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

Month: March 2008

I think a dictionary may have helped her out here

So I know Slate prides itself of being different and politically incorrect, but that doesn’t have to translate into mind-numbing stupidity, does it? From XX, Slate’s lady-blog:

Today, the front page of the Washington Post has another installment in the “feminists are pissed” series dominating the press (and soon to dominate more if Hillary loses today). They call her a witch, a hag, an old bimbo, say the leaders of NOW. They are threatened by her power. Once again, I can’t relate, particularly since the NOW leaders never even consider the possibility that people simply may not like her. But one thought did strike me in reading this. One of the NOW leaders tells the story that she was wearing a Hillary sticker in a hotel and a man came up to her and said, “Ah, come on. A woman’s place is in the kitchen.” I’m not sure I believe the story, but let’s say it’s true. Maybe what it means is this: There are people who still believe this. When I travel around conservative Christian circles, it’s commonly held that a woman’s place is not in leadership. This is true even for modern, highly educated conservative evangelicals. In my book, I focus on a couple of highly successful young career-minded women who are facing this dilemma—work or cede your life to your new husband and family. Basically, they all choose the latter. This makes this “ism” different from “racism.” No conservative Christian would argue anymore that the black man needs to be kept down. But they do have a coherent, theological, philosophical explanation for why a woman’s place is fundamentally still in the kitchen. One may disagree, but is this the same as sexism?

Yes, Virginia, it is the same as sexism, even if lots of people believe it and even if religious fundamentalists have a theological justification for it — kinda like how it was still racism when the Mormon church had a theological basis for denying membership priesthood to black people. “Sexism” isn’t rare, and it doesn’t have to be uncommon to be identified — and the idea that women should be in the kitchen instead of in leadership positions is sexism a first-grader could understand.

Glad to see Slate has hired women with a basic understanding of women’s issues to write for their women’s issues blog.

Tuesday Travel Blogging – Sarajevo

I went to Sarajevo in August of 2006, when I did a solo tour of the former Yugoslavia after spending the summer working in Greece. Of all the places I went on that trip, Sarajevo was my favorite. I was there on an overcast, rainy day and my pictures unfortunately don’t do the place justice, but it’s a gorgeous, spirited city — and despite its near-destruction in the last war, it’s thriving and growing. It’s one of those places where the appeal is intangible, so I didn’t take a ton of pictures, but you can see what I have here. This picture was taken out of the bus window very, very early in the morning when we were driving through Bosnia (which is surprisingly green and lovely):



Bosnia, originally uploaded by JillNic83.

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Posted in Uncategorized

Pantysniffing former Kansas AG loses another one; still determined to get his nose in the drawers of Kansas women

A grand jury in Johnson County, Kansas, has refused to indict a Planned Parenthood clinic in Overland Park on charges that it violated restrictions on the procedure.

Abortion opponents, through a petition, had forced the court to convene the panel and investigate the clinic in Overland Park, Kan., to determine whether it violated laws on parental notice and informed consent.

They also wanted to see whether the clinic was illegally trafficking in fetal tissue.

”We are once again vindicated, as we have been any time there is an objective review of these allegations,” said Peter Brownlie, president and chief executive officer of Planned Parenthood of Kansas and Mid-Missouri. ”The jury investigated all of the allegations that were in the petition that resulted in the grand jury being formed, and they found no evidence of any wrongdoing.”

Said Planned Parenthood attorney Pedro Irigonegaray: ”It gives me great faith in the justice system and the people of Kansas.”

That’s the good news. The bad news is, this isn’t over, not by a longshot. The District Attorney in Johnson County is none other than Phill Kline, infamous for his pantysniffing fishing expedition into the sex lives of Kansas’ women. While he served as Attorney General for the state, he reinterpreted state law to require a wide variety of medical and school personnel to report all instances of “intimate contact” between consenting teens (even though he had a hard time defining just what comprised such contact, and got soundly smacked down by the federal court for his trouble); filed a lawsuit against the governor trying to ban the use of Medicaid funds to pay for abortions; attempted (unsuccessfully) to get the private medical records of thousands of women who had had late-term abortions in Dr. George Tiller’s clinic in Wichita, one of the few that is authorized to conduct the procedure — with the justification that he was looking for instances where the clinic failed to report statutory rape. Happily, Kansas voters had enough of Kline and bounced him in the last election — though he wound up as Johnson County’s district attorney, from which position he promptly launched an investigation of Planned Parenthood in Overland Park.

And defeat? Defeat means nothing to Kline and his ilk. When they lose, they simply persist; if persistence doesn’t pay off, they change tactics. And of course, if the law won’t help them out, they’re perfectly happy to engage in terrorism.

Do these sound like people who have accepted defeat?

”Planned Parenthood cannot claim they are free of any indictment, because the full evidence never reached the grand jury,” said Tim Golba, spokesman for the LIFE Coalition, the anti-abortion collaborative that petitioned for the grand jury.

The jurors issued a subpoena in January seeking the records of 16 clinic patients, but Planned Parenthood feared information in the records would identify the patients.

Johnson County District Attorney Phill Kline, who has started his own investigation into Planned Parenthood, asked District Judge Kevin Moriarty to make the agency and its clinic abide by the subpoena…

Cheryl Sullenger, spokeswoman for Operation Rescue, one of the groups in the LIFE Coalition, said she wasn’t surprised by the grand jury’s decision. Jurors didn’t appear to seriously investigate all of the allegations, she said.

”We’ve been considering a second grand jury effort,” Sullenger said. ”That’s something that’s on the table right now.”

Not that the people at Planned Parenthood are surprised:

Brownlie said he expected abortion opponents to claim the grand jury’s work was tainted.

”Any time a decision is different from the one they want, they will claim it’s because of some nefarious doings,” he said. ”The only people who continue to insist that there’s criminal wrongdoing are people who have a political agenda.”

UPDATE: As Thomas reminded me, Kline was caught out last fall — seems that he doesn’t actually live in Johnson County, which might be a wee bit of a problem for him, seeing as how he’s supposed to live in the county in which he is DA. Whoops.

PETA misogyny strikes again

This time with a naked pregnant woman in a cage.

I’m sympathetic to the argument that sexualized stunts get attention. Fine. But really, PETA, why do you always have to use women’s bodies to make your point? A major feminist critique of advertising in general is the fact that images of women serve as stand-ins for sex itself, leading to a greater cultural understanding of sex as something that women both “have” (and that men are trying to get) and physically embody. That’s incredibly problematic — and (perhaps ironically), it works itself into the way that meat-eating is masculinized and vegetarianism is feminized and de-valued (just read Carol Adams, since she explains this better than I can).

Animal liberation theory does intersect with feminist theory, and our cultural understanding of animals and food (and animals as food, and women-as-meat) is heavily gendered. But PETA is promoting animal rights at the expense of women’s rights — and that’s not only simplistic, but it’s bad for everyone involved.

If you want to draw attention to the plight of animals by humanizing them, go for it. But you don’t have to de-humanize women in the process.

Image below the fold.

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Raped and Silenced in the Barracks

A must-read piece about how women in the military are assaulted and then treated like dirt. The lead:

When military sexual assault survivors call Susan Avila-Smith, she advises them to keep their mouths shut while she works on getting them home.

“It breaks my heart to do that,” she says, “but I want to get them out alive and that’s my main goal.”

Since she left the Army in 1995, Avila-Smith estimates that she has helped about 1,200 rape survivors separate from the U.S. Armed Forces and claim their Veterans Affairs (VA) benefits. As founder of Women Organizing Women, an online support group for survivors of military sexual trauma (MST), Avila-Smith has heard it all. But lately, she’s been more sensitive than usual.

“Maria’s case has triggered something in me,” she says. “I imagine the VAs are filling up right now with women who never even stepped foot in there before.”

“Maria” is 20-year-old Marine Lance Cpl. Maria Lauterbach, who disappeared from Camp Lejeune, outside of Jacksonville, N.C., on Dec. 14, 2007, one month before she was expected to give birth. As the local police enlisted the press to help reach out to Lauterbach and solicit information from the local community, it was soon reported that she had recently accused a superior at Camp Lejeune of rape.

Naval Criminal Investigative Service agent Paul Ciccarelli attempted to quell suspicions that the two might be linked, assuring the Associated Press that the “sexual encounter” was “not criminal.” On Jan. 10, the Marine Corps Times, a weekly newspaper serving military personnel, bolstered this claim, speculating that she may have fled to avoid charges for “making false statements.”

That same day, Lauterbach’s accused assailant, Marine Cpl. Cesar Laurean, was scheduled to appear at the Onslow County Sheriff’s office for questioning. He never showed up. On Jan. 11, Laurean, who had reported for duty for a full month after Lauterbach’s disappearance, failed to do so. His wife told investigators that she believed he had left for Mexico and gave investigators a note written by Laurean that said Lauterbach had slit her own throat with a knife, and he then buried her. Detectives have rejected that claim, and an autopsy found that Lauterbach died of a blunt force trauma to the head.

Later that day, her charred body was uncovered in a shallow grave behind the Laurean home. The horrific discovery took place only weeks before she was to testify against Laurean.

Really, go read it all.

Need a little spark in your marriage? Try a little gender-role revanchism!

Gah. In an otherwise fairly non-objectionable article about couples who never really talked about sex or made it a real priority experiencing periods of sexlessness, CNN quotes this bit of advice from sex therapist Laura Berman:

Berman offers at least one reason to resolve unsatisfying love lives: “Often, when you’re not having sex, your empathy and ability to connect is lower, and it’s easier to have conflict,” she says. “It amplifies (marital) problems.”

At the Berman Center in Chicago, she counsels couples on repairing their sex lives. Some advice:

• Try traditional gender roles: Men may become more sexually assertive if they feel more in control, and women may feel more desire for a mate with newfound machismo. “You don’t have to get his slippers,” explains Berman. “You just have to give him some control.” She suggests a date where the man chooses everything — her clothes, the restaurant, the food — as a starting point.

Being equals is soooooo unsexy. Remember, ladies, it’s your fault the marriage is sexless, because not letting your man control you, down to choosing what you wear, makes the baby Jesus cry. Or at least makes his wee-wee soft. And if you don’t let him control what you wear, what you eat and what you do in bed, then it’s your fault that he and his wee-wee take up with some other woman who will.

Or, you know, maybe you could learn to talk about sex and learn to ask for what you want:

• Talk about it: Couples also would benefit from simply communicating with their partners about what they want in bed. “There is no secret to hot sex,” says Klein. “Sexy lingerie and dinners out are no substitute for an honest conversation about sex.”

Is it just me, or does it seem that these two pieces of advice contradict each other? I would guess that the kind of people who are heavily invested with traditional gender roles aren’t going to be comfortable talking about sex.

Thanks to Jen for passing this along.

Posted in Sex

What to do about sex work

sex work

As I mentioned earlier, today is International Sex Workers Rights Day. I have a huge backlog of emails and stories that I intend to cover, and I only hit a few of them today, which is why I didn’t get to writing about sex work — but I hope you checked out some of the blogs I linked, since they’re all way better at writing about it than I am.

Plus, sex work is one of those topics (like blowjobs, porn and bikini waxes) that is no doubt a feminist issue, but that inevitably degenerates into ugly fights. That’s not a great reason to avoid talking about it, but it probably is a good reason for me to defer to those who know more about the subject than I do. So I’ll just point out that sex work is as diverse as any other type of labor, and there is no singular sex worker narrative — not all sex workers are exploited girls from developing nations, any more than all sex workers are high-paid call-girls living fabulous and fun urban lives.

But many sex workers are talking and they are organizing. This week, there was an online forum about sex work, trafficking and human rights. It’s well worth checking out. Here are some of the most important points that emerged:

* Sex work must be destigmatized and ultimately decriminalized in order to protect sex workers, their clients, and their communities.

* Negative attitudes toward sexual freedom itself are part of the problem and need to be addressed at the individual and cultural levels.

* Sex work meets the economic needs of the people who perform it and meets social, sexual, educational, and emotional needs of those who consume it. The problems with sex work lie not in the work itself but in the cultural stigma surrounding it, and in the exploitive economic systems that sex work, along with most work, is performed.

* There is a huge divergence between the reality of “human trafficking” and the portrayal of it by media and political figures. This divergence includes hugely inflated numbers based on studies with flawed methodology; an over-emphasis on “sex slavery” at the expense of more common labor exploitation, like manufacturing of consumer goods and domestic help; and a paternalistic view of sex workers and migrant workers in general as the “other.”

* U.S. anti-trafficking policies actually make it harder to find and help real victims because resources are diverted to antiprostitution efforts, which do not help the majority of real trafficking victims. Those efforts also interfere with public health projects in other countries by refusing USAID money to any group that does not actively work against prostitution.

* Human trafficking needs to be understood in the context of international (and intra-national) labor migration patterns and in the context of global inequality. Much of what we call trafficking begins as voluntary migration from one economically depressed area to a less depressed area. Barriers to legal migration make those workers vulnerable to other human rights abuses.

* Politicians and media personalities scapegoat sex workers and their clients in such a way as to direct attention away from larger social and economic problems like poverty, consumer culture, racism, sexism, and the growing gap between the wealthy and everybody else.

* Sex workers are not a homogeneous group and they should not be treated as one.

* Research that relies on poor methodology needs to be publicly criticized. Policy should be directed by reliable, valid research.

* Academic researchers, activists, sex workers, and consumers need to talk to each other and listen to each other. And policy makers need to listen to all of them!

Sex work is a difficult feminist issue, but that’s no excuse for ignoring it. It’s also no excuse for comments that obscure the humanity and autonomy of sex workers. So let’s discuss it, but let’s remember that we aren’t talking about sex workers here — sex workers are already part of the conversation. We should be listening, we should be engaging, and we should be learning.

And I really hate using the word “we” repeatedly here, because it makes it sound like there’s a difference between “us” here at Feministe and “those” sex workers over there, but I can’t think of a better way to phrase it. Hopefully the larger point is getting across, and you’ll all excuse the awkward wording.

Feministe Feedback: Talking to Kids About Homophobia

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I’m going to make “Feministe Feedback” a regular feature here, given that the last two reader-response threads went really well (see: Raising Feminist Daughters and Talking to Your Partner About Sexism). I’ll try to do it weekly, although I think it’ll depend more on when questions for the peanut gallery are posed.

This week, the question comes from a regular reader and a close friend of mine in “real life.” The background is this: She and her husband (both 24) have taken in her husband’s 13-year-old cousin, who we’ll call A. They don’t have any other kids, and they only have A temporarily. Today, she emailed me with this (identifying information redacted or changed):

So. Today when I was home at lunch, A was saying how if his friend was gay, he’d punch him. I asked him why. Being gay is wrong, and being straight is right. I asked why again. No answer. So, I pulled up your video of Ellen, found the boy’s name, and googled the article. Then, I read it to A. I also told him about the 17 year that was killed (I sent you the article, I”m bad with names). Then I asked him if he thought it was okay that these guys got killed. He replied no. I asked why. He said they only needed to be beat up. To make a long story shorter, I continued asking questions, and discussing this with him. I was starting to get pretty upset. [My husband] jumped in a few times. A said it was okay for girls to be gay, but not boys. No answer for why that is. So I told him he had to think about why, and we were going to finish this discussion when I got home.

Jeez.

A is a smart kid. He’s pretty well versed in women’s rights. His mom was definitely a feminist. Wouldn’t even carry or use the word ‘purse’- only bags, lol.

I’m sure his parents have had gay friends, so this was pretty surprising to me. So we are going to keep talking and talking and talking about it.

Good thing is, is that I think having [my husband] hear this conversation made my point to him about how it all starts with a joke. And then snowballs into a 14 year old thinking its okay to kill someone.
I’ve never been stern with A cause I haven’t had to, so I think I kind of freaked him out because I was being really stern. If he was older, I would’ve been pissed, but I was trying to remain calm. He’s young, and really its not his fault. Hopefully I can get most of my point through to him. He’s a sensitive kid, so [my husband] asked him how he would feel if someone decided that being Mexican was wrong, and beat him up. (A is Mexican and Italian).

Having a 13 year old is hard.

Sure sounds like it.

So, Feministers: How do you talk to kids (your own or others’) about homophobia? How do you explain that homophobia is wrong to a 13-year-old who is steeped in it every single day, and who probably constantly hears “gay” as an insult from his peers? Any strategies for my friend and for other parents, guardians and folks who interact with kids?