tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2770580070906411828.post568800245523928567..comments2024-03-22T05:55:48.117-04:00Comments on The Pervocracy: I suppose you could call me a "femivore" too, baby.Cliff Pervocracyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/02080142422250604406noreply@blogger.comBlogger24125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2770580070906411828.post-62580684130095644472012-06-30T03:25:18.332-04:002012-06-30T03:25:18.332-04:00The whole choice vs idealized 'womyns lives...The whole choice vs idealized 'womyns lives' thing is getting to be a mess and it doesn't need to be.Ianhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14770818335460387968noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2770580070906411828.post-48660563194105691152012-06-30T03:20:34.663-04:002012-06-30T03:20:34.663-04:00Home self-sustaining? I'd like to see their sm...Home self-sustaining? I'd like to see their small scale smelters and chip fabs! lol. <br /><br />That said, growing a small amount of food can be pretty functional and useful w/o too much work. For example, my family would never have the luxury of good spaghetti sauce without our tomato garden. <br />The same goes for nonbiological equipment. The world would be a better place if one in 5 households had somebody very good at fixing equipment, and willing to share.Ianhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14770818335460387968noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2770580070906411828.post-12498007513363711322010-05-05T14:43:01.852-04:002010-05-05T14:43:01.852-04:00"June Clever - feminism doesn't mean that..."June Clever - feminism doesn't mean that you need to climb into a jock strap and work on an oil rig to fight the fiminist fight<br />That's fine with me as long as you don't mind if I *do* put on that jockstrap. I agree completely that freedom of choice is the essence of feminism, but it always cuts both ways. "<br /><br />Oh, absolutely. If the jock strap/oil rig/18 wheeler deal is your "thing", go for it. If you want to do it all while weraing heels and a ball gown, more power to ya. It's just not my thing. Whatever choice someone makes, it doesn't make them less valuable, or less feminine (unless your choice involves a sex change). <br /><br />My whole philosophy on life tends to run along the lines of "You do your thing, I'll do mine and as long as you butt out of my business, I'll butt out of your's" which, really, I think is just pretty damn good advice for anyone. People make choices about whatever it is they want to do with their lives and, as long as it doesn't affect my life, or anyone else's, I have no business giving an opinion about it. <br /><br />What I had originally tried to say was, I think feminism has come to be seen as this woman crusader-male bashing kind of thing when, in my mind, it shouldn't be that way at all. Every person, man or woman, should have the right to choose whatever type lifestyle they want, be treated and paid equally, and don't worry about what other people are doing. By being a stay at home mom and wife and "femivore" I'm not some repressed, submissive woman who is being used by my husband (ok, well sometimes, but that's a different topic). I choose to stay home and take care of my family, just like another woman may choose to fly a plane or work on a fishing boat. Both of our choices are perfectly valid and we should both be free to make those choices without being judged for them.June Clevernoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2770580070906411828.post-5560523494107005452010-05-05T00:30:10.185-04:002010-05-05T00:30:10.185-04:00Actually, the term for "woman eater" is ...Actually, the term for "woman eater" is "gynophage". "Femivore" would probably mean "one who has a feminine and/or feminist type diet" ...whatever the hell that would be referring to.<br /><br />At the very least it has nothing to do with gardening.Not Menoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2770580070906411828.post-90685952144894635082010-05-04T22:27:24.997-04:002010-05-04T22:27:24.997-04:00Has no one else noticed that "femivore" ...Has no one else noticed that "femivore" means "woman eater?"<br /><br />Carnivore = meat eater.<br />Femivore = woman eater?<br /><br />I think that makes me a femivore, in a manner of speaking. If you know what I mean.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2770580070906411828.post-52405726088323777412010-05-04T21:16:56.141-04:002010-05-04T21:16:56.141-04:00Holly said...
"Jack - It's just creepy ...Holly said... <br /><br />"Jack - It's just creepy to think that in "a kind of modern preindustrialism in which the home is self-sustaining, the center of labor and livelihood for both sexes," <br /><br />*** First, let's winnow some of the bullshit out of that article -- the VAST majority of these folks are not self-sustaining, not within their communities and certainly not within their own 'homesteads.' They're not milling grain, making tools or anything like that. Like the rest of us, they're enjoying a hobby, and to some degree (great or small) supplementing their diets with home-grown food. The rest is just posing.<br /><br />"the Maul Incident might have been permanently crippling or fatal."<br /><br />*** Very true, but perhaps besides the point -- we don't even have a fireplace, so we're not using the wood to heat our home. Our equation isn't one of fundamental-need-vs.-risk-factor. We have a firepit in the yard, strictly used for bonfires and the drunken carousing about thereof. We just like cutting up our own wood; it's good exercise, and again, gives us a more direct connection (albeit small) to what we're doing, vs. lighting a Duralog, etc. Of course, the Maul Incident could've been just as easily replaced by 'suffered Injury X during the kind of play usually featured in this blog,' or 'Suffered Injury Y while going to the mall to pick up a dvd.' Accidents happen whether the activity is fundamental, transcendental, or banal.<br /><br />"Is your garden to the point where it actually feeds everyone, or do you also buy food? (Particularly in the winter.)" <br /><br />*** Not at all --shit, lassie, like I said, it's only 2000 square feet, and my fat ass takes up nearly that much space all by its hairy self. Our garden provides about 20% of our yearly veggies, and the other more emotional/intellectual benefits, that sense of doing it ourselves. But as I said, I wouldn't want to do the self-sustaining household deal -- you give up too much. I just want some of the earthiness that comes with wielding an ax and digging up my beloved potatoes. It's a valid hobby, but no longer a valid lifestyle in our infinitely intermeshed world.Jackhttp://www.itwasactuallykindafunnywhenshehitherfootwiththemaul.comnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2770580070906411828.post-60311333526642039212010-05-04T20:51:41.834-04:002010-05-04T20:51:41.834-04:00Well, I garden and forage a bit when I can. Partly...Well, I garden and forage a bit when I can. Partly because if I'm going to work pretty much my entire waking hours anyway, I might as well spend a small part of the time doing something that involves being outside. And partly for practice, so that if civilization collapses or something I won't be completely useless.<br /><br />One of the advantages of being both a gardener *and* a forager is that you can tell which weeds are edible, so you get a bit more for your work.Not Menoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2770580070906411828.post-22381290092952373272010-05-04T18:03:51.892-04:002010-05-04T18:03:51.892-04:00To me, fresh food, particularly eggs, does TASTE b...To me, fresh food, particularly eggs, does TASTE better than the stuff from the store. That's not enough of a benefit for me to raise the damn chickens myself, though. I keep a kitchen garden, and I love it, but it's not enough to keep me fed. Far from it.<br /><br />Funny how what people struggle to avoid becomes trendy when it's not a matter of life and death<br /><br />William the CoronerAnonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2770580070906411828.post-28773762142885680782010-05-04T17:31:39.027-04:002010-05-04T17:31:39.027-04:00Lastnightsclothes - Again, I'm not criticizing...Lastnightsclothes - Again, I'm not criticizing the gardening, I'm criticizing people who talk about their gardens in an oh-so-fancy "this is a big important movement that I just invented" way.<br /><br />I don't look down on people who drive Prisuses, I look down on people who think the Prius came with a free licence to sneer at and make assumptions about SUV drivers.<br /><br />So grow that garden, spend money and time on it, just because it's a privilege doesn't mean you shouldn't enjoy it. But when you pose for twee little photographs where you cuddle chickens in your adorable little shawl and perfectly clean untanned unscarred skin, it's a goddamn hobby. No shame in that if you admit it.Cliff Pervocracyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02080142422250604406noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2770580070906411828.post-50007439567939197602010-05-04T16:22:15.619-04:002010-05-04T16:22:15.619-04:00lastnightsclothes--
It's actually the superio...lastnightsclothes--<br /><br />It's actually the superiority-complex that gets to me, the idea that they're the most creative and awesome people in the world for coming up with the idea of a vegetable garden (like it's something nobody else ever thought of). If they just had a vegetable garden in their backyard, I wouldn't mock, but I'm irritated by the romanticism of subsistence-farming by people who've never done it.<br /><br />My parents' next-door neighbors are classic hipster farmers, college-educated hippies who work part-time at Cornell University and run an organic farm. They are not hobby-farmers; they are farmers, with an understanding of the realities and challenges of farming in general and organic farming in particular, which means that when they have something to say about either issue, they're coming from an informed perspective.<br /><br />tl;dr, the problem with self-righteous backyard farmers is that they extend their understanding of hobby-farming to actual farming of the level required to feed a society, and in doing so tend to come up with inaccurate, classist, and frankly ridiculous ideas.aebhelnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2770580070906411828.post-5934857119934757082010-05-04T16:04:38.426-04:002010-05-04T16:04:38.426-04:00My last comment was getting way too long, but I st...My last comment was getting way too long, but I still had a bunch of stuff I wanted to say.<br /><br />"Who will make those metal tools? Presumably the class of people who don't get to play pioneer lady for fun. People who never had to whine about not having enough chores. ...if you want a food garden and can afford it, hey, it's fun and it'll make delicious food. Just don't kid yourself that it's something more than a hobby."<br /><br />Well first of all, everyone who gets to make ethical decisions about how their decisions affect the earth/the ecosystem and how to make their lifestyle sustainable is privileged. We live in a very classist society and we've apparently decided that eating Doritos and shopping at Wal-Mart are good enough for the poor. So making fun of privileged people for, LOL, spending more money and working harder in pursuit of an ethical lifestyle sorta misses the point. We should be complaining about the huge numbers of people who can't afford to make these kinds of choices, not about the people who are trying to use their privilege to make a difference.<br /><br />Anyhow, you can't have it both ways -- you can't claim that farming is horrible backbreaking labor people will realize soon enough that they hate, AND that it doesn't count because you're rich and you're just playing pioneer lady. Presumably most of these people are trying to strike a balance between backyard hobby farming and backbreaking subsistence labor. After all, "real" farmers get to go to the supermarket too, it's not like that's cheating.<br /><br />Once a hobby gets to a certain point of seriousness and learned expertise, it's no longer a hobby. Raising actual crops and live animals is, like, a real thing, and if it makes up a significant proportion of your life, there's no reason you should have to regard it as a "hobby," just because you're a hipster who used to work in publishing (or something). <br /><br />Middle-class people who try to do organic-y stuff always seem to face this catch-22 that if they do something quick and easy, like buy a Prius or switch to organic toothpaste, it's mocked as lazy trend-hoppers. But if they make actual sacrifices in pursuit of change, they're mocked as crazy self-righteous masochists. There has to be a way to balance those two things. The fact that some people think hipster farmers are annoying doesn't make our present way of life any more responsible or sustainable.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2770580070906411828.post-52920562542331823412010-05-04T16:03:15.603-04:002010-05-04T16:03:15.603-04:00"femivore" should be the opposite-gender..."femivore" should be the opposite-gender equivalent of a "maneater" (which, I was never really sure what that was).<br /><br />flightlessAnonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2770580070906411828.post-88921653353133575662010-05-04T15:43:24.104-04:002010-05-04T15:43:24.104-04:00June Clever - feminism doesn't mean that you n...June Clever - <i>feminism doesn't mean that you need to climb into a jock strap and work on an oil rig to fight the fiminist fight</i><br />That's fine with me as long as you don't mind if I *do* put on that jockstrap. I agree completely that freedom of choice is the essence of feminism, but it always cuts both ways.Cliff Pervocracyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02080142422250604406noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2770580070906411828.post-84365930753136639462010-05-04T15:41:29.995-04:002010-05-04T15:41:29.995-04:00Lastnightsclothes - I am absolutely not criticizin...Lastnightsclothes - I am absolutely not criticizing urban/home gardening. I agree that it's fun, healthy, and delicious. Although I think as a full-time lifestyle (especially since having food won't remove the need for money to pay other bills) it's probably about as fun as the anon above you makes it sound.<br /><br />Farm work or data entry? Frankly, that's kind of a toss-up. Is the data entry center air-conditioned?<br /><br /><i>You still had a sense of how the process worked, and could perceive the egg farmers as people much like yourself, not as dreadfully banal working-class types whom you'd never set eyes on.</i><br />Femivores think this more than anyone! When they gather the eggs from their backyard coop, they're thinking of themselves as vastly superior to the ignorant proletariat that works in soulless industrial chicken farming. Their connection to real agriculture is entirely romanticized and dependent on everyone having a rich husband to pick up the slack.Cliff Pervocracyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02080142422250604406noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2770580070906411828.post-81165402820135482722010-05-04T15:36:49.301-04:002010-05-04T15:36:49.301-04:00"If it was gay men instead of housewives, how..."If it was gay men instead of housewives, however, I'd call it FAGRICULTURE."<br /><br />BEST comment EVER. LOL<br /><br />In some ways, I quess I'd be considered a "feminist". A woman can do anything a man can do and should be treated equally while doing it. There's a lot of things I'm not quite sure WHY a woman would want to do but, if she does, have at it. That said, what I choose to do is stay home and raise my keds and, yes, grow fruits and veggies, as of this year. I'd love to have some chickens. Unfortunately, so would my American Bulldog.<br /><br /> I'm sure as hell NOT a "femivore". I'm just a stay at home mom who's kids will eat their weight in watermelon in a 24 hour period. Between the melons, green peppers, green beans, cucumbers and strawberries I should be able to keep these little snackers fed half the day, just from the garden. I have the time, and the space, so it just made sense to plant a useful garden instead of just the flowers I usually plant. That doesn't make me a revolutionary. I'm just cheap.<br /><br />I don't think I could raise chickens anyway. I'd end up with a yard full of chickens and then a chicken feed budget that would rival the food budget of all the 2-leggers living here so it would be counter-productive anyway. <br /><br />Screw feminist millitantas. If you want to go save the world and fight shoulder to shoulder with men in a war in a far away country, be my guest. I choose to stay home and raise my family and grow some damn veggies and I don't need a fancy title like "femivore" to do it. In my world, feminism doesn't mean that you need to climb into a jock strap and work on an oil rig to fight the fiminist fight. It just means you get to choose what you want to do and I get to choose what I want to do and everybody should keep their trap shut about where my "place" is. My "place" just happens to be at home raising my family and I'm enough of a "feminist" to punch anyone in the neck that feels the need to comment on my "woman's work".June Clevernoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2770580070906411828.post-26904564369786224462010-05-04T15:28:02.781-04:002010-05-04T15:28:02.781-04:00"Femivore" and the trend pieces surround..."Femivore" and the trend pieces surrounding it are absolutely ridiculous. But I have to object a little to what I see as your criticising the alleged "femivore" lifestyle itself.<br /><br />"When people realized they could have someone else raise their chickens so they could devote their time to something more interesting and just buy eggs, this was pretty much the beginning of civilization....You can pay 20 minutes' wages for a two-week supply and get on with your life." Well yes, but for many people "getting on with your life" involves a horribly stressful, pointless job and a long commute every day in heavy traffic. So the idea that providing the basic materials for living is just a distraction from the fun parts of life isn't really true for many people. Spend some time doing data entry, or commuting on the D.C. beltway, and the concept of backbreaking labor on a farm starts to sound not half bad. (Although yes, I realize it takes much longer if you try to provide all your needs that way.)<br /><br />When people switched over to buying eggs in neat cartons at the supermarket, yes there's a reason for that, but there are also downsides they likely weren't thinking about. For one, fresh eggs taste much better. (And so do other fresh foods, so if you're getting most of your food from your back yard, your meals are more flavorful.) And for another thing, if everyone does that, you have a whole generation who's so alienated from the sources of their food, they barely know what a chicken looks like. Anyhow, back at the "beginning of civilisation," not everyone may have raised chickens, but the people who did still lived in your village or tribe. You still had a sense of how the process worked, and could perceive the egg farmers as people much like yourself, not as dreadfully banal working-class types whom you'd never set eyes on. (I'm not suggesting that's what you, Holly, think, but that that's sorta the inevitable result of having all farming activity bunched up in the flyover states.) & it seems to me the hippie gentlemen-farm people are going for something like that, i.e., thinking of raising one's own food as something anyone can do, not as a specialised activity for people who aren't smart enough to write computer code.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2770580070906411828.post-86939553716384473392010-05-04T14:05:44.280-04:002010-05-04T14:05:44.280-04:00Thank you. I've gardened, raised and slaughte...Thank you. I've gardened, raised and slaughtered meat animals, canned, pickled and preserved enough food to feed a small army--ie, my children---while working full-time to pay the bills as a single mom and raising kids. It is hard. Backbreaking, too tired to even sit down and cry hard....but it wasn't the new incarnation of feminism. It was just work.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2770580070906411828.post-79460566951131882352010-05-04T13:31:03.849-04:002010-05-04T13:31:03.849-04:00Jack - It's just creepy to think that in "...Jack - It's just creepy to think that in "a kind of modern preindustrialism in which the home is self-sustaining, the center of labor and livelihood for both sexes," the Maul Incident might have been permanently crippling or <i>fatal</i>.<br /><br />Is your garden to the point where it actually feeds everyone, or do you also buy food? (Particularly in the winter.)Cliff Pervocracyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02080142422250604406noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2770580070906411828.post-34296722202610525232010-05-04T13:16:50.393-04:002010-05-04T13:16:50.393-04:00Agreed on all points. I have about 2000 square fe...Agreed on all points. I have about 2000 square feet of garden and some mongo pumpkins in the back field (no chickens -- I'm allergic, I get an exception -- although I do have rabbits [also allergic to them, so they're there for pets and to give me some pseudo-'farm cred']), so I suppose I'm almost a femivore. Especially given that the constrcution of the word leans much more to eating women than farming at home, and I like to chew on girls now and then.<br /><br />We garden extensively and chop our own firewood (hence... the recent Maul Incident), and there's an appeal to the simplicity of working with your hands and having things you had a bigger part in creating than just exchanging paper money for. And we know that the food is clean, organic, ultra-fresh, and OURS. That said, I wouldn't want to be a farmer and work the grueling hours for subsistence levels, and wouldn't want to have a fundamentally agrarian society and pass up lovely things like penicillin, professional football and the Internet. There's a balance.<br /><br />But it's 80-20 in favor of all that cool internet porn.Jacknoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2770580070906411828.post-47891629669349957362010-05-04T12:40:02.561-04:002010-05-04T12:40:02.561-04:00Perlhaqr - Oh yeah, and so much more so with fruit...Perlhaqr - Oh yeah, and so much more so with fruits and vegetables. Homegrown tomatoes are so good and different they seem like an entirely different food from store tomatoes, and home strawberries and blueberries are <i>oh my god</i> sweet and delicious. There's just more <i>flavor</i> in plants that have ripened naturally and been eaten fresh.<br /><br />...That said, it's still not a fair trade for my entire career.Cliff Pervocracyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02080142422250604406noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2770580070906411828.post-30251286629353037522010-05-04T12:32:03.930-04:002010-05-04T12:32:03.930-04:00Living in a deliberately inefficient manner, and b...<i>Living in a deliberately inefficient manner, and being all self-righteous about it, is kind of a "fuck you" to people who are living as efficiently as they fucking can just to get by.<br /><br />[...] Just don't kid yourself that it's something more than a hobby. What bothers me here is not the actions but the justifications, the attempt to make gardening somehow more righteous than jogging or Book Club. You're not a "femivore," you're not changing the world, and you're sure as fuck not liberating women. You're just a gardener.</i><br /><br />*GIANT HUGS*<br /><br />Though, I have to say, I visited my Aunts and Uncles up in Montana last summer, and they keep chickens (the ones that don't get eaten by bears, anyway) and super fresh eggs really do taste better than ones that sat in the grocery store for a week after taking another week to get there.perlhaqrhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/01920117742664645165noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2770580070906411828.post-72555634776343926542010-05-04T12:18:14.835-04:002010-05-04T12:18:14.835-04:00"who these days can’t wax poetic about compos..."who these days can’t wax poetic about compost?"<br /><br />Ooo! Ooo! I know the answer to this one: everyone I know can't wax poetic about compost! Where are these people FROM? (rhetorical: it's Berkely. Out where I live, they fertilize, not compost, and it's usually nasty pig manure or a much more horrible-smelling rendering plant byproduct that smells like the white liquid at the bottom of an undercleaned trash can spread across hundreds of acres, and if you can wax poetic about it you need a jacket with wraparound sleeves.)<br /><br />"It was an unnervingly familiar litany: if a woman is not careful, it seems, chicken wire can coop her up as surely as any gilded cage."<br /><br />Yep, here's the real secret of the whole thing. Life is an unending series of traps for the really hardcore feminist; she may be trapped doing what she wants without strugging against the Establishment at all. Raising children been considered a rewarding career by most for almost all of history; how much magic was fertility magic? Gardening was a major pastime of nobility. Even raising chickens has been a hobby for some for a long time, though I have trouble understanding it. If a woman happens to want these things, she has to find a way to define them other than "I like doing this". Thus, "femivore".<br /><br />Without the chickens, my sister-in-law lives like this with no excuses or redefinitions. My brother is not a traditionalist or Christian fundamentalist like me, and she is a liberal from a long line of liberal feminists. But she doesn't need a reason to garden or stay home with their kids beyond that that's what she likes, and she'll spit in your eye if you tell her she needs to justify what she likes.Mousie00noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2770580070906411828.post-37205733125682356562010-05-04T11:26:27.110-04:002010-05-04T11:26:27.110-04:00You're not a "femivore," you're ...<i>You're not a "femivore," you're not changing the world, and you're sure as fuck not liberating women. You're just a gardener.</i><br /><br />Fucking Christ, thank you.<br /><br />I grew up on a farm. If you're actually trying to sustain a family on it, it's a <i>lot of fucking work</i>, especially if we're being all enlightened about it and rejecting Evil Industrial Items--like tractors. Farmers often work ten-hour days or more, extremely strenuous manual labor, and that's <i>with</i> modern farm equipment. It's not something you can do and still have time to do your book club and your spa and your play-dates with the other Environmentally Correct mommies and all the Quality Character Building time you're supposed to be spending with your offspring.<br /><br />And chickens are noisy, disgusting, and peck your legs and hands when you try to get in their coop.<br /><br />A backyard vegetable garden is a lovely thing, but the people who pretend they're going to feed their families with it and that it's SO ENVIRONMENTALLY AWARE make me want to beat my head against a wall.aebhelnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-2770580070906411828.post-39519015345492859332010-05-04T11:11:15.701-04:002010-05-04T11:11:15.701-04:00The word "femivore" bugs the shit out of...The word "femivore" bugs the shit out of me because (if we assume it follows the same pattern as <i>carnivore</i> and <i>herbivore</i>), it should mean SOMEONE WHO EATS WOMEN.<br /><br />There must be a more clever word for the housewives-who-grow-veggies phenomenon, but I can't think of one. If it was gay men instead of housewives, however, I'd call it FAGRICULTURE.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com