Feminist Fred

I have male parts dangling down there somewhere, so I try, I really try! not to comment on the enormous struggle women suffer to liberate themselves from oppression. Especially the struggle with femininity, which the radical feminist will decry and denounce from time to time.

Since I have no first hand experience with being female and suffering the oppression of male dominance, I prefer to let the women talk to the women about these issues, since they know best what feels right and should be able to understand better than I how to communicate helpfully to women who struggle with the desire to dress feminine in a world that rewards femininity and punishes the rejection of it, sometimes brutally, sometimes subtly.

In my last post I referenced the excellent blog I Blame The Patriarchy, where I started my studies of gender under the tender, witty tutelage of Twisty Faster, perhaps the most amusing and creative feminist writer who has ever lived. With scorn, sarcasm, wordplay and insight, she changed me, single handedly, from a normal pornsick dude who aspired to being a nice guy to an outraged person who aspires to a state of humanity devoid as possible of the turgid trappings of masculinity that never fit me anyway. Thanks to her I started to read the classics of radical feminist thought and found myself rethinking everything.

In this same post, Twisty’s commentariat, who have collectively taught me even more than Twisty, came back once again to the knotty and deep problem of women rejecting femininity. Twisty had made an off-hand comment asking women to at least reject some small bit of feminine baggage to show some feeling for the plight of women being killed the world over for the sake of the same system that condones killing our sisters.

There’s not much to be said about men killing women outright out of pure hatred for women. But asking women to reject femininity is harder to swallow, and leads to some real problems in the home, in the workplace, on the street. One commentator threw up her hands at the idea because a woman will be raped just as readily in rags as in stilettos. The feeling of helplessness was palpable.

Short hair, short nails, jeans and t-shirts, hairy legs, hairy pits, no make up, getting up, showering and ready. It’s so easy. Maybe you need to shave the legs – nobody wants to be stared at. The rest of it is below the radar, nobody really notices. Depending on the body shape, people can still tell you’re a woman.

I’m not saying to do it. But rejecting femininity is rejecting a lot of crap you have to buy and things you have to do. It’s not difficult, because it is verifiably easier. You find your comfort spot along the continuum from girly girl to unadorned human and that’s it.

The argument that you’re just as liable to be raped dressed up as dressed down doesn’t make sense to me. The real crime is that men, in their insufferable dominance, have staked out the unadorned human look for themselves and women comply with this ownership by continuing to regard this look as not feminine enough or even masculine.

Twisty has asked us to pass around this report from Pakistan:

ISLAMABAD, Aug 29: Balochistan Senator Sardar Israrullah Zehri stunned the upper house on Friday when he defended the recent incident of burying alive three teenage girls and two women in his province, saying it was part of “our tribal custom.”

Senator Bibi Yasmin Shah of the PML-Q raised the issue citing a newspaper report that the girls, three of them aged between 16 and 18 years, had been buried alive a month ago for wishing to marry of their own will.

I realize that male supremacy, from the standpoint of an American male, fearful of losing his precious privileges or even being mistaken for someone less than masculine at all times, is a somewhat abstract thing, because the less time spent thinking about it the better. But actually it’s all part of a global, age-old set of customs that are no different in essence from this atrocity.

When you think of liberating women from this kind of custom, or any custom that degrades, patronizes or even exaggerates the distinctions between the sexes in the name of masculine or feminine behavior, you are also thinking of liberating yourself from the cultural mandate to be an unthinking monster who oppresses half the people on earth by your very existence.

Just a short note to celebrate TCM paying tribute to Kay Francis on Thursdays all next month. I love Kay Francis. She often played strong women, had an unconventional beauty, and was a top box-office draw at Warner Brothers for most of the 1930s. Watching her pre-code movies reveals a Hollywood that catered to what women thought about and felt, even if they did mostly end with the woman in her place where she belongs. Some of the Kay Francis movies I’ve seen, like Stranded (1935), actually have Kay not submitting to the man in the end, but actually show him admitting what a fool he’s been all along, something that must have thrilled her fans.