the adventures of dr. diana york blaine

A lot has been said about how to prevent rape. Women should learn self-defense. Women should lock themselves in their houses after dark. Women shouldn't have long hair and women shouldn't wear short skirts. Women shouldn't leave drinks unattended. Fuck, they shouldn't dare to get drunk at all. Instead of that bullshit, how about:

If a woman is drunk, don't rape her.
If a woman is walking alone at night, don't rape her.
If a women is drugged and unconscious, don't rape her.
If a woman is wearing a short skirt, don't rape her.
If a woman is jogging in a park at 5 am, don't rape her.
If a woman looks like your ex-girlfriend you're still hung up on, don't rape her.
If a woman is asleep in her bed, don't rape her.
If a woman is asleep in your bed, don't rape her.
If a woman is doing her laundry, don't rape her.
If a woman is in a coma, don't rape her.
If a woman changes her mind in the middle of or about a particular activity, don't rape her.
If a woman has repeatedly refused a certain activity, don't rape her.
If a woman is not yet a woman, but a child, don't rape her.
If your girlfriend or wife is not in the mood, don't rape her.
If your step-daughter is watching TV, don't rape her.
If you break into a house and find a woman there, don't rape her.
If your friend thinks it's okay to rape someone, tell him it's not, and that he's not your friend.
If your "friend" tells you he raped someone, report him to the police.
If your frat-brother or another guy at the party tells you there's an unconscious woman upstairs and it's your turn, don't rape her, call the police and tell the guy he's a rapist.
Tell your sons, god-sons, nephews, grandsons, sons of friends it's not okay to rape someone.
Don't tell your women friends how to be safe and avoid rape.
Don't imply that she could have avoided it if she'd only done/not done x.
Don't imply that it's in any way her fault.
Don't let silence imply agreement when someone tells you he "got some" with the drunk girl.
Don't perpetuate a culture that tells you that you have no control over or responsibility for your actions. You can, too, help yourself.

If you agree, re-post it. It's that important.

Note:
This goes for any gendered rape, male on female or female on male or female on female or FTM on MTF or non gendered to dual gendered and so on and so forth....

-author unknown

Posted by Diana York Blaine at 10:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (35) | TrackBacks (0)

I would feel sorry for intelligent people forced to make specious arguments about feminism spurred by their own perhaps unconscious fears and need for control if 1) their arguments weren't such crap that it's hard for me not to feel disgust and 2) their arguments get such prominent attention in the media, as opposed to feminist theories, which get none.

David Gelernter continues his attack on American woman and American Feminism that he's been waging for years in an article from the Los Angeles Times, which has dumped the brilliant and progressive Robert Scheer in order to bring us more conservative propaganda. In this piece, he bemoans the fact that college women today actually use their degrees to earn a living and work in a profession instead of just heading home after graduation to cook and clean like they were supposed to and supposedly did willingly in the 1960s.

It's breathtaking to hear so much power attributed to feminism, just as it is to hear that women do not have minds of our own or desires to work but are in fact victims of some nefarious cabal of powerful feminists sending out radio waves instructing otherwise loving wives and mothers to instead become castrating bitches. I teach feminist theory, and upon hearing this, 99 times out of 100 the person I am talking to, male or female, says "feminism, what is that?" So now I find out that in fact their ignorance serves the larger goal of the feminist conspiracy: take over the hearts and minds of women everywhere but make sure that they never have any exposure to feminism whatsoever so they'll have no idea why they are making the choices they make.

Sheesh. Come to think of it, I do feel sorry for someone smart enough to teach at Yale who is twisted enough to need to attack a movement for social justice in a country founded on those same principles. But do not mistake my pity for complacency. This is war, and while we are outmanned, outmoneyed, outgunned, and outpowered, I am not giving up and never, ever will.

Posted by Diana York Blaine at 08:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (0)

It's buy nothing day. Having been freed from the tyranny of Christmas a number of years ago by a combination of my mother's death and my own growing desires for social justice and disgust with corporate capitalism, I am happy to extend the same liberty to anyone else sick of feeling forced to spend money on crap for people who need nothing. You can even get gift exemption vouchers at the Adbusters website.

Me, I just tell people I don't do Christmas anymore. Hell, I don't believe in the whole Christ thing, so it's kind of weird to celebrate the holiday dummied up in his honor. And if people give me something, that's swell. It's none of my business whether people gift me or not. But I've got no obligatory gift in the trunk to whip out just in case. I don't give anything out of guilt anymore and it's not my problem if you only give to me because you expect something in return. That's not a gift. That's an obligation.

I do tend to bake cookie bars and pass them around, and one year a terminally ill friend could not get her family to put up a tree for her, so I went over and did it. Seemed reasonable. But no hitting the mall, no mailing those tedious cards, no making a list, no spending what I can't afford, no trying to think of what to get you because I feel I have to get you something. I don't.

You think this sounds harsh? If we have to demonstrate our love for each other by going to WalMart, we are in real, real deep trouble, people.

Posted by Diana York Blaine at 07:05 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Like the opened door, burnt bras and visible body hair seem to rear their tired heads whenever people try and talk about feminism in an informed way. Cool feminist blogger Twisty skewers gals at a small Catholic college for their aversion to hirsute women; check it out.

And speaking of Feminazis, join me at USC tonight for a discussion of this label, why it exists, what it means, and whether or not we should own it!

Posted by Diana York Blaine at 10:03 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Don't miss this beautiful rant from
Redneck Mother, proving that everything is bigger in Texas, including feminist genius.

The war for our reproductive rights is about to reach critical mass. Time to start womaning the posts! I am glad to have her on our side.

Posted by Diana York Blaine at 09:30 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Dr. Phil's huffing and puffing this afternoon about little girls who perform in pageants. "It's just not right," he keeps sputtering, showing and reshowing pictures of five-year-olds with highly teased hair and lots of heavy-handed makeup. Clearly we are meant to agree that these children look sexually seductive, "like twenty-year-old hookers, as one guest says. And that there's something horribly wrong with all of it, though he cannot say quite what.

First of all, they don't look like hookers. They look like matrons. There's a big difference, but the discourse on these pageants is so limited that it tends to regurgitate untenable assertions about how it's wrong to make kids look hot rather than examining larger issues regarding constructions of femininity and the function of celebrity. The good doctor wants to titillate us so he needs to imply that something heinous is taking place when bored southern housewives take their girls and parade them up and down runways that no one but other bored housewives are watching.

"Do you know pedophiles look at websites for pictures of children?" he asks, getting as close as he can to implicating the moms in sex trafficking. As to the hair and makeup, he's disturbed at how "unnatural" it looks. So has he looked at his wife lately? She's there at every show, the supportive and loving woman, who escorts him offstage presumably gushing about how wonderful he is, since that is what she gets paid for. Her hair is teased and blown, her makeup heavy, her features altered, her clothing matching normative femme dictates.

Why is it unnatural on a five-year-old and not on a forty-five-year-old? Well the obvious answer is because Mrs Dr Phil is old enough to choose to trick herself out in order to attract and keep the moneybags talk show host she's married to. But that does not mean that she looks natural, nor that it is natural for us women to be expected to alter our appearances in radical ways that men are not expected to. Look at Phil. I'd say he puts a shine on his bald head and he's out the door. As a man he already has weight and authority and power and his dress affirms that. Look at me, I don't need to bow and scrape to get your attention and approval. That's what his norms say. We women, on the other hand, are told daily in ways large and small that we do not and should not have power in and of ourselves and the only power we will ever have will come from attracting the male gaze.

Even a five-year-old knows that.

Posted by Diana York Blaine at 04:14 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

So Newsweek publishes a hand-wringing article about how our children need to be asked politely not to have oral sex. The author's a rabbi, so as the follower of a god who doesn't like pleasure unless it's tightly controlled, he lives by the credo that only certain kinds of erotic acts are ok.

Well yes fine, welcome to organized religion. But what amazes me is that "oral sex" as referred to in the article is defined solely as something that girls give boys. There's simply no mention of the real problem here, which is that when we say "sex," we mean something boys and men get and enjoy. Under this rubric, women, it seems, are never the recipients.

Such willful ignorance reminds me of why Queen Victoria would not legislate against lesbianism. She said it didn't exist.

I agree with Mr Rabbi Guy that girls should not be encouraged to go down on boys unless they fully understand the limitations of the return on their investment. No one likes exploitation, at least no one I like. The fact is though that some of us actually enjoy giving oral sex, and I guess he doesn't consider there's a pleasurable motivation to kneel down and blow because he represents the anti-enjoyment faction of our culture. Whether you do it because you're a victim or because you like it, you still should not do it (unless you're married, but then you won't want to. You know the old joke, right? What's the difference between your wife and your job? After 10 years, your job still sucks).

But even considering the Rabbi's pompous-ass daddy patriarch position, it's still frightening that he does not even realize or care that there's no reciprocity in these incidents. The clit's just a gaping absence in this dude's world. (Poor Mrs Rabbi Gellman!) As a feminist, I long for the day when the big moral crisis in a tired news magazine like this one is the wave of cunnilingus sweeping across our campuses--or at least outrage at the lack thereof.

And people tell me we are "equal." Hardy har har.

http://www.msnbc.com/id/9979345/site/newsweek

Posted by Diana York Blaine at 03:01 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I ran across a bizarre specimen of patriarchy this morning. Four intelligent young women have a good-looking website in which they routinely cast suspicion on the women's movement, feminism, and the right to abortion.

I am never as surprised to find a man who attacks these common sense elements of American freedom, as I said in a recent post, since men have more to lose than we do from the advancing equality of all people historically disempowered. But to find women who side with men on this issue never fails to confuse me. Particularly young women like these who are attending or attended undergraduate colleges that either would not exist or certainly would not have admitted them if not for, yes, the women's movement and the men and women who have fought for it.

One is at Barnard, which only came into being when the president of Columbia failed in his bid to get women admitted to that intitution. One is at Cornell, which led the pack in insisting upon co-education for women at a time when it was considered absurd. And one is headed back to Yale, which resisted admitting women until well into the twentieth century, finally bowing from pressure exerted by, yes, feminists.

You're welcome, ladies. And I will keep fighting for your rights, just as my ancestors did, even if you are not grateful for your educational opportunities provided by feminists or even cognizant of the need to keep going for the next generations.

http://toughlove.catallarchy.net/blog/2005/10/30/why-maureen-dowd-isnt-married/#comments

Posted by Diana York Blaine at 09:33 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Found a great blog the other day by a man who describes himself as feminist. I am always so happy, perhaps overly so, to encouter such a specimen. Since feminism is simply common sense, and since men get the brunt of sexism, what with all the dying for our country nonsense, you would think all men would happily jump on this bandwagon.

But most men recoil at the very word, as did one guy the other day who asked what I do. Upon hearing I teach feminist theory, he said, "that sounds ominous." I said well, yes, because we live in a patriarchy, so this ideology is taboo. He then informed me it's actually a matriarchy. Good job of hiding this fact, boys, what with your total control of every institution, including the government, church, armed forces, and industry. Sneaky buggers!

Anyway, this feminist man was attacking a Christian site that claims feminism turns all women into lesbians. He wondered if he would turn into a lesbian. All I could think was why haven't I turned into a lesbian yet? I am always feeling guilty for NOT being one.

http://badchristian.com/htsrv/trackback.php/426

Posted by Diana York Blaine at 05:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

The other day everyone's favorite forensic psychologist who has restyled himself as an all-purpose disapproving scold told his audience that if his wife had her way he's be reading her poetry in a park and lighting candles. "Not that there's anything wrong with that," he hollered disingenuously, undoubtedly remembering his handlers' advice to be less alienating and abrasive.

But his homophobia simply would not allow him to act approvingly of men who like poetry, candles, and pleasing women. Turning back to her one more time, he spat "if you wanted a wuss, you should have married one."

"Wuss," Dr. Phil? Is that one of those fancy smarty pants words you learned when getting your PhD at the University of North Texas? Perhaps that is the professional jargon used by psychologists who discourage men from having an interest in art and beauty.

But really what it seems to me is a term used by insecure men to police gender boundries that have been set up to keep male privilege and power in place and force women to accept the burden of doing the majority of emotional labor in our culture. Well done. Another good day at the office for one of our most sexist public figures.

Posted by Diana York Blaine at 08:25 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Sometimes justice prevails. My friend was sued by a bitter resentful ex-employer who was angry that she had exposed him as a liar. In spite of his deep pockets, and her inability to afford an attorney, she won the case. Last night at the victory celebration, I savored the fact that the judge did the right thing.

Well this morning I find the voters of California did the right thing too. We have agreed that people who get pregnant have the right to decided what to do without anyone's interference. The people in this case are minors, and the conservatives hoped to play on our belief that we need to control the minds of the young even though logically someone who is old enough to get pregnant has clearly entered the ranks of adults in an undeniable fundamental biological way.

Unsurprisingly the vote was split between the heartland of California and we callous fruits and nuts on the coast. Take a look at the map: http://vote2005.ss.ca.gov/Returns/prop/mapR073.htm. If it weren't for Los Angeles and San Francisco, young women around this state would now be even more disempowered and silenced than they already are.

Thank goodness for patriotic Americans who know the difference between civil liberty and tyranny. Let's hope we can keep this momentum going as Bush stacks the Supreme Court with men who like to control people.

Posted by Diana York Blaine at 08:15 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

So I am flying to London, minding my own business, and I look down at the cover of the airline's magazine. Big mistake. Here's the copy: "THE PERFECT WINE COMPANION. She's beautiful, curvy and stylish (but it's not what you think.)"

Oh yes, it's exactly what I think. It's sexism. I can tell, as can any astute reader, that this article is not really going to be about "babes." They didn't need to include the coy warning. But they might have in fact let us all know that what they were doing was a misogynist manuever conflating human women with metal objects. In this case, it turns out to be corkscrews. Yes, corkscrews. How can you gender something so seemingly neutral? And if you were to, for some reason, it ought to be male, since corkscrews penetrate-- you know what I mean.

But since the culture is dominated by men and functions to create and support male privilege, then any object that serves needs to be associated with the dominated class, in this case women. Hence the need to feminize corkscrews. Here's the scenario: you are a human and therefore male; you are privileged and therefore buying expensive wines; you are white but ok I can't really make that argument based on the evidence here; and you are all-powerful, therefore in a position to own said wine, corkscrews, and, yes, woman. And it's all naturalized and justified by cover headlines precisely like this one.

So what exactly is MY relationship to wine, privilege, ownership, pleasure? Well, as long as I enjoy being used, there's no problem.

Posted by Diana York Blaine at 05:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)