The most thorough critique of my much-hated Alternet article:
4Nov2006 Filed under: Linkage- Previous: So close, and yet …
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4 Responses to “The most thorough critique of my much-hated Alternet article:”
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Hey there. I'm Ariel Meadow Stallings, a native Seattleite who's written my way up and down the Left Coast. Electrolicious is where I post daily randomata, but I also write for a living. My first book, Offbeat Bride, was published last year.
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amy.leblanc
November 4th, 2006 at 6:11 pm
seriously thorough. wow.
but, i just read the whole thing and nothing really struck me as any sort of non-iterative conclusion.
however, i think the commenter who brought up double consciousness” nailed it:
“it’s not that we women only see ourselves through men’s eyes; rather, we simultaneously see ourselves through men’s eyes (hott or not?) and our own. No wonder this line of thought makes some of us crazy.”
how can you ignore that which you are perceiving? that’s a lot to ask. i think resistance is not the answer, as it is a countermovement and therefore so much more difficult, but reframing and using that (male ideas of beauty) as a tool for your own power, advantage and personal development is.
Rob R-H
November 4th, 2006 at 6:53 pm
Setting aside for the moment the actual subject being discussed, I’d like to say that the author of that critique is absolutely in love with the sound of their own typing and the pretty words scootching across the screen. Reading that was a little like trying to watch C-SPAN on cold medicine.
Christina
November 5th, 2006 at 10:36 am
i have to agree with Rob R-H.
Subspace
November 12th, 2006 at 12:58 pm
I’ve been reading back and forth between your article and certain responses for days now, and I still have a upset stomach about it.
I was raised in a feminist household, and I grew up in a feminist hometown (Olympia). I served Kathleen Hanna coffee at a local cafe for years before she was “Kathleen Hanna!” I gots street cred, yo - in addition to real-world experience, and I keep coming back to the same confusion with I Blame the Patriarchy’s blistering firehose of wrath: she writes as though fat issues were simply a problem of semantics. You are right or you are wrong. You are with us or you are against us. If you are concerned about your weight - for any reason at at - you are a traitor.
The funny part is I was most struck where she criticizes your bemoaning of outgrowing your pants - the reason being, in the last five years I have gained, slowly, about twenty pounds. I was very skinny before this, due to having Crohn’s Disease, so the twenty pounds has made me merely soft around the edges now. However, over the last five years I have been working minimum wage jobs and surviving as the working poor. About once every few months, I was needing to do a total rotation of my closet, because I had a penchant for tight clothes that - surprise - didn’t fit any more. I literally hit a wall a few years into gaining weight where I could NOT afford to buy a new pair of work pants. I became depressed around this time, almost entirely because of my financial situation. And yes, I was angry that I was gaining weight. It was easy to make that my enemy. I mean fuck, who can afford to buy a new bra every time the other one becomes a little tight? I can’t. And yet, here it is.
I Blame the Patriarchy is taking advantage of your writing, I think. And you, by proxy. My opinion is that you had established yourself as a pro-feminist, concerned blogger, which in turn she used as a stage to have a non-cooperative dialogue about how you are wrong. This is irresponsible and rude and precisely the reason women feel they aren’t allowed to lose weight if they want to be feminist.
There is a famous dominatrix in Seattle that offers her skills in combination with that of a personal trainer - she will literally whip you into shape. I keep wondering, what would I Blame the Patriarchy think about this? That she is also a traitor for feeding the male sex fantasy of thinness and pomp? Even though the dominatrix takes female clients, are those female clients countering our feminist agenda by being attracted to a healthy, muscular slender woman?
Ultimately, I have one observation for I Blame the Patriarchy (which I tell to you and not her, because I think you may actually benefit from it): verbosity does not excuse trolling.