April 2010 – Page 9

Happy Confederate History Month

(Really, you guys. Celebrating Confederate history is not celebrating our history. It’s celebrating the historical right of some people to own other people. It’s not celebrating states’ rights. It’s celebrating states’ rights to allow slavery. Let’s at least be up-front here).

How to Write About Africa

This piece, and Ta-Nehisi Coates’ take on it, are interesting when read in tandem with this New Yorker article about an American couple set on saving elephants in Africa (sometimes at the expense of human life and well-being).

Arizona Set to Pass Anti-Immigrant Legislation

In Arizona, the legislature looks set to pass a truly terrifying anti-immigration bill that would, among other thing, allow police to arrest undocumented immigrants on the charge of trespassing simply for being in the state:

The Arizona Legislature gave preliminary approval Tuesday to a proposal that would allow the police to arrest illegal immigrants on trespassing charges simply for being in the state.

The provision, which opponents and proponents call a first in the nation, is part of a wide-ranging bill whose sponsors say they hope will make life tougher for illegal immigrants.

The House bill must be reconciled with a version passed by the Senate, something that may be done within the next week or two. Both include measures to outlaw the hiring of day laborers off the street; prohibit anyone from knowingly transporting an illegal immigrant, even a relative, anywhere in the state; and compel local police to check the status of people they reasonably suspect are in the country illegally.

Immigrant advocates call the bill some of the harshest legislation they have seen in a state where battles over immigration are particularly sharp edged.

Allow me to repeat that, because it’s important. The bill would, among other things, force police to check the status of people they “reasonably suspect” are undocumented.

Tell me, who exactly do you think the people police might “reasonably suspect” of being undocumented might be? Because as a white woman, I don’t think that in the event of this bill passing, I’d exactly have to fear being stopped. What this bill would essentially do is not only legalize but require racial profiling and harassment against Latin@s.

Truthdig has more on the bill. It originally passed the Senate back in February — Google searches indicate the issue was being discussed for a couple months prior to now, though it only recently hit my radar — and the most recent news seems to be that an amended version has passed committee in the House. Though the amended version changes the language about “trespassing,” some immigrants rights advocates worry that the new language is even worse. Not only does the rewording potentially criminalize legal residents who fail to carry their documentation, it also “eliminates the requirement that an individual must be in the midst of committing another crime in order to also be charged with transporting, concealing or harboring an illegal immigrant” and contains no exception for humanitarian efforts.

I’m unsure what kind of effect voter action may have at this stage in the game. The ACLU has called the bill unconstitutional, and the best bet may be a legal challenge. Nevertheless, if my searching has failed and you have action alerts or information about organizations that are combating the bill, please leave the information in the comments and I’ll update the post.

Bits and Pieces

U.S. admits role in killing Afghan women. Sort of, anyway.

Where are the women at NPR?

Apparently this guy has never heard of the Atkins diet — he went on an anti-meat rampage so that girls wouldn’t eat beef and get fat.

The Times profiles Norris Church Mailer, the wife of notorious misogynist Norman Mailer.

Racism is not a “mental illness”: How the left enables bigotry.

Victorian women: Totally boning.

Why the kind of nudity you see in mumblecore films won’t ever go mainstream.

Five things college men can do to stop rape.

This article will really just make your heart break for the poor, beleagured Playboy collectors, who are sad-faced because their favorite brand now has girl-cooties.

Is it sex or not? Most young adults don’t qualify oral sex as “sex” — only 20% think it qualifies (compared to 98% who think penis-in-vagina sex is “sex,” and 78% who think anal sex is “sex”). In a similar study conducted in 1991, twice as many young people defined oral sex as “sex.” The culprit? Bill Clinton, maybe. What a legacy.

Oh man, I don’t even know where to start with this article: A look at “halfway hooker” bottle girls and VIP hosts.

Oh Ellen Page, I love you: ” I am a feminist and I am totally pro-choice, but what’s funny is when you say that people assume that you are pro-abortion. I don’t love abortion but I want women to be able to choose and I don’t want white dudes in an office being able to make laws on things like this. I mean what are we going to do – go back to clothes hangers?”

Two dozen women marched topless in Portland, Maine to protest double-standards about male and female nudity.

For Sexual Assault Awareness Month, A Lesbian and a Scholar is blogging the Yes Means Yes anthology, one essay per day. Check it out.

Who will be Obama’s next Supreme Court nominee? The Nation has some ideas.

Have I mentioned that I love Michael Robbins? I love Michael Robbins.

Feministe Feedback: Suggestions for Anti-Racist Resources

A reader writes in:

Dear Feministe,

I am wondering if you would like to do a post for commenters to suggest resources for unlearning racism and the construction of whiteness. I’ve never taken sociology or women’s studies and I feel I should read a lot more in this area.

Suggestions? Ideas? Post in the comments.

And if you have a question for Feministe Feedback, send it to Feministe@gmail.com.

Fighting Ableism Fights Sexual Assault

This guest post is a part of the Feministe series on Sexual Assault Awareness Month. abby jean writes for FWD/Forward and at her tumblr, think on this.

Trigger Warning

Women with disabilities are more than twice as likely to be victims of rape or sexual assault than women without disabilities. More than twice as likely than what is already a terrifyingly high probability of being a victim of rape or sexual assault. I myself am a woman with a mental health disability who is also a victim of sexual assault, and seeing this statistic always makes my stomach drop and my muscles tense. But when I think about it, what influences that statistic, it makes perfect sense. Rape and sexual assault are crimes of power and control. Women with disabilities are subject to sets of interlocking, intersecting oppressions on the basis of their gender and their disability status. Both gender-based oppression and disability-based oppression separately accept and even encourage abuse and denigration of people in those groups. So of course it makes sense that sexism and ableism would add to each other, reinforce each other’s power, resulting in the heightened vulnerability to assault reflected in the statistics. I find the following chart – taken from a presentation by Nancy Fitzsimons of Minnesota State University – helps illustrate the idea that intersecting oppressions make an individual increasingly vulnerable to gendered violence, culminating in rape or sexual assault:

I’m sure that readers here are familiar with the societal and cultural messages and assumptions that make women vulnerable to sexual assault and rape, so I want to explore some of the components of ableism that interact with and reinforce those sexist tropes. For me, it is always striking to see that for women with disabilities, as is true for all rapes, the vast minority of assaults are done by strangers: 33% of abusers are acquaintances; 33% of them are natural or foster families, and 25% are caregivers or service providers. This echos my own experience – the man who raped me was my boyfriend at the time. And one of the most powerful tools he used against me was my own sense that, as a person with a disability, I was an inherent burden on those around me and so owed an immeasurable debt to anyone who would bother to put up with me. This meant when he demanded things of me sexually, I felt I had no right to refuse. This was colored by my recognition, my insistence, that every woman has the inalienable right to define her own sexual boundaries – but I felt that didn’t apply to me, because I was so worthless, so broken, so less-than, that I didn’t deserve any more.

Sexual Assault Awareness Month: Introduction to a Guest Series

As many of you already know, April is Sexual Assault Awareness Month. All over, people will be holding awareness raising events, engaging in activism, telling stories about their own experiences with sexual violence, and wearing turquoise ribbons.

But a common critique of “awareness” campaigns is that too often, the issue is one that most people are well aware of already. The problem in a lot of cases — not all, certainly, but many — is not making people aware that there is a certain issue in the world, but getting them to actually care enough to act and change oppressive social structures. Awareness is important, but on its own it’s not enough, especially when the most popular awareness campaigns center the most privileged voices.

Last month, Kaninchen Zero wrote a truly excellent post over at FWD/Forward, entitled We Need to Consider More than Universities. In it, she discusses the recent large discussion in feminist communities about sexual assault on college campuses, an issue that was featured at this blog as well as many, many others. She notes the importance of this discussion, but also points out that the sexual assault victims who are the most privileged and already visible are the ones who also receive the most attention in conversations about sexual violence. And she asks when we’re going to center the voices and experiences of more marginalized survivors.

Tying these two points together, it’s not necessarily that awareness raising work is done because most people are fully aware that sexual violence happens — it’s that a lot of awareness raising work is covering the same ground over and over again, and still failing to focus on the experiences of those most marginalized, those whose experiences and issues many still are “unaware” of.

In huge part thanks to inspiration from Kaninchen Zero’s post, Feministe has decided to run a short guest series throughout the month of April. For this series, we’ve asked numerous bloggers to write for us a single post each, designed to raise awareness about an issue that is too frequently overlooked and pushed to the edges of mainstream feminist discussions and anti-violence activism. We hope to have a couple of these posts appearing each week throughout the rest of the month.

(NOT REALLY A) WEEKEND ARTS SECTION: Manic Pixie Songwriting Dream Girls, A History in Youtube and Published Slur

You know what people don’t do enough of? 4,000-word essays about sexism in pop culture, published on the Internet. One such person who does these things is me! Frequently! But another such person is B. Michael Payne, favorite Internet presence/sometimes Tiger Beatdown contributor/person I know well enough, in real life, to tell you what the “B” stands for (it is not, as I once fervently hoped and semi-suspected, “Bret”). And this week, he has done a good one! On Joanna Newsom!

Specifically, on press coverage of Joanna Newsom. He has read a lot of it, some of it by (yikes!) Dave Eggers, and seemingly all of it uses, at some point, the word “elfin.” He points out that “language of diminution and deprecation pervades even positive reviews of Newsom’s work. She’s ‘elfin,’ ‘fairylike,’ ‘whimsical,’ ‘eccentric,’ ‘childlike,’ ‘batshit insane.’ (You would think she was like the protagonist of ‘The Yellow Wallpaper.’)” His conclusion? All of these things are, secretly, synonyms for “girl.” You know, because of how girls are stupid and irrational and not fully human yet adorable like precious little children and such! The essay points out that the habit (which even Newsom’s fans have) of conceptualizing her as a wood sprite with “the hands of Jimi Hendrix and the mind of a precocious child from a Wes Anderson film” and the continuing emphasis on female musicians’ musical or personal weirdness — often overemphasized, or just blatantly made up in the mind of music journalists — serves to give said music journalists good cover for not talking about any of those girls’ actual, technical accomplishments, and for implying that basically all girl musicians birth albums directly out of their vaginas without giving it a second thought.

Bauhaus Michael Payne is right! And do you know how I know he’s right? Because there have been approximately fifteen thousand other female musicians to receive exactly the same press coverage as Joanna Newsom. Or, you know, worse. Join us now, as we take a tour of (only some of) the glamorized, vilified, infantilized and weirdly sexually-fixated-upon Manic Pixie Songwriting Girls of years present and past!

TORI AMOS

FRIENDS WITH NEIL GAIMAN? Yes indeed! As documented in graphic novel, personal essay, and song!

ACCOMPLISHMENTS: Classically trained pianist; frequently constructs songs in complex, non-standard time signatures (9/4? Is that even a thing?) and uses more than one of said time signatures over the course of a song; said songs also feature carefully worked-out, highly complex piano-vocal melodies and harmonies, often referencing classical pieces or styles of note, with unusual chords, non-standard voicings and keys, and frequent key changes; improvises substantially on and/or re-arranges those highly complex songs on every tour; can play piano, synth, harpsichord, Hammond, and basically anything else with a keyboard on it; on last tour, switched between four keyboards, often playing two simultaneously, on nearly every song.

PRESS COVERAGE FOCUSES ON: Did you hear she’s got this thing about faeries?

Don’t call it a comeback.

Happy Easter! Anyone doing anything fun?

(I am drinking prosecco on my roof because it is finally nice in New York, and at some point will go hunting for a Cadbury Creme Egg).

And my very favorite Easter song, for the kids:

Tom Waits – “Chocolate Jesus” Live on David Letterman from Anti Records on Vimeo.

Thinking Critically About the Pill

This interview with Laura Eldridge over at Bitch is worth a read. Eldridge is a feminist writer, and has been an outspoken opponent of hormonal birth control. There’s a lot she says that I disagree with, but I think this point is well taken:

It’s hard for anyone to be critical of the Pill, even if you’ve been studying this drug for years. Even now I feel I need to be cautious. I always want to be respectful of women’s choices, even when they are different from mine. I want to say from the beginning that the Pill works really well for many many women. If a friend of mine is doing well on it, I would never tell her get off.

Many women, though, are living with a very problematic method of contraception that they don’t like, even though there are other options out there. This has to do with their relationships with their doctors, their partners and how they see themselves fitting in to society in general. Analysis of women and the Pill can show both how far we have come and how far we still have to go.

While hormonal birth control is a great thing, it also is far from ideal for a lot of women (myself included). But if you don’t want to use a hormonal method and also don’t want to rely 100% on condoms, your options are pretty limited — most doctors won’t insert an IUD in a 20-something woman without kids, and diaphragms aren’t particularly convenient. And birth control is still the woman’s responsibility.

She also makes some good points about the Pill and other contraceptive methods being highly profitable for pharmaceutical companies, and those companies sometimes sometimes covering up or downplaying negative side effects. But that said? A lot of women love the Pill. For a lot of women, it’s enabled us to live our lives more fully; it’s meant that we can have some basic control over when we get pregnant, so that we can have fulfilling sexual lives while also pursuing our other goals. It’s hardly been a capitalist conspiracy; women have had to work damn hard to gain access to birth control on their own terms.

I’m also more than a little skeptical about her expertise when she claims that emergency contraception is non-hormonal and somehow different from the birth control pill. She also pushes fertility awareness at the end, which surely works for some women but is not nearly as effective as most other birth control methods, and just doesn’t work for a lot of us. And she doesn’t seem to put her commentary at all in context — being critical of the Pill and the pharmaceutical system is great, but that criticism is happening in a country where conservatives are trying to limit access to birth control (and, if they had their way, probably outlaw it). To leave that out of the conversation strikes me as a little irresponsible, or just clueless.

I’m glad to see feminists having critical discussions about the Pill, especially when they center on the many negative experiences that women have had with hormonal birth control. Too often the feminist line on birth control is “it’s great!” and that’s that. But there’s a reason feminists toe that line so strongly — it’s because of ongoing encroachments onto reproductive freedom, including birth control. To leave that out of the picture, and to pepper your interview with misinformation, makes the conversation less helpful and less productive than it could be.

UPDATE: Amanda has two posts on this topic that are worth a read, pointing out that a lot of the anti-Pill arguments are anti-science dressed up as “just asking questions”: One and two.