ginseng peddling grandmother

Jessica Valenti, He’s a Stud, She’s A Slut and 49 Other Double Standards Every Woman Should Know. (via crystalsavestheday)

This actually confuses me quite a bit. We’re “trained to judge her”? It seems to me that this line about “training” conflates two causes, one of which is insidious, the other maybe a little less so. The first is the societal imperative to judge other women; we tear others down to boost our own esteem. This is bad. The other comes from a very real concern about the unhealthy standards to which women are held. This is quite healthy. Women shouldn’t aspire to put themselves on the surgeon’s chopping board, eat food and then vomit it back up, dye their hair so that they can conform to some racialized standard of white beauty. 

That said, I take her point about not being malicious in one’s judgments. Pursued to an extreme, a judgment inspired by a ‘benevolent’ wish to see these impossible standards dismantled can be equally destructive in its effects. The last thing that one wants to do when attempting to stage a constructive dialogue with people of differing opinions is to launch into a thousand hurtful criticisms of their lifestyle choices and retail philosophy. But at the same time, I think it’s important to keep from falling down the moral relativism sinkhole. An appraisal, an assessment, a judgment in the strictest sense of the word, isn’t necessarily bad. How are we to, ahem, smash the epistemological framework that maintains this essential ontological order without them?

“Hello, Judith Butler. Allow me to scrub your back. So you and Feminist Hulk are saying that my devotion to Old Spice body wash might be part of a larger regulative discourse to maintain an essential ontological gender?” 

“That’s correct, Old Spice Man.”

“HULK SMASH EPISTEMOLOGICAL FRAMEWORKS, WHILE SMELLING LIKE SPRING GARDEN.” 

Still my fave.

(via nabokovian)