Amazons International # 44 ************************** Contents: Anne: Bio, feminism, inner strength Megan: Bio, culture, family life Ahab: Military college for women? Horacio: Bio, female strength Yvette: Bio Janek: Bio, female domination Date of Transmission: 25.07.94 ************************************************************** Date: Mon, 20 Jun 1994 11:58:19 -0400 (EDT) From: "Anne M. Stockdell" Subject: Bio "Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man in twice its natural size" -- Virginia Woolf Please forgive the length of the following bio. Hi. I am Anne Meade Stockdell, new to Amazons, and was thrilled to receive my first issues this morning after a late night with two women Amazons, with whom I had a six-hour heated discussion about feminism and what it means to be independent, strong, and intelligent (having intellectual power) in our society and in our own lives. (Boy that sentence was long!) I am 5'7", somewhere around 135-40 (I run from scales), and have been running from my physical and emotional/ psychological strength all my life. Until recently. I grew up in Virginia in a VERY traditional southern family, where female strength is usually expressed through a dictatorship of a matriarch who is soft spoken, genteel, and runs the lives of her family through discreet manipulations with charm-school etiquette. I was a disappointment. At four, I rallied my entire preschool class and led them in a rebellion (an escape, single-file, led by me) from the grounds. I do not remember why; but I have been shamed for 23 years for this. In kindergarten I told my teacher that if she did not teach me to read I would quit school and go to camp. At two I stripped and covered myself in mustard, just because. All of these things I before saw as shameful or unfeminine, but have recently learned that they were glorious (however tactless they may have been) expressions of my own free will which was later squelched horrifically. I am now studying for my Ph.D. in English with a concentration in rhetoric/composition, and have always met with marginal success at anything and everything I attempted; I never wanted to be TOO powerful. However, since owning that power of my mind and my character I have been wildly successful in my endeavors at school and in life, and cannot believe my own strength and passion for life and literature and my friends. I have come to realize that most of the people who love me the most (outside of my family of course) do so for my strength, my intense loyalty and beliefs, and my wit. I have turned Woolf's "mirror" onto myself and want to reflect myself at precisely my natural size and to see others that way as well. My brother recently emailed me that he did not understand my shame about these incidents of my childhood--he said, "I wish I had done them." Of course he did. He would have been called "a born leader." It is affirming to me that there is a group out there who celebrates female strength and perhaps it may shock many of you to realize that I have lived 27 years trying to hide mine. I am not opinionated or narrow-minded or overbearing but many perceptions of strong women describe them as such. I am feminine and a feminist. I love to wear my hair long and to wear short skirts--I think my hair and my legs are pretty; but I don't wear much makeup, never curl/spray/tease my hair, and don't use my physical being to "Get" men or advantages. I live to live--that is, I love the city and its diversity and the opportunity it provides for knowing all kinds of people and lifestyles. I love human contact and seek social and literary knowledge. I read anything and everything, but mostly now I read for my classes. I bike to school (in the heart of Atlanta). I love sailing (the freedom it provides), lunching with girlfriends, music, playing on my computer, and talking. I also cross stitch and cook. I would like to be a wife and a mom at some point too. I am currently interested in gender-based rhetoric and how women have use language historically to further causes/convey messages/survive in a patriarchal society. Anyone with thoughts/information/knowledge/books on the subject is requested, implored, asked nicely to communicate with me. I'll stop now b/c I'm going on way to long and will save some of this for future chats..... Thank you for your attention!!!:) ANNE ************************************************************** Date: Thu, 23 Jun 94 11:44:57 EST From: megan donnelly Subject: Bio, culture, family life I don't know exactly what Amazons is about but it may well be the list for me -- please advise. I am a 5'10" (feminist) lecturer (US=professor) in accounting at the University of Western Sydney, Hawkesbury in Richmond NSW Australia who once played a pretty good game of basketball (no knees left now). My 12 year old (5'9") daughter received a school report when she was about 9 that said (I remember it verbatim): "Janis has strong views and a forceful personality. This is an advantage with individual work but makes it difficult for her to work in groups". While I still find the implicit criticism puzzling (would the teacher have said that about a boy? I think not), I laughed when I received the report because I thought "What do they expect with parents like hers". Yes she is assertive (bordering on aggressive), strong willed and self-motivated but she's a "chip off the old blocks" -- Dad is a 6'6" lawyer specialising in litigation. I spent my first 25 years trying to make myself less noticeable (physically and intellectually) but as I approach my 40th birthday I am happy to say that if I feel like expressing an opinion or throwing my weight behind a cause I don't think twice -- I just go for it. If people wonder "Who's that big pushy Sheilah (US=dame) over there with that assertive tall bloke (US=guy)?", then let them. Megan Donnelly ************************************************************** Date: Mon, 4 Jul 94 0:25:29 18000 From: Ahab Subject: Military college for women? Thomas wrote (way back in AI 34): > While boys are taught to be active, aggressive, to lead, take > initiatives and all the rest, girls are taught to be passive, > submissive, quiet and so on. In short, boys are trained to be > subjects and girls are trained to be objects. A legal skirmish now going on in Virginia touches this issue in a military context, so it may interest some A.I.-ers. Its ingredients are: 1. An all-male military college (VMI) has a long tradition of rigorous physical and mental discipline for cadets. Its academic program emphasizes engineering and technical subjects. It has compulsory full-contact sports such as boxing, karate and wrestling. It uses intimidation of freshmen by upperclassmen in its approach to discipline. 2. VMI gets significant funds from the state treasury. 3. Over 350 young women have applied to VMI for admission in the last few years, and have been refused on gender grounds. (This while the U.S. military has started to put women in some combat units). 4. One of the 350 persuaded the federal Justice Department to sue VMI to force the admission of women. The court decided that VMI must either admit women, or start and pay for a similar "leadership" program at a women's college, or stop getting public funds while discriminating against a large segment of the public. 5. VMI is under great pressure from alumni and others not to admit women. This would "irrevocably change its nature", "destroy the very uniqueness that these women wish to experience". The idea of admitting women just to the academic side of the program (living off-campus and without joining in its competitive physical-education component) was also rejected. So VMI opted to start a military-style "women's leadership program" at a nearby women's college (Mary Baldwin). 6. The faculty at Mary Baldwin decided that, rather than clone the VMI program exactly, they would institute a version that was "more appropriate" for women. The first thing to go would be the systematic intimidation of the first-year students by the upper years. "Young women don't have the same problems of self-concept as young men ... there's no need to beat aggressiveness out of young women by intimidation, the problem is usually that women don't have _enough_ self-esteem ...". The second thing to go was the boxing, karate and wrestling, "too violent and male-oriented". These compulsory sports were to be replaced by ... golf, racquetball and tennis! Finally, the women would be required to wear uniforms only while attending classes with military content, not while participating in the rest of the program (heavily weighted to liberal-arts studies). "This will be a fine example of leadership training for women" said the women's faculty. 7. Nuts, said the feds. They asserted that Mary Baldwin is now also discriminating against women, by designing a program based on "false gender inequities and outdated stereotypes". The failure to emphasize engineering, technical training, and physical discipline, as at VMI, was criticised and the judge was urged to reject the "separate but equal" proposal. The judge has recently ruled in favor of the colleges, but the feds have appealed and the case will go to a higher court. I see some intriguing issues here. What started as outright discrimination against women by an all-male institution became more subtle discrimination against women by an all-female one trying to fashion what they see as a "feminist" program. The latter now stand accused (by the feds) of designing "a finishing school with military uniforms, producing young gentle-women with some military background", not Amazons ready for leadership in the real world. I'd be interested to hear what A.I. readers think about this. How different from an all-male military college should an all-female one be? Should such uni-gender colleges be eliminated? Can women reach equality of opportunity in the military without simply being assimilated into traditional (male) behaviors? Should the physical curriculum for women in such programs include combat sports, as for men? How about the traditional intimidation tactics, there to instil discipline and promote quick (unthinking) responses under pressure? If they achieve their goals with young men who are entering the military, are they appropriate for young women doing the same thing? Paradoxically, they begin by beating the individualism out of young men, yet they produce one of the most "subject-oriented" species on the planet, the career military officer! Ahab ************************************************************** From: an86796@anon.penet.fi (Horacio) Date: Sat, 16 Jul 1994 06:17:40 UTC Subject: Bio, the attraction of female strength I have been a subscriber of AI since July 1993 (more or less). I have read all back issues and must say that this mailing list is just great. I have enjoyed reading all the issues. Among the things which I best remember, I have especially appreciated Thomas's overall work, the article of Marcia Ian (From Abject to Object: Womens Bodybuilding, recommended in AI # 18), Puppetoon's marvelous Amazon story (AI # 26) and Thomas's interview for Different Loving (AI # 11), e.g., he says: "...it is necessary that intimacy is not restricted to tender, soft or "romantic" interactions; if the relationship is to be whole and all-encompassing, it must also include rough, passionate and aggressive interactions..."). Well, a kind of bio, mostly related to my experiences, feelings and thoughts about Amazons: -I'm a computer programmer (male), but actually more interested in graphic arts (like photographing, drawing, painting, sculptures, graphic design, video, TV and film production, etc.) and (of course) music. You will quite quickly discover that I'm not a native speaker of English. So, I apologize for any errors or if I maybe cause some misunderstandings. -I'm sexually (and quite often, romantically too) attracted to women in general, and (like most men) the attraction is increased by things like sensuality, beauty, charm, intelligence, etc. However, the qualities that make a woman most attractive to me, are physical and mental strength. I can say that, associating the idea of physical superiority and raw power to an attractive woman gives me a very strong, marvelous feeling. A few times I have been wondering if maybe this could be a kind of sign of homosexuality, but the fact is that I find the idea of intimacy with, or even touching a male, rather repulsive. Neither do I like the idea of beeing beaten or dominated by a male. I have discarded the possibility of this being a sort of perversion, because such things are rather related to narrow minded, arbitrary "moral" rules in the social enviroment, so I had to choose a more reasonable way of judgement. It doesn't mean that I have an endless liberal mentality. I just cannot accept all kind of rules without analyzing them. I have been thinking and trying to find a good explanation to this huge and overwelming attraction, but all I can do is to summarize a few factors that may play a more or less important role: --I suppose that human personality is mainly determined by genes and/or whatever other factors at birth/conception, and further formed/developed through experiences and with the environment. --Some people tend to feel strongly attracted to things that are different or exotic and most people wish variation and certain changes in determined aspects of their lives and environments. Female strength that can match or challenge average male strength is very unusual and maybe therefore so badly missed by people like me. We grow up with the preconception that men are (and are supposed to be) bigger, stronger and perhaps more intelligent than women; hence we (men) are supposed to take care of women (about the same way that adults are supposed to take care of children) and be in charge. Why on earth should it be wrong to wish or imagine a different situation in terms of "gender roles"? -- why shouldn't women have the "esthetic"/"social" right to be as strong or even stronger (or taller, or bigger for that matter) than men?. It seems to be the case that women need a "special permission" from society to let her biceps grow, e.g. Nevertheless, I'm conscious of the fact that there are a couple of special features that make women more vulnerable at certain periods of time and perhaps more sensitive for the same reason: pregnancy and menstruation. Women's breasts are also a factor of increased vulnerability. These facts force me to be realistic and not to expect too much, neither now, nor in the future. On the other hand, the above mentioned makes my admiration,respect and I would say ...love for women in general, even stronger. When I think about all these things, I really feel a kind of almost religious devotion for women who, despite of all adversity, manage to build a strong body and mind. --I'm an almost fanatic supporter of justice and equality of rights and opportunities among ALL PEOPLE, ALL AROUND THE WORLD. Women (among others), through centuries have been oppressed and treated as a lower category of human beings compared to men. There have been a positive, although slow evolution towards equality on this field, but still, we have a very long way to go before this unequality and unjustice becomes history. All credits to Thomas for the success of AI. If I'm not wrong, he has been an internet-pioneer for the cause of Amazons and has done a remarkable work here, taking the whole thing seriously enough to destroy with convincing arguments, myths about female strength. It is easier for me now to believe that Amazons are not just a freaky thing. I think he deserves a kind of medal. Horacio F.C. ************************************************************** From: Yvette M Adams Subject: Biography Hi! My name is Yvette and I can not tell you how refreshing it is to finally find a home where I can be myself and not be judged. I am 33 years old, an AAA (Amazon African-American) and proud of it! My interests are kickboxing, weight-training, tai chi. I am looking forward to making many friends and please feel free to correspond with me. After all, we're family. Ciao. ************************************************************** Date: 16 Jul 94 09:11:53 EDT From: J C Subject: Bio, British Amazons, female domination Hi everybody, I am a 28 year old, 6 foot two inches tall, fair-haired, blue-eyed, athletic looking single British guy who, having just got hooked up to the Net, has a very keen interest in Amazons. When I heard about AI I thought that you people in the States would have the same interests as us Brits reagrding Amazons. Unfortunately, I think that we have a number of differences. Over here most British people would probably think that AI has alot to do with S&M, Mistresses & Slaves, Female Domination & Male Submission. You know the sort of thing, whips, spanking, bondage and the like which, despite what people in the States may think, is quite big in Europe -- particularly in the U.K., Holland & Germany. Therefore, in the U.K. anyway, for Amazons I think you should read Mistress(es). >From my own personal experiences I know of several couples in the U.K. who, in privacy, 'live' true Sub/Dom relationships -- ones where the female partner is Dom/the Mistress and the the male partner is Sub/the Slave. As more and more Brits, as well as Europeans, get hooked up to the Net I imagine that AI will be hearing more about such people in the future. If there is anybody out there who wishes to discuss any of the above, or more, I would love to hear from you. In particular, I wonder whether there is anybody in the U.K., or even Europe, who would like to discuss my view of Amazons? Are there any U.K./European Mistresses and/or Slaves out there? You never know, it could be the start, as Bogart said, of a wonderful friendship! Bye for now. J ********************************************************** * Amazons International * * Thomas Gramstad, editor: thomas@smaug.uio.no * * Administravia: amazons-request@math.uio.no * * Submissions: amazons@math.uio.no * ********************************************************** "A Hard Woman is Good to Find" -- The Valkyries