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God, the egalitarian

11/03/2008 by Sotah

Try googling “feminist Spirituality” (googling a subject matter is often my point of entry, as you might have realized, if you read any of my other entries), “mainstream” feminist spirituality is often connected with some version of essentialist feminism – aka women are so cool because_____(fill in the blank with something about nurturing, the earth or the moon, and you get the point).

While, I consider myself fiercely feminist, and I attempting spirituality, I have not yet found a feminist spirituality that is “egalitarian,” at its core, or even thinking along that line (feminist for me as philosophy of radical egalitarianism). Calling god the something earthy, like the “wind” or the “spirit” instead of “he” is not what I am referring to, such changes are too easy, because, while attempting to posit a genderless god, old school good is just glossed over with “hippy” names.

An “egalitarian” spirituality ought to deconstruct the very notion of god, because god “the wind” exists in hierarchal relationship with the earth just as god “the king.”

Back to google my Oracle – a search for “egalitarian spirituality” is evens less likely to yield fruits. As expected it boils down to either “love the earth” religion or “everyone is right” religion, which is not what I am saying on either count.

After parting ways with Orthodox Judaism, and going “egal,” I’d love to take “egal” to the next level, and wonder what it would look like to have an “egal” spirituality.

Posted in blogs, gender, religion | 2 Comments »

What’s Wrong with Marriage?

09/23/2008 by Sotah

Patriarchy fucks as all (or gather doesn’t fuck at all)

Below is a brief “chat” with a man who is relatively progressive – a good friend, and used to be rather kinky back in the day.

Me: I am still wondering what you meant by “my sex life sucks, but marriage is a trade off”
The Man: i thought that was pretty clear
The Man: different people want different things out of marriage/life
The Man: I am happy with a loving wife who has a golden heart and will be the best mother imaginable.
The Man: and who has time for sex anyway?
The Man: I am mean, there were times when it bothered me, and im sure it’ll be an issue in the future again, just not now.

This man is settling for a woman he hardly fucks, because you guessed it, she “will be the best mother imaginable.”

This framework denies his wife the full humanity she is entitled to – by conceptualizing her as having “a heart of gold” and a cunt of ice. The only good thing that comes out from what’s between her legs are his babies – that she will then mother.

However, it denies the husband his full humanity as well by creating a false choice – where a “loving wife” that will bear children is a trade-off for a sex life that “sucks.”

In the conversation, appropriately, the man defines this false choice by the title – “marriage.” (my sex life sucks, but marriage is a trade off).

This is indeed “marriage.” (I am not implying that marriage cannot be reclaimed).

And marriage as the institution it has been and the institution it continues to be – sucks.

For many it does not suck as obviously as described above – I do not deny that it is possible to have mind blowing sex in a patriarchal marriage.

However, a patriarchal marriage is the relationship that has utility beyond itself (financial, reproductive. social, religious) – and it is in that soul destroying utility that the full humanity of both men and win goes to die.

Posted in blogs | 1 Comment »

The pregnant body is the most political image on earth

09/02/2008 by Sotah

The pregnant body is the most political image on earth. The pregnancy of Bristol Palin, the daughter of the gun toting, bible thumbing, baby popping, Republican V. P Candidate, Sarah Palin finally motivated me to write.

Why is it surprising, or even interesting that Bristol Palin has sex – I mean pregnancy is generally the sure-fire way to know that one is having sex, which is really why this pregnancy is show-cased. The real news here is that the daughter of moral values America is having premarital sex (along with 40% of American teenage girls). The official statement by Sarah Palin actually suggests that Bristol might be having a shot-gun wedding – Morally Majority indeed!

Bristol Palin is not the only daughter of the Moral Majority who is engaging in premarital sex – She however, will be the only one on cable news, the only one that requires official statements. Her body is not hers anymore, it belongs to body politic and for this I am incredibly sad, and sadder still because the bodies and sexualities of young women are routinely co-opted because they are universal targets that are made to bare opposing ideology upon their shoulders.

The sexuality of young girls is always understood as someone’s failure. For the progressives Bristol’s pregnancy is the failure of the abstinence only sex ed. For the abstinence camp, by having the baby she is taking responsibility for the moral failure to closing hers legs tight, until she sells the right to her sex to some dude. Either way, what is going on here is a failure.

There are no interviews anywhere to be found, no statements of any kind from Bristol herself – we are told she choose to have the baby (choose!!), we are told she will marry the father. Her voice is gone. The image of her holding her baby brother – is shockingly prophetic, and thus ironic. I wonder why she was holding her brother (the woman & future mom) instead of Sarah Palin’s husband.

Is it always a failure for someone to fuck? - Young women, poor women, drug addicted women, retarded women, genetically inferior women, lesbian woman all these women ought to keep their fucking secret and never ever, flaunt it in the face the body politic by actually becoming pregnant, and continuing their pregnancy to term – there is no greater sin against the social order.

In this way, abortions (while must absolutely remain legal), are actually not some radical departure, abortions are maintaining the social order. Bristol only has only thing going against her – age, and thus while scandalous, we can forgive her the pregnancy, if of course she promise to marry the father and thus her sexuality will again be safely possessed and controlled – if her parents couldn’t keep her chaste, perhaps her husband will achieve the proper results.

Now Imagine that Bristol is not only young, but she has one or two other notch from the list above. Better yet, imagine it was not a mistake, imagine that Bristol (still 17) paid one of her high school friends for his sperm, and injected herself with the sperm, or better yet her lover injected herself with that sperm. Then what would we think? Abstinence Sex ed. cannot be blamed any longer, nor the promiscuity of the youth. Who will we blame then for the radical act that is pregnancy.

However, for the women that are the opposite of the list above – older, educated, health, wealthy, and wise – for them the failure to conceive is just as heretical as is the choice to be pregnant for other women.

The pregnant body is the most political image on earth.

Posted in blogs, pregnancy, women's health | Tagged | 1 Comment »

where have the feminist gynos gone?

07/23/2008 by Sotah

A review of Capital Women’s Care

I’ve always been a pick-you- gyno –out-of the-yellow-pages kind of girl, since all I needed was the birthcontrol prescription, and the gyno was the gatekeeper of the goods. At my University Health Center, the kind nurse- practitioners understood this truth and happily forked over the birthcontrol prescriptions and answered any questions I had.

After, I graduated and moved to DC, it was time to go to a grown-up gyno, and I simply called a few random ones and picked the one that had appointments available. Low and behold, I stumbled on Doctor Constance Bohon, who decided to discuss my fertility and the way its being destroyed by my fat, issues I did not ask anything about. When she brought up her “concerns” I told he that I appreciate the information; however, I was comfortable with my body. The Good Doctor, actually went to tell me that, it is a major problem that when I look in the mirror, I think ‘this is me” and I am ok with it. She knows some older women who are like that, but me at me young age, I can still change, thus I should not accept my body.

In the process of my short visit she also managed to mention that she has “friends” who do not accept pregnant patients who smoke tobacco… I am surprised the doctor accepts patients who are fat, but then, I guess it’s an economic necessity.

I also did a bit research to see what everyone else thought about Bohon, and following bit of medical wisdom was attributed to her by the Washington Post:

“In pregnancy, the uterus weighs a lot more, and jogging puts extra strain on the ligaments around it. So that can start to drag the uterus down”

The general guidelines of this topic seem to be, if you used to run, nothing wrong with continuing to run during pregnancy. Don’t believe me, give it a google.  And, the uterus will just have to learn to catch up!

Thank you Doctor Bohon for your good advice.

As annoyed as I was at the time, I did not bother to write this post, I just went on with my life, until today, when I needed Capital Women’s Care (a practice of many gynos, one of whom is Bohon) to call in my birthcontrol prescription to a pharmacy in New York City, which they finally agreed to do, after I lost it and screamed at them in front of my entire office.

Thank Capital Women’s Care for the excellent care you provided today.

At the end of all that, I was not able to pick up my prescription after all, because the medical insurance will not cover it until tomorrow!

And what is the point of this rant?

We need some way of knowing which doctors are going to judge us, and which doctors will treat us? If only there was some kind of forum where we could trash gynos we hate and celebrate gynos well love… is there such a thing already, and I just don’t know about it?

Posted in blogs, gender, women's health | 1 Comment »

Fat Girl Bikini

05/09/2008 by Sotah

I googled “fat girl bikini” using several possible word combinations (ex: big girl bikini, fat bikini, plus sized bikini). Besides the fabulous post from Dairy of a Fat teenager, I found practically nothing. Main stream plus size fashion stores, such as Lane Bryant do not even carry bikinis, the only store that I found that carries bikinis in big sizes is the wonderfully amusing Love your Peaches, while not my style, this store is awesome in its attitude, and of course its title. The models are in all sizes and all ages.

However, while hardly anyone actually admits to selling them, they are certainly available for sale; I purchased  a size 16 bikini at target.

Clearly, I am no fan of modestly or diets as can be seen from past posts, thus I spent the last few days contemplating the intersection of bikinis, feminism, and fat acceptance.

As Wikipedia will happy point out, we did not invent the bikini, the Romans did; however the bikinis in the west did not come around till 1946, and then were band from many beaches until the early 60th, when the bikini began to go mainstream (or almost mainstream, back to that in a bit). The 60th are all also the caldron where contemporary feminism stewed, until it too became somewhat main stream in the 70th at least in regards to the law of this land. The acceptance of the bikini came about a decade before the key government reforms that are the corner stone of gender justice as understood today (equal pay/ anti discrimination legislation, marital rape laws, legalization of birth control and abortions).

There are basically three perspectives on this particular correlation.

(1) Skimpy clothes, aka Bikinis degrade women, and “gender equality” actually hurts women because it erase what woman really want, which is to mother children, while someone provides for them economically, an impossible situation in a world where men and women are expected to desire and pursue the same course.

This perspective appears in texts such as What Our Mothers Didn’t Tell Us : Why Happiness Eludes the Modern Woman by Danielle Crittenden.

According to this book Feminism makes women unhappy because it calls out social status into question, thus prohibiting women from being happy in their “natural” role.

“Those aspects of life — whether it’s the pleasure of being a wife or of raising children or of making a home — were, until the day before yesterday, considered the most natural things in the world. After all, our grandmothers didn’t agonize over such existential questions as to whether marriage was ultimately “right” for them as women or if having a baby would “compromise” them as individuals. Yet we do. We approach these aspects of life warily and self-consciously: A new bride adjusts her veil in the mirror and frets that she is selling out to some false idea of femininity; a new wife is horrified to find herself slipping into the habit of cooking dinner and doing the laundry; a new mother, who has spent years climbing the corporate ladder, is thrown into an identity crisis when she’s stuck at home day after day, in a sweatsuit, at the mercy of a crying infant. It is because of feminism’s success that we now call these parts of our lives into question, that we don’t thoughtlessly march down the aisle, take up our mops, and suppress our ambitions.” -excerpt from  What Our  Mothers Didn’t Tell  Us

(2) While equal pay is all good, and women should go to college and question their roles, the skimpy clothing is actually bad (“degrading”), and speaks to feminism gone wrong; it’s a kind of side effect of liberation, that actually hurts women by preventing them from being who they really are and getting what they really want which is of course marriage and motherhood.

One of the most prominent voices within camp is Wendy Shalit the author of Girls Gone Mild and a Return to Modesty. All over her books is this weird question “If doing away with “repression” was supposed to be liberating why are things now so bad?” (p. 16 of Girls Gone Mild, the first chapter is available on her website).

It is entirely unclear to me what is so bad, however the very premise of this ideology is that things are bad. In both of her books the “mild girl” aka the “virgin” is compared to the “whore” who sleeps around with guys she does not care about because of social pressure. This particular character is at the heart of the argument, just as in the first perspective rests on the character of the unhappy career women who is ignoring her true calling of house work. Thus, it is impossible for a woman to love her job or love having sex with several partners, she is actually repressing her deep unhappiness.

(3) Both the equal pay, and the bikini are aspects of our liberation. It cannot be ignored that societies where women have the most rights are also societies were women were can wear and due wear the most revealing clothing. Feminism is about the liberation of both our minds and our bodies (this is my perspective if you have not figured it out).

This perspective is often loosely labeled as third wave feminism. (Shalit occasionally tries to call her point of view fourth wave feminism). This movement is fragmented, and does not have a single unified voice; however one of my favorite blogs that represents this ideal is Feministing.

From this perspective wearing a bikini is not degrading, it is actually liberating. Now, if it is considered hideous or completely inappropriate for some people to wear bikinis (or revealing clothing in general), it would follow that those people are not as liberated, or rather are not as privileged as the bikini wearing group.

Discrimination against fat women is a documented fact, fat women are denied equal pay protection routinely. While, wearing a bikini will not end the everyday inequality faced by fat women, it is still a political and a feminist act for a fat woman to wear a bikini, just as it was a feminist and a political act for women to start wearing bikini’s in the 60th (a decade until the passing of legislation that radically changed women’s lives).

This summer, at the biggest size I have ever been (size 16) I will wear a bikini (to bad I could not find a yellow pok-a-dot bikini), because Bikinis heralded the arrival of gender equality, and I too am equal (and very hot indeed J)

It would be amazing, If people actually read this post and send me comments with pictures of themselves in a bikinis of all sizes to post on my blog, as protest to fat discrimination (No that’s 4th Wave feminism!)

Posted in Fat, blogs | 4 Comments »

Gendering pregancy and the normative world

04/03/2008 by Sotah

There is at least one transgendered man who gave birth to a child. The birthfather’s, partner also a transgendered man, wrote an article about their life in the Village Voice. In his article he told the story of two men who were born women (one of whom , is a transgender activist and writer of lesbian sadomasochistic pornography), who are raising a child together (that one of them gave birth, in the context of a committed, but open relationship). This narrative did not become a media hit.

In The Advocate, Thomas Beattie, a pregnant transgendered man who is legally married to a woman, wrote an article about his experience. The legal status of his relationship, indicates that society (vis a vi the law) accepts what they are doing as legitimate, by granting them the rights and privileges of a male-female couple. It seems, that “we” are willing to accept this “male pregnancy.” The “pregnant man” will be on Oprah tomorrow (4/3/08)– it doesn’t get more benign than daytime television. This apparently “subversive” story turned into a feel-good feature. Why?

The answer, is likely to be same as for another enigma. I personally never understood why the law allows sex-changes but not gay marriage. Looking at the media reaction to the transgendered men described above, a possible answer surfaces. The desire to be “normal” is given much weight. For instance, in his Advocate Article, Beattie wrote that his wife, did not tell her family that her husband is a transman. He describes the way people saw them and as a normal couple. Desiring to appear “normal” seems to be the ticket to equality under the law, or at least a certain degree of social acceptance. (Another example of this might be the attitude towards fat people who want to lose weight, and those who do not. The moral scorn towards a fat person eating a donut is palatable)

The outcome of privileging normalcy is a society, and thus a legal system that rewards individuals who appear within the normative spectrum. This gives rise to the weird fact that it is illegal for two women to marry each other, and thus “appear” different. However, if one of them for reasons entirely her own desires to take on the male gender, and have a “legal” sex change, then once the couple looks normal, they can be legally married.

This is not a critic of people who choose to have a sex change, but of legal system that rewards normative appearance, and thus presumably the normative desires that are believed to be behind that appearance.

Because of this legal trend, I wonder if Thomas Beati, now that he is a pregnant, and thus no longer “appears” normal at least temporarily, will experience problems with the law, or will the nine month deviation be forgiven, since the baby goes back to a nuclear family?

In Iraq, it seems that while gay men and lesbian women are prosecuted by the official authourity, transsexuals can legally switch their gender through surgery, and even get a government interest free loans to help pay for the surgery.

The blatant, visible injustice of this transformed Iran into a country with the highest percentage of gender reassignment surgery outside of Thailand.

While the level of injustice is certainly different, both in the US and in Iran, the legal system is set up in order to encourage gay men and lesbian women to have sex change surgeries. This sacrifice is one I can easily imagine people making. What is more important to be the right gender or love the right person/have the right sexual orientation? If I was put in a position to make that decision, I would have no problem changing my gender.

Hell, if I for some reason I had to spend my life in Iran, perhaps I would have a sex change, just so I could live as man in Iranian society.

The bottom line of this rant is simple: It is ridiculously unfair to create a legal system that privileges people having expensive and painful surgeries as a means of upholding the normative.

I applaud Beattie, and all the other transmen who are claiming their right to give birth to their own children, and thus undermining the logic (a sex change can be used a means of achieving normalcy) behind the injustice of legalizing sex change, while prohibiting gay marriage.

 

Posted in gender, queer, transgender | Leave a Comment »

Pregnancy is not for gendered women any more :-)

04/02/2008 by Sotah

The right to give birth to a child is central right, a right that has often been denied to marginalized people, either through forced sterilization or through social control. Today the world is changing. So much so, that a transgendered man broke through social control, and decided to give birth to a child. The baby girl is due this summer, I wish him and his wife all the luck in the world. I hope his story will encourage others to break the boundary one of the last boundaries and insist on their right to give birth, to parent, to build families after their own heart.

Posted in gender, women's health | Leave a Comment »

Being thin is not like giving charity

02/20/2008 by Sotah

A brief response to Daniella:

First, being thin is not the moral equivalents of giving charity. “Thinness” actually has no moral value at all.

Second, it seems to me that if modesty was actually about not standing out,  it would be alright to go to the gym in gym clothing, but from reading her blog it appears that modesty is about silence after all…

“I go to a gym that does group personal training. 4-5 people share a trainer and we do lots of different exercises using free weights, rowing machines, rope climbing, running, etc. Recently, I started wearing a skirt to the gym. I wear a pair of close fitting pants and then put this loose cotton skirt on top of them… But, even so, I doubt that what I am doing is really acceptable. Although my trainer is a female, men are sometimes in my group and they are frequently often in the gym. The people who go are mostly older than I am, married and with an established career, and I have never felt that anyone was there being distracted by un-tznius thoughts. However, how do I know?”

Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

Modesty is a dirty word.

02/19/2008 by Sotah

A few weeks ago a story surfaced about Ultra-Orthodox Jewish women in Israel wearing a garment a kin to a “burka” as a way of up-ing the anti on modesty. The original Haartz article on this issue is in Hebrew, but you can read all about it right here. The Haartz article suggested that this trend is in some sense analogues to anorexia.

Some bloggers have cited parallels to eating disorders. Both anorexics and the burka women are denying their bodies in order to make them “disappear”. Both are reacting to unattainable cultural ideals, be they size-zero thinness or increasingly stringent standards of modesty in the Charedi world, by taking them to an obsessive extreme. And anorexia is often understood to be a desperate way for women to assert control over at least one aspect of their lives. Surely, wearing a burka or vowing silence can be construed similarly. Jewish Chronicle.

The assumption behind the blog I cited above is that there is a kind of modesty that is good, and thus by comparison wanting to be skinny per se, is not the problem, it is just the twisty version that becomes a problem. This analysis does not implicate the “healthy” majority in the illness of the fanatics. I, however, implicate the very notion that a woman should strive to be thin or/and modest as the fuel behind this bazaar fire.

Women who strive to be thin or/and modest are doing so (most of the time) because they believe, that they are striving for an ideal of womanhood, an idea that is directly connected to pleasing men sexually (anorexia) and following men’s rules (modesty).

Tangent: Lesbians are at much lower risk of Anorexia. Doesn’t surprise me! (Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology 1994; 62(2):252- 260)

There is no “good” desire to be thin, and there is no “good” desire to be modest. Modesty, is a bad idea, not just at its extreme, it is a bad idea at its inception, because modesty is about women not tempting men by remaining silent and covered! Women silencing themselves for the sake of men is the very definition of patriarchy, if you ask me.

The perversion of modesty is only it progression. And anaraxia, is just the progression of the desire to be thin (aka, desirable, aka beautiful, aka for men).

Thus, the frame of reference must change. Twisty modesty is not going to disappear, until the ideal of modesty disappears, and of course the same thing can be said, and is often said about eating disorders. The change in these fields begins with a change in discourse.

Modestly aught to be a dirty word.

Posted in Jewish, blogs, gender, halacha, israel, women's health | 2 Comments »

The one who teaches his daughter math is teaching her to lasciviousness

02/14/2008 by Sotah

The modern day version of “the one who teaches his daughter Torah is teaching her lasciviousness” (Talmud, Sotah 20a) has arrived. An article in the Seattle Times links an increase in education for girls to an increase in drugs, alcohol and partying. The blog Feministing, picked up this article and critiqued it as a new strain of patriarchy. However, this argument is old, and identical to the one the Talmud makes for excluding women from learning Torah. Yesterday’s “lasciviousness” is today’s “drugs and partying.”

Some might respond to this critic, by attacking the conclusion (rather than the premise); this of course has been done in the Jewish community in regards to women’s learning. Jewish feminists he fought back by saying “It is not true, a learned woman will be just as moral as she was before, even more so.”

This argument is actually devastating to women’s dignity, because it assumes that a goal for womanhood is good behavior, and if men let us learn, we’ll continue to behave (aka be sexually pure). This of course is not true, it cannot possibly be true. Be it Talmud or calculus, a woman who lives in a world where she is taught what is considered valuable for her culture, will by definition have a measure of freedom that will enable her to be “lascivious,” a right that men have cherished for quite some time.

Bottom line: The idea of trading girls’ education, for their good behavior is still alive and well and it will continue to be that way while we accept their premise: women’s top priority is propriety. Time for a new premise: Women exist for their own sake, and not for the purpose of blindly reproducing the hegemonic regime of the moment.

Despite what some well intentioned feminists might say, Women’s liberation is a liberation from “good behavior” first and for most; because it was in the name of “good behavior” that women were locked away from the world, century after century, civilization after civilization.

Posted in blogs, education, gender, halacha | Leave a Comment »

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