It's like an Airplane

More on Judith Herman

Wait a second.  After I linked to this interview with Judith Herman in my previous post and didn't talk about it at all, I'm going a little bit crazy over her.  Have you ever noticed that, when it comes to feminism, not enough people are naming what they see?  We don't trust our own experiences, or at least, we don't feel that our experience is enough to build theories around.  As Ani says, "I would make such a good statistic, someone should study me now."  And the nice thing about political movements, like the women's movement of the '70s, are that they provide a community of thinking where your experiences seem to be commonly understood.      

Anyway, here's what Herman says about this:

"What we observe and how we conceptualize what we observe is so embedded in the context of what we're looking for. And how we name it. [Psychology] isn't physics. So that even the paying of attention, the selection of what it is that we're going to consider interesting and significant in human behavior is formed by the social and political context that we're embedded in. And I think that's particularly true about the emotions related to power and control, the emotions related to one's place in society, one's place in the family, the emotions of shame, of resentment, of pride, of a sense of legitimacy or illegitimacy. So, even to pay attention to what women say about sex, motherhood, relationships, depends so much on what one thinks a woman ought to be saying, ought to be feeling, on what is legitimate to express. Unless you have a political movement that says, "Forget what everybody else thinks you ought to be feeling, what you ought to be saying. Get down to it. Tell the truth. What did you actually think and feel and notice in your body." You need a safe space to be able to do that. You need a political context to be able to do that.

But it's nice that she doesn't lead us to believe that nothing can happen in between feminist waves:

Organizations come and go. Intellectual theories come and go. The power to change the way people think and what people do comes out of small groups of people who care enough about something to try something new. And that can be done any time.

More on fathers

I came across this today from Judith Herman's book Father-Daughter Incest.  Read it and weep:

As long as fathers retain their authoritarian role, they cannot take part in the tasks or the rewards of parenthood.  They can never know what it means to share a work of love on the basis of equality, or what it means to nurture the life of a new generation.  When men no longer rule their families, they may learn for the first time what it means to belong to one.

Booyah.

Not yet a woman, only three-fourths boy

Last night Potvin and I concluded that together we constituted 3/4s of a boy.  This is because we successfully fixed the headlamp on my bicycle helmet.  (I should note that this accomplishment was achieved in  the cooperative, egalitarian manner inherent to our sex.) 

I'm so sick of trying to "fix" things and breaking into a cold sweat because I know I'm going to fail.  It's especially painful because I have all of these memories of my dad giving me gender tests when I was little, which involved handing me some gadget and asking me to figure it out, and then when I couldn't, telling me it was because I wasn't a boy.   Remember those times when the screen door was broken and your dad waits in the car for 20 minutes as you try to figure out how to fix it, tears streaming down your cheeks because you know you're vaginally doomed?  Welcome to my childhood.

The best part about those episodes was that sometimes what I was trying to fix was some contraption that my dad had invented by himself, that involved his own highly personal and subjective logic.  He wanted everyone to understand his own special inventions.  Which is fine, they were always fun and creative.  But they were HIS.  Why should I feel bad because I didn't understand his way of doing things?   When was the last time he asked me to invent a solution myself, instead of watching him as he demonstrated the "right" way?

I'm lucky I was born vaginal.  What if I actually had been expected to live up to this shit?

The truth about fingernails

I've been thinking about fingernails recently, and I have a question that I really want answered (imagine now I'm Carrie Bradshaw looking pensive, tilting my head just slightly as I type away):

Can you masturbate with long fingernails?

It is said that you can tell a lesbian by her short fingernails (and I'll come back to this point).  But can you tell a non-masturbating woman by her long fingernails?  I'd like to believe that manicures simply drive up vibrator sales, or encourage more masturbatory creativity.  But I think we know that the reality is far more bleak.  Long fingernails are like chastity belts for straight women who masturbate.  Not to mention that it's hard to do a lot of stuff, like touch things, with them. 

You're going to think I'm hopelessly naive.  But a few weeks ago I had a little epiphany about this.  I started thinking about all of the women I know and don't know who have long nails.  Was this a sign that all of these women didn't ever venture into the vast and pleasurable realm of self-love?  It was as if someone had pulled a big curtain away from my eyes.  I know that the large majority of American women don't masturbate.  I don't think I'm under any misconceptions about that.  But it's something about the unabashed visibility of chastity-belted-fingers that makes it all so depressing. Not only do millions of women not masturbate, but they flaunt it!  That's how little it matters!

And the whole "lesbians have short fingernails" thing is a fascinating twist to this entire question.  Why is it that we all agree that of course lesbians have short fingernails, because they need easy access, but it's assumed that straight women don't?  Aren't we all, at the end of the day, dealing with the same equipment?

Long fingernails are appealing in many cultures and to women of different backgrounds.  They span class, race, and nationality.  Third wave feminists, and/or choice feminists would argue that if women feel sexy and empowered by their long nails, then they should go for it.  But how much are we just letting culture run all over feminism when we say that?  Can't we just call a spade a spade and patriarchy, patriarchy?   

This is not to say that cutting nails should be the answer to everyone's problems.  Nor even that a 'liberated' woman must have short nails.  Everyone's liberation is not cut from the same cloth.  But can't we accept this simple fact, that everyone's liberation doesn't look the same, and still have some basic tenets to stand on?   I think masturbation is a great place start.  But maybe that's just me.