I totally agree, but let’s face it, there are certain people and things, definitely in Canada but elsewhere too, which you Do Not Criticise.
I’m thrilled (and yes also scared, but overall thrilled) that this seems to be changing.
My only caveat is that I hope this doesn’t turn into “My Hero Isn’t Perfect So Now They’re Dead to Me”, because then the only ones that will be left are the unexamined and the phonies.
I agree. Just as crucial I think is having criticism be actual critique - discussion teasing out the nuance of to what extent aspects of a person’s ideology or work may or not be helping. And resisting the temptation to simply pass cursory judgement. Everyone has something to them of worth, just as everyone has room for learning and improvement. But finding the baby for the bathwater can (and should) at times lead to some introspection which may at times be awkward or uncomfortable.
It is not a free pass to acknowledge that each person is a product of their environment, it is a necessity for placing their work in context.
As an EX-engineering major and knowing most of the other males in the school… I know why they run away.
She may be super white but Margaret Atwood rocks my world. Her poems are divine. Was so excited to have them quote in The Handmaid’s Tale one of my favorite poems of hers. I recited it out loud at Offred thought it.
You fit into me
Like a hook into an eye
A fish hook
An open eye
This poem was my first exposure to Margaret Atwood, during high school.
I am currently reading The Heart Goes Last. And I like it… but man, she cannot write men, at least not this guy. Which is weird, cuz Alias Grace was AMAZING and the men in that were fantastic! (I’ve yet to watch the show I wanted to read it first, but also she had historical sources for that one so maybe thats why its so good?)
I think she, like all WASPy Feminists (myself included) deserve all the scrutiny we get! Its her double-downing and defensive responses that are so disappointing. She’s an excellent writer and she writes tales about women so well. But as @gadgetgirl said, its only certain types of women. And thats ok. Those stories should be told too. But, they are not the be all and end all of Canadian Literature.
This isn’t make much news outside of Toronto, but her and her husband are leading a NIMBY charge to prevent a developer from building a condo in her neighbourhood. And OMG that more than anything has polarized the love/hate Atwood lines in Toronto. If Toronto is good at one thing, its NIMBYism, and also hating NIMBYism. We’re a complicated people. LOL
This book needs to jump ahead in my reading stack. I have been told by many people to read this book, but I haven’t gotten to it yet.
Yep. When I was reading The Handmaid’s Tale, I found the book very feminine so it was hard for me to wrap my head around it, but I was glad I did.
That’s my take exactly. Western feminism typically only represents upper-middle-class white women, and I think this needs to change. However, I don’t think feminism is bad, or worse, that feminism should be dismissed because it’s not intersectional enough. I don’t want upper-middle-class white women to drown out the voices of poorer minority women either, so they shouldn’t tell these women what they think would be best for them. The best solution would be to advocate for issues that affect oneself, but create an atmosphere where those with different but related issues can advocate for theirs.
Alias Grace is one of my two fave books from her. The show was good but not as good as the book, IMHO. Worth watching though.
Agreed. Started reading a little of Gloria Steinem and was, like, wow is this a white lady. The book I started reading talked about her experiences at a spa. Ah yes, the life of the downtrodden!
I don’t know about anyone else, but I thought this was hilarious. Maybe because I bore (and still do -HA!) a boy, lol?
Wait. Wait wait wait. Since when is freaking Minecraft a boy’s game? My niece spent half my youngest brother’s wedding running around after zombie pig men screaming “DIE DIE DIE!” and starting forest fires with TNT blasts.
(While wearing a white party dress with sparkles.)
That kid is being raised right.
As the aunt who got her into Minecraft in the first place, thank you! 
(I promised to buy it for her for Hallowe’en, but she wouldn’t shut up about it so her parents bought it as a back to school gift a couple of years ago.)
She has now started a comic book series about getting magically transported into her Minecraft world, and having to use her knowledge of the game mechanics to get out.
Let’s just presume, please, that she’s imitating a boy who’s into Minecraft. I didn’t see how this video even says it’s a game that only boys play. Really, where was that?
And I drank milk from the carton or jug. Still do. Thank goodness my son is lactose-intolerant.
Maybe someone will make a “Girl Dad” as a companion piece or rebuttal-of-sorts?
That woman did some Lucille Ball-worthy physical comedy, to be sure.
I kind of hope there isn’t a Girl Dad or other kind of rebuttal. It was weird for me to watch since I’m the only girl of three, the boys were definitely the favourites, but there is no way in hell they would have been allowed to do 75% of the stuff in the video. Complete non-starter.
I think this is the right place for this article:
I wish we lived in a world that encouraged women to attend to their bodies’ pain signals instead of powering through like endurance champs. It would be grand if women (and men) were taught to consider a woman’s pain abnormal; better still if we understood a woman’s discomfort to be reason enough to cut a man’s pleasure short.
But those aren’t actually the lessons society teaches — no, not even to “entitled” millennials.
I can’t quite figure out how in the hell I grew up believing I did live in that world. I’ve talked before about how my upbringing in the 70s and early 80s seemed to be informed by a growing cultural consensus that women were just as important and competent and deserving as men. Now, in hindsight I understand that that was far from an actual consensus, and in fact there was a lot of pushback against “uppity women forgetting their station,” but my point is that the cultural messages that landed with me, the ones that stuck and made sense and formed my own sensibilities, were the ones that went contrary to the hideously unhealthy cultural pressures described in the article. And it wasn’t like I enjoyed any specifically progressive upbringing! At least, no more progressive than just being raised in Southern California in a family of Democrats with a working mother who had, before she met my dad and had three more children, had been a working single mother of four in the early 1960s. I learned to read from Sesame Street. Somebody played Free to be You and Me at some point. We rarely went to church, and not at all after 1982 or so.
And yet, even with this utterly half-assed, public-schooled, too-busy-to-put-in-that-much-effort upbringing, I still grew up believing that other people’s feelings and desires and misgivings and emotions were at least as important as my own. It wasn’t hard to grasp, as it wasn’t a particularly esoteric concept. It was a Rule widely described as Golden centuries before I was born, but applied to everyone. And remember: my mom was a lot of things, but “progressive activist” was not one of them. She was raising kids all her adult life, starting at the age of 19 until her dying day. And she was raised by her own grandparents, who were actual honest-to-God Victorians born in the 1880s, stern and rock-ribbed St Louis Methodists who probably disapproved of color photography as being “too racy.”
And yet somehow I’ve never felt socially threatened by female students outperforming me in class or in sports. I’ve never had a problem working underneath female bosses. I’ve never felt a woman owed me anything just because I was a man and she was a woman. In sexual situations, I make it a point to be attentive and tender and caring, for two reasons. The primary reason is because it’s the right thing to do, of course! But there’s also a selfish reason: I am most turned on by people who are turned on by me. I don’t actually want to have sex with someone who isn’t enjoying it. Could it be that that is a strange and unusual fetish? Is it an uncommon peccadillo to cease sexual activity at the first sign of discomfort, and ask about it, perhaps to find out if there might be a different, more mutually pleasing way forward? Or even to ask if she mightn’t prefer to stop for now, if she’s not in the mood?
Nobody had to teach me that attitude, as such. It just seemed self-evidently the right way to do things. I certainly didn’t learn it in my college Human Sexuality class, nor in ninth grade Health, nor in sixth grade Sex Ed. My parents didn’t specifically sit me down and come right out and tell me that my sexual partner’s safety and comfort and satisfaction and happiness were as essential to the overall experience as my own, not because they didn’t believe it, nor because they were prudes of a bygone era, but rather because doing so would have been as redundant-seeming to themselves and their son as it would have been to remind him not to shit in other people’s beds. I guess, by their reasoning, if their kid learned enough basic civility to let other people speak (rather than interrupting everyone whenever a thought struck him), to pass the peas without complaint when asked, to take his place in the queue rather than just muscling up to the front, to treat his sisters and brothers (whether older or younger) with respect and fairness, and to be reasonably interested in the opinions of others, then he’d probably end up being a decent sort in bed.
Well, apparently this very basic minimum level of decency turns out to be laughably rare. I did learn the lessons quoted above, but from whom did I learn them, if society has failed so utterly to teach them to other men? If I, I, y’know… Donald, who still laughs at every single fart joke no matter how lame and juvenile, who is so unsophisticated as to think Mountain DEW-S.A. (the version that mixes three flavors of Mtn Dew into one red-white-and-blue can) is pretty fucking brilliant, who never graduated from college, who has read practically zero scholarly books or articles regarding feminism and sexuality that didn’t appear in his sister’s issue of Cosmo on the toilet tank, who has taken a completely aimless, meandering, privileged, uninformed, undereducated, devil-may-care path of least resistance through life to arrive at his current sociopolitical state of mind… if even a clueless dipshit like me can grasp this concept and do his level best to live it, then oh my fucking God, how hard could it even be?!
Women are constantly and specifically trained out of noticing or responding to their bodily discomfort, particularly if they want to be sexually “viable.” Have you looked at how women are “supposed” to present themselves as sexually attractive? High heels? Trainers? Spanx? These are things designed to wrench bodies. Men can be appealing in comfy clothes. They walk in shoes that don’t shorten their Achilles tendons. They don’t need to get the hair ripped off their genitals or take needles to the face to be perceived as “conventionally” attractive. They can — just as women can — opt out of all this, but the baseline expectations are simply different, and it’s ludicrous to pretend they aren’t.
I learned this lesson decades ago, when I first tried wobbling down the hall in a pair of heels that even my mom had given up wearing long before her fifth child was born. When I asked how anyone could stand wearing them, I was told that women simply got used to them, the unspoken subtext being because they had to. Years later, I asked why anyone actually felt they had to dress uncomfortably to be seen in public, since God knew I certainly didn’t feel that pressure on most days, and complained quite loudly whenever I had to wear dress socks and shoes, or a necktie, or had to comb out the chronic tangles in my hair. I tried to boysplain that nobody actually had to wear such uncomfortable things if they didn’t want to, this naivete informed by that same upbringing that told me that girls and women should be able to do whatever they wanted, at least to the same degree that boys and men could.
Well, here we are. I’ve been a somewhat active participant in the Tyranny of Fashion discussion for over thirty years, and it seems to have progressed not at all toward a more level playing field. The patriarchy, I know, and apparently it’s reinforced by both men and women who buy into it, even unconsciously. I remember the knowing nods shared among women I know when Amy Schumer did her “Girl You Don’t Need Makeup” video.
And it frustrates the hell out of me, because if people really weren’t that dishonest and un-self-aware as the boy band in that video, then Ms Schumer wouldn’t have bothered to make that joke. I’ve never liked makeup (outside of special effects), and I’ve always devoutly hoped that nobody’s bothering to wear it for me.
I’ve strayed from my original point, which is nothing new, but I really do wonder why so very many men cling to such outdated and fundamentally wrongheaded ideas about the purpose of women, and why so little progress has been made in that area in the last few decades, when somebody like me was successfully raised to reject such notions without even consciously trying. I’m no genius, nor am I any saint. But Christ, I read articles in, of all places, Penthouse magazine over 30 years ago that tried to explain the importance and singular wonder and beauty of female sexual pleasure and how to cultivate it through attentiveness and listening.
What the everloving fuck is wrong with men today?