A few weeks back there was this NYT article about how women need to learn how to speak ‘nanny.”

The whole idea is fucked up in so many ways I can’t even articulate, but let me try: the idea of some women “buying” their freedom as a result of being able to pay other women to take care of their children is screwed up. The cultural differences are screwed up. The fact that most of the women who need to learn to speak nanny are bound to be rich white women – while their nannies are poor brown women – just pisses me off.

Take this paragraph, for instance:

The mother, at times beset by guilt, a touch of intimidation or feelings of her own maternal inadequacy, fails to articulate what she wants from the nanny — and then complains to friends, her spouse or an Internet message board when she doesn’t get it. (The father in many cases steers clear of the whole relationship.)

Wow, right? That little parenthetical is about as huge as Mrs. Ramsey’s death in To the Lighthouse, no? Yes, the father steers clear of it all. Now there’s your article, NYT!

Saturday is a good day to talk about vaginas, no? AlterNet seems to think so, with this lovely article about all the stuff the health & beauty industry thinks is wrong with yours, & how they can fix it: with surgery, bleach, dye, douches, deodorant, & mints. Yes, mints. They did forget one recent beauty aid, however:

Problem: Your vagina is plain.

Solution: Vajazzle.

Really, folks, you can get your beaver bejeweled now with tiny crystals to make it glitter like a disco ball.

That’s pretty much 7 quick paths to a yeast infection. None of these procedures is ever encouraged by anyone with a legitimate medical degree, and most of them can cause serious harm. Regular bathing & cotton panties may seem so old-fashioned, but it’s still what the best-kept vaginas are wearing.

(h/t to Diane for the vajazzling)

For those who were fans: Cagney & Lacey are going to be re-united on that hip spy series Burn Notice tonight; Sharon Gless, who played Cagney, is a regular on the show, on which she plays Michael Weston’s mom.

Mary Daly died yesterday.

She resigned from her position at Boston College because she wouldn’t let male students into her Women’s Studies classes. feh.

From her Wiki entry:

Also in Gyn/Ecology, Daly asserted her negative view of transsexual people, whom she referred to as “Frankensteinian.” She labels transsexualism a “male problem” and claimed that post-operative transsexuals exist in a “contrived and artifactual condition.”[13] Daly was also the dissertation advisor to Janice Raymond, whose dissertation, published in 1979 as The Transsexual Empire, is critical of “transsexualism.” Transsexual activist Riki Wilchins has accused Daly of being transphobic.

Mostly we’ll just wait for the rest of them to go, too. Being an anti-trans feminist these days is about as logical as being against same-sex marriage: wrong side of history.

There’s a great video about how women’s bodies are represented in media that was just brought to my attention. It’s in Italian with English subtitles and worth watching. That said, some of the images are really upsetting (and all were broadcast on Italian television).

Wow, this is depressing to read. It’s also not even a little surprising.

In light of all that, then, I shouldn’t have been surprised that using a male pseudonym had such a dramatic effect on Chartrand’s career. Death threats and sexually degrading commentary directed at women writers seem very 21st century — so modern! so fresh! — but being paid half as much for the same work? Landing fewer jobs? Receiving more criticism and less respect? That just sounds so old-fashioned. I learned about women posing as men to get work in elementary school history lessons, not when I went to grad school for writing. The thought that if I’d tried writing as, say, Kevin Harding, I might have earned far more money, opportunity and authority than I have, is almost as inconceivable as it is chilling. Since the Brontë days, says Chartrand, “we’ve had feminism. We have the right to vote, to own property, to be members of Parliament and Congress, to get a job, and to be the main breadwinner of the family. And yet apparently we haven’t gotten past those 19th century stigmas.”

Here’s the original.

Maybe I should have been George and not Helen after all.

It’s kind of amazing, the idea of Iranian men wearing traditional head scarves to show their allegiance to the insurgence, but that’s what they’re doing.

Thus the new protest also speaks to the societal aspect of Iranian women being forced to accept a dress code, according to Dabashi.

“Proud to wear my late mother’s rusari, the very rusari that was forced on my wife in Iran, the very rusari for which my sisters are humiliated if they choose to wear it in Europe, and the very rusari that the backward banality that now rules Iran thinks will humiliate Majid Tavakoli if it is put on him — He is dearer and nobler to us today than he ever was.”

In a speech before his arrest, Tavakoli played on the theme of the day’s historical significance in light of current anti-government protests.

“We Iranian men are late doing this,” Dabashi said. “If we did this when rusari was forced on those among our sisters who did not wish to wear it 30 years ago, we would have perhaps not been here today.”

(thanks to Jade Catherine for the tip)

What a cool thing: a list of feminist books for five year olds.

Makes me want to start using “cisbitch,” myself.

What does it say about me as a feminist if I watch GI Jane solely to check out Viggo Mortensen’s legs?

I’ve just been reading some good stuff over at On the Issues:

• this piece about misogyny
• & this one about biology & the binary
• & this one about the long history of bias against women in science (a la Darwin & Freud)

It’s a fantastic resource, OTI. Do go check them out.

You magazine, of the UK, gave Caster Semenya a make-over, so now she looks like this:

& I guess I’m happy for her, but the whole thing makes me terrifically sad. We just can’t seem to accept people as they are.

There’s one great article about women in the world which to some degree states clearly that feminism is not dead & shouldn’t be, and another article, a book review, talks about the relationship between money and sex as laid out by the sex workers who wrote the essays in Hos, Hookers, Call Girls and Rent Boys.

Friday they had a good article about Caster Semenya written by Alice Dreger.

Can I just ask, how is it these people who are protesting the Cash for Clunkers program AND national health insurance have never cared about anything before? Is it just Fox News all of a sudden having an investment in getting these people out of their chairs? Maybe. I don’t know. I’d just like to say that I find it astounding that Americans can be so absurd as to be totally enraged by isses about health insurance but a fake war is no big deal.

Baffling.

If I see one more woman on TV who knows nothing about her family finances who has swallowed her husband’s dumbass politics hook line & sinker who doesn’t understand the first goddamn thing about how women and children would benefit the most from a national health insurance system I’m going to go find them & smack them.

They embarrass me, besides, going on television knowing nothing but the freaking republican talking points. I mean, shouldn’t they feel some shame in admitting they never gave a shit about politics before? Enough shame to keep them off TV?

Talk about triggery, but this piece on “corrective rape” in South Africa is absofuckinglutely horrifying.

Corrective rape, for those who haven’t heard the term (it’s less than ten years old, since it was just recently coined by human rights activists) is the criminal phenomenon where LGBT people, especially lesbians, are raped by a member of the opposite sex as a means of trying to “correct” their sexual orientation. It’s a particularly vile practice, and while it’s not exclusive to South Africa, the country has become especially notorious for it. So notorious in fact, that the Triangle Project, a South African LGBT organization, is now saying that they deal with up to ten new cases of “corrective rape” each week.

My On The Issues piece, How a Feminst Found Her Sexism, is now up on Bilerico.

Has everyone seen this article about girls & superheros from Thursday’s NYT? Interesting stuff.

Little girls don’t embrace superheroes as often or avidly as boys. That may in part be developmental. With the big blinking caveats that there are vast variations within — as opposed to between — the sexes and that nature is heavily influenced by nurture, research on sex and play indicates that little boys are more readily drawn to competitive, rough-and-tumble activities, while little girls (again, big blinking caveat, see above) strive for group harmony over individual dominance. Beyond that, let’s face it, the choices for girls have not exactly been compelling: who can even remember Batgirl’s secret identity? (She was Commissioner Gordon’s daughter, Barbara.)

I like her big blinking caveats myself, but I’m going to bold them, anyway.

(h/t to Sarah for sending it)

I’ve been Simming for nine years – played TOS (The Original Sims), Sims 2, & now Sims 3. I was even one of those people who test-piloted TSO (The Sims Online) because they apparently had my name on a list of people who really freaking loved the game. Betty & Bob Newbie and Mortimer & Bella Goth are all familiar names in our house.

& While I have reasonably successfully ignored Will Wright’s being a BOR (Big Old Republican), recently EA has just been teh suck when it comes to women.

I’m not even that offended by the “booth babe” idea, but what DOES offend me is the lack of recognition that someone might prefer a “booth boy” or that any of the people who might want to post with a “booth babe” might be women.

& All this while GLAAD is trying to get a conversation started about homophobia in gaming.

I am, sadly, setting aside my Sims playing until EA gets its shit together.

What bothers me even more about all this is that Wright is a right-winger of the Libertarian bent who should have no patience for this kind of heterosexist & sexist crap. As a capitalist, which I’m sure he is, he shouldn’t want to estrange any market. Sims always had the same-sex “woohoo.” Civil unions were in the first release of Sims 2, which came out in 2004, & they stayed put even through the great nudity scandal of 2005. Same sex marriage is possible in Sims 3… all of which all gave me the idea that this trans amorous het dyke was, um, welcome in the Sims community. Apparently not.

Will Wright, it’s time to issue a real apology to women, and to the LGBT communities, for encouraging this kind of bullshit. (& Yes, he’ll be sent a copy of this.)

(You can follow #EAfail on Twitter, too.)

An old friend of mine wrote a cover article for the Times Literary Supplement about the first hunger striker, Marion Wallace-Dunlop. What interesting about his research is that it’s not about her alone, but about the way she understood media – in her case, at the time, painting – and its relationship to politics. He writes:

Wallace-Dunlop’s innovation was to create a kind of political theatre in a prison cell, its impact more dramatic than any she could have made on the image of women in art.

Very cool article about a very cool woman – whose life occupies a nice intersection of colonialism, feminism, suffrage, political strategy, art, and theatre.

This morning, the House Appropriations Committee’s subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services and Education (Labor HHS) eliminated traditional sources of funding for abstinence-only programs by passing the appropriations bill for FY 2010.

The Labor HHS subcommittee and the Obama Administration has recognized what we already knew: abstinence-only sex education programs do not work. The evidence is irrefutable that spending for abstinence-only education is not only wasteful, but also the programs put young women’s health at risk. A 2004 study by the House Committee on Government Reform, conducted at the request of Rep. Henry Waxman (D-30-CA) found that over 80% of the curricula used in the largest federally funded abstinence-only programs contained “false, misleading, or distorted information about reproductive health.” >In addition to pulling the plug on funding for failed abstinence-only sex education programs, the bill eliminates a ban on syringe exchange programs, which have been proven to be a highly effective strategy for preventing HIV.

(via email from FeministMajority.org)