October 2006 – Page 15

The Revolution That Wasn’t

Surprise, surprise: The opt-out revolution is bunk.

Yale University’s Women’s Center released a survey last week finding that just 4.1 percent of Yale women plan to stop work entirely after having children, compared to 0.7 percent of men. A vast majority of women — 71.8 percent — reported they would take less than one year off work after their children were born.

Four percent does not a revolution make. via Feministing.

Take a Stand for Iranian Women

Women in Iran have been sentenced to death by stoning in one week. Ali tells you how you can help.

Patriarchy 4 Life (and in death)

I’m not even sure what to make of this article, which is about Chinese families buying female corpses to bury alongside their dead sons, in order to give him a wife in the afterlife. Brides are already essentially bought and sold in some rural areas, where there are thriving networks of “bride sellers” who trick or kidnap women and then sell them into marriage.

But if you ever needed an example of women’s humanity not mattering, this is it:

“For girls, it doesn’t matter about their minds, whether they are an idiot or not,” he said. “They are still wanted as brides.” Dead or alive, he added, as he peered at the river.

“There are girls who have drowned in the river down there,” he said. “When their bodies have washed up, their families could get a couple of thousand yuan for them.”

It’s apparently customary for families to burn fake money in honor of deceased relatives, with the hope that the dead will be able to use that money in the afterlife. These families also need a woman for their deceased son to use in the afterlife.

Guo Yuhua, a sociology professor at Qinghua University in Beijing, an expert on folk traditions and burial customs in the Loess Plateau, said the minghun custom stemmed from both dread and sympathy for the dead. She said parents with dead daughters, like those with dead sons, were also carrying out an obligation to their child. They will sell their bodies as a way of finding them a place in a Chinese society where tradition dictates that a daughter has no place on her father’s family tree.

“China is a paternal clan culture,” said Professor Guo, who did postdoctoral work in anthropology at Harvard. “A woman does not belong to her parents. She must marry and have children of her own before she has a place among her husband’s lineage. A woman who dies unmarried has no place in this world.”

Lovely.

Jaysus, Mary and Freakin’ Joseph

I certainly have heard of the bizarre Texas rules for selling dildoes and whatnot, but I have never seen them put into practice. Luckily (or perhaps not), Amanda has some video (featuring Molly Ivins!) and a personal story about how exactly one goes about buying a vibrator in the Gret Stet of Texas.

Me? The first adult bookstore I can name that I actually went into and bought any kind of toy for myself was Aircraft Book & News in East Hartford, Connecticut. So, so, not the woman-friendly Forbidden Fruit that Amanda knows about, since it was (and still is) focused on a clientele who stop in for porn after finishing their shifts at Pratt & Whitney.

I later found woman-run erotica shops in Ann Arbor and in the South End of Hartford, but I will never forget the fairly skeezy vibe at Aircraft Book & News and the sense of swallowing my fear before going in there.

Generation Me

Educational grants are down. The federal government has been slashed spending for higher education. There are more students who need money for school, and proportionally less money to go around. Schools give credit card companies access to their students, and the companies bank on the fact that students may be uninformed about consumer debt.

Who’s to blame? The students, apparently, for being selfish narcissists.

But the problem isn’t just financial pitfalls. It’s also a need for instant gratification. Since birth, Generation Me has been spoon-fed self-esteem and told they could be whoever they wanted to be, says Jean Twenge, a San Diego State University psychology professor and author of Generation Me: Why Today’s Young Americans Are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled — and More Miserable Than Ever Before. She adds that they don’t want to earn it — they expect it to be handed to them. A 2002 survey conducted by Twenge and professors at the University of Georgia found that young people mostly agreed with the traditionally narcissistic statements “I am a special person” and “I can live my life any way I want to.” The self-esteem that’s seemingly made young people more confident and ambitious has crossed over into entitlement, and caused them to have unrealistic expectations — which they often fulfill through debt.

Support Ms. Magazine — Do it Now!

See this AOL article and poll on Ms. Magazine’s We Had Abortions campaign. Take the poll and support the magazine and women who are being honest about their choices.

Encouraging Signs From The World of Religion

The Church of England has released a report which finds that traditional wedding vows (you know, those ones with “obey” in them), combined with male-centric views of religion and the Bible and God, could be harmful to women and encourage violence against them.

The report said that clergy preparing couples for marriage should stress that men and women are of equal worth, and that the use of the word “obey” could be seen as an outdated view of the status of women.

The report said that the Church had, intentionally or unintentionally, reinforced abuse, failed to challenge abusers and intensified the suffering of survivors, often through “misguided” or distorted versions of Christian belief.

If people saw their relationship with God in terms of domination and submission, and uncritically used masculine imagery to characterise God, they could validate “overbearing and ultimately violent patterns of behaviour”, it said.

Victims could often see themselves as deserving abuse and could be persuaded, in a spirit of “self-denial”, to forgive the perpetrator and not take action against them. The report, entitled Responding to Domestic Abuse, Guidelines for Pastoral Responsibility, encourages churches to become places of safety for survivors of domestic abuse. The origin of the wedding vows used in Anglican services can be traced back to the Book of Common Prayer, as authorised by Henry VIII.

Good show, Church of England! Now, how about not just offering an alternative version, but omitting “obey” from the vows altogether?

Via Jules.

Fat, Fashion, and Scapegoating

Couple of items came to my attention regarding fat women being presented as sexy and the reactions thereto.

First up: Trouble at the Lusty Lady, the country’s only unionized strip club, over an email from a male worker (who wants to see the union gone now that the club is a co-op owned by the union members) relaying complaints he allegedly heard from customers regarding a night at the Lusty Lady featuring “BBW”* performers:

Like a lot of San Francisco businesses, the Lusty Lady prides itself on diversity, offering up dancers in a variety of sizes, shapes, ethnicities, attitudes and tattoos.

But like a lot of North Beach clubs, business at the Lusty — while steady — isn’t what it was a few years back during the dot-com years, so every customer and dollar counts.

That’s why it was such a big deal in July, when someone booked an entire night of “BBW” entertainment — big, beautiful women — and the clientele reacted by walking out.

The counterman wrote up the customers’ objections — “I came for fantasies, not nightmares” being one of the more printable ones — and sent them off in what he thought was a confidential e-mail to the club’s board of directors.

However, one board member, who worked as a Lusty dancer, took offense and plastered a printout of the e-mail on the dressing room mirror for all the entertainers to see.

Talk about an ugly situation.

Now, from this account, it sounds like “the clientele” walked out en masse. Because, my God! Who would want to see fat women dancing naked?

Shorter Dawn Eden: Chill out, ladies, you’ve got all the silly rights you need!

This week, Dawn Eden takes on feminism. And it’s… special.

First, she lauds the word of Feminists for Life, a group which she says “walk[s] the talk” when it comes to “pro-life” activism, which basically means that they actually try to help poor women and college women when they get pregnant. Now, I can certainly support pro-life groups which seek to help pregnant women and which aim to give women more options. But Feminists for Life, despite their support of a handful of pro-choice and progressive bills which actually help women, are nearly as ass-backwards as Dawn and her ilk when it comes to the basics of preventing abortions.

According to FFL,

Since the Washington, D.C., office opened in 1994 and a new executive director (now president) Serrin Foster was hired to lead Feminists for Life, FFL has successfully and uniquely worked to address the root causes that drive women to abortion.

Basic question time: What is the root case that drives women to abortion?
Basic answer: Unintended/unwanted pregnancy.

Blame the Leftists

Man shoots up an Amish school, targeting female students. Who here should we say shoulders some of the blame?

1. The man who did the shooting
2. Essentially non-existant gun control laws
3. A culture which turns its head or even glamourizes violence and abuse of women
4. Evolution and abortion.

This guy votes for number four:

(via Gawker)

Thank you, CBS news, for turning your broadcast over to this winner. (And thanks to Judd for sending on this link). As for those liberal heathens who are shooting up schools left and right, perhaps we should consider where these school shootings are happening. Check out the map and the list of locations. Because I’m seeing a pretty decent concentration in the South and in the Bible Belt. I’m not seeing very many urban centers making the list. And if memory serves, the vast majority of the perpetrators in these cases have been white males. You know, the traditional arbiters of morality.

Just something to consider before we go throwing stones at progressives and women.