Eliot, Woolf, Plath, Mitchell...

I live and exist through art.

The older I get, and the further I get from my rebellious pre-teen years, the more it seems like my identity and existence are defined through my interactions with others. To be a thing, I must communicate, and no meaningful self can be communicated without artistry.

Further complications arise both from my liberal upbringing and from the near-proverbial "changing times" in which we live. In a conservative society, the basics of identity come from ideas which are well-known to all and easy to communicate: gender, religion, social class, familial relationships. By contrast, in a more liberal society, such things must always be in a state of flux.

Personally, I find that it's the changing status of women that affects me most. Partly this is due to being a woman in a male-dominated field, but mostly I would like to cantankerously blame it on the fact that nearly every notion of feminine sexuality out there either stinks or doesn't suit me. Creativity is clearly called for.

I look back gratefully to the strident feminists who fought for space, who took principled stands and rejected all that came before. Yet I must also bow before the artists who filled that space, borrowing from the culture that feminists repudiated even as they showed how it was flawed or how it might be changed. I'm thinking of George Eliot, whose women accepted the social order and yet you could always see how it was wrong for them. I'm thinking of Virginia Woolf, who could sneak female sexual desire in behind literary curtains. Sylvia Plath, whose self-absorption preserved a somewhat unconventional femininity that others might borrow from if they wished. All three of them had skills that took them far beyond the subject of femininity, yet all three of them could fold in their womanhood as they understood it. For all three of them, that womanhood was cutting edge.

In the past five decades, novelists and singer-songwriters have pasted cutting-edge pictures of womanhood all over the map. I admire Joni Mitchell, who has an unquestioned strength behind her self-questioning. Then there's k. d. lang, who was, I think, my first introduction to the way the queer movement completely redefined sex. The women in many of Anne McCaffrey's novels seem to be inhabiting a different universe (funnily enough...). Sometimes I wish I lived there.

None of what has gone before me is enough. I have a task to do; I believe that every woman does. Perhaps every man does, too. But I look on in awe at the creativity and courage of men and women, past and present. They are my inspiration and my light.

Orlando

Our last book but one for the Nonbelieving Literati was A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf. Having read that and rather liked it, I pulled Orlando off the library shelves a while back, took it into a cafe and began to read.

I loved it, I swooned over it, I laughed with delight. It's one of my favourite books ever, I think, particularly the first half, where the title character is male. Orlando is known, among other things, for the unabashed lesbianism in the second half. That's all very well, and I appreciated it for the ground-breaking daring that it was, but to me, it was passages like this that really stood out:

The King was walking in Whitehall. Nell Gwyn was on his arm. She was pelting him with hazel nuts. ‘Twas a thousand pities, that amorous lady sighed, that such a pair of legs should leave the country.

Howbeit, the Fates were hard; she could do no more than toss one kiss over her shoulder before Orlando sailed.

Now, really! Oh, some may say that Orlando's legs may only be sighed over because he is somehow androgynous. Some may call the fact that Orlando is an object of desire a mere foreshadowing of his eventual femininity. Not I.

There is no denying it. I'm afraid I'm heterosexual.

***

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate . . .

There's many a fictional version of Shakespeare who has written that poem to some beautiful leading lady of the story; we love to wonder who could inspire such verse. In truth, however, it's probable that this famous sonnet was written to a young man -- and to me, this is a lovely thought. I've seen a few men I'd love to apply it to, men with sunshine in their smiles and a sloppy grace to their form. Shakespeare's eighteenth sonnet is more than just a superlative love poem. It's a rare literary glimpse of the beauty than men can have.

I'm not sure that I love men in the way that men want to be loved. I wouldn't mind loving women. It might be as much easier in some ways as it would be harder in others. It's just that when it comes down to it, I'd much rather compare a man to a summer's day than a woman. Not every man wants to hear that.

Hush, now, don't say it too loud, but men are beautiful. It's one of the best-kept secrets of all time.

'Oxbridge'

This post is for the Nonbelieving Literati; I'm afraid it may be less comprehensible if you haven't read the book. We've been reading 'A Room of One's Own' by Virginia Woolf.

I have been there.

I have been there, and they did not refuse me entrance to the library but bade me enter and write my name in a red book, as Newton once did. They gave me a room of my own with a desk and a bed and filled my mind to bursting six mornings a week.

Once a week I'd make my way to formal dinners, to sit with gowned humanities students getting drunk on nearly-free alcohol and discussing everything from politics to philosophy to pornography. We'd stay out late and optimistically propose meeting in Hall for breakfast the next morning.

They never did meet me, of course. Breakfast closes at 9am, no matter what day of the week it is. Nobody gets up for breakfast before 9am when they've been out drinking the night before. Nobody but me, innocently without a hangover, gazing out the window after the alarm had gone off and getting fired up on morningness like a child who has never seen the world before. I'd walk, run, dance through the garden, across the road, down the Avenue. I'd step with carefree possessiveness through those arches, into the nearly deserted Hall at breakfast on Saturday morning, and eat my fried eggs across from whichever portrait on the wall took my fancy.

There are no women on the walls.

I swapped Emmy Noether stories with another young woman one night. Did you know her father tried to stop her? And have you heard the quote about "Emmy is the centre of co-ordinates . . ."? And of course you know what Hilbert said, gosh but that was a good one.

We cling to Emmy Noether, just a little, we young algebraists and theoretical physicists. There are no women on the walls, but once upon a time in another place there was Emmy Noether . . .

Yet when I see the shallow layers worn away on the steps, worn down by the shoes of students -- those shoes are mine. Though they were all men, or most of them, their shoes are mine and my feet step in their footprints and they belong to me and I to them. Once this place was barred to us but we have found our way inside and the men who once lived here belong to us now, too. Their legacy is ours.

Our legacy will be yours, some day.

EDIT: The next book is my choice, and will be 'Zadig', by Voltaire. You can get it from Amazon or from a library, of course -- or if you don't mind reading it off a screen you can get it here for free.

Nonbelieving Literati: Not the End of the World

'I don't like affectation. That doesn't mean I try and make everyone look like they just got up in the morning -- that would be a form of affectation too. I like to try and get behind the screens folks put up, get an image of the person they are when they think no-one's looking. Far easier said than done, right enough. Soon as you point a camera at somebody, they perform. Some do it more subtly than others, but they all play a part.'

'Dave made your pictures sound like, I don't know, psychological X-rays.'

'Nah. Nothing quite so wanky and sophisticated. But you can usually tell what I think of the subject without much in the way of in-depth analysis.'

Steff got back to his plate, oddly relieved to have headed off the discussion.

Many of his pictures were psychological X-rays. Fortunately, most people didn't recognise who of.

Thus do we hear the photographer Steff Kennedy's view of his own art in Not the End of the World. I can't help but wonder if author Christopher Brookmyre's view of his own writing is similar: self-conscious, with a hint of self-congratulation for the self-deprecation he allows himself in thinking of this work, coupled with an insecure, and justified, fear of wankiness.

The book is very quotable in places, witty and sometimes even profound for brief moments that don't quite string together properly. I was touched by Larry Freeman's thought that there are orphans, and there are widows, but there's no word for a parent who loses a child. Quite why Larry Freeman has to have lost a child is less obvious. It's irrelevant to the story, and it's not an aspect of his character that actually develops; it seems to be a bauble that figuratively hangs around his character's neck, something to make him seem more interesting, I don't know.

Indeed, Christopher Brookmyre's ability to develop or even convincingly describe character is -- I can put this no more simply -- terrible. Nowhere is this more obvious than in his stereotyped view of fundamentalist Christians, who conveniently justify Steff Kennedy's oh-so-hip contempt for them in every way possible. I'm sorry, but I don't buy that final scene where evil preacher ("Lex") Luther St John isn't willing to die for what he says he believes in. One of the scary things about fundamentalists is that many of them would just love to be persecuted and die for what they believe, and, whatever else you can say about Luther's character, he is portrayed as a true believer, and a terribly messed up true believer at that. You're telling me he wouldn't play to a martyr's script if you strung him up on a cross? Don't be silly.

Ah, but the fundamentalists are nothing compared with Madeleine. So let me just warn you, I'm about to get frank about some of my views on sex -- and, ahem, somewhat impolite about our author's apparent opinions thereof.

Madeleine, Madeleine, Madeleine. Maddy. Magdalene. Where to start? Our dear Maddy used to be a porn actress. She's one of the good guys, naturally, not like those evil fundamentalists who oppose pornography for prurient reasons, or those odd Dworkinites who think pornography demeans women in some way. Indeed, Maddy watched some pornography for a psychology class at university and understood immediately what the ramifications were and were not:

As she had quickly come to learn, there is no such thing as an 'experiment' in academic psychology, because that would suggest the prof was in some doubt as to what the results would be. He knew all along that sustained exposure to this material would make the depicted behaviour seem more natural, commonplace and perfectly ordinary; the effect was 'demystification' rather than desensitization. So a blow-job neither elevated the recipient male to a position of dominance and supremacy any more than it made the woman a debased slattern deserving of all contempt: it was just a blow-job. A pussy wasn't any kind of mystic portal to the sexual dimension: it was a pussy. The men were neither perverts nor superstuds for doing what they were doing; the women neither whores nor goddesses. They were all just people fucking. And it was no big deal.

Alas! I am not in a position to comment directly on this. However, the wonderful Greta Christina, who is resolutely pro-porn and does know what she is talking about, has written this about people assuming that the stuff that happens in porn is normal sex (when in fact most of the time the details are dictated by what looks good, not by what feels good). She has also written this about the complexities involved in supporting porn:

I also think that pro-porn advocates -- myself included -- need to stop pretending that there isn't a problem. We need to recognize that the overwhelming majority of porn -- or rather, the overwhelming majority of video porn, which is the overwhelming majority of porn -- is sexist, is patriarchal, does perpetuate body fascism, does create unrealistic sexual expectations for both women and men, does depict sex in ways that are not only overwhelmingly focused on male pleasure, but are rigid and formulaic and mind-numbingly tedious to boot. And we need to be trying to do something about it.

Christopher Brookmyre is having Maddy say a load of rubbish here. Pornography is fine. Fine! Nothing wrong with it at all! No possible objections! Any fool can see that!

So why, oh please, why was our dear former porn actress only doing it because her Daddy abused her when she was little? How does that fit into Brookmyre's script? Sure, porn is fine -- but nice girls only do it because they were abused as children. Madeleine is a nice girl, you know. Not one of those -- sluts!

You think it couldn't get worse, don't you? It gets worse. Having created this slimy contradiction in values, Brookmyre can think of nothing better to do than to have sex with it in the form of his Mary Sue, Steff Kennedy. Steff Kennedy is interestingly tall and blond. Steff Kennedy takes no bullshit and commits heresy on a regular basis (coool . . .). Steff Kennedy has watched one of Madeleine's porn videos, but it is only when he sees the real her that he becomes suddenly transported to the daft world of the desperately in love, where he feels cutely awkward and humbly oblivious to the obvious fact that -- of course -- she likes him too.

His stomach was churning. His bloody stomach was churning. He hadn't felt like this since he was about fifteen, and the worst of it was that it was for all the same reasons as back then. Thinking about what she looked like, what she smelt like, her smile, the sound of her voice. Excited by the very thought of seeing her, worried by the thought that she wouldn't show, nervousness multiplied with every unfeasibly long minute that passed.

There's more like that. A whole lot more. Remembering the patronising way the author had endowed the object of this stereotypical worship with a pity-inducing excuse for being a porn star, I wanted to spew. But I'd have settled for the author taking his hand off his you-know-what for long enough to write something that didn't reek of sugar and semen.

Instead, I had to watch as the evil fundamentalist Christians tried to use Maddy as a pawn, a tool to promote their ideology by forcing her to repent. Luckily, Steff comes up with the idea that saves the day! Then he head-butts her evil, abusing father so hard that the father is thrown to the wall, all while making cute sarcastic remarks with his hard-to-fathom (but very coool) sense of humour. It was nice to see Maddy take the stage and turn the tables on the moralising pundits who believed her dead, but I wished I could have seen her turn the tables on her author. He, too, is using her to promote his ideology, and he, too, does not respect her.

I know it can be hard for the best of liberals to entirely shake off the complex, powerful memes that surround sex for long enough to perceive the best way for people to enjoy their lives. Heck, I, for one, have had to concede with regard to my own feelings that sexual repression is not just a weird disease they had in the fifties. Finding the best way to view a sexual issue can take time and thought, and even then you won't always be sure you're right. I'd be more inclined to cut Christopher Brookmyre some slack if he wasn't so obviously wanking to the messed-up ideas that he blithely subscribes to.

On Using Feminine Cultural Advantage

Via Echidne, we find a superb piece of wrong-headedness -- or quite possibly concern-trolling, as Echidne points out -- from Andrew Sullivan:

There were also, of course, the now famous New Hampshire tears - to evoke sympathy. And the blunt appeal on gender grounds alone. And the refusal to disavow the use of her husband for her own political purposes, even as he told lies and cast racist aspersions about her opponent. And, on the eve of Super Tuesday, the tears again. Can you imagine a male politician breaking down in public the day before a crucial vote - and expecting it to help?

It's time feminists realized that Clinton is a dream gone sour.

I find it hard to choose between the two big democratic candidates, but my innermost leanings are probably for Obama. So you should not consider this a specifically pro-Clinton post. Rather, I'd like to weigh in on the feminist questions raised by Sullivan's piece. There are lots of things wrong with the view that Sullivan puts across, but I want to focus on just one particularly silly bit:

Can you imagine a male politician breaking down in public the day before a crucial vote - and expecting it to help?

Excuse me? The main reason a male politician can't do that is because we have this construct known as masculinity. What it means is that men are restricted in the sorts of emotions they can show while still having people's respect. This aspect of masculinity is not sensible. It is not helpful. Women should not be aiming to be restricted by it! Is Sullivan trying to complain because women have this advantage in that we can use emotion in ways that men can't?

Well, it's true. The ability to show emotion and have people react sympathetically rather than scornfully is a cultural advantage that women have over men. And Clinton should have no more qualms over using it than a male politician should over using, say, a tough-guy image to try to attract votes. That is to say, it's silly image politics, but it happens all the time. Why should it be more wrong to use a feminine cultural advantage? Masculine ones are used every day and nobody blinks. And if the aim is to try to even the playing field, that doesn't mean that women should always try to conform to masculine methods of gaining respect.

In actual fact, a tough-guy male politician is helping to restrict men far more than Clinton's willingness to use the occasional sniffle could restrict women. Clinton cannot afford to be feminine all the time -- hence the 'robot' accusations prior to her show of emotion -- so she can't really be said to be subscribing to a narrow view of what women should be allowed to do just because she shows emotion occasionally. Whereas the tough-guy male politician is reinforcing a restrictive gender construct down the line.

If Clinton was always playing feminine and implying that her worth depended thereon, or if she were obviously implying that her husband's skill matters more than hers, well, that would be anti-feminist. But she isn't. She's blending masculinity and femininity in what I consider to be a rather impressive fashion, actually. This is the way we ought to go, being willing to claim the traditionally masculine without subscribing to the notion that anything we gain from femininity is worthless. The ability to give emotion -- not in an uncontrolled fashion but in a calculatedly honest fashion when the situation requires it -- strikes me as a worthy part of a politician's skill set.

And if men want in on the softer emotions, you should jolly well organise your own damn movement. Because until then, we're going to go on aiming to have it all right under your noses, and if you're not brave enough to stand up for your own, similar right, that's your fault.

Conservative think tank recommends fathers give higher priority to their children.

Yes, you read that correctly. The Maxim Institute, a New Zealand based conservative think tank, has come out with a report which says that:

Fathers should
* Take their share of responsibility for their children's wellbeing and development.
* Spend time with them, be supportive and involved.

Families should
* Reconsider factors that drive fathers to work long hours, such as the desire for higher living standards.

Employers should
* Accept and support their employees' commitments outside work.
* Allow flexible working hours and working from home where possible.

Social services should
* Communicate with fathers as well as mothers because both affect the child's development.

Society should
* Encourage fathers' involvement with their children from infancy.
* Give higher priority to marriage and committed relationships.

There are many criticisms that could be made regarding the way this compares with other statements from the Maxim Institute. We could point out that longer working hours are in many respects a result of the free-market economics that the Maxim Institute unequivocally champions. We could point out that they're recommending that parents put off buying a house, when home ownership is a standard level of independence and security in New Zealand, and that social programs which could make it easier to have the house and spend time with the kids would probably be opposed by the Maxim Institute. We could point out that some people can't afford a house or time with the kids, and that the Maxim Institute isn't likely to support helping those people, either.

But I just want to point out that this is a conservative think tank, here, looking at the research and deciding, not that mothers should go back to the home, but that fathers should meet them there. I just want to savour how far we've come.

Blog Evolution Meme...

... with a digression into how I came to like strict poetic forms.

Tobe tagged me, so here we go. I'm supposed to pick five posts from my archives that display how my blog has evolved over time, and then tag five more people to do the same. Like Tobe, I'm going to take the opportunity to go over some history.

I started blogging in February, but I'd been reading blogs for months before that -- my usual starting point was the Carnival of Feminists. Then I found a link to Alon Levy's Abstract Nonsense somewhere in the archives of Alas, A Blog. Abstract Nonsense was the first blog I started reading regularly. Alon's a sharp guy, it's a pity he's not blogging any more. At any rate, reading even one blog regularly makes you somewhat anchored to the blogosphere, and I decided I wanted a place of my own.

Elliptica has always been a bit hodge-podge, usually with several different subjects evolving at the same time. It serves as my presence on the blogosphere, my home base from which to visit other blogs, my space to voice my opinions or explore different lines of thought. It was originally going to be called Parabolica, but there's already a blog of that name (it's in Portugese, though, so I can't tell you what on Earth it's talking about). As noted on my About Me page, I like conic sections. They're pretty.

So. Post number one: Matters of Identity. Definitely one of my better early posts. I think it's appropriate that I start by quoting a feminist post. The central useful idea here is the way statements about gender have a hard time not being normative. I like being a girl (though I really ought to start thinking of myself of as more like a woman than a girl, I suppose) but as a feminist I naturally worry about the ways in which that can confine me.

I started off blogging quite a lot about mathematics. However, mathematics posts are always more work than the other stuff I toss off. If I'm explaining something I understand well, I spend ages figuring out how to explain it interestingly to someone who knows less than I do. If I'm trying to explain something I don't understand so well, I have to keep looking things up. Nevertheless, I really ought to go to the effort of putting more maths up here -- heck, it's on my subtitle, isn't it? And I really do love the stuff. "But if you can't picture it..." was a bit of a gift, really -- a subject coming up in coversation that many non-mathematicians might want to know about, and about which I do have some breadth of understanding.

My blogging about feminism took something of a downturn after my post on Celebration of Female Desire Week. Why? Well, there's one central question that every young woman who cares about feminism has to answer. It kind of split feminism down the middle in the eighties, and it's still going strong. The point is this. On the one hand, increasing freedom of and openness about sexual expression means that women have the chance to ask for more equality (and more of what they would like) in their sexual relations. That's a good thing. But on the other hand, the sexual revolution hasn't precisely got rid of the idea that women who have sex outside of wedlock might be deserving of less respect. When it comes to the virgin/whore dichotomy, there are parts of our culture that seem to interpret the sexual revolution as simply placing all women in the latter category. And thus, within feminism, we have the Sex Wars. Should women avoid sex, or certain types of sex, for so long as many people view it as degrading to the woman involved? Are there other ways to deal with this? The early posts on my blog have several takes on this issue, some heartfelt, some tentative, but this was the final post that wrapped it all up for me. And after that, I just wasn't thinking about feminism quite so much any more, and the topic of feminism went quiet for a while.

I never expected to blog much about atheism. God doesn't exist, already. Big deal. But then I wandered onto Daylight Atheism on one of Ebonmuse's sure-fire eloquent days. My somewhat clumsy response, overflowing with enthusiasm, would end up requiring two follow-up posts as I thought, and re-thought, clarifying my exact position over time (go down to the very bottom of the comments each time to find the 'links to this post' if you want to follow the fallout, there).

On my birthday, in March last year, my sister got me a copy of The Ode Less Travelled by Stephen Fry. Witty and informative throughout, the book had one section called What is Form and Why Bother with It? (subtitle: Stephen gets all cross), which completely overturned my view of strict poetic forms. I know I was told by more than one primary school teacher not to bother with rhyme -- understandable perhaps, given that bad rhyme really is terrible. But then, oh, how terrible, how self-indulgent is the bad free verse that you can end up producing by just 'writing what comes' and expecting it to be deep philosophy. It's a simple fact that in both cases, a little understanding can go a long way. And in my case, after reading Stephen Fry, I realised that I had really only ever written one poem that stood up to much scrutiny.

One poem. A modified haiku. Not just any modified haiku, but one written with some understanding of the traditions of the haiku form, because my mother, many years before, was briefly very interested in haikus. In fact, when I did my first ever Google name search, I found I'd written a haiku of my own back then that was very much a precursor to this one. Oh, the new haiku broke almost every rule in the book -- it had two verses, it involved the poet rather than confining itself to a description of nature, and, hey, forget 5-7-5! It was still a haiku, though. If you're interested, it went like this:

Sitting
In warm grass
Fascinating water swirls

Wishing
Thinking of you
Still made me feel like this

That, my friends, is a poem with form.

So, armed with a new knowledge of rhyme and metre, I struck out into the world of villanelles, sestinas, and sonnets. And you know what? Rhyme gives you ideas. Metre distracts your mind and leaves your subconscious free to work. And any form will very quickly force you to learn the all-important task of editing your thoughts to fit, which leads you naturally into the elusive skill of re-writing without losing the good stuff you already have.

So I had a blog, and I had some rapidly-rising poetic skills. Poems, blog, blog, poems... inevitably, I ended up posting some. The first one I posted was a villanelle, and I'm not at all sure that a single line of that poem would pass muster if I was writing it now. It was still a lot better than anything I'd written previously. However, for my fifth and (regrettably) final choice of archived post, I'm going to give my sestina. It is difficult to be ashamed of a sestina, because they are fairly hard to write in the first place. The only real restriction is on the final word of each line. You have six lines per stanza, and six words with which lines are allowed to end. The exact order of these words varies according to a strict pattern which ensures that each word will occupy each placing in the order exactly once (nice mathematical connection, there). For example, you will see that the final word of the first line of one stanza is always the final word of the last line of the previous stanza. The second line of the stanza ends with the same word as the first line of the previous stanza. Confused?

Let me put it this way. If the ordering of final words in the first stanza is ABCDEF, the next stanza will have the final word of each line in the order FAEBDC. The next stanza is CFDABE. Continue for six stanzas and, trust me, each word will have occupied each position exactly once. Then you end the poem with a three-line stanza in which you include two of your chosen words per line, and you're done.

The six words I chose are "words","fear","mother","lost","daughter", and "well". That last one has a nice variety of meanings to cycle through. So if you're really confused, here it is without further ado: Daughter's Sestina. Oh, and do me a favour? Read it out loud. I don't care if you feel silly. Whisper it, if you must. Because, though I say it myself, the poem has some rather cool metrical effects that found their way in by accident while I was trying very hard not to write in iambic pentameter. You don't have to be consciously aware of them, but if you're just skimming over it with your eyes, you probably won't be aware of them at all. So, please...

And that's all I have space for! A pity, but when your blog is evolving on several tracks at once, it's difficult to get the whole story across. Now, who to tag? L.L. Barkat has been blogging about blogging for a while already, so I'm not sure if this meme would feel too much like more of the same; JD2718 might be a decent bet, but Kelly says she's been tagged already, C.L. Hanson has already done it, um... oh, heck. I'll take the easy way out. Open tag. If you want it, take it.

I am not a fan of beauty standards for vaginas.

Marty Klein, a sex therapist, writes a forthright and often very likeable blog on the politics of sex at Sexual Intelligence. His latest post, however, seems to me to miss an important point:

Unfortunately, a rising chorus of so-called feminists and gender theorists are dissing women who make the “wrong” choices about these things. Claiming they know women better than they know themselves, they decry women who shave, wax, implant, bleach, pierce, or otherwise change their sexual bodies.

These body-modification fascists say all those activities are a response to “cultural pressure” (especially from selfish, obsessed, insecure boyfriends and husbands), and that no adult woman could possibly decide to do these things on her own. They say that any woman who pierces her labia or gets breast implants has been “manipulated.” Oh, you know women—unable to think for themselves. Unable to think, period.

Well, I’m tired of it.

Klein is attacking the most extreme form of feminist distrust of body modification. I think he's correct, as far as it goes, to say that some women do make these choices for their own good reasons and for their own enjoyment. But that's not the point. I'm not going to decry the choices of individual women. Try to be confident in your own body, and then have fun with it however you like. The real issue here isn't individual choices, though. It's overall beauty standards. And I am not a fan of beauty standards for vaginas. Full stop (that means 'period', if you're American).

I am not a body-hating kind of girl. When my mother, a couple of centimetres shorter and a few kilos lighter than me, says that she needs to lose weight, I collect up the sense she taught me, remember that I have a BMI of twenty, and believe it neither of her nor of me. When I read in a magazine that "cellulite is a problem that affects many women, causing unsightly bumps on the upper thighs", I chuckle at the thought of what the writer of the article would say about my stretch marks, left over from when my bum had its growth spurt, and then reflect that I actually rather like my barely-visible tiger stripes, souvenirs from of the year I got a waist. When I went to the mall on a horrible rainy day in my grandfather's baggy old anorak that makes me look twice as big as I am, and a couple of pimply awkward scarecrows of teenage boys started making pig noises at me, I walked on by and paid no attention. And I have hairy armpits. They're not very hairy. You wouldn't mistake them for a man's armpits. But the hair is there, and it's easily visible if I raise my arms. I even have the gall to wear sleeveless tops when I go out dancing.

I am not a body-hating kind of girl, but if we're going to have beauty standards on my vulva, then I despair for myself. Here, of all places, I feel vulnerable. Face it, my vulva is fundamentally messy. I can make it clean (for all of two minutes if cervical fluid counts as 'dirty', which it probably shouldn't), but tidyness just isn't an option. And I don't want some beautician or cosmetic surgeon out to make a buck to make me feel like I ought to try to change that. I want to be able to like it the way it is.

Womanhood, masculinity, and books thereon.

When I was sixteen, my mother got me a copy of 'Woman's Experience of Sex' by Sheila Kitzinger. I was slightly embarrassed, shelved it spine-backwards and didn't touch it until two years later when I suddenly realised that I was probably old enough to have sex and really ought to know more about it. Kitzinger's fascinating, sensitive and only slightly dated look at how women feel and behave sexually was exactly what I needed, and when I finished it I jumped enthusiastically into any sexual parts of 'Our Bodies, Ourselves' that I could find. Alas, the latter was just a little too clinical. New Zealand has perfectly good sex education and I've already had the details of every sort of contraception enumerated to me a few times over. It was the emotion that I wanted to understand.

I was aware, though, that there was also another side to the story. Kitzinger sifted through statements from hundreds of women on what sex meant to them and presented them in a book, allowing some sort of validity to the whole broad range in true liberal fashion (for all that her own middle class status -- and, indeed, her feminism -- definitely acted as a lens). The book she ended up creating was, for me, almost a map of the possibilities of womanhood. It was invaluable. But if that is woman's experience of sex, what is a man's? Books like Kitzinger's, like 'Our Bodies, Ourselves', like Natalie Angier's 'Woman: An Intimate Geography' (which is also excellent) are frequently touted as essential reading not only for women but for lovers of women. As a heterosexual woman, naturally I am interested in finding the male equivalent.

Gee, but you men got short-changed! Well, okay, you still have a bit more money, more political power, dramatically less chance of being labelled a slut -- but I think you're missing out on this particular point. I did find one halfway decent book for men: 'Secret Men's Business' by John Marsden. Secret, huh? I read it anyway. Sorry, but I considered my curiosity to be an entirely benevolent impulse to understand what you guys feel like in bed (and outside of it). It was quite good (not actually all that sexist, either) but it seemed to feel the need to cloak any and all advice with the authority of the Great (And Somewhat Mysterious) Notion of True Masculinity. Which is a pity, because the freedom to deconstruct or discard the Acknowledgedly Silly Notion of Femininity whenever we feel like it is one of the best aspects of the liberal feminist tradition.

Perhaps I'm just holding every book on masculinity I find up to feminist standards. Celia Lashlie's book 'He'll be OK' about bringing up teenage boys was also very good, but Lashlie is a feminist. And it would be better if men were speaking for themselves. (Lashlie recounts an amusing exchange with the principal of an all-boys school. After the two had agreed that men need a movement of their own, the principal remarked slightly wistfully "I don't suppose we could get you to do it for us?" No, says Lashlie, no, we couldn't. Nice try, though.)

I am aware, of course, that the sensible thing to do would be to find a nice man to have sex with and then ask him how he feels about it. Indeed, relying on books rather than reality would be a sorry way to live. Ah, well. I'll get there.

Crucial Minutiae, bad boys and nice guys

Wow! Crucial Minutiae is good. Right up there with 3QD. I especially like their weekly (feminist-friendly) column on masculinity: Punch-for-Punch by Ethan Todras-Whitehill (HT: Hugo Schwyzer).

There isn't nearly enough sensible talk about masculinity. As a woman, I have access to a large body of literature about the way cultural notions of femininity affect me. Men, however, have little recourse to anything besides pop culture and shoddy journalist generalisations.

A comment to this post raised an interesting analogy between the virgin/whore dichotomy for women and a nice-guy/bad-boy dichotomy in men. In particular, the idea is that women date (or marry) nice guys, but they'll have sex with bad boys. Fascinating and quite possibly true.

In some ways, I wonder if behaving like a "ho" or a "bad boy" is a way of signalling that you're looking for casual sex. So when men complain that women like bad boys, there is a real phenomenon there -- that a woman who doesn't actually want a relationship is more likely to have sex with someone who has a bad boy image because that's a situation where she can take it as given that it isn't necessary to behave like a "nice girl" who won't have sex unless she is in, or at least interested in, a relationship. Part of the whole 'bad boy' image is a very overt sexuality. If you want sex, it makes sense to go for a guy who looks as if he wants it.

Me? I like that moment when a (genuinely) nice guy lets a little real sexuality slip...

Celebration of Female Desire Week

Cassandra says this is celebration of female desire week. So I thought I'd weigh in, in my own way.

It's an unfortunate fact that there are still sexual ideas out there that degrade women, that suggest that men have the most to gain from sex while women, somehow, have something to lose. It's an unfortunate fact that, while a little objectification in the form of being desired isn't harmful of itself, the extent to which women are held up as objects of desire rather than as people who desire is entirely out of proportion. It's an unfortunate fact that women still suffer from sexual violence, even if the rate of sexual assaults seems to be decreasing. And there are some who react to this by saying "stop having sex", or who denounce particular sex acts as inherently patriarchal. Sometimes they stress that it is impossible to do anything in a patriarchal society without being subject to the connotations that society attaches to particular acts. As a result, if "patriarchy says" it's degrading, it's degrading. You can't avoid it.

Well, sorry, but that's defeatist! It makes it sound like the dreaded "patriarchy" can revoke any claims you might have for strong, sexual womanhood with a single touch. I dare to claim that "patriarchy" does not have that power. I can still be strong, be whole, be a woman even if I have sex within a society that contains sexual ideas that degrade women. Indeed, finding ways to stay strong and whole under such conditions is the only way I can see of changing those attitudes. Let's not underestimate our power to resist those ideas, even if they are held by those around us - indeed, even if they still lurk in our own subconscious. Even if a man thinks he is using me, I can still be a strong woman. Even if I choose to do something perceived as an act of submission, I can still be a strong woman. And if enough of us succeed in being strong, and if we can show that to others, we will change the definitions. And if we make mistakes and fail to be strong, as all of us do from time to time, well, show your strength by being willing to take the occasional risk and picking yourself up when you fall.

Let's face it, if patriarchy forces all those of us with no convenient homosexual tendencies to hide away in extreme sexual frustration because we can't have sex with men without supporting the patriarchy, then we're not winning. We're losing, big time.

The Dove Advertising Campaign

Via Pandagon, I've been reading Seth Stevenson's two reviews on Slate of Dove's "Campaign For Real Beauty" advertising. My reaction to the first "Real Beauty" advertisement I saw was approval of the sentiment, closely followed by basic distrust of advertising. They're doing it to sell stuff. That's all there is to it. People who selflessly promote these ideas out of genuine concern are the ones who take real credit for any good done by the advertising campaign; in furthering the message, Dove is just cashing in on the sentiment that has been created thereby.

However, I was originally also suspicious that the inevitable need to portray some kind of beauty, even if irregularities are allowed, would mean that the images might end up subtly undermining the message. I'm not about to trust that an image is good for women just because it says it is. Stevenson's unfavourable critiques have improved my view of the advertising strategy considerably. He says:

When I first saw one of these smiley, husky gals on the side of a building, my brain hiccupped. Something seemed out of place. Here I was, staring at a "big-boned" woman in her underwear, but this wasn't an Adam Sandler movie, and I wasn't supposed to laugh at her. It felt almost revolutionary.

Wow! He got some practice at not laughing at fat girls? Seriously, that's awesome. I mean it. I never even considered that side of the campaign - that men would end up being forced to consider that the definition of beauty might be broader than you think. It seems to have worked, too:

I even have a favorite Dove chick: Stacy (the student). She's the one who poses with her backside to the camera, showing off her ample bottom. I see Stacy every day—she's on the bus stop shelter next to my house. "Check out this fiiiiiiiine bedonkadonk," she seems to say to me, grinning slyly over her shoulder. I think I may have a crush on her. But I've said too much already.

He can't be making all of this up, right? So he's actually thinking of her as sexy, even if he does say that her bottom is 'ample' (It's not. To have a smaller bottom without being noticeably skinny, you'd have to be a man - perhaps the femininity of it forms part of the appeal?).

Alas, his intellectual thinking appears to be less healthy than his sexual reactions on this one. His initial reaction is that advertising like this won't work long-term. Sooner or later, he says, they will have to go back to making women feel inadequate in order to sell things.

[I]n the end, you simply can't sell a beauty product without somehow playing on women's insecurities.

Well, sooner or later, maybe Dove will try a different tack - but I'm betting on later. As Stevenson notes,

Dove's sales have been up since it began.

The campaign won't stop before the effect stops, not if the people making the decision are sensible. The simple fact of the matter is that a lot of women buy beauty products to make themselves feel good. It's a way of telling yourself you're special. "Campaign for Real Beauty" is actually only a few steps away from "Because I'm Worth It" - but the Dove campaign lets you feel good about the way you're helping all those other women and girls, as well as letting you feel good because your skin feels clean, or you look a bit prettier, or just because there's been a lot of advertising that promotes the idea of feeling pampered after you've used some sort of beauty product. Beauty has been a "feel good" thing for as long as I can remember, and a "feel good" advertising campaign fits right in.

Part of the reason Stevenson is so far off the mark on this one must surely be because he could never have written the paragraph I wrote above - it requires an understanding of feminine culture which I'm sure he doesn't have. More tellingly, he seems to be allowing his own prejudices into his assessment of an advertising campaign that isn't aimed at him in the first place:

It uses a cheap video camera and murky lighting, and stars an average-looking woman being filmed as she takes a shower. The result bears a queasy resemblance to amateur pornography—though I'm told that even bargain-basement porn features flashier production values and more compelling actresses.

It doesn't look like porn to me. In fact, I'd hazard a teeny-weeny guess that women are less likely than men to automatically associate a naked woman in the shower with porn - particularly when the clip demurely restricts itself to pictures showing no hint of T or A. No, the trouble is that Stevenson expects a hot naked woman, and doesn't understand that this picture isn't aiming for envy - it's aiming for identification, which has got to be another common advertising tactic, right?

So, should we go out of our way to buy their stuff? I have to say, I'm glad that Dove is getting encouragement. If Stevenson's reactions are anything to go by, we need more advertisements like this, whatever the motives behind them. And, as one of the commenters at Pandagon noted, what we're really looking at is a choice between a company that cold-heartedly pushes women's self esteem, and a whole lot of other companies that will just as cold-heartedly set out to make women feel inadequate. So if their soap costs 10p more, I might buy it anyway. Consider it 10p towards bribing the market to work constructively on a social issue for once.

What I Wish I'd Said About Women And Sex...

... because "what I wish I'd said" must surely turn up on blogs everywhere.

"I've never had sex," I admitted, one drunken night several months back.

"Oh, don't worry," he said. "You're not really missing anything."

I shall pause to give you time to choke at the idiocy of this.

Now I shall perhaps provoke confusion when I admit that my reply was not "Don't be silly" or "That's absurd" - but please remember that "That's sexist and absurd" is sometimes not an easy thing to say if you want to be taken seriously. So I replied with a heartfelt

"Oh, don't say that!"

Yeah? Makes sense to me, but it ended up meaning we were having a conversation about whether women can really get anything out of sex.

"Look, we'll ask A__"

A__ (not his real name, or even his real initial, actually; just the first letter of the alphabet) sobered up visibly and thought about the issue. "I think," he said, "... certainly within the context of a loving relationship, women can definitely get something from it, yeah."

Okay, be nice. The generous way to view this is to note that A__ has a long-standing girlfriend and is therefore (hopefully) speaking from experience when providing this counter-example to the idea that women don't get much from sex.

Agreement from the guy who had been speaking to me initially; A__ waffles a bit more and then asks me:

"I dunno - I mean, what do you think, what do you feel?"

A__ is, I suspect, consciously allowing me, as a woman, to define my own experience; he is a nice liberal man who generally tries and, yes, usually succeeds; this conversation does not really show him at his best. However, it is me who fails at this point.

"I don't know," I say, and it's true, of course; how could I know, of my own knowledge? "I mean, it's not like I'm waiting for any particularly special moment - I'm just waiting until I feel comfortable." Sufficiently comfortable, anyway; not, like, comfortable comfortable.

Actually, I'd give anything for a comfortable comfortable opportunity to have sex. I just don't know when I'll get one.

But look, let's go back.

"Don't sat that!" Why? Because "you're not really missing anything" is, get this, exactly equivalent to the statement "sorry, Lynet, there is no satisfaction." It's a horrible thought - one of my worst irrational fears, actually. Apparently the man I was speaking to missed the point entirely. He probably honestly doesn't realise how it feels to be a woman in my position. I ought to have corrected his ignorance, but it's hard. It's very personal to talk about these things. Stating it here is an attempt to redress the balance; the best I can do. So let me tell you.

The worst times are when I ovulate. Seriously, at least when I'm getting my period I have a tummyache to distract me*. There have been times when I'm ovulating when I end up lying in bed, drenched in my own sweat and dissolving in my own sexual frustration, trying to masturbate though my clitoris aches 'cause I've been rubbing it too hard - I've been over once already and it's not enough - and when I shove myself up and over into orgasm I spontaneously burst into tears because even as my body shakes I feel as though it's really not doing anything, I still need sex just as badly (oh, gosh, I just burst into tears typing), and it just feels like nothing's going to help, nothing not ever.

*Ovulation and menstruation are the two times when a woman's libido is highest, in general. Most sources say the feeling is stronger on average during ovulation, but it's certainly perceptible at mestruation; sometimes I can tell when my period is arriving by the increased tendency to think about sex.

Now, I'm happy to say that this has only happened to me a couple of times - most months aren't that bad. I mean, there's no time of the month when I don't think about sex at all, and there is no time of the month when I don't want sex, but, while it's not unusual for ovulation to be a difficult time of the month, I don't always end up crying.

"You're not really missing anything"? NO! Please, please, no! Please, please, please, oh, please, no! Tell me it isn't true. Tell me it doesn't always feel this bad. Tell me one day I'll be okay in some sense of the word, I know I won't ever be free from sexual desire, but tell me that - I don't know - tell me something.

I'm crying again.

"In the context of a loving relationship"? Tell that to my cunt. The only thing I need a loving relationship for is to provide a situation in which I can have sex and still trust the person who I am having sex with to respect me. A situation which provides the latter but is not equal to the former would still be fine; I just don't like the idea of someone touching me if he thinks he is degrading me - or increasing his masculine power at my expense - in so doing. The idea makes me sick. Especially when I'm ovulating. And it would hurt me even worse than the sexual frustration that makes me cry.

But I didn't say that at the time.

It's hard to show people a part of yourself that's so very fragile.

Why do men seem so much more eager for sex?

Being new to blogging (even though I've been hanging around for a while) means that I keep seeing fairly old posts. This one is about 1/9 of the way down the huge pile of comments on this thread:

In casual social situations of single people, if a woman suggests sexual activity to most any man there, he's willing, probably eager, and more than likely thrilled. If most any man there suggests the same to a woman, she'll say no, probably be offended, and very likely will decide that he's a shallow jerk, regardless of whatever interests and attitudes he might have.

I quote it not to refute that statement in particular, but because I have my own thoughts on this phenomenon, and I was finding it difficult to describe without sounding silly. I kept saying things like "People think women can have sex whenever they want, whereas men have to keep asking and asking", which is ridiculous, everyone knows there are plenty of sexually frustrated women out there (don't they?), and the reason men have to 'ask' is because that's the convention and women don't usually break it (my discussion below should suggest some reasons why they don't break it to anyone with sufficient imagination). Described as above, though, it at least seems to be getting at something that looks like it might have a grain of truth in it. I do think there is a(some?) genuine social phenomenon(s) here, buried under the inevitable generalisation.

Before I get to my main point, though, I wouldn't be me if I didn't nitpick:

In casual social situations of single people, if a woman suggests sexual activity to most any man there, he's willing, probably eager, and more than likely thrilled.

Ok, can I just ask something? How many men have actually been in that situation? I mean, when men say they'd be thrilled, can they point to any examples? And if so, was the man in question in fact thrilled? I'm not a man, let alone an "average man", so I don't know if the average man would be thrilled if the average woman suggested sex. I have had at least one male friend mention being propositioned with the remark "not flattering, trust me", so I know it's not always true. The question needs to be asked if it is true in general. I'm wondering if part of the reason men can say that is because they've never seen the reality, but I don't actually know if that's a reasonable suggestion.

Now that I've got the minor question out of the way, I'll get to my main thought on this matter.

As far as I can tell, in a "casual social situation between single people" it is just about impossible for a man to lose status by having sex.

There are some notable exceptions to this, the cruellest and most obvious being "unless the girl is fat", but, in the main, I think it holds.

Similarly, it is just about impossible for a woman to gain status by having sex.

Exceptions to this rule tend to be both equivocal and reliant on there being some commitment between the two people. For example, a woman might gain status by having a successful husband (personally I think such 'status' would probably annoy the heck out of me, but some might disagree). However, this is a far cry from a casual sex situation. In general, a girl having casual sex is going to have to fight to keep the status she has, let alone gain any. Sometimes I scare myself by wondering if the word 'slut' has more synonyms than the word 'good'. If it's true, I don't want to know. The idea behind the word is pervasive, and it means more than 'promiscuous', it means more than 'woman who has sex'. Mostly, the meaning which bothers me is that of woman who is used - used sexually by men. And if being perceived as being used doesn't lower your status, I don't know what does.

A woman is less likely to be perceived as being used if she makes a show of being choosy. That's a point in itself and I'll leave it there.

Another point, though, is that if a woman appears eager for sex, she might end up with less control over the situation. Unless she trusts the man, she can't be sure he won't just do whatever makes him happy with no care for what she wants. Ideally, she would have a say in these things no matter what, but there are men who would be oblivious to their own sefishness (especially if she was begging for sex in the first place), and there are women who would find it hard to protest.

Add that to the fact that the man is essentially asking her to put the way people see her on the line in a way which simply isn't true for him, and the fact that it still isn't conventional for the woman to do the asking; add the stereotype that women are less interested in sex...

... and biological determinism really has only so much explaining left to do.

EDIT: It occurs to me that I didn't really need to reference biological determinism to make my point. The stuff I've shown gives reasons why women might appear less interested in sex that do not rely on any actual difference in sexual interest between the sexes.

There may well be a difference between male/female sex drive, on average, but I think people probably overestimate it - there are just so many reasons why they would.

Things are becoming clear.

More on a similar topic, because I'm still thinking about this 'objectification' thing, and my thoughts keep being refined.

Maia at Alas! A Blog gives an insightful commentary in which she states

There are many, many different ways women are taught that for us being sexual is being desired, rather than desiring.

Desired/desiring. Object/subject, grammatically speaking, and this is part of what 'objectification' means. Of course, there is also a link between 'objectification' and treating women as objects. The extent to which women are dehumanised - treated as objects - and the extent to which the idea of a woman being desired ends up eclipsing the idea of a woman desiring are both important issues, and they are to some extent related. However, I know very well that in the past I have confused myself by mistakenly conflating the two issues. Thanks, Maia. Things are becoming clear.

"Female Chauvinist Pigs" review at The F-Word

The F-Word has a review up of Ariel Levy's Female Chauvinist Pigs. The book is strident in its views, so I was glad to see that they had viewpoints from several women, rather than simply posting one woman's view on the subject.

I particularly liked this remark from Holly Combe

“objectification” (as I understand it) is only dehumanising when it excludes all other possibilities

She goes on to say that she can see why the incredibly large amount of objectified images of women

leads some of us to say a big final “no more” to anything that could be perceived as “raunch”.

I think her original remark is spot-on, though. The biggest problem is not that there are images out there that objectify women sexually. The biggest problem is that there are not enough images out there that portray women sexually without objectifying them.

I don't think we can get rid of the former without first creating the latter.

I think trying to get rid of the former sometimes prevents us from creating the latter because we are too afraid we will mis-fire and end up back at the dreaded, demonised objectification of women. A big final "no more" can get in the way, sometimes.

But I have hope.

Hey - I hadn't heard about this!

A success story! Forget what I said on the 2nd about "too hard to make a change" - somebody forced Girls Gone Wild out of town! Read I Blame the Patriarchy, or go to the Myspace page of the woman who pulled it together.

Matters of Identity

It was after a fairly amicable break-up. But I have to confess it, when he said I was "kind of masculine" because I'm "analytic about things", I did not react by thinking "Why, yes. As a result of socialisation which may or may not be aided by natural differences between the sexes, women do appear to be less analytical than men, on average, and I am certainly an exception to this rule." No, what I thought was basically "Well, f*ck you, too!" Why is this?

On some level, I want to be feminine. That is to say, I want to identify as a woman, want to count as a genuine member of my sex. It's a matter of identity. I think most people feel this way about their gender. As a result, statements of the form "Men are usually..." or "It is feminine to..." are almost never able to be nothing more than statements about the way men or women are. Inevitably, they end up containing some idea that this is the way men or women ought to be.

This means that when people make entirely scientific statements about women, on average, scoring less than men on maths tests (or having a smaller sexual appetite, or whatever) I find it hard to believe that someone, somewhere, is not taking that as a normative statement; a statement about what they should do to fit in with their treasured identity. I'm not saying that people shouldn't do these studies, or report what they find, but I think it's important that people consider what they are playing with when they make gender statements. They are not to be made lightly or without basis.

Of course, it's often possible to flout the 'rules' that apply to masculinity or femininity. I do it all the time. I think it ought to be encouraged. That will make reporting on these kinds of scientific tests less dangerous; it will also decrease the effect of the far more frequent casual statements about gender. Above all, it gives people more freedom to be themselves.

Still, I have to admit, when I look around my room and see the dusky pink silk scarf hanging up on one wall and the sloppy picture of Mount Cook daisies on the other, I can't help feeling glad that, quite without conscious effort on my part, you can tell my room's a girl's room, physics texts and all.

It's important to be yourself. It's very comforting, though, when the person you are can naturally fit in with the labels you want to hold.

Manet's Olympia

It's interesting that Manet's Olympia is simultaneously an example of 'realist' painting and also a work that sparked incredible controversy not least because of the lack of submissiveness or shyness from the nude portrayed.

I think, or at least hope, that this goes some way to showing that real women are strong and sexual at the same time.

Feminism and the 'Personal'

Feminism is personal as well as political. Yes, I know sometimes the personal is political. Thing is, sometimes we push the 'political' side so far that we forget the 'personal' side.

It's too easy to decry the portrayal of women in popular culture. I hate music videos the most; you can pick your own pet hate. It's too easy to denounce these things and too hard to make a change.

Sometimes, it's so hard to make a change, all we can think of to do is to keep up the criticism. Keep it up! Shout louder! Shout more! Find more things to shout about, if necessary. Taken too far, this can lead to debates over whether lipstick belongs in the category of things to be denounced. Because, obviously, if we can just decide that, getting rid of those images of women gyrating in front of the cameras will be so much easier.

No. No, it won't. But here's another problem - a personal problem. I'm nearly twenty-two, and I still don't really feel like I have a fully developed sexual identity. I reject ideas like 'sex kitten' and I've never been that fond of 'dominatrix'; both have their place, but I'm just not happy with them. Partly I may just be slow to learn; I've certainly been slow to get into actually having sex. But I have found ideas here and there that have helped me along. Sheila Kitzinger's Woman's Experience of Sex was a wonderful introduction to the realm of sex beyond the basic mechanics; Girl With A One-Track Mind gave me a completely different and somewhat more detailed view several years later. I don't agree with everything in those two sources. The point is that they had enough stuff in there that I could agree with to broaden my scope.

They say it's easier to destroy than to create, but when it comes to ideas, that simply isn't true. It really does seem to me that destroying the idea of women as sexual objects would be much, much harder than helping to create ideas about women as sexual subjects. When young women say they have no problem with objectification because they like to be sexy, convincing them otherwise is going to be pretty hard, but if we can create more notions of women as sexual subjects, we will at least give them - give us, give me - another option. Bad ideas die more easily when the needs they service can be addressed by a different idea.

Sometimes feminism needs to be personal. It needs to give true examples of ways to be a woman, instead of just being political about the personal by closing options off.