Guest Blogging – Page 114

Even in Sweden

So, I’m accustomed to thinking that, while no country is perfect, the Scandanavians have gotten a bunch of stuff right. I’m accustomed to thinking this is especially true on gender issues, where woman have a more prominent public role than really anywhere else that readily comes to mind. Then, this morning, the New York Times publishes This distressing piece about the Swedes.

It says, in relevant part:

We’ve had to change our picture of ourselves in Sweden,” said Maria Carlshamre, a former television journalist who acknowledged last summer to viewers, against the station’s wishes, that her husband had abused her for a decade. “We are not the gender equality champions of the world.”

The turmoil began a year ago with the Amnesty International report, which took Sweden to task for failing to adequately curb violence against women and help victims cope with their situations. The organization also cited spotty prosecutions, vague statistics, old-fashioned judges and unresponsive local governments.

The report praised Sweden’s laws as “unambiguous,” but warned that “strongly worded legislation is not in itself a sufficient instrument to ensure women’s right to a life without violence.”

The group concluded that acts of violence against women had spiraled upward in Sweden in the last 15 years, a jump that could not be explained away as merely a greater willingness by women to report the incidents. The number of police reports filed for assault against women increased 40 percent in the 1990’s, according to the Swedish National Council for Crime Prevention.

In the category of outrageous messenger-shooting, this is what happened to the woman brave enough to shake the country awake:

Ms. Carlshamre said she was fired because her bosses, fearing slander charges, had warned that the topic was off limits. She then ran for a seat in the European Parliament on an anti-violence platform, and won. “Now you can’t talk about battered women like ‘them’ anymore,” she said. “It’s no longer about poor women on the fringe of society.”

(Emphasis mine.)

So what is going on here? Is the whole edifice of relative gender equality in Scandanavia, or at least Sweden, a facade? I’m guessing not. More likely, I think, the lesson to take is that the barrier between the public and private is stubborn, and that it is possible to make great gains in where women stand in relation to men in public, without corresponding gains in private.

It seems strange to me that men could become accustomed to seeing women as equals, professional peers, bosses, legislators and judges, etc. out in the world, and then could close the bedroom door and beat their wives and girlfriends. Can it really be the same guys that treat female colleagues with respect, then hit those they profess to love? Or is this a secret backlash; a large population of incorrigibles who may have to give the appearance of accepting women in public, but vent their rage at the changing world on the one woman they can get behind closed doors?

I’m afraid it’s the former, or some of both. I make assumptions about how my male peers treat women generally from how I see them treat their female colleagues. Maybe the two are more independent than I have let myself believe.

Thinking about (ick!) Reality Television

I am Thomas. I am guest-blogging. If you know me at all, you know me from my comments here, and at Feministing and Mouse Words.

This from Feministing. Now, we can all be adults and admit that we have each succumbed and watched some crappy reality television (though each of us probably secretly thinks that the garbage everyone else watches is worse than the garbage we watch). Or, even if we don’t own a television, Idol and some of the others are so ubiquitous that events on these shows have been treated by the MSM as real news. In an effort to keep this phenomenon from further atrophying my brain, I’d like to pause to actually think about it.

Some contestants in game shows called “reality TV” get kicked off for making porn (define it how you like). Some don’t. Some get kicked off for committing acts of domestic violence (I’m speaking of Big Brother, here). It looks like many more don’t — This jerk, the guy from “Who Wants To Marry A Multimillionaire” and others.

Here’s the question: is it completely ideosyncratic? Do producers just wing it? Are the networks or producers actually trying to apply criteria of any kind?

I assume at some level, they are just trying to maximize the audience and keep the advertisers from getting skittish. But are they flying blind? Do they test run each contestant “scandal” by some advertisers before making a decision? How does this work? Of course, what they do in the end is a reflection of their biases no matter how they purport to reason to the conclusion — but that doesn’t mean it isn’t important to know how they get there.

Guests, Ahoy!

I’ve enlisted several people to guestblog for me, most of whom participated in Open Blog Day last month. I’ll be in every now and then to post a poem, and of course, host the FRT and pictures of dear Pablo on Friday.

Keep an eye out. We’ve got some killer voices on the way.

Indiana, Oh Indiana…

I don’t have a blog, or a livejournal, or anything fancy like that; I’m just a lady who gets paid to read books and write papers and teach other kids how to read and write papers. Or at least I’m training for it. So I often read the blogs of my fellow-women in education, and Ms. Lauren’s Feministe is the first on the list.
I could write about all kinds of things: I could add my two cents to the Schiavo national embarrassment, and ruminate on the meaning of law, now that our legislative body has taken it upon itself to legislate for the particular individual, rather than for the “universal,” or for the nation at large. But I won’t. Or I could echo all of the rumblings and ramblings about the sorry state of the Democratic party, still sore from a whuppin’, trying to figure out how to be a party of opposition, and how to strategize a comeback. I won’t do that either, except to humbly suggest that looking beyond the New England corridor will probably help, and I don’t mean that in a “those latte-drinkin, Volvo-drivin, sushi-eatin’ Ivory Tower yuppies just don’t understand good ol’ fashion red state ‘Mericans, with their big trucks and their guns and their churches an’ all.” I mean that I haven’t seen a lot of evidence that establishment Democrats have finished the whole dazed from defeat thing and are ready to really try to be the voice for working people, women and minorities, because the other side certainly isn’t. That’s how to be an opposition party, guys. And next week we’ll introduce universal health care coverage, re-introduce the capital gains tax, and have a talk about proportional representation.
(Oh my God! I’m a woman and I started talking about politics, in my first ever blog entry, EVER. Or are those two mutually exclusive? Help! What do I do now? Don’t blame me; I’m the new girl.)
What I really meant to write about was the Midwest. I love the Midwest. I once visited a friend in NYC, a friend who was born and raised (and put up a hell of a fight for the DNC) in Ohio. I had never seen a map of NYC; in fact, I am embarrassed to say that I didn’t even know that NYC was south of Boston. It’s true. I would simply go down one hole, get on a train, and come out another hole, where everyone looked just as strangely serene and urbane and thin as they had been before I went in the hole. I couldn’t wait to get back to Chicago, where there were some people who were ugly or poorly dressed and didn’t really care (not that I dress in such a way of course, dear friends), and would walk around with this odd look on their face, as if they had just smelled something really bad, but would meet your eyes and smile at you in the street, strike up a conversation with you in the corner store, or give you directions and advice, welcome or not.
Folks from the Midwest are warm and friendly and even-tempered; they can also be shockingly xenophobic, parochial, and hateful towards anything new and strange. Midwestern small towns can be cozy and charming and safe places where everyone knows everyone else because they all went to the same high school and work the same service jobs for years on end, trading favors between the pizza joint and the bar. They can also be stagnant dead-end towns where those who aren’t satisfied with sameness are treated as pathological and find themselves isolated and stuck.
At any rate, these are my people and to them, and to Lauren for sticking it out with them (and being one of them), I raise a can of Old Style. Now back to my thesis…
-Sina
skramer1@students.depaul.edu

I know how hard it is to be you

My blog is called Redfish for no particular reason. I’m a student at the University of Toronto majoring in classics and classical civilization. I love everything about the classics program. In fact, I love it so much that I’m aiming for grad school (fingers crossed!) I’ve just started to visit feministe, but I love the idea of an open blog day. So I had to put in my two cents:

I hate it when people tell me they understand how hard it is to be a black woman. It’s usually people who are otherwise fairly progressive who do this, and it drives me nuts.

Let’s get one thing straight: it isn’t hard to be black. It isn’t hard to be a woman.

What can be hard is the way people in this society treat me because I’m a black woman.

It seems like such a small distinction. Most people I’ve explained this to dismiss it with “it’s really not that big of a deal.” But you know what? It kinda is.

I don’t experience racism because I’m black. I experience it because some people are racists. Likewise, people don’t make sexist remarks to me because I’m a woman; they do it because they’re sexist. True, racism and sexism wouldn’t impact me in the same way if I wasn’t a black woman, but my being a black woman isn’t the problem. Racism and sexism are the problems.

This is just as true when it comes to the more invisible, systemic forms of oppression. The discrimination existing in society today is not intrinsically connected to the identities of groups being oppressed.

I know that it can be hard to acknowledge that the lives of women or black people can be incredibly, horribly difficult because of oppression without saying that it’s hard to be black or that it’s hard to be a woman. I don’t, actually, mind it when people use that shortcut–as long as they recognize that it is a shortcut.

I had this argument for the first time in high school. I wish I could say that it’s only teenagers who just. don’t. get it.

Being myself isn’t hard.

It’s the way some people react to my self that makes my life difficult.

Enyo Harlley
enyo_harlley@yahoo.ca

Random stuff from the Random Liberal

So. My name is Robert. I actually comment as randomliberal (though I don’t comment anywhere all that often), but I sign my blog, Random Liberal, as Robert. My partner in crime–Joshua–and I had gone about five months without posting there until last week; hence, the dearth of posts. Sorry. We’re slackers. We mostly post about politics from a personal point of view, although I think that my portion of the blog is going to become more of an international affairs/politics blog.

I’m a college student at TCU in Fort Worth, Texas. TCU is an incredibly monolithic campus. An enormous proportion of the student body is upper-class and white. It’s also “Greece” away from Greece. About half of the undergraduates are in a social fraternity or sorority. To make things even better, I have been recently informed that Tarrant County, where Fort Worth is located, had the second highest proportion of voters in the entire freaking country pull the lever for Bush.* Yeah. Sometimes I feel kind of lonely here.

I’m going to take this opportunity to plug an event I attended last week during my Spring Break. I was in Austin for an anti-death penalty alternative Spring Break. It was an opportunity for high school and college students (and non-students who could manage to get a few days off) to learn about the death penalty and learn how to take direct action. Last Tuesday, the 15th, we went to the state capitol and held a rally, then went inside to talk to our legislators. As you can imagine, we were not very successful in reaching the legislators, but we were able to talk briefly with some of their staff members. While we may not have had much of an effect on the representatives’ opinions on the death penalty, it was at least a good experience on lobbying the legislature. For more information on the activities of the week, or to learn more about the fight for a moratorium on the death penalty in Texas, go to the Texas Moratorium Network’s website.

My thanks to Lauren, who is awesome for doing this experiment today.

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*For those who don’t know, the county with the highest proportion of Bush voters in the nation is some obscure southern California county. I’m having trouble remembering the name, though…that one blogger guy Kevin Drum lives there…also I think there might be some sort of TV show on the DubyaB network…and it’s possible that some random ska bands are from there…why can’t I remember the name…?

Open Blogging on Women and Expectations

I’m Erin of the fshk blog, which has recently taken a swing from every day minutiae to politics and feminism because, despite attempts to ignore, I just can’t anymore. (Also, my mom helms the far more famous mahablog, and knows a think or two about where the women bloggers are.)

It’s pretty awesome to have the opportunity to guest-blog anywhere.

Anyway, since I’ve decided to stop writing about Terri Schiavo (despite my inability to look away from that, too) I’ll link to this very good post at Pandagon about a recent Salon article by Rebecca Traister (whose articles I usually like) about a new generation of men who are desperate to get married. Actually, the post is in response to the angry letters responding to the article, most of them written by men, most of them indignant that a woman dare critique male behavior. Amanda at Pandagon is much more snarky and clever than I am, so go read the post, but bask in the knowledge that all the old double standards are alive and well. *sigh*

Big & Beautiful

Intro: I’m Trish and I’m normally at Fanfare for the Uncommon Woman. Thanks Lauren for giving us all the chance to guest-blog! I thought I’d take this opportunity to share a link.

Leonard Nimoy has taken a series of beautiful photographs of large nude women. Note that this link will lead you to photographs of naked women. They’re artistic, but use your best judgement as to whether or not that’s work-safe.

Nimoy’s second book of photography will focus on the women of the Fat Bottom Revue. He says: “They are interested in fat liberation. Their self-esteem is strong. They will tell you that too many people suffer because the body they live in is not the body you find in the fashion magazines.”

via Big Fat Blog

Just happy to be me, thanks. Pass the pie.

Quick Intro: Hi, I’m Poppy. I’m a computer technician with a degree in psychology. I’m also a wanna-be freelance writer and photographer in what passes for my free time. Like Alleyrat, I’m cheating – this was originally posted in my cheesy little LiveJournal account a year ago. I regularly post prose and poetry, along with pictures at my ‘home’, Shadowroses, and rants or memes go to LJ.

There’s a jolt that happens, described often as being “snapped back into one’s body”, due to catcalls and street harassment. Walking along, talking to a friend or contemplating your next project, mind freer than a soaring bird, free to contemplate big things. Some oaf yells “Hey, shake that thang!” and it pops like a soap bubble. Suddenly, you’re back in your body, reminded that, think big thoughts though you may, as far as this person is concerned, you’re just a body, conveniently placed on the planet for his aesthetic pleasure. And he’s not the only one. No, not all men are assholes who haven’t grasped the concept that women weren’t placed here solely for their pleasure, but there sure are a lot of them, and they’re always the loudest ones, too. The only way I can explain it in terms that most men might understand is this:

Imagine you’re walking out of a pub after a few beers, arguing with a friend about something that you always debate together, in that friendly way that comes from a lifetime of being expected to have opinions and express them. Maybe you stop for a piss against a wall, and as you’re standing there, a guy somewhere behind you, in a voice that cuts through the buzz and sounds far closer than he really is, says “Nice ass.” You tense. Fight or flight response kicks in. Every fight you’ve ever lost flashes into your head. You’re very aware of how big this stranger could be. But you’re too well trained to show fear. Tucking your now-useless dick back into your pants, you turn around and shout back the first insult you can think of, proving that you won’t take that kind of crap from him. Your friend is nearby, doing exactly the same thing, but you don’t have any attention to spare for him. This is about survival. Congratulations. If you have a good imagination, you’ve just been snapped into your body, just experienced what it feels like to be reminded, suddenly, that you could lose, that you could be hurt. Reminded that no matter what else you can do or how smart you are, your survival comes down to who’s bigger or more intimidating.

To a certain extent, society in the early part of this millennium likes to place the blame on the offendee (I’m avoiding the word victim, which I feel is overused and has lost its original meaning). We have cases of people being pulled over for “driving while black.” During the SARS scare, there were jokes about people “coughing while Asian.” This phenomena of catcalling is just a case of “walking while female.” If you can convincingly put the blame on the female for walking down the street, you can absolve the idiots for hollering at her, because of course it’s not their fault they never learned any manners. Psychology in this case has done us a disservice, teaching us that all we need to do is reconstruct our reactions to a situation, and poof, reality changes. I won’t argue that it works. Since you can’t change how someone else behaves, the best we can do is change how we interpret events. But there is a point where a line needs to be drawn and we need to say “I’m not going to reinterpret this to absolve you from all blame. I’m not going to play that game. I’m not going to excuse you because you’re male and that’s what men do.” Just like there’s times when the line we need to draw is “No, I’m serious, that’s really not cool, and I’m not going to put up with it.” And sometimes it needs to be men who draw that line, because women have been drawing it for years, and we aren’t getting anywhere very quickly.

Not too long ago, I was talking to someone I used to date and, as I expected, he was surprised at the weight I’ve gained since we were together. I was, however, baffled by his easy assumption that my pride would lead me to lose it all and be thin and cute again. And still more baffled when, 2 minutes later, after I pointed out that I’ve stopped taking that kind of pride in my body, preferring to spend it on my mind and intelligence, his response was “it’s about time.” Um, hello? What’s with the “it’s about time”? How the hell am I ever supposed to learn and believe that I am worth something based on what I think instead of what I look like when everyone’s first reaction is to assume that “my pride” will make me decide to lose weight instead of, say, take a class in women’s studies so I can eloquently tell people who think I need to lose weight before I can be wonderful to fuck off. Is it just me, or is there a disconnect here? What’s the message, “You should believe that your brain matters, but the rest of the world will focus on your appearance”? Yeah, that’s healthy. Not.

Since then, I’ve explored being overweight (I refuse to say fat. Fat is bad. Overweight just is.) and how I feel about it. To an extent, it’s a disguise against opinions like the one expressed by my friend above. It’s a disguise against wondering if that freaky guy staring at my legs is gonna follow me home or just hit on me clumsily. It’s a disguise against all of the possible reactions the freaky guy might have when I tell him no, I’m not interested. Once you’re truly overweight (and I am talking here about more than just 1-2 inches and my favorite jeans are a little bit snug. I’m talking about replacing entire wardrobes because nothing fits anymore kind of overweight), you’re less likely to be seen as a potential sex object and more likely to be seen as a competent person. More likely to be given a chance to prove that you can think or do something useful and not just written off as “too attractive to be smart.” It’s camouflage, and it can be useful. When you waltz into a male-heavy office and expect to earn your place among the cluefull, it helps to be able to convince your colleagues that you’re not just there looking for a date. Even at 5’5” and 180 pounds, dressed in the same t-shirt and jeans as everyone else, I still had to push about 6-8 months before I convinced most people that I really was “just one of the guys” who worked there and not a man-hungry homewrecker.

Maybe if I thought it would make me deliriously happy, I might consider losing weight just for that. But I’ve tried dieting, once, I’ve tried replacing a meal with a “meal replacement shake.” And let me tell you, one of those things doesn’t even replace a snack. You’re still hungry afterwards, only you can’t eat anything now, because you just drank a whole meal’s worth of calories, and anything else you eat will make the whole thing pointless. So you suck it up and deal with the grumble in your stomach distracting you from entering data into the spreadsheet you’re working on or calling clients to arrange meetings or keeping the kids from killing each other. And, come lunchtime, you’re still hungry, so you eat twice as much lunch and feel guilty about it. I even tried exercise. I had a gym membership that I never used because it was inconvenient and too far to go. I tried walking around the block, but I got down to the corner and the problems with my ankles that no doctor has been able to find make me limp until I can’t walk any further. And, lets be honest, if the foremost thought in my head is “I’m 40 pounds overweight, so I need to walk up the stairs instead of taking the elevator and I need to eat celery instead of a sandwich,” I’m not thinking about anything else, like “That was an interesting book, but I’m not sure I agree with her point about…” Dieting becomes a way of life if you let pride in your appearance drive it. And that’s unhealthy by itself – constant weight fluctuations are more unhealthy than just carrying extra weight around, and that’s saying a lot.

So, rather than lose myself to self-absorbed navel shrinking, I would rather carry my camouflage around, give myself the leeway to do other things that I want to do. If it protects me from idiots who think that I’m only here for their visual pleasure, so much the better. Besides, I haven’t seen any proof that meeting the beauty ideal truly makes anyone happy. I have a friend who is tall and thin, and has hair light enough to pass for blonde in the summer. Meets all of the requirements, right? Tall, thin, blonde and attractive. She’s been hurt as much as I have in my short dumpy brunette life. Her happiness comes from the same place mine does – reading, keeping creative hobbies, having good friends around to laugh with.

So excuuuse me if I choose not to buy into your beauty myth. I don’t like the rules of this game, so I’m making my own. I choose to be the smart girl that I am, and to be proud of it. I choose to be unconcerned with my appearance and more concerned with my health, both mental and physical. I choose to take pride in what I can do and the way I think and the fact that I actively ponder things like why I’d rather be overweight, and I say “F*%# YOU” to anyone who thinks that I should care about being thin and attractive. You’ve missed the point, and I’m sorry you can’t see it.

2005 Update: The original entry produced a few comments, with people weighing in (no pun intended) on having themselves gained weight intentionally when leaving the “dating game” or different experiences as a woman who had lost a dramatic amount of weight. Going off of anecdotal evidence, weight-as-camoflauge certainly isn’t specific to me. Nor is accepting and living with ones body and all of its flaws.

Oh, and thanks, Lauren, for hosting the Open Mic Guest Day.

Open Blogging on Race and Gangs

My name is Lenka, and I usually blog over at farkleberries. I’ve been a fan of Feministe for quite some time, and although I don’t tend to blog much on feminist issues at my place, it is an issue near and dear to my heart. I hope someday I can articulate my views on the subject as eloquently as the folks at Feministe do! 🙂 It’s a happy coincidence that today is open blogging on Feministe, because I had an unusual experience last night that I’m itching to write about: my Criminal Justice Juvenile Delinquency class had four active Chicago members of the Gangster Disciples, Vicelords and the Black Souls – all currently on parole – visit as guest speakers. Even though our instructor is a retired Chicago cop with over 30 years of street experience under his belt, I have to admit that I was a bit nervous when the guests arrived. Let me put that in context.

We’ve had a streak of violent crimes in my neighborhood this winter, such as the killing of a janitor and a young woman only weeks apart in the apartment building directly across the street from my apartment building. While none of these crimes appears to be gang-releated, I still clearly picture walking home from class that January night, as remote newsvans, camera crews and reporters stood in front of the makeshift memorial at 6151 N. Winthrop where 21-year old Melissa Dorner was raped and murdered, allegedly by a man who lived in her building. The Chicago Tribune had quoted one of Melissa’s relatives, saying she had moved to our part of town, Edgewater, because several stranger rapes had occured recently in her old neighborhood. I try not to dwell on these crimes too much, but when I walk home from the train at around 10:00pm some nights, it’s hard not to see every shadow and approaching stranger on the sidewalk as a bit more malign and threatening. Will I make it home alive tonight, or will my name be on the nightly news? When murder hits this close to home, these normally paranoid thoughts seem almost reasonable.

Back to “gang night at Loyola.” Perhaps these events made me a bit hypersensitive, but it took several minutes to get used to the idea that four people with serious criminal histories (including rape, armed robbery, and murder) were sitting about ten feet away from me. I listened intently, not brave enough to ask the panel any questions of my own, a bit too conscious of my body language and facial expressions. As a thirty-something European-American woman enrolled in a private university, I knew I’d be perceived in my status as a privileged, naive outsider. Nothing that could be done about that, really. Three of the gangmembers were men in their late thirties and forties, and the one woman was by her own admission, “twenty-one going on forty.” All looked much older than their years because of hard living and prolonged substance abuse, and at some point during the evening each one said they felt “blessed” to be alive at this point. None had expected to live past their twenties, and all felt their years in “the life” were wasted time.

21-year old”Sheryl,” coincidentally the same age as Melissa Dorner was when she died, had been involved in prostitution, pimping and heavy drug use since the age of 11. She recalled the time she was discovered in rival gang territory a few blocks away from her home., when some women from a rival gang spotted her distinctive arm tattoo depicting a six-pointed star with Gangster Disciples markings. “Sheryl” tried to save herself by claiming the marking meant that she was Jewish. She was lucky that day. Instead of killing her, the rival gang only sliced the tattooed skin off her arm with razor blades.

The biggest surprise? All had talked about and thanked a woman named Adelle, the gang counselor/liaison who arranged their visit and returned them home that night before their 9:00pm curfew. Adelle is an older African-American woman who normally sits in the back of the classroom, frequently expressing her thoughts in what I sometimes perceived to be a hostile, confrontational and anti-establishment manner. After last night, I really saw her differently. Not only is she a fellow non-traditional student, but a strong woman with incredible street cred, a survivor of a lifetime in some of Chicago’s toughest neighborhoods, who understands, connects with, and helps turn around some of the world’s most difficult and misspent lives. She’s a hero in my book.

(P.S.) Thanks, Lauren, for giving us the chance to guest-blog!