The Goddess and The Boob

After a slight dressing-down yesterday regarding my ignorance over the Lincoln-Douglas (not Douglass) debates discussed on Fox News, I am licking my wounds and dipping my toes into the comfortable waters of comic books.

Yes, Girls Read Comics. 

Whenever I need to get my energy levels up and really get the blood moving I can rely on Karen Healey. 

I just read her post from April 24 regarding the Open Source Boob Project at Penguicon. That is where girls wearing a button stating willingness had men approach them asking to touch their breasts.

"Livejournal's the Ferrett, an early adopter of this... oh, let's say 'astonishing' endeavour, wrote a rapturous post about how great it was that he "touched at least fifteen sets of boobs at Penguicon" in the spirit of totally non-tawdry empowerment of women.

For some bizarre reason, not everyone responding embraced the notion that empowering women to mystically heal the wounds of men with their breasts heralded an exciting movement towards a feminist utopia."

The link to The Ferrett's page now comes up with an updated post apologetically stating that "what works in a microcosm does not work in a macrocosm". 

His arguments stink of misogyny however and even more so when I scrolled down and read the original post. Here's just a delicious taster:

"This should be a better world," a friend of mine said. "A more honest one, where sex isn't shameful or degrading. I wish this was the kind of world where say, 'Wow, I'd like to touch your breasts,' and people would understand that it's not a way of reducing you to a set of nipples and ignoring the rest of you, but rather a way of saying that I may not yet know your mind, but your body is beautiful."

Ahem - I had trouble typing there because my fingers started shaking in anger. I don't even know if I can comment on this because it seems so damn obvious. But let's just consider briefly the fact that if you meet someone you find attractive perhaps it would be less reductive to try to get to know their mind, rather than focusing on touching their tits. 

And why does it have to be touching? Can't it just be "Wow, you have nice tits" - some men already don't mind saying these sorts of things. But then there is that old power move of conquering - touching as having/owning, putting their mark on you. A compliment, however brilliant and eloquent, is just too cerebral. It asks for a response. Whereas if you're touching someone's boobs all they have to do is stand there.

While Ferrett argues that this 'project' was meant to make women feel safer, marking out the physically open from those not interested in letting men paw them, it seems, especially given his 'friend's' comments, that it is meant to make men feel safer.

I am also curious as to what Ferrett really thought was happening when women pushed their chests towards him. Did they all really think he was 'worthy' of touching them? This is part of that whole Goddess myth - that men truly worship women and feel privileged when allowed near or in their bodies. 

Let's disabuse anyone of that notion: 

"By the end of the evening, women were coming up to us. 'My breasts,' they asked shyly, having heard about the project. 'Are they... are they good enough to be touched?' And lo, we showed them how beautiful their bodies were without turning it into something tawdry."

As Healey puts it, the demarcation (where some women could opt-in with a button, while others did not participate thus opting-out), was simply a "reification of the cultural gender binary where women's bodies are always rendered as either 'available' or 'unavailable', and never as a body actually belonging to the woman in question."

I guess it also comes down to the fact that, even if women participated in the project, how many women who want sexual liberation (vaguely defined, at best) are thinking "Gee, I wish men felt more comfortable asking to feel my boobs"? Let's think back to the sexual revolution and all of those Free Love groups where many women felt pressured to have sex with multiple partners.

While Ferrett admits that the expression of male power makes such an experiment potentially dangerous one feels, if he was a socially minded as he seems to think, he should have thought of all this before. But of course, when a man gets a handful of generously proffered boob he must have more and finding a way to do that with minimal conversation (aha! buttons) becomes a passion if not a grand quest.

"None of them seem to know how this state of affairs came to be."

I just have to share this from Atrios.

More evidence of the media being unable to see itself for what it is. It's quite funny, really. {sob}

The Flow of Money

From The Independent, Unholy Water: Delhi's rotting river: 

"On Delhi's sacred Yamuna River, beneath a wrought-iron bridge built by the British more than 100 years ago, the remains of the dead were falling on the living." 

The article goes on to say how children waiting below the bridge, like the girl in the picture, gather the bags of ashes and flowers after they fall and rip them open to collect the polythene. 

Despite the fact that the Yamuna is worshipped by those of the Hindu faith it is pumped full of sewage. "For the vast majority, the toxic black ribbon that slices through the east of the city ... is largely out of sight and out of mind. For those not forced to scrape their survival, there is little reason to visit the Yamuna, except for cremating the dead and scattering their remains according to Hindu tradition." (italics mine)

It is interesting to me that something involved in a holy tradition is not more protected, suffering because of more worldly concerns. 

"Manoj Misra, who heads... Yamuna Jiye Abhiyaan, or Save the Yamuna,... said that because the river received no fresh flow of clean water," due to a dam used to extract water for the city, "and yet received a huge daily input of sewage, the toxicity of the water was getting ever more concentrated."

The sewage apparently comes from corroded pipes that do not allow the waste to reach treatment plants,  not to mention those parts of the city that are not even connected to the main sewage system.

I wonder about this lack of proper infrastructure, especially in such a populated place, and looked for more information as to the divide between rich and poor in India. According to a 2006 Guardian article, water subsidies in India "skew benefits to the rich....While incomes are going up, public cash is not percolating downwards. A large part of the reason is the government, which cannot seem to funnel wealth generation into human development."

Of course, as in other countries, the problems do not lie solely with governmental mismanagement or corruption. This 2006 article in The Guardian discusses controversy surrounding Coca-Cola's misuse of water in countries like India, where supplies are limited. Such companies give token effort, and sometimes just words, towards investment in improving living conditions. 

Setting aside the problems these companies create when they abuse the environment and people directly, how far can we expect companies to go in terms of investment in local issues? I am thinking specifically of infrastructure issues, such as those corroded sewage pipelines in Delhi.

On the positive side, those living in rural communities in India are getting help from NGOs like WaterAid, which is building latrines and initiating education programs to teach people about hygiene. What might be useful is if more huge multi-nationals invested in NGOs already working in the areas near their factories or plants. This may save the money from being misdirected by corrupt or inept governments. 

No More Card-Carrying Commies

I promised myself I would just log in, check things out and then leave to save my eyes from the glare of the computer screen.

Of course, I break promises to myself all the time.

While trolling through the blogs on my links list I ran into this article, (a commentary on some issues raised by this article) on BitchPhD.

In brief, the author of the post, Sybil Vane, discusses the antipathy many students feel towards identifying themselves as 'feminists'. She touches briefly on this point, and the weak arguments people make against Feminists, but then broadens the scope to examine another factor in the equation.

"When these young women (and men) say, 'I don't need to identify as a feminist, I already believe X, Y, and Z,' they are saying that they see no value in collective identification. It does not mobilize them or expand their perceptions or confer strength or bolster confidence. It merely reduces them to a member of an 'ism', one whose tenants can be nominally severed from the ideology itself. In part, this is individualism run amuck, but it is also a real poverty of imagination, one that can only see collective identification as hegemonic."

This made me think about those whom I've known who join groups to take collective action for a cause, but who would not place a label on themselves. Now people say "I believe X" rather than "I am X". I wonder, blindly, whether this could be the result of some trickle-down effect after Communism/Marxism proved such a losing strategy. 

People of more recent generations have born the brunt of the repeated failures of collective political and social groups - that is, the radical ones. Many of those groups had clear political ambitions, visible (if ultimately unattainable) goals. Their failures taught us that such group actions, however committed, simply do not work (at least not in a Western political context).

In the case of Feminism, many women simply do not see the point anymore. Young women in the West will have had little or no exposure to blatant sexism - and identity issues are perhaps too subtle (though desperately important) for many young women to understand.

That is not to say collective action does not take place, but those that march outside the White House, World Bank, et al, seem more ad hoc and temporary. I do not agree that radical action is unfashionable (as some commentators on BitchPhD argue), in fact I think it has been reduced to mere fashion. People can join groups at random, perform only those actions they wish to perform. It absolves them of responsibility to others in a group and allows them to commit only as far as is convenient.

As for feminism, it is fair to say that the students are reacting to the fear of how they might be judged, rather than basing decisions on their own judgement of Feminists. Furthermore, I am dismayed at how the same old cliches are being trotted out to put down Feminism, by people who have had no exposure to Feminists such as Julia Kristeva or Luce Irigaray. They do not seem to be reacting to students on their own campus who want to spell 'woman' as 'womyn' but are perpetuating the meme.

One more point, I used to be skeptical about some of the language and image issues that crop up in feminist discussions, though I always identified myself as a feminist. In the end, it is important for people, women especially, to realize that feminism is not always about sexism. To me, the most striking and important aspect of feminism has to do with identity. 

I will save that discussion for another time.

The Elitists

On investigating the Harper's website further I discovered, much to my dismay, that the whole site now requires a subscription. No longer can I feed on the leavings and scraps of previous months for free. This is quite a blow since a subscription from the UK costs over $40, an amount I simply cannot spare at this time. Still, it is a fair price...

At least Salon.com still offers its free pass. Here's something that made me chuckle.

K.I.S.S.

Back already. The baby has a banana to keep her happy, but my coffee's gotten cold.

I am officially registering my dismay at the new Harper's magazine website. What is this red tab nonsense? They've gone from simple dual columns to links overload. Time will tell if this makes it easier to navigate but the look of it leaves a lot to be desired.

All of that said, I am currently debating adding a 'third column' to my blog. I've seen it done other places and it looks nice - but I don't think I have enough content at the moment to justify it. So I guess I too feel the lure of glitzy YouTube boxes, photos and links lists.

Back with a Vengeance

I haven't been here for a while - too tired to rant, I guess. I've noticed there are lots  of comments on here now. Hooray for spam!

With the election coming up this November I suppose I should get back on my soapbox. But, of course, now I'm living in the UK so my perspective is a bit different. Too much BBC World Service, not enough Fox News.

However, it also means I get my news (such as it is) about five hours before those of you in Stars and Stripes land. This may not mean much as I am now also a full-time mother and am too busy watching soaps and making my man's dinner to keep up with a blog. 

I could promise to try. . . nah.