Echidne’s Blog just disappointed me in a way I couldn’t have imagined was even possible. I understand that the on-going assault on women’s rights in this country is traumatic. But insulting the feminist advances of other cultures is not the way. Echidne, who is normally a brilliant and insightful progressive blogger, has published a post titled “Mother Russia Finally Waking Up?” The point of the post is that Russia is a horrible patriarchal country and the stupid money-hungry Pussy Riot group is somehow Russia’s only feminist hope:
They are brave women, given what the Russian state can do to them. And yes, Russia is a stiflingly macho and conservative society. Of course the list of such societies on this earth is a very long one. Much feminist work remains to be done.
I so wish that people just stayed away from making proclamations concerning cultures they know nothing whatsoever about. Echidne will certainly be shocked to know that starting from 1917, all women in Russia (and Ukraine, of course) had the right to vote. They all worked and had brilliant careers. While the generation of Echidne’s mother and grandmother excelled in housewifery and wrapped itself in Saran wrap to look good for the lord and master, their Russian-speaking sisters got educated, worked, made their own decisions, and had their own lives.
Yes, I realize that most women did not Saran-wrap themselves in the US. Still, you’ve got to recognize that there is a huge difference between growing up in a society where the Saran-wrap philosophy arises as opposed to being raised in a place where nobody could ever suggest anything of the kind anywhere in any format.
I grew up on books and movies that, with absolutely no exceptions, depicted strong, resourceful, powerful women who were never visited by the idea that they needed to make themselves easy to consume by men or by children. And here comes Echidne (raised on movies and TV shows depicting brainless, eyelash-batting, stupidly pouting, apron-clad housewives) and pities me for being such a victim of the patriarchal society.
Russian-speaking countries are not, in any way, a feminist paradise. However, I can guarantee that, in terms of having a voice, defending ourselves and our opinions, standing up to any kind of authority, not allowing men to speak over us, etc., Russian-speaking women have a lot they can teach to those of their sisters who are still struggling with the inane “how can a woman have it all” (“all” meaning nothing more than work and family) dilemma.
People who condescend to other cultures because they baselessly imagine themselves as superior annoy me. It would be extremely easy for Echidne to educate herself about the long and heroic history of the Russian-speaking feminist movement. Who needs to educate oneself, though, when one can just hear some stupid soundbite about some stupid self-promoting music group somewhere and invent a whole new history for a huge country on the basis of that?
Clarissa's Blog 
I have the same reaction when people try to teach me how to develop the acute sensitivity of politically correct subjectivity they think I require in order to develop a proper morality.
They don’t think to ask whether or not I come from an integrated bi-racial society. They’ve decided I haven’t; that I have an ideology roughly approximating all the bad guys in black hats in the gangster movies, and that being advanced Westerners, they alone are in a position to teach me a more advanced morality.
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That’s what’s so annoying. People just assume that they are superior on every count without even trying to educate themselves. In terms of feminist achievements, many countries pity the US, as hard as some folks might it to accept that.
A week doesn’t pass by without me seeing an article or a blog post containing something egregiously stupid and condescending about my part of the world. I don’t need to explain to you how that feels.
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There’s little advantage in educating oneself compared to the feeling of moral superiority one can have by not educating oneself. Educating oneself takes time, often money, and substantial effort to move oneself from a state of ignorance to one of being able to understand complexity. Being moral superior takes a certain amount of confidence that one’s views predominate within a particular cultural matrix. Would you change that easy position of feigned superiority for one that is considerably costly?
In my case I find that people of the English speaking world have also invested quite a lot of energy in the belief that their countries are no longer ‘colonial’ (like they assume mine was). They know better. They would never do a thing like that, not them personally. It’s not that they would feel comfortable speaking to an actual black person — they wouldn’t — they just think that I should learn better manners when making reference to them. There are specific forms of jargon that one absolutely needs to be able to refer to “the other” in a way that separates one from seeming to have any mean, colonial intent. I have to learn this from these good people, otherwise I’m still among the unwashed.
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People who condescend to other cultures because they baselessly imagine themselves as superior annoy me.(Clarissa)
Lordie, lordie and to think it was a sister feminist that pissed you off like that. 🙂
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That’s precisely why I’m annoyed. A traitor to the cause! 🙂
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There was a recent rather judgmental AP article written by an American woman journalist touching on the supposed machismo in Mexican society. The irony (completely lost on her) is that the column was about how the next president of Mexico will most likely be a woman, Josefina Vazquez. The writer never stopped to think that in her native USofA there hasn’t even been a woman candidate from a major party to the presidency let alone a woman president.
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GOOD point!
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This is “screeching” —
“While the generation of Echidne’s mother and grandmother excelled in housewifery and wrapped itself in Saran wrap to look good for the lord and master…”
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She started it first, so she deserves whatever she gets. 🙂 If you want to insult people’s cultures, be prepared to get some of your own medicine.
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Echidne is not from the US. Just so’s you know.
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Echidne is not from the U.S. I think she is from Finland.
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Yes, Echidne is from Finland and living in the US. Also, I am starting to think that screeching is underrated. I ought to have got into some screeching a long time ago.
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“After a very heated national debate, legislation was passed in 1985 that gave women an equal right to decide what surname or surnames they and their children would use. ”
That’s in Finland. In frakking 1985.
Yeah, what a total feminist paradise.
As for screeching, something tells me your would be more informed than that of this person.
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CLARISSA:..As for screeching, something tells me your would be more informed than that of this person.
I’m not fully sure of what that means. I was thinking I ought to have “screeched” earlier about some forms of political correctness. I have long tried the non-screeching approach, which hasn’t worked out. Here is a form of a “screech”, but it is not my particular screech and it is a bit esoteric.
The Zimbabwean Children’s Liberation Festival
There was a bear in the garden
Playing piano wires in its teeth
A sparrow on the triangle echoed the burden;
The cat on violin clawed out its kin & kith.
Owl’s brassy eyes sleepily clashed like cymbals
While the rat in owl’s beak shrieked in soprano calls
Cricket & Cicada’ steel brush on silver drums
Dappled the scene with a jazzy farewell to arms.
Little Lulu pulled the pin of a gall she found
And BOOM! Lulu burst out of life into the bass drums.
Her mum on the trumpeters screamed & screamed all
round
While the bear in the Festival Garden
Clawed the piano wires in its jagged teeth.
Fatboy let loose a cello sound from his behind;
Violet the violincello sneezed into her mama’s skirts;
Little Farai squeezed Shona juices out of his brown eyes
And, with a flourish, burst into God Bless Africa.
“Bless you,” Fatboy murmured asweat with sweet
mankind.
But little jeering faces leapt onto the sets
Holding Farai down, sang Baboon Go Home
And sneered at Fatboy for a kaffirlover.
Fatboy’s fists swung like windmills facing Dover
Meatball, his expat teacher, dragged all apart:
Tweaking into reluctant ears the art of nonracism.
BOOM! Lulu again burst out of life into the deep bass
drums.
The bear thumped a grim growl from the piano muzzle
Over his jaws.
“Ma, Shakespeare’s girlfriend was a nigger. Fatboy
Said so, “ said Peter the Pants.
“hush.”
“Ma, Othello’s wife was a white girl,. Fatboy said so, “ said
Violet the violincello.
“Hush.”
“A nigger was an Emperor of Rome. Fatboy said so.”
“You don’t want us to know the United Nations or the
OAU. Fatboy said so.”
“Ma, are you a boer?” “That means I’m also a boer.”
“Did you really kill Farai’s parents at Sharpeville,
Chimoio & Nyadzonyia? Fatboy said you did.”
Fatboy’s parents are white like us. But he says you
jailed them for years and years. Why did you?”
“SHUT UP! These brats ask too many questions.”
“But teacher said to ask.”
“For that I’ll take him to task.”
Bootsie, The Ghetto Boy, chewed his lip.
His dusty buttocks showed through his khaki pants.
With paper & comb he played his soul, hoping for a tip.
His brown moth face, his brown moth wings all vibrant
Toward the spotlight, he played hoping for a tip.
In the background of Bootsie’s thin ghetto strains and
frame.
Grimfrown the Beat rested his chin on the great bass
guitar
And with hairy clawed fingers thrummed a slow judgment
BOOM! Lulu thundered out of life into God’s wrath.
“Fatboy says those who take the gap are cowards.”
“Fatboy says Smith and Walls should have been hanged.”
“Fatboy says reconciliation only works when justice is
seen to be done.
Otherwise all whites are lumped with the killers.”
Fatboy by the fountain fought down a great yawn.
The blistering sun sucked bitter sunlight from his fatty
brawn.
Little Farai had his can-opener head stuck fast between the
rails.
BOOM BOOM Lulu detonated again and again.
Bootsie sang:
I got nothing to tell you
That’s not skin off my back.
I got every
little thing to hide
And win respect a mile wide.
But I don’t do nothing
for nobody
‘Cos nobody does nothing for me.
The cat, furious, screeched demented arrows at the
vanished moon.
Lulu BANGED! BANGED! BANGED!
Prefects like hyenas drooled and drew nearer.
The rat in teacher’s beak squealed expressionist poems.
Alice bleeding from the smashed looking glass bit her lip.
She thought the Zimbabwe Festival “very curious”.
Three staffroom typewriters chattered in tune
Thought Fatboy a future minister or bloated monster
Deemed Farai a prick and Lulu too fargone
And declared the Festival a resounding disaster.
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You know, I don’t know where these women come from. (Well, I know now that Echidne comes from Finland, so I will put a disclaimer that I’m not talking directly about here.) The women I refer to are the ones you talk about excelling in “housewifery and wrapping themselves in Saran.” I mean, I know that they exist — they’re all over the tv and magazines and internet, moaning about how doing this and that means a woman isn’t “feminine” (doing stuff like not wearing makeup or high heels and fussing with their hair, not spending all their time cooking perfect meals, not being totally accommodating of the wishes of every male in the vicinity, having their own opinion, reading books instead of “how to please your husband in bed” articles, etc.), moaning about how unfeminine women will never get a man, moaning about how hard it is to be a woman, bragging about their marriage and kids like they deserve the Nobel prize for doing something humans have been doing for thousands of years, glomming onto trashy novels like Twilight and infecting their daughters with the idea that a 150-year-old perverted manipulative stalker vampire is the ideal of a romantic husband…
I just don’t understand where these women came from. There weren’t any like that in my family. My father’s mother was a farmer’s daughters and my mother’s mother was abandoned by her husband during the Depression. My mother had absolutely no problem being strong and opinionated. I was raised to regard myself as an individual, not as a potential baby mamma for some man. I was never told that men were more important than women. I was expected to do keep my room clean, help clean the house, and do my share of the dishes, but that wasn’t anything to do with “women’s work” — my father and mother shared all household duties including laundry. As a matter of fact, my father cooked most of our meals because my mother didn’t care for cooking all that much and he enjoyed it.
I don’t know where these handmaidens came from. I watched the same tv shows they did. Well — it was the Seventies, I watched shows like Maude and M*A*S*H and All In The Family and Star Trek (the original) and Barney Miller and so on — all these shows featured strong, individual women as guest stars if not main characters. I was aware of Fifties-era tv, but I always thought things like I Love Lucy were comedies, not guides to living.
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I think you answered your own question when you said, “bragging about their marriage and kids like they deserve the Nobel prize for doing something humans have been doing for thousands of years.” It is a lot easier to consider marriage and children the pinnacle of human achievement than to gauge your worth as a human being by something other than your biology. Who needs to go to all that trouble when you can fulfill a biological function and consider your duty in life to be complete?
And it is, indeed, scary that in the XXIst century young girls see the Twilight insanity as an attractive life choice for a young woman.
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I don’t think it’s in any way a good option. It’s an option that victimizes the poor family members of the bored and lazy housewife and that damages her health and turns her into an intolerable hysteric. I don’t see why I should respect something like this. What’s next? Respecting the “choices” of a drug addict or an alcoholic? Thanks but no, thanks.
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Maude and M*A*S*H and All In The Family and Star Trek (the original) and Barney Miller and so on — all these shows featured strong, individual women as guest stars if not main characters.(twisted)
I watched those shows to, in them, there were just as many handmaidens. I guess its all perspective. 😉
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That’s not the point, though. The point is that I love Lucies and Give it to Beavers and Partridge Families existed, too.
The very first time I saw a completely pathetic, miserable, contemptible woman on screen was when I moved to Canada and watched Ally MacBeal.
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I hated that show. I watched maybe half of one episode and turned it off in disgust. All the character did, IIRC, was daydream, buy expensive crap with her lawyer salary, moon over guys in the firm, and stand around looking wistful. I had a friend who watched it more and she’d try to describe the plots to me and they all seemed to be “young, single woman sort of wishes she could hook up with a guy and get married but is sort of conflicted by it sort of sort of sort of.” I think I spent the rest of the 90s watching MTV because at least rock videos didn’t pretend their sexism was really an arch, modern commentary on contemporary life.
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OMG. Isn’t Ally Mcbeal the most pathetic fictional woman of all time?????
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I know!!! I put this show on when I have to do an unpleasant service assignment. I end up doing the assignment a lot faster because I want to turn the show off already.
It works.
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