May

31

The Effects of the War on Iraqi Women

Filed Under International, WOC issues, activism, human rights, sexual exploitation and harassment | Leave a Comment

The NY Times ran an article the other day about how female Iraqi refugees are increasingly turning to sex work in Syria. As if women affected by war don’t already have enough to worry about (their husbands being killed and leaving them with no means of support, the threat of rape, the threat to their children . . .)

Many of these women and girls, including some barely in their teens, are recent refugees. Some are tricked or forced into prostitution, but most say they have no other means of supporting their families. As a group they represent one of the most visible symptoms of an Iraqi refugee crisis that has exploded in Syria in recent months.

According to the United Nations high commissioner for refugees, about 1.2 million Iraqi refugees now live in Syria; the Syrian government puts the figure even higher.

Given the deteriorating economic situation of those refugees, a United Nations report found last year, many girls and women in “severe need” turn to prostitution, in secret or even with the knowledge or involvement of family members. In many cases, the report added, “the head of the family brings clients to the house.”

Of course, any fool could have seen this coming. It is a fact of war that many people are going to be left without income and will go to extreme lengths to stay alive, just like any of us would.

Some of these women and girls are being coerced to work in strip clubs or are sold into sexual slavery. Some are just trying to eat. But none of them are making a “choice.”

Earlier in the month, AlterNet also had up a report (which was also published in Ms. Magazine) about the effects of war on Iraqi women. Women are under far more scrutiny and gendered human rights violations– similar to what the Taliban did in Iraq– than they were under Saddam’s regime. The article sites many examples, but I personally have to look no farther than the public murder of an Iraqi woman, as Iraqi police officers watched, that took place earlier this month.

The article lists three of the very few organizations that are working to help women in Iraq, and I would like to link them here. There is the Global Fund For Women, MADRE and particularly Women For Women International, which will allow you to sponsor a woman affected by war for $27 a month. Please, check them out.

Popularity: 6% [?]

May

31

On White Privilege

Filed Under WOC issues, bigotry, discrimination, race and racism | 12 Comments

I imagine that this may be difficult for some people to read.

There are two posts over at Feministing in the last 24 hours that have really affected me. The first was by Samhita about white cultural appropriation. The post is in no way perfect. I don’t necessarily agree with everything in it. But I think that there is definitely a valid theory behind it. And the comments to that thread were absolutely appalling. So appalling, in fact, that Jen felt the need to write a post called “you don’t have to think you’re a racist to say racist things.”.

I recommend reading them both, comments included. Usually, I advocate removing racist comments. But the fact that there was such a large group of people making these arguments and doing so with such passion, I think, not only justifies leaving them up, but requires it. If we don’t get to see what people really feel, if we block out racism as something isolated, we’re never going to get anywhere.

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Popularity: 8% [?]

May

30

Our Supreme Court is Bullshit

Filed Under courts gone crazy, discrimination, legislation, patriarchy, sexism, work | 15 Comments

That’s right, I said it. Our Supreme Court is officially, without a doubt, bullshit. It wasn’t enough for them to tell women (despite having no medical training) that abortion is bad for them, but now they’ve decided that if you don’t file your discrimination suit fast enough, it’s tough cookies, honey.

The decision came in a case involving a supervisor at a Goodyear Tire plant in Gadsden, Ala., the only woman among 16 men at the same management level, who was paid less than any of her colleagues, including those with less seniority. She learned that fact late in a career of nearly 20 years — too late, according to the Supreme Court’s majority.

The court held on Tuesday that employees may not bring suit under the principal federal anti-discrimination law unless they have filed a formal complaint with a federal agency within 180 days after their pay was set. The timeline applies, according to the decision, even if the effects of the initial discriminatory act were not immediately apparent to the worker and even if they continue to the present day.

Okay, ladies. Just to be safe, from now on it’s imperative that you ask your male coworkers every 30 days how much they make. If they won’t tell you, or this seems rude, you better find a way to start stealing their pay stubs. Otherwise, it’s Your Fault. Not the fault of the assholes who have illegally cheated you for your entire career– it’s Your Fault.

Thanks Alito, Scalia, Roberts, Kennedy and Thomas! You boys never fail to make the Right decision.

Popularity: 5% [?]

May

30

The Beauty Myth

Filed Under books, feminism, reviews | 12 Comments

I finished Naomi Wolf’s landmark book The Beauty Myth several days ago and have been thinking about what to write ever since. I’ve decided to do a personal reflection about what I’ve learned instead of an official review.

It’s a great book. — A dense book, but a great book. There is a lot of theory here, and at times it can be difficult to wade through. I recommend putting in the effort though, because it’s rewarding. Some of the specifics are now outdated, but most of the basic ideas still ring true.

As I was reading it, I felt as if I was learning things that I always new but never consciously realized. It just made so much sense. Of course, I’ve long known that femininity is a cultural construction– that high heels, makeup and removing body hair are arbitrary. Somehow, though, as silly as it seems, I never consciously applied that same concept to beauty itself, to weight, or to the aging process.

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Popularity: 13% [?]

May

30

The Importance of Abortion Doctors

Filed Under abortion, reproductive justice, women’s health | 1 Comment

I received this profile of aspiring abortion doctors a week ago, and haven’t had time to write about it until now. It’s a really great piece, filled with a lot of sad facts about how few doctors are going into the profession, how few medical schools train students to perform abortions and how difficult it is for some women to get access to abortion providers. It also discusses what drives these young doctors to go into such an embattled profession.

Listening to news of the Supreme Court’s ruling, third-year medical student Lysie Cirona, 24, found herself shouting at her radio in frustration. Then she took a hard look at her career plans. She had always been interested in psychiatry, but now she envisioned herself flying to North Dakota or Nebraska a few times a month to perform abortions. “It wasn’t on my radar screen” a year ago, Cirona said, but her priorities have changed as she’s learned more about the history and current state of abortion rights. Cirona has taken to badgering her professors to include information about abortion in their lectures. She attended workshops on how to respond effectively to anti-abortion protesters.

Some days, she still wants to be a psychiatrist. Other days, she thinks of the women who drive 10 hours to reach the nearest abortion clinic. “This is what I’m going to do,” she tells herself.

. . .

Lederer does not know how she will handle such emotion; the closest she’s come to performing an abortion was suctioning the seeds out of a papaya to learn a first-trimester technique. She may, in the end, restrict her practice to early abortions. But that’s not an easy solution to accept. She can’t see how she could ever justify taking one woman as a patient while turning away another because her pregnancy is a few weeks more advanced.

She also knows that the few doctors who perform late second- and third-trimester abortions are mostly in their 60s or 70s. “Who’s going to do this when they leave? Someone has to,” Lederer said. “I feel in my heart of hearts that it’s the right thing to do.”

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Popularity: 6% [?]

May

29

How Abortion Politics Isolate Abortion Patients

Filed Under abortion, anti-choice extremism, reproductive justice, slut-shaming, social conservatives, women’s health | Leave a Comment

There is a piece up at AlterNet by Carole Joffe and Kate Cosby, who are in the middle of conducting an interview study trying to determine the impact of state-sponsored abortion regulations on abortion patients. What they are uncovering, though they have only interviewed a handful of women so far, is astonishing and tragic. They are finding that patients isolate themselves from other women in their situations, taking pains to point out that they are not like those “other” women who have abortions, who are “irresponsible.” According to them, they really, really need their abortions, while the other women don’t. It seems that the anti-choice movement, along with their anti-choice legislation, have succeeded in portraying women who seek abortions as Bad Women and “baby killers,” and the women who get abortions actually believe it and don’t want it to be true of themselves.

The situation we describe is very different from the one that existed in the United States in the 1970s, around the time of legalization of abortion. Then, many women seeking abortions felt part of a larger movement. “Second wave” feminism was flourishing and women’s health issues were a central focus of the movement. People still had fresh memories of when abortion was illegal, and thousands of women died and many more were injured from unsafe abortions. Rather than being ashamed, many abortion patients of the pre-Roe v. Wade era recall feeling entitled to having this once dangerous procedure done in a professional and women-centered setting.

The new occupation of “abortion counselor” was established in this period — someone who explained the procedure to the patient and accompanied her throughout her stay at the clinic. Feminist health activists pressured the newly established clinics to keep prices low and to make sure doctors were sufficiently respectful to their patients. In short, for many patients in the early years of legal abortion, the experience was both “personal and political,” in that there were constant reminders that this medical procedure was tied to a larger movement. In contrast, in many of today’s clinics, the staff is so busy complying with state-imposed “informed consent” requirements, which often involve telling patients downright lies — for example, the supposed link between abortion and breast cancer and other distortions of risks of the procedure — that there is rarely the opportunity to impart a positive political message about reproductive justice.

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Popularity: 5% [?]

May

29

Military Veterans and Rape

Filed Under Asia, International, misogyny, patriarchy, rape and sexual assault, sexism, violence against women and girls | 2 Comments

In my twisted mind, this seemed appropriate for Memorial Day:

AlterNet has a great piece up about new recent finding that 29% of incarcerated veterans are in on rape or sexual assault charges, which means that they are twice as likely to be incarcerated for that reason than non veterans. Why? Here’s one insightful answer:

Sexual violence has been a de facto weapon of war since the beginning of the patriarchal age. Raping and assaulting women is seen as a way to attack the honor of the enemy, and women have always been the spoils of war. The result is that many types of violence against women are exacerbated by militarism, including the indirect effects on civilian populations both during hostilities and after the conflict ends and soldiers go home.

. . .

Examples are not hard to find. Before and during WWII, the Japanese enslaved as many as 200,000 “comfort” women, and after the defeat of the Japanese, the United States continued to use tens of thousands of Japanese women as sex slaves. During the 1990s more than 5,000 women were trafficked into South Korea primarily to work as “entertainers” near U.S. military bases. Hundreds of thousands of women have been raped, frequently for the purpose of ethnic cleansing in countries such as Bosnia, Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Amen. Read the whole piece. It’s short, but spot-on. I will be up-front and say that I have a lot of problems with the military, but I definitely believe that teaching people to kill will devalue humanity. If those that we teach to kill are predominantly male, if they grow up in a patriarchal culture where they are taught that women are not worth much anyway, if the people who are teaching them to kill purposely exclude women and create an environment that encourages pornography and prostitution, women are going to be at the top of the list of the devalued.

Notice that rape cultures seem to exist mostly in strongly in all-male, patriarchal, hyper-masculine organizations. Fraternities. Sports teams. And yes, the military. Get a bunch of men together, teach them about how important masculinity is and that they are meant to devalue anything feminine and be aggressive? You’ve got yourself a recipe for rape.

Popularity: 7% [?]

May

28

Blog For . . .

Filed Under blog news, blogswarm | 4 Comments

So I found out about two different blogswarms, today, that I plan on participating in.

Blogging for LGBT families day is on June 1st. Last year, which was also their first year, they had about 130 posts. Let’s see if we can get them more this year! They are also apparently encouraging bloggers who do not normally blog about LGBT issues to participate, so if that’s you, please consider it.

Blogging for Sex Education day is seemingly in its first year and being run by Renegade Evolution, who blogs about the sex industry. It’s taking place on June 4th. We all know how important sex education is, so let’s give it some of the attention it deserves!

Popularity: 8% [?]

May

28

What We’re Ignoring in the Lybrel Debate

Filed Under WOC issues, feminism, media, products, race and racism, reproductive justice, women’s health | 3 Comments

So here’s another article on the debate over the period-suppression pill Lybrel (written by a man, fyi). They seem to be everywhere, lately– every blog, every newspaper. [I'm not adding links both because they're ubiquitous and because few of them say anything original.] Let’s take a look:

For women with severe physical symptoms—cramps, migraines, nausea—banishing periods is a no-brainer. But for many others, menstrual discomfort is more psychological. At a conference four years ago, researchers presented evidence that women’s interest in menstrual suppression correlated more strongly with their attitudes toward menstruation than with their symptoms. Last year, when Lybrel’s manufacturer, Wyeth, asked women what bothered them most about their periods, most picked pain or inconvenience. But one in four cited mood swings, weight gain, overeating, clothing anxiety, or feeling dirty.

The danger, from a standpoint of emancipation, is that some of these women won’t shut off the bleeding to satisfy themselves. They’ll do it to satisfy others. On menstrual-suppression Web sites, you can find testimonies from women who hate their periods for making them too moody for their boyfriends or too tired to go to the office. Their menses are getting in the way of their men. Even a gender-studies major, effusing over Lybrel, told ABC News, “Maybe men would respect women more if they didn’t have periods.”

I’ll tell you what: I’m sick of having this conversation.

I know that many will disagree with me, but I personally see it as a no-brainer. Women have been suppressing their periods for a long time by skipping the blank pills in their normal pack. They have done so with no ill effects. Furthermore, the period you get when you take your dummy pills is not really a period. It never has been, and it never will be. And I don’t buy into the “unnatural” argument, either– because birth control pills are not natural, “period” or no.

But here’s what’s pissing me off: white, middle-class feminists are sitting around debating this issue over a pill that will likely be monstrously expensive, that only they will be able to afford, while low-income women, affecting largely women of color cannot afford birth control pills at all. These women tend to not have insurance and very little money to spare, making buying pills from a pharmacy impossible. They also have little medical care, and often few opportunities due to work and parenting obligations to get to a free or low-cost clinic (like Planned Parenthood) on a regular basis to obtain birth control pills. These are issues that, if we put our minds to it, we might actually be able to solve, rather than sit around and have theoretical arguments. It has recently struck me in having this conversation how obscene the class and racial disparities in this country are. It has also struck me why women of color feminists are often so resentful of white feminists and why they feel so excluded from our conversations.

I say this as someone who has participated in these conversations. In criticizing the feminists and media around me, I am also criticizing myself. I also don’t mean to suggest that white women’s issues should be ignored (and I certainly don’t see any danger of that in the feminist communities). I even agree that many women are taking these pills for the “wrong” reasons and that many women do in fact hate their periods. And finally, I’m not suggesting that in caring about one issue, you can’t care equally about another.

But this is what I’m seeing. When this type of issue arises, message boards and blog posts get swamped. When women of color issues come up. the comments only trickle in. I definitely do think that there is a blatant bias. And what I’m saying is that we really need to work on stepping back and taking a good, hard look at ourselves, the issues that matter to us, why they matter to us and what we are ignoring in their favor.

Popularity: 6% [?]

May

27

On Stopping Rape

Filed Under activism, feminism, human rights, misogyny, rape and sexual assault, violence against women and girls | 6 Comments

These recent rape cases I’ve been blogging about have been weighing down on my mind. I’ve been thinking a lot (slightly obsessively) about what they mean and where we go from here. Here are some of my jumbled thoughts:

If these cases have made anything clear to me it’s that rape does not seem to be illegal in this country, anymore. I’m not the first to say it and I’m certainly not the last. It seems to be a growing sentiment.

That is how we know that we’ve got a serious problem on our hands, that we need to stop bitching and find a way to start acting.

It is perfectly clear to me that a large portion of our society does not understand what rape is. “NO MEANS NO” was meant to help correct this. I think that “no means no” did a lot of good, but it has also been used as an excuse. I’m tired of the women who created this campaign being criticized as giving an excuse to rapists to say about their petrified, passed out or drunk victims “well, she didn’t say no” when she didn’t say yes, either. That is not the fault of this campaign. That’s the fault of our patriarchal rape culture that looks for any and all excuses to rape with impunity.

That being said, we clearly need a new model, and it needs to be much more complex. Slogans can only take you so far, and that’s not nearly as far as real understanding of an issue can. The problem has several aspects: women not being valued in our culture, sex being seen as a right of men regardless of consent, women being taught that rape is their fault, men being taught that rape is women’s fault, a vast lack of understanding of affirmative consent, an inability to respect the human right of bodily autonomy, the unwillingness of the legal system to prosecute rapists, the believe that women who say they are raped are Lying Whores.

A new approach has to include all of these aspects.

The question is, where do we start? Schools seem like a good place, but what about the older generation? We can’t just let them keep raping with impunity, and they are also teaching the younger generation what to think and how to act. I believe that we need a full-scale campaign: public service announcements, billboards, the whole works. If Isaiah Washington can work with GLAAD to create public service announcements on why gay and racial slurs are unacceptable, why can’t we have public service announcements about affirmative consent?

What’s the first course of action to take? Do we work for a national campaign, lobby NOW and domestic violence and sexual assault prevention groups to join together? Or do we start with grassroots work? I think that this is something we need to discuss. So: what are your thoughts?

Popularity: 6% [?]

May

26

Sweden Starts Hating Women a Little Less

Filed Under Europe, International, beauty myths, feminism, media, misogyny, sexism, sexual exploitation and harassment | 8 Comments

Sweden has dropped out of the Miss Universe competition.

This year’s Miss Universe pageant is missing one of its most noted contestants: Miss Sweden, a statuesque blonde whose country is one of the few to win the crown three times.

Isabel Lestapier Winqvist, 20, has dropped out because Swedes say the Miss Universe competition, airing live Monday night from Mexico City’s National Auditorium, is degrading to women and weighed down by scandals.

“We’re taking a big beating by being linked to it,” said Panos Papadopoulos, the organizer of the Miss Sweden contest, which scrapped its swimsuit competition and allowed women to apply for the position like any other job after heavy criticism from feminists.

Of course, there still is a Miss Sweden competition, which there obviously shouldn’t be. It constantly shocks and amazes me that we still have beauty pageants (but it doesn’t shock or amaze me that they’re run by Donald Trump). I’m not sure: is making pageants less degrading a step towards eradicating them, or a step towards normalizing them so that they’ll never go away? There has been so much publicity of beauty pageants via reality television, lately. And while those portrayals make pageants look like what they are– insane and highly objectifying– I think that they’re also bringing them back into the culture much more than they have been in recent years.

Also, I highly doubt that feminists actually lobbied to change the rules of Miss Sweden rather than just do away with it. I imagine that that was just the Miss Sweden competition organizer’s answer to the criticism, since they obviously aren’t going to do away with themselves.

In any case, you know what I won’t be watching on Monday night. [Hint: it involves thin, busty women prancing around on stage and begging to be judged.]

Popularity: 7% [?]

May

26

Check Me Out

Filed Under blog news, self-promotion | 1 Comment

Today, I have a guest blog post up over at FamilyPride.org. They are a site which promotes the rights of non-traditional families, particularly those that include GLBTQ parents. The post is about the overlap of the gay rights and feminist movements. Do me a favor and take a look. To make things extra exciting, you’ll even get to see what I look like! (I’m sure you’ve been dying without the knowledge).

Popularity: 6% [?]

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