"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
ABC News fuels the "Mommy Wars." Meanwhile, more firms are staying in touch with prized workers who took maternity leave.
Some Bach works may actually have been written by his second wife.
Women cleaners are suing the NY Stock Exchange for sexual harassment. The $51-million lawsuit alleges one woman was told, "Baby, you need some beef on that ass and then you would be perfect for me."
A group of gay gun enthusiasts call themselves the Pink Pistols. Their motto? "Armed gays don't get bashed." (Has it come to this?)
Kenya considers passing its version of a Violence Against Women Act. It took female legislators to make this happen.
A sex worker (who's also a blogger and author) may be changing Brazilian attitudes toward sex.
Rick Santorum holds a forum for professional women, and manages not to mention he thinks they all should be stay-at-home moms.
After a judge denied a Department of Justice motion to reduce charges against three of four US marines accused of raping a 22-year-old Filipina in November, the four accused refused to file a plea during their arraignment.
Prohibitively high prices for sanitary towels are forcing thousands of women in Zimbabwe to use old newspapers, rags, tissue paper or even leaves during menstruation. Vaginal infections have increased as a result.
Chastity jewelry makes the perfect present for Daddy's Lil' Virgin. Shudder.
The Duke rape case is being tried in the court of public opinion.
Headlines read:“Duke Lacrosse Stripper Cried Rape Before!” and “Duke Lacrosse Gang Rape Accuser Made Similar Claim in ‘96.” Shocker.
News has come out that the woman who alleges that three Duke students raped her filed a report ten years ago that she was raped by three men. Which clearly means she's lying. You know, because women can't get raped more than once.
The report was made ten years ago, the case was totally different from this one, and the woman said she didn’t press charges because she was in fear for her life--yet the defense will naturally use this as a way to discredit her accusation. (Rape shield laws may prohibit the information from being given to the jury.)
While we’re some years away from actually have male contraception on the market, it’s exciting to see some coming to reassuring conclusions concerning its testing.
Over 1,500 men have taken part in tests for male hormonal contraception, and on average, it took only about 3-4 months for men to gain their fertility back.
Dr. Peter Liu from the Los Angeles Research Biomedical Institute has looked at 30 studies on male hormonal contraception, and came to the conclusion that the two forms that have been tested, an implant and an injection, are both safe and effective.
"Our data provide strong assurance that the previously described efficacy of hormonal male contraceptives is coupled with highly predictable recovery to sperm characteristics that are compatible with fertility.
These findings thereby increase the promise of new contraceptive drugs allowing men to share more fairly the satisfaction and burden of family planning."
I happened to see a billboard a few blocks away from house the other day and almost barfed. While I’ve listened to New York’s 92.3 KROCK’s music here and there, I was a bit shocked to see a huge picture of the woman above, The RadioChick, and the two sentences that threw me for a loop.
“Built like a woman. Thinks like a man.”
Ew.
I checked out her site and it doesn’t get much better. The first program description I read was about The Chick on Chicks, where she assures men that she’ll help them with their “women” issues, including:
“Want to cheat on your girl and not get caught? She’ll tell you how. Maybe your girlfriend is pressuring you to get married, and you’re not ready...the chick will tell you how to string her along successfully.”
Other shows include Gay for a Grand, The Wheel of Wife Beaters, and The Flaming Stripper BBQ. While I haven't been able to find specifics of the programs, I’m anticipating that they aren’t too tasteful.
Has anyone heard this chick (ha, that was totally accidental) on the air?
They’ve been kicking ass with this project, particularly with their “Safe is Sexy” ad, which is being featured on MTV. Click here to watch why power tools are a girl’s best friend. (I bet you were wondering what the pic above was about.)
On Monday, Lamba Legal filed suit with the California Supreme Court regarding a lower court decision that allowed doctors to refuse infertility treatment to a lesbian patient because of their religious beliefs.
The doctors have claimed that being fundamentalist christians allow them to not have to comply with California’s civil rights laws and refuse treatment to a lesbian, in this case, Guadalupe Lupita Benitez. Yet the case conflicts with a California Supreme Court decision in 2004 ruling that Catholic Charities, a social services agency, may not violate civil rights laws.
The lower court ruling has confused whether the Catholic Charities case applies here, which is pretty much the determining factor in the very request for review by the Supreme Court.
Lupita Benitez was clear with her feelings on the case:
“I trusted my doctors and then they humiliated my family and me by refusing to perform the insemination procedure after they’d been treating me and promising it to me for nearly a year. . . Doctors are supposed to treat their patients, not make religious judgments about them, and I don’t want anyone else to have to suffer the humiliating treatment by their doctors that I endured.”
I wonder if they knew she was a lesbian before or after the year that they gassed her into believing she was going to be inseminated? Either way, it looks like this “conscience clause” bullshit is evolving. The question is -- who will be the next victim?
But not Katie Couric. Columnist Valerie Takahama hypothesizes that Couric was picked not because she's an outstanding journalist, but precisely because she isn't. Or at least she isn't perceived that way. Apparently we Americans want to hear our news from a perky NewsMommy, not Tom Brokaw with lipstick and a wig.
Pamela Ezell, an assistant professor of English at Chapman University and a television producer, points to Couric's personal tragedy and the sense that she rose to the challenges of coping and recovery as central to her popularity.
"She's had the ability to weather that storm publicly. That gives us the sense, oh, we can trust her," Ezell says. "She seems very warm, and there's also this assurance that her kids came first."
Nevermind that she's interviewed world leaders like Kofi Annan, Tony Blair and Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah.
...most viewers also see Couric as Katie, the mother of two young girls, the widow of a man who died at a premature age from colon cancer, [...] and a tabloid favorite who's been spotted out and about with a TV producer, a pop jazz trumpeter and others.
But what if that's a good thing? Should we be happy that Couric doesn't have to downplay her role as a mother in order to get ahead in her career?
"With Barbara Walters, you didn't even know if she had children. ... When these guys [Brokaw, Jennings, et al.] were coming up, you didn't talk about your families," [Kate O'Brian, director of ABC News in Seattle] said. (Walters [...] has one daughter.)
It's problematic, though, when a woman's role as wife/mother becomes such a huge part of her professional life and public persona that she commands less respect as a journalist. It's not just Couric who's been criticized for "lacking gravitas." Her fellow NewsMommies Meredith Vieira and Elizabeth Vargas have taken similar hits.
Outgoing CBS anchor Bob Schieffer said it all when he described Couric as "a wonderful person and wonderful mother who will be nurturing of our correspondents."
Not so much a "wonderful journalist who will challenge and improve our correspondents."
I’m so upset right now, I can’t even deal with writing. Just read.
Two white teenagers severely beat and sodomized a 16-year-old Hispanic boy who they believed had tried to kiss a 12-year-old white girl at a party in Spring, Texas, authorities said.
The attackers forced the boy out of the house party, beat him and sodomized him with a metal pipe, shouting epithets "associated with being Hispanic," said Lt. John Martin with the Harris County Sheriff's Department.
And fucking assholes have the nerve to say that racism is an “ugly memory.”
“Separation (of the sexes) is a throwback to my grandmother's era. It's a big step backward in the fight for women's equality," said Rogeria Peixoto, head of a Brazilian women's group.
I know I’ve said this before, but whatever: while I understand the need for immediate safety concerns, putting the responsibility on women not to get harassed rather than on the men to stop harassing is really problematic.
“Here’s the unmentionable secret: Racism isn’t that big a deal any more. No sensible person supports it. Nobody of importance preaches it. It’s rapidly becoming an ugly memory.”
Because seriously, who knows more about the prevalence (or apparently absence) of racism that Mr. Snow? What an idiot.
Jacobsen is accused of encouraging her students to dismantle a display of 400 crosses that were set up by a campus anti-abortion group. The crosses were supposed to symbolize aborted fetuses.
The six students were charged with criminal mischief and theft by unlawful taking.
Originally there was some confusion as to if Jacobsen took part in the destruction or just urged her students to do so. Apparently though, the student newspaper published pics of her destroying the display. Again, let’s leave the property destruction and harassment tactics to the anti-choicers. I know shit is frustrating, but we’re better than that.
Intersectionality and the politics of white feminism.
Blac(k)ademic has a very articulate post up about a comment that she received when guest-blogging at Alas, A Blog and in my eyes really brings out how mainstream feminism is in fact still dominated by whiteness, despite so much work done by feminists of color, third world/black feminists and anti-racist white feminists. Mainstream understandings of feminisms (in many cases, far be it for me to essentialize here) still show to be obsessed with the reduction of issues, in this case the belief that gender could possibly *trump* race.
...it is ridiculous to lay claim to the idea that all women are oppressed on equal terms, simply because they are women. obviously, oppression is more complicated than that and i personally think that gender does not trump anything. instead, there are interlocking systems of oppression that women face based on gender, race, class, sexuality, religious background, nationality, citizenship status and so forth. it is very naive and very, very 2nd wave-ish to say, "well, gender trumps race." i can't even understand how one can come to such a conclusion.
in the case of the current duke scandal, some folks feel that we must pay attention to the issue of gender before race since, she is a WOMAN and was allegedly attacked by MEN. however, i don't see how we can only pay attention to her as a woman, or as just a black woman, or even as a economically disenfrachised black woman, for that matter--all of her identities must be taken into account. her race is already determining who believes her and who doesn't, how bad of a parent she is (the myth of the bad black mother), and it's determining how she is misrepresented in the media. additionally, we must not forget that we exist in a media saturated world that continuously reproduces negative images that deem black womens bodies as disposable sex objects. it is all too impossible to deny that those images do not play a strong part in concluding how she was/is/will be treated by men of all races. furthermore, if one believes that gender trumps race in this specific situtation, then they deny the harm of the racial slurs that were hurled at the dancers, which i personally see as a form of violence towards these women--no matter what.
I couldn't agree more. And to add to it sexism and racism (among other issues, but this is not my dissertation) are not only intersected but they continually reinforce each other. Things like the feminization of poverty (that women of color are the poorest sector of our society) or the emasculation of men of color (black men being systematically raped in the criminal justice system asserting white male paranoia, anxiety and dominance over *them*) describe moments when issues of class, race, gender, sexuality are interrelating to create new types of realities, differing moments of oppression, that would simply go ignored if we are to look at singular categories of *oppression*. This type of thinking is useless for me. No one ever sees me and thinks "a woman!" they immediately see my race (fuck half the time they hear my race) and that could never *trump* my experience as a woman.
Furthermore, feminists of color are often (and continually, usually subversively) asked to put their race (among other) *issues* to the side to call for some kind of fictional universal sisterhood fighting towards a type of equality we may not even agree with (and an equality the men of "our" diaspora never had). This is in no way a new critique but one that has been discussed and hashed out several times over by many different feminists. But reading the comments to her post (and thinking about all the times I cringe to read the comments when I write about women of color) I realize little has changed...
Ultimately I have to wonder, what is the mainstream face of feminism? All the work we (women of color) have done, has it trickled to the mainstream? Or are people still under the belief that patriarchy functions in a vacuum and is the sole root of oppression? (clearly this discussion is for people that recognize that patriarchy is oppressive...)
Jessica and I were talking the other night about all the posts we have done on women of color and third world women and how ultimately the posts that get the most discussion, the most comments, the most attention are the ones about dating, or differences between men and women, or body image. Of course these discussion are important (and often humorous), but can they *really* be had without rigorous analysis and incorporation of class, race, sexuality etc. And is it still that difficult to engage in discussion about/with/around women of color or are we still strategically and instinctually left out of the dialogue of mainstream feminism?
This is just the tip of the iceburg but since we are a mainstream feminist blog and I am a woman of color writing for a mainstream feminist blog, I thought it was really important to bring this discussion here.
