July 2005 – Page 12

IWF and the mile-high club

Amanda blogs on a sickening op-ed by Charlotte Allen from the “independent” women’s forum about longing for the days when air travel was a bastion of sexism: Why are Airline Flight Attendents so Awful — and so Ugly? (yes that is actually the title). An excerpt:

Frankly, even as a woman, I miss the old sexist days, when stewardesses were stewardesses: pretty young things in cute mini-suits and little heels who oozed attention onto everyone–because who knew? They might end up marrying one of the passengers … Why does feminism have to mean the triumph of the ugly and the surly?

I’m too disgusted to comment further — and I think Amanda covered it exceptionally well, so head over to Pandagon and check out her post.

And although this is may be trite and terrible, head over to Redneck Feminist and sneak a peak at what us awful man-haters have apparently done to Charlotte Allen. Without feminism, the poor gal would probably look more like Elizabeth Hurley, right?

Pro-Life? Go fuck yourself.

You know it’s a bad day when Dan Savage is totally and completely wrong. A young woman writes in:

Q. My boyfriend and I are 18, and we’re in love. We’ve been together for almost four years. He recently decided that he is against abortion, to the point where he won’t have sex with me unless I agree to have the kid if I get pregnant. I told him there’s no way I can agree to that. It’s my choice what I want to do with my body, but he says it’s his choice if he wants to stop having sex with me because he disagrees with my views on the matter. (Which is something he read in your column, BTW.) Where do I go from here? I can’t be celibate until I’m ready to have a kid. But I don’t want to break up with someone I love because of a sincere moral disagreement. What now? —ONE BOY’S GIRL YEARNS NERVOUSLY

And Mr. Savage answers:

A. As a general rule, OBGYN, fertile pro-choice girls shouldn’t have premarital sex with controlling anti-choice boys. But you love him, and sometimes love makes exceptions. So if you do stay with him, and you agree and/or pretend to agree to his conditions, and you get pregnant, and you do decide to have an abortion, what the hell is he going to do about it? Lock you in the trunk of his car for nine months? Whatever you tell him now, it will still be your body and your choice then. Use condoms, take the pill, get a diaphragm, cross your fingers, and fuck his brains out.

Sure, he has a point — her boyfriend can’t exactly force her to give birth (although in many states, her parents certainly could have before her latest birthday). But I think the larger question is, is there a problem with having sex and being in what is apparently a serious relationship with someone who doesn’t believe that you have a right to your own reproductive functions? And if you love someone, is lying to them about what you’ll do in case of pregnancy really the best option?

My rule: don’t do it with someone who thinks they own your uterus. Don’t have sex with conservatives. Don’t even consider exchanging body fluids with anti-choicers.

Why, Sandra, why???

I have been away from the internet for a few days, and when I opened my gmail today I was shocked to find a semi-frantic email from my friend Julie about Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s resignation. Why is this important? MoveOn breaks it down:

Below are just a few examples of landmark cases where Scalia or Thomas voted against O’Connor to try to strike down core rights and freedoms. In many cases if they had one more vote they would have succeeded.

Worker’s Rights: Nevada Dep’t of Human Resources v. Hibbs, which protected the right of workers to care for newborn children or gravely ill family members.

Women’s Rights: United States v. Virginia, which allowed women to attend all publicly funded schools. (C’Connor was not on the Court at the time of Roe v. Wade, but has opposed Scalia and Thomas on reproductive freedom issues in such landmark cases as Planned Parenthood v. Casey)

Church and State: Locke v. Davey, which ensured that states could not be required to fund religious training.

Envrionmental Rights: Friends of the Earth , Inc. v. Laidlaw Environmental Services (TOC), Inc., which protected citizens’ rights under the Clean Water Act to sue against the illegal dumping of mercury and other toxins.

Civil Rights: * Dickerson v. U.S., which upheld the “Miranda” guarantee that people accused of crimes are read their rights. * United States v. Fordice, which protected the rights of those still suffering from the effects of state-enforced racial segregation. * Grutter v Bollinger, affirmed the right of state colleges and universities to use affirmative action in their admissions policies.

Civil Liberties:Hamdi v. Rumsfeld, which blocked the government from indefinitely detaining American citizens without charges, an attorney, or any basic rights.

Sign the MoveOn letter. Write to your senator. Mobilize, mobilize, mobilize. If the wrong justice is nominated, Roe v. Wade is #1 on the chopping block.

Feminist Men

Jim of Feminist Men emailed me a few questions about my views of male feminists, which I found to be very interesting. He’s looking for even more viewpoints, so if you have some spare time, answer away:

1. What can men do to end sexism?

2. Do men have a place in the feminist movement? If
so, how do they fit in? If not, why?

3. Should men be leaders in feminist organizations?

4. Can a man be a “feminist”?

5. Please add any other thoughts or comments you have
about the the subject of men and feminism.

Trackbacks

I have no idea why all the trackbacks are porn sites. I had nothing to do with this. I suspect Lauren didn’t either. I blame George Bush.

La Bella Vita

Hey, wanna see a whole bunch of pictures of Italy? Ok! (Warning: There are, indeed, a whole bunch of pictures after you click “more.” This may be exceptionally boring).

Sailing near Villasimus:
Italy1

Mending the church-state split

Noah Feldman, will you marry me?

My favorite NYU Law professor, author of a handful of fabulous books (I would enthusiastically recommend After Jihad: American and the Struggle for Islamic Democracy and What We Owe Iraq: War and the Ethics of Nation Building) and one of the many reasons I would love to attend NYU Law, writes a fantastic piece for the NYTimes Magazine about finding a church-state solution.

Feldman points to the divide between what he calls “legal secularists” (me) and “values evangelicals” (Jerry Falwell). Feldman writes, “One school of thought contends that the right answers to questions of government policy must come from the wisdom of religious tradition.” These are the values evangelicals. “What all values evangelicals have in common is the goal of evangelizing for values: promoting a strong set of ideas about the best way to live your life and urging the government to adopt those values and encourage them wherever possible.”

And then, there are “those who see religion as a matter of personal belief and choice largely irrelevant to government and who are concerned that values derived from religion will divide us, not unite us. You might call those who hold this view ”legal secularists,” not because they are necessarily strongly secular in their personal worldviews — though many are — but because they argue that government should be secular and that the laws should make it so.”

So we start there. The legal secularists have a series of victories after WWII, when there was a greater consciousness of the marginalization of America’s Jewish population (and other religious minorities) in their exclusion from public Christian displays. As Feldman writes, “instead of attacking religion directly, as some antireligious secularists did earlier in the century with little success, organizations like Americans United for Separation of Church and State and the American Civil Liberties Union argued more narrowly that government ought to be secular in word, deed and intent.”

Religious groups like Falwell’s Moral Majority responded in kind, painting themselves as victims and helping to elect Regan as president.

But the values evangelicals did not succeed entirely in reversing the Supreme Court’s embrace of legal secularism. Throughout the 90’s, in a series of 5-4 decisions in which Justice Sandra Day O’Connor provided the swing vote, the Supreme Court refused to permit the government to take any symbolic action that might be seen to ”endorse” religion, thus preserving and even expanding the ban on school prayer. The other eight justices on the Rehnquist Court held that government financing and state-sponsored religious symbolism should be treated the same way: either both were permissible or both weren’t. But since those justices were split 4-4 on whether to allow more of each or less of both, O’Connor’s compromise — allowing some government financing of religion but no government endorsement of religious symbols — has been the law of the land for the last two decades.

Yeah. Fuck.

Living in the Green

President Bush claims that signing onto the Kyoto protocol would “wreck” the U.S. economy. And the lovely Portland, Oregon — one of my personal favorite U.S. cities — is proving him wrong.

Newly released data show that Portland, America’s environmental laboratory, has achieved stunning reductions in carbon emissions. It has reduced emissions below the levels of 1990, the benchmark for the Kyoto accord, while booming economically.

What’s more, officials in Portland insist that the campaign to cut carbon emissions has entailed no significant economic price, and on the contrary has brought the city huge benefits: less tax money spent on energy, more convenient transportation, a greener city, and expertise in energy efficiency that is helping local businesses win contracts worldwide.

Now, which city would you rather have your county’s environment modeled on: Portland, which is beautiful, healthy, green and experiencing an economic boom; or Dallas, Texas, which under GWB’s leadership quickly rose to be one of the most polluted cities in the country? No one is arguing that the economy is unimportant. But environmentally-sound policies can help to create jobs, not destroy them. And if the rest of the developed world can stick to Kyoto, why can’t we at least give it a shot?

Thy Virginity Doth Protest Too Much, Methinks.

From the Catholic Church’s press release factory, we have an update on federal funding for abstinence-only sex education programs, titled To Abstain or Not to Abstain.

On June 9 the U.S. House of Representatives Appropriations Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services, Education and Related Agencies approved an increase of $11 million in abstinence funding for fiscal year 2006, which would take the overall sum to $115 million. A press release issued the same day by Abstinence Clearinghouse, a nonprofit educational organization based in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, welcomed the decision, even though the increase fell short of the $39 million boost sought by President George Bush.
^…
“Promiscuity keepers, like SIECUS and Advocates for Youth, would have people believe that teen sex is normal, safe and healthy,” explained Unruh, “but science does not support these claims.”

This has got to one of the hackiest bits of “journalism” I’ve seen in awhile.

You don’t have to be a heathen like me to understand that comprehensive sex education programs are not endorsements of promiscuity. In fact, I would think it to be quite the opposite. Arming young adults with the facts about disease is kind of like a military boot camp under a Republican President: You know you’re eventually going to go to war, so it’s best to learn how to survive.

That’s not a particularly germane analogy, so I think it’s time to play the word game. My first contribution, to counter the “promiscuity keepers” canard, would be to call the abstinence-only crowd what they are: the Pro-STD Lobby. Any other suggestions?

Italian Injuries

I don’t get hurt very often. I am exceptionally clumsy, and I fall a lot and bang my knees and elbows and hit my head on things, but I rarely do any damage worse than a bruise or two. But, for whatever reason, I have had very bad luck on the injury front since being in Italy. First, my bed collapsed on my foot. Not fun. It took me about a day to determine that my toe wasn’t broken (thankfully), but I still have a huge purple bruise under my toenail. It’s disgusting. And it ruined my pedicure. Second, I tripped and twisted my ankle. There was a little swelling, but nothing too serious. Then, yesterday, I got bit in the face by a fucking German shepherd. Yeah. I’ve never been bitten by a dog before. I quite like dogs. I do not like this dog. It is big and slobbery and jumpy, and I don’t really love German shepherds in the first place — they just look mean, and I always associate them with really bad things (like being police dogs in the segregated South). And now that this one has bitten me, I really am not a fan. In the dog’s defense, it wasn’t trying to attack me — if it had been, it certainly could have done a lot more damage. It was “playing” by jumping up to snap at my arm (annoying in itself), and I didn’t see it and happen to crouch down at that same time, and it got me above the eye. And the wound isn’t that bad — just two puncture marks, and, luckily, they did miss my eye by a few inches. I’m probably just being a baby. But since I am seldom injured, bleeding from the head is an interesting experience for me. An illustration:

wound

It hurt. I cried (but more out of surprise than pain).