Fuck Yeah, Gender Studies!

Scaling up voluntary medical male circumcision (VMMC) for HIV prevention in eastern and southern Africa can help prevent HIV and appears to decrease costs by averting the need for care and treatment, according to the findings of 9 new articles.

This is great news!

Study by London Metropolitan University.

This is a great post from My Beautiful Chandelier examining the way that society treats “the other woman”, i.e. women who have affairs with married men.

I’ve covered the irrationality of societal responses to single women who have sex with men in relationships several times (here and here and here and here and partly here, to name a few). The post i’m linking to goes into some more personal details about it that really resonated with me.

Like Kate, the author of the post, i have had… hmmm… entanglements with married men.  And I don’t feel guilty, or responsible for any heartache that might have happened or could in future. Contrary to (un)popular belief, i am not an irresistible sexual siren—these men had a choice and they made it—to break their contracts of fidelity to their spouses. That’s really none of my business.

I actually had a falling out with a (former) friend of mine when i expressed these views. As a freshly-engaged woman (this is what she said!) she took a direct and personal  (and, if you ask me, irrational) dislike to my contention that as a single person i have no contracts with anyone to uphold.

I remember very vividly that she blurted the word “sisterly” to me. GROAN. I hate the sisterhood argument. I hate it! The notion of sisterhood implies (at least) two things:
          a) That all women are the same, have the same priorities and lifestyles and are oppressed (or not) in the exact same ways;
          b) That a woman has more duty to her “sisters” as a whole than to her own happiness and freedom and must prioritise the majority goals/ideals in place of her own.

But, of course, all women aren’t alike. I know that my priorities and the oppression i suffer as a white woman in the UK are very different from those of a trans woman or a woman of colour or a woman in a less economically developed country. To assume that my (small-f) feminism is the same as—or should take priority over—the feminisms of other women is perhaps the most preposterous (and paradoxically anti-sisterhood, insofar as sisterhood purports to champion the liberation of all women) idea i can think of! 

So, even ignoring the fact that the “other woman” has no contract of fidelity nor responsibility whatsoever to the women whose husbands she might have had sex with, why on earth should (or would) she, as a single woman, feel a sense of loyalty or sorority towards married women? 
Their feminisms are so wildly different! to use myself as an example:
I am single, they are married. I hate the very notion of marriage, not only for myself but for everybody—i consider it an outdated, inegalitarian, unfair, misogynistic and heterosexist (and i could go on here…) practise that should not exist. I advocate voluntary human extinction! To the married woman who wants kids, what sisterhood have i with her? Our goals and philosophies are largely incompatible.
To her, I am the woman who wants to steal her husband. She hates me. I am trashy, i’m a whore. Her world is built around the notions of “wife” and “family” and usually “mother”; mine is focused on challenging those notions. 

If someone wants to cry sisterhood!! in relation to “mistresses” and marital infidelity, perhaps they ought to recognise that it’s pretty fucking fucked up to expect any woman to take responsibility for men’s knowing and willing behaviour towards their wives. You know who’s entirely responsible? The man.

(And it’s not like the same thing happens in reverse. If a woman cuckolds her husband, she doesn’t escape relatively blameless! And the “other man” does not get attacked by other men for being “trashy” or not being “brotherly”. Rather, she still gets dumped on and he gets a pat on the fucking back.)

You want sisterly? Try not blaming women for men’s misdeeds. 

As Kate comments (emphasis mine):

The perception of the mistress has veered between veneration and disgust, depending on social mores.  There’s been a fairly recent trend for laying some blame on the man, but they usually wriggle out of it with statements issued by publicists about sex addiction, as though pathologising it made it all right.  “You’re addicted to sex?  Don’t worry – we have the perfect rehab programme to help you overcome that.  The focus is on learning to love yourself – not just your penis.”  The wife is pitied, quite rightly, because she’s got a cheating bastard for a husband.  The mistress receives very different treatment.  She is tabloid fodder, at once villified and exploited as a source of sex secrets – his penchant for stuffing an orange in his mouth and a pair of tights over his head or a one-time “romp” in a hot tub with a bottle of flat champagne and some soap suds, for example.  Then she’s forgotten – or she cashes in on her fleeting fame, sobs on talk shows and designs a range of handbags like Monica Lewinsky.

Thing is, the mistress has done nothing wrong.  She signed no contracts; didn’t stand in front of an officiate and promise no other to take.  She’s just a woman having a relationship with a man like any other. 

Have a read. Very interesting.

Being legally considered a man in Australia no longer requires having a penis, after the High Court in Canberra recognised two female-to-male transsexuals who have not undergone full gender realignment surgery as men.

Make no mistake, I grieve the loss of Meredith Kercher and the horrible way she died. But I have little doubt that if Knox had been a little less pretty, a little less sexual, and a little less American, she’d never have spent a day in prison for her roommate’s murder.

I rejoice in her freedom today.

Me, too.