song of the day

Ani DiFranco’s “Out of Habit”

This song came up on my itunes shuffle as I was studying for my comps today and even though I’ve heard this song over a hundred times, there was a line that really struck me today. Granted, I don’t often pay very close attention to lyrics, but when DiFranco sings “my cunt is built like a wound that won’t heal” it really struck me. My first reaction was how striking the word “cunt” sounds in DiFranco’s melodic voice and framed by the upbeat guitar. It also really reminded me of Erika Fricke’s article “In Pursuit of a Feminine Vulgarity,” where Fricke discusses how the language of profanity is intrinsically male and that women need to take it into their own hands and create an empowered language. GI Jane shouldn’t have to yell “suck my dick.” Instead she should find a language that represents her own strength and could be screaming “lick my clit” instead.

The other thing that this line immediately brought to mind was the  Braun and Wilkinson’s paper “Socio-cultural Representations of the Vagina” that I spent a lot of time talking about in the Teeth paper.  What does it mean to us that DiFranco is invoking this socio-cultural representation of the vagina as a gash?  Although the authors did not come up with the theory (I’m pretty sure it is Freudian),  Braun and Wilkinson discuss the image of the gash being a wound left behind from castration of the female’s symbolic penis.  Because the penis represents power, the female is left with not only an absence of a penis and thus an absence of power, but is also left wounded.  

What is striking when you think about the lyrics through the lens of Braun, Wilkinson, and Freud is  that not is DiFranco talking about a “cunt” that is “wounded” but rather one that it won’t heal.  The fact that she considers the wound one that will not heal, as if that were the goal, really speaks to idea of the power struggle that is still very relevant for women today. 

click the jump to check out the lyrics to the song!

can i borrow that?

It’s come up in conversation a couple of times that I’ve been reading Queenbees & Wannabes by Rosalind Wiseman and the reaction that I’ve been getting from people is pretty interesting. My college-aged female friends have almost uniformly been really interested what the book has to say about cliques and growing up female. Some have even asked to borrow the book after I’m done reading it.

Reading the book, I can tell you that it is not a self-help book for young women but rather, one for the girls’ parents since it directly addresses the guardians of these “queenbees and wannabes.”  So the thought that immediately rose to my mind when my friends showed so much interest in this book was, why?  Don’t get me wrong, I was thrilled to begin reading this book under the guise of research for the next in a series of papers for my seniors honors project.  But why are we interested in reading something that is not about us or directed towards us?

One potential reason is because we’re certainly young enough where we can vividly remember our high school experiences.  Reading Wiseman’s book could give us insight into our younger selves and provide an idea of how typical our lives were.  In one section of the book, Wiseman describes the different types of girls in a high schools including the queenbees, sidekicks, targets, and so on.  But we certainly shouldn’t need to consult a checklist in a book to see what type of girl we were in high school.  Everyone already knows if they were the popular girl or a socially outcasted nerd.  However, what I think the book does is to provide almost a sense of pride for those popular girls while providing the nerd a sense of comfort in knowing that her situation was not uncommon.  Reading the description of her own role, the popular girl or Queen Bee can reminisce on the adulation that she received and the power that she had in high school.  Meanwhile, that nerdy girl can feel better knowing that she was not alone in her pain and maybe even feel happy that she is no longer in that situation.

That’s only one of the potential reasons for why a female my age would be so interested in reading Wiseman’s book but there are certainly others. Stay tuned because I’ll be throwing those your way in the next few days : )

watch out for bullies

It seems that the mean girl behavior doesn’t end on the playground or on the high school campus:

But while women have come a long way in removing workplace barriers, one of the last remaining obstacles is how they treat one another. Instead of helping to build one another’s careers, they sometimes derail them — for example, by limiting access to important meetings and committees; withholding information, assignments and promotions; or blocking the way to mentors and higher-ups.

And if you are a woman and happen to have a female co-worker who is a bully, watch out. A recent study by the Workplace Bullying Institute examining office behaviors — like verbal abuse, job sabotage, misuse of authority and destroying of relationships — found that female bullies aim at other women more than 70 percent of the time. Bullies who are men, by contrast, tend to be equal-opportunity tormentors when it comes to the gender of their target.

from A Sisterhood of Workplace Fighting by Peggy Klaus published on January 10, 2009 in The New York Times 

It is certainly worth looking into what causes this sort of behavior to begin so early in a girl’s life and why it continues into her adulthood.

the most threatening opening

“Substituting one orifice for the other, as Margo Glantz would say, the mouth was and continues to be the most threatening opening of the feminine body: it can eventually express what shouldn’t be expressed, reveal the hidden desire, unleash the menacing differences which upset the core of the phallogocentric, paternalistic discourse.”

– Valenzuela, Luisa in her work “Dirty Words” published in The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Michelle Obama: Mom-in-Chief

I found this really interesting article while perusing The New York Times about Cherie Blair’s advice to First Lady elect Michelle Obama.  Mrs. Blair advises Mrs. Obama to prepare herself for letdowns in her new role, one of which is that she will have to take the back seat to her husband, in both public and private.  One of the things that I love about Michelle Obama, aside from her sense of style and the fact that she seems like she’d make a great friend, is that everything about her exudes intelligence and success.  She seems motivated and goal oriented and seems to have been able to achieve it all – a great family life and an incredibly successful career.  But what this article points out, is she putting this all aside for her husband?  She left a job as a hospital executive to become a self proclaimed “mom-in-chief.”  Should we consider Michelle Obama as another woman joining the opt-out revolution? 

As contributers to the article note, this isn’t the end of the road for Mrs. Obama.  She will certainly bring her drive and intelligence to the White House and being First Lady gives her many different opportunities.  In addition, her time in the White House is also an investment into her own name and will only benefit her career in the future.  

I think this is a really interesting new foray into the political realm as we begin to see first ladies who are more than just hostesses at their husband’s events.  Hilary Rodham Clinton was the first first lady to hold an active career before entering the White House, and Mrs. Clinton and Laura Bush are the only two previous first ladies to hold graduate degrees.  Some also noteworthy is that Cherie Blair, a lawyer and mother of four children, continued to work as a lawyer while her husband Tony Blair was Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.

Social Pressures on Feminine Sexuality

One of the articles that I am reading in preparation of writing the first in a series of papers for a potential thesis was Susan Dickes Hubbard’s “Social Pressures on Feminine Sexuality.”  She recounts her experience as a marriage counselor and discusses many of the issues that married couples face, and in particular, the social pressures that add to those problems. What was particularly interesting to me is that, even though Hubbard wrote in the 1960s, many of the issues seem pretty relevant today.  One of her first issues is the perception of a woman’s shortcomings in bed.  She attributed this to a general lack of desire as well as conflicting social constructs.  Those came about by a society that told women to be pure and to save themselves and later, with the sexual revolution told women that they could love freely and liberally.  This sudden change in ideology created an extra social pressure on women who were now faced with deciding between the ideology and the constant fear that what they were doing would be reproved by society.  Even though this was over forty years ago, many young women face the same pressures today.  Society tells women they they are allowed to be sexually free but often condemns them for their actions.  This is only reinforced in the loquitor.com article I wrote about a few days ago where they say that women prefer the ambiguity of the term hooking up because it allows them to conceal the extent of their actions.

“Just as some young women in recent years have argued that appearing topless on “Girls Gone Wild” is an act of sexual liberation, putting an untested Alaskan governor on the road to the White House was spun as a sign of the arrival of real, hot-blooded women into the mainstream of power.”

From “No Extraordinary Woman” By Judith Warner, Op-extra columnist for The New York Times

embracing the F-word

Throwback post! from girlpower1.wordpress.com.

Written on May 8, 2007.

Reading last week’s New York, I stumbled upon an article on Jessica Valenti which was interesting, particularly after our class discussions on feminism. As a freelance writer, author, and blogger, Valenti has been working to make young women embrace feminism. Three years ago Valenti founded her blog Feministing.com where her mission states “Young women are rarely given the opportunity to speak on their own behalf on issues that affect their lives and futures. Feministing provides a platform for us to comment, analyze and influence.” After scrolling through the blog, it’s really interesting to note that a lot of her posts are on the same topics that many of the posts in our girlpower blogs.

I think it’s pretty interesting to look at Feministing.com’s take on modern day feminism. These posts don’t seem to be about radical feminist actions taken by womens, and definitely no bra burnings in sight. So what I’m wondering is, is Valenti feeding today’s young women a watered down, more palatable version of feminism? Because from class discussions, it seems like we’ve come to the consensus that today’s young women would hate to be called feminists, so is the answer just changing our view of feminism?

Really though?

So awhile back, I was watching E!News and they did a glowing piece on Selena Gomez. Apparently Disney’s new darling was working with a program promoting voter registration for young adults at a mall. Sounds great, right? I thought so too. Until they asked her if she would ever consider running for president. Her answer was “I don’t know if i could be a woman president, I’m kind of emotional. but i think it’d be fun to be a first lady.”

I know that she didn’t say that no woman could be president but It’s still heartbreaking to see a girl who is adored by millions of young girls can say something that pushes the women’s movement way back.

This is the kind of behavior I would expect from Brooke Hogan but I had higher expectations for Selena.