Don’t Oppress My People With Your Big Hooped Earrings
Attention, all you white women:
If you didn’t create the culture as a coping mechanism for marginalisation, take off those hoops[;] if your feminism isn’t intersectional, take off those hoops[;] if you try to wear mi cultura when the creators can no longer afford it, take off those hoops[;] if you are incapable of using a search engine and expect other people to educate you, take off those hoops[;] if you can’t pronounce my name or spell it, take off those hoops.
So rants Ms Alegria Martinez, a member of the Latinx Student Union at Pitzer College, Claremont, California, in a campus-wide email. When not struggling with oppressive punctuation, Ms Martinez spends her time fretting about the fact that she and her peers are “not taken seriously” as the radical titans they so obviously are. According to fellow umbrage-taker Jacquelyn Aguilera, who also emailed the entire campus, “winged eyeliner, lined lips, and big hoop earrings” are “an everyday act of resistance” by the brown and virtuous, “especially here at the Claremont Colleges.”
Where students are forking out $60,000 a year in the hope of being terribly downtrodden. Possibly by the pool:
Update, via the comments:
Alice adds,
Some people want childhood to last 70 years.
Well, if you want to see evidence of maturity and self-possession, the Pitzer College Media Studies department, where Ms Martinez spends her time and some poor sucker’s money, probably isn’t the first place to look. And I think that, for many, that’s the tacit appeal of identitarian wokeness – it’s a chance to defer adult norms and an excuse to act out pretentious, inchoate tantrums. But it is a strange thing, this combination of assumed superiority and infantile emoting. Remember, Ms Martinez and Ms Aguilera emailed the entire campus, repeatedly and quite vehemently, with their views on hooped earrings and who should be allowed to wear them.
As sane people do.
And for a little perspective, it’s just occurred to me that when one of my nieces was the same age as these ladies, she was raising money for charity by trekking across the Sahara Desert. I doubt that hooped earrings and lip-liner, and who may or may not wear them, were foremost in her mind.
Commenter [+] quips,
Ain’t no privilege like victim privilege.
It does, I think, take a particular chutzpah to publicly claim to be oppressed – by other people’s earrings – while spending more than the median household income at a glorified holiday resort.
Oh, yes, from a wander through today’s offering of assorted online comics; aspects of doing business, declared personal identity, angry studies, and perceived preparation . . . .
Lactation and breastfeeding are typically viewed as inherently female activities.
Real Peer Review, as linked over at Ace – it’s a doozy, as they say.
http://ace.mu.nu/archives/368783.php
Although breastfeeding is assumed to be “natural” and a biological function, we problematize the practice as both gendered and heteronormative…
I think that needs an Everythingisproblematic’s pinch-faced scold rating.
Also:
An alternative explanation for the rarity of male lactation is gender-based rather than sex-based. It may be because people are socialized to view lactation as an exclusively female enterprise that it is one.
Dazzling and also dizzying intellect on display here. Let your minds revel in it.
That’s twice now that the spam filter has been tetchy regarding links for me. Is it perhaps Getting Ideas?
she’s appropriated the cultural calling cards of the Jersey Shore!
So, Lawn Guyland.
I mean if we’re talking Seaside specifically.
One could also argue it’s cultural appropriation of every mall that existed during the 1980s.
Squires, I was going for comic relief (which is the only thing that works for keeping one’s sanity with these knobs — I’m in academia and surrounded), not exactitude in demographic geography. So in a sense, acting like a journalism major (who is less funny, so there’s that if I say so myself).
Besides, my solution would be a waste of perfectly delicious scungilli salad.
Tiffany and Madonna should sue for trademark theft.
I never went down the shore much. Thus I was speculating, on the impression that Seaside Heights was mostly visited by people from New York/Long Island, and maybe Philly (though the latter I base only off of the preamble to Bitchin’ Camaro).
Now that I think of it, the Italian girls I went to school with did seem to keep hoop earrings alive well into the 90s. Are Italians not the original Latinx?
Apparently there is hope. For every score of young women like Ms. Martinez and Ms. Aguilera you come across one intelligent, erudite young woman like Josephine Mathias.
Ms. Mathias skillfully takes apart a Ryerson feminist professor’s exercise in indoctrination documented here.
Is it perhaps Getting Ideas?
Oh, it already has ideas. Ace is its sworn enemy, by all appearances.
Squires,
I never went down the shore much. Thus I was speculating…
Influenced by this classic, perhaps?
“The original LatinAs” — yes, that is what my (very German) husband calls us! Poor man, he and his son have been surrounded by wife and many daughters who took after wife in looks and temperament….they didn’t stand a chance.
And I had more than one pair of hoop earrings, and rocked those puppies up until I hit 50 and said hello to age and growing old as gracefully as possible (I don’t do the makeup and attire I used to, it is for the young, but back in the day…ah, it was fun, but then again I can do the “Sophia Loren plays Esmeralda the Gypsy” or even just “Jenny R. plays Sophia teaching a literature class” look without coming off as looking overwrought…probably not a style certain women should try…and respectful wolf whistles are to be appreciated as the complements they are, a man’s joyous yet within the bounds appreciation of a woman’s charms is God’s gift to women to enjoy life just as the sight of women is the gift to men…if they’re vulgar, you chew them out, end of story; if you can’t do this then you should stick to looking less…conspicuous).
No teased hair though (mine is thick enough to not warrant teasing), not horrible acid washed clothes or leopard print (there must be some understatement, some suggestion of primness), and I think they are doing the eyeliner and nude lip look completely wrong. It’s supposed to look extravagant and sensual, not like clown makeup. Basta!
And more on hoop earrings . . .