"I love feministing.com and always learn from it." Katha Pollitt, The Nation
"Many people need a morning "fix." For some, it's coffee. For others, it's "SportsCenter." For me, it's Feministing.com." Katie Stone, The Denver Post
"Feminism is fun again! Every bit as edifying as your women's studies books from college, but with a biting sense of humor that keeps things punchy, not preachy." Marie Claire, December 2006
Goddamn, this woman likes vaginas! BadMimi, recently featured in The Chicago Tribune, has a whole website devoted to vagina-love.
While the commandment-style genital adoration is a bit much ("Thou shalt love your Vagina deeply and with reverence"), the products are pretty bad-ass.
So if you have a hankering to own a pussy pen or vagina candle, now you know where to go.
Personally I’m a big fan of the belt buckle (too tacky not to love) and this shirt. Cause really, who doesn’t heart vagina?
In August, the bureau removed questions about working women from its monthly survey of payroll and employment data. A brilliant move. If the government doesn't collect data about women's earnings, we can't compare them to men's. That makes it all too easy for conservatives to say "What wage gap?" Without the numbers, it's pretty difficult for us to make the case that an earnings gap exists, let alone talk about ways to remedy it. So here's hoping the amendment makes it out of conference.
In addition to his indefensible opinion in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, Scalito's record is chock-full of information that should make every woman in America shudder. Happy Halloween:
Gender Discrimination
Alito has ruled in favor of a plaintiff in a sex discrimination case only once. In most instances, Alito issued opinions that made it far more difficult for victims of discrimination to get to court and prove their cases. In one sexual harassment case, Robinson v. City of Pittsburgh, a police officer filed a complaint that her supervisor was "unhooking her bra, snapping her bra strap, touching her hair and ears, telling her ‘you stink pretty,’ making comments about the size of her breasts..." The police chief took no action, and Robinson sued. Alito ruled that there was insufficient evidence that the chief knew of the harassment, even though Robinson had filed a report. (Alito issued similar opinions in Sheridan v. DuPont and Watson v. SEPTA.) Alito also struck down the anti-harassment policy of the State College Area School District in Saxe v. State College Area Sch. Dist. He wrote that "There is no categorical 'harassment exception' to the First Amendment's free speech clause." In other words, "harassment is protected speech!"
Family Leave
In 2000, Alito struck down portions of the Family and Medical Leave Act that would have allowed state employees to sue their states for failure to provide them with time off to care for family members. Alito wrote that a state's refusal to provide family leave has no greater impact on women than on men. (Chittester v. Dept. of Cmty. and Econ. Dev.) When the Supreme Court addressed the issue in 2003, it took the opposite position: that the FMLA does remedy historic discrimination against women, and state employees should be allowed to sue their employers for failure to comply.
Violence Against Women
Alito ruled that female public-schoool students who were physically and sexually abused by fellow students in class could not sue the state, because the state has no special duty in caring for them. (D.R. v. Middle Bucks Area Vocational Tech. School) Alito also participated in a panel holding that the Violence Against Women Act allows a court to order HIV/AIDS testing of a sexual assault defendant. (United States v. Ward)
Alito took pains to distant himself from the longstanding constitutional requirement that abortion restrictions must have exceptions when a woman's health is in jeopardy. He did so when ruling on a law that effectively banned abortion as early as the 12th week of pregnancy and lacked an exception to protect women’s health. The health exception is a fundamental tenet of Roe v. Wade, and the Supreme Court is scheduled to hear arguments about the need for the health exception this fall. Should Alito’s vote replace that of Sandra Day O’Connor, a fundamental right will likely be lost by next summer.
Alito has argued that significant restrictions on a woman's right to choose are constitutional. In Planned Parenthood of Southeastern Pennsylvania v. Casey, Alito argued that all of the proposed law’s restrictions on a woman's right to choose – including a spousal notification provision struck down by the Third Circuit and, later, the Supreme Court – were constitutional. Alito dissented in part because he would have gone even further than the rest of the court.
Alito would uphold state laws that place significant roadblocks in the way of women seeking abortion care. Alito concurred with the majority’s opinion in Casey that concluded that “time delay, higher cost, reduced availability, and forcing the woman to receive information she has not sought,” although admittedly “potential burdens,” could not “be characterized as an undue burden.” This opinion practically ensures that he would never find any burden to be undue.
Now, I didn’t like Maureen Dowd’s NY Times Magazine article for a number of reasons: Dowd’s assumption (once again) that feminism ended in back in the day, the reliance on dubiousstudies, and--as Amanda points out--Dowd’s seeming penchant to blame everyone and everything but patriarchal norms.
But what really struck me about What's a Modern Girl to Do? is the extent of Dowd’s elitism. Determining a social trend based completely on the lives of the upper class isn’t exactly new, but I expected a bit more from an article on feminism. (Silly me.)
(Not to mention, Dowd’s insistence on measuring feminism’s success based on men and how women are faring in the romance department completely nullifies any truth there might be in the article. As I’ve said before, feminism isn’t a fucking dating service.)
Dowd’s reporting on the backlash against feminism and the “confusion between the sexes” relies almost exclusively on women within her social circles. Seriously--the people Dowd cites to make her case seem to be a bunch of her friends and acquaintances. (Mostly reporters, producers and a couple of actors.)
Other sources Dowd uses are just as class-based: the debunked New York Times piece on young women at Yale, a "60 Minutes" report that interviews women who went to Harvard Business School, and Sylvia Ann Hewlett’s book that focuses on women who are corporate executives.
Really, is Dowd so egotistical to think that only certain “successful” women determine current gender relations? Perhaps if she expanded her circle of friends--or actually tried to interview the lowly secretaries, assistants, and nannies who are supposedly stealing up all of the men--Dowd would see that the future of feminism goes beyond her backyard.
UPDATE:Echidne's excellent take on the article.
I’m not feeling particularly festive this year, so I thought I’d throw up a couple of pictures to cheer myself up. The one above is of my favorite costume from a party I had last year. (When there was still hope.)
Anyone dressing up feminist-styles this year? I know Samhita had Wonder Woman plans...now if I could just convince her to post a picture...
President Bush today named appeals court Judge Samuel A. Alito Jr. to the U.S. Supreme Court. Alito, 55, serves on the Philadelphia-based U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, where his record on abortion rights and church-state issues has been widely applauded by conservatives and criticized by liberals.
Alito, appointed to the appeals court in 1990 by President George H.W. Bush, has been a regular for years on the White House's short list for the high court. He was also among those proposed by conservative intellectuals as an alternative to Harriet Miers, the White House counsel who withdrew as the nominee last week.
This is a good little piece discussing the death of Rosa Parks and how we should not just remember her own work (which was incredible) but remember the role of women and girls throughout the civil rights movement. Sister Rosa was one of the few that became fixed in history. But let us not forget the resistences of other women that worked towards making this country somewhat tolerable, but not written about in the history books.
Japan asked to give reparations to victims of wartime sexual slavery system.
This is so intense.
Amnesty International is renewing its call on the Japanese government to accept full responsibility for wartime crimes against women forced into sexual slavery by the Imperial Japanese Army.
"Japan should immediately implement effective administrative mechanisms to provide full reparations to all survivors and remove legal barriers toward bringing claims before Japanese courts by reforming national laws," Purna Sen, director of the London-based human rights watchdog's Asia-Pacific Program, said Friday.
He made the remarks at a press conference in Bangkok to launch a report titled "Still Waiting After 60 years: Justice for Survivors of Japan's Military Sexual Slavery System."
Amnesty estimates that up to 200,000 women from China, the Korean Peninsula, the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, Vietnam and the Netherlands were sexually enslaved by the Japanese military before and during World War II. Many were less than 20 years old, and some were as young as 12.
The Amnesty report says the government denied responsibility for the "comfort women" system until direct evidence was discovered by professor Yoshimi Yoshiaki in 1992. In 1993, it admitted the military had forced Asian women to serve as sex slaves and offered an apology.
But it has consistently refused to pay direct compensation to individual victims, saying all war claims were officially settled by postwar treaties.
Don't tell me not to be suprised. No matter how many times we report crazy stats like this, I am suprised, shocked and deeply disturbed.
Sexual violence is increasingly prevalent in Kenya and police statistics show that more than 2,800 cases of rape were reported in 2004 - an increase of close to 500 compared to the previous year.
Domestic violence is also a serious problem in the East African nation. A demographic health survey carried out by the Ministry of Planning in 2003 revealed that at least half of all Kenyan women had experienced violence since the age of 15, with close family members among the perpetrators.
And these are only instances that are reported.
Women who have been sexually or domestically abused are often too scared by the stigma attached to the crime to tell their families, let alone report their attacks to the relevant authorities.
"Stigma is such a big issue in many cultures. Women and girls blame themselves and fear that they will be ostracised from society if they admit to being raped, and they often are outcasts if they do so," Njogu said.
There has been some work towards helping this situation. In the spring the government passed the Sexual Offences Bill that will seek to reform existing laws. They have also opened a battered women's shelter in Nairobi.
According to this study, teenage pregnancy has gone done by 50% in the the last 25 years, but women in their 20's seem to be giving birth out of wedlock more frequently. Perhaps the oppressive nature of being in wedlock for many women is losing its appeal.
A record number of babies — nearly 1.5 million — were born to unmarried women in the U.S. last year. And those moms were more likely to be 20-somethings than teenagers, according to new federal data released Friday.
The data show that 35.7% of all births were to unmarried women. Births last year to both married and unwed mothers totalled more than 4 million.
By age group, almost 55% of the births for mothers ages 20-24 were to unmarried women. For those between 25-29, almost 28% of the births were to single women.
Teenagers, who accounted for 50% of unwed births in 1970, accounted for 24% of unwed births in 2004.
One researcher found this to be a troubling trend because many of these women have low income status. This is a really complicated issue, because financial obstacles to single parenting are real. But, I also think many women are realizing that the dream of happy white picket fence does not exist except for a select few groups of people, so it is not worth waiting for it.
This last year three of my closest friends had babies and none of them were married, all in their mid-20's and none of them rich, and they are totally happy raising the child on its own.
Oooh, this good! Bloggers such as Liu Man Yin aka Lost Sparrow, are breaking and shaking cultural taboos about talking sex in the public sphere with their openly so so sexual blogs.
Liu's outspoken posts about sex include a "bedside encyclopedia" of love-making noises, broken down by the type of response it can elicit from your lover, and by geographical regions in China -- that is, how pillow-talk may sound in regional dialect or slang. She talks openly about masturbation ("I have no worldly possession, except for two vibrators") and muses about why men are afraid to say "I love you."
Am loving it!
Liu is the latest of a string of Chinese women bloggers who have become famous, some even worldwide. They talk about sex and relationships openly, changing the dialogue between the sexes. In a culture where sexual attitudes are still repressive, the racy details shared by the women bloggers are thrusting them into the spotlight, despite China's most recent crackdown on the Internet news media.
Women talking freely about sex is still taboo in most places, not just in China, and quite frankly sex talk is still for the most part dominated by patriarchal norms (read by and for dude-bros) and hetero-normative (read straight sex only!). Blogs have created quite a bit of space for women to talk amongst women (and others) about sexuality. Despite this, quite a bit of animosity exists within many of these discussions towards women's open and honest discussions on sex. (All of us repeatedly comment spammed feminist bloggers know this very very well!)
Anyway, this is rad. My favorite line...
"Nowadays, if you're on a date with a Chinese man, the first thing that comes out of his mouth would be, 'You're not going to blog about me, are you?'" she says.
It looks like Jean Van de Velde, who lost the British Open in 1999, is apparently upset about the decision by the Royal and Ancient Golf Club (R &A) to allow women to qualify for the Open. In retaliation to this preposterous idea that women should be allowed to play with men, he’s applying to play in the Women’s Open next year,reports Reuters.
Van de Velde's feelings are that the R & A should be attending “more important matters,” and questions why women would even want to enter a competition they would have no chance of winning. “Where do we draw the line?” he asks.
“If they allow me to, I’ll definitely go and play, just to make a point. I would be very happy to use the ladies locker room.” He also jokingly said he would shave his legs and wear a kilt if it meant him being able to enter the competition. You have got to be fucking kidding me.
Former Ryder Cup player Barry Lane is applauding Van de Velde, saying that “If 100 men decided to take the same stance and they all qualified off the ladies’ tees, they could take most of the Women’s British Open’s spots.”
A bit cocky, are we? So if that’s true, why are they so up in arms about women entering the tournament? After all, they’re going to lose anyway, right?
Sounds like our Frenchman is the sore loser to me. I could go on, but I don’t trust myself with this potty mouth of mine.
Check out the Younger Women’s Task Force’s (YWTF) new website, which was recently launched in their efforts to organize and advance the rights of younger women. Sounds like our kind of ladies!
A while back, Jessica posted onher and Lauryn’s visit to one of their meetings in D.C. Since then, this project of the National Council of Women’s Organizations (NCWO) has expanded significantly, for one by starting chapters across the nation.
If you’re interested in joining, take a look and see if a chapter is in your area.
Wendy Wright of our favorite anti-feminist group, Concerned Women of America (CWA), recently stated that there is a link between the higher rate in incarcerated women and the feminist agenda; in other words, we caused the shit.
While we’ve known that the number of women in prison has been increasing for quite some time, Wright claims that we’re leading American women away from the family and into lives o’ crime. After all, what else would we do with ourselves without men and babies?
She says that feminist ideology’s “radical individualism” tells women they shouldn’t be dependent on others, leading them to illegal activities “where they're forced to fend for themselves." I thought that was pretty funny considering the fact we’ve posted before on how Marc Mauer from The Sentencing Projectblames this increase of incarceration on dependence itself:
“it coincides exactly with the inception of the war on drugs…It represents a sort of vicious cycle of women engaged in drug abuse and often connected with financial or psychological dependence with a boyfriend.”
This is just one pic of many from this forward that someone had the audacity to send me this week.
Check out the rest of the pics below, the last one is my favorite. While I usually ignore forwards such as these, I couldn’t help gritting my teeth when it said at the bottom, “Make another women’s day, and share the smiles.” I just had to share.
I know nothing makes me happier than making fun of how incompetent and shallow us ladies are. Good times!
