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

Month: September 2006

The Motherhood Manifesto

Feministing has a fantastic interview up with Kristin Rowe-Finkbeiner, co-author of The Motherhood Manifesto. And it’s a must-read. A few key points that Rowe-Finkbeiner makes:

When you look at what’s happening with women in America, you can see the root of the wage gap between men and women in our country really stems from this maternal wall: Women with children make about 73 cents to a man’s dollar, single mothers make an average of 56 to 66 cents to a man’s dollar, and women without children make about 90 cents to a man’s dollar. So, the maternal wall is a big part of the overall women’s wage gap—women make between 76 and 77 cents to a man’s dollar. Since 82 percent of women in America have children, the lower wages moms receive pulls down the average for all women

And some of the really interesting research that’s happened recently looks at the root of why mothers get paid less. There was a study by Dr. Shelley Correll last year at Cornell University which found that with equal resumés, equal job experience, and equal education, women with children were 44 percent less likely to be hired than women without children. And they were offered an $11,000 lower starting salary on average. And so we know that this is an actual bias up front against mothers—not because of something moms are doing wrong, but because with equal circumstances the bias is there. So, tracing wage inequality back to what’s going on with women in America, we’re seeing a lot of it has to do with motherhood. And getting to solutions from there is very important.

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Cop Sexually Harasses Women, Assigned to Train Other Cops

A Multnomah County deputy who asked several women he stopped in 2004 to either lift their shirt, remove their bra or unzip their pants to search for a “flower tattoo” remains on patrol despite prosecutors’ pleas to keep him off the street.

Don’t worry, ladies, he was suspended without pay for a little while, and has had “corrective action.” And now he’ll be instructing other police officers on how to perform their jobs. Class One: How to convince women you arrest that removing their bras in front of you is part of the booking process.

Good to know that coercing women into removing their clothes, lying to supervisors, and using your job to get you off isn’t a fireable offense for cops in Multnomah County. Oregon’s Finest indeed.

Thanks to Penny for the link.

Rassafrassin’ Knee

I have regaled you all with tales of the fucked-upedness of my knee (and my ankle, and my hip, and my pelvis) and the Very Painful Therapy that restored it to a state of pain-free functionality. Oh, I was so happy to be free of pain. So thrilled. I hired a personal trainer and started with the serious working out.

But just because you’re free of pain doesn’t mean you’re healed.

I forgot that, and last weekend, I put down a new floor in my kitchen. This obliged me to spend a great deal of time either on my knees or bending over in a semi-crouch. And that put stress on my knee and on my hamstrings, which got veryveryvery tight because of course I didn’t think of what I was doing as exercise, so I didn’t stretch. Within three days, my knee was in some serious pain because of the damn tight hamstrings, and I had to leave work early on Thursday because I just couldn’t sit at my desk anymore. Friday, I stayed home and did research from my couch as I iced the knee. Saturday, on the couch with the ice. Now my back hurts because I’m doing so much sitting.

The good news is that the ice and the stretching/strengthening exercises I’m doing have helped — though the bad side of that is that it will take a few weeks to get back to being pain-free. In the meantime, it’s back to limping and having trouble negotiating stairs. Junebug only got about a 200-yard walk this morning because I couldn’t make it around the block (the pain is less diffuse now, but more intense at the kneecap, which was fucking me up). This not being able to walk is kind of getting in the way of doing the moving around I need to do in order to heal.

Aging sucks. In a couple of weeks, I’m going to be 38, and I really hope this isn’t a sign of things to come.

At least I’m catching up on Battlestar Galactica.

And the floor looks fabulous.

Blogs and Legal Scholarship

Law blogs are influencing opinions, cases, law review articles and legal advocacy. Interesting stuff.

Thanks to Dad for the link. And sorry, pops, despite your hopes and dreams I don’t think that I’m going to be turning into a law blogger anytime soon.

The Feminist Destruction of the World

Yes, feminists, you’ve really gone and done it this time — you’ve destroyed manhood, attacked womanhood, encouraged drug use, raised the teen pregnancy rate, and killed babies. Nice work ladies — clearly, you’ve been effectively multi-tasking.

There was a time when women deserved respect-because we are mothers, because of our natural softness and tender feelings, because we have been the ones who raised up righteous leaders of good nations for centuries now.

This is from the soft, tender, feelings-oriented woman who calls herself the War Chick.

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NYC Blogger Party

WHERE: Mica Bar, 252 E 51st St, between Second and Third Avenues.

WHEN: Saturday, September 9th, 8:30pm.

Organized by the fantastic Karol of Alarming News. I’m not sure if I’ll be going or not, but I’m gonna try to make it. Any other takers? Zuzu? Shankar?

They Hate Us For Our Freedom

Conservatives, that is.

Check out this little gem from the Doubleday Web page for Dinesh D’Souza’s new book, The Enemy at Home: The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility For 9/11:

He argues that it is not our exercise of freedom that enrages our enemies, but our abuse of that freedom — from the sexual liberty of women to the support of gay marriage, birth control, and no-fault divorce, to the aggressive exportation of our vulgar, licentious popular culture.

This, frankly, is chilling. And the fact that this is a major publishing house putting this shit out and not some Scaife-funded wingnut welfare imprint like Regnery is doubly so.

Let’s think about this for a moment — this guy is actually arguing that women having sexual liberty and being able to control when they have children and how many is an abuse of freedom. And the same goes for support of gay marriage and no-fault divorce.

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Nitty Gritty

BFP wrote this post about a conversation between herself and Jay Sennett, in which she drew some connections between being a poor woman of color on welfare, and being a transperson:

So the two of us started comparing notes and really getting into the nitty gritty of what it is like to survive and negotiate the welfare and health care industrial complexes as a poor woman of color and a white trans man.

Jay talked about how much power those who are workers for the health care industrial complex have over patients. About how a trans person can be in a bed waiting to head into surgery, and everybody from nurses to doctors get their panties in a bunch–because why does this man need a hysterectomy? About how he has had to have female friends call and set up appointments with OBGYN’s because if he calls the receptionists think that he is pranking them. (Because even those who work in an OBGYN office haven’t figured out that trans people exist and need health care too). About how trans people are forced to constantly read situations and expectations–what does this little white lady expect me to be? What will the group of coworkers who pray together at lunch time tolerate? Who does the pizza delivery guy expect will answer the door? Will the nurse who is prepping me for surgery freak out?

At the same time, as a woman of color, I have had to deal with punk just out of college social workers and family memebers who don’t *get* why it isn’t ok to wait three months to get a starving family their food stamp rations. Why it is insane that every single social agency that works to “help” the poor wants copies copies and more copies of bills, rent contracts, pay stubs, income taxes, etc. How I had to walk over eight miles in one day (from one agency to the next) just to finally be told that the agency I started at couldn’t help me because the final agency I was supposed to go to was too far to walk and not on any bus route.

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Good News from New York State

Just a quick half-entry on this article in the NYT (thanks to pmoney in comments):

After learning that a male science teacher planned to return this year as a woman, school district officials spent nearly nine months worrying and wondering how to keep the transition from causing an uproar.

It seems to have worked.

Students at Batavia High School returned from summer vacation on Wednesday morning and sat through a short presentation on the teacher’s transition and the medical condition propelling it — gender identity disorder, the fervent desire to become a member of the opposite sex and distress at one’s own gender.

Then it was like any other first day of school, officials and students said.

Hee. “Fervent.”

But no job loss! No harassment! No battle between teacher and administration! No mass exodus of hothouse children!

Just this woman:

“It’s wrong,” Amber Robinson, the mother of a 14-year-old boy who is in one of the teacher’s classes, said after the meeting. “If you’ve got a problem, go away. My son is academically challenged and immature — he’s not prepared to handle this. The district is encouraging my son to fail.”

It’s true, you know. There’s a direct correlation between access to transition and falling teenage literacy rates.