Me, the Dog, and a New Episode of True Blood

The disadvantage to watching with the dog is that she’s a farter. I also am wishing I could figure out how to fast-forward through the “previously”s, because they also stink. Like the dog. Who farts.

Whew, the dude climbing on Jason and biting him was pretty homoerotic. But damn, I am tired of this story-line. So tired. How many weeks of “Jason is not as excited about the crazy Christians as he’s pretending to be” are we going to get?

Also, I would also like to point out that I have the Butcher hooked on this show now.

Oh, and speaking of weird things, my co-worker thinks that the orphan in that new movie, The Orphan, is really a tiny adult. Now, whenever I see the commercial, I scrutinize it so closely now, and it’s not even a very interesting looking movie.

I like how, when Bill gets upset, he looks more and more corpse-like. They do a very good job of that, though his neck is still a little pink.

No, not the forehead kiss!

Sam’s a secret agrarian?! Soon, he’ll be writing poetry about the old days and taking a job at Vanderbilt.

Lazarus was the first vampire? Ha, I love that now they’re talking about Jesus being a vampire. And evil is indeed the premedicated choice to be a dick.

Sookie gave Tara a picture of her dead grandma? Good lord, Sookie has the worst gift-giving skills.

Oh no! Andy. What is going to become of poor Andy?

I don’t believe Lafayette’s door was actually locked.

Sam and Sookie fighting is also pretty damn stupid, so why not add throwing away a friendship to it?

And the Reverend is so creepy.  Ugh.

Yeah, I think the last place I’d want to be spending time alone would be the Stackhouse murder house, but that’s just me.

Ha, well, I lost the computer for the last half of the show, but I thought that was pretty interesting. Jessica becomes more and more interesting. Eric… well, yes, Eric. He’s very nice.

And I feel a little deprived of cake-smearing, dirt-eating orgies. Just saying.

White Hair

There seems to come a point in many a white feminist writer’s career when she turns her attention to “black hair.” And then, as you have surely seen, she corners some black woman (usually younger) and interrogates her about her hair, under the guise of “understanding.” You can read such an article here (h/t to Kevin), though I should be honest with you, I did not read the whole thing.  After I got to “It sounds as though black girls’ hair issues are like white girls’ weight issues.” I stopped reading.

There are quite a few things that bother me about this whole approach, but today I’d like to focus on the “Isn’t how dumb I am cute?” white woman thing. Don’t get me wrong, as a white woman, I have long been taught that as long as I appear incredibly wide-eyed-edly stupid (and cute!), I will be able to maneuver through the world of men with less pain. So, I get that “I can do what I want as long as I appear appropriately ignorant” is deeply ingrained in white womanhood.  But Jesus Christ, isn’t it time we admit that we’re trained to do that and that such a defense mechanism ill serves us when dealing with other women (or trying to deal respectfully with men)?

Here’s the thing. This approach is all wrong for many reasons.  But the main reason it’s wrong is that it makes black women into an object lesson in ways that white people closely guard the borders of whiteness against other white people.

Yes, white women, when you write about “black hair,” you are almost always writing about what it means to be a white person.  Because, almost always, your approach is one of “oh, as a poor little, cute, ignorant white woman, who is not out to harm you in any way, I’m just curious about your hair, which I don’t understand AT ALL, because it is so different from white hair” which is, obviously, demonstrably, and on its face just a bald-faced lie.

Unless, of course, you mean that hair like mine is “not-white.”

So, here we are.  The two choices we have are that you’re either being incredibly disrespectful to black women by insinuating that not only is their hair not something you have experience with, but that, because you don’t

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Eh, I started this post intending to rant on about how setting up this dichotomy between “white” hair and “black” hair is a way to reinforce beauty standards among white women and has very little to do with black women, except for to continue to treat them as some strange thing so different from us that they must be held out as the far end of a spectrum along which various white women fall as they move farther away from acceptably white.  So, straight blonde hair? Normal for a white person, beautiful even.  Everything that deviates from that? Not normal for a white person, not beautiful. Bring yourselves back into line, white women.

Need proof? The fact that there can be white women who don’t know about curly hair, when many white women have curly hair, shows you both that the experience of having curly hair is not foreign to white women and that straight-haired white women have some intrinsic sense that you don’t ask other women randomly about their hair, but they think that performing the “I’m so cute and harmless and gee I just don’t know anything, please tell me” act on black women because black women are so different is somehow okay.

There’s a lot to unpack there, but I think that’s the truth in a nugget.

But I’m more interested now, as I think about it, in the ditz-move.

Because the ditz-move is designed to keep us safe from insecure men. We pretend to be stupider than we are, in the hopes that wide-eyed question asking will signal to men that we know we’re not as smart as them, but won’t it be fun to teach us all you know? And then you can take care of me and maybe we’ll even fuck!

In a better world, more men would see this for the insult it is–that a woman is lying to you about who she is in order to manipulate you into feeling like you deserve to have power over her in order for her to exploit you, instead of just dealing honestly and squarely with you.

And let’s be honest, once you figure out that you can use the ditz-move to get out of shit?  Well, it’s really only human nature to do it.  How many women do you know who never bothered to learn how to change a tire or check her oil or balance her checkbook because their job is to be cute and constantly in need of rescue?

Here’s the thing, though–the point I would make to white women–when actors get off the stage and go to a party, the actor who stays in character among her fellow actors is a giant douche.

So, when you use the ditz-move on other women, it doesn’t signal to other women “I am a helpless fragile butterfly, rescue me (even from myself!).”  It signals “Yeah, I’m the douche who doesn’t drop the role. And I expect you to indulge me and my whims.”  It is disingenuous and obnoxious.

And if we can, as feminists, see that the ways that men and women interact with each other are fucked up and damaging to both of us, we should not turn around and pull that same shit on other women.

Mom and I are on the Same Page, Apparently

So, we’re in the bathroom this morning, talking, my mom and I, and she is sharing with me some horror story about the childhood of my poor dead cousin, which she half wants to get into and half does not (because this is the trip of keeping things from B. that I don’t actually want to hear anyway). And finally she says, “Don’t get me wrong, I love you kids. But I kind of wonder if people like us should have had kids at all.”