feminist blogs in english

The days of making clothes for the people who will buy them is long gone or, perhaps, never existed. Case-in-point: Levi's has launched an ad campaign not-so-cleverly titled, "All Asses Were Not Created Equal," with the intention of appealing to women whose bodies do not form a straight line. Fellow blogger Sarah Menkedick covered the new line earlier. I can see why she was excited by the premise of a company that doesn't shy away from different sizes, but I'm calling the company out for its failed attempt at inclusion.

Feministing.com tackled the misguided coding of the Curve ID brand in a recent post, but there's more than just the limp-wristed high-five to "curvy" women that is bothersome. There's this idea that a company doesn't have to really be inclusive to get the credit -- they can fake it and get away with it. And because any nod to women who aren't thin and blond is rare, it's accepted, even praised, no matter how half-assed (pun intended) it is.

Take Glamour magazine's laughable attempt to appeal to its readers who are (probably) near plus-sized or already there. They took all those letters to the editors that gasped and sighed at the thought of a woman with a gut appearing nude in their magazine as a sign that they had done something good, instead of what it was: a sign that they had been doing it wrong and stumbled on a bit of okay, not good.

Levi's "Asses" campaign is definitely faking it. As Feministing pointed out, all of the women in the ads are white and none are particularly curvy. I'm not convinced that curves are a black or Latina thing, but the unabashed embrace of them certainly is, so any butt salute without a Jennifer Lopez or Beyonce look-alike just feels wrong.

Continue reading at Change.org's Women's Rights Blog …

This Hillary Clinton for President, 2012 TV ad is currently running in New Orleans and will soon run in Washington, New York and Los Angeles.


"She has more experience working in and with the White House than most living presidents. She is one of the most admired women in our nation's history. Let's make sure the president we should have elected in 2008 will be on the ballot in 2012. Hillary 2012: Hillary Clinton for President. Start now. Where there's a Hill there's a way," says an ad that began running on television in New Orleans Wednesday.

The commercial was paid for by a Chicago dentist named William DeJean. When asked why he put the ad up, DeJean told CNN Thursday that "I'm a dentist and I don't think this country is headed in the right direction." Regarding Clinton, DeJean says "I think she is the most qualified." DeJean adds that he thinks people are having buyer's remorse about President Barack Obama and says the current administration is ruining the Democratic Party.

Politics Feminist News Gender

I am about as far from a fan of neocons as it gets. I think they are wannabe fascists and I hope to never see U.S. politically active U.S.ers get any more fascistic. But the neoliberals are not proving themselves to stand for anything significantly different, with a few notable exceptions, like wanting to protect Roe v. Wade.

What we have in a president is a figurehead, and I'm increasingly disillusioned with what that figurehead stands for, or is a symbol of. At first, no matter what he accomplised in his four years--maybe his first four years, I felt he would at least be a symbol of a crack in the concrete of white supremacy in the U.S. But even that is not so certain any more, from my white point of view, anyway. I don't know how African American children see him, but imagine he is a symbol of a kind of hope for their own futures that Black children, especially boy children, didn't have life before he was elected. That said, he is behaving like an Empire-adoring racist genocidalist. And that's entirely "white male supremacist" behavior. So there's no applause from me as he promotes capitalism, the delusions of something bantered about as a [class-privileged white male] workers' "American Dream", and the demonisation of "terrorism" from people off our shores while refusing to identify this country as a Terroristic Nation seeking Globalised Empire--by any and all means necessary.

I realised a while ago that President Barack Obama was not really a free leader of a free country. This country and its leader are held hostage by the will and whims of corporate and military leaders and institutions so foundational to what this country really stands for, that there's not much likelihood he will even challenge their premises or practices. He is not "in charge" of our foreign, economic, or health care policy, any more than G.W. Bush was. He offers no plan for halting sexual slavery or trafficking of human beings for the purposes of gross exploitation and violation by disproportionately white het men. He won't speak about what this country is doing, today and tomorrow, and next week and next year, to destroy American Indians. He won't do anything to end rape, battery, or the generalised, normalised domination of women by men. He won't discuss the problem of incest, let alone pass laws against predatory sexual perpetrators having custody of their own children. He presents himself as a warrior, but not "the Audre Lorde kind".

What follows is from The Huffington Post. Click on title to link back.

Obama's Unpersuasive Iraq Speech

Jacob Heilbrunn

It's hard not to examine President Obama's speech on Iraq and the economy without experiencing a sinking feeling. Obama employed a number of nautical metaphors about sailing through turbulent seas and storms in his speech, but even he seemed a little queasy about it all. Nothing could have made clearer the extent to which he remains a hostage of the Bush era, both in domestic and foreign policy. His speech did not chart a path to the future but remained mired in the past.

Obama declared, "We have now been through nearly a decade of war. We have endured a long and painful recession. And sometimes in the midst of these storms, the future that we are trying to build for our nation -- a future of lasting peace and long-term prosperity may seem beyond our reach." But it is simply not the case that we have endured a long and painful recession. The truth is that America continues to endure it.

The same goes for Iraq. Despite the president's pretense that combat is over, or at least that the war is, or that something has ended (it's not really quite clear what), Iraq has no government. Were the remaining 50,000 American troops to exit, Iraq would almost surely be engulfed by civil war, which could happen anyway. Meanwhile, the GOP is pretending as though everything is hunky-dory in Iraq and George W. Bush should get all the credit.

Perhaps Obama will recover his footing in the coming weeks and go on the offensive. But for the moment, he remains an easy target for the GOP. A sagging economy and endless war abroad are unlikely to revive America's or his fortunes.

This is the third in a series of posts coming from the Global Maternal Health Conference in New Delhi, the first conference of its kind. According to EngenderHealth’s Maternal Health Task Force’s website, ‘Every minute, a woman dies from complications related to childbirth or pregnancy. While most maternal deaths are preventable, poor health services and scarce resources limit women’s access to life-saving, high-quality care.’ Check out the conference’s live streaming schedule. You can follow the conference on Twitter, too: the Maternal Health Task Force and EngenderHealth are @MHTF and @EngenderHealth; the conference hashtag is #GMHC2010.

This guest post is cross-posted from the Maternal Health Task Force blog. Its author, Janna Oberdorf, is the Communications Manager at Women Deliver.

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Every year, an estimated 20 million unsafe abortions take place. And of all maternal deaths, unsafe abortion accounts for 13%. Imagine if we could change that. Imagine if we could make a serious dent in the deaths and morbidities that are caused from botched abortions, from unhygienic surgeries, and from unskilled providers.

Now, imagine if we could change that with a few simple, low-cost pills. That’s what the drugs mifepristone and misoprostol are doing for women around the world.

At today’s panel session on “Reducing the toll of unsafe abortion using simple medical technology” at the Global Maternal Health Conference in Delhi, panelists laid out the landscape of how introducing and expanding access to medical abortions could save lives and prevent injury:

• Beverly Winikoff, of Gynuity Health Projects, talked about misoprostol as first-line treatment of incomplete abortion, and about introducing and expanding existing services and implications for training. As she said, misoprostol is low cost, and it can increase women’s choice and reduce the burden on doctors and health facilities.

• Patricio Sanhueza Smith, from the Secretariat of Health in Mexico City, talked about lessons learned from Mexico City on the potential of misoprostol alone for transitioning services. He said, “Medical abortion with misoprostol alone is not the Gold Standard, but it is a duty to widely disseminate its use, while mifepristone becomes available.”

• Selma Hajiri, of the Center for Research and Consultancy in Reproductive Health, talked about a randomized controlled trial of medical abortion with misoprostol only versus mifepristone plus misoprostol. She said that although the combination is the gold standard, misoprostol alone should be promoted where mifepristone is not accessible.

• Kelsey Lynd, of Stanford University, spoke about making outpatient services a reality. She discussed research on administering mifepristone and misoprostol at home, and a pregnancy test that could simplify medical abortion provision.

• Hillary Bracken, of Gynuity Health Projects, spoke about expanding access late in the first trimester, and the promise of outpatient mifepristone and misoprostol after 63 days.

Though I’m constantly amazed by the possibility and potential of mifepristone and misoprostol for safe abortion, I was even more amazed to hear about Kelsey Lynd’s work on making outpatient services a reality.

Having an abortion is a difficult and traumatic decision, with serious health repercussions. But that decision becomes so much harder when you have to pay for a sonogram to determine gestation period; to attend a clinic to take the mifepristone; to return to the clinic two week later for a follow-up visit and second dose; and to have a second sonogram to ensure the pregnancy was terminated. It’s a time-consuming and costly decision… but every one of those steps also takes an emotional toll.

Lynd presented research that showed that it is safe for women to self-administer mifepristone and misoprostol at home. Though this is great news for time and money saving reasons, it also gives women some control and choice over when to start their abortion.

Lynd also presented findings on a home pregnancy test that determine their pregnancy status after abortion. This semi-quantitative pregnancy test is administered at the health facility while the woman is pregnant to achieve a baseline of her hCG blood level. Then, 1 to 2 weeks after the woman has been administered mifepristone and misoprostol, she can use the test to check if her hCG blood level has decreased, thus confirming termination of pregnancy. In her findings, 98% of women felt they could use the test on their own in the future, and the tests identified ALL ongoing pregnancies.

The implications for this research are mind-boggling. I think it is obvious that cutting down clinic visits and sonograms would save time (for the woman and the provider) and save money. But it is the emotional implications that jump out at me. The ability for women to feel they have some control over their bodies and their abortions is something that is severely needed.

One last note is that although these findings are encouraging in making outpatient services a reality, they must be partnered with education, information, and counseling. Home abortions are a scary thing. Bleeding for days on end is a scary thing. And women need to understand complications that need treatment, and have some emotional support. We need to guide these women with the proper education, counseling, call centers, job-aids, and more, if and when we finally make outpatient services a reality.

Lay down

Pick it up

Carry the weight around

until you buckle halfway over

Sweat it through your twisting and turning

midnight soul burning

and shadows will settle all matters right

making amends with the emergence of light

image of the World Trade Center's Twin Towers in NYC is from here

A woman in Canada asked me what my feelings and thoughts were about the matter of the Muslim Community Center being built in the same section of Manhattan as the site where the Twin Towers fell.

This is my answer:

I'll speak to the issue of the Muslim Community Center being built within a few blocks of what is termed "ground zero". This is basically being addressed to those people you have heard who think the Community Center shouldn't be built.

First, I don't think the problem with the U.S. is one of being insensitive to people with power. The problem with the U.S. is its rather grossly destructive insensitivies to people without power, to the oppressed, and to marginalised people. The problem with the U.S. is its racism, misogyny, heterosexism and pro-capitalistic xenophobia.

A few members of a terrorist organisation called Al Qaeda arranged to fly planes into several areas, primarily the Twin Towers and the Pentagon. Their goal was never to collapse the twin towers. That the towers collapsed as they did was due to faulty metals used in the construction. The collapse shouldn't have happened by a plane flying into the side of it. Al Qaeda, in other words, didn't topple the Twin Towers. They poked holes in them, and in the Pentagon, killing themselves to make a political point--in a terroristic way--about the harm the Twin Towers and the Pentagon are doing to people around the world, and specifically in Central Asia. And that harm is real, and the Twin Towers and Pentagon were designed to do the kind of business that kills people and the planet.

So, let's assume that things had gone as they would have if the buildings had been appropriately built. There would have been terrifying scenes of destruction and horror: debris, smoke, deaths. The event would have been traumatic for the city, no question. But the mass media played it up immediately, and has never stopped building a narrative about Islam vs. the Judeo-Christian U.S. that has enabled the U.S. military, run by the Pentagon, to engage in two illegal wars in two countries: Iraq and Afghanistan, and so far the U.S. military, with NATO forces, have mass murdered, raped, and otherwise bludgeoned and butchered hundreds of thousands of people abroad. Creating tons and tons of debris, smoke, and deaths. Thousands of times as much of each as was caused by Al Qaeda on Sept. 11. The phrase "an eye for an eye" seems inadequate to appreciate the horror of what the U.S. has unleashed in Central Asia. "A million bodies for 3000 bodies" is more like it. The death toll is complete in NYC; it's still running higher and higher in Central Asia and most of those killed are not U.S. troops.

So, again, the problem here is that the U.S. is a bully State, attempting to expand an Empire across the globe--one which is deeply racist/misogynistic/heterosexist, imperialistic, colonialistic, and genocidal and ecocidal. THAT'S the problem with the U.S. during and since "9/11". But the U.S.'s genocidal programs are not discussed in media as such. They are discussed as matters of freedom and democracy, and of self-defence and protection from terror. And that's all horseshit, because the U.S. is THE terrorist. Al Qaeda is nothing by comparison. It organised some terroristic activities, and managed to fly some planes into some key buildings in the U.S.: precisely the buildings that are building Empire across the globe.

The U.S. has genocidally been at war against Asia for at least sixty years: from Korea, to Vietnam, to Cambodia, to Afghanistan and Iran and Iraq, and possibly Pakistan. It has also been waging war against Brown people in the Americas, for hundreds of years.

So, given all that, how does "the issue" become a Muslim Community Center getting built downtown in NYC? It's a non-issue, as far as I'm concerned. The U.S. mass murdering Afghan citizens, and pretended it is exiting an illegal war in Iraq--while leaving troops there and after training people who live there to do the evil things the U.S. has been doing there for the last many years. The U.S. has placed in power one of the people who oversaw the horrors of Abu Ghraib. We are not a peace-loving nation, nor an ethical one, nor one that values democracy. We are country founded on slavery and genocide and rape.

So who is getting upset about a Mosque? Some white Christians and white Jews, because a couple of buildings were demolished and horrific things happened downtown on Sept. 11, 2001. There should be some memorial for those who died, to be sure. And the surrounding neighborhoods cannot and ought not be "Muslim-free". That makes no sense and goes against all of what the U.S. pretends to be.

What the U.S. wants is to continue to scapegoat groups like "Muslims" (most of whom are Indonesian, not Central Asian), and "Mexicans" who once possessed the land that was later stolen from them. The U.S. has no moral leg to stand on regarding any matter of "sensitivity". What the U.S. needs is to have scapegoats so that it never has to contend with the fact that it is the bully nation of the world, is pro-genocidal, when it comes to people of color, and wants to set up tensions that can be exploited in the media that continue to keep the spotlight off what white Christians are doing in the U.S., to terrorise and kill people, and what white Jews are doing in Israel to terrorise and kill people.

There are more important matters at hand than the issue of whether or not a Muslim Community Center is built downtown in NYC. And it's about time folks like critics of the "Mosque" being built downtown started dealing with them with the passion being demonstrated in the financial district of New York.

by Amanda Marcotte

So there’s been a dust-up between a guest blogger named Monica at Feministe and fat activists (mostly on Twitter that I’ve seen), with Maia actually posting on it.  I’m not interested in getting in the middle of it.  I think both sides make good points.  FAs are right that Monica is out of line suggesting their negative experiences with health care providers are figments of their imaginations, but Monica is right that the “but some highly muscular people are technically obese!” is a disingenuous argument.  I think people were too hard on Monica, but also that she was incredibly unfair in some ways.  I want to talk about the most glaring unfair assertion she made, one that was pulled out by Kate Harding on Twitter in particular.

Weight can signal a lack of activity or too many donuts, and that shouldn’t irk anyone. Yet, it does.

This was unfair, for the very simple reason that fat activists are 100% right that 95% of fat people are going to stay fat.  Drastic weight loss that stays off is incredibly rare, and is usually the result of weight loss surgery or a complete 180 in personal habits that is the sort of thing that is really not in human nature.  And when I say “180”, I mean 180---the only fat people I’ve ever known to get un-fat without WLS went from being people who didn’t get much exercise to people who turned into jocks.  Moderate exercise---which I still have no idea what that supposedly means anyway---just isn’t going to cut it.  Losing weight is really, really hard.  I put myself on a gym regime when we moved to New York, on top of all the extra walking you do here, and I’ve lost weight, sure, but it wasn’t the kind of weight loss rate that would turn a fat person thin.  I can’t imagine what it would take to lose 10 times as much weight as I’ve lost, much less the 20 times that some people would have to lose to go from being fat people to not-fat people.  I hear people make cracks about soda and donuts all the time, as if merely giving up overindulgence would magically turn a fat person thin.  If you sit down and calculate the calorie shortages someone would have to endure to lose a whole lot of weight, you should see the mathematical issues in play. 

But it wasn’t just the “drop the donuts, lose 100 pounds” simplicity that was off here.  It was also the invocation of the concept of personal responsibility that makes me more than a little queasy.  Not to say that I think that people don’t have personal responsibilities to look after their own diets or exercise regimes, but to write it off to that and not look at the big picture is to miss the point.  Americans have been getting fatter in recent decades, and there have been rising rates of diabetes and heart disease to go with it.  To imply that the cause is simple lack of self-control is to suggest that Americans have magically become lazier or more impulsive.  I would argue that the culture has changed dramatically and puts immense amount of pressure on people to have habits that are simply counter-productive to their diet and exercise goals. 

I was really reminded of how bad it is out there when I went to El Paso this last weekend.  In general, my forays into middle America for family occasions tend to shock me with how much the world outside of my little urban bubble* makes it hard to maintain just basic healthful habits that would probably keep you from gaining weight in the first place.  The food I can’t comment on too much, because we were there for an engagement party-birthday party-baby shower trifecta (all for different people, though I see no problem with having your engagement party with your baby shower), and so there was going to be overeating, because that’s just what you do at parties.  My main exposure to non-party food was the continental breakfast in the hotel, but that was a decent reminder of how the food culture of America is sort of sadistic towards the eaters of America.  I found an item at the bar made by Smuckers that was a waffle with the maple syrup baked into it, to spare you the burning of precious calories pouring your own syrup before consuming it, I guess.  Despite the fact that the waffles came pre-syruped, however, there was a big bottle of syrup available.  One day, the brilliant minds at junk food central will figure out how to dispense with the waffle part of the waffle-and-syrup equation.

But what struck me about this whole inane product wasn’t just the calorie overload built into the breakfast experience.  It was that it was one of those kind of crazy labor-saving things that are so prevalent in America and are waging war on the prevalence of incident physical movement.  This was a small thing, but indicative of a larger culture that discourages moving your body at all costs, unless of course you’re inside a gym or engaged in some other formal kind of exercise.  Then you get to move your body.  But an hour of even intensive exercise a day isn’t really enough.  It’s the constant use of your body throughout the day that’s just as important, if not more so.  Not having to go through the motions to get a waffle into your body is a small drop in a sea of discouragement to exert even the slightest effort.  (Take, for instance, the electric turnstile we saw at a concert that completed the push forward motion for you after you started it.) What was really disconcerting to me during our visit was how much pressure there was not to walk.  No matter who gave us a ride to the hotel, for instance, they would automatically drive right up to our door, even though doing so struck me as more of a pain in the ass than dropping us off at the entrance and letting us walk.  I suppose I could have interrogated people about why the front door service, but I don’t think they wouldn’t understand the question because the idea of walking when you don’t have to in a non-exercise context just isn’t really something many people do.  I mean, I could bother to explain why I ask, and that would be an interesting discussion, I guess.  But I just didn’t want to go through the whole explanation.  In all honesty, I think the reason is that since everything is so far away and can only be gotten to by car, the car starts to feel like an extension of yourself.  At least, that’s how I felt until I started to live in places where walking was a lot more acceptable and certainly a lot more doable.

On top of that, a lot of people work too much to really make a lot of time for exercise.  So they get a double whammy.

What was clear to me was that if I was living in that kind of environment, the amount of personal responsibility I’d have to take to avoid gaining weight would be way more.  Way, way more, like 50% more.  And I don’t know that I have the time or energy to put towards that.  So, I really think that suggesting that the reason Americans are getting fatter is strictly because they’re spoiled or lazy is missing the point by a mile.  Our culture has gone to great lengths to make it very hard to achieve a baseline of physical activity, or to eat in a way that makes you feel satisfied and happy without consuming an excess of sugar and fat.  If we want to change things, we have to change the culture. 

*And this was true of Austin, at least the part where I lived.  It was really walkable.  Plus, the city of Austin is health-conscious, foodie-oriented, and veggie-friendly, which means the calorie to other nutrient ratio on a restaurant plate is way better in Austin than in the rest of Texas.

British magazine Essentials has announced that there will be no more models or celebrities featured in the magazine. Oh, and airbrushing (you know, the process of taking a perfectly beautiful woman and photoshopping her into oblivion) has been banned from its cover, too. Instead, the women's magazine is embracing the oh-so-radical philosophy that women would like to look at and read about people other than the rich and famous. It is the first magazine in the U.K. to adopt such a policy.

Instead of the likes of Jennifer Aniston and Kate Moss, Essentials will feature everyday women on its cover and in its fashion and beauty spreads. The October issue will be the first published under this new approach. The issue will feature ten "ordinary" women, raging in age from 34-70 and from U.K. sizes 8-16 (U.S. sizes 6-14). You can see an image of the cover here. Jules Barton-Breck, editor of the magazine, said, "So many of these women look, and are, amazing that we wanted to celebrate them. "

Essentials decided on the editorial overhaul after surveying 5,000 women. Seventy percent said that they'd prefer non-celebrities on the cover. Nearly 75% of respondents claimed that so-called real women are more inspirational than celebrities, and almost as many said that they feel pressure from celebrities to live up to an impossible ideal.

So far, so good. I certainly applaud Essentials' efforts to celebrate a broader range of women. And, who doesn't feel good about less airbrushing? That said, I am a tad skeptical. I wonder how diverse the women featured will be. Already in the first issue, all of the women of color on the cover are actually behind the fold. Further, I bristle at the terms "real" and "normal" being used to describe women. The implication being that some women aren't real, aren't normal.

Continue reading at Change.org's Women's Rights Blog …