The Lady Finger

What can the women's rights movement learn from the gay rights movement?

2011-04-13T00:54:00.001-06:00

As the gay rights movement seems to be moving forward at lightning speed and women’s rights are slowly being stripped away in practically every statehouse, is there something organizers can learn? Steph Herold and Amanda Marcotte did readers the favor of writing about this issue, one I had been meaning to tackle for a very long time. (Read both of their posts, they’re worth it.) While a victory for one doesn’t mean a loss for the other – this is not a zero sum game or a who’s-more-discriminated-against contest, and in many areas, overlapping goals make a victory in one a victory for the other – there seems to be a difference in momentum. Why are women’s rights under such heavy attack and what have we done/not done to let that happen? Why are gay rights activists winning over the public and racking up wins? What does this say about the state of both movements?

The comparison arises out of real similarities between the gay rights and women's rights movements, which Herold and Marcotte both point out. “Both are fundamentally about sexuality, personal freedom, and (reproductive) autonomy. Both have been radically organizing for centuries or more, demanding equality, often acting as allies," writes Herold, and Marcotte concurs: “The two movements are functionally fighting for the same goal, an overturn of the patriarchy.” But I think it’s the differences that we need to pay attention to that can explain why the speed of change is roaring ahead on one side and feels like a gradual turn backward on the other.

The idea is that gay rights are gaining traction in public opinion because more and more people know someone who’s gay and have come to understand that they’re just like everyone else. By that very logic, shouldn’t people be even more willing to support women’s rights? But that’s exactly the problem – the “other” is too close by. As Marcotte alludes to, gay people securing rights that everyone else already has – particularly the right to marry – doesn’t subvert any power dynamics in heterosexual men’s lives. Giving women more autonomy and power, however, does. It’s hard to persuade men that they won’t be giving up some of their power if women have more of it. But no one loses power when a gay person is allowed to serve in the military or walk down the aisle or avoid being bullied in school (except maybe the bully). The structure of privilege can remain intact when the (current) demands of the gay rights movement are met; it can’t when women’s are. The fight for women's rights seeks not only to extend some of the privileges of participation, but also to upend deeply engrained power structures. Marcotte, acknowledging this, points out that gay marriage is easier for traditionalists to stomach because it’s a group yearning to take part in traditional roles, but a right like abortion can’t fit as neatly into that mold. “Abortion is still seen as a rejection of motherhood, because you’re not going to mother that potential baby,” she says. The same can be said for women pushing to work outside the home and to earn equal pay – fewer jobs and less money to go around for the boys and no one left to take care of the babies. If gay rights activists were to move on to try and upend the power dynamic after victories like marriage rights and the repeal of DADT, it's likely they’ll meet with a lot of the same resistance.

Not to fall victim to the Oppression Olympics, but there’s also an us versus them positioning that can help many activist movements mobilize. But when it comes to women, we live with the “enemy.” Many heterosexual women are even in love with the "other," i.e. men. In her book When Everything Changed, Gail Collins puts it this way: "[The women’s rights movement] was, as the sociologist Alice Rossi said, the only instance in which people being discriminated against lived in much more intimate association with the 'enemy' than with other members of their own group." Where gay people – and people of color, and transgendered people, and other marginalized groups – often tend to create their own communities, women much less frequently do, which can blur the lines of the fight.

The two movements are also different in the history that they have stacked up behind them. The current push for gay rights is a relatively new phenomenon. Women have made some serious achievements – Marcotte points out that a woman can legally get an abortion and cross state lines to do so, but the same doesn’t hold true for gay marriage. This creates a different sense of urgency among activists, and Marcotte notes it also means that gay rights organizers may come upon a backlash stage that women's rights experiences. We've made major gains, and are now working to hold ground; gay rights activists are still conquering new territory.

We also can’t underestimate the fact that gay rights activists have a few really concrete goals right now, and because they are somewhat new are relatively cohesive (although not entirely). Feminism used to be like that, and then after we got some wins we fractured along class, race, sexual orientation, and other lines. Different people within the movement wanted to work on different, equally important issues. I think some of this is a function of goals being met and then having a hard time figuring out where to go next. But it’s also because of sheer numbers. Women are half the world’s population. We’re literally everywhere. So discrimination against us pops up in a million and ten ways, and we could spend all of our energy fighting each instance of it. We’re also a group that is going to experience almost all other kinds of marginalization and our loyalty becomes as fractured as our goals. Many of us support and are involved in a lot of other causes. What are the key goals now? We understandably have a hard time figuring it out.

And then of course, there are those who think feminism is dead. Take The End of Men. Take Ross Douthat (and you can keep him, thanks). Whether or not you support rights for gay people, I think you’d be hard pressed to find many who think they enjoy full equality. They’re targeted by hate crimes, they (were!) forced to leave the military, they’re excluded from adoption, among a whole host of pretty easy to spot, discrimination 101 instances. People think that because women can wear pants and get jobs and have sex they’re are doing just fine. Look at Oprah and Hillary Clinton and even Sarah Palin!, they say. What gay rights activists in the United States are fighting is extremely visible – and in many cases, horrific.

Also don’t underestimate the frog in the pot metaphor. If the GOP heats the water up very slowly, many of us ladies won’t jump out. (Although the GOP has leaned heavily on the temperature dial lately and a lot more women are crying foul.) This is where I agree with Herold – the lesson to be learned is to be proud, loud, and relentless. Feminist activists are doing some of this work. They're waging Twitter campaigns that have been hugely successful because they are targeted, relentless and loud. See: #Mooreandme, #DearJohn, and campaigns to foster dialogue like #ihadanabortion and #thanksPPFA. Offline efforts are happening as well: the GOP’s war on women brought 6,000 women to the streets of New York City alone, while similar rallies took place elsewhere.

Just because we won basic rights, because we’re so far along in the movement, is no reason we can’t be more aggressive. “Why do we only mobilize when we’re desperate, when the situation is bleak?” Herold asks, pointing to yearly gay pride parades no matter the political climate. Fair question. I think the women’s rights movement can suffer from a lack of proactivity, although there are good instances of it that we can expand on. Take the push to repeal the Hyde amendment – rather than react to every president that re-signs it into law or those who want to make it worse, we can fight to get rid of it altogether. We're already doing a lot of the work, but we might just need to turn up the volume. -Bryce Covert

Bryce Covert is a journalist and blogger who writes on feminism, politics, and the energy industry. You can find her at www.brycecovert.com and www.twitter.com/brycecovert.

Memo to Dems: Women are not Bargaining Chips

2011-03-02T16:50:00.001-07:00

The midterms are so 2010. Just a distant memory. The real story is the election season coming up in 2012, and everyone is focused on guessing who will jump into the presidential arena.

But Democrats shouldn’t forget about the midterms as they look ahead to duking it out in ‘12. Remember how right before the election everyone panicked that women wouldn’t turn out to vote? Polls were showing women tuned out, turned off and full of despair about the election. In a last-ditch effort, the White House put out a report on all of the measures it enacted to help women and boost their economic security. But as Betsy Reed pointed out, “Given the level of economic anxiety racking American women, this intervention was clearly too little, too late.” Meanwhile, women had watched extreme conservatives take on all sorts of anti-choice stances -- Tea Party darlings and GOP candidates Rand Paul, Christine O’Donnell, Sharon Angle, Joe Miller and Ken Buck all opposed all abortion, even in cases of rape and incest, just for starters. Yet even as presidential advisor David Axelrod acknowledged that women’s rights were an election issue, Democrats weren’t going to make it a big focus. And it was just months earlier that they voted in a bill in which they traded away restrictions on women’s right to access abortion for the health care reform bill, the biggest crowning achievement since Obama took office.

They might want to reconsider that strategy, and there’s no time like the present. The GOP has all but announced an all-out war on women and our rights. And Amanda Marcotte is right when she points out that there is a real chance that Dems are going to see these rights as yet another bargaining chip, particularly with a crazed GOP majority in the House demanding severe spending cuts. They may feel inclined to make “concessions” on our rights in order to lessen the hit to other services.

Here’s some free advice for the Democratic Party: DON’T DO IT.

I know why they might think it’s a good idea. Where else are women going to go? We’ve already proven that we don’t just vote with our vaginas – we were key to defeating many of the ultra conservative mama grizzlies in the midterms. So no matter how many women the GOP runs, we see through them to be anti-choice and in favor of policies that hurts women and our families. Dems are the only other option, right?

But again, I urge them: remember the panic you felt in October of 2010. Sure, they were destined to take a shellacking before the results came in, women or no women voters. But it would have been far worse if we didn’t show up like we threatened. We swept Dems to victory in 2006; we mitigated the losses in 2010. We did so even though our rights were tossed around like a hacky sack. But the fight is nastier now. It’s obvious. We’re all paying attention.

Sure, they might get lucky. We might decide to vote for the common good over our own, as we often do. But is that a risk worth taking? Men swung far more heavily to the right than women did in the past election. Isn't it perhaps time to take women’s concerns seriously and acknowledge that we are an important part of the Democratic base?

As Marcotte points out, Republicans get it. “A political party is nothing without its base. That Republicans hate the organized pro-choice world so much shows they believe that pro-choicers have the power to win elections,” she says. They’re right. We do. If Dems decide that conceding on women’s rights is a compromise worth making, all I can say is: Be afraid. Be very afraid. -Bryce Covert

Bryce Covert is a journalist and blogger who writes on feminism, politics, and the energy industry. You can find her at www.brycecovert.com and www.twitter.com/brycecovert.

A girl named Nemo

2011-01-18T12:00:00.000-07:00

Ever since I first watched the film Into The Wild—which chronicles the true story of Chris McCandless, a young man from an affluent Maryland suburb who donates his savings to charity, abandons his possessions, criss crosses the United States hitchhiking, and ultimately dies of starvation in the Alaskan wilderness—I’ve been thinking about McCandless’s story in terms of gender.

There are plenty of documented cases of men dropping everything and pitting themselves against the world’s most wild places. But where are the documented cases of women doing the same thing?

I thought reading Jon Krakauer’s book Into The Wild, on which the film was based, might offer me some insight. Instead, reading it just made me ask more questions. Although plenty of people have been quick to deride McCandless as an ill-equipped fool whose reckless behavior cost him his life, Krakauer characterizes McCandless as an explorer who turned to nature in search of truth and beauty--a pilgrim, of sorts.

Krakauer likens McCandless’s nomadic, truth-seeking impulses to those of the iconic 19th-century American naturalist John Muir, whose writings and environmental activism helped preserve some of California’s most awe-inspiring landscapes, including large sections of Northern California’s majestic Redwood Forests. Krakauer also invokes Everett Ruess, a 20-year-old poet, painter, and naturalist from California who changed his name to Nemo (Latin for nobody), and after months of wandering in the wilderness and living off the land, disappeared without a trace into the Utah desert. It took 75 years to uncover his remains.

Author Wallace Stegner said of Ruess, “It should not be denied… that being footloose has always exhilarated us. It is associated in our minds with escape from history and oppression and law and irksome obligations, with absolute freedom.” Historically, have women not craved "absolute freedom" just as much as men? Have“irksome obligations” prevented females from following in the steps of Everett Ruess and Chris McCandless? Or, is there a girl named Nemo whose story has never been told?

I began thinking that the masculine Into The Wild phenomenon highlights dependencies on women. Women's contributions are essential to maintain human society as it is designed. I wondered, have women traditionally just been too busy promoting and maintaining human civilization to abandon it on a whim?

Of Ruess, Stegner wrote, “Call him adventurous boy—at 18, in a dream, he saw himself plodding through jungles, chinning up the edges of cliffs, wandering through the romantic waste places of the world. No man with any of the juices of boyhood in him has ever forgotten those dreams.” Is it really “the juices of boyhood” that motivate such dreams? What about the dreams that girls have?

There are several notable accounts of extended periods of solitude written by women. Sara Maitland’s 2008 Book of Silence—which is one part autobiography, one part historical examination—promises to become a modern classic on the subject. According to the available literature on female solitude-seekers, there are some fairly notable differences between the journeys of men and women. Almost every such book that I have found written by a female author who spent an extended amount of time in the wilderness has been written by a middle-aged or elderly woman, which suggests that women are less likely than men to fully retreat into solitude in their youth.

A possible explanation for this—based on anecdotal conversation with various women about hitchhiking across the country and retreating from civilization—is a very valid fear among young women of physical or sexual assault.

One in every six women will be sexually assaulted during her lifetime. And, college-aged women are 4 times more likely to be victims of assault. Even though most women know their attackers, young women traveling alone Chris McCandless-style (hitchhiking, riding the rails, and sleeping in the streets) are putting themselves in what is thought of as a high-risk lifestyle.

Also, most of the accounts of solitude that I read were written by women living in cabins, with some access to civilization (grocers, post offices, phones, and occasional contact with other people). Based on my literature review, women appear less compelled to try to “live off the land,” or “rough it” as Chris McCandless did. This begs the question: is inserting oneself wilderness by definition a macho ego trip? Do female “pilgrims” search for truth and beauty in different ways?

Since childhood, I’ve been a solitude seeker who has been captivated by the beauty of nature. For me, however, the concept of wilderness is a place that I journey to in my mind, not in the physical world. I’ve always thought of my emotions and my psyche as a great expanse of wilderness to be explored throughout my life. Although there have been times in my 20s when I’ve been tempted to drop everything and retire to some wild place, I always knew that the urge to take off was motivated by something that couldn’t be solved by relocating physically. But whether my stationary journey inward is gender-motivated or purely self-motivated is still unclear.

A recent Times story offers several stories of men who choose solitude over civilization. The director of the Center of Cognitive and Social NeuroScience at the University of Chicago said, “In our culture, there is this mythic individualism that we cherish…That’s particularly true for men — they are supposed to be an island unto themselves. They take that myth more seriously and try to pursue it.”

What stuck with me most after I finished reading Into The Wild is that so many of these famous accounts of men end in death. Is there no girl named Nemo because women are better survivalists? Is there no girl named Nemo because women are more apt to understand one of McCandless’s final journal entries--Happiness only real when shared”--without ever pitting themselves against anything?

In terms of sheer survival and endurance, do women have less to prove than men? Or, does the masculine Into The Wild phenomenon highlight the simple lack of relative opportunity for women to abandon worldly commitments when social limitations constrain and depend on them?

As to unraveling the mystery of why there's no girl named Nemo, I still don't have answers, and I would love to hear readers' opinions. -Jenny Poplar

Jenny Poplar is a New Orleans-based freelance writer and journalist. She is currently contributing to a PBS documentary about a resident of the Lower 9th Ward who rebuilt her house in the wake of Katrina.

On Assange, #Mooreandme and rape culture: feminists are not valued players on the progressive team

2010-12-23T15:17:00.002-07:00

I was surprised by my own reaction to the treatment of Julian Assange’s rape charges and the resulting #Mooreandme Twitter campaign. I’m not a rape survivor and am lucky enough to say that I’ve never even been victim to attempted assault. (Although as Andrea Grimes points out, it is statistically probable that that will change.) So while the way this case has been handled absolutely appalls me, I suspect my feelings are very different than for those who have experienced sexual assault. But it’s some progressives’ response – mainly, although not all, men – to the situation that gets me. It’s been more than disappointing. It speaks to the fact that feminism is still not automatically included in core progressive values.

Over a week of valiant, constant, near-soul-crushing activism on Twitter on the part of Sady Doyle, Jaclyn Friedman, and a veritable army of others in many ways culminated last night when Michael Moore admitted to Rachel Maddow that any rape charges, no matter how suspicious their timing, should be taken seriously and investigated with the full force of the law. (He also subsequently sent Doyle a direct message on Twitter explaining his silence.) While it’s not the apology that we had been hoping for (and the Twitter campaign continues to ask for that apology), it was a pretty incredible moment, considering his first stance was that the rape charges were “hooey.” Keith Olbermann, who hosted Moore’s misguided explanation of his support for Julian Assange on his show and then committed mistakes of his own, has also apologized via Twitter (although activists are still hoping he will go further). None of this would have happened without feminists’ concerted effort to explain to Moore and Olbermann where they went wrong as progressive men who should be feminist allies. As exhausted as I know Doyle must be, I hope she is also proud. This is what successful activism looks like.

But it shouldn’t have had to be this way. That’s the point that most stayed with me, even after I watched Moore discuss rape on camera with nuance. The way he spoke about it with Maddow was the way he should have from the very beginning. It shouldn’t take a week of explaining, coaxing, badgering and practically screaming at a staunch progressive like him to get him to see things our way.

Admittedly, this was a tricky issue, particularly for progressives. As Maddow put it, it doesn’t fit nicely on a bumper sticker. Many of us support Wikileaks’ work to bring transparency to governments and expose the truth. We value freedom of the press and feel that Wikileaks should be protected under that value. And yes, the timing of these charges and the way the Swedish government has handled them are pretty suspicious. There may be political motivation at work on the part of governments who got pie in their faces from the recent Wikileaks release. But none of that should be reason to treat the women who came forward against Assange as liars (or CIA operatives) or to dismiss their claims as nonsense. If you pay attention to high-profile rape cases, this is what often happens to the women who bring charges – they get smeared, threatened, called liars and whores. Some eve end up dropping the charges altogether because of this pressure, even as they never waver from the assertion that rape did occur. This is what we mean when we talk about rape culture. The more intimidation women see of those few who bring charges against their rapists, the less safe they feel in coming forward about their own assailants. It creates an environment where men are less accountable for sexual assault because the knee-jerk assumption is that the woman is suspect, not the man. And it leads to a dismal report rate for rape in the US.

Fighting rape culture is a huge feminist priority. So when the charges against Assange were made public, most feminists worked hard to make sure they got the real story (not a false one) and treated the situation with subtlety. But as Michael Moore, Keith Olbermann, and even Naomi Wolf made clear, many progressives’ knee-jerk reaction was to suspect these women of all the things rape victims get suspected of. Their support for Julian Assange’s work blinded them to the possibility that he sexually assaulted two women. Keeping the two things in your head at once won’t make it explode. It just requires learning to walk and chew gum at the same time and holding your feminist values at the same high level as other progressive ones. But other values, like exposing truth and freedom of the press, quickly trumped women’s rights.

Feminism isn’t just about fighting the far right when they tell us what to do with our uteruses and our lives. It’s also about making the struggle for women’s equality mainstream. Real progressives are feminist allies, no matter their gender. After Keith Olbermann called the movement to demand an apology from him on Twitter a “frenzy” and then blocked most of the users, Maya at Feministing summed up her feelings well: “I can’t think of anything that’s a bigger slap in the face to feminists who genuinely believed – or at least dared to hope – that we were valued players on the team.” The need for the #Mooreandme campaign has taught me that feminists are not valued players on the team. We’re still sitting on the sidelines of the game. But we should be on the starting line-up. -Bryce Covert

Bryce Covert is a journalist and blogger who writes on feminism, politics, and the energy industry. You can find her atwww.brycecovert.com and www.twitter.com/brycecovert.

The procedure that dare not speak its name

2010-11-17T10:52:00.000-07:00

There are a lot of words women aren’t supposed to talk about. The use of “vagina,” for example, can get a commercial banned from TV, even if a euphemism like "down there" is employed instead. “Feminist” has the suffix “nazi” tagged on, turning it into a dirty word. But perhaps the most volatile word, the one that makes skin crawl on the Right, is “abortion.” This legal medical procedure has become closeted, imbued with shame, and the term has morphed into a taboo unto itself. But more than a third of American women will have an abortion by the age of 45. It’s time women take the word back.

Steph Herold recently decided to use Twitter as a forum to connect women who had had abortions by using the hashtag #ihadanabortion. As soon as the media sniffed it out, commentators raised their eyebrows about whether it trivialized abortion to talk about it alongside Justin Beiber. And then the anti-choice brigade found the hashtag, and it’s turned into a flame war. But the idea behind #ihadanabortion is to create a space for women to “come out” so that they can know they are not alone-- and so that the rest of the world can know it, too. What some see as trivializing can also be normalizing. Herold herself explains, “Part of the risk of coming out is exposing yourself to the antichoice hatred that is on Twitter… But I've had many women tell me that the activity on the hashtag made them feel less alone in their experience with abortion, even if they don't feel comfortable tweeting their own story.” By talking about it, particularly in such an open space, it can feel less shameful. In many ways, this idea draws on the gay rights movement, mimicking efforts to shed light on private discomfort or shame, while making its members feel like part of a community.

There’s another lesson women can learn from the gay rights movement: working to de-stigmatize the words associated with the cause. Besides telling people they are homosexual, part of the movement's coming out success is reclaiming the word “queer." The organization Queer Nation, started in 1990, was one of the first that reclaimed the word, and since then it has evolved to signify not a social deviant, as it originally did, but a person of a certain sexual orientation. Now words such as “queer” and “gay” have been co-opted as positive signifiers, and with that the people they represent have make progress in claiming their rightful place in society as equals.

Abortion rights are slipping in the US, while using the word “abortion” has become a weapon of choice on the Right. As Amanda Marcotte writes for On The Issues, abortion is no longer used just to talk about a woman terminating her pregnancy. Because of the ickiness and downright revulsion the word seems to incite in some people, they’re using it to talk about contraception, health care reform, and even women’s rights. Marcotte points out that right-wingers have spread the idea that hormonal contraception causes a woman’s body to reject fertilized eggs and thus is a form of “abortion.” (In reality, this is complete nonsense. Birth control works by suppressing ovulation altogether.) But no matter how wrong the facts, the messaging has worked. Even some “rabid pro-choicers” think that birth control kills something, Marcotte notes. And much noise was made (and, sadly, is still being made) about the health care reform bill funding abortions with taxpayer money – something that just isn’t true unless you use a broader definition of abortion, Marcotte concludes.

Meanwhile, some politicians who are comfortable talking about access to mammograms are unwilling to say the word "abortion." We hear about family planning, a nice phrase, but one that doesn’t mention the reality of unplanned, surgically terminated pregnancies. President Obama likes to discuss his goal of reducing unplanned pregnancies through greater access to birth control and the need to protect women’s health, both important issues. But it is also a nice way to skate around the fact that women need greater access to abortion services, services that are drying up around the country, state by state.

Some of the outrage #ihadanabortion sparked was because of “the idea that abortion is so shameful it shouldn't be talked about in any venue,” writes Anna North on Jezebel. On AlterNet, Sarah Seltzer notes, “Many folks don't want to be reminded that it happens.” But it does happen, and we need to talk about it. We need to de-stigmatize the word. It refers to a legal, safe, and often necessary medical procedure, but has come to signify so much more. When a word becomes a slur, sometimes it's time reclaim it. Now is one of those times.

As a colleague of mine put it, abortion isn’t the tragedy. The tragedy is a lack of access to abortion services. It’s time to stop talking around the fact that abortions occur, are needed, and are legal and safe. It’s time to stop talking about expanding access to family planning and contraception without avoiding abortion. The stigma must be removed. -Bryce Covert

Bryce Covert is a journalist and blogger who writes on feminism, politics, and the energy industry. You can find her at www.brycecovert.com and www.twitter.com/brycecovert.

Can sustainable cookstoves help women and girls?

2010-10-01T13:59:00.002-06:00

World leaders spent the better part of last week deliberating over how to speed up progress on meeting the Millennium Development Goals, charted out in 2000 and intended to be accomplished by 2015.

The bad, albeit unsurprising, news is that we’re not close to meeting these goals, which address climate change, HIV/AIDS, education, and gender equality. But the best environmental news of the week came when Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves, a public-private partnership to be led by the UN Foundation.

The alliance’s achievable goal is to see that clean, efficient cookstoves are used in 100 million households by 2020. To those of us who can pass up a lease for the perfect apartment simply because it has an electric stove instead of gas, such an effort might sound trivial. But about half of the world’s population is exposed to dangerous smoke from traditional stoves or open fires, which are fueled with available forms of biomass ranging from wood to dung to charcoal. Causing almost 2 million deaths annually, this ubiquitous household feature is a leading global killer. The United States government has committed nearly $51 million over five years to the effort, with inter-agency support from the State Department, EPA, DOE, and Health and Human Services.

The cookstove plan highlights the neglected intersection of environmental and public health issues, with a perfectly linear cause and effect: improve the quality of emissions, save human lives. Improving the safety and environmental impact of much of the world’s primary heating and cooking tool is a step toward meeting other hercluean development goals.

Those most negatively affected by the cookstoves are women and children, who generally prepare food and are exposed most frequently to smoke. They may travel great distances to dangerous places to gather fuel sources. Improving their health and safety allows the opportunity to more effectively pursue other significant development goals like women’s empowerment and girls’ education. As noted by the Blum Center for Developing Economies project on cookstoves for Darfur, “Every trek outside of the camps [to gather wood] leaves women at risk of rape and mutilation from the Janjaweed.”

Cookstoves are also a big contributor to environmental degradation, due both to deforestation for harvesting fuel sources (TreeHugger illuminates the link between deforestation and climate change here), and the black soot produced by partial combustion of biomass. The climate change impact of the soot, ominously called “black carbon,” is unclear, but scientists think it has a significant role in warming the planet.

Economic benefits are substantial, too. Eric Van Dusen, Innovation Director of the Blum Center, told me that if the right types of programs are put in place—perhaps a lease-to-own system that could cost a family as little as $1 per month, while they save up to $5 per month on fuel—the potential for poverty alleviation is not only an important benefit of the cookstoves, but their strongest selling point.

Introducing clean cookstoves to the developing world is not a new idea. AidWatch notes that the international development community has been talking about the technology for more than 50 years. The biggest challenge now is to guide cultural changes, turning the stove into an “aspirational” item, says Van Dusen, so that “everybody wishes they had a stove.” Integrating new technology into cooking practices that have been passed down for generations is a culturally sensitive issue. When the Blum Center originally brought their work in Darfur where people cook outdoors to Ethiopia where people cook indoors, ash on the floor was a big problem. It was easily solved with the addition of a pan, but serves as a reminder that every location will need a different technology. Depending on the fuel source—twigs, dung, firewood, or coal—different stoves apply.

The Center for American Progress lauds the plan for its “unique blend of diplomacy, technology, research, advocacy, and economic opportunity,” praising it for paving the way as a model to “meet the needs of those who must develop in a carbon-constrained world.”

The potential impact of 100 million cookstoves is profound. But getting there will entail serious education and cultural changes that need to be carefully considered along with technology, supply chain infrastructure, and distribution. -Sara Rubin

Sara Rubin is an editor at The Lady Finger. This post originally appeared on Campus Progress where she is a staff writer.

How to combat the mama grizzlies? Vote!

2010-09-30T08:55:00.000-06:00

This is the year of the mama grizzly, but not of the woman voter. While masturbation-and-sex-hating Christine O’Donnell wins her Delaware primary, polls are now showing that women are less likely to vote in the November midterm elections and appear less informed and less fired up about the issues. Disinterested voters are making a big mistake, and it's a big problem.

It’s not hard to see why a progressive woman might be frustrated or disillusioned. Where’s the heady media coverage of exciting Democratic female candidates? Rebecca Traister of Salon sees the mama grizzly trend as a sign that there is a new appetite for addressing gender and feminism. But Democrats aren’t interested in taking up the mantle. “There is a frustration, my frustration, with my own party for not reading the signals out there and saying…we want to be the women’s party and put female candidates out there and advertise our strengths with regards to women,” she says.

Meanwhile, the President’s biggest legislative win, health care reform, came at a cost to women’s rights. President Obama signed an executive order reinstating the Hyde Amendment, a legislative provision that bars federal funds from paying for abortions, for another year as a compromise with the anti-choice House contingency. And restrictive abortion language was left in the bill, requiring those who receive federal subsidies to buy coverage in the new state-run insurance exchanges to separate their premiums into a check for abortion services and a check for everything else. Many were concerned that insurance companies would just drop abortion coverage altogether to avoid this hassle.

And indeed, while women’s choice and access to abortion has been whittled away state by state over the past two years, Democrats aren’t planning to take the issue on. While presidential advisor David Axelrod has acknowledged that abortion will be an issue in this election season, given the extremely conservative views in the Tea Party, the focus for Democrats lies elsewhere – namely, the economy. Polls show that while men are angry about the economy and getting involved in the election, the key emotion for women is simply despair.

But while men may be fired up about large deficits and fiscal conservatism, women have just as much at stake in this election season, if not more. What’s on the GOP agenda if they take over the House or Senate – both moves they’ve set their eyes on? For starters, they plan to repeal healthcare reform, legislation that ultimately made a lot of gains for women. Because of the healthcare bill, being a woman can no longer be considered a preexisting condition, maternity care is covered by basic insurance, and 4.5 million more women will be eligible for Medicaid coverage.

GOP candidates want to reduce and/or privatize Social Security. Women rely heavily on these benefits. It’s harder for them to save for retirement, as they often take time to care for children, meaning they have fewer savings and smaller pensions than men. Women rely more heavily on Social Security – one in three single women 65 or over depend on it for 90% or more of their income. And women are at a much higher risk of living in poverty after retiring than men: 12% of women over 65 are poor, versus 7% of men.

The state of the economy, despite the term "mancession," also affects women. With falling state revenues, teachers – who are 82% female – are seeing huge job cuts: Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has estimated that state budget cuts imperil 100,000 to 300,000 public school jobs. Over 20% of women were head of household in 2000, with the number climbing upward. Women are heavily concentrated in jobs with low pay, with 1.7 million working as nursing home aides, 1.3 million as maids and housekeepers, and 1.2 million as child care workers, according to the Department of Labor. And they started out at a disadvantage in pay, earning only 77 cents for every dollar earned by men in 2008. President Obama signed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act upon taking office, but pay equity doesn't make the GOP agenda. Unemployment and a struggling economy will continue to hit women hard in many ways, and the GOP offers no good solutions.

And then of course there’s reproductive rights. The views of the up-and-coming GOP candidates are far more extreme than we’ve seen in recent years. Rachel Maddow points out that a renewed effort to put a "personhood amendment" on Colorado’s ballot includes language so strict it could make contraception illegal because it makes a womb inhospitable to a developing egg. If contraception is murder, what is a miscarriage, she muses – manslaughter? Tea Party darlings and GOP candidates Rand Paul, Christine O’Donnell, Sharon Angle, Joe Miller and Ken Buck all oppose all abortion, all the time – even in cases of rape and incest. And the roster of those who share this extreme aversion to choice continues to grow.

So women need to vote in the midterms. Our power is in our votes, not in our silence. We swept the Democrats to victory in the 2006 midterms, handing them Congressional majorities. We could turn the tides again. As Katrina vanden Huevel says in her column urging all progressives to vote in November: “Progressive apathy will hand right-wingers a victory.”

This election is indeed a referendum – on the extreme and anti-women conservative views of many Republican candidates. As vanden Huevel puts it: we need to eat, pray, and vote. -Bryce Covert

Bryce Covert is a journalist and blogger who writes on feminism, politics, and the energy industry. You can find her at www.brycecovert.com and www.twitter.com/brycecovert.

Well-behaved first ladies rarely make history

2010-09-13T09:28:00.001-06:00

First Lady is a fraught position. You are no longer a woman, a girl, a female – you are officially a Lady, whatever that means. (Even the term FLOTUS is bizarre, sounding both feathery and without substance, and somehow also gross.) By definition you are now second fiddle, supporting actress. It is a tricky role to inhabit. The term officially refers to the woman who is hostess of the White House. Your only duties are to care for your children (if you have any that need caring), tend to and support your husband, and act as social host. The rest is for you to decide – or to shy away from.

Each first lady has approached this situation differently. Jackie was the epitome of stylish decorator. Hillary staked out a clear agenda, then fought tooth and nail for it. Lady Bird toiled for beautification. Laura Bush kept her mouth shut until after her husband left office. What is Michelle Obama going to do? If the first (almost) two years of her husband’s administration stand as an example, not very much.

Courtney E. Martin at The American Prospect relates how her feminist friends lament a lack of action on the First Lady’s part. After all, Michelle’s a Harvard-trained lawyer with a successful career at Sidley Austin, who now spends her time solely on mothering and household-related concerns. I know more about the style of dress she’s wearing than what her opinions are. Her key issue has surfaced as childhood obesity – one that is in need of serious consideration in this country, without doubt, but one that ruffles few feathers and fits easily into a mothering role. She acts as the nation’s children’s mother, telling them they need to eat a little better and get more exercise. It’s very safe. As Martin points out, “She's even avoiding offending the food lobbies by focusing on the importance of activity, rather than zeroing in on the economically and racially explosive issue of how we eat.”

Martin’s friend Gloria Feldt tells her, “She's squandering her enormous power to shape public perceptions of who women are and what we can aspire to be. Power unused is power useless.” And Martin appears to agree, until about halfway through her article. She then decides that the nation “isn’t ready” for such a first lady. She points to the extreme hatred some felt toward Hilary and her agenda, and Michelle’s solid favorability rating around 50 percent. Martin feels – or at least, hopes – that Michelle is simply too smart to cause a scene. Her lack of action, of opinions, is not timidity, but cunning political calculation. At the end she indulges her imagination: “My feminist fantasy is that in Barack Obama's second term, Michelle will be freed to cause all sorts of ruckus in Washington.”

That would be just swell. But it’s as likely to happen for Michelle as it is for her husband. The reality is that every year is an election year, and no political person is “free” to do anything without repercussions. If it needs to be done you just have to do it. Restraint may be politically savvy, but in the grander scheme what does it accomplish? Without risk, can anything be achieved? Without pissing someone off, are you really doing anything important?

Hillary serves as an immediate counterexample. Yes, she’s an incredibly divisive person. But she had some real convictions that she fought for, staking out her own opinions and goals alongside, not just behind her husband’s. She may not have won the battles while he was in office, but I have to remind Ms. Martin that she is currently our Secretary of State, after serving as a New York Senator for two terms. Right now, she’s out in the world fighting for women’s rights and human rights. Where is Laura Bush? Ghost-writing a book and expressing approval of gay marriage. Too little, too late.

But you don’t have to inspire hatred to be a successful first lady. Eleanor Roosevelt is my favorite example of a stunningly important first lady – and she was the first to use the position to promote political causes. She had critics in her time, but also a huge throng of supporters and has become a beloved historical figure. I’ve written previously that without Eleanor, FDR’s presidency would likely have looked very different. Eleanor fought both with and against her husband, always pushing for what she felt was right, while FDR often went for what was politically expeditious. As Blanche Wiesen Cook remarks in her biography of Eleanor, “FDR liked to boast that he was a ‘practical politician.’ He knew how to compromise, make deals, be duplicitous. ER understood the nature of the game, but wanted some assurance that it would be played for the right reasons, the most needful causes.” She was, as Robert Sherwood observed, “the keeper of and constant spokesman for her husband’s conscience.” While there were other forces that pushed FDR to the left and demanded that he enact a progressive agenda, including labor and social movements, Eleanor was a steadfast proponent of important issues, and without her efforts, our country would be a less equal place.

Most of us know Laurel Thatcher Ulrich's famous quotation, “Well-behaved women seldom make history.” I would urge Michelle to buy the button (or any other swag the quote is scribbled on). I understand the desire to be safe. She didn’t choose to be First Lady; her husband was the one who chose to be President. But Eleanor, too, didn’t want the role thrust on her at first, and almost ran away to avoid the duty. She came around. She recognized the power and potential of the post and that it shouldn’t be wasted. There is likely a lot of pressure on Michelle not to make trouble for her husband. That is an old, old pressure: be seen and not heard, don’t cause trouble, keep your head down. Martin plays into the idea that a woman should serve her husband’s needs first and not cause a scene. But women have come past that. And Michelle can get past that, too. If our country was ready for Eleanor, it is definitely ready for Michelle. She just has to stop being so well-behaved. -Bryce Covert

Bryce Covert is a journalist and blogger who writes on feminism, politics, and the energy industry. You can find her at www.brycecovert.com and www.twitter.com/brycecovert.

In defense of trolls

2010-09-13T07:19:00.000-06:00

As annoying as they might be, internet trolls can serve a valuable role in advancing the level of discourse around social justice issues. There are multiple types of trolls, of course, and some are more useful in this role than others. I don’t engage with the ones whose sole purpose seems to be derailing the conversation or offending people; I think ignoring them entirely is usually the best solution. No, I look for the true devil’s advocate- the one who makes arguments out of ignorance, from a place of privilege, who wants so badly to “win” the conversation that they will continue to engage as long as you like. I’ve found conversations with these people to be some of the best learning experiences I’ve had in regards to social justice issues.

Take, for example, an experience I had on Facebook recently. A guy exhibiting typical trollish behavior responded to a celebratory post about the overturning of Prop 8 with a sarcastic comment about the “majority of voters,” which turned into a debate between him and a few other people. His second comment included the phrase, “Your point is moot...give me a better debate please.” Perfect. The ensuing conversation required, in total, just a few minutes of my time to type responses and paste web addresses of resources, but offered me ample opportunity to do research and learn about fascinating aspects of the battle surrounding Prop 8. I reviewed legal concepts I had studied as an undergrad but hadn’t examined much since. I found a few new blogs I like that focus on LGBTQ issues. Best of all, the next time someone claims that judges shouldn’t be allowed to overturn decisions made by “the will of the people,” I have a much more efficient response that I can support with evidence, even if that conversation happens in person, where I don’t have a wealth of information at my fingertips.

I do support bloggers who keep their spaces free of trolls by use of strict comment moderation. It’s important for people who regularly deal with this crap in person and everywhere else on the internet to have at least a few safe places where they can get away from it. Sometimes commenters do a great job calling each other out and moving the conversation forward but at other times, without trolls, they can fall into the trap of just agreeing with each other and the blogger, allowing iffy claims to go unchallenged, with no one learning much of anything. Throw in a decent troll, and suddenly everyone has to support their claims with evidence, use a logical framework, and really understand the terminology they’re using. This can result in a much more vibrant, rewarding discussion, even if no one changes their mind by the end of it.

Conversing with trolls in a respectful way also provides a chance for people who are new to discussing social justice issues to see how it’s done. The presence of witnesses, along with basic human decency and compassion, is a good reason to keep one’s emotions in check. Anger has a place in social struggle, but it’s not worth the energy to get upset at trolls and take what they say personally, nor to give in to the temptation to use oppressive methods of discourse. I avoid sarcasm and snark and I don’t employ big words, unnecessary legal terminology, or foreign phrases to trip them up. I don’t point out logical fallacies by name and I don’t engage in personal attacks. Those are trolling techniques and I’ll leave them to the trolls. No matter what happens, I feel much better when walking away from these conversations if I’ve been able to maintain my calm and my standards of decency throughout the discussion.

To be clear, I’m not saying that marginalized/oppressed people have an obligation to engage with trolls or to be kind in response to offensive and hateful statements. Feministe recently reposted a piece by Tami at What Tami Said, titled, “Marginalized folks shouldn’t always have to be ‘the bigger persons.’” Tami explains, “We try to pick our battles strategically, but it is stressful and ultimately soul-destroying to have to work so hard to ignore so much–to constantly be forced to show benevolence in the face of rude and dehumanizing treatment.” It’s a balance that is, I would argue, particularly difficult for people raised as women: respond too gently, and we risk not being taken seriously, apologizing for our own oppression, not being true to ourselves, or just complying with the demand that women and other marginalized people be quiet and complacent. Speak too forcefully, and we can be dismissed out-of-hand as humorless and reactionary, letting our emotions get the best of us, having a chip on our shoulder, acting superior, or being a man-hater. Personally, I err on the side of coming across too strongly, but I always try not to be a jerk or a bully.

I’m grateful when I see other commenters and bloggers engage with trolls in a straightforward, respectful manner. I made the decision to engage in a similar way as a result of witnessing these conversations and seeing how effective they can be. If I’m in the mood to participate and if all goes well, in the end I’ll be a little more knowledgeable, a little more prepared the next time someone makes the same arguments, and I won’t have compromised my values to make that happen. -Adrienne H.

Adrienne lives in Madison, WI and is a classicist, a gardener, and a curator of the internet.

Mama grizzlies vs. men

2010-08-04T08:37:00.000-06:00

In an insightful post on Double X, EJ Graff takes note of the double standard for gender in political campaigns: Men can sail to victory on a masculinity-based platform, but women are forced to navigate a strange series of conflicting standards. Gender-neutral doesn't work (see: Martha Coakley, who as Graff says, "never pointed out that she was female, she kept her appearance as neutral as possible, and she rarely offered emotion of any kind—emotion being, presumably, soft and girly.") Femininity doesn't work, either. Hillary Clinton's notorious tearful moment on the campaign trail was used as public evidence of her underlying fragile, vulnerable, womanly character.

It would seem that women candidates who are masculine is what wins. Sarah Palin's recent claim that Arizona Governor "Jan Brewer has the cojones that our President does not have" implies that manly women are the political favorites. But with talk in the GOP about Mama Grizzlies comes a reminder that only stern motherliness, or some very specific combination of the maternal and the masculine, is what makes a perfect platform for women politicians. Strong-willed leadership tempered by more traditional femininity is a successful formula. As Graff points out, Scott Brown defeated Coakley with a naked Cosmo centerfold spread and pick-up truck campaign. In ads, he used his truck "as a symbol of his regular-guy-ness, with emphasis on "regular." But it was only regular because he was a guy." Women can successfully position themselves as gun-toting, not as proof of manliness, but as proof of motherliness, or a Mama Grizzly ethic. Michelle Malkin describes herself as one of many "security moms," for whom the 2nd amendment helps to keep their kids safe.

The narrow gender positioning that women politicians are forced into to succeed is nothing new, but certainly of revived attention with primary season buzz, and a president who has been criticized for being too feminine. -Sara Rubin

Sara Rubin is an editor at The Lady Finger.

Christianity and LGBTQ inclusion

2010-08-02T10:10:00.000-06:00

Lately I’ve been dipping my toes into some blogs written by young, seemingly progressive Christians. I read along, agreeing with a lot of what they’re saying, feeling like we’ll hit it off, only to come upon a reference to homosexuality being a sin, or a condemnation of same-sex marriage, and I just get so disappointed. I see a bumper sticker around town that reads, “Don’t like gay marriage? Then DON’T GET ONE.” In its simplicity, this message communicates what mystifies me about the Christian-backed effort to prevent marriage by same-sex couples: why on Earth do they care so much what we do with our private lives? Why is so much of the mainstream Christian message centered on depriving others (LGBTQ folks and women particularly) of rights, of controlling our sex lives and what we do with our bodies? What happened to ‘love thy neighbor as thyself’ and ‘he that is without sin among you, let him cast the first stone’? What happened to fighting poverty and standing up for those who can’t stand up for themselves? What about the state of our criminal justice system? Am I completely misunderstanding what Christ was all about? Why aren’t we working together on these issues?

I had long assumed that same-sex marriage and abortion are The Big Issues for the Christian leadership these days because, as a group largely run by privileged white men, they have a vested interest in keeping LGBT folks and women oppressed. I still think that’s a reasonable, if partial, explanation. But I think answering that last question I asked—why aren’t we working together on these issues?—goes a long way towards explaining the concerns of the most vocal Christians.

In my experience, most feminists and womanists are concerned about many social justice issues beyond struggling against the patriarchy. Organizations and individuals fighting for the rights of LGBTQ folks seem increasingly willing to expand their focus, fighting poverty and human trafficking and communicable diseases. I hear words like intersectionality and kyiarchy used more and more often.

The fact is, if Christians would abandon the cause of fighting same-sex marriage and other rights of LGBTQ folks, we could do a lot more work together and go a long way towards solving some of society’s problems. It makes sense to me that those in power, the ones who have the most invested in maintaining all of our existing hierarchies, are quite happy to have Christians and LGBTQ folks at each other’s throats. Not only does it keep LGBTQ folks and women more manageable, it prevents us from working together with you to solve all those other problems they don’t want us to solve.

Instead of bonding over our common interests in health and safety and dignity for all humans, we’re fighting over laws that aim to keep LGBTQ folks from having these very things. People feel like they have to choose between being Christian and being gay. Just this week author Anne Rice publicly renounced Christianity, saying “I remain committed to Christ as always but not to being ‘Christian’ or to being part of Christianity. It's simply impossible for me to ‘belong’ to this quarrelsome, hostile, disputatious, and deservedly infamous group,” and “I refuse to be anti-gay. I refuse to be anti-feminist.”

I’m not asking people to leave Christianity. I’m asking you to leave the issue of homosexuality alone. Just drop it. You’re on the wrong side of history, your energy can be better spent elsewhere, and you’re alienating and causing real harm to a lot of wonderful, important people.

Let’s talk about what we can achieve together. Martin Luther King, Jr was a minister. I know there are more Christians like him. Why are you letting yourselves be represented in the public eye by people like Fred Phelps, Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin? What can we do together to change the mainstream media so that feminists, LGBTQ folks, and Christians are more fairly represented? Can’t we work together on health care? What about prison reform, disability rights, and homelessness? I walked past a church today displaying a large banner that read, “Torture is WRONG,” and I thought, yes! But are they interested in my help in ending it or will they reject me because of some aspects of my private life?

-Adrienne H.

Adrienne is a Classicist, a gardener, and a curator of the internet.

Why Elizabeth Warren is the feminist hero I've been waiting for

2010-07-31T10:31:00.003-06:00

I got a chance to meet Elizabeth Warren recently, the oft-called TARP "watchdog" and tireless consumer advocate. I couldn’t help but be struck immediately by the fact that she is very real. She asked how I was, introduced me to her husband, and chatted as if she had all the time in the world as I ushered her backstage minutes before she was to speak. She is the epitome of down to earth, and that is likely a lot of the reason why she had such a huge crowd of adoring fans around her at the end of the night.

But while that makes her a great person, that’s not the reason she’s a great idol. She’s a great idol first of all because she is a woman in power. And she speaks truth to power. She has been known to make Timothy Geithner quiver, and has already been dubbed one of the three “sheriffs of Wall Street” (the other two are also women, incidentally). She’s currently under consideration to be the head regulator for a brand spanking new Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, put in place by President Obama’s financial reform. This candidacy has garnered endorsements from the likes of the New York Times, the Boston Globe, and a heaping handful of progressive thought leaders.

And she is a woman in power who got there without showing a bit of skin. It was all brain. While feminists are still duking it out over whether or not they can support Olivia Munn, there is no question of how Warren got where she is. She’s a self-professed dork. A dorky, powerful woman who is taken seriously. People don’t love her because she’s sexy and flirty. She’s just goddamned smart.

Warren has an interesting history. She was married at age 19 to Jim Warren and had two children with him. But she later decided to get a law degree and ended up divorcing Warren (keeping his name, obviously), ending up at Harvard Law School.

She and her current husband, Bruce Mann, are what can easily be termed an adorable couple. And, even more importantly, he loves her without a hint of jealousy, insecurity, or a desire to overshadow her. At the event, he sat at the back of the theater. He hung out on the edge of the cocktail party afterward, happily reading a newspaper, while Warren spoke with every single one of her fans. If there is any internal power struggle, they do a damn good job of acting in front of people.

Warren proves a few things for me. For one, a woman can rise to power and have her ideas taken seriously if she is just whip smart. But she also proves that while women’s lives can be complicated, leading in her case to an early marriage, children, and then a second marriage, they don’t have to be impediments to a career. As I start to look at my own life and yearn to have it all, I am entirely heartened to see at least one woman who does. -Bryce Covert

Bryce Covert is a journalist and blogger who writes on feminism, politics, and the energy industry. She has a B.A. in literature from Brown University and you can find her at www.brycecovert.com and www.twitter.com/brycecovert.

Wedding fashion: a carnival mirror?

2010-07-31T10:25:00.000-06:00

The reason why I think the bridal industry reigns supreme in all our collective consciences? It’s rooted in abstracts, these ideas of romance, love, happily ever after, ideas that we can’t touch or see, so we concoct images for them. Eventually those flashing pictures we see in our minds find their way into becoming tangible objects. If we can touch something, then we can anchor the idea behind it, and whatever abstract an item represents doesn’t feel so free-floating above us, impossible to grasp, but still teasing us to try.

The whole notion of romantic love, other than being a hormonal outbreak, is one of those ideas. In fact, I think it’s one of the most beguiling, because it hides its face behind so many facades, masking itself behind emotions, fantasies, relationships and expectations. There is not a single person who is not conditioned to find love, and there is not a single person who has not tried to understand it. Romance alludes us, because like other abstracts and intellectual pursuits, it resides beyond what we experience in the material world, but unlike other brainy –ism concepts, romantic love scintillates us, and so we devote a good amount of self-identity into thinking we are conforming it to our needs, when really, we’re duped into refitting ourselves. In many ways, romantic love is like a carnival mirror: it reflects our most basic individualistic needs, but then it distorts them almost beyond recognition, so that we’re left feeling incomplete and not pondering what we can do for ourselves, but what others can do for us. Romantic love is Social Darwinism for the coupled world.

Fashion, always rooted in the present, is perhaps the best concrete example of romance’s carnival mirror. We hide our weaknesses behind it, flaunt our strengths beside it. Clothes are the first way we recognize and classify, because how we look is one of the easiest ways to organize where we belong. More than basic body protection, fashion derives its power from the universal need for a voice, and no matter what talents the person may have, choosing an outfit is one of the easiest and most noticeable ways to exhibit self expression.

There are very few industries that reign recession-proof, and I am almost convinced that the top two are fashion and weddings. We already know that weddings persevere because they reinforce fantasies. Fashion plugs on because it fills the need for pleasure. “Out of suffering comes the demand for pleasure,” writes Linda Grant in The Thoughtful Dress: The Art of Adornment, the Pleasure of Shopping, and Why Clothes Matter. “When we have suffered we do not care less about clothes but more.” I can see her argument, because when we look at the human need to turn what we can’t understand into a tangible object, clothes become a fundamental tool in figuring out how we express ourselves when everything else feels uncertain. The dress, in short, is what a bride can depend on whenever everything else around her feels rooted in a paranormal state of flux. It’s familiar, and it’s cut in the shape of a person, so she can look at it and almost give it its own personality, maybe the one that she wants, but doesn’t know how to act it out. It’s just as much of a witness as her attendants will be, and after the wedding, she’ll tuck it away as a sort of living proof that her wedding day did in fact happen. To many women, the dress is a guest, and it represents a level of a bride’s self image that no other family member or friend can.

I’ve been wondering lately if the bridal infatuation with white wedding dresses really stems from this unspoken need to start marriage with a blank slate. The white represents more than just innocence and purity; it also symbolizes a clean start, one that is too young to be anything but devoid of markings and stains. We put a lot of emotional detachments and distractions into the dress, and I can’t help but question if the need for it to be perfect is really to validate whatever need or grief a bride might feel in divorcing herself from her single past. This whole idea of letting the past go is uniquely female, typified by the dominant trend of women taking their husband’s name, and it manifests in the childlike dress-up rituals and therapeutic meditations that lead to finding “the dress.” Just like you can be left with nothing but the clothes on your back, you can also be left with nothing but your remembered past.

Hillary Clinton once described female identity as a balancing act between different roles, roles that men are not as acute to, because for the most part, what defines a successful man doesn’t really change before and after a wedding. For a woman, who is still conditioned to look at marriage and family planning as her greatest accomplishment, “wife” becomes yet another identity she is forced to juggle with “career,” “daughter,” “friend,” etc. Male identity is more cohesive, but for women, we’re expected to consistently prioritize parts of ourselves over others. Wifework has a way of making self-sacrifice as routine as chores. If women, like men, were inundated with these messages of leaving your single past for your married future, I wonder how much validity brides would place on the dress as their last self-expression of their single selves. Male identity has always existed separately from female identity, but to look at that equation the other way around is such a new and still-tested ground. If our culture made female identity more accessible, I wonder how that would affect bridal boutique sales. -Safa Samiezade'-Yazd

Safa Samiezade'-Yazd writes mostly on womens issues, ethnic identity and performance studies. She holds a BA in creative writing from the University of Denver and an MFA in Interdisciplinary Art from Goddard College. You can read her current blog at nakedladyinawhitesilkdress.wordpress.com.

Obama the gender bender?

2010-07-07T20:44:00.002-06:00

Is Obama the first woman president? No.

Unless there is something he’s hiding from the public, President Obama is a biological male. Which means he has a Y chromosome, among other male-only physical features. While race is increasingly difficult to fence in with easy definitions, sex still has mostly rigid boundaries. This is perhaps why Toni Morrison was able to call Bill Clinton the first black president. In her 1998 New Yorker article she described him as such by highlighting certain tropes of blackness that he displayed: “single-parent household, born poor, working-class, saxophone-playing, McDonald’s-and-junk-food-loving boy from Arkansas.” But unlike race, sex is not defined by cultural signals. It can be played with, but that usually means changing from one side to the other. While race can be mixed, self-defined, sex is still mainly a binary. And Obama is squarely on one side.

But this is not an issue of biology and sex; it’s about gender and associated characteristics. Obama is the first female president not because people think he has a vagina, but because they think he is feminine. This, by definition, means that some people believe that there are specific traits that are fundamentally womanly. Martin Linsky of Newsweek has “five important ways” Obama displays his womanness: “inclusiveness in problem solving, deep optimism, modesty about knowing the answers, the courage to deliver uncomfortable news, not taking on all the work alone, and a willingness to air dirty linen.” This woman sounds an awful lot like Pollyanna. But it gets worse. Ralph Alter of The American Thinker has other reasons : “Obama is filled with sensitivity…, he would rather talk than fight, is highly…compassionate and to top it all off, he has a finely tuned sense of fashion.” Beyond the fact that Alter’s goal here is to claim that the “Obama administration fights like a girl” in order to discredit it (he must have missed Joan of Arc and Annie Oakley), these men are talking about gender definitions. Kathleen Parker, the latest to join in the meme, tries to dance around the issue much more delicately. She points out that she personally doesn’t think his “doing things a woman’s way” is a deficiency, yet feels our “cultural expectations” of what a leader should be do not include “coalition building” and talking it out. (Or really, talking at all--Obama is such a “chatterbox”!)

Inclusiveness, optimism, sensitivity, communication. (I will just ignore his sense of fashion.) These are very similar to the traits ascribed to female executives, regulators, and politicians when arguments are made that women in high places bring better results than men. But both claims boil us down to stereotypes by asserting that women share certain traits. It assumes that half the world’s population possesses a set of defining characteristics, a certain femininity that can be labeled. Is a pessimistic woman manly? Must I be sensitive to truly be female? Women differ from each other, not just from men. And it’s okay that we do.

The notion that Obama is feminine doesn't only do a disservice to women. It offends men as well. The authors feel men don’t (or shouldn’t) possess certain female-associated characteristics. A sensitive man? How homosexual. An optimistic man? How naïve. Are men really all that negative, unwilling to talk it out, so clueless when it comes to fashion? Is the U.S. really unable to handle a president who builds coalitions instead of being The Decider? Parker has a hard time believing her own assertion that these womanly traits are “an evolutionary achievement” (she spends the rest of her article attacking him for his desire to talk it out). But isn’t it possible that a more “evolved” man--or one could say modern, or well-adapted--is one that is able to pull from the playbooks of femininity and masculinity? And still know that he is a man?

Hilary Clinton didn’t get the party nomination because she’s too manly. Obama is losing popularity because he’s too female. These are assessments made by talking heads, but is it really what the American people think? Are we really unable to recognize that these two are men and women, no matter how they act? -Bryce Covert

Bryce Covert is a journalist and blogger who writes on feminism, politics, and the energy industry. She has a B.A. in literature from Brown University and you can find her at www.brycecovert.com and www.twitter.com/brycecovert.

Planting mangoes to curb bride burning and female feticide in India

2010-07-01T08:24:00.000-06:00

In addition to packing a hefty antioxidant punch, the mango - a superfruit if there ever was one - is now proven to fend off poverty, global warming, and sexism.

According to an article in the BBC News, residents of the Dharhara village in the Bhagalpur district of northwestern India have engaged in a social experiment using mangoes to up the value of their daughters. In many parts of India, girls are seen as less desirable than boys. Families want a male heir, and a son is seen as an extra source of income for the family. Female feticide - in which doctors illegally abort unborn baby girls on the basis of their sex alone - is rampant throughout India, with 50 million girls missing, according to UNICEF. Female feticide has created a shortage of eligible brides in India, with males in some urban regions traveling to rural areas to secure a wife. But girls who aren't aborted are often subject to extreme domestic violence later in life. Bride burning, in which men set fire to their wives for lack of a sufficient dowry, occurs in parts of India.

It is against this grisly backdrop that the residents of Dharhara have decided to make their daughters more valuable in Indian society. For every girl born, the family plants at least 10 mango trees in the village. The mangoes provide a source of income for the parents, allowing them to save enough money for a dowry upon their daughter's marriage - thus avoiding the violence that accompanies a scanty marriage settlement. One mango orchard yields about $4,245 worth of mangoes each season, enough to supplement the familial income, with leftover money going in a bank account for the child's dowry.

"We heard about it from our fathers and they from their fathers. It has been in the family and the village from ages," Subhendu Kumar Singh, a school teacher, told the BBC. "This is our way of meeting the challenges of dowry, global warming and female foeticide. There has not been a single incident yet of female foeticide or dowry death in our village."

While the Dharhara tradition shelters the village's girls from the misogyny in greater India, the fact that mango trees alone can make a girl more valuable speaks volumes of the undervaluing of women in the first place. Preferable, of course, is a major cultural shift, one in which women - mango trees or not - are treasured from birth like men. But barring that, the Dharhara mango project is a model worth emulating. -Naomi Zeveloff

Image: Mickey_boy[L]

Naomi Zeveloff is an editor at The Lady Finger. This post originally appeared in EcoSalon, where she writes a weekly column about environmentalism and feminism.

New York's nannies, housekeepers, and eldercare givers get a break

2010-07-01T08:08:00.000-06:00

Women nationwide have reason to celebrate this month. Thanks to tireless organizing and lobbying for the past several years by domestic workers organizations, New York is poised to become the first state to recognize the rights of domestic workers outlined in “Domestic Worker Bill of Rights” passed last month by the state Senate and scheduled to be signed into law this week.

The state’s 200,000 nannies, housekeepers and other workers--largely women of color and immigrant women--will be granted rights including mandatory overtime pay, vacation and sick days, once the state Assembly and House reconcile their bills and Gov. David Paterson signs off on the measure as expected. Domestic Workers United and other groups have been pushing for such rights, as unbelievably, current federal and state labor laws do not apply to domestic workers. In effect, they’ve been legally forbidden from the rights to self-organize, to form or join labor organizations, or to bargain collectively for improved wages or working conditions. Without these legal protections, employers have routinely denied their workers pay, refused sick and vacation days, fired workers without notice, and in some cases, enslaved them.

Barbara Young, a Barbadian nanny in New York, told BBC News, "We're on the streets, in the parks, the libraries and the after-school programs, yet people don't notice these are workers. We need a change in this industry."

Why has it taken so long? The lack of legal protection reflects society’s racist and classist tendency to overlook, or downplay, the contributions and rights of certain people--in this case, women of color, low-income women and immigrants who make up the broad majority of domestic workers. Of more than 400 domestic workers surveyed by the Domestic Workers United and DataCenter (based in New York City), about 99 percent were foreign-born, 99 percent were women of color (non-Hispanic white), 76 percent were non-U.S. citizens and 93 percent were female, according to U.N. Human Rights Committee Report. Employers are more likely to assert control over them, understanding they have few tools to defend themselves. Indeed, these women risk losing their jobs, their income, and their safety if they speak out against abuse and other issues.

Of course, domestic work--care of children and the home--is still largely performed by women and considered “women’s work,” even as more women than ever work paid jobs and are primary breadwinners in two-thirds of families.

The bill then not only protects workers from unjust and inhumane treatment, guaranteeing them basic rights, but forces employers and society to recognize domestic work as hard, meaningful work deserving of respect and compensation. The "second shift" has emerged further from the shadows of homes and public spaces, and we owe it to domestic workers and their demand to be noticed. -Jean Stevens

Jean Stevens is a freelance journalist, blogger, promoter, event planner, and novice photographer whose work focuses on issues relating to gender, race, class, sexual identity, food culture, U.S. foreign policy, and feminism. You can learn more about Jean at www.jeanmstevens.com.

A tale of two feminist victories

2010-06-14T21:30:00.000-06:00

Feminists, rejoice! We can stop what we’re doing, for Ross Douthat has decided that the time has come to “officially consolidate [our] gains” from the women’s movement of the 1970s. After all, look at the success of Sarah Palin! Not to mention last Tuesday’s primaries, where “all the major female candidates won” – never mind that they were conservatives. In fact, the fact that they are conservatives is even more proof that our work is done. Conservative women’s “rise is a testament to the overall triumph of the women’s movement,” because “America is now a country where social conservatives are as comfortable as liberals with the idea of women in high office.”

But there are a couple of problems here. The first is that Douthat’s victory lap is celebrating the achievement of simply putting more women in higher office. As Ariel Levy noted (and as I also noted), sticking more women into higher positions isn’t really feminism. It’s what Levy calls the “politics of identity,” instead of a “politics of liberation” – women become interchangeable cogs, and the game is simply to overtake more of the machine. It ignores the values that they may hold. It also ignores whether or not this does anything to make the lives of the rest of us more equal or free. (And equal pay and family planning don’t appear on Sarah Palin’s agenda.)

Because the truth is, American women are not more equal. Only three percent of Fortune 500 companies have a woman as CEO. Women account for 17 of 100 Senators and 75 of 435 Representatives. Why don’t women have access to all the jobs men do? The answer comes down to parental leave and childcare.

Women enjoy far more equality in Sweden--and experience far less misogyny, it would seem. Sweden made itself a test case for increased parental leave, subsidized preschools, and better care for the elderly. Before the incentives of “daddy leave” were introduced in 1995, the country already had the preschools and elderly care in place, as well as a full year’s salary for a parent who took leave, a guaranteed job when he or she got back, and the ability to work six-hour days until the kids were in school. As the New York Times notes, “Female employment rates and birth rates had surged to be among the highest in the developed world.” Then came daddy leave, which meant that a family lost one month of subsidies if the father didn’t take some time off, as well as the addition of a second nontransferable father month. Now 85 percent of fathers take leave. But more importantly than that, a mother’s future earnings increase 7 percent on average for every month the father takes off. As the Times notes, “Companies have come to expect employees to take leave irrespective of gender, and not to penalize fathers at promotion time. Women’s paychecks are benefiting and the shift in fathers’ roles is perceived as playing a part in lower divorce rates and increasing joint custody of children.” On top of all of that, “a new definition of masculinity is emerging” – one in which a manly man takes time off to be with his newborn child.

This is what the game is about: making more choices available for women at every level, as well as equal pay and promotions for the choices they make. This can’t be achieved without highly subsidized childcare and parental leave. Otherwise women are forced to choose between being a mother and being successful at her job. Just take the story of Alexandria Wallace, recently profiled in the Times, who ended up reverting to welfare checks because the childcare for her daughter was no longer funded by the state. As Womenstake notes, Congress needs to invest in childcare subsidies to prevent more stories like Alexandria’s, and to “avoid further economic decline.” It is literally what stands between many women and their desired job. But it is also what holds down pay and promotions, when women take time off for pregnancy.

A feminist victory is not about gaining a few placeholders in office. It’s not about making conservatives comfortable with that idea, either. Rather, it’s about constructing a society where women have the most possible choices. Women in the U.S., sadly, don’t. -Bryce Covert

Bryce Covert is a journalist and blogger who writes on feminism, politics and the energy industry. She has a B.A. in literature from Brown University and you can find her at www.brycecovert.com and www.twitter.com/brycecovert.

No, it's not the end of men

2010-06-10T20:59:00.001-06:00

When talking about feminism with people who don't identify as feminists, the argument that "well, but men and women are different" inevitably comes up. Indeed, this simple observation was partly responsible for my own former reluctance to identify as a feminist--denying my own femininity seemed an unfair demand, and an unrewarding objective. My concept of feminism was largely limited to an explanation I had heard from an elementary school teacher years earlier: it's a movement for women who believe that their differences are unjust. So, they fight for things like easier physical fitness requirements in tests to become firefighters compensate for their relative physical weakness.

The message that to succeed women must adopt more masculine traits has guided the cultural narrative of successful, powerful women, while its corollary (in the grand tradition of double standards), is to "lament is the demise of masculinity," as Ann Friedman notes in The American Prospect. Indeed, who wants less brawny firefighters? Gender role stereotyping cuts both ways. In The Atlantic, Hanna Rosin's essay "The End of Men" argues that women's success comes at the expense of masculinity, and that men simply can't keep up with the contemporary world, and that "the economics of the new era are better suited to women," in a "postindustrial economy [that] is indifferent to men’s size and strength." At least we've finally moved past basic psycho-evolutionary dispositions to certain types of labor--phew.

An expanded take on the "he-cession" that has cost more men their jobs than women, Rosin projects a world with increasing numbers of women in management positions and with higher earning jobs. This should all be good news for all of us, but if it signals the decline of men into Judd Apatow, nobody comes out ahead. The goal of feminism has never been for women to succeed at the expense of men, nor are we quite there yet.

I don't mean to diminish the multitude of women's successes, for which I am personally deeply grateful, but the oppressive systems that feminism seeks to topple are still in plain sight. A record number of women are running for public office, but most of them in the GOP, a party whose platform actually encourages inequalities based on gender and other socioeconomic factors--and if elected, they will still enter a disproportionately male government. Rosin looks at the rise of historically female dominated careers--nursing, food service--and sees increased opportunity for women and a corresponding decrease in opportunity for men. It's partly a result of job disparity like this that the wage gap persists.

As Rosin points out, more and more women pursue higher education degrees--an accomplishment indeed worth celebrating. But according to the American Council on Education, which reports such information, the recent rise in the number of women attending college (they now outnumber men) comes mostly from a growing number of women of color who attend college, and a frightfully low number of men of color who do. While this is good news for these women, it is worth noting that the ratio of white men and women enrolled appears level. The wage gap hurts black and Latina women more than it does white women, positioning them to benefit the most of any group by pursuing wage-raising degrees. Because the most desperate people are working to improve their lot does not mean we've reached an equitable arrangement.

The glib argument that men are lagging is to set back the goals of feminism. Delighting in a reversal of gender roles is not the intent of a movement designed to eliminate traditional boundaries and increase equity. To make professional fields besides nursing and child care unfriendly to men does not benefit anybody, nor are we even near the cusp of a gender role reversal in the home--and that's not the goal, anyway. Success at the expense of somebody else's oppression is not where we've ever been headed. Just because many women have risen to the occasion, balancing their traditional "women's work" with careers, doesn't mean that men are insignificant, but if ideas about masculinity softened enough to make professions like teaching and nursing appealing to more men, that would be a step in the right direction. -Sara Rubin

Sara Rubin is an editor at The Lady Finger.

To be, or not to be...a feminist?

2010-06-07T22:41:00.001-06:00

Is there a way to make Hamlet feminist? Remember, this is the play in which self-obsessed men dominate the stage, with plenty of opportunities to express their inner feeling through soliloquy. The women, though they are peripheral on stage, are actually significant tools of male destructiveness--Claudius kills his brother to take the kingship and his wife, Gertrude, for himself; Ophelia, the object of Hamlet's affections, goes mad and drowns. These are not the brave nor manipulative women of Macbeth or Romeo and Juliet who have a hand in determining the fates of themselves and of others. They function largely as objects.

In a stirring production of Hamlet at the Folger Shakespeare Library, so much careful attention was granted to these two women and their repeated objectification and destruction as collateral, that I saw, for the first time ever, a feminist glimmer within the brilliant play. (To be fair, it was also the first time I saw Hamlet performed live.)

The scene of Ophelia's madness was gripping and revolting all at once, as she sings incongruous bits of song and weaves flowers together. In this production, great weight is given to the forces of men around her, to which she routinely acquiesces. Her brother, Laertes, has a heart-to-heart before he departs for study abroad, and his acting here emphasized the absurdity of a brother giving graphically sexual advice (against sex, of course). Keep not "your chaste treasure open," he warns. He even pronounced "country" as "cunt-ry," a reminder that so much honor is invested in the virginal condition of a woman's genitalia that she must guard her body. "Safety lies in fear," he advises, telling Ophelia to fear men who claim affection.

Ophelia's father, Polonius, gives similar, albeit less sexually vivid advice. He tells her that she is not good enough for Prince Hamlet, and then advices here to no longer "give words or talk with the Lord Hamlet." ("I shall obey," she says--and her refusal to accept Hamlet's letters grates on his already emotionally strained anxiety.)

In this production, Hamlet's madness isn't questionable for a moment as real. It's part of a connivance to revenge Claudius. But as Gertrude, Claudius, and Polonius debate Hamlet's descent into presumed insanity, they are quick to blame Ophelia for unrequited love resulting in Hamlet's sorrow, when in fact, she is just following her father's orders--against her own judgment.

It is not until Polonius dies that Ophelia goes mad, but the confrontations between she and Hamlet are gut-wrenchingly sad. Hamlet, due to his stature (and his gender) is permitted to condescend, while she obsequiously calls him "my lord" and pretends not to love him.

Although the play stayed true to the original 400-year-old script, Ophelia's horrible position of being subjected to a double standard as victim--both forbidden to express her love for Hamlet, and then blamed for causing his madness as a result--served as a prominent character element of this production, bringing deserved attention to the absurdity of treating women as disposable and symbolic. Indeed, in Hamlet Gertrude and Ophelia are stand-ins symbols for whatever is convenient: family honor, loss of male control, uncontrolled sexual desire, guardians, or trophies. But to take not in a self-aware sense, with details like the "cunt-ry" pronunciation, director Joseph Haj gave due attention to gender, bringing it to the troubling center of the play. -Sara Rubin

Sara Rubin is an editor at The Lady Finger.

Are quotas for women a good idea for business?

2010-06-01T21:14:00.002-06:00

Does the US need a quota requirement for the number of women executives in businesses? The financial crisis, as many are coming to realize (including Timothy Geithner himself), was mostly the handiwork of men. The CEOs of all the financial firms that brought the economy down were men. The top regulators who missed the bubble’s signs—Alan Greenspan, Ben Bernanke, etc.—were men. A majority of the traders themselves, at every level of crafting the mortgage-backed securities, were men. And it appears women are the ones now stepping in to clean up the mess. Time Magazine just ran a cover story on the “New Sheriffs of Wall Street”: Elizabeth Warren, a vocal supporter of a consumer protection agency and chair of the Congressional Oversight Panel investigating the TARP program, Sheila Bair, the chair of the FDIC, who was one of the first regulators to raise concerns about a deflating bubble, and Mary Shapiro, chair of the SEC, who cast the deciding vote to go after Goldman Sachs.

It isn’t shocking that the US has dismal numbers to report on the female percentage of executives and board members. Only three percent of Fortune 500 companies have a woman as CEO and about 15% of those companies’ board members are women. Meanwhile, Norway has enacted a law requiring that 40% of all company board members be women. There, more than 25% of board seats at the 65 largest privately held companies are occupied by women. The percentage of female directors overall is above 40%. Back in 2002, when the law was enacted, women held less than seven percent of private-sector board seats.

These two facts taken together must point to a strong argument for quotas—more women will serve in high-level positions, and the world will be better of for it. Everyone wins. Except that the story is more complicated than that.

The issue skirts the question of whether or not the premise itself, that men were in charge of the financial meltdown, is sexist. Dana Goldstein and Ann Friedman, two editors at The American Prospect, tackle this question in their “Ask a feminist” video series. They conclude that while it is sexist to say that men caused the financial crisis, it is not sexist to say that the “hyper-masculine culture of Wall Street” was a factor.

But they make a passing remark that raises something even more troubling. They point to Erin Callan and Zoe Cruz , two high-ranking executives at Lehman Brothers and Morgan Stanley, respectively, as women who “saw their careers end because they were not skeptical enough of the mortgage crisis.” In other words, exceptions—women who were involved in the financial crisis alongside men. But in reality, both of these women are widely assumed to have served as scapegoats for their (male) bosses as the market began to recede--they were pushed off the “glass cliff.” Their firings only serve to enhance the sense that Wall Street is a good old boy’s club and a male-dominated realm. If hiring women can be used as an easy cover, why would a quota system change that motive for promoting them?

The story in Norway is similar to Callan and Cruz’s. The women who were named to boards to fill the quota were overall younger and more inexperienced. The pool from which to pick was less robust than the pool of men—likely because of the long-standing practice of excluding women from the roles that precede the promotions. Theoretically, over time this would change. But in the meantime, it may pose a hurdle for these women. “When you suddenly replace 30 percent to 40 percent of your board with inexperienced people, it is easier for those new members to be manipulated—that’s just common sense,” said Ruilf Rustad, a professional investor who has been chairman of at least 20 listed companies over the past 10 years.

And while all of this is going on, the number of female executives has not risen along with the number of women in boardrooms. A recent study also found that gender quotas for women in government don’t result in more women being politically engaged. While researchers expected that more women representatives would lead to greater involvement, not much has changed. This, at least for now, discounts the idea that a rising tide lifts all ships. The domino effect may not happen automatically.

Women are also often the first to speak up against wrong doing because they are outsiders. Time Magazine’s “Persons of the Year” in 2002 were three women (in a similar pose on the cover as the New Sheriffs): Cynthia Cooper of Worldcom, Colleen Rowley of the FBI, and Sherron Watkins of Enron. Three women who spoke up; three women on the outside looking in at the wrongdoings. It is likely that women are risk-adverse also because they are outsiders: if it took more for you to get your job than your male counterpart, you are less inclined to risk losing it. They often play by the rules because their jobs are more tenuous. But if more women become executives, or insiders, do these effects remain?

In a New York Times op-ed, French Minister of Economic Affairs, Industry and Employment Christine Lagarde joined in to point out that women were not at the helm of the financial crisis. Perhaps they should be, she says; after all, “When women are called to action in times of turbulence, it is often on account of their composure, sense of responsibility and great pragmatism in delicate situations.” But the picture Lagarde paints here smacks of women that are fresh from finishing school. Is it because women are more “composed” that they would have done a better job? She attributes her own personal success to stronger characteristics: discipline, the meaning of hard work, willpower. But many men have these traits as well. Just what it is about women that would have made us better able to avoid the financial crisis? Answering that question leads us dangerously close to boiling women down to essential traits.

Quotas also make feminism what Ariel Levy at The New Yorker calls a “politics of identity,” instead of a “politics of liberation.” The game changes from promoting certain values–and along with them, women who espouse them into higher office–to simply putting more women in more positions of power, no matter what values they hold. “You could have, for example…Sarah Palin.” Levy admits, as do I, that it matters that there are more women in powerful roles than there were in prior years. But to be preoccupied with a game of getting “a bigger slice of the resources” doesn’t serve a larger feminist agenda. Women become interchangeable.

There is something to be said for the fact that having more women in high positions probably means that they will both make their colleagues more comfortable with the idea and create an easier path for women who come after them. Diversity is important, if nothing else for the sake of bringing diverse ideas to the table. And it is highly likely that the more women in a firm, over more time, the less they will experience the glass cliff. Would a strict quota bring them in too quickly? It’s possible. And it’s also possible that too many women will then be promoted for the wrong reasons. And either way, it is hard to avoid characterizing all women in certain essential ways when arguing that they are necessary for business. Saying that having women in charge means better performance begs the question, why? And that question has yet to be answered.

Levy has a different solution: federal assurance that all women have access to affordable childcare. Rather than require companies to hire a certain number of women, give them an affordable place to leave their kids. This way the choice between a career and having a family disappears. And if you don’t have to interrupt your career path for bearing children, perhaps you can advance at the same pace, and in the same positions, as men. -Bryce Covert

Bryce Covert is a journalist and blogger who writes on feminism, politics and the energy industry. She has a B.A. in literature from Brown University and you can find her at www.brycecovert.com and www.twitter.com/brycecovert .

The complicated victory of an Arab Miss USA

2010-05-27T18:11:00.001-06:00

What an honor. When Lebanese-American Rima Fakih, 24, was crowned Miss USA last Sunday night, she became far more than the first Arab-American to win the title. Amid cheers from many Muslim and Arab-Americans, the conservative blogosphere exploded with rage and disdain, dubbing her win a "terrorist conspiracy" and fabricating a link between Fakih and Hezbollah, making her the first beauty pageant target of the U.S.'s geopolitical war in the Middle East.

The attack on Fakih crouches behind the usual critiques of pageants—does a beauty-pageant victory represent any real progress for any group? —and the reputations of their contestants, including their scantily-clad pasts (detailed in pole-dancing photographs drudged up by the blogosphere and the mainstream media). Let's ignore the latter critique, an example of our culture's double-standard demand (and yearning) for women to act naughty while constantly monitoring women's beauty and their sexual history. In this case, Fakih's newfound fame thrust photos of her younger self into the media spotlight and subsequent condemnation, though they're likely no different than the photos millions of women keep boxed up under the bed, safe from being tarred as "slutty" by the public. Let's also skip the debate on beauty pageants and just consider them a popular (or not), antiquated (or not), accepted way of applauding the objectification of a very narrow definition of beauty and women's bodies.

The root of the attack on Fakih however lies not in conservative outrage over female objectification, but from a growing fear in the West of the Muslim and Arab worlds. The post-9/11 fear-mongering War on Terror, combined with our historic xenophobia, dominant Christian makeup, and the invasion and current occupation of two Muslim countries only encourages more anti-Arab sentiment. In other words, it's no coincidence that some are outraged over a Miss USA who proudly identifies with the region we're trying so hard to dominate geopolitically for resources and wealth. Yet, as one blogger rightly observes, trying to undermine the pageant with claims it was rigged by terrorists, or met an affirmative action quota, actually comes at the detriment of a patriotic image by "marginalizing the culturally superior elements of American society — bravery, fairness, open-mindedness, tolerance, and devotion to liberty and equality." Some see a Lebanese winner as a win for the enemy. Could we imagine a Vietnamese-American "Miss America" during the Vietnam War?

Another thread weaves through this narrative: the reduction of women, and their bodies, to a weapon of war. Sparring nations have historically used their opponents' women as a moral justification to charge into war ("We must save Aghan women!"), an action that by most accounts further harms them. Nations also use women to enrage and shame their opponents, raping or abusing women and girls often in front of husbands and sons, and sometimes kidnapping them as spoils of war. Muslim women in particular have served as an extremely powerful tool in the West's fight for control of the Middle East and against Islam. Just this week, France approved a ban on headscarves. (A political priority these days is, of course, controlling what women choose to wear on their face.) The virulent response to Fakih's win demonstrates the capacity to project hate and intolerance onto one individual—in this case, an already objectified woman who makes an easy target—a representation of the U.S.' losing cultural and geopolitical battles. -Jean Stevens

Jean Stevens is a freelance journalist, blogger, promoter, event planner and novice photographer whose work focuses on issues relating to gender, race, class, sexual identity, food culture, U.S. foreign policy, and feminism. You can learn more about Jean at www.jeanmstevens.com .

No, Sarah Palin is not a feminist

2010-05-26T21:34:00.002-06:00

Even before Sarah Palin identified with feminism last week, there was skirmishing regarding what her prominent political and celebrity role meant for feminism. Self-proclaimed "dissident feminist" Camille Paglia and feminist icon Gloria Steinem knocked heads back in September of 2008, when Palin was new to the national scene.

Paglia was two years ahead of Palin in claiming feminism (she noted that "Palin represented an explosion of a brand new style of muscular American feminism"), but that doesn't make Palin's pronouncement that she is part of a "new conservative feminist movement" any less disarming. Some commentators were quick to applaud Palin's gutsy use of the controversial f-word. In the LA Times, Meghan Daum says that if Palin "has the guts to call herself a feminist, then she's entitled to be accepted as one." But to claim feminism for oneself without also aligning with its pro-woman, anti-oppression principles isn't gutsy; it's a politically smart way to appropriate a loaded term and perhaps draw some related constituents.

Because feminism is inclusive of dissent and disagreement and is characterized by a consistent meta-narrative of self-criticism, it has evolved to include anti-oppression platforms against racism, ageism, and classism, to name a few. Daum misinterprets feminism's breadth to mean that anybody who identifies as a feminist should be warmly welcomed into the movement. But the policies Palin supports have consistently been exclusive and anti-woman. As Gloria Steinem wrote, "She opposes just about every issue that women support by a majority or plurality." Palin has been celebrated as the "most pro-life platform in the history of the GOP" for supporting highly restrictive women's reproductive rights. She favored charging money for rape kits back in her Wasilla days. Camille Paglia argues that "feminism, which should be about equal rights and equal opportunity, should not be a closed club requiring an ideological litmus test for membership." I agree, it shouldn't be--but a basic alignment with improving the lives of women and their access to basic resources is essential.

Letting Sarah Palin claim feminism for herself and her ultraconservative platform actually undermines feminism, reducing Palin to her gender. While feminists want to see public offices distributed more equitably according to gender, Gloria Steinem articulated the problem with making a better gender ratio the only goal: "Feminism has never been about getting a job for one woman. It's about making life more fair for women everywhere. It's not about a piece of the existing pie; there are too many of us for that. It's about baking a new pie." Palin is trying to have her pie and eat it too, to take credit for the glorious iconoclasm of feminism without actually supporting any of its principles.

The claim that a new conservative feminist movement is emerging is to strip the word of its meaning. As Rebecca Traister warned in a dead-on post on Salon, this type of Sarah Palin-branded feminism "could not only subvert but erase the meaning of what real progress for women means, what real gender bias consists of, what real discrimination looks like." Tea Party feminism is not feminism, and in fact it is a threat to the ambitions and successes of feminism. -Sara Rubin

Sara Rubin is an editor at The Lady Finger.

Why are women running as Republicans?

2010-05-25T19:15:00.000-06:00

Dredging up the old "Is the GOP pro-women, or feminist?" debate of the "You betcha!" 2008 presidential race comes news that more Republican women than ever are vying for congressional seats, motivated by their faith that the GOP truly represents their interests and their anger toward the administration's current policies.

So far this year, 107 Republican women have filed for House and Senate elections, according to the National Republican Congressional Committee. It's a big boost from the previous high of 91 in 1994, although they still trail behind Democrats, making up less than half of the 270 total women who've filed. (Far more women overall have filed for House seats than for Senate, at 239 and 31 respectively, according to data from the Rutgers Center for American Women and Politics.)

The increase stems from rising anger among Republican women "about health care, their jobs, how to pay for their children's education," said Jan Larimer, Republican National Committee Co-Chairman. She told the Washington Post they "are giving the GOP a second look and realizing that our policies, principles and vision make sense and work for their families."

Perhaps these women need to take a hard, third look. It's tricky, often problematic territory telling a woman that her set of beliefs is indeed not feminist or pro-woman, as she believes. Except, of course, when they decidedly are not. The GOP is not pro-woman (nor is the Democratic Party in many instances, but that's another post). Republican policies continue to undermine the low and middle classes, hamper health care reform for the benefit of all, make family life more difficult and strip away at equal rights. In many states, including New Jersey, Republicans have supported policies that scrap public programs that provide after-school and day care, and have advocated cutting teacher and other education jobs that benefit women, especially mothers. Several states have recently enacted Republican-led legislation that chips away women's reproductive rights, especially those of low-income women who are more likely to seek or need help receiving contraception or abortions. Meanwhile, the U.S. continues to prioritize war over education, health care and other human needs--it spent about half its budget on war; since 2001, about $1 trillion has been spent in Afghanistan and Iraq--which fails to make the U.S. any safer and puts American soldiers at risk (women soldiers are especially at risk; reported military sexual assaults of men assaulting women rose 11 percent last year). Most Republicans ardently oppose same-sex marriage and gay rights, which at their hearts lie issues of freedom of gender expression and identity. The list goes on. Of course, Democratic policies are far from perfect, though they're certainly closer to pro-woman which may explain why more women continue to file as Democrats.

But regardless of policies, it's the process and requirements of running for federal office themselves that remain rather unfriendly to women. Relatively few women overall enter the race--numbers have increased only slightly since 1992, when 222 women filed to run for the House and 29 for Senate contests. Women in politics face the same roadblocks to promotion as women in other professional realms do. They also face additional roadblocks, such as the long hours required of the job (without much attention to child care). It takes an enormous amount of privilege, financial or otherwise, to overcome these roadblocks to campaign and serve. Without greater representation of progressive women --sorry, Palin--we're far from policy change to truly reflect women's interests. -Jean Stevens

Jean Stevens is a freelance journalist, blogger, promoter, event planner and novice photographer whose work focuses on issues relating to gender, race, class, sexual identity, food culture, U.S. foreign policy, and feminism. You can learn more about Jean at www.jeanmstevens.com.

Weighing in on Elena Kagan

2010-05-16T11:26:00.001-06:00

I'm thrilled that President Obama is two for two when it comes to appointing women Supreme Court justices, and that both Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan appear to be excellent, intellectually capable picks for the post. Kagan's confirmation would bring the Court's gender ratio to 6:3, a record for women.

Through all of the inane controversy about Kagan's sexuality, answers have finally emerged. Politico got some long-time friends of Kagan's to tell the public that she's straight earlier this week. Ruth Marcus followed up with an insightful op-ed in the Washington Post, pointing out that we still haven't finished dealing with insatiable public curiosity and expectations regarding gender roles and norms: "It is more complicated than simple sexism...that we assume an unmarried woman in her 40s or 50s 'must be' a lesbian." It would be easier, Marcus argues, if Kagan were a lesbian--it would explain away her singleness, her short hairstyle, her professional drive (and seeming lack of a motherly, family-oriented one). Heterosexual women who don't behave in the ways social expectation demands that they do throw their own wrench into the world according to strict gender and sexuality silos.

The entire conversation about whether Kagan's sexual orientation was relevant has been an interesting one. Most sensible arguments have been in favor of letting it go undiscussed, but Andrew Sullivan made a compelling case for publicly asking her about her sexuality. Although in principle I agree that public officials consent to making their private lives public, I differ with Sullivan because Kagan is not an elected official running for office. The appointee vs. publicly elected role makes a difference in opening one's sexual preferences to public scrutiny.

Double X's Emily Yoffe sees the Kagan "outing" as an archaic remnant of the old days in which men wouldn't date women who were more professionally accomplished than themselves. I don't think it's quite a relic yet, especially at this public a level (although Sarah Palin has successfully capitalized on her and Todd's middle-class ordinariness). -Sara Rubin

Sara Rubin is an editor at The Lady Finger.

Win for Wal-Mart women

2010-05-11T15:48:00.000-06:00

Women employees of Wal-Mart will soon be represented under a class action lawsuit against the behemoth corporation under the charge that it pays women employees less and promotes fewer women than men, a San Francisco court recently ruled.

In a close 6-5 decision, the 9th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals found the experiences of the six plaintiffs who originally filed the suit in 2001 to represent the experiences of all Wal-Mart women employees. While the financial repercussions for Wal-Mart may be huge--to the tune of billions in damages--it could be a symbolic victory for women workers nationwide, who still earn far less than men for the same work and receive fewer promotions based on similar performance. Reuters quoted Paul Secunda, an associate professor of law at Marquette University Law School: "It's a huge win for the plaintiffs, and a tremendous loss for Wal-Mart."

It seems particularly timely given last month's Equal Pay Day. Created by the National Committee on Pay Equity in 1996, April 20th's Equal Pay Day is meant to highlight wage inequality. Anyone paying attention learned, or was reminded, that women earn 77 cents to every man's dollar, while Latina women earn 58 cents and black women 70 cents. The wage gap, of course, has its defenders. Some say that women choose to work in industries that traditionally pay less because they are more flexible. And others believe that since women choose to leave the workforce to have children or take care of aging parents then they are rightly passed by for raises. But these "choices" are not true choices. Women who need flexible schedules can't work in high-paid industries that refuse this flexibility (where family is a four-letter word). And many women can't rely on a partner or a sibling to care for their children or parents.

But back to Wal-Mart. The plaintiffs argue that they were doing equal work for unequal pay. If women workers were not receiving similar pay and promotions for equal work, it is certainly Wal-Mart's passive-aggressive "oversight" at fault. Wal-Mart should be openly offering men and women workers the same promotions, same worker benefits for leave and flex-time, creating a climate of equal opportunity so men and women truly have a choice, allowing families to decide for themselves who will earn what, when, and how much. If Wal-Mart could do it--even by force--that'd be an enormously encouraging precedent for corporations nationwide, a book for working class men and women. -Jean Stevens

Jean Stevens is a freelance journalist, blogger, promoter, event planner, and novice photographer whose work focuses on issues relating to gender, race, class, sexual identity, food culture, U.S. foreign policy and feminism. You can learn more about Jean at www.jeanmstevens.com.

Sexual violence escalates in post-earthquake Haiti

2010-05-06T09:26:00.002-06:00

Trigger Warning: this post includes a description of sexual assault.

We're all familiar with the human and environmental tolls that immediately follow natural disasters. But there's one aftereffect of hurricanes and earthquakes that often goes overlooked: rape. In Haiti, the aftershocks of the January 12th earthquake continue in Internally Displaced Person camps as men rape women. According to a story in Women's eNews, aid workers in the Champ-de-Mars camp in Port-au-Prince - home to 50,000 internal refugees - field reports of rape on a daily basis. And United Nations workers say that sexual violence has increased in recent months.

There is no concrete data on the number of rapes that have occurred since the earthquake. Haiti's formal tracking system, created by the United Nations Development Fund for Women, was destroyed with the quake. But the uptick in rapes is a typical phenomenon in the wake of a natural disaster.

After Hurricane Katrina, in 2005, aid workers cited an increase in the number of rapes. Exact statistics, however, are difficult to come by because police officers refused to document rapes that happened outside of their jurisdictions. This meant that women raped in New Orleans and then evacuated to Houston could not report their assaults with Houston police. While aid workers scrambled to piece together a picture of post-Katrina sexual assault, one high-profile rape brought national attention to the epidemic. Charmaine Neville, daughter of musician Charles Neville of the Neville Brothers, recounted her rape on Baton Rouge television, saying that she and several other women were assaulted after they sought refuge on the roof of a school.

"I found some police officers. I told them that a lot of us women had been raped down there by guys who had come (into)... the neighborhood where we were, that were helping us to save people. But other men, and they came and they started raping women and... and they started killing them," Neville said. "And I don't know who these people were. I'm not going to tell you I know who they were because I don't. But what I want people to understand is that if we had not been left down there like the animals that they were treating us like, all of those things wouldn't have happened."

According to the New York City Alliance on Sexual Assault, rape following natural disasters can be explained by a number of reasons - some of them preventable. First there's the fact that societal support mechanisms - social norms that stigmatize rape and crime, for instance - dissolve during crises. Then there's the fact that psychological strain and deep-seated sexist attitudes lead some men to see unaccompanied women in refugee and IDP camps as public sexual property. But other causes may be more easily prevented. Refugee camps are often hastily constructed out of necessity. That means that large groups of unrelated people sleep in the same rooms, creating opportunities for sexual assault. Additionally, the lack of police officers in refugee camps means that crimes go unpunished.

In Haiti, the United Nations is addressing the rise in sexual violence by sending a unit of 130 female Bangladeshi soldiers to protect Haitian women and serve as their allies. While similar deployments have been successful in post-war Liberia, Haiti's anti-rape workers remain skeptical that this will stem the tide of sexual assault. "What we need is security," Marie Eramithe Delva, a co-coordinator at a Haitian grassroots female empowerment organization, told Women's eNews. "Right now we have none and the rapes are happening not only at night, but in the daytime." -Naomi Zeveloff

Naomi Zeveloff is an editor at The Lady Finger. This post originally appeared in EcoSalon, where she writes a weekly column about environmentalism and feminism.

State restrictions on abortion

2010-05-04T21:04:00.001-06:00

This week marked an important pro-choice victory in Georgia, where an eye-catching ad campaign equating high abortion rates among black women with a eugenics plot garnered national attention just a few months ago. The ads alone would have been an insidious threat to the pro-choice movement in Georgia, but it boosted the public profile of proposed legislation that would have banned sex-selective and race-selective abortions, and created a hostile, litigious environment for abortion providers.

The bill died, thanks largely to the efforts of SisterSong, a reproductive justice organization. But they conclude their celebratory press release with the warning that "this may be coming to your state next."

And it probably will. Banning race-selective abortion is appealing on the simplistic logical grounds that discrimination is bad. That women should not be able to choose an abortion because the father's race is perceived as undesirable is just the right type of argument to appeal to the gray area of "pro-choice but anti-abortion." (For a pro-abortion analysis, see this RH Reality Check column.) I can still recall a high school social studies classroom debate in which our teacher cornered pro-choice kids with tough scenarios--Is it ok to abort because it's the "wrong" sex? Because she will be disabled? Because you don't like the eye color? Trying to address these questions through legislation that limits access to abortions only serves to take away rights, not to grant more. (Nor would it actually solve racism or sexism or ableism as its supporters contend.)

Similar non-discrimination bills are up for discussion in a few other states, though have not passed anywhere, yet. Oklahoma, which passed the nation's most restrictive anti-abortion law last week, was the first state to push for a non-discrimination law. Notably, the law passed but was later struck down on procedural, rather than substantive, grounds. But a legislative climate that is oriented around shaming women with "why?" questions upon seeking abortions still thrives on the state level, and SisterSong's fearful warning is likely an accurate forecast. -Sara Rubin

Sara Rubin is an editor at The Lady Finger.

Are skinny jeans the new short skirt?

2010-05-03T15:28:00.001-06:00

A man was acquitted of rape charges because the jury found that "there had to be 'collaboration' to remove the woman's tight size 6 skinny jeans." According to the New York Daily News, "The 'skinny jeans defense' has become more common in rape trials all over the world.

This perversion of the "she was asking for it with that short skirt" trope into one that suggests certain clothing is violence-resistant and cannot be removed without force is as demeaning as the presumption that certain clothing offers an invitation to violence. Although there is a shift from seeing clothing as provocative to clothing as protective from a legal standpoint, this only reflects changing fashion, not a change in a cultural tolerance of rape and willingness to view women as complicit in sex crimes. The unsettling truth is that for some women, there is a need for wearable rape deterrence and for that, there is a female condom with blades on the interior designed to cut a penis. Skinny jeans are not the same thing.

At least one jury, in a rape trial in Italy, found the "skinny jeans defense" to be erroneous: "'Jeans cannot be compared to any type of chastity belt,'" they found. The jury was right, and even more broadly addresses the problem of conflating clothing with sexual choices. Women's (and men's) clothing, even if it's intended to make them look sexy or feel sexy, or if it's easy or hard to remove, does nothing to change a person's rights to basic physical safety. -Sara Rubin

Sara Rubin is an editor at The Lady Finger.

Top 10 ways to talk about abortion without saying the word

2010-04-28T16:48:00.002-06:00

Abortion is a toughie. Sure, it can be a difficult decision for some women. But the real headache with abortion is how to talk about it. The most politically contested medical procedure of all time, abortion is shrouded by coded language. If you're for legal abortion, you're actually pro-choice. And if you're anti, somehow you're still a pro. Pro-life, that is. It's as if one side says the word and its hand is forever tipped. Oh. Abortion? That's what you meant?!

Luckily, pop culture has long used euphemisms to talk about abortion, so we have no shortage of substitutions. In today's top 10 list, we look to books and movies to tell us the best ways to talk about the procedure without having to say the a-word.

10. "And is he taking care of all eventualities?"

In J.M. Coetzee's 1999 novel "Disgrace," Professor David Lurie asks his daughter Lucy if a doctor gave her an abortion after she was raped. Lucy didn't go through with it, deciding to bear the child instead.

9. "It's your day!"

In the movie Greenberg, which came out this year, grouchy Roger Greenberg accompanies his on-again, off-again fling Florence Marr to the hospital to abort another man's child. Greenberg tries to cheer her with the above statement.

8. "Was that what my money paid for?"

In 1987's Dirty Dancing, Frances "Baby" Houseman secures money from her unwitting father to pay for an abortion for Penny Johnson, a dancer at the Catskill resort who is impregnated by a womanizing waiter. In this scene, Houseman's father questions her about it.

7. "Something unholy and evil."

In the Godfather II, which came out in 1974, Kay Corleone tells her husband and crime boss Michael Corleone that she did a bad thing--abort his son--because she didn't want to bring a male heir into the mob life. Kay and Michael get divorced.

6. "It was a hard decision."

In the 2000 movie High Fidelity, Rob Gordon reflects on his ex girlfriend Laura's decision to terminate her pregnancy without his input after she found out that Rob cheated on her. This, he says, contributed to their break-up.

5. "There was the human body, which was so clearly designed to want babies--and then there was the human mind, which was so confused about the matter. Sometimes the mind didn't want babies, but sometimes the mind was so perverse that it made other people have babies they knew they didn't want."

In the 1985 John Irving novel "The Cider House Rules," Dr. Wilbur Larch, an abortion doctor who owns an orphanage, thinks about the relationship between his two careers.

4. "...if you wanted to do something absolutely honest, something true, it always turned out to be a thing that had to be done alone."

In Richard Yates' 1961 novel, "Revolutionary Road," April Wheeler thinks about the abortion she is about to perform on herself after her marriage deteriorates. Soon after, April dies of complications.

3. "Take care of it! It's not a real thing yet. It's only two months old. It doesn't have any memories. It's just a bunch of cells."

In the 2007 movie Knocked Up, Jonah tells his buddy Ben Stone that he should convince Allison Scott to get an abortion after he impregnated her during a one-night stand. Instead, Allison keeps the baby.

2. "I was thinking I'd just nip it in the bud before it gets worse."

'Cause they were talking about in health class how pregnancy can often lead to an infant." In the 2007 film Juno, 16-year-old Juno MacGuff is impregnated by Paulie Bleeker. At first, Juno tells Bleeker that she's going to get an abortion. Later, she decides to carry to term.

1. "It's just to let the air in."

In Ernest Hemingway's 1927 short story "Hills Like White Elephants," an American in Spain tries to convince his young paramour Jig to end her pregnancy by reassuring her that it's a quick and simple procedure. -Naomi Zeveloff

Naomi Zeveloff is an editor at The Lady Finger. This post originally appeared in Heartless Doll, where she writes a weekly column called The Lady Politic.

Honduran feminist musician performs in NYC tonight

2010-04-27T09:53:00.002-06:00

It is my pleasure to introduce Karla Lara to you, feminist and artist in resistance direct from Honduras. Karla Lara broke into the music scene in 1986 as a singer in the popular group Rascaniguas and later with the famous Salvadoran group Cutumay Camones that accompanied the political struggle during that country’s brutal civil war. She returned to Honduras to join bands intending to harness music as a form of rebellion, where she was a founding member of Doble-Via and Trovason.

Karla is part of an extensive and diverse movement of young Honduran musicians that believes in the need to create Honduran music with its own history, own rhythm, and pride of being part of a new generation that builds dignity in the country.

In December 2004, she presented her first album, Donde Andar, which brings together many of the issues that she has supported and sung about for years. In December 2008 she recorded her second album, Antes del Puente, "an album that will help to build identity, to allow ourselves to feel, through stories, clichés and characters of our country, a sense of belonging, which we believe makes the difference in how you design your participation in the construction of a different kind of citizenship."

She is currently part of the first Central American feminist band, CantArte Vida, that has given concerts in Guatemala and Honduras.

She will be performing in New York City tonight, Tuesday the 27th of April at 8 p.m. at Fonda Boricua at 172 E 106 St. -Tamar Sharabi

Tamar Sharabi is an environmental engineer who became an independent journalist while caught up in the coup d'etat in Honduras in June 2009. She is working on a media empowerment project that you can read about at www.documentinghope.wordpress.com.

Femininjas wreck property and image of feminists

2010-04-26T20:04:00.001-06:00

A group of women in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, dressed in all black and shouting “take back the night,” recently vandalized their neighborhood by smashing car windows, overturning garbage cans, and breaking the window of a small tea shop. They then sent out a press release purporting to explain their actions entitled “WE’LL SHOW YOU CRAZY BITCHES: TAKE BACK THE NIGHT.”

“Tired of tamely shouting slogans,” the group stands against capitalism and the oppression of women, which they see as interconnected. I see a lot of merit in the fight to reclaim “a right to the streets,” working for “advertisements that do not objectify women,” and ending rape. Their anger is justified as women continue to be objectified, harassed, raped, and intimidated. All of these are important issues that women should continue to address vigorously.

But this group is “refus[ing] the violence that continues to force us to be housewives and fuck-toys and mothers and daddy’s girls” without specifying how and what violence has turned us all into passive objects while stealing any meaningful alternatives. The group conflates capitalism and the oppression of women without explaining exactly why they feel that these two forces are the same and should be fought in tandem. If we lived in a world of socialism or anarchy, would women be free from “the structural mechanisms that create rapists?” They don’t go into details. The press release claims a woman stopped the group and asked why they do this. The response: “Because we have grown tired of rape and makeup.” It is amazing that they can jump from rape to makeup in the same sentence, implying that the two are equal and related evils, with a straight (albeit masked) face.

The group also claims that “in recent years Take Back the Night has been co-opted by liberal feminists” but doesn’t explain how this well-established and well-respected program is failing. The first organized Take Back the Night event was a candlelight procession over 30 years ago at The International Tribunal on Crimes against Women. This global movement with international recognition has since worked to eliminate sexual violence in all forms and create a safe place for women to speak out about their experiences. A candlelight vigil made entirely of women walking through the dark streets makes a clear and powerful statement. These "ninjas" have left everyone scratching their heads.

The danger of this group is two-fold. Firstly, they present a very real physical threat to the people who live in their neighborhood, including fellow women. By “claiming” their own violence, they create a more threatening environment. If I were afraid of walking alone on the streets before, I would be even more afraid now with a confirmed threat from fellow women dressed in black skirts. (And on the subject of their outfits, aren’t skirts a symbol of women’s roles as sexy objects? Don’t black masks smack of veiling and suppression?)

They also feed directly into the “feminazi” image created by Rush Limbaugh and beloved by all who are afraid of feminists. Rush now has a handy example to use any time he wants to show his audience that women, armed with knowledge and a thirst for rights, will fuck your shit up without sense. It’s not to say that women need to be nonconfrontational to be taken seriously, but they should have a clear mission and an explanation as to how these actions will further it. The press release never details the hoped for result of all of this violence. The headline exclaims, “We’ll show you crazy bitches,” and it seems likely that “crazy bitches” is all anyone will think of them and what they stand for.

In Gothamist’s piece on the event, the headline reads “Williamsburg ‘Ninjas’ Seem... Confused.” They have certainly left me confused. What do they hope to achieve? How do they expect their dangerous and illegal actions to change anything? Why are they smashing the windows of a small business while purporting to “destroy the commercial mechanisms that objectify women?” Until they have clear answers for us to all of these questions, they pose a threat to their neighbors and to the image of serious-minded feminists everywhere.
-Bryce Covert

Bryce Covert is a journalist and blogger who writes on feminism, politics and the energy industry. She has a B.A. in literature from Brown University and you can find her at www.brycecovert.com and www.twitter.com/brycecovert.

Can feminists and Democrats still be friends?

2010-04-23T19:15:00.001-06:00

Feminists have some reckoning to do with Democrats now that the health care bill is signed into law. It was a huge win for the party, but whether it was a similar victory for women is not as clear. On the one hand, the bill offers many positive changes for women all over the country. On the other hand, we watched as abortion became a major sticking point and eventually a bargaining chip for the passage of the bill itself. Now we have to decide how to relate to the Democratic Party moving forward.

The National Women’s Law Center gives us three reasons to celebrate the bill: maternity care will be covered by basic insurance, gender rating--when women are charged higher premiums than men--will be eliminated, and 4.5 million new women will be eligible for Medicaid. (The Guttmacher Institute did an even more in-depth look at the bill’s impact on women here.) But RaceWire looked at a map and noted that while more women will be able to enroll in Medicaid, abortion will only be covered by it in 17 states. And restrictive abortion language was left in the bill, which requires those who receive federal subsidies to buy coverage in the new state-run insurance exchanges to separate their premiums into a check for abortion services and a check for everything else. (This is widely expected to deter insurance companies from covering abortion at all in order to avoid the complications.) President Obama also signed an executive order at the last minute to reinstate the Hyde Amendment, a legislative provision that bars federal funds from paying for abortions, for another year as a compromise with the anti-choice House contingency (mostly Bart Stupak).

The full spectrum of women’s reactions in the wake of the bill was made clear in statements from leading women’s rights groups: from celebration to complete rejection. Planned Parenthood threw its support behind the bill and spent five paragraphs on the positives. NARAL Pro-choice America could not endorse the bill because of the “egregious abortion-coverage restrictions” still included, while recognizing that it will give more women insurance coverage. NOW stood firmly against the bill, citing a “tragic setback” for women’s rights while spending no time on the positive effects.

So where do feminists and Democrats stand?

I am as frustrated as any other feminist when I watch abortion rights slowly erode state by state, only to now be tamped down at the federal level. It can feel like the Democratic Party has turned against us when they vote for a bill that makes access to a legal procedure (and right) more complicated. If no one stands up for these rights they will continue to deteriorate. The anti-choice movement is being heard loud and clear and the pro-choice movement has to shout over them. We deserve to be heard.

One option we can choose is to forswear all loyalty to the Democratic Party and vow to seek revenge for its capitulation. But by splintering off from the party we risk losing our voice within it. Holding our representatives accountable to our values is essential; fighting for new congressmen who better represent our views is absolutely necessary; but breaking with the party risks an even more diminished voice on Capitol Hill. Whether or not you agree with our two-party system, the only other party in power is the Republican Party—a party we certainly can’t turn to.

I also watch the Republican Party go on a witch hunt for RINOs (Republicans In Name Only) and “fake” conservatives (as a recent example, the firing of David Frum from right-wing think tank the Heritage Foundation for saying the GOP should have cooperated more on health care) and know that I don’t want to be like them. The Democrat’s Big Tent is frustrating, because it welcomes men like Bart Stupak and Ben Nelson, who are strict conservatives on the issue of abortion. But trying to define a movement in rigid terms is leading to the fracture of the GOP. All or nothing can leave you with nothing. That means a smaller party and a smaller base of power. It’s no coincidence that Democrats hold two majorities in congress after opening their arms to a broad range of views.

There is also a lot to lose in being a single issue voter. Political “purity,” as Katha Pollitt at The Nation points out, is one of the most frustrating aspects of the anti-choice movement, which views restricting abortion through a myopic lens. She reminds us, “One thing you can’t call [prochoice leaders] is selfishly obsessed with their own political purity. That would be the antichoicers … who were willing to let millions suffer and 45,000 people die every year unless they got to deprive women of their reproductive rights.” While it is important to protect a woman’s right to choose and access an abortion, zeroing in solely on that issue neglects all of the other important things that women need to fight for.

This isn’t to say that we should tone down our fight for feminist voices in Washington. For me, and I think for many women like me, the health care debate was a serious wake-up call about the dire situation of women’s rights in this country. While the pro-choice movement was willing to be reasonable and keep the fight over abortion separate, the anti-choice movement ignored that call—and were strong enough to muscle congress around. Pollitt, in the same piece, calls for some “payback” in the form of pro-woman and pro-choice legislation in return for our willingness to set the issue aside for the greater cause of passing a comprehensive bill. The fight for what women deserve continues.

We also need to remind the country of our pro-choice majority, not just in the population, but within the Democratic Party itself. As Stupak pursued a last-ditch attempt to insert more restrictive abortion language into the bill before the House voted on the version, Rep. Diana DeGette of Colorado, co-chairwoman of the Pro-Choice Caucus, stormed into Pelosi’s office to let her know that such a deal would mean losing "somewhere between 40 and 55" pro-choice votes. That number dwarfs Stupak’s supposed 11 anti-choice pols that he threatened would join him in voting "no." We need to build the power of our numbers, get coordinated, and keep fighting for the issues that affect us as women.

The health care bill, as Obama himself has said, is not perfect, but merely a step in the right direction. The positive changes for women as a result of this bill are very important, even as we lost the abortion fight. Now we need to take it and expand upon it. Now is not the time to disassociate ourselves from the party. Now is just the time to become even more involved and entwined with Democrats so that our voices are not just listened to, but actually taken into serious consideration in decision making. The Democrats have a lot of power, and it’s our job to make sure they use it to promote equality for the women of this country. -Bryce Covert

Bryce Covert is a journalist and blogger who writes on feminism, politics and the energy industry. She has a B.A. in literature from Brown University and you can find her at www.brycecovert.com and www.twitter.com/brycecovert.

Introducing menstural cycle tracking--for men

2010-04-23T15:30:00.003-06:00

A new iPad and iPhone app will track your lover's monthly cycle. Coder serves as a warning system for men, a technological tool that could help them navigate women's bodies. But instead of serving as a creative navigator, it serves as a sexist, body-negative means to enforce negative presumptions about menstruation.

The app will provide alerts at different times of month. To wit:

Smooth Sailing Alert --- Let’s [sic] you know when she’s feeling like a team player.
Horny Alert --- Let’s you know when you’re able to score.
PMS Alert --- Let’s you know when to hit the (cold) shower.
Ovulation Alert --- Let’s you know when to sit on the sidelines (unless you’re ready to start a junior league).
Code Red Alert --- Let’s you know that it’s game time and you’re way out of bounds.

Starting with its intent to aid men in "surviving" their "girlfriend’s/fiancé’s/wife’s" periods, the app diminishes menstruation as universally negative, and assumes that there are certain times to run and hide from a woman. (It's her hormones that are to blame, of course, never your objectionable behavior.)

Even more distressing is its assumption that women are only horny some of the time, when dictated by their estrogen and progesterone ratio. The app can now inform a concerned lover about when he's "able to score;" no need for an old-fashioned conversation about who's feeling turned on when. The app suggests that there's no need to ask a woman what she feels or what she wants, since it's all tracked right there on your phone. If she's "not in the mood" at the wrong time of month, maybe you should keep pushing for sex, because this little gadget provides the crystal ball into her desire that you've long been waiting for.

The Washington Post mused, "At a deep cultural level, one might speculate that the proliferation of these apps all ties into some deep fear of womanhood -- an attempt by men to make sense of what they do not understand. One might offer the possibility that men would chart the life cycle of a fruit fly if they could do it on an iPad, that this is really all about gadgetry. One might also say this is gross." One might also say, none of the above. Although if it's really about charting life cycles, providing men the same type of app to track fruit flies and their wives's periods isn't offensive in its clinical nature, but in that it's a dreadfully albeit appropriately domineering analogy.

If the app were designed with understanding in mind and really trying to make sense of the female reproductive system, it might have started by being marketed to women. The simple truth, as any woman knows, is that monthly cycles aren't identical, so the app certainly can't be used as a reliable contraceptive. It also won't tell anybody what a woman's mood toward her partner will be on any given day.

Learning about mystery-steeped menstruation is a good thing, but only when it happens respectfully, openly, and honestly. I recently started tracking my monthly cycles using charts from the book Taking Charge of Your Fertility by Toni Weschler (reviewed by regular contributor Adrienne here), and it's been incredibly empowering in my relationship with my body. The book contains information that makes everything less mysterious, and I think that all girls and boys should read it when they learn about the scary world of puberty. The process involves recording daily basal temperatures and monitoring cervical fluid which, yes, requires touching "down there." It helps explain all of the clear and white and yellowish fluid that women are familiar with, but like me, probably ignored for years. Cervical fluid, often derisively called "discharge," is the female counterpart to seminal fluid. It's no more "gross," and it also provides an incredibly accurate look into menstrual cycles and a relatively safe method of birth control.

Using Code Red doesn't require any contact with bodily fluids; it doesn't account for changes in projected ovulation days based on sleeplessness, stress, or illness. It doesn't remind women when to conduct self breast-exams to potentially save their lives. It doesn't help women control their bodies; it helps men believe they can control women's bodies without even talking to them. -Sara Rubin

Sara Rubin is an editor at The Lady Finger.

Obama melts Clinton's ice cube heart

2010-04-22T19:21:00.000-06:00

Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. The level of media scrutiny surrounding Clinton's relationship with the current president rivals press speculation of yore about her marriage to a certain unchaste Commander in Chief. And who wouldn't wonder about Lady Clinton's association with the most powerful man on earth, considering that she's the ball buster who nearly toppled his presidential run?

Speculate no more. According to the New York Times, Clinton's legendary coldness toward Obama in the post-primary Ice Age is beginning to thaw. And here's why: Clinton told Obama that her daughter Chelsea is getting married!!! And, get this: Obama asked Clinton if Chelsea would like to have her wedding at the WHITE HOUSE!!! What better way to appeal to Clinton's soft, feminine side--hidden away as it is by scaly layers of hard professionalism--than to give up his stately home for the most important day in her daughter's life?

"It was kind of sweet that he would offer that," said New York Times reporter Helene Cooper in a Times online video about Clinton's relationship with Obama. "It may be too much to say 'warmth' at this point, but there is a little bit more of a sense of camaraderie."

According to the video, here's more evidence that Clinton and Obama are on the fast track to fellowship:

-They once sat at a picnic table together. Without their aids.
-When Obama realized that you can't negotiate with Iran, Clinton wasn't like, "I told you so."
-Obama once joked that Clinton hugged him after she was exposed to swine flu in Mexico. Funny! 'Cause Clinton's arms don't work that way.
-They both said "yes" to halting Jewish settlements in Israel.
-They party crashed the climate summit in Copenhagen together.

But wait. Let's not forget whom we're talking about, here. This is Hillary Clinton after all, a woman for whom camaraderie feels like an itchy sweater. "At times she's pressed her views forcefully behind the scenes," said the Ben Werschkul, the video's narrator. Like that one time she wanted to save two female journalists imprisoned in North Korea and the only way to do it was to send Bill over to chat and Obama was like, "No," but then later relented? Yeah, like that time.

So maybe these two "frenemies," as Cooper called them, haven't quite built up that "reservoir of trust" that presidents and their secretaries of state are known to cultivate. It's more like small lake at this point. But when the rainwater comes, you better watch out. Those two will dive right in, hand in hand. Unless, of course, Clinton freezes it up again with that icy touch. -Naomi Zeveloff

Naomi Zeveloff is an editor at The Lady Finger. This post originally appeared in Heartless Doll, where she writes a weekly column called The Lady Politic.

Earth Day update: going childfree for the environment

2010-04-22T08:53:00.000-06:00

If green parenting web sites, organic applesauce, and reusable diapers are any indication, eco mommies are on the rise. But so are women who say that even baby feet leave a major carbon footprint. And they’re opting not to have children as a result.

Last year, Oregon State University released a study showing that going childless is a better way help the environment than recycling, driving an energy-efficient car, or using compact fluorescent bulbs. It’s 20 times more effective, in fact. Raising a kiddo in the United States can tack an extra 9,441 metric tons of carbon dioxide to a person’s carbon legacy. By having a single child, one individual’s environmental impact will increase almost six-fold.

While some women cite the environment as their primary reason not to have children, others say it’s an added benefit to the childfree lifestyle. These women are part of the GINK movement (that’s Green Inclinations, No Kids) as coined by Lisa Hymas in an article for Grist last week. GINKs opt not to procreate for many reasons – not enough time, money, or desire, to name a few – and they see their decision as a boon to the environment.

“Here’s a simple truth,” said Hymas. “For an average person like me – someone who doesn’t have the ability of an Al Gore to reach millions, or of a Nancy Pelosi to advance (if not actually enact) landmark environmental legislation, or of a Van Jones to inspire (and piss off) whole new audiences – the single most meaningful contribution I can make to a cleaner, greener world is to not have children.”

In a 2007 article I wrote for the Colorado Springs Independent, Peter Wenker, a member of a social club for childfree couples called No Kidding, cited similar feelings. “If you are not the kind of person who wants to [parent], it’s not going to be fair, given the fact that the planet doesn’t need your kids. It’s important to make sure that if you do have kids, that it will be good for you and the planet.”

Whatever the rationale, GINKs are not alone in opting not to have children. According to U.S. census data, in 1980 just 36.7 percent of women between the ages of 18 to 44 were childless. Thirty years later, we’re up to 45 percent for a similar age bracket (15 to 44).

Going childfree isn’t for everyone, of course – most people don’t do it. What are your thoughts? -Naomi Zeveloff

Naomi Zeveloff is an editor at The Lady Finger. This post originally appeared in EcoSalon, where she writes a weekly column about environmentalism and feminism.

Earth Day update: Congress gets tough on infertility-causing chemicals

2010-04-22T08:45:00.000-06:00

Five years ago, a group of women's health advocates met with scientists in California to discuss creeping infertility rates among men and women. Between 1995 and 2002, the number of couples having problems conceiving had grown from 6.1 million to 7.3 million. That meant that one out of every eight heterosexual couples was infertile, according to Center for Disease Control data.

Women's health advocates and scientists had long known that environmental contaminants like cigarette smoke and mercury were major culprits when it came to diminished fertility. But what brought the two groups together for the first time was alarming evidence that commonplace material, such as plastics, could damage the reproductive system.

Sounds like old news, right? We've all fretted over bisphenol-a, a chemical found in plastic bottles that caused hormonal changes in animals in lab tests, and we all kvelled when in 2008 Nalgene opted to stop using the plastic in its camping wares. But while our attention has shifted to the next environmental catastrophe du jour, those pesky chemicals haven't gone anywhere.

Last week, lawmakers in both houses of Congress introduced the Safe Chemicals Act, a bill meant to up the ante when it comes to chemical testing in the United States. If made into law, the bill will fortify the Toxic Substances Control Act of 1976, a weak attempt at federal regulation. As RH Reality Check contributor Jennifer Rogers notes, the "TSCA was already outdated before it was signed into law. Many dangerous chemicals were 'grandfathered in' under the new law and remain in use today. Many new chemicals remain unregulated because the legislation was limited in scope."

According to EHS Today, a trade publication for environment, health, and safety workers, the TSCA's greatest weakness is its inability to stop dangerous chemicals from entering the market. "Under current policy, the [Environmental Protection Agency] can call for safety testing only after evidence surfaces demonstrating a chemical is dangerous. As a result, EPA has been able to require testing for just 200 of the more than 80,000 chemicals currently registered in the United States and has been able to ban only five dangerous substances."

The new bill would require manufacturers to provide information to the EPA about chemicals currently in circulation as well as those headed for the market. And while some environmental groups want even stricter regulations, women's health groups say the bill is a small, yet serious step, toward curbing infertility due to pollutants. We'll drink (out of a glass bottle) to that. -Naomi Zeveloff

Naomi Zeveloff is an editor at The Lady Finger. This post originally appeared in EcoSalon, where she writes a weekly column about environmentalism and feminism.

Cut up about cutting carbs

2010-04-21T21:37:00.002-06:00

Finally, some news about how women should adjust their diets! A recent Italian study has found that certain carbohydrate foods, like white bread, white rice, corn, pizza, and potatoes, increase women's risk of heart disease, but not men's. The mainstream media has gulped it up, churning out stories on how women should cut those bad carbs and instead gobble things like sweet potatoes and barley. This story is super annoying and problematic. It's just another story (like this one) that instructs women on how to eat (since we obviously have no idea) to best stay thin--er, healthy. And, per usual, this "study" is conveniently paired with quotes from diet "experts" and their latest books. But this kind of story is even more problematic when one considers its assumptions about women's food access, equality, and choice. These assumptions (and privilege) feel especially fraught considering the economic downturn and the powers of the larger food industry.

The reality is that only a certain class of American women could truly consider cutting white bread, rice, pizza, and potatoes. For many Americans, options are limited--fresh produce is impossible to find in many urban and rural areas, let alone whole-grain quinoa. According to Michelle Obama's "Let's Move" program, more than 23 million Americans live one mile or more from a grocery store. In these largely low-income urban and rural neighborhoods, dubbed "food deserts," fast food corporations swoop in to stock convenience stores full of--you guessed it--white breads and high-glycemic carbs.

Of course, an increasing number of Americans, especially single moms, simply have less money to spend on food, and will buy whatever they can afford. (Guess which foods tend to be cheapest, thanks to government subsidies?) About 49.1 million people in the United States are hungry and "food insecure." Of those, about 37 percent live in households headed by a single woman, 26 percent live in black households and 27 percent in Hispanic households. The "food insecure" look for help, which explains why the number of Americans participating each month in the USDA's federal food assistance programs, which includes the food stamps program and the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, recently soared to 33.7 million, the highest point ever. Combing grocery aisles for pricier whole grains and paying with food stamps, while doable, might not sound so realistic when every cent counts and when survival, not long-term health, is the immediate goal. The rise in the "food insecure" also explains why 99 percent of 176 food pantries nationwide reported a major increase in demand, according to a Feeding America study. Food pantries' stock is typically made up of bulk, not-so-fresh donations from food corporations and the everyday public. So it's not as though customers have their pick of a bounty of whole grains and fresh veggies.

That said, let's not assume that healthful eating dovetails with financial security for every woman. For most women, making the switch from junk(ier) food to shopping for and preparing nutritious food requires serious soul-searching, giving up on a lifetime of habits and preferences, and perhaps most importantly, time, which is a scarce commodity in a busy schedule of child care, cleaning, car care, bathing, and other daily tasks (maybe we should just take a break from shopping?). Of course, many people don't make the switch. The point is that every woman, regardless of economic status, should have a panoply of food options available to her and the agency to understand and decide how best to feed her body.

If and when more women emerge from poverty, if and when more grocery stores in rural or impoverished areas sell good carbs and produce, if the government subsidizes "good" crops and prices go down, if fast-food restaurants ditch white bread, and if women of all classes feel empowered, willing, and able to make the switch to so-called good carbs, then studies and their recommendations like the one described above might not seem so ridiculous and unfair. -Jean Stevens

Jean Stevens is a freelance journalist, blogger, promoter, event planner and novice photographer whose work focuses on issues relating to gender, race, class, sexual identity, food culture, U.S. foreign policy and feminism. You can learn more about Jean at www.jeanmstevens.com.

Our careers in journalism

2010-04-19T07:06:00.001-06:00

Professional women have come a long way, and Newsweek's recent story on the history of institutional sexism at the magazine has done a lot to bring attention to persistent sexism in the media. From The Pitch last week, an excerpt from a 1965 how-to journalism book was featured on a blog that disseminates "the finest in forgotten and bewildering crap culled from basements, thrift stores, estate sales and flea markets."

The author's guidance to young women (toward whom he is very encouraging):

"Let's assume the Indian ambassador to the United States and his wife visit your city. Someone from your paper will interview him on such weighty matters as East-West relations, India's neutrality policy, and so forth. But, as a reporter from the women's section, you will talk to Mrs. Ambassador about the problems and pleasures of being a diplomat's wife, her role in Washington, her views about American women, etc."

What's most unsettling is that this 1965 wisdom was quite progressive. A 2002 report on women and journalism found that "by the 1950’s and 1960’s, a few pioneering women’s page editors reflected women’s concerns about education, the economy, and the environment, but many feature sections still read as though women’s principal preoccupation was how to remove ink stains from a shirt."

Where we've come today is undoubtedly an improvement, but not far enough. For fear that women reporters end up simply covering officials's wives for the style section, there's an entire web site devoted to tracking news coverage of Michelle Obama pointing out exactly this same type of 45-year-old reporting. -Sara Rubin

Sara Rubin is an editor at The Lady Finger.

Agonizing over abayas: the complexity of veiling in the United Arab Emirates

2010-04-13T19:01:00.001-06:00

I’m standing on the street corner with my friends, trying to hail a taxi. The white-and-green car approaches, and the driver sees us. We think he is going to stop; we adjust our bags and get ready to jump in quickly, because there is no real place for him to pull over. But he speeds past us. Sand blows in our faces. We look at each other. “Why’d he do that?” someone asks.

“There was someone in there,” says my friend with excellent eyesight. The rest of us know what she means, and why we couldn’t see the passenger. There was a woman in the back seat. She was covered in a black hijab and abaya. In the car, she was all but invisible: a shadow.

The veiling of women is one of the most contested aspects of Islamic culture in the West. Before I came to the United Arab Emirates, I had vaguely mixed feelings about it but generally felt that it wasn’t my place to judge. Five years ago, as a tourist in Vienna, I was interviewed on the street by a local news station. France was considering passing a law banning the headscarf, and I was asked for my thoughts. I surprised the Viennese journalist by proceeding to ramble passionately about freedom of religion. It didn’t matter what I thought of veiling, I said. If a woman chose to cover herself in order to express her religious beliefs, the government had no business prohibiting her.

Now that I live in the Middle East, my conviction in Vienna looks like naiveté. I have not given up my old view, exactly, and I still do believe in the importance of religious freedom. But on the issue of women in Islam, particularly when it comes to veiling, my inner conflict increases with each passing day.

I live in a conservative city called Sharjah, near Dubai but heavily influenced by Saudi Arabia. In Sharjah, I know Muslim women who cover every inch of their bodies and others that wear Western clothes. The style of veil varies considerably from country to country, but in the United Arab Emirates and other Gulf countries, the style favors black nylon abayas, which are loose robes. The hijab (or headscarf) is usually black. Over the last 10 years, full covering has gained popularity in the Gulf region, which used to favor Western dress. As a result, abayas have become a fashion statement, and now women don form-fitting Gucci and Chanel abayas and accessorize with stiletto heels, heavy makeup, and jeweled manicures.

Many women cover their faces fully, or show only their eyes. This is similar to the burqa style, made famous in Afghanistan, but here the material is chiffon or polyester, instead of wool. That may sound like an improvement--it’s lighter--but considering that the average temperature in the summer is around 120 degrees, being draped head-to-toe in a shroud of black polyester hardly seems pleasant. Another popular facial covering is a mask that looks like metal but is actually made of stiff leather painted gold. The masks cover the eyebrows, nose, and mouth, and jut forward like a beak.

The current practice of covering is, in reality, a relatively new phenomenon in the Arab world. The Qu’ran tells men and women to “maintain their modesty,” which has been interpreted in various ways over the centuries. After being out of fashion for a long time, headcovering regained popularity in Iran during the 1970s uprising, when it became a way for women to assert their pride in Islam.

Before I came to the region, I expected the issue of veiling to be somewhat complicated, and for women to have myriad reasons for covering themselves. I was unprepared, however, for the cynical attitude of many people here regarding the practice. I have talked to men and women, Muslim and non, from Western countries, Arab countries, Pakistan, India, the Philippines, and dozens of other places about it. Some, to be sure, profess that it is an important part of their spirituality. But the many believe that, in the UAE at least, the abaya is mostly about fashion, possessive husbands, or showing off one’s own righteousness. I have several devout Muslim friends, and when I ask them about Emirati women with their faces fully covered or sporting leather masks, they roll their eyes. “They’re bragging about what good Muslims they are,” a Pakistani friend told me when I first arrived. “Or their husbands get jealous and make them wear it. It means nothing; faith is on the inside.”

My experience with veiling is all anecdotal, and it is difficult to find information that isn’t. As with any matter of faith and faith-based rules and interpretations, all analyses are subjective. The motives for veiling are so complicated that it is hard for me, as a feminist, to know what to think of it. To me, the wealth and fashion-driven aspect of veiling, coupled with the instances of husbands forcing their wives to cover up, makes the practice much more problematic than it would be if it universally reflected spirituality.

Sometimes I attempt to analyze the topic as objectively as possible. At these times, I always come back to the issue that a faceless, black figure hardly looks human. And at that point, I lose all objectivity and my pop-culture fed imagination runs wild. At best, women here look like shadows, flitting in and out of taxis and gleaming sky rises. At the worst, especially when I’m tired or it’s dark out, they look like gliding black ghosts.

To my eyes, the mask is even more problematic. The first time I saw a woman wearing one was in a Dubai shopping mall, and my brain did not know how to process the image. In a split second, a million thoughts passed through my brain: an extraterrestrial, a freakish bird, some sort of bizarre knight from a Renaissance Faire, a robot. It took a long, unsettling moment for me to realize I was looking at a woman.

When these situations arise (which is every day), I try to remind myself that I am seeing through the eyes of a young, educated, white American feminist. Other Muslims see covered women on the street and know how to process the image far better than I. But I don’t know how they could avoid seeing them as shadows sometimes, when, dressed all in black, they often near invisibility.

The concept of religious head-covering and dress is not new or limited to Islam. From Buddhist robes to Mormon undergarments, all major religions have a dress that is designed to maintain modesty and keep the body sacred. In my religious tradition, Orthodox Jewish women wear long skirts and cover their hair with wigs or scarves. But the fact that this style of Muslim dress literally hides the woman is problematic. Isn’t there a way for Islamic women to maintain modesty without being separated from the rest of the world in a shroud of black fabric? I fully acknowledge that in the West, some women manipulate their bodies to such a degree that they look extremely unnatural. One could argue that some Muslim women are hidden under a veil, and some Western women are, metaphorically, hidden under silicone implants, uncomfortable and degrading clothing, and painful high heels. At our worst, we look like grotesque, plastic dolls. At their worst, these women look alternately like shadowy ghosts, or grotesque, plastic dolls dressed up like shadowy ghosts. In both cases, the real woman is made invisible. -Jessie Szalay

Jessie Szalay currently teaches at an international school in Sharjah, United Arab Emirates. She writes about her observations and experiences at www.inthehotshadeofislam.wordpress.com.

Using Afghan women to justify war

2010-04-12T13:32:00.001-06:00

The CIA has found a new rallying cry to convince Europeans to join the Afghan war: save Afghan women.

A leaked confidential CIA document reveals a NATO public relations effort to garner support among French and German societies for the Afghan war by suggesting French and German governments should push the story of Afghan women, and Afghan women as media spokeswomen, to spread the world about the horror of living under the Taliban and why the war cannot end with a Taliban "victory." This news comes on the heels of the Dutch government's collapse last month after it decided to withdraw from the war.

According to the CIA document leaked on the WikiLeaks web site, increasingly anti-war French and Germans should be told that Afghan women are "ideal messengers in humanising the [international coalition] role" and "speak personally and credibly about their experiences under the Taliban, their aspirations for the future, and their fears of a Taliban victory." The French, of whom nearly half believe all troops should withdraw from Afghanistan, could be further inflamed by what the memo describes the "rolling back (of) hard-won progress on girls' education" which would "give voters a reason to support a good and necessary cause despite casualties." The Germans, who have opposed offensive war since World II, might lend support for another reason: Germany could fall prey to terrorism if the war fails.

The document ultimately serves as another example of how women serve as tools of war, in this case, PR tools. In war-time conditions, according to much well-documented research, women suffer as the victims of not only physical abuse but also sexual abuse. They often become the primary providers for their families and they are the caregivers for injured children. They're victimized by enemies, wielded as shields, and rendered helpless as a means to justify further defense. This final tactic has been fully utilized by the United States' pro-war faction since 2001, when the idea of rescuing women from the Taliban became the ultimate justification for invading Afghanistan. Many Americans still believe, in a rather colonialist or racist way, the war is necessary to save Afghan women even though our continued warfare hurts women--we've improved conditions for women very little, if at all, since 2001. Afghan women tend to oppose the war for these reasons. Just earlier this month, U.S. troops announced plans to train female soldiers to mingle with Afghan women to win them over to the war.

This CIA tactic is a new twist. Why would the CIA view women "messengers" as so appealing to French and Germans? The answer lies in a whole slew of patriarchal ideas about women. Who wants to argue with a helpless woman? Whose heart wouldn't melt a little at a televised plea from an Afghan mother and call for someone to defend her? Women--especially women in Afghanistan--are soft, weak, and helpless. But even if the CIA believes this, its actions are indefensible. It is using women to garner support for a cause that will not save these women but ultimately work against their interests. -Jean Stevens

Jean Stevens is a freelance journalist, blogger, promoter, event planner and novice photographer whose work focuses on issues relating to gender, race, class, sexual identity, food culture, U.S. foreign policy and feminism. You learn more about Jean at www.jeanmstevens.com.

A pro-choice woman by any other name

2010-04-09T09:26:00.000-06:00

The pro-choice and pro-life movements got a lot of media attention in the recent battle over health care reform. Hold on. I should have said the “pro-abortion rights” and “anti-abortion” movements. On the surface, the difference between these terms doesn’t seem that huge, and few notice that media outlets have lately changed their policies. But as a recent NPR story discovers, most news organizations have switched from calling them the "pro-choice" and "pro-life" movements to "pro-abortion" or "pro-abortion rights" and "anti-abortion" or "anti-abortion rights" movements. News organizations are using these new terms, they say, because they offer more neutral language to talk about each view. This way, they don’t pick sides.

But language is never neutral, and it most certainly doesn’t stand a chance of being neutral when it comes to abortion. Calling pro-choice women and men “pro-abortion” is insulting, as if what we want is more abortions in the world. The reality is quite the contrary: the one point on which the two sides can agree is that they would both like to see fewer abortions (even if one side prefers the distribution of condoms and scientifically accurate sex education, while the other believes that telling teenagers not to have sex is an effective tactic). But it is also wrong to call us “pro-abortion rights.” This code puts the spotlight on the word "abortion," where it used to be on "choice"—a woman’s private choice about her own body. It changes the focus from her rights as a living woman to the rights of the fetus inside of her. "Anti-abortion" may be less punchy than "pro-life," but it successfully shifts our attention. The focus of the entire issue has moved away from the rights of living, breathing women to those of the unborn.

Ceding linguistic control to the pro-life movement is a symptom of the pro-choice movement's greater losses. "Pro-life" and "pro-choice" were never neutral terms, but at least each side had its choice—no pun intended—in what it would be called in the mainstream media. Now our side isn’t afforded that option, and changing these one or two words has huge ramifications. Sarah Kliff, on Newsweek’s The Gaggle blog, adds to the NPR story, pointing out that a procedure that used to be called "dilation and extraction” was re-named “partial-birth abortion” by the National Right to Life Committee. Sticking the word "abortion" right into the middle of the procedure’s name led to 31 bans in five years and two Supreme Court cases. The language change also likely spurred the murder of the late Dr. Tiller.

So the problem is figuring out what we should call ourselves. Lynn Harris points out that the word “choice” is not quite right here either. “‘Choice’ is what you get between ‘baked’ or ‘mashed.’… ‘Choice’ sounds like we want women to have more options. It doesn't acknowledge that many women still have none from which to choose. ‘Choice,’ honestly, sounds selfish.” Harris wants to take back the word “life,” because “how dare we let them” take that powerful word? But the unfortunate reality is that the anti-choice movement has taken the word, and there is little chance of taking it back. It’s unrealistic to hope that media organizations would agree to grant us usage.

So what are we? Pro-abortion rights? Pro-reproductive rights? Pro-life? Without being able to use the words choice, abortion, or life, what are we left with? It’s time to figure it out, and to give ourselves a good name. The media isn’t going to do it for us. -Bryce Covert

Bryce Covert is a journalist and blogger who writes on feminism, politics, and the energy industry. She has a B.A. in literature from Brown University and you can find her at www.brycecovert.com and www.twitter.com/brycecovert.

Bristol Palin's offensive new ads

2010-04-08T14:58:00.003-06:00

Urging teens to "pause [until marriage, presumably] before you play," Bristol Palin appeared in a new ad funded by The Candie's Foundation in which she tells viewers, "What if I didn't come from a famous family? Believe me, it wouldn't be pretty."

Advocating for safe sex for teens, and sex for teens only who feel ready to consent comfortably, is something I overwhelmingly support. But using classist scare tactics is offensive and retrograde. As Gawker incisively notes, "The message of the spot is basically, 'If Sarah Palin is not your mother, don't have a baby as a teen...' She shows us that she is lucky to have such a great family and so many opportunities to raise her baby, but no one else has them."

The grating use of the word "pretty" is also bothersome. The ad suggests that rich, influential families produce pretty, well-dressed, well-groomed teenage moms, while poor families produce teenage moms in mere jeans and unbrushed ponytails. The moms who aren't pretty shouldn't be moms, Palin's nugget of wisdom goes, though most parents of any age who are caring for an infant are plenty likely to look harried. It's as if she's saying, don't have sex, because you won't be pretty anymore!, unless, of course, you have a husband for whom to make your looks sparkle. I'm all for giving teens the facts about the full picture of teenage pregnancy including drop-out rates and the costs of child rearing, but scaring them into losing their well styled hair and makeup is a decidedly non-feminist (though not necessarily untrue) road to take.

And, the ad:

-Sara Rubin

Sara Rubin is an editor at The Lady Finger.

Cookie monster: NYC's Department of Education bans homemade treats

2010-04-07T18:51:00.000-06:00

So much for the joy of baking. Parents--mostly mothers--are rallying back against the New York City Department of Education's decision not only to ban homemade baked good sales but to limit sales only to packaged, corporate snacks including Doritos, Baked Lay's, Pop Tarts and Nutri-Grain bars. Earlier this month nearly 100 people, mostly women and children, rallied with a "bake-in" in front of City Hall to protest the decision, which the DOE claims will fight obesity. Watching the protesters and reading their objections, it's clear this sugar and spice battle is one of women against corporate control of their kitchens, their parenting, their children's diets and entrepreneurship--in short, it's everything but nice.

Parents--especially mothers, who make up about 90 percent of members of all Parent-Teacher Associations (which was originally called the National Congress of Mothers)--argue their all-natural homemade baked goods are healthier than packaged snacks. But the DOE claims kids can only make smart choices about packaged food because nutrition information appears on the packages.

Really? It sounds more like parents--typically mothers--will have less control of what their children eat and their children's culinary literacy. Many NYC parents understand this completely. In articles and on message boards, they say this policy will not work against childhood obesity but will encourage kids to buy packaged snacks as that's the only choice they'll have. Not only that, their children won't have the same chance to learn the joy (and many benefits) of baking and selling their wares for their own profit. At the NYC protest, some held posters that read "Food From Our Kitchens Not a Factory" and "Our Schools Are Not Supermarkets."

The DOE decision is exactly what food corporations want to hear. Snack companies have for decades worked tirelessly to sell and market their goods in schools, guaranteeing them young customers, brand loyalty and life-time buyers, not to mention increased profit. A 2007 Arizona State University study concluded schools are now a "total environment of marketing," with corporations spending billions each year on products targeted at children and seeking help from consultants to reach younger consumers. These corporations have been burned by President Obama and state leaders nationwide who have banned or plan to ban packaged snacks from school vending machines.

But while many leaders are standing up to corporations, states are still cowing to snack companies dressed up as anti-obesity heroes. California mandated in 2005 that snacks sold during the day would not contain more than 35 percent of calories from fat, 35 percent sugar by weight, and no more than 175 calories at elementary schools or 250 calories at middle and high schools. In Somerville, Massachusetts, a city outside Boston, officials toasted a ban on bake sales, saying it led to healthier students.

It's a shame that in an era when the call for culinary literacy is reaching a fever pitch, moms will lose the opportunity to teach their children to bake through creating items for bake sales. This is an important tradition in many homes. It teaches math and reading skills and encourages familial bonding. Now, kids in schools will avail themselves of prepackaged options, without understanding why or how they benefit their health. -Jean Stevens

Jean Stevens is a freelance journalist, blogger, promoter, event planner, and novice photographer whose work focuses on issues relating to gender, race, class, sexual identity, food culture, U.S. foreign policy and feminism. You can learn more about Jean at www.jeanmstevens.com.

A note to readers

2010-04-06T20:58:00.002-06:00

Dear readers,

It is our pleasure to announce a new addition to The Lady Finger: surnames. When we started this blog in June 2008, we were both working full time jobs and we thought our employers and networks might take umbrage with our feminist affiliations and some politically volatile posts. (Sara was a food systems researcher in the purchasing department with Chipotle Mexican Grill in Denver and Naomi was a writer at The Colorado Independent where she covered anti-choice groups.)

We decided to go semi-anonymous, publishing our blog posts using our first names only. But nearly two years later, things have changed both in our professional lives and in the new media climate. Sara is interning at The Atlantic in Washington, DC and Naomi is working as a freelance writer in Brooklyn, New York. Both aspiring journalists in an era in which opinion-heavy blogs are practically de rigueur for professional writers, we now see our writing and editing at The Lady Finger as a boon to our burgeoning careers rather than a potential hindrance.

So we have decided to start publishing under our first and last names, effective immediately. On the right hand side of the screen in the "About Us" section, we've included a bit of biographical information about ourselves and the vision for this site. Though we initially decided to include our last names for professional reasons, we also feel that it is important as feminists in the anonymous blogosphere to make our identities visible. We both attended a conference hosted by Women, Action & the Media last week, in which one editor encouraged every participant who asked a question to introduce him or herself to the entire group. Too many women in this field and others have been anonymous for too long.

This change is also an important step forward in making our blog more transparent. As much as we like to think that we represent different opinions in our posts, the truth is that we are very similar people. We're both cisgendered white women. We're Jewish, college-educated, and we were raised by well-off families. In the past, our blog has generally represented the concerns of people like us. While openly acknowledging the limitations of our voices and experiences, we hope to be more inclusive in our own writing. And we hope that our contributors heed the same call.

Speaking of contributors, you'll notice that some of our writers have decided to use their surnames as well. For those that do, we will be including a short bio at the end of each guest post, so you can learn
a little more about our writers and their varied interests. Over the past two years, we have been proud to publish pieces by aspiring novelists, teachers, college professors, undergraduate and graduate students, publicists, professional journalists, and important young feminist thinkers. Now that we have both left Denver, our social and professional circles have changed and we have conscripted several new writers to contribute alongside our most dedicated bloggers. Some will use their last names and others won't for personal or professional reasons.

Though many of us will be using our first and last names, we will continue to allow our readers to comment anonymously to encourage spirited discussion. As always, we are constantly on the look-out for new writers. Please contact us at TheLadyFinger(AT)gmail.com. Thank you. -Naomi Zeveloff and Sara Rubin

Privileged feminism

2010-04-01T21:11:00.000-06:00

Last week, The Lady Finger commented on a recent Newsweek article that examines the past and present gender inequality at that magazine. The women who wrote the article (termed the Newsweek 3 by the blogosphere) have since started a blog of their own, The Equality Myth, to further discuss “young women, sexism, and the workplace.” I applaud their effort to continue the conversation, but it looks like they have some catching up to do if they want to be fully involved players.

For those who haven’t been following the drama, I’ll give a recap. Just after the initial article went up, Jezebel responded with a post noting that all six women in the photograph accompanying the article are white; a subsequent piece expanded on what was neglected in the original article. The Newsweek 3’s response was less than apologetic, sparking debate among bloggers concerned with the issues at hand. The fact that The Equality Myth authors had to ask this question: “How is it that we’ve got the old guard championing the piece, and the young new wave—of which we’re a part-- tries to discredit it with left-field accusations of racism?” is pretty telling.

The problem is that the “young new wave” with which the authors associate themselves is not the blog-happy cohort of feminists that acknowledges the intersectionality of systems of privilege and oppression and insists that feminist movement includes addressing the issues of people of color and all other marginalized/oppressed groups. No, The Equality Myth authors’ version of feminism is deeply rooted in their own privilege, which they demonstrate with their early blog posts and their defensive response to criticism from other feminist and womanist bloggers. I personally felt alienated after reading their early posts, not from a racial standpoint, but because of the assumptions they make about economic class and gender identity/expression. There are an awful lot of generalizations about “women my age” and “my generation” (asserting the right to, for example, “spend money on fancy shoes”), and other indications of their shortsightedness when it comes to privilege. You can claim that your writing only reflects your “personal experience” or you can generalize about all women your age, not both.

The writers at The Equality Myth had the guts to provide a short post that quotes from and links to a justifiably lengthy conversation between Thea Lim and Latoya Peterson of Racialicious, titled “Newsweek Takes on Feminism on Behalf of Young White Girls Everywhere.” The Racialicious post is fair, comprehensive, and entertaining; if you have doubts about where you stand in regards to examining your own racial privilege, or want a better understanding of discussions of race and racism in feminist circles, I urge you to read it.

Speaking as a person with white privilege (among other kinds), I understand the defensive reaction of the Newsweek 3 when their privilege was pointed out. I’ve written about this defensiveness before in regard to privileged language. It’s frustrating to make an effort for good and be told it’s not good enough. As Thea says, it’s hard to hear, “You did half the work, now do the other half. And no, I am not going to say you did a good job, until you finish the job, because otherwise I am not a good ally to your cause,” but she’s right. From experience, I can say it’s wonderful to receive praise, but it’s even better to get honest, informed, constructive criticism that helps push you and your arguments further. There is a segment of young, white, economically privileged feminists who, like some of those who came before them, would be content to criticize and work to change sexism as it harms them without acknowledging the advantages they do have in relation to others. One has that option, but it’s either ignorant or dishonest to take that path and pretend you’re doing otherwise.

The willingness of these women to publicize others’ criticism of their original article and early blog posts is a promising step in the right direction. I haven’t given up on them yet, and I’d be delighted to see evidence that they’ve grown as a result of this experience and to see their work reflect that. For the record, I do like the original article these women wrote for Newsweek. I think it's a worthwhile effort to bring feminist issues to the mainstream, and I agree with those who speculate that it could restart a conversation about sexism in the United States. Let's take that opportunity to make the conversation about more than privileged white women’s problems this time around. To achieve this, women with privilege will have to learn how to welcome criticism from those who have been alienated from the movement.

As Latoya Peterson puts is, "The only other option is just staying ignorant in a small, diminished world." -Adrienne

The women of Passover

2010-03-30T00:20:00.000-06:00

In the tradition of Passover, the Jewish holiday on which we tell the story of the exodus from Egypt which began tonight, a small exegesis on gender is in order. Unlike the story of Purim, women are less prominently placed throughout the story. Moses steals the show, but of significance is that Moses wouldn't even be around if it weren't for a series of strong-willed women.

The Egyptian regime had decreed that all Jewish baby boys would be put to death, and Moses' mother set the baby afloat in a successful effort to spare his life. Miriam, his older sister, who rescued him from a basket in the river, and Pharaoh's daughter brought unidentified baby Moses into the safety of the Egyptian court where he was raised.

Moses proceeds to receive the ten commandments from God and lead the Jewish slaves across the Red Sea to safety, liberating them from bondage. These major accomplishments are all facilitated by the behind-the-scenes action of brave women. This leadership model, in which a man leads the way and is widely recognized and praised while women quietly enable his success, is one that has persisted. I'll be thinking of these significant women along with Moses this holiday. Happy Passover. -Sara

What we're doing this weekend

2010-03-26T19:59:00.000-06:00

Lady Finger editors Sara and Naomi will be at the Women, Action, & the Media mini conference in New York this weekend. Naomi attended and blogged about the main Boston conference last year and this year she's moderating a panel on emerging media technologies. There are plenty of other interesting panels going on, from 'How to Get Articles and Books Published' to 'Jezebels, Divas and Welfare Queens: How To Decode Images of Women of Color in Reality TV and Film.' We'll be sure to share what we learn on The Lady Finger, so check back soon. -TLF

The most powerful woman in American history: summing up today's news

2010-03-25T22:21:00.002-06:00

As the dust settles from passing major, albeit flawed, health care reform, commentators have turned to considering the individual legacies that key policy makers will leave. Chief among them is House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. As Heather Horn writes on The Atlantic, "The person getting more credit than anyone else--with the exception of President Obama--is Nancy Pelosi. As many reevaluate the Speaker of the House, some feminists in particular are doing a double-take, and wondering whether perhaps their elusive political icon was right in front of them all along."

The Economist kicked off the conversation last week when a columnist said, "Mrs. Pelosi is arguably the most powerful woman in American history," and reluctantly admits that "if Mrs. Pelosi succeeds, she will take her place in the Democratic pantheon." With success just days behind us, her place in said pantheon is in development. ABC's Diane Sawyer asked Pelosi what she thought of The Economist's label, she generously responded, "I take it as a compliment for all women."

Double X called her the "Meryl Streep of American Politics,"celebrating Pelosi's apparent ability to achieve it all, noting that "Pelosi makes combining family, beauty, brains, and political brawn look easy," and her public image is a "combination of maternal instincts and raw political power." While this observation adheres to gender norms--we're not often lauding male politicians for their paternal instincts--it's inspiring to see a woman accomplish all that Pelosi (mother of five) has, in contrast to the spiteful attitude that women who pursue careers will lose out on family or personal life.

Perhaps Pelosi's political might went overlooked during Hillary Clinton's presidential run. Matthew Yglesias weighs in to say, "I think it’s fair to say she’s the most politically powerful woman in American history and it’s gone a bit oddly un-remarked-upon." Here's to noticing it, remarking upon it, and celebrating Pelosi's success as a feminist one. -TLF

McMillen wins prom case: summing up today's news

2010-03-24T21:33:00.000-06:00

Last week, we rounded up the news on Constance McMillen, a Mississippi senior whose school cancelled prom rather than let her attend with her girlfriend.

Today, according to Feministing, a federal judge sided with McMillen in ruling that the school violated her First Amendment rights. But the judge refused to force the school to reinstate prom, and McMillen has not been invited to an alternative private prom held by the students.

Shakesville notes that the "the prom cancellation is reminiscent of tactics from at least a half-century ago: rather than integrate public pools, parks, and schools, southern municipalities often closed them. Sometimes, in lieu of closure, they turned over such accommodations to private enterprises. In defiance of school integration orders, they opened private schools and segregation academies. Such acts allowed them to continue de facto segregation long after de jure segregation was outlawed."

Meanwhile, Jezebel notes that another school in the south, Bleckley County High, has said it will allow gay students to go to prom after student Derek Martin inquired about bringing his boyfriend. And Ellen DeGeneres has matched a $30,000 scholarship from Tonic.com threefold so that McMillen can continue her education. -TLF

Abortion and health care: summing up today's news

2010-03-23T20:30:00.001-06:00

President Obama signed health care reform into law today, but the ire over abortion access is percolating. In a last-minute compromise with a small group of anti-choice lawmakers, including Representative Bart Stupak, Obama promised to maintain the Hyde Amendment, which bars federal monies from going to abortion. According to the Daily Beast, "we should all understand that the bill was passed at the expense of poor women's reproductive rights."

In addition to outlawing federal dollars for abortion, "the bill tries to maintain a strict separation between taxpayer funds and private premiums that would pay for abortion coverage," the Washington Post explains. "No health plan would be required to offer coverage for the procedure. In plans that do cover abortion, beneficiaries would have to pay for it separately, and those funds would have to be kept in a separate account from taxpayer money."

But the logistics of separate abortion accounts may prove too unwieldy for insurance companies. According to Jezebel, "a spokesperson for insurance company WellPoint called the process of segregating funds 'nightmarish,' and said there would be no market for policies with abortion coverage. And a letter from nonprofit insurance company Affinity Health Plan stated that the costs of keeping the money separate would dwarf any revenue companies made from covering abortion." Which means that many companies will opt not to cover abortion at all.

Shockingly, many anti-choice groups are as disgusted by the bill as pro-choice groups since they had hoped for stronger restrictions on abortion. Disgruntlement on both sides, writes Politico, could signal a new, nasty era in the abortion debate (as if it's not nasty enough already). "Both abortion-rights and anti-abortion groups say the experience of health care reform has served as a reminder of the stark consequences of elections — and of the need to elect reliable allies who will work hard to advance and defend their agendas."

We'll let RH Reality Check have the last word: "Reproductive health should not be a political bargaining chip." -TLF

Newsweek covers sexism at Newsweek: summing up today's news

2010-03-22T22:25:00.003-06:00

In a bold, must-read story for women in the media, Newsweek writers Jessica Bennett, Jesse Ellison, and Sarah Ball call out Newsweek for its past and present sexist treatment of female employees. The story details the 1970 lawsuit that 46 women staffers filed against the company for relegating them to secretarial roles while the men got the bylines. Things have changed since then, Bennett, Ellison, and Ball write. But, have things really changed?

"In countless small ways, each of us has felt frustrated over the years, as if something was amiss. But as products of a system in which we learned that the fight for equality had been won, we didn't identify those feelings as gender-related. It seemed like a cop-out, a weakness, to suggest that the problem was anybody's fault but our own."

The writers note that in 1970, Newsweek's editorial masthead was 25 percent female. But now, women make up 39 percent.

"No one would dare say today that 'women don't write here,' as the Newsweek women were told 40 years ago. But men wrote all but six of Newsweek's 49 cover stories last year—and two of those used the headline 'The Thinking Man.'"

Mediaite's Glynnis MacNicol speculates that the Newsweek article may restart a national conversation about sexism. "I suspect if you are over the age of 30 none of this will strike you as terribly shocking. It does make me wonder however, if now that the country has adjusted to the President, passed health care, and got over the shock of the economy, whether this signifies we are ready to return the conversation that Hillary Clinton’s candidacy reignited back in the spring of 2008. Namely, wow, is sexism ever not dead."

And Salon's Tracy Clark-Flory congratulates the writers, saying "you go, women" while finally, after years of silence, telling her own story of a lecherous college newspaper editor "who would build me up and then tear me to shreds, over and over, like an emotionally abusive boyfriend...At the time, I went to my journalism professor for advice -- but omitted my close-encounters with [his] crotch-rubbing out of embarrassment -- and she told me plainly that some men take "delight in putting a young, bright, attractive woman 'in her place'" and warned: 'Take a lesson from this -- it won't be the last time.'"

How true. You can read about my experiences here. -TLF

Jihad Jane and feminism: summing up today's news

2010-03-19T22:35:00.001-06:00

After an American woman, Colleen LaRose, was identified as "Jihad Jane" for providing support to terrorists, gender and violence have again been under scrutiny. The Washington Post used plenty of physical descriptors to paint the picture of the little, petite, wouldn't-hurt-a-fly girl next door, and described the "petite, blond-haired, blue-eyed high school dropout" as somebody "who is 4 feet 11 inches tall and weighs barely more than 100 pounds."

This case "dispels the myth that all terrorists look alike," according to Think Progress. This could be a good lesson learned, but instead the case seems to have taken on a mythological dimension in caricaturing women who pursue what they want, ie, feminists. The Daily Beast asks if we should expect "a wave of Jihad Jills and Jennifers." The answer is yes, as "terrorist leaders increasingly choose women to carry out attacks because they attract less suspicion and generate massive media coverage."

As a blogger on Double X wrote, "surely the women are misfits and confused, lost souls, as you call them. But they seem to find meaning and power in a budding new movement which could rightly be called, in that twisted context, feminist." The other "confused, lost soul" of late who comes to mind is Amy Bishop, the neuroscience professor who gunned down colleagues last month. The New York Times offered an analysis of women and violent crime and wrote, "the landscape of unprovoked but premeditated female violence remains strangely unexplored." There is indeed a newfound interest in women who engage in terrorist or any violent activity, but to look at it as a twisted outgrowth of feminism is distressing. It is, indeed, only as a result of feminism that Jihad Jane was ever able to be considered to participate in terrorist plots; but Big Think parses some of the other, more nuanced concerns and says, Double X "incorrectly assumes that any woman who strives to get ahead a male-dominated organization is automatically a feminist. If feminism means anything at all, it is an ideology of women's liberation. In order to be a feminist, you have to value women's equality and women's liberation in general." To make the case that women's liberation and women's success and ambition is inevitably driving them to destructive acts of violence does a treacherous disservice to feminism, conflating isolated cases of individuals with women in general. -TLF

The fight for "zygote rights" continues: summing up today's news

2010-03-18T20:04:00.001-06:00

In Colorado, the battle for "zygote rights"--as RH Reality Check contributor Wendy Norris refers to the movement to proffer legal protection to fetuses--is raging again. The so-called personhood amendment first reared its head two years ago when 21-year-old Kristi Burton waged a ballot initiative campaign to obliterate abortion rights in the state. Voters overwhelmingly rejected the constitutional amendment. But this year has seen a second campaign to put abortion on the chopping block.

Last month, however, it seemed like the 2010 personhood campaign was a complete bust. The organizers turned in around 80,000 signatures to the Colorado Secretary of State--just 4,000 or so more than the required number. Since many, many people put fake or illegible information in ballot initiative forms, the personhood campaign was treading very thin ice in terms of guaranteeing that it had enough valid signatures to pass muster with the Secretary of State and make it onto the ballot. Norris reported at RH Reality Check that a major personhood press conference was met with flagging media interest. "Planned Parenthood and the ACLU are shaking in their boots," Gualberto Garcia Jones, a campaign organizer said to a near-empty room. "They see this army of faithful pro-life warriors coming back for round two." Meanwhile, even Republican groups spoke out against the campaign. Amanda Mountjoy, who spearheads a Republicans for choice group, said, "changing our state constitution is a serious matter that should not be manipulated by fringe special interest groups with a narrow, single-issue agenda. Our state constitution is not the place or the vehicle to mandate private health care decisions, which are often some of the most complicated choices facing families."

In spite of these initial setbacks, it now seems that personhood movement may be picking up steam again. This morning, Planned Parenthood sent out an email alerting members that the campaign had turned in tens of thousands more signatures, likely enough to put the amendment on the ballot. "These anti-choice forces needed to gather approximately 16,000 more signatures after failing to meet the required amount on February 12th and they report turning in 46,671 this afternoon," read the email. "Further, in an effort to thwart the citizen initiative process and standards, they are threatening to sue the Secretary of State. This means that is highly likely that Colorado will face another Definition of Person Amendment on the November 2010 ballot."

Scary? Yes. But according to Tyler Chafee, a campaign strategist who spoke to RH Reality Check, the Personhood movement will likely go down in flames whether it's put to voters or not. "When something goes down as hard as 'personhood' went down last time, even with the small number of voters it takes to get something on the ballot, [former supporters] really start to wonder 'why are we doing this again?,'" he said. -TLF

The first female football coach--for men, that is

2010-03-18T14:23:00.001-06:00

A Washington, D.C. high school teacher has just tackled her way through another gender roadblock. Last week Calvin Coolidge High appointed Natalie Randolph, 29, as head coach of its varsity men's football team, making her the first woman--and first woman of color--to hold such a position nationwide. This achievement, tempered though it is by recent news that the University of Connecticut women's basketball team may be disbanded amid controversy that it's "too good," indicates that women, especially women of color, are continuing to gain acceptance as leaders in even male-dominated sports and earning real cred for their talent.

Calvin Coolidge High chose Randolph, who is also a woman of color, out of 15 candidates, impressed by her work as an assistant coach at another D.C. high school and her six seasons as a receiver for the D.C. Divas of the National Women's Football Association. She helped the team earn the Association's title in 2006.

Like any shattered glass ceiling, this one has sparked a firestorm of misogyny and sexism within the blogosphere. Some have accused the school of hiring Randolph as a publicity stunt. Others have offered the "women don't play football" song and dance. Still more snark about the shame men will feel to lose to her team.

Such commentary feels disappointing, especially in a time when high school women play more sports than ever--in 2008, they made up 41 percent of high school athletes--and women athletes garner more scholarships, attention, endorsements than ever. Of course, it's not totally hunky-dory. Men receive $136 million more in scholarships annually and women athletes' bodies often remain the center of controversy and are typically hypersexualized within advertising and other media--for instance, Olympic athelete Lindsey Vonn. Some women, like those on the University of Connecticut basketball team, are accused of being too good to remain together on a team since, people claim, their games are no longer fair or fun since they typically beat every team they play. (Which says more about how much women nationwide are trained, coached and recruited and funded--imagine the outrage if the Yankees were to be disbanded and split for being too good?) Finally, in a sport like football, which often mirrors racial, gender, and class inequality seen in broader society, women are totally locked out.

Randolph's experience, and that she'll be a coach, not a player (which knocks out any equally misogynstic argument to deny her the position based on her physical ability), is more than enough to validate her appointment. And, awesomely, her appointment has sparked tons of cheer, pride and hope, especially in D.C., a city with a population that is more than 50 percent African American. Adrian Fenty, D.C.'s mayor, marked the day of her appointment "Natalie Randolph Day."

Randolph, a biology and environmental sciences teacher, told the Associated Press that "being female has nothing to do with" her appointment. "I love football. I love football, I love teaching, I love these kids. My being female has nothing to do with my support and respect for my players on the field and in the classroom." -Jean

Revisiting the eugenics campaign against choice

2010-03-18T08:53:00.000-06:00

I wrote a post for The Atlantic today about Georgia Right to Life's anti-abortion campaign that conflates high abortion rates among black women with eugenics. It's part of an insidious new threat to choice, appropriating liberal rhetoric against discrimination and applying it to abortion, and proposed legislation in Georgia and elsewhere threatens abortion providers with burdensome liabilities. -Sara

Let's play "Telephone": summing up today's news

2010-03-17T20:01:00.001-06:00

Lady Gaga's new music video, "Telephone," debuted last week and, in typical Gaga style, sparked a firestorm of controversy in the feminist blogosphere and beyond. Though the song is about a lovers' quarrel that erupts when one person can't reach the other one via cellphone at the dance club, the music video details a murky, half-developed story that's part "Chicago," part "Thelma & Louise." Your best bet is to watch the video in its entirety (see above), but here's a little synopsis: Gaga is thrown in a women's prison for an undisclosed crime (as the guards throw her in her cell and rip off her outfit, one says "I told you she didn't have a dick," and the other responds, "Too bad," a reference to the internet rumors that she is intersexed, which she also responded to by appearing on the cover of Q Magazine with a strap-on). In prison, she makes out with a woman while wearing sunglasses covered in burning cigarettes, she watches a brutal fight break out between two women, and she is eventually bailed out by Beyonce in the Pussy Wagon from "Kill Bill," whom she refers to as "Honey B." The two head to a diner where Beyonce meets up with an angry, volatile man, presumably an ex-lover. Beyonce slips him some poison, and Lady Gaga cooks up more poison and serves it to him and to the other diners as honey. Pretty much everyone in the diner dies, a dance scene ensues, and then Honey B and Gaga drive off into the sunset holding hands. The screen closes with the woman symbol.

What to make of it all? Jezebel says the video "sucks" for its blatant product placement (Polaroid, Virgin), but postulates, "obviously the video is dominated by strong women, lesbian-esque prison romps and "Thelma & Louise"-style vengeance. Does that make it pro-woman? Maybe the poisoned honey is meant to represent how people gobble up sweet things — ideologies, material possessions, media — that are no good for them."

Feministing is less intrigued, taking issue with the prison dance scenes, in which Gaga dances with a bevy of near-nude skinny women. "In the video, all the men get clothes and all the women get outfits from a porn set. Same old, same old. This is where a lot of people are going to argue 'But it's not exploitative -- it's art!' Those things aren't mutually exclusive, though. Look at art history, replete as it is with naked women and dudes posed to be stately. You can have both art and exploitation at the same time."

Bitch, on the other hand, loves it. Read the blog's real-time chat while you watch the video, with one editor saying "I think it's about doing something sexy and different and getting attention. MISSION: ACCOMPLISHED," and another responding "I do think it's about acknowledging her lesbian fans, rather than just the gay men, like Johnny Weir, who have embraced her. I think she wants to go beyond being the new Madonna."

Out comments on gender dynamics in the prison yard make out scene with a Q & A with Heather Cassils, who goes at it with Gaga while the other women look on. Though Cassils says that the camera men on the set were quick to talk up the "girl on girl action," "I said, 'What about boy-on-girl action?' And [Lady Gaga] turned to me and said 'Oh. Do you identify as male?' [Laughs] And I said, "Well, probably more than you do.' And she said 'I'll be sure to tell people that.' We just had this abstracted conversation about gender in the middle of this shoot, which I thought was really weird and pretty interesting: A) that she would take the time and B) that she would even ask me about that."

Gaga also reportedly joked with Cassils "I think you got me pregnant!" after the make out scene. Amazing. -TLF

Body hair and being human

2010-03-17T13:06:00.000-06:00

I wrote my first post for The Lady Finger a year ago, and it feels appropriate to revisit the topic and add to my analysis now that I have another year of feminist growth behind me. In that post, I explained the increasing joy I felt from no longer removing hair from my body. I felt then (and now) that this action can be a powerful blow to the gender binary. Now, inspired largely by the writing of Melissa McEwan of Shakesville, I’d like to add “celebrating my humanity” as a reason I love having hair on my body. McEwan doesn’t write specifically about body hair, as far as I’ve seen, but her recent post about conditional love, in which she says, “to expect a partner's body not to change is to deny your partner hir humanity,” got me thinking about “natural” bodies, changing bodies, and the importance of embracing one’s humanity over the unattainable image of an ageless, perfect humanoid specimen we’re told we should fit.

Allow me to wander a bit before coming back to body hair. In another Shakesville post about a Photoshopped image of actor Matthew Fox, McEwan says, “He has a wonderfully expressive face, and he's damned well earned the lines that mark it; the furrows and creases left by knitted brows and broad smiles are the legacy of being a successful actor, a husband, a father who worries and laughs. Erasing them hides the legacy of his lived life.” This is part of McEwan’s “Impossibly Beautiful” series, links to which can be found at the bottom of that post. The website of the Photoshopping studio McEwan references in post #3 (iWANEX Studio--go to “Portfolio,” then click on each thumbnail and hover over to see before and after shots) is really worth seeing. Even though the process is depressing, I find it heartening to see that, for example, Eva Longoria looks like a real adult human being in un-retouched photographs. I don’t know if I had ever seen what she actually looks like. If you haven’t seen this Faith Hill cover shot comparison, you should.

The popular beauty standards that these altered images reinforce are harmful in many ways, with the physically unhealthy aspects (extreme tactics to reach an unnaturally low weight, slathering and injecting questionable chemicals, joint damage caused by high heels) often getting more attention than the psychological harm. Corporations, whether they sell cosmetics, magazines, or surgical procedures, must keep shifting the standards so that it is not only impossible to fit them all at one time, but if a person happens to succeed in attaining just one standard, it is likely to change soon anyway. Beyond the stress caused by trying to keep up, however, these corporations seek to deny the complexity and reality of what it is to be human. In that post about conditional love, McEwan lists some examples of this reality: “Waistlines get thicker. Hair falls out. Skin loosens and wrinkles. Boobs get droopier. And get removed to save lives. Spines get damaged. Limbs get irreparably injured. Disease or injury or disability can change a life in an instant or after an unalterable journey across years.”

Despite what tabloids would have us believe, pregnancy changes bodies. In an excellent article for the Daily Beast on the recent obsession with postpartum celebrity bodies, Katie Gentile notes, “When women shed the baby weight, they are not merely getting back their pre-baby body, they are obliterating all the evidence of ever having had a baby in the first place. This means the one thing that only women’s bodies can do is expected to be immediately erased. The post-baby body is wrung of its recent life-giving feat. Sagging milk-filled breasts must appear perky; the once-swollen abdomen is made concave. It’s as if we should actually believe the baby dropped from the stork, from the sky, from anywhere but that toned, buff body.”

What does body hair have to do with all this? Well, humans are mammals, and mammals have hair. Just like gaining wrinkles as one ages and the changing bodies of women who go through pregnancy, body hair is part of what it is to be human. This is not to say that people with less body hair are less “natural” or less human (there is alopecia to consider), but rather that the presence or lack of body hair should be value-neutral. Human bodies change as we age and experience life-changing events. Humans bodies look, feel, move, and smell a certain way depending on our genes. There is an infinite range of what should be considered "normal," "natural," or potentially desirable about any particular human body. I’d contrast this with the “Real Women Have Curves” campaign, which only seeks to replace one arbitrary beauty standard with another. Beauty standards are so thorough that I struggle to come up with any examples of value-neutral physical characteristics. Left-handedness? Being able to roll one’s tongue? Eye color, maybe? If you thought the color of your genitals was safe, you were wrong.

Rather than celebrate those aspects of my body that happen to fit popular beauty standards, I choose to celebrate those that illustrate my humanity. In an increasingly artificial environment, having hair on my body makes me feel connected to evolution. For the same reason, I’m not that concerned with how I smell on a daily basis as long as it’s not so strong as to disturb people who are outside of my personal bubble (I wish people who wear artificial scents would be so considerate). I like the shape of my face because it reminds me of my father and his father. I like my unplucked eyebrows because they are unique. My acne scars add character (hey, it works for Edward James Olmos). The shape of my body is shifting as I leave my teens further behind me and I enjoy the mystery of what it will look like in 10, 20, 40 years. I’m excited about the smile lines and forehead furrows I see forming because they show that my joyful and contemplative life is leaving its mark on my face a little more each day. I could try to erase, or hide, or alter these characteristics, but that would mean robbing myself of my humanity: the realities of being a mammal, the genes I received from my ancestors, and the events that have made me who I am. -Adrienne

Birthing dangers: summing up today's news

2010-03-16T23:07:00.001-06:00

"Deadly Delivery," a new report released by Amnesty International "urges action to tackle a crisis that sees between two and three women die every day during pregnancy and childbirth in the USA." Most striking is Amnesty International's assertion that "with a lifetime risk of maternal deaths that is greater than in 40 other countries, including virtually all industrialized nations, the USA has failed to reverse the two-decade upward trend in preventable maternal deaths, despite pledges to do so."

As Time explained, "The Amnesty report spotlights numerous barriers women face in accessing care, even among those who are insured or qualify for Medicaid. Poverty is a major factor, but all women are put at risk by overuse of obstetrical intervention and barriers to access to more woman-centered, physiologic care provided by family-practice physicians and midwives."

Vaginal births after Caesarian sections (called VBACs for short) have declined dramatically in the US, and the National Institutes of Health hope to improve on the dwindling number of women who deliver VBAC babies. The New York Times explored hospitals that have high success rates with vaginal births. Notably, these hospitals, which serve primarily Native Americans, have midwives present at almost all births, as opposed to the piddly 10% nationally.

On RH Reality Check, Rebecca Spence explained some of the contradictions women face when they chose a VBAC: "Legislators have an obligation not to turn their backs on women who choose VBAC at home-- a choice sometimes made because women cannot find a provider who will ‘allow’ a VBAC in a hospital. These restrictions force women to 'go rogue' and give birth unattended."

We hope that NIH and the Obama administration take the birthing risks that women face very seriously, and at a minimum, work to catch up to the rest of the developed world in terms of reducing maternal mortality. The numbers are frightening, and they need to improve. -TLF

Stupak still a sticking point: summing up today's news

2010-03-15T21:58:00.001-06:00

It's today, yesterday's, and last month's news, but it's worth recapping some intelligent coverage of the Stupak amendment and what it means for the slow-going health care coverage reform bill. The Weekly Standard explained how this could hold up health care reform for all.

In an editorial yesterday, the New York Times expressed its dismay with legislators who "say the onerous anti-abortion provisions in the Senate’s bill are still not onerous enough." The piece goes on to parse out the senate bill's already stringent and unfortunate limitations on choice. Some senate bill provisions:

The use of federal subsidies to pay for abortions is banned.
A state may ban insurance companies from offering policies that cover abortions
In states without such a ban, there must still be at least one plan available that does not cover abortions. There is no corresponding requirement to offer plans that would cover abortions.
Payments would be divided between the regular premium and a very small monthly premium that the insurance company would route to a separate account that could be used only to cover abortions.

Ezra Klein blogged about the classicism built into this debate and says, "the poorer women who will be using subsidies on the exchange are a much easier target."

"Abortion is a legal and medically valid procedure that should be covered by insurance—without government interference," writes the New York Times. We couldn't agree more. At least there may some political collateral, and as RH Reality Check reports, Stupak will have some pro-choice competition in his upcoming reelection bid for the House of Representatives, though Huffington Post points out that he still has plenty of supporters who view his anti-choice efforts as "courageous."

Politico wrote tonight that health care reform could still fail because of disagreements on abortion (by male legislators, who will never have to make an abortion choice for themselves). -TLF

Feminist farming: liberating or oxymoron?

2010-03-15T20:50:00.003-06:00

It's no secret that food preparation and production are urban chic these days. Everybody wants to know where their food comes from and that it was grown organically and with fair labor. Plus, it should be nutritious, great-tasting, and fresh. "Kitchen gardens are as much a given here as indoor plumbing," writes Peggy Orenstein of her Berkeley, CA neighborhood. Where you find progressivism and good weather these days, you can expect to find home-grown food.

A locavore and gardener myself, I won't dispute that the back-to-the-land tendencies encouraged by the sustainable food movement are positive. But when it comes to gender roles, we might simply be faced with a new set of sexist burdens, some of which fast food may even help ease.

In the New York Times magazine yesterday, Peggy Orenstein wrote about "the femivore's dilemma." Raising food for one's family, an economically wise choice, suddenly seems like the great liberator for non-working women. "Femivorism is grounded in the very principles of self-sufficiency, autonomy and personal fulfillment that drove women into the work force in the first place," Orenstein writes. Producing food for one's family may be even more valuable than procuring a second income, she explains.

But what's really happening is a glorification of gendered domestic tasks. Just because food-producing tasks happen to be wrapped up in a prominent progressive movement doesn't mean that producing one's honey, eggs, and spinach in the backyard is any less gendered than driving to the grocery store to pick up said items. It may be more gratifying, healthy, and yield more delicious food, but if women who spend the day at home now spend part of that time in the yard, there has been no feminist victory.

Nobody seems more aware of this than Shannon Hayes, a farmer and the author of Radical Homemakers: Reclaiming Domesticity from a Consumer Culture in which she "explores what domesticity can look like in an era that has benefited from feminism; where domination and oppression are cast aside, where the choice to stay home is no longer equated with mind-numbing drudgery, economic insecurity, or relentless servitude." A feminist world doesn't preclude domesticity; in Hayes's practical and logical view, chores are embraced and shared by all genders, an issue I've blogged about in regard to cooking. Hayes is well aware of the threat the femivorism poses if it falls short, and told Orenstein, “If you don’t go into this as a genuinely egalitarian relationship, you’re creating a dangerous situation. There can be loss of self-esteem, loss of soul and an inability to return to the world and get your bearings. You can start to wonder, What’s this all for?”

There is a whole other dimension to women and food production, which is that worldwide women have long been farming, often on a subsistence scale (not bound to the commercial chains that Hayes advocates against). One fourth of the global population is women farmers, many of whom live in poverty. -Sara

Covering sexual assault allegations against a football star: summing up today's news

2010-03-12T21:32:00.002-07:00

In the week following sexual assault charges filed against Steelers quarterback Ben Roethlisberger, commentators have gotten caught up in an unusually meta debate, asking about the best way to talk about sexual assault charges (and, notably, drawing a distinction between charges and a conviction: innocent until proven guilty, after all). This case follows a rape charge filed against Roethlisberger in 2008.

As the Pittsburgh-Post Gazette explained, the victim's privacy is her discretionary choice, and so the media has declined to identify her. The Atlantic's Ta-Nehisi Coates expresses the journalistic conundrum this poses: "What, specifically, should we be saying? How should we be talking about the anonymous accuser? What, specifically, constitutes taking alleged sexual misconduct seriously? Should we really be in the business of denouncing 'alleged crimes?'" We're glad that writers are asking themselves how to talk about sexual assault cases, but in this case, there are plenty of models for the wrong way to do it. (The New York Times posted a round-up of said coverage here.)

Feministing provided a good response: we can, and should, presume innocent until proven guilty. But, "we can still evaluate the way the media portrays women when they bring about rape charges, the extent to which the general public will defend and accept athletes that have been accused (or down right guilty) of sexual assault, sexual abuse and/or domestic violence."

ESPN painted a picture of Roethlisberger as a great, innocent guy--the type of guy who would never hurt a lady, who was "'was very polite with everybody.'" And yet, "this latest situation seems to have shaken fans of the star quarterback, a man who has never hidden the fact he enjoys the nightlife. He has been spotted gambling in Las Vegas and is sometimes seen in public with small groups of friends and bodyguards." The Bleacher Report was even more offensive in saying, "Whether he assaulted the girl is irrelevant in my thinking at this point. What matters is why he put himself in this situation...again."

What's most stomach churning about these arguments is that they employ the same logic that is all too often applied to women who are victims of sexual assault--they were asking for it. Ms. Magazine identified this troubling thread and asks, "Yes Ben, why did you put yourself in that situation? How could you leave yourself so vulnerable? Going to a bar, you were asking to be accused of sexual assault!" (Thanks, Lisa, for the tip.) -TLF

Shaving your pubic hair can be dangerous

2010-03-12T12:41:00.001-07:00

I'm the first to agree that shaving while driving (for anybody of any sex on any part of their body) is a bad idea that shows only the poorest judgment. So I have no sympathy for the Florida driver who hit a truck while shaving her pubic hair earlier this week (and then switched seats with the passenger, her ex-husband, to try and dupe the police into thinking he had been driving recklesskly; she also wasn't supposed to be on the road to begin with due to a revoked license), but I'm still bothered by the snide comments that keep bubbling up in regard to pubic hair "landscaping."

ABC reported that "she was distracted, according to officers, because she was driving while shaving her 'bikini area,'" and they go further to explain the causality: "In the police report obtained by ABC News, the trim job was apparently essential because the arresting officer, trooper Gary Dunick, said the Indiana native told him she was heading to Key West visit her boyfriend." It's easy to make a mockery of this woman who in several ways is a perfect caricature, but the tone suggests that preparing one's pubic hair in such a way is absurd. It's not unlikely that Trooper Dudnick will some time have a sexual encounter with a wife or girlfriend who also shaves her pubic hair, maybe even at his behest, or the "apparently essential" need to be hairless for a man. The news coverage shied away from even saying "pubic hair," instead going for the euphemism "bikini area."

Newser's headline, "Hot Date in Key West Leads To Collision," gets into causation, and Keys News says, "As authorities nationwide warn motorists of the dangers of driving while texting, Florida Keys law enforcement officers add a new caution: Don't try to shave your privates, either." Maybe the most effective way to do that would be to stop demanding that women's body hair look a certain way.

Yes, this is comical and the driver behaved stupidly. But the license to joke about "landscaping" is especially obnoxious when lanscaped pubic hair is, in fact, the social norm. -Sara

"France's best kept secret" for gender equity

2010-03-11T21:53:00.002-07:00

Forehead Tittaes w/ Marion Cotillard from Marion Cotillard

Haterade in Mississippi: summing up today's news

2010-03-11T21:46:00.001-07:00

Eighteen-year-old Constance McMillen planned to take her girlfriend to prom at Itawamba Agricultural High School in Mississippi. But when school board officials got wind of the date, they told her that the girlfriends would not be allowed to arrive together, nor would McMillen be allowed to wear a tuxedo to the event. On top of that, school officials reserved the right to kick the two out if other students felt "uncomfortable." The American Civil Liberties Union, which defended another Mississippi teenager's right to wear a tuxedo in her senior photo, swooped in with an ultimatum for the school board: reverse the illegal, discriminatory ban on same-sex dates. But instead of adhering to the law, Itawamba cancelled prom, leaving McMillen to take the heat from her classmates.

"A bunch of kids at school are really going to hate me for this, so in a way it's really retaliation," said McMillen, who arrived at school this week to be told "Thanks for ruining my senior year" by a classmate. Salon.com commented on the cruelty of the cancellation, saying this is really about "a school board defending its right to discriminate so fiercely it will deny a rite of passage to all the graduating students, and blame it on the one who stood up for her own civil rights and dignity. It's about an institution doing an end run around the law to preserve its own bigotry..."

Shakesville published an open letter to Mississippians who are holding tight to institutional bigotry as a way to prevent change, writing, "Time will not stand still. You cannot re-create your youth or what you envision as the glorious past through your children."

And Jezebel noted that none other than Roger Ebert has taken up McMillen's cause on his Twitter feed, writing "It's okay if girls go to a prom together because they can't get dates, but god forbid if they like each other." Jezebel also got hold of an administrative email address at Itawamba High if you're interested in letting the school board know what's on your mind: tmcneese@itawamba.k12.ms.us. -TLF

Winning in Afghanistan by winning over women

2010-03-11T16:31:00.001-07:00

Some American women soldiers will soon be playing a new role in the war in Afghanistan. They'll be diplomats who reach out to Afghan women.

According to the New York Times, the U.S. military will train American female troops to serve in "female engagement teams" to meet and spend time with Afghan women. According to Afghan custom and cultural mores, Afghan women cannot talk with men and must remain in the home. The military reasons that this new program will allow American women (and Americans) to gain trust and cooperation from Afghan women and the larger Afghan community. This will help the military to infiltrate Afghan communities in order to secure "vital" military recon, like the Taliban's location. It will also allow the military to learn about problems that exist in the area, such as poor sanitation, so that the military can sweep in and fix these issues.

American women soldiers interviewed by the Times appear thrilled for the new task, as they feel it will really help the war effort and allow them to connect with a community that had been largely off-limits. Says Cpl. Vanessa Jones, “When I heard about this, I said, 'Oh, that’s it, let’s go.'"

Though the plan might sound valid, it rings hollow when one considers the implications of our country's current position and broader strategies in Afghanistan in addition to its approach to Afghan women. Anand Gopal, an Afghanistan-based journalist, noted last year that U.S. support of the Hamid Karzai administration is suspect in light of its Taliban-esque stance on women, as illustrated by the passage of the Shia Family Law, which legalizes marital rape. Gopal writes, "Many observers say that unless the rural, tribal structure of the society is changed, the patriarchal prison will continue. But that might be something only the Afghans themselves can accomplish. In the meantime, many Afghan women say that the West can help this process--by dropping support for fundamentalists and misogynists." As American women soldiers attempt to gain the trust of Afghan women, other U.S. soldiers will continue their military efforts of drone attacks, night raids, and more violent activities that continue to hurt women, especially as women suffer far more in armed conflict conditions than men.

Samhita of Feministing wrote last fall that the continued U.S. narrative to help Afghan women is "drenched in racism and colonial fantasy...where often what we are calling for is not what 'others' may want in their home countries, but our ideology on war, terror, justice and feminism guides our political affiliations nonetheless." Perhaps women soldiers will listen when Afghan women continue to ask for aid, not more war, and certainly not tactical friendly visits and infiltration. Afghan women, after all, are making it known that they're unhappy with being left out of negotiations to end violence thus far. -Jean

What's a black doll worth?: summing up today's news

2010-03-10T23:25:00.001-07:00

Barbie dolls on sale at a Wal-Mart store in Louisiana aren't all equal, it seems. ABC reports that "the Teresa dolls, which feature brown skin and dark hair, are marked as being on sale at $3.00. The Barbies to the right of the Teresa dolls, meanwhile, retain their original price of $5.93. The dolls look identical aside from their color."

The price differential was first noticed by the web site Guanabee, where they posited this snarky rhetorical question: "Who says Barbie dolls don’t supply young girls with a realistic portrayal of womanhood?" As Pam's House Blend chimed in in agreement, "Our culture still tells us is that blacks are 'less valuable' as a group on so many levels."

Mother Jones saw problems with the dialogue about race: "Interestingly, ABC News reported that the dolls were 'black,' while Guanabee called them 'brown.' Ambiguity abounds—except for Wal-Mart's contention that whatever they are, they're worth less than white ballerinas." The values assigned to these dolls reflect Walmart's clearance policy, a company spokesperson explained. The physically impossible proportions that Barbie's body puts forth are only a part of the unrealistic portrait of women she paints for children; racial diversity is also just an afterthought, and some sociologists say that consumer preference across race is for white dolls. In response, Pam's House Blend asks, "Why sugar-coat this by keeping the prices at parity?...It seems disingenuous to keep the prices equal in order to spare guilt-ridden people from the truth or consumers who feel uncomfortable with the thought that children still pick the white doll more often than not."

Jezebel got to the crux of the problem and provides an explanation that would counter Pam's objections to tweaking market prices. "Just as Barbie dolls continue to reflect institutional sexism with their unrealistic representation of the female body (a baby-face-plus-big-boobs representation that's become especially popular in an age that incongruously demands both extreme youth and sexual availability), so too the relative 'values' placed on black dolls reflect the ways black women are often devalued." Apparently there's never been a better time to learn about the insidious link between racism and sexism than while shopping for a Barbie doll. -TLF

Is chivalry dead? Do we care?

2010-03-10T19:47:00.002-07:00

When I mention that I'm a feminist to a person who doesn't identify as the same, that person often wants to talk about my presumed hatred of chivalry. Usually, I explain that I'm not anti-etiquette. Chivalry within reason is akin to politeness. (Just don't open my car door for me.) And there's nothing wrong with lightheartedly playing into antiquated gender stereotypes, so long as we acknowledge that's what we're doing.

But if feminists get the anti-chivalry rap, it's probably because of news stories like this one on AOL.com, which details one instance of chivalry's resurgence in American culture. At a Phoenix area high school, a Latin teacher named Cord Ivanyi has been instructing his male students in etiquette, teaching them to stand up when women enter a room, to open doors for girls, and to pull out their chairs for them. He started the lessons, he said, because he was disturbed to see boys roughhousing with girls. But now, things have changed. "There's a different tenor in the class, a gravity attached to the girls. They've been more feminized in the boys' eyes," Ivanyi said. "These girls are reading Jane Austen novels in class. For them, chivalry hasn't gone out of style."

This kind of chivalry, the kind that makes women out to be fainting, frilly little girls, is rather sexist. The good kind of chivalry, the kind that allows men to do nice things for women without coming across as misogynists, is perhaps trickier to employ. But men would do well to take a cue from a Victorian-era playbook by adding a few chivalrous things to their repertoire beyond opening doors and pulling out seats. How about listening without interrupting? Or maintaining a respectful level of personal space? Or educating other men about sexual violence?

As loath as I am to cite AskMen on anything, the site's hilariously misguided "Chivalry vs. Feminism" article does end with one gem of advice. "Don't baby her or treat her like a child, simply be there for her as you would a good friend and everything should be fine." -Naomi (Thanks to Lydia for the tip.)

Happy International Women's Day: summing up yesterday's news

2010-03-09T22:37:00.001-07:00

Apologies for the delay, but Lady Finger editors were so busy celebrating International Women's Day yesterday that we skipped blogging about it. So here we are today, with yesterday's roundup:

International Women's Day has its origins in the early 20th century women's rights movement in the United States, an irony because the U.S. does not officially recognize it as a holiday. (China, Armenia, Russia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Bulgaria, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Macedonia, Moldova, Mongolia, Tajikistan, Ukraine, Uzbekistan and Vietnam, on the other hand, do.) The holiday was envisioned as a day for women to make their political demands, but today it has morphed into a celebration of feminism and its achievements and goals, and also a recognition of individual women and their contributions to their families (kind of like Mother's Day).

Barack and Michelle Obama spoke about the holiday (view their speeches below), with Barack subtly commending Hillary Clinton for her effort to win the presidency and Michelle saying, "We honor women who refused to listen to those who would say that you couldn’t or shouldn’t pursue your dreams. And we honor women who may not have had many opportunities in their own lives, and we all know women like that: Women who poured everything they had into making sure that their daughters and their granddaughters could pursue their dreams; women who, as the poet Alice Walker once wrote, 'knew what we must know without knowing it themselves.'"

Over at Jezebel, you can view a very touching slideshow with photos of women celebrating the globe over. And RH Reality Check has a wonderful roundup of its own, highlighting friends' and contributors' favorite books about women's equality. Gender Across Borders also has a comprehensive list of relevant blogs. -TLF

Sneak preview: summing up today's news

2010-03-05T20:34:00.001-07:00

With the Academy Awards coming on Sunday, everybody's rushing to see the nominated films and to weigh in on them.

The feminist blogosphere has been discussing the significance of and the problems with director Kathryn Bigelow's best feature nominee, The Hurt Locker (the movie has been plenty controversial gender issues aside; in the spirit of full disclosure, I'll say that I loved it.)

The Daily Beast contemplated the historic implications of the first-ever best picture win for a woman director. The Women's Media Center noted an even more striking gender-role exploding observation: "In spite of the deep and abiding desire to see a woman break through this particular glass ceiling, the real possibility that the first Oscar award winning woman director will win for making a war film is almost a kick in the gut to many who make the types of films that most interest female ticket buyers. Bigelow works in a male paradigm and is being rewarded for that."

Shira Tarrant expands on Girl w/ Pen: "Bigelow likes the big bang in her movies — guns, explosions, a rough-punch to the gut. And in The Hurt Locker, there’s plenty of that rugged, isolated individualism that so often defines modern manhood. But Bigelow is more deeply interested in the warrior codes of masculinity that are intertwined with men’s fears and feelings, and their conflicted impulses around loyalty and leadership, posturing and parenthood.

We're not sure why the LA Times is so squeamish about feminism, but an insightful blogger writes, "Although her perspective shouldn't be tagged as 'feminist,' it's one that shakes up traditional notions of what men are and how they behave, whether on a battlefield, in the depths of a nuclear submarine or surfing off Malibu." The piece goes on to note that "by asserting her right as an artist to enter into that combat zone, Bigelow has established herself as one of the gutsiest filmmakers around." It's exciting to see a woman making great movies, making successful movies, and making movies that aren't chick flicks. Though some voices in the feminist blogosphere complain that the minor roles women play in The Hurt Locker are powerless and domestic, the LA Times got it right that Bigelow's "deeper interest lies in men's tribal rites and rituals; their fears, posturings and warrior codes; their feelings about sex and fatherhood; their conflicted loyalties and clashing ideas of what leadership and heroism mean," not just machine guns and combat boots.

We'll be watching this year's stars on the red carpet this weekend.
-TLF

Abortion and the health care debate: summing up today's news

2010-03-04T22:34:00.000-07:00

The partisan tug of war that continues to hold up the health care bill has a new (or recycled) focal point this week: abortion restrictions that Democratic Bart Stupak has said are pivotal in getting his vote in favor of the bill, and as NPR noted, "Of the remaining issues with the potential to bring down the entire health overhaul effort, the one that lawmakers fear most is abortion."

RH Reality Check called Stupak a "petulant child," which is perhaps more generous terminology than The Lady Finger would use at this point. "In my eyes [the president] has to be a little more flexible, especially on this issue of no public funding for abortion,” Stupak said, as recounted by the New York Times today.

In a separate post, RH Reality Check expanded on the details of what proposed language by Senator Ben Nelson would mean for women: "In terms of abortion coverage, women will not only be worse off with this version of health reform, they will also face institutionalized sex discrimination for basic reproductive health care." On Stupak's insistence that there can be no federal funding for abortion, RH Reality Check explains that that's not even on the table. In fact, "the Senate bill does not contain language allowing public funding of abortion and... will result in the elimination of women's access to private coverage for abortion care." Hot Air explains the history of the Nelson-Stupak controversy, and The Atlantic Wire has a great round-up here.

Nancy Pelosi said it most clearly: "There is no federal funding for abortion. That is the law of the land. It is not changed in this bill." What we're left to fight for is basic protections for the status quo in reproductive health care. According to Politico, abortion language may simply be relegated to a separate bill if it's the only hold-up on the much anticipated, long awaited health care reform bill. But if Congress can't work it out, Stupak will undermine health care reform, as he told ABC today. Yes, it's a man who has no uterus who's engineering these decisions for the entire country. -TLF

Baby daddies: summing up today's news

2010-03-03T14:45:00.002-07:00

Earlier this week, Washington City Paper's The Sexist column commented on a study that evidences that men are more likely to be "pleased" with the idea of an unplanned pregnancy than women are. The study, which was conducted by the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, found that 42 percent of men between the ages of 20 and 24 would be pleased with the news of a partner's unplanned pregnancy, as compared with 16 percent of women in the same age group.

The surprising results of the study have feminist bloggers, including yours truly, scratching their heads. This certainly flies in the face of the commonly held sexist notion that women dupe their men into fatherhood by "accidentally" getting pregnant.

Over at Pandagon, Amanda Marcotte theorizes that some men might feel emasculated by engagement and marriage rituals. For some couples, an unplanned pregnancy pushes the idea of marriage to the fore. Instead of playing into gendered, suffocating wedding planning, "....you could get her pregnant and be the conquering hero by making an honest woman of her...It’s the perfect way to get what you want (marriage, babies) without having to say you want that girly stuff. It certainly explained a handful of men’s erratic behavior and opinions that I’ve known in my time."

Here's another idea: men just don't--and really can't--understand the cramp that unplanned pregnancy puts on a woman's style. (Abortion? The cost and the public shaming. Adoption? The physical and emotional toll. Motherhood? Hello!) As The Sexist writes, "I don’t know: Perhaps our joy is muted by the fact that unexpected pregnancies tend to put us ladies out a touch."-TLF

To have them, or when to have them? The baby dilemma.

2010-03-03T05:54:00.001-07:00

The Lady Finger has grappled with the competing demands made on women and the limitations women face when they try to achieve domestic and career success at once. There are expectations when it comes to healthy childbearing, and the uncertain struggle with navigating traditional career paths for women who also raise children. Then there's the relatively new attempt at sharing household tasks across gender lines, with a rising number of househusbands. It is in this context that a guest blogger considers her own personal plans and her future as a parent:

The Washington Post reported last week that a woman's fertility declines as she ages. This is not news: years of research have shown this to be true, and every woman I've ever spoken with about babies is all too aware of that "biological clock." Yet this story was particularly sobering: "Now it appears that the old biological clock may start ticking much earlier -- and faster -- than once thought."

Earlier and faster? I read this, and I think--it's not fair! I want children. I want a husband. And I want a career. I'm 28 now, I don't have even one of those three, and the new research says I will have only 12% of my eggs remaining in two years, when I turn 30. Eeeek!

These aren't questions I ever considered when I was growing up. I grew up in the 90s, and my friends and I were empowered: we dreamed of careers, we poured effort into our education. We went to college, studied hard, devoted ourselves to our extracurriculars--debate, model UN, lit mag. We graduated, celebrated, and dug in for more demanding years of graduate school, because this was the way to achieve success in our field, to pursue the careers we aspired to. We turned 24, 25, and 26. And 27. And 28.

In graduate school, I sat with female friends and worried about when to have children. It takes 5 or 6 years to complete the degree, a period of stress and pressure to produce an outstanding 300-page dissertation, and then, our professors told us, it gets even worse: assistant professorship, when another clock--the tenure clock--starts ticking. Teaching, committees, advising, research, and publishing would consume the next 6 years. Then maybe, just maybe, we'd have tenure, and we'd be (relatively) secure. At the age of 35.

But we wanted to start our families earlier. We didn't want to be "old" mothers. I thought of 35 as the age associated with a significant increase in risks to the baby's health, and it became my line in the sand: I wanted children before then.

The dilemma over when to have kids was just one piece of a larger puzzle, how to achieve that holy triumvirate: husband, kids, career. Looking around the academy, we noted that strikingly few women had all three. To have two of the three was common; two was doable. Had times changed significantly enough from when our professors were starting out, such that now we could have all three? Or were we likely to lose one along the way, as well? And if we thought we could have all three, did it simply mean that we would not get to choose the one we lost? It may be 2010, but it still feels like a mutually exclusive choice: family or career.

And now I find out the clock is ticking faster than I imagined. This has always seemed like a woman's issue, and of course, it is. When I read the WaPo article, I immediately wanted to share it with my female friends. But I realized, perhaps because I am now in a long-term relationship with a man in which I can envision children, that for men who want children, and who plan to have children with women their age or older, they must mind the ticking clock, as well. This frustrating biological reality was a frustration we shared.

And share I did, when I got home, telling my boyfriend about the article. We agreed that when we think of the challenges of having a child, it scares us silly. And when we think of the positives, well, what can you say?-- it's a child, it's a miracle, it's the greatest joy. Of course, we can't truly imagine what it's like to have a child, just as we can't know what it would be like to be 45 and childless. Some things can't be known. Many things, in fact. But we tentatively decided, in two or three years, we would try to have a child. -Anonymous

Responding to sexual assault on campus: summing up today's news

2010-03-02T22:11:00.002-07:00

Trigger Warning:

Naomi blogged last week about the upsetting findings that one in five women on college campuses are sexually assaulted, noting that "on-campus rape has not diminished, in no small part because campus authorities do next to nothing to deter it." Dialogue about the epidemic of rape on college campuses, seemingly safe and bucolic spaces, has been explosive this week in response to a study conducted by the Center for Public Integrity.

CNN explained the context for the CPI study: "The shocking statistics of rape and attempted rape on campus came to light in a study conducted by the U.S. Department of Justice nine years ago. But the recently released series published by the Washington center shows that while federal law requires schools to act on sexual assault allegations and look out for the rights of victims, many higher-education institutions aren't making the grade."

Jezebel described the study as "chilling." Among CPI's findings: "Many student victims don’t report incidents at all, because they blame themselves, or don’t identify what happened as sexual assault. Local criminal justice authorities regularly shy away from such cases, because they are 'he said, she said' disputes sometimes clouded by drugs or alcohol." Although this isn't new, CPI brings renewed attention to a "culture of indifference." RH Reality Check rightly criticized college administrators and said, "While I...understand that the role of a college is first and foremost to foster personal growth through learning, there is no excuse for turning one person’s rape into another’s 'teachable moment'" and "valuing an educational ideal over the health and safety of other students is unacceptable...and dangerous."

Feministing plugged the Campus Accountability Project as a "great tool for student organizers who are trying to change policy and programming on their campus, but it also plays a big role in promoting administrative transparency and reminding schools that policy matters." CAP, with SAFER (Students Active For Ending Rape) is "the only organization that fights sexual violence and rape culture by empowering student-led campaigns to reform college sexual assault policies."

Distressingly, these are uphill battles. As CNN noted, "Many said administrators appeared more concerned with protecting their employer, or the school's reputation, than they were with protecting students."

Kristen Lombardi, CPI's lead researcher on this report, wrote in the San Francisco Chronicle about the dismissive stance that campus administrators often take: "Many incidents go beyond 'miscommunication' among two drunk students - a common characterization among school officials - to predatory acts."

To teach college students that rape is a forgivable transgression undoes so much of the important progress that student advocates and educators have worked for. But, as Naomi expressed in her post last week, the coverage of CPI's report has "made me a bit hopeful that things will get better." We'll keep hoping and working for improvements. -TLF

Suicide and LGBQ youths

2010-03-02T13:24:00.000-07:00

A recent study conducted by Canadian researchers and published in the Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry shows that for LGBQ youths contemplating suicide, the primary risk factor is whether one identifies as LGBQ, not whether one is attracted to people of the same sex or whether one acts on that attraction. I was unable to find a link to the actual publication but the Science Daily article I linked to above gives some of the particulars. According to the article, the researchers found that “those teens who self-identified as gay, lesbian or bisexual, or who were unsure of their sexual identity, were indeed at higher risk for suicidal ideation and attempts. However, teens who had same-sex attractions or sexual experiences--but thought of themselves as heterosexual--were at no greater risk than the population at large. Perhaps surprisingly, but consistent with previous studies, the majority of teens with same-sex sexual attraction or experience considered themselves to be heterosexual.”

Yue Zhao, one of the authors of the journal article, explains, "The main message is that it's the interface between individuals and society that causes students who identify as gay, lesbian, or bisexual the most distress.” This flies in the face of claims from right-wing and religious groups that it is the “gay lifestyle” or the fact that LGBQ people have gay sex that puts them at risk. As one site called Chastity.com claims, “While prejudice against homosexuals can play a role in their unhappiness, evidence suggests that the lifestyle itself causes further pain,” but the site does not say what this “evidence” is. Other anti-LGBTIQ sites refer to the “Gay Youth Suicide Myth” or the “Homosexual Urban Legend.” As the study suggests, the blame for the increased rate of suicide ideation and attempts among LGBQ youths sits squarely on the shoulders of mainstream society and on groups and individuals who continue to stigmatize, marginalize, and oppress LGBTIQ individuals. -Adrienne

Abortion distortion: summing up today's news

2010-03-01T21:25:00.000-07:00

Last week, The New York Times ran a story about the anti-abortion movement's efforts to reach out to black women by telling them that abortion is a form of eugenics meant to eradicate people of color. An organization called Georgia Right to Life has paid for billboards around Atlanta with the phrase "Black children are an endangered species." In addition, anti-choicer Mark Crutcher's video detailing a racist conspiracy on the part of family planning groups has been screened at many organizations in the South. The Times quotes Loretta Ross, executive director of the SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Health Collective in Atlanta: “'It’s a perfect storm,' [she said], listing a lack of access to birth control, lack of education, and even a high rate of sexual violence. 'There’s an assumption that every time a girl is pregnant it’s because of voluntary activity, and it’s so not the case.'"

Feministing calls the article "biased," saying, "unfortunately, the entire article is a detailed explanation of the Right to Life group's opinion, analysis and tactics. Loretta Ross, National Coordinator of Sistersong, is quoted in response, but her arguments barely make a splash on the piece. This doesn't seem like fair and balanced reporting to me."

RH Reality Check comes in where the Times left off, providing much-needed context regarding "factors underlying reproductive and sexual health problems among African-American women," and noting that "perhaps the greatest weakness of this article--and one that is unforgivable given the stakes around women's health and rights--is that the Times failed entirely to point out that the very groups--Georgia Right to Life is but one example of many--spend a good deal of their time and energy opposing funding of the very basic preventive reproductive and sexual health services that would reduce unintended pregnancies (and by extension, the number of abortions), reduce sexually transmitted infections, and dramatically improve the health of African-American women in these areas."

And in response, Racialicious has published a powerful, first-person account of working in family planning clinics in the South. "Women of color are not children unable to make health care decisions, our children are not a species on the brink of extinction through an organized genocidal plot and justice is found when a people are unbound and empowered by medically accurate knowledge rather than dogma." -TLF

Department of Defense education cuts adversely affect women

2010-03-01T15:27:00.000-07:00

Just one month after presenting its enormous $708 billion budget, the U.S. Department of Defense has abruptly halted a popular program of providing educational grants to spouses of soldiers--who are typically women--claiming it ran out of money.

The year-old program, the Defense Department's Military Spouse Career Advancement Account (MyCAA), provided up to $6,000 in grants for college and other educational training programs to wives and husbands. About 98,000 people were involved in the program when it ended last week.

According to the Associated Press, these spouses greatly need additional education to boost their employment odds. Employers "are hesitant to hire military spouses," as their military connection often forces them to move an average of once every three years. In addition, "they often do not keep jobs long enough to earn promotions and raises." Indeed, the unemployment rate in 2008 for military spouses was three times higher than for civilians, according to the DoD.

Many spouses have expressed anger. The AP quotes Rebecca Duncan of Corpus Christi, Texas, the wife of a Navy sailor: "The DoD showed lack of respect for the spouses...To me this was a huge slap in our faces."

Because military spouses are mostly women (men comprise 86 percent of active duty soldiers and 83 percent of reservists), the development is particularly frustrating. American women already face tougher employment odds than their male counterparts in terms of salary and promotion, and military wives are likely to care for the family's children. These wives could truly use the cash. The DoD claims it could no longer afford the program. However, its 2010 budget, at $708 billion, is the largest ever since World War II, 33 percent higher than the biggest DoD budget during the Vietnam War. Much of the current budget funds the development and purchase of massive new weapons.

Several online hubs for military spouses, including MilSpouse.com and MilitaryWives.com, have posted updates on the MyCAA news. About 80 percent of 200 respondents to a MilSpouse.com poll have said their education plans were disrupted by the program's end.

The military, however, holds a weak track record for its efforts to improve conditions for women within the military world. Sexual assault of servicewomen within military ranks continues in huge numbers (check out this fact sheet from the Servicewomen Action Network here), and the military until recently refused emergency contraception to women soldiers.

The DoD has released little information on the future of the program. To continue the program, it could develop tougher standards of acceptance to the program or search for funds for the program elsewhere. If it chooses to definitively cancel the program, perhaps more Americans might wonder why the priorities of its military do not lie in the quality of life for its servicemen and women and their families, and what sort of military America values. -Jean

Live tweeting abortion: summing up today's news

2010-02-26T20:20:00.002-07:00

Blogger Angie the Anti-Theist started live tweeting her medical abortion last week, in what she explained was "not for some publicity stunt or attention or to justify this to myself. I am at peace with my decision. I'm doing this to demystify abortion....I want people to know that it's out there." Angie Jackson gives the full video introduction here:

As Salon said, "women should thank her." "Considering that abortion is so prone to politicized distortions and outright lies, Jackson is doing women a real favor."

RU-486 causes a medical, rather than a surgical abortion by blocking progesterone. In an interview on The Mark News, Angie explained why she chose to make her abortion public, describing this as an extension of her blogging, which already makes her private life public. She sees it as an added bonus that the public is educated about "the need for women to have rights to their bodies and the right to make their own medical decisions" and her followers and commenters have been celebratory and supportive.

The Frisky has a demystifying Q&A with Jackson that answers any of the remaining questions that readers may have, and further articulates her motivation to publicize her abortion: "There’s a lot of misinformation and lies [about abortion]. They do attempt to terrify women. They try to make abortion sound so scary that women are too terrified to do it. And that’s really what I wanted to say, from my personal experience, this was not as bad as labor and birth."

You can read Jackson's twitter feed here, where she says very clearly that it's not that bad--but she gives an honest day by day account of a medical abortion, and the accompanying pain (and Vicodin). The Lady Finger is grateful to Jackson for giving women, and all others, the opportunity to learn more about her experience. -TLF

The Paterson saga continues: summing up today's news

2010-02-25T22:18:00.002-07:00

Remember last week's big let-down of a story about New York Governor David Paterson, whose aid David Johnson allegedly beat up women? Remember how the blogosphere pooh-poohed the allegations, whining that the story's incredible build up belied a minor scandal? Well, things have changed. Several key details have come to the fore about an incident last Halloween, in which Johnson menaced a woman he was seeing, ripping her costume off, smashing her against a dresser, and later preventing her from reaching a phone to call for help. Paterson claimed to have known nothing about the attack, saying it was a "bad breakup."

But, it turns out, Paterson did know about the attack. The woman, who was twice granted orders of protection against Johnson, claimed in court "the State Police had been harassing her to drop the matter," according to another article in the Times. And Paterson himself spoke with her on the phone the day before she was scheduled to appear in court to acquire another order. "She did not show up the next day, resulting in the dismissal of the case."

Another top aid to Paterson, Public Safety Deputy Denise O'Donnell, was so disgusted by what may have been unlawful contact between state officers and a victim of domestic violence, that she resigned today, saying "it is particularly distressing that this could happen in an administration that prides itself on its record of combating domestic violence," according to the New York Daily News.

Johnson, for his part, has been suspended without pay pending the results of an investigation by the state attorney general. And now, Paterson may not run for reelection. The Village Voice is calling for his immediate resignation, saying it would be a wise tack for the governor to take, just like his philandering predecessor, Eliot Spitzer. "There's nothing sympathetic about a slugging sidekick, especially one who's driven a blind and reckless governor down so many dark alleys that the governor decided to take a trip down one for him. Now that Paterson's attempt to suppress a police complaint against constant companion David Johnson is unraveling, it's time for the governor Eliot Spitzer gave us to do a Spitzer. Spitzer had the good sense, within hours of his exposure, to quit. That may have saved him from indictment."

Amid the calls for Paterson's resignation, the Times' Public Editor, Clark Hoyt, is dying to know the name of the woman in the Halloween incident. "There remains another intriguing journalistic question: The Times agreed not to name the woman involved in the Halloween incident because, the article said, she works in a public hospital and feared retaliation. But as a central figure in a scandal engulfing the Paterson administration, she is a natural object of intense curiosity. And with Johnson suspended, Paterson weakened and the attorney general investigating, she would seem to be in a pretty secure position. Will The Times name her? 'I think we are open to reconsidering that,' [managing editor Jill] Abramson said."

Here's The Lady Finger's two cents on that last issue. Please, New York Times, don't cajole this woman into revealing her name. She's already been doubly victimized by Johnson, and later the State Police and Paterson. A Paterson indictment doesn't rely on the public knowing her name. And there's no need to throw her to the media hounds. -TLF

*UPDATE*

Paterson will not resign, according to this article. But he will not seek re-election either.

Criminalizing miscarriage: summing up today's news

2010-02-24T21:27:00.000-07:00

A feticide bill that criminalizes miscarriage has made it through the Utah legislature to the governor's desk awaiting passage or veto. RH Reality Check offers up background information on the bill, explaining that "the basis for the law was a recent case in which a 17-year-old girl, who was seven months pregnant, paid a man $150 to beat her in an attempt to cause a miscarriage."

The bill's language is distressingly vague, holding pregnant women accountable for feticide if they miscarry after "reckless behavior." Jezebel expands, noting that advocates fear "that women will be brought up on murder charges for drinking, failing to wear a seatbelt, or falling down the stairs." Feministing also notes the dangerous line that this bill crosses; currently, feticide laws in many states hold third parties accountable, but none hold mothers accountable for unintended miscarriages.

Feministe was right in describing the bill as a "punishment" for women, and also ponders the philosophical logic behind supporting such a bill: "[Pro-lifers assume that] a fertilized egg is a unique, individual human being, and that the death of that egg is like the death of a person. If that’s the truth, then why no activism around trying to find a cure for the close to 50 percent of fertilized eggs that naturally don’t implant, and are flushed out of the woman’s body?"

In The Stranger, Dan Savage quips, "lots of women miscarry before they even realize their [sic] pregnant... so Utah will have to pass another law, one that compels all sexually active women—actually, let's just say all women, Utah, since some sexually active women claim they're chaste—to come in for mandatory monthly pregnancy tests." Sarcastic though he may be, Savage gets at the heart of the issue: denying women their privacy and the right to make their own choices regarding their bodies and their health. -TLF

NPR covers rape on campus

2010-02-24T11:15:00.001-07:00

Trigger Warning:

The rape epidemic on college campuses--one in five women is sexually assaulted--has been publicized in Take Back the Night protests and consensual sex workshops that have proliferated in recent decades. But on-campus rape has not diminished, in no small part because campus authorities do next to nothing to deter it.

Common wisdom holds that prosecuting rape is difficult because it often boils down to one person's word against another's. But that notion obscures the fact that rape prosecution often stalls because of a lack of political will. According to a story on NPR today, colleges are legally bound by the federal government to publicize crimes that happen on campus. But it's a loosely-enforced law, one that has been used to fine schools only six times. Even when colleges do report crimes such as rape, they can still deal with rape internally by submitting the alleged rapist to a panel of college professors or administrators. These individuals more than likely view informal campus courts as a venue for student growth and reflection, rather than a place to mete out punishment. This means that rapists--even if they are found guilty--are rarely expelled from school. And that means that the women who were raped--and their friends--must see and interact with the people who violated them, sometimes on a daily basis. Some of these women drop out of school. Others suffer silently or even face threats and taunts from the rapist and his friends.

The NPR story made me cry. But it also made me a bit hopeful that things will get better. In it, the Department of Education assistant secretary for civil rights, Russlynn Ali, commits to prosecuting universities that don't appropriately deal with rape by removing some of their federal funding. That is something that her predecessors never did. -Naomi

Apple bans boobs: summing up today's news

2010-02-23T21:11:00.000-07:00

What Apple giveth, Apple taketh away. At least that's what it feels like to Jon Atherton, the wildly successful developer of Wobble, an iPhone app that allows one to attach "wobbly bits" to a photo of a woman's breast so that they jiggle when one shakes the screen. (It's quite unrealistic, I might add, though around 970,000 people are using it.) But now the jig is up for Atherton's boob business since Apple has outlawed all sexual applications from its store, according to TechCrunch.

According to the BBC, women and parents complained to Apple, saying that the apps were too degrading or risque, and Apple responded with the loosely-defined ban. Atherton's company, ChilliFresh, posted a list of the no-no's online, which includes no images of women or men in bikinis and no sexually arousing pictures. ChilliFresh claims that more than 5,000 apps have been banned. But for some reason, Playboy's and Sports Illustrated's sexy apps remain.

TechCrunch has rushed to Atherton's defense, citing the slippery slope argument that Apple could ban, well, anything, including songs with sexy lyrics on iTunes: "Apple is now one of the world’s largest gatekeepers to content, with a store that encompasses music, video, applications, and soon, books and magazines. And it’s shown before that it’s a totally inconsistent hypocrite when it comes to which content it’s willing to sell. Have exposed breasts in an R rated move? Sell it! Jiggling boobs in a silly iPhone application? Banned. Apple previously blocked an iPhone application that allowed users to access the Kama Sutra. What happens if it gets too many complaints about iTunes making it too easy to purchase books and magazines with sexual content?"

Over at Heartless Doll, Andrea Grimes isn't quite so nettled, saying, "Fine, Apple. Way to kind of stand up for not offending women, I guess...Apple deleted this content because of customer complaints, but we don't know if that's women complaining that these apps are sexist and stupid, or if it's a result of parents complaining that their kids have access to sexy apps. I suspect it's more likely the latter."

And I Blame The Patriarchy worries about feminists being blamed for censorship: "...Apple has elected to scapegoat those pesky women complainers. That’s right. Humorless, Puritanical feminists supposedly whined so loudly about being offended and degraded by iBoobs that Apple just couldn’t ignore’em, and out went Wobble faster than you can snap a G-string...Which, if it were true, would be the first time any major corporation has ever listened to feminists about anything, let alone pornography." -TLF

Climbing a different career ladder

2010-02-23T13:31:00.001-07:00

Though more women than men have held onto jobs in this recession, here's more proof that women climb fewer rungs on a steeper employment ladder: Women with M.B.A. degrees, especially women with children, are less likely to nab above-entry level positions, be promoted, or be paid as much as their otherwise equal male M.B.A. holders, according to a new study of 9,000 M.B.A.-holding respondents.

According to the study, released Friday by the New York-based nonprofit research organization, Catalyst, 60 percent of women took entry-level first jobs, as opposed to 46 percent of men with the same amount of past work experience, and women earned about $4,600 less than the men. Thus, women take longer to rise up the ladder.

"Findings reveal that instead of women and men being on equal footing and their career trajectories gender-blind," reads the report summary, "inequality remains entrenched."

The discrepancy, experts explain, stems from several factors. Managers are less likely to support women in their first jobs, and women are more likely to switch jobs, which doesn't necessarily allow them to "move up." Employers also assume women will eventually leave the company to have children and thus are not placed on the primary track to promotion. Echoing this, ironically, women themselves sometimes imagine the time and energy required for them to have a family--perhaps--and do not lobby as hard as men for promotions or raises. The Wall Street Journal quotes Ann Bartel, an economics professor at Columbia Business School, who says companies aren't looking to be unequal, per se. But they "have to redesign jobs so flex-time and working from home aren't negatives for the fast track."

Given our cultural norms, and that the majority of caretaking and housekeeping still falls to women (here is a great piece on this at Forbes Woman), it makes sense that women assume they will be the primary caretakers of children, at least more than their partners. Thus, they demand flex time and opportunities to work from home. Unions, such as AFL-CIO, and various women's lobbying groups, including the National Women's Law Center, have proposed similar structures. They're very real, very necessary solutions Americans should embrace.

But these solutions ignore the root of the problem, the question of why women today must act as the default caregivers and men the breadwinners, and more bizarrely, why only the latter merits higher pay and promotions. In a world where the roles were switched--a notion explored earlier this week when the New York Times' Gail Collins and David Brooks lobbied for more "househusbands"--women might be paid more, but more likely, men would demand and earn equal pay, and be guaranteed flex-time and alternative work solutions. In a better world, both sexes would be both caregivers and breadwinners, impartially regarded by employers, and receive the same pay, promotions, and benefits to care for their families. We all need a new ladder. -Jean

Sexy spam

2010-02-23T10:33:00.000-07:00

A quick aside: I just received a spam email entitled "stimulate your nether attacker" for a male-enhancement product that will "be know to all the girls around" (sic). Take note boys. There's nothing sexier than the thought of having my nether attacked by your "ehnancing" member (sic). Rape reference anyone? Sheesh. -Naomi

Feminism: relevant and local

2010-02-23T07:25:00.000-07:00

In a sharp, statistically packed op-ed in this weekend's Washington Post, Jessica Valenti of Feministing wrote a persuasive call to action. "Most people seem to think that outside of a few lingering battles, the work of the women's movement is done," she writes. The work is far from done, and among the salient facts to prove it are:

More than 1 million women in the U.S. were raped in 2008.
One third of all women murdered in the U.S. are murdered by their husband or boyfriend.
Women serving in the military in Iraq are more likely to be raped by a fellow-soldier than they are to be killed by enemy fire.
85% of U.S. counties have no abortion providers.
Women earn 76 cents to the dollar earned by men.

Valenti addresses the needs of women internationally, but points out that "this isn't a zero-sum game, and we can fight for our rights while fighting for women internationally as well... There is so much more work to be done. The truth is, most women don't have the privilege of being able to look at gender justice from a distance; they have no choice but to live it every day." -Sara

Women and sexism at CPAC: summing up today's news

2010-02-22T20:53:00.001-07:00

On the heels of CPAC (the Conservative Political Action Conference, held in Washington, DC last week) there is forward-looking momentum among young leaders of conservatism. Among the many troubling visions to emerge from CPAC is one to quash feminism. As CBS reported, one first year college woman said that "the female movement has gone on towards feminism and liberalism and really taken the wrong track." Although she wasn't present, Sarah Palin was admired as a leader, and Sarah Huckabee, Mike Huckabee's wife, addressed conference attendees: "Asked if she had experienced sexism in politics, Sarah Huckabee told the audience said she hadn't encountered much hardship working as a political operative out of the public eye, quipping that 'women can do a lot more than any man…We're naturally born multi-taskers.'" To celebrate one's own achievements is laudable, but to presume that socially constructed gender roles are fixed and to conclude that womanly skills are a fair trade-off for oppression runs full circle back to propagating sexism.

Besides the high-level anti-feminist messaging, there was a more insidious sexism lurking. The Daily Caller made a movie featuring some of the young women at CPAC, which, as Salon wrote, was designed to "illuminate The Caller's opinion on their reason for being there: Boys, boys, boys! Also: Looking cute."

In a snarky post about the video, Pandagon wrote, "Attention young losers! Are you sick of hot women running away from you because they see that copy of Atlas Shrugged under your arm and that anti-choice sticker on your backpack? Have you decided all of femalekind is just too simple-minded to understand your incredible intellect, your John Galt-ish superiority? Do you blame your lack of a sex life on the feminists, who have poisoned women into thinking they can just date who they like, and that they deserve men who do emasculating things like listening and respecting their intelligence?...Then come to CPAC, where we round up all sorts of hot ladies pre-screened to make sure they share most of your views!"

Also among the glaringly gendered CPAC festivities: bashing a Nancy Pelosi piñata (for the ladies) and smacking a Harry Reid punching bag (for the gents), according to Think Progress. -TLF

Once a year. Period.

2010-02-22T20:16:00.005-07:00

Without Sarah Haskins to provide us with biting, hilarious commentary on products marketed toward women, we'll just have to go with Sarah Haskins' recommendations. Which I'm doing today because I just saw Sarah speak in Manhattan! Her tip for birth control satire:

-Naomi