2010 January Archive | Feministing

Pentagon to Reveal Plan to Repeal DADT

Obama made brief mention at the SOTU on Wednesday that he will be taking steps to repeal ‘Don’t Ask Don’t Tell,’ and it appears that the Pentagon will be unveiling the steps they plan on taking to abolish a grossly homophobic and frankly inhumane policy.

Gates and Mullen are not expected to offer a specific legislative proposal to repeal the law, but rather to detail some of the preliminary steps that need to be taken inside the military in advance of formulating a legislative plan.
Gates will discuss options for more “humanely” implementing the current ban, for example, according to a senior Pentagon official. The secretary asked his general counsel’s office for options six months ago including how to ...

By Courtney • 14 years ago

What We Missed

Coates kills it on Chris Matthews.

Rohin Guha asks “Why doesn’t America trust its leading ladies?” in response to Forbes list of the 10 most trusted celebrities, only one of which is a woman.
“In India’s relatively young financial industry, women not only are some of the top deal makers, they are often running the show.”
Apparently in Canada, medical students practice pelvic exams on women who are in surgery without their consent.
Immigrant rights leader Pramila Jayapal on her reaction to the State of the Union over at the Women’s Media Center: “I watched President Barack Obama’s State of the Union speech ready to fall in love again or to wage war. ...

By Courtney • 14 years ago

Quick Hit: Itty Bitty Titties Banned in Australian Porn

So many jokes come to mind here, but I’m going to leave the analysis to Ms. Naughty on Australia’s weird ban:

Why ban small boobs? I can only assume it stems from paranoia that flat chests somehow stir up the pedophiles. And you only need to mention that “p” word to start a full-scale moral panic in Parliament.
Shall we put such hysteria aside and look at what this ruling is saying to Australian women? Basically, it’s classing a certain normal female body type as obscene. It’s declaring all flat chests to be automatically juvenile, something that should not be viewed by anyone because of a fear that it will stir up “base instincts” in certain people.
Can the ...

So many jokes come to mind here, but I’m going to leave the analysis to Ms. Naughty on Australia’s weird ban:

Why ban small boobs? I can only assume it stems from paranoia that flat chests ...

By Courtney • 14 years ago

Apparently Diamonds Aren’t Forever

Halle Tecco has an interesting, albeit thin, piece up at HuffPo about the waning interest in diamonds as engagement/wedding rings. She sites the ethical issues, as well as questions about originality, style, and the symbol of ownership. This is quite a shift, although not as large as you might guess when you look at the actual history. Tecco writes:

Your great grandmother didn’t wear a diamond ring. Before the 1930’s, diamonds were rarely used in engagement jewelry. Instead, gems like rubies and opals served as the public display of holy matrimony.
The genesis of the ubiquitous diamond wedding ring stemmed from a brilliant advertising campaign led by the first advertising agency in the U.S., N.W. Ayer & Sons. Named the ...

By Courtney • 14 years ago

Psychiatry’s Bias Problem

The Association for Women in Psychology (AWP) is continually analyzing and advocating about bias, particularly gender-related, in psychiatric diagnosis, but they’ve got their eyes on the prize these days: the DSMV, set to be published in 2013. For those who aren’t familiar, the DSM, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, is essentially the bible of psychiatry, the manual by which folks are diagnosed and prescribed treatment. As you probably already know, there have been various controversies about the ways in which disorder is defined and the ways in which various facets of personality, genetics, and a mix of the two are pathologized. There have been five revisions since the DSM was first published in 1952. Each version ...

By Courtney • 14 years ago

Blogger Asks “How could humans do this to themselves?” in Haiti

“Imagine that I’m a caveman,” writer and former basketball player Paul Shirley urges his readers in a recent post on the devastation in Haiti over at FlipCollective. As you continue reading, he makes it very easy:

While the earthquake was, obviously, unavoidable, the way in which many of the people of Haiti lived was not. Regrettably, some Haitians would have died regardless of the conditions in that country. But the fact that so many people lived in such abject poverty exacerbated the extent of the crisis. How could humans do this to themselves?

Only someone with a total lack of education about global economics, colonial history, and public health could possibly ask such an inane question, leading me ...

By Courtney • 14 years ago

Deconstructing Chris Matthews

Chris Matthews on MSNBC: “I forgot he was black tonight for an hour.”

There will undoubtedly be a lot of conversation about Chris Matthews potentially well-intentioned, albeit totally misguided, attempt to talk about the ways in which Obama’s leadership affected him last night. He’s already attempted to clarify, talking about how miraculous he found it that race, Obama’s racial identity in specific, wasn’t a part of the analysis or interpretation of the State of the Union. He said: “I saw it almost like an epiphany. I hope it’s true. I hope what I saw is true that we’ve gotten beyond it, at least at the presidential level…He’s taken us beyond black and white in our politics.”
First things first, race ...

Chris Matthews on MSNBC: “I forgot he was black tonight for an hour.”

There will undoubtedly be a lot of conversation about Chris Matthews potentially well-intentioned, albeit totally misguided, attempt to talk about the ways in which Obama’s ...

By Courtney • 14 years ago

Thank You Thursdays: Howard Zinn

“There is no flag large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent people.”

The authors of history, as we know all too well within the feminist movement, have inordinate power to frame the way people think about, not only the past, but their present. When one talks about the founding of the U.S. only in terms of a glorious new beginning, one erases the centuries of life that had already taken root on this soil. When one invisbilizes women’s work, women’s experiences, women’s leadership, one robs the current generation of understanding their own legacy of strength and innovation in spite of the most oppressive odds.
Howard Zinn, one of history’s most radical and thoughtful scribes, passed away yesterday ...

“There is no flag large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent people.”

The authors of history, as we know all too well within the feminist movement, have inordinate power to frame the way people ...