbiased—which conveniently ignores that they have the most to benefit from expressed misogyny, giving them every bit as much, if not more, reason to be biased toward denying its existence as women are biased toward exposing it.

No one is, by virtue of their genitals, more intrinsically disposed to be more objective—which exposes as the bullshit it is the whole idea that one must be an objective observer of sexism to correctly identify it (or that such a person can even exist).

We’re all biased—either because we are the potential targets or potential beneficiaries of sexism, whether we want to be or not. A woman who rejects the existence of sexism is no more unlikely to be oppressed by it than a woman who spends her days documenting it. A man who acknowledges and fights the existence of sexism is no more unlikely to passively benefit from other people privileging men over women than a man who actively marginalizes women. That’s the reality of institutionalized sexism; it compromises us all.

So: Toss out the idea that women/men are more subjective/objective observers of sexism.

But, hey—didn’t you say that sexism can be objectively determined? How is that possible if no one’s objective?

Institutionalized misogyny, like any endemic prejudice (racism, homophobia, ageism, ableism, sizism, etc.) should be viewed as a system, with rules and laws governing its existence—although, by virtue of cultural indoctrination, they generally aren’t obvious unless one makes an effort to see them.

The patriarchy is very like the Matrix, in that it is a false construct laid over the top of a reality, that makes things look very different. Viewing the same thing while fully and uncritically socialized into the patriarchy and while cognizant of its falsity creates two very different pictures.

I look hotter in the patriarchy.

Like the Matrix, which Morpheus described as “everywhere. It is all around us. Even now, in this very room… It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth,” the systemic sexism known as the patriarchy is so comprehensive and profound that “seeing it” actually takes some effort, some willingness to see it. And, like those who find themselves awakening from the Matrix, people who find themselves awakening from the patriarchy learn to identify its patterns, upon which it is dependent for the transmission of its ideals and its continual self-generation.

Pattern-finding is one of the main reasons I do ongoing series about rape jokes, or “odd news,” or disembodied things, or the imposition of impossible beauty standards. In addition to illustrating via critical mass the existence of patterns and subverting the ability to dismiss them as unimportant under the pretense any one incident is an anomaly, identifying and revealing the patterns provides the framework in which the existence of sexism can be objectively measured.

Whether something is sexist (be it a word, a consumable item, a practice, or anything else) is neither dependent on how it is intended nor how it is received, but on whether it serves to convey sexism, which itself is determined by its alignment with existent patterns. When 2+2 has equaled 4 since time began, anyone claiming 2+2 suddenly equals 5 would be regarded, quite rightly, with suspicion. It is vanishingly unusual for someone to say/do something that fits perfectly with an ancient pattern of sexism yet is somehow not an expression of sexism.

Let me quickly stipulate and clarify that one can unintentionally express sexism. That innocent intent, or ignorance of the history of how women have been marginalized, does not, however, in any way change the quality of what was being expressed. Something can still be expressed sexism even if the speaker’s intent was not to oppress women. And particularly if it does fit neatly into a historical pattern, it necessarily conjures that pattern of sexism, intentionally or not.

So: Toss out the idea that intent determines sexism. And the idea that any of us, or any of the things we say or do, can exist in a void.

What we’re then left with is the idea that if something fits into a historical pattern of sexism, unavoidably invokes such a pattern, and/or can be overtly quantified as marginalizing women, it is an expression of sexism.

All of these things can be objectively evaluated by anyone who learns the patterns of the patriarchy and the history of women’s oppression.

Women are generally better at identifying the patterns of misogyny by virtue of having been subjected to them for a lifetime. For example: By a very young age (usually around puberty), most girls intuitively understand the concept of women’s bodies being treated as community property, even if they can’t articulate it. But in addition to the expertise conferred by personal experience, there is such a thing as patriarchy-smashing book-learnin’.

There are people—like your blogmistress—who have spent egregious amounts of time and effort acquainting themselves with the ability to navigate the Matrix the language, imagery, rituals, and cultural cues, both subtle and overt, that are used to promulgate the patriarchy.

Becoming intimately, actively involved with the methods by which sexism are conveyed is not unlike becoming fluent in another language. And just like how people who speak Arabic are better translators of Arabic than people who don’t, people who have immersed themselves in the critical theories of gender are better translators of what is and is not sexism.

Identifying and defining sexism is not, as “sexism is a matter of opinion” suggests, a speculative chore. There is an existing framework for recognizing and characterizing expressed sexism—and those who have made it their business to become fluent in it are the closest thing to objective experts as exist in any discipline.

If you find yourself inclined to react to the identification of something as expressed sexism with “I don’t see it,” consider that your “blindness” has been carefully cultivated by the very system that is dependent on your (and everyone else’s) not seeing it.

The Matrix is a system, Neo. That system is our enemy. But when you’re inside, you look around, what do you see? Businessmen, teachers, lawyers, carpenters. The very minds of the people we are trying to save. But until we do, these people are still a part of that system and that makes them our enemy. You have to understand, most of these people are not ready to be unplugged. And many of them are so inured, so hopelessly dependent on the system, that they will fight to protect it.—Morpheus

The red pill’s on offer, if you want it.

The 2008 roundup is at Diary of a Goldfish

This post is about a sidebar module management problem. If you need to remove the Possibly Related Posts feature there’s a footnote to this post giving you the needed link.

Update: someone on the forums gave me a fix that worked. Ta. Details at the end of the post.

Screenshot:

If there was a “reset to default” button on the widget page, I could rebuild my sidebar widgets again from scratch in this situation. But there isn’t. Why not? It would be a simple problem-solver addition in cases where the sidebar management function sticks for some weird reason, as appears to be its wont.

I’m getting used to the new interface, and some things about it do appear to be genuine improvements, but this is one of many areas where it’s snafu.

N.B. if you too blog on wordpress.com and are finding strange links appearing at the bottom of your posts, you haven’t been hacked. It’s the newly rolled out Possibly Related Posts (PRP) feature, which seems to have been very poorly thought out in terms of how it finds these PRP links, and which is opt-out rather than opt-in. For more information, including how to disable it, see Lorelle.

Update - The Above-Promised Solution: the solution is to navigate the page using the TAB key. Just keep hitting TAB until the cursor moves over the top of the hidden EDIT link, then click the mouse, and then the edit-function will open the widget and you can fix the problem. I found that the widget did not want to accept any changes to the coding (it would close when I hit CHANGE in the widget, but then when I hit SAVE CHANGES at the bottom of the list of widgets it wouldn’t save and just reopened the widget again). Hitting REMOVE worked though.

Here’s an excellent column by Amanda Teuscher in Ohio U’s student newspaper which sums up the issues regarding the defeated Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act:
The Feminist’s Corner: Equal pay litigation is justice, not an inconvenience

There’s not much commentary around pointing out that the proposed legislation would have enabled more than just women to have more time to sue for pay discrimination. Any employee with an unequal pay case would have gained the same time extension to enable discovery of the discrepancy and timely litigation, no matter whether the people they were being paid less than were of a different race, ethnicity, sexuality, socioeconomic class or physical ability level.

The major stated objection by the Senators who voted to block the bill was that it would enable “too many lawsuits” seeking restitution for pay discrimination. The idea that companies who behave unjustly and illegally should be forced to provide restitution seems to have entirely passed them by.

When did it become the province of the Government to protect corporations rather than its citizens? This trend of legislation which essentially provides corporate welfare has become rampant in the USA (note the revisions to bankruptcy laws which benefit corporations over citizens yet again). It’s apparently also an emerging trend in other countries where economic conservative politicians hold the legislative power.

Links from FF101 readers to instances of blatant protection of corporations over the interests of citizens in other countries would be greatly appreciated.

Update: A Lurker sent me a link in email to some fine reportage by Dahlia Lithwick at Slate giving more details of the US Republican Senators arguments against the Ledbetter bill, as well as to links of the Majority and Minority Reports from the judgement made by the Supreme Court. I neglected to point out that some of the language used by Republicans just assumes that women are too stupid to know their own best interests. Despicable.

I’m adding new categories and relabelling older posts appropriately, and I’m also retagging some other posts to improve the search function on the blog.

This means that some of you, depending on which service you use to manage your subscriptions, will see a lot of these newly edited posts appear as if they are new posts. Sorry about that, but there’s no other way to do it.

“Nubian” is the nom du blog of the writer of Blac(k)ademic, Kortney Ryan Ziegler. She is fundraising in order to finance the final post-production phase of her documentary, an experimental film project titled still black: a portrait of black transmen, and there are screenings this weekend in Chicago.

Directed by experimental filmmaker Kortney Ryan Ziegler, still black is a feature-length documentary that explores the lives of six black transgender men living in the United States. Through the intimate stories of their lives as artists, students, husbands, fathers, lawyers, and teachers, the film offers viewers a complex and multi-faceted image of race, sexuality and trans identity.

It sounds like a 101 on intersectionality, doesn’t it? There are some clips from the film at the film’s website.

Details of the screenings are here, including contact details and a link where you can donate money if you like her work but can’t make it to the screenings.

Shakesville: We Write Letters

This blog resolves to acknowledge our social privileges without defensiveness, to welcome the comments and contributions of socially marginalised voices, and when our work builds on the ideas of others we will fully attribute our debt to their work.

We will no doubt get it wrong at times. Call us on it. We will listen. We may, in the end, still disagree with some criticisms, but these disagreements will be discussed respectfully and we will still be your allies.

Update May 2nd 2008 - Related Post:
Feminism Friday: When Women Who Advocate For Women’s Rights Reject The Label Feminist - links to many discussions on the shortcomings of mainstream feminism when dealing with matters of race and racism especially. That post was updated May 2nd, 2008 to include some of the excellent posts written in the last few weeks.