Yesterday was 40 days after the death of Neda Agha-Soltan, a particularly significant point in the Islamic mourning cycle. 40 day commemorations of protesters’ deaths were especially important in the 1979 Iranian Revolution. This time, there were so many protesters, so widely dispersed, that the Basiji seem to have been unable or unwilling to take control.
“Tehran was our town today,” exclaimed a 26-year-old woman. “We had more courage and the police less courage.”
(Thanks, AK.)
Gendered products week continues with some gendered chocolate. Ah yes, you’re probably thinking, chocolate is very gendered. It’s the quintessential girlie indulgence, after all. But not ALL chocolate….
How are they failing women soldiers? According to the Government Accountability Office, they’re failing them in many ways. Here’s one small example:
“I tried several times to use the mental health services. I was told that women don’t go to combat so we shouldn’t need counseling.”–Female Iraq and Afghanistan Veteran
For more, see here. (Thanks, Maura!)
In, that is, a situation like that in the Gates case. Should we hope it isn’t like Boston Police officer Barrett’s reaction?
In Barrett’s e-mail, which was posted on a Boston television station’s Web site, he declared that if he had “been the officer he verbally assaulted like a banana-eating jungle monkey, I would have sprayed him in the face with OC (oleoresin capsicum, or pepper spray) deserving of his belligerent non-compliance.”
Or is it just much wiser to assume the police officer is a racist and sexist bigot wanting to hurt you if you exhibit any non-compliance?**
Barrett maintains he isn’t really a racist. After all, some of his friends are people of color. This does make me wonder whether he has dehumanizing ways of thinking about the many different kinds of people he encounters. Are white students “spoiled, useless brats”? White women “stupid suburban bitches”? (Actually, he seems to think in more concrete metaphors but I’m not going to try to imagine them.)
Anecdotes have so little evidential value in cases where we are raising general questions. Still, they can remind us of alternatives that sometimes do happen. With topics like these, I’m often reminded of driving down a California freeway with a white, male visitor from Oxford; this was some time ago, and we were going to an APA in Los Angeles. It was about 10 o’clock at night and yes, he was driving and we were speeding. We got pulled over by a police officer in an unmarked police car (so unfair). When told we were substantially over the speed limit, my friend, using an impeccable Oxford accent, explained that he was a visitor to the country and couldn’t be expected to know the laws. The policeman nicely agreed and said he understood. We drove on.
Seriously, that did really happen. I think the police officer did suggest we slow down.
** We should notice that the implications of this question are a bit odd. It doesn’t really ask if we should assume all police officers are racist, sexist violent bigots. That seems to me a very offensive assumption to make about all the members of a group. Rather, it’s about what’s the more protective assumption to make in certain situations. There are plenty of situations in which it is wise to assume that any X you encounter could hurt you even when you know that most X’s are not dangerous. This could extend from unknown people out late at night to abandoned luggage at airports or unlabeled medicine.
Lani just sent us this one from Feministing:
Although the state Legislature submitted a budget with a 20 percent reduction to the $20.4 million the state provides to agencies that offer domestic violence services, Schwarzenegger slashed the funding by 100 percent Tuesday.
For Catalyst, which relies on state funding for nearly 35 percent of its operating budget, the affect will be “devastating,” Executive Director Anastacia Snyder said.“We’re still in shock,” Snyder said Wednesday afternoon. “We were bracing for the 20 percent cut, but did not believe the governor could, with a clear conscience, cut 100 percent of funding for services that keep women and children safe and alive.”
If you’re a resident of California, please click on Stop Family Violence’s action alert to urge lawmakers to reinstate funding for the programs that save women’s lives. If you’re not in CA – pass this on to someone who is! You can also post the following message to your Facebook account, or tweet it: CA Gov Eliminates funding for Domestic Violence Programs. Lives will be lost. You can help! CA residents click http://bit.ly/3jKQSo
I’m pretty cynical, but eliminating ALL state funding shocks me.
Flaffer has sent us this horrendous story from Iran.
MEMBERS of Iran’s feared Basij militia forcibly marry female virgin prisoners the night before scheduled executions, raping their new “wives” and making it religiously acceptable to execute them, a self-professed member of the paramilitary group says.
The anonymous militiaman, exposing a part of the Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s religious regime in Iran, told The Jerusalem Post that at age 18 he was “given the honor to temporarily marry young girls before they were sentenced to death”.
In the Islamic Republic of Iran it is illegal to execute a woman if she is a virgin, the former guard said.
Another very good reason we all need to remember the struggles still going on in Iran.
It’s fair to say that a large portion of my teenage years were spent poring over the pages of NME, and I don’t doubt this is still true of many young women now.
Important news, then, of the magazine appointing its first female editor, Krissi Murison:
“It’s definitely a good thing and is ridiculously overdue,” said Andrew Collins, a former NME staffer and broadcaster. “It helps erase the strange notion that this is just a boys’ game. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy, really. If you have a woman near the top it is more likely to inspire younger, female writers”.
Let’s hope so!
Gendered products week continues with an item familiar to UK readers but (as far as I know) still unfamiliar to US readers. (I’ve no idea at all about elsewhere– do tell!)
For people who are reading through a number of posts here, this post might seem obvious. But a lot of people don’t seem to do that much. So it might be worth looking at a strikingly common thread, which could be called “Should you just suck it up?”
Last night I mentioned to j in response to a comment here that an Hispanic administrator at my uni had mentioned to me how she learned the value of just sucking it up. (She was then head of our Affirmative Action program, so you can imagine how that worked.) Then I turned to CNN.com and saw Colin Powell had talked about being the victim of racial profiling a lot and having to just suck it up. The very same expression.
So here’s the common thread: Being less powerful and sucking it up.
Sotomayor: she just sucked it up in the hearing and got through! A lot of garbage was thrown at her.
Gates: Should he have just sucked it up?
The C-section case: It is horrible and outrageous that she’s lost her child because she didn’t just suck it up, and do it during childbirth.
In case you haven’t heard yet, a Sudanese woman has been sentences to 40 lashes for wearing trousers. That’s the focus of most of the reporting, and definitely of the headlines. That lets the reader view it through the familiar lens of “appalling backwards country treats women horrendously”. But the headline above captures something important that all too easily gets lost.
The woman, Lubna Hussein – a former journalist who now works for the United Nations – has invited journalists and observers to the trial.
She was arrested in a restaurant in the capital with other women earlier this month for wearing “indecent” clothing.
She said 10 of the women arrested, including non-Muslims, later each received 10 lashes and a fine of $100.
Ms Hussein and two other women asked for a lawyer, delaying their trials.
Now Ms Hussein has printed 500 invitation cards and sent out e-mails, saying she wants as many people as possible to attend her hearing on Wednesday.
She says she has done nothing wrong under Sharia law, but could fall foul of a paragraph in Sudanese criminal law which forbids indecent clothing.
“I want to change this law, because this law doesn’t match in constitution,” she told the BBC.
“It is important that people know what is happening,” Ms Hussein is reported to have written on the invitations she circulated.
(Thanks, Jender-Parents.)
Feminist Philosophers 