One Thousand Words

Mirrored from brigidkeely.com/wordpress.

I’m re-reading my Big Book of Jane Austen and wondering, yet again, why some people continue portraying her work as romantic.

I mean, sure, they involve matrimony and at the end of the story there’s a marriage and not a funeral, so technically they are romances and not tragedies, but still.

Most of the established marriages are pretty awful, formed of people who barely tolerate each other at best and despise each other at worst. New relationships are entered into with negotiation, almost as business partnerships, even when actual affection is involved. And when a potential spouse who has objected to a match based on social standing relents, it’s not because passion has swept him/her away. Rather, it’s because he/she found out something further about the potential spouse like their family isn’t as unrelentingly tediously awful as first thought and there are some Members Of Quality present. For instance, Elizabeth Bennet and her atrocious family (except for sweet, naive Jane) but wait, she has the civilized lawyer uncle and aunt.

A lot of modern readers (and, let’s face it, viewers of dramatic versions of the books) forget or never knew that a good marriage was an upper class woman’s job. If she failed at it, she (or the daughters she misaligned) could face poverty or abuse with little alternative save returning home to live with her parents. If you’ve ever read Vanity Fair you’ve seen what Amelia Sedley– a woman with a very high class education and wealthy background– is reduced to in order to survive. (spoiler: she has absolutely no marketable skills and mostly goes hungry, surviving on handouts from relatives)

Austen’s heroines are women with very little options trying to make the best future for themselves they can. Maybe, like Marianne, they narrowly escape being “ruined” (spoiler: “seduced” (possibly raped), impregnated, and abandoned therefore to be hidden away because of The Shame) by A Cad only to find a decent marriage to a man literally old enough to be their fathers; maybe, like Jane Bennet, they luck out and have a few small difficulties before snagging a congenial easily-pushed-around wealthy dude with bitchy, unpleasant sisters;maybe they’re rescued out of grinding poverty (and a very close knit and loving family) to live among people who treat them like unwanted and threatening time bombs waiting to go off, only to find a love alliance with a cousin after all (but have spent over a decade being treated like crap by the rest of the family). She writes with humor and there are comedic elements and, yes, the novels have a Happy End. But there’s a grim undertone of desperation under the social skewering and witty banter.

If these women fail at catching a good husband, they are fucked.

Mirrored from brigidkeely.com/wordpress.

The Witches of Eastwick, by John Updike, is a pretty sexist book. Let me sum it up for you:

*There are women! And they are witches! Also: they are whores! They have a lot of sex. WITH OTHER WOMENS’ MEN. Whores.
*Also: they menstruate
*Also: They get pregnant and lactate OH MY GOD IT’S SUCH A MIRACLE LET’S FETISHIZE IT and then also let’s talk about pee and how women apparently all have shy bladder syndrome all the time.
*Women: They totally murder men. Just because. It’s what they do. They get bored of a dude and they kill him. Or suck the life out of him. You know. Whichever. Vampiric harpy witch women! GOD! They just prey on men! All the time! CONSTANTLY! When they aren’t having orgies, that is.
*Women: Get them tipsy and in a hot tub and they totally lezz out at the drop of a hat.
*Women: They can’t live without men and after they get dumped by a grotesque dude who is secretly gay (gay men! They’re the pits!) they will create men out of nothing and magic so they can be mated and happy again. Because a woman without a man is nothing!

The plot of the book goes like this:

There’s these women in New England who are petty, vindictive bitches. They are in a coven together. They are all widowed or divorced and man! Do they love to fuck! So they fuck the husbands of other women, taking on a maternal role in their lives, while hating those same wives. They hate them so! They are full of hate. And they are not above murdering these women, or driving the men to murder them. Just, you know, for larffs.

Anyway, one is a sculptor of crappy little vacation trinkets, one is a mediocre cellist, and one writes a gossip column for the local small town paper. They aren’t even good at what they do professionally. Also: they are really shitty, negligent mothers. This is mentioned. A lot. Shortly after hexing an elderly woman and causing her to fall over, which could have resulted in broken bones or death (she was boring! she deserved it! how dare she discuss gardening with a member of the gardening club who is also a petty, vindictive witch who is a bad mom and a whore??!!?), this really grotesque dude rolls into town. He’s hairy and drools and wears awful clothing and is incredibly rude.

The witches pretty much immediately start rubbing themselves all over him because… I guess… women just love cock that much? I don’t know. He kind of pits them against each other and he knows they’re witches and it just… none of it really makes sense. They wind up working together to kill this chick he ends up marrying (for her money, he’s a con artist) and he skips out in the night with her brother (because he’s gay. EW! gay. That’s so gross.) leaving the witches behind. Which is when they magic up men for themselves.

I haven’t seen the movie in a while, but I remember liking it. The women, you know, are powerful and don’t use that power JUST to put other women down. In the movie, if I’m remembering correctly, the dude is the devil and he tempts them to evil and then they’re all “dude! This is the devil! he’s evil!” and they take their power back for themselves. Also they all have babies, I don’t even know. WHATEVER HOLLYWOOD. But even saddling them all with devil babies is still a step up from this book which is just sexist and craptacular.

I had better hopes for this book. I could tell it was shitty from, like, the very first page. I kept reading it anyway, internets. For you. For yooooouuuuuuuu.

Mirrored from brigidkeely.com/wordpress.

Nesko and I watched “The Exorcist: The Version You’ve Never Seen!!!” recently, although since I’d never seen “The Exorcist” before any version would be one I’d never seen. I was afraid it wouldn’t stand up, that it would be hokey or awkward or corny. It wasn’t! It was a good movie, very interesting, and I’m keeping me eyes out for a copy of the book it was based on.

One of the most interesting things in the movie (to me) was the way Regan dressed. In the first part of the movie, because she’s dressed in nightgowns and kept to her room/bed, she wears jeans and plaid shirts. She’s a girl, 12 years old, and she’s wearing clothing that’s really gender neutral. Other than possibly having buttons/zippers on the “wrong” side, or minor fashion detailing/stitching, her clothing is something a boy or a girl could wear and look good and feel good. I didn’t pick up on her being presented as a “tomboy” either. She was just wearing clothes.

I was walking around outside the other day and a big group of kids and their caregivers was walking in the other direction. There were 15-20 girls in the group, and every single one of them was wearing pink. Most of them were also wearing ruffles on their shirts and jeans. They weren’t dressed up, but they were ruffled and pink and heavily gendered. Some of the boys had non-gendered clothing, plain jeans and t-shirts, but most of them had macho things like “king of the playground” or “here comes trouble!” or something (as opposed to, you know, “‘princess” or “diva” or “flirt” or “cute”).

Children’s fashion is so excessively gendered at this point that seeing a girl in plain jeans and a plaid shirt jumped out at me as something to be noticed. There are people who claim that there’s no point in being a Feminist any more, no point in pushing a Feminist agenda, because wow! Feminists won! The world is a Feminist playground and women are in control and men are on the decline and becoming weaker and less powerful and less effective every single day. But there is an incredible divide between what’s acceptable clothing for “boys” and “girls,” and while it’s considered appropriate to dress a girl in “boy” clothing it’s not acceptable to dress a boy in “girl” clothing because that will turn him gay or something. Because “male” is still the default, and female the exception to the rule.

Mirrored from brigidkeely.com/wordpress.

There’s a lot of guys who do this thing, in public, that is really aggressive and potentially threatening and invasive and all around douchey, and I’m pretty sure they’re not aware that’s how their actions are perceived, because if they were aware of that they’d stop doing it. Maybe. There’s a lot of aggressive, entitled, douchey guys out there, though.

Anyway, this is the thing:

When you are a dude in public, especially if you are with other dudes in a group, and you happen upon a lady who is minding her own business reading a book or eating an ice cream cone or working or whatever, and you want to know her name, give her yours first. Don’t just demand her name. Especially don’t follow up with questions about where she lives.

Because that? Is threatening. That’s now two pieces of private information you’ve tried to get out of her, and could easily lead to stalking.

And there is a LOT of pressure on women to play nice and answer the question. Because, you know, he’s just being friendly. They’re just questions. What possible harm could it do?

But it’s one of those things that makes women feel unsafe, especially because if she doesn’t answer these (very personal, private, could endanger her life and security) questions, she doesn’t know if the guy asking them will start screaming at her and calling her an uppity bitch.

Maybe you are thinking to yourself “huh, how could simply knowing a woman’s name and neighborhood make her unsafe?” Here is the thing. It’s really easy to watch women, especially in a big city. It’s easy to narrow down where a person lives, what public transit routes they take, including what block they live on, what apartment they live in. It’s easy to get access to women. It’s especially easy when you know that woman’s name. “Oh, hey, I’m here to see [woman's name] and I think her buzzer is broken? could you let me up?”

I mean, think of how normalized-as-romantic this incredibly scary behavior is, how often it’s portrayed in romantic comedies.

So, you know, your harmless questions can actually be very alarming. Especially when the flow of information is only going one way.

So be mindful of that. If you MUST intrude upon a woman’s personal space (like, maybe she’s the most attractive woman in the known universe, or she has a tattoo with an obscure quote on it you recognize, or she’s reading your absolute favorite book series about soul-bonded dragons, and you know in your heart of hearts that you are soul mates), open with your own name first. Get the flow of information going both ways. Make it a conversation and not just an interrogation. And be mindful also of the fact that women don’t owe you anything. They don’t owe you a smile, or a conversation, or answers to your questions. If they don’t want to engage with you, that doesn’t make them bitches or whores or nasty people out to get you. It makes them human beings who don’t have the time, interest, energy, or whatever to expend upon you. And that’s their right, to not interact with some stranger who is making unreasonable demands on them.

Sometimes when a woman is being interrogated by a stranger (who, when male, usually is taller, stronger, louder, and heavier than her, all of which put her at a physical disadvantage), she might try to turn attention away from herself and ask questions of the stranger.

This does not mean the woman is trying to bone you, is giving you permission to “have sex with” (rape) her, is flirting “aggressively” with you, or is, in fact, interested in you/your dick. It also doesn’t mean you can then suavely segue into demanding to know what female celebrities she wants to have sex with, nor does it mean you can loudly call her a prude when she doesn’t answer you right away. I mean, you know, maybe she’s flirting with you and wants to get all up in your business. Sometimes people connect in the most unlikely ways! But it is not probable. More than likely she is trying to get you to talk about yourself (most peoples’ favorite topic of conversation) so she no longer feels like you are stalking her. She’s trying to redirect the conversation in such a way that she no longer has to actively take part in it. She’s reduced to this strategy because most women are not permitted by strange men they meet in public to opt out of conversations the men initiate.

Think about that for a minute.

If you are male, are you routinely dragged into personal conversations by other people? Do they ask you personal questions over and over again, getting louder and more persistent? Do they insult you if you refuse to talk to them or avoid answering the question? If you are reading a book or listening to music via headphones, do people assume that you owe them attention, that they can monopolize your time, that if you don’t fawn over them you are somehow at fault?

Because that’s pretty standard for women who go out in public.

If you feel the need to apologize several times for you/your group and your “obnoxious” behavior then consider changing your behavior. I mean, if you are acting obnoxiously and then apologize for it and then keep acting that way it pretty much cements that fact that you’re an epic jackass with no regard for the feelings of others, and no care at all for how you’re impinging on their social/physical space.

Mirrored from brigidkeely.com/wordpress.

When I was of an age/interest to read Young Adult Literature, most of it was written by dudes, featuring dudes as the characters, and was directed and marketed at dudes. If female characters were present, they didn’t say anything, or were a designated love interest, or taught the Young Hero a Valuable Lesson. There were books directed at female readers but they pretty much sucked, featuring as they did date rape and cancer and orphanings and promising piano careers cut short, and did I mention the date rape and also the stalking? They were horrible, terrible, awful books.

There were a few bright spots, in my reading. Lloyd Alexander who roped me in with his Prydain books, for instance. His stuff was pretty male centric but he DID have the Vesper Holly books, books with a female protagonist who goes on adventures of the sort a male protagonist usually went on. Tamora Pierce’s Alanna/Lioness Rampant books were pretty trail blazing and inspiring, and shaped my world view in ways I’m still discovering. Meredith Anne Pierce’s “Dark Angel” trilogy (which apparently went out of print, with the final book being IMPOSSIBLE for me to find for YEARS) which flavored my dreams and my notion of what strength and love were. Robyn McKinley and Jane Yolen. Susan Cooper’s “Dark is Rising” series and sweet, strong Jane. Mary Stewart’s “Romantic Thrillers” with women who often didn’t know how to drive (my maternal grandmother, of an age with Lady Stewart, never learned to drive) but who still kicked butt and seized their own happiness.

There’s probably more, but in 30 years worth of reading, I’ve come up with what, seven names? Seven authors? And even then, most of Alexander’s work was male-centric, as was Cooper’s “Dark is Rising” books.

This is, now, changing.

Graceling is a book about a young woman “graced” with the ability to fight and kill. She hates it. She hates being under the control of her uncle the King, who sends her out as his bully and muscle. She hates hurting people. She hates herself. And over the course of the book she comes to better understand herself, and slip out from under the control of other people. She also Has Adventures and acts. She isn’t acted upon. She is a driving force. And she doesn’t end up married and with children. In fact she is opposed to marriage and doesn’t want children. How refreshing is that?

The Forest of Hands and Teeth is a coming of age story focused on a young woman whose father is vanished and presumed dead, and whose mother essentially commits suicide in the first few pages. The protagonist comes to realize that the utopia she lives in is actually a dystopia built on lies and half truths, and must escape her fate and her world by launching into the unknown, leaving everything she knows behind. As she journeys, she faces her staggering ignorance and realizes the world is much larger, huger, than anything she could imagine. It’s hard to really describe this book and how much I like it without running into spoiler territory. As with “Graceling,” the protagonist acts more than she’s acted upon. She makes decisions and takes charge and runs her own life.

Lips Touch: Three Times is a collection of 3 short stories about first kisses. I am not and have never been a fan of romance, which makes me kind of a freak, I think. In the “Alanna” books, for example, when I first read them as a teen, I actively resented the romantic bits in the story. So when I say this is a collection of 3 short stories that have a common theme of “first kisses,” please understand that it’s also about a lot more than that. Each story follows a young woman at a turning point in her life. Each must take control of her destiny, her fate, her life, and make a decision about something and then live with the consequences. And each one does.

Some friends of mine are having a baby girl and, nerdishly, one of the things I’m most looking forward to is her discovering reading. I’m incredibly glad that there are books that are written for her; not just books that she can enjoy, but books that are written with her in mind, heroines that she can easily see herself as. I spent most of my childhood running around pretending I was Robin Hood and Taran Wanderer and King Arthur. In order to star in my own youthful fantasies, I had to be male, take on a male persona. I’m excited that literature is opening up and giving young women a taste of what it means to be strong, adventurous, heroic, and female.

If you’re looking for feminist/female-centric books, you might want to check out the Amelia Bloomer Project for lists and descriptions of books.

Mirrored from brigidkeely.com/wordpress.

I love vampires so hard, guys. I really do. I’ve been really into vampire literature since I was 11 or 12 (before that it was werewolves), so on the surface books like Twilight seem like a perfect match, right? It’s Vampires! And they interact with the world! But there’s this “older, more physically and socially powerful man grooming/stalking/courting a younger, less powerful woman” theme that I hate. I’ve always hated it, and it is RIFE in YA lit, in fact pretty much all literature, aimed at women.

Most of the women I know have been sexually assaulted, molested, and/or raped. While some of the perpetrators were the same age or younger, or were female, most of them were older men who spent time grooming them, stalking them, and manipulating them. I don’t know if the women I hang out with are unusually unlucky, if broken people attract each other, or if they just talk about shitty stuff that’s happened to them more than other women do. The Powerful Older, More Experienced Man trope may be sexually thrilling in fiction, but in real life it’s freaky as fuck; and it’s something that’s touched my life both directly and indirectly. When I was 17 I was sexually assaulted at work by coworker with seniority, who had laid down a ground work of intimidation and silencing action ahead of time. Two of my girlfriends, both under the age of 18, had been raped– one by a boyfriend, and one by somebody she grew up calling “uncle.” The boyfriend’s stalking ended after a year of threats; the uncle encouraged the second girl to tell because “nobody would believe her anyway.” Both young women had powerful, assertive men roll up in their lives, treat them specially, “watch them sleep” as it were, and then fuck their shit up.

It’s a fantasy I can’t get behind. I’ve seen it play out in real life, and it’s pretty twisted. A guy who’s interested in you and climbs a tree to peek into your bedroom generally isn’t checking to make sure you’re safe. In real life, he’s likely to send you a photo of your room with a note saying he knows where you sleep at night. It’s a threat. He can get you at any time.

You aren’t safe.

It isn’t very sexy.

Mirrored from brigidkeely.com/wordpress.

I want to open this by saying that if you’re a dude I interact with in a positive way, this is not about you. I have male friends who are feminists and if I had a problem with their behavior I’d address it to them directly.

This is directed at dudely dudes in general who are dipping their toes in this crazy thing called feminism.

Here are some pointers for you!

• There are a LOT of resources about feminism available both on line and in print media. It is extremely lazy and demanding to drop into a conversation about feminism and demand that the people participating drop what they’re doing and educate you on certain matters. Nobody owes you anything. You do not innately deserve women’s attention, nor do you innately deserve personalized educating. Get off your ass and do your own reading; stop trying to change the subject to yourself. You are not the center of the world.
• Feminism is a large movement with a large number of active and involved participants who are out working to make very real changes in the world. Will your male participation be welcome? In theory, yes. In practice, if you demand respect and attention and accolades simply because you have a penis, you are in practice an entitled douche bag. Feminism does NOT need men as participants to be taken seriously. In fact, that’s the whole POINT of feminism: that women do not need male approval to function. If you act like an ass and are asked to leave a discussion, please don’t rant about how feminism “needs more men” and shouldn’t waste a “valuable male ally/resource.”
• If you feel compelled to open conversations with “If you have an issue with a feminist who JUST HAPPENS to have a penis, I don’t know WHY so many people TAKE ISSUE WITH WHAT I SAY” than the problem is YOU. If people keep calling you on the same shit, you need to examine that shit and change it.
• It is utterly hilarious in a very bad way to have a dude talk about how he’s really new to this whole “privilege” thing and then demand that someone help him explore what his privilege is. Congratulations, you know a buzz word. You also fail utterly to comprehend anything about it, and are proving your inability to read or think critically.
• Guess what: including praise about a woman’s body with praise about her mind isn’t really praise. “Joan has a great ass! And she’s pretty smart, too.” is insulting. “Joan is so smart! And has a bangin’ heiny” is also insulting. Congratulations! You approve of her body type! Who gives a shit? Why do you feel compelled to mention that? Why are you unable to separate your physical attraction to her body from her actual accomplishments and skills?
• “The Patriarchy” exists. “Rape Culture” exists. They permeate all aspects of the world. Ridiculing women for taking to task book authors, writers for television, web comics, etc because they’re not focusing on “real issues” does nothing except prove how little you get it, how little you actually value and respect women, and how little you are aware of the work that feminists are doing around the world. Ignorance: you’re soaking in it.

If I have the time, I’ll work up an article about vaccines and morons next. It will have to go through many revisions as I remove insulting language and cusses and sheer ranting.

Originally published at brigidkeely.com/wordpress. You can comment here or there.

Dr. Tiller, one of the few doctors in the USA who is willing and able to perform late-term abortion, was shot to death while leaving church services. He has been shot before, his clinic has been bombed, the women who have gone to him for health services have been intimidated, terrified, threatened, and injured. Now he is dead, murdered by a person or group who doesn’t believe that women have the right to make decisions about their health.

Late term abortions, those performed after 20 weeks, represent only 1.4% of total abortions performed by doctors in the USA. 1.4%. Even if you nudge the definition of “late term” back to 12 weeks gestation, a time where the fetus is maybe sort of possibly viable if you have cutting edge technology and millions of dollars to spend on health care (or a willingness to declare bankruptcy instead of paying astronomical medical bills), the total of abortions performed is only 6.2%. Yet late term abortions are presented by those who call themselves “Pro Life” (yet aren’t above murdering people) as incredibly common. Save the babies! It’s an epidemic of murder! God’s baby garden is getting too full of precious miracles!

Of course, the women who chose late term abortions generally do so not because they suddenly realize OMG I AM PREGNANT OH NOES if only I weren’t such a slut! I better get rid of the evidence and murder this baby! They do so because they are physically or financially unable to have an abortion earlier, because a sexual partner or family member prevented them from having an abortion earlier, because they did not know that it was possible to get an abortion or that it was ideal to have an abortion before X weeks. In other words, most women who have late term abortions do so out of ignorance or fear of someone hurting them. Those eager and willing to murder men who provide medical services to women, however, are quick to paint these women as too stupid to make any sort of medical decision for themselves, even when it’s the efforts of these murderers that have ensured that young women in this country grow up taught little to nothing about their bodies and contraception, and have fought to deny funding to organizations that provide contraception and reproductive health services, and which assist women who are having financial difficulties while pregnant.

So women whose much wanted babies are hydrocephalic or have malformed organs or don’t have brain tissue or are already dead and starting to rot are pretty much fucked because the doctors who can provide needed medical services to them are either prohibited by law from providing those services or have to worry about being murdered if they continue to provide these medical services. Assuming, of course, that the women themselves can make the journey, often across state lines, to a medical provider and then can safely enter and exit his or her clinic without getting harassed or assaulted themselves.

People who claim to be religious and who claim to “respect life” value the “life” of a lump of poorly formed non-viable tissue over the life of the woman carrying said tissue in her body. People who call themselves “pro life” have no issue with attacking women. While claiming to “respect life,” they seek to inhibit women’s access to health care, contraceptives (one of the best ways, if not THE best way, of reducing abortions is to reduce the amount of unwanted pregnancies) and contraceptive education. After negatively impacting her reproductive health, these individuals have also tried to strip away social safety nets that can help women with children. Funding has been pulled for health care, WIC, food stamps, and child care and welfare programs. Women are expected to “pull themselves up by their bootstraps” while also going into debt paying for vaccinations for their kids. They are expected to go to work and support themselves and their kids, but child care is so expensive that it’s very possible to turn over one’s entire paycheck to a day care facility. There’s a reason so many little kids from economically depressed backgrounds are shaken to death or otherwise killed by their care providers: their moms can’t afford anything better for them.

Women are expected to be virginal creatures, and if they have sex these “pro life” assholes expect them to be punished for it. They deserve pregnancy, as a punishment. They deserve poverty, as a punishment. Women aren’t meant to enjoy sex, and those who have sex out of the strictly defined marital bed deserve to be punished. And since a potential baby has more value than a living woman, even if the fetus is non viable (and conceived during heterosexual wedlock in accordance with Christian religious values), said fetus should be treasured and made comfortable despite any risk to the mother’s health. Because, you know, those women had SEX and sex is BAD when women have it, and they need to just shut the fuck up already and PAY THE PRICE. And if that price means KNOWING that their babies don’t have heads, they need to just continue gestating them for 28 more weeks with all the physical pain and discomfort that pregnancy entails and also the emotional discomfort and pain with knowing that their babies are going to be born DEAD, and carry that lump of malformed tissue “to term” and either push it out their disgusting, filthy cootches or else have major abdominal surgery to remove it. Because every life is sacred, as long as it’s not an adult woman’s. Sure, the precious angel fetus might die and start to rot and poison the woman and kill her slowly, but that bitch shouldn’t have been having sex anyway, am I right? Sin of Eve and all that.

There is a continual chipping away at my rights as a human being. Women should be able to go to clinics to get cervical exams without assholes who claim to represent Jesus shoving pictures of dead babies at them and harassing and assaulting them. Women should be able to visit womens’ health doctors without worrying about being shot to death doing so. Women should be considered, wait for it, rational human beings who are capable of making their own health and reproductive choices; not treated as childlike innocents who need these choices made FOR them. Time and again individuals and organizations have targeted people who provide medical services to women and have stalked, harassed, threatened, and killed them. Places where women receive medical care have literally been bombed and destroyed. Clinics that provide reproductive medical services (often to less affluent women) like PAP smears, vaginal and cervical exams (you know, to detect cancer), and contraceptive services (which, you know, prevent pregnancy), are picketed and pressured to not open. Women seeking medical care are verbally harassed and sometimes assaulted or murdered. This has been going on for YEARS and rarely is anything done about it. This is terrorism directed at women, and it’s going unpunished.

I’ll leave you with this graphic: