Sproutedink's List: Feminism and Womens Studies

Whether you're already knee-deep in young adult literature or looking to reacquaint yourself with an old favorite, the Bitch Media Community Lending Library has got you covered. We've put together a whopping 100 of our favorite young adult novels, featuri

Magdalene asylums, also known as Magdalen institutions, were institutions from the 18th to the late-20th centuries ostensibly to house "fallen women", a term used to imply female sexual promiscuity or work in prostitution. Asylums operated throughout Euro

The fact that it’s written by women, that it’s historically accurate, that the women are nuanced characters, and that the writers aren’t afraid to show the men being unabashed jerks still doesn’t justify categorizing the show under “feminist.” None of this means the show is in and of itself feminist. It just means that the show is fertile ground for feminist/gender analysis.

“Mad Men” is feminist/gender analysis gold, that much is certain. However, when I read shit like Nussbaum’s rape article, I feel like banging my head against the desk a few times:

At once a real person and an iconographic cartoon, she was a retro Samantha Jones, a third-wave feminist before her time, eternally articulating one form of female power: the potent combination of an arched eyebrow and a tight green skirt.

Uhhh…

Was it really necessary to Sex-and-the-Citify Joan?
Is it really necessary to keep perpetuating the impression that third-wavers are empowered solely through their sexuality?
The second wave hasn’t even happened yet, much less the third. Again, totally projecting/jumping the gun with these labels.

The second wave exploded on the scene largely with the publication of The Feminine Mystique, which was first published in early 1963–the year in which this current season is set. These women are who The Feminine Mystique is about; they experience The Problem That Has No Name on a daily basis. We may very well start to see some the women setting the framework for a true feminist awakening on the show. (Even then, I’d be hard pressed to consider the show itself feminist.)

Until then? Stop projecting.

"What I've been having trouble with is this: I think I was stirred by one story that stayed with me, in which some of the men who had abused the storyteller seemed to be acting on sexual scripts that they had learned from porn. On sexual scripts that on some occasions in the past I have also engaged in: using force, tossing on the bed, calling her a good girl, choking. I think there's nothing wrong with these things in an enthusiastic and consensual context, but I think what's been bothering me is the realization that the mainstreaming avenue for these behaviors, one of the things that made these men think it was okay to force them on a woman, was the average porn video.

So many of the traumatic stories were of men behaving the way porn stars do by inflicting sexualized violence upon women. The way that we've come to accept these manifestations of sexualized violence as scot-free sexuality itself is disturbing to me. The way these accepted manifestations of sexualized violence are shared both by my sexual partners and these horrifying rapists is disturbing to me. The way that the sex positive movement seems, at times, to give all of porn a free pass.

Annnnd what's most: I don't know now how to embrace sexual behaviors that mimic the horrifying violence endured by others, when these two things (sexual expectations of me by men, and the assault on and violation of other women) both stem from the same shit misogynistic capitalist exploitative porn videos. Can any of you weigh in?"

Socially, we still seem to be hitting a few snags. At the 2003 meeting of the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers, some two-thirds of attending lawyers said the Internet played a significant role in divorces that year, pointing a finger at online pornography. Seven or eight years ago pornography had an almost nonexistent role in divorce, reports author and journalist Pamela Paul in Time (Jan. 19, 2004). Keep in mind, legally married couples represent only a portion of the population. Jealousy, shame, mixed feelings, and mixed messages all speak to the difficulty of confronting evidence of desires we find in some combination confusing, elating, obscene, and terrific.

This is interesting to me because i wouldn't want to limit the way that women (or men) want to present themselves sexually in the world. While I agree that the messages can be harmful to young women, I feel uncomfortable asking them to behave in a specific way. Is the problem these women or do we just need better representation in general so there are more ways of viewing women in media and film?

"From another angle, Knox has spoken about the fact that we live in a sex-negative society, where women's bodies and choices are limited. In an interview with Piers Morgan, she said, "To be in porn and to be able to be naked and to be able to be free and have that sexual autonomy, it is so incredibly freeing." While this may be true for Knox, does porn really give all women sexual autonomy?

With all of these thoughts in mind, I decided to look up some of Knox's work. I was disturbed to find many videos and photos that seemed to have a twinge of non-consent present in them. In the thumbnail for one of her videos with "teen girls" in the title, Knox is topless and looking into the camera with a terrified look on her face. Another video has "facial abuse" in the title; that alone is enough to make you cringe, as abuse doesn't really imply consent. Within the first 30 seconds of that video, the cameraman asks why she's there, to which Knox replies, "because I'm a whore." A few minutes in, he asks her how she feels about women being objectified, to which she says that it's "hot as hell." That's very feminist of you, Knox."

We spent a few hours laying by and lounging in the pool, all the while staring at (while trying not to be too obvious) the women's bodies around us. Did we engage in meaningful conversation that would more humanize the breasts and butts we were staring at? No . . . Did we learn the passions and interests of the women whose bikini lines we ogled? No . . .

Is THIS beautiful? Is THIS healthy?

Unfortunately, this was not questioned. It was normal. Pretty much every man there was doing the same, and pretty much every woman there seemed (at least to our lustful gazes) comfortable with the reality of this arrangement.

In the days since this experience, I have thought a lot about it. Why did I, someone committed to the antithesis of this reality, participate in the way I did? Why did I not question the situation or the language used by the men there? Another thing that really has stuck with me is that the women in this space had bodies that were probably the closest to the unhealthy standard of beauty that our society has constructed that I have seen in a long time, and it left me wondering, a standard to which I am sadly attracted. Is this healthy for them?

I can't say for sure and I can't judge because undoubtedly there are infinite numbers of body types and I am not a woman, but I imagine that it could be unhealthy in a few ways. To achieve this body type, I imagine many women would need to pursue one of two unhealthy courses. First, they could eat very little while toning their bodies through exercise, thus depriving their body of nutrients and calories that are needed for everyday functions. Second, they could eat relatively normally but work out so regularly that it could become an unhealthy obsession, working out every day to the point that it is no longer healthy emotionally or psychologically (even if their bodies are rather healthy).

Maybe I am wrong. Maybe they are just very healthy young women, but I do know that the way that the men at that pool were looking at them and interacting (or not interacting) with them was not healthy. It was unhealthy because we were not only holding the women around us to an unhealthy standard of beauty while treating their bodies as objects, but we were encouraging within ourselves the unhealthy relationships with women that lead to sexual violence, relationships that treat women as simple objects of our desire rather than human beings deserving of our full respect.

It is time that we as men work to change the way we view women. This is our responsibility, and this is hard work . . . I know because I have been working on it for a long time and I struggle with it every single day. Socialization is a powerful thing, and we have been socialized to see women as sexual objects that should look a certain (read: unhealthy) in order to be worthy of our attention. It is time for us to create our own counter-socialization. We need to hold each other accountable to the ways in which we are looking at and talking about women. We need to call each other out and hold ourselves accountable as well (something I failed to do in going to the pool only a few days ago). We need to not be upset or defensive when women call us out or hold us accountable (and women, it is my hope that, while not your responsibility, you will be more willing to call men out as we further constrict the box of body image in which you are expected to live).

Impacts of Porn (2)

A lot of studies have been conducted on the impacts of porn on men and women in society. Of all of those impacts, three most resonated with my experience:

1. Violence Against Women (3): This includes an obsession with looking at women rather than interacting with them (voyeurism), an attitude in which women are viewed as objects of men's sexual desire, and the trivialization of rape and widespread acceptance of rape culture - fueled by fake depictions of women in porn videos often pretending to desire violent and abusive sexual acts.

2. Numbness & Disembodiment: This can include erectile dysfunction, inability to orgasm when not watching porn, detachment from your physical body, emotional unavailability and numbness, lack of focus and patience, poor memory, and general lack of interest in reality. Furthermore, these outcomes in men have been linked to boredom with their sexual partners, higher levels of sexual promiscuity, adultery, divorce, sexism, rape, abuse, and suicide.

3. Fear of Intimacy: Watching porn contributes to many men's inability to relate to women in an honest and intimate way despite a longing to feel loved and connected. This is because pornography exalts our sexual needs over our need for sensuality and intimacy; some men develop a preoccupation with sexual fantasy that can powerfully impede their capacity for emotionally intimate relationships.

A call to focus the issue of girl's self esteem onto fixing the culture, rather than on the specific incidents themselves.

When you look at the AAUW study, the enormous success of Reviving Ophelia and this week's New Philanthropy Captiol study together, it's easy to see that all this data is valuable not because it reflects a cultural transformation but because it does no such thing. In the three or so decades where studying the self-esteem of young women has even been considered worthwhile, we've seen minimal change in those numbers. Undoubtedly, there are myriad factors in modern life that contribute to this latest incarnation of low self-esteem, including easy access to pornography, excessive texting, anonymous cyber-bullying and reality television, but for every misogynist situation our culture manages to sideline or eradicate, a new one will appear. This will always be true.

Ultimately, when we're seeing a certain social phenomenon remain relatively consistent over time, it makes a lot more sense to look at what else hasn't changed for that group over a period of time (e.g., the gender pay gap, rape culture, media misrepresentation), rather than what's different (Snapchat).

Feminism challenges acts of male dominance and analyzes the underlying patriarchal ideology that tries to make that dominance seem inevitable and immutable. Second-wave radical feminists in the second half of the 20th century identified men's violence against women-rape, child sexual assault, domestic violence and various forms of harassment-as a key method of patriarchal control, and made a compelling argument that sexual assault cannot be understood outside of an analysis of patriarchy's ideology.

This doesn't mean that all men are rapists, that all heterosexual sex is rape, or that egalitarian relationships between men and women are impossible. It does mean, however, that rape is about power and sex, about the way men are trained to understand ourselves and to see women.

The majority of men do not rape. But consider these other categories:
· Men who do not rape but would be willing to rape if they were sure they would not be punished.
· Men who do not rape but will not intervene when another man rapes.
· Men who do not rape but buy sex with women who have been, or likely will be, raped in the context of being prostituted.
· Men who do not rape but will watch films of women in situations that depict rape or rape-like acts.
· Men who do not rape but find the idea of rape sexually arousing.
· Men who do not rape but whose sexual arousal depends on feeling dominant and having power over a woman.
· Men who do not rape but routinely masturbate to pornography in which women are presented as objectified bodies whose primary, or only, function is to provide sexual pleasure for men.

Those men are not rapists. But is that fact-that the men in these categories are not, in legal terms, guilty of rape-comforting? Are we advancing the cause of ending men's violence against women by focusing only on the acts legally defined as rape?

The author writes a lot about media studies, porn, and racism. He is a feminist.

Feminism for catholics... like mothers and grandmothers :)

Jarvis, Christine1, c.a.jarvis@hud.ac.uk. "The Twilight Of Feminism? Stephenie Meyer's Saga And The Contradictions Of Contemporary Girlhood." Children's Literature In Education 45.2 (2014): 101-115. Education Full Text (H.W. Wilson). Web. 26 June 2014.

"Stephenie Meyer's Twilight Saga has achieved extraordinary popularity and scholars have interrogated the nature of its appeal from a variety of perspectives. Its popularity raises questions because in many ways it mirrors romantic fictions from the 1960s and 1970s. Such fictions have been read by critics as expressions of female anger and frustration at their lack of power in relationships and in society-as stories of revenge and appropriation. Yet it is often stated that girls today can compete and succeed in their own terms and there are many powerful, emancipated fictional heroines. For these reasons, girls' enthusiasm for a romance like Twilight is initially difficult to understand. There is, however, a well-developed literature on girls and girls' education which problematises their apparent empowerment and demonstrates that although girls have opportunities denied to previous generations, they are subject to intense and insidious forms of patriarchal control. This article examines Twilight in the light of this literature. It focuses on the imperative to conform to norms of female beauty and the growth of self-harm as a defining characteristic of female identity. These are explored through the examination of two tropes in Twilight: the repeated use of the beauty makeover and the repeated use of what Tania Modleski called 'the disappearing heroine' in her analysis of Harlequin romances of the 1960s and 1970s. I conclude that one reason for Twilight's exceptional success may be its capacity to provide fantasy resolutions to some of the intense conflicts and contradictions girls face growing up in the twenty-first century."

"Feminism Doesn’t Do Away With Anti-Feminism

Since not all choices are feminist, and not all “choices” are actually choices, being a feminist doesn’t stop you from doing things that are anti-feminist.

There’s this idea that if you’re a feminist, suddenly everything you do becomes a marker of feminism.

And that’s simply not true.

Feminism isn’t a magic potion that causes you to not do anything that goes against it. The fact is, people are complex and multi-faceted, and feminism doesn’t constitute someone’s entire identity or sense of self. Being a feminist doesn’t mean that you’re “on” or perfect 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Feminists do anti-feminists things all the time.

But the point is: That’s okay.

It’s okay not to be “perfect” or live up to society’s (or the movement’s, for that matter) idea of what a feminist is supposed to be like.

It doesn’t make you a bad person – or a bad feminist.

Why? Because we live in an anti-feminist world, for one, that rarely gives us agency to live feminist-ly. As was earlier discussed, we don’t really have choices about a lot of things that society might try to tell us are choices.

Also, because feminism is out to destroy this idea that women need to be perfect or live up to an ideal womanhood.

Because forcing women to be a specific kind of woman is exactly why feminism began in the first place.

So yes, you’re probably going to do anti-feminist things. But that doesn’t have anything to do with you’re worth as a person, or a feminist."

A great article that explains the history of rape activism in our culture.

1. The Importance of being Pretty

We never really see being a smart female as preferable to being attractive. Smart is only acceptable when coupled with mainstream pop-beauty — and only barely then.

What does this teach girls? That they have to choose between smart and pretty — and that they’d better choose pretty.

2. The Emphasis on Marriage

"Young girls are taught to be marry-able and not to dream about fulfilling careers or adventures. Instead of encouraging them to be smart and ambitious, we encourage them to find a spouse."

3. Expectation Differential

What does the passive/active dichotomy have to do with being smart? Lots.

By the time kids get to a classroom, they’ve had years of conditioning into these passive/active roles. The result is that boys are more outgoing and willing to participate, while girls don’t ask or answer very many questions.

Meanwhile, if a girl does manage to defeat the gendered messages she’s been fed since birth and match her male peers in terms of class participation, her teachers are still less likely to engage with her than with her male peers.

And, that’s just by the first grade. After years of that pattern, tell me again why STEM fields are male dominated?

4. Bossy, Bitchy, and Other No-No Words

One of the things that can deter young girls and young women from demonstrating intelligence and ambition is the onslaught of derogative language awaiting. Although the bullying classics such as nerd and teacher’s pet are relatively androgynous, there are far more female-specific slurs. Know-it-all, bossy, show-off: These are almost exclusively aimed at girls.

These terms refer to malicious action within the female intelligence. Showing off means that simply existing as a female and possessing intelligence is inherently and actively mean.

So, even if girls are learning, they are shamed into closeting it — lest someone else becomes uncomfortable.

5. Aggression

"ape culture is everywhere, but most of the time we don't even notice it. As Senior Editor Liz Plank wrote here back in January, rape culture and sexism is a constant part of our favorite TV sitcoms, so it would make sense that it would also be present in some of our generation's most popular movies.
Many examples of this type of entrenched societal bias can be found in that most innocuous of Hollywood genres, the romantic comedy. It's amazing how some of the most familiar of supposedly romantic narratives are framed around unhealthy behaviors like stalking and harassment. As Feministing's Senior Editor, Chloe Angyal tells Mic, the danger in this narrative is that it teaches young women that they can't trust their own judgment. "You don't know what you want. You aren't intelligent enough to know what you want," Angyal said. "If I'm nice enough, then this dumb woman with terrible judgment will give in and date me."

These behaviors become even more problematic when we reinforce the notion that no doesn't actually mean no. As advocates work tirelessly to change the way we talk about and define consent in America, it's important to point out how warped our notions of traditional male-female romance has become.

"We don't notice it in fairy tales either," Angyal said. "We always teach our children that persistence is admirable and desirable and you should be willing to do anything to get the person of your dreams. It's not going to register as a violation of consent. We are always taught that a man can be tamed or changed by being loved by the right woman."

With sexual offense reports on the rise among U.S. colleges, it's becoming increasingly apparent that the battle to end rape culture must be fought among the younger generations, not their parents. This is why it's also important to remain vigilant about the kinds of messaging disseminated by one of our most accessible forms of entertainment: the Hollywood blockbuster. Let's take a look a few popular films over the years and analyze why they reinforce rape culture across generations."