A Dyke A Broad #32
All lezzie all the time. The semi-chill edition. With a cover reveal for the new re-release of the Lesbian Avenger Handbook! Coming soon.
Hello from Paris!
Where it’s time I confess I’ve got a monkey on my back, and the monkey wants peanuts. Now! Literal peanuts. Which I’ve been trying to give up.
We all have our coping techniques, mine is all about salty, crunchy snacks consumed at regular intervals starting about three in the afternoon. Last week I finally admitted that I am powerless over them, and am trying to keep them out of the house. At least most of the time. I love potato chips, corn chips, bread chips. But I have a special adoration for peanuts, roasted to a shiny brown, grainy with salt and shoved in my face by the handful where they snap between my teeth and after a brief trip down the gullet release a blast of fat and glorious, glorious sodium that makes life almost worthwhile.
Oh my god. Give me peanuts.
A Little Good News
In other news, I am pleased to announce to you, dear readers, that the new edition of the Lesbian Avenger Handbook will be available June 1. To reward you for your dedication, here’s a sneak peek at the draft cover. All props to designer Lutzka Zivny.
For Your Homo Amusement
A little video worth watching even if you don’t speak French. With Camille Cottin, of Call My Agent! fame, a fake 1950’s commercial about what the lady of the house gets up to when her husband is too tired from his demanding job to make love.
“Don’t worry my dear,” she assures him, “I keep busy.”
Spoiler alert—it’s not with housekeeping…
U.S. Democracy Going South
One thing I realized when I started covering international news two decades ago was the central (and beneficial) role democracy played in my life. I hadn’t thought about it much. I voted when I could be bothered. I never tuned in to a political debate. But watching LGBT people trying to organize in fragile states like Guatemala or Zimbabwe, I learned pretty quickly that the only reason I could exist as an out dyke, blabbermouth journalist, and for that matter, agnostic in religious matters, was because I had social and political breathing space won by actions enshrined in our constitution—assembly, protest, speech.
This is why I hate censorship coming from the Left as well as the Right and anywhere in between. It’s why at this point I practically have an acquired oppositional defiant disorder to anything that smells even faintly of authoritarianism. You must say this, you must not say this. No debate. Fuck that. Of course it’s worse when lies are imposed. Which the Left is as vulnerable to as the Right. Don’t get me started about the delusions most lefties have about Cuba.
It’s not just that censorship and lies are abhorrent in and of themselves, but because they erode the pillars of democracy, and that will always, always come back to bite social and political minorities in the ass. And dykes like me will always be one—a minority. Just in terms of sheer numbers.
And that is of course why, unlike plenty of other sneery queers, I’m glad that Liz Cheney stepped up—at least on this occasion, and made Republicans spell out their complete abandonment of democracy.
Paul Campos write about “The Significance of the Liz Cheney Auto-da-fe”
We are on the precipice of a massive constitutional crisis. If Republicans control Congress in January of 2025 they will not certify the victory of a Democratic candidate in the previous November’s election. They may not even have to go that far: It’s now quite possible that Republican state legislatures in enough states will simply refuse to ratify electoral results that would give the Democratic candidate the majority of electoral votes. (This is all above and beyond the possibility that the Democratic candidate gets ten million more popular votes but loses “legitimately,” via the Wisdom of the Framers).
I’m not sharing this to make people throw up their hands in despair, but to emphasize the importance of local and regional politics— not just in the U.S.—but everywhere, because this is a global trend.
From the Annals of the More Things Change…
So, I’m dipping my toes into a little research, specifically on the differing histories of U.S. and British feminism. And I should say how grateful I am that so many scholarly journals do not have paywalls even if they need the dough.
One article I’m reading is The Great War in the History of British Feminism: Debates and Controversies, 1914 to the Present.
It opens with this:
When, in the 1980s, numerous feminists began joining the women’s peace camp at Greenham Common, a radical feminist pamphlet was published questioning the wisdom of this move. One contributor expressed her fear: of large numbers of women abandoning women’s liberation struggles in favour of what is seen as a ‘larger cause’. It runs deep in all of us to put aside our ‘special concerns’ for the human race. (…) The parallel that haunts me is with what happened to the first wave of feminism in this country when the First Wold War began. I want to be reassured that this is not an appropriate parallel.
Nope, not a new problem, this thing of women supporting everything, everybody but themselves.
Another reading rec
I almost always find something useful in the snide Invisible Women newsletter by Caroline Criado Perez on the male default world. Who wouldn’t adore a writer Like the Kardashians, but with more feminist rage.
This week— how women are not adults. Or doctors. Or professors. Or lawyers. While all our human bodies are only and always male. And a peek too at female-designed products for female bodies which are really not like male bodies in so many ways.
That you should keep you busy for a moment.
Semi-disgruntledly yours,