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By femme. • 14 years ago

On Personhood: The Dehumanization of Black Women & Children

On February 4th, Feministing posted a link regarding the recent efforts of anti-abortion groups in Georgia to claim that black women have so many abortions that “black children are an endangered species.” On February 5th, The New York Times published an article about the billboards that publicize this claim:

The billboards — there are 65 now and will eventually be 80, Ms. Davis said — were created in conjunction with a new Web site, www.toomanyaborted.com, which says that all of Georgia’s abortion clinics are in “urban areas where blacks reside.” The Web site connects abortion to segregation, saying that after the civil rights era, racists went “underground,” and that today “abortion is the tool they use to stealthily target blacks for extermination.”

Also:

Ms. Davis said Georgia Right to Life would also support state legislation that would make it a crime for abortion providers to solicit business based on the race or sex of the fetus. (Emphasis added.)

Ms. Davis, I’m sorry but your argument just doesn’t hold up. Even though, according to the article, 57.4 percent of abortions in Georgia were performed on black women, do you actually think making abortion illegal will improve women and children’s lives? Don’t you think comprehensive sexuality education and resources would assist these women better than making abortion de facto illegal?
The way Ms. Davis, and other anti-abortion advocates, frame this argument is both misogynistic and racist. She claims to care, but her goal is not to improve ...
By femme. • 14 years ago

This is Rape Culture: “Gray Rape.”

Trigger warning.
Community member cunegonde wrote a blog post recently about her experience being psychologically coerced into having sex with a male peer.
Since we live within a rape culture, and we operate within an unequal social system (patriarchy) that certainly affects and sometimes causes our interpersonal experiences, this happens to women all the time.
To a certain extent, this happened to me twice as a teenager, and cunegonde’s brave post inspired me to open up about the experiences.
Incident #1: I was hanging out at my best friend’s house with a couple friends. We were 17. We were drinking and smoking pot, listening to music, gossiping and laughing those head-thrown-back, invincible teenage girl laughs. She invited ...

Trigger warning.
Community member cunegonde wrote a blog post recently about her experience being psychologically coerced into having sex with a male peer.
Since we live within a rape culture, and we operate within ...
By femme. • 14 years ago

Dykes to Watch Out For: The Evolution of Visibility

I was born in 1987. I don’t know a time when queer* women weren’t part of our cultural and social landscape. While I was going through puberty, Ellen DeGeneres blissfully caressed Anne Heche’s on red carpets and TATU played lesbians on MTV. During high school I relished episodes of The L Word whenever my fundamentalist mother wasn’t home. I danced in dim-lit bedrooms to Scissor Sisters and Ani DiFranco with friends, hiding empty bottles in our purses. I watched But I’m a Cheerleader at least fifty times. Queer women my age don’t face the cultural wasteland that women like Rachel Maddow faced. There are women like us on TV every day. But is this peri-mainstream visibility ...

I was born in 1987. I don’t know a time when queer* women weren’t part of our cultural and social landscape. While I was going through puberty, Ellen DeGeneres blissfully caressed Anne Heche’s on red carpets and ...
By femme. • 14 years ago

The Fantasy of Being Rich.

Kate Harding’s November 2007 blog post, The Fantasy of Being Thin, really resonated with me. I just discovered it, after linking from the also-evocative, more recent post from Mean Asian Girl (The Fantasy of Being White), which details her personal struggles with self-hate and the dissonance between who she was and who she (thought she) yearned to be.
Both of these excellent articles are part memoir, part social critique. While reading them yesterday night I realized that I not only identify with them because I have struggled with both Harding and M.A.G.’s Fantasies (years with an eating disorder and some intricate skin color/racial identity issues). I identify with them because of another particularly relentless one: The Fantasy of ...

Kate Harding’s November 2007 blog post, The Fantasy of Being Thin, really resonated with me. I just discovered it, after linking from the also-evocative, more recent post from Mean Asian Girl (The Fantasy of Being ...