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Fuel the Enlightenment

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Cody's Books
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savageb Avatar
savageb
Posts: 67
Posted: 09.25.06, 03:04 PM
Serano offers a very individual and alternative view of feminism. Serano's remarks on the politics of transsexuals and feminism were very interesting. I have never thought of the transsexual community as a feminist community before. However, Serano's remarks about socio-political factors, and expectations and demands, that affect the trans-community, expand the bounds that one thinks of of conventional feminism.
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rocketdog Avatar
rocketdog
Posts: 196
Posted: 09.27.06, 09:23 AM
These are great readings, but does anyone else think the "Open Letter to Carnie Wilson" deserves a little of its criticism for being overly harsh? The tone of that essay is brutal.
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Newspeaker Avatar
Newspeaker
Posts: 37
Posted: 09.28.06, 03:47 PM
The letter is harsh, but it was sent to the magazine from a reader. That's why it is so extremely obsurd. It was a good and entertaining choice for them to include in the reading.
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Erin Avatar
Erin
Posts: 18
Posted: 10.09.06, 04:31 PM
I actually bought this book on amazon.com when I heard it was coming out...so I was very excited to see the two editors of the book on foratv.

I thought the letter to Carnie Wilson was spot-on in terms of pointing out her hypocrisy...also, I think it's important that more people know just how much surgery is involved in gastric bypass. I was astounded to read that she had to do so much cosmetic work afterward to look normal again: excess skin removal, breast lift, belly-button re-positioning, the list goes on. Is it really liberating to have your stomach be the size of your thumb? And does she feel happier now, celebrating her successes (and I resist the urge to put "successes" in quotation marks to denote that posing for Playboy and having 3 million spreads in People are dubious successes at best - only because I've watched Girls Next Door on E! [the show about Hugh Hefner's girlfriends] to think that maybe there's an element of legitimacy in becoming a Playboy model, and possibly there's an aspect of feminism that includes being an exhibitionist...but this is an entirely different topic altogether) by eating 3 peanut M&M's?

What a long, long sentence.

I originall meant to say that while the letter to Carnie is mean, it's interesting to contrast that kind of meanness with the kind of meanness directed toward Pamela Anderson in her roast, described in the book's essay "Laugh Riot: Feminism and the Problem of Women's Comedy." The shots they took at Carnie were smart and intended to be snarky, funny, and to make a serious point. The shots taken at Pamela Anderson, Bea Arthur, and Courtney Love, by contrast, during during Anderson's roast were the most reprehensible, shocking, low-culture insults to all women I've ever seen. And many of the awful comments directed toward Anderson and Bea Arthur (a feminist icon in her own right, as Maude and to a lesser extent as Dorothy on the Golden Girls) came from women, Sarah Silverman and some other woman comedian whose name I can't recall. I think there's a kind of "cattiness" where women publicly critique the behavior and image of another woman, that can be constructive, even if it is mean...like the letter to Carnie Wilson. And there's another, much much worse kind of meanness that can't even be called cattiness, that was evidenced in the Roast, that has no political point and that drags the respect women have worked hard to earn in public spheres backward...I was going to say it drags it backward fifty years, but in the 50s it wasn't exactly common to direct strings of obscenities at ladies. At what other point in history has this been permissible? I don't know. Whenever that time was, if indeed there was such a time, they've dragged the cause of feminism back that far and put negativity in the world only for shock value.

Any who, all of that was to say that there's much meaner things being said about public figures who are women today.

The essay on feminism and stand-up comedy really stood out to me as making an interesting point...there was another essay that talked about the trend of films and tv shows using fat suits to make people laugh, and how in the future these will be as reviled as minstrel shows are today. Overall I thought the book was good and I was glad I bought it, but I thought that some of the essays were too short to really get off the ground. They were originally written for the magazine Bitch, which explains why they're short, but I would have liked to see some of them expanded for the book.

I don't even consider myself that much of a feminist but I'm all over these boards like a 1-person NOW parade...
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rocketdog Avatar
rocketdog
Posts: 196
Posted: 10.13.06, 04:21 PM
Huh, you know, I've wondered that myself...what is it with all the Bea Arthur jokes, anyway?

Thanks for the reply. It's interesting to hear from someone who's read the book. It sounds like a good read and I've thought about picking up a copy myself. Which of course would finally prove to all of my friends in Missouri that they've lost me to a west-coast lefty sensitive-guy archetype.
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