feministe – Page 3

5,000th Post!

This is the 5,000th post at Feministe. Way to go, ladies and gents.

I’ve been here for 2 1/2 years now, and feel really lucky to have inherited such a dynamic, challenging and supportive space. Lauren created a great community here, piny and zuzu built on it, and it’s been pretty incredible to watch it shift and change and grow. I started blogging because I was bored at a summer desk job I had in college; almost four years later, blogging has become a major part of my day-to-day life. I love writing here. I love reading through the comments and seeing the reactions, responses and thoughts of so many intelligent, interesting people. I love that I’ve learned more about feminism from blogging and reading feminist blogs than I did in four years of gender studies courses.

Feministe has become a full-time (but unpaid) job for me. It requires hours every day of posting, emailing and managing various odds and ends, not to mention the hours I spend thinking about the comments you all make, how I could have done this or that better, what I think about some issue that someone here brought up that I had never before considered. It can certainly be stressful, but there’s nothing I’d rather be doing. It brings me a lot of happiness, and it occupies a lot of my time. It’s been an interesting journey to the point where a large part of my identity is now “feminist blogger.”

5,000 is a pretty big milestone, so I’ll issue all of us who have blogged here a hearty congratulations. It’s been pretty rad. And I’ll issue a big thank-you to the commenters and readers for making this such a great space.

That’s what Feministe means to me. So I’m curious: What does this space mean to you, and how does it fit into your life?

I suck.

I’m at the airport getting ready to fly home, and I wanted to apologize for never scheduling a Feministe meet-up. The conference ended up being more jam-packed than I thought it would be, and I ended up being pretty exhausted by the end of each day. So I didn’t go out in Chicago at all, and I missed most of the blogger social events because I’m an old lady who needs her sleep. So, I’m sorry Feministers! Chicago was a great town, and I will most definitely be back — hopefully very soon. And next time, I will not be so lame.

Chi-Town Yearly Kos Meet-Up

There have been some calls for a Feministe meet-up at Yearly Kos, so I just wanted to let you all know that I’m working on planning something and will post details as soon as I know them. It’ll probably be tomorrow night, but I’ll post something soon. Looking forward to meeting some of you!

obligatory introductions

Hi, everyone! I just wanted to thank Jill for including me in the Summer of Guest Bloggers. I’ve guest-blogged a bit at Feministe before, and am thrilled to be back. The obligatory quick biographical sketch: I just graduated from law school and finished the bar. After I pass the bar (fingers crossed until knuckles hurt), I’m off to work for US Army JAG. (I worked for them last summer doing criminal law and labor and employment law.) I’m getting married in November to a lovely man hereinafter identified as T, flagrantly misuse parentheses, and am addicted to diet coke.

I will probably also post photos of my recently acquired dog, Bronx, even when it isn’t Friday because she is cute as a button and I like choruses of “awww!”

Stupid Everything…

Okay, so either my router or my modem has taken a serious powder. Luckily I wasn’t supposed to do anything important this week, like guest blog at Feministe or anything, so it shouldn’t be a huge deal.

Haha.

I’m writing this post on my Sidekick, which is tedious (where’s my scorn for iPhones now!) and difficult on the thumbs. I’d had another post planned for today, but I’m going to try to get my real computer working first. If I can’t, I’ll get used to the thumb workout.

ACTION ALERT: Call for last-minute clemency for a Georgia man unjustly sentenced to death

Hello, Feministe readers! I’m Jack, and I usually blog over at AngryBrownButch. I’ve been reading Feministe for a while and am honored to have been invited here as a guest blogger.

Note: I began this entry this morning to get the action alert link to Amnesty’s website up ASAP; you’re now reading the expanded entry.

Somehow, I managed to miss Troy Davis’ story until this morning, when I was listening to today’s podcast of Democracy Now. I’m a steadfast opponent of the death penalty in any case. But Davis’ story is one of the most enraging and saddening examples of how deeply flawed the judicial system can be.

Troy Davis is on death row in Georgia, where he was convicted in 1991 for the murder of a Savannah police officer. His execution is scheduled for tomorrow (Tuesday) night at 7pm, despite an abundance of evidence of his innocence. The case against him was comprised entirely of witness testimony, which even at the time of the trial contained inconsistencies. Since the trial, seven out of nine of the non-police prosecution witnesses have recanted their testimony. Some of the witness have even stated that they were coerced into giving testimony against Davis. Jared Feuer, Southern Regional Directory of Amnesty International, said this in his interview on Democracy Now!:

You know, what we have to talk about when we discuss the witnesses is that in some cases they were sixteen years old. They had a number of children. Some of them did have prior records. And they were told that if you do not tell us what we want to hear, you will be going away to jail, or we will actually be fingering you. And the witnesses were scared out of their minds. I mean, they had a number of police who would, you know, arrive at their house and tell them, “You sign this, or you’re going to go to jail.” One of the witnesses was given a signed statement, and he can’t even read.

Only two of the non-police witnesses have not recanted: a witness who said they could not identify the shooter, only the clothing they wore; and Sylvester Coles, the original suspect in the shooting, whose testimony swung the police’s case against Davis.

So, from the get go, Davis’ situation looked grim. As Feuer says, “there was an officer who was down, and the police really wanted to make sure that they got their suspect.” Such tales are as old as american racism itself: a white person is killed, especially a white cop, and “justice” must be had, even if it comes at the expense of an innocent young Black man. Amy Goodman gives this related statistic from the American Bar Association: “Among all homicides with known suspects, those suspected of killing whites are 4.56 times as likely to be sentenced to death as those who are suspected of killing blacks.”

Davis wound up being convicted and sentenced to death; the appeals process up to the state level was unsuccessful, at times because of “procedural defaults” that prevented the defense from introducing new witness statements. One of Davis’ final avenues – turning to the federal appeals court – was closed off to him in 1996 with the signing of the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act. This law, passed by the Republican-controlled Congress and signed by President Clinton not long after the Oklahoma City bombings, severely limits the ability of federal appeals courts to consider cases like these. Earlier, in 1995, Congress voted to eliminate federal funding for legal organizations which provide legal assistance to death row prisoners, hobbling these organizations to help those inmates with the fewest resources.

Indeed, it looks like the government has been doing more and more to ensure that “justice” be served by executing people as quickly as possible, wrongful convictions be damned. As Feuer put it, “we have a death penalty system in this country that favors expediency over getting it right.” Read that over a few times. Let the awful truth of that sink in. Because this is the ultimate punishment; get something wrong here, and the mistake is irreversible.

Troy Davis’ lawyers appeared before the U.S. Supreme Court in late June to try, one last time, to convince a court to stay the order of execution and reopen the case. The Supreme Court declined. Now, Davis’ only recourse is the Georgia Board of Clemency, which can exonerate him, grant a stay of execution (and possibly a new trial), or allow the execution to take place. Davis’ clemency hearings began at 9am this morning; the clemency board has until 3pm tomorrow (just four hours before the time set for his execution) to make their decision. I encourage everyone to take a few moments to visit the Amnesty International page and send a fax to the clemency board demanding that they make the only right decision — to save an innocent man’s life.

UPDATE: The clemency board granted Troy Davis a 90-day stay of execution, within which the defense will have one last opportunity to present the case for his innocence. While this in itself is an important and heartening victory, the case can still go either way, so I encourage people to continue to send in faxes, make calls, spread the word and take action. And let’s hope that this case can do much to bring attention and an eventual end to the deeply-flawed and inherently unjust system of capital punishment in this country.

(cross-posted at AngryBrownButch)

Well hello there

Hello to everybody at Feministe, and thanks Jill for this chance to guest-blog. This is a much bigger gig than the one I usually do over at my place, so I’m understandably a bit nervous. So I’m going to calm my nerves by telling you a little about myself before I go to my first post.

Over at my place I focus mostly on poverty issues at the micro-personal level: this is what poverty looks like for my family and me, this is how we cope, and in the meantime, life still goes on. I started out wanting to make the lives of women and families in poverty more visible on the net, especially since it seemed to me when I began blogging that most of the blogs I was familiar with were mind-numbingly middle-class. Where were the voices that sounded like mine? Where were the families and issues like mine? So I started my little experiment in saying, without apology, that I am poor, I’ve been on welfare, I don’t regret it, and that I believe our society has a moral obligation to take care of each of its members. From healthcare to guaranteed income, from food to shelter, we are connected and our survival depends upon recognizing that connection.

I also believed it was necessary to combat some of the stereotypes of what a person in poverty looks like and sounds like. If I can make myself real to you, perhaps I can make poverty real, and not something that happens to some vague Other; perhaps I can make our common humanity more recognizable.

So those are my lofty goals; but a lot of the time I just get lazy and talk about my kids and my life and stuff like disability and losing my car and how shitty it is when the electric company comes to shut your power off. I talk about the things that impact me, my kids, my neighbors, the inner city of Milwaukee, and always make the political very, very personal.

So this little introduction seems to be turning into a post of its own! With that, I’ll be back in a short with something of real substance. And I look forward to being in the guest-room this week!

We’re Moving!

A very kind guardian angel is in the process of moving Feministe from its current server to a new and improved one. That means that there will be some outages over the weekend. Comments may get eaten. There will be at least an hour when the site is entirely down. We’re going to try and do all the tinkering late at night so that it’s as smooth as possible, but there are guaranteed to be hiccups. So please be patient. All should be well by early next week.

No sex for the poor

I guess I should introduce myself. Hi. I’m trailer park, a 26-year-old (former teenage) mom living in Austin, TX with my eight-year-old abstinence-only baby and my husband of three years who (shockingly) didn’t mind that his bride wasn’t a virgin. I’ve been online for years, but I only started my little public blog a few months ago, and I’m thrilled to be guest-blogging at Feministe for a week. And now, with that out of the way…

Jennifer Roback Morse must be crazy:

A poor cohabiting teenager using the Pill has a failure rate of 48.4%. You read that correctly: nearly half of poor cohabiting teenagers get pregnant during their first year using the Pill. If she kicked her boyfriend out of the house, or if she married him, her probability of pregnancy drops to 12.9%. At the other extreme, a middle-aged, middle-class married woman has a 3% chance of getting pregnant after a year on the Pill.

Wow, who knew that wedding rings worked as a contraceptive? It’s as if quality education and access to health care have nothing at all to do with one’s ability to use contraception effectively.

These figures cast new light on the debate over contraception education. The commonly quoted failure rates of 8% for the Pill and 15% for the condom are inflated by the highly successful use by middle-aged, middle-class married couples. Yet, the government promotes contraception most heavily among the young, the poor and the single. The “overall failure rates” are simply not relevant to this target population.

Planned Parenthood and its allies in the sex education business have had conniptions over federal funding for abstinence education. But at least abstinence actually works. If you don’t have sex, you won’t get pregnant. It works every time.

Poor people just shouldn’t have sex! That’s the ticket! It’s not like poor people need anything fun or pleasurable in their lives, right? Sex is not a natural, normal part of human pair-bonding, it’s a luxury like champagne and caviar!

God, who do these people think they’re fooling? Even before the sexual revolution, 90% of Americans had premarital sex. Poor, young, single people are NOT going to stop having sex, and raising the risks of sex only leads to tragedy:

Three times in the last eight years, investigators have fished the body of a newborn from a lonely stretch of the Mississippi River in Minnesota, haunting detectives and residents in the area.

This week authorities announced a horrifying development: Two of the three children likely came from the same mother.

The nearest abortion clinic to Red Wing, MN is an hour away, and the only Planned Parenthood clinic in town is open two days a week. There are, however, dozens of anti-abortion pregnancy centers in the area. If lack of access to abortion and birth control forces the young and the poor to remain abstinent, just how did those three dead babies wind up in the river?

Resnick said the typical profile of a mother who commits neonaticide was a 19-year-old young woman, often unmarried, who may still live with her parents, and may not be able to face her parents’ disappointment — both that she’s had premarital sex and that she’s become pregnant.

“Some may feel that they will literally be rejected from the house,” he said.

Resnick, who treated a woman who killed two of her newborn children, said that such fears can become so overwhelming that the mother completely loses sight of what she is doing. He points to the remarkably difficult circumstances under which neonaticides often take place.

“These women deliver alone, without pain relief, and without crying out, for fear of discovery. Oftentimes the parents are in a different room in the house. Then [the mothers] manage to wipe up all the blood, dispose of the baby and do all of this unaided. In that sense, you can see how the women are so much more terrified of discovery than they are of actually taking a human life.”

So much for the idea that slut-shaming creates a “culture of life.”

hat tip, Amanda

cross-posted

Right, so.

I’ve spent the past two weeks trying to paint pretty much all of a mural, working title, “The Fucking Mural.” Aside from a misconceived blockout in house paint*, I hadn’t done any work on it until about two weeks ago. I have about three more hours this morning, not counting packing for the weekend (see below) and breakfast, and then…it needs to be finished. It’s almost done. Just the detail in some of the mountains, the talus, this little section in the lower left, and the bit under the wall sconce. I’m a little punchy.

My deadline is so tight because I’m also about to go on a trip. I’m going to the Grand Canyon over the weekend, and then I have about twelve hours back home, and then I’m going to Europe for five months to paint and draw things that are not murals.** I was not originally planning to have to take much time off at all, but a bunch of stable houseguest arrangements crumbled just recently, and now I’m gonna be in hostels for most of my trip. I’m hoping to keep up with feministe, and I’m sure I’ll be plenty homesick, but things are up in the air. I will have a stable address from the end of July though the end of August, so I’ll be back then.

So I nominated a guest-blogger, one I’m sure you’ll all be glad to see, and will be lining up other guest-bloggers as I go. Assuming I actually do lose internet access, I’ll miss all of you.

*House paint is far cheaper than artist quality oil paint. The texture and quality’s somewhat different, but the biggest problem is that you can’t really select the colors all that carefully. Artist paints are standardized–there are some variations from brand to brand, but you get to assume that “cadmium yellow” is a bright sunny yellow that mixes sunlit greens and warm oranges, whereas “alizarin crimson” is a cool dark red good for eggplant purples and soft greys. Artist paints typically do not have names like Kittredge Point Memories, Plum Bake, Salmon Pearl, and Delicate Orchid. I had no idea what the hell I was purchasing, not on the level I needed in order to actually use the paint. Was Midnight Dove anything like prussian blue? Would it mix well with December Sky? Would Scandinavian Blue, Brilliant Blue, or Montana Blue be closer to ultramarine? Was it just a really bad idea to buy a color whose name started with Las Vegas? I ended up trying to paint the mural with colors selected more or less at random, and it showed. Even the undertone, which was supposed to be a nice yellow ochre (and yeah, we bought and swabbed on samples of all of these), turned out like something that really should have been in the “fair warning, it’s bright orange” name family. Harvest Melange, or Adobe Sunset, or Pumpkin Spice. Now I’m using artist quality paint, and it’s suddenly like painting a picture on a wall.

**Okay, so maybe it was a bad idea to agree to paint a mural right before leaving the country for half the year. At least now I know exactly how long it takes me to paint a mural, give or take a few hours, right?