and singing this song's no way to say goodbye

Combining two recent themes, we have a college dream about W.

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I woke up and said his name into the empty room. Hard to believe it's been more than five years since I spoke to him in life.

Soundtrack to this dream: "Oh My Brother" - Eddie from Ohio

Metallica LOLcats

http://syndicated.livejournal.com/cute_overload/852806.html

or you can see it at

http://mfrost.typepad.com/cute_overload/2008/09/metallica-4chan.html

Yeah, this pretty much made my morning.

a ranty review about a ranty book

So, yesterday I finished reading Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity by Julie Serano for my queer book group.

I really really wanted to like this book. I expected to like this book. I was enthused by the cover and by the reviews it's been getting. I was predisposed to assume that I would like a book picked out by the awesome book group moderators. Alas, I was doomed to disappointment.

This book is more or less a manifesto. Serano has a lot of political ideas and isn't afraid to share them. She dips into many pots - the media, academia, the sciences, personal experience, anecdotes from friends - in pursuit of her thesis: that "traditional sexism" (oppression of women by men) is far less of a problem than "oppositional sexism" (our society's tendency to make 'male' and 'female' into mutually exclusive categories with no overlap) and making assumptions about other people's genders.

There were a few things I liked about this book. I found Serano's model of intrinsic inclinations (the idea that our sex and gender identities, along with sexual orientation, are neither purely nature or nurture, but based on deep-seated inclinations that are hard to deny) compelling. I also really liked the way she talked about media portrayals of transsexuals. She pointed out that the media is more or less obsessed with showing MTFs putting on makeup, and argues that this is a way of demonstrating the artificiality of trans genders. I feel she has a good point there, and was considering that the other main demographics that seem to be shown putting on makeup a lot in the movies are sex workers of various stripes, older women, and teenage girls trying to be badass. More examples of artifice and genders we're trying to say are fake, I believe.

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Sorry, Serano. I really wanted to like your work, but it just has too many problems, more than I can even list here. One star. And I'm sure that she, or anyone who supports her work, would claim I make these arguments because I'm cissexual and trying to perpetuate oppositional sexism. No. I support the trans movement strongly - I just think that this is a bad book.

This really makes me want to re-read Bornstein or Feinberg or Kaldera as a trans-activism palate-cleanser. I hope the rest of the book group books will be better, though admittedly it's a bit hard to imagine how they could be worse.