Elisabella
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ORIGINAL: ShaktiSama
1) Expressing my opinion is not "imposing my views on everyone". You cannot "impose your views on everyone" unless you have the political power and social power to do so, in addition to the will to force others to obey your whims: I have none of the above, and have said as much more than once. I even mentioned it in this thread, before you jumped in to play the part of Annie Coulter.
And let's also make one other thing very clear: I am a female dominant and a feminist, posting to a thread on Feminism in the ASK A MISTRESS forum. I could not choose to express my feminist views in a more perfectly correct and polite place to do so. Of the two of us, I am the one who naturally belongs here and I am the one whose views were specifically requested in the OP by its forum location.
YOU are the person who has come here looking for a fight among people who were simply talking. I did not seek you out, nor do I go to football games to harass people who participate in a loathesomely sexist institution. So let's just make it very clear WHO is imposing WHAT on WHO, shall we?
My stating my opinion is imposition, and yours isn't?
You're the worst bloody hypocrite I've ever met.
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But I also don't think it's right to prevent a child from doing cheerleading, dance, or gymnastics if they want to, from preventing them from having fun with their friends, just because you think it's unfeminist.
*shrug* There are lots of way to have fun with your friends; you don't have to dress up like a sex object and show your underwear to strangers while underage. If a girl under my care wants to play virtually any other sport, or pursue a less obnoxiously sexist version of dance or gymnastics, I have no objection to it. My younger daughter has been in a number of dance programs over the years and was the fastest runner in her grade for many years. She has many friends and plenty of fun; somehow she manages to lead a full life without needing to get in a lot of early practice for life as a whore. Believe it or not, it can be done.
Well that's fine, but it's also irrelevant. I was talking about girls who *want* to be cheerleaders.
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Forgive me if I don't get offended, but I don't feel that someone who is unable to have a debate without throwing insults is a proper judge of what constitutes class.
"I pray you don't have daughters or nieces" is a very, very profound insult. The fact that you are so intellectually dishonest that you cannot acknowledge it as such is beyond pathetic.
Well yeah, since you use 'little girl' as an insult, I do hope you aren't the primary caregiver of any little girls. It doesn't matter if you only use the phrase as an insult to some people - the fact that you think the phrase itself is a denotation of inferiority says a lot about your mindset.
You wouldn't call someone 'beautiful woman' as an insult, would you? Because to you that phrase is inherently complimentary. Yet somehow 'little girl' has something about it that makes you think it's a proper insult, and that makes me wonder if you'd stifle your little girl's little girlhood so she isn't seen as weak and contemptible. Subconsciously, of course.
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Sexually exploited. Strong phrase. Using it to describe cheerleading kinda demeans all those girls in Asia, Africa, and Eastern Europe who are raped on a daily basis.
There are other words to describe rape. Like, for example, RAPE. Or assault. Or violation.
See how rich the English language is? You can use words like "sexual exploitation" to describe sexual exploitation, and words like "rape" to describe rape.
Yeah, and you can say "tricked into accepting a job then kidnapped and forced into prostitution, making money for her captors as she is repeatedly raped"...or you can say "sexually exploited." One's a lot more concise.
And I fail to see how you can categorize something someone willingly does as 'exploitation' - generally if someone's being exploited it's not their prefered state of affairs.
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Frescoes of naked women doesn't mean that women walked around naked in public.
No, in this case it means that adult women walked around naked in semi-private for the entertainment of men who could afford it, and were sexual objects.
See my above point, re: slaves vs citizens. Feel free to say slaves were exploited. But don't use slaves to back up a 'women were exploited' point.
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Western society has not significantly changed since then, as many a former cheerleader who works in the innumerable topless bars and strip clubs of the world can tell you.
I fail to see the problem in this. That former cheerleader could just as easily be a waitress or a dance instructor. She chooses to work in a particular field, she gets paid for it, there is no exploitation. Just a choice that you consider the wrong one.
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And those women were probably slaves - you can't talk about the exploitation of women by referencing slaves any more than you can say that since male slaves had to do heavy work, all men are being exploited.
Lol..."probably" slaves? I would argue that in a patriarchist system, ALL women are slaves--including the patrician women, whose bodies are the owned property of their fathers/brothers/husbands. But in this case, you are mistaken; some of the women depicted are slaves, some of them are professional prostitutes and entertainers who are paid wages and who go home to their private lives after the party. We know this from the historical record which accompanies the depictions.
If you're using the actions of slaves and whores to prove women are exploited, I'm so done with this. I am wholly against slavery but looking at history you have to look at it in historical context. Female slaves and whores (and in Rome, foreigners and freedmen/women) were not treated the way citizen women were. That is a matter of ethnocentricism and classism, not sexism.
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The class of prostitutes I was referring to were the meretrices.
A meretrix was a registered prostitute. They held a license so that they could be taxed by the state. The majority of women who sold sex or sexual entertainment were not registered--then as now.
I knew the meretrices were the guild, I didn't know most whores weren't meretrices. Still, I was talking about prostitutes in the literal sense (a direct exchange of sexual service for money or gifts) rather than some "she had to marry some guy she didn't like therefore she was prostituted" sense of the word.
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You neglect to mention that all of the children of the pater familias were his property.
I also neglected to mention that I had peanut butter for lunch. I didn't mention it because it wasn't relevant, and neither is this--unless you're ready to come over to my side of the fence and agree that patriarchy harms everyone, both male and female. 
Well I just think it's pretty dishonest to say "it's sexist because women were their fathers property" when there was absolutely no difference between sons and daughters - it's a non-sexist example of one of the structures of an actual patriarchy. Patriarchy isn't "male dominance" - it's "dominance by the father."
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1) Rome did have virgin priestesses of the senatorial class, who were killed quite brutally if they violated their chastity. And no, Augustus did not expect his sister to be one of them. I was using "virgin nun" as a quick summation of the unilateral sexual propriety which was expected of Roman upper class women.
2) The name you first mentioned was not Octavia--who was only married twice, the second time to her brother's ally/opponent Marc Anthony. Octavia, the sister of Augustus, has been confused with Julia, his daughter.
Octavia is not really associated with any sex scandals where SHE was the one having the sex. She was forced to marry Marc Anthony, but she was faithful to him, apparently. Anthony was the one who screwed around on HER, and betrayed his Roman wife after she sent him money and troops.
3) "Julia", the royal lady of more scandalous fame, was the daughter of Augustus by his first marriage. And Julia was married three times. It was the third marriage, in which she was forced into wedlock with Tiberius just a few months after her second husband had died violently, that she ran afoul of her father--both sexually and politically, although of the two the political problem was by far the most serious.
Yeah, I wondered why you brought up Octavia. I said something about Julia and you replied: "The behavior of Julia was "notorious" because Augustus was such a stickler for moral rectitude--the ultimate "stiff". If his sister was not a virgin nun, it tended to undermine his authority to command others to be virtuous." I just assumed you were changing the subject.
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And for the record, since you have brought up the subject of the negative aspects of Absolute Paternal Power? This particular forced marriage hurt Tiberius every bit as much as it hurt Julia, if not more so. Julia's husband Agrippa was dead--but Tiberius was married to a living woman, one he loved completely and passionately. Augustus forced him to divorce the woman he loved and marry Julia for the sake of the dynasty, and Tiberius was a broken and bitter man thereafter until the day he died. They say that he encountered his ex-wife on the street once, and was so overcome at the sight of her that he burst into tears and followed her home weeping, begging for her forgiveness.
Yeah that made a really powerful scene in I, Claudius, though according to that story it was Livia who orchestrated the marriage. Anyway. I'm not arguing for an absolute patriarchy or a return to Roman society (I'm not a fan of snap-your-fingers-divorce), but I do think that there were some good things about the society. Women were celebrated as wives and mothers, now the only recognition women get is from a successful career. We were also expected to be publicly virtuous (and consequently, rape was punished by death) - people today freak out when someone points out that a rape victim was getting drunk and giving lap dances, but it's natural for us to want to protect virtue, and to be less indignant when we see a lack of virtue. If you think a woman who was acting slutty gets a bad rap if she's raped, imagine a man being raped by a woman. The assumption of sexual virtue in men is so low that unless there's anal penetration most people think it's *impossible* to rape a man, not as a matter of physicality but because "come on dude, you're a guy. guys don't say no to sex." If women keep heading down the path we're on, in 500 years they'll say the same about us.
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The only hostility in this thread has come from you and DemonKia, with your unprovoked insults.
You came in with a hostile and aggressive attitude--you were received accordingly. Try not to be so surprised.
If my attitude were hostile, why did only two people reply hostilely when the rest were able to engage in civilized disagreement? Please don't blame your actions on me - you chose to reply the way you did.
< Message edited by Elisabella -- 10/19/2009 5:02:15 PM >
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