1. R. Mildred has such a brilliant post about the patriarchy-blaming lobe of the brain that I almost can’t stand it. She’s being factious, but her analysis of the ways in which oppressive systems allow expressions of pseudo-dissent in order to actually reinforce those systems is so spot on that even though she’s admitted in the past to having an irrational fear of fat people, I’d totally let her touch my boobs.
2. Lindsey takes down Mark A. Rose in one deft swoop. I could only add, in snarky fashion, that the reason NOW doesn’t have a Tehran chapter is that NOW stands for the National Organization of Women, and while some folks behave as if the world is merely the United States’ wild and humongous back yard, the rest of us are more clear about national boundaries.
That’s it. I’ll probably have mad crushes on more people before the day is out, but I just pulled my butt out of bed twenty minutes ago and have not even been to the park yet.
But god damn, R. Mildred has just blown my mind.
I wonder how it fits in with that long discussion from yesterday–that the accepted social script is to just outright deny the suffering of black people so that when we have discussions in which black people and their pain are given the same equivalence as the suffering of other minorities, it seems, at the surface, like good things are happening in the discussion because black people are recognized as people the same way that the Irish or indentured servants are and their suffering is recognized as equivalent to the suffering of other people.
But as nice as it is to see white men recognizing black people as fellow humans who’ve suffered at the hands of other humans, it still gets to gloss right over the point that Gandalph Mantooth made, which is that the core difference was that the whole system of African slavery existed how it did because of white people’s willingness to not only believe, but to enshrine right into the backbone of our government, the idea that people of African descent were not fully human.
And god damn, if it doesn’t also seem to get at what’s going on in Mark Rose’s post! When Rose asks where the feminists are when it comes to Muslim women, he gets to claim the role of dissenter (in that he seems to be supporting feminist kinds of liberation for Muslim women) in the face of a system that believes that all forms of feminism are bad, but really he’s just reinforcing the idea that Western feminists are selfish.
It’s like the intellectual equivalent of the Three Card Monte. I christen it the Three Card Mildred in honor of R. Mildred. I like it. So much of the Patriarchy is a humongous con, we ought to have easy to reference names for the ways it plays out in ordinary life.
Tiny Cat Pants 