July 13, 2010

EW (International) Reader

Some stories from around the world…

In India, one village plants fruit trees to celebrate the birth of a girl…and to give her a dowry/savings account later in life.

The Economist’s perspective on maternal health in Mexico and other developing countries: basically, contraception and midwives are good, but infrastructure and general spending on health are better.

Some areas of Australia moving to criminalize prostitution.
Is Saudi Arabia (slightly, slowly) liberalizing?

Many of the women in prison in Afghanistan are there because of “moral crimes” or “bad character.”

In China, after thugs who are believed to be associated with the police raped and killed a young woman, men who posted information online to try to help her family’s quest for justice were arrested.

BBC talks to women who were raped during the Rwandan genocide and conceived, and their children.This Nigerian woman is in charge of fighting corruption in the financial sector.

And finally, the BBC reports on a study that supposedly shows babies have an intrinsic bias toward certain gender-role-related toys. What do you think?

The Economist asks, “What if Arab women don’t want rights?”

Image from inju’s flickr.

July 8, 2010

Serena’s (female) body

By Alison Thurston

This weekend, Serena Williams took home her thirteenth Grand Slam title (in straight sets, no less) at Wimbledon on Saturday. This victory marks her fourth singles’ Wimbledon championship. She also is appearing in August’s issue of Harper’s Bazaar, out this month. As far as I can tell from the previews, the magazine will show Serena in more makeup than she usually wears, and in dresses not made of Lycra and mesh, a big change from how we usually see her. The cover will say something like “Serena’s Sexy Side” and the magazine’s teasers reveal that Serena will talk about her embracing her body despite what she perceives as its flaws—her butt, her “overly fit” arms, etc. I’m glad Serena is going to be portrayed as attractive and feminine in a mainstream magazine, but the approval of Harper’s isn’t necessary for me to see Serena as beautiful.

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July 6, 2010

More Thoughts on Racial Profiling

By Alison Thurston

In my post last week, I talked about my experience working in retail and being told by my managers to follow around black women, to make sure they did not steal. I wrote that though it does make me feel uneasy, it often serves its purpose. I don’t want my stellar retail career to cause me to sell out (though it may be too late…) or lose perspective on how social context determines so much of what we do. I think that I did do a little of that with my last post. My managers have doubtless been privy to the constant messages sent implicitly and explicitly by the media saying that black people are somehow more deviant. The social context definitely has affected everyone on staff, including myself. So even if it works, it’s all of our responsibility to recognize it and not allow it to have enough of an effect on us that we make one person who comes in feel harassed.

This week, I’ve mulled over what I wrote then and I think my mind has changed a bit. I’ve been thinking about what it means to be an employee, especially an entry-level position in a large chain. I think that part of the reason I was able to carry out my manager’s orders (other than the one hardest to overlook: every store clerk is very replaceable) is that I had absorbed company culture. As I said, I’ve been with the company since the spring of 2008—that’s two years. Even though for much of it I was at Princeton, I still felt some lingering allegiance to the place that gave me a steady job through high school and even for the paltry few weeks that I spent at home when I returned from Turkey last summer.

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July 3, 2010

From Masculinity to Misperception: Gender Observations from South India

By Kelly Roache

Three weeks into my summer in Hyderabad, I am still finding gender issues to be some of the most fascinating and perplexing aspects of the local culture. They are also what have affected my experience here the most personally. In particular, I am beginning to develop an oftentimes contradictory picture of what is considered “masculine” here. Whether downtown or in dirt alleys, men and boys alike can be seen walking together with their arms around each other, and similar displays of physical affection like a pat on the thigh are anything but taboo. Likewise, one of the staff members at the Institute with whom I have become close is an avid baker; he is unabashedly the first to admit it, perhaps in part because there is no fear of mocking from the other men, who would never think to poke fun at what is viewed here as a facet of personality. I try to contrast this with the flack I have seen guys take at home for having such an “inherently feminine” hobby. Here it is a point of pride, while there it can be one of shame.

At the same time, this liberal definition of masculinity is very much a new phenomenon amongst the youngest adult generation. My baker friend and I were discussing this when he shared a story with me about an older Protestant priest he knows who has little incentive to remodel his kitchen, despite his wife’s desire to do so, as only she spends time there. There is also, from my perspective at least, an attempt to balance out this unconventional definition of masculinity with public reassurances, such as how all of my male friends here call each other “boss” (think the Indian equivalent of “bro”). I imagine this is the sort of tension that will vanish within a generation, but at least for the moment, it is palpable.

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July 1, 2010

The Rainbow Weekend – a Party, Protest, or both?

 By Elizabeth Cooper

Pride invaded NYC this past weekend, and like many queer women, I partook in some of the festivities. Note my choice of language. Festivities. I just read a Gawker article “A Straight Person’s Guide to Gay Pride” where they describe Pride as “a giant celebration of living somewhere over the rainbow.” Yet the organizers of the Dyke March, an event in Pride weekend, describe it as “a protest march, not a parade.” So, what is Pride? A party or a protest? What does it represent to the LGBT community, LGBT individuals, me and you?

My personal point for comparison to this past weekend was the National March for Equality back in October, which EW editor Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux called “transformative” and “an incredible high” because we were “fighting for what was right.” I felt similarly high from the day. I had spent many hours organizing to get our busload of Princeton students to come march for equal rights, and the fruits of my labor tasted sweet indeed.

The Dyke March, on the other hand, did not feel transformative, at least for me.  Although I wanted it to be a protest, it didn’t feel like such for a few reasons. Most importantly, I hadn’t been invested in the organization of the march, and therefore hadn’t really thought about what the march meant to me – it was happening, and I felt like since I was in the city partially for Pride and consider myself an activist in some respects, I should go. Amongst the people I marched with, I felt we shared this sense of not exactly knowing why we were marching. A couple of people thought we were going to be watching a parade, rather than participating in a protest. Once they realized the nature of the march, namely that it was a protest rather than a parade, they asked what we were protesting. I ventured a vague answer about protesting homophobia, but even the question made me insecure about not being more informed about what the march was about, as a whole, and for me personally.

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June 30, 2010

Ke$ha, Feminist Pioneer

This is the first in a series of articles on women in popular music today.

By Nick Cox

A few months after its release in August of last year, Ke$ha’s hit song, “TiK ToK”, achieved a moderately significant historical benchmark: it sold 610,000 copies in one week, more than any single by any female artist ever.  It outsold the previous record-holder–“Just Dance”, by the formidable Lady Gaga–by a margin of nearly 200,000.  It also topped the US charts on January 2nd, becoming the first number-one hit of the new decade and remaining so for nine consecutive weeks before finally losing the number one spot to Gaga’s “Telephone”.  In August, no one had heard of Ke$ha; by March it took the two most well-established women in pop music, along with the most outsize music video in ages, to best her.  This sort of success doesn’t happen by accident.  Ke$ha, as Louis Armstrong might say, has got “that thing”–she has the talent, the charisma, and the work ethic that constitute genuine star-power.  But despite her enormous success, she has won little of the reverent praise that is constantly heaped upon Gaga.  Listeners and commentators, regardless of how they feel about her music, are reluctant to take her seriously as an artist or as a star.  In this article I offer a possible explanation for this reluctance, and argue for why Ke$ha deserves far more respect, as an artist and as a feminist icon.

When her popularity was at its peak, Ke$ha was also amassing more haters than just about anyone in the music world.  Her main rival on this front, Justin Bieber, was and remains mostly a cute little punchline: people poked fun at him for looking like a nine-year-old and for his mediocre music, but it was all in good humor.  Ke$ha-haters, in contrast, are dead serious, and their jabs are often joltingly vicious and mean-spirited.  For instance, a story on Starpulse.com from back in February, headlined “Ke$ha: STFU”, responded to a droll comment from Ke$ha by addressing her, in the second person, as follows: “Okay. We get it. You’re competing with pop star idols like Lady Gaga and Katy Perry. But stop whoring yourself out for attention.  You’re trying to [sic] hard.”  Another story from a few months later, about the “Your Love Is My Drug” music video, had just the same nasty tone, telling her, “don’t get rid of your stylist—that’s the only thing you have going for you!”  The hating only increased in the wake of the “TiK ToK” craze, as though the last nine weeks had been an insane bender that people wanted to put behind them.  The question, as with all such morning-after disavowals of the past, is: What is it about “TiK ToK” that makes people so ashamed to have liked it?  In those nine weeks, what truth was revealed that the masses of now-sober revelers would rather have kept secret?

The above quotes from Starpulse.com are more than just garden-variety culture-blog trolling.  Everyone gets made fun of on the Internet, but not like this—this has “personal” written all over it.  With its formulaic, bargain-bin sarcasm, its seeming indifference to the usual need to be funny or sound clever, its palpable eagerness to start saying mean things as quickly as possible, this criticism feels inspired by some sort of vendetta, as though Ke$ha had just tried to sit with the popular girls in the high school cafeteria.  In a sense, though, that’s exactly what she’s done, which may well explain why so many people take such pleasure in hating her.  With her ratty cowboy boots and her beat-up 1978 Trans-Am, her drunken forearm-flailing dance and her occasional disregard for personal hygiene, she is undeniably quite a bit different from any major female pop star in recent memory, different in ways that vex people severely and prompt them, almost like a scorpion when you touch it, to lash out at her, if only to make sure everyone within earshot knows that they are firmly in the anti-Ke$ha camp.  A lot of people like her, but few want to be known as the type of person who likes her.

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June 29, 2010

Bones Before Bodies

By Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux

Cross-posted at Princeton’s Mount Menoikeion’s seminar blog.

Reading on a bench under a bank of jasmine in the courtyard a few days ago, I watched one of the nuns beat mattresses while others greeted delivery men, chatted with tourists, and walked up and down the cascading stone steps with baskets of laundry. Threads of female voices filtered through the kitchen windows, mixing with the smell of simmering okra. I kept looking up from my book to talk or to check the time; after an early-morning breakfast, I was starving. I talked to the nun beating the mattresses about Texas, her birthplace, and we discussed the bow on my sun hat (the hats they wear in the garden, she explained, would never have such decoration). Except for in the kitchen after dinner, where for the past few nights I have been helping dry the scads of dishes that emerge after every meal, I felt closer to the center of the monastery’s daily life than ever before. I was content to sit, to read, and write a few pages in my journal. It was easy to belong.

Later that day, I learned that the spot where I had chosen to read had more significance than I realized. Surrounded by a confident, compelling community of women, it’s hard to imagine the monastery’s all-male past in any concrete way. Unlike the frescoes in the church, where layers of history are fully visible, I need to be given tangible reminders of what this past means, or its deeply gendered roots can easily evaporate. The bench brought me squarely back to earth, when Nikos, our program director, mentioned that in the early twentieth century, this was as far into the monastery as women could go. They could speak with the monks, and even ask them for spiritual advice, but they couldn’t enter the monastery’s holy center – they weren’t allowed near the church, or the parts of the monastery where the monks lived and prayed. In the monastery’stypikon, women, except for royalty who are permitted to enter the monastery to worship and then leave, are expressly banned. It was striking to realize that the bench where I had so comfortably sunned myself would until only recently have represented the marginality of my relationship to the monastery’s core.

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June 28, 2010

Musings on Clothes & Empowerment

By Jillian Hewitt

This article, which we recently linked from Jezebel, got me thinking a lot about how we dress, and what that does—or doesn’t—say about us as people, or women, or feminists, or whatever.  Anna North tackles the issue of dressing “immodestly,” and whether sporting skimpy attire is empowering or not.  I especially liked this section:

“We’re often told that dressing in such a way is “tantalizing”—that if we want to show our bodies, we’d better be prepared to give them up to the first man who wants them. But telling women that if they look a certain way they’d better behave a certain way—that if they don’t want to have sex with any dude they meet, they’d better cover up—puts women and men in an extremely restrictive box. And dressing however the fuck you want while behaving however the fuck you want is one way of breaking out of it.”

I don’t think it’s fair to say that dressing in short shorts or low cut shirts is necessarily empowering or not.  Empowerment is about feeling agency and strength, and by virtue of that is an individual experience.  To say that one way of dressing is inherently feminist and that another way is inherently not is a bit ridiculous if you ask me, especially given our constant emphasis on choice as a fundamental tenet of feminism.  North also quotes another feminist, Jessica Valenti, who writes:

“Wear high heels, mascara, and whatever else you want. I sure do. But let’s not forget that by doing this, we’re adhering to a narrow, male-created vision of hotness. Again, this isn’t to say it’s wrong to want to look “hot,” and to go along with the status quo from time to time, but let’s not call it empowered.”

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June 22, 2010

EW Reader

Another day of articles…

NYT puts together something interesting on Lady Gaga!

Empowerment in showing more skin?

Over the counter birth control? Why not?

Apparently sex after age 45 isn’t so great anymore…

Til when can women give birth and rear children?

Borderline Personality Disorder as a ‘sexy’ disorder?

Happy LGBT Pride month!

Texas FAIL: The Republican GOP wants to make same-sex marriage a felony and reinstate the ban on sodomy.

Obama continues to expand benefits for LGBT people.

Yet another reason for same-sex marriage: profit.

Image from dbking’s flickr

June 22, 2010

How I Became a Racial Profiler

By Alison Thurston

I haven’t gone a summer without gainful employment since I spent my seventh grade summer as my father’s junior legal secretary (and yes that is as inflated a title as it sounds). I got my first job in retail at fifteen, in a higher-end store for “tweenage” girls. There, as in the many stores to follow, I was asked to keep a close eye on certain women who came in. Yes, it was always women. And no, it has never not been a woman of color.

This has become an issue again because to supplement the money from my real job (i.e. to allow me to fuel my Forever 21 habit) I’ve been moonlighting at one of the stores I worked in in high school. Last year I saw an ABC special showing people being harassed for “Shopping While Black,” and I had trouble quashing my feelings of guilt when I did.  I’ve talked to my manager, a twenty-something Costa Rican woman, about my issues with tagging along behind shoppers before. When I told her I thought it was racist she said, “but….a lot of the time, they steal.” I’ve asked myself many times: just because we do sometimes catch women of color stealing, does that make it ok to always follow women of color around? And if the only reason we find disproportionate numbers of WOC stealing is because we follow them more often, does that mean we should stop following them, even though what they’re doing is wrong?

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