Ubuntucat

I’m usually quite entertained by The Marriage Ref. I like that they seem to take both serious and ridiculous marital squabbles and make them fun, also rewarding all couples with a paid-for second honeymoon. The most recent episode made me quite angry, though—first for constantly reinforcing the idea that in het marriages the husband always wants sex and the wife doesn’t, except when the husband buys her something (i.e., marriage as long-term, monogamous prostitution); and second for unanimously insisting Erica Cobb take her husband’s last name. For a moment, the host actually sided with Erica but then was booed by the audience and the other panelists and then succumbed to the pressure and ended up siding with the husband.

Look, I get “choice feminism.” If a woman wants to take her husband’s last name, cool. If she wants to wear make-up and high heels and be a stay-at-home mom, also cool. All cool if that’s what she wants to do. But if her husband is pressuring her to do those things against her will and then Hollywood strangers are also pressuring her to do those things against her will, that is not cool. No husband has the right in this day and age to demand his wife take his surname. If it’s so damn important both people have the same last name so that the (future) kids will all have the same last name, the husband can change his name to his wife’s surname.

What decade are we living in? The 1950s? Very disheartening…

I’m a big fan of Jessica Valenti. Unfortunately, there is a limitation any one writer inherently faces being only one writer—the lack of multiple perspectives. So I was very pleased to finally read Yes Means Yes!, which is an anthology she co-edited (and contributed one essay to).

The essays vary widely in terms of nuance, tone of voice, degree of feminist radicalism, and gender/sexuality (male, female, trans-gender).

I was a little disappointed that the essay entitled “Real Sex Education” (by someone who works for Planned Parenthood, at least part-time) contained this factual misinformation:

[I]n discussing intercourse and pregnancy, you can’t escape the male orgasm. It has to exist for pregnancy to happen.

Um, what?

The “withdrawal method” has long been known to be ineffective as birth control. From Planned Parenthood’s own website:

Even if a man pulls out in time, pregnancy can still happen. Some experts believe that pre-ejaculate, or pre-cum, can pick up enough sperm left in the urethra from a previous ejaculation to cause pregnancy. If a man urinates between ejaculations before having sex again, it will help clear the urethra of sperm and may increase the effectiveness of withdrawal.

Male orgasm does not have to exist for pregnancy to happen.

Other than that—lovely book. I particularly enjoyed Margaret Cho’s introduction, Millar’s “Toward a Performance Model of Sex,” Harris’ “A Woman’s Worth,” Harding’s “How Do You Fuck a Fat Woman?” Corrina’s “An Immodest Proposal,” Serano’s “Why Nice Guys Finish Last,” Higginbotham’s “Sex Worth Fighting For,” Valenti’s “Purely Rape: The Myth of Sexual Purity and How It Reinforces Rape Culture,” and the multi-authored “Who’re You Calling a Whore?: A Conversation with Three Sex Workers on Sexuality, Empowerment, and the Industry.”

Lots of perspectives, lots of agendas. Many of the essays will make you think. It’s almost impossible to agree with all of them—I think that’s what makes this book great. There are some essays I can see even the most avidly self-professed anti-feminists agreeing with, and there are a few that even I, as a self-professed radical feminist, found on the fringes of radicalism. That’s good. I like that kind of diversity.

Two books that changed my life were recommended to me by a good friend during senior year of high school. One was The Autobiography of Malcolm X, and the other was The Feminine Mystique. Recently, I picked up Leslie Bennetts’ The Feminine Mistake from the library, and I think it’s a life-changing book that everyone—both male and female—should read. It’s kind of an unofficial sequel to Friedan’s groundbreaking book of a similar name.

Yes, Bennetts is a self-proclaimed feminist. But she doesn’t spend most of her energy on ideological battles (she does shove a few into the last chapter of the book, which may anger some conservatives). She looks at working while having children from a pragmatic point of view. Her main point is that women who decide to quit their jobs for full-time motherhood are putting themselves (and their children) at economic risk, because they can’t anticipate the likelihood that their husbands will leave them, suddenly lose their jobs, or become extremely disabled or dead. Coupling those unfortunate possible future circumstances with the unlikelihood that someone 15 years out of the workforce will be able to find a job on par with the one she left makes it a no-brainer that simply for economic reasons, women should keep their jobs while having kids, or at least not leave the workforce for too long.

Added to that, Bennetts notes that the burden of being the sole breadwinner also adversely affects men and traps them in jobs they may not like or feel fulfilled in. More importantly, she debunks the idea that women have to “have it all” or “be perfect.” You don’t have to put 110% attention into your job and 110% attention into your children. Both men and women have various aspects of their life that need to have attention paid to—personal relationships, hobbies, achievement, community involvement, etc. And sharing work, children, and household chores ends up benefitting the whole family.

Even though Bennetts does repeat herself a lot, the book doesn’t feel as repetitive as some other one-idea books, mainly because Bennetts (who is a journalist by trade) goes so in-depth into her topic (using the full breadth of sociological studies, books, magazine articles, interviews, and personal anecdotes to flesh out her point).

A while ago, I read Full Frontal Feminism, and then I just recently finished He’s a Stud, She’s a Slut, and 49 Other Double Standards Every Woman Should Know. There are some things I dislike about Valenti (sometimes she does seem to be trying too hard to be hip and humorous, for example), but she’s genuinely a refreshing feminist voice that is able to articulate well what we all know and often can’t express properly.

The book does get a little tedious by the end (she lays it out as 50 “different” double standards, even though most of them are different facets of the same double standard, just so her publisher can boast a long list as opposed to three really long chapters, I guess). Still, Valenti is able to point out many sexist phenomena without sounding like a whining perpetual victim. She’s also able to get across well how sexism against women is actually harmful to men, too, which is really important to progress. We can’t, if we want to live in an egalitarian society, keep thinking of problems between groups and oppressions as us vs. them. “They” may appear to have privilege and benefits, but even those privileges and benefits come at a cost of freedom for all groups.

For example, the expectation that women will either take their husbands’ surnames or consider it while men always keep their names clearly puts men in a position of privilege (his name is important but hers isn’t). Nevertheless, men are often like Princess Jasmine from Aladdin. If they want to get out of the “royal treatment,” they face many obstacles. I thought it was just social pressures (my parents raised a huge stink about me wanting to take my wife’s last name), but apparently in many states a man cannot even take his wife’s name if he wants to, and in the states he’s allowed to change his name in the procedure is far more costly and involved than the woman-taking-her-husband’s-name procedure is.

Of course, there are also some supposed double standards that she exaggerates. For example, she makes it sound as if women are considered selfish if they don’t want to have kids, whereas men are not considered selfish if they don’t want to have kids. That hasn’t been my experience at all. The extent to which the double standard does apply, I think it has to do with single people thinking about the future, as opposed to married couples talking about the present. In other words, if a single man says, “Yeah, I don’t want to have kids,” instead of thinking he’s selfish, people just won’t believe him. They’ll think, “He just says that now. When he gets married, though, some woman will turn him around. I bet he’d make a great father.” If, however, a single woman says, “Yeah, I don’t want to have kids,” the selfish police will come out in droves.

When married couples talk about not having kids, though, the selfish label isn’t gender-specific. My wife and I definitely don’t want to have kids, and I think we’ve heard the selfish line about equally. No one has said, “Your wife is selfish.” They definitely think both of us are.

She’s no Susan Brownmiller, but Jessica Valenti’s got some good points to make, and she is now my… almost-hero.

Kate Perry has a pop song with a very catchy tune. It’s about how she “kissed a girl.” Supposedly, this is something she’s very proud of and feels is subversive or bucking the system: It’s not what / Good girls do / Not how they should behave. On the contrary, Kate, it’s quite how good girls are supposed to behave. You talk about experimenting and being curious. You talk about how you hope your boyfriend won’t mind.

Believe me, if he’s like most typical het guys out there, he won’t. That’s his fantasy. The traditional male fantasy is that women will be bi-curious and ultimately heterosexual. They’ll play around with each other, but in the end they just need a penis—that’s the real way to get fulfilled.

Nope. You’re not subversive. You’re not rebellious. That’s exactly what you’re supposed to do, Kate. I’ll be impressed when a male pop star who does not identify as gay says he kissed a boy and he liked it, and he was curious and experimenting and hopes his girlfriend doesn’t mind. That’d be subversive. Then again, people would just think he was closet gay.