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

Month: May 2011

Cutting Planned Parenthood and Fixing the World

This is a guest post by Rebecca Nathanson. Rebecca Nathanson is student at NYU majoring in Journalism. She writes for NYU Local and rambles about life, feminism, and idealism on her blog. She enjoys dancing, running, drumming, traveling, leather jackets, and Cheerios. She also wants to be Jack White. Or Patti Smith.

We’re all really busy. In the rush of the days that constitute our hectic lives, it’s easy to gloss over the headlines, to dismiss an issue as irrelevant to whether or not you’ll finish your paper on time, to miss something that actually matters in a very real way. There’s a lot of news being thrown at us from every direction and sometimes it’s just simpler to block it out. Sometimes it all feels distant and entirely disconnected from the reality of our days; other times it’s as connected as anything can ever be.

There are certain rights that I take for granted and I’m only just beginning to realize how wrong that is. In an ideal world, there wouldn’t be anything wrong with taking basic rights for granted because they would be unquestionably guaranteed, but this is nothing close to an ideal world and I’m starting to learn exactly how far from secure many of my rights are. Of course, reading the front page of almost any newspaper will tell you this exact information, but oftentimes that information is presented in such a voiceless, impersonal way that we fail to connect it to ourselves. Perhaps it’s just my twenty-year-old naïvety and innocence, but I’m incapable of not feeling when I read about the problems and injustices of our world.

Somehow, despite the onslaught of depressing news that I am faced with, that naïvety and innocence has survived and left me with the silly notion that I have to try to fix the world. Recently, there’s been a surge of pro-life, anti-common decency legislation, a “War on Women,” and I find those two particular traits of mine beginning to wane as I am faced with the reality of the situation. I know that people have different beliefs and points of view, but I honestly never completely registered how seriously those differences could manifest themselves until I started reading about the ridiculous abortion laws that some states are trying to implement and the proposed bill to eliminate funding for Planned Parenthood.

This isn’t abstract or distant or irrelevant to my life; it’s real and it’s scary and it’s fucking disgusting. The fact that the people running this country think that Planned Parenthood isn’t worthy of their valuable money is horrible and the fact that those people were elected, that the majority of people actually chose to give them power, is absurd. My general rule is that my opinions and politics should always be on the side of choice (unless you’re trying to bring a gun to class), but apparently most people do not abide by that, which would be fine if those same people weren’t trying to take away rights that I believe are necessary and fair and essential to my freedom. My beliefs aren’t effecting anyone else’s life, won’t restrict anyone from doing anything, and won’t force anyone into doing something that they don’t want to do. It would be nice if other people had enough respect for their fellow humans to adhere to the same principle.

The fact that you have access to abortion services does not mean that you have to use them. The fact that there’s a place where you can go to get birth control does not mean that you have to go there. All that it means is that you have the option and, while some people may not want the option, it’s completely unfair and unwarranted to try to take that option away from people who want to make use of it. I don’t particularly care if people feel that there is something inherently wrong with the fact that I want to have sex but have no intention of having a baby, but I care if they get in the way of allowing me that small liberty and I care that they think that their opinions are worth more than mine or that they have the right to tell me what I am and am not allowed to do with my body when apparently even I don’t have that right.

As I said, I took those rights for granted. Silly me for ever believing that I deserve the right to choose whether or not I have a child or have access to birth control. My bad. I guess I’ll just go have sex without any and see what happens. I’ll be sure to keep you posted, seeing as how the GOP seems to care so deeply about the details of my sex life.

Indiana cutting funds for women’s clinics

Indiana governor Mitch Daniels is the latest soldier in the crusade against Planned Parenthood. The Indiana bill is particular important because Indiana is the first state to cut off Medicaid financing for women’s health clinics. This sets a horrible precedent for other right-leaning states, and threatens access to health care for millions of women nationwide. It’s also targeted directly at low-income women who rely on Medicaid for their health coverage:

Planned Parenthood says the bill could leave as many as 22,000 patients without access to Pap tests, birth control and treatment for sexually transmitted diseases.

The governor’s office said the law will affect 7 entities in Indiana that have a total of 34 locations in 21 counties.

These seemingly small state issues often fly below the radar, and then we’re all surprised when cutting Planned Parenthood is #1 on the national GOP’s agenda. So let’s do something, yeah?

1. Contact Mitch Daniels. If you’re in Indiana, contact your state rep and urge them to vote against this bill.
2. Spread the word. Retweet, reblog, tumbl, post to your Facebook wall, whatever.
3. Donate to Planned Parenthood of Indiana — and do it under Mitch Daniels’ name.

Let’s stop this in its tracks.

Bitches Acting Crazy

Rich Santos has observed a phenomena: Sometimes, bitches be crazy. I know, such an usual thing for someone to write about or say out loud! Definitely not something I’ve heard before. So why, Rich, do women act so crazy all the time?

She Was Hungry
Something happens to women when they get hungry: They mutate into evil, cranky beings. In fact, many women I’ve dated have completely broken down immediately after the onset of hunger. But what baffles me is that even though a woman may be low on energy and dysfunctional while hungry, she still manages to find the strength to lash out.

Ok, that one is actually true.

She Was Tired
For some reason, when the gal I’m with is tired, everything I say suddenly becomes annoying and every joke I make falls flat. What’s the deal?

Haha oh Rich. She is too tired to humor you.

She Was PMSing
No questions asked, if a man blames anything on PMS, he gets in trouble. But if a woman blames something on PMS, the man gets in trouble for not accepting it as a valid excuse. I know we can’t control our hormones, so I guess I understand where this one’s coming from. But I’m still scared when a woman is on a PMS tear. One night I was at a girl’s place and I heard stuff flying in the other room — her roommate was clearly throwing things at her boyfriend. I asked what was going on and the girl I was with casually said, without looking up: “She’s just PMSing.” I wish we could harness this energy and anger of PMSing women for the power of good.

She Couldn’t Find Anything To Wear
I remember getting my butt kicked because the girl I was seeing couldn’t find anything to wear. If you ask me, “I can’t find anything to wear” is the woman’s ultimate excuse, and it seems (to her) to be a perfect justification for why she was mean. It basically puts a guy on notice that crankiness, meanness and insanity can come out nowhere like a summer storm.

She Was Stressed Because It Her Birthday
Why do women feel so overwhelmed by their birthdays? I was watching the Bethenny Show on Bravo (I admit it), and I watched her stress about her birthday for an entire episode, only to spend the majority of her actual birthday party crying in the bathroom. (Guess this is the extreme interpretation of “It’s my party and I’ll cry if I want to?”).

Ah women. Can’t live with ’em, can’t shoot ’em!

via.

Filling the Gaps

In my world, the way I learned activism, if you see a gap you don’t stand around pointing at the gap and complaining that no one else has filled it for you yet. You FILL THE FUCKING GAP.
–Florence.

This month, I will have been at Feministe for six years. I was writing for a different feminist blog for about two years before that. I was writing about feminism and engaging in feminist activism for years before that. This post is my 4,234th on this website. When I started blogging, way back sometime in 2003, I had never read or even heard of a feminist blog. “Blogging” was a new, super-nerdy thing. (I am old). I started a blogspot blog, and wrote to no one but myself.

Then people showed up. And then a few more. And then I discovered Feministing, which had also just launched. Then, over the next year or two or three, Mouse Words and Feministe and Rox Populi and Amptoons and a handful of others. By 2005 I was here, and it was a Big Blog in the online feminist world, but still a blog — still outside of the mainstream, still nerdy, and still totally uncharted territory. Feministe was little in the then-small world of blogging — big in the feminist corner, tiny everywhere else (which, it’s worth noting, is still true). I wrote under my real name because I had only written for student newspapers and other publications, and hadn’t considered that writing on the internet could be a liability; I hadn’t considered that a pseudonym was even an option.

Blogs are no longer the fringe oddity that they were a decade ago, and the feminist blogosphere is no longer a tiny corner of the internet. There are hundreds of feminist blogs out there. There are major media companies that traffic only in websites; Gawker Media has a somewhat feminist-minded lady-blog; lefty blogs use the term “feminist” regularly and without derision. There have been blow-ups and call-outs and fuck-ups and flounces and come-backs. There have been threats and stalkers and various attempts to get folks (including me) fired from their day jobs. There have been opportunities to write for newspapers and magazines and other websites and anthologies; there have been book deals and op/ed columns and TV appearances.

The feminist blogosphere today doesn’t look at all like it did way back when.

In a lot of ways, that’s a good thing — there are more of us, and as Lindsay Beyerstein has pointed out, if you’re reading any left-leaning website on the internet you’re never more than two clicks away from feminism. As the blogosphere has grown, so necessarily has its diversity — feminists of all backgrounds have been online since the beginning, but with so many more blogs out there it’s easier to find a space that caters to a particular brand of feminism, or a particular identity, or a particular writing style.

But in other ways, online feminism is worse for wear. Part of that is what Florence is talking about above — blogs, and especially the “big blogs,” are perceived as institutions rather than collectives of people writing about something they’re interested in when they have time, in order to facilitate a conversation among like-minded people. With the perception of institutionalization comes expectations — that a blog will not only cover about what you think it should cover, but will also cover it in the way you think is most appropriate, using the words you think are the best. Which isn’t totally unfair, but which segues from potentially productive into poisonous when the method of conveying those expectations is Calling Out.

I’m as guilty as anyone else when it comes to partaking in feminist Call-Out Culture. Calling Out, I think, is part of any activist’s growing pains. We all want to do right. We all feel like we’re doing more right than some other people who we perceive as having more power (or influence or airtime) than we have. We all want to be a good _____: feminist, ally, woman, activist. Part of that, if you love an idea (and I think most of us do love the idea of feminism, even if we don’t always love how it plays out in real life), is saying something when you see someone else Doing It Wrong. There should be space for that. We should keep each other in check; we should all want to be better.

But in the feminist blogosphere, “calling out” has increasingly turned into cannibalism. It’s increasingly turned into a stand-in for actual activism. We have increasingly focused on shutting down voices rather than raising each other up. Pointing at the gap has replaced doing the hard, often thankless work of filling it.

Read More…Read More…

Good news.

Osama bin Laden is dead. Couldn’t have happened to a more deserving guy.

(In less good news, we have been in Afghanistan for 10 years and are still doing targeted drone attacks, which are discussed at length in this article. And enormous numbers of other people have been killed or wounded in the “war on terror,” so. Glad Osama is dead, but but but there are a lot of buts).

Posted in Uncategorized

Happy May Day!

“Pray for the dead and fight like hell for the living.” -Mary Harris “Mother” Jones, Hellraiser.

Here in the U.S. Labor Day is a muted affair celebrated at the end of the summer. It’s mostly lost its meaning to millions of people as anything other than the time at which kids go back to school and we stop wearing white. (Some of us.)

But around the world, the real labor celebration is May 1. International Workers’ Day began here in the U.S. when, 125 years ago, police opened fire on a protest at the West Randolph Street Haymarket in Chicago in favor of the 8-hour work day, after a dynamite bomb was thrown by an unknown person. Eight anarchists were arrested and four executed, not for any evidence that they threw the bomb but for their role as agitators.

Socialists and labor supporters around the world began celebrating May 1 as workers’ day, but in the U.S. Grover Cleveland feared the association with the history of the Haymarket Affair and endorsed the Labor Day we now know. But in more than 80 countries around the world, May 1 remains the true Labor Day.

We have seen this year once again that symbolism matters. We have seen right-wing governors not only attempting to suppress workers’ rights to organize, collectively bargain, and negotiate their wages and working conditions, but also taking down murals that celebrate the history of labor in this country.

We’ve also seen a resurgence in the labor movement at home–Wisconsin workers and allies 100,000 strong rallying day after day in their Capitol building and now gathering signatures and preparing to recall the state senators who voted to take away their rights. Beyond the symbolism of workers sleeping in sleeping bags in the Wisconsin winter outside the building, there’s been a resurgence of an awareness of history within the labor movement.

April 4, the anniversary of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination as he rallied with sanitation workers in Memphis, saw “We Are One” rallies around the country as labor and civil rights groups banded together to fight the latest onslaught against union workers.

And this May Day, Chicago will see a remembrance of the Haymarket Affair as well as rallies for immigrant workers. AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka will march with Milwaukee’s workers and immigrant community in a solidarity march that celebrates not only Wisconsin’s leadership role in the fight against union-busting state politicians (who are, it should be noted, not all Republicans), but also acknowledges the 2006 May Day rally in which millions marched in support of undocumented workers and defeated anti-immigrant legislation.

Christine Neumann-Ortiz, the founder and executive director of Voces de la Frontera, one of the groups organizing the Milwaukee rally, said:

“We want to send a message to corporate America, politicians and others that working people will not be divided,” she said.

Allison Kilkenny has more about rallies around the U.S., and the AFL-CIO has a liveblog and Twitter feed. If there’s no action in your neighborhood, help spread the word and stop dehumanizing immigrants with ColorLines’ “Stop the I-Word” campaign.

It’s about more than just symbolism, after all–it’s about organizing for right here, right now. Remembering the past, as Mother Jones said, is important, but the “fight like hell for the living” bit is the one that really matters. We want to build on history, not just nod our heads solemnly at it.

This year too, we learned once again the importance of international solidarity, as people around the world tuned in to Al-Jazeera English’s riveting live reporting from Egypt as that country peacefully threw off its dictator. Wisconsin protesters told reporters repeatedly that they were inspired by Tahrir Square to keep coming back each day to their own capitol, and Egyptians responded by sending messages of support (and pizza) to Madison. And just recently Egyptian activists joined U.S. activists here in New York to share advice and support–U.S. activists who were in turn inspired by the UK group UK Uncut to protest corporate power. 

Egypt and Bahrain are two of the countries celebrating Labor day today even as they struggle for freedom.

 Paul Mason of the BBC tweeted from Egypt’s May Day celebration today:

“Enjoy the revolution” says graffiti on Tahrir. They are. Tomorrow a Lab Party to be formed: doctors to vote on strike; new music evrywhere

In Moscow, 30,000 are expected to turn out–many to express dissatisfaction with their government as well as support for workers.  In Turkey, 200,000 hit the streets in the largest rally since 1977, and in South Korea, 50,000 rallied. China, the Philippines, Taiwan, Spain, and Hong Kong also saw marches and actions.  

In the UK, despite the Conservative government’s wishes to move the holiday away from a day associated with workers, May Day coincided with the royal wedding and thus got even more police overreaction than usual–at least in Brighton.  

Internet organizing has gotten a lot of attention of late, particularly in relation to Egypt (and before that Iran), but May Day is a day to remember the importance of getting out in the streets. Facebook and Twitter can only take you so far. 

We need our holidays to mark the past, to look to the future, and to fight for the rights of all. As Emma Goldman said:

“I want freedom, the right to self-expression, everybody’s right to beautiful, radiant things.”

Sarah Jaffe is web ninja at GRITtv, a writer and rabblerouser. Follow her on Twitter or Tumblr.