This is unreal– and an opportunity to truly ask yourself the concluding question: What does it all mean? I’m working on it.
Curiosity strikes. What is up with people Twittering? I simply can’t understand why it works and for whom. Thusly, I am now a Twitterer in pursuit of enlightenment. If that isn’t news enough, I am going to toy with the once fortified wall between my internet personae and actual self. Keeping the two seperate has proven utterly futile (more on this in a piece to come).
For the new and exciting synthesis, follow me on Twitter: Twitter.com/nextwaving
The implication here is that I’m promising more blog updates and the tentative commitment to Twitter as well. Rejoice!
The theory of post-feminism towards which I move, is once more in sight.
Nicholas Kristof offers this thought provoking op-ed, suggesting that women’s relative economic conservatism would’ve prevented our current crisis had they equalized male-dominated Wall Street. Kristof writes:
So could it be that the problem on Wall Street wasn’t subprime mortgages, but elevated testosterone?
I direct your attention to part 1 of Gina Barreca’s piece “Why Men Can’t Handle Money“.
What explains the high levels of counterproductive trading made by men in financial markets? The researchers offer one word: overconfidence. “Those who trade the most realize, by far, the worst performance. . . .This result suggests that not only are investors too willing to act on too little information, but they are too willing to act when they are wrong,” declares the study. “The average annual risk-adjusted net return earned by men is 1.4 percent less than that earned by women.” So those bright fellows hurrying to act on their latest hunches might well be taking risks in all the wrong ways, given that “men (and particularly single men) are more likely to act (i.e. trade) despite their inferior ability. The net returns earned by married and single women are greater than those earned by their male counterparts, regardless of the benchmark used.”
Both of these are interesting to think about especially when we consider the success of micro-finance organizations that lend exclusively to women. Plain and simple, economic studies show that women are better bets to lift their families out of poverty than their husbands.
While these studies are encouraging, I don’t know if I’m necessarily going to file them in the “RaRa” column. I’m terribly concerned about the decline in academic performance of boys and men and despise the thought that women’s success in the educational/public/economic sector rests on her relative fear, caution, and propensity to play by the rules.
Higher education is bursting at the seams with homework-doers and note-takers whose SAT scores may be impressive but are impoverished when it comes to the superior cognitive feat of insight. The wild, arrogant, poetic students and raging, frenzied, bloated traders are dynamic traditionally masculine (though not necessarily male) archetypes and it would be a shame to see them defeated by bloodless prudence, whether or not injected by women.
For your interest, a BBC documentary on our heroine, Nina Simone.
Goodbye John Updike. Alas.
I would direct your attention to his work in The New Yorker, but I always have had one of those abusive, co-dependent relationships with that rag he so often redeemed (I just can’t quit you!). I offer instead his piece, “Fast Art” on Andy Warhol from The New Republic.
Like the pidgin pronouncements of Gertrude Stein, Warhol’s harbor amid their deadpan tumble of egocentric prattle an intermittent clairvoyance, a shameless gift for seeing what is there and saying it. The political turbulences and colorful noise of the 1960s did not bide from him the decade’s essential revolution: “During the ’60s, I think, people forgot what emotions were supposed to be. And I don’t think they’ve ever remembered. I think that once you see emotions from a certain angle you can never think of them as real again.”
Updike’s assessment of Warhol’s art and rightful reverence for his philosophy are admirably in the Pop Feminist tradition (another of the recently deceased).
Well, rest in peace. It’s always a shame to lose a person of letters.
One of the most fascinating movements galvanized by new media is the role and responsibility of higher education as it makes use of exciting/terrifying possibilities online.
First Monday offers us this piece on Wikiversity to think about, and recently I’ve discovered just how many institutions of higher education are putting their courses online free to all. My new blogroll directs you to MIT and Columbia University’s interactive sites, but I’m currently most excited about UC Berkeley’s.
Be still my heart. They have uploaded video of every lecture Thomas Laqueur gives on European History Renaissance to Present. Thomas Laqueur, for those of you who don’t know, penned what I consider to be one of the important books for feminist thought since Foucault’s History of Sexuality.
If you haven’t yet, you must read this book. It blows the gender door wide open. When I discovered Laqueur taught at Berkeley (near my hometown), it crossed my mind to follow him around and harass him into explaining the world to me. Now, thanks to UC Berkeley’s webcast, it appears I narrowly avoided a restraining order.
As thrilled as I am to have these lectures available to me, I’m wondering about the implications for so-called “higher learning” when it’s so radically democratized online. It’s something to consider, but for now, I’m going to curl up with the Professor and swoon at his canonical opining.
“It’s the beginner’s mind I embrace and permit myself now, when I’m very far from being a beginning writer. When I began publishing thirty years ago, I entertained a simpler version of the figment that there were two people around here: I and a writer of the same name. Admiration–no, veneration– for a host of books had brought me to my vocation, on my knees. So, naturally, I was scared that I wasn’t talented enough, worthy enough. How then did I find the courage to launch my vessel into literature’s wide waters? Through a sense of two-ness that expressed, and enforced, my awareness of the gap between my own gifts and the standards I wished to honor in my work.”
“Far from needing the consolation of a certain ironic distance from myself (the earlier distance wasn’t ironic at all), I’ve slowly evolved in the opposite direction and at last come to feel that the writer is me: not my double, or familiar, or shadow playmate, or creation…Now I think there’s no escaping the burden of singleness. There’s a difference between me and my books. But there’s only one person here. That is scarier. Lonelier. Liberating.”
-Susan Sontag, Singleness (1995)
As most of you are aware, Cara at The Curvature has been posting some great essays on Yoko Ono and feminism. I congratulate her on having the entire collected article archived on Ono’s website ImaginePeace.
While New York City has apparently been hosting a historical reenactment of the Ice Age, my line-of-sight has been basically limited to whatever I can make out through that moist hole my zipped up jacket hood makes (is it spit? snot? sweat? snow? one of life’s great mysteries). So it’s saying something that from the inside that little tunnel, I haven’t failed to get an eye-load of Barack Obama on the cover of every single magazine on every single news stand since what might be forever. The guy sells magazines. I get it.
Still, I’m amazed that Ms. Magazine decided to hop on the relevance train clutching a one-way ticket to Utopiobamalandia, all jittery and empty-eyed like its other mildly insane residents. Population: everyone I know.
Elenor Smeal unveils the (not at all cheaply rendered) cover claiming Obama’s femini-cred by relating,
When the chair of the Feminist Majority Foundation board, Peg Yorkin, and I met Barack Obama, he immediately offered “I am a feminist.”
Granted, his little airbrushed representative already has pathological delusions of grandeur, it might as well help those piddling rascals at Ms. cast the term “feminist” into the infinity of oblivion.
And hey, I’m all for exposing the vacuous black hole at the bottom of American politics, which is why I have to agree with Sarah Breslin that the ensuing feminist-backlash is an overreaction to the point of embarrassment. Breslin takes it up a notch, writing:
This is what gets feminist knickers in a twist these days? The cover of Ms.? Oh, how the mighty have fallen. Feminism lies like a beached octopus, tentacles thrashing in all directions, looking for anything upon which it may find purchase, desperately seeking to be relevant again.
It’s funny cuz it’s true.
I’m looking forward to not having to endure everyone looking forward to the inauguration. I just hope once he takes office our country can hold it together. If special-edition Alternate Reality President is what Ms. and the rest of us need to survive, then I’ll gladly take an eyeful of his austere portraits on our withering news magazines for as long as they inspire us. Let’s hope he can fulfill a fraction of our expectations.
A few months ago, Bitch Magazine asked for handouts from the feminist community. In their words “We need to raise $40,000 by October 15th in order to print the next issue of Bitch.” Even though my conspicuous eye-rolls and pages of Bitch are well acquainted, I considered donating some cash as a practice of my conviction that we must support feminist discussions of all kinds everywhere, period. But given, like, a fraction of a second thinking about it I realized how ludicrous it was for Bitch to feel it so crucial to print anything at all.
As their wildly successful begging campaign attests to (which I commend them for running so splendidly), the internet is a much more effective method of community-building and communication than one-sided print media.
No one is wringing their hands and gnashing their tongue more than me about the impending death of print media. The whole industry has been flipping out with all the grasping moans and lashing desperation of a Joan Crawford death scene. But what puts the “tragi” in “tragicomedy” here is the possibility that high quality content that deserves to be one-sided is losing its forum. Some writers are still great—few, but some—and deserve to speak and be heard. Those writers do not contribute to Bitch.
Websites like Feministing, Feministe, Racialicous and the Curvature consistently produce high-quality analyses and critical essays, and spark insightful and community-building discussions online. The emphasis on discourse-based content is not just a given in web communities, it was the foundation of the feminist movement and will continue to be the bedrock of our progress.
Bitch’s endeavor to fund their one-sided anachronism for as long as they can con us into giving our money to them, as opposed to proposing a more cost-effective online presence which fuels the productive work of an inter-play between professional and user-generated content, is short-sighted and bizarre.
In their appeal, the Bitch editors claimed that “it’s not magazines like US Weekly or Vogue that you’ll see disappearing from the newsstands—they have the parent companies and the resources to weather industry ill winds”. This assertion isn’t just false, it’s self-destructive. In fact, it is precisely because the major media players are giants that they’re falling so hard to their knees. They’re cumbersome and steeped in decades of tradition. The sentimentality they lug around for the glory years of their industry is making it hard to be lithe and adapt in a changing landscape. The young, hip, women who hail from a tradition of community building that pre-dates the internet are at an extraordinary advantage to be at the helm of innovation for successful online community building. The absurdity of measuring themselves against the large media conglomerates and demanding special help in order to mimic the terms of Goliath’s survival is the exact opposite of the approach that we need to take.
(As an aside, I consider it manipulative for the editors to name US and Vogue magazines in particular in their appeal, which will immediately read to Bitch subscribers as “bad, stupid, harmful to women, and therefore less deserving of such corporate protectionism than the comparatively righteous Bitch, which we now feel obligated to ‘save’”. You know what else won’t be disappearing? The New Yorker and Harper’s to name a few. How about Vanity Fair and O Magazine? They’ll survive too. And why? Not paternalism but superior content. Bitch aggressively steers the conversation elsewhere).
This is not a piece of writing geared toward scolding Bitch or their supporters. I want to underscore only the invigorating fact that the websites I mentioned above have leaped gloriously ahead of Bitch, and it serves us feminists to recognize a number of things this proves:
1) As hard as it is to admit or confront, the contemporary feminist community doesn’t have “public intellectuals” worthy of a print publication. Just something to chew on there.
2) What we do have in spades, is interested and interesting women of all ages ready to engage with one anther online as Feministe and Feministing attest to. This is extraordinary and could be key not only in generating feminism’s “next wave” but (one hopes) the accompanying public intellectuals to support it.
3) Women’s online communities could be key in unlocking the future of publishing and written media. Women need to figure out why this may be (I’m working on it), and how to capitalize on it, before anyone else does.
More on the future of publishing to come. Stay tuned. Bitch: all the best! Keep the techno-zeitgeist alive.
