Scribblings with Green Chalk

Those self-righteous uppity bitches just don’t know when to stop. They throw at you that twisted nonsense divorced from reality, cos they’re closed off in their own world. They’re loud and ridiculous. Vicious and competitive. Turn off the volume and you get an amusing pantomime. Caricatures of women. They’re like half-women, trying so hard to be like men. If they knew the meaning of the word “moderation,” they’d just shut up.

Sorry. Did I forget the quotation marks? I was so focused on translating. I’ve always been quite gifted with languages, supposedly because I have ovaries. Or because I inherited the talent from my father. Either it’s irresistible biology, my small, comely feminine brain, or my masculine side, making me an exceptional token woman, almost as neat as a guy. Theories of intelligence are exciting, really. And they’re oh so objective and oh so neutral.

There is an interesting post on Shakesville about this article. Sadly, the comments shifted quickly from theories and perception of intelligence to whether men are “maybe, just maybe, actually smarter.” Good luck arriving at conclusions beyond the shadow of a doubt. But just how do you plan to “see” and evaluate intelligence? I might have old information, but for all I know no one has procured the philosopher’s stone and we’re stuck in a world of perceptions, misperceptions, and inferences.

The first paragraph is, as I hinted, a translation of a message I’ve heard many times. In its most polite formulation meant as “good advice,” it sounded like this:

“Modesty is the greatest virtue. A truly modest person will be content with possessing knowledge and keeping it to herself. She will answer only when asked directly. She will help others, give them the answer, because she knows she has a moral duty toward the group to work toward achieving harmony, to cooperate.”

Quotation marks duly inserted. Emphasis mine. The only thing this vision lacks is a deathbed scene wherein a grateful crowd gathers over the heroine’s body (after her last breath) to say how wonderful she was. Hearing the accolades would be to immodest, of course she has to be dead. Why do I make “person” feminine? Because I got this wonderful lesson of “true womanhood” from someone who was very concerned about my modesty. It’s a picture of what I should have become but never could.

Looking back, I can say I am greatly indebted to my native culture and system of education for the following: for not knowing what “intelligence” should mean, having heard smart and accomplished women described as bitter bitches (worse if they happened to be childless and/or unmarried), for not having a sense of reality that would allow me not to feel like the world’s biggest hoax, an award and national contest winning idiot, for recognizing my curiosity as inappropriateness, stupidity, a desire to be “one of the boys,” for translating my ambition as “trying too hard,” ” an anti-social impulse.”

Abiding by the rules of “modesty” does not let a woman excel. But that is not a problem, given that an “immodest” woman is evil. And, as so many will let her know, she is not a woman at all, because she supposedly wants to be a man, as shown by her sins against femininity.

The performance of intelligence is gendered, and intelligence itself, the “essence” is beyond reach. You never experience someone’s naked intelligence. There’s always gender trouble and intellectual cross-dressing involved.

When you hear a man disclaiming his contribution with “This may be stupid or irrelevant…” or “I’m sorry…”, let me know. I never have. If that happens somewhere in the world maybe we can talk about those IQ tests.

Why such a post sounding like I thought I knew more than I know I do? Because, hey, why not? (OK, that’s not the reason. Read on.)

Honestly, I don’t see myself as capable of “enlightening” destitute minds. I don’t think you can “teach” anyone anything, you can only tell them about the different possible paths. This reading guide contains a couple well-written texts about issues that anger me but to which I often fail to respond, because I’m too preoccupied with guilt-tripping myself about the things I haven’t yet read and I don’t yet know. (In other cases, when I do try to answer, I feel that no one gets my point.)

Caveat lector: a narcissistic paragraph about my personal philosophy follows. Humor me, because I’m on a serious caffeine overdose, taking a break between writing two papers, and badly in need of some pseudo-intellectual showing off.

The foundation of my personal philosophy is a deep belief that if you challenge people and let them know that you believe in their capability to think and learn, you help them grow. Treating them as children and spoonfeeding “knowledge” leads to blind conformism and, when brought to the extreme, totalitarianism and utter stupidity. I’m against stupor, because it means the death of thought and there is nothing I desire and admire more than free thought.

Free thought, mind you, in my subjective free-thinking out loud, must be informed. It’s born of curiosity but not naïvety. It seeks self-discipline and connection to other interesting thoughts, it negotiates its place, but, nevertheless, respects its own arrogance. There is little more arrogant or, to some, offensive than free thought practiced by women. I find this witch-hunt both repulsive and fascinating, ergo I let my thoughts play with other thoughts on the playground we often call feminism.

Forgive me, dear reader, the lie. I gave you two narcissistic paragraphs instead of one.

I came up with the idea of a reading guide when engaging in evil, brain-damaging multi-tasking whilst I should have been concentrating on writing my first paper in queue. This is to give your (and my) free thoughts something too nibble at: delicious rhetoric and lucid argumentation. The posts I link to below answer the repeated accusations against feminism:

…watch this space, I might add more later. In the meantime, back to paper #2…

There is a point where relativity cracks: some things just aren’t funny. And if you still think they are, you should run a reality check, you might be dangerously disconnected from the world around you. Sense of humor just ends somewhere, it’s not about “different feelings and responses.”

I saw this pencil sharpener ad two days ago and couldn’t quite believe my eyes: sharpening a pencil as rape and that is supposed to be funny?! Please enlighten me what is amusing about a pencil sharpener in the shape of a woman exclaiming (yes, it’s got sound) “Help!” when you stick in a pencil into its… well, it’s the plastic woman’s vagina (sic!). Is that not rape in some alternative universe of misogynist logic?

Right here, right now it’s a representation and an attempt to satirize rape. It promotes misogyny (among men and women) and tries to condone sexual violence.

One of the comments on Feministing.com linked to the producer’s customer service, and I’ll do the same here. Please write to them, tell them what you think about the product.

It’s usually them, a distant, vaguely defined group of the abject. We know they’re there, but they don’t have faces. They come to embody the reverse of the norms we live by, clinging to the idea of romatic love, clinging to lust, clinging to the images of family, and clinging to disgust. Useful but useless. Always used.

There is still no language to talk about prostitution and not enough courage to talk about them as people with faces and personal stories. There is no way we could rationally talk about their rights, since most societies choose to pretend they do not exist.

This article about murders of prostitutes in Edmonton, Canada is a glimpse into the larger narrative of hypocrisy and violence, spanning centuries. The article links to the murdered women’s pictures and presents them as mothers, sisters, wives; individuals rather than mere bodies for rent.

I know that it’s a bigger question whether any perpetrator sees the victims of their crimes as persons in their own right. Given the fact that in this case the victims were chosen solely among sex-workers, it does seem like a misogynist crime, attacking a “safe” target: women rejected by society in principle, partly invisible, those no one would stand up for. The families of some of them strongly deny that they were prostitutes, probably some of the relatives only found out about this after they died. The story’s caught up in a spiral of shame. Many, perhaps all, of the families feel stigmatized by the publication of the photos. This is not a truth about their lives they would wish to reveal. Whatever the actual details were, however heinous the deed, there is the troubling connection between the womens’ profession and what happened to them. In a sick and insane way, the perpetrator(s) (?) channeled the desires to penalize the abject. The society left them a niche to operate in by denying sex-workers their rights. If you’re invisible, no one will hear your scream.

I remember watching a debate about sex-workers’ rights on French TV. Among the participants, there were several ex-prostitutes. Not hiding their names nor faces, they spoke openly about their situation and demanded legal recognition of their existence. I don’t know what that led to but I was stunned to see real people speaking up about real problems instead of the usual “experts” throwing theories and hypothesies at each other. And finally talking instead of blushing.

What do their relatives and neighbors feel when they look at the pictures of the dead women? What do you feel?

Thinking is dirty. Let’s outlaw it. There is nothing more violently protested against than thinking. It verges on the obscene, it’s everything our traditions despise. Let’s write manuals against thinking; teach your brain to be moderate — know when one ought to defecate, when to say thank you, and halt right there. Let’s make it new modesty: “don’t you dare show off those gray cells, don’t you dare overexercise them!”

Should someone still be tempted to engage in the outrageous activity, we will make them feel sordid and guilty. Let’s give them a lesson on how to behave, let’s unwind their brains and eat them out with teaspoons. Till all we have is the regular ticking of clockwork people.

That’s just me, reading about yet another brilliant strategy to convert women to embrace “modest behavior” (here). If you had the impression it was about sex, do some dirty thinking, because that’s what it is about. Congratulations on the sophisticated strategy, dear guardians of morals; how noble of you to use guilt and shame as arguments against free thought and choice. How dirty it is to think one is allowed to think.

Remember Jane Eyre and the woman locked up in the little red room? The diagnosis was that sex blew her mind. The treatment: keep the poor dear away from decent people and treat her like an idiot child. The story comes from the times when, as Queen Victoria said, women didn’t have legs, so they couldn’t even mention anything that was underneath the layers of petticoats. What are our times?

The sci-fi writer Philip K. Dick believed that the Roman Empire never ended only we were living an illusion in which time feigned movement, but the world really stood still in 70 A.D. Dick had schizophrenia, but his theory doesn’t sound so crazy to me when I read about people such as Parker, Grossman, and Stepp and their brilliant [sic!] plans to “enlighten the weaker sex.”

Please read the discussion at Feministing.org along with the linked articles, comments, and responses to get a fuller picture of these grand initiatives aimed at reducing women to helpless idiots that need to be protected from themselves. And most importantly, from their sexuality which, as the Good Books out there say, is the source of unimaginable evil.

Are we stuck in the nineteenth century for good? The pseudo-theories in biology and evolutionary psychology’s explanations of every social aberration as result of human development could well have been penned by Charlotte Brontë, they bring nothing to our understanding of the world. They do, however, give us insight into the minds of their makers and the politics to which they subscribe. Is it boredom with historical materialism or some almost religious desire for positive essence in human cruelties throughout the ages that makes them come up with these ideas? Or again, is it the work of the specter of a glorious tradition that never really existed but is romanticized and fetishized into a set of rules imposing “order,” that is, oppression…?

What I find especially heinous is when women do it to women — when they assume the role of mother figures only to patronise and tell other women to “behave.” Where’s the breaking point? When will there be enough of spoonfeding shame and when will our brilliant scientists and reformers find that women have brains and are able to see through spurious claims intended to keep them in “their” place?