feminist blogs

Posted by olvlzl.
I'd always felt that the odd affection I have for Brian Hughes "The Bridge" is a kind of guilty secret. It is clearly an example of the banal smooth jazz genre. It wasn't the music itself, it had to do with a certain Canadian adventure, but we don't need to go into that. Now, to find out that he's played on The Weather Channel during Weather On The Eights there's no denying it anymore.

So, I've told. What's your guilty secret?

The panel is actually titled New Media Distribution 202: Empowering Communities Through Online Tools led by the fabulous Deanna Zandt, and girlfriend knows her shit. (Which is exactly why she's working with us.)

Here is a del.icio.us (indeed) resource list of some of the tools she went over.

The movie "300" has already had its day in the sun, but I just ran across this belated assessment by M. Duss at Alterdestiny.

Duss avoids seeing the film through the simplistic swords-and-sandals/freedom-vs.-tyranny lens through which most critics, whether they liked or not, have viewed it. Instead, he believes it is "as good an illustration of Edward Said's ideas about Orientalism as I ever expect to see on film":

I find Said's work most compelling when he focused on the use of literature and art in the production of knowledge and the maintenance of Western popular assumptions about the Orient. 300 could function as Exhibit A in this regard. The Greek (rational, well-organized, frequently bathed, and white) and Persian (prone to magic, a horde, much less frequently bathed, non-white) ethnic and cultural stereotypes are so blatantly offensive that they come very near subverting themselves. There were parts of the film that really made me wonder if the filmmakers were indeed winking at the audience, such as the Spartans' "Before we sally forth in defense of reason, let's consult the Oracle!" bit, but I don't think so.

[...]

I find it interesting that quite a few people I've spoken to have criticized the movie's representation of the Persians in terms that that I can only describe as Saidian. That is, they recognize the role that popular culture plays in reinforcing assumptions about the Other, and the way that these assumptions service certain political ideologies. The fact that some tech dudes at a party, who had never heard of Edward Said, were casually pointing these things out to me between tequila shots can, I think, be seen as a victory for the better parts of Said's work.

I'm a sucker for a good allegorical reading.

We have some great women on this panel, which is discussing ways to reach out to and communicate with young women of color. Mary Mahoney from the Pro-Choice Public Education Project is moderating, with Nicole Clark from Helping Our Teen Girls in Real Life Situations (HOTGIRLS) and Candace Webb from the AIDS Alliance for Children, Youth & Families as presenters.

One resource they gave that I really want to check out is this study, “Representin’ in Cyberspace: Sexual Scripts, Self-Definition, and Hip Hop Culture in Black American Adolescent Girls’ Home Pages” that was released this month in the international journal Culture, Health and Sexuality and led by Dr. Carla Stokes, the founding Executive Director of HOTGIRLS. While the study challenges the generalization that black teen girls aren’t tech-savvy and shows ways that they use the internet and hip hop to express themselves in creative ways, it also showed that much of the time, they actually choose to emulate the hypersexual, negative stereotypes of black women that are depicted in the media. All the more reason to have more online activism and outreach to these young women.

Oh gawd, they just put on “A Girl Like Me.” Great film, but I so do not need to be crying today.

Dana Goldstein of CampusProgress, who is also at WAM, has an interesting post up about what exactly folks mean when they say "feminist media."

What do you think?

Whew. So my panel is over and I can relax a little bit. (At least until tomorrow when I'm moderating a panel chock full of funny ladies, including Mikheala Reid.)

I'm at a panel run by the very cool Caryl Rivers on media myths like the "boy crisis."

Another media narrative they're discussing is the myth that professionally accomplished women make for bad wives, or have bad relationships. Well, shit...I've had my fair share of bad breakups but I'm pretty sure it didn't have much to do with how well I was doing at work.

I love these ladies...they're talking about how the Forbes debacle actually turned out okay for women. Women were so outraged by the article that they really had to eat their words and admit, well, that they were full of shit.

I really need to get this powerpoint, they also have a lot of fantastic info and stats debunking the male brain/female brain differences myths. (And boy are there a lot of them.)

My question is--yeah, so what do we do? I mean, we see these kind of bullshit stories all the time...but how do we call them out in a way that does more than piss off a couple of feminist bloggers.

Posted by olvlzl
If you think the warning below about an emergency is overblown, read this interview with Martin Garbus. He points out some things that make it almost a certainty that Bush will get one more nomination to the Supreme Court, that unless we do something to prevent it he will get another anti-democratic royalist like Roberts on the court and that we could lose just about all the progress made in the past century if another one lies their way into confirmation.

Watching the Senate Judiciary Committee the other day they don’t seem to have lost their ability to put comity before the Constitution, though some of that could be due to the fact that our media seems to think that Arlen Specter and the Republicans are still in the majority*. If we are going to save our civil rights, our environment, any kind of justice then we are going to have to do everything we can to force them to reject anyone who isn’t clearly on record as being considerably to the left of the RATS, and I’d add Kennedy to that list too. Consider this quote:

Words like judicial activism and judicial restraint have absolutely no meaning. If I have a liberal court, I want to see judicial activism. I want to see them go out and do things. If there’s a conservative court, I want to see judicial restraint, so they can’t do too much damage. The language that the Rehnquist Court and the conservatives have used over the last decades accusing the Warren Court of being too judicially active, and that they’re restrainers, is nonsense. The Rehnquist Court struck down more federal legislation than any other Court before it.

-- Martin Garbus, trial lawyer and author of The Next 25 Years.

The words replace reality and they argue about the words. The record is clear, conservatives will rule from the bench and lie about it as they are doing it, they can depend on Republican politicians and the corporate media to repeat the lies for them. Their determination to thwart democracy through a radically conservative judiciary might already be impossible to avoid except through attrition and then only if we can prevent more Roberts, Alitos, Thomases and Scalias being appointed. And that’s going to be hard enough to be getting on with.

* It seems so long ago, when it was only last December, how the media seemed unaware that there were ranking members. The policy was to entirely ignore them when they were Democrats. Now, it’s the majority who seems to have largely disappeared. Notice that the next time you’re watching the news.

-They deny confidential pre-natal care to pregnant teenagers. Because scared, pregnant girls should have to choose between telling their parents and getting decent medical care.

“Vast generations have been born without the type of medical care and prenatal care that we have today,” said Rep. Dan Ruby, R-Minot. “It’s great that people get the treatment early, but we don’t need to do something that is going to take away the authority of the parents, who are responsible for paying the bills.”

-They outlaw abortion, which is guaranteed to make the practice much more dangerous, and will jail you for up to a decade for performing an illegal abortion. There is a life exception, but not one for the pregnant woman’s health — so if she was, for example, going to go blind if she gave birth again, she could not terminate the pregnancy. The bill also has a rape exception, but no incest exception. Rape exceptions from “pro-lifers” are always interesting to me, because they’re a pretty accurate reflection of just how much anti-abortion legislation is about punishing women for sex, and not about the fetus at all. Women who get pregnant after rape — that is, women who had no agency or choice in sex — should have access to this medical procedure. But women who have sex because they want to should not. As usual, being “pro-life” is slut-punishing at its finest.

-They instruct doctors and nurses to figure out if rape victims are ovulating or if one of their eggs has been fertilized — and refuse to offer them emergency contraception (Plan B) if they are. Call me crazy, but I think that if you refuse to provide patients standard medical care, you should probably not be in the business of providing medical care.

-They smack down any dissent which would actually affirm the humanity of women, gay men and lesbians. Even more telling, “Last week, the Vatican rebuked a Jesuit priest in El Salvador who is a leading scholar of liberation theology, which emphasizes religious advocacy for the poor.” After all, if there was one thing Jesus hated, it was helping the poor and the downtrodden.

All of this reminds me why I love Eliot Spitzer. And why I’m glad we have an “assholes” tag.

Jon Stewart called it "Iranian Hostage Crisis: The Next Generation" (with the requisite cool cable-news-like graphics), but now Iranian dissidents are saying it really is like old times: The Iranian government planned to take British soldiers hostage.

Abedini told a London press conference that an Iranian Revolutionary
Guard naval garrison had been on alert from the night before the
kidnapping, to prepare for the operation.

Mohammad Mohaddessin, who handles foreign affairs for the council,
said in a statement that Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei,
had ordered the detention of the Britons in the hope of pressuring the
British government over a threat to toughen U.N. sanctions.

"You can see that the clerical regime had in a premeditated act
arrested British sailors in order to win concessions from the
international community and divert attention from its nuclear project,"
Abedini said. "Claims that the sailors were arrested in Iranian
territorial waters are baseless."

They just hate to be left out of all the war-making fun.

Jon Stewart called it "Iranian Hostage Crisis: The Next Generation" (with the requisite cool cable-news-like graphics), but now Iranian dissidents are saying it really is like old times: The Iranian government planned to take British soldiers hostage.

Abedini told a London press conference that an Iranian Revolutionary
Guard naval garrison had been on alert from the night before the
kidnapping, to prepare for the operation.

Mohammad Mohaddessin, who handles foreign affairs for the council,
said in a statement that Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei,
had ordered the detention of the Britons in the hope of pressuring the
British government over a threat to toughen U.N. sanctions.

"You can see that the clerical regime had in a premeditated act
arrested British sailors in order to win concessions from the
international community and divert attention from its nuclear project,"
Abedini said. "Claims that the sailors were arrested in Iranian
territorial waters are baseless."

They just hate to be left out of all the war-making fun.