Not buying it.

[CrispyQ]

From Miss Representation:

http://www.missrepresentation.org/notbuyingit/notbuyingit-gqs-woman-of-the-year-cover/



Some good comments on their FB page, too, as well as the expected inane ones.

[MadrasT]

1. For fuck's sake.

This shit gets exhausting. Truly exhausting.

[seabeyond]

2. they say women are not visual. i look at that and am visually knocked on my

ass at what it is saying and what an insult it is.

who the hell is lena and why the hell do women not get how offensive this is not only to them but all women. are they really so self adsorbed.

[ismnotwasm]

3. GQ

A friend of mine at work brought an issue in, it's cover had some actress I didn't know in a nude colored outfit, so at first glance she looked nude and exposed. My friend, who is a Gay male, gives us magazines, one male oriented one called 'Details' I enjoy. GQ is another story. Its content is often superficial and inane, if I was a male, I'd be insulted by it. Like "cosmo" insults me.

Anyway, my friend made the comment that he hoped "it wasn't too risqué". Turns out it bothered someone enough to color clothes on the woman. A couple co-workers asked if it was me because I'm very vocal about being a feminist. (I had waited to see what my mostly female coworkers would do.)

Of course not. This is how the much of the male media want to present women, naked and objectified and I'd rather point that fact out that hide it. Ill bet The coloring of clothes on the woman was done because someone was uncomfortable, but either lacked or rejected the feminist volcabulary needed to say "this is sexist bullshit" in some manner, and just toss the magazine. I did have a conversation with my Gay friend, women do nothing for him, so while he could see "risqué" he couldn't see the objectification because she wasn't a sexual object to him.

[CrispyQ]

4. Someone on FB also observed how the woman is posed in a fetal position

compared to the men.

The number of people ok with it is sad.

I've been reading "An Unnatural Order." I highly recommend it.

[seabeyond]

5. doesnt this sound interesting.

Coauthor with Peter Singer of Animal Factories , the classic expose of the cruelty of mechanized animal farming and slaughter, Mason here writes an eloquent, important plea for a total rethinking of our relationship to the animal world. He analyzes the West's "dominionist" worldview which exalts humans as overlords and owners of other life, an outlook that he believes is rooted in millennia of animal husbandry. Speculating that dominionism arose with the transition from ancient mother-goddess religions to patriarchy, he ambitiously links our current exploitation and domination of nature to fears of our own animal nature, repressive antisexual attitudes, misogyny, curtailment of women's power, racism and colonialism. Human brains and thought processes evolved through close contact with animals, Mason argues, and restoring our kinship with animals is central to bridging the rift between humanity and nature. His powerfully argued manifesto will change many readers' attitudes toward hamburgers, animal experimentation, hunting and circuses.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

this is interesting. any real insight, throw it out....

[CrispyQ]

7. Here's an excerpt from the book:

http://politics.innerself.com/html/articles/trends/general/102-an-unnatural-order.html

I've finished three chapters. It's very interesting with a lot of ideas I'd not considered before.

Have you ever read the Earth's Children series by Jean Auel? It's a fictional account of human life before agriculture - similar to the type of writing James Michener does - fictional, but based on research. Anyway, the society depicted in the stories is quite different from our male centered one today. There is no religion, just a keen awareness & deep appreciation of our Earth Mother & all She provides. Females, who bring life into the world, were highly valued in that society.

Agriculture changed that. We no longer viewed ourselves as part of the earth, but as masters of it. We put life in a hierarchy with humans at the top. Misogyny's roots are in dominionism. Within the human collective, we have a hierarchy, too, & women were placed at the bottom.

On a different, but somewhat related topic, did you know that in the dairy industry they have an apparatus called a rape rack?

All forms of dairy farming involve forcibly impregnating cows. This involves a person inserting his arm far into the cow’s rectum in order to position the uterus, and then forcing an instrument into her vagina. The restraining apparatus used is commonly called a “rape rack.”

Pretty gruesome, huh? Like Mason, I believe our relationship with animals has a profound impact on who we are. I don't know how accurate some of his conclusions are, but he certainly gives food for thought on what is needed to get us off this destructive path.


on edit: The change from gatherer's to farmers took several thousand years & not all cultures embraced agriculture.

[seabeyond]

10. a decade ago

i did study in spirituality. not religion. a good couple 3, 4 years. a lot of it was balancing and embracing the male/female in who we are. in the process i clearly saw the unity of it and that is why so much of what is being fed to us over the last decade, so aggressively fed to us, is clearly not correct. nothing about it has to do with universal balance. and when the feel of balance lacks.... that is our clue in to look at the reality of what we are being fed. it is a clue in that ego is involved.

excellent.

thank you

[CrispyQ]

8. Some interesting excerpts from the book:

Even millennia before agriculture, then, there was this rough division of labor between the sexes. Never think for a moment, though, that the women of these societies were relegated to inferior, submissive roles. Their roles as child bearers, midwifes, food gatherers, food preparers, food sharers, healers, shamans, and all-around nurturers contributed to considerable female power and status. In an age when the kin group was everything, females carried on the life of the kin group - via children, food, herbal medicines, and much of the knowledge of the magical powers in the world that could help or hurt her kinfolk.


more...

Put another way by University of Virginia social anthropologist Henry S. Sharp in his study of northern Canada's Chipewyan people, "to be female is to be power, to be male is to acquire power. Men may have power but women are power just by being women." In primal society, men's power and status, then had to come from rituals and planned activities, for they had no natural link to procreation yet.

We must bear in mind that primal people had no way of understanding reproductive and birth cycles. Jacquetta Hawkes and other anthropologists have noted that Australian and other "primitive peoples (do) not understand biologic paternity or accept a necessary connection between sexual intercourse and conception."


more...

Even anthropologists as conservative and chauvinistic as Robin Fox note this basic gender tension in primal times. In "Encounter with Anthropology," Fox says: "Women participated in the natural world through childbirth; men stood apart from the natural world, mostly through the hunt and war. Women crated life; men destroyed it. A good deal of the male religion involved a careful attempt, through hunt rituals and scalp ceremonies, to restore this balance.


more...

In the jargon of psychology, then, primal man had feelings of gender insecurity and lack of status in the group because of their societies general awe of the female powers.

[MadrasT]

9. Really interesting, I need to find that book.

The thing that strikes me from reading this excerpt it that those male feelings of gender insecurity still exist. Otherwise, why would men worldwide spend so much time and effort continuing to subjugate and oppress and control women?

[CrispyQ]

13. I tried to keep within the four paragraph rule. There's so much more I would like to have posted.

Last edited Mon Sep 10, 2012, 02:06 PM - Edit history (1)

The switch to agriculture was the ideal opportunity to start the myths, religious & secular, that male dominance is the natural order of the world. Instead of an Earth mother being the giver of life, a male god is the life giver & he gives life first to a man who was created in his image & then as an after thought, created woman as a companion to man. A toy, almost. What a fucking crock of shit. No wonder we have so many female/male issues when people are raised on this bullshit.

Another aspect of anthropology that he mentions is how anthropology itself was male dominated for so long. He asks, how biased were their findings, based on our current male dominated culture? He believes that the hunter part of the "hunter-gatherers" was really not as big a part of their lives as many (male) anthropologists make out. His arguments are sound & backed by evidence that primal man's diet consisted mostly of plant food & that the women were the gatherers, & therefore the 'bread winners' of the group.

Be warned about the book - it's more a book about humanity's relationship to animals than it is about human-to-human relationships. I believe that the way we treat animals has a profound impact on how we treat the rest of the planet & each other. Can we recognize that animals have lives that have value, outside the value we put on them? It's the same with people. If you can objectify an animal, dominate an animal, you can objectify other people, too.

It's been an incredible read so far.

on edit:

Regarding the bias of male anthropologists, he said that whenever any type of tool with a sharp edge was discovered, it was always attributed to the great male hunters. More recently, however, they are thinking many of the sharp edged tools were women's tools, used to cut tough roots & crack nuts.

So very interesting how our current culture influences our interpretation of our historical culture in a way that reinforces our current culture.

[seabeyond]

15. primal man's diet consisted mostly of plant food

i have heard this also, and how it is never factored in when using evo psych. thanks.

and again, i am going to agree with you totally on the animal issue. absolutely.

LOVE it

throw in your snippets. i really appreciate it.

[seabeyond]

11. turns evo psych on head....

Last edited Mon Sep 10, 2012, 12:45 PM - Edit history (1)

"primitive peoples (do) not understand biologic paternity or accept a necessary connection between sexual intercourse and conception."

which of course makes sense and now is a real duh. but, being fuckin clueless, then ALL the premise of what they are feeding to us through evo psych is crap. and why wouldnt they be clueless? that makes sense.

[CrispyQ]

14. It's interesting to think there was a time in our history

when we didn't connect the two events. I believe that the root of a lot of the hostility men have toward women is the lack of certainly in the paternity of their offspring.

Issac Asimov wrote a story about a future human culture that believed that society benefited from children not being raised by their biological parents. It's been a long time since I read it, but he made some good points. When I see shows like that horrid "Toddlers & Tiaras" I think it's not a bad idea!

[seabeyond]

16. i have heard that... but but but

i love me my boys, lol.

i could easily raise anyones kids. a baby is uniquely their own. whether biologically a part of us or not.

[seabeyond]

12. this really seems ot be the bottom line in so many of these discussions.

primal man had feelings of gender insecurity and lack of status in the group because of their societies general awe of the female powers.

now, we are well educated and understand the workings of the body, unless you are an aikin. it is no longer mystical as it would be in the past. i have no desire at all for men or boys to have gender insecurity and i think many men resolve the same as women do with our issues. BUT... we hear so many of the insecurities in the most vocal men working so hard to dehumanize, degrade and demean women. i find it so consistent once digging deeper with what is being said.

there is nothing ok in this. and in no way would i cheer something like this to promote any kind of superiority.... i am not into setting up one gender against another, ever, in anyway.

interesting. will have to think about this, too.

[boston bean]

6. Benny in the comments section at the linked post is an a-hole. nt