February 2010 – Feministe

International Women’s Day is very soon!

International Women’s Day is coming up in just a few days. What is IWD, I hear you say? I’m glad you asked! IWD has been marked yearly on 8 March since the early twentieth century. That is, it began with a National Women’s Day in the United States on 28 February 1909 as started by the Socialist Party of America. The next year, a more international Women’s Day came about with a vote at the Socialist International meeting in Copenhagen. IWD was first celebrated in Austria, Denmark, Germany and Switzerland the next year, and gradually spread around the world; you can read more about all this at the UN website. Wikipedia lists the following countries as observing the day: Albania, Algeria, Armenia, Australia, Azerbaijan, Bangladesh, Belarus, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Brazil, Bulgaria, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Chile, China, Colombia, Croatia, Cuba, Cyprus, Denmark, Finland, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, India, Italy, Israel, Laos, Latvia, Kazakhstan, Kosovo, Kyrgyzstan, Macedonia, Malta, Mexico, Moldova, Mongolia, Montenegro, Nepal, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Russia, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Sweden, Syria, Tajikistan, Turkey, Turkmenistan, Ukraine, Uzbekistan, Vietnam, Zambia. That’s quite a list!

In 1975, International Women’s Day was adopted by the United Nations. They assign a new theme every year; this year’s theme is ‘Equal rights, equal opportunities: Progress for all’. On their site they’ve got listed a wide range of events, and these are not limited to 8 March. In fact, if you hurry you can get into online discussions by way of contributing to Beijing+15, the 15-year review of progress following on from the hugely important Beijing Platform for Action. Here’s the UN’s calendar of events around women’s rights for this year.

But wait, there’s more! Here’s a pretty good website dedicated to International Women’s Day, not an official one, I’ll note. They maintain a list of IWD events around the world; as I’m writing this, upwards of 500 are listed. What’s more, if you’ve got a celebration or event or gathering planned, you can add it to the site yourself. If you were wondering whence I obtained that nifty logo up top, it’s from this page and there are a bunch more.

Gender Across Borders (which is a marvellous feminist blog with an international focus you should check out) has something special planned. They’re running a Blog for International Women’s Day event which you yourself can participate in! Bloggers are being asked to think on either ‘What does “equal rights for all” mean to you?’ or ‘Describe a particular organization, person, or moment in history that helped to mobilize a meaningful change in equal rights for all.’ Be sure to sign up and get your blog on the list of participating blogs. You can grab all the details you need here.

So get ready for a day packed full of events and blogging and focus on women around the world!

Edit: Emily from GAB has contacted me regarding the unofficial International Women’s Day site mentioned above. There are a number of issues regarding Thomson Reuters’ involvement with the site.

Shameless Self-Promotion Sunday

You know what to do.

Friday Random Ten – the Snowpocalypse part 30454 edition

There’s a huge snowstorm in New York right now, and it’s making me wish I was still in the southern hemisphere. Ugh. Anyone having a better Friday?

The Friday Video this week is a song that I’ve been a little obsessed with for the past few months — I admittedly think the TI version is the jam, even if it’s not the most feminist thing in the world, but having a lady sing it? In a really fun sex-positive video where she works at Toys in Babeland and her customers include Daniel V from Project Runway and Andy from Weeds? Love.

Now, the Ten. Add yours in the comments.

1. The Pogues – Fiesta
2. Mike Wexler – Pneuma
3. Tom Waits – How’s It Gonna End?
4. Yeah Yeah Yeahs – Man
5. Sally Shapiro – Time to Let Go
6. Santogold – Starstruck
7. Sufjan Stevens – Size Too Small
8. Mos Def & Faith Evans – Brown Sugar
9. Voxtrot – Blood Red Blood
10. Bon Iver – Skinny Love

Live-Tweeting Abortion

Angie Jackson is live-tweeting her abortion this week, and it seems to have brought a lot of woman-haters out of the woodwork. She has, predictably, been accused of everything from trivializing the procedure to baby-killing. But it seems to me that what she’s doing is brave, and a pretty generous service to other women. One in three American women will have an abortion in her lifetime, but it’s not something that we usually talk about in public — or at least, that we talk about beyond political debates and platitudes. A lot of women who go in for abortions don’t actually know the details of what happens, and have been properly terrified by anti-choice propaganda.

Angie also seems like a pretty good spokeswoman for the cause. She is, in a lot of ways, a woman who a lot of people in the middle would say should be “allowed” to have an abortion (she’s a mom, she has health complications, she was on birth control and it failed, she’s in a monogamous relationship), but she doesn’t use those qualifiers to argue that somehow she’s special, or that other women aren’t just as deserving of medical care as she is. In this interview, she points out that even given all of her “extras,” she’s still been subject to tremendous amounts of abuse, and can’t imagine how women branded less deserving must feel:

I’ve been astonished. I had imagined, naively, that people would accept it because I’m in a committed relationship. I was monogamous. I was using protection. I had a kid. I have health risks. We paid for this out of pocket and not out of any taxpayer means. If I can’t talk about my first trimester abortion, which was legal and in my case life-saving, then who the hell can talk about her abortion? Or his abortion story, from the women he was with? … I’ve just been astonished by the level of hatred and death threats and threats of violence against my son. It’s been a very ugly side of people to see.

She’s still out there, though, telling her story. And her reasons why are quite poignant:

I think any time that we are silent about things or secret about things, it is unhealthy. I say this as a sexual abuse survivor. When I stopped keeping secrets [about the sexual abuse] and starting telling somebody, life got better. I have kept that throughout my life And I’m an autobiographical blogger. I am very open with the internet about how I am. I am very open about who I am with parenting and mental illness … For me, this wasn’t very different. This was about me talking about who I am openly. For me, talking about things is just how I approach all the taboos of life. I think that secrecy is unhealthy. We don’t get help when we don’t talk about things. For women who do need counseling or support or love or understanding after an abortion, if they have to stay quiet out of shame, then they won’t get that help. I think talking about things really can make a huge difference.

I feel that I was reasonably responsible. This is a possible responsible answer to this problem. In my case, I do feel like this is the best decision. I talked it over with my son and my boyfriend, who are the only people besides me who get a vote. It’s still my choice, but I’m going to talk it over with the people that I love — not that my son understands it much. But I don’t see why I should be ashamed that I’m saving my life. I don’t think that I’m being a killer; I don’t feel like I killed a person. And I’m sure if I did, I would feel guilt. And that’s why [anti-abortion activists] try so hard to convince you that it is.

Thursday LOST Roundtable: Lighthouse

Spoilers below!

Screencap from the LOST episode "Lighthouse": Hurley and Jack sit outside the Temple, having a discussion. A few unidentified Others stand in the background

This week on LOST, sideways Jack dealt with a new kind of daddy issue, regular Jack and Hurley visited (and destroyed!) a magical lighthouse, and Claire turned out to be a whole lot scarier than we’d predicted. We had an awful lot to say about it all, so let’s jump right in …

[REMINDER: No spoilers for unaired episodes in the comments!]

Some things you should know about the Vancouver Olympic Games

I wanted to draw your attention to protests against the Winter Olympics by a number of indigenous groups in Canada. I’d not heard much about it until Anna of Trouble is Everywhere drew my attention to the protests; speaking of which, thanks to Anna for for helping me find some of these links! It seems there has not been much coverage outside of Canada, so let’s you and I do some background reading. Before I go on, a note on language. I’ve done my best to use appropriate terminology when referring to particular groups. I recognise that I may have slipped up and if so apologise in advance. Here’s a terminology guide if you’d like to learn more yourself.

Vajazzled

So, um, this is interesting. I suppose if you want to decorate your pubic area with little crystals, go for it. I can’t even begin to imagine the ingrown hair situation there (or the totally disturbed look you’ll get when your dude or lady comes face-to-face, if you will, with your Swarovskified-vulva), but to each their own.

But here’s what made me sad: “The trend exploded when Jennifer Love Hewitt announced that she Vajazzles regularly to feel good about her privates.”

To feel good about your privates you have to superglue crystals to them? May I suggest that perhaps there are better solutions, like therapy or Toys in Babeland?

I also suspect there’s no such thing as balldazzling. Although it would lend itself well to a punny post header about disco sticks.

via Kate’s Twitter.

Taylor Swift Flame

Is Taylor Swift bad for women? The F-Bomb says she is not a feminist dream! Because, well, she is maybe not so talented and she writes pretty much just about boys and she relies pretty heavily on the virgin/whore thing in her songs and videos. My one quibble is the idea that Swift isn’t a feminist dream because there are lots of better female artists out there, like La Gaga, and they should be getting more of the credit. That is true, but this is not a zero-sum game! The music industry is chock-full of really really crappy male artists to balance out the handful of really really good male artists, so I’m cool with having a bunch of really really crappy female artists, too. And yes, I would put Taylor Swift in that category, even though I think she is completely adorable. And for the record, I like my share of really really crappy artists, so if you like Taylor Swift? That’s ok! But songs with painfully trite lyrics like that over sweet little melodies? Entertaining no doubt, but not exactly Musical Genius. But again, that’s ok — women should have just as much room as men to make easily-marketable and widely-palatable musical Big Macs. The problem, of course, is that women don’t have as much room as men in the music industry, and so even the really talented ones either get funneled into the Sweet Girl With a Guitar box or dressed in a latex bikini. The fact that Swift plays the virgin isn’t her fault, personally, but it is a problem with her branding — which is why it’s important to keep the ensuing flame-age focused on the idea that we’re criticizing Taylor Swift as a musical brand created and marketed in a particular cultural context, and not Taylor Swift the surely very sweet and smart young woman.

Anyway, apparently not all feminists are in agreement that Taylor Swift is bad. The point, though, isn’t that we should feel bad for liking Taylor Swift because it somehow damages our feminist creds (did anyone say that?). Just that, you know, as feminists who write on the internet we analyze pop culture and stuff. And maybe Taylor Swift is not the best thing, feminism-wise. Kind of like how Nickleback is not the best thing, humanity-wise.

All of which is to say, I’m with what our girl Sady wrote way back in ’09. And also Kate Harding, because, of course. Autostraddle also has kind of an amazing post.

Although I’ll add that, despite my feeling that Swift is completely precious, I will always sort of hate her for allowing that travesty of a duet with Stevie Nicks to go on at the Grammy Awards. That is Stevie Nicks. Stevie Nicks does not sing back-up. And if she does back you up, you had better not be out of tune.

Seen and Not Heard

From the LA Times:

Women may make up 51% of the population, but actresses nabbed only 29.9% of the 4,379 speaking parts in the 100 top-grossing films of 2007, or so says a new study released by University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism, which was conducted by professor Stacy. L Smith.

According to Smith’s study, 83% of all directors, writers, and producers on those films were male. Not surprisingly, the number of female characters grew dramatically when a woman directed a film — up to 44.6% from 29.3% if a man was behind the camera.

But Women Don’t Rape

*Trigger warning on the post and the comments*

A guest post by writer and social researcher Rachel Hills, of Musings of an Inappropriate Woman.

We’ve all heard the “but he’s such a nice guy” defence trotted out to explain away sexual assault, but what about the “but she’s such a nice girl” defence?

It’s a question Pluralist raised in the Feministing community last week, and I’m glad she did. She tells the story of her best friend, who “(unknowingly) forced her boyfriend into sex”:

Apparently he had said things along the lines of “I’m too tired right now, let’s just go to sleep” and she had continued to proposition him thinking “welll, this will help you sleep better!” My immediate reaction was that there was no way she had coerced or pressured him into sex. After all, he should’ve just said “No really, I don’t want to do this right now” if she kept at it. It was his fault for not stopping the encounter.

And then I realised that had this been a woman in his place – not to mention my best friend – I would never have given this consideration. I was victim-blaming, basing my assumptions in tropes of male hypersexuality and female passivity. She didn’t handcuff him to a heater and force-feed him viagra. She’s a nice girl, she couldn’t have done that!