March 2010 – Page 8

WEEKEND ARTS SECTION: Marisa Tomei Will Never Invite Me To a Dinner Party

I hate to say that my problem in life is that I have “high standards.” Only jerks say that, right? I mean: Have the standards or not, but don’t invoke them in the name of defending your right to be mean. Those are the basic rules.

Nevertheless, on March 4, I attended an event in honor of Half the Sky, the book on global womens’ rights by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl Wudunn. This event was broadcast to many movie screens across the country, and featured various celebrities, and a panel discussion to which the celebrities were invited along with actual experts, and a short film co-directed by the actress Marisa Tomei, along with Lisa Leone. At this event, I came to feel that I had perhaps unreasonably high standards for discussion of global womens’ rights, and that these standards had begun to pose a problem.

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Feministe All Over The World Redux

Recently I was taking a trip through the Feministe archives when I came across this post of Jill’s from 2007, Feministe All Over The World. She took a look at the Sitemeter stats, which show you where in the world the most recent visitors to the site are.

I’ve been taking looks myself at different times of day over the past few weeks; we have visitors from all over! Most of you are from the United States, much as you might expect, and there are also a fair few folks from Canada, Australia and the United Kingdom. We’ve visitors from New Zealand, India, Slovenia, South Korea, Germany, Norway, Morocco, Austria, Spain, Sweden, Colombia, Trinidad and Tobago, Yemen, Ukraine, France, Hungary, the Netherlands and the United Arab Emirates, and that’s only a sampling!

It’s a marvellous thing to know that you’re tucked away in front of your computer in your little corner of the world, yet you’re in community with so many people. So let’s see where we’re all from!

Leave a comment telling us where you’re from and, if it differs, where you live. Also, what’s the time where you are as you’re commenting?

I myself was born in Sydney, Australia, and live here still, though I keep threatening my family with moving to Denmark. It’s 8.17 on Sunday morning.

Join Women on the Bridge

(Video transcript below the jump)

Chally recently posted a reminder about International Women’s Day coming up on Monday, March 8th. There are all kinds of events taking place all over the world, but I received an email about one particular set of events that I thought I’d highlight here.

As most blog readers are probably aware, due to war, women in both Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo face incredibly high rates of rape and other violent assault. On March 8th, Congolese and Rwandan women are taking action to demand an end to war and violence against women. Via the email:

On March 8, hundreds of Congolese and Rwandan women will unite on a bridge to demand an end to the violence that has caused 5.4 million deaths and hundreds of thousands of rapes. They will tie together banners of fabric on which they’ve painted their visions for a peaceful future.

To honor and support their resilience, Women for Women International is hosting a global campaign – Join me on the Bridge – which will replicate that meeting at bridges in different cities all around the world in a show of global solidarity. Already supporting the Congolese and Rwandan women in their call for war’s end will be thousands of women from Bosnia, Kosovo, Sudan, the UK and the US.

In New York City, we are rallying people to the Brooklyn Bridge at noon on Monday, March 8. Sponsors such as kate spade new york, Marie Claire and the ONE campaign are also joining us. Project Runway’s Tim Gunn will be in attendance. Self-organized bridge events will also be taking place in other cities, towns and schools nationwide.

Check out the Women For Women International website to see all of the events that will be taking place. The two largest events will take place in New York and London, but there will also be many, many events in other cities. Most are in the U.S. and U.K., but there are also events in countries such as Australia, Canada, India, Mexico, and Nigeria. Almost all of the events will be held on either March 7th (this Sunday) or March 8th (Monday). Please consider attending if there’s one near you.

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Profile of a College Rapist

Sexual assault trigger warning on this post.

Matt Yglesias writes about incidences of sexual assault in college, and a recent NPR story about David Lisak’s extensive research on college rapists. Thomas has also written extensively about this, and I would recommend reading his takes. NPR summarizes Lisak’s findings thusly:

There’s a common assumption about men who commit sexual assault on a college campus: That they made a one-time, bad decision. But psychologist David Lisak says this assumption is wrong —-and dangerously so.
…
It might seem like it would be hard for a researcher to get these men to admit to something that fits the definition of rape. But Lisak says it’s not. “They are very forthcoming,” he says. “In fact, they are eager to talk about their experiences. They’re quite narcissistic as a group — the offenders — and they view this as an opportunity, essentially, to brag.”

What Lisak found was that students who commit rape on a college campus are pretty much like those rapists in prison. In both groups, many are serial rapists. On college campuses, repeat predators account for 9 out of every 10 rapes.

In other words, the people who insist that on-campus rapes are the result of two people getting drunk and making a bad decision and the woman regretting it in the morning? Those people are wrong.

Unfortunatley, Matt’s take on the issue is… somewhat troubling. I’ll preface this by saying that Matt is a really smart guy and a feminist ally, and I also initially misread his post (I confused his comments about Lake’s quote to be about Lisak’s research) and I made the mistake of reading some of the comment thread, so that’s probably coloring my take a little bit. But I find his take-away from the NPR piece to be a bit lacking.

Here’s what NPR writes, and what Matt posts, about Lisak’s research:

[Lisak] found them by, over a 20-year period, asking some 2,000 men in college questions like this: “Have you ever had sexual intercourse with someone, even though they did not want to, because they were too intoxicated [on alcohol or drugs] to resist your sexual advances?”

Or: “Have you ever had sexual intercourse with an adult when they didn’t want to because you used physical force [twisting their arm, holding them down, etc.] if they didn’t cooperate?”

About 1 in 16 men answered “yes” to these or similar questions.

And these dudes who admit to having sex with people against their will? They don’t define what they did as “rape.”

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With the Understanding of Gandhi, Aminatou Put Her Life on the Line

by Barbara Becker, cross-posted from On the Issues Magazine

When I was in college, I had a small book of questions meant to serve as conversation starters for social gatherings. There was one question in particular that I had no idea how to answer, and not having a response seemed to indicate some form of personal shortcoming in my young and idealistic mind: “Is there a cause for which you’d be willing to sacrifice your life?”

It wasn’t until years later when I began working in international human rights that I encountered others who could answer that question affirmatively. This past year, I had the privilege of getting to know such a person when I spent time with Aminatou Haidar, the Western Saharan human rights defender who was in the U.S. last fall to accept the 2009 Civil Courage Prize for her peaceful advocacy on behalf of the Sahrawi people.

For over 20 years, Aminatou has led the nonviolent struggle to free the people of Western Sahara from Morocco’s 34-year occupation. During this time, Aminatou — regularly referred to as the “Sahrawian Gandhi” — has spent nearly five years in prison for her peaceful activism, much of it in solitary confinement undergoing repeated torture.

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TRANSform Me

Alisa at PostBourgie writes about a new VH1 show featuring a team of trans women traveling around the United States to make over cis women in need. I hadn’t heard of TRANSform Me before; this is how VH1 describes it:

TRANSform Me is a makeover show in which a team of three transgender women, led by the inimitable Laverne Cox (I Want To Work For Diddy), rescues women from personal style purgatory. Laverne and her ultra-glam partners in crime have undergone the ultimate transformation, so they’re the perfect women for the job.

They’ll travel the country in their tricked out fashion ambulance, siren blaring, and swoop into scenes of fashion disaster. They’ll not only make women look better but feel a whole lot better about themselves. It’s about discovering one’s inner personal style.

Laverne and the girls will cruise from boutiques to beauty salons in search of just the right look. And they won’t pull any punches with their subjects–or each other!

Each episode of TRANSform Me will cover the makeover of one woman who’s written to the show asking for help. The subject expects to be made over for a reality show–but she doesn’t know it’s going to be by three transgender women.

Ah, hmm.

On one hand: It is good to see trans-identified people in the mainstream. Queer Eye for the Straight Guy wasn’t exactly the most politically conscious show in the world, and in a lot of ways it played into some ridiculous stereotypes, but it did bring gay men into households across the United States; same with Will & Grace. Those shows were problematic for a lot of reasons, but in the trajectory of gay rights and acceptance in the United States? I think they pushed things forward. I think they helped to open a door for Ellen Degeneris — whose original show tanked after she came out as a lesbian — to become one of the most popular talk show hosts in the country (and not just on those godforsaken coasts, either). Popular culture matters, and a lot of times it’s going to be ham-fisted in dealing with marginalized groups, but I fall pretty firmly on the side of “it’s better to have marginalized groups imperfectly represented than not represented at all” (the caveat, of course, is that a marginalized group serving as a punchline is not just “imperfect” representation).

Which brings me to that other hand: I haven’t seen TRANSform Me, but I do worry that the trans women will be punchlines or caricatures. I worry that VH1 set it up so that the trans element of the show is a “gotcha!” moment — “You thought you were getting a make-over, but really you’re getting it from transgender chicks OMG!” I worry that “trans” will get a lot more attention than “women.”

But again, I haven’t seen it (is it even on yet?). Anyone have any further intel or thoughts?

So maybe that’s why we don’t know how birth control works

Americans also can’t agree on what sex is.

The study, published in the February issue of the journal Sexual Health, randomly surveyed 486 adults, most of them heterosexual, between the ages of 18 and 96. They were asked the following question: “Would you say you ‘had sex’ with someone if the most intimate behavior you engaged in was [blank],” and then followed more than a dozen “behavior specific items.” A press release reports that “two out of ten people did not concur that penile-anal intercourse was sex, and three out of ten said ‘no’ to oral-genital activity, as did half of the respondents about manual-genital contact.” And, while 95 percent classified penile-vaginal penetration as sex (one has to wonder what does count for the remaining 5 percent), that number dropped to 89 percent in cases where the man doesn’t ejaculate.

I wonder what percentage think it’s “not sex” if the woman doesn’t orgasm? And what if both partners are of the same sex?

Americans stunningly ignorant about birth control

Apparently your boyfriend is freaked out by your NuvaRing and doesn’t understand how the Pill works. And apparently unmarried ladies and gents across America are similarly confused! (PDF)

Here are some very frightening statistics:

-Among people who are in sexually active relationships and want to prevent pregnancy, 19% use no contraception at all. 24% use contraception inconsistently.

-42% of men and 40% of women believe that your chances of getting pregnant within one year while on the birth control pill are 50% or greater (the pill is actually about 92% effective with typical use).

-18% of men believe you can reduce the risk of pregnancy if you have sex standing up.

-24% of American singles believe that using two condoms is more effective than using one.

-25% of young men believe that douching after sex can prevent pregnancy.

-29% of men and 32% of women reported knowing “little or nothing about condoms.” 78% of men and 45% of women said the same about birth control pills.

And 90% believe they have all the knowledge they need to prevent an unplanned pregnancy.

American singles think we know a lot about pregnancy prevention, but in reality we not only know very little, but we also have a lot of totally bad information that we happily act on (the Fox News-ification of sex, if you will). So thanks, abstinence-focused American sex education system, which teaches us that birth control doesn’t really work and that condoms are kind of useless. And thanks, lack of universal health care, for making sure that young people aren’t able to actually go to the doctor to get the information and preganancy-prevention tools they need. But uh, glad to know that people are gettin’ to it in positions other than missionary I guess.

Gender-Neutral Oscars?

Kim Elsesser from the Center for Study of Women at the UCLA poses this question in the New York Times: Why is it considered acceptable to segregate nominations by sex, offering different Oscars for best actor and best actress?

The editorial is well worth a read. I agree with her in principle, but what of the fact that women are 51% of the population but only made up 29.9% of speaking roles in the 100 top-grossing movies of 2007? And that 83% of the directors, writers and producers of those movies were men? With so many more men snagging speaking roles — and so many more men writing, directing and producing films — women just wouldn’t have an equal shot at a gender-neutral acting award. But perhaps that’s not reason enough to keep awards gender-segregated. Thoughts?

Thursday LOST Roundtable: Sundown

Spoilers below!

This week, Sayid’s life sucks all around. Off the island, Nadia is married to Sayid’s brother, who Sayid bails out of trouble. On the island, Dogen and Flocke play ping pong with Sayid’s emotions and Flocke wins.

Read the discussion and add your own thoughts and theories (without any spoilers for episodes that haven’t aired yet).

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