Symbols, imagination, signs…
It is very interesting to analyze the way our brains work.
For instance. What do you see on this picture?
I see a crappy logo which is pink.
As I was told today by a friend who is studying animation, this was called “Lisa Simpson giving a blowjob”.
The idea is that the logo is so crappy that it is very easy to imply almost anything in it.
But what is more interesting, almost all people with whom I have talked said that they see “Lisa” (3 women and 3 men. Almost all the women couldn’t see it, before I told them where exactly to look, the same I was told but all of the man saw it without any help from me. Interesting, huh?). Is that the only arrangement?
No.
Is Freud right when speaking that all we can think of is sex? Well, not exactly.
You see, people see this in the logo mainly because we are so obsessed with sex that any implications of it are treated as something bad so we are spending more time to search for those things in the world around us.
Although sex is not the taboo it was some time ago, it is still perceived as something dirty and secretive and hilarious, and many young people spend their teens in search for anything even remotely resembling sex or sex-like activities.
But do not take my word for it.
Check it yourself and tell me what do you see and how many other figures did you manage to see.
I will be interested in your answers.
WT978XHYGEPR
I am truly sorry for my language but all the thoughts I had in my head just made ‘woosh’ and disappeared.
The only thing I can ask is WHO created this vapid thing?? (Ok, I know, Miller and although I am a comics die-hard fan, it has proven in time (and practice) that comics do not look good on-screen. And they begin to have a lot different meaning once they’ve come trough the Hollywood destroy… I mean screen writers/producers/whatever-they-are.)
Kid – kicking ass – ok, not bad, being a super hero.
Kid – cursing – why? She was kicking ass without it.
Kid – engaged in really bloody violence – again… why? Why on Earth she needs to chop someone’s leg just to disable him (pun not intended)? Or to shoot someone in the face (and so on, check it, you will see).
Aren’t there enough movies which glamorize violence to add one more?
Do not get me wrong, I am over the roof for the existence of a sassy, female heroine who is not a damsel in distress.
But they are making her so unreal (as far as I can see) so it actually doesn’t change much in the way women/children are perceived usually.
I am going to check this movie (definitely) but I am a little spooked because of the girl.
It is interesting question if I was going to be spooked on the same level if it was a boy (maybe yes, because my issue is not gender-related). Not because of the actions, but because of the heavy violence and the language. What, you can’t be a bad ass without the language?
And I am so tired of the usage of the word ‘cunt’ as an insult towards men. Especially when coming from a female… it just doesn’t have any sense.
Maybe I am overreacting but I am still under the impression of this little gem.
(Thanks for both of them to Jezebel)
What are your thoughts about it?
Where is the line and is it correct to create such images using children. Using adolescence children, to be precise?
“We interrupt this program to tell you..”
It is snowing! It is snowing, it issnowing, itissnowing,itissnowing!!!!!!!
This is so awesome! I thought that this will be one sad, little Christmas, without any snow but now it’s snowing outside my little window and it doesn’t look like it is going to stop any soon.
I am so happy!
‘Got to go and catch a cold while playing in the snow outside.
(And because this is England, I suppose I will have to use these cute fellows to go anywhere for now on but still 
. )
I am not a big fan of Tom Jones because of two reasons.
The first is “Sex bomb” – yes, I admit that out there in the worldm there are much more sexist songs with far worse implications. But still, every time I hear this peace of crap I feel angered.
The second and biggest reason is “She is a Lady”.
This a very clear story of how the ideal woman is perceived by a male point of view (may be patriarchy point of view even?).
Well, she’s all you’d ever want
She’s the kind I like to flaunt and take to dinner
But she always knows her place
She’s got style, she’s got grace–she’s a winner
She’s a lady
Oh, whoa, whoa, she’s a lady
Talkin’ about that little lady
And the lady is mine
If you read it in detail, there are few almost scary lines.
The implication that ladies are the one who man bring to dinner (’cause, you know, she is a marriage material, unlike all those… unladylike women. Wait… what?). But let us see what are the skills that define a woman as a lady.
“She always knows her place” – how can anybody ignore this piece of thought? Apparently the lady is a woman who knows where she stands and of course… this is under the thumb of our male hero. Or she is like a furniture but with legs? Hello, feminism anyone? Human rights??? Didn’t we stop treating women like possessions a long time ago?
“She’s got style, she’s got grace–she’s a winner” – really? Are there any competitions about the grace-st, stylish lady around here? Can I borrow yours, mine has broken. You know, like racing horses. Or dogs… yes.
“And the lady is mine” I asked haven’t we stop treating women like items … apparently not. This is his house, his mobile and yes, his lady. You can clearly see the ownership stamp on her forehead.
Well, she’s never in the way
Always something nice to say, and what a blessin’
I can leave her on her own
Knowin’ she’s OK alone and there’s no messin’
She’s a lady
Oh, whoa, whoa, she’s a lady
Talkin’ about that little lady
And the lady is mine
But wait, that is not all…
“She’s never in the way” – God forbid for a woman to have different opinion or to want to do something else than waiting for his next wish, right? The most horrific part is that he is describing a passive woman as the perfect woman. So if you want to be called a lady, you need to behave properly. And do no remember… it is not your opinion for yourself that counts but of a male.
“Always something nice to say, and what a blessin’” – aw… the sweetest thing. It is perfect – she knows her place, she is always nice… are you sure you are not talking about a robot? Because this is definitely not a human. Oh… I get it. Women are not human… or at least ladies are not human. They are those unrealistically passive creatures, who do not have another wish in their heads but to please their masters… er… men. (I do not know how these two words mixed…)
Ok, so far, so good. She behaves, she wait patiently in the corner what else?
I can leave her on her own
Knowin’ she’s OK alone and there’s no messin’ Apparently, she is a person that could be left alone and if there is another man around, she is not going to throw herself on his neck!!! Amazing!!! Unlike all those other women who do it all the time, the bitches, to leave such a nice guy… and with no reason. Yes, ladies are keepers indeed.
Well, she never asks very much
And I don’t refuse her
Always treat her with respect
I never would abuse her
What she’s got is hard to find
And I don’t want to lose her
Help me build a mountain
From a little pile of clay, hey hey hey
Well, she never asks very much
And I don’t refuse her Above all, ladies are economic – they do not ask for much. So he doesn’t refuse her… (what will a lady ask for anyway?) And she is so much better than those women who will expect to be treated like persons with respect, not dolls with on/off buttons. The lady asks so little… and now the guy can prove how generous he is. Am I wrong or this guy calls most of the women greedy creatures who ask and ask man for stuff (like we can’t buy it ourselves)???
“Always treat her with respect
I never would abuse her” – I was talking about respect and here is respect included into the song.
Apparently under respect ladies can hope they wouldn’t be abused. Because this is what respect is all about.
Right… very neatly described, indeed. And apparently all other women who do not fit under the “lady” label could be abused as much as the guys like… because they are no ladies, they have opinions, they do not know their place and expect equality between women and men. So… bring in the abuse.
“What she’s got is hard to find
And I don’t want to lose her” Yes, it is so hard to find a mindless creature who doesn’t have any plans for itself, not to mention self-respect. So… she is a keeper, that lady. Just keep it somewhere else!
Help me build a mountain
From a little pile of clay, hey hey hey – I am not so sure how to interpret this. I have some ideas but all of them sound so horrible, so I will leave it to your imagination.
Well, she knows what I’m about
She can take what I dish out, and that’s not easy
But she knows me through and through
And she knows just what to do and how to please me
She’s a lady
Oh, whoa, whoa, she’s a lady
Talkin’ about that little lady
And the lady is mine
Yeah, yeah, yeah, she’s a lady
Oh, whoa, whoa, she’s a lady
Talkin’ about that little lady
And the lady is mine
(fade out)
“Well, she knows what I’m about
She can take what I dish out, and that’s not easy” – Hey, she knows he is an asshole. But at least he doesn’t abuse her, so she would be happy, right? (What kind of abuse are we talking about, anyway? Emotional? Psychological? Physical? Because the last part is suspiciously alarming)
“But she knows me through and through
And she knows just what to do and how to please me” – So far, no hints that this is a normal relationship. Everything is one way – the lady who is all that and the dude who is an asshole.
But most importantly – besides living with all his crap, she knows how to please him. Again… are we talking about a sex doll/slave or something? Because this doesn’t sound like a healthy relationship between adults at all. What we see here is a very short, very neat construction of gender roles – women and men. Men are owners, active, receivers and women are givers, passive and they are owned.
“Talkin’ about that little lady
And the lady is mine” – Shes is his, she is his… I suppose he is bragging in front of his friends (male of course) about this… person of some sorts. And she is his!!
And of course, there is so much patronizing about this “little lady” that I really can’t stand.
As a whole, the song is awful but what is even more awful is that many people see it as a romantic or want to be (or to have) the described lady.(One of the things I always think after hearing this particular piece of patriarchy values and ideals in action is “I do not want to be a lady!! Ever!!! It is fucking terrifying.”)
And one of the things the song says is that women are worthy when they please a man, behave according his wishes and that is how they prove their usefulness and gain the right not to be abused or to be treated with respect.
Scary, misogynistic and sexist as hell.
And it wins its place in my “10 things I hate about you”
I have commented this subject with friends and expressed very similar view. But I really like the way this article is constructed.
The author is John R. MacArthur
the text is published here.
“Following President Obama’s war speeches at West Point and Oslo — two breathtaking exercises in political cynicism that killed any hope of authentic liberal reform — I’ve got only one question: Have the liberals who worshipped at the altar of “change you can believe in” had enough?
There was already ample evidence of Obama’s feeble commitment to peace, progress and justice. Ever since he started fundraising for his presidential campaign, it’s been clear that the principal change in the offing was skin tone and slogans. One only needed to read “The Audacity of Hope” to see how thoroughly Obama was enmeshed in the neo-liberal orthodoxies of the Robert Rubin-Clinton wing of the Democratic Party. Obama’s impeccably establishment party credentials — that is, his fealty to the Democratic leadership of Chicago and Capitol Hill — practically guaranteed that he would hew to the status quo when forced to choose.
Even before he announced his candidacy for president, Obama endorsed the Iraq hawk Joe Lieberman for re-election to the Senate; then, when Lieberman lost the primary to the antiwar Ned Lamont, Obama made sure that he was never seen with the official nominee of the Connecticut Democratic Party, a bald act of realpolitik that helped Lieberman win as an “independent.” In the U.S. Senate, meanwhile, Obama’s voting record on Iraq war funding was identical to Hillary Clinton’s.
Liberals, exhausted by President Bush and heartened by Obama’s challenge to the pro-invasion Hillary, ignored their new hero’s record and fixated on his one major anti-Iraq speech, delivered when he was a state senator. Ironically, it was Clinton who best characterized Obama’s candidacy when she said that she and John McCain would “put forth” a “lifetime of experience” while “Senator Obama will put forth a speech he made in 2002.”
Indeed, apart from extraordinary ambition, there wasn’t much more to Obama than that one speech.
So what’s left of the liberal adoration of Obama? The first major defector among the camp followers was Gary Wills, who denounced the Afghanistan escalation as a “betrayal.” As Wills astutely noted in a New York Review of Books blog, “If we had wanted Bush’s wars, and contractors, and corruption, we could have voted for John McCain. At least we would have seen our foe facing us, not felt him at our back, as now we do.”
But Wills seems to be the exception. For now, the leading liberal commentators are clinging to the belief that Obama’s blatant doubletalk — sending more troops while announcing their eventual withdrawal — is somehow virtuous.
Typical is Frank Rich, who though critical of the troop buildup, doesn’t “buy the criticism that [Obama] contrived a cynical political potpourri to pander to every side of the debate on the war.” For the former New York Times theater critic, good acting still counts for a lot: “Obama’s speech struck me as the sincere product of serious deliberations, an earnest attempt to apply his formidable intelligence to one of the most daunting Rubik’s Cubes of foreign policy America has ever known.”
That Rich is so impressed by the alleged complexity of Afghanistan and Obama’s supposed brilliance speaks in part, I imagine, to Rich’s ignorance of American political history. As Rahm Emanuel knows well, milking the role of “war president” (with a backdrop of men in uniform) is a time-tested winner in re-election campaigns, from Abraham Lincoln in 1864, to Richard Nixon in 1972, to George W. Bush in 2004. I suspect that Rich is disturbed that his matinee idol is suddenly being called a poseur by respectable people whom Rich might meet at a dinner party.
In the same vein, Hendrick Hertz-berg, of The New Yorker, twisted himself into knots to present the president as an honorable man. “His speech,” Hertzberg pronounced, “was a somber appeal to reason, not a rousing call to arms.” Of Obama’s “plan,” Hertzberg wrote that “the best that can be claimed for it is that it does not guarantee failure, as, in one form or another, the alternatives almost certainly do.” From Obama’s (and Hertzberg’s) self-contradictory gobbledygook, we may be reassured that “if there is no Obama Doctrine, there is an Obama approach — undergirded by humane values but also by a respect for reality.”
Obama’s West Point speech was nothing if not a tribute to fantasy. Almost everything he said about fighting terrorism and “stabilizing” Afghanistan and Pakistan was counterproductive nonsense (see Edward Luttwak’s recent article in The Times Literary Supplement). As for humane values, it takes more than gall to tell an audience that includes future dead and maimed soldiers that they’re going off to fight for a good cause when, in fact, their presence in Afghanistan will create added bloodshed and recruit more volunteers for the Taliban.
Then there’s Tom Hayden, the former radical and author of the Students for A Democratic Society’s Port Huron Statement, who was a belligerent booster of Obama during last year’s campaign. Hayden, too, is upset about Afghanistan, but not enough to cast aside his self-delusion about Obama. Claiming to speak for “the antiwar movement,” he laments that the “costs in human lives and tax dollars are simply unsustainable” and, worse, that “Obama is squandering any hope for his progressive domestic agenda by this tragic escalation of the war.”
Unsustainable? Tragic? There’s no evidence that Obama and his chief of staff see any limit to their ability to print dollars, sell Treasury bonds and send working-class kids to die in distant lands. And what “progressive” agenda is Hayden talking about? So far, Obama’s big domestic goals have been compulsory, government-subsidized insurance policies that will further enrich the private health-care business, huge increases in Pentagon spending and purely symbolic regulation of Wall Street.
While Obama was speaking to the unfortunate cadets, I couldn’t help thinking of Richard Nixon and his “secret plan” to end the Vietnam War, a plan that entailed a long and pointless continuation of the fighting. Most liberals would agree that Nixon was a terrible president. Yet, for all his vicious mendacity, I think the sage of San Clemente had a bad conscience about the harm he did, about all he caused to die and be crippled.
Instead of shoring up Obama’s image of goodness, liberals really should be asking, “Does the president have a conscience?” Because if he does, he’s really no better than Nixon.”
This article made me really angry. Why? Because it tried to talk about a really serious topic and didn’t say anything. It didn’t try to explain why we are so obsessed with sex or mention how many people suffer and die because of the unrealistic and stereotypical ideas and expectations our society in which we live in projects onto us. And most importantly – didn’t mention how these expectations are projected and reassured again and again.
The author is Helen Rumbelow and it is from The Times.
The way we cope with Caster Semenya, the South African athlete of disputed sex, is to tell ourselves that she is nothing like us, nor anyone we know, nor anything we are likely to know. She is, in the court of public opinion, a freak, no matter what the news is from the International Association of Athletics Federations tomorrow.
I am sorry, who did you give the permission to speak for me? Who are those uncanny “we” you are talking about? If you believe that somebody is a freak only because they don’t fit the gender dichotomy, this is only your problem. Please, please do not drag me into this or try to justify yourself pretending that everybody are like you. Because I saw hundreds of blog articles and discussions about the subject and they weren’t calling Caster S. a freak. Or these people do not exist, because they are not interesting enough or do not prove your point? I remember who made the entire show and it was … wait for it… the media!!! What a surprise!!! The media made the whole absurd fascination with C.S., because the topic was so going to sell the newspapers and nobody thought about C.S., so please do not speak about “we” here. It was you. It was you who shaped the public opinion and presented C.S. as a freak and made fun of her life and every person who do not fit the neat little stereotype about femininity and masculinity looks. And please do not try to describe the issue with C.S. as original. For years Serena Williams have been bullied by the media for her looks. And she is woman, she just doesn’t look like Scarlet Johanson. Which apparently is more than enough to make fun of her. So this is so not about being part of the one gender or the other but the way you look and the way you act. (P.P. You make fun of Scarlet Johanson too… interesting, right?)
So would it surprise you to know that every other day in Britain a baby is born looking different enough that doctors cannot instantly tell its sex? Would it make you feel less safe in your opinions if you knew that for 1 in 4,000 expectant parents a year, there is no answer to that first question: is it a boy or a girl? That almost certainly someone you know has started off his or her life like this? That, when you take into account the more subtle disorders of sexual differentiation, it becomes apparent only at puberty or later, as is the case for Semenya, and the rate doubles again? That children with physical problems such as this are one of medicine’s best-kept secrets?
Disorder? Are you trying to tell us that this is a disease? Like small pox or something? GASP! Not looking like male or female… this would mean that the poor baby could have the opportunity to choose for itself when it grows up. Or that even, imagine that, not to be raised according the stereotypes of our society and the incredible useless baggage of expectations? And this is the first question? Boy or a girl? Heck… gender is not the alpha and the omega of our existence. So can you please adopt a language who shows that? Media, please do that. You are trying to tell us that these kids are having a hard time but that is not true. Our society is having a hard time and the fact that the two neat boxes “f” and “m” just do not work.
Sit down and steady your nerves. Because after that first shock, there is another one. The outrage over Semenya has got British doctors angry. For it jeopardizes one of the most progressive medical experiments of the 21st century. Very quietly, very delicately, the NHS has become world pioneers in this unexpected field. And what makes our team of specialist consultants so radical, when faced with a baby of ambiguous genitals, is how little they are doing to alter that, rather than how much.
My nerves are perfectly fine. Why do you imply that not specific gender is going to freak me out? Is it because if you didn’t tell me I wasn’t going to think that I have to freak out?? Pioneers? Ahem… right…
Britain is the first to base treatment on the assumption that it should be acceptable for boys and girls to look far from “normal”. That doctors may be better off doing nothing to “fix” the kind of confusing genitals that incite laddish, locker-room bullying. This approach asks provocative questions of the rest of us. What makes us the sex we are, and what makes that so normal in the first place?
Because there is nothing more normal than being altered through our society brainwashing system only on the account of our gender. And using the world normal to describe being male or female. There is nothing normal in the way we perceive it.
“These conditions are relatively common,” says Professor Adam Balen, consultant gynaecologist at Leeds General Infirmary. “I wouldn’t say they are hidden because that is an emotive term, but we’re obsessed by sex, and whenever sex is raised all of a sudden a prurient angle comes into it. We are not open enough in our society to discuss the variations that come with disorders of physical development.
Sooo… instead of making this an open topic and changing our ways of dealing with it and may be, changing our ways of raising and perceiving gender it was easier just to hush it up? Wow… way to go doctors, hypocrisy For The Win! What was that funny little thing called the oath? Oh, never mind…
“How do you define your gender? Is it defined by sex chromosomes? Not always. Is it your sex hormones? Not necessarily. Then what?”
Then it is our society. What a shocking news.
Victorian doctors studied “hermaphrodites”, but that term is outlawed now, not only because of its offensive whiff of the circus freak but also because it is medically inaccurate (they have male and female genitalia, whereas often it is more complicated). Then, in the 1960s, the term “intersex” was coined. It’s still championed by some today despite unhelpful associations with “transsexual” (intersex conditions are biological rather than psychological — genetic or hormonal, or both).
I am sorry but why people were paying to see two-gendered people again??
It was at this point in the 1960s that a US doctor called John Money, when presented with a baby boy with a botched circumcision, decided to make “John” into a “Joan”. It was, as surgeons put it, simply easier to “make a hole rather than build a pole”.
Yes, thank you for setting the facts clearly for us. Female gender is a hole, male gender is a pole.
Money’s experiment was fictionalised in the prize-winning bestseller Middlesex, by Jeffrey Eugenides. Money’s theory — that the child would develop a sexual identity that would fit whichever shape the surgeons fashioned its genitals into — was to dominate the world’s medical establishment for the rest of the 20th century. Until it was challenged by UK doctors.
So… the gender is make-believe then?
When Sophia, 45, from Brighton, was born with a genetic condition (called 5-ARD) that made her sex initially unclear, her parents were told nothing. This secrecy by the medical teams was absolutely standard. “They didn’t know what I was, but all they said to my parents was, ‘there’s a problem, we’re doing some kind of repair’.”
Apparently gender is a problem. You know what? It is… everyday hundreds of women and men are assaulted because of the way we understand gender. And instead trying to change this doctors thought it would be easier just to “fix” it, changing the lives of children without telling their parents. This is an utterly bad idea and it will have bad consequences.
She was sent home to an almost impossible life. Her parents were told she was a boy, but they “picked up something strange was going on”. Meanwhile the botched “repair” made life as a boy utterly miserable.
See? Gender is more complex than “hole” and a “pole”.
In adulthood Sophia now lives (“exists” is the word she uses) as a woman, campaigning passionately against surgery to “normalise” babies. Wouldn’t it be kinder, I ask, to make a child less different in the eyes of their peers, to spare the taunts? “That argument is countered by the messiness the surgery itself causes,” she says.
Yeah, wouldn’t it be?
Laurence Rangecroft, a recently retired consultant pediatrician who specialised in these cases at the Royal Victoria Infirmary in Newcastle, remembers the days of the hush-hush operations. “Surgeons used to think, ‘There’s a problem, we need to correct it’, and that’s what they, with the best of intentions, enthusiastically set out to do. But with any operation that is complicated and difficult to perform, you’re not always going to get good results.”
Let me see… they are making people wait for years to change their gender even if they are adults and understand what happens with them and that gender is not about body parts, but with babies they did whatever they want? How was that right?
Then, in 1997, Money’s star patient, “Joan” went public with his story. Not only had he reverted to his male identity as soon as he could, but his life had been blighted by Money’s treatment. His male twin had died of an overdose, and he himself committed suicide in 2004.
One of the “consequences” I understand? One of many?
“In the US, surgeons got very scared,” Rangecroft says. Corrective surgery looked risky, but so did the alternative. “With fears of litigation, with either course of action, I had one surgeon say to me, ‘It’s reached a state of paralysis, people don’t know what is the right thing to do any more’.”
Well… duuh.
Enter Sarah Creighton. As a gynaecologist at University College Hospital, she was the first to set out to compare those whose doctors had, at birth, attempted to “normalise” their genitals, and those who had no surgery. Nobody had followed up on patients in the past, as, cloaked in secrecy, doctors had concealed the truth from parents and child.
Yes, change their gender, than leave them to the wolves (and by wolves, I mean society and by leave, I mean say nothing and do not help).
But she tracked them down and her groundbreaking study in The Lancet found that those who were left as nature made them fared as well, if not better, than those who had been normalised. Being yourself was more important than being like others.
Again… duh? Still, imagine how much better there people would be if they weren’t presented as freaks or pushed to behave in one specific way or another but left them be?
Take Gordon, a man who lives on the north coast of Britain, who “was a male child with ambiguous genitals”. Unusually for his time, he escaped surgery. He was raised as a girl until the age of 3, because of a genetic condition that drastically lowers testosterone levels. Then he was brought up, unhappily, because of changing-room bullying, as a boy. “I always had this idea that I had sisters that I was detached from. It has occurred to me that, since I was dressed as a girl as a baby, I was feeling detached from myself.” His condition was diagnosed and treated only in his middle age, after a lifetime of struggling to succeed in a macho family, school and workplace — never “feeling or acting right”. “Typical males would consider me a sad specimen. But my girlfriend thinks it’s great.”
Ah, yes, the beautiful and sweet life of the extreme two-gendered society. Again we receive hints from the author that it is not just body parts but also the way we are supposed to act. Hm…
So, on reflection, he is glad he was not “corrected” at birth. “I see a society that doesn’t want to admit variation exists.”
Well, society is not made my martians, you know? Society is made by everyone of us and we wouldn’t understand something that is hidden and denied and presented as a mistake or as incorrect. We are making ourselves miserable. You remember the first time you received the talk about how little girls/boys do not do this or that, that this could only be done by little boys/girls. Kids do whatever they feel it is right and always it is not gender connected. And it continues to happen. It is even worse. Have you been in a kids store recently? No? Well, go and check it out.
Creighton’s findings were to start a British-led revolution: first, telling parents the truth about their child’s ambiguous-looking sex and, even more radical, saying that perhaps he or she could stay that way. Creighton backs the statistic from the Scottish study: that one baby in 4,000 is sexually ambiguous at birth. “It is difficult, as the first question any couple ask at birth is, ‘what have we got?’” she says.
Interesting proof of how far we’ve got with all this gender thing, isn’t it? Girl or a boy? Well.. for starters – a human being.
Now, instead of paternalistic bluster, the doctor is trained to reply, “We’re not sure yet”, and refer to one of the major centres — University College Hospital, London, for the South of England; Balen’s team in Leeds for the North — for a battery of tests and genetic analysis.
Oh… so… it’s not about leaving the child alone. Just digging harder for the answer. Shit, so it is ok folks, nothing is changed, we sill live in the world of denying reality.
This is a shocking time for parents — a 2006 survey by the Scottish Audit of Genital Anomalies found that 95 per cent of parents were desperate for more information on the condition after the birth. Most were extremely worried about “ridicule and stigma” for their baby and the difficulty of discussing it with friends or relatives.
Quick question… who is going to stigmatize your children parents? Oh… that’s right, it is you. Way to go parents. If you can raise that child the way it is and show that person is a person despite the gender it would change everything. But it is easier just to mutilate your child, because what everybody else would have said if you didn’t have done it. Well you are creating the problem, not these mysterious “others”.
“It can take days or weeks to determine the sex — the limit on naming a child is six weeks and sometimes that has to be extended,” Creighton says.
Nobody learned their lesson obviously. And naming is so important.
What about relatives, clamouring to know the baby’s name?
Relatives??? Are you serious? You put the opinion of the relatives as important enough to alter your baby life? Please government, make everybody who wants to have a baby to take a test or a parentship course. Obviously being able to accomplish the physical part is not a proof for their skills to raise the kid/s.
“We advise parents to say the baby’s poorly, they are awaiting tests. All children are then allocated boy or girl, but much more controversial is: do you proceed to surgery? That is hard to undo. We tend to think that surgery is all-powerful and by having surgery you have a cure. These aren’t conditions that you can cure.”
Boy or a girl. Because we do not see everyday people who do not feel like a male or female only because they have the matching parts. And we do not see them struggling.
So for the past ten years British parents have been discouraged from surgery purely for reasons of social acceptability, thereby allowing the child a decision when they are older. It’s not always easy. One surgeon said the parents of a genetic girl, with an enlarged clitoris, were begging him for surgery, “rather than the other way around”. Creighton says that the risks have to be carefully explained — surgery will affect any future sex life, for example.
Oh My God! You are saying that the surgeries are not for the sake of the children and they never were but only for their parents to feel “good”? What a shocker.
“We are leaders in this field, worldwide, in terms of disclosure to the parents and child, and challenging surgery,” she says.
Leader is not the word that comes in my mind.
So a generation of children, now coming up to puberty, are facing their own choice about whether they want to look like a normal man or woman, or remain as something far more unusual. They are pioneers.
So what you are saying – normal is what society thinks is normal. And society thinks that normal is two-gendered society because the fact that people are more complicated than that is kept a secret and being something else than male or female presented as humiliating. Hmm.
“It is now as adolescents that they are getting the full information. It’s a stormy time for all teenagers, but it’s really difficult for them,” Creighton says.
“Sweety all your life you didn’t feel good in your skin. Well… it is because of the gender stereotypes. It is not you, it is the society. Please change your gender now, so the society feel again comfortable with you, please?
Everyone I talk to believes that the new strategy is right, after many decades of getting it wrong. But it is uncharted waters. A few years from now the first of the new generation will be able to tell their own story. Are we ready for what they will say?
At the end of the novel Middlesex, the mother of the hero tells her it would have been easier to hide her condition, remain the way she was. “This is the way I was,” is the hero’s reply. When I ask Sophia, in my blundering way, which sex she is, genetically, she replies: “Genetically, I am me.”
Aaaand that’s it. May be the author of this article tried to tell us this but I think she did a poor job.
I spend the last weekend writing an essay about femininity and how it’s presented and policed in women magazines.
I felt so tired emotionally after reading Vogue and Cosmopolitan that I felt like not finishing the essay at all. This subject really makes angry and tired and sad…
I really liked my intro, but I had to delete it, because it wasn’t academic enough.
I do not want to lose it in the white endlessness of my scrap books, so here it is.
Hope you like it.
“One is not born a woman; one becomes one.” – De Beauvior argues in her book “The second sex” and how can I not agree with that? If that is not true why women magazines exist? If femininity is something pre-existing our cultural norms, why are we so eager to teach ourselves something we already know? The fierce way gender is shown as natural is suspicious. We do not fight about the colour of the sky and do not write long books about it. We know that it is there, it is blue and if you stare too much at it, your neck will start to hurt, and that is almost everything we can say about it.
But that is not the case with femininity. It is a social construct. Which means it is created from us for us. Created does not mean imaginary, because the consequences are very real and we see it everyday and feel it everyday, everywhere around us. It hurt us more than everything else. May be because almost everything else is a consequence to it.
But we can’t simply change it. It is not about gender and it hasn’t been about that for a long time.
It is about money, about selling a dream and making something unappealing to appeal to women. And one of the greatest ways to do that is trough women’s magazines. And boy, do they sell the dream.It is like a pink version of “women club only”. It creates a micro universe in which theoretically everything is about YOU. Or at least we are supposed to believe so.
I felt a really strong impulse to add this to my paper too.
And I imply can’t miss the opportunity to post this incredible cartoon here.
When it is ok?
America is one of the places with the strangest laws I’ve ever heard.
Not only laws from the past (like this – it’s illegal to post a stamp of the monarch upside down, ok, this is british law, but still it’s pretty awkward), but even from the present day.
So… let me check this thing once more.
My health, my sexual life and my free will will be in the hands of a total stranger? (OK, I do not live in America… and I will never will because of mindfucks like this, but this is not my point)
No, thank you very much.
My body, my sexlife and my personal choices are my own business, trying to make this decisions instead of me is not only extremely offensive, but is against everything that rights of people are.
This allows somebody to refuse reproductive health care because they do not like dykes or women with blond hair, or because they didn’t sleep well. Or because they do not believe in premarital sex.
How am I going to be safe from them?
Who is going to defend my rights?
The very idea of this law implies that women are unable to take care of themselves and approves interference from anybody.
Is this the thing that America is trying to say?
Are we going back to the times when women had no rights over their bodies?
I do not know what to think about this, except that it’s completely insane and totally absurd.
I really hope, for the sake of all women living in that country, that the law will be changed or removed.
Check what feministing has to say and feminists for choice
P.P. Last question… I didn’t catch the logic behind the refusal to give birth control pills to a woman, because she has emotional trauma from her multiple partners. (And how does the pharmacist know that? Is she a psychic? Or she uses Tarot?)
How is that logical. Because it can’t cure her emotional trauma she wouldn’t be allowed to take them?? What about aspirin? It doesn’t allow me to fly… does this means that I will not have the right to receive it?
P.P. 2 – somebody asked me this in pm in twitter
No, I am not going to be happy if they begin to deny men viagra on the same reason.
But at least it will sound more fair.
I have heard lots of people talking that hate and racism are bond with class.
Unfortunately this is so not true.
The first link is from 6 weeks research by two reporters here in Bristol. As it appears racism is NOT something from the past.
Although the people shown are usually the same, they do exist. The fact that it happens again and again is horrifying.
May be the question is: “would it be different if they had called the police?”
The interesting part is the age and also the environment of the people who acted that way.
Is it possible to say that it is unbalanced? Yes. Does it make it less serious? Definitely no.
The second video is american. All the people portrayed in it are well educated, living in society in which class differences are not so big issue and still they are as prejudices, racist, homophobic as the british people from the first video. This video is made in humorist way, but nothing about the reps is made up.
(Thanks to Feministing for the heads up)
Yes these two videos are different in many aspects but are a good example that racism and hatred, and prejudices are still strong in our society.
The whole story really made me sick. Especially the appeals that he had already suffer enough or trying to describe the crime as “nothing important”.
On one of my favorite sites: Feministing, I found this particular peace called:
What Whoopi Goldberg (‘Not a Rape-Rape’), Harvey Weinstein (‘So-Called Crime’) et al. Are Saying in Their Outrage Over the Arrest of Roman Polanski
A youthful error? Yes, perhaps.
But he’s been punished for this lapse–
For decades exiled from LA
He knows, as he wakes up each day,
He’ll miss the movers and the shakers.
He’ll never get to see the Lakers.
For just one old and small mischance,
He has to live in Paris, France.
He’s suffered slurs and other stuff.
Has he not suffered quite enough?
How can these people get so riled?
He only raped a single child.
the next part of the poem you can read after the jump.
As far as I understood, the author is Galvin Trillin
Although I don’t think that Hollywood will stop it’s absurd protection towards Polanski, I think the peace is very good at pointing what is happening.
