This week has all the usual topics and players with continuing bad news and a smattering of good news. Perhaps the most important discussion this week was about Matt Lauer’s questioning and interrupting of Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton in this week’s Commander in Chief forum. Eight questions about Clinton’s private email server while Secretary of State. Let’s see—where does that rank in the questions about foreign policy and war? And about being the Commander in Chief? And Lauer interrupted Clinton’s answers over and over. The good news here is that for once much of the media condemned Lauer’s performance in his role as one of the questioners in the forum. Reporters (and everyone else who watched or listened) condemned the behavior, a rare moment when people realized that Hillary Clinton was being treated quite differently than her opponent with the orange toupee.
As a linguist, I can tell you that the scholarly and empirical research on men and women in conversation show the same thing, over and over again. Though not enough research has yet been done on how this works out all the way across the gender spectrum, men interrupt women—no matter how you define interruptions—at a considerably higher rate than women interrupt men. Most of this research has been conducted on white, middle class speakers, and research into cross-sex conversations in the African American community indicates that the outcomes and interruptions may be quite different than the white, middle class version. But . . . male working class patients interrupt women physicians during office visits. Male students interrupt female instructors in conferences. Men in academic meetings interrupt women, even when women are the majority in the meeting. Corporate work meetings also show women being interrupted, silenced, ignored in various configurations. Linguists now observe that what is driving these male behaviors toward women in conversations is more a reflection of power dynamics than gender. But this week, for just a moment, a number of watchers and listeners recognized how the extraordinarily qualified woman speaker was treated by a male, sophomoric, talk show host.
On to the week’s news.
CRIMES AGAINST WOMEN
RAPE
Wear Your Voice guest blogger Kristance Harlow on Brock Turner case, multiple other similar cases that have been in the news, and makes a poignant comparison between the outcome of Stanford swimmer Brock Turner (3 months served) and Vanderbilt football player Cory Batey (sentenced to 15-25 years). You know which one is white.
wearyourvoicemag.com/…
Rewire article by Nicole Knight on pending CA legislation awaiting Gov. Brown’s signature bringing CA rape law into congruence with the FBI definition. This definition makes any penetration with any thing, another sex organ, hands, fingers, any abject, into the crime of rape.
rewire.news/...
Jezebel reporter Anna Merlan reports on contrast between an Oregon prison guard accused of sexual abuse of a prisoner and the accuser being held as a material witness because the prosecutors thought she might not show up at his trial. Fair, huh?
jezebel.com/...
From Women’s eNews, Uganda correspondent Moureen Kitsakye reports on too little, too late in law to save the adolescent from rape. This could also appear under international news.
womensenews.org/...
HUMAN TRAFFICKING
Polaris report on human sex trafficking in cantinas and bars in the United States. Considerable attention to the dangers to undocumented women from Central America and Mexico. Forty pages.
polarisproject.org/...
SEXUAL HARASSMENT
Article by Gabriel Sherman in New York magazine. A thorough, investigative account of the behaviors of Roger Ailes and the management at FOX news. Although both Gretchen Carlson and Megan Kelly are highlighted in the article, Sherman provides information about all too many women who were harassed. Sherman highlights the surveillance culture at FOX, which given the adventures of Murdoch backed reporters in the UK, should have been no surprise to the women or the readers.
nymag.com/...
Rewire article by Julie Fletcher on how women being poor subjects them to more sexual harassment, especially those who are working as domestics.
rewire.news/...
GOOD ESCAPES
Although this happened a bit earlier, the story has resurfaced. And it’s about a woman overcoming her capture and thinking of something very smart to escape. Daily Mail story by Lydia Warren. The Florida woman used a pizza app to get help. Pizza Hut employees called the police and the woman escaped.
www.dailymail.co.uk/...
CREATIVE WORK
Film, Books
Wear Your Voice article by Sezin Koehler reviewing the HBO film “The Night Of” focused on a Pakistani-American accused of murder. Good discussion of dynamics of criminal investigations.
wearyourvoicemag.com/...
Lauren Dickman’s review of the new fat activist coloring book by Allison Tunis. Recommends coloring books for stress reduction as well as this one in particular for its fat positive stance.
wearyourvoicemag.com/...
Twitter graphic giving a feminist response to male catcalls. Love it!
www.instagram.com/...
NYT book review by Cara Buckley on Margot Lee Shetterly’s historical account of the lives of the African American women who served as mathematicians at NASA. Also should count in the Awesome Women and Their Work category!
www.nytimes.com/...
Guardian article by Emine Saner on Margot Lee Shetterly’s Hidden Figures. This article discusses both the book and the forthcoming movie with additional details on the lives of key African American women scientists and NASA. For many years, these brilliant women were segregated into the West Computing group, but eventually some of these women were so good that they were moved into the main engineering and scientific work groups. Funny, how when they are part of critical needs, the race of these women didn’t matter so much. I’m really glad to know of this. As a child, I worshipped the whole NASA project and wanted to be either an astronaut or a scientist working for NASA. Busy as NASA was telling people like Hillary Clinton that she couldn’t be an astronaut, NASA managed to employ these African American scientists.
www.theguardian.com/...
List of relatively recent new feminist books from Feminist Campus Org.
feministcampus.org/...
Independent’s Rachel Revesz reports on new “exciting” feminist books. Includes the Laura Bates book, Girl Up, on everyday harassment of women. Several sites on women’s rights suggest the book is a must-read for younger women. You can assess its import by the British school libraries’ placing of the book only on Year 13 reading—don’t let those younger women know what they need to know.
www.independent.co.uk/...
Medium.com article by comedian and author Sara Benincasa on the reactions to her recent, “Why Am I S0 Fat.” The original article has now reached more than 630,000 views.
medium.com/...
Intersectionality
Twitter tweet by charlotteirene8 on white response to SF 49er’s quarterback Colin Kaepernick’s decision to stay seated during the national anthem. My beloved Seahawks will join Colin as an entire team.
www.instagram.com/...
Abortion, Planned Parenthood
An older Mother Jones article (July 2015) by Molly Redden with photographs by Donna Ferrato focused on the effects of legislation advocated by anti-abortion group Americans United for Life. Several women who have founded abortion clinics are highlighted for article including Women’s Whole Health founder Amy Hagstrom Miller and their efforts and their unending fights dealing with hyper-regulation of clinics. TX and the Miller case are prominent in the article. Well worth reading to bring us up-to-date on the effects of anti-abortion groups. Supreme Court decision of June 28th, Women’s Whole Health v. Hellerstedt, 579 U.S. ____ (2016), partially resolved the issue in favor of women’s right to an abortion, indicating the TX could not require the clinics to be in effect a hospital. Justice Kennedy joined the majority 5-3 decision, written by Justice Breyer.
www.motherjones.com/...
Rewire reporter Nicole Knight on a study of the outcomes for women of Ohio’s requirements for use of medication for abortion under old FDA rules. The results of the study indicate that this older procedure harms women.
rewire.news/...
Rewire article by Teddy Wilson on the opening of new clinic providing so-called abortion reversals, called quackery by a number of physicians. Apparently based on not providing the second pill of a two-step medication abortion, physicians pointed out that the first pill alone is effective only about 50% of the time. The new clinic is a neighbor of the Planned Parenthood Clinic.
rewire.news/...
Rewire article by Michelle D. Anderson on US District Court, Western District, Wisconsin decision that Wisconsin state must pay $1.6 million to Planned Parenthood who had to defend against the unconstitutional “admitting privileges” law applying to abortion centers. Besame notes that there are now only three centers providing abortion in all of Wisconsin.
rewire.news/...
Same Old, Same Old
Jezebel writer Laurel Evans discusses news of soccer star Lauren Holiday and the wildly inappropriate headline from NOLO’s Times Picayune focusing on her husband’s football career, rather than the news that she is both pregnant and has an operable brain tumor. The comments section is full of other instances of inappropriate discussions of women’s lives. I especially liked the Canadian woman who designed NASA rockets whose obituary starts with her ability to make a mean beef stroganoff. Sigh.
jezebel.com/...
Twitter post on women’s home roles remaining gendered. Post from the NYT Women in the World. Twitter post leads to expansion of the post. Article by Women in the World Staff at the New York Times on the persistence of the expectation that women are responsible for the housework. Based on an Indiana University study, The NYT brief was based on a longer article by Anna Almendrala on the Huffington Post. The information came from a paper presented by Natasha Quadlin, Indiana University Ph.D. student, at the annual American Sociological Association’s meeting in August. Quadlin’s findings confirmed that Arlie Hochschild’s The Second Shift www.amazon.com/... is still operating, despite some data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics indicating that some change is under way. Quadlin’s data also indicated that the gender division held steady in same sex couples.
nytlive.nytimes.com/...
AWESOME WOMEN AND THEIR WORK
Powerful and truly tragic editorial by ER doc Naomi Rosenberg about how to tell a mother that her child is dead. Do not read if feeling blue. When I read it, I was in an okay mood and still cried. But brave, smart, heartfelt piece.
www.nytimes.com/...
CONSERVATIVE WOMEN
Jessica Valenti article on Phyllis Schlafly’s death. Founder of Stop ERA, this prominent woman used her status as an affluent woman to do all the things that she argued women shouldn’t do—lead a political movement, found an organization, and go to law school. This one is personal for me. As a politically active young woman, I was part of the contingent of Democratic women supporting the ERA and lobbying the legislature when Indiana became the last state to produce a positive legislative vote for the ERA. Schlafly was there in Indianapolis lobbying against the ERA and her minions walked around the city accosting women supporters of the ERA and reading Bible verses at them about women being silent and telling my then-husband that he needed a truly virtuous woman and clearly I wasn’t. The fight for the ERA stalled after Indiana. The obsession with bathrooms was already a part of the right’s arguments against women’s rights and LGBT rights. All I could think then about that bathroom argument was that the entire population of the United States used unisex bathrooms at home. What in the world were/are they thinking? And still thinking?
www.theguardian.com/...
Salon’s Amanda Marcotte provides a collection of appalling Schlafly quotes from over the years. Here’s a sampler:
On the importance of wives keeping their tongue. “Fred never interfers with my civil liberties,” Schlafly said of her husband in 1979. “Whenever we have a fight he reminds me of my constitutional right to remain silent.”
On the “psychological” dangers of feminism. “It has caused a lot of women to have low self-esteem, to convince themselves [that they] are repressed,” Schlafly told Newsweek in 1979.
On the dangers to women of liberalizing divorce laws. “When a man is fat and 50, he thinks he can be attractive to another woman and can walk out,” she said in the same Newsweek piece. “It’s a fact of life, though: a woman fat and 50 isn’t attractive to men.”
www.salon.com/...
THE PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION
Amanda Marcotte’s Salon article suggesting that Trump develop a crackdown on real criminals: men. Men in fact do commit more crimes.
www.salon.com/...
Digby on Hullaballoo about the first eight of nine questions in the so called Commander in Chief forum being about Clinton’s emails as SOS and compared to Trump’s whacko ideas about foreign policy, such as in a 2011 video in which he wants the U.S. to assassinate Quadafi and then require the Libyans to repay us (with oil). Ramara remarks smart girl vs. village idiot=a tie. What?????
digbysblog.blogspot.com/...
UltraViolet’s campaign to get more questions on women’s issues into the presidential debates. Given the paucity of questions on women’s issues in the primary debates and the “performance” of Matt Lauer in the Commander in Chief forum, this campaign seems very necessary.
debates.weareultraviolet.org/...
WOMEN and the PAY GAP
Rewire article from July by Kathleen Geier on the structural reasons for the gender differential in pay. Draws from Economic Policy Institute report by Elise Gould and Jessica Schieder examining pay gap with finding that every occupation and every level of employment in US produces the pay gap, worse gaps for WOC. Report on which the article is based found at www.epi.org/....
rewire.news/...
The pay gap explained visually.
www.facebook.com/...
INTERNATIONAL NEWS
BBC article about another outbreak of fear of Muslim female dress, this time in Corsica, over parents wearing headscarfs when five parents were barred from entering a nursery.
www.bbc.com/...
Guardian article by Christine Delphy analyzing the French law and attitudes toward public display of religion and the decision by the Conseil d’Etat that the mayor of Nice was in the wrong on the dress of Muslim women. Delphy is the author of Separate and Dominate: Feminism and Racism after the War on Terror (Verso, 2015).
www.theguardian.com/...
Madeleine Rees in the Guardian on the opportunities for positive development in countries consumed and scarred by nationalistic warfare in the upcoming conference of the Association for Women’s Rights in Development to be held this month in Brazil.
www.theguardian.com/...
The agenda of the International Women’s Conference to be held in Chicago in late September, the 26th through the 28th. Includes speakers and topics. Women in executive positions in global corporations seem a bit overrepresented.
iwforum.org/...
Women’s eNews story by Monique John of the possible effect on women of the UN Peacekeepers leaving Liberia. Article notes the strength of women’s ideas in the current government but also assessed safety and infrastructure problems for women.
womensenews.org/...
Washington Post twitter on the “need” for female genital mutilation in Egypt because Egyptian men are sexually weak. Twitter post leads to article below.
twitter.com/...
Washington Post article by Sudarsan Raghavan about Egypt discussing making its anti-FGM laws stronger after UN noted that Egypt has one of the highest rates of FGM in world. Estimates of the number of women who have undergone FGM at 27.2 million. The legislator who was the subject of the Wapo twitter was walking back his statements.
www.washingtonpost.com/...
WOMEN’S HEALTH
Anna C. at Planned Parenthood Advocates on the documentation of Zika as an STD. Observes the delay from first case in 2008 to the current media stories as if sexual transmission wasn’t already known.
advocatesaz.org/...
National Women’s Law Center seeking women’s responses to the need for birth control for their health.
This spring the Supreme Court deadlocked in Zubik v. Burwell, a major birth control case that would allow certain bosses to use their religion to make it more difficult, if not impossible, for women to get the birth control coverage they need.
The Department of Health and Human Services is asking for input from the public about the importance of birth control coverage. We need you to submit your comment to make sure we're heard loud and clear: everyone deserves access to birth control coverage, no matter where they work or go to school.
Tell the Department of Health and Human Services that birth control coverage is essential for women's health, equality, and economic security.
Site includes a form for response to the Department of Health and Human Services.
secure2.convio.net/…
And that’s the news (at least some of it) for this week in the continuing war on women.
Thanks, as always, to the women of this group for their help in gathering this news: Besame. 2thanks, ramara, officebss, Tara the Antisocial Social Worker, ErinJoy, tamar. elenacarlena. Some of the good fun of doing these diaries is the ongoing discussion during the week of possible articles for the diary and reactions to them. Please feel free to join the ongoing discussion in the messages section.