Post-election, Still a Feminist

America-hating liberal here.  Anyone up for a terrorist bump?

I’m having post-election musings about feminism post-Palin.  Oh, those conservatives—to borrow a line from Stephen King—hypocrisy so transparent you could read a newspaper through it.   They’ve been rallying round the subjugation of women, discrimination against women, hypocritical double standards in sexual conduct for women, and they’ve been demanding submission from women.  Then, when their female crusader for all of the above was called out not on her clothing, but on her lavish spending on clothing while hard-working, decent Americans are losing all but the clothes on their backs, they screamed sexism.  That is truly rich—the rest of us show outrage at this calloused display of greed, and we turn Republicans into feminists.  Who would have thought, through all these years, that that’s all it would take?  And now that we’ve got them boasting about their feminist hearts and souls, maybe we can convince them to support reproductive rights, pay equity, and all the rest. 

Anyway.  As to their smear of feminists as “man-hating.”  Just some anecdotal insights into this: I’m acquainted with feminists and women who hate feminists.  No doubt, I’m sure there are women calling themselves feminists who hate men.  I’ve never met one.  I’m not one.  Hatred for half the human race based on how they were born, gee, don’t feminists fight that?  I wouldn’t call a woman who hates men a feminist.  But when I hear feminist-hating women let fly, wow. 

This is how it goes: they view feminists as naive in the sense that we give men credit for too much.  As they tell it to me, men are rats, bums, no good, and always will be.  We feminists need to face up to that.  We are foolish to try to appeal to decency and honor in men when we insist on our rights because men aren’t capable of showing decency or honor toward women.  We should resign ourselves to that.   We should face the facts according to feminist-haters.  They say men can’t be trusted not to cheat on us, lie to us, demean and abuse us, so we should be real, tough women.  We should suck it up and deal with it.  Curious, this last part, given that the conservative take on women is that we’re inherently too weak and timid to hold public office. 

This from an ideology that produced a woman brazen enough to parade around in designer duds someone else paid for, when she isn’t shooting moose from a helicopter that isn’t hers.

Write a letter to Pepsi

Telling them that you will no longer be buying their products (even if you don’t really buy them anyway).

See Melissa’s post here on why and how.

Palin: Do As I Say, Not As I Do

I don’t like Sarah Palin’s politics.  I don’t like Republican politics either.  That’s why I’m not voting Republican in this election.  I find everything the Republican Party stands for deeply immoral, with the behavior of Republicans—and I’m not saying the Democrats are angels—but the behavior of Republicans in recent decades has been so deeply unprincipled, dishonorable, inhumane, outright corrupt, and hypocritical that I’d face public execution before I’d vote Republican.  

I’d like to single out Sarah Palin’s hypocrisy.  Palin denounces feminists, which is curious, given that she lives according to so many feminist principles.  She is a mother and a woman in a position of power in the public sphere with a husband who has been described in the press as a stay-at-home dad.  Assuming this is true, the Palin’s don’t do traditional gender roles or traditional marriage.

But she’s a Republican.  The Republican Party platform calls for traditional family values and imposing on women the traditional nuclear family with the husband and father as the “head” of household and the wife in subjugation.  It calls for women to remain confined to the domestic sphere, and for men to dominate the public sphere.  

Palin the Republican professes to support the Republican Party platform.  She’s profited from enacting public policy consistent with that platform.   But if she truly endorsed that platform, she wouldn’t be anywhere near the public sphere.  According to Republican ideology—the ideology she claims to support—Palin should be a full-time, at-home mother tending to the needs of her brood, and especially the needs of her infant Down Syndrome son.  

I support wholeheartedly the right of women—Sarah Palin or not, mothers or not—to participate fully in enacting public policy that affects all of us.  The trouble is, Sarah Palin doesn’t.  She supports an ideology that subjugates women.  She campaigns to keep in power a political party that will work to keep women down.  She works to ensure that women must be twice as good as men at the same tasks to be considered half as good, and she opposes discrimination legislation aimed at protecting women from such double standards.  She supports a party that calls for women to remain confined to the domestic sphere while she, herself, campaigns to become the nation’s first woman vice-president.  

So I think I have this straight: she denounces the feminists who secured for women the rights we enjoy now; she doesn’t shun those rights, but she takes them and runs with them; she uses them not just to enrich and empower herself, but also to deny the rest of us those rights. 

Apparently Palin never has heard of leading by example.  

I have no patience with women who denounce feminists and who have rained scorn and ridicule on them for decades, but who eagerly help themselves to the rights those feminists fought so hard to secure for women.  But then, I’ve never been fond of ingrates and hypocrites.  If nothing else, Palin serves as an example of one such woman.

A Man’s Pro-Choice Matter

This is the only bind I can think of that a man would face, that compares to that of a woman facing a crisis pregnancy and the specter of abortion:

A man—I’ll call him John—has a rare type of body chemistry, like a blood type or some other raw body material or organ.  An ailing person—I’ll call her Mary—never having committed any offense or crime in her life, needs some of this raw body material of John’s because it’s the only compatible type accessible to Mary’s health care system.  If John’s raw body material isn’t donated to Mary, she will die.

The process of getting John’s raw body material from his body to Mary’s is arduous.  John will be increasingly less mobile and more confined over several months in preparation for making the transfer of his body material to Mary.  He will face restrictions in diet and in medication he can take, so as not to taint the body material, making it useless for Mary.  This process will culminate in an unfathomably painful, hours-long process.  Doctors will not give him any pain medication for fear that it might harm Mary and render his body material useless.  This process is so rigorous as to cause possible trauma to John, leaving him altered forever afterward.  He will face a long recovery period.  Mary is totally, utterly dependent on John for her life.  If John does not go through this process and donate his raw body material to her, she will die.

I cannot think of any anti-legalized-abortion leaders who have called for a man in this situation to be forced by law to donate to a recipient who will die without the donation. 

A double standard?

Just One Sarah Palin Issue

My head is spinning.  Contemplating where to begin about Sarah Palin’s nomination by John McCain as his running mate, it’s enough to make anyone grab for the nearest wall. 

I’m going to make myself stick to just one of her utterances, one I heard often from Phyllis Schlafly, on the issue of job discrimination.  She and John McCain oppose legislation enforcing equal pay for equal work, and conservatives in general oppose action against discrimination against women.  Palin’s rationale went this way:  instead of we women “whining” about discrimination—dismissing us as weak and sniveling if we insist that discrimination cease—she urges us to “go the extra mile” (I’m paraphrasing).  She tells us we should just strive to achieve even greater excellence.  She says we should be willing to have to show much greater merit than men working alongside us to achieve close to the same pay.  She—and conservatives—claim that all it takes is for women to become qualified and to prove ourselves for discrimination to cease.

If that were true, discrimination would have ceased at the latest, in the 19th Century.

I can’t wrap my brain around this—an enlightened people actively, vigilantly watches for injustice, and when finding it, seeks to end it.  An enlightened people doesn’t tolerate injustice or make excuses for it. 

We’re supposed to vote for people whose ideology holds them to standards this low?  Palin holds herself and her Republican peers to standards of decency and honor this low while she preaches to women to fight discrimination with high standards of job performance? 

How anyone affords people of this persuasion any credibility boggles my mind.

Dear Olympics,

I have been a dear fan of yours for some time now, and with this year’s world-record-breaking record, wow has it been exciting! But seriously–WHY are all the ladies wearing extremely TIGHT PANTY athletic underwear while they perform?

Seriously, the volley ball ladies, the hurtling track ladies, the gymnasts, the swimmers, all of them picking wedges out of not only their asses but also their hootinanies. WHY? Why, when a diver is standing on the boards, should she have to be yanking at her crotch worried that the world can see her areas? Why are the men trackstars and volleyballstars wearing knee-length shorts if it’s so much more “comfortable because of the heat” to wear PANTIES?

I’m sure some ladies like it, support it, are just plain used to it, whatever. But i don’t care what the argument for wearing these clothes, nothing is going to amount to an argument in support of wedgies. No one likes that shit. Especially in the Vagine!

I understand that some sports are going to require the bare minimum in dress–surely swimming and gymnastics are two big ones. Olympics, I don’t want clothing to get in the way of performance. I just want a girl to have some self respect and have the choice to not be flashing the world her vagine when she falls over a hurtle, or when she falls off a balance beam.

Surely the reason for the tightness is BECAUSE of the skimpiness–when you wear PANTIES to gymnastics, they sort of have to be super tight in order not to fall off or away from your body. But, I mean…we’re talking about expectations here. The mens are oftentimes wearing shorts if not pants to perform the same sports that the women are wearing their PANTIES to. Why?

Oh Olympics, if only you could talk back to me and tell me this isn’t just world-wide sexist expectations that women display their bodies for other people, I could sleep at night.

Becca
PS–Fuck, I was going to post some contrasting photos of men in pants to women in their skivs. But as for the ladies, all I could find was website after website featuring the “Hottest” female Olympic athletes with links to photos of them POSING like fucking porn stars. What is the percentage of Olympic ladies who pose, spread eagle, in thier bikinis to the ones who don’t? I don’t know, and don’t have time to research it right now. But it’s disturbing that only a fraction of the photos I could find were about these women’s atheticism (those were on the Olympics website) instead of thier sexual worth.

Landmark in Science for Women

‘Cosmopolitan’ Institute Completes Decades-Long Study On How To Please Your Man

More argument for living simply

In Yahoo! news a few weeks ago this article appeared on why the Western demand for a certain metalic ore called Coltan has fueled wars in the Congo region of Africa.

Tantalum, which is an essential ingredient in Play Stations, cell phones, GPS units, etc., is extracted from Coltan and the Congolese people trying to make some money from the deal are plundering mines and using POW and kids to do the mining. The article blames it on Sony, because there was a huge increase in demand when Play Station 2 came out. But in the big picture, I see it as a moral problem that we-all-consumers must face.

I am, of course, immediately reminded of the rape happening in the Congo that has been described as the worst in the world, and how rape is used prolifically during periods of war. In fact the UN Security Council recently declared that rape is a military tactic, not just a consequence of war.

What’s striking to me is that this is just one example of how complicated Western consumerism is in almost every way that we consume—you buy a computer and you are causing rape by a few degrees of separation. The “Buy Local” food movement has begun to address the problems of fuel use, exploitation, poor working conditions and regulations for food purity. And a sprinkling of Ten Thousand Villages have popped up to address exploitation problems with material goods like toys, cloth goods and jewelry. But it’s not enough and I doubt it ever will be.

Even if more of these stores popped up it will not solve the problem, which is that we simply consume too much, making it possible for the routes our goods take to become complicated and tangled up in conditions that we wouldn’t approve of if it were happening where we could see it. It’s not about one component of your purchasing decision or one ingredient here or there, it’s about all the degrees of separation from the origins of the products.

And the goods are no good for us, too! Heavily processed foods have very low nutrient density, feeding us mostly endosperm, sugar and hydrogenated fats; artificial sweeteners siphon nutrients out of our bones and flesh; high fructose corn surup disrupts the Lectin in our bodies, rendering our brains unable to receive the message that we are full after eating (thus the “addiction” to nasty foods–we literally can’t know how to feel full); pesticides; growth hormones; smog; ingredients used to make building materials and the furniture—causing cancers, obesity, diabetes, heart disease, laziness, entitlement, meaningless, insular ownership

All of these factors need to be considered when thinking about “change.” Not just prices at the gas pump, or whether something is organic, and not just whether or not your plastic water bottle is poisoning you. But ALL of the ways “products” and “goods” are toxic to consumers and to producers and to the Earth.

When I consider how ALL of them are connected and related to the same causes and effects, the only solution I can come up with is to live more simply. To grow my own food, to not buy a lot of “things,” to create my own entertainment instead of buy expensive “entertainment units,” and to keep learning how to do it all better and with less dependence on bad or unknown sources.

This is the solution for the world if we want to come into a more congruent relationship with the Earth and its resources and with “others” and the resources they have access to, and if we want to heal our bodies and prevent war and rape and exploitation—we’ve all got to turn it down a few notches, a lot of notches in fact. Fortunately we probably won’t have to wait until the wealthy choose an energy-and-goods starvation diet on their own, because I think peak fossil fuels will be forcing us into it sooner than we think.

But will anything ever get powerful and wealthy people as a group to stop perceiving the act of acquiring and keeping goods as their primary relationship to the world, regardless of cost…?

Perceived Higher Need

One of the primary things that keeps people in relationships with each other is need for unconditional love and need for physical comfort and safety.

By believing in the theory that men are driven by a primary need to “spread seed” and women to “protect nest,” we aren’t just subscribing to some abstract theory of evolution. We are also subscribing to a much broader set of ideas and beliefs that effect our day-to-day lives, which have nothing to do with evolution. They are ideas that keep power structures stable.

This idea of evolutionary urges insists that there are wide, gaping differences in the needs of men and women sexually, and that those needs are the most powerful of all needs. That women need men to “stick around,” and so are neurotic or otherwise not good enough if they are single or can “catch” a mate. This has implications on women’s self-image and worth, and implications that the sexual identity of women is completely contingent on a man’s sexual desire for her.

For men this theory tells them that they don’t need emotional and physical comfort and unconditional love and attention from a stable community. That if they don’t think about and desire sex 24/7 that there is something “wrong” with them. And it gives monuments of excuse for a “boys will be boys” attitude that not only allows sexist and misogynist men to continue their sexual harassment and prejudice, but encourages new generations that this is the way to gaining acceptance, it’s a right of passage.

As individual groups, men and women both suffer from this extremely simplistic theory, which excludes many factors of culture and not-biological conditioning that influence behaviors.

And then there is the need thing again. In relationship, this dynamic causes women to have more percieved needs from men in day-to-day life than visa versa. And therein lies the emotional support structures for a power differential that keeps men “needing less” and having more power over women who “need more.”

A Woman’s Courage

This is a tribute to Shukria Barkzai and a rebuke to the women of America.

Shukria Barkzai is a heroic, courageous woman who puts passive, apathetic, complacent Western women to shame. Every time I discuss feminism with a woman who says, “I don’t care if I’m discriminated against,” I think of Shukria Barkzai right before I excuse myself from the conversation, for fear of going radioactive.

Shukria Barkzai is an Afghan woman. During the years of Taliban control of Afghanistan, she ran a number of clandestine schools for girls in Kabul. She did this at great risk to her own life. If she’d been discovered, there was a good chance she would have been killed. Most certainly, she would have been imprisoned and tortured. She acted with mind-boggling courage to educate Afghani girls; she stood up to the most savage persecution of girls and women imaginable, in a place where women were—and still are—entombed alive.

In 2003 I had the honor of meeting Shukria Barkzai.  The occasion was my alma mater honoring her as the 2003 Journalist of the Year.  The award was in recognition of her founding a women’s magazine in Afghanistan after the fall of the Taliban, and managing to get it distributed not only in Kabul, but also in remote areas of Afghanistan.

When Ms. Barakzai accepted her award, she thanked us in broken English.  She struggled to answer our questions, and became visibly angry when commenting on the press conference Laura Bush had held in Kabul shortly before Ms. Barkzai was honored.  At her press conference, Mrs. Bush had boasted that her husband’s administration had liberated the women of Afghanistan, who no longer were oppressed thanks to her husband; they now enjoyed freedom and equality thanks to his policies.  Ms. Barakzai begged to differ, and she said so.

Much as I shared Ms. Barkzai’s ire about Mrs. Bush’s comments, another issue was bothering me.  I felt honored to be in the presence of this heroic, brave woman who risked her life to give young girls an education under the constant threat of being discovered by the Taliban.  And she didn’t stop there.  Once women had gained enough liberty, she also founded a magazine devoted to their concerns and issues.

Much as Ms. Barakzai’s courage inspired me, the contrasting, shameful apathy and complacency of American women brought disgust and ire.  I find little excuse for it.  I do remind myself that many women remain silent out of fear.  As to fear: can we think for one nanosecond that Shukria Barkzai did not fear the wrath of the Taliban as she secreted little girls into her schools for the basic right to learn to read, to write, to add, to count?  In the face of her courage, how can any American woman justify silence by claiming fear?

Here’s a guess.  Silent, compliant American women will argue that we do not suffer abuses as savage as those Afghan women and girls suffer, so we bear no need or responsibility for taking risks.  We need act only if the American Taliban’s persecution of women reaches the savagery of Taliban extremists in Afghanistan.

I don’t have an answer so much as a question.  What if the status of American women were to descend to the plight of Afghan women?  Would now-silent, complacent women act?  Would they risk their lives to educate American girls?  Should we expect valor or heroism from them?  If women don’t stand up to sexism and discrimination American-style when they’d face no danger in doing so, why should we think they’d stand up to persecution if it did carry great danger?

Shukria Barkzai puts us to shame.