Ha-Ha-Hallmarks of Feminism

Now here’s a comment I just can’t let hang out there:

Despite the “progress” in decreasing the glass ceiling of wage gaps, educational attainment, fertility control, improvements in technological changes in domestic appliances, and more freedom in the market sphere, women are not any happier. Instead, career-women, failing marriages, neglected children, unkempt homes and general unhappiness are the hallmarks of feminism.  [Zeal for Truth ????!!!!]

Well roll on the miserable floor, I just had to come up with something to counter that howling piece of miscreancy.  And here it is, just in time, from Barbara Ehrenreich via Tom Englehardt:

Feminism made women miserable. This, anyway, seems to be the most popular takeaway from “The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness,” a recent study by Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers which purports to show that women have become steadily unhappier since 1972. Maureen Dowd and Arianna Huffington greeted the news with somber perplexity, but the more common response has been a triumphant: I told you so.

On Slate’s DoubleX website, a columnist concluded from the study that “the feminist movement of the 1960s and 1970s gave us a steady stream of women’s complaints disguised as manifestos… and a brand of female sexual power so promiscuous that it celebrates everything from prostitution to nipple piercing as a feminist act — in other words, whine, womyn, and thongs.” Or as Phyllis Schlafly put it, more soberly: “[T]he feminist movement taught women to see themselves as victims of an oppressive patriarchy in which their true worth will never be recognized and any success is beyond their reach… [S]elf-imposed victimhood is not a recipe for happiness.”

But it’s a little too soon to blame Gloria Steinem for our dependence on SSRIs. For all the high-level head-scratching induced by the Stevenson and Wolfers study, hardly anyone has pointed out (1) that there are some issues with happiness studies in general, (2) that there are some reasons to doubt this study in particular, or (3) that, even if you take this study at face value, it has nothing at all to say about the impact of feminism on anyone’s mood.  [more]

Ehrenreich’s latest book is out – Bright-sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking has Undermined America at amazon.ca

Here’s Ehrenreich interviewed by John Allemang at the Globe & Mail, more stuff at The Situationist here and a half-hour audio discussion at Talk of the Nation here

Come on Ye Young Feministes!

See this post at Broadsides to learn more about this great and spreading movement.  Then join if you’re a young woman and support if you’re a man or older woman.  YAY!

This Is Great!

I’m over the moon about having something good to say about Barack Obama.  Apparently his administration has decided to climb back into the leadership saddle at the UN:

After nearly a decade of an often tense and estranged relationship with the United Nations, Washington appears to be taking a much more conciliatory and multilateral approach to the world body.

U.S. President Barack Obama formally restored funding for the U.N. Population Fund (UNFPA) Wednesday by signing a major spending bill, prompting U.N. officials to again welcome the policy shift on women’s health-related rights.

In January, Obama issued an executive order lifting an eight-year ban on U.S. funding for overseas family-planning groups and clinics that perform or promote abortion or lobby for its legalisation.

“We are delighted that the United States will, once again, take a leading role in championing women’s reproductive health, and rights,” said UNFPA’s executive director Thoraya Ahmed Obaid. “This is a great day for women and girls.”

During the administration of George W. Bush, the UNFPA lost its U.S. funding on charges that it was trying to promote abortion, an allegation that Obaid and other officials strongly denied.

In a recent statement, Obama said the resumption of U.S. funding would help not only to reduce poverty, but also improve the health of women and children and prevent HIV/AIDS.

UNFPA says due to the U.S. restrictions on funding its programmes, millions of women in poor countries were unable to access health care during pregnancy and that many of them died as a result.

Earlier this week, Obama signed the legislative omnibus funding bill containing a 50-million-dollar contribution to UNFPA. The funding had been in limbo since 2002 when Bush began to implement his ideologically-driven policies towards women’s rights.  [more]

The UNFPA has been almost hopelessly underfunded.  Among other things, it’s the UN agency responsible for the health of women in the DNC – those who have been raped and maimed by DNC rebels and soldiers.  Much more money is needed than will be provided by this change, but it’s a wonderful new start.  Thanks Barack!

Emily’s Hat

From Annie Finch at harriet:

I propose that what those of us who think about poetry will find most deeply startling about this piece of photoshopping, inspired by the “Aretha’s hat” post-inauguration website, is neither its humor (everyone knows Dickinson had a great sense of humor), nor the chronological workout it puts us through, nor even the implications about Dickinson’s political views. What is most profoundly startling, most unprecedented, is that the photo situates Dickinson blatantly in relation to another woman’s ideas. And this is not how we normally think of Dickinson.

Dickinson, after all, famously claimed that “she never had a mother.” This remark, with its combination of defiance and wistfulness, surely applies to the literary and intellectual as well as to the familial realm. Dickinson passionately admired Barrett Browning and hung her picture on her wall—but this fact is not part of the Dickinson myth, nor does it affect the way in which her poems are usually read. To think of the Emily of this portrait as not only digging on Aretha, but publicly sporting her affiliation with the older woman, does violence to the usual idea of Dickinson as the perpetual daughter, the rootless wonder, the eternal anomaly, sprung Athena-like from the brow of patriarchal culture.

I have written elsewhere online and in print about Dickinson’s relation to the long-forgotten “poetesses” who were the literary source of much that seems to us odd and singular about her. As Dickinson’s letters attest, these are the poets that she, now considered without question one of our greatest poets, most often read, learned from, and rated herself against. Wouldn’t you expect that the work of these, her influences, would be combed over, studied, valued, if only for its influence on her? And yet it is, in general, not even physically available to us (in dusty, gold-carved volumes sold for their bindings) —and if we do encounter bits of it, they are not poems written in a tradition we have any idea how to approach, to read, but only caricatures set up in contradistinction to her.  [more]

Iraq’s War Widows

Here’s a story that’s easy to read if you don’t think about it:

Her twin sisters were killed trying to flee Falluja in 2004. Then her husband was killed by a car bomb in Baghdad just after she had become pregnant. When her own twins were 5 months old, one was killed by an explosive planted in a Baghdad market.

Now, Nacham Jaleel Kadim, 23, lives with her remaining daughter in a trailer park for war widows and their families in one of the poorest parts of Iraq’s capital.

That makes her one of the lucky ones. The trailer park, called Al Waffa, or “Park of the Grateful,” is among the few aid programs available for Iraq’s estimated 740,000 widows. It houses 750 people.  [emphasis mine]

As the number of widows has swelled during six years of war, their presence on city streets begging for food or as potential recruits by insurgents has become a vexing symbol of the breakdown of Iraqi self-sufficiency.

Women who lost their husbands had once been looked after by an extended support system of family, neighbors and mosques.

But as the war has ground on, government and social service organizations say the women’s needs have come to exceed available help, posing a threat to the stability of the country’s tenuous social structures.

With the economy limping along, dependent almost entirely on the price of crude oil, and the government preoccupied with rebuilding and quelling sectarian violence, officials acknowledge that little is likely to change soon. [emphasis mine]

I thought that one motivation for the US invasion of Iraq was to make life better for the poor sods living under the rule of the terrible tyrant Sadaam?  Good work so far eh?  “… little is likely to change soon.” 

More:

In large cities like Baghdad, the presence of war widows is difficult to ignore. Cloaked in black abayas, they wade through columns of cars idling at security checkpoints, asking for money or food. They wait in line outside mosques for free blankets, or sift through mounds of garbage piled along the street. Some live with their children in public parks or inside gas station restrooms.

Officials at social service agencies tell of widows coerced into “temporary marriages” — relationships sanctioned by Shiite tradition, often based on sex, which can last from an hour to years — to get financial help from government, religious or tribal leaders.

Other war widows have become prostitutes, and some have joined the insurgency in exchange for steady pay. The Iraqi military estimates that the number of widows who have become suicide bombers may be in the dozens.

In the past several weeks, even as the government has formed commissions to study the problem, it has begun a campaign to arrest beggars and the homeless, including war widows.  [still more]

Because Women Are Only Incubators

A Baptist pastor who violated an Oakland, CA ordinance that prohibits anti-abortion protesters from coming within eight feet of women entering an abortion clinic for a legal surgical procedure has been fined $1000. and put on three years’ probation.  His crime could have led to a two-year jail sentence.

The court noted that the pastor didn’t “lay hands” on anyone [um, that would have been assault] and asked him if he would obey an order to stay 100 feet away from the Oakland clinic.  The pastor said “no”.  The judge let him go anyway.  Because this law isn’t serious, the “victims” aren’t real.  They’re only women incubating babies.  It’s pretty clear the law was drafted to prevent disorder around abortion clinics and not to protect its patients. 

The anti-abortionists call this a “free speech” case.  I don’t even think they believe themselves on this one.  These are people who try to exploit whatever “right” or “freedom” suits their overriding wish for control over women’s bodies.  The justice system, in this case, is more sympathetic to them than it is to the women harassed by fundies carrying mendacious posters of baby bits.

The pastor’s lawyer was at pains to point out the “conspicuous absence” of patients at the trial to testify that they felt threatened by him.  Of course, the law doesn’t require the presence of threatened patients.  The fact that the pastor was inside the “protected zone” with his sign is enough.  It doesn’t require a woman who’s visited an abortion clinic and been harassed to show up in court – an obvious invasion of the very privacy, safety and security that’s put at risk by people like the pastor.

Here’s what a women’s health specialist had to say:

When anyone restricts access to reproductive health services, every woman affected is a living example of a colonized body.

I suppose we’re expected to be grateful that there’s any protective law at all, even when it’s taken so lightly that a man standing in a courtroom who says he’s going to break it again is given the “all clear”.

RIP Dr. Alison des Forges

One of the victims of the air crash near Buffalo yesterday was Alison L. des Forges.  A senior advisor to Human Rights Watch, Des Forges documented the Rwandan genocide.  From NYT:

Alison L. Des Forges, a historian who documented the 1994 genocide in Rwanda and was an authority on human rights abuses in Central Africa, was a passenger on Continental Airlines Flight 3407 when it crashed near Buffalo on Feb. 12, 2009, killing all 49 people on board. She was 66.

The MacArthur Foundation recognized Dr. Des Forges’s work with a $375,000 “genius” grant in 1999. Her book “Leave None to Tell the Story: Genocide in Rwanda,” published that year, was considered one of the most authoritative accounts of the genocide.

Before the genocide, Dr. des Forges was part of a group convened by Human Rights Watch and other organizations that examined rights abuses, including killings and attacks and kidnappings of civilians, in Rwanda from 1990 to 1993.

Alison B. Liebhafsky was born in August 1942. She graduated from Radcliffe College in 1964, and received a master’s degree in 1966 and a doctorate in 1972, both in history, from Yale. Her master’s thesis focused on the impact of European colonization on Rwanda’s social system, and her doctoral dissertation was about Yuhi Musinga, the mwami, or ruler, of Rwanda from 1896 to 1931, during which Rwanda became a colony of Belgium. She was fluent in French. – Sewell Chan, Feb. 13, 2009

You can read her book online here

Dr. des Forges also served as an expert witness for the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda

Interview with Alison des Forges in 2004 at PBS

Alison des Forges tribute page at Human Rights Watch

Sanity on the Octuplets

Hysperia loves Patricia J. Williams and has for a long time.  At The Nation, Williams adds some sanity to the discussion of the octuplets birthed by Nadya Suleman .  Here are some bits:

No doubt Suleman has emotional problems. But rather than caring about her mental health, much of the media are content to pillory her as a drain on the public dole–selfish, frivolous, calculating and cruel. No Brangelina-style accolades of “God Bless ‘Em” in People magazine. Just impassioned calls to cut off her remaining sources of income and to criminally prosecute the doctor who fertilized her. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution even ran an op-ed calling for the government to appoint a legal advocate for every child born to an unmarried woman, since the “lack of a father’s guidance” must be “a major cause of [children's] suffering.” Furthermore, in the case of Suleman’s children, “the legal advocate would file suit against the fertility clinic or a physician who knowingly contributed to their abuse–life in a multiple-child household headed by a single woman.”

[...]

This past fall The New York Times Magazine ran a cover story by Alex Kuczynski, fashion writer and self-confessed “cosmetic surgery addict.” Her wish to have a child was framed by fierce determinism, the “natural outgrowth” of marriage to her husband–without whom she “would skip the child.” Kuczynski is married to a man whose “sperm had a track record”–six other children by two prior wives. She, the third bride and twenty years her husband’s junior, described herself as engaged in nothing less than a “battle for my fertility”; having a biological child was “necessary,” a “mad desire,” a “compulsion” and “proof” of the marital bond, without which she faced “wrecked hopes” and an “abyss of grief.” Indeed, to die “without having created a life is to die two deaths: the death of yourself and the death of the immense opportunity that is a child.” When she thinks she’s pregnant, she feels a “shiver of victorious accomplishment…. my own fecundity triumphant.” When she tells people she’s not, she feels “barren, decrepit, desexualized,” “branded with a scarlet ‘I’ for ‘Infertile,’” “the dried-up crone with a uterus full of twigs.”

Just because Kuczynski is married and wealthy does not make her less obsessive or more profound than Suleman. Kuczynski sounds like a sad, silly child mooning over “fertile but fit” stars like Halle Berry, Nicole Kidman, Salma Hayek and “John Edwards’s sometime mistress,” who all had babies in their 40s. Likewise, Suleman takes heart looking at Angelina Jolie. Suleman and Kuczynski represent disturbing emotional extremes. But that should not excuse the rest of us from examining the oppressive competitive natality that seems to have gripped us–the fantasies of “baby bumps” and breeding, always breeding, yet more of “our kind.” Our culture’s antifeminist backlash and its unrealistic aspirations have bewitched Kuczynski and Suleman, these two young women who are so addled and so suggestible, so endowed and yet so impoverished. All these years after the age of “liberation,” perhaps it is time to revisit the myths we still concoct about childless women’s worth.

Perfectly perfect.

Read the whole thing here

How to Hang On to Your Man

Shorter Gary Neuman:

Men have emotions.  They want to be “winners” – as proof, watch them turn the tv off if their team is losing badly.  It’s not that they’re sore losers, it’s just that losing makes them feel bad.  Emotionally.  If men don’t feel like they’re winners, they get insecure and then they cheat – they go out and find women who make them feel like winners.  Men kinda know this – they know when they’re starting to feel kinda – like losers.  But they can’t talk about it.  They need you to fix it.  You women.  Of course, no one’s saying you have to.  It’s just, if you don’t, your man’s gonna cheat.  But it won’t be anyone’s fault.  Just, you know, take your pick.  Do all the work of the relationship or lose your man.

 In his latest book, sure to be a blockbuster, M. Gary Neuman gets to the bottom of the male infidelity conundrum and finds that, though he doesn’t believe women are to blame (thanks Gary), still, all his advice about fixing the problem is directed at women who are supposed to build up the ego of their men or lose them.  This is new?  This is worthy of Oprah’s attention?  It’s downright worrying that this woman has so much influence.  I’d say e-mail Oprah but her mind is made up and she’s made it clear that a lot of whining complaints will have no effect.  What goes around comes around, eh?

I wonder why 40% of married women in the US … cheat?

Oh Yeah! Woman Power Thru Poetry

Not sure what I think of a televised poetry contest but I know I’m rootin’ for Al Jahani!

ABU DHABI – Recent media attention has surrounded female poetess Aydah Al Aarawi Al Jahani, who competed for the second time last week and who is the first poetess to make it this far in the Millions’ poet TV show on Abu Dhabi TV.

Al Jahani has received mounting pressure from family and tribe members, in Saudi Arabia, to resign from the competition due to the fact that she is female. The poetess who has competed fiercely alongside her fellow male competitors, has succeeded in avoiding elimination from the competition thanks to the Public’s votes.

This week Al Jahani made it through to round three of the competition with 59% of the audience votes stating “I am very proud to be the first female poet to make it to this stage of the competition, I am now just afraid of loosing”.

Despite the pressure from family and tribe members, Al Jihani is strongly supported by her husband who attends to watch her perform in the theatre along with millions of viewers around the world who have tuned in to watch her.

The 59% of the votes can be translated into millions of SMS votes received in favour of the poetess. Al Jihani is one of three female poets to compete in the competition with Siham Al Bayan Al Adwan and Haneen Al Samarneh Al Aajarma both from Jordan being eliminated in the first round of the competition.

Al Jihani’s poems have so far concentrated on the struggles of women as poets and focuses on striving to empower her fellow female poets to succeed in becoming the best they can be in an art form dominated by men.

Al Jihani will now compete against 11 other poets in round three beginning 19th February as she moves one step closer to becoming the first female Millions’ Poet. The past two winners of season 1 and 2, Mohamed bin Fteis and Khalil Al Tamimi Al Shibrimi, have both been from Qatar winning 1 million Dirhams each, however this season the stakes have risen as well as the prize money with first prize now being raised to 5 million Dirhams (approximately $1.3 million).

Al Jihani has become a role model for women all over the region with her strength and motivation to continue in the competition and program makers expect this to encourage more women to audition for next season’s show.

Nashwa Al Ruwaini, the show’s Executive Producer and also a well-known media personality in the Middle East quoted, “I am very proud of Aydah and hopes she continues in the competition and doesn’t throw in the towel before her time. She is a true example to women all over the region proving that women too have their place in the arts and should endeavor to overcome the obstacles they face in life against their gender.”

via bookninja