feminist blogs in english

Amnesty International reports that women are 5 times more likely to die in childbirth in the USA than in Greece, 4 times more likely to die in the USA than in Germany, and 3 times more likely to die in the USA than in Spain.

The crisis in maternal health is not addressed by the current health care reform proposal. The organization is calling on President Obama to establish an Office of Maternal Health because:

"In the U.S., we spend more than any country on health care, yet American women are at greater risk of dying from pregnancy-related causes than in 40 other countries," says Nan Strauss, the report's co-author, who spent two years investigating the issue of maternal mortality worldwide. "We thought that was scandalous."

Amnesty International’s report Deadly Delivery: The Maternal Health Care Crisis in the USA reports that 1 out of every 3 pregnant women in the U.S. experience pregnancy-related complications, while a shocking 1 out of every 4 women in the U.S. do not receive adequate prenatal care.

At a high school in Rome, just a few miles from the Vatican, two euros will now buy you a three-pack of condoms from a vending machine.

The Pope is ticked off: a papal spokesperson says that the condom machines "trivialize sexuality." Of course, contraception is a big no-no in the Pope's book (thankfully, many Catholics ignore this and protect themselves), but what with recent revelations of the Vatican's "big gay prostitution ring," it seems like maybe he has bigger issues to attend to in regards to trivializing sexuality -- you know, outright buying and selling of sex, perhaps through non-consensual human trafficking, while continuing to treat queer sexuality as an abomination. Sorry, wait, that doesn't trivialize sexuality. It disrespects and degrades human sexuality. Plus, it's a crime.

Meanwhile, why would condom machines be a divine idea for Rome's schools? Currently, 60% of teenage girls in Italy aren't using any form of protection when having sex -- 40% just do it and keep their fingers crossed, while another 20% rely on withdrawal to keep them from getting pregnant. Yeah, so not only am I skeptical of the ability of teenage boys to pull out in time, but what many people fail to realize is that pre-ejaculate fluid can hold those pesky, pregnancy inducing sperm as well. And, of course, neither crossing your fingers nor pulling out does a whit of good toward preventing the spread of STDs. The school's headmaster says that the decision to install condom machines is part of a broader sex ed curriculum, aimed at preventing rising rates of HIV related to Italy's condom taboo.

With the HIV/AIDS epidemic running rampant, when Pope Benedict was elected five years ago, there was talk of revising the Vatican's stance on contraception. No such luck. So it's a good thing that school administrators in the Pope's backyard aren't waiting for him to get it together before they start working to protect and educate teens. It's not a matter of trivializing sexuality: it's a matter of teenagers' health.

Photo credit: AchimH

by Amanda Marcotte

The quick news story to kick off this Friday’s Genius Ten: Turns out The Princess and the Frog had lackluster box office, and now the blame game has begun.  One could point out that perhaps the problem is that the movie came out in the midst of the worst recession in the U.S. since the Great Depression.  Perhaps many parents thought to themselves, “Instead of ponying up the cash to see this movie multiple times, we could just put the kids in front of TV to watch The Little Mermaid or Cinderella or Beauty and the Beast for the umpteenth time, since all these movies have exactly the same plot and aesthetic.  And we’ll buy Princess when it comes out on DVD.”

But who wants to consider factors like that when you can always resort to straightforward sexism?  No, Disney has decided that girls suck, and what they need to do is stop making movies centered around them. They’ve retitled the upcoming Rapunzel movie Tangled and have made the prince the center of the story, and they’ve shelved The Snow Queen, with its scary, female-centric title.

Of course, Disney did this once before, making Aladdin to break up the supposed monotony of female-centric fairy tale films.  It did great box office, but it was riding the Beauty and the Beast coattails.  And in the subsequent years, what character did they make a killing merchandising from that movie?  Oh yeah, the love interest Jasmine.  Because the Disney Princess brand is making them a killing!  But the idea that female money spends as good as male money is something Hollywood has never wanted to hear.  The funny thing is that the Disney aesthetic is associated with little girls in the public mind, so no matter how butch they try to make Tangled, it’s going to be all about the little girls. But at least the executives can sleep better at night, having convinced themselves they avoided the hellish emasculation of making their money selling fantasies to little girls.  Apparently, the fact that those fantasies are utterly sexist wasn’t enough to stop the smarting.

Genius Ten’s original song is chosen for this story, of course.  Leave yours in comments.  Or make fun of this story.  Or say whatever you like, Genius Ten’s should be considered open threads.

Original song: “Princess” by Datarock

1) “Pieces of the People We Love"---The Rapture
2) “Meeting Paris Hilton"---Cansei De Ser Sexy
3) “Shake A Fist"---Hot Chip
4) “Watch The Tapes"---LCD Soundsystem
5) “Girls In The Back"---White Rose Movement
6) “Must Be The Moon"---!!!
7) “In One Ear & Out The Other"---Fujiya & Miyagi
8) “Hearts On Fire"---Cut Copy
9) “Grip Like A Vice"---The Go! Team
10) “Count Souveneirs"---Junior Senior

Videos and a cat pic under the fold.

Molly has been a real lovebug lately.  I sat on the couch yesterday to finish reading Carole Joffe’s page-turner Dispatches from the Abortion Wars: The Costs of Fanaticism to Doctors, Patients, and the Rest of Us, and Molly jumped up on the couch, crawled inside my blanket and purred as loud as I have ever heard a cat purr.  I didn’t get a picture of that cuteness, but I did get her snuggling my feet while we watched “The Shield”.

I can’t tell if she loves me, my blanket, or if it’s the combination that’s so intoxicating.

Dmitriy T.M. sent in this graph from CNN (found at Gawker) using info from the Bureau of Labor Statistics,  rating the “best” jobs in America:

I zoomed in so you can read the chart better. The second line under each icon tells you what job sector the BLS categorizes it as and the total number of jobs. On the third line, the salary in regular font on the left is the median salary for that job, while the salary in bold in the right is the highest reported salary. The colored icons represent different things (i.e., highest overall median salary) that aren’t as interesting, at least to me, as the other info:

Labor force broken down by sex and race/ethnicity (notice that the numbers are in 1000s, so there are actually 66,208,000 women in the workforce and so on):

I calculated the percentages of each race/ethnicity by sex and noticed a few differences. Here are the % of the workforce that falls into each racial/ethnic category, broken down by sex (sorry if the formatting’s showing up all weird):

Whites:                              Women = 80.6         Men = 83.7

African Americans:            Women = 12.4          Men = 9.3

Hispanics:                        Women = 12.1          Men = 15.8

Asians:                              Women = 4.7            Men = 4.8

So we see differences between men and women for every group except Asians. Notice that African Americans stand out as the only group where women make up a larger proportion of the workforce than men do. I know I’ve read things suggesting that African American men face a tougher job market than African American women do because of negative stereotypes (they’re angry, they don’t work hard, they don’t interact with customers well), leading to more discrimination against Black men than Black women (who clearly also face job discrimination). Other explanations?

And of course, we always have to remember that BLS data is based on official job reporting; off-the-books or informal employment, which some groups are likely overrepresented in, aren’t included.

And notice that in the sex/ethnicity breakdown, we see two icons, one clearly marked as female and the other as male, but in the rest of the chart, where sex is not explicitly discussed, all of the icons are the male version. Just another example of using male icons as “neutral” and female icons only when discussing sex/gender specifically.

Related posts: sex  and starting salaries of college grads, joblessness by race/age/sex/education, more on joblessness, race, and education, men in “good” jobs by race, race and the economic downturn, changes in type of work over time, gender and the wage gap, trends in academic employment, science/engineering Ph.D.s for women and minorities, changes in compensation by job sector, more on the male/female wage gap, gender and the recession, gendering jobs, do immigrants work harder?, and the post-industrial economy.

(View original at http://contexts.org/socimages)

Sent via BlackBerry by AT&T

Immature moment of the day:

[Photo of a newpaper with the headline, "Republicans turned off by size of Obama's package."]

via, by way of Amanda.

This is a guest post of the presentation given by our incredible student panelist at the University of Iowa for our college tour, Conner Spinks. Just a freshman, Conner's insight, brilliance and general bad-assery absolutely blew us away.

To begin, I want to explain my own relationship to feminism. Personally, it has never been a word I shied away from. I was a loud mouth tom boy and I saw how my interest in tools and trucks over dolls was thought of as strange. I saw how confused my father was when I refused to put on a dress and if forced, would sit with my legs as wide as possible, which eventually led to pants anyway. My independent minded mother would try to calmly explain to aghast relatives that "No, she doesn't think she's boy, she just doesn't like dresses." Or her favorite, "No, she's just being Conner." Clearly, my mom doesn't subscribe to traditional gender norms. My name is Conner.

As I grew up and learned about the inequalities faced by marginalized populations, and discovered there was a word for the fight against those inequitable distributions of power, I was all over it! I was eager to claim the identity of feminist. That identity is something I still debate about labeling myself because that label to some is enough. There is no need to truly question your own relative privileges or power, you're a feminist. There's no need to listen to claims of struggle that you don't face, you're a feminist. Because of that label, you can't be ableist or transphobic, you're a feminist!

I am not calling in to question how a good a feminist someone is. I am questioning what feminism means to the students on this campus and that ambiguity is what causes me pause when it comes to applying the label to myself.

This campus especially has shown me these feminist in name only. People who have regressive views of gender are looked at like Neanderthals and openly argued against. But regressive views of race that are patently obvious to me, go unquestioned or even unnoticed. Sometimes, I have literally looked around and asked, "Am I the only who heard that?"

As a woman of color, it offends me more than anything to witness ridiculous displays of ignorance about race on this campus. Race is not talked about enough here because it's thought that we are post-racial because of all the progress made for communities of color. Even when there are obvious instances of racism, it is downplayed.

So the incidents where international students from China have racist graffiti written on their boards and people openly mock Chinese accents are treated as if cultural miscommunications. Ideas about English Only and mistaken ideas about America having an official language are not only condoned but widely held. Though this wasn't here on this campus, at ISU, a friend of mine who is both Asian American and lesbian was forced to break her housing contract and move out of the dorms because of the harassment she faced for being lesbian and Asian American. She had little recourse besides to leave.

There is some resentment of the largely black populations from larger cities that live in Iowa City. When searching for apartments, I saw multiple notices of "NO CHILDREN" or "NO SECTION 8." At the beginning of this school year, there was an editorial in our school paper, the Daily Iowan that noted how divisive Iowa City has become because of the North/South division, with the Southside being the largely black low income area. The talks surrounding the concentration of black people to the Southside never referenced the refusal on rental properties to rent to low income and/or people with families. Responses to the piece used euphemisms like "those people" and said everything but black. Even a highly racialized situation like that, there is a refusal to acknowledge race.

I have seen absolutely egregious displays of ignorance from women and men who claim the title of feminist. Within a gender studies classes, I have heard a young woman who claimed to be a feminist explain to me that a picture of a black woman dressed in jeans and a t-shirt was overly sexual. When I pressed for a reason why, she looked confused as if the answer were obvious. I sat staring at her in my own jeans and t-shirt, wondering how obscene my own body must be.

But my experiences with my fellow feminists are best summed up by an encounter with a young woman last semester. I just finished arguing with a friend of mine about the label of feminist because my friend believes in everything feminist oriented but the label. The young woman approached me to say that she proudly identified as feminist. We high-fived and after a beat, she did what a lot of black women fear. She raised her hand and asked me, "Can I touch your hair?"

That is not to say that my every experience with feminist on this campus was as offensive as someone trying to touch my hair, but it really is depictive of the state of feminism on this campus. There is a serious discrepancy between what it is in theory and how it is performed on this campus.

When I bring up issues of racism or nativism to some, they ask me how that relates to feminism. Feminism is especially for marginalized groups like POC and our struggles. Feminism is about explicitly fighting against the "-isms" that harass us POC on this campus. This is my feminism. I am a feminist.

Post what you want, when you want it. It’s anarchy!

1. I liked this post by John Corvino at the Indie Gay Forum, categorizing the “that’s not the definition of marriage” argument against equal marriage rights into four categories.
2. Howard Stern on Gabourey Sidibe: hard facts
3. Ron Unz at The American Conservative (obviously a liberal hippie think tank) debunks claims of “an illegal alien crime wave.”
4. Crack cocaine sentencing disparity will soon be “One-Fifth As Racist As It Used To Be“
5. Nathan Newman argues that progressives actually got some significant policy wins in Obama’s first year.
6. Cell phones, Facebook, and the war on loneliness
7. Democrats Who Oppose Student Loan Reform Love Banks More Than They Care About Students

* * *

Alas, there’s going to be an outage for a few hours on Sunday while the server undergoes updates.

This Dove deodorant commercial, sent in by Emma H., is a nice, simple example of how women are taught that certain feminine performances are required.  In the commercial, the woman wants to wear a sleeveless dress. Her comment is followed by the following text:

Emphasis on “has” and “of course,” of course.

Watch it:

This is the same Dove, of course, that markets itself with the “real beauty” campaign and is owned by the same company as Axe.

(View original at http://contexts.org/socimages)

Tony Judt, a well-known historian, has written an engaging essay called “Girls! Girls! Girls!” for NYRBlog, The New York Review of Books blog, about how our stance towards sexual behavior on (and, by implication, off) campus has changed over the years. I don’t agree with everything he says–and he would probably say it’s because I am a product of my (and his) times–but what he says is thought-provoking. Here are some snippets, which, taken out of context, may lose some of the irony that informs them in the original:

Shortly after I took office [in 1992 as chair of NYU's History Department], a second-year graduate student came by. A former professional ballerina interested in Eastern Europe, she had been encouraged to work with me. I was not teaching that semester, so could have advised her to return another time. Instead, I invited her in. After a closed-door discussion of Hungarian economic reforms, I suggested a course of independent study—beginning the following evening at a local restaurant. A few sessions later, in a fit of bravado, I invited her to the premiere of Oleanna—David Mamet’s lame dramatization of sexual harassment on a college campus.

How to explain such self-destructive behavior? What delusional universe was mine, to suppose that I alone could pass untouched by the punitive prudery of the hour—that the bell of sexual correctness would not toll for me? I knew my Foucault as well as anyone and was familiar with Firestone, Millett, Brownmiller, Faludi, e tutte quante. To say that the girl had irresistible eyes and that my intentions were…unclear would avail me nothing. My excuse? Please Sir, I’m from the ’60s.

***

[T]he anxieties of contemporary sexual relations offer occasional comic relief. When I was Humanities dean at NYU, a promising young professor was accused of improper advances by a graduate student in his department. He had apparently followed her into a supply closet and declared his feelings. Confronted, the professor confessed all, begging me not to tell his wife. My sympathies were divided: the young man had behaved foolishly, but there was no question of intimidation nor had he offered to trade grades for favors. All the same, he was censured. Indeed, his career was ruined—the department later denied him tenure because no women would take his courses. Meanwhile, his “victim” was offered the usual counseling.

Some years later, I was called to the Office of the University Lawyer. Would I serve as a witness for the defense in a case against NYU being brought by that same young woman? Note, the lawyer warned me: “she” is really a “he” and is suing the university for failing to take seriously “her” needs as a transvestite. We shall fight the case but must not be thought insensitive.

So I appeared in Manhattan Supreme Court to explain the complexities of academic harassment to a bemused jury of plumbers and housewives. The student’s lawyer pressed hard: “Were you not prejudiced against my client because of her transgendered identity preference?” “I don’t see how I could have been,” I replied. “I thought she was a woman—isn’t that what she wanted me to think?” The university won the case.

***

Here as in so many other arenas, we have taken the ’60s altogether too seriously. Sexuality (or gender) is just as distorting when we fixate upon it as when we deny it. Substituting gender (or “race” or “ethnicity” or “me”) for social class or income category could only have occurred to people for whom politics was a recreational avocation, a projection of self onto the world at large.

Why should everything be about “me”? Are my fixations of significance to the Republic? Do my particular needs by definition speak to broader concerns? What on earth does it mean to say that “the personal is political”? If everything is “political,” then nothing is. I am reminded of Gertrude Stein’s Oxford lecture on contemporary literature. “What about the woman question?” someone asked. Stein’s reply should be emblazoned on every college notice board from Boston to Berkeley: “Not everything can be about everything.”

Full disclosure: One reason this piece engages me as much as it does, is that I have the same response as Judt to the question he poses at the end of his post:

So how did I elude the harassment police, who surely were on my tail as I surreptitiously dated my bright-eyed ballerina?

Except in my case she was a dark-haired and compellingly dark-eyed woman from Iran. And I have made the answer my title.

Cross-posted on It’s All Connected.