Fuck you Disney princesses

h/t to Sociological Images

Fuck you Disney Princesses. Out of all the things in my anti-feminist childhood, I have to say that I dislike you the most. Your perfect hair and submissive mannerisms were never the most sexist thing on the block, but you certainly were the most influential. Even though I found that I had a hard time relating to most of you, you still stood alongside Barbie as the most available commercial female role models. You were pretty, nice, and got to have magical adventures. You always fulfilled the things demanded of you by society eventually, and got together with a very charming handsome prince. Or at least you snagged a man who eventually became a prince or someone of equal importance.

To a hopelessly nerdy tom-boyish girl who related to books better than she related to girls and boys her age, you represented an ideal that I know I ought to meet, but found myself unable to. My hair was always too short, my figure too stocky, and the boys seemed to prefer girls more like you than like me. Since having a boyfriend was the best indication of social standing by the time I hit nine, I was equal parts envious and awe-stricken. I even dressed up as both Jasmine and Pocahontas several times each for Halloween, and lovingly kept the costumes even when I grew out of them. Today, I try to tell myself that at least I was unconsciously progressive enough as a child to choose the non-white and more rebellious princesses as my favorites, but the fact still remained that I looked up to you, the childhood scions of anti-feminist lore.

You taught me a lot of things; most of which were incredibly damaging. You taught me that it’s only appropriate to look up to men, and that all older women are inevitably evil, unless they are fairies. You taught me that mothers are useless, and better off dead, and that fathers are well-meaning tyrants that must be defied in small ways because they were understandably hesitant to hand over their power over you to another man.

You taught me that I must be nice to even the meanest of men, in case they were a prince and my kindness and resemblance to a door-mat could redeem them. If they were genuinely mean, I ought to know instinctively, or at least suffer silently until a prince rescued me. If I tried to rescue myself, I would inevitably end up in more trouble. You taught me that good girls always enjoy housework, caring for children, and sacrificing themselves for the sake of a man.

You taught me that that sacrificing myself for the sake of men may involve using my sexuality to seduce villains that I want absolutely nothing to do with, putting my life on the line, allowing myself to be imprisoned and abused, and giving up all the hobbies and talents that defined who I was. Those hobbies and talents didn’t really matter anyways, because they were only bargaining chips for snagging a prince, who cared more for my physical beauty then anything I was capable of or enjoyed doing.

You taught me that men knew better than me, even if they were abusive, angry, immature, and foolhardy. You taught me that the most important thing in a man is his legacy and royalty, his physical attractiveness, and his charm and wit. If he wasn’t royal, he must fake it, even if a show of material things didn’t really impress me. For a prince charming must buy me, even if I don’t wish to be bought. A proper man, you see, always pays for me, because women are objects.

You taught me that men go out and do things, and that I’m just there as a prize to be won or a silently suffering support system who is always waiting, never doing.

You taught me that I must wait for “true love” and never waste myself on short but enjoyable flings. True love was always the product of a simple kiss, by which I could determine the course of the rest of my life. You taught me that there was no divorce, no uncertainty, and no break-ups. A princess stays with one man, the first man, forever. You taught me that a whore moves on and does what she think is best for herself. A whore leaves a man who is abusive and angry instead of sacrificing her comfort and pride to turn him into a prince. You taught me that all men are redeemable by the charm of my physical beauty, naïve optimism, and willingness to put up with anything.

You taught me that if I somehow erred and found myself with a man who was not redeemable, it was because he was a villain that I must stay with until a true price comes and saves the day. If said prince never came, it was because I was not sufficiently beautiful and forgiving to the man I was with, and that if I tried harder, he would stop being so abusive. You taught me a that a good girl is never single, and never happy being single. Her entire life revolves around men and self-sacrificing relationships.

You taught me that good men will overlook me if I’m poor, too homely, or insufficiently wealthy. I must wait for someone to grant me with the material objects to fake being wealthy instead of seeking them myself. You taught me that if a prince only notices me if I doll myself up and meet his expectations of womanhood, that he isn’t a materialistic shallow jerk, but that I must follow certain rules and never question status-quo in order to be happy and taken seriously.

You taught me that men blinded by their incredibly lofty, but never wrong or shallow, standards for the opposite sex, and are therefore easily manipulated by the physical beauty of evil women, and thus that I must “save him” by being even more physically beautiful than them. You taught me that if I was richer or more beautiful than a man, that my wealth and power and standards of physical beauty were erroneous, and that I should be happy to marry  a thief or someone cursed or disfigured. You taught me that I must meet his standards, whether he is a prince or a pauper, and that his standards are always right, and mine are always wrong.

You taught me that a princess is never gay, fat, anything less than absolutely stunning, or a tomboy out of anything other than desperation. You taught me that inter-racial relationships are only allowable if my prince is conquering or colonizing my hopelessly backwards and savage ethnicity; an ethnicity that is always somehow more sexist than his. You taught me that only then is it fine if I wish myself to be his “prize” for showing the savages the benevolence of the white man.

You taught me that good girls only marry for love, but somehow inexplicably only fall in love with conquerors, princes, and men who could suitably become royalty.

Disney princesses, you taught me a lot of things, but never how to be true to myself. You never taught me how to love my mother or have good female friends. You never taught me how to look up to anyone who didn’t have a penis. You never taught me how to be successful by not waiting for the heavens to open up and hand things to me because I was beautiful or because I existed only to make myself beautiful. You never taught me how to deal with what I was given instead of wishing for a man to save me and bring me back into line with the status-quo. You never taught me how to fall in love with someone I was actually attracted to or someone that was good for more than trying to save me when I was perfectly capable of saving myself. You never taught me how to say no to anyone. You never taught me how to watch my ass, protect my self-esteem, and judge standards for myself. You never taught me how to think for myself. You never taught me about things that mattered like politics, ethics, or anything else but fashion and a narrow definition of love. You never taught me to get out of tight spots by my own wit and force of will. You never taught me that my sexuality wasn’t a bargaining tool, a prize to be won, or the only thing about me that was worth two shits.

Out of all the things you didn’t teach me, you didn’t teach me that being a chubby bookish gay girl who didn’t take shit from anyone was perfectly okay. You did teach me, however, that I was a freak of nature. You taught me that I ought to put down the books, shut my mouth, and take up putting on makeup and doing laundry as my hobbies instead. You taught me that I should fumble my way through several ill-fated abusive or uncomfortable relationships with men instead of looking for love where I was endlessly more likely to find it. You taught me that my body was an unruly tool, and that by viciously controlling it with eating-disordered behaviors and self-hatred I might become a woman worth anything but scorn.

But you only succeeded in teaching me these things because you weren’t alone. You were a bullhorn in a room of sympathizers. There were healthier less damaging whispers around the outskirts, but you and the like-minded denounced them as social pariahs, sexual deviants, mentally disturbed, and political extremists. As a girl desperately just wanting to disappear and fit it, I never really had a chance. Neither, I gather, did the majority of my peers.

In short, fuck you Disney princesses. I will not pay to see your regressive movies, I will not look up to your flawless beauty-standard-compliant faces. Additionally, I will live my life telling everyone who will listen that we’ve got it all wrong. You and your clique of impossibly beautiful peers are the ones that ought to be silenced and ostracized. Not me, and not all those other beautiful and achingly real girls who desperately need to be heard and appreciated for how they are, not scorned for how they fail to be just like you: the perfectly useless, silent, submissive princess.

Wah, how do I make women like me?

I haven’t been posting for a while because it’s the middle of finals and I have two papers due in a little over 24 hours. One of which I haven’t started. Oops.

Anyways, a friend and I were eating lunch outside the other day. It was overcast and not to cold, so we were enjoying the breeze in one of the few days we get to wear sweaters or jackets in Arizona without fooling ourselves. Outside the little cafe, quite a lot of people had congregated. Before long, our little sanctuary was ruined by the arrival of a large group of men, five or six of them, that took the table adjacent to ours. This is not usually something that I care about, it being a large and crowed campus, but this particular group of men was especially loud and obnoxious. We debated moving, but decided not to since the only open table was covered in the droppings of our diseased urban wildlife. Plus, we were lazy.

Before long, their conversation turned to “girls”. Now, I usually don’t make a habit to eavesdrop on others. Mostly, it’s because I don’t think other people are that terribly interesting when I have someone in front of me that I actually care about, like my friend. Also, I’m not really the sort of person that thinks everyone else’s business is my business. My business is plenty interesting, or at least pressing, by itself. I couldn’t help overhearing them though, because as is the habit of a large gathering of fraternity-type men-folk, they seemed to not care that there were people in the vicinity that really didn’t give a damn about how big the dump they took last night was.

Their present topic was women. About half of the group preened and loudly proclaimed their conquests upon the fairer sex. They were very obviously quite proud of the endeavors of their shloongs. My friend and I exchanged eye-rolls. The stench of cliche was overwhelming.

The other half of the gathering, however, smiled and looked with awe upon the gods of sex that had decided to take a break from their divine life of (fabricated) fornication to bring testosterone-laden tales of their exploits to the masses. One, in the infrequent pauses (these men really liked to loudly talk over one another), made the statement, “the women here seem to be a bit more frigid than usual. How do I make the women in my major like me?”

What women don’t get about men: we’re all whiny assholes

I cannot for the life of me imagine why Michael Bywater, a columnist at The Independent, even has a job, let alone gets paid to write such self-pitying sexist garbage. I am by no means a linear thinker myself, but at least I understand how to propose a main idea in a short essay format.

So here’s the main idea of this post: Michael Bywater is a self-absorbed douchebag who expects the world to tell him what he ought to do with his penis, being the center of his personality. Also, the world and all the people in it better please his penis, dammit, or he’s going to start whining.

Don’t believe me? Go read the article. Keep in mind that it’s only coherent if you read it as an argument for assisted suicide.

But suppose I take pity on you. For the purposes of snark and self-indulgent superiority, I will break down his long rant of Freudian asshatery for the scorn and mocking of intelligent society. By “intelligent society” I mean myself, and maybe you, if I decide you are a nice sort of fellow.

Michael begins with some sort of allusion to the time-old conundrum: my penis is separate from me, it says I must do bad things, thus I do bad things, and I won’t do bad things if I didn’t have a penis, so maybe I should chop it off, but I like my penis, but it makes me do bad things… ad nauseam. We already know that this is going to be a long synopsis of one man’s love/hate relationship with his penis.

I really hate music sometimes

Probably the worst thing about being a very musically-inclined person is that most music sucks. Not only that, the people who are into music, maybe even the same music as you, are probably assholes.

There is some law of the universe that the intellectualism or popularity of an activity increases the assholes attracted to doing that activity. Music is both something that is very popular and something that requires a bit of technical knowledge and practice to perform (or interpret, if you’re a dancer). Thus, the amount of assholes interested in music, performing music, and dancing to music is truly astronomical. I reference radio DJs and the Body Police dancers for all the evidence I need.

Regardless, I just used to skip from station to station when the commercials were over and the DJs started talking to avoid hearing the stupid racist, classist, homophobic, sexist shit they’d inevitably spew.

Now I have to switch stations because of the actual music lyrics, and I don’t even listen to rap or hip-hop. These are the song that I encountered just in my commute this week:

Fluid sexuality and Olympic eye-candy

Just to be clear, I do hate the focus on tits and ass at the Olympics. I think it’s incredibly demeaning that women are required to wear smaller and more revealing uniforms then the men on almost every event. Also, it doesn’t help that shitbags like Simon Barnes, without a shred of irony, are upset that the women’s swimming uniforms compress their breasts so he can’t ogle them at the same time he feels threatened enough by the male synchro divers to remark, “it all looks like a wonderfully elegant gay suicide pact.”

In short, he finds the lack of female breasts to drool over insulting at the same time that he feels that the perceived sexuality of the male divers (who must be gay, because semi-naked men are obscene and catering to other men by default, not women or, shockingly, no one) is worthy of denigration.

Nevertheless, I have to admit that the endless parade of shirtless male swimmers and scantily-clad sweaty and toned female volleyball players is enormously titillating. The athleticism and sportsmanship is way more attractive than any mock coquettishness in a sleazy pornographic film.

I’m fairly aware that half the reason the women volleyball players are supposed to wear as little as possible is for ratings. But, God help me, it’s working. I usually like watching gymnastics more than volleyball, but I simply cannot turn away from Misty May and Kerri Walsh’s beautiful and awe-inspiring sportsmanship. I’m also incredibly disappointed by the lack of coverage on female soccer, which is also one of my favorite events.

Reversing sexism in Hollywood

If I was a Hollywood producer, I would like to produce this kind of movie:

A woman is a crime-fighting lawyer. She is not a side-kick or a spin-off. It’s very clear the movie is about her, because the title of the movie is her name. She probably comes from a tough background. She learned to overcome it, however, by standing her ground and refusing to let the world run over her. She is inspired by her past to go into the justice system.

However, there’s a dark side: she’s has a terrible temper. Sometimes, when she is angry she gets very threatening and verbally abusive to the people in her life. She takes her stress out on the opposite sex. She picks up young, weak and naive men, has a fling, and then dumps them. She probably accomplishes this by saving them in court and then expecting their undying worship. That’s okay, however, because she’s very popular with the men, she’s very much a smooth anti-hero type. This beginning part of the movie should feature her in very commanding clothes, maybe with simpering male secretaries that purposely flash bits of bulges and butt cracks in their tight clothing to try to catch her attention. There must be some sort of gratuitous sex scene in which she is shown having sex with a man who moans and groans very loudly, and tells her how wonderful she is afterwards. In the morning, she tells him to get out and addresses him by a name that is not his own. The man should visibly look ashamed at himself for his wanton behavior as he walks out.

And now, an interjection from a sex-positive feminist

When I usually encounter a “sex-positive” on the internet, they are about as far from being feminists as humanly possible. I submit for your evidence: Bang-Bros (don’t worry, it’s just a wikipedia link).

Occasionally, I actually stumble upon an actual feminist, not someone who is posing as one to write off their nasty exploitive shit as art, who submits that they are “sex-positive”.

Via Feministe, KaeLyn’s Feminist Porn: Sex, Consent, and Getting Off. I was pleasantly surprised. No overt anti-feminist sentiments were expressed. No glaring logical holes were presented. The comment thread, quite long at this point, is mostly civil.

Nevertheless, the post bothered me. Not in the way that inspires me to hurt inanimate objects, but in the way that I felt that the work of my feminist icons and my own opinions were being unintentionally misunderstood and discarded.

Stripping is not a fucking revolution

Seriously.

As much as people say it is, it still is not. I’m amazed I have to say this.

Yes, and this post will alienate a very large population of the sex-positives and liberal dudez. I don’t cater to hypocrites though¹, and there is such a large pile of rotting fecal hypocrisy in the notions that stripping is a revolution that I’m amazed that very little people (beside the ever wonderful Twisty or Nine-Deuce², for example) have pointed them out.

Namely, it is this: those that profess stripping, porn, and prostitution are feminist in nature, can be feminist, or are progressive in any way or form are typically enamored of using some sort of appeal to history, such as some deviation of the phrase that “prostitution is the oldest profession”.

How telling! Did anyone else notice that?

If prostitution, the buying of a woman’s sexuality for the pleasure of a man (or a richer woman) is the “oldest profession” there really cannot be anything revolutionary, progressive, or new about it and its various forms³.

On abortion, part trois

This will be a post about abortion and rape, although not in the way most people relate the issues.

I promise.

In my last abortion post, I said a fetus cannot survive without the willing cooperation of the mother. It is simply not a viable organism on its own. I claimed that I have never heard a viable moral argument that would substantiate the anti-abortion position that a fetus is guaranteed the support of an unwilling mother. I realize that I was giving this specific line of thought not enough attention. Very few people outside of academic Ethics have heard of Judith Thompson’s “right to life” thought experiment which I have quoted here:

The fetus is an innocent person with a right to life. Abortion results in the death of a fetus. Therefore, abortion is morally wrong. In her thought experiment we are asked to imagine a famous violinist falling into a coma. The society of music lovers determines from medical records that you and you alone can save the violinist’s life by being hooked up to him for nine months. The music lovers break into your home while you are asleep and hook the unconscious (and unknowing, hence innocent) violinist to you. You may want to unhook him, but you are then faced with this argument put forward by the music lovers: The violinist is an innocent person with a right to life. Unhooking him will result in his death. Therefore, unhooking him is morally wrong.

However, the argument does not seem convincing in this case. You would be very generous to remain attached and in bed for nine months, but you are not morally obliged to do so. The parallel with the abortion case is evident. The thought experiment is effective in distinguishing two concepts that had previously been run together: “right to life” and “right to what is needed to sustain life.” The fetus and the violinist may each have the former, but it is not evident that either has the latter. The upshot is that even if the fetus has a right to life (which Thompson does not believe but allows for the sake of the argument), it may still be morally permissible to abort.

On abortion, part deux

The biggest disconnect between the two sides of the abortion debate is that both are talking about entirely different things. The pro-abortionists are, rightly, concerned about the rights of the mother. The anti-abortionists are concerned with the rights and status of the fetus.

It is from this that antagonism spawns. It should be obvious that I am patently and unapologetically pro-abortion. I am ready and willing to take on any anti-abortion debates. Why? Well, anti-abortion debates are usually founded upon the principle that a fetus is human, and is therefore entitled to all human rights. They point towards shoddy research, stating such things like at what point a fetus feels pain, or at what point it has fingers. They might also claim that a fetus is human at the point of conception, because it has a full set of human DNA. If they are feeling particularly inspired, they will appeal to a higher authority, citing that abortion is against the will of God and misinterpreting various passages of the Bible.

Firstly, all the research in the world about when a fetus has brain waves or hair is all for naught. I have not stumbled upon a single rational argument as to why a fetus unable to survive without the willing cooperation of the mother is somehow guaranteed that cooperation, or why exactly a fetus is human. The fact that a fetus has a full set of DNA is also inconsequential, because so does my spleen and the nails I just clipped. The greatest abortionist of all, God, also cannot save your shoddy argument, for it is fate that aborts more fertilized ovum than any number of willing women.

All of the anti-abortionist logic can easily be defeated. What cannot be brushed off, however, is that there is a very real infringement of rights that would result from the banning of abortion. There are women that would die, unnecessarily, from illegal and unsanitary abortions. These are facts. Incontrovertible facts.

Anti-abortionists give me no such relevant facts. In the interests of my rights and my innate rationality, I cede unqualified victory to pro-abortionists. The very real fact of the matter is that anti-abortionists cannot prove that anything necessarily morally wrong happens during an abortion. Whereas, pro-abortionists can prove, with little effort, how legalized abortion saves human lives and grants half of the population reproductive rights.