MP asked to put her jacket on June 13, 2013

Earlier we posted about the No More Page 3 campaign, here; Caroline Lucas, MP, wearing a No More Page 3 t-shirt, was asked to put her jacket back on during a speech, in order to comply with Westminster’s dress code. You can watch the video, here, over at the BBC site.

There’s no transcript there, but after the MP chairing the session interrupts, Lucas responds (while holding up page 3 of The Sun): “It does strike me as an irony that this T-shirt is regarded as an inappropriate thing to be wearing in this house but apparently it is appropriate for this kind of newspaper to be available to buy in eight different outlets on the Palace of Westminster estate.”

Women Breadwinners and Fox News June 2, 2013

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.

Calling out sexual assault for those entering military leadership May 26, 2013

Not the usual graduation speech. We can hope those committing or covering up sexual criminal behavior will feel less safe. Do you think the effects will go beyond that?

Obama at Annapolis:

Hagel at West Point

“a wonderful woman” April 11, 2013

About a year ago some people I know were talking about Margaret Thatcher. One was maintaining that the group should find a way to honor her. The first scientist to be PM and the first woman to be PM. Others were silent and stared at the ceiling or found the cutlery suddenly extremely interesting. One finally spoke, “The problem is really doing that without having everyone else furious about it.”

I’ve been hearing about how wonderful she is from people who are not aware that many people think otherwise. Brian Leiter has a link to Glenda Jackson’s assessment of Thatcher, and it might be worth looking at that:

Art Activism: Bedding Out April 10, 2013

Liz Crow, artist and activist, is starting a revolution from her bed.

BEDDING OUT emerges from the current welfare benefits overhaul, which threatens many with poverty and a propagandist campaign that has seen disability hate crime leap by 50%.

“I wear a public self that is energetic, dynamic and happening,” explains artist-activist Liz Crow. “I am also ill and spend much of life in bed. The private self is neither beautiful nor grownup, it does not win friends or accolades and I conceal it carefully.

“But for me, along with thousands more, this new system of benefits demands a reversal: my public self implies I don’t need support and must be denied, whilst my private self must be paraded as justification for the state’s support. For months, I have lain low for fear of being penalised, but the performer is beginning to re-emerge. Instead of letting fear determine who I am, I’d rather stare it in the face.” BEDDING OUT is a performance in which I take my private self and make it public, something I have not done in over 30 years. On this stage, for a period of 48 hours, I am performing the other side of my fractured self, my bed-life. Since the public me is so carefully constructed, this will be a kind of un-performing of my self.

“I want to show that what many people see as contradiction – what they call ‘fraud’ – is only the complexity of real life. This is not a work of tragedy, but of in/visibility and complication; a chance to perform my self without façade.”

Join her live over the next 48 hours!

2012 Gender Inequality Index March 17, 2013

The U.N. (Development Program) released the 2013 Human Development Report (and the 2012 Human Development Index within it) a few days ago. It incorporates data from 2012 for the latest Gender Inequality Index (on pages 156-159). This index reflects gender inequality along three dimensions – reproductive health, empowerment, and the labor market – as rated by five indicators: maternal mortality and adolescent fertility for reproductive health, parliamentary representation and educational attainment for empowerment, and labor force participation for the labor market.

Of the 186 countries ranked in the 2012 Human Development Index, 148 of those countries are ranked in the 2012 Gender Inequality Index. The U.S. ranks #42, the U.K. ranks #34, Canada ranks #18, Australia ranks #17, New Zealand ranks #31, and South Africa ranks #90.

Also out of those 186 countries (for the 2012 Gender Inequality Index…), Netherlands ranks #1, Sweden ranks #2, Denmark and Switzerland rank #3, Norway ranks #5 (though as you might expect, Norway ranks #1 overall in Human Development), Finland and Germany rank #6, Slovenia ranks #8, France ranks #9, Iceland ranks #10, Italy ranks #11 and Belgium ranks #12.

In addition, out of those 186 countries (for the 2012 Gender Inequality Index…), India ranks #132, Saudi Arabia ranks #145, Afghanistan ranks #147, and Yemen ranks #148.

Click here for a PDF of the full 2013 Human Development Report.

Click here for a webpage with frequently asked questions (and answers) about the Gender Inequality Index.

Click here (and scroll down to “technical note 3”) for a PDF file that provides details on how the 2011 Gender Inequality Index was calculated.

Unfortunately, the link (to a PDF file) for details on how the latest Gender Inequality Index is calculated does not currently work. Click here in case it starts working.

Click here (and then click on “2012” toward the right side of the page) for a webpage that provides a possibly more straightforwardly ordered listing of countries in the 2012 Gender Inequality Index (though some parts of the ordering seem different from the ordering indicated in the 2013 Human Development Report).

What do readers think? All sorts of data here for all sorts of comments…

Also, in case anyone is interested: “The Google Public Data Explorer makes large, public-interest datasets easy to explore, visualize and communicate. As the charts and maps animate over time, the changes in the world become easier to understand.”

Here is a webpage for this tool.

Readers can find some basic Google Public Data Help for using the tool here.

The new pope on women in politics? March 14, 2013

Someone please tell me this didn’t really happen. (Seriously, if anyone knows more, please do say so in the comments.)

Women are naturally unfit for political office (…) The natural order and facts teach us that man is a politician par excellence, the Scriptures show us that woman is always the supporter of man, the thinker and doer, but nothing more than that.

From here and here (in Spanish), among other places — all seemingly in Spanish, so if you find it in English, please post that, too, in the comments.

UPDATE: This is probably not a real quote. The only reference I can find (until the last few days, that is) online is the one in the yahoo answer forum Kathryn linked below. My guess is that the comments here are correct, that the quote was fabricated in 2007, and is being picked up now. See swallerstein’s comments below for more pressing concerns regarding Pope Francis’s history.

Zerlina Maxwell Discusses Gun Control & Rape Culture; Receives Threats of Violence March 10, 2013

(trigger warning)
Zerlina Maxwell, a media pundit and activist, went on Hannity to talk about gun control and sexual assault. (Specifically whether making it easier for women to be armed can lower the rates of sexual assault and rape.)

Maxwell said,

“I think that the entire conversation is wrong. I don’t want anybody to be telling women anything. I don’t want men to be telling me what to wear and how to act, not to drink. And I don’t, honestly, want you to tell me that I needed a gun in order to prevent my rape. In my case, don’t tell me if I’d only had a gun, I wouldn’t have been raped. Don’t put it on me to prevent the rape.”

 

People are reporting that Maxwell has received a huge backlash on the internet, filled with of course, rape threats and racism.  Talking Points Memo discusses the backlash here.

But Maxwell went on to restate her argument on Feministing.  And there is now a twitter hashtag #tyzerlina for people to support her.

As for the content of the discussion, there are reasons to think that focusing on the perpetrators works.

And as messed up as the backlash is, it’s actually doing a decent job of demonstrating what people mean when they talk about “rape culture.” (Here’s a link to the tweet below.)

“Got a rape threat for tweeting about @ZerlinaMaxwell getting rape threat. #Rapeculture is a thing, y’all. #TYZerlina

What is wrong with feminism? March 1, 2013

There have been two posts so far on the PBS program, Women Making American; see here and here. It is not as problematic as I originally feared; that is, it isn’t just about fairly recent white US female media personalities. Still, a program that attempts to follow even the limited history of the feminist movement from Friedan forward is going to be short on critical analysis.

Nonetheless, there were two topics that often get at least a mention on this blog about which we’ve not had much explicit to say. So when the program took them up, I listened very carefully. The program’s style of interviewing one or a few women meant that in some cases we were just getting one person’s opinion. Still, though the content on two topics was very minimal, I thought it might be interesting to get reactions from those of you who come here.

Topic One: why don’t young (white, middle-class) women want to describe themselves as feminists?
One answer: because feminism is associated with the more extreme forms it took in the 70′s and 80′s. Women today are not so anti-male, etc, as these parts of radical feminism.

Topic two: Why doesn’t the feminist movement attract more women of color?
One answer: because it typically leaves out class; women of color see the problems in terms of race, gender and class.

I think it would be a mistake to think along the lines of “it can’t be this simple,” because in fact these are not simple problems. But what do you think?

Watch the Makers Documentary Online! February 28, 2013

A while ago I complained about a TV series that seemed to be glorifying a bunch of rich white men as the people who made America.

And a short while ago Fem Phil posted about the PBS documentary, Makers: Women Who Make America.

In case anyone missed it on TV, you can watch the whole thing (yup all 3 hours) here or here.  (The first link doesn’t contain commercials, as far as I can tell.  Apologies if the video doesn’t work everywhere. I tried searching Youtube as well but couldn’t find another version.)

And if anyone ever followed Twisty at I Blame the Patriarchy, she is still occasionally throwing out a blame or two, in between blogging about the various ailments her horses suffer from. She points out some irony regarding the commercials for the documentary:

“Despite the title, during the station break a voiceover described the doc’s subject as “women who ‘helped’ shape America.” Women are helpers, yo, just in case this film causes you to forget that for a moment.”

And in classic Twisy fashion, she helpfully suggests,

Here, Voiceover, let me “help” you kiss my entire ass.

(If it’s not obvious, I miss IBTP.)

I haven’t watched the documentary yet, but I’m hoping it’s good.  Twisty links to a few articles on it in her post.  And Chris Hayes talked about it some on his Feb 9th show–you know, the one where he devoted the WHOLE TWO HOURS to the women’s movement (both local and global, past and present.) The show, while containing a few awkward kumbaya moments, had some of the best dialogue I’ve seen about how to address the women’s movement without slipping into American-centric white middle class feminism. (If you can watch MSNBC shows, you can watch it here by hovering over “recent shows” on the left and finding Feb. 9th.)

 

Melissa Harris-Perry (left) and Sarita Gupta (right) on Up with Chris Hayes