This week I want to begin with some reflections about the 1950's inspired by some of the reading I've done for this diary.
Some of us are old enough to have been influenced by popular culture of this decade. Doris Day movies and Leave it to Beaver, curvy women in full skirts and tight tops showing full breasts (whatever size you really had), with belted small waists. A house in the suburbs, white picket fence, two and a half kids and a dog. And before marriage a definite stress on flirting and making men feel strong and ... well, masculine. Don't show your intelligence, especially if you're smarter than the man you are with.
Women's fashions always reflect what society wants us to be; the 1950's were a deliberate reaction to the end of WW II. Look at the movies from the war years. Women wore suits with slim skirts and padded shoulders. Or maybe even slacks. With so many men away fighting, women emerged from the home to work in factories, drive trucks, etc. The shape was economical, using less fabric in skirts, more masculine, with broad shoulders and narrow hips. With the men returning home, there was a perceived need to convince women once again that they were dependent on men - and this became the overarching message in popular culture. Remember all the wonderful gadgets considered necessary for the home? Most imaginings of the future had women with much more leisure - but not rejoining the workforce.
I thought about all this when I saw an article and a video from Fashion Week, and an article about how Danish women's economic independence aided by government policies like paid maternity leave make them "unfeminine" and not easy marks for pick-up artists.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...
http://www.dissentmagazine.org/...
October is violence against women awareness month.
Violence Against Women
As all too often happens, indigenous women in Canada who go missing usually get very little attention in their country, whether they are later found dead or never found. Now the indigenous women are taking matters into their own hands, with two initiatives shown in these articles:
http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/...
http://aptn.ca/...
This Pennsylvania town (and apparently others around the country) has a law that punishes victims of domestic violence with eviction is they call 911 more than three times in a four-month period. This story first caught my attention in June, when the assault in question first made the news:
http://www.sadlyno.com/...
If this is what's in store for Afghan women as we leave the country, we've achieved even less than we thought. This includes a petition to look out for women's rights as we withdraw our troops.
https://secure.avaaz.org/...
And finally, here's a story of what local and international action can do. Maldives is more egalitarian in its punishment for rape, but women can still be flogged for having premarital sex:
http://www.avaaz.org/...
If you want background on this story, here it is:
http://www.google.com/...
Rape Culture
In Japan, mayor Hashimoto still thinks the women kidnapped and forced to serve as "comfort women" for soldiers during WW II were necessary - after all, soldiers have all that testosterone racing around their bodies, and if they're not fighting they have to find something to do with it, don't they?
Although this article is about one particular country and one particular war,the availability of prostitutes is routinely a part of war. The problem of what soldiers were to do about sex in Muslim countries came up with the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. It seems that their female colleagues have provided some of this "relief" for them, given military rape statistics.
http://www.cnn.com/...
And remember that 50 year old teacher sentenced to 31 days in jail for repeatedly raping a 14 year old student because the judge said she seemed "older than her years?" Well, with the process in train for resentencing, he's a free man again. Just ducky.
http://www.dailykos.com/...
What follows is a lecture given by a psychological researcher whose area of study is false memories. I know this can be a controversial subject, especially for survivors of childhood sexual abuse. But anyone who has read the book "Picking Cotton," in which the story of a rape victim and the man she mistakenly identified as her rapist, who was later exonerated by DNA testing, focuses on the unreliability of eye-witness testimony and the process by which eye-witnesses are questioned. There's a lot to think about here.
http://www.psychologicalscience.org/...
Reproductive Health
This is the saddest and the most rage-inducing thing I have read on this subject, excepting only descriptions of botched and self-inflicted abortions:
http://www.dailykos.com/...
An update on the story of Beatriz, the young Brazilian woman who was initially denied a life-saving abortion, and whose pregnancy was much further advanced when Brazil was finally forced to allow it by an international court:
http://rhrealitycheck.org/...
And in case we don't realize how women suffer from our exploitation of labor in poor countries:
https://www.commondreams.org/...
Announcing a film coming this month about the erosion of Roe:
http://www.afj.org/...
I end with a piece of hopeful news that could give women, especially where men don't allow them to control whether and when to get pregnant, greater freedom:
http://www.cbsnews.com/...
Women and Politics
First, the best news of the week:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...
Hmm... This may backfire, and it couldn't happen to a nicer guy:
http://www.dailykos.com/...
A Kossack's tribute to his mother's political convictions and her life:
http://www.dailykos.com/...
And in case we needed another reminder of how clueless the mad hatter's tea party is about the real world:
http://www.dailykos.com/...
Women and Culture
Gloria Steinem recants her former rejection of trans-women:
http://www.voicesonthesquare.com/...
A poet victorious:
http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/...
A reminder that what we do is what matters, as Meteor Blades reminds us:
http://www.blackgirldangerous.org/...
Here's some get-back with humor:
http://annfriedman.com/...
And for sheer uplift, here's why education for women everywhere is so important:
http://www.ted.com/...