Posts Tagged ‘ideologies’

A center in Berlin, Germany has opened showing the lives and facts of the Nazi era. People think the war criminals were dragged to the Nuremberg Trials, but the majority were not. Young men faded into post-war Germany and lived out normal lives, untroubled by punishment for atrocities. A statement in the story leaped off the page at me, about these evil AND banal men:

“….men who didn’t necessarily fit into today’s stereotype of a Nazi war criminal, neither boorish sadists nor bloodless bureaucrats. They were ambitious university-educated men, aged around 30 and more likely to be IDEOLOGUES than technocrats. ” (emphasis mine)

Now see, this is why I feel sure America is in trouble. Ideologies are more popular than real people, real events. Ideologues began the Communist revolution, ideologues ran the day to day Holocaust. Ideologues set the Taliban in motion. Ideologues run modern feminism, telling women how to act just like Islamic clerics dictate ‘proper’ female behavior.

Fight ideological authorities, folks. Even if one is your mother. The curators at the new Berlin center say they like it that visitors leave with more questions than answers. And that is the correct response—keep questioning! Settling for just any answer—or ideology— at all almost always means accepting the wrong answer.

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There is a bit of blog squabble on a pagan blog I routinely read.  Seems the blogger called Sarah Palin a “bitch” and immediately got scolded by feminists who feel it is never proper to call another woman “bitch”…or worse yet, “cunt.”

I have been thinking a lot about feminism the last couple weeks—I got my first issue of “Bitch” magazine; and guess what, it is a “feminist” magazine.  It struggles because it is independant and takes donations to make printing costs, since it won’t sell its soul to advertising.  And I am not sorry I both donated and subscribed.  And yes, I AM a bitch and I approve this message.

That said, I have some issues with the permutations of feminism I have seen since my teens (back when dinosaurs roamed the earth), when I was automatically labeled a “lesbian” for advocating wearing slacks to school in winter instead of continuing to freeze my ass off in skirts.  Back then, feminism was a “movement” and not an ideology.  I don’t much like ideologies as they tend to apply blanket pronouncements to real life and it is never a good fit.  It seems to me that ideological wrangles get around to little besides constipating progress.

My copy of “Bitch” is no exception.  One article decries the fact that female comics are not considered funny if they make the same crude jokes as male comics.   I must in fairness point out that many male comics are likewise unamusing if they are making misogynistic jokes to a female audience.  So, if female comics are relying on staples of castration humor in a male audience; no, that is not funny but demeaning and insulting.  I fail to understand how this is not valid reason to not laugh, if misogyny is un-funny ?  This is the problem with something being an ideology, you see; a new set of rules is often assumed for “our side.”  It could just be, that both kinds of humor are funny in the right place at the right time.  Laughing at something is often the first step to deconstructing what is wrong with it.

The feminism I ascribed to as a teen and as a grandmother remains the same—I want justice and equality, NOT special privileges.  And no, by “special privileges” I do not mean I am against equal pay and decent affordable child care or anything that right wingnuts call specially privileged.  But the same rules should really apply to both sides.  If misogynistic meanness is not funny, then neither is meanness to males.

The magazine also had a moderately thoughtful piece on heavy metal music and feminism.  Moderately, because on one hand it decried the objectification of women by some metal artists, but suggested a special female “niche” in metal such as had been created in rap.  Excuse me?  You pan metal for objectification and then mention rap in the same breath…..as a GOOD example??  And it bitched about how there were not enough metal artists of the female sort—neglecting people like Otep totally.  And when it mentions a band with a kick-ass female (Arch Enemy), it gripes that said singer doesn’t sing songs to promote feminism.  So, it isn’t enough that a woman is in a tough field singing and succeeding?  She has to pimp the feminist program, too?  So living the life, fighting and winning as a woman is insufficiently feminist now?  That is ideological…..and asinine.

The same magazine then complains that female writers and scholars don’t get to write about “what is important to THEM.”  Well, hell, folks…..you have a nerve to say that when you just bitched about a singer who didn’t sing YOUR program instead of what SHE wanted?  And yes, I understand that the articles are all by different women writers, but there is presumably a single editor?  Couldn’t this person see that the magazine is filling up with self-contradictions faster than the Old Testament?

Stop being into ideology and get back on the damned ramparts.  Applaud women succeeding instead of nibbling their work to death with statements like “Well, I don’t know if I can read that book, because I don’t know what it ’says’ about feminist causes.”  I know self-declared feminists who work 80 hour weeks for 50 hours of pay, while the men work their 50 or 60 hours and go home.  When you have reduced a vital movement to semantics and talk to be talked instead of a walk to be walked and ass to be kicked, you have lost the battle.

Get bitchy, don’t fear to call sell-outs what they are: cunts.  Because when they sell out, that is the last remnant of their vaunted feminism.  Sarah Palin is an irrelevant cunt who was picked up to try to sweep up female voters, she is not a feminist for anyone but herself and doesn’t give a crap about the lives of other women.  She talks the talk and walks all over women in her high priced GOP-paid for Fifth Avenue heels.  She isn’t smart enough to be a bitch.

It isn’t what you SAY, it is what you DO, how you live, what you win and what you lose.  No amount of  semantics and window dressing will liberate anyone who isn’t invested in fighting for herself.  And just because that woman doesn’t do it as the writers of feminist ideology write it doesn’t mean it isn’t feminism.  A feminist fights for herself first, and other women thereafter….or if she can’t fight for them, she gets out of their way!  And nobody wins if the battle is won by reducing the other side to losers.  Feminism began about justice and balance—swinging the scales too far the other way will just make “matriarchy” and dirty a word as “patriarchy” deservedly has become.