Thread about Women's Rights and Girls Gone Wild Videos and Stuff
 

*It's occured to me that I might have screwed up the title of this thread - if a Moderator could please shorten it to "What Happened?" that'd be wonderful.

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Now, I enjoy most things in today’s popular media. I like watching TV, I like going to movies – I love listening to music. But recently, I’ve flipped on the TV and I’ve seen… well… porn. There’s really no other way to describe it. Yeah, this is one of those – the only difference between me and an aging feminist is that I’m an 18 year old teenager. Just hear me out, okay? It’s time for a history lesson.

Now a long time ago, man brought home the bacon. Women took care of the home front. Everything was as it was in those old 50’s television shows – the father would come home from a hard day at the office, and the kids were upstairs doing their homework, and the mother took a break from the housework to cook everyone dinner. These were the times where everyone still said things like “the bee’s knees,” “hip cat” and “twenty-three skidoo.”

However, all was not well in the world. War was brewing. A big war. World War I, in fact. Now, all the men were out of the office, and on the front lines – leaving women to take up their place. In order to keep households in their homes, women worked in factories, worked in offices – they worked anywhere that they were needed. This was a great victory for the Suffragettes, a group of women who felt trapped in society, women who were tired of being housewives. This proved that women were capable of doing what was traditionally a man’s job.

Now, this led to women being allowed to vote. Women all over North America and the UK felt that they had proved themselves, and began protesting with the suffragettes – and it wasn’t just women. Men picketed for women’s rights, too. It was decided that women should have the vote, but they were given the vote with the same limitations that had been placed on men. That meant that only property owners over 30 could vote – so only unmarried women and widowers qualified.

This was fantastic for women, who, in the 19th century, were property. They were literally property. Do you know when you go to the coffee shop and buy a cinnamon bun, and that becomes your cinnamon bun? It’s yours. You can choose to keep it or give it away. Women were the same. They were taught at a young age how to act to a man, who was “obviously” better. They cooked and cleaned and sewed and worked in order for her father to find her a nice man to marry. By nice man, I mean the man who will give your family the most stuff, the best dowry.

Females have struggled hard for equal rights. Though the voting process is only one battle that has been won, it’s not the only battle that’s been waged in the battle of the sexes. The funny thing is that in some things women dominate men, and still demand more, while in other areas, there’s no fight at all.

Now the reason I’m writing this is that I saw today Britney Spears’ new music video, “Give Me More.” I also say Avril Lavigne’s “You’re So Hot.” I remember how the Pussycat Dolls were denied a line of toys by MGA Entertainment because of their “overly-sexual nature.” Now, a toy company is telling down an international pop group because of how they act.

I find it sad that the heroes of little girls nation wide are stripping on national TV – literally stripping, what with pole dancing, chair straddling and sex slavery and everything, and the only person that slaps them on the wrist is a toy company. What I find even more sad is that what hundreds of thousands of people picketed for, protested for, spent long hours talking and debating and waging moral battles and victories and losses – all their hard work evaporates as a musician makes a “How To Strip” video, or how women can get raunchy sex videos released all over the world and just say “Oops.”

Let’s put this into perspective: for nearly a century, a century and a half, women have tried to get equal rights. Now, in our time, they’re almost at their goal. Women are seen as equals, if not treated as equals on almost all fronts. Hard work has paid off. But everything goes away when a twelve year old girl turns on the television and sees her idol grinding her groin on a pole. Now instead of thinking about the important things, that twelve year old girl is thinking that maybe the best way to get attention is to mimic her idol, while twelve year old boys are thinking that girls aren’t people – they’re eye candy.

Maybe we ought to cut down on how much sexuality is put into today’s media. Just a tiny bit. Or maybe it’s not the media’s fault. If all we have is toy companies standing up to these people, maybe we should look at ourselves and change. And just to set the record straight for little girls everywhere, Avril Lavigne is not the queen of punk. Bif Naked is.

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Okay, um, a few things so far. (Forgive me if my thoughts are a bit scattered and/or incomplete; I'm not all that used to formulating Discussion-type arguments.)

Oh Jeebus, no, not nearly. Look, patriarchal culture, as I understand it, has been around since at least the ancient Greeks, and probably earlier than that (I think the Romans cribbed a lot of culture and ideas from the Greeks, and Europe cribbed from them both, and it was all brought over to the New World without a whole lot of modification, but don't quote me on it). That's millennia of extremely basic, rigid and flawed ideas about the nature of the sexes and sexuality that have changed much more in their expression than in their substance. You really think that a fitfully expressed, often derided (take, for instance, the notion of the modern strawfeminist or "Feminazi": the unattractive, shrewish woman who's just out to destroy sex and fun for everybody while hiding behind the mask of "equality", probably because she's jealous of the prettier girls) and sometimes actively suppressed movement that's only been around a century and a half or so tops could fix, or has fixed, almost everything that's wrong with the very foundations of Western culture? It's very optimistic of you, Seil, and it's good that you're devoting serious thought to the subject; but it's just not accurate.

Look, I'm pretty new to the whole feminist philosophy 'thang', but I can tell you this: Feminism is not "almost at its goal", not by a long shot, because the problems faced by feminism (and other movements for social justice) run a whole hell of a lot deeper than just not being able to vote or work wherever one likes. The problem isn't quite so much the obvious bigotry; that's the nasty, nasty icing on a cake made of--not even hate, but just flawed assumptions in the very way everyone thinks about other people, where we draw the line between "us" and the "other" and why, on a level so basic most of us hardly even notice it until it's pointed out to us, and that will take a hell of a lot longer to fix than we've actually been aware of it. And the examples you've cited are symptoms of the problem, which you just touch on in the last bit of this here (bolding mine, all mine!)--

It's a bit more complicated than that, maybe, but you have it right in that the main problem is in how people think--often without even realizing it.

"Dominate men and still demand more"? Maybe I'm misunderstanding you, but can you give me some examples of this one? Also, I wonder about some of the history you cite (especially your assessment of women's rights in the nineteenth century--that might have been unspoken or assumed custom, but I'm not certain it was explicitly law at that point), but I'm no expert on that--maybe someone more knowledgeable can examine that?

But, I have to say this: Goddamn right =P .

This is completely wrong unless you are reading feminist texts from the 1970's.

If you read more modern feminist analyist, most appropriately Scottian gender analysis, this assumption was created by feminists both of the early 20th and middle 20th century in thier effort to create ahistoric patriarchys to rebel again. Interestingly they only depowered women rather than empowering, part of why everything changed.
Try reading any work by (first name forgotten!) Procida, Christina Larner, some of the work of Robert Young, Joan Richards or Joan Scott for starters.
Or really anything written in the last 5-10 years on 19th century Western society.
The whole domestic/public sphere dichtomy has been thrown out as has most of the notions of a man lead patriachy, replaced by a much more complex and subtle interplay between the sexes.
Women's life was not as you portray it. Well it may be for some but a very small proportion chosen as test-cases for the militant feminists.
I can try and sum up actual 19th century but it is a very fragmented time and this is inordinately difficult to do (this is in fact the greatest problem with history in the post-modern age as the basis of historical narrative has been torn asunder) and I"m not sure its too relevant to this discussion. Just thought I woudl clarify a few things.

While Seil may have gotten the details wrong, her sentiment is accurate. Nothing has really changed, we just tend to have a subtler mysogeny (and I mean this in a very broad sense, not a specific one).

Go to a Wal-mart or Target and go to the toy section. One aisle is pink, the rest are filled with the 'cool' toys for boys.

With the advent of ultrasound, we begin railroading our children into specific gender roles even before they're born. That alone should throw up a red flag.

As for your specific point about overt sexuality in the media, while we do in our society have a dichotomy of approach and withdrawal from sexuality, I think it is healthy for women to take control of their sexuality. I also think that it is being abused, especially since it is targeted at such young girls.

There's certainly a difference in status. A woman who exhibits traditionally masculine traits is often seen as attempting to improve her status. A man who exhibits traditionally feminine traits is scorned because he is pursuing an inferior status.

Too much sexuality in the media isn't just a problem of gender roles, there's also the problem of having an arbitrarily elongated childhood--adolescence. It's a complex problem, but one important facet is that we don't teach responsibility, mostly because we don't practice it ourselves.

I'm not sure if I made much sense with this post. I may add more later.

Okay, I've just been wanting to use the phrase trompe l'oeil since I learned it
 

I don't necessarily agree with it, but one example might be how females, on average, do better in school than males, but the majority of feminist institutions claim that it's females who need the help in school, and that males don't.

Now, I've recently become convinced -- if not completely -- that this is more of a statistical anomaly. Men, as a group, tend to exhibit far greater variance of quality in activities than women do (see: IQ). More accurately, they tend to have a higher deviation than do females who still exhibit members along the entire spectrum of capability, but tend to have a more centric grouping, and smaller deviation.

So, if you put the two in situations where the top is capped and both could otherwise far exceed it, men seem to do worse. The prime example being grades. People of both genders can far, far, far exceed what it takes to get an A in high school. I have, and know people who have, done it without even pretending to try to try. It's generally so goddamn easy, and internal grades in areas I've seen tend to be obviously skewed towards the As, Bs, and Cs, unless it's just in a terrible area. Because the grades are skewed to this end, and you can't actually exceed them, the higher percentage of males -- versus females -- who achieve low grades stands out, and pulls the male average down.

Conversely, in a distribution where people tend to group towards the middle and bottom, the higher percentage of males -- versus females -- who achieve high <whatevers> would tend to pull the male average up.

Meanwhile, the vast majority of both would tend to be in the same situation, and it's just a trompe l'oeil of statistical distribution.

Well, actually, it went something like this:

There's these foragers out by the Nonexistant River Basin, starting to realize they want to do something new and exciting! To survive or some shit, carrying capacity being what it is. So, anyway, they're running out of space, through encroachment or overpopulation, and they think, "Hey, these animals seem nice. I wonder if we could take care of them and use them for food!" So, they take herds of these animals, move to a larger (if generally less productive) span of land, and proceed to herd and guard, in that or the other order.

And thus is Pastoralism, the second economic strategy, born.
BAM! Patriarchy.

I mean, it tends to get better as you move towards cultivation and then industrialization, but the ending point is pretty random, where the starting point is remarkably universal, across many, many, many unrelated, and mutually isolated societies.

The generally accepted reasoning is that patriarchy comes from patrilinealism and patrilocalism. And what those mean is that in herding societies, families are dictated by the male line, and that women become part of the male's family. The practical upshot of this is that, with an extended family setup that pastoral societies traditionally used (in contrast with the nuclear-type family of earlier societies) you gather a bunch of men under one roof.

A bunch of men raised in a strong warrior tradition.

You've created a barracks.

Meanwhile, it was new and vitally important for pastoral societies to protect their lands to/and keep their herds alive. Without these herds, the land can't support them, and they starve. So, this grows into a massive expansion of male-dominated activity now necessary for the survival of the group, and men now contribute as the majority to food production. BAM! Patriarchy.

On the flip side, there were several societies who allowed a female desire to participate in traditionally male warrior-activities, often through the creation of a third and/or fourth "gender" being men who take up female pursuits and females who take up male pursuits, in the modern understandings of those words. In these situations these males take husbands and females take wives to complete the distribution of work across genders, and it just works normally, with a few concessions to biology.

I'm not exactly sure where I'm going with that, but it seemed interesting at the time. Which was, like... a couple hours ago, I got distracted.

Inasmuch as I understand and am familiar with the subject, most of those complex and subtle interactions are still largely understood to derive from the influence of patriarchal structures.

Also I would really appreciate if you would expound on who exactly you're describing with the term "militant feminism" as I personally am not familiar with any usage of the term that isn't a straightforward ideological slur.

Not really. There is a substructure of gender analysis which uses this but it pretty much ridiculed by the field as a whole.
Well in theory.
The patriachal gender analyists have been pretty much roundely destroyed in theoretical disputes but the problem is still that a lot of historians don't engage too much with these disputes. So yes there are still a lot of historians who use this but I don't think I'm streching things to say that these are not the ideal.
As an example of where gender history is heading, Joan Scott is really the signpost. She posits gender as an analytic tool. Thus instead of using ahistoric undefined groupings as our explanations, there is a highly contextualised, localised studies which involve the interrelation of both genders as the "patriachal hegemony" is a meaningless term in itself.
In practice this involve lots of textual deconstruction and Geertzian analysis to create localised cultures which are not loaded with our descriptions.
This is very difficult and often ignored, especially by more popular histories though the authors I listed in the post above have made valient attempts.
Which leads me to difficulty in citations because unless you have access to historical journals I can't provide much with articles tending towards more sophistication than generic books.
And leads me to the next bit:

Well this yes this is a bit of a slur but I feel well-founded in this context.
I was using this term to represent the patriarchal feminist historians who use this patriarchal structures in thier histories in an ahistoric way designed to pander to presentist goals.
In general, this is pretty roundely denounced by historians as a complete corruption of the discipline (though there are debates about this but this is not the right forum to bring them up).

Barrel-Hating Sycophant,

You're implying a vast consensus on several broad questions in elusive language. Consensii that I can't say I'm aware of, and that I'm certainly surprised to hear about. But I guess since I'm more familiar with the discipline of History I guess I'm not "the ideal."

Okay stop the presses.

Dude if you are going to unapologetically use what you yourself acknowledge are slurs against groups of people, in discussion of all places, I really have to warn you. Regardless of how justified you may be or feel you may be.

I'm not saying there's no such thing as a gray area on this kind of thing but if you're going to be like 'no there's no gray area, I was deliberately insulting a group of people because I disagree with their views' then I mean, dang.

Okay, carry on.

My issue here is multi-fold.

Why?

Why does it all evaporate as soon as someone strips on TV? Explain to me what bearing Britney, of all people, getting 'jiggy wit' it' on the television has to do with women's rights struggles.

Because, honestly, I see no comparison at all.

Britney being sexualized on television is not keeping the glass ceiling in place. Avril Lavigne wearing a mini-skirt in her newest music video isn't keeping women from being paid the same amount as men in the same positions.

No--there are two things doing that. The first is a patriarchal society that is not quite ready to see women as full equals yet (and probably won't be for quite awhile, if every other social rights battle ever conducted is of any evidence). The second is the fact that there's a lot of 'feminazis' getting too much publicity and spending too much time battling sexual expression for the more important women's rights battles to get their fair share.

Honestly, how many times do we hear about the glass ceiling and unequal pay between men and women compared to how often we hear about the 'objectification of women in today's media'. Maybe if we spent a little more time on breaking that glass ceiling instead of worrying about what this week's pop star is wearing, or what Hugh Hefner is putting in the latest issue of Playboy, we'd have a better chance at equality?

Further--why is it that women being sexualized is hurting women's rights?

If anything I'd say that it's helping them--or at least a symptom of increased women's rights. Look at all the worst times and places for women's rights throughout history and then look at how women dressed were forced to dress--in the most 'puritan' or concealing clothes imaginable.

Believe it or not, a lot of this sexualized media is because of women who discovered that, now that they were free to act how they wanted and to garner their own power, they could use their bodies AS power. Sexuality is an immense power that women have over men thanks to the way society has conditioned the two genders (fun fact--women get just as physically aroused by pornographic images as men and desire sex just as much on a primal level, but men are taught to seek sex and women are taught to deny sex by society--the effect is that most men want sex more than most women, which allows women to control men with their sexuality. Sociology and psychology--Mmm Mmm good).

I'd honestly say that trying to tell women what they can and can not wear, what they can and can not do with their bodies, where they can and can not show their skin--that's the infringement on women's rights. It's certainly not their ability to wear what they want when they want and use their sexuality to gain the upper hand with men (as unethical as it may be).