Okay Olympics,

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.

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.

Iranian Woman to be Stoned to Death

This is an issue that Equality Now has been covering, and which they think that people like us can help with by writing letters. The only crime punishable by stoning in Iran is adultery, and Equality Now is trying to help one woman in particular right now who could be put to death anytime. Go here for more info.

Please write to the Iranian officials below, calling for Kobra’s immediate release, the commutation of all sentences of death by stoning and the prohibition by law of all cruel, inhuman and degrading punishments in accordance with Iran’s obligations under the ICCPR. Urge the officials also to initiate a comprehensive review of the Civil and Penal Codes of Iran to remove all provisions that discriminate and perpetuate discrimination against women, including those regarding adultery and fornication, in accordance with Iran’s own constitutional provision for equality before the law.

Progressing, Regressing, or Static?

I’m thankful for the advancements women have made in past decades. But though a lot has changed, not enough has changed. And we still face stony-faced resistance against the progress we still need to make.

The resistance shows itself when “Take Your Daughters and Sons to Work Day” rolls around. Remember the good old days, when we first greeted it as “Take Your Daughters to Work Day”? When it was an answer to the resistance to women in the public sphere, when it’s purpose was to instill in our daughters the awareness that they have every right to enter professions, any profession? Remember when it was meant to overcome the toxic message that they were rightly confined to the domestic sphere, with no say in public policy?

I don’t begrudge boys the opportunity to learn about the livelihoods of their fathers, and to be able to explore what path they want to take as adults. But the point of “Take Your Daughters to Work Day” was that boys already had all of that, and too many girls were denied that. The day’s purpose was to help girls to break free of oppressive, confining, unjust demands; it was to give them a self-image as people worthy of the same opportunities as the boys. It was to show them their mothers, and other women, as role models with successful careers in the public sphere.

The reaction to “Take Your Daughters to Work Day”—to change it from a proudly feminist tradition to a generic one—reveals how deeply ingrained resistance to women’s equality still works to create drag on our pursuit of equality.

I suggest a more apt answer to “Take Your Daughters to Work Day”: on that same day, let’s establish “Keep Your Sons at Home Day.” Let’s work at chipping away oppressive roles, and let’s teach our sons to participate in, and respect, the unpaid work done in the home. On “Keep Your Sons at Home Day,” fathers would stay at home with their sons. They would teach them about competently doing laundry, scrubbing bathrooms, cooking, and managing a home. They would teach them that juggling the responsibilities of child rearing and maintaining the home is a high-skilled, demanding job. They would teach them how to prioritize, how to manage their time, how to defuse a cranky, defiant child, and how to rearrange priorities in the case of an emergency. They would teach them that once they marry and have children of their own, they should honor their obligation to do their fair share of the household work.

The reaction we have had to “Take Our Daughters to Work Day” reveals a lingering lack of respect in society for work in the home. Boys are still taught to avoid any activity or appearance associated with girls and women; they’re taught that a likeness to anything thought feminine is something to be ashamed of. They’re taught to avoid it as you would avoid the ebola virus.

I’m glad that when boys participate in this day, they’re seeing their mothers in non-traditional roles. And I don’t want them denied opportunities. I just remember my glimmer of hope when I saw girls provided a hand-up in overcoming the resistance to equality that still besets us. Now, this day looks like another day that enables more of the same disrespect for the feminine in America. Now it’s a once-hopeful breaking of chains co-opted by foes of women’s equality.

A lot has changed, then, but not enough has changed.

Feminist Graffiti

Years ago, on a trip to London, I saw the following, scrawled on a brick wall:

War is menstruation envy.

Rape is also a war tactic, the UN says

I didn’t post about this before because I thought that there was just so much other stuff being said about it out on the internet. But it keeps coming up that people haven’t heard yet, so here it is. The UN Security Council a few weeks ago voted unanimously for a resolution to call rape a war tactic. Read this article for more

The news that led to this vote is all very sad, in the same vein of all of the other extremely sad truths about sexual violence: the rape of female military soldiers by their fellow soldiers; the rape of Iraqi women by U.S. soldiers; and more rape (graphic) if you don’t believe that one; the rape of female contractors working in the middle east by their own co-workers all while the military hushes things; the sale of children from poor countries to camel racers in the UAE to be used as starved, beaten, camel jockeys and sex slaves; the sale of girls into the sex trade all over the world in poor countries and the men from wealthy countries who support it; the belief in much of the middle east, in African countries, and in parts of Asia that girls and women are worth no more than the worth of an animal; genital mutilation of girls and boys in the Muslim, Christian and Jewish religions; the teaching of sexual shame to little girls and boys; domestic violence everywhere, it’s all everywhere.

The only comment I have for this, and the UN’s 2003(?) declaration of rape as a casualty of war, is…Why’d it take so long? Why do women always come last. Why is it acceptable for peace and aid workers to rape little girls in the countries in which they are sent to relieve suffereing? It’s all very sad.

Filthy Fuckers

Okay, it’s been a minute (ha) since I got REALLY angry over something REALLY pathetic (mostly because you get used to that feeling). There is a web site called boobsforbarack, where women are encouraged to “Write a message on your mammories, wear a bra, bathing suit, or go totally bare, if you support Barack, then show IT by showing THEM!”

I wasn’t going link to the site because I don’t think people should click on it. But you can go to the site and take ACTION without giving the nudey parts a click!!

Take a picture of a message of protest to these people and upload it at their sight at boobsforbarack.com

Here are some of the images I sent in already:

There isn’t a lick of information about who runs this site. And a lot of the pictures are photo-shopped models, not real people. But there are real people on there too. What the fuck, ladies? I’m ripping my hair out. Without any other forethought about the misogynist overtones of this website, there is a simple question that I think everyone of us ought know the answer to before hooking up to the internet: DO I WANT TO SEND A PICTURE OF MY BODY TO A WEB SITE WHOSE ORIGINS OR INTENTIONS I DON’T KNOW?

Barack Obama people–I implore you to not let scum bags use your campaign to take advantage of women.

Change

There is some sort of point at which change happens. The stories we are reading in my lit. class are by Middle Eastern women about Middle Eastern women, and are mostly subtle expressions of transformation. We are left at the end of almost all of them feeling the emotions behind power struggles of a woman and her home life, a woman and her culture, a woman and her own self-placement. We are also left feeling her loneliness and her sorrow.

Our professor has told us that most of the literature published by women in Middle East is not the most uplifting stuff–most of it is sad, frustrating, fraught with abuse and control, and lonely. It is vastly different from the American literature that I have studied in the past–full of hope and intrigue and life, along with some of the sorrow of course.

The transformative parts of these stories, though, is what our questions have been directed at as of late. In all of the stories, the protagonist is coming to an intersection in her mind and soul about her life. Some event, taken place over two days or two months or even just an hour, is telling us, the reader, that this woman is no longer participating in old dynamics–she has become fed up, she has had a realization of some sort.

But then, in most of them, that’s where we are left. We don’t know what she is going to do next, now that she has found out her husband wants to take another wife, once she finds out that her husband has had an affair, once she has realized that the lower-class day laborer working for her treats her infant as tenderly as she wishes a lover would treat her, once she finds out that the lies she is telling herself in order to keep quietly sedated in “happinees” won’t really work anymore.

In our last class we read a story that had the ending we all cheered for: an abused wife finally walks out on her husband after five years. The woman in this story had run into an old friend who was happy, healthy, pretty, and owned her own apartment and raised her child on her own–she was happy and independent. And BAM, just like that our protagonist understood that her life was not her own.

And BAM, my classmates and I had the second piece of the puzzle, according to our professor: vision for something different and the hope and belief that it could be acquired.

I’m still mulling over this concept–the idea that change happens when 1) people simply can’t do “it” anymore; and 2) a creative idea for something different is believed in and hoped for.

I keep coming back to: Yeah, but 1) Even if women are fed up with patriarchy and misogyny, we don’t have the power so what does it matter? Doesn’t it also require the men to be fed up? OR 2) Say women can make the change themselves (being that you can’t keep the same dynamic if one-half of the interaction simply changes their part in it), how many of us does it take? Per community/per country/in the world altogether?

Flexing Feminism and Basic Human Rights

Lots of other bloggers have commented on the vile hate messages women bloggers get from the troglodytes out there in cyberspace. They aren’t men, they’re boys with Internet access without adult supervision.

Some time ago I read a news article about this, and sadly, some women bloggers stopped blogging because a few of these knuckle-scrapers sank to threats, and possibly knew where the women bloggers lived.

Which brings to mind a sad fact of the Internet: if you’re a woman and you’ve secured anonymity, you can blog in safety. On the other hand, gender bigots and woman haters out there also have anonymity, and if they know enough about you, they can make threats from behind the mask of anonymity—or worse, carry out those threats.

Still, women bloggers do have a good degree of safety and anonymity, and the troglodytes can’t stop us from blogging. They know it, and that’s what drives them around the bend.

Bloggers who use Internet anonymity as protection from threats or physical harm are not cowards, but only the most pathetic cowards use that anonymity to threaten others.

They can’t do a damned thing about what we say, can’t stop us from saying it in public. So we should take courage in that. When overgrown boys throw hissy fits at us because they hate us and our freedom, we take it as high praise, as an encouraging sign that we’re stronger than them and their hate, that we’re reaching goals they want to withhold from us.

Still, I recall fondly graffiti I saw years ago on a wall in London: “Take the toys from the boys.”

Feminism, by definition, needs to show attitude. Real attitude.