Dare To Be A Feminist

I met Antonia Crane when I was putting together an anthology I did about sex work & sex workers. From our first correspondence it was clear she was smart, articulate, funny, talented, ballsy and didn't take herself too seriously. I knew she had a...

The abortion debate is not about unborn babies. I bet you knew that, didn’t you? If it were, there would be a similar outcry over every issue involving the lives of babies. Such as lack of healthcare, babies born addicted to drugs, babies killed after being left in hot vehicles, etc. Every year here in Texas someone leaves a kid in a carseat in 100 degree weather and the kid bakes. No public outcry. No organized protest. In fact, the person responsible usually escapes criminal prosecution.

But do you really know what it is about? The pro-life attempt to criminalize abortion is not about saving the lives of unborn babies. If it were about that, you’d see pro-lifers working toward preventing unwanted pregnancies and better adoption rates of unwanted children. In Abortion and the Politics of Motherhood, Kristin Luker explains the psychology behind this centuries-old debate.

People generally don’t put a lot of time and effort into an issue unless it directly affects them. So..how are pro-lifers directly affected by the abortions of others?

The abortion debate is about women and their role in society.

“Monster porn”, otherwise known as “monster erotica”, “cryptozoological erotica”, and “erotic horror”, should be well-known to fans of this site. These sexy stories employ mythical creatures — everything from vampires, demons, zombies, and other monsters to centaurs, mermaids, leprechauns, and aliens — as sex partners. And apparently this upsets people enough for them to censor such stories. But why?

The French feminist collective La Barbe laid into the French literary world a couple of weeks ago. In the 110 year history of the Prix Goncourt, they said, hardly any woman has won it. They said that this omission pointed to the invisibility of women writers: a hundred out of 110 Goncourt winners, and 75 out of 87 Renaudot winners were men.

As this type of porn gains visibility, it reflects a greater demand for explicit sexual representations among women, where sex isn't always a "ribbon-tied box of happiness and joy," say editors in this excerpt from "The Feminist Porn Book."

...With the emergence of new technologies that allow more people than ever to both create and consume pornography, the moral panic-driven fears of porn are ratcheted up once again. Society's dread of women who own their desire, and use it in ways that confound expectations of proper female sexuality, persists. As Gayle Rubin shows, "Modern Western societies appraise sex acts according to a hierarchical system of sexual value." Rubin maps this system as one where "the charmed circle" is perpetually threatened by the "outer limits," or those who fall out of the bounds of the acceptable.

On the bottom of this hierarchy are sexual acts and identities outside heterosexuality, marriage, monogamy and reproduction. She argues that this hierarchy exists so as to justify the privileging of normative and constricted sexualities and the denigration and punishment of the "sexual rabble."

The title -- and cover image -- gave me this impression: This book is going to be about women taking back the kitchen and crafts (and all the things once called "women's work") and are refusing to be told that they are anti-feminist or backward-thinking for doing so. They are reclaiming the word "domestic" from its status as a slur.

Yes . . . but that was just the tip of the iceberg. Matchar explains that that is what we think we're doing (there's the motive) but what we're really accomplishing, if we truly believe ourselves to be feminists, might be shooting ourselves in the feet (there's those repercussions).

...Some women who are quitting their jobs to bake bread and grow veggies and homeschool their kids are saying, as I did, when I dropped out of the workforce, "Work sucks and it ain't getting any better. Screw the middleman. I'm my boss now and my job is to feed my family." As noble as this seems (and, yeah, I was getting a bit of a head), Matchar thinks that we have jumped off a ship that isn't sinking, as we thought, but is, in fact, still struggling to get out of the harbor. Feminism hasn't failed -- it just isn't done yet. Just as we don't have total racial equality even though we have laudable civil rights laws, we don't have equality between the sexes, either -- not in employment or anywhere else. To use another metaphor, our mothers didn't fail to win, they just started the fight. They tagged us in and we've walked away.

In his new book, “Towards Collective Liberation: Anti-Racist Organizing, Feminist Praxis, and Movement Building Strategy,” Chris Crass rightly points out that there are more men influenced by feminism today than at any other time in history. While this may be so, and I believe it is, a book written by a man about his deep commitment to feminism is still radical, and far too rare. Especially because these books are able to speak to readers with gender privilege in a unique and effective way. The good news is with his first book, Crass is able to do just that, and more.

...Crass seeks to bring his white audiences to consciousness about racism through articulating how white supremacy instills an internalized sense of superiority over people of color. This work is not easy as it requires confronting feelings of fear, guilt and shame. However, Crass believes that everyone is needed to build a powerful and successful movement. He states that his overall goal in writing is “to help turn race, class and gender into catalysts to help us build our progressive Left movement rather then have them continue to divide us.”

Check out this fab post from Unpacking the POWER of Picture Books: Sharing Titles About Women in Canada's History!