October 2009 Archives

Regular readers will have noticed that in recent months, Feministing has brought in a number of new contributors: Ariel, Jos, Lori, Rose Afriye and myself. No doubt you're getting to know them and their expertise by reading their posts and engaging with their ideas in the comments section, but I also suspect that you want to know a little more about these wonderful women (I know I do!). So, over the next few weeks, I'll be interviewing my fellow new contributors, so that you and I can get to know them a little better. This week I interviewed Ariel Boone.

Ariel is in her third year at Cal Berkeley, where she is completing a double major in Music and Political Economy. She grew up in Davis, CA, and was heavily involved with student activism during her high school career. At Berkeley, she is even more heavily involved in student activism, and her list of extracurricular activities reportedly makes her parents wonder how on earth she gets her schoolwork done. In addition to being a Senator in the Associated Students of the University of California and a member of Cal Students for Equal Rights and a Valid Education (CalSERVE), Ariel spends her summers doing a dizzying number of jobs and internships, working on a wide range of issues, from national security to reproductive rights.

Ariel is a self-described policy wonk and a huge West Wing fan (check out who her favorite fictional heroine is). She started contributing to Feministing this August, when she covered for Miriam when Miriam was on vacation. And I speak for all of us when I say that we're might glad that she stayed on.

And now, without further ado, The Feministing Five, with Ariel Boone.

President Obama signed into law the Matthew Shepard Act, which adds sexual orientation and gender identity to existing hate crimes laws.

A trans woman in Australia successfully fought for an apology and a change in policy from the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade after she suffered embarrassment and harassment while traveling abroad with a passport that still identified her as male.

It's Friday folks! Add your links in comments and enjoy the Halloween weekend.

A group of people wanted to hold an online auction to raise money for Scott Roeder, the man who shot and killed Dr. Tiller at his church in May.

Ebay refused to allow the auction.

Based on the details we know about the anticipated listings, we believe these would violate our policy regarding offensive material," the company said in a statement to The Kansas City Star. "EBay will not permit the items in question to be posted to the eBay site, and they will be removed if they are posted."

A letter from Dr. Tiller's family explained their position on the auction:

"These materials contain hate messages, glorify violence against abortion doctors who provide constitutionally protected medical services, and instruct on means of violence, including bombing, of abortion clinics," said Lee Thompson, an attorney for the Tiller family, in a letter sent to eBay on Tuesday and approved by Tiller's widow, Jeanne Tiller.

I'm glad Ebay took the right stand on this one, and appalled (but not surprised) that the people in question would try to raise money in this way.

About. Damn. Time.

Via The Advocate and Akimbo:

"The United States is one of a dozen countries that bar people with HIV from entering the country," Obama said as he announced the lifting of the U.S. policy banning travel and immigration to the U.S. by people who are HIV-positive.

"If we want to be the global leader in HIV, we need to act like it."

This should go a long way towards battling the seemingly ubiquitous stigma and discrimination HIV-positive people face worldwide. What a great way to end the week!

Today is Equal Pay Day in the United Kingdom. The pay gap there, for full-time workers, is 17.1%. Meaning women make on average 17% less than men make.

This website has some interesting graphics that breakdown the details of the pay gap for two different cities in the UK, where the pay gap is actually reversed in the city with lower income overall.

More information here.

When we started our Feministing College Tour this year, we had decided that we'd give each school we attend an opportunity to include one of their students as a panelist at our presentation so that we can have the school be a part of the process as well and speak to some of the issues that their feminist organizations and groups have been addressing. We also offered the student panelists the opportunity to feature their presentation as a guest post on Feministing. The wonderful and amazing Kym Nacita wrote the first of many to come. And here's our next student panelist, Sarah Jayne, from the University of Ottawa.

So what does this mean for us? It means we're challenging language. It means we're acknowledging the integral role that men play in ending violence against women. It means we understand that men can be feminists. It means we have finally started to push for the inclusion of other forms of oppression in our discourse. We are starting to see how race, gender identity, income or class status all play a role in the world we live in. The world we want to change.

"As a child, I never saw a confident woman; I only saw women being abused. That's why I am here... I want every girl and woman who walks through this door to know that she is loved, no matter who is telling her she isn't loved."

-- Mary J. Blige, announcing the opening of the Mary J. Blige Center for Women in her hometown of Yonkers, NY (As Samhita noted last year, Mary founded an organization to empower women in their lives and careers.)

And with that, I think it's time for a little music, no?

[Video: Mary J. Blige - Family Affair]

Thanks to the lovely Becky for the head's up.

Transcript of lyrics after the jump

On October 30, 2005, six days after Rosa Parks' death, she was transported to the US Capitol and became the first woman to lie in honor (have their body be presented for public recognition) in the Capital Rotunda. This also made her only the second African-American to lie in honor.

Rosa Parks' is best known for her role in the civil rights movement, when she refused to give up her seat to a white woman in Montogomery Alabama in 1955. She wasn't the first to resist these segregation rules, but her action sparked a wider boycott on the bus system. She later went on to collaborate with Martin Luther King Jr and other civil rights leaders.

Via New York Times On This Day

Mary Cuddehe Jennie Rothenberg Gritz of The Atlantic writes about the backlash from a Mexico City decision to decriminalize first-trimester abortion within the city.

Various parties weigh in on Rhode Island's unique approach to indoor vs. outdoor prostitution.

17-year-old star Taylor Lautner, star of the new Twilight movie, is posing all over the place with his pecs on display. Hollywood, with a double standard? Naw, couldn't be.

The brilliant Alaa Al-Aswany on why religious extremism is the other face of political despotism.

Poet Joan Kane, an Inupiaq Eskimo woman, received the prestigious Whiting Writers' Award. (It comes with $50,000!)

"My husband jokes that he's probably the only start-up lawyer whose practice is being kept afloat by his poet wife," she said.

Some of the money will buy health insurance, she said.

She'd also like to take her children and her mother to King Island, an expensive and difficult proposition.

The remote settlement in the Bering Sea was abandoned under pressure from the government in the 1950s. Memories of the deserted village contribute to overtones of loss and change that haunt Kane's poems. King Islanders retain a strong sense of identity with the place, though members of the younger generation -- including Kane herself -- have never been there.

Kane hopes to visit small communities in the future, to talk about writing and "bring books to others."

"As a writer, you have to be concerned when you see all of these towns without bookstores," she said.

Read some of Kane's poetry here, here, and here.

Via Reihan.

Check out Ann's newest column at Tapped, titled The Polanksi Paradox, on some of the drawbacks to taking legal action with respect to violence against women.

It's understandable, given the prevalence of violence against women in this country, to want to push for big, systemic solutions to the problem. That is the premise on which VAWA was based. But the deeply personal nature of this crime is what makes such a broad response inherently problematic. Many observers were shocked when Rihanna chose not to press charges against Brown. The woman who, as a child, was raped by Polanski later said that she wished prosecutors would drop the case. This may be hard to accept for those of us who saw the photos of Rihanna's bruised face or read the damning testimony from Polanski's trial, but these women have a right to decline to get involved with the justice system. Violence against women is a public scourge, but respecting survivors' wishes must be paramount.

Go read the whole thing.

Last night at our panel, Roxie bravely talked about a moment when she got into a big argument with her uncle about whether a woman had the capacity to be president. He was arguing that women were too emotional. She was arguing, of course, that emotion could be a fundamental tool in leadership positions. In the midst of this whole thing, of course, Roxie felt like she was going to burst into tears (she held it in until later).

Her brave admission reminded me of my own struggle within intellectual arguments, especially in my early 20s at Barnard and Columbia Colleges, to manage my own emotions. I remember one class, in particular, in which a classmate and I got into a fiery argument about the politics of language, ebonics, poverty, and education. I teared up in spite of myself and felt frustrated for the rest of the day that I'd let my emotions show.

Today I have more empathy for that 19-year-old version of me. I think that emotions, as Roxie argued, are a critical part of how I process the world, understand ideas and issues, and formulate my own arguments. In this still male-dominated realm of intellectual debate (just look at the op-ed pages of any major newspaper), the standard is still clear: emotions, and most certainly crying, don't have a place.

But the older I get, the more comfortable I am in my own skin and with my own ideas, the more I think that's a bullshit sexist paradigm. Of course it's important to be self-aware and manage one's emotions during an argument, but I think pretending as if the issue you're arguing about has no personal significance or emotional resonance is actually a disempowering and, of course, inauthentic place to come from. My power these days comes from combining both intellectual rigor with emotional authenticity.

My mom says I'm setting the movement back ten years when I am sexually assertive. What should I tell her?
Why do you think there aren't more men at this lecture?
Why and how did you get into blogging?
I feel like I have to be the spokesperson for both feminists and feminists of color all the time. What should I do about it?

These were just some of the questions that Samhita, Miriam, and I answered last evening at Wheaton College as part of our Feministing Fall Tour. It was a great event, kicked off with a talk in a lively Intro to Women's Studies class, where we discussed quite a bit about the blogging life--both its highs and lows, freedoms and insecurities. Then after a podcast interview with new campus publication, The Bubble, we went on to dinner with a lot of great women's studies students, and then, of course, the official panel.

Roxie, our student panelist, was amazing. She spoke about the pressures of being an Iranian feminist leader on the Wheaton campus--how there is a double burden of pressure to do good because she wants to prove that women are capable and Iranian aren't terrorists (or other such misconceptions on the part of post-9.11 Americans). She also spoke about the need for everyone to get involved and reminded her community of the flabbergasting fact that there hasn't been a woman president of the student government since Wheaton went co-ed in 1988. We hope to be featuring a guest post from her very soon.

Thanks to all the great organizers at Wheaton who put energy into bringing us, all the students who asked fantastic questions, and my badass co-panelists Miriam and Samhita. Off to the Holiday Inn pool!

Still don't know what to be for Halloween? Planned Parenthood of NYC has a list of some awesome and hilarious pro-choice costumes.

A Guam Archbishop says suicide bombers are better than gay people.

Models promise to get naked for you if you talk to your politicians about climate change.

A new bill was proposed in Baltimore that would force crisis pregnancy centers to post signs disclosing they don't provide all reproductive health services.

What's wrong with how "romance" is portrayed in video games.

As many of you know, a group of disability rights activists organized to call us out on our lack of coverage on disability issues and ongoing problem with ableist language at Feministing (sometimes on the part of editors, but mostly popping up in the comments sections). Some ableist language that I used in this post was the proverbial straw that broke the camel's back. I apologized, pointing out that I really don't know enough about the field of disability rights and activism and want to learn more. And Miriam jumped on board to serve as another representative of Feministing who was interested in forwarding the dialogue about this intersection and it's presence or lack there of on our site and in feminism at large.

We moved forward by scheduling an online chat between these activists, who meanwhile started their own blog (their abelist word profiles are really enlightening, as are their regular recommended readings, and fantastic general content), Miriam, and myself. It was a productive and affirming experience for me personally. This group of activists and bloggers communicated their suggestions with incredible clarity and coordination, and as it turns out, most of their ideas were things that Miriam and I were either already discussing or open to implementing. The summary of the suggestions appear after the jump.

One of our problems, related to this issue and others, is capacity. We continue to maintain Feministing without enough time or money to realize our full vision of what it should be. Nevertheless, it was empowering, for lack of a less overused word, to go through this process of being called out on my own ignorance, widening the frame to the larger issue of the intersection between feminism and disability rights activism, dialoguing with a bunch of awesome activists, and now I'm excited to implement and learn more.

The crew is following up with some suggested resources (readings and the like), so I'll definitely communicate about that to the larger Feministing community. Meanwhile, we're excited to have a model of how to deal with criticism that makes us a better blog, makes each of us individually better thinkers/activists, and moves the movement forward. Thanks so much to the crew of folks from all over the world who are engaging with us in this process. You, in a word, rock.

In terms of addressing the capacity issues that this (and other situations in the past) have brought up, we're working hard at finding new solutions to deal with the volume and vibrancy of the Feministing community. A big part of this is comment moderation, which we'll be talking more about new ways to strengthen our ability to do this. We implemented a new policy this summer, in direct response to similar feedback about comment sections, and we're still evolving that policy. We'll make sure to keep folks updated as changes happen, but you should expect to see more posts with pre-approved comments as one way for us to better moderate.

The other main thing that this particular engagement brought up is our ability to be a truly intersectional feminist website. It's something we've struggled with before as we all bring different identities and expertise to the table. One way we open this up is the community blog, but we realize that's not enough. We're committed to continuing these dialogues to develop how all sorts of important issues that intersect with feminism are represented at Feministing.

The full summary of the suggestions from the group we engaged with appear after the jump. You can also see the transcript of our chat here.

Perception, a British scholarly journal, has conducted a new study suggesting that heterosexual men are more attracted to curvier women than to thin women.

The study asked a gaggle of male students from St Andrews University to look at photos of women's faces and rate them by health and attractiveness. These young, virile men found women with more facial adiposity, or with curvier, rounder faces, were more healthy and more attractive. Then, Telegraph.co.uk and The Daily Mail then took this study to prove that all men find curvier women more attractive than thinner women.

Better bust out the champagne now! But wait--

This neglects certain facts. First, the polling sample was a group of men from St Andrews University, the alma mater of Prince William. Race data about the student body is unavailable, but the UK now sees growing inequality in retention and graduation rates between white and nonwhite university students, and St Andrews boasts a 98% graduation rate. The university's secret society, the Kate Kennedy Club, advertises itself as "Penises only." It is irresponsible for British news sources to extrapolate these findings to all men.

Second, the study really was about health, and the variable of facial adiposity to predict body composition.

"We often remark on how healthy or unhealthy someone looks, but it can be very difficult to say precisely how we know this," said lead researcher Vinet Coetzee.

"Scientists have been trying to answer this question for decades, and have made many breakthroughs in our understanding of health and attractiveness, but until now they have tended to overlook the influence of weight."

This is not the first time Perceptions Journal has condoned objectification via research study.

The funny (but not so funny) thing about this is that Rush Limbaugh has literally said something along the same vein: "If homosexuality being inborn is what makes it acceptable, why does racism being inborn not make racism acceptable?"

Remember how conservatives think the HPV vaccine will just make young girls want to go out and have lots of The Sex? According to a new UK study published in the British Journal of Cancer, it looks like getting the vaccine actually makes them even more wary about risky sexual behavior:

One in five of the 12 and 13-year-olds polled by the University of Manchester team thought the vaccine was embarrassing because it is for a sexually-transmitted infection - human papillomavirus, or HPV.

But, 79% of the girls said having the vaccination reminded them of the possible risks of sexual contact and 93% said it showed they were serious about their own health.

This is not too long after Gardasil was recently approved for boys and a new vaccine for girls aged 10-25 has been approved by the FDA, Cervarix.

Sorry, I just couldn't wait two whole days to say FUCK YOU to this quote:

"This dance itself was a successful event."

--West Contra Costa Unified School District spokesman Marin Trujillo looks on the bright side after the brutal gang rape of a 15-year-old girl outside of her high school's homecoming dance.

via The Awl.

A reminder to take five minutes today between 10 and 4 to call Congress and tell them we need to cut funds for failed abstinence-only programs and fund comprehensive sex education. It's time to take the clowns out of the classrooms and give young people accurate information about sex and sexuality.

Check out this previous post for more information. Call-In Day is organized by Choice USA, SYRF, SIECUS, Advocates for Youth, and Catholics for Choice. Below, a video from my friends Kierra Johnson and Edith Sargon from Choice USA asking you to call your Senators.

(Transcript after the jump).

Script and talking points for calls also after the jump.

Just when thought you couldn't miss this woman more, we find that Bea Arthur has left $300,000 to the Ali Forney Center in New York, an organization that supports homeless LGBT youth.

The center supplies a number of services to youth around the city, including food, emergency housing, medical treatment and HIV testing. The announcement of Bea's donation came with the center's plans to build a house that will shelter 12 homeless youth and name the building in her honor. Executive director Carl Siciliano said they were "overwhelmed with gratitude that Bea saw that LGBT youth deserve as much love and support as any other young person and that she placed so much value in the work we do to protect them and to help them rebuild lives." Thank you, Bea.

The Ali Forney Center was named after a homeless queer teen who dedicated his life to helping other homeless queer youth, was an HIV prevention worker, and advocated for the NYPD to investigate a series of murders of homeless queer youth in New York City. In December of 1997, Ali was murdered. Check out more about the org here.

Via The Advocate.

A disheartening story about runaway youth. According to the NYTimes, "Nearly a third of the children who flee or are kicked out of their homes each year engage in sex for food, drugs or a place to stay."

A Swiss investment company is reserving funds for companies that have women on their boards.

Check out the most recent "Addicted to Race," about Latino in America, Halloween, Chinese adoptees, racist kid.

The 5 Most Unintentionally Racist Movies About Racism via Racewire.

A teenager was gang raped and brutally beaten and approximately 15 people were watching and did nothing. This story is horrifying.

I definitely took pause reading this excellent column by Michele Goldberg at the American Prospect about the potential for a feminist justification of war. She writes,

Women for Afghan Women (WAW), a nongovernmental organization that runs women's shelters, schools, and counseling centers in three cities in Afghanistan, has watched with alarm as American opinion has turned against the occupation. An American withdrawal, its board members say, would be catastrophic for the women they work with. "Every woman who we have talked to in Afghanistan, all the Afghan women in the NGOs, in the government, say the United States and the peacekeeping troops and NATO must stay, they must not leave until the Afghan army is able to take over," says Esther Hyneman, a WAW board member who recently returned from six months in Kabul.

As an anti-war feminist, it is hard for me to hear that women in Afghanistan would want to keep the troops. She goes on to write that there has been reluctance in coming to this positive, however many activists believe this is what is best for women. Part of what makes this challenging to read is because these types of sentiments are often interpolated by the right to justify military expansion covertly for the purpose of the war on terror, not actually feminism. In their book Just Advocacy, Wendy Hesford and Wendy Kozol, write about the strategic use of women's rights as a justification to expand troops in Afghanistan.

Both the events of 9/11 and the subsequest use of women's rights to sell the Bush administration's war on terrorism in the weeks following 9/11 (Smith) renewed interest in the anonymous Afghan girl depicted on the 1985 cover. In her radio address to the nation on November 17, 2001, Laura Bush claimed that, "the brutal oppression of the women is a central goals of the terrorists....Civilized people throughout the world are speaking out in horror--not only because our hearts break for the women and children of Afghanistan, but also because in Afghanistan, we see the world the terrorists would like to impose on the rest of us...I hope Americans will join our family in working to insure that dignity and opportunity will be secure for all the women and children of Afghanistan.

This is a compelling narrative, if it were not drenched in racism and colonial fantasy. A feminist narrative for increasing troops in Afghanistan is not a new one, however, it is new when it is coming from women in Afghanistan, or is actually feminist, not just a cover up. And like any other country women have different positions on the presence of troops and align themselves with different parts of the political sphere in Afghanistan, some for and others against the occupation, but it still forces us to ask what role should the military have in Afghanistan?

This competition in narrative from what they want and what we want, is a plague to US based progressivism, where often what we are calling for is not what "others" may want in their home countries, but our ideology on war, terror, justice and feminism guides our political affiliations nonetheless. I suppose I am at a loss in finding a way to reconcile this difference, but I do wonder if Obama truly has democracy as his intention for increasing troops in Afghanistan, we have greater leverage to demand that military presence be for feminist good. But I don't have that kind of faith. Will the American public or military support such an initiative or is the focus perpetually on the terror threat?

Why teh internets hate us!

Sorry for the lag in posts and any difficulties in commenting. Should be up and working now.

Yesterday was Intersex Awareness Day.

Oct 26th marks the 5th annual celebrate intersexual awareness day! Today is the (inter)national day of grass-roots action to end shame, secrecy and unwanted genital cosmetic surgeries on intersex children.

Via Queers United, where you can learn more about the issue and what you can do take action.

Via Feministe, via Sociological Images. As this commenter notes, where are Mulan, Pocahantas, Giselle and Lauren notes the absence of Tiana, first African American princess who were all also constructed as racist and sexist stereotypes. Disney doesn't discriminate who they create sexist caricatures out of, that is for sure.

The Daily Mail says women might imagine being drugged and put at risk of rape, but in reality they just drank too much.

Dr Adam Burgess, from the University of Kent school of social policy, said rumours about the prevalence of date-rape drugs were little more than an urban myth.

This led young women to underestimate real risks of alcohol misuse, which can include impaired judgment putting them at risk of sexual assault.

'The reason why fear of drink-spiking has become widespread seems to be a mix of it being more convenient to guard against than the effects of alcohol itself and the fact that such stories are exotic - like a more adult version of "stranger danger".'

The study, published in the British Journal of Criminology, found that three quarters of students identified drink-spiking as leading to an important risk of sexual assault - more than drinking too much alcohol.

If a journal of criminology is making these conclusions, you can start to understand the thinking that informs the legal system when dealing with rape cases. The person who analyzed this data set either hates women or is not a woman because (a) "oooh, I was drugged," is a far cry from an exotic story and (b) being drunk isn't what puts a woman at risk of sexual assault--being near a rapist does.

Perhaps looking at the increase in use of alcohol by women and its harrowing effects on self esteem on the body or the mind, or who is providing the alcohol to the victim, creating said circumstances for violence, might be helpful. But no, it is so much easier to blame young women and suggest they have rape fantasies about "stranger danger" and lie about their irresponsible boozing. Anything else you got that will shame women about their habits and suggest they were "asking for it?"

via Daily Mail.

Thanks to Hannah for the link.

Congrats to Jessee Vasold, the first transgender homecoming queen at the College of William and Mary!

A new study on the Internet and prostitution.

Italian feminists are wiping the floor with Berlusconi.

Why did Project Runway edit out a gay relationship from the show?

During the third season of Mad Men Feministing writers will offer some of our thoughts on feminist moments, scenes, and themes in the new episodes in order to start a discussion about these topics in our community. *WARNING: Lots of spoilers follow.

Roger Sterling and Annabelle Mathis.

It was kind of nice to see Roger flirting with a woman his own age. I also love that we're getting some backstory on him. -Ann

I think this turned out to be so interesting, since Roger ultimately "rejects" her advances and normally his weakspot is teh ladies. It is almost cute that he is obviously doing it for some kind of broken-hearted revenge. -Samhita

Ugh. I hated seeing Annabelle's character portrayed as ultimately "humiliated" because of her failed sexual advances on Roger, even if that portrayal rings true with the social norms of the time (and today's). I don't think it was a coincidence that she was also stubborn and "couldn't move on" in business as well- that she had already "soiled the value of her good name" but was hesitant to look for another- it was just painful for me to watch her character as a casualty of Roger's newfound strength/willpower. Women don't have to take such a hard L every time a man decides to take "the high road"- if that's what Roger was even doing. -Lori

Oh, yeah...and what Lori said. -Samhita

Q: When does Roger say "no" to sex with a drunk woman? A: When he wants to be cruel in an attempt to make himself feel better and win the upper hand. -Jos

I'm with you, Jos. For a moment, I really thought Roger had grown a conscience. So much for that. -Chloe

This whole thing gave me second-hand embarrassment. -Jessica

Don and Suzanne Farrell.

Don's behavior with Suzanne, was now clearly foreshadowing for the facade of the Don "the Man" to break to him being a human. The tension of her waiting in the car along with Betts confronting him about his past was basically unbearable. What I still don't understand about her character is that she is supposed to be the super independent bleeding heart liberal, but it almost reproduces this woman who is just blindly supportive of the actions of a man. It is almost what women are taught to fear about feminists...women that want/get all the love of a man, without the expectations or the attachments. -Samhita

Yeah I don't know what it means for feminism and the show that she ended up getting hurt and sort of cast to the side. Was this meant to be a critique of the "liberated woman" model you mention, Samhita? I also thought it was interesting that of all the things Suzanne didn't get to say in their brief "breakup" conversation, one thing she did ask Don about was her job. Damn. It just made me realize how perfectly aware she was that her affair with Don threatened virtually every element of the life she had set up for herself, and how much she had to lose, and yet she was still willing to jump into it head first. I just don't know if the writers were trying to depict this, and her, as brave, romantic, foolish, or all of the above. -Lori

Ugh. Her waiting in the car was horrible. Her walking away with her suitcase into the darkness, looking so tiny was the worst. But Don basically forgetting about her and ending it so easily was a good reminder that no matter how independent or feminist or smart - he simply doesn't have relationships with women that are based on equal footing ever. -Jessica

We've been building towards the big character shifts in this episode all season. We started off with everyone wandering aimlessly - things weren't turning out how anyone wanted and there was a loss of stability, a shifting of the ground following the Cuban missile crisis, but no one knew where to land yet. In this episode Joan, Don, Roger, and Betty all took important steps in terms of recognizing or responding to their emotional realities, which is a huge change for a show that's been defined by repression. Makes Suzanne's character make a lot more sense to me, actually - she's already taken that step but is surrounded by characters who haven't so she comes off as strange, out of place. She's not just an early suburban feminist, a manic pixie dream girl (thanks to commenter Tara K. for pointing out this aspect of the character), or clueless - she's a complex character like the show's leads, but we haven't been given an in to understand her because our leads haven't, either. At the end of the episode Don calls Suzanne by her given name for I think the first time - in fact I can't remember anyone referring to her by any name besides Miss Farrell before this moment. Suddenly they're closer to the same plain. The affair with Suzanne was a growing experience for Don, but even his self improvement work hurts women, in this case Suzanne and Betty. -Jos

Joan and Greg. "You don't know what it's like to want something your whole life and plan for it and count on it and not get it, OK?"

USA Today has an article about conscience clause legislation - laws that, among other restrictions, allow pharmacists and health care workers to deny women access to birth control pills if it goes against the pharmacist's religion. It's your run-of-the-mill piece, but this quote from Dr. Michele Phillips just killed me.

"I'm not going to give any kind of medication I see as harmful," said Phillips of San Antonio. The drugs would not protect her patient from "emotional trauma from multiple partners," Phillips reasoned, or sexually transmitted diseases. "I could not ethically give that type of medication to a single woman."

Wowza.

Via Feminists for Choice.

Champions of Sexual Literacy Honorees: Richard Garcia, Cecile Richards and Rose Afriyie

Last week, I got the chance to be honored at the National Sexuality Resource Center's (NSRC) Champions of Sexual Literacy Dinner following in the footsteps of my amazing mentor Samhita. This year, the main honoree was powerhouse sexuality-rights advocate Cecile Richards, president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America (PP). From afar, she had this elegance to her that was really alluring. When I first arrived, she was knee deep in a conversation with an ambassador. It seemed that the entire room occasionally glanced at her, the woman at the helm of perhaps the only woman's rights organization left that is a household name no matter one's race, class, or gender.

In her acceptance speech, she recognized the efforts of young women and young educators. She described the award as "a reflection of the thousands of teen sex educators across the country." She identified them as crucial to political gains and referenced the 3,000 young people that advocated through PP in their community for sex education this September. Her closing was the most interesting to me. She spoke about an African American male who was a prominent sexual health educator in Anacostia in Washington, DC. She recognized his courage as he educated in a community with high incidence rates of HIV and chlamydia amidst financial hardships during the Bush years. She ended by mourning the possibility of what this man could have done with just a drop of abstinence-only money. While drawing attention to young people's political action is something that I am gladly starting to see more of in woman's rights circles, it is all too rare. Somehow, this woman's rights organization that centers it's mission on delivering medical services, administering education, and advocating for public policy still finds a way to prioritize women while highlighting the efforts of men of color in reproductive equality.This is progress in a world where many feminist organizations struggle to include young people, men, and people of color in a way that is meaningful.

Later, I had the chance to sit down with Cecile to talk about the health care debate and women's reproductive health care generally. For ten minutes we gabbed about the role of Planned Parenthood in the health care debate, the current status of abortion in negotiations, staying encouraged despite gender discrimination and what's next on the agenda after health care reform. It was as revealing as it was encouraging. So here's the recap:

Lambda Legal made this great documentary that tells the story of the Supreme Court victory in Lawrence v. Texas that struck down state sodomy laws.

Click here to find out more about the film and how you can host a screening at your school or organization.

h/t Audacia Ray on Twitter.

Now here is a Barbie that you don't see everyday. This one was done by Loanne Hizo Ostlie. She is a bad-ass artist who sells Barbies on ebay with the hair re-rooted in diverse styles that are more representative of Black women today.

I often have this image on my desktop because it's the closest image of Barbie that resembles my look and we all need a little affirmation every now and then. It's not to say that Barbie with locs is problem free. But this work is an important contribution and it should be acknowledged.

I don't know if I am on a hair kick because I am still reeling from Chris Rock's Good Hair shenanigans, but I can't help thinking about this image in the wake of the disappointment regarding these new black Barbies that were released this month.

Here are just some of the notable quotables about the hair texture of these new Barbies:

A 'So In Style' hairstyling set that allows girls to straighten their dolls' hair completely has alarmed observers, who say it will fuel the "beauty issues" that many black girls have .

"Black mothers who want their girls to love their natural hair have an uphill battle and these dolls could make it harder," said Sheri Parks, an associate professor of American Studies at the University of Maryland.

Barbie's skinny figure has long come under fire for promoting an unrealistic body image. But Kumea Shorter-Gooden, author of Shifting The Double Lives of Black Women in America, said the diminutive, primarily Caucasian frame of Barbie dolls had a more negative impact on black girls.

"They are already struggling with messages that 'black skin isn't pretty and our hair is too kinky and short'," she said.

Mattel needs to employ Loanne as a consultant if they truly want to create a doll that represents black women.

The UN recently released a report on "Protection of human rights and fundamental freedoms while countering terrorism" by Special Rapporteur Martin Scheinin that focuses on gender. The report (which can be accessed in pdf form here) is mostly about human rights abuses experienced by "women," by which it seems the author means cis women. However, it takes a broad approach to gender, looking at intersections of race, religion, sexual orientation, and gender identity:

Gender is not synonymous with women but rather encompasses the social constructions that underlie how women's and men's roles, functions and responsibilities, including in relation to sexual orientation and gender identity, are defined and understood. This report will therefore identify the gendered impact of counter-terrorism measures both on women and men, as well as the rights of persons of diverse sexual orientations and gender identities. As a social construct, gender is also informed by, and intersects with, various other means by which roles, functions and responsibilities are perceived and practiced, such as race, ethnicity, culture, religion and class. Consequently, gender is not static; it is changeable over time and across contexts.Understanding gender as a social and shifting construct rather than as a biological and fixed category is important because it helps to identify the complex and inter-related gender-based human rights violations caused by counterterrorism measures; to understand the underlying causes of these violations; and to design strategies for countering terrorism that are truly non-discriminatory and inclusive of all actors.

The report includes some discussion of how security measures negatively impact transgender folks:

Counter-terrorism measures disproportionately affect women and transgender asylum-seekers, refugees and immigrants in specific ways. For example, enhanced immigration controls that focus attention on male bombers who may be dressing as females to avoid scrutiny make transgender persons susceptible to increased harassment and suspicion. Similarly, counter-terrorism measures that involve increased travel document security, such as stricter procedures for issuing, changing and verifying identity documents, risk unduly penalizing transgender persons whose personal appearance and data are subject to change.

I have written previously about the dangers of travel document security measures for trans folks. I am very happy to see the UN acknowledging this reality.

An editorial from The New York Times takes on the Oklahoma law requiring doctors to post the details of women's abortions on a public website.

I wear a few hats on campus. Along with being a graduate student and a Feministing contributor in constant search of my next post, I am also the President of the Campus Coalition for Sexual Literacy (CCSL). CCSL, an org that is an affiliate to the National Sexuality Resource Center, promotes sexual literacy through community forums and serving as a liaison between students and campus health providers. This past Wednesday, with the help of HBO, film distributor Roadside Attractions, University of Michigan academics and student organizations, we held a private screening of Chris Rock's Good Hair 2 days before the film premiered in Michigan.

While the event, and the conversation that followed with the 300 audience members was powerful and revealing, the film really underwhelmed me. The sexist comments and the framing of black hair issues was striking. In addition, the portrait of Black hair excluded some important voices that were equally vital to the black hair conversation. However, the film did make a contribution by grappling with the relationship that decision-making about hair has with age. Lastly, it educated the masses about the harm involved with relaxers using two methods that are bound to be widely received--humor and famous people.

So let's break this down.

Love her.

The Matthew Shepard-James Byrd Hate Crimes Bill passed the Senate. (For a dissenting view on hate crimes laws, read Jos's take.)

Are big movies with strong female leads damned if they do, damned if they don't? More from Women & Hollywood.

How the Superfreakonomics writers get it wrong on sex work.

On Law & Order's anti-choice propaganda.

A Utah OB puts its anti-woman policies on a sign for all to see.

The gender gap in the results of a survey of DC teens about sex.

Challenging assumptions about working mothers.

The nation's only African-American lacrosse team.

Ramapriya Gopalakrishnan on her life as a single, urban, and happy Indian woman.

The Navy announced it would start stationing women on submarines. Cue sexist outcry!

A new report reveals the level of discrimination and inequality faced by trans people in Britain.

Disability and sexuality 101.

I don't have an issue with Obama having a regular all-male basketball game. But I am tired of male politicians citing the "strong women in their lives" as proof somehow that they have no gender biases.

The Department of Housing and Urban Development has taken a stand against discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity.

Does Islam need a sexual revolution?

Writes Tami, "I've come to expect black women, especially plus-sized ones, to be the butt of the joke in low-brow comedy films--the sort of flicks commonly associated with Eddie Murphy, Rob Scheider or Tyler Perry." But now Amy Poehler, too? Ugh.

What have you all been reading/writing this week?

This weekly Saturday column "Ask Professor Foxy" will regularly contain sexually explicit material. This material is likely not safe for work viewing. The title of the column will include the major topic of the post, so please read the topic when deciding whether or not to read the entire column.

Dear Professor Foxy,

Well, for about two years (I'm 21) I've been thinking that I'm gay. And, after a recent, and first, sexual encounter with a woman I decided that, yes, this lesbian thing is for me. Since then I've slowly been coming out of the closet: I've told a friend here, a cousin there but I still have yet to tell my parents. While they are very liberal and I'm sure they wouldn't have a problem with it (I have a cousin who is gay), I'm sure you can understand that this is still a very hard thing to do.

So, after getting my courage up I asked my (straight) sister (who I had told previously that I had some queer inklings) that I'd like her help in telling our parents. Now, my sister, as far as I know, is quite liberal herself but is often annoyed by my "radical" feminism. I'm in Women's Studies, she's in Engineering - you get the picture. Anyway, I asked her to help me tell our parents that I'm gay. Her response? "OH MY GOD." Followed by, "Are you sure it's not just because of Susan (the cousin) and Women's Studies and stuff." I immediately dropped the subject. We continued on with our evening and it wasn't until the next day that I realized the ignorance and cruelty of her response, especially since I had already told her that I might like girls.

I haven't confronted her about her response and probably won't be asking for her help with my task again. But, I still haven't told my parents! So, Professor Foxy, this brings me to my first question: how on earth will I regain my confidence and say to my parents, the seemingly simple words, "I am gay"?

However, this question is only the first in my often drama-filled life. Shortly after the conversation with my sister, I visited a psychic. This was the first time I'd seen one and it's not something I put much weight into. What she said, however, made me think. Halfway through the reading, while discussing the tall-dark-and-handsome man I was soon going to meet, she paused and asked, "Who do you like, him or her?" Maybe she was psychic or maybe she just saw the disinterest in my eyes while I was hearing about this man. Anyway, after I told her that I do, in fact, like "her," she smiled and said, "Ah, and who have you told?" I told her that Susan (the same cousin) knew. "And she likes the girls?" the psychic asked. She, like my sister told me that it was my cousin's influence that resulted in what I thought was a changing sexuality. "It won't last" were her final words about my lesbianism.

The reason I am telling you all of this is that maybe my sister and the psychic are right. Of course my Women's Studies education has something to do with my sexuality - it has completely reformed my thinking and helped me to see, I thought, that I prefer women over men. My second question, I suppose, is that do you think there is any truth in what my sister and the psychic are saying. Has my sexuality been influenced by my cousin's, to the point that I'm convinced I'm gay when I'm not actually? What seems preposterous about this possibility is that it's not a trend to be gay, nor is it seen, in general society, as the more positive sexuality. Don't get me wrong, if I am gay I'll be happy that way but of course if I had the CHOICE I would be straight, in terms of an easier lifestyle, socially, legally, etc.

I'm sorry to have dragged on like this, but I'd really like some guidance. Am I just following my cousin's sexuality or being swayed into thinking I'm gay? If I am really gay, how do I go about telling my parents?

-Query from Canada

Hello Query -

I am sorry your sister had such a negative response to your coming out. But being gay or queer or lesbian is not like the swine flu - you cannot catch it. Your cousin being gay is wonderful, because it gives you someone in your family you can talk to and an example of someone you admire and love who is gay, but that will not turn you gay. I am sure there are many people who you love and admire who are straight, but that will not turn you straight. Women's studies classes can open your mind and broaden your horizons, but they cannot turn you gay either.

The psychic is bunk. A random stranger, whatever her gifts, cannot know you better than you know yourself. In any case, you have no way of knowing how she feels about LGBT people in general. She could be a complete homophobe.

One of the hardest things about coming out is that it's a process, not an immediate snap of the fingers. First, it takes time to understand and realize you are gay. Then, when you are finally ready to tell people, it also takes those people time to understand and accept that you are gay. Though being patient with them is frustrating and annoying, most people come around. Your sister's response was ignorant and mean, but that does not mean that she will never be able to realize that you are still the same person you were before and that it is a sign of your love for her that you told her this incredibly important thing about yourself.

Your parents will likely have a good response, but you should have friends at the ready to talk to just in case. What about your cousin? Can she be there for you during it or after? Parents are often more ok with gayness in the abstract or in people other than their children. You need to make sure that you have someone or several people to help you.

Talk with these people to regain your confidence and move forward with telling your parents. If they have a good response, wonderful! You have another source of support. If they have a bad response, they will take time, but most parents come around. If yours do not, there are other ways of finding support. Many LGBT people have two kinds of family: family of origin (the one you are born into) and chosen family (the family that you grow as you age, the family that supports you no matter what). Your cousin, friends you have told: these people can all be your chosen family and your support system.

Take care of yourself during this time. Being a lesbian is a wonderful thing and there is a whole community of folks who can be there with you through this experience.

Best,
Professor Foxy

If you have a question for Professor Foxy, send it to ProfessorFoxyATfeministingDOTcom.

A. S. Byatt, or Dame Byatt as she's officially known, is a Booker Prize-nominated novelist who writes stories about intelligent, complex women - in other words, the kind of women we love here at Feministing. Byatt has written almost a dozen novels and numerous short stories, but her best-known work is Possession: a Love Story. Possession, which she wrote in 1990, is a fascinating story about the interaction of gender, history, literature and love. It was named one of Time's Best 100 Novels of All Time, and is required reading in colleges and high schools all over the world.

In a 1995 interview with Salon, Byatt offered an explanation for her tendency to create educated, willful female characters. "I'm a political feminist," she said. "I think women's lives need quite a lot of improving, some of which has now happened. I'm interested in feminist themes, women's freedom." Despite her political leanings, however, when it comes to teaching literary history, Byatt has very little patience for the practice of reading women novelists simply because they're women. "If you want to teach women to be great writers, you should show them the best, and the best was often done by men... Women should be truthful and then it will be more often done by women, or as often done by women." Given the quality of Byatt's work, it would seem that this prediction has, in part, come true.

Dame Byatt is in the States promoting her new novel The Children's Book, for which she received a Booker Prize nomination. She'll be reading from it, and speaking about her work, this Thursday the 29th at the 92nd Street Y in New York City. Tickets are $10 if you're under thirty-five, and $19 for everyone else. You can (and should!) book a seat here.

And now, without further ado, The Feministing Five, with A. S. Byatt.

Queens University covers the launch of our tour! We'll be at Boston College on Monday and Wheaton on Wednesday. Contact the amazing Martha (polk.marthaatgmaildotcom)if you'd like to book us for an upcoming stop.

Corruption compounds the discrimination women already experience.

Women's eNews covers An $18 million "Start Strong" initiative to prevent teen dating
violence.

Jenni Prokopy founder and editor of ChronicBabe.com, an online resource for young women with chronic illness, writes about health care reform over at the Women's Media Center.

"Sexual dysfunction affects more than half of menopausal Hispanic women over 40, an 11-nation study said Wednesday."

Women in Somalia contend with all variety of threats to their lives while trying to flee persecution.

I wasn't planning on writing much else about getting married because I figured folks were getting sick of hearing all about it. (If I'm tired of hearing about it, I can't imagine how others feel!) But over the last few days I've seen coverage of my wedding/marriage online - from Salon to Playboy to The Nation - with responses ranging from the congratulatory to the cruel. So I feel like I have to jump in.

When I first wrote about getting married the title of my post was, "Does the personal always have to be political? (And can't it ever be private?)," because one of the biggest issues I was struggling with was how to have a personal life that was well...personal. I was trying to figure out if it was possible to be public in some regards, while still maintaining a modicum of privacy. Apparently the answer is no.

One of our awesome readers, Jason, was doing some research and came across this seemingly innocuous business article by The Iona Group, a company that purports to have worked with the Gap, Williams Sonoma, and Sharper Image among other major companies.

Well guess what advice The Iona Group has for women?:

FOR WOMEN ONLY
1. I watch my hemlines, necklines, and see-through blouses. I leave the sex appeal and liberation manifesto... in the parking lot.
6. I watch my condescending "more liberated than thou" attitude.
7. I don't like, but can accept the hard reality, that a woman may need to prove herself beyond that of a man in a similar position.

Shit. My "sex appeal" is so large that it doesn't fit in my car. What do I do with that, um, "hard reality"? And while we're on the subject, my "liberation manifesto" is rather assuming and valuable. Won't it get stolen if I just leave it lying around?

Feel free to email Earl T. Benson, the Independent Director of Iona, with your questions and/or thoughts: iona@tiac.net.

This year marks the 45th anniversary of Mario Savio's tremble-worthy speech on the UC Berkeley campus at the pinnacle of the Free Speech Movement. Notably, 45 years later, the faces of the new UC Berkeley movement now include women leaders and students of color. As part of a week of events to celebrate both Savio and the public university itself, I will be speaking on a panel with University of California faculty, California State Assembly members, and local government officials about the erosion of public funding, diversity, and popular support for public education in California.

On November 17, the UC Board of Regents, a group of decision makers appointed by the Governor of CA, will vote on a proposed 32% increase in student fees for in-state California students. Accompanied by additional fees for UC professional, engineering, and business schools, this will force fees above $10,000 for the first time in University history, systematically denying access to underrepresented, lower-income, and now, middle-income students.

Come out if you are in the Bay Area! The week of events also includes a guest lecture by Naomi Klein, author of The Shock Doctrine, on Californian crisis politics:

10/26 The Crisis of the Public University
Monday 4-7 PM
Pauley Ballroom

Speakers:
Ariel Boone, ASUC Senator
Jayna Brown, UC Riverside
Stan Glantz, UC San Francisco
George Lakoff, UC Berkeley
Ananya Roy, UC Berkeley
Nancy Skinner, California State Assembly
Phil Ting, San Francisco City Assessor-Recorder
Alberto Torrico, California State Assembly Majority Leader

10/27 Naomi Klein "The Shock Doctrine: California Style"
Mario Savio Memorial Lecture
Pauley Ballroom 8pm

Peggy Robertson was denied insurance coverage because she previously had a c-section. But her super kind and thoughtful insurance company told her that if she got sterilized, they would give her coverage. Seriously.

Another video about Robertson's story after the jump.

Via FAIL Blog:

Wow, seriously? Spot the disabled kids on campus and win free shit! This is right up there with Shoot the Freak in terms of sophistication and ethics. It's not only wildly misguided, but dehumanizing.

I don't what university it originates from, but someone needs to check their Disability Resource Office. Maybe they could run a contest called "Spot the Assholes" where students take pictures of the administrators and win tuition waivers.

Yesterday was the The National Day of Action Against Police Brutality, and guess what went down in Brooklyn? Yes, just that. From a reader:

This morning at 11:30am a young woman was having an altercation with about 8 folks from the nypd at the R/M 25th st stop in bklyn. After it was over and she was on her way to the turn style, they came back to arrest her. When she resisted, they tasered her. Clearly, I don't know the background, but she was one, unarmed, woman and the tasering was undeniably excessive.

This is breaking news, so I don't know if anyone is organizing around this incident, but please use the comments section as a place to link folks to that work if and when it happens!

Related posts:
Police Taser Disabled Man for Not Leaving Bathroom
Obama on Skip Gates
Understanding the Dialogue Around Lovelle Mixon
Understanding the Dialogue Around Lovelle Mixon Part II
Justice for Oscar Grant-Please spread widely!
Justice for Oscar Grant: Update on Fruitvale BART Protest

This Fuck Yeah goes out to reader, activist, and attorney Benjamin Edwards, who served as co-counsel on a case in New York defending transgender rights.

Transcript after the jump.

I just got back last night from our second awesome stop on the Feministing tour: The University of Ottawa. Vanessa, Miriam, and I were amazed at the awesome coordination on the part of the folks that brought us out. They were an incredible group of feminist activists, attuned to intersectional feminism and adept at turning their values into real world actions on a regular basis.

We did a blogging workshop in the afternoon, which mostly amounted to a big ol' conversation about our structure as a blog, our ongoing struggle to moderate comments, online identity, sexism and harassment, and much more. Miriam and I talked afterwards about how helpful it was for us to articulate answers to questions about some of our ongoing internal processes and challenges. Thanks for providing that space crew.

In the evening we presented with another amazing student panelist, this one named Sarah Jayne. She talked a lot about the great campaigns that local feminists have waged against sexist newspapers and administrators (guest post to come!). Miriam, once again, spoke about gender identity, and Vanessa focused on the blogosphere through a gender/activism lens.

The questions were fantastic and thought-provoking, including gems like these:

How do you get someone with unexamined privilege to stop taking up so much space in meetings?
How do you manage ongoing conflicts with family members who don't agree with your politics?
What is feminism's most effective response to the Tucker Max's of the world?
What about the intersections of race and sexual identity? People don't seem to talk about that enough.
Why aren't more women successful in the political sphere?
How can we convince skeptics that there is a place for humor when it comes to serious issues like sexism, racism etc.?

Such smarties. Next stop: Boston College on Monday.

Senate blocks Medicare Payment Bill.

Aboriginal women are targeted in the Canadian sex trade.

Can people stop writing books about unlocking women?

More on reframing health care around gender.

A mind-numblingly awful story about a woman who was struck from insurance after taking anti-AIDS medication after being raped.

Latoya on Precious.

*Content is triggering*

This story speaks for itself. From the free Sara Kruzan action page at change.org:

"Life without parole means absolutely no opportunity for release," said Senator Yee. (of California) "It also means minors are often left without access to programs and rehabilitative services while in prison. This sentence was created for the worst of criminals that have no possibility of reform and it is not a humane way to handle children. While the crimes they committed caused undeniable suffering, these youth offenders are not the worst of the worst."

"As a society we've learned a lot since the time we started using life without parole for children," said Elizabeth Calvin, a children's rights advocate with Human Rights Watch. "We now know that this sentence provides no deterrent effect. While children who commit serious crimes should be held accountable, public safety can be protected without subjecting youth to the harshest prison sentence possible."

Watch. Listen. Weep. Take Action.

Also, read our previous coverage on prisons.

When I had originally posted on Facebook this shockingly well summarized study from OKCupid about race and reply rates on the popular dating website, I had just written the word, "duh." Race has always been a part of dating for me, whether it be what race my parents find acceptable, finding that my white boyfriend that I thought wasn't racist really was, or figuring out on first glance when a man likes you for you, or because he has a thing for Indian chicks. But my friend Dave took me to task and noted that they actually analyzed an enormous set of data that they then published, so that gets more than a, "duh." I will upgrade to a, "that is fucked up," and "duh."

But enough with my Facebook shenanigans. This study is interesting to no end and not just because I am writing a book on dating. The study found that even though OKCupid has a unique matchmaking system where race shouldn't matter...

First of all, how do we know that race shouldn't matter? Are we just making some after-school-special assumption that "true love is colorblind?" No, we're not: we know race shouldn't matter to replies because the races all match each other more or less evenly, and reply rate correlates to matching.

...it does:

* Black women are sweethearts. Or just talkative. But either way, they are by far the most likely to reply to your first message. In many cases, their response rate is one and a half times the average, and overall black women reply about a quarter more often.

* White men get more responses. Whatever it is, white males just get more replies from almost every group. We were careful to preselect our data pool so that physical attractiveness (as measured by our site picture-rating utility) was roughly even across all the race/gender slices. For guys, we did likewise with height.

* White women prefer white men to the exclusion of everyone else--and Asian and Hispanic women prefer them even more exclusively. These three types of women only respond well to white men. More significantly, these groups' reply rates to non-whites is terrible. Asian women write back non-white males at 21.9%, Hispanic women at 22.9%, and white women at 23.0%. It's here where things get interesting, for white women in particular. If you look at the match-by-race table before this one, the "should-look-like" one, you see that white women have an above-average compatibility with almost every group. Yet they only reply well to guys who look like them. There's more data on this towards the end of the post.

So our newest contributer Rose is being honored by the National Sexuality Resource Center with the Trojan Student Journalism Award, next to Cecile Richards, President of Planned Parenthood. The event is tonight for those of you in the Bay Area and can be followed on twitter.

From the program:

We are proud to acknowledge the 2009 NSRC Trojan Student Journalism award winner, Rose Afriyie. The award recognizes college journalists who demonstrate outstanding sexual health reporting in their college print, radio, television or online media outlet, including journalistic blogs. The Student Journalism Award is founded in the belief that an open and honest dialogue about sexual health, especially among young people, is essential to improving the poor state of sexual health in America

Yay Rose! I have been working with Rose since we met in my summer class at the National Sexuality Resource Center Summer Program, and she continues to be a bright and constant force for change and continues to redefine what feminism means to her. I had the honor of being awarded by the NSRC in the past and I applaud their constant commitment to honor diversity and young women's voices.

Remember the amazing Lateefah Simon we wrote about when we were at the Omega Institute? Well she has been nominated by a friend for Glamour's Woman of Your Year. Voting ends tonight, so go over and voice your support and show the Glamour world that we support feminist women of color that do on the ground work and make profound differences in our communities!

October is Sex Ed Month of Action and organizers from Advocates for Youth, Catholics for Choice, Choice USA, Law Students for Reproductive Justice, NARAL, Planned Parenthood, SIECUS, Sierra Club, and Spiritual Youth for Reproductive Freedom are joining forces to tell Congress it's time to finally get rid of failed abstinence-only programs and fund comprehensive sexuality education.

You can find information and tools for organizing a Call-In Day here. You can also sign on to a petition in support of the REAL Act which would authorize funding for comprehensive sexuality education.

This is a crucial moment for comprehensive sex ed. For the first time in a while we should have the support in the White House and Congress to de-fund abstinence-only programs and support real, accurate education about sex and sexuality. However, politicians in DC are continuing the same old fight despite overwhelming evidence that ab-only doesn't work. Electing people who say they agree with us is only the first and easiest step in bringing about political change. The real hard work comes after elections, when advocates need to hold officials accountable, push them to support our issues, and create a climate where that's the most expedient political move for them to make. The time is now: let's finally make federal funding for comprehensive sexuality education a reality!

One of my biggest struggles when I was living in the San Francisco Bay Area as a South Asian, was the unapologetic way self-proclaimed new-agers would appropriate Indian culture. Wearing Indian inspired clothing, listening to Indian music, eating Indian foods, studying Indian traditional medicine and of course, practicing yoga (including all various types of chanting and instrument playing). It has never been an easy line for me to tow. I believe that culture is fluid, it doesn't necessarily belong to any one person and South Asian culture is the jam, so it is easy to understand why people are drawn to its complexity.

Or are they? Perhaps it was curious exploration, but to me it has always felt like the new-ager obsession with India feeds into the belief that Americans don't have their "own" culture, so they need to participate and steal from "mine." Even though I had adopted a Western lifestyle and it was definitely "my culture"--one trip to India made that very clear. Furthermore, it felt very convenient for people that hadn't experienced life as a person of color and an immigrant in this country to participate in a culture by choice, one that I had been discriminated against for being a part of. My ambivalence to Westerners adopting and often distorting what I knew as my "home" culture has only grown, where yoga practice for me is sometimes my fight to deal with my anger around cultural appropriation.

This very personal confrontation I have had with cultural appropriation (and the fact that I am human) makes me think the incident with the Oprah-approved self-help guru, James Arthur Ray who took some 50-odd people to a retreat center in Sedona, Arizona, had them fast and then sit in a sweat lodge, after which 2 of them died and 19 were hospitalized, is especially disgusting. The blatant lack of recognition of cultural appropriation, how dangerous and deadly the situation turned out to be and the chilling reality that perhaps this could have been anyone of the new-agers I encountered in San Francisco, starved and craving a culture of their "own," is irksome at best.

Indigenous leaders agree. Chief Arvol Looking Horse, 19th Generation Keeper of the Sacred White Buffalo Calf Pipe Bundle, writes personally on NDN News,

As Keeper of our Sacred White Buffalo Calf Pipe Bundle, I am concerned for the 2 deaths and illnesses of the many people that participated in a sweat lodge in Sedona, Arizona that brought our sacred rite under fire in the news. I would like to clarify that this lodge and many others, are not our ceremonial way of life, because of the way they are being conducted. My prayers go out for their families and loved ones for their loss.

Our ceremonies are about life and healing, from the time this ancient ceremonial rite was given to our people, never has death been a part of our inikag'a (life within) when conducted properly. Today the rite is interpreted as a sweat lodge, it is much more then that. So the term does not fit our real meaning of purification.

Who knows what Ray's intention was, but not knowing how to do the ceremony properly led to the unnecessary death of 3 people and injuries to countless others. According to CNN the deaths will be investigated as homicides.

I am so deeply disturbed by this.

Hey Folks! I'm back from my five week hiatus wherein I focused on life outside of the internet and worked on my MA thesis (which is almost done!) in Women and Gender Studies. In the last few weeks, I had the opportunity to push aside writing online to delve into my thesis research which is an exploration of the production of identity vis-à-vis the internet and specifically how people articulate, vet out and circulate ideas about race, gender, class and sexuality in online worlds. Academic writing is so different in many ways from journalistic or blog style writing; citations are more formal, arguments more nuanced, obviously pieces are longer and filled with complex terms. But in some ways it is the same, since as a blogger, we strive for more nuance, we clear theoretical ground and we hat tip those that said it before us. There are benefits and pitfalls to both and I think the two types of thought production hold the potential to compliment each other very well.

In researching, thinking about and writing about what identity means on the internet and how meaning is produced through how we discuss issues, where we fall along political lines, I got an opportunity to really think about the power and pitfalls of blogging. I am lucky to be in a position where I have a captive audience that listens to and engages with the work I put out there. But I also thought about the ways feminist discourse sometimes runs in a circle and becomes a constant game of she said/she said, difficult to break through with innovative new ways of engaging, when historical inequities and the language we use to describe them, has not changed.

For a few years, I disengaged myself from my academic writing, feeling constricted by what I felt its jargon and exclusivity. But after careful reflection on many of the events that have happened in the last few years at Feministing and the reactions to them by other bloggers, conservative bloggers and the greater news-reading public, I realize we have only but to gain from the intersectional analysis of authors such as Patricia Hill Collins, Donna Haraway, Audre Lorde, Kimberle Crenshaw, Lisa Nakamura, among many many other, anti-racist feminist, socialist feminist, cyberfeminist and radical feminist scholars that paved the way for us to be able to do the work that we do and engage with the ideas we engage with. Many of the battles being fought online and in feminism are battles that have been fought before, ideas engaged with and categories, like gender, destabilized. Of course, repetition is the name of the game, and hopefully every time we engage in a conversation, be it old or new, we learn something new.

That is a long-winded way of saying, despite the inherent exclusivity and accessibility issues around academia and blogging, I am glad to be back engaging with what feminism and social change means to us, as a movement, as clusters, as subgroups and as complex imperfect humans. I have a renewed energy and belief that telling our stories and writing our words is the most powerful and effective step towards creating the world we want to see around us. Perhaps in Lorde's vision, it was never possible for us to move forward like this, using the tools of the oppressor in this way, but maybe through our repetition and mindful diligence, it actually is making a difference.

Bear with me as I catch up with the news cycle!

Abortion is still a major issue in the health-reform debate. Plus, why we need a queer-er health care system.

Men's involvement is key to ending rape culture. But what does that look like?

Pregnant women are at greater risk when it comes to swine flu.

An excerpt from Kate Bornstein's Hello Cruel World.

The public radio show Radiolab interviews Stu Rasmussen, the first openly transgender mayor in the U.S. (Interview is at the 20 minute mark.)

A court blocked the Oklahoma law that would have required the public disclosure of the personal health details of women who have had abortions.

Infuriating: A woman was ousted from a New Jersey roller derby team because she was being stalked by the owner of the rink where the team plays. Several of her teammates quit in protest.

"Join us! We're not really into powerful women or gay people, either!"

The New York Times reports on an unusual move by Vatican officials to try to lure Anglicans into the Catholic Church:

In an extraordinary bid to lure traditionalist Anglicans en masse, the Vatican said Tuesday that it would make it easier for Anglicans uncomfortable with their church's acceptance of female priests and openly gay bishops to join the Roman Catholic Church while retaining many of their traditions.

Anglicans would be able "to enter full communion with the Catholic Church while preserving elements of the distinctive Anglican spiritual and liturgical patrimony," Cardinal William J. Levada, the prefect for the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, said at a news conference here.

The Vatican is trying to capitalize on fear of teh gays and teh womens within the Anglican Church. There are plenty of Catholics struggling against patriarchy within their own faith community, but now the Vatican is basically saying they're the church for Christians who only want supposedly straight cis men in positions of power. And they're saying bigotry trumps almost everything that's divided the two churches since the Reformation. It's a pretty disgusting recruitment strategy.

I've written previously about the news media failing miserably at following their own rules when it comes to writing about transgender individuals. The Sexist's Amanda Hess, who has done a great job of calling the press (including The Washington Post) out on these types of stories, has a write up of the latest gender identification screw up from The Washington Post.

WaPo first published a story that included an account of an off duty police officer in Prince George's County, MD shooting two women after they dragged him with their car from the scene of a robbery. I am always disappointed when the press does not follow up on police violence - the power imbalance is such that I think these stories usually require more reporting than they receive. And there has been a lot of police violence in the DC area recently. But in terms of reporting individual's genders there were no red flags in this piece.

But then WaPo published a follow up titled "Two Men Shot by Pr. George's Officer Were Dressed as Women" which is all kinds of wrong. The two people identified as women in the original article were brought to the hospital, and then this happened:

It was believed at first that the two who were shot were women. But they "turned out to be males dressed in female clothing," Officer Henry Tippett, a county police spokesman, said early Sunday.

That finding was apparently made when medical personnel began treating the two for gunshot wounds, Tippett said.

Every year we read about the worst sexist and racist Halloween costumes. And get really angry or bummed out about what should be a fun excuse to play dress-up.

So let's discuss some alternatives, shall we? Most of these ideas can be thrown together last-minute -- because how many of us really plan our costumes that far in advance? (Warning: Some ideas may contain shoulder pads.)

Good news (via Matt Yglesias): Women in Kuwait have been granted the right to travel without their husband's permission.

The article abolished by the court dated back to Kuwait's 1962 passport law which required a husband's signature on a woman's passport application.

Aseel al-Awadhi, one of the new MPs, welcomed the passport law ruling as a "victory for constitutional principles that puts an end to this injustice against Kuwaiti women".

Women's political rights have really improved in Kuwait over the past few years. Women were granted voting rights in 2005, and first voted and ran for office in 2006. This year, the first female members of parliament were elected. And this month, two of the four women MPs, Rula Dashti and Aseel Al-Awadhi, announced they would not wear the hijab in parliament. When a fatwa issued shortly after their announcement, the Dashti tabled an amendment to repeal a rider to the 2005 law that says women must follow sharia law. But that doesn't mean she's given up.

[Dr Dashti] said Kuwait's constitution stipulated freedom of choice and equality between the sexes and did not incorporate sharia.

"There's a group of people who know they cannot Islamise the constitution so they try to Islamise every issue when it comes up," she said. "I'm going to examine anything that violates the constitution, taking it law by law."

Bad ass. The new passport rights are a step in the right direction. And make no mistake, this would not have happened without the activism of Kuwaiti women like Dashti and Al-Awadhi.

We had an amazing night last night kicking off our Feministing tour in Kingston at Queens University in Canada. Miriam, Vanessa, and I were joined by super star Kim, a graduate student in human geography at the university (stay tuned for a guest post of her incredible talk, which earned her a standing ovation!). Thanks to the amazing Martha Polk for coordinating our visit, and The Women's Empowerment Committee and other groups on campus for bringing us out.

Kim spoke about a range of local concerns, including the difficulty of investing sustainable activism in a town that most students are transient in, and linking theory with action. She also gave other students permission to be angry and encouraged them to pair that anger with humility, and not shy away from challenging and disagreeing with one another. Vanessa spoke about the feminist and not-so-feminist blogosphere, I spoke about the top five myths about young feminists, and Miriam talked about the gender identity crisis in contemporary feminism.

My fave quotes from my co-conspirators:

Miriam: I had to figure out who I wanted to be before I could figure out who I wanted to be with.

Vanessa: So much of the learning process has been through our readers--it's about the conversation, the accessibility, and talking to other young feminists rather than at them.

The Q&A period following our comments was totally engaging. Students asked a range of great questions and made lots of insightful comments. Many of them centered around exploring why so many young women and men are resistant to the feminist label. Students shared their moments of "coming out" as feminists. There were multiple questions about the role of men in feminism, as well as some exploration of the legacy of the sex positive vs. anti-porn sentiments of 70s feminism. We also discussed strategies for dealing with anti-feminist friends and family.

So as you can see, a totally enlightening night! Unfortunately it took so long for us to get our food post-talk that we missed what I can only guess was an amazing after party: Dance, Dance, Feminist Revolution. Thanks Queens!

This is just, wow. I have no words. Ok, that's a lie. I have one word: Bullsh*t. Make that two words: Hilarious bullsh*t.

This website aims to "expose choice as the killer it is".

How, you ask?

Why, by selling T-shirts and bumper stickers with pictures of babies being stabbed by machetes, of course!

But don't worry, that's not the only technique this campaign is using to convince the world of how wrong it is to give women autonomy over their own bodies. They've also created a mascot- That's right folks. Meet Judy, the talking embryo. All she wants is to "get out of here alive." Unfortunately, a machete (the abortionist's tool of choice, don't ya know) enters and puts an end to that dream. The fate of the woman whose cartoon stomach has apparently just been stabbed with a machete is left unclear.

There are a billion things wrong with this picture- the absence of recognition of a woman's personhood being one of them- but the most egregious in my mind is the cheesiness. I mean, as Chloe points out, can we at least have a little creativity? Some alliteration or something? Can I get an Emilia the Embryo?

Additionally, the "testimonies" from the models are hilariously fake, as evidenced by the tiny disclaimer after the fake comments and pics:

"*typical comments from typical young women but not necessarily these models"

Vomit. Next time you're going to launch a campaign against women's autonomy, maybe you should consult some real women first.

Big ups to Audacia Ray for the link.

The FDA, which recently approved the Gardasil vaccine for use in boys, has also approved and a new HPV vaccine - Cervarix - for girls and women ages 10 to 25.

Amanda takes on the teen oral sex panic in her podcast for RH Reality Check.

Apparently women "hate" thin models because we're oh-so-ashamed of our fat selves. Uh huh.

The new fabulous blog FWD/Forward highlights a 2008 piece from Hoyden About Town on the barriers women with disabilities face when reporting rape.

We mentioned this summer that we were organizing a Feministing Tour. Well it begins this week with four events! Thanks to all the amazing students who worked hard to bring us to their campuses--organizing, fundraising and general awesomeness. We're really looking forward to dialoging with and meeting you all.

Queens University
Kingston, ON Canada
Tuesday, October 20th
7pm

University of Ottawa
Wednesday, October 21st
7:30pm
Alumni Auditorium of the University Centre

Boston College
Monday October 26th
6pm

Wheaton College
Wednesday October 28th
7pm
Holman Room, Mary Lyon Building

Sorry I don't have all the location details folks!

If you're interested in trying to bring a few Feministing Editors to your school or community, email Martha, our tour coordinator extraordinaire at polk.martha[AT]gmail[DOT]com. We'll be scheduling events for the spring soon!

During the third season of Mad Men Feministing writers will offer some of our thoughts on feminist moments, scenes, and themes in the new episodes in order to start a discussion about these topics in our community. *WARNING: Lots of spoilers follow.

Carla and the Drapers' church habits.

As someone who grew up in a religious community I identified with processing difference through performance of faith. One of the first ways I became aware of race was through differing religious rituals. In this episode we see Sally starting to engage with racial difference, possibly as a result of Miss Farrell's class. -Jos

Don and Suzanne Farrell.

This feels much more relationship-y to me than Don's previous affairs. I think this is partly because the power dynamic is unlike anything we've seen with Don before: Don and Suzanne appear to be relative equals in their interactions. I was consistently surprised by the ways Don reacted to Suzanne, going along with her words and actions when the expectation based on his past actions is that he will push away. -Jos

Don: "There is a blue that at least forty five percent of the population sees as the same."

That ish was deep. I don't even have anything more to say about that. -Lori

Don: "Every time i hear 'and then' there's another chance for the ladies at home to misunderstand."

Just in case we forgot: Don thinks the women he sells to are idiots. -Jos

This seems to be Don's logic towards most people, which is another reason why he doesn't tell Betty much about his past- he doesn't think she can really "get him". -Lori

Since getting married, a lot of people have asked me if I feel "different." I always say no. While my relationship feels a bit different, I am the same person I was before getting hitched. Yes, down to my name.

As I've written before, changing my name - even to a hyphenated last name - was never really an option for me. Didn't want to do it. (So you can imagine my annoyance when I received this in the mail) I feel the same way about the 'Ms.' title. I've always used it, always will.

I'm thinking about this after reading Judy Berman at Broadsheet, who writes about how Time's Nancy Gibbs thinks that the "Miss, Ms. Mrs." debate isn't really necessary anymore.

Whether my children's friends call me Ms. Gibbs or Mrs. May or any combination of the two, I view it as a sign of respect and don't worry about the particulars. My husband never remotely suggested that he was bothered by my not taking his name; in fact, he's accustomed to occasionally answering to Mr. Gibbs. My late father, a fine writer, thrilled to see that name in the pages of this magazine. All these identities are me: Ms. when I'm out slaying dragons, Mrs. when I'm in the company of those I love most, Miss when I want to stay home under the covers and daydream. Feminists a generation ago fought for the title and dreamed of Freedom and Choice and Opportunity; maybe the surest sign that they've won is not which title we pick, but that we can have them all at once.

But isn't this the problem? That each title announces something specific about who we are, when the truth is every woman is more than the sum of her married or unmarried parts? Men are always 'Mr.', and in that way they're always themselves. I understand the inclination to embrace all parts of yourself - but language matters, and titles that exist to categorize women by marriage don't do women - or men! - any favors.

Via Women's Glib, we find out that Walgreens is selling an "illegal alien" costume. Seriously. Even worse? It's so popular, that it's sold out.

You can contact Walgreens here.

Steven Wayne Turner, a (now former) college police officer at Carver Bible College in Atlanta, was arrested for exposing himself to three women that he pulled over. The kicker? This is not the first time Turner has been caught.

In September 2008, Turner resigned from the Lithonia Police Department after an internal affairs investigation found he exposed himself during a traffic stop and then lied about it, Lithonia Police Chief Willie Rosser said Monday.

"He was given the option of resigning or be terminated," Rosser said.

Investigators opted to allow Turner resign instead of filing criminal charges against him, Rosser said.

The lack of criminal charges made it possible for Turner to get a job on a college campus - unbelievable.

Via Jill at Feministe, I see that John Mayer is being more of an asshole than usual - he recently threatened to sodomize a New York Magazine editor. Seriously.

UPDATE: Ann's take after the jump.

When Kathy Cleaves-Milan's live-in boyfriend abused her she did what society is always telling abused women to do: she reported him to the police. And what did she get for bravely doing "the right thing?" She go evicted.

A day after she told police that her live-in boyfriend had brandished a gun and promised to end both of their lives, the managers of her Elmhurst, Ill., apartment complex served her with eviction papers for violating the terms of the lease, citing the criminal activity she had reported to police.

"I was punished for protecting myself and my daughter," Cleaves-Milan, 36, said.

Cleaves-Milan's lawyers are suing the company that owns her apartment building, alleging that her eviction was a form of sex discrimination - based on her gender and status as a DV survivor. And get this:

A representative of the company said the eviction wasn't solely about the domestic violence but also involved Cleaves-Milan's ability to afford the rent if her boyfriend moved out -- an assertion Cleaves-Milan strongly rejects.

If that's was really the case, should Cleaves-Milan should have stayed with her abusive boyfriend in order to pay the rent? This is why women don't - and often can't - leave abusive relationships.

The Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) bans victims who live in public or subsidized housing from eviction, but the law concerning private landlords is not as clear.

Sandra Park, a staff attorney in the ACLU Women's Rights Project says that this "forces women into a situation where they have to choose between reaching out for safety or staying in their homes."

For more information on employment and housing rights for victims of intimate partner violence, click here.

Via Feminists for Choice.

Picture via Chicago Tribune.

Hilarious.

In an effort to offer an alternative to "leering drivers," a new fleet of taxis driven by women, that cater exclusively to women, have been launched in the Mexican city of Puebla.

Oh, and they're pink and come with a beauty kit. Sigh.

Providing spaces for women on trains and other forms of transportation has become a bit of an international trend in terms of preventing sexual harassment. And while offering women a respite from what can be a hostile environment (anyone who has ever ridden the NYC trains to school as a female high school student can tell you all about that!) is a nice idea, does it really get to the root of the problem? As I've written before: Shouldn't we be targeting the gropers and harassers? The onus should be on men to stop harassing women, not on women to escape them.

Vianeth Rojas, of the Network for Sexual and Reproductive Rights in Puebla, seems to agree: "We are in the 21st century, and they are saying women have continued worrying about beauty and nothing more...They are absolutely not helping eradicate violence against women."

The good news about the taxis in Puebla, however, is that they're opening new job opportunities for women in what has traditionally been a male profession. Now if we could just get them to ditch the pink...

Related Posts: Japanese men angry over women-only train cars
Tehran introducing all-women transportation
Women-only train cars in Brazil

Pic via AP.

The Center for American Progress and Maria Shriver today released The Shriver Report: A Woman's Nation Changes Everything. We'll probably have more coverage of the report to come, but you can check it out here.

On the backs of Princeton's decision to offer limited gender neutral campus housing next year, President Shirley Tingman is opposing the creation of a campus center for chastity and abstinence. More at Equal Writes.

Some serious outrage in response to an article in the UK's Daily Mail by Jan Noir concerning the death of Boyzone star Stephen Gately.

Love your Vajayjay? Well Etsy's got a necklace for you. Via Jezebel

This is sad. A Queen's woman who was leading an important sexual harassment lawsuit against the construction company she worked died in a fire at her home.

IXCHEN, a Nicaraguan NGO named after a local goddess, provides a diverse array of affordable services for women in and near Masaya, Nicaragua. Providing healthcare for women and their children, empowering Nicaraguan women to handle situations of domestic violence, and using educational materials to open dialogues with local women about their access to rights.

In July, a fluke electrical fire destroyed the office and all of IXCHEN's educational materials. They have no insurance, and not enough money to continue paying rent and rebuild their space. Ixchen needs help.

A fellow feminist and UC Berkeley student, Molly Green, works there and writes:

All that IXCHEN is quickly approaching the end of their abilities to rent out an office space. I am currently collecting donations to help them rebuild their building. Here in Nicaragua, every penny goes a long way. I know money is tight for most of you, but I have, with the help of my sister, set up a blog where you can pay with just the click of a button: www.ixchenmasaya.blogspot.com

On this site there is more information and will soon be, as soon as I can get the internet to work, more pictures of IXCHEN working in the community. I regret to say that currently the donations are not tax deductable but still are much needed and appreciated. I will be providing updates on the situation in IXCHEN and ongoing activites. Thanks to everyone, vaya bien.

Molly Green

Please, please donate if you can.

Here are before-and-after photos of the fire:

It's been a spell since I last posted, y'all!

I caught one of those wicked flu bugs and this illishness has lingered for weeks.

Ugh.

Anyhoo, I'm finally feeling like myself again and glad to be back on the internets.

Shall we?

Cool!

September was National Literacy Month. I had planned to post about literacy, but caught the flu-plague and...well, yeah. This message isn't month specific, so...

I couldn't read until I was in the second grade. I'm not dyslexic. Rather, I was one of many people who don't respond to the traditional methods of teaching folks how to read.

My inability to read wasn't discovered until midway through second grade and, in keeping with the tone of things throughout my grade school career, the discovery was theatrically humiliating and took place in front of the entire class.

My second grade teacher, who I remember as an absolute horror who only spoke to me twice and smelled sharply of bleach (don't ask, 'cause I sure as shit don't know why she smelled that way), hauled me in front of the class to read something or other. Trapped, I confessed that I couldn't read the material. After some grilling in front of my peers, she then half dragged half hauled me out the door and yelled at me for lying to her for most of the year. She sent me to the principal's office and my mother was called up to the school and then all hell broke out as my mother went off on every adult present for failing to teach her child to read.

She pulled me out of that school and then spent two weeks teaching me how to read...the hard way.

Pause...wince at the memory...continue.

Basically, my mother taught me to read through threats, yelling and humiliation.

She checked Where the Wild Things Are by Maurice Sendak out of the library and told me that if 3 year old chil'ren could read it so could I. Since she used the term "dumb ass" liberally throughout her speech, it wasn't exactly inspirational. I sat there, mortified and nauseous, staring at those damn wild things and the strange groupings of letters on the page and was convinced I'd never understand how they all fit together.

This really pisses me off and I'm once again disturbed that Congress is supposedly a representational body: fifty-three House Republicans have signed on to a letter asking the Obama administration to fire Kevin Jennings, Assistant Deputy Secretary at the Department of Education for the Office of Safe and Drug Free Schools. Why? Because Jennings founded GLSEN and has been a longtime advocate for queer youth.

"As the founder of the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network, Mr. Jennings has played an integral role in promoting homosexuality and pushing a pro-homosexual agenda in America's schools -- an agenda that runs counter to the values that many parents desire to instill in their children," the lawmakers write.

As GLSEN's own research shows queer and trans youth experience incredibly high rates of harassment in school. These young people need advocates and role models in positions of power, and Jennings is both. The campaign to fire Jennings, which has been going on for a while now and includes the typical drudging up of old and miss-reported information, demonstrates complete disregard for the physical and mental health and safety of LGBT youth.

By sending the Obama administration this letter the fifty-three House Republicans are saying the experiences of these young people don't matter, that they don't deserve respect and support. This campaign isn't just an attack on Jennings but on all the young people he represents. It's an extension of the bullying Jennings fights against.

The full text of the letter can be read here and the list of Representatives who signed on to the letter can be found here.

I spent an hour and a half of my midterm-studying time on Wednesday engaging in a debate on the new dress code at the historically black male college, Morehouse. Read what's included in the "11 expectations" of students and weep:

No caps, do-rags and/or hoods in classrooms, the cafeteria, or other indoor venues

No sun glasses worn in class or at formal programs

No jeans at major programs, as well as no sagging pants on campus

No clothing with derogatory or lewd messages either in words or pictures

No wearing of clothing usually worn by women (dresses, tops, tunics, purses, pumps, etc.) on the Morehouse campus or at college-sponsored events.

While I have never been an attendee, I have spent some time at black colleges and universities as an organizer. And the class stratification that goes on is intense. With respect to the dress code, it's not my wish to get a view of anyone's coin slot on my way to Public Management (re: sagging pants). And there is no doubt that my quality of life goes down when I see men advertising sexist pictures of women that display their sexuality and nothing else (re: derogatory or lewd...).

Professor Melissa Harris-Lacewell has an amazing piece up at the Nation about marriage. If you don't know Harris-Lacewell's work, you should. Check out our recent interview with her.

As someone who also feels critical of the institution of marriage, it makes me really happy to see a straight feminist ally so thoughtfully reflect many of my feelings about the work ahead of us.

You can read the entire piece here.

So what are we to make of marriage? It is both a deeply personal relationship for which people will make almost unthinkable sacrifices, and it is a declining social institution offering little security for most who enter it.

As a black, feminist, marriage-equality advocate I reside at an important intersection in this struggle. This movement must acknowledge the unique history of racial oppression, while still revealing the interconnections of all marriage exclusion. This work must reflect the feminist critique of marriage, while still acknowledging the ancient, cross cultural, human attachment to marriage. This work must be staunchly supportive of same-sex marriage, while rejecting a marriage-normative framework that silences the contributions of queer life.

Typically advocates of marriage equality try to reassure the voting public the same-sex marriage will not change the institution itself. "Don't worry," we say, "allowing gay men and lesbians to marry will not threaten the established norms; it will simply assimilate new groups into old practices."

This is a pragmatic, political strategy, but I hope it is not true. I hope same-sex marriage changes marriage itself. I hope it changes marriage the way that no-fault divorce changed it. I hope it changes marriage the way that allowing women to own their own property and seek their own credit changed marriage. I hope it changes marriage the way laws against spousal abuse and child neglect changed marriage. I hope marriage equality results more equal marriages. I also hope it offers more opportunities for building meaningful adult lives outside of marriage.

I know from personal experience that a bad marriage is enough to rid you of the fear of death. But this experiences allows me suspect that a good marriage must be among the most powerful, life-affirming, emotionally fulfilling experiences available to human beings. I support marriage equality not only because it is unfair, in a legal sense, to deny people the privileges of marriage based on their identity; but also because it also seems immoral to forbid some human beings from opting into this emotional experience.

We must do more than simply integrate new groups into an old system. Let's use this moment to re-imagine marriage and marriage-free options for building families, rearing children, crafting communities, and distributing public goods.

Sex toys, books and lube make great gifts. However, a little literacy and label reading can ensure that your purchases feel good and are healthy. The Safe Sex Store in Ann Arbor provides an excellent model for sexual aids and toys that promote positive health outcomes for men and women. Undoubtedly, this result is a feminist one. However, I could have done without boob tubes (devices that enable folks to chug beer from a woman's nipple) and the Halloween costumes that sexualized military women and police officers. Jury is still out on what exactly makes a sex shop feminist. But other than those cons, the pros are excellent.

My shopping experience went a little something like this...

Last month, one of my sorority sisters was getting married. For the first time in my life, I was stumped about what to buy as a wedding gift. I knew my sister's sizes for shoes and lingerie, book preferences, favorite foods and biographic details -- the whole nine yards. But now that I wasn't just buying for her, the whole twosome bit was throwing me for a loop.

House appliances were overdone. Money and gift cards weren't personal enough. So, I did what any sorority girl would do when faced with this situation: I headed to the nearest sex toy store.

It's a beautiful thing to attend a university where safe, affordable sex toys are sold right off campus. One of Ann Arbor's best-kept secrets is that the Safe Sex Store (S3) on South University is a hub for sorority girls who sometimes travel in pairs to buy their big, little, dean, pledge, sands, soror or sister tokens of affection to get her vibe on. The thing is, I wasn't the run-of-the mill customer. I had spent my past summer doing evidence-based research and one of the topics I covered was sex toys and lubricant.

This is what Barbara Ehrenreich titles her recent opinion piece, addressing the recent study that's given many folks the opportunity to declare that feminism has made women miserable:

This, anyway, seems to be the most popular take-away from "The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness," a recent study by Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers that purports to show that women have become steadily unhappier since 1972. Maureen Dowd and Ariana Huffington greeted the news with somber perplexity, but the more common response has been a triumphant "I told you so!"

On Slate's Double X website, a columnist concluded from the study that "the feminist movement of the 1960s and 1970s gave us a steady stream of women's complaints disguised as manifestos ... and a brand of female sexual power so promiscuous that it celebrates everything from prostitution to nipple piercing as a feminist act -- in other words, whine, womyn, and thongs." Or as Phyllis Schlafly put it: "The feminist movement taught women to see themselves as victims of an oppressive patriarchy. ... Self-imposed victimhood is not a recipe for happiness."

But it's a little too soon to blame Gloria Steinem for our dependence on antidepressants. Three things need to be pointed out about the Stevenson and Wolfers study: (1) that there are some issues with happiness studies in general; (2) that there are some reasons to doubt this study in particular; and (3) that even if you take this study at face value, it has nothing at all to say about the impact of feminism on anyone's mood.

Read the entire thing.

I'm out of town this week, and so I'm going to hand over the Sunday link roundup to you all.

What have you been reading/writing this week? Leave your links in comments!

This weekly Saturday column "Ask Professor Foxy" will regularly contain sexually explicit material. This material is likely not safe for work viewing. The title of the column will include the major topic of the post, so please read the topic when deciding whether or not to read the entire column.

Dear Professor Foxy,
I am six months pregnant, living with the father and very happy. We have a wonderful sex life and I feel very lucky to have the relationship and life I have. However, lately I have been puzzled by my lustful desires. When we have sex, it is no longer a romantic, intimate, drawn out affair. Before I became pregnant, we would switch sex tempos regularly. Long romantic love making on Monday and by Wednesday I would be craving being thrown against the wall, digging my nails into his back.

However, since I have become pregnant, long romantic nights of love making no longer happen due to my desire to have rough sex. I do want a romantic scene sometimes but more often than not, it's a wild, intense, passionate fuck. We have sex more often and when we do, I am on top (due to how fabulous being on top is and my large belly) and we both get into an intense, wild frenzy of naugthy talk, pulling and many quick orgasms instead of one large one. Furthermore, while my partner satisfies me very well in the bedroom, I masturbate more often then on average, even after we have sex. I know that many women who are pregnant desire sex more but I am on a trip that I feel has no end in sight. I do miss our long romantic love making sessions but these hard ramps are giving me my fix. Is this something that will pass or am I in for the long haul? Is my pregnancy causing this desire and need for rough hanky panky or am I entering a new phase of my sexuality? If there is any advice you can give me I would greatly appreciate it.

Thanks
Sexy Sue Who

Hello Sexy Sue Who -

A dear friend of mine and I were talking about what sex felt like while she was pregnant. One of her thoughts sticks out at me: "Honey, when you are pregnant, you just want to and need to fuck. Your desire is sooo strong." And my friend is not a woman with a low sex drive. Good for you for being able to be sexual and pregnant.

Hormones impact our bodies and our desires and our sex drives. Pregnant women have stronger hormones, so a stronger desire for sex and a particular kind of sex, should not surprise us. Unfortunately in our society, pregnant women are too often seen as either asexual or sick for having sexual desires.

When a woman stops being pregnant, those hormones dive down (often one of the reasons for post partum depression) and then go back to where they were pre-pregnancy. Your sex drive and desires may very well go back as well. There is really no predictive factor. All you can do is ride it out and see where your body and desires end up.

Best,
Professor Foxy

If you have a question for Professor Foxy, send it to ProfessorFoxyATfeministingDOTcom.

Michael Kimmel is an author, teacher and activist, and is widely acknowledged as America's most prominent and prolific scholar on masculinity. Kimmel is the author of a staggering number of books, including Men Confront Pornography, The History of Men, The Gendered Society and Manhood in America (noticing a theme?). Most recently, Kimmel's book Guyland examined the lives of young American men. To write it, Kimmel interviewed hundreds of men between the ages of 15 and 25, using their words and his expertise to draw a frightening picture of young American manhood today. Luckily, Kimmel has a one-word solution to the problem: feminism.

Kimmel lives in Brooklyn with his wife, Amy Aronson, with whom he frequently co-writes, and their 10-year-old son Zachary, a budding male feminist. He is a Professor of Sociology at SUNY Stonybrook, where he teaches on gender and masculinity, and has taught and lectured all over the world. He is also a frequent contributor at The Huffington Post. And as if all this wasn't impressive enough, last year he was brought in as a consultant on gender politics during the production of Feministing's favorite TV show, Mad Men.

And now, without further ado, the Feministing Five, with Michael Kimmel.

Community poster wonderwall brought attention to this awesome performance by spoken word artist Desdemonda.

A woman is suing Toyota for a marketing campaign that led her to believe she was being stalked.

Double X has a piece on Lingerie Football, perhaps the worst excuse for a sport created.

New York women's organizations and senators are calling for the removal of Democratic Senator Hiram Monserrate from office for assaulting his girlfriend, then getting off the hook with a misdemeanor charge. Says NARAL Pro-Choice New York: "Our message to the Senate is urgent and clear: if you do not remove this individual from office, we will."

It's that time, folks! Here's a gem from someone who just couldn't understand what us "feminists" want:

i don't get it. what do you 'feminists' want? you got your equal rights, you can vote join the army and do everything a man can do. feminism made sense back in 1800 but now it just seems like you don't want to be equal, you want to be better that men. the law is already in favor in women. if a woman consensually has sex with a man, and later says that he raped her just because she wanted some attention the man would most likely have to go to jail, for nothing. Sure there are some men who are sexist, but by being so extreme about this aren't you 'feminists' being sexist as well. it seems to me like all 'feminists' are completely insane and power mad, or have been brainwashed by other feminists. so back to my point: i don't see the point and i would much appreciate it you would stop.

thanks in advance for taking your time to explain!

So after much deliberation, we've made a group decision among the editors to adhere to this person's wishes - this will be our last official post on Feministing.com. Kidding!! Too...power...mad...to...stop...

Now back to our daily brainwashing.

Now this is art - a poem by Calvin Trillin at The Nation, titled...

What Whoopi Goldberg ('Not a Rape-Rape'), Harvey Weinstein ('So-Called Crime') et al. Are Saying in Their Outrage Over the Arrest of Roman Polanski

A youthful error? Yes, perhaps.
But he's been punished for this lapse--
For decades exiled from LA
He knows, as he wakes up each day,
He'll miss the movers and the shakers.
He'll never get to see the Lakers.
For just one old and small mischance,
He has to live in Paris, France.
He's suffered slurs and other stuff.
Has he not suffered quite enough?
How can these people get so riled?
He only raped a single child.

Read the rest at The Nation.

Breastcancer.org performed polling on more than 3,000 young women between 8 and 18 from Philadelphia, Atlanta, Baltimore, and Los Angeles, to determine fears of breast cancer among pre-mammogram-age women.

The survey found that 31% of these young women mistook a sign of normal breast development as a symptom of breast cancer - even though breast cancer in young women is exceedingly rare. The survey also indicated that 67% of these young women had a relative or close acquaintance with breast cancer.

In fact, this correlates to a change in women's health care that I have experienced: some medical practices now recommend that young patients cease self-examination for breast cancer, because of the false positives and ensuing fear.

Meanwhile, the National Breast Cancer Foundation maintains:

"Nearly 70% of all breast cancers are found through self-exams and with early detection the 5-year survival rate is 98%. If you find a lump, schedule an appointment with your doctor, but don't panic--8 out of 10 lumps are not cancerous. For additional peace of mind, call your doctor whenever you have concerns."

The exception appears to apply to young women. Have you had any experience with this change of message?

Remember Robert McDonnell's Master Thesis which contended that working women and feminists are "detrimental" to the family? In efforts to avoid this Republican candidate from governing his anti-women wackness over the state of Virginia, NARAL Pro-Choice Virginia did an awesome video asking folks if this is the kind of governor they'd want.

Working Women for Virginia also have an ad and Facebook campaign against McDonnell. Good stuff.

No. Just no.

Via Amanda Terkel at Think Progress, we find that a Louisiana justice of the peace has denied a marriage license to an interracial couple, his reasoning being for the children's sake. From AP:

"I do ceremonies for black couples right here in my house," Bardwell said. "My main concern is for the children."

Bardwell said he has discussed the topic with blacks and whites, along with witnessing some interracial marriages. He came to the conclusion that most of black society does not readily accept offspring of such relationships, and neither does white society, he said.

"I don't do interracial marriages because I don't want to put children in a situation they didn't bring on themselves," Bardwell said. "In my heart, I feel the children will later suffer."

If he does an interracial marriage for one couple, he must do the same for all, he said.

He also added, "I try to treat everyone equally," and when he says "equally" he means he lets his black friends use his bathroom:

"I'm not a racist. I just don't believe in mixing the races that way. . . I have piles and piles of black friends. They come to my home, I marry them, they use my bathroom. I treat them just like everyone else."

Angry Asian Man says it right, "Well, that is great. I was mistakenly under the impression that he was one of those racists who makes his black friends pee in the backyard. Turns out, he treats them 'just like everyone else.' Except when it comes to letting interracial couples get married."

Pam and Racialicious have more.

With Olympia Snowe's surprise vote this week during the passing of the Senate Finance Committee's health care reform legislation, conservative pundits are taking any sexist shots they can at a woman with power who, like, uses it. Media Matters has a good round up, which are pretty ridiculous:

Savage dubs Snowe "Jezebel." After airing a clip of Snowe discussing her vote, Savage played a portion of the song "Jezebel" by Frankie Laine that included the lyrics, "If ever the devil was born without a pair of horns, it was you. Jezebel, it was you." Savage added, "Jezebel is Olympia Snowe. Of course she has thrown over with the turncoats who have stabbed America in the back, dragging us into a socialized medical system against the will of the majority of the American people." [Talk Radio Network's The Savage Nation, 10/13/09]

Limbaugh: The "voice of the new castrati, those who have lost all manhood, gonads, guts, and courage" applaud Snowe for health care reform support. Anticipating that Snowe was "going to vote yes" on the Finance Committee's health care reform bill, Limbaugh attacked Snowe by praising the "bipartisanship" of the bill using "the voice of the new castrati." Limbaugh described the "new castrati" as "those who have lost all manhood, gonads, guts, and courage throughout our culture and our political system." Limbaugh has previously described the "new castrati" as supporters of Hillary Clinton. [Premiere Radio Networks' The Rush Limbaugh Show, 10/13/09]

Not to mention Jim Quinn dedicated the Garbage song, "Stupid Girl" to Snowe and Limbaugh referred to Snowe and Sen. Susan Collins by saying, "'Women, damn it.'"

And I doubt this is the end of it. Misogynists, damn it.

A new report published Wednesday by Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America includes stats like these: more than 30,000 single mothers have deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan and the divorce rate for female soldiers is nearly triple that of the men who wear the same uniform.

Raymond Ruddy, a 66-year-old retired businessman who runs a pro-life charity in suburban Natick, Massachusetts, is the premier benefactor of the abstinence-only sexual education movement. The Atlantic Monthly analyzes his unsubtle strategy to block comprehensive sex ed.

Fox And Burger King apologize for ad mocking Jessica Simpson's weight.

Apparently people are as racist in online dating as in real life. Go figure.

The New York Times takes on all this cougar talk. God help us.

The super smart Lauren Sandler writes about the color that just won't quit. Pink, of course.

So. Incredibly. Moving.

My childhood friend Mollie sent me not one, but two copies of her former professor's book, when she noticed that I was thinking and writing a lot about work/family balance issues (thanks Mollie!). Getting to 50/50: How Working Couples Can Have it All by Sharing it All by Joanna Strober and Sharon Meers is a deeply-researched, very practical guide to getting real about some of the most critical unfinished business of contemporary feminism.

Unlike Linda Hirshman's Get to Work, which leaves many readers feeling judged and misunderstood, or Leslie Bennett's The Feminine Mistake, which leaves many readers thinking doomsday thoughts, Strober and Meers approach the subject with healthy doses of both realism and optimism. They are women who have been through it, and lived to tell the tale. (Both are heterosexual, and so their own life examples are from this perspective. Unfortunately they didn't do much to look at non-hetero couples or non-marrying types).

After reviewing all the research that proves that dual working families are actually healthier, happier, and more economically viable, they go on to talk about some of the roadblocks to making it work and their suggestions for getting past those roadblocks.

One of the insights that really struck a personal chord was that women have to truly let go of the notion that they are inherently more fit to parent, that they can simply do it better, by virtue of being women.

I spoke at Arizona State University on Tuesday and had the pleasure of being introduced to a new academic model that they are pioneering to not only institutionalize the importance of intersectional analysis, but also insert activism in an undeniable way. It's call the School of Social Transformation. From their new website:

Four units comprise the new School of Social Transformation. Our school brings together four distinct interdisciplinary fields of inquiry with unique identities, histories, constituencies, affiliations, intellectual frameworks and topics of inquiry.

There's a new iPhone App for the Tucker Max types who think that hooking up with women is a matter of having the right height of popped collar and tired pick-up line. It's called "Amp Up Before You Score," and it's made by PepsiCo. In short, it gives men pickup lines and strategies to use with a variety of specific types of women (women's studies major, by the way, is a category), and a bulletin board to brag about their "scores." More on this brodude blasphemy:

Hortense, over at Jezebel, had this gem on the topic:

It's going to be so easy to score with AMP energy drink on your breath and a list of incredibly generic "types" in your pocket. All you need is a fresh Ed Hardy shirt and a spritz of Axe body spray and you are good to go! There's a reason why I go after bro culture as often as I do: things like this, which are completely unacceptable and ridiculously offensive. This is a program sponsored by a major corporation that encourages men to look at women as objects to be won, used, and tossed away after a "victory" is obtained, and the more normalized things like this become, the worse off we're all going to be.

Pepsi, perhaps recognizing that they are pissing off a lot of ladies and some enlightened fellas, tweeted this on Tuesday: "We apologize if it's in bad taste & appreciate [your] feedback." Mmm...doesn't feel like much of an effort, does it? Feel free to give the national HQ a call and tell 'em what you think: (914) 253-2000.

In other iSexism, check out this app that assumes tween girls want nothing more than to memorize outfits while watching inane flirting. Ugh.

Thanks to Jesse and Jezebel, and many others, for the heads up.

The International Center of Photography has an amazing exhibit up right now called Dress Codes. While the framing is technically fashion, the show is really about image--chock full of interesting art about gender, beauty, race, and the body, among other favorite feminist topics. They describe its range:

The theme of fashion encompasses a diverse range of practices and ideas, including explorations of identity and affiliation; the production, distribution, and consumption of images and goods; contemporaneity; age; gender; and global industry. The themes of the Triennial express the exuberance, wit, and astute social observation taking place within contemporary image-making. These artists variously explore fashion--whether in everyday dress, haute couture, street fashion, or uniforms--as a celebration of individuality, personal identity, and self-expression, and as cultural, religious, social, and political statements.

The most compelling piece, in my opinion, was a video installation done by Australian artist David Rosetzky in which the amazing Cate Blanchett talks about performance while doing various physical movements in a big, open warehouse. She dresses and undresses, dances with the knowledge that she is being watched, moves her hands in a sort of beautiful interpretative swirl, walks and pauses, walks again etc. All the while, she talks about her approach to performance in truly surprising ways. For example, she admits that doesn't really fall in love with the characters she portrays, as so many artists claim to, that in fact she finds that her best work comes when she is a bit indifferent to them. There is something so vulnerable, so artful about the whole piece. She ends by talking about the "constant pull between wanting to be seen and not wanting to be seen."

Other artists to watch who are included in the exhibit: Miyako Ishiuchi, Pinar Yolacana, Mickalene Thomas, Olga Chernysheva, Lorna Simpson, Cindy Sherman, and good ol' Barbara Kruger.

Via ThinkProgress:

In 2005, Jamie Leigh Jones was gang-raped by her co-workers while she was working for Halliburton/KBR in Baghdad. Jones was prevented from bringing charges in court against KBR because her employment contract stipulated that sexual assault allegations would only be heard in private arbitration. Sen. Al Franken (D-MN) proposed an amendment to the 2010 Defense Appropriations bill that would withhold defense contracts from companies like KBR "if they restrict their employees from taking workplace sexual assault, battery and discrimination cases to court." Check out his speech from the Senate floor yesterday:

The amendment passed by a 68-30 vote. Jones commented: "It means the world to me. It means that every tear shed to go public and repeat my story over and over again to make a difference for other women was worth it."

There are a lot of pretty ridiculous kids toys out there, and we've taken on the sexism they invoke before.

The My Cleaning Trolley is an amazing eleven piece cart to push around with all the cleaning supplies you could ever need! I'm all for teaching kids about cleaning--even making it fun.

But the big purple "Girls Only" stamp is just too much.

Are you an LGBT parent? Take this survey to be part of a Lawrence University research project.

The Senate Finance Committee approved it's version of health care reform legislation today, with a yes vote from Republican Senator Olympia Snowe. It's got no pubicpublic option. Now all the bills go behind closed doors, where congresspeople will craft one piece of legislation to be voted on.

A Ralph Lauren model was fired for being "too fat", when she weighed in at 120 pounds and 5 foot ten inches. She was also photoshopped to the point of absurdity in a previous ad for them (see link for pic).

The National Cancer Institute now has a website exclusively for adolescents and young adults battling cancer.

Another technological advancement for detecting the date rape drug--this time it's a coaster.

Domestic workers are at heightened risk for exploitation. This SF gate article examines why.

Sexism from liberals is no more acceptable than sexism from conservatives. Olbermann screws up big time when talking about Michelle Malkin on his show.

Via The Economist, some data about teenage pregnancies in the US:

On one point, however, experts agree: when it comes to teenage births, the United States is backsliding. Between 1991 and 2005 the teenage birth rate declined by 34%, according to the National Centre for Health Statistics. Between 2005 and 2007, the last year for which statistics are available, it crept up 5%.

A quick and easy blame game points to the Bush era abstinence-only policy, which is scientifically proven to fail.

But those working on the issue of teen pregnancy know it's more complicated than that. Access to sex education and birth control are key to preventing teen pregnancies--but not all teen's want to prevent their pregnancies. Some want to be parents, despite their young age.

Silvia Henriquez, the ED of the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health (disclosure: I work for them), is quoted in the article:

Latina teenagers, for example, have a considerably higher birth rate than any other group, even though they have similar rates of sexual activity. Silvia Henriquez, the executive director of the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health, reckons that access is the problem. Latina teenagers are less likely to have health-care coverage for contraceptives, and are more likely to lack transport to the free clinics in their cities.

For some Latina teens (and others), parenting may actually be a choice. Now often it's a choice that is couched within the context of little hope for their own future--why "wait" to parent if you don't have access to college education or real career options? The same can be said of other groups, but Latinas are focused on because of our particularly high rates of teen parenting.

I don't think being young makes you a bad parent. It does mean you're less likely to make money in a society that rewards high levels of education and long working hours.

For me, an ideal strategy to address teen pregnancy and parenting is a situation where young folks are given access to education, birth control, but also support if they do decide to parent at a young age.

Nan Robertson died last night.

She was the author of The Girls in the Balcony, a book chronicling the class-action gender-discrimination lawsuit brought by female employees of The New York Times. (The title refers to the standing-room-only accommodations for female journalists at Washington's National Press Club before it admitted women as members in 1971.) Because the case was settled out of court, Robertson's book remains the most comprehensive account of discrimination experienced by women at the Times in the 60s and 70s.

Robertson also won a Pulitzer Prize in 1983 for an article chronicling her near-death experience from toxic shock syndrome (TSS). While her illness wasn't caused by a tampon, she helped to raise awareness about the risks of tampon use.

A totally inspirational, pioneering woman journalist. She will be missed.

A new Guttmacher study about international rates of abortion show that they are on the decline:

Increases in global contraceptive use have contributed to a decrease in the number of unintended pregnancies and, in turn, a decline in the number of abortions, which fell from an estimated 45.5 million procedures in 1995 to 41.6 million in 2003. While both the developed and the developing world experienced these positive trends, developed regions saw the greatest progress. Within the developing world, improvement varied widely, with Africa lagging behind other regions, according to "Abortion Worldwide: A Decade of Uneven Progress," a major new Guttmacher Institute report released today.

Read the rest of the summary, or the full report, for more on the lasting problem of unsafe abortion.

Via Emily Rutherford at Campus Progress:

It's a pilot program which designates Spelman Hall, an apartment-style housing option for upperclass students (in which, significantly, every student gets their own bedroom), as gender-neutral. Instead of having to draw in groups of four students of the same gender, there will be no gender requirement on groups entering the Spelman draw...Depending on interest, they may choose to expand gender-neutral housing to other upperclass dorms, or to keep it restricted to Spelman.

My alma mater, Swarthmore College, actually drew attention and controversy right before my freshman year (about 6 years ago) for offering gender neutral housing options in one dorm off campus. In our situation you can actually choose to share a room, in Princeton's case it's just an apartment.

This is of course a big step forward for trans and gender non-conforming students, who won't be forced into single gender housing that might conflict with their identities. It's also important for any person who wants more choice in who they live with, regardless of gender. Hopefully they can quickly expand the option to more buildings so it isn't restricted to this one group of upperclass students.

Congrats to the students at Princeton who got this passed.

This is a pretty horrific story. In 2007, a public school teacher, while at a party with other teachers from her school, had offensive graffiti drawn all over her body after she had passed out on the floor of the living room.

According to the police report, Etheridge, Town, Piechotte and Woodworth stopped at Town's home on the way to McKinney's house, which is a short distance from the school. There, according to the report, they decided to smoke marijuana and Town produced and provided the drug for the three women, who went to the garage to smoke it. The teachers then continued on to McKinney's house.

Later that night, after more alcohol consumption by all involved, Piechotte crawled between a coffee table and a sofa in McKinney's living room. There she passed out.

According to the report, Town and Beebe decided it would be "funny" to draw on Piechotte's unconscious body. The two proceeded to draw penises on her legs, glasses on her face, write the word "balls" backwards on her forehead and write their names on her stomach. Much of the writing was sexual and crude. McKinney and his wife, as well as Etheridge and staff member Phil Rutkowski, watched the drawing. McKinney took pictures with his digital camera, and at least one person took pictures with a cell phone

Via Huffington Post

I'm not a big follower of fashion, or a wearer of high heels, but these shoes are out of control. Apparently they are, unsurprisingly, the invention of the male designer, Alexander McQueen.

One of the few remaining feminist bookstores, Women and Children First in Chicago, celebrated it's 30th anniversary this weekend.

Happy 30th, WCF, and here's to another 30 years.

Via Alison Bechdel

Oklahoma prosecutors are investigating accusations that ormer state employees at the governor's mansion raped three female inmates assigned to work at the mansion's grounds.

Teen feminists blogging. Love it.

An interview with a lesbian soldier who was denied "Don't Ask Don't Tell" discharge, was subsequently harassed, and is now seeking asylum in Canada.

The awesome Audacia Ray on "Thoughtful Masculinities"

I'm showing this amazing film in my class at Rutgers today, so just thought I would share!

Related Posts: Hip-hop, Misogyny and the Beats (we hate to love).
Hypermasculinity, Hip-hop and Lady Rappers fighting Misogyny.

If you want a "real" man, don't use birth control!

This is too amazing. Today's stellar quote comes from "abortion doctors eat babies" Jill Stanek.

From Feministe:

Basically, a study says that women who use birth control tend to be attracted to men with more boyish features with caring personalities, versus "rugged" men with controlling personalities. The study itself is questionable, and the article detailing it comes from the less-than-reliable Daily Mail. But Stanek jumps on it nonetheless, saying, "Also don't forget estrogen from the Pill is water has been found by several studies to feminize male fish. So women on the Pill may be getting what they're helping create, wimps." (Emphasis mine)

Someone needs to read The Wimp Factor!

Yesterday, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said that she would not run for president again.

"This is a great job," Clinton said in the [NBC] interview broadcast Monday. "It is a 24-7 job. And I am looking forward to retirement at some point."

...Clinton also denied that her voice is not being heard in the administration, and said it is not her style to try and be the center of attention.

"I find it absurd," she said. "I find it beyond any realistic assessment of what I am doing everyday."

Clinton went on to say that she believes in "delegating power."

"It is just the way I am. My goal is to be a very positive force to implement the kind of changes that the president and I believe are in the best interests of our country. But that doesn't mean it all has to be me, me, me all the time. I like lifting people up."

Adam Serwer at Tapped lets us know that Rush Limbaugh will be a judge for the Miss America Contest. "[I]t seems to me that when looking for the judge of a beauty contest sexism may be more of a feature than a bug...Someone who laments the 'chickification' of American culture probably enjoys a ritual that puts women -- how would the RNC put it -- 'in their place,'" Serwer writes.

This weekend, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger signed a bill which designates a day, May 22, to recognize and memorialize Harvey Milk. (Schwarzenegger vetoed the same bill last year.)

That's the good news. The bad news is Schwarzenegger also vetoed two bills affecting trans people in California. From TransGriot:

AB 1185 would have allowed qualified transgender people born in California to return to the county of their birth to obtain a new birth certificate reflecting the correct gender, as well as any accompanying name change.

...Schwarzenegger also vetoed AB 382 which would have established protections for LGBT prisoners, which he said was "unnecessary."

67 percent of LGBT inmates in California report being sexually assaulted; the rate for sexual assault of LGBT prisoners is 15 times higher than the overall population. So yeah...real "unnecessary."

If you have some time today, check out this short film called Obvious Child from Gillian Robespierre about a one night stand that results in pregnancy and abortion, featuring Jenny Slate, of SNL (and f-bomb dropping ) fame.

The film presents a subversive alternative to the Juno model, in which abortion is a quickly glossed over road-sign on the highway from CasualSexville to Babyland.

Photograph credit: "Excessive," from the amazing Sara Heart Bacon.

Christian Louboutin is set to release Barbies made over with his stylings over the coming months, but the luxury shoe designer "reshaped the dolls' figures," as he didn't find their existing shapes appealing.

A Louboutin spokesperson said, "He found her ankles were too fat."

Charming.

Via RH Reality Check.

Just when you think that insurance companies can't get any lower than scum on this whole pre-existing condition mess, think again. As we've posted before, several states allow for domestic violence to be listed as a pre-existing condition. Some recent data (also in the link) reports:

An informal survey by the House Judiciary Committee in 1994 found that half of the 16 largest insurers in the country considered domestic violence in deciding whether to approve health coverage. The Pennsylvania insurance Department reported a year or so later that nearly one out of four insurance companies factored in domestic violence when deciding whether to issue or renew policies.

Ryan Grim at Huff Po has updates on the measures that some state reps have taken to stamp out this kind of discrimination. He also sums the issue up here:

Under the cold logic of the insurance industry, it makes perfect sense: If you are in a marriage with someone who has beaten you in the past, you're more likely to get beaten again than the average person and are therefore more expensive to insure.

In human terms, it's a second punishment for a victim of domestic violence.

I wonder what else we don't know that counts against us as women. Talk about a double disadvantage. The good news? Democrats have vowed to ban on the practice in the health care reform legislation.

Christopher Columbus is being more accurately described in many classrooms as the criminal he was - but the struggle to recognize the day for what is really represents still continues. Sign the petition.

CA governor Arnold Schwarzenegger signed two bills; one declaring May 22nd as a day of recognition honoring Harvey Milk, and the other recognizing same-sex marriages performed in other states. But of course, he had to veto a trans rights bill as well as legislation establishing protections for LGBT prisoners.

Tell Congress that being a woman does not make you a pre-existing condition.

Amidst the Obama "Did he deserve it?" Nobel Peace Prize hoo-hah, we missed that Elinor Ostrom has become the first woman to win the Nobel Prize in economics. In fact, it was a Nobel record year for women.

The newest from Bryan Safi takes on "No homo." But as commenters pointed out, what's up with the Tara Reid comment?

Jay Smooth has some background on the phrase in the hip hop community, which has been around for quite some time.

Props to commenter raspberrying for pointing out Safi's new video to us in this week's WFR.

During the third season of Mad Men Feministing writers will offer some of our thoughts on feminist moments, scenes, and themes in the new episodes in order to start a discussion about these topics in our community. *WARNING: Lots of spoilers follow.

Betty's dream.

Every time Betty wishes to passively allow life to happen to her, the fainting couch is involved. Being undressed by a man you're not married to? It's ok, darling, you're clearly in distress because you're on your fainting couch! -Ariel

Betty: "I want what I want when I want it. You don't care what it does to the rest of us. Like someone else I know."

Or like every relationship with a clear power dynamic in this episode. Conrad Hilton, Lee Garner, Jr., and Don Draper all want something: Connie wants a campaign, but also constant support, Lee wants Sal, and Don wants Miss Farrell. And they don't care about how getting what they want affects anyone else. -Jos

The "I have a dream" speech.

I thought this was a nice correlation to the Birmingham terrorism referenced later in the show, as a sign not only of the disconnect, but of the contrast between the young activist teacher and the older, noncommittal ad man. -Ariel

Friday night at UC Berkeley, a hip-hop show called Breaking Beats and Borders attempted to bridge the hip hop community with activism surrounding Palestinian rights. The highlight of my evening was the performance by Invincible, or Ilana Weaver, a queer white Israeli-born woman who learned English by listening to hip-hop.

Based in Detroit, Invincible works with the Detroit Summers Live Arts Media project, to bring arts and awareness to urban educational curriculum. Check her out:

"I'm striving to be one of the best period/ Not just one of the best with breasts and a period."

This guy is pretty awesome. After leading police to a man wanted for sexual assault and battery in the UK, Lloyd Gardner was told he was being given 10,000 pounds as a reward. Instead of taking the money, he gave it to the survivor:

He spotted two women he knew on the film - and they led police to rapist Jakub Tomczak.

Mr Gardner said he did not deserve the reward and hoped the cash would help the woman rebuild her life.

"It was a difficult decision to make because it is a lot of money and it would have been very helpful but I didn't feel like a deserved it at all."

The 48-year old survivor suffered a skull fracture and severe brain damage from the attack.

Considering the history of the UK agency that is supposed to give reparations to rape survivors, it feels hopeful to know we have folks like Gardner on our side.

Amanda Marcotte has a piece up at the Guardian giving us the many reasons as to why Rachel Maddow has become the best talk show host in the country.

For a feminist policy wonk who also has an interest in how technology interacts with policy, it seems that all the goodies are hidden in the business section of the New York Times. This week's Sunday edition featured an article on how government agencies are squelching inefficiency by entering full-fledged into the digital age. A part of me is glad that some government officials are now aware that computers can crunch numbers and summarize data. But it seems that a little advancement here and there may have to be weighed against possible disadvantages.

I, for one, am a little concerned that in all this technology talk, particularly with respect to government agencies moving information online, not a word was mentioned about the Digital Divide. It's not news that low-income people of color and women are devastatingly impacted by decreased access to technology. But as states and state agencies experience budget constraints, activists must keep an eye out to insure that these creative measures are sensitive to the needs of these communities.

Data consolidation is one thing, but how will "automated government services" impact consumers? More specifically, how much computer literacy will be needed to interact with these agencies? I'm not saying that agencies should stay in the Stone Age per se; But, before these agencies pull a George Jetson, they should assess the technological literacy of their communities through surveys or other methods. Also, they should use some of the savings from implementing these new high tech programs to invest in more free Wi-Fi hotspot locations and free technology education workshops--that run at night and provide childcare.

Along with the issue of access is the issue of privacy. The image of giant technology companies salivating at the increasing demand for tech services from government agencies makes me cautious. When government agencies make business deals with corporations such as IBM, city dwellers and privacy activists should be vigilant about these deals being compliant with the Principles of Fair Information Practice. That is, in the case of Dubuque, Iowa, it should be clear to constituents how much consumer information IBM, as an investor for their initiative, has access to and how this data will be used. In the end, efficiency in government shouldn't make it harder for low-income Americans to participate or cost Americans their privacy.

With yesterday's National Equality March and President Obama's promise (again) to end Don't Ask, Don't Tell (the speech transcript was released last night), we missed the story last week about government stats showing that women are more likely than men to be discharged from the military for Don't Ask Don't Tell.

While 619 people were discharged under DADT last year, one-third of them were women (when they only account for 15 percent of all active-duty and reserve members). The numbers were particularly prevalent in the Air Force, where women represent just 20 percent of the Air Force but were 61 percent of the members discharged for DADT.

Folks say there's not enough evidence yet to know if women really are being targeted, possibly as a result of the prevalence of sexism and misogyny that the military is often charged with, or if it's just the case that there are more lesbians in the military than gay men. (Community poster Spiffy McBang beat us to the punch on the story and had some discussion on this.)

But regardless of the breakdown of who is discriminated against through DADT, what matters most at this point is that all people should have the freedom to serve openly. We'll be waiting, Mr. President.

UPDATE: NBC's John Harwood reports that the White House believes LGBT mobilizing is merely part of the "internet left fringe":

HOLT: But in general when yo look at the left as a whole, have there been conversations about some things they thought would have been done but haven't?

HARWOOD: Sure but If you look at the polling, Barack Obama is doing well with 90% or more of Democrats so the White House views this opposition as really part of the "internet left fringe" Lester. And for a sign of how seriously the White House does or doesn't take this opposition one adviser told me today those bloggers need to take off their pajamas get dressed and realize that governing a closely divided country is complicated and difficult.

Just, wow.

Photo by Lez Get Real on Flickr.

The National Equality March is happening today in DC. On a related note, Obama again promised to end Don't Ask Don't Tell, but failed to say when. Plus, one gay man's experience in the military.

On Apple's transphobic advertisement.

How the economic crisis is impacting young people of color -- and what to do about it.

Women senators spoke out about health reform.

Students at Minneapolis College of Art and Design collaborated to create a primer on women, feminism and art! Plus: Know a feminist art blogger? Contact womenarts.org!

Add your name to a letter asking President Obama to listen to the women of Afghanistan. And on a related note, apparently the U.S. military is finding there are some advantages to using teams of all-female soldiers there.

Various writers consider the question of why many women wear high-heels. No one goes with the shortest answer: Patriarchy.

It's sadly unsurprising that Serena Williams, naked, on the cover of the ESPN magazine has really brought out the racist/sexist trolls.

"Schrödinger's Rapist: or a guy's guide to approaching strange women without being maced." With a response by Thomas.

This weekly Saturday column "Ask Professor Foxy" will regularly contain sexually explicit material. This material is likely not safe for work viewing. The title of the column will include the major topic of the post, so please read the topic when deciding whether or not to read the entire column.

Dear Professor Foxy,

I go to a very socially liberal, small private school where I am heavily involved in queer and feminist activism. Over the summer, I waited tables in a popular tourist area where I also met, and fell in love with, a woman that I am now in a long distance relationship with. Because I was working in a more conservative area, I did not broadcast the fact that I consider myself politically radical as well as queer, though my haircut generally means I'm read as a butch lesbian.

Now that I am back at school, I am working through the emotional and social effects of accepting my identity as trans and genderqueer. Because I am in such a liberal and accepting environment, I have the privilege of having a community of people that are familiar with the types of language used to describe my identity, and are comfortable with the concept of non-binary gender. My partner, though she publicly interacts with the world as a woman (albeit butch), has also told me that she has some trans and gender identity issues. She also is originally from a more conservative area than I am, and her family is much more conservative, so she has never really been able to act upon those impulses.

I have hit a point where I feel that being out as trans, and hopefully initiating some of the steps of physical transition, are critical to my current and future happiness. However, I am completely unsure of how to initiate this conversation with my partner. Because I don't feel that I totally fit the label FTM (a concept that my partner is familiar with), I feel like I may need to launch into some sort of explanation of queer theory, etc. I am afraid of coming off as condescending and overly academic, and possibly offending or hurting my partner. I also think that the idea of being genderqueer, or at least being far more flexible about gender, might be a freeing concept for her. Still, I am afraid that she might judge me or be unhappy about my desire to physically transition. I am also very much in love with her, and feel that I should be able to go to her for support on this issue.

These problems are augmented by the fact that we are in a long distance relationship and will not see each other again for a little more than a month. I would be devastated if she broke up with me because I spoke with her about this, but I also do not want to be dishonest with her and pursue transitioning without telling her. Would it be inappropriate to pursue transitioning without telling my partner? How do I respond if my partner is ok with my intellectually knowing that I'm trans, but isn't ok with taking physical steps toward transition?

A confused transperson

Dear Confused Trans Person -

Thanks for your letter. As I was reading it, I kept thinking this is about you, not about queer theory. By this I mean while queer theory may have helped you along your journey and I am not trying to negate that, but the heart of this issue is you and your happiness. I think you need to speak to your partner from your heart and from the personal. Talk about what you want for yourself and your body and how you think you will go about achieving it. Tell her what this means to you and why it is important to you.

You should be able to go to your partner for support, it is key to having a healthy relationship and you will need support as you transition. Make sure you have other places to turn to as well, especially places where you can work out your feelings about her reaction.

I think you should tell her as you are going through the process of thinking things out for yourself. How do you usually have serious conversations with her? Over the phone, email, gchat? So tell her soon and take time to rehearse it and think it out first. What do you think her hardest questions will be? What is the worst thing she could say? The best? Be ready for all of them. Also be ready to give her some space to think things through for herself. We all have our own ways of dealing with major change and she may need time to deal.

She will also deal based on her own issues, especially since she has some gender identity issues of her own. She may feel happy that she has someone who gets gender issues, she may be jealous, she may be incredibly happy, and she will likely need to figure out who she is in relation to you. Her reactions are hers, not yours and you will need space and other places of reflection to work out who you are for yourself.

You deserve support and she deserves honesty. She may not be able to support you through your transition and that will be incredibly painful. She may also be excited for you and excited about possibilities for herself. She will likely be some place in between. You both need to know if you can count on and be honest with each other; regardless of the issue this is the only way for relationships to stay healthy and strong.

Best,
Professor Foxy

If you have a question for Professor Foxy, send it to ProfessorFoxyATfeministingDOTcom.

Rachel Simmons is a writer and a teacher who has penned two New York Times bestsellers. Not too shabby.

In 2002, Simmons' wrote Odd Girl Out: The Hidden Culture of Aggression in Girls, which shed light on the "mean girls" phenomenon and examined for the first time the cliques and codes of teen girl culture in an academic but accessible way. Like Odd Girl Out, Simmons' second book The Curse of the Good Girl, is based on hundreds of hours spent interviewing and teaching young girls, which Simmons does all over the world. At her summer camp the Girls Leadership Institute, during the months she spends every year teaching at a girls school in South Africa, Simmons gets a rare, honest look inside the torturously complex inner workings of Girl World. The Curse of the Good Girl was written for the parents of young girls, so that their daughters can not only survive Girl World, but emerge as authentic and self-aware young women.

Simmons lives in Brooklyn and, during the course of our phone interview, managed to parallel-park her car according to that borough's complex alternate-side parking rules, while also answering questions about the many challenges facing the modern feminist movement. Again, not too shabby. As you'll see from her interview, Simmons is a very impressive lady.

And now, without further ado, the Feministing Five, with Rachel Simmons.

Conservative group's video: If you love playing in piles of leaves, don't support same sex marriage.

A Kansas college denies funding to a trasngeder speaker.

Check out this new poll on the internet/new media and Latina voters.

A Canadian group wants the government to ban the burka and the niqab.

A new lipstick in the UK will turn blue if you've ingested a "date rape drug." Huh.

October is National Equality Month. Sunday on the National Mall, thousands will gather for the National Equality March, promoting the Gay Agenda: equality!

Logo TV is going dark for the march. Thousands of youth from across the nation are traveling in delegations to make it to the march. And the night before the march, President Obama will deliver the keynote speech on gay rights at the annual Human Rights Campaign dinner.

He is expected to detail "incremental progress" on equality. Many believe President Obama hasn't yet earned his Nobel, noting his solid procrastination of fighting Don't Ask Don't Tell, and his less-than-resounding endorsement of ENDA and hate crimes legislation.

Recent outcry in the LGBT community, however, has focused instead on the dismissal of queer people of color in the marriage equality movement. Over at Queerty, Nakhone Keodara details what he perceives to be the systematic devaluing of the experiences of queer people of color in the national equality organizing space, and their underrepresentation even in lists of supporters like this one.

Keodara "quit" the movement, eliciting head-shaking disapproval by some activists. It's possible that the lack of commitment by President Obama, a celebrity of color so popular that "Dreams of my Father" almost beat "The Bible" on the list of books people lie about reading, has influenced the inclusiveness of the movement. But any change in inclusivity must start not with the government, but with marriage equality organizations.

Warning: Below video is racist, highly offensive

Whatever happened to being a citizen of the world? Why aren't media outlets more conscious about their content in this age of mass information sharing? It is true that I have never been to Australia and probably don't plan on going anytime soon. But it is totally disheartening for me to see privileged, and ostensibly educated, white men appropriating this feigned image of Blackness for comedic ends. Then there is this other problematic moment where the "Jackson Jive" ridicule Michael Jackson's vitiligo and highly complex relationship with color by feigning white face. It's as if, the MJ impersonator wasn't white himself. For shame.

Check out Whoopi's take on the matter on The View:

Jonathan Escobar, a former student at North Cobb High School, was told by the assistant principal to dress more "manly," or consider being home schooled. This was on Jonathan's third day of school.

Escobar said the assistant principal told him his style of dress had caused a fight...

"You can't wear clothing that causes a disruption," said Jay Dillon, spokesman for Cobb County schools.

...Jonathan Escobar says he wasn't a disruption in the classroom, but he attracted attention in the lunchroom. "Everybody was surrounding me," he said.

On his second day of school, Escobar says he was pulled out of class to speak with a police officer who told him he was concerned about the student's safety.

"They should've told the students to back off," Escobar said. "They should have never given me the option of homeschooling or changing who I am."

Sounds like actual disruption were, you know, the students who were harassing Jonathan.

Escobar says, "If I can't express myself, I won't go to school...I want to get the message out there that because this is who I am, I can't get an education."

Also frustrating: Escobar says explicitly, "I don't consider myself a cross-dresser...this is just who I am," yet most news videos and articles covering this story refer to Jonathan as a cross-dresser.

To join the Facebook group supporting Jonathan, please click here.

Last night, I had the pleasure of meeting Lydia Cacho, Mexican, feminist, journalist, human rights activist -- and overall badass in general. Thursdays are my crazy days because I have 7 and half hours of classes, but I couldn't pass her up. Because, after all, I am a sucka for hot, feminist, women of color getting the recognition they deserve for feminist advocacy. She was at my stomping ground, University of Michigan, receiving the Wallenberg Medal L. And, I must say, the Lydia Cacho experience was such an affirmation to my quirky black-girl self. It reminded me that although things like the George Sodini murders or the threat of rape keep me up some nights, I cannot allow the ills of sexism to jade me. I always have the resources to share a smile, count my blessings and prioritize love on my to-do list.

Her feel-good points were like India Arie's third album rolled into a lecture. She spent a large part of the evening explaining to over 100 students and Ann Arbor residents that, unequivocally, we all had the right to sexual pleasure and to live free from violence. While these concepts may be Women Studies 101 for some folks, many audience members were having an a-ha moment. It was a beautiful thing. The part of her talk I enjoyed the most is the notion that we can be change agents and enjoy this life thing along the way. Sounds good to me.

I don't know what tickles me more, cupcakes that say "Abortion Kills" in icing or this telling excerpt from the site's FAQs:

Q.) What if I run into a pro-choicer and they smash the cupcakes in my face?

A.) Wipe the cake off your face and share the rest of them with someone less angry inside. Go with courage and go with love, the unborn need you to be their voice.

Note to self: Rethink cupcake smashing agenda. They're onto us.

A few things I wanted to mention in the video but didn't (and didn't have the heart/editing skillz to add in):

-Beavan makes it pretty clear this project is for people with resources, in this country and globally. For those who don't even have electricity, or access to clean water, they need more, not less. That has to be part of our bigger picture strategy to deal with the situation.

-He's a never ending idealist, with a bit of sap thrown in.

Links:
No Impact Man Book
Movie
Blog
Project

What do you think?

From one of the partner organizations, Spiritual Youth for Reproductive Freedom:

SYRF is working with several partner organizations (including Advocates for Youth, Catholics for Choice, Choice USA, Law Students for Reproductive Justice, NARAL Pro-Choice America, Planned Parenthood, SIECUS, and the Sierra Club) to make October 2009 an entire month of collective advocacy and organizing for comprehensive sexuality education.

Many faith groups support comprehensive sexuality education and some denominations even have their own faith-based curricula. Unfortunately, proponents of abstinence-only programs have succeeded in getting over $1.5 billion in funding for dangerous ineffective programming. You can help. By raising awareness in your community about the harm these programs have on the health of students, we can work towards a time when classrooms will teach medically-accurate, positive, and honest messages about sexuality.

Awesome. Learn more about the month of action at the partner websites.

The President of Legal Momentum has a piece at HuffPo about how immigration enforcement hurts women.

Talking Points Memo reports that the gubernatorial race in New Jersey is being strongly influenced by the candidates positions on health care reform and mammograms.

A group of Swedish sixth graders campaign against a Toys R Us catalogue's gender stereotyping results in a public reprimand for the store.

The LA Times reports that a woman who lost her 17 year old daughter due to a denied liver transplant by their insurer, Cigna, received heckling and the finger from employees at the agency when she went to ask for an apology.

One woman's guide for men on how to approach women without being maced.

Yes Means Yes: Visions of Female Sexual Power and a World without Rape edited by Jaclyn Friedman and Jessica Valenti, is being used to frame a new official sexual education class at Colgate University.

Colgate University has introduced an official sexual education class on campus. "Yes Means Yes" is a series of five non-credit classes held on Wednesday evenings over dinner from 7 to 8:30 p.m. The topic of discussion will be Colgate's "hook-up culture," what one wants in a relationship, how to navigate one's own sexuality better and how to help others with these areas. Facilitators will focus on the formative novel, Yes Means Yes! Visions of Female Sexual Power & A World Without Rape.

Berger selected Yes Means Yes! Visions of Female Sexual Power & A World Without Rape, written by Jaclyn Friedman and Jessica Valenti, to emphasize positive sexuality and consensual sex. An individual chapter is assigned for each week's discussion in order to have a strong foundation for conversation and plenty of participation.

As a contributor to Yes Means Yes I'm by no means impartial, but I think the book rocks and has coverage of issues I would have loved to talk about in college.

Way to go Colgate!

This week, a victory from the folks at the National Advocates for Pregnant Women and the ACLU.

This case is pretty horrific. You can see more about Nelson's story in the RH Reality Check video after the jump. More info:

On Friday, the United States Court of Appeals for the Eight Circuit (the federal level appellate court that reviews decisions from federal district courts in North Dakota, South Dakota, Iowa, Nebraska, Missouri, Minnesota, and Arkansas) issued the long-awaited decision in Nelson v. Norris. In this case, Shawanna Nelson argued that being forced to go through the final stages of labor with both legs shackled to her hospital bed was cruel and unusual punishment, in violation of the 8th Amendment to the Constitution. She argued that she should be allowed to sue the director of the prison and the guard who repeatedly re-shackled her legs to the bed. Ms. Nelson, an African-American woman, was incarcerated for non-violent offenses of credit card fraud and "hot checks."

This is REALLY messed up.

Via Think Progress:

On Nov. 1, a law in Oklahoma will go into effect that will collect personal details about every single abortion performed in the state and post them on a public website. Implementing the measure will "cost $281,285 the first year and $256,285 each subsequent year." Here are the first eight questions that women will have to reveal:

1. Date of abortion
2. County in which abortion performed
3. Age of mother
4. Marital status of mother
(married, divorced, separated, widowed, or never married)
5. Race of mother
6. Years of education of mother
(specify highest year completed)
7. State or foreign country of residence of mother
8. Total number of previous pregnancies of the mother
Live Births
Miscarriages
Induced Abortions

WTF.

When I first read this headline, I assumed this was one of the crazy proposed but not signed into law bills that get introduced all the time. Nope, this one already passed and will be enacted within a month. Turns my stomach.

Obviously it's a huge violation of privacy, even without a name attached to the requirements. Totally a way to scare women into not having abortions.

Imagine these kinds of requirements for other medical procedures? Plastic surgeries, or vasectomies, or anything else? It's absurd beyond belief.

Luckily, according to Jezebel, the Center for Reproductive Rights is challenging the law. Let's hope they win.

More at Feminists for Choice, Jezebel and Think Progress. Updated: Check out the Broadsheet post on the story for more details.

I've been getting really into entrepreneurship lately. It's strange, to be honest, to be wishing I could have taken business classes in college. I went to a liberal arts school, majored in Anthropology and Spanish, and stayed away from anything practical. But in the years since leaving school, and particularly these last few, I've started to get super excited about the idea of business and entrepreneurship.

What turned me off from business for so long was the idea that the goal had to be making money. That I could only be involved in business if I wanted to get rich off my project.

I've come to learn that's totally not true, and there are business out there that aren't non-profits (at least legally or tax-wise) but are more like not-really-for-profits. Where the owners and employees cover costs and receive salaries, but aren't in it to become millionaires.

I've also come to value the skills that are required for business ownership. Taxes, financial management, legal statuses, all of these are really valuable things to understand--even just as individuals.

I've been tagged as "the Business" by my co-editors at Feministing (check out the best birthday rap ever if you didn't see it in May) and the title is pretty accurate.

There is something about the seeming simplicity of business--meeting a need and covering costs--that is really appealing to me.

I firmly believe that one huge factor holding back entrepreneurship in this country is employer-based health care. Speaking as a self-employed person, it's a scary proposition that I could lose my coverage at any time. How many folks would choose non-traditional routes of employment if they didn't have to worry about being denied health care coverage? How many more amazing companies and inventions would we have if everyone (regardless of employment) had access to health care?

I've got plenty of dreams and ideas about what my feminist businesses could look like (not surprisingly, a feminist sex shop for example). Any of you budding entrepreneurs? If you could run your own feminist business, what would it be?

I mentioned in a What We Missed post two weeks ago that an organization based in DC had decided to close it's doors after the DC government slashed their budget almost completely. A group of volunteers and founders from the almost ten year old domestic violence organization (one of the biggest in the District) got together to try and save WEAVE. And save they did!

I am very, very excited to tell you that it's official... we have saved WEAVE!

On the morning of September 30th, the Board of Directors officially voted to keep WEAVE open. This is a long-term commitment not just a temporary reprieve. Every dollar of the more than $85,000 you helped the team behind the SaveWEAVE.org effort raise was pivotal in convincing a consortium of foundation funders to make a significant investment that will keep WEAVE going in the coming months.

All in all, more than 700 gifts were made to SaveWEAVE.org in just 10 days! This campaign has truly been one of the most amazing things I've ever been a part of and I cannot thank you enough for being part of it, too, by making a gift and helping us get the word out. Every one of you has a special place in WEAVE's history for helping us make sure that domestic violence survivors still have WEAVE to turn to.

We have all been overwhelmed by the breadth and depth of support WEAVE has. This proves that WEAVE is viable and is necessary in our community. WEAVE has had to make some changes in order to stay strong and continue to pay a key role in the community. Unfortunately, that has meant some lay-offs of staff and the transfer to SAFE (another domestic violence organization in DC) of a very long-standing program that WEAVE adopted in the early 2000s that helps people file the necessary paperwork to seek court-ordered protection orders. WEAVE is very grateful to SAFE and so many other partner organizations that were willing to help during this tumultuous time.

I know the work of WEAVE in the DC community and chipped in what I could to this campaign. I'm really happy to know that the larger community values their work as well, and as tight as times are, folks were willing to chip in. Their struggles are still ahead of them, as $85,000 does not replace the budget of a large organization, but hopefully we can ensure women in DC still have access to their import domestic violence support and services.

If you still want to support WEAVE, they are continuing their push to raise money.

The Federal Trade Commission has new rules for bloggers.

DV victims struggle to get health insurance.

Egyptian conservatives want to ban an artificial hymen being sold to help women fake their virginity and exile anyone who sells it.

And from Daily Kos: GOP backs corporate rape

Egypt's most powerful Muslim cleric, Mohammed Sayed Tantawi, has announced an impending religious edict against the wearing of full, face-covering, headscarves, or niqab. He apparently announced that full-face veiling was a custom independent from Islam, and seeks to ban it from schools of Al Azhar University.

From AP:

A security official also told The Associated Press that police have standing verbal orders to bar girls covered from head to toe from entering al-Azhar's institutions, including middle and high schools, as well as the dormitories of several universities in Cairo.

Saturday, a handful of women protested the ban outside the university, and despite such backlash, it appears Tantawi will not be "dismissed."

Unfortunately, his announcement came after he visited a local school, witnessed schoolgirls wearing the niqab, requested that one girl take hers off, and was surprised when she didn't, saying "Niqab has nothing to do with Islam...I know about religion better than you and your parents." Inappropriate!

The challenge now facing Egypt is that of deciding next steps. Some doubt the ban will be enforced, like a ban on full-face veils for nurses declared but not implemented last year. Just last month, Egypt's Mufti encouraged women to wear pants. Additionally, judicial precedence in Egypt does not favor a ban on the niqab:

A researcher wearing the niqab prevented from using the library at the American University in Cairo in 2001 took her case to the Egypt's supreme court and eventually won. The court ruled a total ban on the niqab to be unconstitutional.

Additionally, these young women students will be denied government-subsidized housing and food as a result of their classification as "extremists." The Egyptian government seems to be demonstrating a blatant disregard for recruitment and retention of women students, creating one more social obstacle for women in their journey to education. Thanks for making it that much harder for women to stay in school.

(BBC has this helpful guide on the types of head-covering scarves for Muslim women.)

Related:
Sarkozy Supports Burqa Ban
Muslim Women Can Keep Veils On

Back in March, we mentioned that the FDA had recently approved a new female condom (FC) for distribution in the U.S.

Well folks, that new female condom has officially hit U.S. markets, and is now available for our all-American consumption. The FC2 is made of a new, thinner, material, is less likely to squeak during use, and is about 30% cheaper than the original FC.

My colleague Audacia Ray has a post up on Akimbo about why this news marks exciting progress for US women's access to safer sex materials.

Now, I know that the FC often gets a bad rap. Previous commenters have touched on some of the many criticisms it often faces- it's not readily available, it's too expensive, it squeaks, it looks funny, the materials' unfamiliar, it's uncomfortable, it's unnatural, it's inconvenient, it's not effective enough, etc. And part of this criticism is understandable because the FC is a relatively new form of contraception and- let's face it- not many of us use FCs on a regular basis, or even know someone who does. How many of us have even seen an FC for sale in a drugstore? Or seen women carrying around FCs in their wallets the way men often do with the male condom?

I got married this weekend. Woot! I'll have a longer post soon about the experience and some thoughts I've been having about feminism and marriage, but for now - since I'm too tired to move - enjoy some pictures from the wedding. There's a slide show after the jump. (And thanks to all of the lovely readers and commenters who sent me good wishes.)

But that doesn't mean the rate of rapes in this country still isn't really high.

USA Today reports that FBI data shows that the rate of reported rapes in the U.S. has gone down considerably.

The FBI estimates 89,000 women reported being raped in 2008 -- 29 women for every 100,000 people. That's down from a high of 109,062 reported rapes in 1992 -- 43 women for every 100,000 people. Data for 2009 are not yet available.

"We have seen reform in how police work with victims, gather evidence and investigate rape; we've seen increased awareness of the crime, and we've seen better prosecution," says Michael Males, senior researcher for the Center on Juvenile & Criminal Justice in San Francisco. "Hospitals now have rape kits that they didn't have 40 years ago" which make it easier to collect an attacker's DNA and other evidence of a crime.

Okay, I'm glad - really glad - that the number of reported rapes have declined. (Thanks, feminism and VAWA!) But there are still over tens of thousands of women a year who are reporting being raped - imagine how many more are not reporting their assaults.

And even if we have made inroads in terms of police and rape kits (though even that is debatable), the culture that condones and excuses rape is far from gone.

Males says in the USA Today piece that today, "you don't see the nightmarish trials of the 1960s where a woman's reputation would be brought into question and people would conclude she deserved it." But the thing is...we really do see that kind of victim-blaming. All the time.

So while, we should thank feminism for the small victories surrounding sexual assault legislation and policy - let's continue to fight the rape culture that makes this country such an unsafe place for women.

I got an email from this band, Team Smile and Nod, who thought I might like their music since I'd posted Athens Boys Choir before. Turns out they were right! Here is how they described themselves:

We are a lesbian-fronted electro anti-folk duo from Columbus, Ohio. Our tunes touch on a lot of what you write about...feminism, LGBTQ issues, politics, vegetarianism (food politics).

Definitely up my alley. You can listen to their tunes at their website, or on their myspace page. Here's what one reviewer had to say about their music:

"With 20 tracks, it (debut CD) blasts through themes of homophobia, vegetarianism, and consumerism like a smoking chunk of political dynamite. Some of her lyrics make hardcore statements and others teem with dark humor, but all are designed to provoke discussion." -Alexandra Kelley, Columbus Underground

Also after the jump an acoustic video version of "Truth and Fact."

You don't even have to watch, and you know it's going to be good.

USSA, Campus Progress and USPIRG are working on a campaign to get a bill that would increase Pell Grant funding passed through Congress. As many of us know intimately, debt is one of the most pressing economic issues of our generation and the rising cost of education is a huge part of this.

Getting a college degree is more important than ever, but students have to assume too much debt to pay for it. Increasing federal Pell grant aid will help students rely less on federal loans to pay for college.

Both President Obama and the House proposed a massive $40 billion dollar increase in student Pell grants. Now it is up to the Senate to invest in students.

Big lenders have spent millions fighting this proposal, which cuts wasteful lender subsidies from the federal government, and uses the $87 billion in savings to make college more affordable. To ensure that the Senate prioritizes students over banks, we need to Raise Some Pell!

During the week of October 5 - 9, USSA, USPIRG and Campus Progress are asking young people to call, fax, and tweet their senators to demonstrate massive grassroots support for more Pell grant aid.

The link to take action is here. You can also sign the Student Wall of Debt, to show how much debt our generation really has.

I wrote about this group when they first got started, but I continue to be impressed by what the Young Invincibles are doing to send the message that folks of our generation (18 to 34 year olds) care about health care reform, and have a lot at stake in the debate.

Michelle's story is one of the many the Young Invincibles are bringing to the conversation.

They are organizing events all around the country for folks of our generation to push the health care conversation. There is a lobby day in DC next week on Tuesday October 13, and there are more events and ideas for getting involved here.

Jan Buterman has filed a complaint with the Alberta Human Rights Commission after he was fired by the Greater St. Albert Catholic school district in Edmonton, Canada. Buterman was fired after disclosing his gender identity and informing the district he was in the process of transitioning from female to male.

In the letter of dismissal he received Buterman was told his transition would confuse students and parents. As Cara points out at The Curvature, this is bullshit. Young people and their parents should be learning about trans issues, learning to interact with trans folks in a respectful way, learning about our humanity. Having a trans teacher would be a great opportunity to humanize trans folks to Buterman's students and show them we're not all that scary and weird after all.

Religion was used in an attempt to legitimize Buterman's firing:

"The reason for removing you from the substitute teacher list follows a conversation we shared in which you indicated that you had been diagnosed with a gender identity medical condition and that you were undergoing physical gender changes from the female gender to the male gender," wrote Steve Bayus, deputy superintendent of schools.

"In discussions with the Archbishop of the Edmonton Diocese, the teaching of the Catholic church is that persons cannot change their gender. One's gender is considered what God created it to be."

A representative of Alberta's Human Rights Commission had this bit of absurdity to add:

Marie Riddle, the commission's director, said Alberta's human rights law does cover transgender and disability issues.

But she said the law also can allow discrimination in some cases involving religious beliefs, depending on the circumstances.

"There might be discrimination, but the discrimination might be reasonable and justifiable," she said. "What we would do is look at prior case law. "

"The discrimination might be reasonable and justifiable." Seriously. At least someone is stating it outright: religion may be used to justify discrimination. Now the next step: not letting folks hide behind religious beliefs in an attempt to excuse their bigotry.

The Sexist gives us the 10 Worst Sexy Halloween Costumes. Be afraid.

Another horrifying top 10 (as in horrifyingly offensive): "Top 10 Actresses Past Their Expiration Date." Let them know how you feel about it.

The Supreme Court refused to hear a case by Illinois anti-choicers who gathered 25,000 signatures to try and force the state to issue license plates that say, "Choose Life." Dream big, guys!

The New York Times has a story on medically treating depression while pregnant.

During the third season of Mad Men Feministing writers will offer some of our thoughts on feminist moments, scenes, and themes in the new episodes in order to start a discussion about these topics in our community. *WARNING: Lots of spoilers follow.

And yes, this edition of the column is a day late because of wedding weekend. A very good excuse, I'd say.

No Peggy!

Seriously Mad Men writers, what are you doing to me? This is just mean. -Jos

Pete reads Ebony.

Pete really seems to be following through on his idea to market to the African American community. This was just a subtle hint but I'm curious to see where this storyline goes. -Jos

Betty: "I'm paid well enough already."

What's Betty talking about? What does she consider a housewife's wages? -Jos

I love how Don's first reaction to seeing Betty working on this campaign was "you should be paid for that". Ironically enough, Betty does work- admittedly of a different sort- in front of him every day that he fails to really acknowledge or value. I wonder if the writers are foreshadowing a greater feminist awakening in Betty, since much of the feminism that emerges during this era is related to acknowledging the monetary value of housework (ie Betty Friedan). Sidenote: Woh, I just realized that Betty's name is, well, Betty. -Lori