Clarity & Chaos

Kelly, as I’ve written before, is the brains of the Fox News operation, and, occasionally, she stops caring whether the men around her notice. Sometimes it’s an emergency intervention, when a Supreme Court decision or election returns are coming in. And, every now and then, the ideological blindness seems too much for her, and she makes it clear that she’s smarter than the men around her, rather than deftly letting them think they are. She’s done it before on women’s issues, when a Fox commentator called maternity leave a “racket”; perhaps that makes it easier for her colleagues to reassure themselves that it was a girl thing, and pretend, as they fall through the holes in their logic, that the ideological ground under them is still there.

This split in reaction is also evident in case studies of hate speech. The typical reaction of target-group members to an incident of racists propaganda is alarm and immediate calls for redress. The typical reaction of non-members is to consider the incidents isolated pranks, the product of sick but harmless minds. This is in part a defensive reaction: A refusal to believe that real people, people just like us, are racists. This disassociation leads logically to the claim that there is no institutional or state responsibility to respond to the incident. It is not the kind of real and pervasive threat that requires the state’s power to quell.

The same could be said/applied to sexist incidents and misogynist hate speech. The backlash about the #Aufschrei-discussion of everyday sexism in Germany is just one current example. The appeasing responses by ‘non target-group members’ came from Internet trolls, journalists and even the German President. The described reactions can also be witnessed in the case of KKK and other racists depictions at Oberlin.

Feminism is itself a challenge. Feminism is a challenge to the way things are in the world. It is by definition an oppositional movement, because it’s trying to accomplish something. I’ve never felt like feminism was a consciousness raising effort in isolation. Everything about feminism is about getting something in the world to get better for women, and to get the world to be less stupid on gender bifurcation terms.

Rachel Maddow

(via feminishblog)

(Source: fem-phil.org, via feminishblog)

So, repeat after me: Criticizing sexist shows is not censorship, it’s criticism. Criticizing Blackface is not censorship, it’s criticism. Criticizing the use of racist slurs is not censorship, it’s criticism (and basic human decency). Laws against censorship exist to protect people and political positions from governmental interference and to prevent the oppression of marginalized points of view from political, economic, cultural and social hegemonic power structures. Criticizing hegemonic conversations about marginalized people is not censorship – it is exercising the right to fight against oppression. Criticizing sexism, heterosexism, ableism, anti-Semitism, racism in its daily and special appearances is not censorship, it is the attempt to re-claim at least a small part of forcefully occupied spaces.

On Censorship « stop! talking. Also read the article for spot on commentary on a horrible proposed German TV show called “Who wants to fuck my girlfriend” and the debate re: replacing the German nword in (Children’s) literature. 

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We want our celebrities to be everything to us at once. We want someone like Beyoncé, or Megan Fox, or: [insert your favorite famous person here] to be both powerful and vulnerable, secretive and revealing, in our bedrooms and on a pedestal—to look sexy in lingerie while telling the editor of GQ to shove it up his ass. We put these unrealistic expectations on women especially, because even non-famous women are expected to be all things to all people. But those of us who are paying attention—and I do not count Esquire and GQ among us—realize how unfair that is, and how complicated these images really are. We can’t ask famous women to comment on their looks and then commodify those looks and call it a “serious profile.” We can’t accept magazines that objectify famous women on their covers and then trash the famous women who appear there. (Not if we want them to stay famous, anyway.) And until we can look at the bigger picture that is our sexist celebrity culture—one that tells women their value comes from their bodies and then criticizes them for those bodies—and hold ourselves and our media to a higher standard, until we can create a space where Beyoncé actually could wear her own t-shirt on a magazine cover, or Megan Fox could be known for something other than her looks, we’re in for more of the same.