Some links, or how I wasted my whole day (and now, you can too!)

[fictional]

First, there were the PUMAs. Have you guys heard about these folks? PUMA apparently stands for Party Unity My Ass, (??? Really?) and they seem to be American feminists women of a certain age who feel utterly betrayed by the election, and spend a lot of time totting up grievances about who has suffered more, people of color, or women? (And what about female people of color? They don't seem too bothered. The sisterhood, it seems, doesn't contain them; it doesn't even seem to occur to them that it ought to...?)

In all seriousness, they actually seem certifiably nuts.

I spent a good portion of today rubbernecking the traincrash reading palinpumawatch and clicking on through to associated links. Whoa. If you don't want it filtered, go straight to Reclusive Leftist and look around. I think the mod, Violet Socks, or whatever is a deranged fruit-bat, but the real gold (or tragedy, depending on how you look at it) is in the comments, and the community being fostered. Here is a pre-election sample. At first I was mesmerized (and enraged!) but then -- I began to see the heartbreak of it. Because, from my reading, these seem to be women who have sad, sad lives. They talk about marital discord. They talk about giving up everything for their families (occasionally in really bad poetry.) They are among the casualties of the system, right? And their lives are ordinary, and seemingly filled with a host of claustrophobic, petty disappointments. And so this neo-con cult of aggressive mediocrity (Exhibit A: Not!Joe the War Correspondent¹) is going to be terribly appealing to them. Something that makes a virtue out of victimhood, that places all the blame for everything terrible that has happened to them squarely on the shoulders of someone else -- much like Sarah Palin, and her post-election, 2012 prep interviews that accuse everyone of being so unfair. At least the bizarrely named NiceDeb who actually compared Obama to Hitler (!!!) is the most offensively wingnut of conservatives; these other ladies seem to be left-leaning? Or believe that they are left leaning? But I don't think the word means what they think it means. Much like their beloved Hillary being named "secretary" of state? Because some of them don't seem to like the idea. Why? Not just too little, too late, but ...the idea of being a man's secretary? ...kinda sticks in the craw, doesn't it???

Um. No.

And yet, there's legitimacy in their quarrel with the world, right? Hasn't socialism/communism failed women in a stunning myriad of ways? Of course it has, just like capitalism, and well, basically every system in the world. It's a sexist world, no question.

And then I started thinking about feminism. Third wave? Radical? Sex positive? Post-feminist? What is the place of feminism in my philosophy?

I mean, not the PUMA way, obviously. Voting the other way for McCain and his "women's health" and Palin, who is NOT a feminist, saying that abortion wouldn't be necessary if young girls weren't "sluts" (yeah, these PUMAs are really pretty weird), dissing on Michelle Obama, who is just pretty awesome, even if she's got the most thankless (if prestigious) unpaid job in the world, AND voting against the man who not only supports a woman's right to choose, and you know, equal pay for equal work, and incidentally, say what you will, is closing down Gitmo, and trying to make government transparent, and is shutting down the secret CIA prisons round the world [And that's just the first three days in office!] cannot be considered left or feminist, in my opinion.

But what can? How do we appropriately deal with a climate of institutionalized and internalized sexism?

Unrelatedly -- but to close with a taste of awesome, via rm, author Cathrynne M. Valente makes this post of sheer poetry about our new world.

¹ I don't even like Rick Sanchez, but I must admit to enjoying that clip. But this begs another question. I love participatory culture. I think the ability of the internet to give ordinary people a voice, and an impact on affairs is staggering, and awesome (in the old, non-valley sense of the word). And yet, (oh god, am i agreeing with Sarah Palin?) -- we shouldn't be getting our news from blogs! Because there's a difference between reading people's opinions (the Op-Ed page, the Editorials) and the actual news! Is it wrong to want journalists to be, you know, trained? I don't think I've got any right to go to Gaza and be a war correspondent...! And I'd like my president to be smarter than me. I mean, the problem with majority rule is that the majority of people kinda suck, don't they? But if we agree that the Great Man theory of history is wrong...? ...Although ever seen a movement succeed without some stellar spear-heading? I just go back and forth on it all the time. But this just leads me back to one of my central problems -- how does one unite a desire for excellence with an allegiance to the interests of the common person? And the old problem of communism - what is it that binds the intelligentsia and the workers together? But this is another post, for another day...

Comments

[psykaos42.livejournal.com]

I'd wager a lot of these women have no idea what the Secretary of State does. The Secretary of State is the person responsible for U.S foreign policy, including serving as Head of the US State Department It's generally considered the most Senior position in the President's Cabinet, and puts whoever holds it fourth in the line of succession should the President be killed or unable to carry out his duties.

I think they see the word 'secretary' and immediately think 'menial desk job.' Which in turn leads to 'Well of course they're not going to put a woman in a position of any real power.' Tell that to Condaleeza Rice and Hilary Clinton. Or Nancy Pelosi, who's the current Speaker of the House of Representatives.

[kalichan.livejournal.com]

Yeah. It is alarming. I don't understand why these aren't things that are taught in school. It's also weird. They haven't seen an episode of 24? Of the West Wing? Or watched any news items with Condaleeza Rice?

[psykaos42.livejournal.com]

They may've seen 24 or the West Wing, but they just think, "Well, that's Hollywood, and everyone knows Hollywood isn't real.' So it's not like there are actually women serving as Senators and Governers and Police Chiefs and Mayors all over the United States or in other countries.

I'm not sure how they missed Condaleeza Rice. Or Indira Ghandi. Or Margaret Thatcher.

Thing is, I know women like this in real life, and they're pretty pathetic. But I'd feel sorrier for them if I didn't get the feeling they enjoy being 'victimized' just a teensy bit more than is either good or proper. It reminds me of the peasants in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, and the whole "Help, I'm being repressed over here!" schtick. They glory in their martyrdom in a way I haven't seen since my mom died. And she, at least, had the excuse of having been born in 1919 and raised in an era where women really didn't have any choices beyond marriage and having kids, unless they wanted to become social pariahs.

[troygirl68.livejournal.com]

I haven't read/watched all the links, but I will when I get a bit more time. I am interested by this though. One thing I would pick up on is the:

"these seem to be women who have sad, sad lives. They talk about marital discord. They talk about giving up everything for their families"

When we moved to the US my youngest child was 7 months. I couldn't work (no permit) and the cost of childcare made it prohibitively expensive, anyway. My HB travels a lot for work so there were days and sometimes weeks where I was home alone with 2 small children and no real network (bear in mind I'm in the suburban mid-west and for an open-minded atheist it was something of a culture shock. You also can't go anywhere here without a car, and the winters are cripplingly isolating). My network was a group of ex-pat Moms in the same boat, but they were my friends because of our situation, and not necessarily women I would have naturally been friends with. I was always sleep deprived (some babies defy the laws of nature with how little they sleep) and that has a huge impact on everything in your life.

My point is, even when it caused fights, even when I felt like my brain had gone to mush, even when I'd wonder where the hell the woman I knew had gone, I NEVER ever blamed anyone. You know I fully understand the difference between being comfortably middle class as opposed to on the poverty line in this situation, but I think the some people just have mentality of blaming someone/thing for every woe in their lives.

And I want to punch some sense into every woman who says they gave up everything for their families. I am speaking of women who have a choice in procreating. It's not rocket science that having children will change your life FOREVER. I'm third in the pecking order now, after my daughters, and that's how it should be. If I raise them to be strong, confident, determined and happy in whatever they do then that's the best reward I could ever have. Now they are bigger and more independent I'm able to dip back into more stuff for me. I could have continued to not work and bake brownies and be at every PTO meeting, and for many women that's a valid choice. But the end of the day, until they pack their bags and leave they will always come first.

(And lest you wonder where my husband is in all this, I am not writing an essay on what a great guy he is, you'll just have to believe me. We wouldn't have been together for 18 years otherwise).

[kalichan.livejournal.com]

This is the thing, right? I completely agree with you re: children. I know that when D. and I decide the time is right to have one, my life as I know it will be over. And I think it will be totally worth it. I'm so very grateful that my parents were the same way with me. But that's a choice, and an important one. Like, have agency. The world doesn't happen to you; you have to do stuff!

But yes, in short, I agree with you 100%. And I think it's ironic that these women demand things from the world that they don't in their own personal sphere. I think it's fascinating that they apparently neither want to fish or cut bait; like, their husbands are "sexist," but they're not taking any steps to make their lives more proactive, or equal.

Marriage and relationships, at their best, are partnerships. From what you say, it doesn't surprise me in the slightest that your husband is a great guy. 'cause if not, why, as a feminist would you be with him?

[troygirl68.livejournal.com]

I love these posts and the comments; you spent a whole day on this but I got all that info in minutes. And you express what I'm trying to say so much more succinctly.
You'll be such a cool Mom; baby on boob, wine in hand, dictating to Rach XD

[framefolly.livejournal.com]

I love your fn :)

[kalichan.livejournal.com]

lol. Thanks. My brain, it is befuddled! But am pretty happy with the state of the union, regardless.

[rm.livejournal.com]

For now I'm just goin to address your footnote.

Historically, we, in fact, did get our news from the equivalent of blogs. Papers were not theoretically objective with an opinion page, rather they were in face political screeds subscribed to because they were amusing and published on the credentials merely of welth and the abilit yot do so. As cities became more populous and eading extended to a broader class of people, newspapers also began to inform of civic information that was not longer transmittied because everyone in an area knew each other -- everyone in an area no longer did -- and so police blotters and other local news that was not innately political began to fill the newspaper. It is from here that news objectiviism came to us an ideal. If a woman is going around throwing paint on woman with broawn hair, we should be objective and not say he's killing and eating them, This seemed a pleasant and useful way of communicating information, and so the INSANE political rhetoric of the 18th century began to be dialed back in the 19th (in conjunction, yet again, with its rise of science and conservatism).

Science continued to enhave this struggle for objecctivity. A photo cannot lie, so photographers must act like this machines. Typewriters provide the word precise, so writers should use precise words. Journalism as an academic subject became (and in some institutions still is) a bachelor of science -- not for the techniques of the printing press or the business of runnign a newspaper, but for the act of making ones self an objective machine.

Sometime in the last 30, 20 or ten year it snapped. Maybe it was the ease of doctoring photos and all our other technologie of lies bringing us back into the biased world. Perhaps, we just got bored. Perhaps the cult of personality abosrbed reporters and angry men and women (Keith Olbermann, Ann Coulter) are far more sexy than robots. But it's back, the 18th century an there's just one problem.

Nobody claimed, even the writers themselves, that journalists in 1760 were telling the truth. It was merely a style of exhuberant discourse used to make a point about teh actual truth unreferred to.

But today peopel think Fox News and MSNBC and the editorial page of the WSJ are telling the truth. And their not. And that's fine, if we know it, but we don't.

[kalichan.livejournal.com]

It's the confusion about what it is that troubles me. More and more, I think self-awareness is the key to EVERYTHING.

[rm.livejournal.com]

Here's the problem though -- knowledge requires trust of sources of information and no one trusts any sources; therefore everyone is making it all up.

School? That's run by liberals; can't trust them. Or, conversely, run by corporations; can't trust them.

The only way people trust anything is based on saying "trust me" and whether the person saying it punches their desire to roll over for some sort of alpha, whether that's the brainy alpha or the agressive alpha or the biggest dude alpha or the avenging mommy alpha. It's a fucking nightmare.

[kalichan.livejournal.com]

Okay, right. (And you know that I am far more comfortable with certain kinds of authority than others... i.e. universities, schools, etc...)

But what I mean more is, there shouldn't be any problem with how much you can trust yourself. Like, okay if I'm writing a polemic, or an opinion, it should be clear to me that's what I'm doing. I shouldn't think that what I'm doing is being objective, or truthful.

Or that I'm qualified to be a photojournalist because I've got a digital camera. That's just ridiculous.

It's like the soap-opera thing.

[rm.livejournal.com]

It is. But how do people learn to trust themselves?

Learning.

How do people learn?

Parents
Schools
Experience

Parents increasingly spend most of their time making sure their children have no experiences whatsoever and when schools aren't busy being inadequate they are busy being the subject of suspicion and while it's one thing to say everything I learned in life I learned from fiction; it's another thing to say everything I learned in life was from reality TV and wishing it could be me up there.

And that's where we are. Untempered hope and skepticism + utter lack of imagination = contempt.

Bad scene.

[contrarywise]

I'd heard the term PUMA before, but had pretty much ignored it. Clearly, I was doing myself a favor there. They've bought into some weird, Bizarro-world version of feminism that bears little or no relationship to what I understand as feminism. There's so much wrong there that it breaks my brain trying to sort out where to start. Sort of like my ex-boy's mom, who believes that women's bookstores are sexist. Or the billboard I saw once that made the claim that when vegetarians "cheat", they always go for a big, juicy steak. The very premise that PUMAs operate from is based on a profound misunderstanding of the subject they claim to embrace, with a big, steaming dollop of hate on top. It boggles my mind, it does.

OTOH, that post by yuki_onna? Yes. Just, yes.

[kalichan.livejournal.com]

It was all new to me, although I'd vaguely heard of some Clinton-enthusiasts who had switched allegiance to Sarah Palin, but whoa. I was not expecting it to be this nuts.

There's so much wrong there that it breaks my brain trying to sort out where to start.

Mind boggling is literally the only term for it. It's just, wait, feminist, what now??? Meanwhile! Obama gets rid of global gag rule! Hello, awesome!

[kel-reiley.livejournal.com]

ok, i only skimmed through a few of those but holy shit
i am going to bookmark this for later

[kalichan.livejournal.com]

seriously, it ate my whole day. Like, whoa! Welcome to crazytown!

[askeladden.livejournal.com]

When I was in high school, I found the webpage of a woman who was in college, but she was queer and liked opera and Latin (okay, yeah, I have a type), and so we had a brief correspondence. When I came to the city some ten years later, we met briefly over dinner (I think she got a little upset because I got antipasto with cold cuts and I hadn't realizes she was a somewhat militant vegetarian, but wasn't a huge jerk about it or anything), talked about Latin and opera, and parted with the intention of getting back in touch and hanging out sometime. It never really happened, but we exchanged a few friendly emails, and then she moved to California to be with her new girlfriend. I subscribed to her blog because I thought it might be interesting, though she rarely posted, and that was pretty much it.

Then the election season came, and she started posting huge pissed-off vicious screeds against Barack Obama. The better he did in the polls, the more furious she got. Now, it doesn't take a psychologist to see that she really wanted a woman in the White House, set her heart on Clinton, felt betrayed and upset as it became more obvious that she wouldn't get the nomination, and then had residual bitterness that her team didn't win throughout the rest of the election. But that it turned an extremely left-wing feminist lesbian into a raging, frothing Sarah Palin supporter? WTF? Seriously. WTF. This is her blog; I can't really do it justice by describing it. But I stayed subscribed to it mainly out of incredulity. I honestly did not smell the stink of crazy the single time I met this woman, but it's amazing what'll bring it out in someone:

http://crapbuiltonlies.blogspot.com/

[kalichan.livejournal.com]

Oh wow. Yeah. This one's even more disturbing as the person doesn't seem to be crazy except... well, wow.

But that it turned an extremely left-wing feminist lesbian into a raging, frothing Sarah Palin supporter? WTF? Seriously. WTF.

Yeah, I mean, there's not enough WTF in the world.

Also, I'm sorry, but what is it with the the Hitler comparison meme (http://crapbuiltonlies.blogspot.com/2008/10/special-message-from-artur-axmann.html)?

Like, I just don't understand it. Both charismatic public speakers, with ardent followings, I guess, but really??? And if you're a Clinton supporter/feminist, it's like the holocaust?! I just... words fail.

[magnetgirl.livejournal.com]

All of this just makes me even angrier that no where in a high school standard education is there anything resembling civics classes anymore, nor the increasingly important skill of being a critical receiver of information.

I can smell bullshit in a news story or on tv with a pretty high success rate. Obviously you can too. Most of the country? Not so much.

NY1! NY1! Why I won't switch to direct tv because then I'd lose the only news channel I trust.

[kalichan.livejournal.com]

Word. Everyone should have at least a basic understanding of how this shit works. Like, come on.

Anyway, wasn't it bizarrely fascinating?

[jackarono.livejournal.com]

I suspect that PUMA is more a matter of the media's constant focus on what's of minor conflict and basically trivial. Focusing on the small percentage of Clinton voters who didn't (or said they wouldn't) vote for Obama-- most did, and, after all, Hilary campaigned very hard for him-- means they didn't have to focus on important issues that actually had some importance to the voting public. (Fortunately, this election, Americans decided not to be diverted into caring more about the trivial than the important.)

More women than men voted for Obama. Many, many more Clinton voters supported Obama. But today's media really can't help themselves. The exception is always more fun to them than the rule, and that's why so often they give this skewed version of reality, the kind that has people saying, "You know, I don't know anyone like that... I guess I only know boring people who never get written up in the newspaper." :)

[kalichan.livejournal.com]

No, I totally agree. I was merely surprised/mesmerized by the quality of the response, not thinking they were actually important. And none of these sources were even in the mainstream media, thank goodness. Just the little dark corners of the internet. It is so nice to look at the fringe lunatics, and not have to think, "and they're the ones in charge!"