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

Month: October 2007

Ask a stupid question…

The New York Times asks: Is the “Mom Job” really necessary?

“Necessary?” They’re asking if elective plastic surgery (a tummy tuck, breast lift, and liposuction) is a requirement? Are women’s bodies, especially mothers’ bodies, so flawed in our current culture that we are now required to pay thousands of dollars to be allowed to be seen in public?

Also, I wish that the NYT chose to focus more often on issues affecting more than the top 1% of the income distribution.

The war against women

Susan Faludi has a new book coming out about how 9/11 and the fear of terrorism, has been used to push women back into the kitchen and out of public participation. Rebecca Traister has a wonderful review at Salon:

Before she can pursue the big picture, Faludi must start where everyone else in America did: her personal experience of Sept. 11. There is her prophetic dream on the night of Sept. 10, in which she is shot while on a plane, a bullet lodged in her throat; she wakes only to discover that the world is under attack. Before the end of the day she has received the phone call that provides her book with its foundation myth: A reporter asks for her reaction to the tragedies, crowing to Faludi, “Well, this sure pushes feminism off the map!”

Not 24 hours out, and Faludi has been handed the key to how this plot will unfold: To her mind, Sept. 11 will give the nation, uneasy with the strides made by women in the decades leading up to the attacks, an excuse to stuff them back into traditional boxes. That first gleeful caller is soon joined by others, all anxious to know how quickly women will abandon their corner offices and get back to tweaking their meatloaf recipes.

Apparently, Faludi has spent the past six years writing down the license plate number of every drive-by offense against gender parity, and the first two-thirds of “The Terror Dream” is her obsessive catalog — a simply staggering one.

There are the media stories promoting a never-realized post-9/11 baby boom and the “return of the cowboy/superhero” trend pieces. Here are the fawning portrayals of the macho Bush administration (she’s looking at you, Graydon Carter), the newscasters heralding the death of the “girly-man,” the breezily patronizing “We’re at War, Sweetheart” headlines.

You’d almost forgotten the feeling of impotence provoked by 9/11? Faludi hasn’t. Here’s her recounting of the people lined up at the blood banks with no one to give blood to, the police faking “live saves” to cheer up rescue dogs on the pile, because even the canines were depressed. There’s the adoration of the firefighters and of the “Let’s Roll!” male heroes of Flight 93 — remembered always for their college sports achievements and their regular-guy toughness — while the stewardesses who boiled water to throw on the terrorists were written out of the myth.

Just when you think there can’t be more, Faludi concludes Chapter 3 by asking, “If women were ineligible for hero status, for what would they be celebrated?” Well, see Chapter 4: “Perfect Virgins of Grief.” From here on out you’ll find the victimization of Jessica Lynch, and the tale of how widows — especially stay-at-home-mom widows, and especially widows who were pregnant — became the golden geese of the morning shows. She recalls articles about how lonely all those haughty, self-satisfied single career women were now that we’d been attacked by terrorists and they had no one to snuggle up with at night; the Bush administration’s phony interest in women’s rights in the Middle East; makeup tips on how to look like a pale, pure angel; the decrease in female bylines; the nesting obsession.

The post-9/11 era has most certainly been characterized by a swaggering macho mentality and a whole lot of fluttering over manly men, from the firefighters and rescue workers (the image of which was always male*, despite the fact that female first responders were killed, too) to Commander Codpiece and his Aircraft Carrier Potemkin (I mean, do you remember how much Chris Matthews swooned over the flight suit? How much the conservabots droned on about how “sexy” Bush was?** I sure do. Damned embarrassing, if you ask me). And the war, probably the ultimate expression of anxious masculinity out there, from Bush’s “Bring it on” to Thomas Friedman’s “Suck. On. This.”

Well, now some of the manly men on whom the backlashers relied to boost their own masculine cred — the firefighters and the soldiers — are rebelling. And the Presidential candidate who’s wiping the floor with everyone else, including the Manly Men of the Republican party — even Mr. 9/11 hisself, Rudy Giuliani — is a woman. The last election was all about who could be tougher on terror. This one, not so much. It’s more about, how the hell do we get out of this damned war and prevent our economy from tanking, and oh, yes, we’d like universal healthcare this century, please.

I’m going to check out Faludi’s book. It sounds like a keeper.

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* Granted, the fire department and unions such as the Ironworkers who worked at the site *are* overwhelmingly male. New York is a wonderful place, but there are certain deep streaks of the old-boy network, and FDNY and trade unions are some of the biggest. The NYPD’s done a much better job of hiring female officers and people of color; FDNY remains largely a legacy operation, which means it stays overwhelmingly male and white; women are most represented in the EMS service.

** I’ve said it before: Bush required an aircraft carrier and a sock in his flight suit to get the “sexy” label. You know it just eats up conservatives that all Bill Clinton had to do to be sexy was bite his lip.

But really! He cares about kids!

Just like he said he would, Bush has vetoed the law authorizing expansion of S-CHIP, meaning that millions of kids won’t be covered. Oh, but he’s not against providing health care for kids, oh no! He just wants his buddies in the insurance industry to have a piece of the pie:

The measure would provide $60 billion over the next five years, $35 billion more than current spending and $30 billion more than the president proposed. Mr. Bush and his backers argue that the bill would be a step toward federalization of health care, and that it would steer the program away from its core purpose of providing insurance for poor children and toward covering children from middle-class families. The White House has rejected as “preposterous” any suggestion that Mr. Bush does not care about the welfare of poor children.

Later, in an appearance before the Lancaster Chamber of Commerce and Industry, Mr. Bush expanded on his reasons for vetoing the bill. “It is estimated that if this program were to become law, one out of every three persons that would subscribe to the new expanded Schip would leave private insurance,” the president said. “The policies of the government ought to be to help poor children and to focus on poor children, and the policies of the government ought to be to help people find private insurance, not federal coverage. And that’s where the philosophical divide comes in.”

Yes, because his administration has been such a boon for poor children. Really, they’ve got a special place in the hearts of the Bushies. Those lucky duckies!

Lucky, indeed. Because Bush isn’t just vetoing an increase in funding for the program, he’s tightening the eligibility rules so much that many of the kids who are currently insured will have to be booted off the rolls:

In their legal challenges, the eight states contend that the new eligibility rules, which went into effect in August and limit coverage to children living at or below 250 percent of the poverty level, will either force out children in the program or leave tens of thousands without coverage who would be eligible.

In August, federal health officials informed states that they could no longer receive federal matching funds for children in families living above 250 percent of the poverty level, except under special conditions that the states say would be almost impossible to meet. Three weeks ago the federal health officials denied a request by New York to insure more children by covering those in families with incomes up to 400 percent of the poverty rate, or $82,600 for a family of four.

“Despite every effort to negotiate in good faith, the Bush administration did nothing but put roadblocks and poison pills in our path,” Governor Spitzer said at a news conference yesterday. “The president was out of touch with the reality on the ground.”

New York will be joined by Maryland, Illinois and Washington in its suit against the federal government, while New Hampshire, Arizona and California will be filing amicus briefs. New Jersey — whose governor estimates that 10,000 children will lose coverage under the new rules — is filing a separate suit.

I’m home sick today, and I was able to listen to the Brian Lehrer Show on public radio. The first segment dealt with the S-CHIP (audio here). The guests were Elisabeth Ryden Benjamin, director of the New York Healthcare Restructuring Initiatives at the Community Services Society, and Ben Zycher, senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. As you can imagine, Benjamin and Zycher did not agree on the merits of the expansion, but overall I felt that Benjamin had actually done the research, while Zycher more or less parroted a party line and did not display much actual expertise in insurance policy.

One thing that I found very interesting was that while Zycher kept touting Health Savings Accounts and tax credits for the purchase of private insurance, Benjamin kept pointing out that each of those alternatives would wind up costing the government MORE than simply expanding S-CHIP to cover children from families up to 400% of the poverty line (which, incidentally, is not adjusted by cost of living. So a family of four can live quite well on $80,000 somewhere like Mississippi, not so much in New York City). Moreover, Benjamin pointed out that the HSA option would result in a higher percentage of people abandoning private insurance than would S-CHIP. Which is what they’re supposed to be concerned about, right? Though I suspect that someone with a connection to the administration would be making some money managing those accounts; that has to explain why they push them so much.

So, when it comes right down to it, this isn’t really about the expense. But I think it *is* about making sure that government health insurance remains something that poor people get. Not because Bush wants to help poor people, but because he and his crowd, who would love nothing more than to dismantle all of FDR’s social programs, want to be sure that government health insurance maintains the stigma of being something, like welfare, that poor people — and in particular, poor brown and black people — get and middle-class people don’t. Because we’ve seen with Social Security what happens when you get middle-class people used to the idea of entitlement to social programs. And they sure as hell don’t want middle-class people getting used to the idea that they deserve to have government-provided health insurance in exchange for their taxes. Unfortunately for them, momentum for this very idea is building.

See also bean, who makes the following observation:

Seems like there’s something of a pattern emerging in Bush’s vetoes: his first veto was of a stem cell bill, and this (his fourth) is of a health insurance plan for kids. Seems to me that though Bush talks a big game on supporting a culture of life, his vetoes speak otherwise: they portend sickness and suffering for millions more Americans. He talks the talk, but in this (and so many other areas) he just doesn’t walk the walk.

Help a Humanist

A million thanks to Dr. Confused for guest-blogging while I’m on vacation* and, in a few days, studying for exams. I won’t be posting for the next few days, but perhaps I’ll drop in occasionally next week. In the meantime, we have a reader request for assistence, and I thought I’d turn it over to you all:

My friend is pretty awesome but privileged enough (white, male, Christian, middle class, etc.) that he has trouble identifying his own privilege and identifying lack of privilege in others. He doesn’t believe the patriarchy exists, for example, and whenever I try to explain it to him I just get really upset and start crying. Not productive. I think the most annoying thing, though, is that he professes to believe in the goals of feminism but thinks it should be called… humanism. He also believes that rampant “misandry” gives some credence to MRAs. Ugh. How can I begin to guide him in the right direction? I don’t think he’s a lost cause. If you can point me towards a previous post or pose the question on a thread or something, I would be so grateful. I don’t even know where to begin. Thanks!

Thoughts? Suggestions?

*If anyone has any Lisbon tips, I’d love to hear them!

Sexism in our Everyday Professional Lives

One of the roles I think feminist blogs can play in our lives is what the “Women’s Libbers” liked to call “Consciousness Raising.” While the phrase evokes a coven of Farrah-Fawcett-haired women in an avocado and harvest-gold living room, I think the concept still has feminist legs. In short, we tell our stories about living while female in the world, and over time relate the individual stories to the systemic misogyny of our culture.

What I’d like to focus on today is stories of our professional lives. There are many people who think that while there still may be battles to be fought on the home front and within our individual relationships, the fight to win equality at work is mostly won. After all, nobody would dare to show sexism at work; it could get them fired!

In a comment to my introductory post, AJ writes:

I haven’t experienced too much as a female student in such a male dominated area, but every now and then I get somebody doubting my credibility because I was born with two x chromosomes.

This comment reflects my feelings as well. I have had some great mentors of both genders help lead me to where I am now. I don’t live in a chilly climate, I’m not being sexually harassed at work, and most people I interact with treat me and others appropriately. But the second half of AJ’s comment is telling: “I haven’t experienced much, but…” There’s always a but. And we tend to minimize the “buts,” the incidents that go against our belief that everything is perfectly fine in this beautiful post-feminist world.

Often it’s only in telling our stories that we see how egregious they really are. I was interviewed by a professor of women’s studies as part of a project she’s doing on gender relations in aerospace engineering. “Everything’s great!” I told her. “My gender hasn’t held me back at all. Although, the lab director gets a female junior faculty member to send his faxes when the secretary is out. And guess whose job it is to clean out the lab fridge…” Her eyebrows went up and she started scribbling. Everything is perfectly fine, except when it isn’t.

I have two stories of my own, and then one secondhand story, because it’s just that good.

Story 1:

This is way back in my undergraduate days, my first year of university in fact. My calculus professor was an older man, a metallurgical engineer. He liked to tell stories of the good old days when he was a student. Somehow these stories always got around to how there weren’t any women back then. Example: “I would like to encourage you to work together on your homework. Back when I was a student, all the guys…” (hesitates, looks around uncomfortably) “I mean, back then, they were all guys, see. Not that I have a problem with there being girls in engineering school! In fact, I think it’s great! It’s wonderful! Women bring so much to engineering, they’re so much more nurturing and caring. Engineering needs a softer touch!”

Story 2:

As a student, I was attending a dinner for a professional society in my field, at which one of my friends was going to receive an award. The keynote speaker was an engine designer, who had decades ago worked on a famous, historically important aircraft engine. (Yes, there is such a thing as a famous, historically important engine!) After he was introduced, the first thing he said was “I would like to apologize to the ladies in the room. I’m afraid my presentation has many formulae and graphs and other mathematical details.” And he didn’t stop there! Every time he came to a slide with charts or numbers, he apologized “to the ladies.”

Now, I actually understand where he was coming from. It was a dinner: there may have been non-technical spouses present, and they would have been understandably bored with numbers they were not trained to decipher. And in this older man’s life, the majority of technically-trained people were men. But he failed to notice that the woman who introduced him was… an aircraft engine designer! I was glad to see that she didn’t take this slight lying down. When thanking him afterwards, she made sure to mention that as an engine designer she was fascinated by the charts and numbers, and was glad to see he had included them.

Story 3:

This did not happen to me, but to a colleague. Mary (not her real name) is also an aerospace engineer, and she got her doctorate the same time I did. This may not be relevant, but unlike me, Mary is a “girly girl.” She performs femininity much more than I do, with her expensive haircuts, omnipresent makeup, and feminine mannerisms.

At a professional conference, she went out to dinner with a group. There was one senior professor, a few junior professors, and a few graduate students. She, a student, was the only woman. As is usually the case in this kind of group composition, the senior professor was “holding forth,” dominating the conversation while his academic juniors listened respectfully. The topic of conversation was his daughter’s roommate. Apparently this roommate was very attractive young woman, in this professor’s opinion. She was an aspiring model and actress. Unfortunately, she wasn’t particularly good at managing her finances. So the professor gave her money. “And just so you knowhow truly beautiful this young woman is, I gave her $2000. She was that beautiful. I mean, take Mary here. Mary is pretty. But she’s only worth, oh, about $100.”

I notice now that all three of these stories are about older, powerful men, mostly just bumbling in their attempts to relate to others. The standard response is a shrug. You can’t teach an old dog new tricks. We’re just going to have to wait until these dinosaurs retire or die (mostly the latter, since academics tend to never retire) and then we can live in our beautiful post-feminist utopia. There’s some truth to this response. But it’s foolish to deny or minimize these incidents. It lets us think our work is done. It minimizes the magnitude of our accomplisments: not only do I have a PhD, I have one despite being repeatedly (if not constantly) told I don’t belong in this world. The stories are important, because while they seem like exceptions to us, taken together they have a systematic effect.

Your turn. Tell a story about sexism you’ve encountered in your own workplace.

Update, from SarahMC, a pretty shocking thread at Jezebel about workplace sexual harassment.

Introduction

I’m Dr. Confused and I’m a rocket scientist.

That’s not quite true. I haven’t done any work on rockets, though I am probably relatively close to qualified to do so. I have a Doctorate of Philosophy in Aerospace Engineering. I work more on the “aero” side of things than the “space” side. As part of my undergraduate degree, I did in fact have to take one class in space propulsion (that is, rockets), and I assure you, it’s much easier than you’ve been led to believe. Aerospace engineering on the whole is not as hard as it sounds. I find it much easier, for instance, than getting a photocopier to staple my documents, or using public transit in a country in which I don’t speak the language. I’ve only been a doctor for a few months now, and frankly, nobody calls me doctor in real life, which may be why I feel compelled to use it in my handle.

I wasn’t going to tell you exactly what it is I did, but in a couple of the posts I’m planning during my guest-blogging stint here at Feministe, my area of study comes up tangentially and is hard to avoid. Just don’t use it to try to find out who I am, ok? I’m looking for a tenure-track academic job, and I don’t need potential employers finding the comments I’ve left on this blog. Not that I’m ashamed of any of the things I’ve said, but I’ve told a number of stories from my past that I wouldn’t share in a professional context.

I will be guest-blogging here for about ten days. Topics you may look forward to: sexism in our everyday professional lives, the leaky pipeline in science and engineering academia, the intersection of feminism with pregnancy and birth, gender-stereotyping of children, and whatever random thoughts come into my head during the next week.

My first substantive post will be sometime this afternoon. I’m only up right now due to pregnancy-induced mid-sleep hunger, and am hoping to get some more sleep.

No, not so much.

Matt Zeitlin makes this argument for denying transpeople protection under ENDA:

I think a little historical perspective is necessary here. When Loving vs Virginia was decided in 1969, did it “throw gays under the bus” when it only established protections for interracial marriages? No, it instead was a huge step forward for equality and laid the groundwork for the push for gay marriage, which came more than 30 years later. Hopefully, employment protections for the transgendered won’t come around in 30 years, but ENDA — in its current form — is still a large step forward that should be supported by all of those who care about equality and substantive rights for sexual minorities.

Read More…Read More…

Former Knicks executive awarded $11.6 million in sexual-harassment suit

A jury in federal district court in Manhattan awarded Anucha Browne Sanders $11.6 million in punitive damages in her claim against Knicks coach Isiah Thomas for harassing her, and against Madison Square Garden, L.P. and the chairman of Cablevision, the parent company of the Knicks and MSG, for allowing a hostile work environment and firing her when she complained. The jury, which was unable to agree on whether Thomas should have to pay damages individually, will decide on compensatory damages (for things like back pay and benefits and other economic loss) later.

The jury, in federal district court in Manhattan, also ruled that the former executive, Anucha Browne Sanders, is entitled to $11.6 million in punitive damages from the Garden and James L. Dolan, the chairman of Cablevision, the parent company of the Garden and the Knicks.

Of that figure, $6 million was awarded because of the hostile work environment Mr. Thomas was found to have created, and $5.6 million because Ms. Browne Sanders was fired for complaining about it. Mr. Dolan’s share is $3 million; the Garden is liable for the rest.

My speculation is that the jury had trouble with assessing damages for Thomas because he may not have been in any kind of supervisory relationship with Browne Sanders. However, if your employer knows you’re being a douchebag to the other employees, they’re supposed to step in. Not that it sounds like they had much interest in stepping in, given the kind of atmosphere they encouraged among the players:

Today’s verdicts are the latest embarrassment for the Knicks, who have floundered in recent years. The team has had six head coaches since 2001, has only made the playoffs once in that time, and has signed numerous expensive players who have flopped.

During the trial, testimony by witnesses made the inner workings of the Garden appear dysfunctional, hostile and lewd. The Knick’s star guard, Stephon Marbury, testified that he had sex with a team intern in his truck after a group outing to a strip club in 2005.

Here’s the basic allegation Browne Sanders made:

Ms. Browne Sanders, 44, was fired in February 2006 from her position as the Knicks’ vice president for marketing and business operations. She contended that the firing was in retaliation for her sexual harassment complaint.

She testified that Mr. Thomas, 46, subjected her to hostility and sexual advances starting in 2004, after he arrived as team president. She was fired from her $260,000-a-year job by Mr. Dolan, the chairman of the Garden as well as of Cablevision, in 2006.

And doesn’t this sound familiar?

The Garden countered that Ms. Browne Sanders was fired for incompetence and for interfering with the investigation of her sexual harassment complaint.

The Garden and Dolan and Thomas will, of course, appeal this ruling, so it’s not over yet. But I do like what Browne Sanders had to say:

After the punitive damages were announced, Ms. Browne Sanders appeared outside the courtroom and said the decision was important not just for herself, but also for “the women who don’t have the means and couldn’t possibly have done what I was able to do” and for “everybody that cares about working in a civil work environment.”

Exactly. Good for her.

H/T: Norbizness.
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Unintentional hilarity of the day, from a correction at the bottom of the Times article: An earlier version of this article misstated the location of a 2005 sexual encounter between Stephon Marbury of the Knicks and a team intern. Mr. Marbury testified that it took place in his truck, not in the trunk of his car.

I was gonna say: must have been a big trunk.