CL Minou

by

Where In The World Is C.L. Minou?

Categories: all about me, silly blather, the tiniest violin in the world

Well, for once, back here.

I do apologize, ducks. This has been a slightly weird week: I mean, I was in the Guardian, and the Carnival, and also work was busy (I was doing stuff at 10 pm on Tuesday) and oh yeah it was my birthday yesterday and so I had to go out and have drinks with my girlfriends (and one of their boyfriends: he was our Designated Boy.) And then back to work but oh yeah, my enormous cat, Fafhrd, the Grey Mouser, has been sick and I had to take him to the vet, which will set back my primary financial mission for 2010, the Payinge Off Of Ye Ginormous Credite Carde Debte.

So: I know! Wild!

The other thing is my job. I’m glad I have it and it’s mostly not particularly hard (even if they’re paying me a lot less than I’m used to), and it’s cool to be able to work from home–but after spending over ten hours at my desk, I tend to be a little too burned out to sit down and write. At least this week. I think that will sort out eventually.

But there will be more stuff, eventually! Here and at Tiger Beatdown. I have some thoughts about the whole Bindel thing and Second Wave radical feminism that ties into kyriarchy nicely. And I will eventually write something about “Heathers.” Also, Sophie had a really good comment that tied into my post on Mary Daly and I just want you to know, Sophie, that I noticed! And have been thinking about it! And will, one of these days, write about it!

So, stay tuned, you who tune in. And if you’re not tuning in, why not try? Although, given that you’re not tuning in, I’m not so sure how it is you’ll hear me ask you to tune in. But it all comes out in the wash.

by

In Unexpected Delights

Categories: (un)popular entertainment, cis-o-rama, gender oh eff me, i get around, kyriarchy, let's hear it for the ladies, teh tranz

Hey, the takedown of that London Times article I did over at Tiger Beatdown got included in the 13th Carnival of Feminists! Drop by to read the other stuff, you know it’s good!

And in other unexpected pleasures, I haven’t been flayed to pieces in the comments section at the Guardian. And Julie Bindel replied to me! And I replied back! Wow!

by

C.L. vs Julie Bindel

Categories: i get around, transphobia: now in blog format

Where in the world is C.L. today?
Over on the Guardian’s CIFA!

I don’t much care for Julie Bindel, unlike Beatrix Campbell, who defended her on this site yesterday. That does not mean I don’t admire her. As a feminist whose radicalism would probably surprise her, I appreciate Ms Bindel’s advocacy and the genuine good that has come for her work against violence directed at women. Yet in her long, lonely crusade against transsexuals she contradicts three of her own three feminist principles:

 Yes, I get to take on Julie Bindel and her belief that I have not been, and never will be, a woman! Comments should be fun!

by

BTB: P.O.’d

Categories: below the belt, i get around

If it’s Wednesday, then it must be Belgium. Wait! No! Below the Belt:

Something interesting happened recently in the Michigan Secretary of State election race.

Now, before you tell me that the word “interesting” and the phrase “Michigan Secretary of State” syntactically can’t be in the same sentence together, bear with me, and let me introduce you to Representative Paul Scott:

Seems a charming enough fellow! Step right up, sir, and let us know what you’re planning to do for the people of the great Wolverine State! Let’s see, I have his website right here…

  J?ie!

by

The Secret Lives of Married Men–Now With Bingo Cards

Categories: i get around, privilege stories, the male ogle, the patriarchy: you can't live with it....that is all, tiger beatdown rocks

Where am I again? Why, Tiger Beatdown:

I have not, temporally speaking, been doing this here ladybusiness for all that long. (Some would draw a facetious comparison, in fact, to the amount of time I have in fact been a lady, but as that number would vary between never and 37 years depending on whether you asked Germaine Greer or Kate Bornstein, I’ll just move on.)
Yet even that short time, the depressing amount of material that exists out in the lady-hating or lady-indifferent or just lady, get me a beer world can drag you down. Why, you say to yourself as you labor over your blog in a hot kitchen (well, I’m baking cookies, see…) should I address another MRA apologia, tear apart another straw-feminist, or deal with this week’s Exciting Variation on the Tone Argument. (I solve those by getting louder.)
But then, as Sady herself discovered, you come across something absolutely stunning in its bold sweep, all-encompassing douchery, and just plain ol’ damnfoolishness.

 Yosh!

by

Later That Same Evening

Categories: media tool kit, privilege stories

I’m not much for the late night talk shows–I don’t even watch Jon Stewart when he comes on, preferring to let my DVR work its magic. (Not to mention that there have been more occasions than I care to discuss where Jon was–there’s no gentle way to say this–a bit of a douche.)

So I really haven’t cared too much about the Leno-O’Brien freeforall on NBC; I have better things to worry about than which middle-aged white guy is going to bore me at 11:35 PM. I haven’t watched Conan O’Brien since I was in college, and Letterman since I was in high school–and the odd times I have caught Dave since then have just proved that what played well to my 15-year old, kinda-sorta guy self is pretty crappy nowadays.

And as for Leno, his show has always been an unwatchable piece of trash–he turned hard into the gutter back in 1995 with the Lance Ito dancers and has gleefully wallowed there ever since.

But one thing that I have noticed about this whole fiasco is how often the principals have descended to lady-hating and other associated misogynies. I said noticed, not “surprised at”: Leno has frequently been a public prick about women, and Dave…well, Dave built a frakking bedroom over his set so that he could not-quite coerce his not-quite interns with not-quite threats about very, very realistically killing any chance of a career in the business.

So no surprise as well, as Liss noted, that Leno is a contemptible misogynistic jerk:

He takes a swipe at Letterman’s marriage that, in trying to hit Letterman, sprays collateral buckshot all over Regina Lasko, who is married to Letterman. And that’s not a bug of the joke; it’s a feature. Leno’s the kind of nasty bully who will take aim at another guy in a way that hits his wife, too.

It’s a construction that treats Lasko like Letterman’s property, which is why this jibe has the same cowardly feel as a guy who keys another guy’s car in the dark parking lot of a bar, instead of taking a swing at him.

 But wait! It’s not just the principals in this mess, it’s also the feakin’ commentators:

Now, Seth Myers has always been pretty douchetastic; it’s his shtick, and it has been ever since he started co-hosting Weekend Update with Amy Poehler. But for fuck’s sake, comparing hosting a TV show to being married to a woman, and the process of changing hosts to divorce…and…and…the whole way it just assumes that women are commodities to be traded, is special even for him, and a further sign of SNL’s two-decade decline into pointless wankitude. To think: this was the show that started out with Jane Curtin, Gilda Radner, and Laraine Newman, launched the career of Julia Sweeney, and gave as Tina Fey as well as the aforementioned Amy…well, sigh.

Of course, it’s a woman’s fault to begin with, because a woman fucked up the Tonight Show 17 years ago.

That woman was the late Helen Kushnick, the woman who had discovered Leno, served as his manager and personal friend for his entire career, and engineered his takeover of Johnny Carson’s well worn seat. And right away there were nasty stories about her: she was most notorious for her vindictive policies of shitlisting guests who had dared to appear on Arsenio instead of The Tonight Show. NBC, tired of her bullying ways, fired her after a few months of heading up the gabfest, and Leno sadly had to let his friend go before she destroyed the career she had built.

Or wait! Maybe that’s not what happened, mostly because Leno is a huge douche and misogyny is a recreational sport in Hollywood. To wit, from a 1996 EW profile:

Kushnick’s story is well-known to those who follow the late-night TV wars. She was portrayed as an abusive tyrant in The Late Shift, Bill Carter’s 1994 book about Leno and Letterman, and in last February’s HBO movie; and the image was no exaggeration. In the end, many who had been her supporters, like former client Jimmie Walker, and even NBC executives, found her impossible to deal with. Her stepdaughter, Beth Kushnick, 35, still calls her a ”ghastly monster.” Even her only sibling, Joseph Gorman, 48, had been estranged from her until shortly before her death at age 51.

But what is not so well-known is the story of Kushnick’s final years — years spent out of the media eye, years that ended in a kind of redemption and, for her daughter, Sara, 16, in a reconciliation with Leno. ”Maybe she did have to be a bitch to get where she did,” says Sara, Sam’s surviving twin. ”But when she started out, women were supposed to be secretaries. She did things with anger because it was the only way she knew how.”

”They called her a bitch,” says Mitzi Shore, owner of L.A.’s Comedy Store, ”but if she were a man, she wouldn’t be called a bitch. There are managers in town who are 10 times worse than she was and they don’t call them bastards.”

 And if you needed any more confirmation about Leno’s jerkiness, consider this from the same piece, about  Kushnick’s daughter:

She grew up with Leno, called him Uncle Jay, considered his parents her grandparents. ”He came over for dinner the weekend after my mom got fired,” she says. ”We had chicken wings — we always had chicken wings. I sat on his lap and he said everything would be okay. That was the last time I saw him.”

 And there’s another way to look at the Kushnick story, as Rudy Panucci explains in a sweetly vitriolic piece on the whole late night mess:

Kushnick was dying of cancer while Leno was explaining that he had to fire her and ban her from the studio lot because he was shocked, shocked, to discover that she had lied to him about planting the rumors that hounded Carson into early retirement. The truth is, Leno threw his long-time manager and personal friend under the bus when it became clear that The Tonight Show with Jay Leno was a poorly-produced, barely-watchable disaster. After eighteen months of coming in second to Letterman, even though NBC had a strong prime-time line-up, Leno’s manager took the fall, and then the large-chinned wonder let NBC revamp the show to rescue it from cancellation.

So there you have it, folks–the kyriarchy in a nutshell, brought to you by a bunch of rich white guys who are barely even funny. I think I’ll just go to bed early.

by

A Purloined Girlhood Part 1a: Wild at Heart

Categories: all about me, i get around, tiger beatdown rocks

Hey, where am I today? Over at Tiger Beatdown!

I saw “Where the Wild Things Are” this weekend, ducks. (One of the advantages of living in the Great American Metropolis is that movies tend to hang around a surprising length of time.)

I saw it because of Spike Jonze, and because I am just old enough to have grown up in the Golden Age of Maurice Sendak — that hazy, golden late afternoon in America when Sesame Street had become established, the children raised by Dr. Spock were raising their own children, and Sendak and Shel Silverstein dominated the bookcases of every “with it” parent. (I was too young to say things like “with it,” of course, but I had teenaged cousins, and was vaguely aware of things like The Disco… we are talking about that point in history when The Captain and Teneille had their own TV show, people.) It was an age brought to you by CTW.

 Vamanos!

by

How To Tell You’ve Transitioned, Part II

Categories: all about me, how to tell if you've transitioned

I had a kinda frantic day today–spent all day trying to get some SQL to behave correctly, even though the task should have been pretty easy to do. Plus I was late for my therapy appointment–even with catching a cab.

As I was coming up out of the subway, a panhandler asked me for some money; and as I was walking away, he said “You have a nice day ma’am–sir–ma’am.” (I’m assuming he saw either my boobs or my lipstick and that pushed him over the edge.)

I wasn’t particularly happy to hear that, but I wasn’t terrifically surprised either. I was dressed for work, when you work from home: a black tee, jeans, and sneakers. As I was walking away, I thought to myself, you’ve forgotten how to be a girl.

I am much less enlightened in the dark recesses of my mind than I am in print.

But there has been a change in how I present myself over the two years of my fulltime life; there was a time when I always wore eye makeup when I went out, and gave much careful thought to what I was going to wear. Nowadays, not so much; I’ve even gone out without wearing any lipstick, something I’d been avoiding ever since I got read when not wearing it.

A little of this is the weight I’ve put on, and being too broke to buy new clothes and too unmotivated to try and lose weight. But a lot more is simply that I’ve reached a new point of stability with my life; that my acceptance of myself as a woman means that I need fewer and fewer reinforcements via the trappings of femininity. (That, and a year of pounding concrete sidewalks; that gets you out of heels really quick.)

Three years ago, in the middle of my dark winter of discontent when I began to seriously consider the idea of transitioning, I would sometimes ask myself (as a way to not transition) what the difference was between hanging around my apartment in my PJ bottoms and a tee as a man and doing the same as a woman; the idea being that my life would be the same whether or not I transitioned, so why transition? I think I know that answer better now; it’s because now I’m free of the doubts about whether I should transition, the doubts about whether or not I really was a woman, the awful amount of psychic energy I dumped into worrying about that problem. And a lot of those issues are gone now, and overall (when I’m not fighting off major depressive crises), I have a lot more energy to think and do things–case in point, this blog, started a year after I transitioned. Even if I have forgotten how to be “a girl,” however it was that I construed living inside the public tokens of femininity.

Being a woman–a person–is a lot more satisfying anyway.

by

Hiram Monserrate Watch

Categories: hiram monserrate watch

Sometimes, you get a win:

The political fate of State Senator Hiram Monserrate, a Queens Democrat convicted of assault in a dispute that left his companion with a gash on her face, grew uncertain on Thursday as a special committee recommended that the Senate vote soon on a motion to expel him.[…]

The special committee formed after the trial concluded that Mr. Monserrate lied about the dispute and demonstrated “a lack of fitness to serve in this body.”

The report says that he recklessly put his interests above the safety of Ms. Giraldo and was insincere in his apology. “Whether the senator was worried for his political future or not, the evidence demonstrates both recklessness and callousness,” the committee wrote.

“Accordingly,” the report said, “the select committee recommends that Senator Monserrate be sanctioned by the full Senate, and that the Senate vote to impose one of two punishments: Expulsion, or in the alternative, censure with revocation of privileges.”

 Now, the New York State Senate is the most useless legislature since the steering committee of th Mesopotamian Pot-Washer’s Guild tried to formalize which pots they would, in fact, wash, and the most corrupt legislature since…well…since ever, I think.

What I’m saying is that if these guys think you can’t sit with them, you really have to be an asshole.

Like Monster Rat QED.

by

BTB: Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary

Categories: Uncategorized

It’s Below the Belt time again!

I call myself transfeminist, because I identify as trans (with a little help from our wonderful society which does so much to keep me from forgetting it) and feminist. Usually this isn’t a problem: I identify as a woman, and  feminism is about furthering the causes and rights of women, and I am. so. there.

But at the same time it has to be acknowledged that feminism and transgender activism often have found themselves in at best an uneasy alliance, and at worst completely divorced from each other. A certain strain of radical feminism (see: Heart, Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival, and my friends at AROOO) maintain a richly transphobic tradition of never seeing trans women as women (or trans men as men, for that matter; that’s why so many trans men have had no problem getting into MWMF), using such all-time hits as “mutilated men,” “colonizers,” and still number one with a bullet, “rapists.” (I always like that one. I once went looking for statistics on how many trans women get raped a year. The numbers proved very elusive–it seems most trans victims are either killed instead of being raped, or killed right after being raped.)

 Mach schnell!

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 18 19