The quote on Amazon from the Christina Hoff Summers positive review says "An irresistible, post-feminist Taming of the Shrew." I take it that is supposed to be a good thing.
I hadn't had reason to think about how she'd flip-flopped on whether she was bisexual in several years. http://www.afterellen.com/2009/2/visibility-matters Other controversies include her admission and then denial that she has a diagnosis of bipolar disorder and details about why and how she lost her LA journalism job. She's been writing and deleting her story for ages.
The quote at the end of that article -- where her current boyfriend thanks the abuser for having "tamed" her and she, like, "totally agrees" -- is the real kicker.
I have no doubt that I will be seen as the enemy by many in the women's movement. I will be seen as espousing something that many people fear will set women back a couple hundred years. I also know enough by now, having been a newspaper reporter for a decade and a novelist for that same amount of time, to understand that some people will want to fight, no matter what you say to them. I used to be one of those people. I know that there are some people for whom I will always be the bad guy, no matter how I explain myself.
She seems to have confused bad personal decisions with having dismantled all of feminism.
An irresistible, post-feminist Taming of the Shrew
Presumably any Taming of the Shrew is going to be post-feminist. Or pre-feminist.
This new book is sad. Jackie Parker Posey Parsley Paisley has sold out, man.
Was "10 Things I Hate About You" particularly pre- or post-feminist?
Shouldnt this be "The Asshole Alleged Feminist and the Abusive Asshole"?
I think oudemia said it best by suggesting that this woman has not demonstrated that she is worth reading.
Person first, people. It's "an asshole who is abusive."
Oh, definitely she seems like a piece of work herself.
Here's the cached blog post.
http://redravine.wordpress.com/2009/07/16/the-case-of-alisa-valdes-rodriguez-is-it-envy-or-earned/
This is a post about a book review of one of her novels. The novel, as described, and her current situation are congruent enough that one wonders how 'true' the memoir really is. She's clearly got an ability to write herself into and through a trainwreck, as evidenced by her efforts to distance herself from the 3,000 word resignation letter she'd sent a few years earlier that ended up going viral. (I don't have time to find that link again, but it's out there.)
Not that this is the most important detail, but:
Then, at my first prenatal ultrasound appointment, the technician told me something terrifying. There was no baby anymore. The blood tests said I was pregnant, but there was no detectable sack or embryo. They rushed me to the hospital, thinking I was having an ectopic pregnancy. After observing me for a week, they concluded instead that I had miscarried.
This makes no sense whatsoever. The first two sentences have happened to me, and then all involved jumped immediately to the last phrase.
The more reviews I read, the more it sounds like this woman is a terrible writer, whatever her politics/feminisms are. From Jezebel:
The memoir follows single mom Valdes' adventure on a dating site as she attempts to find a guy who "belonged to a food co-op yet understood snark and appreciated sushi... a man with a flurry of liberal bumper stickers on his Subaru."
Yet? None of those three things is at all surprising in the company of the others.
15: Yeah, that makes less than zero sense. A week of observation for a suspected ectopic pregnancy? They can, you know, actually check to see.
Also, the more I read, the more she sounds like the world's most unreliable narrator. I'm quite happy to believe that he's an abusive asshole, but I don't believe any of her descriptions of her own behavior. It just sounds too glib.
This is actually reminding me of Penelope Trunk. The same kind of true love/abuse all played out in public online, and the same sort of urban/rural themes. Both of them have my sympathy insofar as they're having difficult times, but I have no opinion as to what's actually happened or who did what to whom.
The person who is a narrator and who is unreliable and who may be a feminist and the man who is a cowboy who is an asshole who may be abusive.
Apparently being converted from non-abusive relationships to abusive relationships works as well as being converted from gay to straight.
There is also an angle with autism here, since one of the things the Cow-douche did was convince her that her kid was not in fact autistic, he just (like her!) needed a firm hand.
a never-been-married 52-year-old conservative actor-rancher named Steve Lane, who collects guns, buys only American cars and watches Fox News
I had not realized that "real man" was so coincident with "evident loser". I was surprised he didn't look more like the comic book guy.
Just from reading the original link, nothing about this seems reliable. Especially including the concept of "Difference Feminism", which sounds about as healthy as eating cement.
which sounds about as healthy as eating cement.
If you think my mash potatoes are that bad, just come out and say it.
We mash potatoed all night long on American Bandstand.
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If you ever served me a steaming pile of Difference Feminism, I would, in fact, come out and say it.
Related(ish): would you rather have Jeremy Irons or Phil Gingery as your OB-GYN?
Now how is that related to potatoes?
You know what sounds kinda-sorta similar to this -- even by a terrible person! -- but actually good and not marred by the author's own unreliability? The Last American Man by Elizabeth Gilbert (of Eat Pray Love trash fame).
Jeremy Irons: Our most tuberular actor.
31 - I thought for a minute you meant Dave Gingery, which I think is actually a better party game.
32: Dr. Gingery has delivered a lot of babies.
The person who is a narrator and who is unreliable and who may be a feminist and the man who is a cowboy who is an asshole who may be abusive.
There's no way Danny Kaye could remember which one of them held the poison.
I just caught that I'd put the quote in 15 into my syllabus, due to a copy-and-paste error. WHOOPS.
actor-rancher named Steve Lane
The male pendant of "actress-model"?
You'd certainly find out if anyone reads the syllabus.
Even ignoring the unreliability of the narrator in these reports, there's something else that bothers me about the whole thing. I want to say that I don't condone violence or abuse of any kind. But the non-violent parts of this and Penelope Trunk fit in with a trend I've seen from some several other stories I've heard, namely, when manipulative people get involved with other manipulative people and then are shocked when they end up getting out-manipulated. Sorry, hon, I have no sympathy for you.
I'm quite happy to believe that he's an abusive asshole, but I don't believe any of her descriptions of her own behavior
Isnt it just as likely that she modified him to fit her story-line?
"Those who seek drama will find it" is a good something something.
Sure. But there's a very messy path of mitigating an abuser's abuse when the recipient is also a total asshole, and I wanted to keep a wide berth from that territory.
I seek drama. I find it on TV.
45, 47: ENOUGH WITH THE SPONSORED COMMENTS, USA NETWORK.
a trend I've seen from some several other stories I've heard, namely, when manipulative people get involved with other manipulative people and then are shocked when they end up getting out-manipulated. Sorry, hon, I have no sympathy for you.
This makes me uncomfortable. I suppose there's a point at which I completely lose sympathy for someone, but it's well past "manipulative", which read expansively covers (at times) me and most other people I know. I figure it's workable to keep believing that people shouldn't maltreat each other, even when the person being maltreated started it by being really annoying.
46:
I am just disinclined to believe that I have any ability to figure out whether there are any parts that have not been modified for effect.
Or wait TNT. HAH YOUR MARKETING FAILED, TNT NETWORK THAT HAS THE SLOGAN 'We Know Drama' AND SUCH HIT SHOWS AS "Franklin & Bash" AND "Rizzoli & Isles" AND "Law & Order" AND "NBA & On TNT".
That, certainly. The whole thing could be fiction start to finish.
Well, obviously TNT runs fictitious programming.
"Ted Turner" was a composite character.
Speaking of the NBA on TNT, while watching it recently I had the totally libellous thought that Craig Sager is potentially the next Jimmy Saville. Who knows what lies behind those weird ass clothes.
56: you've made a weird add out of yourself and Halford. Well done. Now borrow a set from Craig Sager and cover up.
It's like this woman is trying to be her own Thomas Friedman's taxi driver and doesn't know how to live a life that's not some sort of contrarian anecdote.
There's no way Danny Kaye could remember which one of them held the poison.
Well done.
As Will can also attest these kind of stories are routine and it appears from time to time the crazies people who might be crazy are somehow getting writing gigs out of it. On New Year's day one woman decided to get back at her boyfriend for breaking up with her for drunkenly fucking another dude by calling us and telling me her chronically abusive boyfriend had hit her and then dragged her down the snowy driveway by her arm. Like an asshole I "refuse to do my job" and observe she doesn't have a hair out of place and there's no marks in the snow. She then decides while she's gathering her belongings to try and embarrass him by telling us all of the crazy lines he used on her while he was presumably off his meds (stuff like how they're soulmates who met in a previous life on another planet). Me pointing out that apparently those lines got him in her pants was not appreciated.
I honestly don't know what to think about this, but based on the fact that she now says her new boyfriend has written a thank-you note to the "Cowboy" -- a man Valdes says has beaten and raped her -- for "taming" her so well and that she thinks that's terrific, well, I hope for her sake she's made the whole thing up. Christ.
Well done.
Thank you. I was hoping people would appreciate that.
They can, you know, actually check to see.
Perhaps she hadn't had the little window installed.
Are you claiming she's a UNIX?
Maybe the ultrasound doesn't look at the little tubes.
Oh hey look who has time to comment on the internet after scoring a TOTALLY BOGUS SNOW DAY off of work.
70: SLC is a lawless hellscape in the snow???
It's my day off but I don't get out of squat. That was a dig at Cala.
Look, I have my own agenda. Harvard, out. University of Utah, in. I'm gonna get a 4.0 in damage.
SORRY, IT'S OUR GO TIME.
73: Sez you. I normally have Fridays free of teaching! :P
I'm surprised we closed because the typical attitude towards snow around here is "I have AWD am INVINCIBLE [crash]" but I'm glad we did because students coming in on 89 would have been toast.
My street is not actually passable in my car. A neighbor plowed my driveway for me but I think I need to invest in snowshoes, or a truck. (either way.)
I'm just bitter that my wife's district didn't close.
or a truck.
The Subaru is inevitable, quit fighting it.
65 is pretty much my take on the whole thing. Who the hell writes thank you notes to exes?
79: Ha. I want one, but shiv thinks they're ugly.
The Subaru is inevitable, quit fighting it.
This was what my husband and I repeatedly said to each other last night during the hour it took us to drive 3.5 miles to get home.
I'm not a big Subaru fan, but I'd make an exception if I lived in Utah.
If you have a Subaru, you'll have more occasions to use the word "Boxer."
I was going to get a more fuel-efficient car if I stayed in (non-snowy parts of) California, but now that I'm moving somewhere with colder winters, I think I'm sticking with the Subaru.
86: Exactly our thinking. My husband wanted to get a Nissan Leaf and after all the snow we've had lately he decided that he really needs a Subaru.
I finally got out of the rental Prius and back into a real car. God what a nightmare, in any climate.
Anyhow, if you're considering an electric car in Utah, DEFINITELY go for the Volt over the Leaf for driving in snow.
" I figure it's workable to keep believing that people shouldn't maltreat each other, even when the person being maltreated started it by being really annoying."
really? what about treating me like a troll? and i even didnt start it all, so that doesnt fit this your very noble thesis, imo
i mean what's use to say always nice and correct things if one cant be always consistent
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Feminists and Abusive Assholes?
Crisis in the SWP? Richard Seymour
Oh, lots of comments
LP's tile:"What does the SWP's way of dealing with sex assault allegations tell us about the left?"
2nd of even more comments:"And because accusing everyone who criticises [Laurie Penny] of being a sexist or bigot is a good way of deflecting the fact she's from a very wealthy and priviliged background that most people in this country could only dream of - Private school, oxbridge, media luvvie and co-editer of the New Statesman by her mid 20's etc"
Just read Hobsbawm this morning on 2nd Wave Feminism:
This observation does not justify one form of rule rather than the other, but it may help to explain why many women who, for want of anything better, had learned over the generations to 'work the system' were relatively indifferent to liberal middle-class demands which appeared to offer no such practical advantages. After all, even within the bourgeois liberal society, middle-class and petty-bourgeois Frenchwomen, far from foolish and not often given to gentle passivity, did not bother to support the cause of women's suffrage in large numbers.Since times were changing and the subordination of women was universal, overt and proudly advertised by men, this still left plenty of room for movements of feminine emancipation. Yet insofar as these were likely to gain support among the mass of women in this period, it was paradoxically not as specifically feminist movements, but as women's components within movements of universal human emancipation. Hence the appeal of the new social revolutionary and socialist movements. They were specifically committed to women's emancipation - the most popular exposition of socialism by the leader of the German Social Democratic Party was, significantly, August Bebel's Woman and Socialism. Indeed, socialist movements provided much the most favourable public environment for women, other than entertainers and a few very favoured daughters of the elite, to develop their personalities and talents. But more than this, they promised a total trans-
formation of society which, as realistic women well knew, would be required to change the ancient pattern of the relation between the sexes.
"As Bernard Shaw pointed out to an emancipated female correspondent, woman's emancipation was chiefly about her"
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More from a name you know.
The writer China Mieville, a longstanding member of the SWP, told me that, like many members, he is "aghast":"The way such allegations were dealt with - complete with questions about accusers' past relationships and drinking habits that we would instantly, rightly denounce as sexist in any other context - was appalling. It's a terrible problem of democracy, accountability and internal culture that such a situation can occur, as is the fact that those arguing against the official line in a fashion deemed unacceptable to those in charge could be expelled for 'secret factionalism."
Mieville explained that in his party, as in so many other organisations, the power hierarchies which have facilitated problems such as this have been controversial for a long time.
Okay, whatever. I am for democratizing. Laurie Penny and China Mieville and other rich privileged abject subalterns can just fuck off.
Net result is that rich privileged people will exchange positions and the life expectancy of poor women will continue to decline.
1) Richard Antonio's article on Marxiin Blackwell's Companion to Classic Social Theorists is a good a survey of Marxism's current consensus and condition as I have read yet.
2) As I was reading Hobsbawm on Age of Empire nationalism I was inspired to compare current identity politics to Edwardian nationalism, that other problem for socialists.
3) This has mostly made me very sad ever since I read the Eley History and followed the Shari Berman seminar at CT.
People I do admire greatly like Estes and Seymour just remind me of Weber and Bernstein facing that other irresistible freight train in 1914. 1 part idealism and love, 1 part strategic calculation and cynicism, 10 parts unspeakable despair. Opportunism at the end of the rope.
Luxemburg and Liebknecht died pointlessly, Lenin is considered one of history's greatest monsters, Weber and Bernstein washed the blood off their hands and joined the pantheon.
Terry Eagleton via Richard Antonio:
The power of capital is now so drearily familiar, so sublimely omnipotent and omnipresent, that even large sections of the left have succeeded in naturalizing it, taking it for granted as such an unbridgeable structure that it is as though they hardly have the heart to speak of it...With Darwinian conformity, much of the cultural left has taken on the colour of its historical environs:if we live in an epoch in which capitalism cannot be challenged then...it does not exist.
88
I finally got out of the rental Prius and back into a real car. God what a nightmare, in any climate.
You trying to pick a fight or something? I drove a Prius for a few days and didn't have any problems but if you don't like it get a different car next time.
I'd never heard of Alisa Valdes until this hit the airwaves, or internet, yesterday. There's a piece about it at the Atlantic by someone who apparently wrote a straight review of the book at the time of its release, and who I gather feels a bit chagrined now, though he tells us that he stands by his initial treatment.
What bugs me most is some of his recounting of Valdes' recently redacted post:
In comments on her post, Valdes insists that she still rejects the feminist ideology that prevented her from trusting men. She insists she still stands by her claim that "feminism stole my womanhood."
As I admitted in my review, there is something to the argument that feminism doesn't sufficiently respect femininity.
"The feminist ideology"? That doesn't trust men? It would appear that this means second-wave feminism, and it sounds as though none of the speakers in this particular discussion knows a thing about it.
Anyway, the Feminist and the Cowboy is so clearly a not-very-updated version of the romance novel in which the plucky heroine is ravaged/saved by the rogue.
It's possible I should read the Atlantic writer's original review!
I just read his original review. He should indeed stop talking about the relationship of "feminism" to "femininity," but he makes great points about how the author has pretty fucked up ideas about gender to start with.
I love the headlines put out by the NYC tabloids.
NY POST: "TAMING OF THE SHREWD. Ultra-liberal author says she only found love when she learned to submit to a conservative rancher -- but is it all just an act to sell more books and save herself from bankruptcy?"
You trying to pick a fight or something? I drove a Prius for a few days and didn't have any problems but if you don't like it get a different car next time.
He's been insulting the Prius in every active thread for a while now. Apparently it's the grains of automobiles. Such a relief to return to the Dodge Paleochallenger.
Why would you run interference when Shearer is being successfully, delightfully trolled?
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I was just asked to offer feedback on an essay someone is writing for Edge.org. If only I could reply with a link to this comment without revealing my blog habit.
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