A segment from Fox News simultaneously containing a stunning (though, perhaps, unsurprising) level of sexism, and a wonderful response from Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly. What’s especially telling about this exchange is that Kelly is rightly, intelligently, factually, and articulately, taking Erick Erickson and Lou Dobbs to task–and they seem to fail to grasp this. More than once, she’s met with giggles from her interlocutors.
A partial transcript is available here.
This is a powerful essay from Deborah Copaken Kogan–well worth a full read, but here’s a snippet:
This is what sexism does best: it makes you feel crazy for desiring parity and hopeless about ever achieving it. A few months later, after delivering a lecture on the media-invented “mommy wars” at the Sun Valley Writers’ Conference, a song pops up on my iPhone as I’m walking back to my hotel room: Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone.” “When you ain’t got nothing,” Dylan sings, “you got nothing to lose.”
Yes, I think. Yes.
I suppress the three words that have haunted me my entire adult life—”They’ll smear you”—and choose Dylan’s instead. . .
Yesterday I was watching the Melissa Harris Perry (MHP) Show and legal scholar Kenji Yoshino talked about a possible paradox at play in regards to the Supreme Court (SCOTUS) ruling on Prop 8 (and the other case that no one seems to reference by name). He brought up the following point: a group has to have a significant amount of political power in order to even make it to the Supreme Court, who will rule on whether they are being discriminated against. This can be restated as,
“A group must have an immense amount of political power before it will be deemed politically powerless by the Court.”
I can’t find the exact clip, though here is Sunday’s MHP show. And since I was forced to search the internet for another mention of Yoshino’s quote, I stumbled across a law review article he wrote on the topic (no pay wall!).
Today I was reminded of this paradox as I logged onto Facebook and was greeted with a newsfeed awash in red and pink:
a pink equals sign on a red background
(more after the jump)
Kenya ranks #130 in the 2012 Gender Inequality Index and ranks #145 in the Human Development Index. (Also, click here for a PDF of Kenya’s composite indices for the 2011 Human Development Report.)
Despite serious problems represented by these figures/values, Kakenya Ntaiya and the Kakenya Center for Excellence arguably provide many of the kinds of action, growth, hope, and promise that we need most in this world.
Woman challenges tradition, brings change to her Kenyan village (CNN Heroes story from March 14, 2013)
(Please check this out. Well worth our time. Every single minute – only 15 minutes, 42 seconds. Really gets going, truly inspiring, in the second half.)
A diplomatic row between the Netherlands and Turkey looms over who the Turkish government deem fit in the Netherlands to be foster parents to children with Turkish origin. Turkey has started an investigation into the nature of the foster families that currently foster children of Turkish origin in the Netherlands under Dutch law. This was triggered by a mother appealing on television (in Turkey, I think) to get her 9 year old son back, who has been in foster care since he was a few months old. The foster parents are a lesbian couple, who now have had to go into hiding because of all the media attention.
According to various news sites, the Turkish government objects to foster parents being gay or christian or otherwise not upholding Turkish values, and they wish for the Dutch government to see to the issue. The Dutch government is not amused.
The Dutch government has the authority to relieve parents of the care of their children and place them in foster care, which is what happened in the case of this little boy. This is not a measure that is taken lightly. When the necessity to remove a child from its parents arises, the authorities first see if there are relatives who can take care of the child. If they are not available, the preference is to place the child in a foster family, of which there is quite a dearth. If no suitable family can be found, a child will be placed in a home, but it is generally believed that it is better to place a child in a family.
It is going to be a bit tough to find sufficient “suitable” families for foster care that suit the whole world, I suppose.
By all means, let us focus on the best interest of the children involved, shalll we?
Transforming FAMILY is a ten minute documentary that jumps directly into an ongoing conversation among trans people about parenting. It is a beautiful snapshot of current issues, struggles and strengths of transexual, transgender and gender fluid parents (and parents to be) in North America today.
You can watch the video here. (I don’t know whether vimeo is accessible everywhere though; apologies if it isn’t.)
Interesting data in a WSJ story (though, I have not read the study itself) about the effects on worker pay when a male CEO becomes a parent, and the difference depending on the sex of the child:
First, the bad news. In general, when a male chief executive has a baby, his workers’ salaries shrink by 0.2%, or about $100, per year. That decline is driven by a 0.4% drop if the child is a son, according to the study of almost 1,600 births to more than 18,000 male CEOs at 10,655 private companies in Denmark between 1996 and 2006.
But there is good news for workers: The dynamics change if the CEO and his wife have a daughter, particularly if she is their first child. Employees’ wages actually go up after the delivery of a first-born daughter. And in that scenario, female employees get the larger boost, with their salary tending to grow by 1.1%, compared with a 0.6% gain for male employees.
I’m usually a fan of longtime Guardian favorite Hadley Freeman, so I was surprised to read the following, written in support of her assertion that parents shouldn’t let their daughters choose to become vegetarians.
When Lena Dunham announced that “a lot of times when you are a vegetarian it is a just not very effective eating disorder” she was duly pilloried. But speaking as someone who has been a vegetarian for 30 years and has a certain amount of knowledge about eating disorders, I’m going to defend Dunham here, even though she slightly missed the real point. Vegetarianism is not an ineffective eating disorder – it is a potential gateway to eating disorders.Obviously not all vegetarians become anorexic and not all anorexics are vegetarian (although in my experience, in regards to the latter part of that sentence, there is a heavy overlap). But vegetarianism encourages people to divide foods between the good and the bad, and it then becomes a legitimate means of limiting one’s diet. Your daughter has a whole lifetime ahead of her to think of food as something other than a pleasurable physical necessity. Why let her start early?
I really don’t know where to start with this. First, the suggestion that vegetarianism is “a potential gateway to eating disorders” seems to come out of nowhere (and has no evidential support, as far as I can tell). The thought that careful ethical consideration about food choices is the sort of thing that might lead to an eating disorder seems both to woefully misunderstand the pathology of disordered eating and to insult young women’s capacity to handle ethical decision-making. I’d have thought that a young woman who makes, for whatever reason, a conscious decision to avoid meat might be lead to, I don’t know, careful ethical consideration of other parts of her life. But apparently young women are just too delicate and fragile to handle the way in which “vegetarianism encourages people to divide foods between the good and the bad”. That’s just too much for girls. They’ll end up with an eating disorder, the poor things!
The idea that vegetarianism is “a gateway” to eating disorders manages to be disrespectful both to young women with eating disorders and young women who choose to become vegetarianism. It suggests of the former that their complex, multifaceted disease might be little more than the side-effect of confused thinking about food. And it suggests of the latter that they need to be protected from their own ability to consciously, deliberately think about the ethical implications of the food they eat. What nonsense.
(You can read Freeman’s article – on “How to Parent Girls” - here.)
This season, supportive moms [and dads] have gathered to send a holiday message to all LGBTQ children, teens and young adults who are without family support and who would like a “stand-in Holiday Mom”–or 40! Knowing that not every mother is ready to accept her own LGBTQ child exactly as-is (as hard as this is for us to imagine), we moms have written to extend our love beyond that of our own family.
Uganda: The Fight for Women’s Land Rights
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http://thinkafricapress.com/uganda/womens-fight-land-rights
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“In 2001, after the death of her husband, and her son shortly afterwards, Helen Kongai was left with no money and the threat of losing her land – the land on which she had long lived and farmed. But while Ugandan culture dictates that a husband’s family take back any land after he dies, Helen fought successfully to keep it.
“Now, at the age of 50 and a successful farmer, Helen runs a residential training centre from which she has trained thousands in sustainable organic agriculture and offers gender studies lessons in an attempt to bridge the gap between men and women, overcome customary discriminatory practices, and help women gain equal access to land…”
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See also:
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Send a Cow: Supporting African families out of poverty
http://www.sendacow.org.uk/our-work
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Helen Kongai – Ugandan Farmer: How small scale agriculture transforms the lives of women in Uganda
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/womanshour/02/2008_28_mon.shtml
http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/documentaries/2009/04/090407_outlook_sendacow_page.shtml
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Recognizing the African woman farmer
http://feministphilosophers.wordpress.com/2012/09/01/recognizing-the-african-woman-farmer/
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Gender Inequality Index
http://feministphilosophers.wordpress.com/2010/11/27/gender-inequality-index-3/
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2012 Gender Inequality Index
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