Photo by Flickr user DJOtaku. Used under a Creative Commons license.

Tumblr blogger STFU Fauxfeminists passes along the following comment following a series of posts about penile circumcision. I'm passing it along too because it makes a point that seems to be increasingly difficult to get across. Emphasis mine.

I know there were a million other things wrong with the male circumcision ask that you needed to address, but I think it should be pointed out that every time someone starts a question with "why don't feminists do X" they should do a Google search to see if it actually is true that no feminists do that. Plenty of feminists are against male circumcision; I feel like there are probably more than who are for it. We're just not into false equivalencies to female genital cutting.

Source: STFU Fauxminists!

Speaking personally as the victim of a botched, unauthorized circumcision initiated by a nurse against my mom's and my (pediatrician!) grandfather's direct order that I not be circumcised, I'm still on board with this.

Heck, despite the fact that I'm personally opposed to male circumcision of all sorts I'm still on board with this!

Male circumcision is generally a bad, stupid idea and when it's done on people who are unable to consent (particularly to gratify the esthetic, habitual, economic, or even "religious imperative" urges of third parties) it's not just bad and stupid, it's bad, stupid, and wrong!

But even in my case, where the consequence of my genital mutilation included considerable sensation loss I gotta say there's a false equivalence between conventional female and conventional male genital mutilation.

How can that be? I'll tell ya.

The stupid, sullen, class-obsessed nurse who caused me to be circumcised against my family's wishes nevertheless would have been appalled that I lost sensation over much of my penis and would have been thankful to know I at least retained a couple of "good spots." Because loss of erotic sensation in men is never the intention of male circumcision.

The intention of female "circumcision," however, is absolutely and unapologetically the complete erasure of erotic sensation in women.

In other word my circumcision was considered botched because I lost some sensation. A woman's circumcision, on the other hand, is considered botched if she retains even partial erotic sensation.

Does any of the above make male circumcision right, ok, tolerable, or anything less than bad, stupid, or wrong? Duh no! It's still completely bad, stupid and wrong.

But anybody who thinks either the intention or the result of routine male genital mutilation is equivalent to routine female genital mutilation is... well.. bad, stupid, and worse-than-Todd-Akin-and-Paul-Ryan wrong.

Photo by Flickr user Sharon Drummond. Used under a Creative Commons license. />

So. Was the crucial fallacy of early 2nd-wave feminism in the 1970s the idea that women could somehow possibly live in the public world with the same social, economic, political, and personal rights as men? No, we might still not be there but it's still self-evidently true. Was it that "when women were equal to men" we'd all wear unisex clothes, use unisex bathrooms, be apathetically/indifferently bisexual, and, I dunno, have special cigarettes for women? No, that was mostly about insufficient imagination in a culture just a couple of years removed from the world of Mad Men. Was it that women would become the dominant sex and give up men, shave their heads, braid their armpit hair, and wear nothing but Birkenstocks, wool socks, and purple mu-mus? And definitely no bras because they'd all been burned? No, and besides, that possibility existed mostly in the fevered imaginations of (male) sitcoms and late-night comedy sketches.

So what was the crucial fallacy of early 2nd-wave feminism? Via DailyKOS, Laurie Penny says, I think correctly, it was the meme that feminism meant women could "have it all."

Without wishing to sound like a conspiracy theorist, if I had to invent a way to undermine feminism as a socially useful movement, here's what I'd do. I'd set up a ridiculous standard of personal and professional attainment, one that would be unachievable for the vast majority of women who weren't independently wealthy, white and upper-middle class and I'd call it "having it all". After I'd set up this impossible standard, I'd be sure to make women feel like failures for not attaining it.

Source: The Independent

 Yeah, about that "having it all" business?  Where you can simultaneously have a great education, a brilliant career, a fulfilling social life, a rich and complex family life, feed your family fabulous, balanced meals that you cook from scratch yourself, completely immerse yourselves in your children's upbringing, keep your house spotless, have a wild and tireless sex life with your spouse (or, if a single mother, with an enviable stable of beaux that includes Mark Ruffalo, Hugh Laurie, George Clooney, and Ryan Gosling) and, I guess, never ever grab the wrong remote control while using the tv/cable/x-box/dvr/stereo?

Yeah, that?

Folks, if anyone knows anybody, male or female, who ever could or ever can "have it all" I'll kiss my own behind! So why on this big blue marble would anyone think the benchmark for the success of feminism would be "having it all?

To paraphrase my very successful, accomplished, and well-rounded cousin (who came pretty close) when you see someone and think he or she "has it all" it means you just don't know them very well.

Sweet mother of pearl!  Have you gotten a load of Anne-Marie Slaughter's life lately?  That woman's hella accomplished!  She's got a lot!  She's a former dean and current endowed-chair professor at a prestigious university! She had a great 2-year stint as a crucial policy maker for the United States State Department under Secretary of State Hillary Clinton!  She's a darn good mom.  Sounds like she's got a pretty good marriage.  And she's deft enough, well-connected enough, accomplished enough, and talented enough to contribute to cover articles in The Atlantic Monthly!  That's admirable!  Enviable!  By any measure an amazingly long string of successes!

The only fault I can really pin on her is an incredible gullibility when it comes to what someone, somewhere decided had to be the core promise of feminism back in the 1970s.  And her credulity on that point turns out to be a pretty significant fault.

Because instead of swinging from the Princeton and/or State Department and/or Atlantic Monthly headquarters flagpole hollering "I'm top of the world" she sees herself as such a miserable failure that she... got another cover story complaining about it!

Listen, gang, nobody has it all.  But guess what?  Nobody needs to have it all in order either to be a happy, healthy, well-rounded person or... for feminism to be working just fine.

Instead the only real promise of feminism, for women and men, is that there aren't going to be any bullshit social, economic, political, or domestic barriers to being whoever you actually really are.  All the rest? The ordinary constraints we face in the actual physical world, like the numbers of hours in a day, the number of years in a lifetime, the demands on our immune systems, the forces of gravity and atmospheric pressure?  Only a propagandist or his dupes would think feminism, or any other manner of -ism, ought to let us transcend that.

Sheesh! 

Image from dontknowreally.tumblr.com.

In her review of the new show Girls Amanda Marcotte totally gets how some feminists still fall for the patriarchal-pedestal stereotype that women are naturally wise, serious, moral, hard working, chaste, and otherwise sugar, spice, and everything nice.  And that if they're not then they're broken, wrong, and someone to be both ashamed of and ashamed for.   (Emphasis mine.)

I lament how much ink is being spilled about how it's scary and upsetting to see women performing the same kind of comic tropes that men have done for roughly forever. Now, most critics don't see it that way. They didn't stop for a second to wonder if they'd issue the same criticisms if it was a male-centric show. For instance, I highly doubt Madeline Davis of Jezebel would write a piece where she lambasted a sitcom about a man because the comic main character made a bunch of stupid choices she feels are irresponsible and she hopes that young [men?] out there don't make. Like I said in my Prospect piece, the double standard is staggering. Men in comedy get to be stupid, get to make mistakes, get to make bad decisions and have comically exagerrated bad sex, and we all laugh because we know it's a comedy, not a symposium on How To Act Right. That so many feminist-minded women don't notice what they're doing here is distressing to me.

Source: Pandagon

Overall point being that relentless "positive" stereotypes are still stereotypes.  And even when feminists find them flattering old sexist stereotypes are still sexist. There's nothing wrong or shocking about half the population being below average. Nor, for better or worse, is there much stigma overall that much comedy depends on depictions of below-average people. And, duh, women being people it's ok for half of them to be below average losers too.*

Quick tip: Does anyone old enough to remember the comedy show Friends think any young men consciously or unconsciously emulated the amoral wastrel character Joey?  The dim and mopey Ross? The Maxwell Smart character's brutality or promiscuity in the 1960?  The Maynard G. Krebb's character's pre-doper conformity aversion in the 1950s?  No?

Think any 40-year-old men emulate the Louie character contemporary show of the same name that Amanda mentions in another (excellent) post along the same lines? No? Then either a) ask yourself why the double standard when the characters are women as in Girls or else b) chill.

* It would be one thing if the characters are all depicted as cliché TV bimbos instead of normal sitcom losers. But that's evidently not a problem in Girls.

Anyone out there want to raise their hand and say that like Ann Romney I'm qualified to advise the Republican Party on women's issues?

Because hey, just like Ann Romney I stayed home and raised children.

Hmm... I don't see anyone out their raising their hands.

Kind of makes me wonder if maybe there might be more to representing women's issues than being a stay-at-home parent.

Naah. Couldn't be.

Hilary Rosen must have been completely out of line to suggest Romney isn't the perfect choice to represent all women for her husband's political campaign and, for that matter, her husband's entire political party.

Gotta be.

Update:

Perhaps not surprisingly Linda Hirshman better articulates the point I was trying to make.

Although Ann Romney may be a fine spokesperson on some issues, the dirty little secret of angling for female votes is that while all women’s work, inside or outside the home, has the same worth, as Michelle Obama and Barbara Bush sweetly expressed, all women do not have the same interests. Women who work in the home do not have the same interest in the recovery of the formal job market as women who have to work for pay. Indeed, wage-earning women probably have more in common with their paycheck-dependent male co-workers on the subject of economic recovery than with household laborers such as Ann Romney.

Source: The Washington Post

That sounds about right. When I was a stay-at-home dad I really didn't spend much time thinking directly about either the delightful job markets of the Clinton years or the real-estate bubble. Nor did I think much of the Cheney/Bush-engineered job-market collapses. I instead mostly spent a lot of time stewing about how to manage our household budget while relying on someone else to provide it.

If that had been the sum of my experience of the job market it would not qualify me to say I'd worked a day in my life no matter that as a stay-at-home parent I labored mightily.

Bottom line: In America today most parents are obliged to simultaneously compete for jobs and earn money in the workforce and perform all the duties of domestic consumption at home. To say that Ann Romney's experience in the home qualifies as workforce experience is as out-of-touch as saying that Mitt Romney's experience at Bain Capital qualifies as parenting.