The sex and gender question, infiltrating our use of the internet.

Okay, so I know it's not my turn to blog this week, but I can't help sharing this, because I think it's super-relevant to what we were talking about today with the Butler reading.

This is a blog post by someone who uses deviantART, which is a web community where artists can upload their work and share it with others for comment and critique. During the sign-up process, like many other websites, dA asks users to select their gender, either male or female. There were some transgender users who found this extremely offensive, and there was a huge blow-up about it, the details of which are outlined in the post. The fact that there was a huge outcry and debate over the distinction between gender, sex, and the various kinds of genders that people can now identify with, lead dA to change the way it let users display (or not display) their gender, as is explained in dA's CEO's blog post on the subject.

I just wanted to know what you guys thought about the subject. Did the users go too far in assuming that dA was being disrespectful? Did dA go too far in changing their sign-up interface? Or is this all just nuts?

Whose Girls?

Of my hundreds of faithful readers, there are only a few of you who know my feelings about Animal Collective--namely that I can't seem to understand what all the fuss is about. However, that lack of understanding is probably a topic for another day. All I'd like to do right now is to post a sample of the lyrics to "My Girls," one of their more satisfying cuts, followed by an audio clip of the song. Knowing what I know about their left-leaning politics and such, it would seem that the band would try to avoid essentialisms and endorsements of materialism. However, "My Girls," arguably, seems to rely pretty heavily on stock gender stereotypes (the titular girls are their--the masculine vocalists'--girls), and I wonder if it's possible not to care about social status but yet to want a house. Finally, what's up with the romantic conception of "adobe slats"?

Thoughts?

"My Girls":

There isn't much that I feel I need
A solid soul and the blood I bleed
But with a little girl, and by my spouse,
I only want a proper house

I don't care for fancy things
Or to take part in the freshest wave,
But to provide for mine who ask
I will, with heart, on my father's grave

On my father's grave
(On your father's grave)

I don't mean to seem like I care about material things,
Like a social status,
I just want
Four walls and adobe slats
For my girls

My Girls - Animal Collective

Young Lungs

If you'll permit me to invoke Roland Barthes for a minute, I'll call your attention to a series of under-interrogated myths about aging: Namely that when you get older, you get less limber, less strong, less youthful, less attractive, and less cool. Susan Bordo has written brilliantly on how advertising culture, in its focus on youth, beauty, and thinness, consistently marginalizes those of us whose bodies do not mirror the images of beauty circulated by mainstream media. For good reason, Bordo focuses her attention on the impact that mainstream advertising has on women. My intention today, however, is to call your attention to the following video for Dinosaur Jr's "Over It" (from their new album Farm), which focuses its attention on men, and the way that it contradicts the mythology that equates aging with fragility:



The men performed all of their own stunts in this video, and it's quite a hoot to watch. Who says a grey-haired man in his mid-forties can't properly execute a killer kickflip?