Don't even turn the television on anymore

Objectified flesh covered in dead tortured flesh. Sure sounds sexy to me. Designer Tuleh, who was on America's Next Top Model made sure to mention it was, as he looked at the womyn clothed and surrounded by flesh.

Insert the obvious Carol Adams critique here. Particularly for me, as I looked at the images and heard the (shockingly) sexist and speciest commentary, was the part at the end of The Sexual Politics of Meat where she iterates,

"For women in the patriarchal culture...we have been swallowed and we are the swallowers. We are the consumers and the consumed."

Wrapping yourself in consumable to most flesh certainly drives this point home, literally saying consume me as you would meat.

I keep getting these mailings from Nigel Barker for the last three weeks or so (okay, so really probably the HSUS or some other messed up organization [why am I still on their mailing list?] that pretends to be "for the animals" sometimes--but my e-mail sender totally says it's from Nigel, so...) and I know that these e-mails contain pictures of super cute seals, so of course I looked at them. And they are, SO cute. Like a cold puppy. And I decided to move Nigel up a few points on my cool list because he has this letter that clearly states,

"Like you, I care about animals and I don’t ever want to see them suffer...Each year, hundreds of thousands of defenseless baby seals are brutally clubbed and shot to death for their fur—most of which is exported to Europe.I still remember the first time I saw the shocking images: conscious seal pups impaled on metal hooks and dragged across the ice, wounded seals left to suffer…some baby seals even skinned alive. I vowed then to do everything I could to stop this cruelty."

Replace the seal with another being and fur with flesh and the same thing is happening, only by the billions. So, how is this different again? Shouldn't you be vowing to stop the cruelty to these beings used in this shoot? I don't know how some people's heads don't explode with the disconnect they try to make their minds mold to.

So, I'm obviously not going to show some pictures of flesh on flesh, but I will show a seal pup:

and while you're at it, take a look at this cute cow because s/he is totally worthy of your compassion as well.

Issues with addressing groups

(This is the post in which I will pretend I haven't neglected my blog). I think it comes off a little they said, then I said, in parts; but bear with me-I'm trying to get on the blogging track:

So, a few instances have popped up recently that has made me think a bit. A fairly new co-worker asked me the other day if I was from "the South". Being confused at the seemingly random question, after answering in the negative I asked her why. Oh. Because I used the word ''y'all" when addressing my table, which was apparently weird if I didn't hail from there. After saying very vaguely that it is my favorite gender neutral address, I was told that they were all ''ladies" and I totally should have totally addressed them as that.

I don't know them, or their gender; so I would never address them in a way that took for granted that. The topic, much to my dismay, gets continued fairly often. Cries of, "you did it again!", and little remarks of how I'm a "crazy vegan (though I struggle to find the relevance of this particular quip-maybe just to further emphasize how crazy I really am?) feminist" gets repeated now, and I just seriously never envisioned this thing as labeling me as such. Is addressing a group with gender neutral language that extreme? Really? How depressing. I think my next dilemma quite possibly enters that category, but even so; I think it's something to at least spend a bit of time thinking about.

I finished a short presentation with a classmate and afterwards the professor exclaimed, "thanks girls, and now I believe you two gentlemen are next?". Okay. Even assuming that the classmate I worked with identified as female, and following presenters identified male--there is no positive or helpful interpretation of that remark. It wasn't "ladies" and "gentlemen" which could have been at equal levels I suppose; it was girls. And a lot of times I think of myself as a kid, sure, (certainly at school sometimes) but this seemed deliberately dismissive; especially when put so closely with identifying two males as the latter.

What really irks me even more, as I've been trying to pin down as I've been thinking about it, is that it all seems unnecessary to me. How is it relevant what gender the presenters were (especially in a situation where all of us are getting a grade)? Is it really important to classify my customers as male or female and address them as such? No.

Look at me(!!!): I can talk AR without objectifying womyn!!!

I'm going to preface this rant for just an unexpected moment with: I like Alicia Silverstone, I do. I like how she talks about veganism on popular shows, when asked for an interview, in a way that doesn't seem defensive, or angry; attributes that I inevitably end up producing whenever I'm trying to talk about it.

But seriously: she made awesome, totally articulate arguments for veganism--with her clothes on.

And I'm not to sure with what taking them off had to do with animal rights, especially in a world where this was done without a catch phrase of, "I'd rather go naked then wear fur" (not that this would make it a particularly better argument, but it would at least be a bit more explainable). Just talking about how awesome "vegetarianism" is, (because even though this is one of the rare times PETA uses a celebrity with a consistent advocacy, for some reason it's conveniently[?] left out and reduced to an advocacy that is still pretty down with exploiting animals) without your clothes (and wet!!! because wet naked is soooo much sexier then just naked alone) may, I suppose, somehow makes steps for AR, but a world where animals have rights, yet womyn are reduced to objects, is still a pretty sucky reality for me.

Though this doing things in actuality for animal rights is still a pretty weak argument for me. Naked womyn and PETA is hardly a new concept, surely the "shock" factor of which they claim this advertisement originally was supposed to do, is gone. Indeed, although it is breaking today, it isn't making any huge headlines (though it did warrant a few seconds on The View, but that was mostly so Elisabeth could tell everyone how not mad she is at Alicia, not to actually discuss veganism).

This isn't going to launch a new discussion of ethical discourse in America; it's just another situation where a womyn is being devalued as a person with ideas and feelings, and made into a sexual object where we can judge her physical attributes more accordingly. The fact that it has Alicia's face on it, the fact that she's a "celebrity", the fact that the ad is talking about vegetarianism is all rendered irrelevant when they're trying to accent her sexual attributes at the forefront. The blurb by the video ad on PETA's website by Alicia seems to be the final stamp on this ("I lost the weight" and "I look better now"), seemingly to advocate not to be vegan for any moral implications, but to use veganism as the method and the way to increase your sexuality, a way you too can render yourself fit to serve a male dominated fantasy.

And that fucking sucks.

That's okay: I didn't want to be paid the same amount as dudes anyways

In an America where you can sue a dry cleaner to the tune of 67 million dollars for a lost pair of pants, I'm finding it impossible to conceive that similar retribution has been made virtually impossible for victims of pay discrimination.

180 days to file a claim relating to such an issue is a joke; and the plaintiff, Lilly Ledbetter is the personification of this problem, as it took nineteen years before it was realized she was getting paid forty percent less then the lowest paying male supervisor (see this fantastic article).

Justice Ginsburg puts it correctly in her dissent saying, "In our view, the court does not comprehend, or is indifferent to, the insidious way in which women can be victims of pay discrimination...Title VII was meant to govern real-world employment practices, and that world is what the court today ignores."

The Grossman and Brake article states, "An employer could pay a woman less than her male counterparts for her entire career, and admit that the reason for doing so is because she is female, as long as the decision to set the discriminatory wage happened at least six months earlier. This rule places untenable burdens on employees and circumvents Title VII's substantive protection against pay discrimination."

Will I ever sue because of a pay discrepancy? Probably not. I like to believe, though, when ever I'm in a tough situation that the law "is on my side" and works most of the time (I know, I know; how I manage to sometimes so romanticize 'the law', even baffles me at this point) . But that romanticism is what gave me the strength to tell my boss' supervisor when I worked at the dinning hall, that they couldn't simply change the names of our foreign exchange students to something "American" because my boss couldn't pronounce their real name, and not think I would get fired. (Oh, the good ole days when I knew nothing about 'big corporation' and the ability of an employer to make you want to leave)

This takes so many steps backwards towards getting the pay gap closed. It's something that makes me struggle to find an area where the law is, in fact, "on my side" when they seem to care about an already rich guys pants over low paying workers trying to get through the every day. Yes, these two cases aren't in a direct competition at all, but the fact that the first case can exist while the second is now shut down, is extremely disheartening.

The feminist lurking inside of me

Is more upsetting things happening, or is everything just upsetting me more?

I finished up my philosophy class today; an intro class to logic, something that filled my schedule at 8am three days a week, that I never really had to study for or try real hard because of previous classes taken already addressing the material. It was boring in some parts, in terms of how often the same concept was explained, especially days before tests, and what not, but altogether a pretty easy run. Until today's final.

The last question was detailing how 'Pete' doesn't like to be treated as a child, so therefore he shouldn't treat his wife like one. So I'm going along underlining the premises, as per the directions, and otherwise answering the questions, thinking there are probably a dozen more reasons why this dude shouldn't treat his wife like a child, I come up to the last part: write a counterexample that illustrates a situation where this would not be the case.

Immediately, I shockingly(especially having just diagrammed various other reasons to myself why this would be the case) can't think of anything. Then, as I'm trying just to finish up the test, and tell myself there are plenty of times where I've taken the other side of the argument, and a measly four point question where I do just that, shouldn't be any type of problem for me; I decide that I really don't want to. I don't want to spend any time trying to think up a situation where it would be okay for a guy to treat his wife like a child, because it's not okay. Maybe I'm thinking about this way too much, or not putting the question in context or something; but I feel like that act would always intrinsically be offensive and sexist. And furthermore, (because let's face it, if I'm taking it this far, I might as well go all the way) thirty people thinking about a situation where it would be okay to treat a wife as a child is probably a bad idea. So, just getting more upset really, I just wrote that (not that I didn't want to do the question, though if I hadn't spent the time fuming I probably could have wrote a lot about that too) and that the correct answer is there is no logical example where this would be permissible. And I probably got it wrong, but I feel like the question was wrong also.