Say Uncle Oppresses Me and I Missed It?!

All I can say to that is that maybe you need to be a little firmer in your oppression of me, sir!  So to speak…

Ha, no, it’s very cute, the gun bloggers are all worried that linking to women in bikinis shooting guns will hurt the gun-rights campaign.

I decided to interview well-known internet feminist, Aunt B., to get her take on the whole thing.

Me: Do you find straight guy’s fascination with women in bikinis doing things to be somewhat ridiculous?

Me: Yes.  However, in this specific case, not so much.

Me: Why is that?

Me: Well, first of all, it was clearly labelled so that, if you are a reader of Say Uncle’s blog, you would have known that you were going to, if you followed the link, get a picture or a video of women in bikinis shooting guns.  Second, there was nothing in his commentary to indicate that he or other gun nuts think that the only way women should be allowed around guns is if we’re all bikini-clad.  In other words, there was nothing prescriptive.

Me: So you weren’t annoyed?

Me: No, and I’m a feminist; you know how we are.

Me: Ha, ha, ha.

Me: Ha, ha, ha, ha.

Me: So, the problem is not that men find women sexy.

Me: No, of course not.  The problem comes when men act like the only thing women are good for is being sexy or that, if women want to participate in things, we have to be sexy.

Me:  But might women be turned off from the gun-rights movement by videos such as this?

Me: I think it depends.  If the gun-rights movement is filled with lots of images and stories of ordinary women enjoying shooting and owning guns and going to the range for our own reasons and videos of sexy women shooting guns are just a small subset of the images of women shooting guns, then, no, I don’t think it turns women off to guns.  If anything, we see that men who are gun-nuts do the same things that other men do–one of which is enjoying looking at women in bikinis.

But if those are the only kinds of images available to women who might be interested in guns, then, yes, it becomes a problem.

So, you see, it’s not the video itself, but the larger context.

Me: Isn’t contextualization some of that hippie liberal shit?

Me: Yes.

Me: Okay, just wanted to be sure.  I think that’s everything.  Thanks for your time.

Me: You’re welcome.

Edited to add:  I will say, though, that it impressed the shit out of me to see men sitting around talking about this stuff and, though I tease, I hope you don’t take my teasing as anything more than an indication of my loving delight.  I am tickled that y’all would see something like that and worry about what women who see it might feel.  Wow.

And thanks, really.