RAWHIIIIIDE!
Ahem. Hi there. I’ve been coasting for the past week or so on the whole guest-blogger thing, which is great, because I’ve been pretty busy painting my apartment, installing new light fixtures, painting the dog, finishing the kitchen floor and stuff like that.
And now, rather than a real post, I’m doing a lazy round-up post, using emails that some of you have sent to the feministe gmail account (feministe (at) gmail (dot) com), or to my personal email. So here we go.
First, a request from Geeta, a Ph.D. candidate in engineering who’s beginning to get into literature: what are the books that inspired your feminism?
From Noelle: A calendar featuring the “Women of UW” has been pulled from the university bookstore.
Part of the reason may lie in an e-mail campaign started by some students who say the calendar objectifies women.
The whole episode has yielded some surprising lessons about business and about life for the five students who produced the work for their entrepreneurship class.
“I never would have guessed any of this going into it,” said junior Zach Meissner, who began as the group’s financial manager — and turned into its crisis manager.
Meissner said the students intended to produce “his and hers” calendars. But despite an eager group of males willing to pose, their market research showed consumers generally sought to buy only the female version.
Thomas Thurman passes along news of the groundbreaking new mayor of his fair city, Cambridge, England:
WHEN Jenny Bailey becomes Mayor of Cambridge tomorrow she will pass a new milestone in the city’s history by becoming the first transgender person to take the office.
Jenny was born a boy, but went through a sex change operation to become a woman when she was in her 30s. And her partner, former councillor Jennifer Liddle – who will spend the year by Jenny’s side as Mayoress – has also gone through the same process.
Jenny and Jennifer met while undergoing hormone replacement therapy. They now live together, work together and have served on Cambridge City Council together, as well as bringing up Jenny’s two boys by her ex-wife.
The couple will be the world’s first transgender mayor and mayoress, as Cambridge holds celebrations marking 800 years of the role.
Sarah, Bringer of Tea has an analysis of the dismayingly predictable press reaction about the Lady Mayor and Lady Mayoress.
From Amanda M: MSNBC just can’t figger out them mysterious wimmins.
Astra Nomer sent us this transcript from a segment on public radio’s Marketplace program on lobbying reform. Check out this lovely bit:
Melanie Sloan is the executive director of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. She doesn’t usually agree with the lobbyists.
SLOAN: It’s just ridiculous that it’s constantly coming down on the lobbyists and never on members of Congress. It’s as if members of Congress can’t stop themselves from being seduced by lobbyists, so the people who have to be stopped are the lobbyists. It’s like, you know, it’s analogous to saying I can’t have a pretty girl in my office because I won’t be able to stop myself from harassing her.
Add lobbying to the list of things women can be blamed for!
jweiss sent us this New York Times article : Algeria’s Women Quietly Advance in Careers and Society.
Chicklet passes along this article from the Cleveland Plain Dealer about 5th graders who are getting etiquette lessons and lessons in female friendship through a Girlfriends Club that culminates in tea at the Ritz.
If this is a Cinderella story, Freeman is the girls’ fairy godmother.
She’s the teacher who started the tea tradition six years ago when she founded the Girlfriend’s Club.
Because she was the adviser to the school’s conflict-mediation team, teachers would send girls who had been fighting to her for help. Right away, Freeman noticed a trend: They didn’t know how to be good girlfriends.
“And in the scheme of things,” Freeman says, “it’s your girlfriends who are the one constant in your life. They’re going to be with you through man after man after man after man. So you’ve got to make good girlfriends.”
Freeman put the girls in charge, though. She let them write the club’s rules.
She taught them, too, about the things that lead to fights – gossip and rumors and boys; how to smooth over their differences; how to stop friends from making mistakes.
She added afternoon tea after attending one at a family reunion in Atlanta.
I see this as a little more positive for these girls than the tea parties/etiquette lessons given to girls at Hartford Public High School, but only if they were contestants in the Miss Hartford High pageant. These girls in Cleveland are taught more than how to pour tea and keep their mouths shut; they’re being taught to work together toward a shared goal.
Juniperblog sends us this article from the Toronto Star about the way Canada is balancing rights and freedoms, particularly in the context of religious accommodation:
Superior Court Justice J.A. Doherty said that had Humaid killed his wife for religious beliefs, that alone would have been “a motive for murder.” But it was a moot point because Doherty didn’t buy Humaid’s new religious devotion and, in his 2006 ruling, concluded the story [that she had been unfaithful and he, as a devout Muslim, was defending family honor] lacked credibility.
Nevertheless, the judge was concerned enough about the nature of the defence argument to write: “The alleged beliefs are premised on the notion that women are inferior to men and that violence against women is in some circumstances accepted, if not encouraged. These beliefs are antithetical to fundamental Canadian values, including gender equality.”
So there you have it. Fundamental Canadian values. They exist. Although the case didn’t set a charter precedent – say, gender rights over religious rights – the judge couldn’t have been clearer in signalling his position. Some lawyers interpreted his comments as a warning about trying to use religious freedom to justify murder.
Perhaps it’s not such a stretch to be thinking about such arguments. Already, there is growing controversy over women’s rights in our multicultural society, whether over wearing the veil to vote in Quebec or the practice of polygamy among B.C. Mormons. Doesn’t it say something about the status of women’s rights when polygamy, illegal under the criminal code, is allowed to continue?
Lizard gives us this column — wonderfully entitled “Home birthing is far too dangerous for us poor, stupid women to understand”— about the Missouri Legislature’s antics on home births and midwifery:
For fear of a passing vote, Sen. Chuck Graham, D-Silk Ties, recently filibustered a bill (SB 303) poised to lift the ridiculous restrictions on home birthing. Graham isn’t an OB/GYN. You’d think it, since he’s positioned himself as Jefferson City’s resident “Home Birth and Lady Parts Expert.” No, he studied journalism in college.
Eribentha Blog sent us a link to this entry on the Bennetton “Colors of Domestic Violence” ad campaign. Exploitation or awareness campaign? I’m left wondering why the women are all the same color, more or less, given Bennetton’s history of racial diversity in advertising. Oh, and MRAs infest the comments to that blog right quick with the WHAT ABOUT THE MENZ stuff.
Emily Lockwood from Planned Parenthood Federation of America gives a heads-up about a pharmacy in Great Falls, Montana, that refused to fill a woman’s birth-control pill prescription. They even gave her a note.
Finally, we’re getting some really bizarrely chirpy PR emails about a new film, Crazy Love. I mean, check this out:
Hi there,
Crazy Love has been released in selected cities, starting today! To celebrate, I have selected a particularly juicy clip from the film, in which Burt goes off the deep end when Linda breaks up with him. His crazy eyes haunt me in my dreams!
Do you know who Burt and Linda are? Burt Pugach was a married man in 1959 when he pursued the young Linda Riss. When she got fed up with his unfulfilled promises to leave his wife, she broke up with him.
The going off the deep end bit? He hired a couple of thugs to throw lye in her face, blinding her. He spent fourteen years in prison for the crime, during which time he wrote Linda long letters which largely went unanswered. Nevertheless, he was the only man who wanted her now that she was blind and her world was shrinking, and she ended up marrying him when he got out of prison.
From reviews, it sounds like the film makes her out to be just as nuts as he was. But was she? She was from a time when a woman was nothing without a man; was it an unreasonable choice for her to agree to marry the man who’d blinded her if no other man would have her?
Manola Darghis made a good point in her review, which I think needs to be highlighted here:
When reporters have written about what happened between these two, they sometimes have used the phrase crime of passion, one of those slyly misleading idioms, like collateral damage, employed to paper over ugly reality. Crimes of passion have often been viewed as categorically different from other crimes because they supposedly originate in lust and desire, an argument that has been used historically and even legally to rationalize violence against women, including rape. What is odious about the notion of so-called crimes of passion is how the phrase necessarily implicates victims, because it is the very desirability of the victims, after all, that provokes their assailants to madness (passion). All of which makes the image of Mrs. Pugach standing by her man squirmingly uncomfortable.
It’s the chirpy PR people and their “juicy” talk that are nauseating.