"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
USA Today reports that one in four U.S. women become infected with HPV, the virus which causes cervical cancer.
Researchers have estimated that 20 million Americans have some form of HPV. The study concluded that 26.8% of U.S. women are infected, a figure that is comparable to earlier estimates using smaller groups.
"We expected the prevalence of any HPV infection would be high and that's what we found," said CDC researcher Dr. Eileen Dunne, the study's lead author.
As you might imagine, when I interviewed Gloria Feldt, former president of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America and current independent writer/speaker, I heard some pretty amazing stories in her still slightly detectable Texan accent. Gloria was behind planning the largest march in history on the Washington Mall in April 2004.
But what stuck with me most profoundly is what she told me about the moment her own life became, well, her own. In her young twenties, struggling with three kids, she had almost given up ever pursuing her own goals…and then she discovered contraception. The pill was approved for contraceptive use by the FDA in 1960 and the whole frickin’ world changed.
I recently read artist Ann Fessler’s amazing book, The Girls Who Went Away: The Hidden of Women Who Surrendered Children for Adoption in the Decades Before Roe v. Wade and it got me thinking all over again about how amazingly blessed I feel that, at 27, I have access to contraception—and as a result—access to my fullest life. I want to have children some day, but in the meantime, I’ve got a lot of shit I want to change in the world, a lot of stories I want to tell, and a lot of props to dish out. Thank you Margaret Sanger and Gloria Feldt and Estelle Griswold and William Baird and countless nameless others.
A heads up to all you New Yorkers: the fabulous Amanda Marcotte is coming into town! So get out your party hats and come to a super cool event on Saturday night to support Amanda.
Is the feminist sisterhood more sorority than social justice?
A sorority at DePauw University in Indiana has recently come under fire for dismissing 23 sisters for being “socially awkward.” The women evicted from the Delta Zeta house included every woman who was overweight and the only black, Korean, and Vietnamese members.
The national officers of Delta Zeta claim to have booted the “undesirable” women because of their inability to attract new recruits to the sorority. As I read the unbelievably pathetic excuses given by the sorority for their actions, it occurred to me that in the same way Delta Zeta resorted to active exclusion as a recruitment strategy, mainstream feminists rely on passive exclusionary tactics to keep the movement “pure.”
Oh baby, it's so sexy when you chain me to the radiator
From the acclaimed misogynist director of Hustle & Flow comes a new movie in which Samuel L. Jackson chains a skeletal Christina Ricci to his radiator and attempts to "cure her of promiscuity." I saw the trailer a few months ago and found it hard to believe. But seeing the film's website, which is up now, I realize they're completely serious. It's not even done in a pulp-y style.
Ricci told MTV her character is "a girl who suffers physical flashbacks to a childhood rape. Some women and young girls freak out, panic, and need to cut themselves. [My character] needs to cause herself the same kind of pain when she has panic attacks by having anonymous sex."
Sounds like being chained up in only her underwear and then preached to is exactly the kind of healing process this character needs.
The creepiest thing about the movie, or at least its marketing, is that it's not only about selling Ricci's body. It's about selling the idea of sex with a girl who's been abused and who's clearly got a lot of problems. There's even an interactive feature (if you click on "experience" in the upper left corner -- click here for a screenshot) that allows you to drag two pills across the screen and then watch a video of Ricci collapsing. Now she's yours for the violating! Plus, the "page loading" graphics that appear every time you click feature her silhouette struggling against the chain. A recurring image in the film as well, I'd imagine.
One of the most embarrassing Sex and the City scenes was the one in which Carrie enlists Samantha's help to remove her diaphragm. Not because the situation seemed a little intimate, even for two close friends, but because it revealed that Carrie's chosen birth control method was the diaphragm. I mean, how retro was that? Despite conversations about ticking biological clocks and complaints about twentysomething women, the characters had always seemed pretty young to me. Until this talk of a retro method of contraception that doesn't even prevent most STDs.
Or could it? Last week at TAP Online, Beth Schwartzapfel wrote about how the diaphragm is being re-designed using more flexible materials so that one-size-fits-all. This might make it a more convenient option for women who can't or don't want to use hormonal birth control. But perhaps more promisingly, it could help curb HIV infection rates in Africa:
Because the cervix is much more susceptible to HIV infection than the vagina, cervical barrier methods like the diaphragm could be of great help. Beth writes,
Not only could it offer American women yet another contraceptive option, but it could prove a powerful tool in reducing HIV infection rates both at home and abroad. In a large-scale clinical trial that's the first of its kind, researchers are currently testing the impact that diaphragm use has on HIV infection rates in Africa -- where methods of protection that women can initiate without requiring their partners' consent are badly needed.
That's enough for me to consider the diaphragm on its way back to cool again.
A whole bunch of Islamic female students have been protesting the destruction of a series of illegally possessed mosques.
Several hundred female students from an Islamic seminary in the center of Islamabad have been holed up for the last month inside a public library, in an unprecedented protest that poses a dilemma for President Pervez Musharraf's government.
The young women's ostensible demand is the rebuilding of half a dozen mosques in the capital that the government tore down because they were constructed on illegally seized land. Dozens more are under demolition orders.
As the article mentions, the Western world is breathing down Musharraf's neck to see to it that he is cracking down on radicals.
But I am more interested in the role that women are playing in the move towards more fundamental forms of Islam. Not only are these women integral to building a nation, vision and future that is vastly different from Western democracy, they are willing to die for it. From our perspective it may seem that these women are fighting for their own oppression, to live under strict Muslim rule.
But the reality is they are fighting (alongside or sometimes without men) for what they believe in. Is this a moment of feminist empowerment?
There's apparently hell to pay when you point out that there's no scientific or medical reason to deny women over-the-counter access to emergency contraception. Although the Bush administration and Congress requested and allocated a full $4 million in funding for the Office of Women's Health, the FDA plans to withhold more than a quarter of that money -- $1.2 million.
Martha R. Nolan, a vice president at the Society for Women's Health Research, a Washington advocacy group, said that big budget bites in Washington are often the beginning of the end and that she worries that this is retribution for the Plan B controversy.
"We fear this is the first step toward eliminating the Office of Women's Health," Nolan said. "We must not allow this office to be eliminated or reduced to an empty shell that has no program funding."
But if the funding cut becomes official, the office is going to be in a bind NOW, not just in the future. They've already spent or allocated the remaining portion of their budget for this fiscal year, which means that program operations will come to a grinding halt if they don't receive the additional $1.2 million they were counting on. That'll teach them to stand up to the FDA.
46% of rural women in India don't know about AIDS/HIV.
As health educators expand their focus in India, only 56% of all women know about HIV/AIDS in contrast to 80% of men.
The Indian government has focused its HIV/AIDS prevention efforts on high-risk groups, such as commercial sex workers and injection drug users, rather than on the general population, according to Reuters. An unnamed government official said that the government is "expanding prevention efforts among the general population in rural areas, especially women, over the next five years." Anjali Gopalan -- head of the HIV/AIDS advocacy group Naz Foundation India -- said the report "shows women don't have access to information, translating into more women getting infected." According to Reuters, women account for 40% of HIV cases in the country. Many women in rural areas contract the virus from their husbands, who travel to cities and visit commercial sex workers, Reuters reports. HIV/AIDS advocates are urging the government to train health workers and send them to rural areas in an effort to educate rural women about the virus (Zaheer, Reuters, 2/23).
Now my girl Neela just got back from India and was mentioning that she noticed much of the education about HIV/AIDS is targeted to poor people. So the question is how much of this education is reaching the middle class or is HIV/AIDS being seen in India as something only affecting marginal, disenfranchised or "high-risk" populations?
Suburban housewives dancing on poles! Everybody panic! What has the world come too?
Pole dancing, once exclusively the province of exotic dancers, has flared up as a much-hyped Hollywood exercise craze, and has seeped into the collective unconscious through shows like “The Sopranos” and “Desperate Housewives.” A variant called motorized pole dancing, which occurs in stretch limos, has raised eyebrows as far away as Britain, where some female university students pole-danced as a fund-raiser for testicular cancer. And mini-poles have even been spotted as dance props at over-the-top bat mitzvah parties in suburban precincts.
Now the pole — think ballet barre turned vertical — is the new star at racier versions of Tupperware parties in well-heeled (if high-heeled) areas like this one in the northwest hills of Morris County, about 33 miles from Manhattan. Billed as “femme empowerment,” such at-home pole dancing lessons are taking place in the realm of book clubs, with mothers — and grandmothers — learning slinky moves for girls’ nights in, bachelorette send-offs, even the occasional 60th birthday celebration.
The pole craze? Has mainstream culture embraced strippers in the name of "femme empowerment"?
Some say exercise that echoes the acrobatics done by women who take their clothes off for a living is exploitative rather than empowering. But Ms. Shteir and Joan Price, the author of “Better Than I Ever Expected: Straight Talk About Sex After Sixty” (Seal Press, 2006), see a clear difference between middle-class, middle-aged women choosing to give parties in their homes and women pushed by poverty into potentially dangerous or demeaning work.
Yeah I didn't think so. It is OK to pole dance if you are a suburban housewife, in fact it is even empowering! But if you do it for a living you are engaging in nasty, demeaning work that is dangerous (and well they may not say it but, you are also a bad person, who is slutty and probably doesn't even deserve basic human rights).
Yet another world leader calls women baby machines; it was only a month ago that Japanese Health Minister said the same. Looks like we got a best-seller.
German Bishop Walter Mixa tried to switch things up by saying that women are being degraded as “birthing machines” because of the existence of daycare. His comments were in response to new goverment proposals to expand daycare facilities, and asserted that "enticing" women to use daycare after giving birth so they can return to work was “harmful to children and families” and lowers women to being nothing more than babymakers.
In that case, what about you Sperminators a.k.a. working fathers? No "liberation" for y'all?
Anbumani Ramadoss, India's Health Minister and father of three girls, is requesting a ban on gender bias in advertisements, where depictions of families are typically daughterless. According to the minister, it reinforces sexism and often results in female infanticide:
An estimated 10 million baby girls have been murdered in India in the past 20 years because parents see boys as better future breadwinners.
Recent figures have shown the situation is getting worse, with the gender ratio down to 927 girls for every 1000 boys and falling, particularly in well-heeled urban areas where people have ac
