beth > Recent Status Updates

I suppose the Fatal Attraction phenomenon was the Gone Girl of its time, in that a fictional story was used to try and smear 'real' (made-up) women in the press.

'But this homage to feminine passivity was cleverly packaged in activist language, a strategy that simultaneously acknowledged women's desire for autonomy and co-opted it. The New Traditionalist, the ads said, was an independent thinker who "made her own choices" and "started a revolution."' You still see this a lot today -- it reminds me of shaving ads.

Crazy how often the press spread lies about women's supposed behaviour that then actually led to the behaviour happening... eg concocting that 'women who chose business careers found they weren't able to prioritise family' (imagined women) and then the number of women applying to business schools the next year would suddenly lessen after a decade of growth... awful.

'To make a fuss about sexual injustice is more than unfeminine; it is now uncool. Feminist anger, or any form of social outrage, is dismissed breezily—not because it lacks substance but because it lacks "style."'

'Household income would have shrunk three times as much in the decade if women hadn't worked in mass numbers. And this fact dealt the final blow to masculine pride and identity: not only could the middle-class man no longer provide for his family, the person who bailed him out was the wife he believed he was meant to support.'

'In reality, the past decade's economic pains most often took a disproportionate toll on women, not men.' Most women entered worse-paying jobs in positions with few male competitors.

'The economic victims of the era are men who know someone has made off with their future—and they suspect the thief is a woman.'

Important to note: that population of men were not the ones driving the backlash though. Those men were far more affluent. The poorer men were its audience, ready to internalise the backlash's messages.

I suspect there's a lot of overlap with the situation today, in that it is men who feel economically left behind that are the most hostile to feminism. This makes sense, it's easier to target women than it is the system of structures making their lives hard. The language these men describe themselves with is remarkably similar to now.

'The men who belonged to this group had one other distinguishing trait: they feared and reviled feminism. "It's these downscale men, the ones who can't earn as much as their fathers, who we find are the most threatened by the women's movement," Susan Hayward, senior vice president at Yankelovich, observes.'

'And for twenty years, the leading definition [of masculinity] ... has never changed. ... It is simply this: being a "good provider for his family." If establishing masculinity depends most of all on succeeding as the prime breadwinner, then it is hard to imagine a force more directly threatening to fragile American manhood than the feminist drive for economic equality.'

'We should not, therefore, gauge a backlash by losses in women's numbers in the job market, but by attacks on women's rights and opportunities within that market'

'Women's contradictory circumstances in the '50s—rising economic participation coupled with an embattled and diminished cultural stature—is the central paradox of women under a backlash.'

'The '50s backlash, in short, didn't transform women into full-time "happy housewives"; it just demoted them to poorly paid secretaries.'

'The Victorian era gave rise to mass media and mass marketing—two institutions that have since proved more effective devices for constraining women's aspirations than coercive laws and punishments. They rule with the club of conformity, not censure, and claim to speak for female public opinion, not powerful male interests.'

Interesting how (US) antifeminist backlash in the '80s had a focus on women's ostensibly deteriorating mental health as they gained independence (wrong, the opposite was true), but ignored noting that men's mental health decreased as their wives and women in general gained economic independence/increased social status. Nowadays all the focus is on how bad men feel in response to 'the crisis of masculinity'. Mask off?

'Three-year-old toddlers may survive day care, they argued, but newborns would surely suffer permanent damage. Their evidence, however, came from studies conducted on European children in wartime orphanages and war refugee camps' -- Excuse me?

'If the widespread promotion of the Harvard-Yale marriage study had one effect, it was to transfer much of this bachelor anxiety into single women's minds. In the Wall Street Journal, a thirty-six-year-old single woman perceptively remarked that being unmarried "didn't bother me at all" until after the marriage study's promotion; only then did she begin feeling depressed.'

These male social scientists trying to salvage their careers after their inaccurate and questionable study results on college-educated women's marriage prospects are overturned after a female statistician with more rigorous methodology comes out at a very different set of results... May I be gifted their unearned confidence.

'Yet, as women near the finish line, we are distracted. We have stopped to gather glittery trinkets from an apparent admirer. The admirer is the marketplace, and the trinkets are the bounty of a commercial culture, which has deployed the language of liberation as a new and powerful tool of subjugation.'

I've loved the book, but I have to be pedantic here: Virginia Woolf's point wasn't that you actually have to have a room of your own in order to write. In some circumstances, absolutely. But it was a metaphor for having enough security and time to be able to think about making art, and most women didn't have it. Moss even highlights a metaphorical room would have to do. ...But it was a metaphor!

'Frédérique knew about my morning walks. Every day I got up at five; my room-mate was asleep. The school was cloaked in a subterranean wind, life was rotting, or regenerating itself.'

'Marfua To’xtaxo’jaeva makes a similar argument about the results of
the Soviet modernization program: that while it did create equality in
work and education (those areas that benefit society), discourses and
gender roles remained largely unchanged in the Soviet period.'

'For those who were literate, the language that they read shaped the
borders of their world. For example, in 1928 Russian teachers in Xorazm, Uzbekistan, lived in the Soviet Union . . . At the same time, Turkic-speaking teachers in Xorazm lived in Uzbekistan, reading Uzbek-language newspapers that were published in Tashkent and Samarkand and nothing from the larger union.'

'Joan Scott argues that in any case, subjects “are not unified, autonomous individuals exercising free will, but rather subjects whose agency is created through situations and statuses conferred on them. Being a subject means being ‘subject to definite conditions of existence. . .’ These conditions enable choices, though they are not unlimited.”'

This is getting weiiird. Loving it so far. Very different from the other two books I’ve read from her.

The fact those leading the service worried those in the service would be viewed as transphobic for being interested in the stories of those who had detransitioned… That’s their lives. Imagine feeling so let down and then people saying you’re too politically inconvenient to be spoken of