In defense of the sanctimonious women's studies set || First feminist blog on the internet

Category: Media & Media Literacy

16 Days of Activism Against Gender Violence

Today kicks off the 16 Days of Activism Against Gender Violence (h/t).

The days of action start with The International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women — which is today — and ends on December 10 with International Human Rights Day. I think that this is an absolutely amazing structure: beginning discussion relatively narrowly and then building up to a broader world view to remind people that gender issues are human rights issues.

This year’s theme is Demanding Implentation, Challenging Obstacles: End Violence Against Women, and you should read more about it.

I very strongly recommend that you check out Sokari at Black Looks for more information about the 16 Days and for information about the Carnival Against Gender Violence, for which submission are due December 6th. Personally, I can’t wait to see it.

If you happen to be in NYC, check out these events. For everyone, here is a great resource for suggested actions (pdf).

And as a blogger, I encourage all others to blog on the topic as much as possible for the next 16 days (and thereafter). Of course, blogging is neither the only nor most effective method of activism, but I also think that it plays an important role. If you read liberal blogs that don’t normally cover “gender issues,” strongly encourage them to participate (and demand answers if they won’t). If you run a non-feminist blog, or read other non-feminist blogs by writers that you know care about women, let them know and encourage them to blog about the issue, too. The issue of gender violence is an absolutely massive one, considering the many forms that violence can and does take and all of the intersections of race, sexual orientation, age, nationality, class, religion, location, etc. It has more dimensions than I imagine the combined efforts of every feminist blogger working diligently for the entire 16 days could fully cover. And that’s why it’s so important to say as much as we can. I will be covering the issue of gender violence as much as possible on my own blog for the 16 Days.

You can also download the 16 Days logo, which I encourage you to put in any posts that you write, in your sidebars, on your myspace page, etc. And don’t hesitate to create a “16 Days” tag so that your posts will be easier to find. Please, participate and let people know that you’re participating.

So You Wanna Be a Rock n Roll Star

About a month ago, I wrote a post about Guitar Hero III. The main gist was that as a big-time previous fan of the series, I was thoroughly unimpressed with the the changes that have been made to the game, which are quite misogynist, exploitative of women and completely insensitive to the fact that the game has a female audience. To my great surprise, the post became a big hit (and troll target) and was linked to in all kinds of forums and blogs that would normally never give me a second glance. This was also to my slight dismay, because I didn’t spend much time on that post, and frankly, I don’t think that it’s very good. Anyway, lesson learned.

The point is that I now feel compelled if not required to say a few words about Rock Band.

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Your Daily Dose of Hate

Here’s a beautiful example of male college students who think that being offensive is the same thing as being funny: The Sentinal “humor” piece “Mock of Love.” It’s a set of “spoof” suggestions for the second season of the VH1 Bret Michaels dating show Rock of Love. The irony is that if you’ve ever watched Rock of Love (you won’t admit to it, so I’ll do it for you), you’ll know that no one could mock the show better than its mere existence does. The jokes write themselves — including the incredibly misogynist ones.

Now, I can’t say that we should expect much from a publication whose poll in the sidebar looks like this (the options are bad enough, but what people actually chose is even worse). But Antonio Ciaccia takes things to a whole new level of douchery, managing to insult everyone on pretty much the most vile terms possible, and miserably failing to actually be funny.

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What are bitches for? Making men money, of course.


Ah, the polite “we both know who’s going to call who a bitch later” smile

Several feminist bloggers have reported on John McCain being asked by a supporter “How do we beat the bitch?” His response was to laugh, not denounce the question, in fact call the question “excellent,” and then answer it.

More than one such thread has devolved into fight over whether the fact that McCain answered the question is something that he should be held responsible for, since, after all, he was not the one who asked it. My immediate (and continued) answer was “yes.” It seemed to me to be the obvious answer.

But some still wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt. And though I certainly enjoy being right, I take little glee in the irrefutably proven wrongness of those who did not immediately want to assume that McCain is a misogynist. Because more misogynists in the world is an all around bad thing.

Here they are, though. McCain has had since Monday to either denounce the remark or issue an apology. On Tuesday, his campaign actually argued that McCain showed respect for Clinton in his answer — and hey, I guess instead of saying “that’s an excellent question,” he could have been more disrespectful by saying “that’s a horrible question — Senator Clinton isn’t a bitch, she’s a stupid whore!” In light of that suggestion, maybe McCain’s response was respectful.

But now it seems that McCain’s campaign has had the gall to send out a fundraising campaign based on the remark, claiming that the big bad old liberal media is attacking him over the remark (the one he has refused to denounce or apologize for), even though it was actually, um, Senator Clinton who was called a bitch.

Excellent job there, McCain. No one could ever accuse you of lacking class.

Women Who Rock (the Egyptian Blogosphere)

I just returned from an evening of campus conversation at the American University. The title of the event: Her Space, Our Space: Girls and Women Pushing the Boundaries of Cyberspace.

Uh. I thought it was most appropriate for me to write about. The panel of speakers included a one fabulous Ms. Mona Eltahawy, three Egyptian female bloggers, and two girls representing Bussy, a great club on campus.

Mona Eltahawy, to begin, is the beautiful and talented journalist-sister of my co-worker Nora. She is Egyptian, has lived in England, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Israel, and is currently based out of New York. She writes for Arabic media as well as Reuters and other English media sources. In short, she is a really astounding, well-spoken Egyptian feminist. I basically have a huge girl crush on her and wish I could be her. Or maybe just around her. Yeah. Just follow her around and listen to her talk…that might be bordering on weird, I don’t know. You tell me.

The two Egyptian female bloggers on the panel are already out of university and are working in Cairo. Reihab, writes fiction (in Arabic) for her blog, and Shahinaz writes political commentary and protest on her blog. As soon as I get links to their blogs I’ll try to post them.

Bussy (literally meaning “to look,” in Arabic) is a great club on campus that provides a forum for women (and men) to tell their stories of struggle or censorship or, well, really anything. Bussy fields emails of stories (most of them anonymous) about street harassment or molestation or rape amongst other issues women face in Egypt. From these emails they put together plays (a la The Vagina Monologues) in order to raise awareness about women’s issues on campus and in Egypt in general.

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War: Bringing Us Together Since…

From every newspaper and newscast I read/watch these days, it seems like Iranians, as, an entire nation of people, are cast as anti-Semitic bigots. And while I am almost positive there are Iranian people who fit this bill, I cannot imagine that all Iranians believe what our favorite Ahmadinejad touts as the Iranian ethos: hate Jews, homosexuals, the West, etc. etc.

So, to read this article in the WSJ is not only promising and exciting, but also enlightening. A new TV show called “Zero Degree Turn” is apparently a huge hit with Iranians all over the country. (I’m trying to post a clip of an episode from YouTube above, but until I technology and I stop having a marital spat, you can check out full length episodes at YouTube)

The hour-long drama, “Zero Degree Turn,” centers on a love story between an Iranian-Palestinian Muslim man and a French Jewish woman. Over the course of the 22 episodes, the hero saves his love from Nazi detention camps, and Iranian diplomats in France forge passports for the woman and her family to sneak on to airplanes carrying Iranian Jews to their homeland.

Now, I think this is pretty grand. The story casts an Iranian-Palestinian Muslim man and a French Jewish woman. That’s pretty ballsy of the director if Iran really is as anti-Semitic as I think we’re all led to believe.

The really surprising part, I think, is the fact that the show is state-funded. State-funded? Wow.

…the government’s spending on the show underscores the subtle and often sophisticated way in which the Iranian state uses its TV empire to send out political messages. The aim of the show, according to many inside and outside the country, is to draw a clear distinction between the government’s views about Judaism — which is accepted across Iranian society — and its stance on Israel — which the leadership denounces every chance it gets.

As someone who has spent a majority of her high school and college career reading, learning, and arguing about Israel and Palestine and trying to formulate my own thoughts on the entire situation, I found the above quote especially interesting. I know a lot of people, friends of mine, who would believe that being anti-Israel automatically means anti-Semitic. I wholeheartedly believe that it does not. But I suppose I understand many Jews who would believe that. I think it’s possible to oppose the fundamentals of a state or its policies without having to oppose the people of that state. It’s kind of like…oh, the way I oppose most, if not all, the ridiculousness that Dubya likes to write home about, but um…I don’t hate Americans. And opposing US policy on anything does not should not imply that I’m anti-American.

Iran is home to some 25,000 Jews, the largest population in the Middle East outside of Israel. Iran’s Jews — along with Christians and Zorastrians — are guaranteed equal rights in the country’s constitution. Iran’s Jews are guaranteed one member of parliament and are free to study Hebrew in school, pray in synagogues and shop at kosher supermarkets. Despite Mr. Ahmadinejad’s statements, it isn’t government policy to question the Holocaust, and the country’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, hasn’t endorsed those views…
He [Hassan Fatthi, the show’s writer and director] says he came up with the idea for “Zero Degree Turn” four years ago as he was reading books about World War II and stumbled across literature about charge d’affaires at the Iranian embassy in Paris. Abdol Hussein Sardari saved over a thousand European Jews by forging Iranian passports and claiming they belonged to an Iranian tribe.

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Who’s playing the gender card now?

Everyone is piling on Hillary Clinton for allegedly using her gender to garner sympathy in the presidential election. Even Maureen Dowd — author of Are Men Necessary? — is accusing Sen. Clinton of using her status as a Vaginal American to get ahead and get out of answering tough questions. The story has only gotten bigger and bigger since the last debate. And it’s illustrating one major problem with American media and public perception: If you repeat something enough times, it becomes true. Even if it’s not.

See, Clinton never actually threw down the gender card, during the debate or in conversations about it thereafter. She even explicitly said, “I don’t think they’re piling on because I’m a woman, I think they’re piling on because I’m winning.”

I think that’s an accurate characterization.

The big post-debate gender-mention was in her speech at her alma mater, when she said, “In so many ways, this all-women’s college prepared me to compete in the all-boys club of presidential politics.” Yes, she mentioned gender. But that isn’t quite the same thing as using it to garner sympathy. And are we all supposed to pretend like gender doesn’t matter and doesn’t exist at all? That the presidential race is split evenly between men and women, and that presidential politics aren’t actually an all-boys club? She was also speaking at her all-women’s college about her candidacy in a race that is historic because she is both a woman and her party’s front-runner — and the only woman of 17 presidential candidates. Of course that’s relevant — and it’s what everyone has been talking about. Yet when Clinton so much as mentions it — and certainly not in a self-pitying way — she’s taking unfair advantage of being a woman.

Most of the Clinton critics are focusing on her team’s reaction to the debate. According to the Chicago Tribune, “In Tuesday night’s Democratic debate, Clinton bobbled a question about illegal immigrants getting driver’s licenses in New York, appearing to both support the idea and later distance herself from it. Her campaign responded with a video showing each of her male candidates zeroing in on her.”

What should they have released? A video of the female candidates zeroing in on her?

No one from the Clinton campaign argued that the other Dems are targeting Sen. Clinton because she’s a woman; they simply pointed out that the debate did devolve into an all-versus-one pile-on. It’s media commentators and Clinton’s detractors — you know, the ones who are saying Clinton shouldn’t be bringing gender into it — who are bringing gender into it. In claiming to want a gender-neutral race, they demonstrate just how much our deeply-held ideas about gender and power matter in politics.

Why is this not a major political scandal?

With all the page space and air time given to John Edwards’ hair cut and Hillary’s laugh and clothing choices, why doesn’t anyone mention the fact that Republican front-runner Rudy Giuliani is flat-out lying — and why don’t reporters bring up his intentional lies when they’re doing yet another piece on the personality and character of the candidates?

“My chance of surviving prostate cancer — and thank God I was cured of it — in the United States? Eighty-two percent,” says Rudy Giuliani in a new radio ad attacking Democratic plans for universal health care. “My chances of surviving prostate cancer in England? Only 44 percent, under socialized medicine.”

It would be a stunning comparison if it were true. But it isn’t. And thereby hangs a tale — one of scare tactics, of the character of a man who would be president and, I’m sorry to say, about what’s wrong with political news coverage.

Let’s start with the facts: Mr. Giuliani’s claim is wrong on multiple levels — bogus numbers wrapped in an invalid comparison embedded in a smear.

Mr. Giuliani got his numbers from a recent article in City Journal, a publication of the conservative Manhattan Institute. The author gave no source for his numbers on five-year survival rates — the probability that someone diagnosed with prostate cancer would still be alive five years after the diagnosis. And they’re just wrong.

You see, the actual survival rate in Britain is 74.4 percent. That still looks a bit lower than the U.S. rate, but the difference turns out to be mainly a statistical illusion. The details are technical, but the bottom line is that a man’s chance of dying from prostate cancer is about the same in Britain as it is in America.

So Mr. Giuliani’s supposed killer statistic about the defects of “socialized medicine” is entirely false. In fact, there’s very little evidence that Americans get better health care than the British, which is amazing given the fact that Britain spends only 41 percent as much on health care per person as we do.

Anyway, comparisons with Britain have absolutely nothing to do with what the Democrats are proposing. In Britain, doctors are government employees; despite what Mr. Giuliani is suggesting, none of the Democratic candidates have proposed to make American doctors work for the government.

That’s all bad enough. But as Krugman points out, why aren’t candidates being called out for intentionally lying to the American public in the same way they’re called out for getting $200 haircuts?

By rights, then, Mr. Giuliani’s false claims about prostate cancer — which he has, by the way, continued to repeat, along with some fresh false claims about breast cancer — should be a major political scandal. As far as I can tell, however, they aren’t being treated that way.

To be fair, there has been some news coverage of the prostate affair. But it’s only a tiny fraction of the coverage received by Hillary’s laugh and John Edwards’s haircut.

And much of the coverage seems weirdly diffident. Memo to editors: If a candidate says something completely false, it’s not “in dispute.” It’s not the case that “Democrats say” they’re not advocating British-style socialized medicine; they aren’t.

The fact is that the prostate affair is part of a pattern: Mr. Giuliani has a habit of saying things, on issues that range from health care to national security, that are demonstrably untrue. And the American people have a right to know that.