Apr 06

Power or Responsibility?

Several years ago, a local arts centre ran an ad for the position of General Manager.  It caught my eye – for a second, I must’ve thought of applying.  But then my conscious self must’ve recognized it as being out of my league and I read on.

But then I thought, wait a minute!  I’m 37 years old, I’m a multidisciplinary artist who has published books, produced and marketed cassettes, and run music and dance studios, I’ve been Chief Negotiator for a union, I’m intelligent, I’m efficient – surely I’m capable!  Even though I’ve had no experience specifically as a General Manager, surely I have the skills “to be a team leader, to balance the arts and business, to be sensitive to multiple art forms, to be a host at ease with the community and the industry….”

So why then was I reluctant to apply?  Well, I thought, it’s a lot of work, it’s a lot of responsibility (the ad said the centre was “a $1 million venue”) – and that daunted me.

But – and this is the point I want to examine – a man with half my background, and probably ten years less experience, wouldn’t think twice about applying.  Why is that?

Perhaps it’s that women see responsibility where men see power.  Women see burdens where men see benefits.  Women see work where men see privilege.

Hm.  And why is that?  One, women haven’t had a lot of power – so they’re not used to looking for it, seeing it, using it.  Two, women have had a lot of responsibility – so that’s what they’re used to noticing.

Wait a minute – men haven’t had a lot of responsibility?  But they run the government, big business –   Yeah.  Ironic, isn’t it.

What I mean is, consider this.  As girls, we got jobs as babysitters: that’s a lot of responsibility – what if the house catches fire, what if the baby starts choking?  On the other hand, as boys, men got jobs as ‘paper boys’: they were responsible for getting a bunch of paper onto someone’s porch.

The trend continued in adolescence: the women became camp counsellors and recreation leaders, while the men worked on maintenance crews; the women were entrusted with the physical, social, emotional, and artistic development of children, while the men were entrusted with shrubbery.

Then, or later, in matters of sex, it’s the woman who has the responsibility – for deciding yes or no and for contraception.  Men have the power – to rape.

It goes on.  Which parent is primarily responsible for the child?  The woman.  Sure, the man is responsible too, but his responsibility is usually limited to financial matters (and even then, more to getting the money than to managing it).  It’s the woman who is primarily responsible for emotional matters – for providing attention, affection, love; and for physical matters – for seeing that the child doesn’t get hit by a car, for seeing that it doesn’t put its finger in a socket; and for intellectual matters – for seeing that the homework gets done, for planning and making trips to the library.  The men’s responsibility can be fulfilled in 8 hours each day; the women are responsible 24 hours each day.  And yet, should he decide to make his car payment instead of his child support payment, he affects, in a big way, the quality of life for at least two others besides himself.  That’s power.

So it’s no wonder we see responsibility where men see power.

And it’s no wonder we don’t apply for the positions higher up.

[Hell Yeah, I’m a Feminist is a feminist blog, often radical feminist (radfem), always anti-gender and anti-sexism.]

Mar 22

Making Taxes Gender-Fair

Since men commit 90% of the crime, they should pay 90% of the tax that supports the judicial system. Prisons are expensive to build and maintain. As are prisoners – they don’t work while they’re in prison, so we have to support them. Then there’s the expense of the police forces and courts that get them there. We already require that they pay the bulk of car insurance premiums because they’re the worse drivers. So what’s stopping us from going further, making the system even more fair?

And since a large percentage of their crime is violent, it follows that men are responsible for far more ER visits than women (assuming no gender differences with regard to illness and other injury) (actually, since men take more risks than women, there probably is a gender difference with regard to injury) (don’t forget the driving thing), so men should pay more of the tax that supports the healthcare system.

Oh and the military. Men are the ones who thrive on aggression, they get off on the excitement of fighting. They want to join the military. They want to go to war. So let them pay for it. Let them pay the $530 billion required by the military budget.

Then there’s all the environmental stuff. All those beer cans, empty cigarette packs, fast food cartons – most of the litter along the highways was put there by men. As they continue to drive their big gas-guzzlers with the high emissions. And the companies that dump toxic waste, and clear cut forests, and dam river systems? All run by men.

We could call it the Gender Responsibility Tax – a $5,000 surtax could be levied on each and every male. Payable annually, from birth to death. By the parents, of course, until the boy reached manhood.

 
[Hell Yeah, I’m a Feminist is a feminist blog, often radical feminist (radfem), always anti-gender and anti-sexism.]

Mar 12

And now for something completely depressing

And now for something completely depressing:

http://100percentmen.tumblr.com/

Mar 05

Pointlessly Gendered Products

Check it out: http://www.buzzfeed.com/erinchack/pointlessly-gendered-products

Be sure to read the comments/captions. They’re great.

Feb 23

Dangerous Sports

I haven’t really kept up with the sexism in the Olympics, mostly because the nationalism bothers me so much I don’t even watch them anymore, but I suspect there are still some sports in which women aren’t allowed to compete. Perhaps because of the tired, old, and fuckingly patronizing ‘You could get hurt!’

This from the sex that makes beating someone senseless part of the game.

And has its reproductive vitals hanging by a thread at bull’s-eye of the body with nary a half-inch layer of fat for protection. (What’s next in the evolution of the male, a brain growing outside the skull?) (Oops, been there – )

The sex that got the girls’ and boys’ bicycle designs backwards.

And competes on the pommel horse, voluntarily.

Do I need to point out that women’s musculature is generally more elastic, rendering it less prone to injury?

And that women seem to have a better developed survival instinct? We duck. We run the fuck the other way. And we don’t make insupportable claims about our opponent’s sexual preferences or those of her parents.

[Hell Yeah, I’m a Feminist is a feminist blog, often radical feminist (radfem), always anti-gender and anti-sexism.]

Feb 11

The Proverbial ‘Walking Alone in a Park at Night’

In a rape trial, that the woman was walking alone in a park at night has been considered relevant – presumably it’s a mitigating circumstance: the accused can be excused for thinking she wanted it if she was walking alone in a park at night.

What!?  Why? Why is it that a woman walking alone in a park at night is understood – by men – to be implying consent to sex with any and all men?

Are parks designated sex zones?  I suppose in a sense they are.  Lovers often (used to?) meet there for clandestine encounters.  For consensual clandestine encounters.

Okay, but parks at night are also popular mugging zones, perhaps because of the poor lighting which makes escape easier in the event they are policed.  But a woman walking alone in a park at night is more at risk for rape than for purse-snatching.

So why is a woman walking alone – ah, is that it?  A woman unaccompanied by a man is unowned?  And therefore up for grabs?  Literally?

[Hell Yeah, I’m a Feminist is a feminist blog, often radical feminist (radfem), always anti-gender and anti-sexism.]

Feb 02

Show a Little Initiative!

If you just do as you’re told, you don’t get promoted, you don’t get advanced up the ladder, because you’re not showing initiative.

Yeah right. Every time I showed some initiative, I got fired. Or at least reprimanded.

Then I realized that’s because there are different rules of advancement for men and women. Initiative in a woman is insubordination, especially if her boss is a man.

Then I realized later, much later, there are no rules of advancement for women: do X, don’t do X; do X, do Y — doesn’t matter, either way you’re not advanced.

Quite apart from the likelihood that the positions you get aren’t even on a ladder of advancement.

‘You can’t get there from here’ comes to mind.

[Hell Yeah, I’m a Feminist is a feminist blog, often radical feminist (radfem), always anti-gender and anti-sexism.]

Jan 27

Dolly

Wilmut’s team named the sheep cloned from a single adult cell “Dolly” because that cell had come from a mammary gland.  I’m tempted, on that basis alone, to cast my vote against human cloning.  I mean, if that kind of short-sightedness or immaturity is going to be running things, they’re bound to go horribly wrong.

Did they really not foresee that “Dolly” would become headline news?  Or did they not even recognize how juvenile they were being?  Mammaries = women = mammaries.  We are not seen as people, or perhaps colleagues, certainly never as bosses.  Really, need I go on?  This is all so old.  And yet, grown men, brilliant men, on the cutting edge of science, who become headline news, are apparently still forcing farts at the dinner table and snickering about it.

So, cloning?  I don’t think so.  Not until the other half of the species grows up.

(Then again, since cloning means we finally don’t need them at all, not even to maintain the species, let’s go for it.)  (Could it be they never thought of that either – that cloning makes males totally redundant?)

 
[Hell Yeah, I’m a Feminist is a feminist blog, often radical feminist (radfem), always anti-gender and anti-sexism.]

Jan 07

Arrogance, I think

Fresh from the office of my supervisor who persists in gently giving me unsolicited advice, despite being neither older nor wiser, I’m struck by Rousseau’s tone (in his “Marriage”):  “Extreme in all things, they [women] devote themselves to their play with greater zeal than boys.  This is the second defect.  This zeal must be kept within bounds.  It is the cause of several vices peculiar to women, among others the capricious changing of their tastes from day to day.  Do not deprive them of mirth, laughter, noise and romping games, but prevent them tiring of one game and turning to another.  They must get used to being stopped in the middle of their play and put to other tasks without protest on their part.”  I have as much trouble imagining the absolute certainty, the arrogance, required to initiate, let alone sustain, such pontification as I do imagining myself putting an arm around the shoulder of the guy who works in Accounting, and telling him what he should be doing with his life.  Even if I were his supervisor.  I simply could not go on and on like that, not even to students, nor even to children.  Not even at forty.

At least not without the qualifier ‘I think…’, that recognition of subjectivity – the absence of which is the presumption of objectivity, of omniscience.   Can you spell ‘ego’?  I recall one of my philosophy professors stroking out every single ‘I think’ in my paper, calling it wordy, but no doubt judging me to be lacking in confidence or certainty to ‘hedge’ so much.  But his corrections left me with lies – with presentations of opinion as fact.

And I now recognize that omission as the quintessential male lie; it’s how we come to consider them as authorities, on everything.  Refusing to accept one’s ideas as personal means refusing to accept the possibility that they’re incorrect or insignificant.  (Particular shame on epistemologists for this.  I now understand that, compared to my philosophy professor, I was subscribing to the more mature epistemology – by not arrogantly equating or ignorantly assuming that my (subjective) thoughts and perceptions were the (objective) thoughts and perceptions.)

Or maybe the absence of the ‘I’ is simply the denial of, the failure to take, responsibility.  Compare “Your postal code is indecipherable” to “I can’t read your postal code”: the first, without the ‘I’, doesn’t even consider the possibility that the fault may rest with the reader.

Perhaps there’s yet another explanation.  Owen Flanagan notes that “Insofar as reflection requires that we be thinking about thought, then an ‘I think that’ thought accompanies all experience” – but he goes on to qualify that, saying, “There is no warrant for the claim that we are thinking about our complex narrative self.  We are not that self-conscious” (Consciousness Reconsidered 194).  Well.  He may not be.  But I am.  And I dare say men in general may not be that reflective, but women are.  (Actually, I suspect some men are that aware – and they omit the ‘I think’ quite intentionally because of the effect.)

 

[Hell Yeah, I’m a Feminist is a feminist blog, often radical feminist (radfem), always anti-gender and anti-sexism.]

 

Jan 05

Feminist Shakespeare, anyone?

Those of you interested in a feminist take on Shakespeare, chris wind’s Soliloquies: the lady doth indeed protest is free as an epub or pdf download at her site: https://www.chriswind.net.

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