Some Guy TT posted:

watching an old episode of law and order svu (s10 e10) about a serial rapist with some kind of magical mind blanking roofie that doesnt show up on a toxscreen his one weird trick to beating rape charges is to film them and claim hes acting out mutually agreed upon rape fantasies and the final act is him blaming porn as his defense

old svus have really discouraging gender politics mostly because theyre just...the same aside from the specific actors who are onscreen theres hardly ever any strong clues whether the story is taking place in the aughts or the twenties

it occurs to me that the whole premise is actually drat near perfect for workshopping modern feminism and all its grotesque contradictions because when you start from the point of "police care about rape and rape makes them angry" your framework is already so fundamentally flawed that nearly any conclusion you come up with is so abstract as to be completely useless

Some Guy TT posted:

On a gloomy New England afternoon last winter, I climbed the stairs of the Adams Free Library, a grand Beaux Arts building in the Berkshires, to join in a historical commemoration. The venue was itself historic, a designated Civil War Memorial, its second floor originally the meeting hall for Post 126 of the Grand Army of the Republic, the association of Union veterans of Adams, Massachusetts. The post’s high-backed chairs are still on display, along with flags, swords, and sepia photographs of soldiers; the coffered ceiling is emblazoned with the names of bloody battles: Cold Harbor, Gettysburg, Antietam.

The day I visited, a crowd filled the rows of folding chairs and spilled into the aisles. We were there to honor a leader in another historic battle, Susan B. Anthony, on the occasion of her 203rd birthday. Anthony’s childhood home, a mile and a half away from the library, opened in 2010 as the Susan B. Anthony Birthplace Museum. Its declared mission is “raising public awareness” of Anthony’s “wide-ranging legacy”—including her purported crusade against abortion.

You can spot the museum’s agenda in the offerings in its gift shop, from books (ProLife Feminism) to bumper stickers (WOMEN’S RIGHTS START IN THE WOMB), or in the inscriptions on the walkway’s bricks placed by donors, alluding to “the murder of the innocents.” On that February day at the library, Patricia Anthony, a museum board member and wife of a descendant, made that message explicit, enlisting an old civil war in service of a newer one. “Anthony and the women suffrage leaders allowed their previous work in the abolition antislavery movement to instruct them,” she told the assembled, not only to believe that “a human being could not be owned by another human being” but also that “a mother could not own her unborn child.” The antiabortion proprietors of the Birthplace Museum understand the uses of history.

Or its strategic misuses. Vanquishing abortion was never Anthony’s cause. The editors of her newspaper, The Revolution, ran or reprinted a number of articles and letters that pro-life advocates interpret to be against abortion. Yet in their voluminous public record, neither Anthony nor her lifelong collaborator Elizabeth Cady Stanton called for its prohibition. Stanton vigorously championed women’s right to control their own procreation.

While pro-life activists often attribute a supposed antiabortion quote in The Revolution to Anthony, because it’s signed “A.,” the letter most likely stood for “Anonymous”: Anthony signed her pieces “S.B.A.” Anyway, the article opposed criminalizing the procedure, endorsing instead voluntary motherhood and sexual restraint on the part of men. The evidence of a “pro-life” Anthony boils down to a passing mention of the word “abortion” in an 1875 speech—in a list of ills men inflict on women—and in a pair of brief diary entries from 1876 in which she notes that her sister-in-law, gravely ill after a self-induced abortion, will “rue the day she forces nature.”

That hasn’t stopped antiabortion advocates from calling Anthony one of their own via everything from billboards to campus pamphlets that proudly dub her “Another Anti-Choice Fanatic.” Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, whose president, Marjorie Dannenfelser, famously promised to support presidential candidate Donald Trump in exchange for antiabortion Supreme Court justices, heralds Anthony as a “trailblazer for the rights of women and the unborn.” Mike Pence declared Anthony and Stanton “pro-life and unapologetically so.” Sarah Palin proclaimed that the modern antiabortion movement is the true descendant of “our feminist foremothers.”

Progressives have been known to deploy history to make their case—witness the 1619 Project. But when it comes to invoking progenitors, the American left and right are engaged in asymmetrical warfare. Maybe that’s because the left’s conceit of radicalism—that its legions are ever young and its ideas ever a corrective to all that’s been thought before—rejects the very concept of heritage. Its adherents are more inclined to pronounce on the sins of their famous forebears, especially their famous foremothers: Anthony and Stanton (racists!), Margaret Sanger (eugenicist!), Betty Friedan (bourgeois suburbanite!). The left could, more honestly and as easily, also celebrate the suffragist duo’s fervent abolitionism or Sanger’s close collaboration with Black leaders in bringing a family-planning clinic to Harlem in 1930, and her work with Ida B. Wells, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Mary McLeod Bethune.

The American right, meanwhile, positions itself as staunch defender of tradition and “originalism,” invoking the Founders even while confounding the Founders’ intent and repurposing feminist icons as right-to-life revolutionaries. “What would Susan say?” the pro-life writer Erika Bachiochi (director of the Wollstonecraft Project at the conservative Abigail Adams Institute) asked in 2016 of an antiabortion Texas law. Susan, she answered, would cheer—Bachiochi based that claim, she said, on her tour of the Susan B. Anthony Birthplace Museum.

In the museum’s main exhibition room, as I saw on my own recent visit, a full wall is devoted to “Opposition to Restellism,” a reference to the nineteenth-century midwife and abortionist Ann Trow Summers Lohman, aka Madame Restell, who remains as much a bête noire of pro-life America as Susan B. Anthony does its faux advocate.

In 1839 Ann Lohman began advertising her midwifery practice in the New York newspapers and eventually adopted the moniker “Madame Restell”—claiming to be the granddaughter of a noted, and fictional, French female physician. From colonial America until the mid-1800s, abortion was largely uncontroversial, unregulated, and legal before “quickening”—when the pregnant woman feels the fetus move in her uterus. When Restell launched her business, New York had only a decade earlier passed a law classifying abortion before quickening as a misdemeanor (one of the first states to do so) and as a felony afterward. The statute was primarily intended to protect patients from injury by incompetent practitioners and was enforced only on the rare occasion that a woman died. By 1872, abortion in New York at any point in pregnancy had been upgraded to a felony, with sentences of four to twenty years in prison, a law that criminalized not only the provider but the patient. By 1910, abortion was illegal in every state.

Restell is central to the story of the dismantling of American women’s reproductive freedom during the last half of the nineteenth century, yet she has largely been treated as a curiosity and a footnote. So it’s a welcome development to have two biographies come out this year, devoted to restoring her life to the historical record: Nicholas L. Syrett’s The Trials of Madame Restell and Jennifer Wright’s Madame Restell. The works fill a grievous void. Two previous biographies of Restell, published in the 1980s, read like overwrought melodramas. Syrett, a professor of gender studies at the University of Kansas, has written a thoroughly researched and scholarly account, blessedly free of academic jargon. Wright, the former political editor-at-large at Harper’s Bazaar, has produced an engaging, breezier chronicle, with clear passion for a figure who “deserves a place in the pantheon of women with no fucks left to give.”

Between Restell first putting out her shingle and the New York State legislature declaring abortion felonious, the newly minted American Medical Association sought to establish its authority by discrediting female midwifery; a nativist movement claimed that white middle-class women’s declining birth rates threatened the “Anglo-Saxon race”; and a new mass-circulation, scandal-hungry press seized on abortion, as The New York Times put it in a multipart series in 1871, as “The Evil of the Age.”

By the mid-1840s Restell had been elevated to public enemy number one: “Mrs. Herod of America,” the “mistress of abominations,” the “hag of misery,” and one of the “lieutenants of Satan,” whose hands were “stained with the blood of numberless innocents” and whose practice, along with that of two other women in Manhattan known to provide abortions, had reduced New York to a “vast, continuous city of the dead.” A front-page news illustration featured Restell with a demonic bat blossoming from her crotch, devouring a full-term baby. The tabloid Polyanthos, one of her most devoted maligners, equated Restell to

Editorials called for her lynching. The city police stationed officers at her door to spy on her movements and interrogate her patients. Restell was repeatedly arrested, tried, and, in 1847, imprisoned for a year in the Dickensian penitentiary on Blackwell’s (now Roosevelt) Island.

Restell’s life began inauspiciously. She was born Ann Trow in 1811, one of nine children of mill-working parents in the textile town of Painswick, in the English Cotswolds, and was sent into domestic service to a local butcher at fifteen. About two years later she married Henry Summers (or Sommers), a tailor and a drunk. The couple and their infant daughter immigrated to New York City, where Henry soon died. Unable to make a living doing garment piecework—one of the few forms of (legal) livelihood for women in the city—the newly widowed Ann learned pill compounding from a neighborhood pharmacist and schooled herself in midwifery. With an assist from her new husband, Charles Lohman, a printer and “freethinker” who became a longtime aide and advocate of her work, Restell began running ads in the city newspapers for her “celebrated preventative powders for married ladies whose health prevents too rapid an increase of family.”

Restell’s sales pitches were as political as they were promotional, mini-treatises on the virtues of family planning:

In rural America, women facing an unwanted pregnancy might turn to a trusted female network to find a sympathetic midwife. Newcomers to a strange city had no such recourse. “Madame Restell had melded a traditional woman’s role, that of midwife, with the urban economy,” Syrett notes, “at precisely the moment when gender roles and traditional conventions of marriage and sexual propriety were also undergoing seismic shifts, especially in cities like New York.”

Within a few years Restell had leveraged her marketing abilities and her skills as a pill maker and midwife to build a thriving business. She was reputed to administer to a wide-ranging clientele, from society wives to servants. Her services included a lying-in hospital, a dispensary of contraceptives and potions to “restore” menses, and, when these treatments failed, a rudimentary form of abortion using a sharpened whalebone. Rudimentary but apparently safe: no one has found evidence that a patient died in her care.

Not that her antagonists didn’t try. When Mary Rogers, a tobacconist’s assistant known as “the beautiful cigar girl,” was discovered dead in the Hudson River in 1841, the case became a front-page sensation and the press trumpeted the theory that Restell had dumped her there after a botched abortion. Allegations that Restell was burning babies in her basement circulated so widely that the city’s sanitary department investigated (and found…a furnace to heat the house). Seemingly every event in her life was cast in lurid terms. When she built a mansion on Fifth Avenue, directly across from the newly erected St. Patrick’s Cathedral (outbidding the archbishop, an archenemy), her decriers anointed it the “palace of death” and said “the mortar was mixed with human blood.” When her husband of more than forty years died of kidney disease, a news account insinuated that she’d poisoned him.

After the Civil War, Restell acquired a new and more treacherous adversary: Anthony Comstock, the priggish and relentless investigator of “indecent” literature for the YMCA, and later the director of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, whose crusade was sponsored by wealthy industrial moralists (including J. Pierpont Morgan and the soap and toothpaste magnate Samuel Colgate). That campaign led Congress to pass—with virtually no debate—the Comstock Act of 1873, banning the mailing of “obscene” materials, which included not just smut but “every article, instrument, substance, drug, medicine, or thing which is advertised or described in a manner calculated to lead another to use or apply it for preventing conception or producing abortion.”

In the winter of 1878, Comstock twice showed up at Restell’s door, pretending to be seeking abortifacient pills and contraception for a woman in need. Restell handed over some medicinal powders and explained how to use them. A few days later Comstock returned with a warrant for her arrest. On April 1, the night before her trial was to begin, Restell was found dead in her bathtub, her throat slashed with a carving knife, apparently by her own hand. Rumors were soon flying that she had planted a look-alike corpse—supposedly obtained by bribing an undertaker—and was living the high life in Europe. Her body had to be exhumed to confirm her death. “A Bloody ending to a bloody life,” Comstock wrote in his ledger. He boasted that Restell was the fifteenth abortionist he’d driven to suicide.

How do you write a biography when the voice at the center is absent? Ann Lohman left no diaries or correspondence. Nor did her husband or her only child (the daughter from her first marriage) or her two grandchildren, who assisted in her midwifery practice for years. Silent, too, were the countless women who turned to her for care, except for the few dragged into court.

“The hegemony of patriarchal thought in Western civilization,” Gerda Lerner wrote in The Creation of Feminist Consciousness (1993), “is not due to its superiority in content, form and achievement over all other thought; it is built upon the systematic silencing of other voices.” Recovering those voices is one of the foundations of feminist scholarship. “Women’s history challenges traditional history in a far more basic way than do any of the other new subspecialties in conveniently labeled ‘minority history,’” Carroll Smith-Rosenberg wrote in her anthology Disorderly Conduct (1985), which includes a trenchant analysis of the forces behind abortion’s criminalization in the nineteenth century.

Women constitute the forgotten majority in virtually every society and within every social category. To ignore women is not simply to ignore a significant subgroup within the social structure. It is to misunderstand and distort the entire organization of that society.

But how can we learn to see accurately a woman who was not so much forgotten as buried in calumny?

Jennifer Wright tries with mixed success to fill in the blanks in Restell’s story. She valiantly attempts to rescue her protagonist from symbol-hood, though at times a you-go-girl enthusiasm threatens to substitute one caricature for another. (“Madame Restell was so much more than any one thing. She was unrestrainable. Unapologetic. A survivor. The kind of woman who has always existed in America, and always will.”) Wright is strongest when she places Restell’s occupation in its larger social setting—the rampant sex trade, the baby farms where abandoned infants were fed pap made from boiled bread, the foundlings who died in almshouses at the staggering rate of nearly 90 percent, the orphan trains that shipped children to the countryside to labor on farms, the surplus of ill-trained male graduates of for-profit medical schools determined to seize maternal care from female hands. “Essentially, you could graduate and go to work as a doctor without ever seeing a sick person up close,” Wright notes. With midwives in attendance, one in two hundred women died in childbirth; with doctors presiding over deliveries in the new maternity hospitals in the US and Europe, the maternal mortality rate was ten to twenty times higher.

Both Syrett and Wright mine the public record for clues. The transcripts of Restell’s court cases yield intriguing asides, suggesting that she had a social conscience and a kindly, dare we say maternal, side. The patients coerced into testifying revealed that she lowered her prices for indigent women, told them to call her “mother,” slept by their side and comforted them when they were in pain. Financial records hint at her generosity to family: she funded a first-class education for her daughter and bought her a house, covered her brother’s room and board, doted on and largely raised her grandchildren.

Restell’s transactions also indicate business smarts: she invested early in uptown property and, when no one would buy the lot she owned beside her Fifth Avenue “palace of death,” she commissioned the construction of what was then the second luxury apartment building in the city, complete with steam elevators. From her will, we might deduce that she believed in women having their own money. Restell left her daughter an annual income of $3,000, but only “for her sole and separate use, free from the control of any husband.” Then again, Restell might just have been furious that her widowed daughter had chosen to remarry a city cop. After the wedding, mother and daughter were estranged for several years.

The most substantial expression of Restell’s views are the ones she published in her own defense in the press. When the editor of the New York Sunday Morning News railed that her practice “will demoralize the whole mass of society and make the institution of marriage a mere farce,” Restell’s eye-rolling reply in the New York Herald observed that the Sunday Morning News ran ads for contraceptives: “These, I presume, if paid for are, of course, very conducive to morals, piety, and virtue.” Perhaps, she tartly remarked, the editor was just upset that “I did not deem your scurrilous sheet of sufficient importance” to advertise in its pages. When the press cast her practice as a threat to “public morals,” she countered:

But even here, is it Restell’s voice we’re hearing? The second passage is cribbed from social reformer Robert Dale Owen’s 1831 treatise, Moral Physiology, which advocated for family limitation. As both biographers note, Restell and her husband were regrettably prone to such plagiarisms. Charles Lohman ripped off large sections of Owen’s (and others’) writings in his The Married Woman’s Private Medical Companion, which he published in 1847 under the nom de plume A.M. Mauriceau.

What to do with so little material, and so much of it suspect? Maybe the important story here is not the real Ann Lohman but the “she-devil” Restell, the monstrous projection generated by a culture unhinged by breakneck economic and demographic change.

Syrett’s analysis proves most illuminating when he turns his attention to the class and gender dynamics that fueled male rage over Restell. What Victorian men seemed to see in the reflecting glass of the “mistress of abominations” wasn’t the midwife; it was their own unbearable shame. On February 23, 1846, a mob of mostly young working-class men gathered in front of Restell’s house, shouting curses and threats. They had been drawn by handbills plastered around the city, accusing her of kidnapping an infant born to an unwed working-class woman in her charge. The young mother, a seamstress named Mary Applegate, had become pregnant by her employer’s son. The handbills were posted by George Washington Dixon, the former editor of the Polyanthos, a provocateur and blackface performer famous for his tune “Ole’ Zip Coon.” Only a police presence prevented the mob from storming Restell’s home. The men’s fury, Syrett perceives, had as much to do with class as with sex. They “blamed upper- and middle-class men for seducing working-class women, as well as Madame Restell for helping the men to get away with it.” In this drama, Restell played the gilded accomplice, her “bloody empire,” as the press characterized it, built on cleaning up the rich seducer’s mess.

Restell’s wealth might have shielded her if she had been a man. Syrett’s previous book, An Open Secret (2021), chronicles the long live-in romance of Robert Allerton, the “richest bachelor in Chicago” and arts benefactor, and John Gregg, a college student when the two men met in the 1920s; Allerton, who was twenty-six years older, passed off his boyfriend as his “son” (and later literally adopted him). How did they accomplish this fiction? While those riches “thrust Allerton into the spotlight,” Syrett said in an interview, the two men “were protected because they were so wealthy.” For Restell, wealth brought only added peril.

The trial that landed her in prison for a year and made her a household name took place in 1847. Maria Bodine, a twenty-six-year-old maid with a child by her employer, had sought out Restell’s services. More than a year after her abortion, Bodine fell ill. The symptoms of her illness were almost certainly the result of venereal disease, not miscarriage, but her male doctor reported her abortion, in writing, to the mayor of New York.

The court drama turned on which woman could best play the female victim, a contest Restell was destined to lose. Bodine approached the stand “with a feeble, tottering walk…evidently in a rapid decline of health,” the National Police Gazette reported, creating “much excitement and sympathy throughout the crowded court-room.” At one point, Bodine fainted. Meanwhile, the prosecution portrayed Restell as “fiend-like” and “unsex[ed],” “the butcher” to Bodine’s “lamb.” An all-male jury delivered a guilty verdict in less than an hour.

In the end, the victors in the proxy class war were not the workingmen riled up by the tabloids but the upper-crust “regular” male physicians of the American Medical Association, who took advantage of the inflamed climate to stamp out midwifery and claim the field of obstetrics and gynecology for themselves. That charge was led by Horatio Robinson Storer, a Harvard Medical School graduate and gynecologist, who persuaded the AMA to formally oppose abortion in 1859.

Central to Storer’s success was his creation of a new “victim,” the fetus, whose life, he insisted, began not when a woman said it did—at quickening, which he dismissed as “but a sensation”—but at fertilization. “The child is alive from the moment of conception,” he wrote in a letter the AMA issued in 1860, a theme he reiterated in multiple missives and an 1866 book. Once the egg “reached the womb,” he held, it “assumed a separate and independent existence.” The zygote was now the patient—and a sexed one. Storer and his AMA fellows called that autonomous embryo “the potential male” and “the future young man.”

As for the pregnant woman, the AMA’s new policy “seems to have thrown out of consideration the life of the mother,” one dissenting doctor remarked at the time. Storer maintained he was saving her life—from the toll of abortion, which was “a thousand fold more dangerous” than childbirth, leading to invalidism, incurable disease, cancer. Even thinking about having an abortion could bring on insanity.

Not discussed in the biographies, but worth noting: Storer had his wife put away in a mental institution, where she died. He then married her sister, who died giving birth to their only child. The lives of Storer’s wives are part of that vast forgotten record of female experience, what Gerda Lerner called “the systematic silencing of other voices.”

I recently came across a note to myself in a 1999 journal. I’d been reading about Madame Restell while pondering the Clinton impeachment. “Parallels with D.C. media’s trashing of Hillary Clinton as a ‘parvenu’ and not ‘of our set’?” I’d scribbled. “Comstock = Com-Starr?”—a reference to independent counsel Ken Starr, whose understudy Brett Kavanaugh now sits on the Supreme Court. “And the Cigar Girl?” Whatever the merits of that equation, other and more immediate parallels abound. Restell’s legacy haunts the present, all the more for her erasure, which has left her memory at the mercy of the modern-day right. Her significance lives on through that demonization. History has not so much repeated as continued.

Now as then, an embryo is granted “personhood” and the champions of the fetus “have thrown out of consideration the life of the mother.” Now as then, “post-abortion syndrome” is falsely promulgated as a scourge to women’s physical and mental health. Now as then, a Great Replacement theory fuels rage at white women’s failure to produce more babies. Now as then, antiabortion state lawmakers race to draft ever more punitive laws—earlier this year, twenty-four South Carolina legislators sponsored a bill to make a woman who has an abortion eligible for the death penalty. Now as then, pro-life advocates frame family-planning clinics as a “bloody empire” profiting off poor women to feed “the abortion-industrial complex.”

The Comstock Act is invoked by name in a bid to stop the mailing of mifepristone, and Comstock’s sting operations continue under the auspices of the pro-life Center for Medical Progress, whose undercover videographers claimed (incorrectly) to have caught Planned Parenthood selling fetal tissue. George Washington Dixon’s mustering of a mob continues with the 2021 Texas state law authorizing vigilante justice against anyone who aids or abets an abortion. The heirs of Polyanthos and the National Police Gazette continue at Fox News and Newsmax. What are “crisis pregnancy centers,” with their pitiful supply of diapers, and Safe Haven Baby Boxes, with their self-locking metal drawers, but the latest manifestation of baby farms and almshouses for foundlings?

In Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, Justice Samuel Alito Jr. wrote: “The inescapable conclusion is that a right to abortion is not deeply rooted in the Nation’s history and traditions. On the contrary, an unbroken tradition of prohibiting abortion on pain of criminal punishment persisted from the earliest days of the common law until 1973.” To make this assertion, Alito had to skip over more than two hundred years of American history—from the earliest colonial era to the mid-1800s. In short, he had substituted the late-nineteenth-century backlash against abortion for the actual legal precedent. That sleight of hand also had the effect of recasting midwives who practice abortion as simultaneously medieval—“barbarous and unnatural,” as Alito approvingly quotes a British judge declaiming in 1732—and freaks of modernity. In a real sense, Madame Restell was an unnamed codefendant in Dobbs.

And Ann Trow Summers Lohman herself? How do we find the “real” woman behind the fearsome reputation? Curiously, she may come most alive in My Notorious Life, Kate Manning’s 2013 novel based on Restell’s story. Even as Manning takes liberties with the facts—making her protagonist an Irish orphan from New York named Ann “Axie” Muldoon who stages her own death and leaves behind a written account of her life—she recovers her subject’s humanity. That’s in large measure because Manning turns the lens around. We are looking at the world through a midwife’s eyes, asking not our questions but hers: Is what I do moral? What do I owe the women who come to me? How do I survive ignorance and hatred?

Muldoon’s political awakening unfolds through her confrontation with the gray areas not only of her professional practice but of maternity itself. She becomes an apprentice to Mrs. Evans, an elderly midwife who teaches her to navigate the murky waters of their calling. After she completes her first abortion—at the desperate pleading of her pregnant best friend, a destitute and homeless single mother—Muldoon struggles to come to grips with what remains in the basin:

Perhaps the only way to see clearly a woman so impugned by fictions when she was alive, and so obscured by fictions after her death, is through fiction.

Some Guy TT posted:

watching an old episode of law and order svu (s10 e10) about a serial rapist with some kind of magical mind blanking roofie that doesnt show up on a toxscreen his one weird trick to beating rape charges is to film them and claim hes acting out mutually agreed upon rape fantasies and the final act is him blaming porn as his defense

old svus have really discouraging gender politics mostly because theyre just...the same aside from the specific actors who are onscreen theres hardly ever any strong clues whether the story is taking place in the aughts or the twenties

it occurs to me that the whole premise is actually drat near perfect for workshopping modern feminism and all its grotesque contradictions because when you start from the point of "police care about rape and rape makes them angry" your framework is already so fundamentally flawed that nearly any conclusion you come up with is so abstract as to be completely useless

Grimnarsson posted:

I really hate when a recipe is prefaced like this. I don't want to hear about your day, your holiday, your life story, just give me the drat ingredients and directions how to make this loving lentil soup!

Some Guy TT posted:

whats the premise of the argument just the usual once you factor in all the things that are significantly more likely to be true for women there isnt actually a gender pay gap

A Buttery Pastry posted:

here's a free argument for you:

with food and rent being about half the household expenditure of the average worker, and men on average being larger than women, a gender pay gap is necessary to maintain equity between sexes. this becomes more and more true as food costs continue to rise.

Some Guy TT posted:

i see so what youre saying is that southwest airlines giving fat people an extra seat for free is actually a form of misogyny

i say swears online posted:

lol south korea

Whirling posted:

I learned something really funny in another thread which is that gacha games have to make absolutely sure nothing resembles the "🤏" emoji in South Korea because some Korean radfem site used it to make fun of right-wing dudes online and it collectively traumatized them so badly that they will have a meltdown if they see it again.

Whirling posted:

I learned something really funny in another thread which is that gacha games have to make absolutely sure nothing resembles the "🤏" emoji in South Korea because some Korean radfem site used it to make fun of right-wing dudes online and it collectively traumatized them so badly that they will have a meltdown if they see it again.

i say swears online posted:

lol south korea

Whirling posted:

its weird, I feel a lot of pity for men who are poor since it seems like patriarchy is only enjoyable for wealthy men and the rest are viewed by the rich as completely disposable drones, but also the way that many of them cope with this is so funny and stupid that I can't help but laugh. like come on why are these dudes sinking what little disposable income and free time they have on gacha games and youtubers who rant about politics in their trucks.

Whirling posted:

its weird, I feel a lot of pity for men who are poor since it seems like patriarchy is only enjoyable for wealthy men

One More Fat Nerd posted:

There is a very specific kind of sting to (perceived) failure when it happens in an environment specifically built to favor you.

Judakel posted:

feminism really went sideways the last 10 years. hosed up

A Buttery Pastry posted:

i'd suggest another, harsher, sting, for people who don't accept the above premise: being poor makes you (basically) a woman

A Buttery Pastry posted:

i'd suggest another, harsher, sting, for people who don't accept the above premise: being poor makes you (basically) a woman

War and Pieces posted:

not if you conspire with other poor men to make poor women's life hell

Whirling posted:

I learned something really funny in another thread which is that gacha games have to make absolutely sure nothing resembles the "🤏" emoji in South Korea because some Korean radfem site used it to make fun of right-wing dudes online and it collectively traumatized them so badly that they will have a meltdown if they see it again.

Platystemon posted:

quote:

“Get killer legs with the following exercises that stretch and elongate your leg muscles. Do them with smooth, fluid motions; tight, jerky moves will give you bulkiness you probably don’t want.”

quote:

“Lively cardiovascular activities (running with a friend, jumping rope while listening to music, or going in-line skating) for 30 minutes three times a week combined with targeted butt exercises . . . and you’ll definitely see quick results”

quote:

“I finally managed to flirt — and have guys flirt back. My confidence grows every day, and now, a couple of years later, the hot girl I knew I was (but nobody else could see) is more and more evident.”

quote:

Suddenly, about a decade ago, when I started to notice that fat women were a) calling themselves fat, with pride, and b) walking down the streets of our nation’s great cities nonchalantly wearing tight or revealing clothing with a general air of, “yeah I will wear this and I will wear whatever I want, and I am hot, too, I will be hot forever, long after you have all died,” I thought to myself, Oh my God WHAT? The solution is not … the diet?

I started seeing fat, beautiful models and actresses in catalogs, and on television shows. I would like to have seen more, but I was pleased to see them at all. I was and remain in awe of their confident beauty. I feel tenderness for them as well, for what they endured, and still endure, to achieve it. I sometimes choke up with love for them, and for the idea of how I could have lived if I had allowed myself to just weigh what I weighed.

Some Guy TT posted:

Twenty eight years ago, I was sitting on the dusty rose carpeting of my childhood bedroom, staring at the cover of the latest issue Seventeen. This particular issue isn’t available on eBay, and only certain articles from inside have been digitized, so I can’t tell you the exact wording of the Editor’s Note, but others have a similar memory of its contents: look at this non-model on the cover, which I interpreted as look at this non-ideal body on the cover.

If this body was non-ideal, I remember thinking, then what was mine? I had just turned twelve years old, and was about to finish sixth grade. I was starting junior high in the Fall. Somehow both bodysuits and massive, baggy flannels were popular. My body, like a lot of other girls at that age, was beginning to rearrange itself. I felt so alienated from it, so unmoored from any sort of solid sense of self.

Three months later, I read the Letters to the Editor (which, miraculously, have been digitized), which framed the cover model “as a body you can relate to.” The first letter, written from a dorm at Wheaton College, expressed “relief”; the second thanked Seventeen for putting someone “who forgets to do their step aerobics from time to time,” and the third argued that if you’re going to put someone in a bikini on the cover, “she ought to have a better figure.”

Again, the message I received — and why the original cover and the letters to the editor remain fixed in my brain — was that this body was somehow “normal” (and thus desirable/obtainable) but also undesirable (insufficiently controlled, not for public display, un-ideal).

Reading these letters now, it’s striking that they were all authored by groups of girls and/or women — suggesting that they came together, talked about the cover, came to a consensus, and decided to submit their feedback. But it’s also striking that Seventeen chose these three letters as the ones, out of hundreds, maybe even thousands, to highlight. They represent the two postures that pervaded the pop culture of the ‘90s and 2000s: you should let go of old fashioned ideas of beauty and femininity, embracing your own understanding of what liberation and power looks like….while also conforming to new, often equally constrictive standards of girl and womanhood.

Of course, these two postures are in direct opposition. But most ideologies are contradictory in some way — and dependent on pop culture, from the Seventeen letter section to actual celebrity images, to reconcile the contradictions and prop up the ideology as a whole. In the ‘90s, feminist theorists immediately called bullshit on this practice, which they referred to as a “postfeminism” (I cannot tell you how many pieces of feminist scholarship from the early ‘90s I have read on the postfeminist quagmire that is Pretty Woman) but that didn’t stop it from becoming the backdrop of Gen-X’s early adulthood and millennials’ childhoods.

In “The Making and Unmaking of Body Problems in Seventeen Magazine, 1992-2003,” design scholars Leslie Winfield Ballentine and Jennifer Paff Ogle point to the ways in which teen magazines work as illustrating texts — filling in the “contours and colors” — for readers trying to figure to what it means to be a young woman. At the time of their research, Seventeen was “reaching” a whopping 87% of American girls between the ages of 12 and 19.

“Reaching” is different than “reading” or “agreeing with,” but what the magazine communicated, in concert with similarly voiced texts, like YM and Teen, mattered. (At least to white teens: Lisa Duke’s illuminating work found that while white adolescent readers viewed the magazines as sites of “reality,” Black readers primarily used the magazines as opportunities for critique).

In their analysis, Ballentine and Ogle delineated two types of body-related articles. The clear majority were concerned with the “making” of body problems, but they were often accompanied by articles “unmaking” those same problems. In other words: there was an abundance of articles introducing something that the reader should be worried about (cellulite, wrinkles, blemishes, bacne, “flabby” areas, stretch marks, “unwanted” hair, body odor) and how to address it in order to achieve the “ideal” body….but also, often in the same issue, there were articles instructing the reader to let go of others’ ideas about what beauty or perfection might look like. (See the cover of that June 1993 Seventeen: “You are so beautiful / Celebrate your heritage, celebrate yourself)

As any past or present reader of these magazines knows, the framing of imperfections and their reparation is rarely as simple as “your legs are hideous, here’s how to make them not hideous.” It’s more like this passage, from 1993:

Or this 1998 advice column response to a reader to “work [her] butt off” after voicing concern about its size:

Or this 1996 confessional from a high school student after returning from “fat camp” having lost 30 pounds:

As in so many other instructional texts, the body becomes a project in need of constant maintenance in order to achieve its ideal, attractive form, which is slender (but not too skinny), petite, toned but not muscular. Over the course of the ‘90s, that (woman’s) ideal was gradually refined until reaching peak form in the video for “I’m a Slave 4 U.”

There is no accounting for genetics, for race, for abilities, for access to time and capital, for even the existence of actual diverse body shapes. The ideal shifts slightly from decade to decade, but it never disappears; if anything, the sheer number of products and programs available to help it arrive in its ideal state proliferate. And if you can’t arrive at the ideal body, it’s not because your existing physical form cannot achieve it. It’s an implicit or explicit failure of will.

I have the skills to disassemble and analyze these images now, but at the time, I was just trying to drink from the cultural firehose of MTV and Seventeen and My So-Called Life. I didn’t have the internet. Sassy wasn’t on my radar, neither was Riot Grrl. There was no Tumblr, no Rookie. I had a Top 40 station and a mom with feminist inclinations but not a lot of feminist language. I had a fairly conservative youth group and because I wasn’t good at basketball or volleyball, the only other organized activity available to me was cheerleading.

As for alternative visions of femininity, I had Lois Lowry books and Go Ask Alice. I had the Delia*s catalog and the Victoria’s Secret catalog and “The Cube” at the local Bon Marché. I was middle class, my home situation was never precarious, and I was largely unchallenged in school — which is another way of saying that I had a lot of mental energy to dedicate to thinking about the ways I failed to fit in to the narrow understanding of what a teen girl should be and look and act like in Lewiston, Idaho in the 1990s.

Which also means I was incredibly susceptible to the understanding of what the ideal should be, and eager for any and all advice on how to achieve it.

https://twitter.com/clhubes/status/1395061523274506242

I like to think of phrases like the one above — along with images like the Seventeen cover above — as a vernacular of deprivation, control, and aspirational containment. It’s the language we used to discipline our own bodies and others, and then normalize and standardize that discipline. For Younger Gen-X and Millennials, it includes, but is by no means limited, to:

Britney’s stomach and the discourse around it (1000 crunches a day)

The ubiquitous mentions of the Sweet Valley Twins’ size (6)

TLC in silk pajamas for the “Creep” video

Jessica Simpson’s “fat” jeans

Celery as a “calorie negative food”

Janet Jackson’s abs in “That’s The Way Love Goes”

The figuration of certain foods as non-fat and thus “safely” consumable (jelly beans, SnackWells, olestra chips)

“Heroin chic” but specifically Kate Moss saying that “nothing tastes as good as skinny feels”

The reign of terror of low-slung jeans

The “going out top” whose platonic form was a handkerchief tied around your boobs

The phrases “muffin top” and “whale tale” and “thigh gap”

Ally McBeal, full stop

The Olson Twins, full stop

Kate Winslet as “chubby,” Brittany Murphy in Clueless as “fat,” Hilary Duff as “chubby,” one of the cheerleaders in Bring It On as fat, America Ferrera as “brave,” Anne Hathaway in The Devil Wears Prada as fat, Gisele as “curvy,” Alicia Silverstone as “Fatgirl”

Tyra Banks as “Thigh-Ra Banks”

The entire loving discourse around Bridget Jones’ supposedly undesirable body

The Rachel Zoe aesthetic

The Abercrombie aesthetic

DJ Tanner eating ice “popsicles” on Full House

The “Fat Monica” plotline on Friends

The pervasive idea that bananas will make you gain weight

Reporting on stars’ diet secrets, including but not limited to soaking cotton balls in orange juice and swallowing them to make you “feel” hungry

“A shake for breakfast, a shake for lunch, and then a sensible dinner!” aka Slimfast, whose advertisements were everywhere

Maya Hornbacher’s Wasted as instructional text

Miranda pouring dish soap on the cake she put in the garbage on SATC

“Diverse body types” articles where “diversity” was a shorter girl with a size-C cup boobs

Messaging from our own mothers, grandmothers, and elders that stigmatized fat, normalized hunger and deprivation, and praised the skinniest (and often least healthy) versions of ourselves

Gwyneth Paltrow’s 1999 Oscar dress

The hegemony of the strapless J.Crew bridesmaid dress of the late ‘00s

The obsessive documentation and degradation of Britney’s pregnant and postpartum body

Valorization of the “cute” pregnancy / Pregnant Kim Kardashian as shamu

I’m starting to get into more recent territory here and could go on for some time, but I wanted to cover foundational, formative language. (Please, feel free to add your own memories in the comments). To be clear, I’m in no way suggesting that young Gen-X/millenials are the first to internalize this sort of destructive body messaging. And I know there are different ideals and messages that have disciplined and damaged men and their relationships to their bodies.

But instead of shouting “BUT TWIGGY!” and “My grandmother survived on saltines and cigarettes!” I think it’s useful to return to the formation of the tweet referenced above: “If any Gen Z are wondering why every millennial woman has an eating disorder…” The author is trying to elucidate a norm (the desire to discipline and contain your body) that, over the course the last twenty years, has become slightly less of a norm. Her tweet, like this post, is a way to explain ourselves, but also to make the mechanics of the ideology not just visible but detectable — if in slightly different form — in their own lives.

It’s one thing, after all, when you hear that your grandparents did something — that feels old-fashioned, foreign, and distant. It’s quite another when it’s the primary practice of people just five, ten, fifteen years ago — when the ideology is still thick in the air. Fat activism and the body positivity movement has done so much, and in a relatively short amount of time, to shift the conversations we have about our bodies. But there’s so much work still to be done. I spent a lot of time thinking about this exquisite Sarah Miller essay:

That last sentence is a sentence of mourning. There is deep and abiding sadness here, the sort that so much of us are processing (or, you know, refusing to process, and submitting to their continued quiet torture) everyday.

As someone still doing this work with myself every day, what I crave — and where Virginia Sole-Smith, Sabrina Strings, Aubrey Gordon, and Michael Hobbes are already leading the way — is something more akin to a deep excavation, a social genealogy and cultural archaeology, of these ideas: where they come from, how they gain salience and thrive, how they adapt and acquire new names (hello, intermittent fasting, I see you!)

Why, for instnace, did Bridget Jones need a particular sort of body to make its narrative work? Why does it feel so revelatory and familiar and deeply sad to hear Taylor Swift talk about the gray area of disordered eating? What made it so easy to fall in love with the postfeminist dystopia? What ideas are passed down through our families, and how do we even begin to reject them?

We can’t unlearn noxious, fat-phobic ideas if we can’t even begin to remember where and how we learned and normalized them. We can’t stop the cycle of passing them down to future generations in slightly camouflaged form if we can’t even identify their presence in our own. And we can’t unravel these ideologies without acknowledging the deep, often unrecognized trauma they have inflicted.

https://twitter.com/thekuhlest/status/1395880183589003265

When millennial women shudder at the prospect of the return of the low-slung jean, we are not being old, or boring, or basic. It’s not about the loving jeans AS JEANS, and I wish people could actually understand that. It was about the jeans on our bodies. We are attempting to reject a cultural moment that made so many of us feel undesirable, incomplete, and alienated from whatever fragile confidence we’d managed to accumulate. We are trying to avoid reinflicting that on ourselves, but more importantly, on the next generation.

The jeans will come back. They already have. I know this. Whatever the style of fashion that made you feel inadequate and unfixable, it will likely come back too. You might have the strength to refuse to allow it — and the ideal body it imagines, — to have power over you. Some young people are acquiring more of this strength every day, facilitated by TikTok and Billie Eilish and other forms of internet communication I probably don’t even know about. Many are learning a vocabulary of resistance and analysis that I simply didn’t have access to, at least not until late into college.

But twenty years from now, will Gen-Zers be excavating their own relationship to TikTok’s beauty norms and midriff fetishization, to Kendall and Kylie Jenner, to Peloton and pandemic-induced eating habits, to the faux empowerment of the “Build a B*tch” video and their moms’ and grandmothers’ fitness and “wellness” routines? I mean, yes, certainly. But we could also start having those conversations now. Because as Sarah Miller puts it, “I’m pretty sure we haven’t “arrived” anywhere. And why would we have? The material conditions of being a woman have not been altered in any dramatic way, and seem to be getting worse, for everyone.”

As I’ve said before in reference to my relationship to work and burnout, I am trying to and failing and getting slightly better and backsliding all the time. The same is true with my relationship to fatphobia. That doesn’t mean the work is bullshit. It also doesn’t mean I’m “succeeding” at it, or that I don’t periodically think, like Miller, that it’s too late for us.

It just means the work is hard — but that it does gets easier, however incrementally and imperceptibly, when you don’t feel like you’re doing it alone.

Ohtori Akio posted:

didn't read this.

Some Guy TT posted:

In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Pygmalion is a sculptor who is so horrified by the existence of prostitutes that he begins to hate and revile women. He then sculpts himself a marble woman, later dubbed Galatea, who is so beautiful he falls in love with her, fondling her cold stone parts and kissing her. He begs Aphrodite to bring her to life, and she does. Galatea and Pygmalion get married and have a child.

Pygmalion is a potent myth (Ovid wasn’t even the first to tell it) — the fantasy of a woman created in a man’s ideal specifications. The story has been told and retold: George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, which became My Fair Lady. The book Stepford Wives. The movies Mannequin; Lars and the Real Girl; and even She’s All That, along with so many others, play off the myth of a man using his skills to create a perfect simulated woman — innocent and untouched, who will meet all his needs without any of the complications of a real-life woman¹.

Each iteration of the story rests on the creator's fundamental dissatisfaction with women as they are now. Women are imperfect: slovenly, ugly, mouthy, slutty, frigid, or otherwise distasteful. Woman must be created again, in man’s reimagining of all that is beautiful and desirable. Each iteration of the story — even the satires — is in a way a warning to women that they have fallen outside of what is acceptable. You women who are fully alive and aware must be less. Do your hair. Fix your attitude. Or the men will build your replacement.

The most recent iteration of the Pygmalion myth is the movie Poor Things, starring Willem Dafoe and Emma Stone. In the movie, Dafoe plays a maniac scientist named Dr. Godwin Baxter with a heart of gold in a steampunk world of the past where everything is lit in garish and vibrant colors, both real and unworldly, familiar and strange. Dr. Baxter finds a woman who has attempted suicide and resurrects her by giving her the brain of an infant. The woman, Bella Baxter, played by Stone, becomes a tabula rasa brain in a smokeshow body. Things get sexy very quickly, as Stone discovers masturbation and sex at the hands of Mark Ruffalo’s delightfully caddish Duncan Wedderburn. Together the two go off together, until Bella becomes bored with Wedderburn’s controlling nature and she disappears off into the world, where she discovers herself as a prostitute in Paris. It’s a clever gently caress-you to the original Pygmalion that the ideal woman in this instance becomes a prostitute by choice.

Each iteration of the story — even the satires — is in a way a warning to women that they have fallen outside of what is acceptable. You women who are fully alive and aware must be less. Do your hair. Fix your attitude. Or the men will build your replacement.

The movie has been declared a feminist masterpiece — a story of a woman finding freedom in a restricted world.

But even in this fun, weird romp of a movie, where Stone’s animatronic body movements provide slapstick relief, the creation never rises above her creator. When Bella returns to Dr. Baxter’s home, she makes peace with his decision to create her. She calls him “God” throughout the movie. And she takes up the mantle of his work in a violent, vengeful way, by putting a goat’s brain into the head of her abuser — the man who had driven her to attempt suicide in the first place.

Bella, in the end, is still doll-like. Still completely ensconced in the world of men. The critic Angelica Jade Bastién, writing in Vulture, calls BS on the “liberated” sexuality of the movie, noting, “The primary failure of Poor Things’ sex scenes is rooted in the decision to make Stone’s character mentally a child, blasted clean of history. I want to see what a grown woman thinks and feels about sex! Show a woman with a body and brain above the age of 40 getting gloriously railed.” Bastién concludes, “This isn’t a sincere treatise on female sexuality, it’s a dark comedy for people who carry around an NPR tote bag.”

I don’t think it’s insignificant that the other hot feminist movie of 2023, Barbie, is also about a woman created to be perfect. Barbie was invented by a woman, but we all know no one carries more water for the patriarchy than other women — enforcing the rules of desirability, correct behavior, and obeisance to men.

But in that movie, the doll created to embody perfection chooses to become human; chooses to embody flaws and imperfections, and eventually death. And, whatever else you may criticize about the movie — and it is a rich text —the creation does surpass the creator by choosing to be something else. The thing created comes into her own.

I loved Poor Things, but I found in it an anemic version of feminism, one that suggests a glorious, sexy harmony of liberated women espousing the ideas of the men who made them. Here, the tensions between creator and created are swiftly resolved in a deathbed scene. The image of subversion is sex, but it’s not even very subversive sex. Stone’s body adheres to thin, white beauty standards; the sex is all very pleasing and very hot to the male gaze. Cool and fun. But not subversive. Not particularly messy or revolutionary. And then it all comes to an end when Bella returns to Baxter’s home. She was wild, but now she is mostly tamed.

“Every story men love to tell,” Rebecca Solnit once told me in a whisper, before we did an event together, “is Pygmalion.” She was being quippy. But I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it.

I see it everywhere. In the trad wives of TikTok, whose beauty and bodies are mere marionettes, the strings guided by wealth, class, and help — glorious, behind-the-scenes help. These women are self-made creations intended to become popular by appealing to all the disgusted Pygmalions of the world.

And they are disgusted. Men are trying so hard to get women back into that box of desirability, obedience, quiet. Journalists interviewing me about the release of my book keep asking me, what brought us to this moment in culture when so many male pundits and politicians are pushing a return to traditional marriage? And my answer is that women got out of control. We cannot forget that 2017 was a watershed year for women — it saw the largest single-day protest in American history, which was driven by women*. And then the #MeToo movement came into full force and a few men were forced out of positions of power. There was a reckoning. An anemic and incomplete one, but more consequences than we had ever seen before.

In addition, more and more women are refusing to marry and opting out of dating. It’s not insignificant that there are entire movements of men designed to bully and harass women into love. Get back in the box, they say. You are not pretty, you are not worthy. If you don’t comply, we will find another.

But I think they should go ahead. Find another. Build your bloodless, fleshless, ideal of a woman, if that’s what you want. The rest of us will keep pursuing life in all its messy, beautiful, disgusting, rebellious glory.

Some Guy TT posted:

i wonder sometimes if these kinds of feminists have ever spoken to literally any man in their lives if they genuinely believe we all fantasize about loving sticks with cantaloupes