In defense of the sanctimonious women's studies set || First feminist blog on the internet

Month: November 2010

Pro-Choice Reads

Two articles to get your week started right:

First, Loretta Ross of Sistersong takes on the racist anti-black-abortion campaigns, and emphasizes the need to trust black women. She writes:

Our opponents began a misogynistic attack to shame-and-blame black women who choose abortion, alleging that we endanger the future of our children. After all, many people in our community already believe that black men are an endangered species because of white supremacy. Our opponents used a social responsibility frame to claim that black women have a racial obligation to have more babies – especially black male babies — despite our individual circumstances.
…
We had to fight the rhetorical impact of the billboards by reframing the discourse as an attack on the autonomy of black women, shifting the focus away from the sad, beautiful black boy in the advertisements.

It was not accidental that they chose a black male child to feature in their messaging, exacerbating gender tensions in the African American community. We decided that the best approach was to emphasize our opponents’ negative subliminal messages about black women. Either we were dupes of abortion providers, or we were evil women intent on having abortions – especially of black male children – for selfish reasons. In their first narrative, we were victims without agency unable to make our own decisions, pawns of racist, profit-driven abortion providers. In their second narrative, we were the uncaring enemies of our own children, and architects of black genocide.

We decided on affirming messages that refuted both narratives. We had to manage both positive and negative emotions about abortion.


Read it all here.

Next up, Amanda Marcotte looks at the right wing’s use of the word “abortion” to mean anything they don’t like, from women’s autonomy to heath care. She lists a series of examples, but this is my favorite:

Conservatives have been so successful with labeling contraception “abortion” that they’ve moved on to expanding the definition of “abortion” to include any support for women’s liberation and equality. Senators Tom Coburn and Jim DeMint recently levied questionable legal arguments along with their not-inconsiderable power to stop the National Women’s History Museum, a private organization, from buying land to build the museum. One reason was that a group called Concerned Women for America wrote the senators complaining that the museum would “focus on abortion rights.”

It’s hard to buy the argument that love of fetal life has anything to do with their opposition: Not only would the museum, being a museum, not be providing abortions, the CEO of the museum has made it clear that there wouldn’t even be an exhibit on the reproductive rights movement. The objection to the museum is clearly due to the fact that it celebrates women, women’s work and women’s right to equality. It’s hard for DeMint, Coburn, or the CWA to openly object to women’s equality, so they simply label equality “abortion,” and bank on the stigma that word carries.

The full article is here. Enjoy!

Transgender Day of Remembrance

This is a guest post by C. L. Minou. C. L. Minou has written on trans and feminist issues for the Guardian’s Comment Is Free, Change.org, and Tiger Beatdown. She blogs at The Second Awakening.

[TW for transphobia]

I don’t remember when I first heard of the Trans Day of Remembrance. It must have been at least five or six years ago, when I was just beginning to connect the private tortures of my transness to larger societal concerns. I can’t, to be honest, remember very well my reaction to it. Probably something along the lines of “that’s a good idea.”

I mention this not to give you insight into the Banal Morality of C. L. Minou, but because it seems that nowadays some trans folks are turning against TDOR. Not just the various observances of it, but against the entire concept of having a day to remember the murdered trans people of the previous year. “It’s depressing,” say some. “Where is the positive day?” say others. “Why do we only talk about the depressing deaths, when trans people have accomplished so much?”

And some say, “why should I care about a bunch of prostitutes who have no bearing on my life?”

I’m not going to dispute the first two points. Yes, indeed, remembering the deaths of people who died simply because of who they were is depressing–horribly depressing, and it’s horrible that every year there isn’t a shortage of names to add to the list. And of course trans people are doing amazing things: becoming judges, working in government, bravely taking a stand against ongoing discrimination. These are all amazing things and we should celebrate them.

But that still doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t have a day to remember the dead, or exchange that day for one of unfettered celebration.

Read More…Read More…

Poll: Should this couple terminate their anti-choice internet fame-grab and crawl back into the swamp they came out of?

Pete and Alisha Arnold

I vote yes.

The Arnolds are having a baby. Unless the public votes to have the child aborted. Meet the couple behind Birthornot.com, where “you can vote and choose whether we abort or keep our unborn child.”

Pete and Alisha Arnold, both 30, both tech professionals, live in the Minneapolis suburb of Apple Valley and have been married for 10 years. Since September, they’ve blogged about their expected child at birthornot.com, posting health updates about the mother and the fetus (which will be 17 weeks-old tomorrow), and ultrasound pictures and video. But at the top of the blog is a poll hosted by PollDaddy.com. The question: “Should We Give Birth or Have an Abortion?” “Give Birth” has 46 percent of the vote at the moment, with “Have an Abortion” at 54 percent. The poll closes on December 7th.

As Amanda pointed out yesterday,* the whole thing is pretty clearly an anti-choice prank — (a) pro-choice people don’t actually think that every pregnant woman should have an abortion, and (b) the whole ideological underpinning of the pro-choice position is the idea that the woman should decide whether or not to carry a pregnancy to term. It shouldn’t be left up to a vote, in Congress or on the internet. As Amanda wrote:

At first blush, I gave it 9-to-1 odds that it’s an anti-choice stunt, just on the fact that the couple running it have the pro-choice view completely backwards. Putting what you do with your body up to a vote is the anti-choice view. Treating women’s bodies like they’re public property is the anti-choice view. True, most anti-choicers think a woman’s rights should be voted on in order to force childbirth, and they’re making this more open-ended, but the underlying sentiment–that women’s bodies are public property, that their choices should be determined by strangers–is what the pro-choice movement rejects.

And look at that, she was right. The dude behind the website is a right-wing anti-choice blogger. The whole purpose of the campaign seems to be to horrify readers at the idea that abortion would be left up to an internet vote. Which, yeah, is kind of horrifying! Just as horrifying, actually, as the fact that people would use what appears to be a real pregnancy to encourage people on the internet to vote on whether to or not to abort as part of some sort of pro-life publicity stunt. The fact that these individuals will actually be raising a child is stomach-turning. Maybe when that kid is old enough, he’ll have the sense to terminate his relationship with such toxic parents.

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*I initially forgot to put the link in here — sorry for the oversight!

Men & Fashion

An Esquire blogger takes issue with Google’s new “Boutiques” shopping site:

Shopping is hard enough as it is. We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: The reason men don’t get quite as excited about buying clothes as our female counterparts comes down to information — we need options, often easy ones, to make the right decisions. And the Internet doesn’t have a lot of easy options, which is why men aren’t currently going quite as crazy hunting for Black Friday deals, nor do many of us even know what that “Cyber Monday” exists.

Which is also why we got excited to wake up this morning to an e-mail from Google, the Internet’s kingmaker of simplicity in the information overload, about… fashion. Boutiques.com, we were told, “uses computer vision and machine learning technology to visually analyze your taste and match it to items you would like.” Sounds nerdy, but totally brilliant, which is basically why The Times’ Cathy Horyn gave Google’s new e-commerce site the rave review we read on the train this morning.

And then we logged in. Google’s machine learning asks for Your Boutique Preferences, followed by not one but a dozen pictures of…. wait, this is only for women? Now, we understand, ladies love to shop online, and for our half of the species, well, it’s kind of a pain in the ass right now. But as Michael Williams over at A Continuous Lean lamented the other day, guys want to shop online, and there’s a missed opportunity in having fantastically curated clothing sites that are more or less “deliberately designed to repel men.”

A Google spokesman told The Style Blog this morning that the company had “no other specifics to share at this time” beyond its blog-post announcement that right now “Boutiques is only available in the U.S. and only for women’s fashion, but we plan to expand in the future.” Well, men might as well start making their voices be heard. There will be other sites — good ones, without repellants — but this Google thing is going to be a big deal, and it’s going to get better. Tell them you want a whizbang, mind-reading fashion site of your own — or at least a tab on there somewhere. In the meantime, Gilt Man has some nice shirts on sale today.

Maybe I’ve been in New York for too long, but most men I know are interested in fashion, and shop extensively online, and care quite a bit about how they look. I realize Google is operating out of t-shirt-and-flip-flop land in Palo Alto, but this is a pretty big misstep (and missed opportunity). I’ve been playing on Boutiques all morning, and dudes, you are missing out. Rise up!

For Catholics, Interest in Exorcism Is Revived

Oh, good.

There are only a handful of priests in the country trained as exorcists, but they say they are overwhelmed with requests from people who fear they are possessed by the Devil.

Now, American bishops are holding a conference on Friday and Saturday to prepare more priests and bishops to respond to the demand. The purpose is not necessarily to revive the practice, the organizers say, but to help Catholic clergy members learn how to distinguish who really needs an exorcism from who really needs a psychiatrist, or perhaps some pastoral care.

So glad that’s covered.

“People are talking about, are we taking two steps back?” Father Vega said. “My first reaction when I heard about the exorcism conference was, this is another of those trappings we’ve pulled out of the past.”

But he said that there could eventually be a rising demand for exorcism because of the influx of Hispanic and African Catholics to the United States. People from those cultures, he said, are more attuned to the experience of the supernatural.

Bishop Paprocki noted that according to Catholic belief, the Devil is a real and constant force who can intervene in people’s lives — though few of them will require an exorcism to handle it.

“The ordinary work of the Devil is temptation,” he said, “and the ordinary response is a good spiritual life, observing the sacraments and praying. The Devil doesn’t normally possess someone who is leading a good spiritual life.”

With the idea that Latino and African Catholics are more attuned to the experiences of the supernatural, and that people who are possessed are leading bad lives, what could possibly go wrong here?

Taking Babies from Undocumented Immigrants

Encarnación Romero was an undocumented immigrant working at a poultry plant in Missouri when she was arrested in 2007 during a raid by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement. She was jailed for two years for federal identity theft, because she used a fake name and Social Security number when applying for her job (those charges, notably, would not stick if they were filed today — the Supreme Court rejected the use of identity theft prosecutions in simple immigration cases like this one). In prison and unable to care for her infant son herself, Romero did what many parents would have done (and what my own parents certainly would have done): She asked her sister to look after the baby, Carlitos, until she could come home. The sister was already overwhelmed with her own three children, and sought help through her church. An acquaintance took Carlitos to the home of the church’s minister, and the minister and his wife contacted another couple who were looking to adopt.

Romero’s parental rights were then terminated, and Carlitos was adopted by Seth and Melinda Moser.

Unsurprisingly, Romero did not have adequate legal representation, and does not speak English. Lawyers for the Mosers, who adopted Carlitos, say that Romero abandoned her child, and “She went by different aliases, and therefore all the correspondence that the court sent her, and that I sent her, even that her attorney sent her, all came back refused.” Romero’s attorneys, though, say that while she did seek employment under an assumed name, she gave ICE officers her real name shortly after being arrested. The fact that she was booked under a false name doesn’t mean that she abandoned her child — it means that there was a clerical error (and possibly that there wasn’t proper translation, and that she didn’t have a lawyer).

The whole thing is horrifying. And of course the public argument is coming down to nice adoptive parents vs. illegal immigrant jailed mother — with “the best interests of the child” used as a tool to advance injustice:

Rick Schnake, the Joplin attorney representing the Mosers, said that removing the child from the family he has known for the past few years would only compound the tragedy. He argued that the best interests of the child are served by keeping him with his adoptive parents.

“This little boy is four years old. He doesn’t speak Spanish, he speaks English,” Schnake said. “I don’t mean to be caustic about it but it’s not the child’s fault she was (in jail).”

Considering that Romero would not be jailed for the exact same act had she been arrested today instead of in 2007, it’s not so clear that it’s totally her fault she was in jail, either. And it’s not her fault that her parental rights were terminated, and that her son was taken away from her. It’s not the child’s fault that he was part of a predatory adoption, but that doesn’t mean that it’s in his best interests to stay with those adoptive parents. Adding to the mess is the fact that the adoptive parents hired the attorney who acted on behalf of the birth mother during the court proceedings to terminate Romero’s parental rights.

A lot of the commentary on this story says it’s a “tragedy for all involved” and that we’re all hoping for “the best outcome for everyone.” Except, well, no. It is a tragedy for all involved, but it’s more of a tragedy for the woman who had her baby taken from her and for the baby who was taken than for the couple who knew that parental rights hadn’t properly been terminated, but apparently thought that their desire for a child trumped another woman’s rights to raise the child she carried, birthed, loved and raised for his first six months of life. I don’t want to impute too many motives on the Mosers, because who knows what the whole story is from their perspective. But I do think it’s fair to expect that adoptive parents will make every reasonable effort to figure out where their baby is coming from, and will act as ethically as possible in a situation which is often fraught with inequality and injustice and coercion. I’m not sure it’s clear that the Mosers did that here. I can understand why, having raised this child for four years, they wouldn’t want to give him up. But unless I’m missing something (and I might be), it seems that they made a whole series of unethical, bad decisions on the front end and now want everyone to look the other way. I don’t have a whole lot of sympathy for that position.

The undercurrent in all of this is the idea that the Mosers are de facto better parents than Romero because Romero is brown and “illegal.” And that’s an idea that plays pretty well in much of the United States. I hope Romero gets her son back, and that this case can be a lesson that predatory adoptions and aggressive anti-immigrant policies only serve to harm women, children and families.

Happy Birthday, Chally!

Today (her time!) is the birthday of our very own and very fabulous Chally! Here’s to hoping, Chally, that this next year is as awesome as you are. Please accept this humble offering of the thing I assumed you would enjoy most in the world — David Tennant with a cute little kitty cat:

David Tennant holding a tiny kitten.

Leave your birthday wishes for Chally in the comments!

My Endless New York

Not much else to say other than, Tony Judt, you are so sorely missed. I’m not sure there’s a writer alive who so perfectly articulates the spirit of a place or the truths of a particular time. The public intellectual, the insightful and accessible historian, seems to have taken a back seat to the partisan blow-hard. Tony Judt was a giant. And his picture of New York looks a lot like mine; I also chose this place. It’s sadly a less vibrant city without him in it.