Category: feminism

4 More Years: Forward

Posted by helenboyd – November 7, 2012

It is so, so good to live in a country that makes sense to me. Thank you, all of you, but thank you so much to all the women of this country. We rocked it.

Rape apologists voted out, & a feminist President re-elected.

Wisconsin (woot!) elects the first openly gay U. S. Senator with Tammy Baldwin. New Hampshire now has a female governor and two female senators, which is pretty damned cool, too. & There were a ton of other victories for women all over the country in all kinds of races.

Maine votes in same sex marriage by ballot. Maryland approves same sex marriage too. (It’s leading in Washington, too, which would mean a total of 9 states would legally recognize same sex partnerships. That’s just about a fifth.)

Top 10 Reasons to Vote for Obama #7: The Supremes

Posted by helenboyd – October 30, 2012

No, not those Supremet: Obama gets to pick the next Supreme Court Justices, which hold the fate of not just Roe v. Wade in their hands, but many other things as well.

 

Top 10 Reasons to Vote for Obama #8: This Is What A Feminist Looks Like

Posted by helenboyd – October 29, 2012

But more importantly, what a feminist acts like: Obama supports women’s right to choose, passed The Lily Ledbetter Act (which allows women to correct pay inequity), and thinks women should make choices about their own bodies.

Halloween: Keep Your Tits In

Posted by helenboyd – October 27, 2012

Kind of awful in an excellent way.

That said, sexy costumes are great when they make sense. When they’re just messed up, objectifying versions of men’s costumes, they’re just stupid. At the very least, throw in some scary or gruesome, ladies: sexy zombie nurse is way better than way overdone sexy nurse. Or really push it, & shoot straight to enema nurse.

Happy Halloween!

Speaking of Foreign Policy…

Posted by helenboyd – October 23, 2012

… did you know Romney/Ryan plan to bring back the Global Gag Rule? No, I didn’t either.

Mr. Romney has pledged that, on his first day in the White House, he would reinstate the “global gag rule,” the odious restriction that has been used to deny federal money for family-planning work abroad to any organization that provided information, advice, referrals or services for legal abortion or supported the legalization of abortion, even using its own money.

and

The gag rule did nothing to prevent use of government financing for abortions because that was already illegal under federal law. But it badly hampered the work of family-planning groups overseas, forcing clinic closures, reduced services and fee increases. It also violated principles of informed consent by requiring health care providers to withhold medical information from female patients. And, by stifling political debate on abortion-related issues and violating free speech principles, the gag rule badly undermined America’s credibility as it tries to promote democracy abroad.

So again, no difference between candidates, my radical friends? This one is huge.

If You Like Having Sex…

Posted by helenboyd – October 23, 2012

I think she makes a good, simple case for the problem with the Romney/Ryan ticket.

He will not be your advocate. Be your own. Vote.

The Truth About Romney’s Binder

Posted by helenboyd – October 20, 2012

As it turns out, Mitt Romney didn’t ask for the binder full of women, even. He was given it.

What actually happened was that in 2002 — prior to the election, not even knowing yet whether it would be a Republican or Democratic administration — a bipartisan group of women in Massachusetts formed MassGAP to address the problem of few women in senior leadership positions in state government. There were more than 40 organizations involved with the Massachusetts Women’s Political Caucus (also bipartisan) as the lead sponsor.

They did the research and put together the binder full of women qualified for all the different cabinet positions, agency heads, and authorities and commissions. They presented this binder to Governor Romney when he was elected.

So there you have it. He’s not even as woefully un-sexist as he claims to be; he’s even more sexist than that.

A Thousand Words

Posted by helenboyd – October 13, 2012

(But I’ll add a couple anyway: vote Obama, who believes in a woman’s right to choose.)

via PoliticsUSA

Balpreet Kaur

Posted by helenboyd – September 27, 2012

Okay, she’s my new hero.

Some jackass took a photo of her and posted it on Reddit in order to mock her appearance. A friend saw it & told her about it. So Ms. Kaur wrote to the jerk:

“Hey, guys. This is Balpreet Kaur, the girl from the picture. I actually didn’t know about this until one of my friends told on facebook. If the OP wanted a picture, they could have just asked and I could have smiled :) However, I’m not embarrased or even humiliated by the attention [negative and positve] that this picture is getting because, it’s who I am. Yes, I’m a baptized Sikh woman with facial hair. Yes, I realize that my gender is often confused and I look different than most women. However, baptized Sikhs believe in the sacredness of this body – it is a gift that has been given to us by the Divine Being [which is genderless, actually] and, must keep it intact as a submission to the divine will. Just as a child doesn’t reject the gift of his/her parents, Sikhs do not reject the body that has been given to us. By crying ‘mine, mine’ and changing this body-tool, we are essentially living in ego and creating a seperateness between ourselves and the divinity within us. By transcending societal views of beauty, I believe that I can focus more on my actions. My attitude and thoughts and actions have more value in them than my body because I recognize that this body is just going to become ash in the end, so why fuss about it? When I die, no one is going to remember what I looked like, heck, my kids will forget my voice, and slowly, all physical memory will fade away. However, my impact and legacy will remain: and, by not focusing on the physical beauty, I have time to cultivate those inner virtues and hopefully, focus my life on creating change and progress for this world in any way I can. So, to me, my face isn’t important but the smile and the happiness that lie behind the face are. :-) So, if anyone sees me at OSU, please come up and say hello. I appreciate all of the comments here, both positive and less positive because I’ve gotten a better understanding of myself and others from this. Also, the yoga pants are quite comfortable and the Better Together tshirt is actually from Interfaith Youth Core, an organization that focuses on storytelling and engagement between different faiths. :) I hope this explains everything a bit more, and I apologize for causing such confusion and uttering anything that hurt anyone.

The bold is mine.

And that is just too amazingly cool. I wish I had half the nerve, the confidence. I never even found out how much facial hair I might have been able to grow, and now I kind of wish I had. That said, I’m gonna guess she might have PCOS too, in which case she should be careful about being pre-diabetic.

But damn.

The cooler thing still is that the jerk who posted it actually had his opinion changed and apologized for being an asshole. And now, if you really need to, you can go look at the photo.

(via Jezebel.)

Race & Gender & Life Expectancy

Posted by helenboyd – September 23, 2012

So this is shocking news: whites who don’t graduate high school have a life expectancy that’s four years shorter than it used to be. And look at this:


In 2010, American women fell to 41st place, down from 14th place in 1985, in the United Nations rankings. Among developed countries, American women sank from the middle of the pack in 1970 to last place in 2010, according to the Human Mortality Database.

Uneducated white women are now living not even as long as black women with the same lack of education. That is honestly shocking. The life expectancy of uneducated black women has always been horrible, but now even more women are dying at the same rates.

But then there’s this guy:

“There’s this enormous issue of why,” said David Cutler, an economics professor at Harvard who was an author of a 2008 paper that found modest declines in life expectancy for less educated white women from 1981 to 2000. “It’s very puzzling and we don’t have a great explanation.”

Um, what? Bad health care, single parenting with little to no safety net (which can cause more stress), substance abuse (especially of prescription drugs and cigarettes), sexual violence… is this really hard to work out?

The one good part, I suppose, is that the percentage of everyone without high school diplomas is down from 22% to 12%.

So much for feminism being redundant in America, eh?

Gaga Feminism Blog Tour

Posted by helenboyd – September 18, 2012

J. Jack Halberstam’s new book, Gaga Feminism, is out, and it is a fascinating read; I highly recommend it. For those of you who are turned off my academic writing but like gender theory, give this a try. It’s funny, first of all, but it’s also the kind of book that leads you to think in new ways and to ask new questions. I had a revelatory moment thinking about the inter-generational quality of queer culture, and honestly, that’s only mentioned in passing. This one sends off really useful sparks.

I asked the author to comment the intersection of basic legislative issues that have been in the news – saying “vagina” in the state house, “legitimate rape”, issues of choice/abortion, etc., in the context of gaga feminism, and here is Halberstam’s response:

When did “vagina” suddenly become a fashionable term? First Lisa Brown, a state representative for Michigan, shocked her Republican colleagues when she used the word “vagina” to try to debate anti-choice legislation in her county. When Brown and another colleague were silenced for supposedly turning a polite conversation into one lacking in decorum, Eve Ensler pulled into town to save the town with another long speech on vaginas – The Vagina Monologues!! Meanwhile, Republicans got into their own hot water while debating vaginas – Republican Rep. Todd Akin called upon an apparently vast and deep reservoir of knowledge about the female body and its reproductive potential when, in defense of his indefensible position that rape victims should not have access to abortion, he suggested that in a “legitimate” rape, the female body would mysteriously reject the offensive sperm and protect itself from pregnancy. And then of course, feminist writer Naomi Wolf put out her own take on the suddenly hot topic and provided us with a “biography” of the vagina.

Wow! How to make sense of all these vaginas, some of them with brains (Wolf), some of them with primal prophylactic powers (Akin), some of them with so much to say (Ensler). In my new book, Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender and the End of Normal, I do not use the word vagina at all! Instead of pitting bodies with vaginas against bodies with penises, I argue that we are living in a new world where the categories of male and female are rapidly being updated all around us. In this world of sperm banks, IVF, queer families, butch daddies, transgender men and women, heteroflexible women, pretending to be offended by the use of the word “vagina” in a public speech or making insupportable claims about rape and pregnancy are not just quaint and old-fashioned, they signal a deep ignorance about the world we live in and the enormous changes that have taken place within it in the last two decades. So rather than making the vagina talk back to the idiocy of Christian or Republican hypocrisy by giving it a biography or a monologue, it is time to move on from simple, genital genders and start actually engaging the many forms of gendered embodiment that are moving us out of the age of normativity and into a new era of going gaga!

The next stop on the tour is at Queer Fat Femme, who is generally and specifically amazing, so do go check that out.

Not Too Far in the Future

Posted by helenboyd – September 2, 2012

RIP Shulasmith Firestone

Posted by helenboyd – August 31, 2012

Shulasmith Firestone, author of The Dialectic of Sex, has died at the age of 67. It’s an amazing piece of radical feminism, Freud meets Engels meets deBeauvoir.

“I’ve arranged the thingies into a pretty glass vase for now”

Posted by helenboyd – August 30, 2012

Oh, wow. Bic made pens For Women. Women (and men, as far as we know) have completely lambasted them for doing so with these very, very clever reviews.

Father says not to ask questions because it might give me wrinkles, indeed.

Who’s Poor? Women

Posted by helenboyd – August 20, 2012

With all of this blather about financial bottom lines, I’d just like to point out a small fact: the majority of the poor people in this country are women. So any budget plan that cuts funding for the poor is cutting funding for women, especially single mothers with children.

It’s embarrassing that we have the largest gap in poverty rates between men & women in the Western world.

Here are some other useful facts the next time someone starts going on about budgets and bottom lines and how there’s no need for feminism:

  • 13% of women over the age of 65 are poor; only 6% of men that age are.
  • The poverty gap between women and men widens significantly between ages 18 and 24—20.6 percent of women are poor at that age, compared to 14.0 percent of men. The gap narrows, but never closes, throughout adult life, and it more than doubles during the elderly years.

Why? Not just because of the wage gap, which is still significant – 77 cents on the dollar these days – but also because

  • women provide far more unpaid care giving than men,
  • they are still responsible for most of the unpaid childcare,
  • women still get pregnant and lose jobs as a result, and finally,
  • women lose paid work days dealing with the sexual and other violence.

So how about we actually work on a plan that eliminates sexual violence against women to balance the fucking budget, instead?

(h/t to Dylan.)

Queer Derby: Vagine Regime

Posted by helenboyd – August 16, 2012

Always forward, never straight – how it is in roller derby.

Erica Tremblay is making a documentary about the queer subculture within roller derby, and she needs funds.

Cool.

RIP Helen Gurley Brown

Posted by helenboyd – August 13, 2012

You don’t have to like Cosmo to have admired Helen Gurley Brown. You only have to appreciate how rare her voice was at the time it appeared: Sex and the Single Girl came out a year before The Feminine Mystique.

And she was, of course, a pro-sex woman’s voice which in the 1960s and 1970s was not very acceptable in mainstream feminism.

RIP, Ms. Brown. You did good.

Olympics Photos

Posted by helenboyd – August 5, 2012

Nate Jones has done a nice photo essay on “what if all Olympic sports were photographed like women’s beach volleyball?” which makes the point very, very clear. (& Some of you out there will be all for this turn of affairs. Honestly, that swimmer is – wow. It explains why they’ve gone through more than 100k condoms in the Olympic Village. If everyone looks like that, well, DAMN.)

Male Femme Responds

Posted by helenboyd – July 13, 2012

A transvestite of my acquaintance has written a very interesting response to the radfem anti-trans position that is worth reading. Jeffreys, and other radfems, seek to disenfranchise trans women on the basis that they are just transvestite men, and this male femme takes on why, exactly, that doesn’t make sense either.

This section is particularly interesting:

After that digression, in her final section Jeffreys asks the (for her, rhetorical) question: “Transfemininity – Transgressing Gender or Maintaining It?”, reiterating once again that “Femininity is exciting because it is the behaviour of subordination” and, further, that “it is because it is the behaviour of subordination that it cannot be preserved.” From my own perspective, femininity is not intrinsically the behaviour of subordination, so any move to eliminate it is unwarranted (never mind being hopelessly impractical). Instead, what is required is the negation of gender stereotyping, so that people are able to develop their gender freely and are free to express it as they need or wish. As for Jeffreys’ question itself, I think the answer is pretty much “neither” in all cases:

— For trans women (with whom Jeffreys is primarily concerned at this point) the question has no relevance, since trans women are not inevitably feminine; their gender is as variable as that of any other woman. (Jeffreys merely confuses sex and gender here.)

— For male submissives transgression does occur in a sexual sense, in that maleness is disassociated from stereotypical expectations of sexual dominance. Sissies might appear to render this ambiguous by coupling femininity with sexual submission, but it is still in essence male submission. In either case gender transgression is not really the point.

— For male transvestites cultural gender rules are certainly transgressed, but that doesn’t imply any real gender transgression either. As Jeffreys’ selective evidence indicates, some transvestites (like anyone else) can have quite ‘traditional’ views on gender. (A penchant for cross-dressing is no assurance of progressive values.) Moreover, transvestites’ default stealth (i.e. closetedness) rules out meaningful transgression for most of us, whatever our politics. The best that might be said is that transvestites are potentially transgressive. If we were all out and open about our (varied) gender expression, so that the assumed correlation between femininity and femaleness was shown to be false, we might well be gender transgressive. But, with a few notable exceptions, we mostly aren’t.

As much as I would rather see this embarrassing radfem position just go away, it won’t, until or unless pro-trans radfems are willing to speak up and provide logical theoretical reasons for why trans people should be included in a radical feminist agenda.

Domestic Violence PSA

Posted by helenboyd – July 6, 2012

This is chilling. And informative:

It’s for refuge.org.uk.

In New York, there’s NYC’s services, as well as Safe Horizon.
In Wisconsin, here’s a list.
In the Fox cities, there’s Harbor House and the SACC.

Please do donate to any or all of the above, and spread the word.