Feminism // Current

Ovary storage as a way to delay motherhood?

Egg freezing has been heralded as the solution for women who refuse to make the choice between having a high-powered career and... more

tracyclarkflory
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Woman becomes 4 star general.

An Army lieutenant general has become the first woman in U.S. military history to get four stars. Gen. Ann E. Dunwoody will... more

davemcgrail
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Shirley Manson: “The beauty expectation is a way of controlling women.”

Garbage singer and Terminator actress Shirley Manson talks candidly about music, her new TV role, women's issues, and her... more

MandyMonroe
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Stonewall was a RIOT

Stonewall's decision to nominate transphobic Julie Bindel of The Guardian for the Journalist of the Year award sparked an... more

QueerYouth
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Margaret Cho's stand up tour "Beautiful"

Margaret Cho mixes a little raunch in with her inner beauty on her stand up comedy tour, "Beautiful." ... more

chapinyoung
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Why a disabled lesbian feminist might vote McCain-Palin

A few months ago, I received the email about Michelle Obama's allegedly "militant" university thesis which is debunked in the link above. Actually, it arrived in my fiancee's inbox, as do most of our personal emails.

One of the striking things about our acquaintance, whom I'll call "Sukie," forwarding that particular email to us (it's the only election-related "important story not in the news!!" type email we got this year, thankfully) is that my fiancee is African-American.

Sukie is hardly the stereotypical or even typical McCain-Palin supporter. She said yesterday that she was still undecided, in reassuring us that she did plan to vote -- though neither my fiancee nor I are registered as Democrats, we do both support Obama, and as we do every year, we've been reminding everyone we know to vote, regardless of which candidates they support. Still, taking her at her word that she remains undecided, and adding up: her considering the baseless, racist Michelle Obama smear worth forwarding; her periodic statements about immigrants and Hispanic Americans needing to speak English in public, which I always gently correct; and her claim to still be undecided at this late date; she seems more likely to vote for McCain or a third-party candidate than for Obama.

Like my fiancee and myself, Sukie is bisexual, and currently in a lesbian relationship. She was previously married and has adult children. She's lived in the West and the Midwest, and in Alaska. She currently lives in subsidized housing in a seaside New England town, after spending much of 2008 homeless after her multiple disabilities and low employability led to an eviction. She is a military veteran. Her girlfriend was recently diagnosed with cancer. She and her partner have been involved with feminist causes, including regular breast cancer fundraising events. She and her partner are both white.

(As mentioned above, my fiancee is African-American. She also has Native American, Chinese and European ancestry, all from several generations back. I'm of mixed European and Native Canadian descent; being 1/4 Sicilian, I may have had some African ancestors 1000 years ago.)

From my perspective, Barack Obama is the obvious choice for someone in Sukie's position, and McCain an untenable one. Both campaigns have said they prefer civil unions or domestic partnership to allowing same-sex marriage, though all four candidates have stated or acted on somewhat different positions at different times; I don't know whether Sukie and her partner of ten years "Betty" want to get married, but that doesn't mean the issue doesn't affect them. Veterans' benefits have long suffered from underfunding and poor quality of care, and this situation has only worsened over the last eight years; Senator McCain's record on supporting veterans' benefits has been abyssmal despite his own military service, while Senator Obama has voted to maintain or increase funding for VA programs time after time.

Perhaps the issue of most immediate importance to Sukie, though, is health care. Betty is an hourly worker, and while her direct supervisors at the chain store where she works have been supportive so far, they could be overruled at any time, especially as she needs to take increasing amounts of time off for surgery and chemotherapy. Should she lose her current coverage, she will have virtually no options for replacing it if insurers continue to be allowed to deny coverage for "pre-existing conditions" -- potentially putting her in much the same situation Barack Obama's mother faced during her battle with cancer. Betty would probably be eligible for Medicaid coverage, but Medicaid payouts across the country were already so low most doctors won't accept Medicaid even before the economic crisis led states to cut their budgets. And while Betty might be eligible for Social Security disability if she becomes unable to work, by the time she could get Medicare she'll likely have either beaten the cancer or died.

[cont'd]A few months ago, I received the email about Michelle Obama's allegedly "militant" university thesis which is... more

the_Jack
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2 responses

20 days ago

3 Weeks on T, Changes, and a little life update

Witness my transformation from female to male

JaceTurnerFilm
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3 responses

23 days ago

What effect will Obama's absence have on the polls?

The big story the past few days is that Obama will be taking a few days off the campaign trail to spend time with his grandmother,... more

RebeccaTraister
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0 responses

27 days ago

Boybama - Battleground For Your Heart

Please send this to five white women.

khasson
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0 responses

29 days ago

Please Sarah

A powerful reminder of how far women have come, and how precarious those gains are this year.

girlsforthefuture
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20 responses

1 month ago

National Organization of Women Political Action Site

A voting guide for progressive candidates from the National Organization of Women. A voting resource for anyone who supports... more

Denica_Cassandra
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22 responses

1 month ago

Fey's impact on the McCain/Palin ticket

There's nobody that this election has been better for than Tina Fey.

RebeccaTraister
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0 responses

1 month ago

60 percent of women harassed on daily basis - Cairo

CAIRO: Being an Egyptian woman is to accept sexual harassment as daily routine, according to a recent report from the Egyptian Center for Women’s Rights (ECWR). The study outlines, 60 percent of Egyptian women and 98 percent of foreign women are harassed on a daily basis.

This is not a new problem. In fact, the problem has been simmering silently since the fall of 2006, when dozens of men and boys attacked and assaulted women outside a downtown a Cairo cinema. In a mob style attack, the perpetrators attempted to grope and tear at any passing woman’s clothes in the October attack.

Street harassment globally includes a wide range of verbal and nonverbal acts, including whistles, jeers, winks, grabs, pinches, public displays and often the use of foul and offensive language. Extreme cases can accelerate into physical attacks where clothing is ripped and a woman is bruised, cut or injured.

No woman is left unharmed by acts of street harassment. Exposure to such acts of public humiliation that result in verbal or physical assault are often ignored by the police. In Cairo this is due to the lack of protective enforcement of Egyptian laws.

Although articles 268 and 306 of the Egyptian Penal Code touch on issues rising out of extreme sexual harassment on the streets of Cairo, the specific legal wording to aid in protecting women exists nowhere in the code. This makes prosecution very difficult and extremely rare.

“There is no law criminalizing sexual harassment in Egypt,” says New York based and award-winning Washington Post columnist, Mona Eltahawy. A native of Egypt, international speaker on Arab and Muslim issues and former reporter for Reuters news in Cairo and Jerusalem, Eltahawy has been vigilant in her stand on human rights and women’s rights.

“Police often refuse to report women’s complaints,” added Eltahawy. “And when it is the police themselves who are harassing women, then clearly women’s safety is far from a priority in Egypt.”

The 1993 Harvard Law Review report, “Street Harassment and the Informal Ghettoization of Women,” by Cynthia Grant Bowman, Cornell Law School professor and Gender Studies professor from Northwestern University, outlines the need for specific criminal and civil laws to protect women in public. Street harassment globally has one insidious and common denominator, the use of words that include extreme sexual innuendo and profanity.

“Fighting words statutes seem to offer an appropriate remedy for many kind of street harassment,” says Professor Bowman in her report. “They encompass personal, face-to-face insults that cannot possibly be described as political discourse; they apply to ‘threatening, profane or obscene revilings’; and they turn upon the reaction of the hearer rather than upon the intent of the speaker or harasser.”

Although the ACLU – American Civil Liberties Union has come out strongly in opposition defending the use of ‘fighting words’ as free speech under United States law code, it does lean in the favor in the prosecution of “acts of violence, harassment or intimidation and invasions of privacy.”

“The ACLU recognizes that the mere presence of speech as one element in an act of violence, harassment, intimidation or privacy invasion doesn’t immunize that act from punishment,” said the organization in a 1994 “Hate Speech on Campus” report.

On the streets of Cairo in 2006, eyewitnesses and citizen reporters’ pictures were clear proof that terror against women had taken place, despite denials by police and the Ministry of Interior. Some of the photos revealed police watching from a distance in amusement and indifference to the women’s predicament.

The event proved to be the breaking point for women, and some men, in removing their heads from the sand. It was the first time women had spoken out about the issue, taking to the streets in demonstrations against this enduring social problem.*****CONTINUESCAIRO: Being an Egyptian woman is to accept sexual harassment as daily routine, according to a recent report from the Egyptian... more

goldenways
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3 responses

1 month ago

Controversy over Stonewall Awards

Transphobic journalist nominated for this year's for this year's Stonewall Awards. QueerNews.org.uk has learned a... more

QueerNews
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1 response

1 month ago

Three Sisters

Documentary: Women in Eritrea are often depicted as Africa’s most liberated sisterhood. They fought on the frontlines in... more

IFAD
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1 response

1 month ago

What America's Smartest Women Say About Sarah Palin - Newsweek.com

Heels on, gloves off. Pitbulls with lipstick. Cleavage controversies and baby dramas. For more than a year, we've been talking about women in politics, and, still, we're not tired of it yet. Get any group of women together, of any political stripe, and Sarah Palin, with all her complexities and contradictions, becomes topic No. 1. And once you mention Palin, someone will bring up Hillary Clinton. And feminism. And whether mothers should work. And whether there will ever be a day when we don't talk about a female candidate's hair.

Even with an economic crisis on the front pages, these are irresistible topics—as evidenced by the conversations at NEWSWEEK's annual Women & Leadership conference, held this week in New York. Dee Dee Myers, White House press secretary for Bill Clinton, praised Palin's fortitude and, yes, intelligence: "I think she's both smart and resilient and optimistic and courageous and all those things. ... Her confident and completely unfazed response to being criticized is great because she didn't run from the stage crying. She sort of shrugged it off and when on to the next event, in a way that didn't seem callous, and it didn't seem unfeminine, and it didn't seem like she was acting like a guy, it was just her way."

Republican pollster Kellyanne Conway had no problem acknowledging the debt that her party owes to a Democratic star: "I don't think you could have Sarah Palin's meteoric rise without Hillary Clinton coming before her."

But these women disagreed on whether Palin belongs in the White House: "Is she ready to be vice-president? No." Myers said. "But it's not because she doesn't have these other qualities that make a great politician—things that you cannot teach as easily," such as the ability to connect with voters and deliver a speech with Reaganesque aplomb. "If she'd been allowed to work as governor of Alaska, stand for reelection, maybe be involved in something like the national governor's association, travel around the country, travel around the world a little bit, develop a world view that's more clearly thought through than the one she has now, she could have been a formidable candidate. And she may still be. But as it stands right now, to say that Barack Obama is no more qualified than Sarah Palin is laughable in my view."

Political commentator Bay Buchanan thinks Palin would have been attacked in the media no matter how much experience she had. "A woman like Sarah Palin, a socially, pro-life conservative woman who is extremely feminine, and a mother, and all of these things that one thinks about when they think about a traditional woman, was unacceptable [to the media and critics on the left]," Buchanan said. "Was totally unacceptable. It didn't matter if she had 10 years or two years [of experience]. They were going after her."

But author and editor Tina Brown said that Hillary Clinton was also subject to an unrelenting storm of criticism for everything from her cleavage to her ankles. "The moment that Hillary wept was a hugely transformative moment for women in a strange way," Brown said. "Because she was so extraordinarily abused by the media—I do feel that strongly—and she was so stalwart and she is so stalwart and so valiant, and she had this moment of breaking down, and there was a collective acknowledgement: What are we doing? I even felt sorry for Sarah Palin last night when I saw her on television, she looked so beat up, that you had to say, this process is so grueling, are we right to put our public figures and our politicians through quite such an ordeal, and what does it do to their values and their sense of themselves by the end?"

(more at the link)Heels on, gloves off. Pitbulls with lipstick. Cleavage controversies and baby dramas. For more than a year, we've been... more