March 2010 – Page 9

Goodbye, Jon Swift

Oh this is so sad. The wonderful Jon Swift — whose real name was Al Weisel — has passed away. Jon was one of the first bloggers to link to my writing, and was always very supportive of feminist bloggers. His writing was consistently incisive, intelligent and hilarious.

He was a good one, and he will be missed.

Race, those billboards and abortion as genocide

Last month, Renee wrote about the “Black children are an endangered species” billboards. Now the New York Times has picked it up, in a story about how the anti-abortion movement is using race and accusations of genocide as a way to “court” supporters of color to a traditionally white, long-racist movement. The anti-choice strategy has been to hire a handful of women of color to travel around the country telling African-Americans that abortion is part of a decades-old conspiracy to kill off black people.

The tactic seems to be working, at least to a point. And it works in large part because there is a long history of trying to curtail the reproductive capacities of men and women of color. The term “black genocide conspiracy” might be met with a lot of eye-rolling from white people, but there is a legitimate back-story that enables such a theory to take hold and to grow, and there are legitimate concerns about population control and the targeting of families of color. Tuskegee. Puerto Rico. Mississippi appendectomies. Women’s bodies were used as vessels to increase the slave population, and enslaved women had no legal right to their own children. After slavery, the reproductive coercion flipped, and people of color in the United States (or people wanting or forced to come to the United States) faced anti-miscegenation laws, anti-immigrant policies, mandatory sterilization and the wide embrace of eugenics. Through the 20th century and into the 21st, the bodies and reproductive capacities of women of color were used as political warning signs — Reagan’s welfare queen, “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action,” and on and on.

And it’s not all “history,” either. Louisiana, last year. Criminal courts today. Women are paid to be sterilized, or otherwise coerced out of reproducing if they’re the wrong color or the wrong socioeconomic class, or if they’re addicted, or if they’re disabled.

All women face attempted infringements on their reproductive rights. But women of color in the United States have faced those infringements in a very particular way, and that’s in part why the “abortion is genocide” argument resonates.

A question.

Why does David Brooks still have a job?

40 vs. 4000

On February 17th, anti-choicers started the “40 Days for Life” campaign, where they show up at abortion clinics and harass patients and employees even more than usual. Now there’s a great (and informative) response: 4,000 Years for Choice. The conclusion: Women have, forever, been trying to control their reproductive capacities and determine for themselves the number and spacing of their children.

Boyfriends “pleased” by unintended pregnancies?

This is kind of terrifying. Researchers asked men and women who were trying to avoid pregnancy how they would feel if they or their partner got pregnant — whether they would be “Very upset, a little upset, a little pleased, very pleased, wouldn’t care.” The results?

Results: Staggeringly gendered! Forty-three percent of young men responded that they would be “a little pleased” or “very pleased” by the news; only 20 percent of women answered the same. Men also proved more comfortable with an unplanned pregnancy at an earlier age: Thirty-four percent of men 18-19 said they would be pleased. By the time they reach age 20-24, 42 percent of men said they would be pleased. And over 50 percent of men aged 25-29 would be pleased by the news. Remember: this is only among men who deemed it “important” that a pregnancy not occur at this junction.

Women, though, were generally less pleased — 16 percent across the board for women 18-24, 29 percent for women 25-29.

So what, exactly, is going on? Are dudes’ biological clocks just ticking faster? Is it a weird territory-marking thing? Are they just excited to know that their sperm worked, as someone suggested in the comments over at The Sexist? Is this a way for them to enter into a certain lifestyle they might want (a wife, kids, etc) without having to make serious decisions or admit they actually want it? Anyone?

Thanks to Amanda for the link.

Gaga 3:16

Hot damn I love her.

Some women choose to follow men, and some women choose to follow their dreams. If you’re wondering which way to go, remember that your career will never wake up and tell you that it doesn’t love you anymore.

Thoughts on the “hookup culture,” or what I learned from my high school diary

A guest-post by Nona Willis Aronowitz. Nona is a feminist journalist and co-author of Girldrive: Criss-crossing America, Redefining Feminism. She blogs at Girl-drive.com.

Debates about “hooking up,” swinging from genuine concern to hysteria on both sides of political spectrum, have been raging throughout the 2000s.* And this week, it’s seemed to bubble up to the surface again. I’ve spent the day reading ruminations by teen girl expert and Teen Vogue advice columnist Rachel Simmons, the always-thought provoking Kate Harding of Broadsheet, and Amanda Marcotte, who gives us a searing and passionate rebuff of any sort of nostalgia we might have about dating rules and traditions.

This rips open a wound for me–I spent most of 2007 contemplating this issue. But I’m gonna weigh in afresh now that I’ve just celebrated 2 years with my healthiest, post-high-school, Completely Committed Relationship (technically marriage, but that’s another story)–the sex-and-love “holy grail,” according to the many women’s and teen magazines Kate lists in her Salon piece. Before, it was my “sorta” this or my “fuck buddy” that or my “I wish I knew what he was thinking” friend-with-benefits. And I gotta say, no matter how much I railed against Laura Sessions Stepp and Dawn Eden and Miriam Grossman and all the other rightwing, anti-feminist cautionary matrons, the facts remained: I knew how it felt to agonize over a text message. I knew how much it hurt to hear that the guy I’d been hooking up with “didn’t do relationships.” And I knew what it was like to use sexuality to coax a guy into being with me, only to have it fail miserably.

Feminist or not, that shit sucks. And it happens a lot, to women and girls everywhere. And yet, if you consider me and the vast majority of America who eventually couple up, it seems to end up okay. What to make of all this?

Selling Food Stamps for Kid’s Shoes

I’m incredibly far behind on the recent Colorlines investigation into the practice of poor U.S. families selling food stamps for cash. But now that I’ve finally gotten to reading it, it’s certainly worth the time to bring it to the attention to those of you who have not.

Due to the welfare “reform” of the 90s, which placed time limits on how long one can receive cash welfare assistance, a substantial and growing number of families who have already used what the government is willing to supply literally have nothing else left. More still simply do not have enough for what they need. In order to buy basic necessities (soap, toilet paper, laundry detergent) and pay bills, they’re forced to illegally sell their food stamps as their only option for making ends meet. According to the article, not only were a staggering one in eight Americans (one in four among children) using food stamps in November, but about 6 million Americans receiving food stamps say that they have no other income.

And yes, women, and particularly women of color, are by far suffering the greatest impact:

Blacks, Latinas and Asians nationwide are about two times more likely than whites to have been pushed off cash assistance as a result of time limits, rather than for another reason, according to a ColorLines analysis of 2008 data from the US Department of Health and Human Services. Because women-led families make up 90 percent of TANF cases that have been closed, women of color like Eva are now more likely to be living without access to any cash assistance.

For many people then, food stamps are all they have.

Not discussed in the article is the conundrum of the legions in the U.S.’s bootstraps obsessed culture who will insist that women selling food stamps is not a sign that our system is broken, failing desperately, inherently cruel, and on the brink of collapse, but evidence that those receiving any assistance at all are “scamming” the system, and do not even deserve the scraps the middle-class is willing to throw their way. After all, this situation didn’t occur by accident; it was predicted and chosen.

But what the Colorlines investigation does do is follow the life of a woman, called Eva, who is unable to find a job, and must both sell her food stamps and run up a tab at her local store every month in order to ensure that she and her daughters can survive. It’s also the result of interviews with several other women in similar circumstances, as well as service providers. If you haven’t read it yet, go do that.

via Racialicious