A fascinating collection of real-life stories from a wide variety of young women of various backgrounds, ethnicities, and beliefs. The piece, "Word Warrior", is positively chilling.
Hilarious! Heimel chats about things that bug her about being a Baby Boomer, single mother, on welfare, sixties hippie, sorta feminist. I constantly recommend Heimel's books to anyone as a fun primer for feminism.
[...] there's Mr. Potatoe-head, that oozing lump of vacant protoplasm, that dickhead who talks about the "cultural elite" when we know he means "Jews," that cow patty in human shape we recently called our vice president. It seems that this living definition of cretin has, with searing poinlessness, become the defender of "traditional family values." You can't shut him up.
Another excellent humour book with a strong pro-women statement.
It might be true that I remember a time when feminism meant that a woman, although she liked and lusted after men, wanted to be in charge of her own life and her own job and her own carburetor. I even vaguely remember when women called each other "sisters" and felt this odd sort of, well, kinship.
And it's also true that I became confused when "feminist" rather suddenly was changed to mean: A ballbuster who hates all men and wants to see them dead [...] and before we knew it regular women were backing away, covering their faces with their hands and saying "Oh no, certainly not, I'm not a feminist, get outa here!"
I have conflicting opinions about this book. First, I think it raises some valid criticisms of the current gender (cultural) feminist movement. However, she, herself, is guilty of many of the charges she levels against cultural feminists. Her position is one of liberal humanism/liberal feminism, and I think she has difficulty acknowledging critical theory outside of that ideology; she dismisses other viewpoints as ridiculous, rather than debate them properly. But, I do think she has compiled some very interesting research that attempts to debunk some feminist rhetoric. I've recently read a web site that debunks some of Hoff Sommers' rhetoric, and, to be honest, I think the debate between both sides is useful for weeding out bad rhetoric.
A lot of anti-pornography books take the position that wiping out pornography is not worth the cost of implementing censorship, but McElroy is very clear in saying that she doesn't support censorship because pornography is fun. She believes that women enjoy pornography, and works to dispell the myth that women in the pornography industry are victims. Her style is more chatty than academic.
For over a decade, I have defended the right of women to consume pornography and to be involved in its production. In 1984, when the Los Angeles City Council first debated whether or not to pass anti-pornography ordinance, I was one of two people -- and the only woman -- who stood up and went on record against the measure. I argued that the right to work in pornography was a direct extension of the principle "A woman's body, a woman's right."
I haven't finished reading this book, yet, but Strossen spends a lot of time attacking the "MacDworkinite model" (that is, relating to Andrea Dworkin and Catherine MacKinnon) of anti-pornography legislation.
A close friend told me I should read this book, and I did, expecting to hate it. Wolf compiles considerable evidence about how the need for women to appear beautiful is used not only to marginalize those who are not beautiful, but also to restrain all women. This was one of the first major feminist publications that I read that really opened my mind.
During the past five years, consumer spending doubled, pornography became the main media category, ahead of legitimate films and records combined, and thirty-three thousand American women told researchers that they would rather lose ten to fifteen pounds than acheive any other goal.
I love this book. Having come to realise how much women need feminism, I can now see that men need men's studies. Farrell is able to identify the things that constrain men without blaming feminism.
ITEM: Steve Petrix was a journalist who lived near me in San Diego. Every day he returned home to have lunch with his wife. Recently, as he got near his door, he heard his wife screaming. She was being attacked with a knife. Steve fought the assailant off his wife. His wife ran to call the police. The intruder killed Steve. Steve was 31.
A friend of mine put it this way: "What would you pay someone who agreed that, if he was ever with you when you were attacked, he would intervene and try to get himself killed slowly enough to give you time to escape? What is the hourly wage for a bodyguard?
I've recently become fascinated with Bhabha's writings on hybridity and the Third Space. I try to apply his material to gender theory, even though he writes about cultural theory.
Must we always polarize in order to polemicize? Are we trapped in a politics of struggle where the representation of social antagonisms and historical contradictions can take no other form than a binarism of theory vs politics? Can the aim of freedom of knowledge be the simple inversion of the relation of oppressor and oppressed, centre and periphery, negative image and positive image?
Last updated: September 7th, 1996
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