Tuesday, February 20, 2007
Sweeeet
"Happy Valentines Day, love! I'm not going to beat you today!" That's probably not the message here, but that's the impression I get from the headline: "Helping Women, Stopping Violence Is Best Valentine."
Taylor Allbright's piece is a response to that other piece last week bitching about how radical feminists have hijacked flying vagainas and flown them into the World Trade Center of Romance. (Note to Daily Cal how about investing in hyperlinks?) Oh, should I use the word "bitching"? I can never tell.
But here we go. The one sentence approach:
I never thought that wanting to end oppression and believing in equality would be so controversial, but apparently it is. Burn! Well, okay, when people think you're a bunch of man-haters, you have an image problem, and it's not one solved by saying "nuh uh!" Nor does stating a goal absolve you of any blame for the image projected by your actions. Can people want to end oppression and believe in equality without coming off as a bunch of man-haters? If the answer is "yes," then that dismissive statement is just that: Dismissive.
Where do you go from being dismissed? "Oh, now that you've unfairly dismissed my complaints as anti-equality, I see that you are correct"? Yeah, not likely. CalSERVE has the same problem, by the way, when it comes to representing white folks.
Folks don't get together and say "Gee, you know what? We should take this perfectly fair and even-handed opinion and pretend that it's anti-dude!" Image problems occur because the things you do and the attitude you project. If your response to that problem is denial, than you may as well not bother responding to folks who see that image. The fact that you don't think your cause looks like that doesn't change anything.
For instance, in this case, you might talk about why it is that all the dudes in the Vagina Monlogues are dicks, which is one of the complaints raised by Allison Kasic. (I don't actually know if that's true, since I haven't stopped by a Vagina Monlogues performance) Right now, without an explanation, or just a denial, it's up to the reader to fill in the blanks about what message is being sent. Nothing in this piece changes how folks are going to fill in those blanks. An explanation, though, could explain how to fill those blanks in the right way, so that the feminist folks don't come off as anti-dude.
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