The multi-plex previews include an ad by out and family-friendly lesbian entertainer Ellen DeGeneres pimping for a major cosmetics company. One online report includes the following images about the sexualized commodity politics of feminizing the faces and bodies of women:
Photo’s tag line: “Ellen-a CoverGirl spokesmodel?! It’s true, snitching spies told the New York Post on Tuesday.
The 50-year-old Emmy-winning talk show host has inked a deal to appear as the face of CoverGirl makeup in a forthcoming ad campaign, according to a new report. Ellen is “shooting the campaign this week,” an insider says. “She must have gotten at least $1 million for it.” [Online screen continued the hawt-ness with the following]
Everywhere you go online, scantily clad and make-up wearing women are “hawt” and “hottest,” and other women wanting desperately to be men also apparently “hawt” in the unequal roles and rules of man’s war against womankind. Last month in NYC somebody I knew in LA wowed crowds with her ability as a drag king to perform “gendered” as a man:
Photo’s tag line: “World-renowned gender illusionist Dred [who still went by Mildred when I knew her (Jude’s note)] brought crowds to their feet last week after her performance in Wow Cafe’s Hypergender Burlesque show in NYC.”
One sad part is that the global culture’s entertainment over-focus on maleness as higher-caste status (and the subordinate classism of feminization) has resulted in a bit of performing glory for a few while oppression continues against so many more women.
To excerpt again from University of Melbourne’s professor Sheila Jeffreys (and author of Unpacking Queer Politics: A Lesbian Feminist Perspective among her other great books on the global politics of sexuality), as social commentary:
FTM Transsexualism and Grief, By Sheila Jeffreys
In “Pornography and Grief” Andrea Dworkin writes very powerfully about the impact upon her of having to look at so much pornography in order to write about it. The horror of the pain, destruction, and just pure run of the mill hatred towards women inspired grief in her (Dworkin, Letters from a War Zone, 1988). I have looked at the websites aimed at and created by female-to-male transsexuals (now fashionably called transgenders). I have experienced considerable distress from witnessing the destruction of female body parts, the pain, the blood and cutting up that is being visited presently on women who, often by their own admission, would, a few years previously, have considered themselves simply lesbians but are now ‘transitioning’ (to use the jargon). … My response [to ask why] is very different from that of most queer theorists, liberal public policymakers and lawyers who are busily working out how to `respect’ or `celebrate’ the choice and agency of transsexuals by changing laws and policies.
… Loree Cook-Daniels found FTM [female-to-male] transsexualism to be surprisingly common in her circle of lesbian friends in the US once she started asking around in response to her partner’s decision to become a ‘transman.’ … FTM transsexualism destroys the lesbianism not just of the woman who ‘transitions’ but that of her female partner too. Sadly, Cook-Daniels’ FTM partner committed suicide in 2000.
…I understand transitioning to become `gay men’ to illustrate the almost total dominance of gay male culture and gay male versions of masculinity within ‘queer’ communities. In Drag King shows, now sweeping Australia as they have the US and the UK, lesbians tend to dress up specifically as masculine gay men and seek to outdo each other in the imitation.
…`Butch’ lesbians who choose to be gay men do not have functioning penises, phalloplasties are very expensive, enormously painful and do not erect, thus they become `bottoms’ in gay male sexual practice.
This contemporary epidemic or cult of female-to-male transsexualism needs to be placed within its historical and political context in the oppression of lesbians. The vast majority of the women who ‘transition’ have identified as lesbians, or at least lived within the lesbian community and conducted relationships with lesbians. The attribution of masculinity to lesbians historically has formed a major tool of control. Lesbian feminists in the 1970s developed a sophisticated critique of the ways in which masculine scholarship and culture sought to disparage or disappear lesbians by portraying them as masculine or really wanting to be men. Many lesbians in the 1980s/90s rejected the understandings of feminism and developed fashionable sadomasochism and butch/femme roleplaying out of which the phenomenon of FTM transsexualism has arisen.
The reasons given by lesbians for their decisions to ‘transition’ in books such as Holly Devor’s FIM. Female-to-Male Transsexuals in Society (1999) in Loren Cameron’s Body Alchemy (1996) and the collection Sissies and Tomboys (Rottnek (ed) 1999) derive quite clearly from their oppression as lesbians and as women [Jude’s note: when they’re not pretty-privileged, family-friendly, exceptionally funny, cosmetics-wearing, lucky-in-love-and-money lesbians like Ellen DeGeneres] … Manhood is attractive because it represents higher social status and an individual escape from the oppression of lesbians and women without any social change. But manhood is a social construction which requires the continued creation of femininity and the oppression of the vast majority of women to have any meaning.
So FTM transsexualism is a problem for all women who want to change the power relations of male dominance rather than engage in surgical social climbing. But it is most spectacularly a problem for lesbians because it is lesbians who are suffering the agony and the expense. … We must challenge those forms of self-harm which are presently being promoted as progressive and liberating such as butch/femme roleplaying, sadomasochistic self-mutilation and the instruments, drugs and surgeries now being used to enable lesbians to ‘transition.’ Though there has tended to be an attitude of liberal tolerance towards these practices on the part of many lesbians, which has allowed them to flourish, there has come a time when the very serious consequences of what have never really been ‘playful’ behaviours needs to be recognised. …” Source of Sheila Jeffreys quoted words from Rain and Thunder Summer Solstice 2002; an extended version of this piece forms one chapter of her book, Unpacking Queer Politics: A lesbian feminist perspective; an earlier version of this piece was published in Lesbian Network in Australia, April 2001.
It’s not playful, it’s not funny, it’s not okay for the longest war continually to man-ipulate womankind.
The least funny part may be how easily so-called “free will” — promoted as an ego construct and source of false pride by self-serving man-made religious theory long before the era of mass-media mental programming — can be co-opted by cosmetics payola and drag-king approval.
TheLongestWar 