pro-choice?

so today was pro-life/pro-choice day today, and I must say, I enjoyed myself immensely. You might have seen me dear reader, with my lovely wwmsd? (what would Margaret Sanger do?) t-shirt running around school today. I was most pleased though, with the amount of boys who saw our shirts and lauded us. It was proof to me that there are intelligent, well-informed males out there. If there is any one thing in the world that I hate it is pro-life boys. I mean, they can't get pregnant! They will never have to make that decision, it isn't their futures and college educations and social alienation at stake! I think that any man who has at least a teaspoon of respect for women should recognize that it is HER decision. It was pointed out to me today that pro-choice does not mean anti-life and I think that that is really important to keep in mind. Even if an individual may disagree with abortion, for religious reasons or otherwise, they HAVE to recognize a woman's right to choose in our democratic secular society. Here are some lovely points from the day:

"keep your rosaries away from my ovaries!" - crude but catchy and too the point

"77% of pro-life leaders are men, 100% will never get pregnant" - very true

"pro-choice does not mean anti-life" - food for pro-lifer thought

The oddest thing was that both my parents are pro-life and I just couldn't bring myself to argue with them. I think that it is more filial piety than fear or wishy-washy feelings on my part. I just hope that one day the idea of pro-choice isn't just some radical thought us crazy kids are bitching about.

-thine in the bonds of womanhood :-)

"Jason, you need a filter!"

So I feel that I didn't truly do Virginia Woolf justice earlier, as I won't know. But what I really want to make a point of his how To The Lighthouse provides a very specific filter of feminism within the many intricate subsets of feminisms, with which to look at any later or earlier literary works by women.

So I Told Jon I Would Write a New Entry...

Sorry it's been so long guys! I just really haven't felt inspired lately. I did however, just finish A Room of One's Own, by Virginia Woolf and can write about that. It will be short though, as I want to reread the book and think about it more.

Virginia Woolf says that in order to be a truly genius writer you must be sexless, that is your prose must not be too masculine, or too feminine. Of her male predecessors and contemporaries she feels that perhaps Shakespeare was androgynous, and Keats and Stern and Lamb and Cooper. Milton had too much male, as did Wordsworth and Tolstoi.

Woolf however, praises Emily Bronte and Jane Austen earlier in her essay, for their ability to "write as women write" not as men write. She states: "what genius, what integrity it must have required to face all that criticism, in the midst of that purely patriarchal society, to hold fast to the thing as they saw it without shrinking"(74). Jane Austen was an amazing writer because she developed a writing style all her own, instead of imitating men writers.

One of the things Woolf finds particularly interesting is how men depict women in their works. Women in Shakespeare, in classical works, in contemporary literature are often pictured as being very strong, but very static. They are never as developed as the males; never in a male work do you hear the lines "Chloe liked Olivia" like in Mary Carmichael's novel. Woolf points out that Octavia never complimented Cleopatra on her hair (i found this funny).

All of this made me wonder, how exactly ARE woman portrayed in all my favorite books by men? This was actually quite a sad fault. Fitzgerald fails immediately, all of his women are the femme fatals of the males, they are over-emotional, they are needy or cold or even insane. It is always the male that saves the female. Dr. Diver dating his weak, crazed patient? Think of every female in This side of Paradise, all overemotional. The worst would be that girl in The Last Tycoon who does everything just for the purpose of have sex with some guy, when she slept she was resting for sex, when she ate it was fuel for sex. Thank You Virginia Woolf, you ruined my favorite author for me. haha, oh well.

tired now, more later