Go, Stabs!

I'm a little late on this. But on Friday, during a Senate debate over whether the government should be allowed to dictate what procedures private plans must cover, Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-MI) got off the best "Your mom!" retort I've ever heard:

Sen John Kyl (R-AZ): “I don’t need maternity care, and so requiring that to be in my insurance policy is something that I don’t need and will make the policy more expensive.”

Sen. Stabenow: "I think your mom probably did."

How I want to define myself in fewer than ten words

I'm trying to think of a sign to carry at the march on Washington for LGBT equality next weekend. I'm afraid I won't forgive myself if it's not clever enough. Because clearly a civil rights movement can and should be reduced to a pithy slogan scribbled in magic marker on poster board.
I seem to recall that there is an early Dykes to Watch Out For strip in which Mo carries a sign that reads "Subvert the Dominant Paradigm." I'm sort of thinking of doing that to see who gets the joke. I could even wear the Mo shirt I did up (once again, in magic marker) for drag ball.
No matter what I come up with, however, I suspect it will be better than most of the signs carried by the Teabagger crowd.
Heh, Teabagger. Still can't hear that without sniggering.

On the sexualization of pre-teens: A sex-positive, feminist viewpoint

Current Music- I Watched The Temple Fall (The Shondes)

This is partly in response to my cousin (first cousin once-removed, I believe? Or is it second cousin? I always confuse these things) Miryam's post on "Juicy" clothing (which I had to look up, as I'd never heard of it) and the sexualization of pre-teen girls.

A couple of caveats: first, I'm not a parent, and I accept that my views on this issue are lacking the experience and perspective that comes with being one. That said, I WAS a teenage girl fairly recently, which brings with it a different sense of perspective.
Second, as the title of my post indicates, I'm a queer, sex-positive feminist. This means that I come at this issue with certain pre-determined beliefs and assumptions about sexual morality and gender.

Like Miryam, I'm bothered by the implicit message of the "Juicy couture" line of clothing (though it's worth pointing out that this line is HARDLY the worst offender: Feministing highlights some really egregious examples)-- namely, that the body of a pre-teen girl is prime real estate for the advertisement of commercialized sexuality.

My concern, however, has less to do with sexuality per se; rather it has to do with the fact that this kind of clothing is a result, as well as a perpetuator, of a culture that sees female sexuality as object rather than subject and defines the ideal of female sexual attractiveness as passive, submissive, and childlike-- "Lolita-chic", if you will. I also think this culture tells girls that their greatest asset is their nascent sexuality-- in other words, why bother studying when you can marry a nice doctor? And make no mistake-- the vast majority of this marketing is directed at girls-- you may see padded bras sold to six-year-old girls, but I doubt you can find correspondingly padded underpants marketed to boys.

The other side of this coin is that it's female sexuality that's seen as dangerous and as a sign that our collective morality is slouching downward. We criticize the behavior of sexually forward teen girls, and yet our concept of manliness is based in part upon a man's conquests. For a further exploration of these double standards, by the way, I highly recommend Jessica Valenti's informative and entertaining book, "He's a Stud, She's a Slut, and 49 Other Double Standards Every Woman Should Know"

And I don't believe this culture is a result of being too open about sex; on the contrary, I think NOT talking about it makes it worse. Blaming feminism and sex-positivity for this phenomenon also overlooks the fact that objectifying young women is nothing new; for instance, a quick look through my iTunes library turns up several British folk songs about fair young maidens falling in to bad situations with handsome rakes, rambleaways, and saucy sailor lads; indeed, one, "The Gentleman Soldier", sounds like an 17th-century rendition of "Bitches ain't shit":

It's of a gentleman soldier, as a sentry he did stand
He saluted a fair maiden with a waving of his hand
So boldly then, he kissed her, and passed it off as a joke
He drilled her up in a sentry-box, wrapped up in a soldier's cloak

"Oh, come, my gentleman soldier, now won't you marry me?"
"Alas, my dearest Polly, these things can never be,
"For I have a wife already, and children have I three,
"Two wives are allowed in the army, but one's too many for me!"

And the drums are going a rap-a-tap-tap
And the fifes they loudly play
Fare thee well, Polly my dear,
I must be on my way.

I also don't think it's a question of secular vs. religious; I find the father-daughter purity balls common on the Christian Right profoundly creepy, for many of the same reasons. The marriage of teenage girls to older men is common among Fundamentalist Latter-Day Saints-- and again, the same trope of the prepubescent, submissive woman as the height of attractiveness is at work here. On the other hand, I know of many relatively secular parents (including my own!) who didn't buy such clothing for their daughters, mainly for the reasons I've described.

So I don't like these clothing lines one bit. But I don't necessarily think they exist because our current culture is any more sexualized than any other. I think they exist because our current culture is particularly consumerist, and the makers of this clothing are simply capitalizing on well-established misogynist trends. (Note that this doesn't excuse them one iota!) I don't think the answer is less sexual freedom or sexual frankness. On the contrary, I think the answer is more frank (and age-appropriate) talk about sexuality, within a cultural context that teaches teen girls--and boys-- to respect themselves and others as whole beings.

News in Brief

Music: Peter, Paul, and Mary- Leavin' on a Jet Plane

- RIP, Mary Travers.

- Crop scientist Norman Borlaug also died recently. An interesting article on his legacy, which claims that by ignoring political and distribution issues in favor of a single-minded focus on food supply, he may have done more harm than good. Via La Vida Locavore.

- Sickening: After gender testing seems to have indicated that she is intersex, South African runner Caster Semenya is apparently on suicide watch. Via Feministing.

- Despite talking the talk on climate change, the World Bank is throwing billions at new coal plants in the developing world.

- And finally, some (possibly?) good news: one more Senate Democrat seems to have grown a backbone on healthcare: Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) writes to Finance committee chairman Max Baucus (D-MT) on why healthcare co-ops are a sham, and gets a meeting with the White House.

Who's on First

While mucking around in my files of undergraduate papers today, I found a reflection I'd written for a course I took on Oberlin College's memorial arch (which structure commemorates the Oberlin missionaries killed during the Boxer Rebellion).
I actually ended up hopping between two of the arch's columns, rather than walking through it, as I said I'd do here. But I rather liked what I'd written:

(Rebecca Levi, 2007)

I’m walking through the arch.

I should state up-front that this isn’t at all to discount its deeply problematic nature. And I do, despite all my talk about the complicated nature of the issue and my disdain for symbolic gesture in favor of action, find it problematic. While I believe that the Oberlin Band had none but charitable intentions, I also believe that missionary work is at its core a fundamentally destructive enterprise, and cannot, by its very nature, ever completely free itself from its associations with racism and cultural triumphalism. Additionally, there’s no denying that, well-intentioned as the Oberlin missionaries may have been, that their very presence in the Shanxi Province of China directly rode the coattails of Western Imperialism. And the exclusion of the scores of Chinese people also killed in the Boxer Rebellion—even those directly connected with the Oberlin mission—is inexcusable. The addition of the plaques is too little, too late. In this sense the arch is at worst a paean to cultural Imperialism, and at best a monument to liberal naiveté.

So my decision to walk through the arch is not a dismissal of the concerns raised by King’s (then-college president Henry Churchill King, who commissioned the arch) folly. On the contrary, it is a shouldering of their burden. After all, I am heir and subscriber to that same liberal mindset of the Oberlin Band, that mindset that says that one can go out into the world and make it better for one’s having cared enough to act; that mindset that led to our late, lamented motto: “Think one person can change the world? So do we.” Since 1900, our understanding of just what it is that changes the world for the better has evolved, but the belief that we can and must be the agents of that change, I think, endures. With the desire to change the world must come the willingness to examine all the consequences of (and the motivations behind) the change we wish to effect. When I walk through the arch this May, it will warn me of the price of not fully and objectively examining one’s aims.

And a word about the structure itself. When it was built, and even years after that, it may well have been what I characterized it as earlier, “at worst a paean to cultural Imperialism, and at best a monument to liberal naiveté.” But that was a century ago. Since then the arch has generated years worth of controversy and dialogue. Can the reaction to a symbol change the meaning of that symbol? I believe it can. Ironically, one reason I have decided to walk through it is that so many people have walked around.

Two summers ago I visited Israel for the first time in my life. When I found myself at the Kotel—the Western Wall, the last remnant of the Jerusalem Temple, and the holiest site in Judaism—I realized I didn’t quite know what to make of it.The wall represented the last gasp of the Temple cult, whose demise marked Judaism’s shift from a hierarchal, priestly creed to a religion based on study, knowledge, and disputation—in my opinion, the best thing that ever happened to it. So I wondered why I should be praying at a structure that represented longing for a past that was better left in the recesses of history—where we came from, but where we were surely far beyond.

Then I saw the branches growing out of the cracks in it, and a pigeon sitting far above my head in a little nook. I felt the stones—dented and worn now, not smooth and uniform as they must have been in Herod’s day—and I saw different people praying their own prayers, and I realized that monuments take on new meaning as they experience history and people imbue them with their own interpretations and stories.

I understood, then, that even old stones can change.