'Cause she knows that it's demanding to defeat those evil machines...

Thoughts on Rape Culture, Advertising, Feminist Aesthetics, and Warrior Fatigue

The history of men's opposition to women's emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself. ~ Virginia Woolf

I haven't blogged about advertising and feminist aesthetics in a long while. It happened for a handful of reasons: lack of time, lack of energy, distracted by shiny objects. But also? Sometimes, I get warrior fatigue. Sometimes I feel lost and alone, orphaned by my own movement, and generally defeated. It is hard to always be fighting.

Oh yes, this completely
nude woman totally makes
me want to buy Shalimar...
no wait: I meant puke.

I also sometimes wonder, dear reader, if you aren't a little tired of hearing it. I feel like I am writing to the choir. If you already know this stuff, what is one more post going to do?

“There is nothing revolutionary whatsoever about the control of women's bodies by men. The woman's body is the terrain on which patriarchy is erected.” ~ Adrienne Rich

I was always a feminist. I don't know why. I think probably because being an abuse little kid raised by crazy people who kept insisting they were normal forced me to make a choice. Either they were right, and I was awful and deserved awfulness, or they were wrong, and the world was a weirdly biased and inherently unjust place.

I did what any child desperate to survive would do under those conditions.

I chose myself.

I chose not to accept that I was awful, not to let their poison change my mind. I made that decision one terrible day in a hospital, though I didn't know it at the time. But I do remember thinking, very clearly, that it wouldn't always be this way, and it wasn't worth my life. I stopped taking out the awfulness on myself that day, on my own body, and I started living, just out of spite. If I was going to die, it wouldn't be by my own hand. I would no longer be complicit in my own defeat.

Nearly twenty years later, I've seen enough of the ugliness in the world to wonder: how many women have had to make such a choice...

Dear Tom Ford, thanks for making it easy
to despise your entire product line.

All oppression creates a state of war. ~ Simone de Beauvoir

That my father had a position of public power that made normal channels of relief unavailable to us underscored the power of status and privilege. That I am naturally highly empathetic meant that when I got older, my sense of personal injustice seemed easy to extend to others when I came to see the world in all its horrible inequity.

These things made me, like fire tempers a blade.

Call it coincidence or the juxtaposition of fate and genetics, a little nature/nurture combo, but whatever it is, I am who I am: a feminist from first breath to last. But when I am tired and weary of a world where people genuinely seem to hate women, and especially hate those who attempt to fight against that hatred, even I have to take a break.

Sometimes I just can't do it anymore. When I see students protesting rape culture at a top tier college being told they deserve to be raped and at another university, a Take Back the Night week is protested by a crazy man who says the students marching for safety are sluts who should be raped, sometimes I just feel like nothing I do matters.

“Patriarchy has no gender.” ~ bell hooks

If we could see patriarchy,
I feel like it would look
a lot like this...

Patriarchy is so big; it is so everywhere and every time and every culture. It is like The Silence in Doctor Who. It's influence is always there, just outside your field of vision, pervasive and persistently changing the world for the better. And as soon as you look away, even for a moment—you forget. You can't remember where that sick feeling in your stomach came from because you're too busy just trying to live your life. You forget that the silence, and here I mean the silencing influence of patriarchy, is standing behind you, influencing your thoughts, your decisions, even your actions.

The most stunning, terrible, mind-melting eleven words I have ever read was a short line in Catharine A. MacKinnon's “Feminism, Marxism, Method, and the State: An Agenda for Theory.” They were these:

Feminism does not begin with the premise that it is unpremised.

The piece—a thick diatribe against our broken understanding of rape and our failed ability to properly prosecute it, as well as a whole lot more—drops this nugget of wisdom in two paragraphs out of maybe a hundred containing just as many ideas. And yet, it scrambled my brain all around. She goes on.

That is, the equality of women to men will not be scientifically provable until it is no longer necessary to do so. Women's situation offers no outside to stand on or gaze at, no inside to escape to, too much urgency to wait, no place else to go, and nothing to use but the twisted tools that have been shoved down our throats. If feminism is revolutionary, this is why.

Who needs a woman
then they can have an
object and woman in one!

Even if we are revolutionary, even if what I do is a fight worth fighting, it is only because I continue to exist in the face of this vast awful thing that premises me. This is both a literal and philosophical truth in my case. The abuse of a developing child premises the adult they become; the oppression of women underlies my understanding of the world, the entire world's understanding of itself.

It affects men and women. It premises our understandings of ourselves and each other. Patriarchy is terrible for everyone, and we all cannot escape it. We literally cannot imagine a world without patriarchy. The driving animus of my life, feminism, exists because of patriarchy. Patriarchy and an inborn sense of wrongness, of injustice.

That realization, that moment when I see the horrible thing I always feel standing behind me, raising the hair along the back of my neck and I know it's real and true and awful, the moment just before I forget again, it is terrible and sad and it takes all the fight out of me.

“How else to make a dent in an object as immovable as patriarchy itself...?” ~ Dalma Heyn

Yes, my dear, sweet, lovely, and perhaps saddened reader, I get tired. I believe we all do, from time to time.

But then I see something like the video below, and I remember. I remember what it is like to feel the rage of first knowing, or of realizing the truly awful depth of the problem, and to think, “I can change it. Maybe only a little. Maybe only for one person. Maybe that person will just be me.” And with humor and angry and sadness and creativity, they begin to struggle against the wrongness without and the rage within.


And I think, that is why I write these. Because if one of you is new, or has just found this piece, or is reading any of these words and considering these ideas for the first time, let me say:

Yes, it is a terrible thing. Yes, it is okay to feel sad and frustrated and angry. But know this: you are not alone. And every single one of us, to the best we can, are fighting with you.

Until that unpremised day, viva la revolution.

Or, to put it another, particularly Whovian way:

Sooner or later, Silence will fall.


"...'Cause she knows that it'd be tragic
if those evil robots win.
I know she can beat them.

Oh Yoshimi, they don't believe me,
but you won't let those robots defeat me."
~ Flaming Lips, "Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots"