The Holy Chao

Lowe posted this, in the course of a longer post - go read it over at his place, if you like...

I once co-taught a course with a fellow professor. We were teaching Lolita and the subject of feminism came up. After a rather rowdy discussion of stripping, in which one of the class members defended it as an acceptable vocation (it's basic capitalism: there's more money to be made stripping for 4 hours than working at McDonalds), my friend brought up the idea of beauty and made the argument that the biggest failure of feminism has been the fact that many women gain more by working towards the hegemony than they gain by working against it. In other words, if you are beautiful and can get ahead in a sexist world by working your beauty, than so be it.

The converse of this, of course, is that women could stop most sexism tomorrow if they simply refused to take part - stop working at Hooters; stop throwing up your lunch because some fashion mag has imparted upon you some ideal of beauty (and, indeed, stop taking work at fashion mags); stop doing stuff to "impress your man" and do it for yourself; &c. &c. &c.

It won't, of course, ever stop. What women gain from working at Hooters is more than money - as one of my students said on Tuesday, they gain self-esteem, even if it's a pretty sick trade off (what kind of self-esteem is gained by trying to live up to standards that you don't sent). But, as the song goes, "If you've got it, flaunt it."

I thought it was an interesting take on things, that the dominant hegemony plays off the combination of women's insecurity and women's poverty to reinforce the hegemony's hold over women. And women (because of the insecurity thing) tend to like the attention and "positive" reinforcement this gives their egos.

Just makes me sad.

At the camping trip this past weekend, there was this little girl who latched on to me and Luke and followed us around for a while, until I stopped playing her game and went to be with my friends. Pretty little thing, will be very hot, no doubt. And she told me the following:

that she didn't live with her mother, who was in Texas

that she was camping with her grandmother (this was at an SCA event of over 600 people, where she was wandering around by herself - I found her as the rapier guys were setting up a battle at the "castle" she was playing on - at one point, she sprinted onto the fighting field while guys were swinging swords and arrows (blunt, padded, but still) were flying around - I had to yell at her, and one of the fighters and I convinced her it wasn't a good idea)

that she lived with her dad "somewhere in Maryland" - I asked where, in interests of making conversation (I lived in Rockville, for a while, whatnot), and she rattled off her address (!), but couldn't remember the town...

Anyway, where I'm going with this is that she was all about "I'm the most popular girl in my school" and "want to see my cheers?"

And my thoughts were 1) that she would have spat on me in high school, which made me instantly dislike her (to my shame - I mean, she was like 8 years old and at an SCA event, you know - it's not like she was thinking of me as a geek, or whatever), and 2) that she is not very well-positioned to be raised up to be a critically-thinking, contributing member of society.

I mean, what are this girls' politics going to be like? Is she just going to vote with her husband? Is she even going to vote?

*sigh*

# posted by Matt @ 6:23 AM