"Suprihmbé is a proheaux womanist thot scholar who wants to promote freedom, is Morrison political, and likes cats."

Okay, I just learned a new word: "proheaux."

The quote in the post title is the blurb about the author of something I was reading (at Wear Your Voice), "Being Naked With My Son/My nudity does not offend my son, because he has not been exposed to trivial conversations about modesty. My nudity means nothing to him." Excerpt:

Why is my nakedness around my child an issue? Why is him seeing my genitalia in a non-sexual manner an issue? Is he worried my child is going to develop some sort of Oedipus complex? According to Freudian lore, my son being just about around 5-years-old, is in the phallic stage. Freudian psychology is heterocentric and cissexist–it deals in binaries and doesn’t take into account a spectrum of identities. For its time it was revolutionary–but science is permeated with sexist and racist men, polluted with biases.

... At this age my son is supposed to have formed some sort of erotic attachment to me. Yet here he is, playing pretend in our living room, oblivious to the projected sexual nature of our being naked and sweating in our little house.

Ah! Freud came up. I brought up Freud this morning, in the context of the hard, pointing prong of Callista Gingrich's hair, and as I did that, I was thinking, life was so much more interesting when adult conversation flowed easily into Freudian speculation. Then prissy demands for science spoiled the fluid fun. Suprihmbé seems to be saying that Freud's work was patriarchal, but the rejection of Freud's ideas for their failure to fit the rigors of science is also patriarchal, so there is perhaps something of the counter-patriarchial in restoring Freudianism, sparingly and strategically, such as in the discussion of Callista's pointy prong.

But that word! Proheaux. I looked it up and got another article by Suprihmbé: "proheauxism: a working definition." Key to understanding the coinage: Heaux is a way to spell the plural of ho. (Do you have a better idea? I wrote "the plural of ho" because I didn't.) The definition has 4 parts. I'll just quote #3:

Sex positivity for black and brown women and femmes. Specifically sex worker & trans inclusive. Might be: a professional heaux, a refined heaux, an elegant, sensual woman of divine sex. One who owns oneself, regardless if she is attached to a man or masculine person or not. One who understands and reveres the power of healthy femininity (and masculinity) and understands that this power is beyond the physical. It is political, it is economic, it is survival, it is personal. Fuck classism. Fuck respectability. Fuck the norm. Fuck free emotional labor.

"Dear Virgie, I am an elementary school teacher. Recently, there has been some teasing around weight that happened in my classroom."

"My co-teachers and I really want to introduce the idea of body positivity and body diversity to the class. My students are 10 and 11 years old. I was wondering if you had any activities or ideas for opening up this discussion at this age level."

Virgie — at Wear Your Voice/Intersectional Feminist Media — responds with a 5-point list, but I was disappointed that none of them were actual "activities." Maybe you can help me think of some kind of classroom role-playing or game that would work in a classroom of 10 & 11 year olds.

"Strange to see Althouse on-board with AnCaps/libertarians about the right of businesses to discriminate as much as they like."

Writes James in the comments to yesterday's post about the female-only showings of "Wonder Woman," which I'd discussed in terms of PR for a movie I find mind-crushingly boring. I'd quoted a writer at Wear Your Voice/Intersectional Feminist Media who made hyperbolic fun of the "cishet men" who are acting (feeling?) outraged over the exclusion.

In blogging the controversy, I quite consciously chose to ignore the legal issue. Not everything has to be approached from a legal perspective. There are many paths into a subject, and opting for law talk can foreclose other interesting insights. Teaching law school classes, I would often begin a discussion of a case with the question whether we (or anybody) should want a particular matter controlled by a legal restriction, monitored by the government. It can be more enlightening to open up that inquiry before you get to a discussion of whether what was done in fact violated a statute and whether a constitutional right trumps the statute. It can help you think about how broadly to interpret that statute and that constitutional right.

I didn't want to talk about the law yet. Other bloggers have announced flatly that what the theaters are doing is against the law, and I acknowledge that those laws exist and should be taken seriously. The theaters are exposing themselves to legal proceedings. I can see some plausible defenses. We could talk about freedom of association cases like Boy Scouts v. Dale. This isn't like a restaurant wanting to exclude a particular type of person. The exclusion has to do with the expression of ideas. But I'm not the movie theater's lawyer, and I haven't worked out the argument. 

In any case, there's a such thing as civil disobedience. I don't know if the freedom of women to assemble in a public space and watch a super-hero movie without men in the room is the sort of thing that's worth risking the consequences that are part of civil disobedience, but it's one way to behave in this world and sometimes good things ensue. For example — to get back to the aspect of the controversy I forefronted — PR.

Anyway, thanks for the challenge, James. I had to look up "AnCaps."

Anarcho-capitalists hold that, in the absence of statute (law by centralized decrees and legislation), society tends to contractually self-regulate and civilize through the discipline of the free market (in what its proponents describe as a "voluntary society").

You know, I'm not the type.

"Male fragility has been breaking all over the basements of social media and the stench of unwashed boxer shorts and toxic masculinity is wafting upwards gaining our attention..."

"... simply because certain theaters are hosting screenings exclusively for folks who identify as women and femmes. On Thursday, a theater franchise called the Alamo Drafthouse announced* that they would be hosting woman-identified only screenings for the release of the film... Now, of course, this made cishet men angry, because when everything has always belonged to you and entitlement happens to be one of your defining characteristics, it must be really hard to be excluded from a few screenings of a film centered around a female-lead. Of course you’re upset at not being invited to see Wonder Woman, that’s totally discrimination. Keep crying those salty tears.... I am no stranger to the wrath of white man-babies and it is clear that the more space women make for themselves – especially women and femmes of color – the more misogyny and racism we will be met with. The only thing we can do is keep carving out safe spaces for ourselves to heal and flourish."

Writes Laura Witt at Wear Your Voice/Intersectional Feminist Media.

ADDED: This is some great PR jujitsu.** Men are squealing to body-slam their way into a movie they'd have distanced themselves from. The woman-superhero purveyors have learned something since the lady Ghostbusters flop of 2016. The new idea is to act like you don't want men to see the movie. Suddenly, it's desirable. This movie is playing hard to get. Such a delightfully old-fashioned way to lure men.
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* The announcement read:

“The most iconic superheroine in comic book history finally has her own movie, and what better way to celebrate than with an all-female screening? Apologies, gentlemen, but we’re embracing our girl power and saying “No Guys Allowed” for one special night at the Alamo Ritz. And when we say “People Who Identify As Women Only,” we mean it. Everyone working at this screening — venue staff, projectionist, and culinary team — will be female.”

** Sorry for the culturally appropriative metaphor.

"Brown and black skin and indicators of non-whiteness have been newly weaponized since the Trump regime was installed..."

"... and many of us are managing our Otherness more than ever as a matter of survival. And along comes a white woman by the name of Stacy Jacobs, whose gimmick is wearing saris in protest of Trump’s reign. She hashtags her fashion activism #BordersAreForSarees and #ProtestSarees. Her Instagram feed is filled with pictures of her in a sari every time Trump does something awful.... [T]here is a growing and disturbing trend of supposedly progressive and liberal feminists who seem to think that their political wokeness gives them free license to appropriate other people’s cultures. Under the guise of globalistic rhetoric, these so-called progressives justify and defend their cultural appropriation as the natural course of our globalized society — a post-racial society in which differences can be erased because they have decided so — veritably denying that cultural appropriation exists at all. To these fauxgressives, everything belongs to everybody and they have the right to transform these cultural and spiritual practices as they see fit. Like metal yoga, 'fuck you' yoga and beer yoga, not only has an ancient Indian spiritual practice been culturally appropriated, it has been mutilated and Frankensteined together into a monstrous shadow of itself."

From "This White Woman's 'Protest Saris' Are Peak Appropriation," by Sezin Koehler in Wear Your Voice/Intersectional Feminist Media.