So, for the record, Sarah Palin is not a feminist… I’m sorry, but you don’t just get to say you’re a feminist and automatically be one. It doesn’t work like that. It’s not allowed. (menstrualpoetry)

NO. Not on, not right, just no. You DO, in fact, just get to say that you are a feminist. It won’t make me automatically agree with you (and we’re talking about Palin – a woman with whom I share not a single grain of common thought). Hell, it won’t make me do or think much of anything, really.

However, someone standing up and announcing that a woman has to pass some shibboleth, some test of correctness before they can be allowed to use the word? SO NOT ON. You know why?

Patriarchy is all about telling women what we are supposed to be, what we are supposed to do, how we are supposed to do it, and how we are supposed to feel while we are doing it. I don’t care what you call yourself, if you’re doing any of the above, you are feeding into the power structure you claim to be fighting against. (Or maybe the feminism fairy gave you special I-get-to-be-in-charge pixie dust.) I call bullshit.

You want to know what happens when feminist women become overly-concerned with gatekeeping? You keep out the wrong people. Beating your womanist breast over Sarah Palin calling herself a feminist will have NO EFFECT WHATSOEVER on Sarah Palin, but will absolutely have an effect on women who might agree with some of her politics, who might self-identify somewhat with her. It will make them reject everything you stand for and maybe you’re thinking that that’s just fine and dandy, right? You don’t WANT women like that in your precious and pure movement, disagreeing with your politics and questioning your -isms.

It means that maybe those women (whom you do not deem worthy of using the word feminist) won’t ever question their own internalized misogyny, (like I didn’t all though my 20′s) that maybe they’ll pass on that same awful internalization to their daughters. But that’s ok right, because they failed your litmus test, because they don’t conform to YOUR vision of what a feminist woman is supposed to be or do. Because you might not have the power to make the world better, but you sure as hell have the power to kick people out of your little corner of it.

I spent a significant chunk of my life rejecting the term feminist because according every feminist I came across in the 80′s and 90′s, almost everything that I liked or did was incompatible with then-current feminist theory, (porn, casual sex, geek/tech-culture…) and even the things that I did agree with/fit into were presented in such a black and white, us vs. them mode that I wanted nothing to do with them. Second wave feminism did very little but tell wee!me I was wrong, bad, and a complete failure at feminism. You think this fed into my internalization of female things equaling things that were worthless? You bet your ass it did. (Well, if I suck at being female* anyway, then I might as well reject as much of it as I can.) For third wave feminism to run to the other end of the field and do the same damn thing makes me want to… well, you saw the post title, right?

I find Palin’s politics horrifying, and her personal and public actions to be every bit as reprehensible as any fear-mongering, demagogue-leaning, anti-intellectual male.** I die a little inside every time I run up against anyone who thinks she’s ever-so-great, but the solution to people not agreeing with me is not to turn my back and kick them out of the club house. I want to leave a slightly better world for EVERYONE, not just for the people I happen to agree with. On a less idealistic note, telling a not-at-all-small percentage of the women in this country that, by association, they are not good enough to come into the feminist clubhouse is no way to sway them to your cause.

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*This came from both ends, BTW. I failed at “correct” feminism, and I utterly failed at makeup-wearing hetro boy-dating femininity, so I said to hell with ALL of it in favor of just trying to figure myself out. The fact that this involved a whole hell of a lot if internalized misogyny wasn’t something I would realize for a long time.

**Srsrly, if you’re going all second wave anyway, you might want to take note that she’s done exactly what the second wave told my mother’s generation they could do, which was: anything a man could do. Just in this case the man happened to be Bill O’Riley. So congratulations!

To the secretary for Very Important Man at Very Important Company -
I understand that Very Important Man does not take phone calls, and you are assuring me that he checks his email constantly, but he has not responded to any of the emails we have sent him, and if he does not respond very soon (like, in the next 15 minutes) his Very Important Project will not be sent out on time. So while getting back to us on this is, of course, optional, it would certainly make my life, and yours, and his much easier if he did.
– One grumpy liaison

My scanner software just tried to “helpfully” nudge me down to 100dpi as a 300dpi scan would take longer and be bigger. (duh… that’s the pont.) Much as I like the one touch functions on this thing, I was tempted to light it on fire just then.

If I wanted a small scan I’d have set the specs up for a small scan, thank you very much. Sadly, it doesn’t have a “I know perfectly well what I’m doing so please keep your helpful hints to yourself” feature. (Although “please don’t show this message again” is close.)

Working on the premise that more people will run across my work of I maintain archives where people might actually see them, I keep accounts on DeviantArt and Flickr, in addition to the archive here.

In a moment of curiosity, I plonked down some money for paid account time on DeviantArt, to see if doing so would at all streamline the upload process. (Which is a bit very clunky compared to Flickr.)? If you pay for an account they let you bulk upload files via FTP. Cool, right? And letting me upload large files via a protocol designed for same would be lovely…? if they didn’t make me go though the same time killing interface to finish the art submission phase.

Actually, most of their paid account perks seem to be of the useless. Will not be re-upping when my paid time ends.

First, some background on the Collyer brothers.

So if you’re going to write a story (even a quasi-fictional) about this, of course one would feel obligated to do some research about the subject, so as to avoid to give the appearance of talking out of one’s ass, right? Apparently not.

(E.L.) Doctorow says that writing a fictional account of the Collyers’ existence required figuring out how to “break into that house” and see what was going on and why. He says that he didn’t do much research for his novel; he felt that the brothers required “interpretation, not research.” (Link)

Bullshit.

If you wanted to write a work of fiction, more power to you. I’m cool with that. But you’re using real people and real events to bolster the visibility of your fictional story; and you’re doing it in a dishonest, or at least amazingly disingenuous fashion.

The Collyer brothers were always on my mind. … Somehow the fact that they had come from a well-to-do family and had more-or-less opted out was the real mystery of them.

Never heard of compulsive hoarding, have we? This is not “opting out”, certainly not in the sense of choosing (voluntarily) to absent oneself from society. The DSM-IV currently has it listed as a type of OCD, but it may have it’s own separate diagnosis in the DSM-V.

Doctorow tells his story from Homer’s point of view, a character who he describes as “a very compassionate, sensitive fellow.”

“The issue for [Homer] is to create meaning out of their lives in this peculiar eccentric decision that they’ve made,” explains Doctorow.

These were ill men who died tragically. If you wanted to use that as a general springboard to write a story romanticizing the “eccentric” rich, (which I wouldn’t respect much either, but would at least not get so annoyed by) you can say that the story was inspired by or bears a passing resemblance to real events, but don’t title your book “Homer & Langley” and then ignore fact that they were actual people, instead trying to make them into some sort of floating archetypes.

Why yes, I *do* expect my historical fiction to be rigorously researched. (Even if you intend to go off in a different direction.) Presenting your lack of historical research as an artistic choice just makes me think you’re intellectually *lazy*.

The interview doesn’t touch on this at all, but I do have to wonder (with a blind main POV character and all) just how much research Doctorow put into being blind (and specifically loosing one’s sight later in life), or if he just “interpreted” his way though that as well.

Note should be paid to the commenters at NPR, who quickly do note that hording does not equal “eccentric”.