I’m thinking in images this week, so you’ll just have to accept my new visual campaign as your thinking material this week. This one is called “Against Marriage.” The last one was called “Foot Fetish.”
Please feel free to steal these graphics.
End Patriarchy By Any Means Necessary
February 22, 2009 — Anna Belle
Here at P&L, we try not to re-invent the wheel. History is filled with countless examples of people who challenged power structures and won. Take a page, take a page is the constant refrain of my song. Sometimes it takes something radical to shake the world up–see Martin Luther, Alice Paul, or Malcolm X.
Here at P&L we also fight the patriarchy. For months and months now I have been writing about effective ways to do this. One of my recommendations is that we use dynamics that are intended to keep us down to fight back, and first and foremost in that set of dynamics is the issue of child care. While magazines are filled with articles about the new dad who participates and finds joy in parenting, even taking over some of the more odious tasks, the reality is that part of the design of patriarchy is the free labor of women, and nowhere is that labor more free than between a mother and her child.
Over at I Blame the Patriarchy, commenter MLH is doing a very good job of instructing her son about issues of sex as he comes of age. This is important work, and she’s doing the best she can with the tools she has. Here’s what she had to say:
I Fall on the Floor and I Laughing
February 20, 2009 — Anna BelleJubilation! It’s Friday, and the weekend spreads before us, promise looming with brightness of the late February sun. A few brief laughing points for you today:
Matthew Yglesias Plays Fantasy Poker (Or Not)
Yglesias: “I’ve noticed an odd tendency in some quarters to, whenever Obama makes a move to the right and therefore attracts some criticism from the left, turn around and criticize those critics on the left for failing to recognize the brilliance of Obama’s secret left-wing plan. From where I sit, whether or not such a plan exists, its execution actually depends on moves to the right attracting criticism from the left. So rather than speculate as to whether or not this is ‘really’ what the administration is planning to do, I’ll just say I think that would be the right thing to do.“
WTF? This man is paid for this? Again: WTF? Shorter Yglesias: I’m not really sure if there’s a fantasy poker game going on, but I’m all in anyway! Buffoon.(via)
Analogies Guys Can Understand
How patriarchy operates: Men are the owners; women are the baseball players. (via Mr. Peacock)
The Future of Poetry
A little something I’ve been compiling in my spare time…a sort-of-sonnet in links.
I told you so. I told you so. I told you so.
I told you so. I told you so. I told you so.
I told you so. I told you so. I told you so.
I told you so. I especially told YOU so.I told you so. I told you so. I told you so.
I told you so. I told you so. I told you so.
I told you so (there goes Wonder Woman).
I told you so. How was that slumber, buddy?
I told you so. Good fucking grief, wasn’t THIS obvious?
Just a little fun late in the afternoon on Friday. Enjoy!
Mature Poets Steal
February 18, 2009 — Anna BelleThe title is a quote from T.S. Eliot, and happens to be the truth; this much I can discern after some 20-odd years behind the pen. Everything we do is imitation. This truth is so evident it is included in the Bible: there is nothing new under the sun. The best we can hope for is an artful enough arrangement of words–literally rhetoric–and enough help from the humans who’ve gone before to not have to re-invent the wheel. That’s part of why I focus on history so much. There is a way to progress, and others have found it, therefore so can we.
I realize I’ve been emotional this week. I’m under a lot of stress already and media exposure, which I’ve just recently allowed back into my life after a months-long intentional media blackout, has seriously affected me. The Rhianna story and the Aasiya Hassan story have seriously messed with my mental well-being. I’ve written before about my growing alarm at the level of misogyny present in the world, and I continue to be alarmed. These events have incalculable consequences.
So I’m weeping tonight. I don’t know what else to do. I want so badly to unify with other women, to achieve something like the women from history I know about, to impact the world and make it easier for the women to come, some just girls, some not even born yet. My own powerlessness breaks my heart.
Latenight Frameshop: America Already Has Sharia Law
February 17, 2009 — Anna BelleWell fuck. No other way to say it; sorry if you hate cursing. I wrote the title of this post on Saturday, intending to come back later and finish it out with a righteous analogy between Sharia Law and America’s family courts, where U. S. citizens are subjected to parallel justice because their attackers were family members. But for the citizens being Middle Eastern, that’s the definition of Sharia in a nutshell.
Then I saw this today. Let’s just tell the fucking truth here:
On February 12, 2009, in Orchard Park, Buffalo, NY, forty-four year-old Muzzamil Hassan, a prominent Muslim businessman, was arrested for having allegedly beheaded his wife, thirty-seven year-old Aasiya Z. Hassan. What was Aasiya’s crime? Why, Aasiya was having Muzzamil served with divorce papers. And apparently, on February 6, Aasiya obtained an order of protection which had forced her violent husband out of their home.
NOW New York State is horrified that Erie County DA, Frank A. SeditaII, has referred to this ghastly crime as “the worst form of domestic violence possible.” The ridiculous juxtaposition of “domestic” and “beheading” in the same journalistic breath points up the inherent weakness of the whole “domestic violence” lexicon. Read the rest of this entry »
What Every Woman Should Know: A Black History Sampler, Part I
February 16, 2009 — Anna BelleWhat Every Woman Should Know is a bi-weekly series on American Women’s History published at The New Agenda.
Samplers are an aspect of history that is exclusively associated with women. As many feminists have noted, sewing has traditionally been women’s work, and it has been the assignment of just this kind of tedious, time-consuming labor that has contributed to our inability to participate meaningfully in the public sphere in ways that men have, among other consequences we’ve suffered. Few will argue that having literally clothed all of humanity for millennia, we have universally been a kind of slave in a system that shunned and thwarted us, and used us for our free labor.
19th Century Sampler
But what is a sampler? Samplers were long pieces of cloth that a woman would use over the course of her life to accumulate ideas for sewing patterns. When a woman saw a pattern that she wanted to remember, she would sit right down and sew her example onto her sampler for future reference. So a sampler is a collection of lessons accumulated over time—an educational tool as much as a practical solution. Women would often later collect their best ideas on one piece of cloth, sort of like collecting works for publication; these samplers were for display. Some families had samplers that were passed on from one generation to the next, often by way of wills.
Sewing has been our legacy until lately, and our contributions have been so under-valued that the technology of our work had barely been improved upon from the spinning wheel and needlepoint to the invention of the sewing machine at the end of the 18th century and the advent of patterns at the end of the 19th century. Women have been forced, without the benefit of education or any knowledge of mechanics, to create their own solutions in accumulating knowledge and passing it on. One way they did so for hundreds of years was with the sewing sampler.
The sampler is the perfect frame for a discussion of several prominent African American women, a frame I will use again when I want to collect connected threads of history under one topic. Black women’s history is even more hidden that white women’s history and, like our foremothers, we will have to improve upon the technology and formulate the solutions ourselves. Like women throughout centuries, we are accumulating knowledge, building a body of reference work that we will one day hand down to our daughters. Here then, is my collected sampler of American black women’s history.
Black Female Poets Read the rest of this entry »
Sexism Sampler
February 11, 2009 — Anna BelleI’ve got a lot going on, not the least of which is that Mr. Peacock gave us all a little scare on Monday night with blood pressure that suddenly spiked to 160/110. When you’re a nurse, and you’re on the verge of stroking out, they send you home. Thank goodness for that. He’s been to the doctor, is on medication, and we are in the process of doing those little things in life that people tend to put off: quitting smoking, changing our diet, trying to get more active. The blog…well, I may lose more time on it. I miss you readers, and the opportunity to textualize and contextualize the insanity that runs deep in this world! Here’s what’s been on my mind of late.
Sexism in Medicine
A funny thing happened when we were explaining all of this to Lily yesterday. I got the chance to re-enforce that feminist lesson once again, which I did, despite the eye-rolling on the part of the rest of the Peacock family. See, Mr. Peacock was making a point about how the changes we would be making would be good for all of us, because as a man, he was fortunate enough to have the symptoms of blood pressure and heart trouble for men spelled out explicitly by the medical community. He began to make the argument that the same was not true for women, that their symptoms were less discernible, when I piped right up with a lesson about how all of medical science since the inception of that particular field of study had centered around the male body, which was itself symptomatic of sexism in the sciences and medicine. I explained how if research were conducted more equitably, we would know exactly what the symptoms of such health issues for women were, because their bodies would have been studied simultaneously with males’. It wasn’t that feminine bodies were more mysterious just because they were, it was that we all suffered from a profound and deliberate ignorance about women’ s bodies in general.
As I said, much eye-rolling ensued, but whatever. At least she’s heard the truth now.
Sexism in the Media(s)
Ooooooh, Rihanna! He’s just a boy… There were so many ideas for titles on this particular example of sexism. What a clusterfuck! Read the rest of this entry »
Stitches in Time
February 8, 2009 — Anna BelleThe work week starts tomorrow and I will be too busy to post anything until Wednesday, at least, so I leave you with this rather profound quotation from Elizabeth Cady Stanton from her final speech, delivered before a joint meeting of the Congressional Judiciary Committee & the National Women’s Suffrage Association (NWSA) in January 1892. (Can you imagine if Congressional committees met with women’s rights groups today? WOW!) The speech is entitled The Solitude of Self.
To appreciate the importance of fitting every human soul for independent action, think for a moment of the immeasurable solitude of self. We come into the world alone, unlike all who have gone before us, we leave it alone, under circumstances peculiar to ourselves. No mortal ever has been, no mortal ever will be like the soul just launched on the sea of life. There can never again be just such a combination of prenatal influences; never again just such environments as make up the infancy, youth and manhood of this one. Nature never repeats herself, and the possibilities of one human soul will never be found in another. No one has ever found two blades of ribbon grass alike, and no one will ever find two human beings alike. Seeing, then, what must be the infinite diversity in human character, we can in a measure appreciate the loss to a nation when any class of the people is uneducated and unrepresented in the government.
The first bolded quote is what drive me to grief when I read or hear about another person lost to violence or injustice. We slough it off so easily, it’s just numbers, but it’s not–a unique point of view and promise are lost forever.
The second bolded quote is what drives me to action over the loss to our our world and ourselves by this continued attempt at excluding/subjugating fully half of the global population. To put it in modern terms for you, consider this excerpt from an excellent article on women in technology:
Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, ran into a storm over his comments about sexism in IT. “A culture that avoided alienating women would attract more female programmers, which could lead to greater harmony of systems design. If there were more women involved, we could move towards interoperability. We have to change at every level,” he said.
This is directly analogous. IT is a system, just like any other system. The talents women can bring to bear in the world of IT are similar to the talents we will bring when women are fully integrated into every part of our political system.
Subtext & The Econ Crisis
February 7, 2009 — Anna BelleI tell you, this job just gets harder and harder. By job I mean reporting on the wildly blooming blossom of misogyny unleashed by the campaign last year, which is in reality just a long crazy growth on an already hearty rosebush. Everywhere I turn these days I see it, because I can’t unsee it. Today I was checking out The Confluence and ran across this Odiot’s article about how Obama is still like totally awesome, but said Odiot is now a little worried. The apologies were bad enough, but then Odiot quoted Robert Reich, whom you may recall as Clinton’s Secretary of Labor. His quote is the most discombobulating sentiment to my sensibilities as a feminist with Marxist tendencies that I have read in a while. I was utterly flabbergasted, caught in a true dichotomy between agreeing with half of what he said and also being pissed off as hell at his re-framing of the second wave. Check this shit out: Read the rest of this entry »
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Blue Lyon- Out and aboutI’m in Dallas for the Susan G. Komen Affiliate Conference, so you won’t hear much from me for a few days. A few tweets here and there, possible FB updates. Y’all behave now. Filed under: Out Of Office
- Out and about
- Chaos Party
- PreviewsI’ll be writing on this topic at some point this week. If you are interested in the new predatory lending bubble being created in higher education, this article is your homework. Enjoy!
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