feminist blogs in english

by Amanda Marcotte

Well, this strikes me as the most irritating non-story I’ve read in a long fucking time.  I suppose I’m supposed to be shocked and mildly distressed at the release of a study (conducted by Nutrisystem) that shows that half of American women would “give up sex” rather than gain 10 pounds.  But I find the whole thing too suspect to take seriously.  And it’s not because, or at least just because, of what Tracy Clark-Flory pointed out, which is that 66% of survey respondents felt like they have to lose weight to feel sexy, which is a sad result of the widespread fat-shaming in our culture.  (The survey suggested the average amount that had to be lost to reach that goal was 23 pounds, which is such an abstract number as to be meaningless.  Is that a number that includes all the women that feel they’re 5 pounds away from getting into a size four averaged with people who want to lose 100 pounds, or is it just a lot of people who feel they need to lose 23 pounds?  No idea.) But it’s because they poisoned the well to make sure they got the results they wanted. 

See, they didn’t ask if people would give up sex rather than gain weight.  They asked if you’d give up sex for the summer rather than gain weight.  Considering that’s only 3 months, I’m surprised more people didn’t say yes.  A lot of Americans go 3 month stretches without getting laid all the time, often even if they’re in relationships.  I’m sure people who’ve had 3 month dry spells outnumber people who haven’t many times over.  It’s not a super fun idea to go 3 months without sex, but most of us have plenty of assurance we’d survive.  (Unless they’re rolling masturbation into their definition of “sex”, which I’m almost positive they aren’t.)

But what really pissed me off about this survey was that it’s indicative of the entire problem with the American diet industry, which is basically built to encourage yo-you dieting. You’ve heard the statistic that 95% of diets don’t work?  That’s because they’re designed not to.  The entire pitch of diet programs is, “Deprive yourself of pleasure for short periods of time, and then, when you reach a goal, go right back to your old habits.  In a few years, when you’ve gained it all back, come back and we’ll do it all over again.” There’s no natural reason to connect sexual deprivation with weight control---on the contrary, I’d guess frequent sex actually burns a fair number of calories---but the diet industry’s logic is just this.  The whole notion is that you “earn” pleasure by being skinny enough to deserve it, and the only way to earn it is to lose weight.

Silvana has a really long, interesting post on the way that getting married can provoke body anxiety in even the most stalwart opponents of that kind of crap, and she mentions something that has always bothered me, too.

As a fat chick, I am well aware of the MUSTLOSEWEIGHTBEFOREWEDDING cultural imperative. I was aware of this before I ever knew what Fat Acceptance was. And I knew before I ever got engaged that I would be doing no such thing. Frankly, I wasn’t even tempted. I know people who have gone on serious diets in the year or so before they get married, women who have attended “boot camp,” and companies who have made a lot of money off of fueling those anxieties. I wanted no part of it.

I’ve always been perplexed by the “lose weight before the wedding” mandate for a few reasons:

1) It’s assumed that every bride to be, no matter what size she is, will spend the time before her wedding anxiously dieting.  This mandate is so universal that it’s applied to the skinny and the fat, as well as anyone in-between.  Even within the logic that accepts that weight loss for aesthetic reasons should be a goal, this has never made sense to me.  If you’re already skinny, why do you have to lose weight?  If you’re fat, it’s not like you’re going to get skinny by the wedding.  But this is universally applied and assumed of every bride, no matter what her realities.

2) This whole mandate is straight from the ugliest corner of heteronormativity, but it doesn’t make sense even assuming the logic of heteronormativity.  After all, you were validated by a man’s love when he proposed to you; I highly doubt most marriage proposals come with the caveat that you’ll be loved and adored if you can just be 10 pounds thinner.  You just got your heteronormative female validation!  Can’t you enjoy it for a second, or do you have to punish yourself by doubling down on the belief that you, being female, will never be good enough?

3) If you reject #2 and believe that there’s a caveat to “you’re the one”, which is “if you lose 10 pounds”, then aren’t you being a little deceitful with a diet program that’s basically built around the belief that those 10 pounds are only going to be off your body long enough for you to get married, at which point you’ll abandon the diet and probably put it right back on?

None of these points are me suggesting that there’s anything good and right about the logic that makes women obsess over their bodies.  I’m just saying that even within that system, the wedding day diets have always struck me as irrational.  They are emblematic of the entire problem with the diet industry, which is that it encourages you to set a target day that you’re supposed to be at some goal weight, and then basically you’re pretty much expected to put it all back on.  But yo-yo dieting isn’t like having your hair get a little shaggy before getting a haircut---it’s hard work and it’s really bad for you. 

But now that I’ve read this survey that irrationally conflated depriving yourself of sex with not gaining weight, I think the internal logic of the yo-yo dieting system makes sense.  The diet industry really works off the puritanical self-punishment mentality, where you only deserve pleasure if you’ve punished yourself sufficiently through self-deprivation.  So, a bride (no matter her beginning weight) only deserves to enjoy her wedding if she went through the hellish ropes of self-deprivation for a year beforehand.  Or you only get to enjoy sex if you lose 23 pounds.  Or, most troubling in terms of people’s health, is this survey result:

Nearly half (46 percent) of the country chose not to diet, even when they knew they needed to lose weight, because they didn’t want to give up their favorite foods.

There’s the logic of diets in a nutshell---you deprive yourself of your favorite food until you lose the weight, and then you go right back to eating like you did before.  It’s an all-or-nothing culture, feast or famine.  Moderation, maintaining healthy habits will not depriving yourself of pleasure, and god forbid, actually enjoying the process of staying healthy?  Doesn’t even register.  There’s no suggestion that favorite foods can be enjoyed in moderation or that many delicious foods aren’t necessarily bad for your health.  And there’s not even a whiff of discussion about the importance of exercise and heart healthiness regardless of one’s dress size.  If you were trying to design a toxic culture around food and exercise, you couldn’t do better than the one that’s evolved in the U.S.

by Amanda Marcotte

Via Atrios, I see that full-blown brainless resentment as a campaign strategy is well under way in 2010.

Republican gubernatorial candidate Dan Maes is warning voters that Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper’s policies, particularly his efforts to boost bike riding, are “converting Denver into a United Nations community.”

“This is all very well-disguised, but it will be exposed,” Maes told about 50 supporters who showed up at a campaign rally last week in Centennial.

Maes said in a later interview that he once thought the mayor’s efforts to promote cycling and other environmental initiatives were harmless and well-meaning. Now he realizes “that’s exactly the attitude they want you to have.”

Yep, the argument is that programs that look like they’re about reducing emissions and reducing dependence on fossil fuels---as well as getting people to be healthier by getting more exercise---are in fact a liberal plot to have the UN take over our cities.  Apparently, starting with those out West, because what you want when you’re plotting a takeover of a country is to go after cities that are well-armed and spread out.  Though I suppose the paranoid right wingers could just say that’s why they have to take over the cities by stealthy hippyness, because warfare isn’t gonna get it done.

There’s some jibber-jabber paranoid explanation for why bike programs are secret UN plots to destroy America.

Maes said in a later interview that he was referring to Denver’s membership in the International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives, an international association that promotes sustainable development and has attracted the membership of more than 1,200 communities, 600 of which are in the United States.

Whatever the bullshit explanation is basically irrelevant, of course.  The point is to stoke resentment against bicyclists, and then transfer that resentment to the Democrats.  Bicyclists and pedestrians are easy hate objects, because they make car-dependent people feel insecure, especially if those car-dependent people are using their car even in situations where they know they could walk it or bike it.  If you doubt this, I highly recommend actually getting a bike and trying to commute with it---even if you can’t go to work, try going to the store or to nearby occasions with it---and you’ll find that there are lot of mindlessly angry drivers out there who take your bicycle as an affront to their manhood or something.  Yes, even if you obey every traffic law and are scrupulous about staying out of the way (which I was when I lived where I biked everywhere---now I just walk).

I’m beginning, however, to think that conservatives are out to kill each other off, which seems to be a poor campaign strategy, but it’s getting harder to deny.  There’s an increasing tendency with conservatives to adopt a pious attitude about having really bad health habits, namely eating a bunch of crap and refusing to move your body more than 10 feet without fossil fuel-based assistance.  Bicyclists, vegetarians, and arugula munchers belong in the cast of villains for the right.  It’s a particularly troubling trend, since we all have to share health care costs at the end of the day.

Take, for instance, this hilarious post at Sadly, No! making fun of one Julie Gunlock, who appears to be kept up at nights with worry that somewhere someone poor might be enjoying a healthful and tasty meal.  She rails against soup kitchens that serve food that she thinks sounds fancy, like pumpkin soup or blueberries with sour cream.  And she thinks that free lunch programs should be cut off because they somehow prevent parents from feeding their own children, hiding behind the claim that no cafeteria could compete with the nutritional value of a meal put together by someone who can’t afford enough food to feed their children three squares a day.

Sadly Naut Tintin suggests that Gunlock is hardly the person to be talking about food in such detail, or claiming knowledge of how best to put together nutritious meals, because she writes a food column where she suggests melting your leftover cheese platter over some pasta and calling that dinner.  Perhaps someone in the Wal-Mart frame of mind doesn’t realize that there are “seasons” and that they have “surpluses” that might explain why a soup kitchen has a lot of donated ingredients that they turn into things like pumpkin soup.  It’s a tempting explanation. 

But between this and the bicycles-are-a-UN-plot nonsense, I have an alternate theory: Perhaps this is part of the larger wingnut assault on Americans making it to age 40 without a couple heart attacks under their belts.  After all, Dick Cheney had his first at 37, and who are we to argue with greatness?  Dan Maes might be in the division of the secret wingnut anti-health forces that concentrates on making sure that no one gets their hearts near their target heart rate.  (With a big assist from the anti-sex brigade.) Gunlock is part of the Permanent Constipation division, focusing on a goal of making sure that no American craps more than once a week. 

Red states do more poorly on health outcomes than do blue states.  You can come up with all sorts of explanations for why the may be so, starting with the fact that red states are often less wealthy, more averse to unionization that gets people better health care plans, etc. 

Or maybe it’s just that the widespread wingnut assault on target heart rates and regular bowel movements is working out really well where they have a lot of influence. 

Due to an anti-choice kerfuffle on Wednesday on whether Pre-existing Condition Insurance Plans (otherwise known as high risk pools) will include abortion coverage, President Obama seemed to quickly concede and announced a total abortion ban in the pools. This is despite the fact that this was not in the original health care reform bill. As a result, many high-risk women who may be more apt to complications with their pregnancies will not be given coverage for an abortion.

RH Reality Check has the lowdown about this and how the ban actually goes further than the executive order compromise made originally:

It is understandable that the Administration might now feel the need to honor the "spirit" of the compromise that resulted in the Executive Order. But the whole point of the compromise was to preserve the status quo, which included both restricted and unrestricted spheres of abortion funding. Moreover, the terms of the agreement were carefully negotiated. Abortion opponents who participated in the bargaining did not raise concerns about high risk pools or other specific potential sources of federal funding, and they should be able to live with the deal they made.

The worst of it is that the Administration could have at the very least set up something akin to the Hyde Amendment and the PPACA by giving states the option of using state or private money to cover abortion care costs. Instead, the Administration cited the Federal Employees Health Benefits Plan specifically as the controlling precedent for the PCIPs.

The FEHBP, like the Stupak Amendment, imposes a total ban on non-Hyde abortion care, meaning that non-federal money cannot be used to supplement premiums in order to purchase a plan that includes abortion coverage. Thus, without even any political or legislative benefit to receive in exchange, the Obama Administration has imposed a more restrictive abortion funding rule on PCIPs than is required for health insurance exchanges or Medicaid.

Check out statements being made by pro-choice organizations like the National Institute for Reproductive Health and Planned Parenthood. You can take action via NARAL Pro-Choice America here.

Thanks to the feminist activists that protested the Stupak amendment, (which I wrote about here, 'member?) the health care reform abortion coverage ban was defeated. Well that's just great, right?

The list should be released today, and the Wall Street Journal says it won't include birth control. This list is part of the new health care overhaul, as bits and pieces go into effect starting now.

The Obama administration on Wednesday will unveil new rules specifying which preventive health services will be free to consumers under the new health law.

Cancer screenings, including mammograms and colonoscopies, as well as obesity prevention services, immunizations, blood pressure screenings and tobacco cessation services are among those that will be available to consumers without a copayment or other direct costs for consumers on new health plans after Sept. 23.

Birth control will not qualify as preventive under these regulations. The Planned Parenthood Federation of America is pushing for it to be included in a separate set of regulations on women's health expected to come out in the coming months.

To ensure access to birth control for everyone who wants it, including it as a preventative service would be key. The fight on this is definitely not over, as reproductive rights and justice groups gear up to push the White House on this issue.

Just a quick reminder, you can submit links for this column via e-mail at rosiered23 (at) sparecandy (dot) com, and you can catch up with Spare Candy on Twitter, Facebook or Tumblr as well. Or! Leave a link in the comments! Self-promotion is perfectly acceptable here.

The movie "The Kids Are All Right," starring Annette Bening and Julianne Moore as a lesbian couple with two kids, is getting rave reviews. People are already talking Oscar for Bening. The movie is directed by Lisa Cholodenko, who also co-wrote the movie with Stuart Blumberg. (Cholodenko also wrote and directed "High Art.") Jezebel has a good roundup of reviews, and check out Women & Hollywood's article, too. I haven't seen "The Kids Are All Right" yet, but after reading reviews, I plan to. Has anyone seen it yet? Thoughts?

In other news:

• New York Times: "Phys Ed: What Exercise Science Doesn’t Know About Women."
• The Post-Standard: "Dr. Robert Seidenberg, outspoken feminist and celebrated author, dies at 90."
• Washington Post: "Health insurers may soon offer contraceptives at no extra cost." Wouldn't that be nice?!
• Reuters: "Caster 'thrilled' to compete again." About runner Caster Semenya, who had to undergo gender testing after allegations that she wasn't a woman.
• Newsweek: "Women Will Rule the World; Men were the main victims of the recession. The recovery will be female."
• AP: "Hawaii governor vetoes same-sex civil unions bill."
• Transgriot: "Legal Victory For Vandy Beth!"
• AP: "Presbyterian leaders approve gay clergy policy."
• AP: "White House silent on Mass. gay marriage ruling." The ruling involves federal benefits for gay couples.
• Change.org: "Google Can Find Only 8 Women to Honor, Over 100 Men." One of them is Frida Kahlo, and speaking of her ...
• Leaving Evidence: "Reflecting on Frida Kahlo’s Birthday and The Importance of Recognizing Ourselves for (in) Each Other."
• Shakesville: "13-Year-Old Girl Humiliated for Being Insufficiently USian." Ugh.
• The Frisky: "Daughter Wants 'Artsy' Footage Dad Filmed Of Her Breasts Out Of NYU’s Archives." Warning, this one will leave a gross taste in your mouth.
• Common Dreams: "What We Make Our Sisters Do for Healthcare."
• Feministe: "Storytelling as a Radical Act."
• The Curvature: "Alabama Expands Abuse Protection Law to Cover Dating Relationships."
• Broadsheet: "Why can't 'career women' just be women?"
• Daily Mail: "Playboy cancels Portuguese edition after it features Jesus Christ among topless models."
• Politics Daily: "The Next 10 Women to Watch in Politics."
• The Sexist: "Waterboarding Is Torture, Pickpocketing Is Theft, Rape Is Rape." Short, but with an important point.
• BBC: "Majority of rape cases in NI do not end up in court." NI = Northern Ireland.
• 10 TV (Ohio): "Alleged Rape Victim Says She's Target Of Intimidation."
• AP: "Spain's unrestricted abortion law takes effect." Unrestricted in the first 14 weeks, that is.
• Ms. magazine: "Louisiana Abortion Bills Become Law." Both laws are entirely suspect.

Twenty-seven states have laws that require some level of prescription contraceptive coverage.  Access to additional free or subsidized contraceptives may (or may not) occur in the fall, when the health care reform changes will require new health plans to begin providing a range of preventive health services at no cost to members.  What that means for contraceptive coverage is not yet known.  Michelle Andrews has an article in the Washington Post that talks about the issues.

Yesterday the Obama administration unveiled healthcare.gov, a website that is meant for folks to understand the changes and plans available to them under the new health care law.

It's a snazzy and informative site. Check it out.

by Amanda Marcotte

I posted some on this at Double X, but I thought it would be interesting to expand on here.  This article in the LA Times is about when it’s okay to let your kids quit an activity, but what really jumped out at me about it was how much children’s sports are portrayed as this miserable hellhole of competition where only the toughest survive.

But the intensity of the conditioning was unlike anything Bob had experienced. The boys did up-downs until their faces turned purple. They were forced to run laps holding hands as a punishment. While there was an emphasis on teamwork — in theory, football is supposed to be the ultimate team sport — there was a profound absence of positive reinforcement.

So after 13 weeks, and just before the season ended, my son did what his gut told him to do: He quit.

“It’s not fun,” he said wearily. “And I’m tired of the coaches making me feel badly about myself.”

Awesome, I thought.  Bob’s chances just shot up of being allergic to athletic activity for the rest of his life because of these associations.  Maybe he’ll get lucky and this experience won’t sour him on his own image of his body as an athletic entity.  But if he’s like many to most Americans who had negative experiences with jock culture as young people, his insecurity about not being perfect out of the gate will hound him, and make all future attempts to pick up exercise feel futile and disheartening.  When his doctor tells him he better pick up some exercise routine or else, he’ll join a gym or try bicycling, but exposure to the jocks in that environment will dredge up the same negative associations and feelings of inadequacy, and he’s quite likely to give up.  Or, if he’s lucky, he’ll fall in with people who see working out as a competition only with yourself, and who see sports mainly as a way to relax and have fun, and he’ll be able to get into the groove.  But he’ll always be a little behind where he wished he’d be, where someone who’d spent his whole life doing athletic things would be.

Sorry to sound so bleak, but few things can create mental blocks for people like being labeled as children---it often takes decades for adults to realize that they actually aren’t bad at math or incapable of being athletic, as they were told as children.  If they ever learn.  Which is exactly what the LA Times writer discovered.

The results of the study also send a strong message to coaches who humiliate children: The things they do and say can turn a child off from team sports for years.

Although the study was designed to examine how instructors made sports fun for kids, the responses focused more on what coaches did wrong. Strean, in fact, says he was shocked by the emotional responses he received.

“The so-called physical education that I received as a kid robbed me of the joy of physical activity for many years,” one participant wrote. “It did nothing whatever to establish habits of balance in life between the cerebral and the physical. Instead, the focus seemed to be on achieving excellence in a competitive setting. It destroyed my physical confidence.”

And these pee wee coaches acting like they’re coaching the fucking NFL isn’t doing anyone any favors.

In his four years as a softball coach, Charlie Hutchinson, a father of two daughters, has had to counsel his share of parents whose kids want to drop out.

“In most cases, kids want to quit because they feel they are not good at something,” Hutchinson says. “We tend to not want our kids to suffer. I think it’s part of the culture where everyone gets a trophy. Parents should make them stick with it. You made a commitment? You should finish it.”

Hutchinson, however, agrees with Strean that coaches need to “stop worrying about winning and start having fun,” he says. “How else do you build a love for something?”

That he doesn’t see the contradiction there is interesting.  It’s such a truism that there’s something wrong with rewarding kids for simply getting out there and trying, but when it comes to sports, I would actually say that’s a critical thing to do.  Because you know what?  When you’re an adult and trying to work up enthusiasm for putting on your sneakers and going for a run, you’re not going to get there convincing yourself it doesn’t count unless you’re an Olympian.  You need to reward yourself just for getting out there and trying. 

You have to ask yourself what we’re trying to get out of juvenile sports.  Is it there to teach kids that winning is everything, and that anything short of that is utter failure?  Are we using it simply as a system to find the one in thousands that will become a professional athlete?  Or is it there to teach about sportsmanship, camaraderie, and inculcate a love of physical activity that will serve you well your entire life?  If it’s the latter, then the everyone-gets-a-trophy attitude is actually the best approach.  Just because everyone gets a trophy doesn’t mean you can’t have competition---winners, I suspect, will always get better trophies.  But if people who aren’t the absolute best get no positive reinforcement, of course they drop out.  We’re human beings---we thrive on positivity and reward, not despair and failure. 

Just a quick reminder, you can submit links for this column via e-mail at rosiered23 (at) sparecandy (dot) com, and you can catch up with Spare Candy on Twitter, Facebook or Tumblr as well. Or! Leave a link in the comments! Self-promotion is perfectly acceptable here.

• From Austin to A&M: "It's summer. Time for the slut-shaming!" Yes, yes and YES to everything in this. And I'll warn you, if you read the editorial that this post is responding to, you will want to either throw your computer, bang your head against a wall, or both. It is that bad.
• New York Times: "A Poor Nation, With a Health Plan." This is about Rwanda, which has a national health insurance program. Among its benefits: Women giving birth at medical facilities instead of at home.
• Toronto Star: "G20 Girls, Brazil: Abortion fight for raped girl, 9." The Star has a series of articles about girls in all the G20 countries; you can find links to them on the left side of the page.
• Ms. Blog: "Guess What Friday Is? Abortion Blackout Day!" Yep. Anti-choicers wore black this past Friday.
• Fannie's Room: "Florida Gunman Targets Only Women, Media Fails to Ask Why." Great read here.
• Helsinki Times: "Centre elects (Mari) Kiviniemi as party chair and Finland's prime minister." Now Finland's president and prime minister both are women. Their president is Tarja Halonen.
• Gender Across Borders: "A Woman’s Worth is Measured by Her Cup Size: The Gender Policing of Delphine Ravisé-Giard." This is about a trans woman in France who has been told by the government she needs to have bigger breasts in order for her to be legally identified as a woman. Because that's what makes one a woman. Big breasts. Sigh.
• New York Times: "Panel Recommends Approval of After-Sex Pill to Prevent Pregnancy." The drug in question works better than Plan B, and works up to five days after sex. Be prepared for anti-choicers' "this kills babies" propaganda.
• Jezebel: "Louisiana Passes Pre-Abortion Ultrasound Requirement." The latest state to join in the compulsory ultrasound legislation craze. And no exceptions for rape/incest victims, of course. Also see this story about Michigan's law.
• Native Appropriations: "But Why Can't I Wear a Hipster Headdress?" This blog post is from April, but I just happened to come across it recently and I think everyone should read it.
• Slate: "Why Do Dads Lie on Surveys About Fatherhood?" Interesting article. I think this point is probably spot-on: "But this puts men at about where women were 30 years ago—new to the work-life-balance issue and unsure how to square all their identities."
• Change.org: "The Recession Wiped Out Decades of Progress on Child Poverty." Not good news, at all.
• New York magazine: "The Housewife’s Moment of Truth." The magazine's article from 1971 previewing Ms. magazine. Definitely worth a read.
• PopcornBiz: "'Criminal Minds' Cutting Loose Female Cast Members. Isn’t That Kinda Wrong?" An ongoing problem in TV and movies.
• CommonDreams.org: "Gender Apartheid Online." All about how women's news is othered by the press, both print and online. Excellent article.
• FWD/Forward: "Open Post: Helen Keller Mythbusting Blogswarm Day!" Please do read the comments, an important point was raised that deserves attention. It was also addressed at Womanist Musings in the post "Why I AM Not Celebrating Helen Keller Mythbusting Blogswarm Day!" Feministe also has more about Helen Keller.
• The Oklahoman: "First black woman elected to Oklahoma House dies." Hannah Atkins was 86 years old.
• BBC News: "Male menopause is 'rare' but it is not a myth." I had not heard of this before. Interesting.