February 2010 – Page 3

Naïveté and Submission

A French anti-smoking ad compares smoking to oral sex, with the slogan “To smoke is to be a slave to tobacco.” The New York Times describes the visuals of the ads thusly:

The slogan is bland enough: “To smoke is to be a slave to tobacco.” But it accompanies photos of an older man, his torso seen from the side, pushing down on the head of a teenaged girl with a cigarette in her mouth. Her eyes are at belt level, glancing upwards fearfully. The cigarette appears to emerge from the dress trousers of the adult.

The image is here if you want to take a look. And it’s… ick.

The vice-president of the advertising firm that created the ad says it intends to portray smoking as “an act of naïveté and submission.” Which is apparently what oral sex is? Complicating the issue is that the teenager with the cigarette in his/her mouth looks scared; the person with the cigarette in their pants has a hand on the teenager’s head, and the whole situation looks more like abuse than sex (or naivete or submission, for that matter).

I’m with the French feminist who commented that “what is most shocking [about this ad] is the banalization of sexual violence,” and that “It’s a poverty of imagination. When people have no ideas they use female bodies.”

Shameless Self-Promotion Sunday

You know how this goes. Hope you’re having a marvellous day!

Thursday LOST Roundtable: The Substitute

Spoilers below!

This week was a Flocke & Locke episode – off the island we see Locke struggling to accept his disability at his job and with Helen. Meanwhile, Flocke is trying to recruit on the island and shares some info with Sawyer, his new recruit. Read our reactions and then leave your own – but, please, no spoilers for episodes that haven’t aired yet.

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Si son de amores vengan derechas

The House of Secrets: The Hidden World of the Mikveh by Varda Polak-Sahm
(Beacon Press)

One clear evening in Jerusalem, Varda Polak-Sahm shows up alone at her neighborhood mikveh – a ritual bath for Jewish women – to purify herself before her second wedding. After her first mikveh experience, during which she kept her out-of-wedlock pregnancy a secret from her family and the Orthodox balaniyot (mikveh guides), she’s understandably nervous. Yet this time, as the balaniyot towel her off and push congratulatory candies into her mouth after her plunge, Polak-Sahm experiences “an elemental emotion so stunning in its intensity, so acute, it was as if every fiber of my being was stirring wondrously to life.” Fascinated by the incongruity between the dull building, the slightly scary women running the place, and the depth of her spiritual experience, she decides to return to the same mikveh and interview all the women connected with it – clients, guides, and anyone passing through.

Among the various commandments that Jews observe, the commandment to immerse is one of the more obscure. The purpose of the mikveh is to bring women out of niddah, the spiritual impurity associated with menstruation, but Polak-Sahm quickly discovers that the practice has taken on a whole host of extra meanings and superstitions. She paints a decidedly unflattering picture of the Orthodox women who subscribe to it, chronicling bizarre and often offensive claims that impure brides give birth to disabled children, that ritual purity is the only way to keep a marriage together, and that Jews are preternaturally brilliant because their mothers immersed before conception. Unsurprisingly, purity laws are used to oppress women, as Polak-Sahm demonstrates when she describes rabbinical control over reproduction.

But she’s not alone in her spiritual – and intensely pleasurable – reaction to immersion.

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… yeah.

‘Everything that can be invented has been invented.’ Perhaps you have heard this quote before, attributed to a Charles Duell, commissioner of the US patents office in 1899. This is a funny story, but it is not actually a true one. Still, sometimes I like to have fun thinking of all the things that had not yet been invented in 1899. You know, useful things. Amazing things. Inventions that have had a great deal of impact and importance in our lives.

Like… inflatable toast!

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Rape: the sinister blame game

A new UK study shows that most people still blame rape victims at least some of the time — and women are even more likely to victim-blame than men. I offer my analysis on these findings in my first ever piece for the Guardian.

A new survey by the Havens service for rape victims shows that most respondents blamed rape victims for their assailants’ assaults at least some of the time. In particular, well over half said that victims should take responsibility if they climbed into bed with someone who went on to rape them. While the widespread notion that getting into bed with another person equals consent to any and all sexual activities is certainly worthy of discussion and dismantling, the headlines are focusing on a different matter altogether – that more women than men held victims responsible.

This news will likely come as a shock to most. Some will inevitably use it to claim that if women blame victims in such large numbers – even though women constitute the vast majority of victims – victim-blaming can’t be too off-base after all. Others will use it to hold women primarily culpable for societal attitudes regarding sexual violence, and in doing so shift the focus off men. As far as revelations go, this one is disappointing – but it shouldn’t be considered particularly surprising.

Check out the full piece here.

Some Work/Life Facts to Piss You Off

From the good people at Fem2.0. Considering this is my first full day back to work after last week’s back-to-back blizzards, I’ll let this list of U.S. statistics speak for itself…

1. 48% of workers do not have paid sick days; 76% of low-wage workers and 80% of part-time workers do not have paid sick days.

2. In 1960 only 10% of mothers worked and only 10% were unmarried. Today 70% of mothers work and 40% of mothers are unmarried.

3. 70% of American children live in households where all adults are employed.

4. Single mothers earning less then $20,000 are twice as likely as other workers to have nonstandard hours, and have the highest rate of nonstandard hours of all U.S. workers.

5. 41% of working parents say they had missed medical appointments or delayed treatments for their children because they could not get away from work.

6. Nearly 40% of employees say they have missed work due to elder care responsibilities.

7. The US, along with only three other countries-Liberia, Papua New Guinea, and Swaziland-have no paid maternity leave.

8. Of the world’s 15 most competitive countries, 14 provide paid sick leave, 13 provide paid leave for new mothers, and 12 provide paid leave for new fathers.

9. 40% of low-wage workers work nonstandard hours, defined as anything other than 9-to-5, five days/week.

10. Workers coming to work when they are ill cost $180 billion annually in lost productivity.

11. Employers with family friendly policies improve their bottom line by reducing attrition and absenteeism and increasing employee performance.

Update: I regret adopting fem2.0’s original word choice uncritically (see comments) and have edited the post accordingly.

Dear USians on the Internet,

The United States is not the world. It’s not even the centre of the universe.

I know, I know, it’s shocking stuff. If I were polite, I would have offered you a seat first. ~~But I am an uncouth foreigner~~Well that’s just too bad. Also, you have frequently whipped the seat out from under me in the past. I shall illustrate how through the following fun fact-filled lessons.

Not all non-white people are black. Stop referring to us as such. In fact, neither do all non-white people fit into that routine construction of ‘black/Latino/Asian’ that you so frequently employ. Yes, indeed, you are not being inclusive even if you sometimes tack Native Americans on as an afterthought – you know, as though you’re not in their ancestral homeland or anything that would accord them some respect. In fact, there are many many many many many people in the world other than the ones you choose to mention. I would tell you about some of them, but I don’t want to contribute to that whole list-some-people-and-erase-other-people thing you do. And also it would be a great exercise if you could go learn about them! Maybe you could even meet some! Maybe you have been meeting some and have also been erasing their identities by acting like they were from ethnic/racial groups you’re more familiar with!

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Blessing the Boats

It pains me to find out that Lucille Clifton, the beloved American poet, passed away on Saturday after a long battle with cancer. Clifton had a long, celebrated career spanning forty years, writing poems about what it means to be a black woman in America, to have the legacy of slavery lapping at her ankles, and what it meant to see her elders and icons have to bear the daily slog of being othered in a racist land.

Clifton is famous in the feminist community for poking at sexism with a short stick, most notably for “Wishes for Sons” and “Homage to My Hips.” Her narrative poems move me most, such as when she wrote about finding out she had cancer in the poem “1994.”

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Shameless Self-Promotion Sunday

Link us up with posts you’ve written this past week. Include a short description and don’t just link to your whole blog. Have a most fabulous day!