ann coulter is pretty

so your issue is that you hate associating the color pink with femininity?

Also regarding their tactics, they are pretty much expert at self-marginalizing. I just find it an embarrassment. And I hate this war. It's illegal and wrong. That should be enough basis for a protest and it's worth being serious about such a protest, this isn't a carnival.

Speaking of portmanteau words, what does 'liberal' mean?

interesting that you cite the image of a woman being brought into the labor force to build weapons as a preferable icon of femininity.

Why don't you read what I said? Clearly that is not what I said.

Damn. That was referring to "pink = femininity" as the basis of my issue re codepink. Good lord

I understand that you were being flip, but can we at least agree that there are qualitative and quantitative differences between the authoritarian left and the authoritarian right in this country?

As per fascism, I think that most of the civilized world is currently operating under a hybrid republican*/corporatist model.


*the form of government, not the party.

btw daria "serious" protests don't get press

interesting that you cite the image of a woman being brought into the labor force to build weapons as a preferable icon of femininity.

And why not? Half (*) of the social progress for women in the first half of the 20th century came from or after the world wars and our enemies were hardly benign regimes, whatever can be said of us and our allies.

(*)Pulled out of my ass, of course.

I think that most of the civilized world is currently operating under a hybrid republican*/corporatist model.

Great Britain, Holland, Belgium, Sweden, Spain, Japan, Canada, Denmark, and Australia are all nominally monarchies.

nothing wrong with it, its just an interesting contrast between two very different ways to project female power (one ostensibly masculine, military, and capitalist - the other maternal, familial, and amorous)

I don't really want to get into this discussion, but masculine v. maternal doesn't really seem the proper way to frame the difference between Rosie the Riveter and Code Pink. more like for-oneself v. for-others

I can't tell which is which in yr estimation - the Code Pink women are only out for themselves? I don't get how that's the case.

anyway can't we all just agree that Ann Coulter is a velociraptor

no, I mean, code pink seems to rely on a model of feminine identity that's defined by how women influence and help others, rather than acting as their own agents. which does seem retrograde.

yeah, like I said, don't really want to have this discussion.

who are you, Ayn Rand?

yes, 20th century feminism=objectivism. this is why I didn't want to have this discussion. please.

I was referring to yr explicit priveleging individual agency over collective responsibility, but hey you don't want to have this conversation. you just want to talk about how you don't want to talk. right-o.

oh Foxpaws

x-post

rather than acting as their own agents

Let's not go too far , here. What's remarkable about Veronika Lake cutting her hair and millions of women working in the war effort isn't that they were doing it all on their own or even for a greater cause, it was that society realized that it needed the 'man'power, that women were just as capable of competently working shit industrial jobs to make ends meet and that once transgressed, the status quo ante was going to be hard to get back in the bag once the war was over, hence the plethora of post-war films about docile wives and viragos getting their come-uppance.

I never fully understand why influencing and helping others isn't a form of agency, though.

Wait, Borges has been dead for what, 21 years?

internet makes me a misandrist, holla

[img]http://i23.photobucket.com/albums/b361/tapestore/medv.jpg[/img]

Boht the extreme right and the extreme left have a tendancy toward totalitarianism.

ugh again

Dude I am so glad someone else calls people/themselves a misandrist. I called my prof that the other day. Fuck anyone.

Firefox is trying to tell me misandrist is not even a word. It is suggesting I use "misanthrope." Not not the same, not.

Perhaps I'm being unfair in both cases but 'left fascists' and this circular nonsense are generally just self-congratulatory centrist (or liberal - 10 degrees to the left of center in good times, 10 degrees to the right, etc.) bullshit.

Whatever truth they might hold (which is arguable - were Debs and Goldman and Proudhon and Joe Hill and Woody Guthrie and MLK 'predisposed to authoritarianism'?) is obscured by the image of a comfortable middle-class white person patting him or herself on the back.

eugene debs on fascism, which shamefully i only know because chris hitchens quoted it - 'i will not lead you into the promised land, because if i could, someone else could lead you out'

Whatever truth they might hold (which is arguable - were Debs and Goldman and Proudhon and Joe Hill and Woody Guthrie and MLK 'predisposed to authoritarianism'?) is obscured by the image of a comfortable middle-class white person patting him or herself on the back.

Images you make up in your head do tend to obscure things, that's true.

hahahaha kudos

I love how there's this process of freeper affirmative action whereby Ann Coulter can be labeled "attractive."

She's thin and blonde, ergo she MUST be attractive even though she has features sharper than a boxcutter and a neck that could eat Topeka.

guys,

guys what?

Jumping in late in this, I guess, but it's weird: I used to think of Code Pink type rhetoric in terms of the stuff that became a big argument on the Freidan RIP thread -- like a fear that certain feminist models might accidentally denigrate feminine roles that are perfectly good and commendable, and this desire to latch onto and bolster those things as a valid, non-trivial female contribution to the world. (Horseshoe's right to worry about the essentialist bent of that -- it's not like they're suggesting that these are good roles in general for both men and women -- but I think they sell specifically because they're adversarial that way, claiming feminine roles but then casting them as preferable to bad male ones.)

Okay right but the thing is that after the publicity roll-out for that Fonda / Steinem radio thing, it's come to look more and more to me like just a marketing tool, and a kind of concession to the bad PR feminism gets among lots of women as overly tough or unfeminine or whatever. Which is probably just bad in a different way, but who knows -- I'll just admit that I was really worried and unsure when I heard them pitching that radio thing more or less by saying "oh, men are just yelling at each other about politics, it's all adversarial; our political discussions will be all pleasant and polite because we're women." And it bugged me not even because I was sure it was a bad idea, but because it didn't seem to even be an idea -- there was no sense that they'd decided on this as like an important ideological direction, and every sense that they just thought they could get more listeners by kinda Martha Stewartifying their tone that way. (Something that would come off totally insulting if male programmers were like "oh, women like stuff that way!")

Anyway, point being I think there's a conflict of direction here -- which I am not pretending to have a real sure opinion on -- between feminism as something that challenges or tries to change women (to put it in good + bad terms) versus new strains of something feminism-like that play, market-style, to what large numbers of women are going to find accessible and fun (hahaha Pussycat Dolls!), and the Code Pink rhetoric has clearly made a decision to mobilize lots of women by appealing a bit in the latter sense. (Which, since it's a political action thing, it's not entirely damning to say "well this rhetoric is market-based to mobilize people easily" -- that's part and parcel of the deal, obviously.)

Sorry to ramble but I always wind up thinking about this, and there's a really tough question up in there -- it sounds bad to say "oh this kind of pseudo-feminism is just pandering to XYZ," but on the other hand if lots of women respond to XYZ, shouldn't "feminism" be about what on-the-ground women need at the moment, and hasn't the movement suffered a lot of blows from the perception that its leaders are hectoring women to be or want things they don't, necessarily, yet? Should its main role be to challenge women (more so than men, even!), or just to represent them?

Ach, that was very poorly put, and I am not exactly comparing Code Pink to Pussycat Dolls, obviously, but hopefully the point comes through. A lot of the thinking of political action things like Code Pink (or the Million Mom March, or whatever), is to use conventional, commonly held ideas about femininity and motherhood to attract a base that includes people who aren't usually political, or to cut across people's political leanings -- you see this rhetoric all the time, like "it's not about politics or party, it's about our FAMILIES and so we all come together because this is bigger than your workaday political squabbling." So in that sense Code Pink is totally unsurprising.

there is a really tough question embedded in this stuff (hi nabisco, thanks for understanding what I was saying and not comparing me to ayn rand!), and my maybe silly response to it is to say that I'm okay with the pink part* (what's so insidious about girliness, anyway?) but the "women are mothers and therefore different kind of beings than men and this is a kind of identity that we can mobilize politically" rhetoric has just gotten women in too much fucking trouble historically and all over the world, not just in the west, in precisely this kind of way--it does mobilize people and often has some immediate positive effect (though never for women, and never in the long run). it seriously makes me break out in hives whenever I hear women using it in support of any political platform no matter how progressive because it's like, remember how this is how we got fucked last time? and all the times before that? like, how can political movements happening in 2007 use the same gender rhetoric that Virginia Woolf used (with a considerable degree of irony and despair) in Three Guineas in the 1930s? doesn't anything ever change? I realize I sound slightly paranoid talking about this, and that's because I am but that doesn't mean that this kind of rhetoric isn't dangerous as hell.

*I get why dar1a is bothered by the pink thing, though.

that probably wasn't clear at all but the "I'm okay with the pink" was meant to be a nod to the mobilizing women strand of feminism, and me flipping out about the other stuff was my feeling that a line has been crossed where mobilizing people is not worth the price, i.e. NO THIS PART IS A TRAP STOP GOING OUT LIKE THAT, WOMEN OF THE WORLD!

but I'm still not officially talking about any of this.

ANYWAY. ann coulter has to be an a really committed performance artist; that's the only way I can make sense of her. I do think she's fairly pretty.

(I guess the best way I can think of to pinpoint the problem is that a lot of this modern rhetoric comes down to a "girls rule, boys drool" tactic -- which is unnerving not because it's poppy or simplistic, but because it encourages women to value or assert themselves within the same existing sex roles and ideas of gendered behavior. And so sure, there's something to be said for valuing and feeling good about those roles, but part of the whole point here was that men and women both should think about whether those roles are kinda fucked up and limiting to begin with!)

See, I'm at "don't worry about it - SAY NO." I say no to political movements in which women dress up in pink costumes. It's not that deep or complicated. It's a pink costume! It screams "Don't take me seriously!" And, I mean, if they need the pink costumes to mobilize people because otherwise the same people wouldn't be sufficiently interested in their issues, well, why should anyone take them seriously?

Most of the wacked out leftists I know are direct democracy types or Chomsky-esque "anarcho-socialists". I seriously don't know any authoritarian leftists. I am, however, related to some authoritarian conservatives.

I think the whole "the extreme right and left meet up OMG it's a circle" crap is the result of lazy thinking.

I think there exists an authoritarian left, but that specifically, in this day and age, in this country, they are practically non-existent.

guys can we discuss this stuff in terms of Holly Hunter's film roles please, to include providing the voice of Elastigirl in The Incredibles

also note she played Billie Jean King in a TV movie once

I guess what I'm trying to say is if a lady can be Holly Hunter in Broadcast News and then go be Holly Hunter in Raising Arizona, perhaps that would be why the avowed ladies on this internet thread would rather not go around in circles with a condescending closet misogynist about it