feminist blogs

If you have not read it, Autumn at Pam’s House Blend linked the decision in In re Marriage Cases, the California Supreme Court case that made marriage equal for all Californians irrespective of sexual orientation. She has up a long quote which I will not repeat. I liked this part from page 6:

[W]e conclude that … the constitutionally based right to marry properly must be understood to encompass the core set of basic substantive legal rights and attributes traditionally associated with marriage that are so integral to an individual’s liberty and personal autonomy that they may not be eliminated or abrogated by the Legislature or by the electorate through the statutory initiative process. These core substantive rights include, most fundamentally, the opportunity of an individual to establish – with the person with whom the individual has chosen to share his or her life – an officially recognized and protected family possessing mutual rights and responsibilities and entitled to the same respect and dignity accorded a union traditionally designated as marriage…

(Emphasis in original.)

What might get overlooked, I wanted to highlight under the legal maxim of est majorifico fuckin dealio:

[W]e must determine whether sexual orientation should be considered a “suspect classification” under the California equal protection clause, so that statutes drawing a distinction on this basis are subject to strict scrutiny. As pointed out by the parties defending the marriage statutes, the great majority of out-of-state decisions that have addressed this issue have concluded that, unlike statutes that impose differential treatment on the basis of an individual’s race, sex, religion or national origin, statutes that treat persons differently because of their sexual orientation should not be viewed as constitutionally suspect and thus should be subjected to strict scrutiny. The issue is one of first impression in California, however, and for the reasons discussed below we now conclude that sexual orientation should be viewed as a suspect classification for purposes of the California Constitution’s equal protection clause and that statutes that treat persons diffeently because of their sexual orientation should be subjected to strict scrutiny under this constitutional provision.

(Opinion at pp. 95-6, footnotes omitted.)

This isn’t “just” marriage equality. This is full equality, as far as California law can effect it.

So often, our nation’s, our people’s and our institutions’ reach exceeds their grasp; we fail or refuse to live up to our promise and potential. But on this, in one state, on this day, we did the right thing.

(Thanks to Holly, Jack & Co. for letting me guest-post occasionally. I very much appreciate the privilege.)

I recently got a free issue of Men’s Journal. Dwayne Johnson was on the cover. It’s a profile by Allison Glock. I don’t know much about him. He was a football player then a WWE wrestler, he’s biracial, he gives kids of Samoan heritage someone to cheer for, folks say he works hard at being an action star and comedic actor. All good reasons to read the piece.

So the reporter writes that he’s “a modern breed of film star”, “an amalgam of magnetism and marketing savvy.” (So far, so good):

George Clooney minus the smugness. Arnold minus the skeeve. Tom Cruise minus the crazy. Ryan Seacrest, if Seacrest were a man.”

And … we’re done here.

The point isn’t whether a man or woman polices the arbitrary policy that manhood is a privileged status revoked at the slightest infraction. The point is that this conception of manhood is part of the problem, and reaffirming it doesn’t do anybody any good.

Not finishing the article.

The title has an obvious double-meaning. My two-week guest bit is over. See all you folks in comments.

The subtitle of this blog is “in defense of the sanctimonious women’s studies set.” Some folks will recall where that title came from: when the best-known Democratic blogger in America loudly dismissed feminism as some special interest interfering with Team Blue’s entitlement to win elections. And that’s not an isolated problem. As the inimitable Melissa McEwan pointed out at Shakesville recently, and even more recently because some people needed clarification, there are a lot of fauxgressive guys in the blogosphere who belittle and snicker at women and marginalize issues that “only” concern women (roughly half the population).

(The primary season has been evidence, if more was needed, of that. See Zuzu’s posts here and here. And I say that as someone who never intended to, and did not, vote for Clinton.)

So it’s good that some of the “big” political bloggers say some of the right things. I won’t attempt an exhaustive list, but I’ve been particularly impressed with Atrios, of Eschaton, who is Duncan Black. I read him for the econ - he has that PhD and all - but it always raises my spirits to see him say explicitly feminist things.

For example, when Judge Deni in Philadelphia called the armed rape of a sex worker theft of services, Zuzu covered it. Atrios picked it up right away, and gave the judge the “Wanker of the Day” headline.

And then, when the now-famous Charlotte Allen self-hating misogyny appeared in the Washington Post, Atrios personally called out the editor, John Pomfret, naming Pomfret the “Wanker of the Day” and quoting some of Allen’s other disgraceful remarks to highlight Pomfret’s insipid excuse that Allen’s work was satire.

Then, he answered the question, “Why Don’t Women Read the Post?” He said, “Today I could read opinion pieces from David Broder, Robert Novak, David Ignatius, Robert Joseph and J.D. Crouch II, and Tim Westrich. It’s truly a mystery.”

And most recently, this.

Now, that stuff is good, but he recently said something which required actual insight, and one not common among het guys:

“I’m reminded of my college days, when rape awareness education for women was all the rage. It started off in a sensible place, but it also gave women a list of “risky behaviors” which made them feel responsible for their own rape if they actually did crazy things like walk out alone at night.”

I’m not claiming perfection for him, of course, and I’m sure he’s said some things that would make us shake our heads or even our fists in the past. But that last part has the sound, to my ears, of someone who listens to the women in his life when they tell him what it’s like.

First it was Roxanne’s, and then when she gave it up, it was Lauren’s, and it only seems right that there should be one up here. So:

1) Offspring: Pretty Fly
2) Pink Floyd: When You’re In
3) Wicked Tinkers: Gaelic Aire
4) Jimi Hendrix: Voodoo Child (Slight Return)
5) Spinners: Rubberband Man
6) Commitments: Mustang Sally
7) Enter The Haggis: Twirling Towards Freedom
8) Southern Culture On The Skids: Sweet Spot
9) Green Day: When I Come Around
10) Slayer: Aggressive Perfector

This is a global distributional issue. This is about getting enough to eat. (I make no claim to originality here: several women* are writing on this issue right now.)

Women are roughly 50% of the world’s population, do two thirds of the work, but earn 10% of the income and control just 1% of the world’s wealth.

The price of food everywhere is going up. The major rises in agricultural yield came about because of mechanization and petrochemical fertilizers, both of which become more expensive when energy prices go up. Worse, politically attractive but resource-stupid forays into ethanol have pushed the prices of some food crops higher.

The New York Times this week said that in Peru, women urge action on food prices:

More than 1,000 women protested outside Peru’s Congress on Wednesday, banging empty pots and pans to demand that the government do more to counter rising food prices, which are squeezing the poor worldwide.

The women, some toting small children on their hips, run food kitchens, known as eating halls, for the poor.

… the women say they are struggling to provide enough food and want the government to increase financial aid so they can cover their costs.

Hundreds of thousands of people rely on the eating halls each day in Peru, where about 12 million people, or 42 percent of the population, live in poverty.

The rising cost for basic foods sank President Alan García’s approval rating to 26 percent this month, the lowest level since he took office in 2006.

***

“Food prices keep on rising, and the government doesn’t pay attention to the eating halls,” said María Bozeta, director of one of three associations that represent eating halls in Lima.

All modern famines are failures of entitlement, not of food production. There’s enough food, but some people due to poverty or other barriers cannot get it. That’s the conclusion of Bengali genius and Nobel Prize winning economist Amartya Sen, and the subject of his 1981 book Poverty and Famines: An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation — but the conclusion will not be surprising to anyone who knows the history of the Irish potato famine, when due to English policies, Ireland was a net exporter of food, keeping food prices high, while its poor starved to death because their own potato crops failed and they could not afford to buy food.

If, as seems inevitable, energy prices continue to rise, the result will not just be an increased cost to drive or transport goods. The result will be that women with dependent children living in poverty around the world cannot afford to eat. This world, taken as a whole, is wealthy enough to apply a number of solutions to that. But history suggests that women are and remain so disempowered globally that nothing much will be done.

The interplay between energy, food and poverty is complex (for example, food charity can depress local farmers’ income, preventing some hard working folks from moving up out of poverty by their own hard work); and a book-length treatment is both beyond my expertise and beyond the scope of this medium. So I’ll leave it like this: when talking about energy policy, let’s not just talk about how and where folks in wealthy countries drive, or power our televisions. Let’s remember that the policy choices that affect these things also affect whether a mother of four young children living on $300 a year, or even less, can feed herself and her kids, and let’s insist that the policy issue be framed to include her.

*The simplicity of the title is powerful, and I picked it before I found ABW’s post, where she apparently came to the same conclusion.

Woman fights back against rapist, mob sexually assaults her. UConn. Trigger warning.

Every man involved in the assault must be identified, and their names so publicized that they cannot apply for a job or an apartment without their role in this sexual violence coming up. UConn must hold them accountable. If the school does not condemn this, it condones it.

The most diverse county of the United States will have the first US branch of the world’s best known microcredit lender.

A reader emailed this to me in response to this; I don’t have the email available (or I would H/T her by name) and Feministing ran with it before I could get around to it: it took a major legal battle for a man in California to take his wife’s name. It’s hard enough changing the heavy, ingrained social structures, but when the administrative and legal apparatus of the state throw hurdles in the way, too …

This is about a weightlifter and parent, not necessarily in that order.

The New York Times ran this in sports.

I loved her story, but I didn’t love the story, not the way they covered it. The whole thing starts with a very traditional-role narrative. First, the reporter sets it up:

Melanie Roach is a former gymnast who owns a gymnastics facility. Her husband is a state legislator. At 33, she is the mother of three young children, including 5-year-old Drew, who is autistic. And she can lift 238 pounds over her head.

Then, he (Greg Bishop) spends the first half of the piece talking about her role as the mother of an autistic child:

The problems she encountered in competition were nothing compared with the challenge she confronted with Drew after his autism was diagnosed in 2005. Roach said she was preoccupied with everything he would never be able to do — school dances, church missions, college classes. He did not have bad days; he had bad weeks, bad months, filled with relentless tantrums.

“It was literally in a week my life changed,” Roach said. “I went into depression. I went through a mourning process. Almost like I lost a child.”

She said she would kneel at his bedside every night, praying he would get better.

Not that I didn’t like that part of the story. In fact, it resonated with me quite a bit. I have young children with health problems — though not autism. So I felt a profound empathy with this fellow parent whose parenting challenges can be overwhelming, and I liked that part. But I saw it as positioned in the story in a way that it would not have been with a man.

The piece goes on:

“She learned that no matter how much money and time she put into it, she couldn’t change the outcome,” said her husband, Dan. “That has really helped with lifting. In the end, it’s the same concept.”

Without her experiences as a parent, the rest is a conventional sports narrative. She converted from gymnastics to weightlifting (so did US Olympic weightlifter Tara Nott, BTW; I think that’s a more common conversion than might immediately be apparent as both are dependent on explosive power, flexibility and balance and reward short people). She was an overnight sensation and set a record in 1998, but then injuries took their toll; she had several comeback attempts and a lot of pain and finally back surgery; now she’s the aging vet looking for one last shot at gold. She’s paid her dues and trained through a lot of pain to get here. That’s a conventional narrative, but it’s a good story. I’m totally with her on that. Go Melanie!

But the reporter’s interpretation of the interplay between Melanie Roach, Champion Weightlifter and Melanie Roach, Mother bothered me:

Thrush can tell immediately how well Roach is balancing the complexities of her life. He said he knew Roach was struggling with the pressure at the national championships in March, when she successfully lifted only two of six attempts. To qualify for Beijing, she must finish fourth or better in the 53-kilogram weight class at the Olympic trials in Atlanta on May 17.

“You’ll have an opportunity to be an average, everyday woman after August,” Thrush said he tells Roach when she seems distracted. “You need to be selfish now.”

Team Roach marches on through a life that Dan Roach described as “organized chaos.” Bonnie Kosoff, Melanie’s mother, moved in recently to take care of the children. Summers and Thrush travel to events.

“You know how they say it takes a village to raise a child?” Kosoff said. “Well, it takes a village to get someone to the Olympics, too.”
The changed outlook remains. Had Roach gone to the Olympics in 2000, she said, she would not have three kids or the business. Had there been no Drew, she may never have learned what Thrush tried to teach her all along — the concept of slow and small but steady and incremental progress.

But the biggest change that Drew inspired was in Roach, the athlete. She now enjoys the Olympic quest, 14 years after it started.

(Emphasis supplied.)

I don’t know Melanie Roach and I can’t speak for her. It’s possible that this reporting is completely true to her own interpretation of her experiences. Or it could be the reporter’s positioning. But I think that the reporter is highlighting things that would be true but taken for granted for male athletes.

If a man of 31, an international class athlete, were headed to the Olympic trials after a career of triumph, injuries and comebacks, with three kids and a spouse, it would also be true that it took a village to get him there. But I don’t think it would get much attention. I think everyone would just call it normal. But when a woman has kids, how she negotiates the demands of the rest of her life is The Big Question, the one that prompts several paragraphs in a major newspaper. It’s not just the way the role of mother is presumed to take over a woman’s life; it’s especially that this presumption goes unexamined.

And it wasn’t just the reporter. Her coach’s juxtaposition of “average everyday woman” (clearly a pejorative there) with high-level competition and positioning her ambition as “selfish” is exactly the problem. When men compete, they represent. The village isn’t just supporting them, they are bringing the triumph home for their family and friends, communities, nations, etc. But this guy is telling his lifter that she’s doing it all for herself. Way to motivate, coach!

I don’t have a good line to summarize this. I liked the athlete and I was bothered by the way it was framed.

p.s. there is a lot in the article that I didn’t raise. She’s Mormon, she had three home births, a few other things. It’s an interesting read for several reasons.

PD at Shakes has this up: a long post about LGBT PDA and self-censorship, including a bit about a couple of het friends who took her up on a challenge to be closeted, to conceal that they were a couple, for a week.

They lasted exactly three days.

My friend returned to me in tears on day four and said: “I’m sorry. I had no idea what it is like for you.”
***
That is how I lived for the first 32 years of my life, whether I was single or coupled.

And while my current self-editing is not nearly as extreme as it was before I made the choice to live as an out lesbian, it’s still self-editing.

I should note that I spotted it at Alas, where Amp discusses it.