Still recovering from the election. We lost out on being represented by powerhouses like Wendy Davis and
Mary Burke. While minimum wage hikes passed in five out of five states (Alaska, Arkansas, Illinois, Nebraska, and South Dakota), those same states sent Republicans to the House and Senate. There are now 100 women in Congress, which sounds good until you realize that's still less than 20 percent.
Reproductive rights are increasingly threatened. Colorado and North Dakota both rejected "personhood" amendments, but
Tennessee passed an amendment stating,
"Nothing in this Constitution secures or protects a right to abortion or requires the funding of an abortion."
At times like this, I try to take the long view. A century ago, normal political discourse included this flier from the
National Association Opposed to Woman Suffrage, warning of the dangers of "petticoat rule." It also included this hilarious response:
Why we oppose votes for men.
Note: It's been suggested that we get a logo for this diary series. I think that's a great idea. Please post suggestions and contributions in comments!
The good, the bad and the ugly below the orange dimpled chad.
Workplace issues
• Despite the NYT's happy claims to the contrary, academic science has a big problem with sexism.
• The other side of diversity: being the lone African-American woman in various tech jobs.
• There's nothing feminist about feminist t-shirts made with sweatshop labor.
Harassment
• The infamous 10 Hours of Catcalls video has raised some discussion about overemphasis on men of color among the harassers, and the invisibility of women of color as targets. Danielle at One Black Girl, Many Words reminds us:
This cultural reality makes it so that white women remain "protected" from the full brunt of male entitlement. At least in relation to men of color. This no doubt carries to street harassment. When you're a woman of color the "hey beautiful's" and "how you doing's" caught on the Hollaback video can and will quickly turn to "you're an ugly bitch anyway" and maybe even lead to a threat of physical harm. Recently, a Black woman's throat was slit by a man who she rejected after he had approached her on the street.
• Trudy at Gradient Lair has written a lot about
the racist way that women of color are seen as acceptable targets for harassment, and the
double bind of being expected to protect men of color and/or white women, at the expense of their own safety and well-being.
• Collier Meyerson did her own video asking women of color about their harassment experiences:
As (bad) luck would have it, while we were shooting a video about how women of color were affected by street harassment, one of our interviewees was approached — totally unsolicited — by a white man who asked her for a kiss.
• Amanda Marcotte destroys
the ridiculous argument that it's ok to catcall because women "should" like it, even if they don't:
The silly defenses of street harassment continue to roll out, with many men angrily insisting that women are overreacting to men just being nice and saying “hi”. (I want any man who does this to give me his phone number so I can text him 100 times a day with demands for attention disguised as banal greetings and see how he likes it.)
• Kossack Elon James White observes: "Im so confused as to why dudes are complaining about not being able to say hi to women. Go say hi to other dudes if you need to so bad." And thus was born the hilarious hashtag
#DudesGreetingDudes. My favorite:
You see a dude in a nice suit, just roll up on him like "Damn. You wearing that suit. Hmm Hmm!"
• Artie Lange's
racist, misogynist harassment of Cari Champion.
• An interview with Brianna Wu, one of the targets of BitterExboyfriendGate, on women and the future of gaming.
• Kossack TrueBlueMajority on the scary experience of standing up to a harasser.
• When all else fails, there's 1-800-4-CREEPS.
Reproductive rights
• Debunking the myth that Latinos are anti-choice.
• Illinois voters upheld the right to have prescription birth control covered by insurance.
• National Advocates for Pregnant Women:
Abortion is the defining women’s rights issue for many women because the ability or inability to control pregnancy means the difference between full participation in society or not. But for poor women and women of color, the ability to end a pregnancy is most likely not the factor that determines their ability to be full and equal participants in our society. Rather, for them, salient issues include the ability to access health care and to have the opportunity to bring children into the world that they can love, support, and raise in a safe environment. Moreover, more and more women are finding that they are denied informed decision-making in the context of birth and need to be fully part of the Reproductive Justice movement. Thus, there are many groups of women who are allied but for whom the right to an abortion is not the key to their reproductive and human rights.
By choosing to focus on pregnant women and the full range of attacks on their rights – including the efforts to establish separate legal rights for fertilized eggs, embryos, and fetuses under the law, to hold women criminally liable for the outcome of their pregnancies, and to expand the drug war to women's wombs, NAPW is making new allies and building new strength from a broad based and integrated approach to reproductive and human rights.
Violence
• Great respect and hope for healing to Carlesha Freeland-Gaither, whose struggle against her abductor was caught on a security camera, and led to her being found alive. Healing thoughts likewise to the unnamed 16-year-old girl who escaped from the same abductor a few days earlier.
• The Jian Ghomeshi case now has so many women coming forward that the reporter covering the story literally couldn't get to them all, with similar stories going all the way back to 1988. And I have to wonder once again, what a difference it might have made if we'd created a climate where it was safe for one of those victims to come forward all those years ago, with the expectation that something would actually be done about it. Here's a painful read from Denise Balkissoon on that latter point. And women (and men) talk about how they've BeenRapedNeverReported.
• Women respond to victim-blaming with #MyAntiRapeFace.
• Girls who were pimped on Backpage while underage are now suing.
• Marissa Alexander remains on in-home detention, with her new trial to start on December 8th.
• In an appalling case out of Britain, Eleanor de Frietas was prosecuted for making a "false rape charge" although police acknowledged there was no evidence that she had lied:
De Freitas reported to police on 4 January 2013 that she had been allegedly drugged and raped by a male associate shortly before Christmas in 2012. The police investigated the case, interviewed De Freitas and arrested the alleged perpetrator. But the police eventually told De Freitas they could not proceed further as there was not a realistic chance of a successful conviction, partly due to the fact she had reported the alleged rape some time after the event and as such no forensic evidence had been collected to support her claims. The alleged perpetrator was told there would be no further action and the case was closed.
De Freitas’s father said his daughter had accepted the police’s decision and tried to get on with her life. But the man at the centre of the rape claim began a private prosecution against her saying she had lied about the rape. Some months later lawyers for the CPS [Crown Prosecution Service] announced they were taking over the case against De Freitas. Her trial for perverting the course of justice was due to open on 7 April. On 4 April she took her own life.
Good News and Action Items
• The women behind the legends of Amazons.
• WAM (Women, Action & the Media) is working with Twitter to be more responsive to harassment issues. Here's their reporting tool.
• A good year for women in science fiction.
• A pickup artist gets dumped: Julien Blanc teaches seminars on "how to pick up women," which he himself compared to the techniques that domestic abusers use. A change.org campaign has persuaded some hotels to stop hosting his events, with the reasonable argument that participants will wind up harassing the female hotel guests. Here's the petition, which will go to his future venues.
• The deadline is Monday on this last one - a petition for clemency for Tondalo Hall:
Her partner severely beat her and her children--but she's the one serving 30 years in prison.
Tondalo Hall, a 30-year old mother from Oklahoma, is serving a sentence 15 times that of the man who abused her--for "failing to protect" her children from him.