Tag: Link Round-Ups

A whole lot of them, because the bar is two weeks away, which means very little thoughtful blogging on my part. Enjoy:

Heroes of the day: The girls who are stepping up and defying child marriage in Yemen. That is true strength and true bravery, and it looks like they’re making real change.

Melissa and Feministe alum Zuzu have two articles up in The Guardian about the attacks on Hillary Clinton. Check out Part 1 and Part 2.

Something that will ruin your day:

Investigators said the men opened fire on a car full of teenage girls at John Young Parkway and Princeton Street two weeks ago. Mildred Beaubrun was removed from life support Tuesday, more than two weeks after she was shot at the Orlando intersection.

Investigators said Beaubrun and two of her friends stopped at a gas station after leaving Club Firestone. They were approached by a group of men asking for their phone numbers.

When the men didn’t get what they wanted, they followed the girls to the intersection of John Young Parkway and Princeton. One of them fired a shot. It hit Beaubrun, who was sitting in the back seat.

But street harassment and getting asked for your number should be flattering! Thanks to SarahMC for the link.

Why is Obama using right-wing talking points when he talks about abortion? Also, putting Obama’s comments in perspective.

RH Reality Check has a great package about reproductive justice and population change — check it out for a variety of views. Too often, women’s bodies are used as pawns in a conversations about the environment, population control and demographics. And too often, people on both sides of the conversation pin the responsibility on women to quit having so many babies in the name of environmentalism, or to have more babies in the name of cultural supremacy. The pieces RH Reality Check selects get beyond those simplicities.

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As usual, too much good stuff to write about and not enough hours in the day. Since Torts calls, I give you a link round-up:

Various writers tackle women and work. Some of my favorite excerpts:

Dana:

Over the course of a century in which women’s roles outside of the home expanded radically, mothers continued to spend the exact same number of hours on basic childcare chores as their great-great-grandmothers did. And the average working man with a working spouse still spends just three hours a week on basic child care.

Ezra:

In a home where both parents work, women spend 11 hours a week caring for the kids and men spend…three. Whoa. Of course, this isn’t because husbands and wives sit down and set up a schedule where women do about four times as much child work. Rather, it just sort of…happens that way. People are busy. The guys look at the work and assume someone else will take care of it. The women look at the work and decide they’d better get it done. Societal expectations reinforce this division of labor.

Woah indeed.

Tom Colicchio from Top Chef:

Women are reluctant to enter the culinary world because they believe (and this is not unjustified) that a cooking career is incompatible with raising children, which leaves those of us who want to hire, promote, and mentor women with a slimmer field to choose from than we’d like. And to an extent, they’re right: The bottom line is our society does not yet provide women in the workplace with the type of social supports, like high-quality subsidized child care or extended parental leave, that allows them to fully go for it, and the impact this has on the scope and depth of a career is profound. Right or wrong, men plunge into their careers without much thought about how they’ll navigate the work/family balance. They assume someone — spouse, parent, paid caregiver — will materialize to take care of it (and usually someone does.) This one assumption opens up an entire world of possibility to a young person in a way that can’t be overstated. Ask yourself how many female Ferran Adrias, Thomas Kellers, or Joel Robuchons have chosen a different path — say, catering or opening a bakeshop — because it seems more family friendly? These may be great career choices, but they aren’t the breeding grounds of culinary legend.

Atrios (just read it all — it’s brieft).

It genuinely pains me that I am probably not going to have time to write a post on this article about shared parenting in last weekend’s NY Times Magazine. But you should definitely check it out. I went in expecting to hate it — particularly because it’s written by Lisa Belkin, she of the “opt-out revolution” faux-trend articles — but actually found it to be quite nuanced and interesting. It gets beyond the same old explanations for the household division of labor and really delves into the structural and broader social that push women in certain directions while casting it all as a “choice.” There have been some criticisms that the article only focuses on two-parent families, but since it’s about the gender-based division of labor, I can see why Belkin made that choice. I do wish that there had been a greater emphasis on the class dynamics at play, but Belkin did do a decent job at addressing those without flat-out using the word “class” — through the anecdotes and interviews, she made it clear that for a lot of families, equal division of labor and childcare is an economic privilege, and that the “choice” to have a less equal division is more about financial realities than feminist beliefs.

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Six conservative female bloggers on dating. A few observations: Conservative female bloggers dislike arrogance and over-confidence. They do like chivalry, which liberalism and feminism has apparently been trying to kill (weirdly, I still get the door held for me on occasion). They dislike “wimpy” guys (which is apparently defined as “not having a gun”). But the answers are interesting, and certainly differ from woman to woman — something that in itself flies in the face of a lot of conservative talking points about “what women want” and how all chicks dig “real men.” My favorite responses are from Karol, who I met about a year ago and who is really smart and bad-ass (but then, I tend to like uppity broads, even the right-wing ones), and Dawn, who I think is totally wrong, but who has clearly thought out these issues and come up with a cohesive and intelligent view.

Speaking of dudes and dating, CNN has an article on Japanese “geisha guys,” who hang out with Japanese businesswomen and serve as pretty accessories. There is no mention of sex, which is weird — if the article were about female geishas, I’d imagine sex would come in. That said, I’m pretty sure the whole thing is just one more of those “Japan is so weird!!!” articles, which is why it’s light on actual reporting. Thanks to Fauzia for the link.

Can porn and feminism coexist? A very interesting article that doesn’t re-hash the same tired arguments.

From a Saudi website — Want to keep your maid? Pamper her. And by “pamper” the author actually just means “don’t abuse.” Nice.

Jeff Jacoby is a moron. His article is about sex-selective abortion, and the conclusion is “it’s bad.” Someone give this man a Nobel prize. He further argues that parents in backwards oriental lands (like China or India) “may have rational reasons for preferring a son,” but parents in the USA would never have any reason for sex-selective abortion. Because apparently girls and boys are totally equally valued in this country. He doesn’t seem to offer any solution, and he refuses to recognize that there may be reasons (albeit offensive ones) for sex-selective abortions in the United States. As a conservative, he’d rather just put his head in the sand and rail against feminists and brown people (who are the only ones who have sex-selective abortions, of course) instead of strategizing solutions beyond “make abortion illegal.” Although he does want to know “what kind of feminist would it be who could contemplate the use of abortion to eliminate ever-greater numbers of girls, and not cry out in horror?” Apparently “crying out in horror” is the ideal solution, as opposed to agitating for gender equality — you know, what feminists actually do.

Chris Matthews is a ridiculous asshole. Thanks to Kyle for the link.

The Kenyan rape crisis is re-opening the debate on abortion. From the same publication: Kenyan men are deciding that Kenyan women are too uppity, and so they’re pursuing Ugandan women instead. Sound familiar? Apparently MRAs have gone international.

Top Bush advisers approved “enhanced interrogation” techniques. In other words, it was the guys at the top who sanctioned torture. Disgusting.

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