Anyway, I have decided to also hijack this event for my own purposes, and have the intention of not shaving my legs for the entire month. Mostly I want to do this to see what it’s like. I began shaving my legs in sixth grade, before I even had any leg hair, because I wanted to be a grown up and leg-shaving seemed a great way to symbolize that. Since then I have never gone without shaving my legs longer than a day or two. I’ve tried waxing (WTF, ow.) and I’ve tried depilatory creams (my hair is sparse, but strong like an oak tree or something that stuff had no effect.) So I’ve shaved, every few days at least, for 28 years. I never really thought about it. It’s just what you do.

And then last year I was reading a blog by a lady who had stopped shaving her legs because fuck the patriarchy. And she said something that I found fascinating. She said that after her leg hair grew in, she was walking outside one day and suddenly realized that she could feel the breeze blowing her leg hair, and that this was like having an extra sense restored that she never knew she was missing. Suddenly her leg hair was this super-sensitive barometer of outside conditions. One that she’d been removing for years and years. And that kind of fascinated me. Like, what if I have been shaving off the equivalent of my legs’ twitchy cat whiskers all this time? What would it be like to feel the wind blow your leg hair? What if I never knew? And even worse, what if I never knew how such a basic body thing felt just because everyone said that I had to shave this hair off, forever and ever amen and I had never even argued?

And so, this month I am going to try my darnedest  to not shave. It’s cold enough now to be reliably tights/socks weather, and so no one has to know or give me some kind of cultural disapproval of my experiment unless I choose for them to see my legs. That said, I do not know if I will take to this very well. My leg hair is pretty sparse, but it really disturbs me to have it there. I already have a little bit of stubble, and I already really, really, really want it gone. But! I am going to hang in there as long as I can. Now, I will say that if this nascent foliage begins to get caught in my socks and ripped out in a painful manner, that’s a deal breaker. That’s not a curious sensation I long to feel. So we will see how it goes.

No, I will not be posting pictures, but I might let you know what it’s like. Also, you know, fuck the patriarchy.

Some guy in the comments: Well she looks amazing anyway!

Because we all know what’s really important.

Oh, and here’s the most recent cover of Vogue Italia, for your viewing pleasure. (and pro-Ana pinup needs)

No girls.

Oh hey look, it’s another boys-coming-of-age-amidst-some-giant-catastrophe story. Yawn. Oh look. There’s a token chick to be the object of their adolescent interest. Yay. Some untouchable female ideal to get their chubby little adolescent cocks hard. Whee. Naturally the dudes have the action, and the girl is there to be inscrutable and fascinating, and naturally there are not TWO girls. That would be like, weird. One is plenty to get all our kiddie-cocks hard, dude, for real, we don’t mind sharing.

And thus the basis of my profound disinterest. (Also, go look at the trailer. Srs. It’s like, dude, dude, boy kid, dude, boy kid, dude, dude, dude, lady in the background, boy kid, girl they’re all in love with, dude.)

It’s just all “Stand by Me” and every other boys-grow-up kind of movie all over again, this time with a space alien or some shit.

Additionally, in thinking about other media in which a bunch of boys have an adventure with a token chick, I was thinking about “It.” And seriously it had never occurred to me to question or wonder why the only way that the kids could be saved at the end of it is their sole chick friend pulling a train with all of them down a sewer.

Really, Stephen King?

For a treat, go to Super 8′s photo gallery and try to find any females that aren’t Elle Fanning. I’ll wait here.

Oh, and here’s the movie’s official cast list from that site.

One of those is the way that geek guys bond with each other. I know a fair amount of really geeky guys, and they seem to share this vast repository of well-loved cultural artifacts that, although I grew up in the same time period, I do not have ready access to. You get these guys in a room together, and they’re speaking a secret in-joke language of games and toys and cartoons that I know about, but for which I have no real nostalgic feeling. And that got me thinking about the easier way in which guys seem to bond, at least superficially. I can sit down in a room with four other females my own age and we will not be throwing out references to movies we loved as kids, usually. We won’t be bringing up how much we loved our weirdo Barbie makeup heads and stuffed Smurfettes. We probably all share that same history, but it’s not a thing that we’re going to be like “Holy shit, Apricot was the dopest smelling of all the Strawberry Shortcake dolls! Lemon Meringue could not hold a candle to that sweet-smelling bitch. Dang!”

I wonder if in some ways that’s because of the types of toys that were/are marketed to girls. They all seemed to center on dressing up, being pretty, playing house, boring crap like that. They didn’t really encourage us to use our imaginations to have adventures and tell stories, they were centered on… looking cute and grooming. Boring. My brother had $6 Million Man toys that had exploding secret briefcases, and a Pele doll that would really kick a soccer ball. I had a giant disembodied head onto which I could apply makeup, and a lot of stuffed animals. Tell you the truth, I never liked toys that much. I liked books. At least sometimes in books something happened to a girl, or she actually started an adventure of her own.

So anyway, I was thinking about that, how guys seem to create these narratives around their toys and games, and how they could pretend to be the characters in their cartoons, and they could then act out what they saw, and that acting out would be, you know, fun. I don’t remember wanting to act out any of the adventures that Smurfette had, very much. I do remember the guys across the street had this awesome gully in their property and when it rained the water would flow over the rocks there and they had a natural waterfall terrain for their war games. Which I was not allowed to play, being a girl and everything.

So then I was thinking about my friend Pilot, of whom this movie reminded me, and how much he must identify with the movie. Like, he can probably see himself and his friends in not only the performers but also in the crowd. How he has to look at it and think “Oh heck yeah, these are people just like me!” And how even if your community is self-identified geeks, at least it’s a community. At least it’s a group of people who bond over shared experience and culture and interests. At least that’s a banner you can fly. Because I cannot think of a single movie, documentary or otherwise, which with I have ever identified. Sure, there are parts of some characters that I can identify with, but by and large, no one I ever see in any kind of popular or even underground/indie media reminds me remotely of me. They don’t act like me, think like me, and they sure as shit don’t look like me. My lady friends are way too smart to sit around watching Sex and the City and talking about shoes, and they are not going to ask me to watch the latest Kate Hudson romcom with them, if they value their lives, but then… with what are we left, really? So we have no shared cultural phenomenon, and that leaves a hole in the way we bond, I think.

The only movie that has ever had a character with whom I have even wanted to identify (and whom I wished I was still young enough to dress up and pretend to be) was Kick Ass, in the form of Hit Girl. Foul-mouthed, super-skilled, horribly strange and wounded Hit Girl, who fucking kills everyone. Finally, when I saw that movie, I understood about boys and their action heroes. Here’s someone I wanted to be like, someone whose choreographed expressions of pain and rage and righteous fury felt… genuine. See, adult female actions heroes, as scarce as they are, are sex objects too. It’s not enough that they can kill you, you also have to want to fuck them. They can’t just save the world, they have to save the world in heels, maintaining flawless skin and perfect manicures. I cannot identify with that shit from the outset. Even Buffy, and lord knows I love me some Buffy, was very much a sexual object, hyper-feminine and tiny, in heels and skirts and wandering bra-less in midriff tops down the halls of her high school. Sure, she could kick your ass, and did, but she was also there for fucking and fantasizing.

So I think that when we talk about women in general, and particularly any women who are not sort of interchangeable carbon copies of each other (young white thin blond young white thin blond young white thin blond) being under-represented in the media, that becomes sort of a phrase you don’t think about. “Under-represented in the media.” We’re under-represented. Well, what does that mean, really? What is the impact of that? The impact is this: If you never see yourself in any popular media, you are culturally isolated. If there is no shared experience or thing around which you and other people can bond, you are left alone. If you cannot construct fantasy narratives as a child around people who look or act or feel like you look and act and feel, then you’re left assuming that how you look and feel and act is weird. It’s odd. You’re the only one. It’s wrong in some way. And so I think of a group of young girls trying to play together, and most of that play turns into policing each other on how they’re breaking the rules of how to look. And that turns into a bunch of adult women, who play dress up for real now, and police each other on how they’re breaking the rules. In the meantime, none of the geek dudes I know gives a crap how their geeky male friends dress, they only want access to each others minds, their senses of humor, their ideas and imaginations.

Dudes, what a shitty world, for real.

Because I would like to sit around with my lady friends and talk about all the kick-ass media aimed at us that represents the way we are, or even ways we’d like to aspire to be. But it doesn’t fucking exist. And it is awesome to trade stories of work, and recipes, and craft tips, and talk about relationships, sure. The ladies I hang with are Thoughtful Ladies, and they all have specialized, if diverse, interests that make them wonderful and fascinating. But how much more fun would it be if we could add in playing games and talking about new movies we’re totally jazzed to see, with, you know, women like US in them. If WE got to get together and play video games that were created to interest us.

But those things don’t exist because we’re, ya know, under-represented. Or ignored, or erased, or crossed out and passed over. Whatever term you want to use, there are very few things in any kind of media, popular or not, with which women like me can identify. And that sucks. I have no answer for it, but I do feel the lack of it, all the same.

To be fair, I haven’t seen the movie Brothers, so it might feature a “strong female lead.” But since it lists no women as stars, and makes little reference to women in its description and is called, you know, BROTHERS, I suspect not. Thanks for playing though, Netflix!

I mean really. These are all arguments I’ve watched happen online in the last week. The take-down of thoughtful, intelligent, well-intentioned people on nitpicky bullshit. Are you seriously serious? If I have to read about one more person screaming that their identity is being erased because they’re not specifically included in every sentence written about every topic discussed in the history of ever, I am going to turn off my computer in disgust.

And the sad thing is that they’re all right, in some way. It does suck to not feel represented, and not feel seen, and not feel as if people “get” your issue. But then again, that’s life. Ain’t never gonna be a time when everyone gets it. Does everyone have to be your super-sensitive ally, or can you give some people credit for good intenti0ns? And even if I am in need of education on your topic about which I should be more sensitive, dude, let’s just chill out on it. I am not actually attempting to destroy you in the process of expressing my own thoughts and experience.

I don’t really know the answer, as I honestly think everyone has a point that other people aren’t sensitive enough/educated enough about things, and especially all these nuanced, multi-hued things about body and sexuality and gender. But I am sick to death of watching people who are smart and interesting sit and in-fight with each other and cause weirdo rifts in what should be supportive, connected communities.

But I think that’s just the way of it, really, our tendency as humans. We want to bond over common ground, but we also want to be Set Apart, and Other. We want to be the same, but different and special too. We want to belong to a group, and also be recognized as the most Uniquely, Authentically Groupish of the Whole Group.

Shit – maybe THAT’S it. Maybe if  we allow for others’ experiences within our group to be different-yet-valid, we threaten our own identity as a part of that group, most especially as the absolutely perfected distillation we want to be of all that group stands for. And then if they’re different-yet-valid and we’re not right in the MIDDLE, then we don’t BELONG and then our identity is threatened and so we fight that. So… we destroy our own affiliated peer group from a fear of being told that we don’t belong to the group that was originally large enough to encompass us all, until we started splintering it.

Huh. Now that’s a thing to ponder.

So, Julian Assange is someone who is at the heart of a good, important thing (Wikileaks) and also is accused of doing some really bad things (non-consensual sex things, we call that rape.) The rape charges are allegations at this point, he has not been convicted. But there is no reason to automatically disbelieve his accusers, just because he’s a guy who does important things, or because the timing is suspicious.

I will admit that this is a hard concept to grasp, it’s kinda cog/diss unless you’ve given it some thought, I suppose.  Here, I will let FeministHulk explain it:

Tough concept number one: People can do good important things and very bad things all at the same time. People are that complicated.

Prosecution timing, suspicious – and yes, as Naomi Wolf said in her HuffPo article, these governments (US, Sweden, UK) are completely pimping out this fantasy world where they aggressively pursue those accused of rape. And that makes me sick. They’re certainly picking and choosing who’s the focus of an international Interpol-assisted manhunt and who’s not, aren’t they. Fuck you, you three governments. You suck. Most/many rape survivors can’t even get a hearing, and some are dissuaded from pressing charges, given the same sort of evidence that these women are able to provide. Conveniently, this case is the one you take seriously? Give me a fucking break, we see through that shit. That brings me to:

Tough concept number two: It’s not fair that all rape cases aren’t treated equally. That doesn’t mean that this one shouldn’t be taken seriously.

So, all this is going on, and people have complicated reactions to it, given all these tough concepts. And Michael Moore, who was seemingly having some difficulty with concept number one, wanted to get involved and help Julian Assange out. So he spoke out for him, and posted some of the money toward his bail. Now, it’s possible to speak out for and defend the good things that this man has done, without disallowing the possibility that he’s also done bad things. But Michael Moore was not yet on board with that concept, and felt that to support him, he must discredit the accusations.

Enter Keith Olbermann

Michael Moore went on Keith Olbermann’s show and said the following: That the charges against Assange were “lies and smears” and a “bunch of hooey” as far as he was concerned. He also asserted that it was a crime in Sweden for a condom to break during consensual sex. This is actually not true, but he was not challenged on that by Keith Olbermann. He was not challenged by Keith Olbermann on any of those statements. But Keith Olbermann is a journalist. And if he was having someone on his show to discuss rape allegations and rape law in Sweden, I think he should research the case, and the law, and be prepared to make factual statements about those things, or at least challenge untruths. Even if the untruths are committed by warm fuzzy making people like Michael Moore (who speaks for the little guy!)

Now, the assertion that consensual sex with a broken condom is legal in Sweden was EVERYWHERE last week. It may have started with Assange’s lawyer saying it in court. But it was everywhere. You could not go anyplace and read or hear about this case without someone telling you that. And *I* repeated it, because I heard it from what I thought were trustworthy news sources. So I helped spread disinformation, unknowingly, and that’s embarrassing to me! I am really sorry I took part in that, and feel stupid. So, now here’s where we hold people like Keith Olbermann to what I am going to call… say… a higher journalistic standard. Keith Olbermann should have researched this, known the law, and refuted the statements that Michael Moore made. And if he could not do that at the time, he should have clarified after the fact, revisited the issue, made corrections. Because people listen to him and people trust him as a source for news. It sucks that I told my friends some of this stuff and it turned out not to be true, but it sucks way worse that Keith Olbermann facilitated Michael Moore telling it to hundreds of thousands of people.

The story now moves to Twitter, where Keith Olbermann retweets a link to an article alleging that at least one of the women who has accused Assange has CIA ties, and revealing the accusers names. The person writing the article, it turns out, is a Holocaust denier, and most reasonable people will then hold most other things that person says somewhat suspect. Okay, here’s an important thing: KO committed a major journalistic no-no (revealing the names of sexual assault victims, and promoting the idea that they were somehow colluding to spread lies about Assange, which placed them in very real danger) and later he issued an apology for the spreading of this information. Well, wait. What he actually apologized for was linking to an article that was written by a holocaust denier. I guess if the source had been on the up-and-up, it would have been okay for him to link to these women’s names, and broadcast them to all his followers, and accuse them of false rape allegations? No. That doesn’t make any sense. But keep in mind, it’s what he apologized for. And he deliberately stirred up his followers by repeating “I’ve already apologized!” When the apology was the equivalent of “Sorry I burned your house down using gas from the BP station, I don’t like to support BP because of that whole Gulf incident.” Dude  you BURNED THE HOUSE DOWN. That’s what you’re supposed to be sorry for!

Enter Sady Fucking Doyle

Sady Doyle of Tiger Beatdown does not think any of this is remotely okay. She is, in fact, outraged. She wants Michael Moore to retract his false statements, and stop promoting the rape culture by shaming and smearing the victims who accuse men of rape, especially high-status men. Her very sensible argument is that this sucks, and makes women afraid to report rape because the backlash of it can be just as violating as the rape itself, and has little to no payoff in terms of the perpetrators ever being held accountable. That’s the rape culture. We live in it, we know it. But we don’t expect Michael Moore, of all people, to use it against us. Bill O’Reilly? Sure. That crying guy with the tennis shoes and the blackboard? Surely. But Michael Fucking Moore? And Keith Fucking Olbermann? These progressive liberal dudes are supposed to be ON OUR SIDE. They’re supposed to HAVE OUR BACKS. And then when this same old tired, played-out situation happens to someone they esteem/admire, suddenly no—these women are not to be trusted, their stories are suspect, perhaps they work for the CIA, and oh it was only “sex by surprise” and nevermind anyway.

No. Just no.

So Sady Doyle wants Michael Moore to say he’s sorry, and correct himself. She starts a twitter campaign, and you can read all about it in lots of places, so I won’t rehash it all here. But basically she wants MM to apologize, and it wouldn’t hurt if KO fessed up to shoddy journalism, either.

But they won’t. KO, in fact, throws kind of a fit, feels victimized, says he knows rape victims, so how dare anyone accuse him of not being sensitive! Darnit! And he uses a lot of pointed language to belittle some very legitimate greivances, and a simple request for an apology and clarification. He helps start a flame/troll war against Sady Doyle, riling his followers up so that they participate in some adventures with tough concept number one—which played out online as ”I like Keith Olbermann/Michael Moore, he says lots of things that I think are true and is generally a Swell Guy, so certainly anyone accusing him of anything is totally wrong. Fuck you, you cunt.” Which, that’s a lot of leaping around, but that’s pretty much how it happened.

Michael Moore, in the meantime, Mr. Champion of the Little Guy, would not deign to even address the issue. Just ignored it. Thousand of people calling for him to start a dialog, willing to hear his side, and he would not talk to them. Really startling and disappointing, to say the least. I am ashamed of him.

KO, then, in an even more disappointing maneuver, starts claiming that he apologized a long time ago! All this brouhaha is over nothing, because he already addressed the issue! And he tells that to his followers, most of whom do not check that out themselves to see that all he apologized for was the belief system of the guy who wrote that article that he should have never linked to in the first place – not for linking it. Then he starts claiming to be Just Folks, and LOTS of people have linked to it, and why hasn’t everyone attacked EVERYONE ELSE WHO DID IT, HUH? And that’s where we get back to the higher standard thing. Since he clearly knows and benefits from the fact that his voice is much more widely heard than the average person’s, he must show more caution in what he says. Simple.

And Michael Moore? Still silent.

Enter Rachel Maddow

Last night, MMoore was appearing on Rachel Maddow’s show, and the internets threw all their hopes behind her. Surely SHE would not betray us. Surely SHE, so smart and thoughtful and witty and seeing of the big picture, and speaking of the bold words and actually BEING a lady-person and part of a class that is discriminated against every single day, and everything, surely she would not let us down? And I have to admit that it was only with trepidation that I watched the show – I feared so very much that Ms. Maddow would not live up to the standard my mind has set for her. But she did. Here’s what she (quite reasonably) said:

The timing could not be more suspicious. The man accused says he’s being pursued for political reasons. But even if you’re suspicious about the timing, there are two women who went to the police with what are essentially date-rape charges against this guy….Can your suspicion about the forces arrayed against Julian Assange and Wikileaks — your suspicion about the timing and pursuit of these charges — coexist with respect for the women making these accusations against him and with a commitment to take rape allegations seriously, even when the person accused is someone that for other reasons you like?

And then Michael Moore came out and he said a lot of the same things, somewhat less coherently. Which was good, good that he said them. I am disturbed by the fact that this makes him seem like a good guy here, some kind of feminist hero, for people who had not been following along the whole time. Maddow didn’t challenge him to apologize about what he’d said before, she just offered him a chance to say the right thing now – and he did, and that’s good, but it presented him in a rather different light than the actual daylight reality of the situation. But anyway, he STFU with the “hooey” talk, which is good.

And then Olbermann finally bowed to pressure and started tweeting somewhat more reasonable things too. And so… people were grateful. People who had been protesting and demanding answers all week were glad to get anything, anything at all from these two pompous jerkwads. And I don’t blame them. I’d have been glad too, had I been in their shoes. It doesn’t change the fact that these two guys are total fucksticks who only act marginally right when hectored mercilessly for a week, and who only say what needs saying when sarcasm, tantrums, blocking, ignoring and lying about their challengers have all failed them. They didn’t see the light, they capitulated to the pressure. And it’s better than nothing, but it’s not the same as them understanding what they did was wrong. At all. All they seem to understand is that the trouble was not going away until they acknowledged it. And for that I commend those who kept the battle raging for a week. (Since my twitter feed is private, I could not join in – no one would have seen my posts. I only got into it very late when it involved @maddow, because for some strange reason [I think because I was one of her first followers when she got on Twitter] she follows me, so she could see my tweets.) So, I did what little I could. Anyway. It’s somewhat over now, to the extent that any such thing can actually be over.

Exhausted yet? I am.

This whole episode has sucked a little more of the will to interact out of me, I have to admit. I exist in a state of almost constant disgust and disappointment with our media. With my fellow humans. With the culture I am subjected to. It’s really shitty, the things my friends say, the things popular media tells me, what I have to read and listen to and look at all day. The messages that I am not valuable, and my voice doesn’t count, and my experience doesn’t matter, and my opinion is not only unimportant but also not to be trusted. That I need to change everything about myself and even when and if I would do that, it’s still not going to be good enough, that then I am just an attention whore, desperate to please. Women exist in this curious state of can’t-fucking-win-for-losing, as my mom would say. (But she would leave out the word “fucking” probably.) You are trying too hard, or not trying hard enough. You’re not pleasing enough people, or you’re pleasing too many people, who do you think you are? And on top of that we’re never really safe, and then we’re blamed both for doing things that make us less safe AND for being “paranoid” about our own safety. It’s… beyond tiresome. It’s truly mind-numbingly exhausting. It’s hard to stand up straight and remember who you are in such a world, really. And when you have identified people who are supposed to be on your side, who purport to be on your side, and who hold a lot of influence over OTHER people who are usually on your side, and those people kick your legs out from under you—the betrayal of it is heartbreaking.

And so I watched all this unfold over the past week, and I watched the fabulous Sady Fucking Doyle come basically unglued over it, with a broken heart, and lots of admiration. I watched people I esteem, like Kate Fucking Harding, get her back and support her, and that made me glad it was happening and sorry it had to, all at the same time. I watched media figures that I wanted to respect behave in really disappointing ways. I watched their rabid fan bases turn on each other and bring more ugly into the world. I became even more ashamed of all of us, as a society.

There is no moral to this story. It’s only another ugly tale of people versus people, where no one wins and we lose collectively. Anyone have a solution, aside from living in a cave?

So a user named “random-mash” posted this on reddit today – I don’t know if s/he made it or not, but I ganked it to post here because… true it is. And naturally half the comments on it were from guys who were either like – “Really? Why do you ladies let yourselves feel that way?” And then the other half of the guys were like “Stuff marketed to girls is stupid, are girls also stupid?” and the other half (I know the math is perhaps questionable at this point) were like “Why don’t you just pretend you’re a guy, and stop being a girl so people don’t have to call you out on your tits and whatnot? Being a girl is a cry for attention!” And kind of proved the cartoon’s point. So…everyone should read “Female Chauvinist Pigs” so I don’t have to keep explaining all this to everyone, because it wears me out.

Now there is a meme ridiculing all the dumbass stuff you say and do! Feel free to get all butthurt, because, you know,  how dare someone make fun of a group you belong to! Why are people being so mean and not understanding YOU as an individual, and all the lovely, logical POINTS you are trying to make? Don’t they know you’re to be listened to for your wisdom, and not mocked? And also, you have feelings?! And just because lots of people in your group act that way and sometimes YOU act that way, it’s still not OK to make fun!? These jerks.