Maybe Maimed but Never Harmed

Friday, April 30, 2010

Yes, men can be feminist leaders.

Category labels: Myths and misconceptions, Personal experience, Politics of sex, Sexism, Vanilla life

I don’t claim clairvoyance and I work pretty hard to unpack the privilege I know I have as a white man. But I can also identify with a collective experience of being oppressed—and this is not unique to anyone reading, regardless of your biology or psyche.

I believe every inequality oppresses the oppressors as well as the oppressed because inequality erases opportunity and choice. As a man, I have privilege, but I’m also bound by strict social constraint. I’m not able to cuddle with acquaintances whether female, male, or intersex without being seen in a predatory light. I’m not able to express emotionality without fear of humiliation. And apparently, I learned painfully for the first time through this Femquake thing, some feminists believe I’m also not allowed to offer leadership in gender justice activism no matter how amorphous or self-empowering (as opposed to dogmatic) that leadership is intended to be.

Inequality is not the reality I want for humanity’s sons, nor its daughters, nor the rest of its children. That is why I call myself a feminist.

There are no truths without full and original context

Before I go any further, let me provide some background. On Sunday, April 25^th, I witnessed a surprising amount of debate over whether Boobquake was essentially anti-feminist, and I learned that Brainquake was organized to counter it. Unhappy with this dichotomization, I created another Facebook page and event called Femquake in the name of unity and self-empowerment:

Everyone should have the right to do as one pleases, from showing off cleavage to showing off intellect—or both! The real issue is not a woman’s body or her mind, but her humanity. Empower one another to live the lives we want, free of coercion.

What seemed pretty simple and straightforward at first quickly became more complicated when a blogger by the handle Feminist Mom attributed the creation of Femquake to Feministing.com and I left a comment to correct the misinformation. Then, an anonymous commenter on Feminist Mom’s blog expressed disappointment that I am a man, as they had been hoping Femquake was started by a woman. Now that they knew a man started the page, they said the sentiment I had expressed through creating Femquake “means…less” to them, despite still being a good one.

When I questioned why this might be the case, Feminist Mom offered this explanation, which I understand and disagree with:

When men step up as leaders for the women’s movement, it looks like we can’t even lead ourselves.

Anyway, consider reading the full comment thread on my post, as well as on this followup post by Feminist Mom questioning, “Men as feminist leaders?“. It’s Feminist Mom’s post and the anonymous commenter there that I’m responding to, below.

Ultimately, the conversation seems centered around two concepts: equality and leadership. To avoid any potential miscommunication or further conflations, I want to address both of them distinctly, and as succinctly as I can.

Leadership

Feminist Mom begins with a question:

What you said was, “for people to realize a desire to be independent, regardless of whether they are women or men, ‘following leaders’ is not the way to do it.” What is the way to do it then?

I thought I was pretty clear about my thoughts on leadership when I said this in an earlier comment:

All of us who started a “*quake” are leaders. But so are the many people who spread the word about the events. Jennifer McCreight could not possibly have done what she did without the leadership of her “followers”, which I count myself among.

What I am pointing to is the initiative of each person involved in collective action, such as the 160,000 people who wore “immodest” outfits on Boobquake, the several thousand who participated in Brainquake by showing off Iranian women’s intellectual achievements, and the several hundred who participated in Femquake by doing one, the other, or something else of their own choosing. In my view, many of these people could be considered leaders as well as followers. When I said that ‘following leaders’ is not the way to [achieve independence] after describing the ideal of self-empowerment that I tried to put forth in coining ‘femquake,’ what I meant was each individual can find independence through intentionality, but not through thoughtless action.

Independence is leadership of oneself, for oneself—but not necessarily by oneself. When someone has the freedom to choose their actions, they are no more followers than they are leaders. They may also be following the lead of one person while leading others themselves. To construe freely following a leader as being placed in a hierarchy in which there is no opportunity to move around is to misconstrue choice with force, and personal initiative with disempowerment.

So, the way to achieve independence is to acknowledge that you can both lead and follow at once, or you can do one or the other, and at your own volition. Otherwise, you are beholden to either your leaders or your followers. If you choose to follow a leader, do so with intent and without sacrificing skepticism. If you choose to lead, do so through example and without antipathy.

Equality

The Anonymous who I quoted in my last post left several more comments:

maymay is really misguided on how the infrastructure of feminism actually works. I can tell that simply by his disbelief in a feminism hierarchical…of course, I’m just reading off this page and hasn’t ventured into his blog yet. I imagine it’s a lot of RAH RAH YOU ROCK and I’m sorry that I can’t be the one, it’s a sweet effort and I appreciate that his heart is in the right place but nobody wants to hear from the white man on damn near anything to do with fucking equality, okay?

[…] get off my nuts b/c we’re talking about maymay here and not me.

Nobody wants to hear how a man lead us to unite our boobs and our brains and that is the long and short of it here. Men are NOT feminist leaders. They can be active participants in the movement, but they have to take a back seat in the charge and that’s just what it is. I’m sorry.

In regards to “how feminism actually works,” there is probably a lot of sociopolitical nuance that I have yet to learn. You are welcome to teach me, Anonymous, if you can do so without being mean to me. Otherwise, as should be elementarily obvious to you, I will simply refuse to listen.

Since you say you haven’t ventured into my blog yet, I can easily forgive your ignorance on the fact that I am a bisexual man. This instantly places me outside of the heterosexist viewpoint you seem to have already “imagine[d]” me in. Furthermore, I can forgive your ignorance on the fact that I am a sexually submissive man. Or that I am a Jewish man. Or that I am a non-monogomous man. Or that I am a man diagnosed with bipolar disorder. Or that I am a man without a high-school degree. Or that I am a man like many others who has faced any number of additional circumstances that would cost me certain privileges in one sense or another.

But should any of those things even matter in defining the value of Femquake? On the Femquake page, Ian Iverson said:

Part of gender equality is to not let gender be a basis for projecting motives onto others.

I think it does a severe disservice to any and all social justice causes to stand under a banner of equality and wave a flag of feminism while speaking assumptively about who someone else is due to either real or perceived privilege. I feel this is doubly true when one does this while admitting to indolence. It’s actions like the ones Anonymous demonstrates that retard the progress of gender justice because it alienates people who would otherwise easily identify themselves with feminist ideals.

I felt hurt—deeply hurt—that my gender would be the cause of a devaluation of the message of Femquake. I am left wondering: what role would Anonymous have men take as “active participants in the movement”? I, for one, do not advocate for equality so as to be told my place.

Later, Anonymous commented again and said this:

It annoyed me further to see that there is a wiki article about this now and the comments were all “I’m glad to see women discussing this, taking charge of this”.

YEAH, ABOUT THAT. The brainchild behind Femquake is a fucking man, so we don’t even have that glory hole, it’s his…and that’s why it means less to me.

As it should.

Feminism is about gender equality, and until we have gender equality, everyone of all genders will continue to pay a horrifically painful cost one way or another. In feeling that Femquake somehow belongs to men because a man started the page, Anonymous is playing a simplistic (and very sad) zero-sum game where the actions taken by people of one gender necessarily invalidates the value of another.

That is an old, ugly game that can never lead to equality. Feminists ought never to play it.

And that’s all I have to say to or about Anonymous.

Tagged with: feminism, femquake

Comments (24)

Tuesday, April 27, 2010

Femquake Fallout: Feminism, the Internet and Boobquake (and Brainquake)

Category labels: Communication, Community, Personal experience, Politics of sex, Sexism, Vanilla life, Writing and blogging

Boobquake was hilarious. Above all else, the joke turned media frenzy turned factional feminist debate taught me that the Internet is like a giant game of telephone. No matter what someone says, someone else will misconstrue it as something totally different.

And y’know what? That’s not so terrible. Here’s why.

The Internet is like a giant game of telephone

While misunderstandings and hurt feelings aren’t fun, they’re not the only thing that can result from a game of telephone. Similarly, while misunderstandings and hurt feelings sadly abound in response to Iranian Cleric Hojatoleslam Kazem Sedighi’s claim that immodestly dressed women cause earthquakes (not to mention Pat Robertson’s equally bigoted claim that gay people cause hurricanes)¹, a lot of real good did come from Boobquake. As Lissy observed:

watching my facebook statuses I noticed something… boobquake worked for a lot of people who I know don’t spend much time thinking about feminism at all. My very capable and hardworking sister Ginger, takes no shit from anyone but would never be described as a feminist activist[…]. But boobquake? She was onto that, spewing on her facebook status about sexist pigs in a way that made me a proud older sister… she listened to me ranting, all that time I thought she wasn’t listening as a teenager she was!

Of course, baring cleavage in the name of women’s liberation is itself controversial. In short order, Boobquake received criticism from feminists who felt “saddened” by this response. A counter-event, categorized as a “Protest” on Facebook named Brainquake, soon sprung into being. What’s most interesting of all, Brainquake creators Negar Mottahedeh and Golbarg Bashi say that they’ve been in touch with Boobquake instigator Jennifer McCreight, and McCreight says she’s been in touch with the Brainquake creators, and that there’s little (if any) animosity between the three of them.

Responding to factional feminism

Nevertheless, while hanging out on Twitter on Sunday, I saw a seemingly endless stream of negativity about Boobquake from Brainquake supporters. It was being described as “anti-feminist,” and while I personally don’t find boobquake that appealing (although it is funny), I found the negativity spewed Jennifer’s way even less appealing. That’s when I decided I’d break the binary and came up with Femquake. As I wrote when I introduced the idea:

Both breasts and brains are good for humanity and deserve our respect. Don’t coerce women into being proud of one over the other, or feeling ashamed of either! YES WE CAN all get along.

[…]

The core ideal is not a woman’s body or her mind, but her humanity. Decrying women who are proud of their bodies is as oppressive as forcing the ones who aren’t to cover them up. Hailing intellectualism over physical value is as insensitively demonizing as nonconsensual sexualization.

It’s time for women, men, and everyone else to empower one another to live the lives we want to live, free of coercion and abuse, whether modestly dressed or not.

It’s time for a FEMQUAKE!

Jumping on the “b*quake” bandwagon had its benefits. Within hours, the Femquake Facebook page had hundreds of fans—and an equal number of detractors. It seems that you’re damned if you do and you’re damned if you don’t. And, statistically speaking, that’s precisely the problem with Boobquake, too, as Phil Plait from Discover Magazine wrote:

there are very few huge quakes, and a lot of little ones. We expect to rack up maybe one quake more powerful than magnitude 8 in a year, but on average we get one in the magnitude 6 – 6.9 range every couple of days somewhere in the world, and one in the 5 – 5.9 range something like three to five times every day. That’s every few hours!

And there’s the weakness in the Boobquake plan. […W]ithout defining the time period, the earthquake size, and the region in advance, this can actually reinforce the cleric’s claims! Given the huge tracts of land involved, no matter when women of the world unveil their decolletage, there is bound to be a magnitude 5 quake within an hour or so of the event, and a mag 6 quake within a day.

Jennifer McCreight, Negar Mottahedeh and Golbarg Bashi, and myself have all received criticism for supporting gender justice in our own ways, and the criticism is as diverse as ever. That’s no surprise, and again, I think it’s actually a beautiful thing. Having this diversity empowers people to choose the form of activism that’s right for them.

And if you don’t see what you like, you can self-empower yourself to go make it.

Feminism is about gender equality, and equality requires self-empowerment

That message of self-empowerment is, in my view, what my response to the factionalism over the “*quake” events is all about: Don’t let ideological feminists shame you into covering yourself up, or pressure you into exposing yourself, I wrote. Your body is YOURS. It is yours to show off however you like, whether physically, intellectually, or otherwise.

On that note, let me share with you some of the criticism I’ve received over Femquake. I think the negativity can be illustrative and can offer a wonderful opportunity to practice empowering positivity. If all this hullaballoo over boobquake has shown me one thing, it’s that we all need to practice assuming good faith and responding to offense nonviolenty.

@Custard_Socks says “fuck off with your titpics”

I followed conversation about #Femquake on Twitter. Here’s what @Custard_Socks had to say:

Femquake? Brains and boobs? My sister’s a flat chested idiot but she’s done damn well in a male dominated job, so fuck off with your titpics

(They said it here.)

I responded:

@Custard_Socks #Femquake is feminist solidarity—the idea is that #sexuality is too often divisive. Why be so negative when we could empower?

In answering honestly (I believe), @Custard_Socks said:

@maymaym From the participants on the Femquake Facebook page, feminism means you can brag about your high IQ & big tits. Solidarity, my arse

@maymaym Boasting is empowerment for the selfish.

(They said it here and here.)

At this point, it occurred to me that there probably wasn’t anything I could say to convince this person of Femquake’s intent. I simply don’t know how else to describe Femquake than the way I did on the Femquake Facebook event page:

On Femquake Day, honor a feminist who inspires compassion among different groups of people and who celebrates the value inherent in the diversity of human sexuality. In other words, HONOR FEMINISTS WHO ROCK YOUR WORLD!

Or, just smile at a stranger. It’s good for them, for you, and for our planet. :)

If honoring feminists who rock my world amounts to “brag[gin]” about their high IQ and big tits, well, fuck, I’m in! If smiling at strangers is “boasting” and “selfish,” fuck it, slap my ass and call me narcissistic! Smiling is healthy, and so is being proud of who you are.

Anyway, taking my own advice, my conversation with @Custard_Socks continued with my reply, which I intended just as genuinely as I believe they intended their earlier reply to me:

@Custard_Socks :) I hope you have a fantastic day today and brighten someone’s day. It’d be wonderful if you were able to do that.

But a moment of insight hit me when @Custard_Socks answered back with, @maymaym Are you saying I’m more than likely not capable of that?

“Oh,” I thought to myself, “is that the concern?” Does @Custard_Socks feel so disempowered to bring joy to others that they are so ready to jump to the false belief that others find them incapable of it? Obviously, only @Custard_Socks can answer that, but regardless of this person’s situation, it occurred to me that countless people probably do feel exactly that.

Maybe some of what the knee-jerk negativity in feminist debates needs is someone to say, “Hey, I support you, and I think you can bring this world joy!” (You can read the rest of my conversation with @Custard_Socks here, here, and here.)

Melliferax says, “someone else who is ostensibly on the same side has to go off whining about it? Grumble.”

Femquake got blogged about right alongside Boobquake and Brainquake, just as I’d hoped it would. Of course, not everyone was so enthused. In a comment on one such blog post, Melliferax said:

Femquake… had a very quick look and it just seems like the usual call for equality? How’s that different from, y’know, feminism or good ole humanism? Why is it that every time someone comes up with an idea, like arresting the pope or showing some cleavage, someone else who is ostensibly on the same side has to go off whining about it? Grumble.

Femquake was born out of my unhappiness with the unhappiness many Brainquakers felt towards Boobquakers. So yeah, I guess you could say I was “whining about it.” But is that so terrible?

I mean, if a “call for equality” can come from unhappiness, is saying that the people who advocate for that equality are “whining” really going to help matters? I don’t think so, but I’m not going to belittle you for thinking differently.

If calls for equality stem from whining, then maybe what we need are more people whining! What I think we don’t need, however, is negativity directed at calls for equality. Since you get to choose how you respond, why choose something negative when you could choose something positively empowering?

Millerax says that Femquake “just seems like the usual call for equality,” but as the billions of female-assigned, intersex, transgender, gay, lesbian, bisexual, kinky, and queer people will attest, calls for equality is anything but “usual” in far too many parts of the world. I think the absence of more calls to equality in places like Iran is seriously whacked, yo. Don’t you?

Anonymous says, “awesome. a man is leading the femquake charge. […I]t means a little less to me now.”

As I’ve been saying for years, one of the beautiful things about the Internet is that it enables us to let our ideas, words, and actions speak for themselves, without judgements based on age, race, gender, or other characteristics. On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a insert-your-feared-identity-here. However, identity really matters to some people.

In a comment on Feminist Mom in Montreal’s Femquake blog post, someone who prefers to remain anonymous said:

awesome. a man is leading the femquake charge. That’s all great and lovely, but I guess I was hoping that it was a woman. If that makes me sexist, well, I guess maybe I am.

Not gonna lie, it means a little less to me now.

The point is still there and the point is a good one, but meh…some dude on the internet leading the charge on us uniting our boobs and our brains is just, IDK, ironic.

Thanks for the help, though.

First, Anonymous, you’re very welcome! :D I’m glad to help bring about a world where gender justice is a reality!

That being said, I have to wonder why my being a man means that Femquake loses some measure of respect in your eyes. As a man, I know that it’s very difficult for men—including myself, at times—to stand up for the rights of women. Y’see, I could choose not to. I could go about my life content in the knowledge that because no one questions me when I check “M” when replying to Facebook’s “Gender” question,² I have privileges that someone who checks “F” may never have.

And y’know what? That’s a pretty sweet deal for me and the other “M”‘s, and a pretty crappy one for all the “F”‘s.

That’s why it’s absolutely baffling to me that when men stand up for gender equality, it somehow means less than when women do it. The reality is that no matter who is standing up for gender equality, it means the same thing: that we are all working towards the same goal of equality and opportunity for all souls on this planet, regardless of what body those souls inhabit.

So, while Anonymous may find it “ironic” that a man like me came up with Femquake, I find it equally ironic that someone who wants to support gender equality would devalue an effort to support gender justice due to the gender of that effort’s founder.

Strengthen love, not shame

There are, of course, plenty of other negative and positive responses to Femquake, and I’m thrilled to see that the Femquake page is still getting fans. After all, communication is inherently imperfect because otherwise we wouldn’t need it. And so I think, in the end, all this diversity is beautiful—it’s a reflection of the diversity inherent in all of you!

Ultimately, regardless of whether someone supports me or tries to put me down, I’m going to work on just being happy. I want to spread joy in the world. :) I know it can be hard, and I struggle to smile sometimes but, with your help, I’m learning how.

Thank you for all the criticism, the support, the encouragement, the denigration, and responses. Thank you for keeping the conversation going, and for talking to one another, and to me! Thank you for turning a sexist comment by an Iranian religious leader and a boob joke by a young feminist into an opportunity to promote peace and happiness and understanding and unity and self-empowerment and beauty and intelligence!

Now go and enjoy life, because working towards bringing pleasure and joy and equality and opportunity to everyone—everyone—is what feminism is all about!

I think Pat is wrong about the whole hurricane thing. I think Teh Gehys actually cause volcanos. Don’t you remember the recent Icelandic volcano that halted air travel in Europe? I mean, those Frenchies are all sexual deviants! I say we need a #Gaycano experiment! Go, Internet, go! [↩]
Facebook really ought to change that label to “Sex,” not “Gender,” since those two words are not actually interchangeable. See also: Gender and Technology. [↩]

Tagged with: boobquake, brainquake, femquake

Comments (16)

Monday, April 26, 2010

Femquaker: Shanna Katz, Sex-Positive Sexuality Educator

Category labels: Community, Politics of sex

Femquaker: A person who promotes compassion among different groups of people and celebrates the value inherent in the diversity of human sexuality. In other words, a feminist who rocks my world!

Femquake is intended as a show of feminist solidarity. The idea is that contentious issues of sexuality too often fracture the unity that women, men, and every other freedom-loving person needs to support in order to bring about gender justice. Treating sexuality as a divisive force, whether by claiming that immodest attire causes earthquakes or by ousting women who show self-empowered sexual agency from the “sisterhood” of feminism, is a condemnable thing to do.

Why should boobquake and brainquake be mutually exclusive? Brains and boobs are often found together in competent, sexy women (whether female-assigned at birth or not). Don’t coerce women into being proud of one of these things over the other, or into feeling ashamed of either!

I have the good fortune of knowing many smart and sexy women relatively well because I treat them with the equal dignity and respect they, like every other human being on Earth, deserves. Since feminism is about equality, not ideology or biology, it applies to every body. And that includes bodies that are differently abled than yours.

Which brings me to Shanna Katz, the self-described sassy, fun loving, crowd pleasing, witty and amusing sex educator based in Phoenix, Arizona who I’m honored to announce as the first femquaker I’ll write about. What makes Shanna awesome? What doesn’t?!

Shanna Katz is an accredited member of AASECT, the American Association of Sex Educators, Counselors and Therapists, holds a Master’s degree in Human Sexuality Education from Widener University in Pennsylvania, and a B.A. in Sociology from Colorado College. But those are all just pieces of paper. Shanna’s real talent comes in the form of the sensitive, nuanced, and incredibly deep understanding she has for multiple intersections of sexuality and other aspects of life, most notably disability.

She is currently compiling submissions for an anthology on people’s experiences on sexuality and dis/ability:

People of all ability levels are sexual beings. Sex is hard enough to navigate and negotiate when one fits in with society’s notions of what a sexual being is, but once you add in the concept of ability, it can become quite challenge. This anthology, Sexual Ability, seeks to bring forward the stories, challenges and experiences of differently-abled people and their partners, putting a face on the trials that so many valuable members of our society must face. By sharing the experiences of the disabled community in relation to sexuality, Sexual Ability hopes to challenge people’s viewpoints, foster discussion and conversation, and open doors towards a shift in the social constructions surrounding sexuality and disability.

This approach of fostering discussion and conversation is one Shanna doesn’t just talk the talk about, she walks the walk (as much as conversation can be analogous to walking, anyway). Shanna’s guest appearance on the sexuality netcast Kink On Tap has been lauded as one of the best episodes of the show (it was certainly one of my favorite). In it, Shanna eloquently explains complex ideas like myriad varieties of “privilege” in a stunningly accessible way:

My partner is really big on social justice and so in the last year and a half I’ve worked a lot more about, ‘Well, what is privilege?’

For example, I have white privilege. Whether I do anything about it or not, it still exists, it doesn’t go away. And somebody that can walk up a set of stairs has ability privilege. And if you can drive a car you have the privilege of driving a car. But they’re not necessarily things we think about all the time.

So, I think when you’re looking to host events and stuff, if you don’t have trouble getting somewhere—you have a car and the ability to pay for insurance and gas—it probably doesn’t even cross your mind that a portion of your membership might not.

[…]

I think that when people make choices like, ‘We’re going to have [an event] at this hotel that is not handicap accessible, that is not light rail accessible, that is not any of these things, I don’t think they’re actively [disrespecting you], but I think that they’re like, ‘I don’t know what my privileges are, so how can I work towards people that don’t have them?’

(Skip to 1:03:10 in the audio recoding of Kink On Tap 31 for the start of the quote.)

Shanna’s “Best Of” listing reads like a course in sexual empowerment, and she doesn’t balk at any topic. The list includes posts discussing everything from supporting informed abstinence to male survivors of sexual assault. And despite some attempts at denigrating her, Shanna consistently stands up for the life-affirming power positive portrayals of sexuality provide:

[W]hen one of us is attacked, whether it is online or in real life, whether we’re being called a pervert or a pedophile or a whore or the anti-christ, we are all being attacked. We are being told that sexuality education is harmful, that we are wrong to want people to be educated and open and have happy sex lives (whether vanilla or kinky, monogamous or not). We are ALL being attacked.

Ergo, I stand up for sexuality education, I stand up for sex positivity, I stand up for the free discussion of sexuality amongst all people.

Shanna’s breadth of understanding, commitment to diversity, and unending drive to empower every person on Earth to claim a life free of abuse—whether individual or societally endemic—is why I chose her for today’s Femquake spotlight.

Tagged with: boobquake, brainquake, femquake

Comments (9)

Sunday, April 25, 2010

Breasts AND brains are good for humanity & deserve respect! Introducing: Femquake

Category labels: Politics of sex, Rant

As you probably heard, a ~~sexist bigot~~ Iranian Cleric by the name of Hojatoleslam Kazem Sedighi claimed that women who don’t dress modestly cause earthquakes:

Many women who do not dress modestly […] lead young men astray, corrupt their chastity and spread adultery in society, which (consequently) increases earthquakes.

This ridiculous statement caused 22 year old Jennifer McCreight to call on women to Help fight supernatural thinking and the oppression of women, just by dressing immodestly! She instituted “Boobquake,” a global experiment on Monday, April 26th (tomorrow!) to see if so-called immodest dress actually causes earthquakes.

I think this is a fun meme, and I see nothing inherently wrong with it. Nevertheless, the call to immodesty in the name of science offended way more than just Iranian clerics. Many feminists seem to object to the idea that women’s bodies can be a source of pride and joy and empowerment for the women those bodies are attached to, even when those women clearly demonstrate their own agency. The objections, unsurprisingly, seem to imply that in a patriarchal society, women have no agency.

McCreight’s boobquake event sparked concern from these other feminists, causing them to launch a counter-event called brainquake. Brainquake says:

We (Negar Mottahedeh and Golbarg Bashi) are saddened that Jen McCreight, a blogger at Blag Hag, and a so-called feminist and thousands of women have responded by committing to show off “some cleavage for ‘Boobquake’ this Monday”. This campaign has aroused the evidently insatiable enthusiasm of the web community, male supporters in particular who can’t wait to see “regular” girls and women, many their direct friends to “showing off their tits”.

While many people may not understand the full context in which boobquake was originally proposed, is it appropriate for others to view the boobquake event with such tunnel vision? Well, yes and no, actually. Brainquake makes important and necessary arguments:

Everyday women and young girls are forced to “show off cleavage” and more in order simply to be heard, to be seen, or to advance professionally. The web is already filled with images of naked women; the porn industry thrives online and many young girls are already vulnerable to predatory abuse. Violence against women and girls has a direct correlation to the sexualisation of women and girls. The extent of their sexualisation is evident in the hundreds of replies that pour into the “Boobquake” Facebook page where women write, apologetically: “I don’t have boobs, not fair” or “Hey, I only have a C cup… ” and “what about those of us who no longer have a cleavage? they sag too low.”

Indeed, lack of self-esteem, poor body-image, non-consensual sexualization and many other problems, no tragedies, affect billions of women (and many men, I’d like to add) every day. This oppression absolutely must end. But is calling Jennifer McCreight, a woman who is a double major in genetics and evolution, a “so-called feminist” really part of the solution?

Now, look. The way I understand it, feminist ideals are not about shaming women’s bodies, nor pressuring women to expose them. Feminism is about gender equality for every body, male-assigned, female-assigned, intersex, and everyone else! In a world where women are pressured by men to either cover themselves or expose themselves, do we really need other feminists to be pressuring women in the same manner out of the inertia of ideological imperatives?

In the words of nonviolent women’s rights and social justice activist Arundhati Roy, When we are violent to our enemies, we do violence to ourselves. When we brutalize others, we brutalize ourselves. And eventually we run the risk of becoming our oppressors.

Don’t let ideological feminists shame you into covering yourself up, or pressure you into exposing yourself. Your body is YOURS. It is yours to show off however you like, whether physically, intellectually, or otherwise.

That said, the brainquake event, which asks women to show off their intellect instead of their cleavage by honor[ing] the accomplishments of Iranian women by showing off our abilities, our creativity, our ingenuity, and our smarts on our blogs, on Wikipedia, on Twitter, on Youtube, on Flickr and all over Facebook is a fantastic idea, too!

I think both Boobquake and Brainquake are fantastic ideas. So why the infighting? Why the “you’re not a real feminist” finger-pointing? Why did an Iranian cleric, whose ideology believes that promiscuous women cause earthquakes for fuck’s sake, fracture the unity with which women and men and every freedom-loving person on the planet needs in order to create a world where gender justice becomes a reality?

So I say, yes, let’s absolutely honor the intellectual accomplishments of Iranian women! But let’s also honor the accomplishments of women who do not dress modestly, such as Annie Sprinkle, “prostitute and porn star turned sex educator and artist,” and the numerous other feminists who stand up for the rights of women to be sexy on their own terms.

In response to all this divisiveness I keep seeing in feminist debates over issues of sexuality, I think it’s time for a FEMQUAKE!

Both breasts and brains are good for humanity and deserve our respect. Don’t coerce women into being proud of one over the other, or feeling ashamed of either! YES WE CAN all get along.

The Universal Declaration of Human Rights states “Everyone on Earth is born free and equal in dignity and rights.”

Part of what that means is that every woman has the prerogative to do as she pleases, from showing off cleavage on Boobquake to showing off intellect on Brainquake.

The core ideal is not a woman’s body or her mind, but her humanity. Decrying women who are proud of their bodies is as oppressive as forcing the ones who aren’t to cover them up. Hailing intellectualism over physical value is as insensitively demonizing as nonconsensual sexualization.

It’s time for women, men, and everyone else to empower one another to live the lives we want to live, free of coercion and abuse, whether modestly dressed or not.

It’s time for a FEMQUAKE!

Regardless of your gender, please join Femquake on April 26th, by blogging, tweeting, and publicizing the achievements of women, whether physical, intellectual, or (preferably) both! Tag your blog post with “Femquake” and your tweets with #Femquake to participate.

Even though there’s not much time, I’m going to run a post on this blog tomorrow highlighting the achievements of a woman who I know stands up for women’s sexuality, dresses immodestly, and has numerous academic and professional achievements.

Because smart is sexy, and sexy is smart, too.

Tagged with: femquake

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