September 2007 – Feministe

Burma Rally in NYC on Monday

Monday, October 1 12:00pm – 1:00pm
Permanent Mission of the Union of Myanmar (Burma) to the United Nations
10 East 77th Street
(near 5th avenue, east side of central park)
New York, NY

Rally for Human Rights in Myanmar

Amnesty International members around the world are holding a series of demonstrations outside Burmese embassies and high profile public locations calling for the Myanmar authorities not to respond with violence, but to respect the human right to peaceful protest.

We urge you to act quickly to prevent an escalation in violence. Join us during your lunch hour next Monday, October 1st from Noon to 1pm.

Wish I could be there with you all. Thanks to Elaine for the info.

Donate to Darfur

Until Midnight tonight (Sunday) your donations will be matched dollar-for-dollar. Please go donate now.

Oh yeah, Sudan… wasn’t there something happening there?

Despite the rubber bracelets* and the outraged Facebook groups,** the genocide in Darfur and the ongoing crisis in Sudan seems to have again slipped away from the world’s view. I suppose we can only handle one major humanitarian crisis at a time,*** and this week it’s monks in Burma. But 10 peacekeepers in Darfur were just killed, and while al-Bashir is feeding everyone his usual shit about settling the conflict, settlement is nowhere in sight. And this is just the current genocide that has wiped out 200,000 people are displaced 2.5 million; there’s still the rest of the country to deal with, and civil war has been raging since I was born. Many, many more have been slaughtered in acts that don’t technically fall under the “genocide” label; even more have perished as they tried to escape to refugee camps. They’ve been murdered, they’ve starved to death, they’ve died of disease, they’ve been killed by wild animals and by the elements while trekking for months trying to find a safe haven. They’ve been kidnapped and sold as slaves and concubines. They’ve been beaten, abused, enslaved, and raped. al-Bashir and the government in Khartoum has funded and encouraged it. In response, the opposition forces have grown more brutal. Neither side (if you can even divide it into “sides,” it’s grown so complicated) has the moral high ground here.

In the meantime, millions of people live in refugee camps. Some have been re-settled, many in the United States. But our asylum laws make it tough for people in conflict-ridden states to gain entry into this country. We have a “persecutor bar” which has been expanded to include a “terrorist bar,” both of which sound nice, but are devastating in practice. If you are found to have ever persecuted someone because of their race, ethnicity, religion, etc, you are automatically barred from gaining asylum in the United States. If you are found to have ever aided terrorism, you are automatically barred from gaining asylum in the United States. Again, both of which sound all fine and good — until you look at the breadth of those bars.

Do it!

Evangelicals are threatening to run a third-party candidate if Giuliani is the Republican nominee. Which puts me in a really tough place — I can’t stand Giuliani and I think he’s a dangerous and scary man, but boy would I like to see this.

Conservative Christians are downright terrified at the idea of a lady-president in the White House. Clinton is one of the most conservative Democrats running, and yet her name — and the vagina-ness that it exudes — apparently scare the shit out of Hellfire-and-brimstone crowd.

“I can’t think of a bigger disaster for social conservatives, defense conservatives, and economic conservatives than Hillary Clinton in the White House,” Mr. Bauer said.

Still, he added, “But I do believe there are certain core issues for the Republican Party—low taxes, strong defense and pro life— and if we nominate some who is hostile on one of those three thing it will blow up the GOP.”

…so you’re telling me that this is awesome either way?

To paraphrase our Dear Leader (and Kirstin Dunst), Bring it on.

Onward Christian Soldiers

Not even a good Christian education will teach you how to spell “infidels.”

Radically conservative Christian colleges are targeting students all over the country — and they’re literally looking to go medieval on your ass:

The students and teachers call what they are doing “classical Christian education.” They believe it’s much more than memorizing Latin declensions and Aristotle’s principles of rhetoric, though they do plenty of that. Doug Wilson, 54, the pastor who spearheaded New St. Andrews’ founding, puts the college’s purpose simply: “We are trying to save civilization.” He’s not alone in his mission. The C.C.E. movement began in the early 1980s among Protestant evangelical private schools and home-schoolers who scorned most conservative Christian colleges, which were long on classes in business management and Bible prophecy but short on history, literature and ideas. Now the movement boasts a host of home-schooling associations and curriculum companies, more than 200 private schools and college programs around the country. Evangelicals at New St. Andrews are using dead languages and ancient history to reinvent conservative Protestant education. As Matthew McCabe, an alumnus, puts it, “We want to be medieval Protestants.”

Nothing says “fine education” like wanting to regress a few hundred years. And, sorry dear readers, but you aren’t eligible to apply:

N.S.A.’s philosophy is that cultural change begins with right worship and community rather than with political activism. College life revolves around Christ Church and Trinity Reformed Church — both members of the Confederation of Reformed Evangelical Churches, a denomination based on “historic Protestant orthodoxy” that Wilson co-founded in 1998. The college handbook forbids students to embrace or promote “doctrinal errors” from the 4th through the 21st centuries, “such as Arianism, Socinianism, Pelagianism, Skepticism, Feminism.” If drawn to such ideas, they must “inform the administration immediately and honestly in a letter offering to withdraw from the College.” Cultural revolution cannot tolerate heretics.

Why are there more men involved in online politics than women?

That’s the question that Katherine Seelye is posing on the NYTimes blog today. She recognizes that the entire premise of the question might be wrong, and that’s where I stand — I don’t think there are more men involved in online politics than women. I just think “women’s issues” and women’s voices end up being marginalized, silenced and ignored.

What do you think? Head over there and share your thoughts. I’d be curious to hear them over here, too, so double-post if you can.

Ongoing Issues

UPDATE: We seem to be working again, woohoo! A million thanks to our techie guardian angel, who has put in so much time and effort to keep this place up and running. If you encounter any problems, please email me at jill.filipovic -at- gmail -dot- com.

In case you haven’t noticed, Feministe is a little screwy. Long story short, we were trying to switch over to a more secure server (hence the change to the feministe.powweb.com/blog address), but that didn’t work out as planned. So we attempted to switch back to the original feministe.us address, which sort of worked, except that feministe.us/blog leads to an error message, a bunch of old posts (including the tabs at the top) are gone, and now none of the comments or “more” functions are working. And I don’t know about you all, but I get an “internal sever error” message about every fifth time I load the page. Refreshing a few minutes later seems to work.

So. Bear with us. We’re working on it, and hopefully things will recover over the next few days. I’m still in the long process of trying to get us onto a better server, but right now it’s looking like that’s financially untenable, as many server companies apparently charge more than some people spend on rent. Add my total incompetence when it comes to anything tech-related, and you have a long and frustrating process.

Thanks in advance for your patience. I’m hoping all of the really irritating stuff (comments, etc) will be fixed by Monday.

We will keep you posted.

Penis envy

Meet the Shenis:

Of course, it would be possible to make a device that enabled women to pee standing up and didn’t look like a giant foot-long cock, but where’s the fun in that?

Before I buy one, though, she’s gonna have to do a better job of marketing it to the ladies. Paint it pink and bedazzle the shit out of it and then we’ll talk.

via Jezebel.

Reporting While Black

One New York Times reporter exposes abuse and racism from police officers:

THE police officer had not asked my name or my business before grabbing my wrists, jerking my hands high behind my back and slamming my head into the hood of his cruiser.

“You have no right to put your hands on me!” I shouted lamely.

“This is a high-crime area,” said the officer as he expertly handcuffed me. “You were loitering. We have ordinances against loitering.”

In law enforcement’s efforts to crack down on gang crime, they end up focusing on people who they think look like gangsters instead of gang crime itself.

This is a dangerous area,” the officer told me. “You can’t just stand out here. We have ordinances.”

“This is America,” I said angrily, in that moment supremely unconcerned about whether this was standard police procedure or a useful law enforcement tool or whatever anybody else wanted to call it. “I have a right to talk to anyone I like, wherever I like.”

The female officer trumped my naïve soliloquy, though: “Sir, this is the South. We have different laws down here.”

I tried to appeal to the African-American officer out of some sense of solidarity.

“This is bad area,” he told me. “We have to protect ourselves out here.”

As the police drove away, I turned again to my would-be interview subjects. Surely now they believed I was a reporter.

I found their skepticism had only deepened.

“Man, you know what would have happened to one of us if we talked to them that way?” said one disbelieving man as he walked away from me and my blank notebook. “We’d be in jail right now.”

It’s no big secret that “cracking down on gangs” is code for “cracking down on black and brown people.” Of course no one supports gang violence, or illegal activity. But prosecute the violence. Don’t slap handcuffs on any black man who happens to be standing on a street corner in a “bad” (read: mostly non-white) area.

Why feminism is good for everybody, part 2954

Divorce rates are the lowest they’ve been since the 1970s, and marriages are more stable.

There are certainly myriad reasons why marriages are stronger now than thirty years ago, but I’d imagine that chief among them are things heavily influenced by feminism. As traditional gender roles expand, women and men have greater choice in who they marry. Men no longer shoulder the burden of being the sole breadwinner, and women are no longer expected to do all of the home and child-care. Women are going to college and grad school in record numbers, and are meeting people with whom they are share genuine interests and goals. People are delaying marriage, and marriages entered into later in life tend to be more stable and longer-lasting. Marriage is increasingly optional, and so more couples enter into it when they want to, instead of getting married so that they can escape social pressure or have children or live together or have sex without guilt. And couples can have sex for pleasure instead of constantly fearing another pregnancy, making marriage very much an institution for the two people who enter into it, and, ideally, fostering families who can choose to have children when they’re ready (which obviously makes for happier parents).

Next step: Making this institution open to everyone.