Feminism.

Posted by: Attila Girl at 02:39 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 3 words, total size 1 kb.

. . . Jeff G. decided to show up for work today.

(Oh, for Pete's sake, people. No, rape isn't funny, but white guilt can be hilarious. And these days those who think black men are more sexual than white men—or better in bed, or whatnot—don't know very many men of any race.)

Posted by: Attila Girl at 01:00 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 63 words, total size 1 kb.

. . . may begin "allowing" women to do something I've been doing since the age of 17. (No, not that. We're talking about that skill that takes decades to get really good at, and is generally thought of in the West as "the right to travel," and A Good Thing for commerce.)

There's even talk of letting adult females register in hotels without male "guardians."

There are moments in the middle of the night that I just want to, um, ventilate the entire Muslim male population of the entire Middle East.

Then I take a valium, and I'm good for another 24 hours.

Please send more tranquilizers—or more Winchester Silver Tips. Either way.

Posted by: Attila Girl at 11:40 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
Post contains 122 words, total size 1 kb.

As long as we're being so "tolerant" of other cultures and their various approaches to radical genital mutilation, why not bring back the castrati?

Not removing the testicles of young boys so they will have greater vocal range later in life strikes me as intolerance of traditional Italian culture, and a terrible blow to opera-lovers everywhere.

Posted by: Attila Girl at 01:25 PM | Comments (6) | Add Comment
Post contains 66 words, total size 1 kb.

Dennis is oppressing Amanda Marcotte on the side.

"Knock-knock jokes." What a strange, fascinating creature Dennis is.

Posted by: Attila Girl at 09:23 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
Post contains 33 words, total size 1 kb.

I adapted the expression about a servile womb not breeding free men from the closing stanza of this poem:

Advice to Young Ladies

A.U.C. 334: about this date
For a sexual misdemeanor, which she denied,
The vestal virgin Postumia was tried.
Livy records it among affairs of state.

They let her off: it seems she was perfectly pure;
The charge arose because some thought her talk
Too witty for a young girl, her eyes, her walk
Too lively, her clothes too smart to be demure.

The Pontifex Maximus, summing up the case,
Warned her in future to abstain from jokes,
To wear less modish and more pious frocks.
She left the court reprieved, but in disgrace.

What then? With her the annalist is less
Concerned than what the men achieved that year:
Plots, quarrels, crimes, with oratory to spare!
I see Postumia with her dowdy dress,

Stiff mouth and listless step; I see her strive
To give dull answers. She had to knuckle down.
A vestal virgin who scandalized that town
Had fair trial, then they buried her alive.

Alive, bricked up in suffocating dark,
A ration of bread, a pitcher if she was dry,
Preserved the body they did not wish to die
Until her mind was quenched to the last spark.

How many the black maw has swallowed in its time!
Spirited girls who would not know their place;
Talented girls who found that the disgrace
Of being a woman made genius a crime;

How many others, who would not kiss the rod
Domestic bullying broke or public shame?
Pagan or Christian, it was much the same:
Husbands, St. Paul declared, rank next to God.

Livy and Paul, it may be, never knew
That Rome was doomed; each spoke of her with pride.
Tacitus, writing after both had died,
Showed that whole fabric rotten through and through.

Historians spend their lives and lavish ink
Explaining how great commonwealths collapse
From great defects of policy—perhaps
The cause is sometimes simpler than they think.

It may not seem so grave an act to break
Postumia's spirit as Galileo's, to gag
Hypatia as crush Socrates, or drag
Joan as Giordano Bruno to the stake.

Can we be sure? Have more states perished, then,
For having shackled the inquiring mind,
Than those who, in their folly not less blind,
Trusted the servile womb to breed free men?

—A.D. Hope

More thoughts on the current pertinence of the poem here, and another site reproduces it with footnotes to explain the historical references.

When I was young I always assumed the poem was written by a woman, because men were too busy thinking of new ways to oppress us. Wrong.

Posted by: Attila Girl at 12:00 AM | Comments (4) | Add Comment
Post contains 454 words, total size 3 kb.

Darleen has some great thoughts that started as a riff on my last rape post, and took on a life of their own.

Posted by: Attila Girl at 05:45 PM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
Post contains 29 words, total size 1 kb.

Cathy Young and Jeff Goldstein are trying to have a serious discussion of rape, and how to address the current inequities in law/custom without going back to the old inequities in law/custom.

Oddly, they are each experiencing a high noise-to-signal ratio. Hm.

Next week Jeff will take another crack at abortion, and Cathy will respond. Doctrinaire gender feminists will be just as helpful in that exchange.

I can't stop thinking of the time I read aloud in my writer's group from an autobiographical piece that discussed my first experience of sexual intercourse, which happened to be by force—but by a boy I was dating, and knew would not kill or seriously injure me.

One of the women in the group was profoundly shocked at all this, and simply could not believe that the people who knew about it didn't do more to help me.

"You know," I responded, "that was pretty small potatoes compared to all the other things that were going on when I was a teenager."

This woman had heard enough from my autobiographical pieces to know that I was homeless multiple times during that era, not to mention getting attacked with a club by a close family member. Etc.

And yet, in the tradition of extreme feminists everywhere, she regarded me as simply a walking vagina with arms and legs attached to it.

How did sexual politics come to this? When did we get this far off-course?

Posted by: Attila Girl at 05:52 PM | Comments (11) | Add Comment
Post contains 244 words, total size 2 kb.

James Joyner pays his respects.

Posted by: Attila Girl at 01:57 AM | Comments (1) | Add Comment
Post contains 9 words, total size 1 kb.

No, I haven't read all the posts and cross-posts; I'm on vacation. But I do like Darleen's summary of the current blogstorm.

I continued to call myself a feminist right up to the point that some self-proclaimed leaders of the women's movement publicly justified William Jefferson Clinton's exploitation of Monica Lewinsky. Then I backed off for a few years.

Since I've started blogging I've used the label on occasion—to distinguish myself from conservatives of the LaShawn stripe—but I generally like to remind people that the word feminist has about as many interpretations as there are people hearing the word.

What do I mean when I say it? I mean sexists are icky. That's all.

Posted by: Attila Girl at 05:29 PM | Comments (6) | Add Comment
Post contains 118 words, total size 1 kb.