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

Month: December 2008

Accents

My mother is adorable. She’s lived in the US for over 35 years now. She has authored, edited or translated a half-dozen books — in English! But she still sends me e-mails with lines like this, in her recipe for Japanese curry, from ten minutes ago:

“In the same flying pan, add some more oil and quickly fly carrot, potato, onion, diced; and pepper, salt (other veggie, such as cerery, is also good; a bay leaf if you have one).”

Frying pan, mom. Frying pan! Celery!

I don’t know why, but it’s this kind of thing that endears me to my family the most, tugs at my heartstrings. The perfectly normal and understandable behavior that just happens to play into silly stereotypes (belly solly, sah!) even as it makes me slap my forehead. It’s not like I think confusing the English letters “r” and “l” is some kind of problem or deficit — after all, most of you probably can’t pronounce ryu, the word for dragon in Japanese. (And yes, the name of the guy from the Street Fighter series.)

Maybe it’s because it reminds me of when I was a kid and I had to proofread her galleys for little slip-ups like these. Maybe it’s because it’s just an essential part of the second-generation immigrant experience. You’re a kid, you’re an American because you grew up watching Saturday morning cartoons and saying “duh, dookie brains.” And you’re kind of embarrassed sometimes, around some other people, that your folks talk funny or eat weird food. But you’re proud too, even if you don’t realize it. And then you grow up, and realize a lot more about what it all means and how it’s part of who you are.

I’m sure you all have stories too.

Hmm, should I post the whole recipe? It might be a family secret, but the secret mostly seems to have to do with the weird crap she throws in at the end. OK… it’s behind the cut!

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As long as my baby likes Tom Waits, we’ll be cool.

This is the 16th-most-common song sung to babies in the UK (not work-safe):

The rest of them seem more appropriate for a Euro karaoke bar than for a nursery, but I suppose that makes sense — parents sing songs they know, right? My grandma was a song-writer and a singer, and she used to sing us her own songs; my mom sung us her songs, too. My dad, who was apparently not all that creative, sang the ABC song on repeat.

I do find it entertaining that “Sweet Child O’Mine” is on the list. “Angel,” “Nothing Compares to You,” and that stupid James Blunt song seem logical enough, though I’m not sure where “I Kissed a Girl” comes in.

What do you sing to your kids? Or what ridiculous songs did your parents sing to you?

Conspicuous Feminist Consumption

Who isn’t looking for more opportunities to blow those precious few little dollars you’ve managed to hang on to? I know I am, so here are a few of my favorite feminist things…

A few years ago I stumbled on this birth control jewelry on the Planned Parenthood of Northeast Ohio website. It’s convenient that the baby recently trashed the yellow daisy pendant I bought (symbolic? I think so), so now I have very good reason to pick up that Ivy w/ 3 Pills.

The NOW Store has just about everything you’d imagine – t-shirts, mugs, bumper stickers, buttons – with your classic feminist quotes as well as some new sauciness I enjoy. (These bumper sticker sleeves remind me of that scene at the end of PCU, where the protestor produces a spring-loaded blank sign and ubiquitous Sharpie. “No thanks, I brought my own.” Yeah, you heard me. PCU. Don’t judge.) I’ve picked up their Love Your Body calendar in the past, and I like that it identifies notable dates in women’s history – Equal Pay Day, anniversary of Roe, anniversary of women’s suffrage, etc.

Feminist Majority also has a pretty nice online store. These Afghan crafts are new, and on sale, to boot…

Choice USA has particularly nice totebags – and having worked in non-profits for a while now, I’m a woman who knows her totebags.

I did a bunch of digging around today, but I’m sure I missed a lot. Any good online stores to share?

Posted in Uncategorized

Newsflash, jackasses: Planned Parenthood is a health care provider

People are all in a tizzy over the fact that Planned Parenthood of Indiana is offering gift certificates for health care services. Anti-choice bloggers are predictably claiming that Planned Parenthood is offering “gift certificates for abortion,” and that the gift certificates “would be more accurately described as death certificates.”

What they neglect to mention that while Planned Parenthood of Indiana provided 5,000 abortions last year, that was out of 92,000 total patients. The gift certificates are in $25 denominations, not for particular services — so they offer women (many of whom may be uninsured) access to things like pap smears and birth control. It’s not the most romantic Christmas gift ever, but neither are the socks that my mom gets me every year. And women do have a need for health care services. There’s nothing shameful about that.

Anti-choicers and conservatives would be better off focusing on the real issues. Like the annual War on Christmas.

Women and AIDS

Yesterday was World AIDS Day, which predictably unleashed a flurry of suggestions for how we can improve our current HIV/AIDS policy. So it’s worth noting that domestically, the AIDS crisis has been particularly damaging to black communities. AIDS is the #1 cause of death for black women between the ages of 18 and 34. Black women are almost 15 times as likely to be infected with HIV than white women. They are 23 times more likely to be diagnosed with AIDS than white women. African Americans generally make up 12 percent of the population, but 45 percent of new HIV infections.

And only 4 percent of the domestic HIV/AIDS budget in the United States focuses on prevention.

People living with AIDS are stigmatized and sometimes criminalized. We live in a country where African Americans are imprisoned at staggering levels; where bodies of color have been maimed and abused as part of “public health” measures; and where racialized social institutions have done harm to people and communities of color for as long as anyone can remember. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that such a history — and such a present — breeds a rational distrust of state authority and public health outreach.

The solution most certainly is not to criminalize people living with HIV. A man in Texas was sentenced to 35 years in prison for spitting on a police officer — he had committed “assault with a deadly weapon,” because he was HIV-positive. An HIV-positive Georgia woman was sentenced to three years for spitting on another woman. Another HIV-positive Texas man was charged for biting a police officer.

And these prosecutions aren’t limited to the United States:

In Switzerland, a man was sent to jail earlier in 2008 for infecting his girlfriend with HIV, even though he was unaware of his HIV status …

In Uganda, proposed HIV legislation is not limited to intentional transmission, but also forces HIV-positive people to reveal their status to their sexual partners, and allows medical personnel to reveal someone’s status to their partner.

Most legislative development has taken place in West Africa, where 12 countries recently passed HIV laws. In 2004 participants from 18 countries met at a regional workshop in N’djamena, Chad, to adopt a model law on HIV/AIDS for West and Central Africa.

The law they came up with was far from “model”, according to Richard Pearshouse, director of research and policy at the Canadian HIV/AIDS Legal Network, who maintains that the model law’s broad definition of “wilful transmission” could be used to prosecute HIV-positive women for transmitting the virus to their babies during pregnancy.

Considering that in the U.S. we sometimes prosecute women for murder if they are drug users and their babies are stillborn (or child abuse if the baby is born alive), it’s not totally off the mark to suggest that an overzealous prosecutors may very well target pregnant women and mothers.

Criminalizing HIV transmission doesn’t do much to stem its spread; but it does speak to the relative lack of power that HIV-positive people have in their respective societies. I’m pretty sure we can come up with better solutions than this.

Pearl-Clutchers and Straw Women

A guest post by Renee at Womanist Musings.

I have written repeatedly about colluders and the various reasons why they disgust me. There is however another group of women which I hold in equal contempt; and they would be the Pearl Clutchers. You know who you are. The oh noez not me crowd. You are the kind of woman that professes to be all about equality, until a WOC has the nerve to point her finger at you and say the word privilege.

I really do wonder why it is so hard for you to STFU and just listen. Instead we get the temper tantrum, foot stomping and all around dismissive bad behaviour, that feminism has historically employed as a weapon to silence WOC.

This is when we start to hear the famous, “IMO its not racism“. You know what, who the fuck asked and you, and how the fuck do you know. Seriously pearl clutchers, how the fuck do you know what is and isn’t racism?

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It’s World AIDS Day

There are an estimated 33 million people living with HIV/AIDS around the world. Almost 10 million people in developing and transitioning countries are in need of HIV/AIDS drugs; fewer than 1/3 are receiving them.

There is still hope — and on this 20th anniversary of World AIDS Day, there’s finally talk of a vaccine. But we have a long way to go when conservatives continue to insist that AIDS is a “gay disease” — ignoring the fact that 59% of people living with HIV in sub-Saharan Africa, the region with the highest concentration of HIV infections, are women.* And we have far to go when mandatory HIV testing is considered a legitimate solution to the problem, and is discussed without the context of discrimination, homophobia, racism, classism, and the stigma of aidsism. (even while that context is given to the lack of response to the AIDS crisis in the first place).

The fact is that HIV/AIDS may affect people of all income levels, colors, sexual orientations and genders, but it hits some communities harder than others — and it’s a disease that is manageable primarily through access to expensive and complex drug regimines and medical treatments, which are far from universally available. It’s also been deeply politicized. Ronald Reagan famously ignored it because it seemed to be centered in gay communities, and conservatives today promote ideology instead of prevention. With a new administration coming into power, I hope that this World AIDS Day marks the last year that conservative ideals trump scientific standards when it comes to prevention. If Obama’s website is any indication, we’re headed that way:

Our first priority should be to implement the recently signed President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), legislation Barack Obama long-supported, to ensure that best practices – not ideology – to drive funding for HIV/AIDS programs. In that context, Barack Obama and Joe Biden will commit $50 billion over five years to strengthen the existing program and expand it to new regions of the world, including Southeast Asia, India, and parts of Europe, where the HIV/AIDS burden is growing. An Obama administration will also increase U.S. contributions to the Global Fund to ensure that global efforts to fight endemic disease continue to move ahead.

Julie David at RH Reality Check has other suggestions for what we can do domestically to curb the HIV/AIDS crisis. Prevention Now! has more.

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*Not that women can’t be gay, of course, or that lesbians can’t contract HIV. But when conservatives say that HIV is a “gay disease,” they usually mean a gay man’s disease.

Predictions.

Who’s going to die on Gossip Girl tonight? It pains me to say it, but I’m guessing Eric.