Recently in Feminism Category

I have been thinking a lot about what it takes to sensitize non-feminist folk to issues that have broad implications for women. I attend school in Michigan, where Dave Camp, Vernon Ehlers, Fred Upton, Bart Stupak, Candice Miller, Thaddeus MCotter, Dale Kilder and Peter Hoekstra all voted to write women out of affordable health care this week.

How do you talk to gender skeptics about feminism? Is abortion the place to start? Is there a feminist warm-up issue that is domestic in nature that the general public would agree is a clear manifestation of sexism? Is conversion the ultimate goal? How do you talk about these issues while also acknowledging that even though you are a feminist, you may not have the full truth on feminism, and that your feminism grows, evolves and even adapts?

I wrote the following column on the health care debate as a starting point to appeal to students, faculty and residents in the broader Michigan area:

*** *** ***

If you have been even halfway plugged to the healthcare debate this week, chances are you have caught wind that many women and their allies are not happy about the recent bill. H.R. 3962, the Affordable Health Care for America Act, passed with a vote of 220-215 this past Saturday night. It is an achievement insofar as policymaking occurs at the speed of molasses and we finally have a health reform bill -- that includes a public option, ends pre-existing condition discrimination and extends healthcare to 36 million Americans -- that has been punted to the Senate. But one small step for healthcare reform has meant one giant leap back for womankind.

Miriam, Samhita, Jess, and I are headed to Hotlanta tomorrow for the National Women's Studies Association's annual conference. We look forward to meeting readers there for the first time and reuniting with old friends. (And pretty please, if any community posters are there and get to see Angela Davis' keynote tonight, please write about it. We were all dying to see it but couldn't get out in time.)

Anyways, we're doing a panel on bringing off line and on line feminisms more, well, in line. I thought I'd throw an excerpt of the abstract up here and see if anyone had any thoughts/questions for us as we head into our lil' talk:

There is no question that the internet is one of the most vital sites of feminism activism today, but too often the women's studies classroom feels separate from, at best, and alienated from, at worst, this valuable resource. Some academics may not be familiar with the terrain of feminist blogs and intimidated by learning the language and customs associated with them. Some may have had a taste and decided that contemporary feminism needs more, not less, grounding in theory and history.

Many bloggers, for their part, have turned to the internet as a medium in direct opposition to what feels like an academic discipline that increasingly falls into the same traps of inaccessible language and unnecessary bureaucracy as its patriarchal counterparts in the university system.

So how do we bridge the divide? It is our conviction that the feminism's very survival depends on the interplay between the academics that train young women and men to be critical thinkers about gender and power, and the bloggers that continue to engage them in grassroots movements and continued analysis of this half-changed world. And of course, many of us are both in the same body--professors and bloggers, academics and activists, theorists and artists. How do we bridge the sometimes largest gap of all--that within ourselves?

One of the buzz words that kept coming up at the pro-feminist men's conference at St. John's last week was accountability. How can men be accountable to women? How can pro-feminist men be accountable to the feminist movement?

There were no easy answers. Michael Kaufman, founder of the White Ribbon Campaign, wisely debunked the idea that there is some all-powerful feminist committee who serve as the accountability police. Obviously it is a diverse movement filled with folks who would consider some things okay and others offensive--as evidenced by the comment section of this very blog on a daily basis.

On the other hand, it does seem critical for men interested in doing feminist work and identifying with the feminism to be accountable to certain basic ideas--like the notion that men have, for too long, possessed a disproportionate amount of power in our society. This means that in feminist spaces, men should be cognizant of how much they talk, what sort of influence they exert, what kind of leadership they inhabit. But then again, shouldn't men and women always strive to be cognizant of these things.

And, of course, real accountability would come in creating a world where everyone gets to express their gender identity in whatever way feels most authentic, a world where no one would be forced to exist within a gender binary that didn't feel right for them. Men and women aside, this is the ultimate dream that we can be accountable for.

Anyone else have ideas about accountability within feminism? I sort of tie myself in knots trying to think through this one.

We've blogged a few times about this awesome, on-the-road project from Nona Willis Aronowitz and the late Emma Bee Bernstein, but I wanted to give the official thumbs up after having finally had the chance to read this fascinating tour-de-force cover to cover.

I was most struck by two elements of this unique book (and major brava to Seal for taking a chance on publishing something so unorthodox). First, the breadth of voices was astounding. Whether I was in Sioux Falls listening to a bartender bitch about the irrelevance of her degree or Portland hearing Banji scoff at the label of feminism, I was learning something. As Elizabeth Kolbert writes about in one of the latest issues of the New Yorker, one of the disappointments of the internet is that it allows us to retreat into our ideological bubbles even further--only visiting blogs and websites that support the view we already hold. I'm a big believer that this kind of balkanization of thought is not good for us. Period. But what Nona and Emma's book does is breaks out of that balkanization and get us face-to-face with folks all over the country who we may or may not have much in common with. I'm so grateful for that gift.

The other thing that's undeniably striking about this book is the authenticity of Nona and Emma's voices through out. They are infinitely likable and obviously flawed. They smoke a lot of weed. They even drop acid. They write--sometimes with more romance, sometimes less--about the journey of thought and geography that they undertake together at this critical moment in both of their lives. Their voices struck me as distinctly young and alive and unapologetic, another huge gift to a lady looking ahead at her 30s and feeling a bit less wide-eyed than I used to. Nona and Emma recaputure that spirit for me. The sound of their voices are a testament to how the feminist movement reinvigorates itself. Neverending.

Thanks girls.

To know it's gonna make you angry. Sigh.

h/t The Frisky

Happy Birthday k.d. Lang!

Today k.d. Lang turns 47. I'd say that's a moment in feminist history. k.d. Lang is best known for being an openly lesbian, gender-bending Canadian singer, songwriter and musician. She is also, according to Wikipedia, known for her commitment to animal rights and vegetarianism. See after the jump for her gender-bending and oh-so controversial Vanity Fair cover from 1993, that features Cindy Crawford shaving k.d.'s face with a straight razor. Her activism has also included work on behalf of HIV/AIDS research.

One note: One thing I can't say I love about her activism, although I support her vegetarianism, is her affiliation with PETA, the organization we criticize for their blatantly sexist, racist and overall offensive ads. She did an advertisement with them in 2006. My only hope for k.d. is that their most recent stunts (and advertising) would make her think twice about working with them again.

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

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.

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!

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.

Two years after Nona Willis Aronowitz and the missed Emma Bee Bernstein hit the road for a journey across the country and into the minds of young women on the many states and forms of feminism, their book on their findings has been released. Here's the description:

What do young women care about? What are their hopes, worries, and ambitions? Have they heard of feminism, and do they relate to it?

These are just a few of the questions journalist Nona Willis Aronowitz and photographer Emma Bee Bernstein set out to answer in Girldrive. In October 2007, Aronowitz and Bernstein took a cross-country road trip to meet with the 127 women profiled in this book, ranging from well-known feminists like Kathleen Hanna, Laura Kipnis, Erica Jong, and Michele Wallace, to women who don't relate to feminism at all. The result of these interviews, Girldrive is a regional chronicle of the struggles, concerns, successes, and insights of young women who are grappling--just as hard as their mothers and grandmothers did--to find, define, and fight for gender equity.

Check out their blog (which documented their adventures) for more info and to buy the book.

I just love it when conservatives get all riled up 'bout little ole us.

Our girl Phyllis Schlafly contended at the conservative conference, "How To Take Back America," this weekend:

I submit to you that the feminist movement is the most dangerous, destructive force in our society today. [...] My analysis is that the gays are about 5% of the attack on marriage in this country, and the feminists are about 95%. [...] I'm talking about drugs, sex, illegitimacy, drop outs, poor grades, run away, suicide, you name it, every social ill comes out of the fatherless home.

She was later presented with the "American Hero of the Century" award, in which Mike Huckabee stood up and said "God bless you - and God bless Phyllis Schlafly most of all."

Via Think Progress.

Women, Action and the Media (WAM!) Director Jaclyn Friedman sent out an email blast yesterday with some big news about WAM! The organization is in transition, and becoming an entity independent of the organization it was born from, the Center for New Words. They've got big plans for the new WAM! including a national focus, local chapters to provide regional support and more.

We won't lie -- it's not going to be easy. In order for the new WAM! to succeed, we have to find brand-new sources of funding at a time when many funders are having a hard time even fulfilling their existing commitments. But we have one thing most organizations don't have: YOU.

Around the country and globe, there are thousands of women who consider themselves WAM!mers. If you're reading this, it's likely you're one of them. Maybe you've had your work published or produced because of WAM!. Maybe you've found a source or a story you wouldn't have otherwise. Maybe you've been exposed to a new idea that's changed the way you see the world, or changed the kind of media you're working to create. Maybe you were inspired to action. Maybe you got the chance to inspire others to action. Maybe you connected with someone who's become a valuable friend or colleague, or plugged in to a community that helps you feel less alone and more energized.

Whatever your story, if you've ever considered yourself a part of the WAM! community -- or even wanted to -- this is the moment to be counted. You are WAM!, and what you do right now will determine WAM's future.

The sad news is that the WAM! Conference, for which they are known, is being postponed until March 2011. WAM! was my first in person introduction to the world of feminist media and it remains an amazing gathering place for all sorts of writers, filmmakers and media folks focused on bringing the lens of gender to their work. I don't want to see it go.

Join the fundraising campaign that will set WAM! up to begin it's new phase. They've set a lofty goal to raise $30,000 by October 20th. You can donate by going here, and as always, every little bit counts.

Today in 1838, Victoria Claflin Woodhull was born.

On September 16, 1913, thousands of women demonstrated for suffrage in Holland.

Via Today in History

You know you are in a powerful conference space when there is a buzz around you of inspiration, innovation and creativity. The concluding morning panel is a discussion with all the morning panelists about what they are getting out of the conference so far and how they do the work they do. I thought the answers about how the overcome fear were the most powerful.

What is the practice or script you use to push yourself past fear?

Sakena Yacoobi: "Every time I am walking out of my house I am taking a risk...it is my faith that carries me through, side by side."

Alberta Nells: "Spirit, tradition. Instead of wallowing in fear, I pray and go into ceremony so my fears won't happen."

Gloria Steinem: "I was too afraid to speak in public until after 30 and finally decided to speak because of the women's movement and I still was terrified, but I realized if women can't do anything fucking right anyway, might as well do as you please."

Jensine Larsen: "Still have knots in my stomach, I fear I am not doing enough. I go to my stomach and think about my sisters in the struggle around the world and trust peace and that things will happen in time."

Lateefah Simmons: "If my grandmother had a soapbox or a bullhorn, what would she do? I try and garner their strength and all the women that came before us."

I also have to appreciate that Gloria Steinem brought up the irony of us asking Alberta Nells what feminism is to indigenous movements, since indigenous resistance and practice were one of the inspirations to the women's movement in the United States, but was polluted by the legacy of colonization. "Feminism is about memory," she said, and I would add, feminism is about our collective memory and our overcoming the way we have been taught to remember to forget.

The New York Observer reports that Naomi Wolf's new book will be "a cultural history of the vagina." Which is funny, because I was totally planning on writing a history of my left tit! (Kidding, kidding.)

Hanne Blank - amazing author of Virgin: The Untouched History - pointed out on my Facebook wall that Wolf has a tough act to follow: Catherine Blackledge took on the history of the vajayjay in The story of V: a natural history of female sexuality (which I have yet to read).

I'm more interested in what the title will be... Come up with a title for Wolf's new vag book and share in comments! The commenter with the most "likes" at the end of the day wins a book (your choice of Full Frontal Feminism; He's a Stud, She's a Slut; Yes Means Yes or The Purity Myth.)

Since I've been hanging with my family this week, it occurred to me that it would be fun to ask my dad a few questions about feminist fathering. We have so many examples of anti-feminist fathering around, but it's rare that we hear from a dad who is truly committed to egalitarian parenting and gender justice. The other thing that makes my dad sort of unique is that he has all the trappings of a traditional dude--white, middle-class, retired lawyer, raised Catholic, likes to talk about the weather and wear embarrassing outfits to bicycle around town--but will surprise you when he drops some serious feminist insights. (He also hasn't updated his slang since the 80's, thus the subtitle of this post.) Read on...

Courtney: Do you consider yourself a feminist? Why or why not?

Ron: Yes, because I believe in equality in all respects.

Courtney: How do other men react to your feminist identity?

Ron: At first, I found it odd to own the identity among other men, but after awhile it became clear and comfortable. I am guessing that other men may feel the same. I think some men would never call themselves a feminist because they would view, wrongly, that it would mean that they are feminine, and at all costs, do not want to feel that.

Courtney: What do you think are the essential ingredients of feminist fathering?

Ron: Teaching your sons and your daughters that gender should never be a barrier to anything that you want to do. [My dad resigned from the men's only business club in my town when I was a little girl, citing that he didn't want to be a part of any institution that would one day accept his son but not his daughter.] In addition, you have to not only say the right words but you have to live those words. It is particularly important with your daughter, just like your son, to praise them for their minds and intellect, because the world will still tend to only comment on their physicality.

On Sept. 2, 1948, Christa McAuliffe, the American teacher who died in the 1986 space shuttle Challenger explosion, was born.

As we gear up for Omega's Women and Power conference next weekend, we find this week's post in our partnership series on intergenerational feminism is by two women - a mother and daughter - on being raised/raising a feminist. Enjoy!

RAISING A FEMINIST

By Sil Reynolds

In one week my daughter leaves home. My 18-year-old baby turned young woman, Eliza, is packing the car for college: Botticelli posters, red and pink pillows, a desk lamp, closet organizers, a hat stand - nesting things for a nest that I will not be sharing with her. This is our sacred rite, our last great initiation and our milestone together: shopping, packing, planning, and giddy giggling energy. SHE'S LEAVING? Can't I come too? I want to take her courses "Shakespeare's Present Tense" and "Social Psychology", I want to meet new people, I just want to stay at college with her and cuddle at night in one bed with my little girl and whisper about the world.

Yet, remarkably, I also find myself ready to release her because she is so ready for the world.

I intended to raise a daughter who lives authentically, passionately and on her own terms -a daughter who is open-minded and openhearted. In short, I intended to raise a feminist. My husband was a remarkably attuned father and I had extraordinary friends and family at my side. I have taken notes as I have mothered because I teach workshops for mothers and their teenage daughters. So as I pause at the dawn of this new era of empty nesting, I offer this list:

1. Find a village to raise your child. Take Hilary Clinton's advice to heart and find village women and men to help you raise your child in a loving and supportive community. You cannot do everything or be everywhere - create that circle for her and for you.

2. Love your body. Then your daughter will be inspired to cherish her own unique feminine body. Teach about what is wrong about those too skinny images that are coming at her every day.

I was visiting a couple of friends that I've known since childhood this week and my feminist identity came up. My friend's husband, a small business owner, generally pretty conservative guy, asked me how I defined feminism. When I explained ("genuine equality, educated choice, and authenticity") he was a bit stunned. "By that definition, I'm a feminist," he said, incredulously.

"Yup," I said, smiling.

"But if feminism has such bad connotations in the mainstream media and in so many parts of the country, why do you use it? Doesn't that just alienate you from people that you're trying to influence?" he asked next.

It's, of course, not something that every feminist who cares about being effective hasn't thought about. I explained that I use it strategically. For example, in my book, Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters, I obviously use a feminist lens, but don't spend much time explicitly talking about feminism. When I go on The O'Reilly Factor to defend Helen Thomas, they slap FEMINIST under my image, and while I wouldn't mind them using an actual professional title as is customary in the industry, I'm loud and proud about my identity. I've always been of the mind that if using the word means the difference between me reaching someone with a feminist analysis or turning them off to the point that they won't even hear me out, then I'll bypass using it. I'm strategic, and maybe, a bit of a sell-out in this regard.

Another friend brought up that she's more comfortable with the term "humanist," which Webster defines as "a doctrine, attitude, or way of life centered on human interests or values." Okay. Sounds good. But it feels like the fact that it doesn't hold any controversy, that there's so much ambiguity in the terms, makes it less powerful. Plus, it seems to invisibilize the fact that various humans (i.e. women, people of color etc.) have gotten a disproportionate shake at dignity. Somehow "humanism" sounds neutral to me, like we are all on a level playing field and just need to protect that.

Plus, a huge part of feminism, for me, is about community. Where would I find my humanist roll dawgs? With feminism, I know just where to look.

I've been a huge fan of Bitch Magazine ever since I discovered it in my college library. I've been an avid subscriber, supporter, and even had a Love it Shove it piece published there a few years ago. Trust me, getting that edition in the mail was one of my most exciting writer moments.

I've been eagerly awaiting the Fall edition of the magazine, which was delayed by a redesign and organizational changes.

Yesterday, it came in the mail. Unfortunately, I couldn't find an online replica of the new design, so I old-school scanned on of the pages from the new edition, it's after the jump.

I love you Bitch, but why so much pink??

The new design of the magazine is in color (great!) but the color makes it kind of blinding to read. It's a bubble gum/hot pink and it's just too much. I don't mind the headlines, the title boxes, the pink accents. But a good percentage of the graphics and photos are also pink hued (see scanned page after the jump). It makes it hard to read and unpleasant.

Any color, used this way, would produce a similar effect. But I still have to ask the question--why pink? As a magazine that has always been an amazing feminist critique of pop culture, I think we've seen enough pink to last us quite a while--in every product and commercial targeted to women. I'm not a pink hating feminist, but I can't help but seriously question this design decision.

I've worked on enough publications to know that a muti-colored layout would be way more expensive, but to be honest I prefer the old black and white version to this pink mania.

Update: I got this email from Andi Zeisler, Editor of Bitch (I had emailed her to let her know about my post):

Since this was our first issue with spot color, we expected some technical difficulties with the transition from black-and-white to spot color. Because of this, we decided to use magenta, which as one of the four process color makes it a known quantity -- you know what to expect and there are generally few unpleasant surprises in the printing process. Aesthetically, we felt like it announced Bitch's new look in a way that was fun and splashy, and since the Bitch website uses bright, poppy colors, the magenta fits well with the color palette we've been developing.

As for the girly implications of the color pink, obviously we're aware that pink still signifies a lot with regard to women and representation, and this issue was meant to neither comment on that nor reclaim it. Bitch has always engaged with the varied meanings of the color (you might recall that we did a whole Pink Issue back in 2001), and we're really not interested in either writing it off entirely or embracing it in an ironic, pink-can-be-feminist-too! way. For this particular issue, the color choice was an aesthetic and practical decision, and we're very happy with it. We did expect that some people wouldn't be, but we're also well aware that we won't please everyone every time.

Also Bitch previewed the new design on their facebook group--if you search through it you can find images of this edition. I'm happy to hear that the pink is not permanent, and interested to see how the spot color turns out in future issues.

On August 26th, 1920 the 19th Amendment went into effect. It gave women the right to vote in the United States. Via InfoPlease

This is why today is also marked the annual Women's Equality Day, started in 1971 by Bella Abzug.

Is anyone else having a really hard time waking up this morning? (Yes, I may still be recovering from my sis throwing me a bachelorette party Friday night.) I figure there's nothing like a never-ending slide show of feminist graffiti to put in a little spring in one's step...

On August 3, 1993 Ruth Bader Ginsberg was approved by a vote of 96-3 to serve as the second female Supreme Court Justice, and the first Jewish woman to serve on the court.

The timing is appropriate, since Judge Sotomayor (who would be the third female justice on the court) is set to be voted on by the Senate as soon as this week.

I've decided to start highlighting historical events in Feminism that happened on this day in the past.

Today's event is from July 31, 1916. On that day NASCAR's first woman driver was born, Louise Smith. From the History Channel:

Louise Smith, NASCAR's first female act, was born on this day in 1916. Known as racing's "Good ol' Gal" she competed in stock-car racing during its decidedly "good ol' boy" years. A native of Greenville, South Carolina, Smith raced various Modified, Sportsman, and Grand National series events between 1946 and 1956.

I find it both deeply troubling and kind of awesome that this study in the Psychology of Women Quarterly was done. I mean, aren't we past the whole feminists-hate-men thing yet? (I know, I know - that one will never get old.)

Three researchers from the University of Houston found that feminists aren't "man-haters" and - get this! - anti-feminists are the ones who have more negative attitudes about men.

"Our work finds that, indeed, non-feminists believe in traditional gender roles such as men being breadwinners and women being caregivers. At the same time, these non-feminists actually appear to resent the confines of the traditional roles they advocate, which presents a paradox for women and men in traditional heterosexual relationships," says researcher Melinda Kanner. (Emphasis mine)

If that's right, the folks at the Independent Women's Forum and Concerned Women for America must be the most man-hatingest ladies out there! (Watch your back, Solanas!)

This is sort of insane. As Texas develops new curriculum standards for social studies textbooks, a couple of specially picked "experts" to advise them during the process are trying to omit civil rights leaders who they believe are "given too much attention":

"To have César Chávez listed next to Ben Franklin" - as in the current standards - "is ludicrous," wrote evangelical minister Peter Marshall, one of six experts advising the state as it develops new curriculum standards for social studies classes and textbooks. David Barton, president of Aledo-based WallBuilders, said in his review that Chávez, a Hispanic labor leader, "lacks the stature, impact and overall contributions of so many others."

Marshall also questioned whether Thurgood Marshall, who argued the landmark case that resulted in school desegregation and was the first black U.S. Supreme Court justice, should be presented to Texas students as an important historical figure. He wrote that the late justice is "not a strong enough example" of such a figure. (Emphasis mine)

And of course they couldn't leave out feminist figure Anne Hutchinson. Marshall contended in his report, "She was certainly not a significant colonial leader, and didn't accomplish anything except getting herself exiled from the Massachusetts Bay Colony for making trouble." When he says "making trouble," he means, you know, advocating for equality, religious freedom and other kinds of meddling those broads tend to do.

How does one become qualified to be an "expert" in making decisions about Texas education curricula anyway? Be a Christian minister or the former chairman of the Texas Republican party. Those are some expert historians you've got there!

I love this post from Miranda at Women's Glib in its entirety (a response to conservative sex scare tactics concerning young people), but it's this quote that had me cheering in my seat:

Young people are certainly not the only group whose bodies are subject to public scrutiny and moral debate, but this backlash against the use of appropriate protection and enthusiastic consent to seek pleasure is an almost laughable example of the "keep your legs closed, you silly youngsters!" mentality. Is there a magical button, somehow pressed when a person turns 18, that suddenly allows them to experience sexual desire, pleasure, and satisfaction? Of course not; you and I know this is a ridiculous idea. But conservatives are all caught up in it when they act as though teenagers are across-the-board immature and utterly devoid of agency.

It's not a secret: we know -- because we're doing it -- that sex feels good.

A new blog for teenage feminists, called the f bomb is up!

About The F bomb:

The FBomb.org is a blog/community created for teenage girls who care about their rights as women and want to be heard. Young feminists who are just a little bit pissed off and very outspoken are more than welcome here.

Name
In this case the "F Bomb" stands for "feminist." However, the fact that the "F Bomb" usually refers to a certain swear word in popular culture is not coincidental. The FBomb.org is for girls who have enough social awareness to be angry and who want to verbalize that anger. The FBomb.org is loud, proud, aggressive, sarcastic...everything teenage feminists are today.

Author
Julie Zeilinger is one of the proudest teenage feminists of all, who delivers every bitter social commentary with a smile. She's from Pepper Pike, Ohio, and her own experiences with constant bad weather and a depressing city life have made her comfortable with (loudly) expressing her every complaint. She is a wary optimist who loves chocolate and hates people who speak two inches away from her face. Queries, comments and bad jokes to be sent to: juliez@thefbomb.org

Very cool. Check it out here.

The NY Times writes last week about marriage, infidelity and Mark Sanford,

Despite strong social riptides working against it -- the liberalization of divorce laws, the vanishing stigma of divorce, the continual online temptations of social sites like MySpace or Facebook -- the marriage bond is far stronger in 21st-century America than many may assume. Infidelity is one of the most common reasons cited by people who divorce. But surveys find the majority of people who discover a cheating spouse remain married to that person for years afterward. Many millions more shrug off, or work through, strong suspicions or evidence of infidelity. And recent trends in marriage suggest that the institution itself has become more resilient in recent years, not less so.

The article looks at statistics and finds that since more people are staying married, despite the temptations to get divorced or cheat, marriage is working. It ignores one key fact, that perhaps less people are actually getting married, but more often just live together. The article does acknowledge that since people get married older, they are more clear about what they want and are better equipped at "making it work."

Firstly, if it is true, that people stay together after infidelity, looking at examples of public officials is not a good gauge of this since public couples have more at stake to stay together and not be destroyed by the public eye and the news media. They want to make an example of how they can overcome obstacle in their relationships, even if it is at great personal cost.

Secondly, if people are staying together despite infidelity, it could be for a variety of reasons. One, the pressure of marriage, culturally and financially doesn't allow for all the transgressions we think our "free" society allows and second, our view of monogamy has shifted and we can accept when someone falls off the path of heteronormative monogamy. I am sure there are more open marriages now than there were say 30 years ago.

But that doesn't change the main argument in the article which is really about how marriage is a resilient social institution. And I think it is safe to say the fact that marriage has become a booming industry, increasing cultural norm in almost retrograde terms and the government's re-commitment to keep it between a man and a woman are not innocent players in this supposed resiliency. So I guess the question is, has anything really changed? Has feminism helped at all in helping women not buy into the industry of marriage?

Well, interestingly, it seems that feminism is part of what is keeping marriage working.

Some of the same social changes that have unsettled traditional 1950s-era marriages have seemingly deepened them in the 1990s and 2000s. Today women are contributing more financially to relationships than earlier generations, and men are contributing more to the domestic duties. Compared with earlier generations, men and women today are more likely to marry someone like themselves, with a similar educational background, experts say. The relationship is less about dividing economic and domestic duties and more about shared interests and mutual happiness.

That is something I can buy, but I still take issue with the "who" of these articles. Only a handful of my friends are actually getting married. Many of them may want to, but many of them are having kids without husbands and they are not getting married. Some because they don't want to, or they haven't found someone to marry or they don't have access to the means to have a wedding. I am over studies that are just about how middle class people stay married and cheat or do not cheat. What are the relationship habits of people that don't marry, that try alternatives, that don't have social access to marriage (the queer community, poor people, etc), what are they doing? Their behavior will tell us much more about the institution of marriage than just looking at statistics of how many people are staying married.

Check Jessica out on CNN talking about whether feminism is obsolete! (Can you guess what her answer is?)

Hey friends, just had to write a little post about the new Vendela Vida/Dave Eggers movie, Away We Go. Besides featuring the oh-so-goofy-cute John Krasinski and the awesomeawesomeawesome Maya Rudolph, you absolutely cannot miss the amazing parody of hyperconscious feminist parenting played by Maggie Gyllenhaal. Everything from militant breastfeeding to "family bed" to the exoticization of women of color is packed into this parody punch that will make feministing readers laugh their asses off.

Beyond that, the movie is satisfying and truly unique. Sometimes the quirky dialogue grated on my nerves a bit, and I absolutely detested one scene involving a woman dealing with a recent miscarriage, but other than that, I thought it was great. And I'm telling you, M.G. does a freakish version of the sanctimonious feminist so well, you will pee your pants.

We just got this letter from a reader:

Help out a newbie!
I just new to feminism, thanks to my psychology of women class I'm taking this summer. It inspired me to read Full Frontal Feminism - now I'm hooked! But...I have no idea where to go from here. What should I read next? And what can I do as someone who's still pretty clueless but would like to change that and get involved?
Thanks for any suggestions!

My two cents:
On reading, you can't go wrong with Sister Outsider by Audre Lorde, Backlash by Susan Faludi, and This Bridge Called My Back by Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzaldua (among SO many others). Seal Press also has a new series called Seal Studies designed to be an introduction to a lot of different topics that you might want to check out.

Reading blogs is a great thing too. Make sure to look for voices with perspectives that are unlike your own, allowing you to stretch your definitions of what constitutes a feminist issue and even how you might look at the same ol' things.

On getting involved, I think starting locally is a great way to get your feet wet in feminist activism. Is there a feminist group on your campus or on in your town that you can get involved in? The people you meet there can probably key you into other activist networks. Activism, just like everything else in life, is about relationships, so start meeting other feminists and they'll lead you to the action. Also, be sure to check our events page to look out for other feminists in your area doing great work.

Alright community, what suggestions do you have for this self-declared newbie?

If you're in the Brooklyn area, don't miss our intergenerational conversation in honor of Father's Day where we'll be exploring questions like:

• How were your ideas about men and masculinity formed while growing up?
• How did men shape your thinking about your own identity as a woman?
• What is the role for men in the contemporary and future feminist movement?

It's really meant to be a dialogue, so the more folks we can pack in for their perspective, the richer the learning. Best of all, it's basically free (voluntary donation on the way in).

Deets:
Brooklyn Museum of Art
Saturday, June 20th, 2-4pm
Courtney Martin, Gloria Feldt, Deborah Siegel, and Kristal Brent Zook

And for those of you who liked Spy vs. Spy, the DJs that started the anniversary bash out right, consider ending the day lovely at Underwater Lounge in D.U.M.B.O. Brooklyn (no cover). They claim that if you show up in summer gear, they'll buy you a drink?!

My friend Gwen sent me this awesome video of Bad Brya, a Moroccan MC who performed this song at the 7th European Feminist Research Conference. Love it.

We've received a ton of reader mail (and public requests) over the course of the past week asking us to blog about an article that appeared on Playboy's website about conservative women they'd "like to hate-f*ck." Several people have asked us write about it to "prove" we are against sexism and hatespeech directed at all women, regardless of their ideological orientation. Others are saying that, because we haven't blogged about this one article, which has since been taken down, we are ok with sexism directed at conservative women.

And I'm getting annoyed. Because this sounds really familiar. During the presidential campaign (and long after) conservatives liked to invent a narrative in which feminists did not decry sexism directed at Sarah Palin. These poor souls are all apparently unable to use The Google. Because if they were, they would have turned up:

Sarah Palin Sexism Watch: O'Reilly Edition
Palin Sexism Watch: Proud Uncle McCain Edition
Palin Sexism Watch: C-Word Edition
Palin Sexism Watch: Sex Doll Edition
Sarah Palin Sexism Watch: Halloween Costume Edition
Palin Sexism Watch: Sexist Stereotypes Edition
Sarah Palin Sexism Watch: Schoolgirl action-figure edition
Sarah Palin Sexism Watch: Skirt-wearing, SexyMom edition
Palin Sexism Watch: VPILF Edition

And there's more -- including a recent post calling out the misogyny against Miss California Carrie Prejean.

What I find almost laughable is that most of the conservatives who have said, "HA! See? Feministing doesn't care about that Playboy article, and therefore all feminists are hypocrites!" are not folks who normally give two shits about sexism. They only care about this article because they think it's a "gotcha" moment.

The real reason I, personally, have chosen not to blog about the Playboy article (or the follow-up on a right-wing blog titled "liberals we'd like to hate-f*ck") is the same reason I choose not to write about every offensive thing published in Maxim or on many other sites that are repeatedly, link-baitingly sexist: because I (or any number of feminists) am not going to change the very editorial mission of these publications. My writing about how fundamentally screwed up an article is will not lead to more feminist or less sexist content in Playboy in the future. It will just give them many more hits. I'd rather spend my time calling out widespread media narratives that are sexist (i.e. Palin is a "VPILF") and trying to change them.

Moderator Isobel Coleman begins by pointing out that there is some controversy over the title of the panel itself. She asks: "Is this a new agenda? Who's agenda is it?"

The first panelist to speak is Lamia Karim (pictured right), from the Department of Anthropology at the University of Oregon. She speaks to all of the various human rights discourses, many of which she obviously doesn't think are complex or ethical. "What I am most interested in is grassrooots, indigenous, human rights movements organized, not around an individual human, but much more on a group rights basis.This is taking up these rights discourses but trying to renegotiate with the realities on the ground."

"As feminists we need to really go beyond the rhetoric of the empowerment of women and ask carefully, 'What does it take to empower women? Is money enough? What does it mean to give women access to capital without giving them skills training?' This is the Grameen Bank model--based on neo-liberalism."

Larnia has a book coming out through UC Press in spring 2010 which she describes as "a radical critique of this model, this particular model. I wanted to put it out there because this has become a very innovative way of framing how women, especially in the global south and very poor women, can be economically and socially empowered." Can't wait for that!

Isobel turns to Jill Lester next, who is the ED of The Hunger Project, to ask her what her reaction is to the radical critique of micro lending.

"Unfortunately, I think we're going to be in violent agreement." [audience laughs]

"The Hunger Project believes in an integrated approach to poverty. Part of that is having a micro finance facility. We ask the community to form a micro finance committee of 100% women to set their own agenda."

Next up is Radhika Balakrishnan (pictured left), of the Marymount Manhattan College:
"Rather than talking about the crisis as if it something that fell from the sky, we're calling it the 'manufactured crisis,' caused by deliberate changes that the government made in the regulatory framework."

"We're trying to turn human rights around on them. You want to oppose human rights all over the world? What about the human right violation right here. What about the TARP legislation? There's no transparency. That's public money. This is our institution. Therefore there's a human rights obligation on the state."

Cynthia Enloe (holy amazing) jumps in as the pinch hitter:

"One has to be able to think analytically in order to act. I've hated the theory-practice divide. It's stupid. Anyone who acts, especially if you try to act collectively, if you try to mobilize beyond your best friend, it means you've done some causal thinking. You are an analyst. Out of your action come new analytical understandings. It works and you think why did it work? Or it didn't and you have to go back to the drawing table. We are all analysts. We are all thinkers who think thinking matters. Thinking is in handshake with action."

"If we've learned something from feminist thinking from around the world, it is that you have to think big in order to think small--the guys say that of course--but you also have to think small in order to think big. It works both ways and it's really one of the great strengths of feminist thinking for action."

"We are at a moment now where we've got a pool of schools and an understanding of what needs to be acted upon, some people call it an agenda, and we are at a moment, not just because we have a new president of one country, not just because the institutions of capitalism are wobbly (they're not as wobbly as we'd liked)."

"We really are at a moment amongst all of us, and I mean all of us who aren't in the room, where we have the capacity to think as if it matters and the capaity to know what needs to be acted upon. This is a very, very exciting moment. We shouldn't let cynicsm let that moment pass."

"Think as if it matters and then act as if it affects our thinking."

I'm going to let my friend Laura Leischner, the Prevention Specialist at The Collins Center, blog this one out...

It's a pretty informal setting with people finishing their lunch, but the caucus is going to be moderated by Kyla Bender-Baird and Lisa Rast, both of NCRW. Everyone went around and introduced themselves. There are a wide range of women in the room, from freelancers, college students to attorneys.

Lisa talks about how one of her favorite quotes is by Madeleine Albright, "There's a special place in hell for women that don't support other women." She poses the question, "How can we support other women while looking out for ourselves?" A tough one indeed.

A NCRW intern Shirley raises the point that she appreciates the quote, but doesn't like how it focuses on the individual. Sisterhood is powerful.

Another participant transitions and talks about corporations and the lack of support that they give women here in the US (especially with maternity leave) as opposed to other countries. She explains we are taught here to compete with men.

Lisa raises the point that in New York, in all sectors of business, the norm is leaving the office at 7pm. This point alone shows the importance we place on work as our livelihood and in turn how it's becoming our whole life.

Someone brings up the point about women's organizations and how there is an internal glass ceiling there. She says that If the older women don't get out of the way, how can we as young women get a move on and take the reins? It's a constant struggle for us as young feminists and something time and time again we end up talking about.

A new study shows that when girls do worse than boys at math, the likely culprit is culture.

Amanda gets her hands on an anti-choice manual - read it, if you can stomach it.

Ann and Dana bring you the third installation of "Ask a Feminist." This time it's door-opening protocol...

Emily at RH Reality Check calls out "pro-lifers" who abet in terrorizing abortion providers.

Saletan at Slate hits a new low with this headline: Is it wrong to murder an abortionist?

New research explores Twitter and gender

Julia Serano announces a show she'll be participating in at the 2009 National Queer Arts Festival: Girl Talk: A Cis and Trans Woman Dialogue.

Check out Jessica Wakeman's personal essay on resolving the conflict between her fetish for being submissive in the bedroom and her staunch feminist identity outside of it.

Don't sleep on Katha Pollitt's great piece in the Nation on intergenerational feminism:

Media commentators love to reduce everything about women to catfights about sex, so it's not surprising that this belittling and historically inaccurate way of looking at the women's movement--angry prudes versus drunken sluts--has recently taken on new life, including among feminists....

The wave structure, I'm trying to say, looks historical, but actually it is used to misrepresent history by evoking ancient tropes about repressive mothers and rebellious daughters. Second wave: anti-porn; third wave: anything goes! But second wave was never all anti-porn--think of Ellen Willis, for heaven's sake. It even gave us the propaganda term "pro-sex." The ACLU is jampacked with feminist lawyers of a certain age. In fact, feminists in the '70s and '80s had the same conflicts over pornography that are playing out today among young women over raunch and sex work. You wouldn't know it from the media, but there are plenty of young feminists who do not see pole-dancing as "empowering" and do not aspire to star in a Girls Gone Wild video. Ariel Levy's Female Chauvinist Pigs sold very well on campus. These women don't fit the wave story line, however, so nobody interviews them.

It was so gratifying to see Pollit sum up the misconceptions and spuriously simple tropes of second and third wave here. And got me thinking more personally about my journey with intergenerational analysis...

As a younger writer, I was sometimes guilty of peddling in second wave stereotypes; it was a reaction, I think, that stemmed from (1) my sense of powerlessness and (2) my hunch that to be a writer of note, one had to be salacious and even a bit mean (see Linda Hirshman school of commentary).

With regard to the former, taking aim at the old guard allowed me to feel some sense of power, when I was otherwise relegated to making copies and pitching magazines like crazy with little to no response. It seems like part of our generational divide in print and online is directly rooted to our lack of forums and systems by which younger women can feel heard and seen (exactly what feministing strives to counter).

With regard to the latter, I don't ascribe to that theory on getting literary attention. While I do try to make fresh arguments, and sometimes aim for a little provocation, I am deeply committed to not caricaturing people in my writing. I don't think it makes any of us smarter or the world any more just.

I try to avoid over-generalizations these days, even as I attempt to sometimes analyze generational trends within the feminist movement. What's hard for me, and it would be interesting to hear Pollitt's take on this, is that there are generational differences that I'd like to address, but there is sometimes a fine line between addressing difference and reinforcing generalizations. For example, I do believe that older feminists tend to take a fairly myopic view when it comes to what constitutes a feminist issue. Does this mean that every young feminist identifies with intersectionality or every older feminist doesn't? Certainly not. But there is an important, largely historically-shaped trend there that warrants exploration. By doing so, I don't want to be seen as someone who reinforces stereotypes.

Ultimately, the proof is in the pudding with this kind of analysis. With thoughtful writing, good editing, and clear intentions I think we can do intergenerational analysis without stereotyping whole groups of people, but it takes care and a certain sense of efficacy not to grasp for the cheap shots, but to strive for the transformational conclusions.

Check out the books: Poems from the Women's Movement by Honor Moore and The Little Book of Meaning by Laura Berman Fortgang.

Approximate transcript after the jump.

Check out the Q&A that Damsel, a blog for and by feminist 20-somethings, did with me. I thought that they asked some great questions. An excerpt:

Damsel: I'm not going to lie: It really pisses me off when women who subscribe to feminist beliefs (and reap the benefits of the movement) refuse to call themselves feminists. Frankly, I think they're ingrates. You, on the other hand, have said you "don't actually care much" whether people wear the label. And you write for Feministing.com! Help me understand your reasoning.

CM: First off, I champion you for feeling so strongly about the feminist label. I get it. I really do. But for me, the history of feminism is so complicated and the continued class issues so entrenched, that I really empathize with women who want to distance themselves from the label. Feminism was historically seen as a very white movement, and too often, it still resides in the upper echelons of society (colleges, fancy feminist organizations etc.). I hope that young women of diverse ethnic and class backgrounds identify, but if they don't, I don't want them to feel like they can't fight for gender justice alongside me and the other card carrying Feminists.

Read the rest here.

I'm loving this series from The American Prospect (and not only because our very own Ann is involved.) This week, the question is..."Is it sexist to say the financial crisis was caused by men?"

I suppose I shouldn't be surprised to see this headline: "Sex, drink and fashion. Is this the new face of American feminism?"*

After all, if there's anything the mainstream media loves, it's painting feminists - specifically young feminists - as vapid and sex-crazed. (See here, here, here, here and here.)

While I'm tempted to weigh in on this particular article and the many ways in which it got things wrong - especially since it touches on something I blogged about recently - I think there's a larger issue that's more important to get at. (Though damn it's hard not to say anything about the piece - especially the 6 bullet points at the end. Wow.)

There's a reason that the mainstream media continually covers young feminists in this way. Backlash is part of it, of course: framing feminism as a perpetual catfight or a watered down movement based on drinking and fucking is a great way to dismiss it. But it's also indicative of a media that has no interest in nuance or truthfulness when it comes to covering women.

When I read this latest article, I was reminded of something I wrote in The Purity Myth about the moral panic wackiness surrounding young women's sexuality:

The fact is, focusing on hyped-up problems that sell newspapers and titillate the imagination make it that much easier to ignore actual problems young women are facing, issues that take a lot more than a moral scolding to fix. For a young woman living in poverty, spring break isn't even an option, let alone a concern. For a young woman who has no health insurance, the "moral" debate over STIs won't do anything for her the next time she needs to see a doctor. And for a young single mother, hearing about herself as an unfortunate statistic isn't going to make her life any better or easier.

The same could be said about the media's feminism problem. Salacious headlines about feminists-gone-wild not only sell newspapers - they also make it that much easier for people to ignore actual feminist work that's being done. When was the last time you saw an article about youth organizations like the Pro-Choice Education Project, or feminist media like Shameless? Have you ever seen a mainstream media profile on any of the women here? Of course not. Because focusing on the truth of what feminists activists and media makers are up to would mean portraying women as thoughtful, socially engaged citizens. (Wouldn't that be ridiculous!) It just doesn't jibe with how America wants to see women, especially young women; they'd prefer to think we're all nekkid, drunk and stupid.

Now, I don't fool myself into thinking that this media narrative about feminists (or women) is going anywhere anytime soon. But that doesn't mean we can't do anything about it. When you see an article that relies on bullshit stereotypes about feminism, inundate the reporter with links to profiles of young feminists and youth-led organizations. Show them what feminism really is.

*Full disclosure: The reporter who wrote this piece contacted me via email for an interview, I didn't have the time to respond. (And now I'm really glad that I didn't!)

Rola Dashti, one of the four women elected to Parliament

This past Saturday, four women won seats in the Kuwaiti parliament--the first time ever women have been represented in the parliament. Women in Kuwait were only given the right to vote and run for office in 20062005, so this is a huge step forward in a short amount of time.

From CNN:

'The Kuwaiti women have been able to notch up this great victory at a crucial time and set a precedent in the history of Arabian Gulf parliaments,' Mohammad Al-Feili, a constitutional law professor at Kuwait University, told the official Kuwait News Agency.

Two-hundred-and-ten candidates ran for 50 seats in the general election; 16 were women.

Al-Awadhi said the elections proved Kuwaitis want political change.

'Yes, they do, absolutely,' she said. 'Yes, I mean, this is my second time running for election. I ran last time ... and yes, people were talking about change. But this time, I realized that people are determined -- that they want to achieve change, they want to see change happen.'

UPDATE: On a related note, Lithuania just elected it's first female president, Dalia Grybauskaite.

If you want to chat with me about The Purity Myth feel free to hit me up directly or use #puritymyth to talk to me or others about the book. (Not sure what a hash tag is? Check out Deanna's great post, A non-fanatical beginner's guide to Twitter.)

I know, I know. Everyone is talking about Twitter. So many people are tweeting and talking about tweeting, it's nearly jumped the shark. But I don't care - I love it. Mostly because I love following fabulous feminists. I can see what Sarah Haskins is up to, or what Latifa Lyles (running for NOW president!) is thinking. I can even follow the bloggers I like.

How about you, do you tweet? Who is your favorite person to follow? (And of course, if you'd like to follow your friendly Feministing bloggers, our twitter profiles are listed after the jump. /self-promotion)

Courtney's post last week, and the subsequent comments, stirred up some thoughts that a few community bloggers added their opinions on. Since some of you suggested this in comments a few weeks back, here is a round-up of the community blog posts about male feminists.

First, the link to Courtney's original post where she stated that male feminists are underrated (and some commenters disagreed).

Next, Gular, added some thoughts in the post Can anyone be overrated?

I have been closely following the overrated/underrated post that Courtney put up a couple days ago. I find one of the trends rather confounding, and that's the pile on of "male feminists" as overrated. I think it highlights a problem that should be addressed within this, and the entire, community of feminists. It's this: male feminists are important and, more over, vital.

There are many men here on Feministing, especially as of late. They are a pretty vocal minority and I am admittedly one of them. I think it's first to start there and work into where the rest of this is going.

Moody Girl shared her thoughts in the post, Some More Thoughts on Men and Feminism.

I think the idea of male feminists as "overrated" which was lately expressed in the comments on the overrated/underrated post reflects less a desire for men to abstain from participating either on this site or in women's movements in general and more an acknowledgement of some of the problems of male participation. To say that something is overrated is not to say that it is bad or even that it is not important, but that too much attention is devoted to it. For instance, here we are, discussing the desirability of men's participation in feminism and the terms on which it ought or ought not to take place, rather than engaging in discourse that some of us might find ultimately more productive.

Last, Marc wrote the post, How men can be better feminists/allies/partners.

I am far from perfect. As a male feminist, I've stumbled, picked myself back up, learned and stumbled some more, and I am still stumbling - that is, to say, I've been in feminist movement for quite a while now and believe that part of being a feminist is about growth. I came to the feminist movement five years ago as a freshman and I am still learning and making mistakes.

As such, and in response to recent posts on this site about the involvement of men within feminism and whether they are "overrated," I'd like to make this post about how we, as men, can be better partners and allies to the feminist community.Please feel free to contribute and add your advice. It's the only way we'll learn to be better partners.

If you want to join the discussion, you can comment on any of the above threads. A reminder though: keep the comments clean and refrain from using personal attacks.

So my friend Andrew Marantz came up with the idea to collect people's lists of the four most overrated things--inspired by just such a list by grumpster Christopher Hitchens ("champagne, lobsters, anal sex, and picnics"). Ever since he invited me to participate, it has been taking over my brain, so I warn you now, it might do the same to you.

I won't reveal what I finally submitted because it hasn't been unveiled yet, but you should submit yours to Andrew at overratedlist@gmail.com. Meanwhile, I thought I'd post a feminist version with a twist over here at feministing. And yes, the whole exercise is meant to be controversial. It's not fun to declare "the patriarchy" as overrated, for example, because we all know that.

Overrated:
1. the abortion debate
2. gender and sexual binaries
3. women's innate peacefulness
4. nonprofits

Underrated:
1. class critique
2. young women
3. male feminists
4. birth control

Add your lists in comments!

In a book review about the life of Helen Gurley Brown, feminist author Naomi Wolf manages to malign second and third wave feminists - impressive! Hackneyed quips abound in this piece, where stodgy old feminists are humorless and sexless, and young feministas are all lipstick and high heels.

And guess what? In the long battle between the two styles of feminism, Brown, for now, has won. Just look at the culture around us. Ms. Magazine, the earnest publication that defined feminism in the 1970s and '80s, has been replaced on college women's dorm room shelves by sexier, sassier updates such as Bitch and Bust. The four talented, smart -- and feminist -- women of "Sex and the City," who are intent on defining their own lives but are also willing to talk about Manolos and men, look more like Brown's type of heroine than "Sisterhood Is Powerful" readers. The stereotype of feminists as asexual, hirsute Amazons in Birkenstocks that has reigned on campus for the past two decades has been replaced by a breezy vision of hip, smart young women who will take a date to the right-on, woman-friendly sex shop Babeland.

Seriously? I find it incredibly depressing that the mainstream media - and feminists! - are so intent on regurgitating this nonsense. It gets us nowhere. (But the newspapers sure do love it!)

Via Feministe.

Check out this awesome ongoing blog dialogue between Letha Dawson Scanzoni, 72, and Kimberly B. George, 27--thus the snazzy name of the blog, 72-27. They are both self-identified Christian feminists and discuss everything from labor division in the home to violence in Pakistan to chickens. Don't miss it. A long excerpt from super smart Kimberley:

I wanted to begin this letter by letting you know that I have been thinking a great deal about that first article you linked in your last post (the BBC article that talked about women reportedly confessing the sin of pride more than men). It so happened that when I got your letter I was reading Feminist Theory and Christian Theology by Serene Jones. (Dr. Jones used to be a professor at Yale Divinity School, and now she is at Union Theological Seminary.) Her book gave me a news lens for seeing some of the important issues in Reformed theology, particularly the weighty idea of "pride equals sin" within that tradition.

Jones explains that Calvin, similar to many preachers today, focused on pride as being one of the most damaging aspects of the human condition. Pride was a brazen, over-inflation of self that offended God, or so Calvin and others have said. It was the essence of sin and to be avoided at all cost for a healthy spiritual life.

Dr. Jones questions where women--and other marginalized people--fit in this tradition. It is one thing for the most powerful people in society to promote these ideas around pride: perhaps Calvin's deepest struggle really was this grandiosity of self that he describes. Certainly, many of the preachers I have listened to seem to struggle with pride a great deal, so it makes sense to me that they would define sin in terms of over-inflation of self.

And yet these preachers and theologians are often white heterosexual men with tremendous spiritual authority who are at the top of the power structures in society. Of course they struggle with pride. They are simply reading the Bible and writing their theology out of their lived experience. They are being honest with what they know-- they just are not seeing from the vantage points of those not sharing their pedestal. Perhaps they have no idea of the "view from below" or have no sense of what it means to hold the kind of power that they have. (Indeed, they might even deny that a power structure exists, so far are they from understanding marginalization)

So, what happens when all those messages about the sin of "pride" are communicated from a position of power to those who are disempowered and marginalized? What happens when the promoters of this theology are in an entirely different position of status and voice than those "below" them?

This blogs represents just the kind of dialogue that I hope will be happening in person at the upcoming Omega Institute conference next fall, Women & Power: Connecting Across the Generations. Don't forget to get those scholarships in.

Full bios for Letha and Kimberley after the jump.

From the NYTimes:

Marilyn French, a writer and feminist activist whose debut novel, "The Women's Room," propelled her into a leading role in the modern feminist movement, died on Saturday in Manhattan. She was 79 and lived in Manhattan.

With steely views about the treatment of woman and a gift for expressing them on the printed page, Ms. French transformed herself from an academic who quietly bristled at the expectations of married women in the post-World War II era to a leading, if controversial, opinion maker on gender issues who decried the patriarchal society she saw around her. "My goal in life is to change the entire social and economic structure of Western civilization, to make it a feminist world," she once declared.

That's a goal I can get behind.

More thoughts about French's work and life at Isak.

I'm happy to be able to share the video from my session at WAM 2009: In/Out of Focus: Gender, Non-conformity and the Media.

I unfortunately don't have a transcript and the live twitter feed from the session (the tag was #wam09gnc) seems to have expired. My apologies to folks who are not able to listen to the video. Here are a few links to a few liveblogs from the session:

Susan Mernit
Kerri Kanelos
Jill at Feministe
Anna J. Cooke
Chicks Rock Blog
Mikhaela Reid drew this cartoon in response to the panel

I was really excited to be part of this conversation with Jack Aponte (of Angry Brown Butch and Feministe), Julia Serano and Kate Bovitch. Our hope was to focus on the issues of gender non-conformity within feminist spaces like WAM, feminist blogs and feminist media. I think we got a really interesting conversation going.

I've been reflecting a lot on this panel lately, since there has been conversation (and criticism) about how discussions about trans issues go down on feminist blogs, in particular ours. I think what it reiterates for me is how important these conversations about gender and gender non-conformity are to feminism and how difficult they are to have, particularly online.

At the WAM panel we never had issues with people asking questions that were offensive, or off-topic, or derailing in the way people talk about our comment threads. Maybe that's because the panel was a self-selecting group of people, or because people with those kinds of comments/questions didn't feel comfortable asking them in such a public way.

I've made some mistakes in how I've begun these conversations at Feministing, particularly on the Focus on the Family post. I appreciate those who called out these mistakes in a constructive way. I'm definitely learning from those moments and I'm committed to continuing this dialogue, both on and offline.

The criticisms about comments at Feministing are well heard, and, as I've said before, we're hoping to revisit and revise our comment policy at our upcoming retreat at the end of May.

For those of you who have time to watch some of the video (the session was an hour and a half) or check out the liveblogging, I recommend it. Again, sorry about the lack of transcript!

UPDATE: Some other videos from the WAM conference are available here as well.

Check out my piece in The American Prospect about how Laura Kipnis' Against Love: A Polemic shook up my feminism.

Check out this interesting guest post by artist and yogini Maya Breuer on her own history as it relates to feminism through the generations, a topic we will continue to explore leading up to the conference this fall at the Omega Institute. We will be publishing a series of guest posts as a fun way of initiating some of the speakers--who are generally new to blogging--into our exciting online community. Please make them feel welcome.

Back in the 60's I did not fit the typical description of a feminist. When Gloria Steinem, Bella Abzug and Betty Friedan founded the Women's Political Caucus, I was enmeshed in the politics of economic inequality. I attended the '72 Democratic National Convention, as a representative from the National Welfare Rights Organization, protesting cutbacks in federal assistance to poor families.

Following that convention, I did community action work in equal employment and affirmative action. I was also a young black mother attempting to find my voice, which was becoming tinged with overtones from inspiring women like Angela Davis and Sonya Sanchez.

I was also in an abusive marriage. After one particular beating from my husband, I went to the local police station seeking protection. I registered my complaint. The officer asked, "Isn't he that news reporter from Channel __?" "Yes, I replied, he is."

He then asked me to have a seat. When he returned he said, "Mrs.___, we'll take you home, and have a conversation with him. Then he added, "He's a good guy, we'll talk with him."

The police escorted me home, spoke with my husband, but nothing happened. I was struck with the reality that there was no protection for me or my children. True, I was a black woman, but now I felt the need to align myself with other women, and to figure out how I fit in to the feminist movement. Was there a place for black women in the feminist movement? If I joined would it somehow diminish my commitment to racial equality?

I joined a consciousness raising group. We met regularly, we laughed, we talked, we cried, we pondered and discussed events of the day in the feminist and the civil rights movements. We talked about how restrictive marriage could be, that women had no personal reproductive rights, the need for legal protection and safe haven for women being abused, and sitting on the floor we even looked at our own vaginas with speculum-like mirrors.

I read The Feminine Mystique, lauded Shirley Chisholm's run for the Presidency and celebrated the landmark Roe v. Wade decision, all the while trying to figure out where I stood. Was I a feminist?

Since the 90's my work as a yoga instructor and director of the yoga retreat for women of color has led me to recognize the value in an evolving and growing feminist perspective. I have worked primarily with women of all ethnicities, socio economic backgrounds and generations. Our intergenerational dialogues have encouraged many to find their own voice and vision for personal growth. The need to be part of a collective feminist consciousness is as essential today as ever.

This September, women of all colors and generations are coming together at Omega for the Women and Power Conference to dialogue about feminism, health, art, body, mind and spirit. I look forward to sharing my voice and experiencing the collective voices and wisdoms of others. Perhaps our intergenerational dialogues at Omega will begin an evolution into the next wave of global woman spirit and the feminist movement.

See Maya's full bio after the jump.

A group of women from three different continents convened in Seoul, Korea to discuss the international state of oppression via patriarchy and to come up with some new forms of activism to counter-act the harsh realities faced by most women through militarism, economic oppression, sexism, imperialism and fundamentalism. Their solution was to create a School of Feminism and a network for what they call "Glocal" Activism.

The network will start with 5 glocal points (GPs) in China, South Korea, Mexico and South Africa.

"To deal with global economic crisis, we need to explore new attempts and forces. Mutual interaction between local and global will bring about new energy for feminist activism. It should be based on green (ecology)-red (Marxism)-Purple (Feminism)," says Patricia Martha from Mexico.

Glocal is a combination of 'global' and 'local.' The organisers say this is created to refer to mutual responses and relationships between 'local and local', and 'local and global'; different from the existing concept of the South, the third world or transnational, for instance.

This is a much needed initiative as women's rights continue to be ignored or scaled back world-wide. Pass this post on, let's make sure they get tons of international recognition and support.

You can read more about the entire network here and check out the website for the Network for Glocal Activism.

Thanks to Jonathon for the link!

So there has been a heated dialogue this past week, partially in response to the comment thread on my post about Focus on the Family last week. Queen Emily at Questioning Transphobia wrote an initial response to it, voz responded to the larger issue of how trans women's issues are treated at Feministing and Feministe, and Cara responded at Feministe yesterday.

I've been doing a lot of listening, and hearing, and reading. I have a lot of thoughts brewing about all of these threads.

There are two discussions I think need to come from this. One is a discussion about comment moderation and Feministing. It's a discussion we as bloggers often engage in, and one that crops up all of the time, as each of us find strategies for how to manage comment threads.

Moderating comments is probably the part of this work that I feel least adept at. I do agree that moderating is a part of our role as bloggers. It's a conversation that we plan on continuing at Feministing, and writing more about as a group. This is a group blog, and while we each moderate our own threads, we do have a collective comment policy. So more to come on that.

The other conversation is around gender identity related writing and activism. This is a conversation I am highly invested in, which is why I really appreciated reading Queen Emily's thoughts about the comment conversation and my original post. I'm invested in it because I'm a feminist, because I identify as genderqueer, because I have a strong agenda around gender. I have all sorts of thoughts and ideas about how feminism needs to evolve it's beliefs and interaction with the gender binary--including what trans inclusion looks like. At the WAM conference this year, Julia Serano, Jack Aponte, Kate Bovitch and I were on a panel to discuss these issues. I hope to post the video soon, but these are conversations I'm engaging in elsewhere as well.

These two conversations need to continue and I plan on further engaging. Unfortunately because of how life works, particularly my life where I have other responsibilities outside of this blog, I can't engage in that dialogue with all of you tonight, or tomorrow, or in the next few days. To acknowledge the fact that much of the criticims of the original thread revolved the comment moderation, I'm going to turn comments off on this post.

I'm going to be back on Monday, with more thoughts about this. I'll post a new thread then, with comments open.

Cartoon from Questionable Content

This cartoon from Questionable Content, sent to us by a reader who loves our feminist sex shop reviews. I think I've lived the above scenario at least twenty times by now. I am such an advocate of sex shops, particularly feminist ones. I'm also a huge advocate of taking my friends to buy toys. One year I bought a vibrator for everyone as a birthday present (well minus family members).

The whole strip is here.

Thanks to Catherine for the link!

Gotta give props to Brian Fairbanks over at Nerve who compiled a list of some seriously courageous, complex feminists for his Top 10 Feminist Icons. He writes:

Males have something against admitting they are feminists, perhaps because they mistakenly believe the term applies only to women.

Today, I decided to set out to right that wrong-- much as these women (and one man) did over the course of their very interesting lives. The result is pure history-filled entertainment and not meant to be definitive by any means. For one thing, Gloria Steinem, Virginia Woolf, and Sylvia Plath should be on a list of the great feminists, to be sure, but I found that so much has been written about them already and decided it was best to spare you my half-assed attempts to say something original about them.

This woman is awesome! Thanks to Lisa for the link. Apparently this show is kind of like the Canadian version of Colbert.

Last month, I spent a lot of time traveling doing speaking events for Women's History Month. Besides it being amazing because I got to meet awesome young feminist women from all over the frigging place, it was also really head-clearing to step back from the work I do online. Because let me tell you, doing the majority of your work from behind a laptop can be exhausting.

Don't get me wrong, I love the online community we have here and my heart is blogging - but spending some time with people outside of the internet really invigorated me in a way I didn't expect. Here's why...

While blogging is an amazing activist outlet and energizer, I don't think it's a secret that we get a lot of negativity thrown our way. And though we take the power away from online misogynists by posting things like our Anti-Feminist Mailbag, that shit takes a toll on you. There are only so many times you can get called a cunt, whore, slut, bitch, etc, before it starts to get to you.

And, as sad as I am to say it, the same can be true of our own comments section at times. The vast majority of our commenters and community members are incredible, but it can be really difficult and frustrating to continually get comments criticizing what we choose to write on, personally attacking us or our feminist and political cred, or just folks being plain jerkie/sexist/racist/transphobic/fat-hating.* I really started to think about this more critically in the last month because I met so so so many young women who read Feministing but who told me they didn't comment because of the sometimes-hostile environment in our threads. That just made me sad.

But hanging out with all of these incredible young feminists - women and men - who were so excited to be talking about feminist issues, who were doing all sorts of activism, and who were just genuinely stoked about creating change...it was beyond wonderful. I had a spring in my step after every event - and I'm not the spring-step type!

Doing online feminism, I feel like it's easy to get caught up in threads and user names and forget that there are people behind those computer screens - whether you're talking about bloggers or commenters. So I guess I'm just wondering how we can take the humanizing interaction of real life activism** to create better communities online: feminist communities that support each other; comments sections that are critical and contain progressive debate, but that do so without attacks and with accessibility; blogs that are informed by offline activism and visa versa.

Now, I may just have some online fatigue - after all, Feministing started almost five years ago! - but I get the impression that a lot of folks who do online work are asking themselves the same questions. What do you think? How can people doing online feminist work re-invigorate each other, especially in the face of so much misogyny? How can we create even better feminist spaces online? (Cause despite the downsides, I still think they're pretty darn great!)

*I am not saying that comments sections should be free from criticism and constructive debate. That's one of the things I love about blogging!

** "Real life" activism can be a real drag too, believe me I know. That's part of the reason I turned to blogging.

Pic from webchicken.

Check out Courtney's latest at TAP: The End of the Women's Movement. (And don't let the headline fool you!)

Yes, that Gloria. She turns 75 today and, as much, I thought it would be an opportune time to reflect on leadership within contemporary feminism.

Gloria became the face of the feminist movement--along with Betty Friedan and a few others along the way--in the late 60s. Her scandalous investigative report on Playboy catapulted her into the spotlight. She would use that blinding light to do so many incredibly things over the years--co-found The Ms. Foundation for Women, Ms. Magazine, and the National Women's Political Caucus, champion the Equal Rights Amendment, and more recently, create Choice USA--a haven for young activists in the reproductive justice movement. I, personally, have benefited from her vision in multiple ways, one of which is the Women's Media Center, which she co-founded with Jane Fonda and Robin Morgan. It trains women to be pundits in this male-dominated landscape of public debate. It's the reason I was on The O'Reilly Factor, but more importantly, it's one of the key reasons I am completely unafraid to present my feminist point of view on television, radio, or where ever else I think it might be needed.

There's no question that Steinem has used her leadership in amazing ways. But as even she has said: "A pedestal is as much a prison as any small, confined space." She has been criticized (especially over her lack of awareness about trans issues), projected upon, and blamed for much of feminism's failings. And this, in essence, is the cost of such a bright light of leadership.

She is just one woman, and as such, can't please everyone nor represent the vast range of what feminism has been and is today. Further, in a movement historically built on its ideological critique of white supremacy, it's continually disappointing to see white women chosen by mainstream media as the figureheads of the movement. Steinem is pictured with Dorothy Pitman Hughes here. Steinem wrote:

For the four or five years surrounding the birth of Ms., I was traveling and speaking as a team with a black feminist partner: first Dorothy Pitman Hughes, a child-care pioneer, then lawyer Florynce Kennedy, and finally activist Margaret Sloan. By speaking together at hundreds of public meetings, we hoped to widen a public image of the women's movement created largely by its first homegrown media event, The Feminine Mystique.... Despite the many early reformist virtues of The Feminine Mystique, it had managed to appear at the height of the civil rights movement with almost no reference to black women or other women of color. It was most relevant to the problems of the white well-educated suburban homemakers who were standing by their kitchen sinks justifiably wondering if there weren't 'more to life than this.' As a result, white-middle-class movement had become the catch phrase of journalists describing feminism in the United States..., and divisions among women were still deep.

Which brings me to today. While Gloria Steinem is still, I would argue, the most famous contemporary feminist, there are a few young women who have written their way into the spotlight--Jennifer Baumgardner, Amy Richards, our own Jessica, Andi Zeisler, at times, me. Notice anything? Yes, we're all white. White privilege has played a role in each one of our lives, in each one of our access to the publishing industry, media training, higher education etc. etc. Does it mean that we don't deserve to state our opinions in public venues or represent a feminist point of view from time to time? Of course not. But it does mean that the systems of oppression are still majorly at play in who gets the book deals, media calls, and speaking gigs. Jess and I talk a lot about ways in which we can share our privilege--both earned and unearned--with those that the national networks don't see. I know it's something Amy and Jen have talked about A LOT as well.

But what if leadership in contemporary feminism were not defined by the readily visible stuff--TV show spots and books--but on powerful activism and community building? Then you'd have a whole different list of leaders: Latifa Lyles, VP of NOW, Mia Herndon, ED of The Third Wave Foundation, and the women of INCITE!--Alisa Bierria, Eunice Cho, Chela Delgado, Nada Elia, Rosemary Gibbons, Isabel Gonzalez, Xandra Ibarra, Emi Kane, Jenny Lee, Andrea Ritchie. Etc. Etc. As our Fire in the Belly series indicates, there are young women all over the country doing amazing work. Are they leaders? Absolutely. Are they famous? No.

So what is the value of a "famous" feminist leader (or a few)? Does that value outweight the costs? Is it in our best interest to make sure that the next generation has visible leaders who are women of color, or should we throw out the idea of visible (as in mainstream media visibility) leadership altogether and embrace the grassroots activism that is really the engine of feminism as more than enough? What is the loss of that approach? Your thoughts?

*As if Gloria weren't enough birthday excitement for one day, Aretha Franklin also celebrates her birth today.

It is clear that we have been in Austin for 6 days, I have lost my voice and we may have lost our minds. But please enjoy our take on being feminists at SXSW.

Check out our other posts on SXSW music and SXSW Interactive if you haven't already.

Full transcript after the jump.

Some of the take-aways from last night's intergenerational discussion on feminism, work, and the economy at 92Y Tribeca:

• There is an opportunity, this economic downturn, for all sorts of gender shake-up. When we're forced to recognize that old styles of leadership and assumptions about gender roles are no longer valid, we can get even the most reluctant folks to try a more enlightened, equal approach. The media coverage of this phenomenon has been totally unsatisfying (dads who cook! women who work! what a revelation!), but in truth, there is something interesting going on.


• American workplaces won't change--in policy or culture--until men take this on as their own issue just as women have for years. If they can't do it under this big tent movement called feminism, maybe they can invent their own way of owning the issues. I recommend John DeGraff's Take Back Your Time organization as one way for men to test the waters.


• When older women are happy with younger women, they refer to them as empowered. When they're irritated, they call us entitled. The real meaning of entitlement is "a belief that one is deserving of certain privileges or rights." Sounds like what feminism had in mind all along, no?


• The word "choice," as you might imagine, came up an awful lot. Gloria Feldt, who is part of the ungeneration and has been through a lot of life, gets irritated when women lament how difficult it is to have so many choices. Debbie Siegel, 40-years-old and facing lay off woes with her husband, talked about men being in a unique position to choose how they want to remake masculinity in this age of uncertainty. Elizabeth Hines, in her early 30s and 9 months pregnant, talked about how it never seemed like there was a "choice" to be had in her family. Women worked through motherhood, no question about it. I am really interested in the idea that feminism is too often cast as heroism instead of self-respect. In other words, it's been perverted to meant that you choose yes on everything, rather than carefully choosing autonomy, health, fulfillment, and yes, family, if that's what you want. I think our outlandish expectations for ourselves mixed with that sense so many women have that only they can make the dinner, have the talk with their teenage daughter, clean up the living room etc. well enough, perpetuates this sense of never being enough, either in work or family.

This is just a fraction of what we explored, but I thought I'd share a little for those who couldn't attend. Check out Elisabeth Garber-Paul's take on the panel over at RH Reality Check.

There's going to be another intergenerational pow-wow, Unfinished Business--Women's Vision for the Nation: What's It Going to Take?, this weekend at the Brooklyn Museum of Art for anyone that's interested. Deets here.

Seriously? I mean...seriously?

Mother Jones blogger and columnist Debra Dickerson, responding to the NYT piece on the future of abortion providers, writes that young feminists should "blog less and work more." Ya know, because young women don't actually do anything. (Ahem.)

But you young chicks maybe need to go the Northern Exposure route, sending folks to med school in exchange for a few years running an abortion clinic. That feminist fire in the belly? I gotta say: Pole-dancing, walking around half-naked, posting drunk photos on Facebook, and blogging about your sex lives ain't exactly what we previous generations thought feminism was. We thought it was about taking it to the streets.

Yeah, taking it to the streets is something young feminists never do.

Dickerson seems to have a penchant for calling young feminists "pole dancers" and "chicks", so I'm loathe to take her too seriously...but there is something so infuriating about someone with a progressive platform like Mother Jones promoting the most hackneyed stereotypes of young feminists and young women. (Courtney via email has two questions for Debra: How many abortions have you provided? And do you know any young women?)

Harsh, you say? Uninformed? OK. Tell me exactly what today's feminists are doing for the struggle.

I think maybe we should tell her. Please go comment at MoJo and tell Dickerson what young feminists are really like. (Couldn't find her email address...)

Related: Elisabeth Garber-Paul at RH Reality Check also weighs in.

I've written a bit about my awesome road show of intergenerational feminists before:

I have had so many conversations with veteran feminists that have left me feeling like I am part of a vast and beautiful history, like I am one more radical thinker in a paradigm-shifting tradition. Most often, these are conversations that acknowledge our complexities.

For example, Gloria Feldt, the former president of Planned Parenthood who is in her 60s, challenged me on stage at one of our recent panels about my choice to support Obama. "Courtney, I'd love to hear from you on this," she began, then asked if I was worried about losing the potential to influence political leaders if a unified "women's vote" proved impossible to coalesce. A great question. I gave my most earnest answer -- that I think women, like men, are diverse and will never vote as a bloc.

I learned from the exchange (which was part of an ongoing dialogue Feldt and I have been having on stage and off) and felt like my perspective was respected and my thinking refined. I know that Feldt may not agree with all of my choices, that some of them might even disappoint or irritate her, but that she sees them in the context of who I am as a whole person, as a complex feminist.

We're hitting the stage again next week (co-sponsored by 85 Broads and the Women's Media Center): The deets:

Who: Me, Gloria Feldt, Deborah Siegel, and Elizabeth Hines (who is subbing for Kristal and is AWESOME!)
When: Wednesday, March 18, 2009 @ 7pm
Where: The 92nd Street Y-Tribeca, 200 Hudson Street
For more info.

And for those of you who aren't in NYC, we travel! Let us know if you'd like to bring us to your school, community center, or backyard BBQ. Intergenerational feminists love BBQ.

I'm really excited to announce that The Purity Myth: How America's Obsession with Virginity Is Hurting Young Women is out. (Though super nervous too!)

And while I'm anticipating some backlash - shit, even the title/cover of the book generated some conservative hand-wringing - I'm hoping that it will further the conversation about how the conservative movement uses young women's bodies and moral panic myths to push traditional gender roles and punish women who don't fit into the "pure" ideal.

If you want to get more of an idea of what the book is all about, you can download the Introduction here. Hope you enjoy it!

You can buy The Purity Myth on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Powell's or Indiebound.

This would be funny if not for this: The Vatican agrees with our 50s commercial heroines; their newspaper says that the washing machine did more to liberate modern women than birth control or the "right" to work outside the home. Yeah.

Equal Writes has more.

Thanks to Natalie for the video!

Lately, there have been some things going on in the loose, yet bizarrely limiting category of the feminist blogosphere. They have gotten me to thinking about social change, feminist activism and how it is connected to blogging and new media. This is one of those, "I am going to think out loud posts," so bear with me.

In light of recent conversations about inclusion and exclusion within the blog world, there are some facts that are apparent. Some voices are considered more legitimate than others and it doesn't exactly take rocket science to figure out why. Online interactions or power relations mirror the real world in many ways, so if you look at who is dominating dialog in mainstream media, sometimes you see those same patterns online. It is not true across the board, but generally, the words, thoughts and analysis of not just certain demographics, but also certain points of view, for example more centrist liberal ideology, is privileged.

But, I guess I already know that, since I have been blogging here for a long time and have felt first hand what it means to be a woman of color that says radical things in a very public way. It means getting threatened, it means being challenged, it means having my credibility laughed at, it means sometimes and often feeling delegitimized and stupid, it means not being linked, even when I wrote about something first. And blogging for what is considered a big feminist blog, it means being made to feel like an outsider, a betrayer to my community, someone who has stepped outside the confines of home and community, speaking my truths on someone else's soil (even though it is my soil, I have tilled and planted and I get to decide what grows and I have ownership of my croppage, and total rights to replant, haha, to continue with the metaphor if you will...). And obviously, I don't agree with all these criticisms, I can hear them, but in general, I know what I am doing and why I am doing it. I own that shit. But I am human and shit gets under my skin. I am sensitive, I get affected, I even cry (probably more often then I should.)

This analysis of race and class has been extended to which voices get heard in the feminist blogosphere. I don't want to minimize the extent to which it has been discussed, but I am not going to rehash old debates. I have written about the topic of racism and feminism before. But right now, I am just going to talk about myself. My work speaks for itself and I have let go of the belief that I can make everyone happy. Sometimes we won't get along, sometimes we just won't be friends.

What I am wondering about though is what is the meaning of all of this? Why do we blog? And is the reason we blog for our own individual voices to be heard? Or the voices of our communities? Hell, what does community look like online? I love many co-bloggers and commenters, both on Feministing and off, but my real friends are the ones I have met face to face, that have looked in my eyes and I into theirs. That does not mean that the community I build online isn't meaningful, it is. It is just different.

After working in the social change sector, I learned that everything is strategic and blogging has become one way to rally support around key issues. And it is a powerful way to do it. It is not perfect by any means, but despite all the opposition I have faced and despite all the racism that is embedded within this powerful tool and the inequitable power relations that are reproduced online, I realize this tool is not just about my own voice. It is about the stories we give light to, it is about the campaigns we support, it is about the tragedies we expose. Oftentimes, I am just the fire starter.

For me, staying rooted in a vision for social change and social justice allows me to make sense of the day to day pain of the racism, sexism, classism or othering I have experienced frequently here on the internet. I know I have a community of support behind me and I support them in the work that they do, by highlighting their campaign and their on the ground actions. That is why I blog, but obviously it is not the only reason.

I also blog because I know that I have had certain life experiences that are not documented in mainstream media or in mainstream feminism and I know there are young women everywhere that can relate to my stories. I also know there are people that appreciate my point of view and my analysis on issues, a perspective that is not often given in mainstream media. I blog because I have been given this tremendous opportunity that comes with great responsibility and I don't take it lightly. I do my best with the resources I have and I am here and I am present and I am "Fired up and Ready to Go!"

And sometimes, I get to meet people face to face and they tell me about how I changed the way they look at something, or someone running a campaign tells me that my exposure helped them get more support. And I feel really good about that and I realize that despite all the drama and all the problems with the tools themselves and the way they have manifested, I am doing what I want to be and I am accountable to who I need to be. I don't want to seem naive, because I know, we should all be so lucky. But I must say, I am lucky and I am thankful and I love blogging. And I am not going to apologize for my success at it.

There's been lots of talk about clean coal these days. Have you seen any of the industry's commercials? But what you haven't heard much about since Robert F. Kennedy visited the region back in the day is where coal comes from -- the Appalachian Mountains. His son continues to speak out about the region. Ashley Judd a long with many folks in her home state of Kentucky have been doing a lot of activism around mining and the disparities in the Appalachian Mountains there. Judd recently spoke out about a piece Diana Sawyer aired on 20/20 last week called "Children of the Mountains on Appalachian life in Kentucky -- Diane Sawyer is also from the state. The piece sparked some reaction in the blogosphere from folks who have been in the trenches working on these disparities just about their whole lives.

I decided to ask Theresa L. Burriss, the Assistant Professor of English & Appalachian Studies at Radford University, about everyday life in Appalachia and what she thought about clean coal and Diane Sawyer's piece. (Diane Sawyer did a follow-up piece last night on "Mountain Dew mouth".)

Here's Theresa...

As many of you are probably aware, I got a lot of shit for my post last week on what a day in my life looks like. Many people, both in comments and on other blogs, felt that I wrote smugly about my "easy" life without any class consciousness or respect for the fact that an economic downturn is affecting many people's lives. I was made into a caricature:

so bourgeois, so laden with economic privilege as to be tone deaf to the realities of most women's daily experiences; rich, easy, fabulous lives of professional people in coastal cities; to only have the kinds of problems wherein you have to choose between private schools and nannies, or fret over how best to represent yourself on Facebook

For me, there are two levels on which this issue must be examined. The first is the systemic level of class, race etc.-based privilege. We still live in a world where my white skin, my middle class upbringing, my able, not-fat body, and so many other factors of birth, not merit, give me power. This is a reality and anyone who claims otherwise is denying cold, hard facts and needs to unpack their knapsack, as Peggy McIntosh wrote. Those with knapsacks so heavy they drag on the ground, as well as those who carry a lighter load, are all responsible for fighting this system.

But what does that look like on a daily basis? I think that's the question that a lot of people avoid asking because it is either too painful or seems too hard. Many folks with privilege let guilt paralyze them, but what I learned long ago was that guilt doesn't put food on anyone's table or put anyone's story out into the world or even make me a smarter or more compassionate person. Another thing that folks with privilege often do is stay quiet or start fronting. Rather than admit when they've benefited from a system they may dislike, they pretend they haven't--falsely claiming money worries or putting on "struggling" airs. This is also unproductive, in addition to being inauthentic. It keeps privilege locked up.

There is a lot of amazing work out there questioning both of these reactions; check out Enough, a new blog that questions how much wealth accumulation is really necessary, and the work of Resource Generation, which gives wealthy young adults a chance to process their own responsibility and power and do productive, world-changing work with it.

So what does one do with privilege once you have it? Especially in an economic downturn when so many are being laid off, going without health insurance, losing their retirement, struggling with even basic necessities?

Critical thinking is scawy!

Republicans in Georgia have announced a campaign to try and ban "racy" college courses like queer theory, and oust the professors that teach them.

"This is not considered higher education," [State Rep. Charlice] Byrd said. "If legislators are going to dole out the dollars, we should have a say-so in where they go."

Byrd and her supporters, including state Rep. Calvin Hill, R-Canton, said they will team with the Christian Coalition and other religious groups to pressure fellow lawmakers and the University System Board of Regents to eliminate the jobs.

"Our job is to educate our people in sciences, business, math," said Hill, a vice chairman of the budget-writing House Appropriations Committee. He said professors aren't going to meet those needs "by teaching a class in queer theory."

Intellectualism is inappropriate, gosh darn it! Bryd and Hill are not just twisting themselves into a moral tizzy because state schools are teaching queer theory, but also because a couple of professors at Georgia State University are listed as experts in oral sex and male prostitution. Apparently they don't quite get the notion that one can be experts in a field - you know, like study it - without participating in said area of study.

As Georgia State spokeswoman Andrea Jones said, "Teaching courses in criminal justice, for example, does not mean that our students are being prepared to become criminals. Quite the opposite."

Kelly: an anti-feminist riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma.

In a recent interview, singer Kelly Clarkson went off on why she's not a feminist.

Would you call yourself a feminist?

No, not at all. I mean, that was the first time in my life -- which maybe I'm naïve and I've not been put in any situations like that -- but that's the first time in my life I've ever even heard someone use that mentality. I'm like, "Hey, knock-knock, 2008." Most of the men in my life have been very highly supportive. I've never had to even think like a feminist because no one around me even thinks one [sex] is higher than the other.

Really? Well it must be nice to work in an industry that's completely sexism-free! But wait...another question from the same interview.

Do you consider the record industry to be a boys' club?

I just know for a fact ... why I said that was because I was actually on a phone call with two people who did not know I was on the phone, and I literally heard somebody I used to work with say, "Well, you know what, he can get away with it because it's a guy. She's a girl, so let's just face it, it's different." And I was like, "Is this the 1950s?" I hung up and didn't listen to the rest.

Does. Not. Compute.

Longtime reader and fave commenter SarahMC has started a new blog with some friends, and we wanted to spread the love. And I'm sort of in love with the blog title and tagline:

The Pursuit of Harpyness: As narrated by six of the most charming and vicious broads on the internet.

Blog on, ladies!

I generally can't take these shows. But I couldn't help but watch this episode of Wife Swap that reader Angela emailed us. First of all, one of the women featured was a bad ass doctor/roller derby player. Add in all of the mouth-dropping moments from the husband of a beauty-obsessed pageant mom - like when he says he hopes his daughter will be a man's "accessory" one day - and I was pretty much hooked.

Maybe this can be my unfeminist guilty pleasure...

Thoughts?

Thanks to Elizabeth for sending along the pic.

Just wondering... And please, share your fave feminist new sources in comments. (Or shamelessly self-promote your feminist blog, mag, etc!)

This made me really happy today.

In its new package of rule changes, the House has finally decided to make its official language gender neutral, recognizing the growing representation of women in Congress (including as Speaker of the House). Gone are references to "he," "chairman," and phrases such as "his duties."

I'm literally giddy. Melissa breaks down why this is so important:

[A]n inevitable effect of regarding "male" as the Norm is regarding "female" as the Other. Every time we engage in the little, unimportant thing of male-universal language, we are reinforcing the very foundation of inequality upon which the entire structure of institutional sexism rests.

In short, language matters.

I have never been a fan of New Year's Resolutions. When I was younger they always had to do with losing weight or to quit eating cookies or some such thing that I was told if I do would unlock the secret to the life I always wanted. As I have gotten older and more in touch with myself and my feminism, I realize that negative self talk or putting myself up to tasks that are based on insecurity and hold the 'secret to everything I am missing' is rarely successful and never makes me feel good. So I moved to focusing on being as healthy and positive as I can be. But this year, I am coming out of my anti-New Year's resolution attitude with a few resolutions that have to do with things I want to do, not things I think I should do.

1. I commit to doing more video-blogging.
2. I want to get my personal website/consulting business up and running.
3. I will continue to write for Feministing, building on the work we have already done as we move to building relationships in the real world.
4. I will continue to not give a shit about my weight, but live a full, happy and healthy life based on self reflection, deep breathing and love.
5. I will finish my book. Hopefully. (Ha!)

Once I let go of resolutions that were based in self hate and things I didn't want to do, I realized that this is actually pretty fun, like a to-do list for the year, filled with positivity, aspirations and ways to move forward.

What are your New Year's resolutions this year?

Emma Bee Bernstein, a 23-year-old feminist photographer, died a couple of weeks ago. Jess and I both had the privilege of meeting her through her innovative project GIRLDrive, which we've blogged about previously. Emma and partner-in-crime, Nona Willis Aronowitz, hit the road and interviewed and photographed young women talking about their relationship to feminism. It morphed into a book which will be released on Seal Press in the near future. Read more about both Emma and Nona here.

I met Emma only twice, but her presence left a real impression on me. She had a quality of wild aliveness--animated about philosophy and art, dramatic about the ins and outs of her young, exciting life, literally bursting. She was beautiful, charismatic, dressed like a person who understood the playful capacity inherent in fashion, who liked to subvert people's expectations about appropriateness or trendiness. The last time I saw her and Nona, Emma had just read my book, and showered me with the most generous and seemingly authentic praise. I remember leaving the meeting feeling ten feet tall. Emma, this bright young engaged artist, had called me a philosopher. I felt like my words were important.

I can only imagine that Emma made a lot of people feel this way--like their presence, their take on the world (feminism, art, music), their words, were deeply important. I love her and Nona's project because it defies so many people's expectations about the young and cynical. It asserts that, indeed, young women are still interested in the open road, in communing face-to-face with strangers and friends alike, in intellectual journeys, in this transformative and unfinished movement called feminism.

She wrote the following, when asked to respond to the idea of intergenerational feminism for a panel at the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum of Art:

There is good news: young women artists are revolutionary. They are making works that deal fervently with gender and sexuality, that deconstruct beauty standards, that unveil the veiled. They revel in the grotesque, the cosmetic, celebrity culture. They poke fun at themselves. They show us their obsession with the "feminine", but it is pop essentialism, deadpan gender. They do not care if you think they are vapid sluts, clad in designer trends. They look with a female gaze, they have autonomy, they are not marionettes. They are, indeed, artists who are feminists. Young women thinkers will say they are gender revolutionary before they are feminist-identified, and just as they seek to explode the binaries of sex, they mix-media and ideology, creating a patchwork of consciousness that is as thoroughly contemporary as it is politically feminist.

I like to think of her reading those words. That they were about "young women"--abstractly speaking--but, most specifically, about herself. She was that revolutionary, that joker, that deconstructer, that unapologetic sexual being, that autonomous seer, that binary exploder, that conscious, political feminist theorist and activist. She was that friend. That daughter. That sister. That artist. That innovator.

Emma ended her own life. It's almost impossible for me conceive of someone that alive now being dead. But I have to believe that she needed release in some profound way that even her beautiful family and friends, that even her relationship to art and feminism, couldn't provide. It's not romantic. It's unacceptable. It's also a reminder that life is a fragile, fragile thing, a choice that we each make every single day. When Emma was alive, she made the choice fiercely and with her whole being. I thank her for the lesson.

For New Yorkers, there will be a service on Wednesday, December 31st at 10:30 am, at the Plaza Jewish Community Chapel at 630 Amsterdam Ave (at 91st Street).

More links:
Nona's take
her dad's take
photographs of Emma
Emma's photographs
her whole essay on intergenerational feminism

I've always been a fan of Kate Winslet's acting, and was thrilled when I saw the headline, "Kate Winslet: I'm a Feminist," although her declaration was not as quite cut-and-dry.

In a recent interview, Winslet talks about how she read Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique while preparing for her role in the upcoming film Revolutionary Road, where she plays a 1950s housewife. So when asked the big question,

'I think I probably am, aren't I?' Her assistant hurriedly adds, 'In a loose, unofficial kind of way,' but Winslet continues to ponder. 'I think I probably am. I mean, not in a bra-burning way. But I think I am a feminist, yeah.'

Nice job, assistant. Because loosely and unofficially caring about women's rights makes it acceptable. But as little as Winslet may know about the bra-burning myth, I still give her some props. Not nearly as much as I would give feminist activists like the fabulous Ashley Judd, but still props nonetheless.

5. The Spice Girls-will someone please explain how this could have possibly been misinterpreted as empowerment?

4. Tyra Banks-look, I know she does some awesome stuff, but she also humiliates young women pretty consistently on her show and refrains from any real interventions on ANTM when it comes to mental health issues...oh and there was that dead girl photo shoot

3. Diamond companies who advertise the "me ring"-Wow. So not only do the majority of you have heinous labor practices that affect women and children in mostly third world countries, but now you're trying to sell me the products of that labor through a bullshit idea that a diamond ring on my right hand somehow symbolized empowerment? Wow.

2. Sex and the City-I know I'm going to get some shit for this, but I have to ask how we can consider something truly feminist that has NO CLASS or RACE ANALYSIS. I enjoy it. I'm down to watch it. But do we have to call it feminist?

1. Sarah Palin-I don't think I need to explain. But if I do, just read here.

I know you've got some of your own that you'd like to add in comments...

At first glance, the True Woman conference doesn't seem anti-feminist. It's main promotional video has a sisterly kind of vibe - it's all about loving God and living a good life. The trailer above about the conference hints at anti-feminism, but it gives a nod to "career women" and is magnanimous enough to show a woman wearing a stethoscope. (Never mind the implicit notion that only some women are "true" women, that's about to be the least of our concern.)

But their post-conference press outreach reveals a more insidious message: If you love God, you have to hate feminism.

A group of conservative Christian women is seeking 100,000 signatures on a "True Woman Manifesto" aimed at sparking a counter-revolution to the feminist movement of the 1960s.

Introduced at a gathering of more than 6,000 women in early October, the document calls not for equal rights, but instead proclaims that men and women are created to reflect God's image in "complementary and distinct ways."

That includes the idea that women are called "to honor and support God-ordained male leadership in the home and in the church."

The press release intrigued me, so I checked out their website and some of the panels. Perhaps the most telling was one talk, "You've Come a Long Way, Baby!", given by Mary Kassian.

The short version: Patriarchy is fabulous, feminism is unnatural.

Kassian is particularly fond of romanticizing the imaginary perfect world of Leave it to Beaver, suggesting that life back in the 1950s (before darned feminism came around) actually was like the show.

Once married, a woman could normally count on her husband to financially support her and the children...

Pornography and rape and homosexuality, sexual perversion, sexual addiction, sexually transmitted diseases were uncommon and rarely encountered.

I don't know about your families, but back in the day my married Nana was working her tail off to support her kids because my grandfather's salary wasn't enough. And rape most certainly existed, though maybe it wasn't called that.

Latoya has a new series up at Racialicious, "The Things We Do to Each Other/The Things We Do to Ourselves" about the ways that race intersects with other movement building efforts and despite our attempts at moving to more nuanced understandings of race in America, outside of community based organizing that is explicitly anti-racist, it is rare that you see an actual centralization of race in the mainstream gay rights movement. In discussing how we as identity-based workers and folks working for policy based changes to increase rights in our communities, we overlook the ways that we marginalize other voices. In the case of the organizing and coverage of Prop 8 it was the voices and contributions of queer people of color.

I think it is safe to say that an apt parallel is the women's rights movement and its returning insistence of centralizing the voices of white women. Whether it is intentional or not, feminism frequently recenters itself around the needs and lives of privileged women, and I think this is a point to make. Feminism has dirty baggage in its tokenization of women of color and there have been many many conversations, anthologies and organizing efforts around displacing the white center for mainstream feminism. But those of us that work from the margins can only change the history and image of feminism, along with the way that it plays out in organizing efforts, so much. If the mainstream image of feminism continues to insist that feminism is for white women, how can we reclaim it for our own communities and break it down as something that is potentially useful across sectors?

What am I trying to say? That despite our attempts at including voices of color, mainstream feminism always comes back to revolve around the voices of white women and women of color are generally put in the position of token or an addition and after thought after the omission has already been made. This stems from internal turmoil sure, but it also is damaged by mainstream messaging, marketing and distribution of resources along the lines of privileged women being centralized. The theory being, well feminism has always been for white women, so isn't it just going to be like that?

Thanks to Rachel Superstar Simmons for the heads up on this episode of Amy P.'s awesome new show, "Smart Girls at the Party."

1. What is the accurate, once-and-for-all differences between men's and women's brains?
2. How can a woman who's super invested in mothering also protect her own creative/intellectual/professional life?
3. What truly works when it comes to rape and violence prevention?
4. When do I focus on being right and when do I focus on being effective?
5. When do I address sexism directly and when it is best to handle it indirectly?
6. How can society still be so invested in the categories hetero, homo, and bi when sexuality so obviously exists on a spectrum?
7. Why do so many feminists resist being critical about the institution of marriage?
8. How can we have no holds bar honest conversations about race and class disparities within feminist circles?
9. How important is it that women embrace the feminist label?
10. How ethical is it that feminist writers like Judith Butler and even bell hooks are hard for my women's studies 101 students to understand?

What are you still sorting out?

(PS: To leave comments that the moderators can get to and other participants can interact with please use the mogulus chat function!)

Tonight for the day after the election feminist town forum! Get more info here and check back at 7pm EST as we will be hosting a live broadcast.

Big time.

Last month, Jessica gave us the lowdown on how the mainstream media has been feeding the whole Palin-as-Feminist rhetoric that's been going around, and Ann reminded us earlier this week about why Palin's attempt at feminist talk is completely empty of meaning. But apparently, the Washington Post disagrees. Lois Romano writes:

Palin's candidacy has sent a jolt through traditional liberal women's organizations as she tries to redefine feminism, suggesting that the old movement has become detached from the hockey moms Palin champions. The mother of five and former beauty queen is the antithesis of the bra-burning militant libbers of the '60s, and she is adamantly antiabortion. Yet Palin has grabbed the feminist label vigorously and has been hailed as one by the thousands of supportive women who wave their lipstick tubes at her rallies.

The author also contends that the "unexpected recognition of a conservative as a role model for women has forced some traditional feminists to reconsider the movement's mission," specifically referencing to her stance on abortion multiple times, as if Palin being anti-choice is the only issue that distinguishes her from feminists. Forget about charging residents in Wasilla for rape kits and her general apathy for rape victims, her lack of support for the Lilly Ledbetter Act, the fact that she's against emergency contraception , her history of cutting funding for young, low-income mothers - you get the gist.

What's the most infuriating is that Romano pretty much labels her as this subversive revolutionary working against a puritanical movement:

Palin proclaimed that feminism is no longer synonymous with liberalism but something that could be shared and celebrated by all women.

You mean no longer synonymous with the "bra-burning militant libbers of the '60s"? And speaking of, she quotes a Clinton-supporter-turned-McCain-supporter who says that, "Sarah Palin rocks all the stereotypes of feminism and can only enhance progress for women."

Somehow this writer managed to reinforce feminist stereotypes while deeming Palin as proof that feminists can be so much more than just stereotypes. You know, they can be airbrushed sexymoms with hot legs.

Sigh.

For those who want to check out Courtney on SIRIUS radio tonight at 7 pm ET on SIRIUS Stars channel 102, go here to sign up for a free trial and tune in.

There is no doubt that I am a gender studies geek. I live and breath it like several of my Feministing co-editors. So here you go, my ten favorite feminist books.

1. Dawn by Octavia Butler

2. Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics by bell hooks

3. to be real edited by Rebecca Walker

4. Palestinian Women of Gaza and the West Bank edited by Suha Sabbagh

5. Making Face, Making Soul edited by Gloria Anzaldua

6. The Decolonial Imaginary by Emma Perez

7. Dangerous Liasons edited by Anne McClintock, Aamir Mufti and Ella Shohat

8. The Eloquence of Silence by Marnia Lazreg

9. Sister Outsider by Audre Lorde

10. Between Woman and Nation edited by Caren Kaplan, Norma Alarcon and Minoo Moallem

These are books I go back to over and over. They have had tremendous impact on what I write, how I write and who I am writing for. And I can't claim these books without also giving thanks to the amazing professors I have had at San Francisco State and SUNY Albany that helped me understand what was captured by each of these authors.

What are your favorite feminist books?

Shelley Mandell, the president of LA chapter of the National Organization for Women caused shock waves in the California feminist community when she endorsed Sarah Palin this weekend at a GOP rally.

"I know Sarah Palin cares about women's rights...As vice president, she will fight for you. She cares about our children and she cares about women's lives."

Excuse me? Whoa.

Though Mandell started her speech with the disclaimer that she was speaking as an individual and not for NOW, it's not a shock that the media picked up on the story as a NOW president endorsing Palin. (And I would imagine she knew that.)

CA NOW released the following statement after Mandell's speech:

This is too neat. Blogs can now embed books available on Google Books for readers to peruse. I hope Feministing can use this to highlight awesome feminists texts... So in honor of Samhita's recent post, check out Barbara Smith's great book, Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology, after the jump. (And don't forget to support feminists by buying their books!)

So for those of us Feministing gals (Jessica, Vanessa and myself) that went to school in that sleepy upstate town known as Albany we all have a special place in our hearts for Barbara Smith. One of my most formative feminist "click" moments was seeing Barbara Smith lecture at SUNY Albany when I was a young women's studies undergrad (11 years ago, eeeek, LOL).

If you have never heard of her, well she is an anti-racist, feminist, socialist activist and one of the framers of early identity politics. Frankly, her humility extends so far that she rarely gets the recognition she deserves. I am sure her constant calling out of white feminism for their inability to truly incorporate an analysis of race and class certainly has kept her on the sidelines as well.

I was pretty excited to see that Colorlines magazine (always on top of it) has a Q&A with her and what she has been up to, including running for public office. Check it out.

So to really get our minds off the election I thought I would switch it up and do a Feminist Fuck Yeah to Henry Rollins. Why Henry Rollins? Well because he is awesome (this is more awesome), but we also got several emails from readers who have seen his spoken word performances (which are amazing) and apparently he is a fan of Feministing. If that is not FUCK YEAH worthy, I am not really sure what is.

And I have been known to bite his style from time to time. (And full transcript after the jump.)

The lists yesterday were awesome, but it did make me think that we should practice some gratitude to balance everything out. So here's my list of ten things I can thank feminism for:

1. playing basketball and lacrosse in high school
2. the Planned Parenthood clinic in my hometown, Colorado Springs
3. an authentic language to discuss sex, work, and just about everything in between
4. my feministing crew
5. Hillary Clinton
6. sexual harassment policies
7. my ambition and sense of entitlement (the good kind)
8. the way my brother sees and treats women
9. feminist culture: Bust, Bitch, all the amazing feminist blogs, comedians, writers, actors etc.
10. so many of my intergenerational relationships

Bitch magazine, the wonderful feminist publication, is in dire need of help. The past issue it put out may be its last if the mag doesn't raise $40,000 by October 15.

That's a lot of money - but with all the kick-ass feminists out there who know and love bitch, I'm betting it's possible.

So please take a moment to watch this video of Debbie Rasmussen and Andi Zeisler explaining what's going on, and consider donating here. I know I will be.

Rebecca Traister at Salon has a great piece up about the "bastardization of everything feminism has stood for" - the scariness that has been the Sarah Palin/feminism talk.

In this "Handmaid's Tale"-inflected universe, in which femininity is worshipped but females will be denied rights, CNBC pundit Donny Deutsch tells us that we're witnessing "a new creation ... of the feminist ideal," the feminism being so ideal because instead of being voiced by hairy old bats with unattractive ideas about intellect and economy and politics and power, it's now embodied by a woman who, according to Deutsch, does what Hillary Clinton did not: "put a skirt on." "I want her watching my kids," says Deutsch. "I want her laying next to me in bed."

...What Palin so seductively represents, not only to Donny Deutsch but to the general populace, is a form of feminine power that is utterly digestible to those who have no intellectual or political use for actual women. It's like some dystopian future ... feminism without any feminists.

Seriously, the more this goes on the more afraid I get.

The mainstream media seems confused these days. It appears that because Republican VP candidate Sarah Palin is a woman, she is also a feminist. And not just a feminist, but THE feminist - a sign that all is right in the world when it comes to gender equity. But how could that be, you ask? How could anyone paint Palin - whose policies make it all too clear that she's about as anti-feminist as they come - as feminism's second coming? Well, by pithy misleading headlines - that's how!

The Wall Street Journal: Sarah Palin Feminism

Townhall: Sarah Palin: A Liberated Woman

LA Times: Sarah Palin's 'new feminism' is hailed

NPR: Sarah Palin: New Face Of Feminism?

Adweek: Feminism's Next Wave

The New York Post: A Feminist Dream at the GOP

Even more interesting is that the reporters touting this Palin-as-feminist nonsense are people who pretty much know jack shit about feminism.

Take Wall Street Journal reporter Naomi Schaefer Riley, who writes that progressives should rest easy about Palin's candidacy because "most American evangelicals have wholeheartedly embraced the idea of women in the workplace." A radical feminist sentiment if there ever was one! But perhaps one should take Riley with a grain of salt, considering she's the same reporter who wrote that murdered NY college student Imette St. Guillen should have known better than to be out drinking at 3am. Victim-blamers aren't exactly bastions of feminist thought.

Karin Agness, who wrote the piece for Townhall, calls Palin a "success of feminism" and "truly a liberated woman." Agness is also the President of the Network of Enlightened Women, an anti-feminist college organization that lurves Elizabeth Hasselbeck and even (sigh) mocked a NOW conference attendee in a wheelchair on their blog.

Really, most of the "feminism" talk is coming from conservatives appropriating the language of the movement to push a ridiculously anti-feminist candidate. This, of course, is nothing new (cough, IWF, cough) and fairly transparent.

But what I find even more upsetting is the Palin/feminist talk coming from mainstream outlets who are demonstrating absolutely no knowledge of feminism. Take the Adweek article, for example, which says "Palin is a classic third-wave feminist, benefiting from all that came before her in terms of the women's movement..." So by this definition, any woman who has benefited from feminism is a feminist. So, all women are feminists? Uh, yeah.

So, please, esteemed members of the mainstream media - if you want to write about Palin and feminism, how about you get a feminist to do it? Or at least interview one of us for goodness sake - there's plenty of us around and we'll be happy to talk to you about what the movement is about. (Hint: It's a lot more than thinking any woman is a good choice for all women.)

A reader sent in this story of a woman who intervened when she saw a girl getting physically abused, and I thought it brought up a lot of interesting questions about when to get involved.

I was waiting for my bus up to Ye Olde Transit Centre early this morning, and I noticed a young couple scuffling outside the Youth Employment Centre near my bus stop. They were older teenagers - the boy was 17 or 18, and the girl looked to be about 16. She was crying and yelling something at the boy, and suddenly they started pushing and shoving.

She took a swing and he grabbed her hand (he was easily 6' and she must have been 5'2 and about 100lbs) and he threw her up against the building and grabbed her throat. I was alone at the stop and reacted instinctively: I pushed my way between them and told the boy to back off. Predictably he started screaming at me to "stay out of his business" but I ignored him and worked on leading the girl away. She kept sobbing in apology, and flinched when the boy tried to grab her hand. The boy kept yelling at me to "stay out of it" and I told him that he if was going to assault his girlfriend on a public street than it damn well was my business, and that if he didn't back off and move away I was going to call the police.

...He muttered, "Fucking feminist bitch!" and moved away up the street.

Telling that he called her a feminist as a pejorative, but I digress. I've often seen things in public spaces that I found upsetting and/or well, criminal, and I've spoken up when I've felt safe. But how can we gauge safety, or if other women want us to get involved?

I'm reminded of two stories...

A women's studies professor I had as an undergrad told my class about how her sister was in an abusive relationship - his battering her was so loud that the neighbors called often the police. However, the police generally made things worse: Not just because they didn't arrest her boyfriend and treated her as if she was the criminal - not believing her, asking if she had attacked him - but also because once they left, she was beaten even worse. My prof went on to say that from then on whenever she saw or heard a woman being abused, she asked if the woman would like her to call the police - assuming that she knew what was best for her own situation.

Today is the 88th anniversary of the passage of the 19th Amendment, which gave women the right to vote.

In honor of the anniversary, I thought folks could share their first-time-voting story... The first time I voted (and I was so excited to) was in the 1996 presidential election. I had turned 18 years old a mere four days before election day, and I was living in New Orleans at the time - which meant that I had to vote by absentee ballot. Not quite the lever-pulling fun I was looking for, but I remember being so psyched that it didn't much matter to me. I was also the high and mighty gal who was appalled by my classmates who weren't voting, and wasn't afraid to let them know. Yeah, I wasn't very popular at Tulane. (Thank goodness for transferring!)

What's your story?

From her recent piece at Alternet:

Over the last five years, trans feminine feminists have begun to articulate a new perspective on feminism and trans activism that better captures our own experiences dealing with sexism. This approach is not so much rooted in queer theory as it is in intersectionality -- a theory that grew out of the work of feminists of color, most thoroughly chronicled by Patricia Hill Collins, and perhaps first discussed in relation to the MWMF trans woman-exclusion issue by Emi Koyama. Intersectionality states that different forms of oppression do not act independently of one another, but rather they interact synergistically. Unlike queer theory and lesbian-feminism, intersectionality focuses primarily on the ways in which people are institutionally marginalized, rather than fixating on whether any given individual's identity or behaviors "reinforce" or "subvert" the gender system.

It's long and delves deep, but as with most of her writing it's pretty fantastic. Check it out.

I have had the pleasure of being on an intergenerational adventure with Kristal Brent Zook--journalist and professor--over the past year or so. I'm continually amazed by her work; she's written three books: Color By Fox, Black Women's Lives, and most recently, I See Black People: The Rise and Fall of African American Owned Television and Radio. She was the journalist who spent the most time with the woman's family at the center of the Duke rape case and broke many stories surrounding it for Essence. And as if that weren't enough, she's a professor at Hofstra.

She's also kind, thoughtful, humble, obsessed with an intersectional analysis of justice, and an amazing model of dignity and wellness. She sent this essay along, thinking it would interest our feministing community. What do you think?

Power lost and found
Kristal Brent Zook

I was at Los Angeles International Airport recently enjoying a veggie burger and a beer at TGIF while waiting for a flight. The man next to me at the bar was hoping to entice two young women (barely legals) via his expense account.

"Can I buy you girls a drink?" he asked.

I overheard them say they were from a small town in Oklahoma, traveling to Dallas. One of the women had attended college for a semester, I heard her say, before dropping out. "School is just not for me," explained the other flatly. The man reported that he worked in the biotech industry. "What's that?" said the one with false eyelashes.

On the subject of cheap flight tickets, the man suggested going online to look for great deals.

"Oh, I don't know how to do any of that stuff," said eyelashes with a laugh.

They were interested in fashion, and topics such as weight gain, designer brands, drinking, and parties. Oh, and they hated long flights.

Their conversation got me thinking about women and power. Maybe I was being too hard on the girls, but I wondered: with the myriad of options available to them in this day and age of possibility, achievement and access, why were they missing out?

Why hadn't any of the things feminists had been writing and speaking about (and living) actually translated into their lives?

Of course there are pea-brained young men out there too. But there was something about these two women that was especially unsettling: perhaps it was their profound vulnerability, I thought, in a world that will so quickly leave them behind.

Or maybe it was the fact that they seemed so disinterested in their own potential -- their own present, as well as future power.

Or maybe I was just a 40-something old fogy, witnessing that perfectly normal phase that so many young people go through as they struggle to find their way into adulthood. I've been there. Maybe they'll pull it together eventually, I thought, and find their own unique passions.

And when they do, I hope that feminism will be there -- ready to help make the journey beyond fashion and fake eyelashes, into true power.

Clem in Australia passes this one along: "Hi ladies, thought you might like this little bit of feminist graffiti 'editing' I spotted in Carlton, Melbourne."

Nice.

The Financial Times has an interview with Gloria Steinem if you want to check it out. Not-so-favorite moment? When reporter Chrystia Freeland (fully aware of the slightly ugh nature of the question) asks Steinem if she regrets not having children.

Now this is a good way to start the week off!

Thanks to Katie from MI for sending this awesome vid along.

It's back folks! This series which I kicked off a few months back with the Millionaire Matchmaker edition. As a refresher:

In this series we're going to share a few of our own (un)feminist guilty pleasures. It's those pop culture things that you love, even though deep down inside you know that they might conflict with your feminist values. Maybe it's a show that makes your Women's Studies 101 alarm go off, but you just can't stop tuning in every week. Maybe it's a celeb gossip blog, or an immature movie marketed to teen boys, or high-fashion magazines where all the models look half dead. Maybe you're just human, and humans are complex occasionally hypocritical beings. Maybe you have created your own unique definition of what it means to be feminist that includes all of these guilty pleasures (and much more).

We at Feministing believe there are ways to maintain a critical eye towards these (un)feminist things while still enjoying them. It can even be fun! We think you believe this too and we are psyched to see what guilty pleasures you have to add to the mix.

So on that note, to today's edition, which is reggaeton. Now maybe it's because I'm Cuban, but nothing gets me dancing faster than some good old reggaeton. We're talking Daddy Yankee, Don Omar, Wisin y Yandel, Aventura. I love most of it, but especially the songs with a great dance beat. Unfortunately, a lot of my favorite reggaeton tunes have horribly sexist and offensive lyrics. You name it, it's there. Talk about brutal sex, the objectification of women, machismo at its worse. None of this is unique to reggaeton, and a lot of it comes from the roots of reggaeton, which is a fusion of Jamaican music like reggae and dancehall with Latin American music like bomba, plena, salsa, merengue as well as US hip hop and R&B. (Go here for a great explanation of what reggaeton is, and its history).

That's why reggaeton is my (un)feminist guilty pleasure. I can't stop listening to it, because I enjoy it too much (I even have a pandora station that I'm listening to right now!). Occasionally I just pretend that I don't understand spanish so I can ignore the lyrics, but its tough. What do we do with art forms like music that might use these kinds of sexist troupes? Boycotting the artists does little to remedy the underlying issues of sexism and misogyny that lead to these lyrics. Luckily, there is an alternative for reggaeton lovers who can't handle the misogyny anymore: Ivy Queen, a female reggaetonera has been gaining popularity. Now, being a woman does not guarantee that her music won't include any of the same sexist ideas, but from what I've listened to, it's a big improvement.

What music is your (un)feminist guilty pleasure?

I've argued that the feminist movement doesn't need icons, and it's always problematic to start naming feminists as more "important" and worthy of iconic status than others. But hey, it's Friday - and it seemed like it would be a fun poll topic. If your feminist icon of choice isn't in the poll, feel free to name drop in comments...

Note: These are names I thought up of off the top of my head, so pretty please spare me any "I can't believe you didn't include so and so" comments. I don't consider this a complete list in the slightest - I was hoping you lovely feministas could help me fill it in. :)

Two related calls for help in the feminist publishing world this week.

The first, via Lisa Jervis over at the Bitch Magazine blog, is about South End Press.

If you're not already familiar with South End, you should get to know them right now. They are, as their letter notes, "the nation's only unapologetically radical, feminist, mission-driven, and majority women of color publishing collective." Their list is tremendous: big names like bell hooks, Vandana Shiva, and Howard Zinn, plus less well-known but no less important books from Incite!, Andrea Smith, Kristian Williams, and many more.

And they're in trouble, because Borders is in trouble, and the unfortunate thing about the publishing business is that the actual producers of actual content are generally at the mercy of retailers and distributors when it comes to our financial survival.

The short of it is that they need help, particularly in the form of their community supported publishing program. You pay a monthly fee and get their books for free. Sounds pretty great. More info about that program here.

The second comes from Off Our Backs, an almost 40 year old feminist news magazine. From an official statement:

We are not closing down yet, but things are a bit difficult for us right now. We are trying some last-ditch efforts in the hopes that we will be able to raise enough funds to continue publishing.

Ironically, we have been in a process of actually coming closer to achieving self-sustainability, but have a shortfall of approximately $20,000 at this time. When we are able to afford enough staff to continue our new subscriber campaign, we in fact are able to steadily increase our revenue. If we can manage to fill this gap, we believe that we will be able to continue building our growing subscriber base through our subscriber
outreach campaign, which, when we have been able to do it, has been remarkably successful.

As the oldest feminist publication in the United States, we are in our 38th year of publication, so hopefully, we'll be able to weather this latest downturn in funds and regroup to keep going. Rest assured that all of us on the collective are trying as hard as we can, and we have managed to come through funding shortfalls before, but we're not sure right now how this will happen.

You can donate to off our backs here, and even better, subscribe to the newsjournal here.

We have to support independent and feminist media, particulary during times of economic decline so that we don't lose important venues for these writers and ideas.

So, first of all, apologies to those not living in NYC or DC for how geographically biased my event posts are. As the majority of us are based in those two cities, our event posting tend to be geographically weighted. Apologies, and a reminder that the community blog is a great place to post about events in your area!

Next week, the Feminist Majority Foundation is hosting a Congressional briefing on funding for reproductive rights.

The Feminist Majority Foundation (FMF) invites you to attend a briefing on Capitol Hill on July 24, 2008 from 9:30 AM-11:30 AM

The event will feature Members of Congress and leaders in the global and domestic women's health communities. Speakers will discuss the critical need to increase U.S. assistance for international family planning. The panel will expose the ways in which cuts to family planning funds both domestically and globally are killing thousands of women every day.

Space is limited and available to first respondents. Light refreshments will be provided. To reserve your spot, please RSVP online.

Questions? Call (703) 522-2214 or Email ahossain@feminist.org

Ann and I are planning on going, so hopefully we'll see some other readers there to support the event!

H/t to the awesome FMF interns for the info

For those in or around the NYC area, next week holds a couple of cool feminist events. On Wednesday the 16th, NOW NYC is holding a forum with financial planner Diane MacPhee where she'll be talking about the economy affects women and how to take a hold of your moneys.

That weekend on Saturday, July 19th, the inspiring Girls for Gender Equity are having their 3rd Annual Gender Equality Festival (check back on their site for more info) and a fundraiser, "Get Down 2 Get Up" with DJs spinning dope beats at Sputnik in Brooklyn. Click here for more info.

I'm sad to say I'll be on vacation joining Jess in Martha's Vineyard that week, but I highly recommend you join the summer feminist love.

The Women's Media Center has posted some great little clips from the panel I was on a few weeks ago at The Paley Center: From Soundbites to Solutions: Bias, Punditry, and the Press in the 2008 Election. Patricia Williams is especially amazing. Thanks to my friend Sean for the miso-ginee story.

Feministing friend and author of Odd Girl Out, Rachel Simmons, wanted to let ladies know that she's speaking at an Omega conference in September on Women & Courage. There are scholarships available for young women here. Deadline is July 15th, so don't sleep on it. Speakers include Isabelle Allende, Tara Brach, and Queen Afua, among others, and the conference material reads, in part:

The classic myth of the hero traces an arc of death-defying adventure and violent battle. Yet, on our interdependent planet-with no territory left to exploit and no war that can be won-empathy, love, and wisdom have become the most heroic of all adventures.

It is time to change our definition of what it means to be a brave and daring human being.

I can definitely get down with that. Thanks for the heads up Rachel.

Moe and Tracie of Jezebel appeared on a show called Thinking and Drinking recently, with host Lizz Winstead. What ensued has been the subject of many blog posts, a whole lot of comments and a ton of emails to Feministing. I was tempted not to write about this at all, because it seems like a no-win situation: The damage is done, the whole thing was sad, and writing about it very much feels like beating a dead (and drunk) horse.

But the thing is, this is important. As many of you know, I'm on vacation this week with the boyfriend - and despite being all relaxed and laying around, this video caused quite a stir among my friends who were here with us over the weekend. We sat around for a good couple of hours discussing what it means to be a role model, apathy, rape "jokes" and the use of irony and sarcasm in feminism. So it's clear to me that there are plenty of jumping off points for progressive and useful discussion.

For those of you who haven't already been following it, here's what went down.

Check out this article from Dave Hill at Comment is free, "Gender stereotypes hurt men too."

I think Hill brings up a lot of important points about the ways in which sexism damages men, but I wish he would identify feminism (at least more concretely) as a movement that's already working to help men as well as women. For example, Hill writes of gender stereotypes affecting men, "Sensible, grown up, non-sectarian feminism recognises all of this and seeks ways for men to combat it." I'm not sure what "grown up" feminism is, but the feminism I know has always talked about the ways in which the movement can benefit men.

Thoughts?

Pic from longlostcousin.