After Corbu

…the evidence I’ve studied and my life experiences all suggest that men and women are like two overlapping Venn diagrams in almost everything. Partly different and partly the same.

Eek!  Gender…not…binary?  Does…not…compute….(Combustion)

The Goddess has/had a great post about The Armpit Wars.  A portion:

The reactions to the armpit hair revolution were swift and of the expected type. The hairy armpit wearers were condemned as ugly (why not talk to Mother Nature about that?), as manly (ditto) and as unable to attract men and therefore giving up on the fight. But the hairy armpit wearers were also labeled as focused on a trivial matter, on something that has to do with body grooming, on something that was so silly as to endanger the whole feminist movement.

I really hate this kind of conditional argumentation.  “What you advocate is trivial, but pursuing it would destroy the movement.”  What?  Isn’t that a contradiction?

I do see the point though: the body hair stigma is a small injustice within the grand expanse that is Patriarchy, but fighting it would produce a lot of backlash, thus it’s a bad allocation of time/resources.  However, Echide’s post does a good job of pointing out that 1) The armpit hair controversy actually addresses many issues essential to feminism, and 2) the meta debate about “what good feminists should do” isn’t nearly as helpful as addressing what the opposition is saying.