feminist blogs

Nadja Benaissa, of the popular German all-girl pop group No Angels, has been charged in criminal court with grievous bodily harm and attempted aggravated assault. Her crime? Having unprotected sex with three men without informing them of her HIV-positive status. One of the men has since become HIV-positive as well. (The other two tested negative [...]

Read more global feminist posts at Gender Across Borders.

Via Tracy Clark-Flory at Salon’s Broadsheet, a recent study from the University of Iowa suggests that “hooking up” can actually lead to meaningful relationships sometimes!

Honestly I find nothing more tiresome than oldsters (not to over-stereotype, but it does seem to be a certain brand of baby boomer — ahem, Laura Sessions Stepp), who warn young women not to give away the milk for free. They often seem appalled that younger women have sexual agency. It shouldn’t be all that surprising that research shows that hooking up after meeting someone by chance at a bar or a party is just another way to meet someone. Sometimes you meet a dud and sometimes you meet someone worthwhile. It’s also worth remembering that this is related to the study a while back from the University of Minnesota that showed casual sex wasn’t emotionally damaging.

Granted, there are several problems with this study: They only examined 642 heterosexual adults. As we all know, LGBT folks have experiences with hooking up (and not hooking up) too. One of the researchers, sociologist Anthony Paik, was also quoted in the press release reinforcing some pretty heinous stereotypes about hooking up: “The study suggests that rewarding relationships are possible for those who delay sex. But it’s also possible for true love to emerge if things start off with a more ‘Sex and the City’ approach, when people spot each other across the room, become sexually involved and then build a relationship.”

Hear that, ladies? You can be like Samantha from “Sex and the City” and still get that ultimate relationship!

But for all the stereotypes about women getting warned of the dangers of hooking up, I’d argue that it’s actually the reverse that’s the danger. It’s not sexual freedom and casual hookups that are disastrous for women. After all, as Jaclyn Friedman found hooking up to be liberating. What is disastrous for young women is that they’re raised with cookie cutter expectations about what their sex lives will look like.

The rules young women encounter about their sex and dating lives are near endless. A young woman are supposed to lose their virginity to someone she loves (unlike when a boy loses his virginity in movies, which, as Jessica Wakeman over at The Frisky pointed out, is just an epic quest to get laid). If she doesn’t, she’s damaged goods or a slut. (I could go on about this virginity point, but instead will just refer you to Jessica Valenti’s The Purity Myth.) Women are also supposed to withhold sex when it comes to someone they really care about. A woman is supposed to be into boys and only boys. A woman is supposed to want marriage and children — in that order. The thing is, a young woman is never handed a list of these rules, but she still picks it up along the way.

It is the very existence of this amorphous laundry list of sexual expectations that leads some young women into thinking that sex equals love. Therefore if she engages in sex outside of love than she is a slut. Or if she lets herself believe that perhaps sex will lead to love and she’ll withhold sex only become emotionally invested before she knows if the relationship works sexually.

The good thing is that I think this narrative is slowly changing. People these days (at least most normal, rational people I meet) are starting to view hooking up as a natural part of their general sexual experiences. This changing attitude about hooking up is sort of what Kathleen A. Bogle tried to document when she wrote her sociological book Hooking Up: Sex, Dating, and Relationships on Campus (which I reviewed for Bitch when it came out). Still, Bogle but she still managed to slip in many stereotypes about what women and men should do. She asserted that “Men’s greater control has lead to sexual exploitation of women in both the dating and the hooking-up eras” and that hooking up can lead to “postponing adulthood.” She also discovered that many young adults of the college-going variety sometimes revisit a more traditional form of dating once they become Grown Ups with Real Jobs.

Now that’s not to say that women don’t suffer emotionally sometimes because of a bad hook up. Sometimes they do. (I’d almost argue that encountering an asshole or two in the realm of hooking up is necessary for young women so they can improve their bullshit detectors later on.) It’s also true that men suffer emotionally sometimes — a side of the hook-up equation that almost never gets discussed. Of course, I should also note that hooking up isn’t without risk. Increasing the number of one’s sexual partners also increases the exposure and risk of STIs and pregnancy. And hooking up isn’t for everyone. But. Many people still manage to emotionally and physically survive hooking up relatively unscathed.

We need to not fear the fact that people are sometimes taking on sexual agency when they decide they want sex — and sometimes just sex. Instead maybe we should start to realize that people’s sexual experiences are diverse and that sometimes hooking up is included in that.

So two pieces of drug related news that are in need of noting. Firstly, there will be a year ban on ‘legal highs’ so that research into the harms of the drugs can take place. Secondly, the government is now considering the proposals to withdraw benefits from those who don’t take treatment.

Again, further piece meal reforms that do little to help the problems around drug use. These are deeply undermining and regressive drug policies that ignore the ever increasing body of scientific and intellectual (and real life examples) work of how well decriminalisation works!

Consider the Vienna Declaration – it is a perfect example of the growing decriminalisation movement. However, for some reason or another, the government like to run their drug policy on the fear of the media moral panic frenzy that erupts at the slight noise of drug decriminalisation. However, the evidence is clear, we shouldn’t treat drug abuse as a criminal offense, it is a medical condition. Furthermore, as many have pointed out before, only certain drugs are problematised, others – conveniently the ones which bring in a heap of revenue – are left relativity unscathed.

All this ban will do is drive the market further underground, result in an increase in harmful substances, and make the whole situation worse.

And now onto the withdrawing benefit idea. As many of the critics have pointed out, all this will do is drive people into things such as prostitution and crime in order to fuel their addictions. Only when the government realise that its own war on drugs is what is actually creating many of the problems, will real reform take place.

You can’t help but think that the government’s revival of the plans is also part of IDS’s attempts of wide-ranging cuts to get through his slim lining of the benefit system proposal.

Again, two rather illogical policies that will only seek to further undermine the existing help that drug abusers get (which is very poor as it is). It is about time that the government start listening to all the scientific evidence that they are always increasing the funding for.

Cream suit, a salient detail in the war crimes trial

The media was all atwitter this past week because THE miss Naomi Campbell, scary but gorgeous icon that she is, took the stand at the Hague in the war crimes trial against Charles Taylor.  Never the willing accomplice, Campbell was subpoenaed to testify after it became . . . → Read More: Six Degrees of Separation: Naomi Campbell’s Cream Suit…Maternal Mortality in Sierra Leone

For the record I got my first bra at age 8 or 9. It was kinda cool but quickly went to kinda embarrassing. Along with being the attention of a few of the boys, I started to gain weight. I went from the skinny tomboy to a round tomboy. Of course I wasn't fat, but I felt like it. Especially compared to the girls in my class who hadn't been smacked by puberty.

Thus when I read and hear all the talk about girls being fat as the number one cause for early puberty, I am skeptical. I'm mostly skeptical because the impact of all the chemicals in our environment and hormones in our food chain are pretty much blown off. BPA? We jumped all over that baby. Why can't we do the same with all the other crap we're been ingesting since we were in our mom's wombs?

I'm not saying that we don't have an obesity issue with our kids. They are eating too much, staying inside too much and not getting enough exercise. But for many of our kids, that's a systemic problem (violent neighborhoods, environmentally toxic neighborhoods), not so much a personal failure. So why must we blame girls and their families for something that just might be out of their control?

I also fear the trickle down effect of blaming the girls for early puberty. Does that mean we can blame them when older boys and men glare at them? When they dress 'age-appropriately' in a hypersexualized society but still look slutty? And what if they do develop breast cancer later on?

Puberty is tough for everyone, much less for an 8-year-old who just might have it in her genes not her fat that her boobs start budding, but will nevertheless be examined by her pediatrician and society to see if she's too fat and caused it all.

As Dr. Walker on NPR noted yesterday, girls "know" that their weight can lead to onset of puberty and try to restrict their diet in an effort to keep puberty from happening. I fear that this news will only cause an increase in eating disorders that are self-inflicted as well as inflicted by parents fearing their daughters' growing breasts.

What to do? Talk to our girls about their bodies and the changes that are pending. Talk to our boys about respecting those changes and the ones that they will soon be going through. And get to studying the impacts of all the crap in our ecosystem!

It's the first Annual Latina Week of Action for Reproductive Justice! And our prompt is:

What's your contraception story?

My family is Catholic, but I wouldn't say that I was raised Catholic since we didn't go to church on a regular basis. Now when I was in second grade I noticed that a lot of my friends were starting CCD classes, so I asked my parents if I could too. Well it was too late to start, so I had to wait until the next year. The priest lost his chance because the next year I was in third grade sitting in a class on Saturday mornings with second graders *rolling the eyes* and learning about Jesus.  I dropped out. I tell this story to set up the next part.

When I was about 11 or 12, I asked my mom out right, "Why don't we go to church?" Her reply? "Because they say I can't use these," as she held up her birth control pills. We then had a short chat about how the Church was trying to control her and other women's lives. How she wanted to be the one to decide when and if she would have another baby (by this time, she had been pregnant 4 times and given birth 3 times with one miscarriage). And I think she ended it by saying that all women should be making this decision, not the church.

And as they say, the rest is history.

From that moment on I was firmly a pro-choice woman-child.

My mom and I had similar talks about abortion and how she chose to have me as a partnered-yet-single-19yo-woman. Thanks Mom.

But as my mom said, all women should be able to make their own decisions about when and if they become pregnant. One part of this equation is access to affordable birth control:

All women need affordable access to birth control services, supplies and visits. However, barriers to low-cost or no-cost contraception are still an unjust reality. This results in many Latinas having to struggle to afford birth control or expensive insurance copayments for birth control.

Urge your representative to ask the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to support comprehensive family planning services that include contraception as a key women's health service under the Women's Health Amendment.

Please act today! 

The Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights (SRHR) Situation Report is a monthly column devoted to examining policy changes and issues around these critical rights around the world. This month’s column focuses on so-called “reproductive tourism,” the growing trend of women in the U.S. finding gestational surrogates in India.  Gestational surrogacy is the practice of [...]

Earlier this week, Papau New Guinea apologized before CEDAW (The Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women) for its inaction against the torture and murder of women suspected of witchcraft. Government officials did not deny that those alleged to practice witchcraft have been tortured and killed. According to the Center for [...]

Found many-a interesting things while perusing the web on my Sunday afternoon, so here's a nice little round-up for y'all.

• If you need your daily dose of disgust, you can read about the opposition to building mosques near Ground Zero.


• For those of you who haven't heard, an appeal has already been filed against the Prop 8 ruling. No one's particularly surprised.


• From The New Gay: Queers You Should Know: Fred Karger, Our First Gay President?


• In honor of World Breastfeeding Week (which ended yesterday), Kimberly Seals Allers wrote a piece for Women's eNews about the low breastfeeding rates amongst black mothers.


• I found this absolutely horrific but thought it served as a good reminder of the lengths people will go to in order to protect their precious gender roles. A man allegedly beat his girlfriend's 17-month-old son to death because he wasn't acting "manly" enough.


• From AlterNet: In States Where "Gun Ed" Is Prevalent, Comprehensive Sex Ed Is Nowhere to Be Found.


• Another one from AlterNet: The GOP Fights to Make African-Americans Sicker and Poorer.


• Scenes from an anti-choice abortion-kills-black-babies protest.


• Ironically, Lucky magazine airbrushed Jessica Simpson to make her look thinner in her photo for an article about how much she loves her body.


• Jane Lynch. Hosting SNL in October. 'Nuff said.


• Thank goodness for Rachel Maddow and her ability to take on offensive media powerhouses, e.g. Bill O'Reilly.

Well, here’s some research that can’t possibly be misconstrued: a new study published in The Lancet has documented an association between the amount of weight a mother gains during her pregnancy and the birth weight of her infant. Since birth weight can be used to predict adult BMI, cue the ZOMG! Obesity! commentary. “For babies, studies are just now beginning to show that the effects of tipping the scales at birth may linger throughout life. Many experts suggest that excessive nutrition in pregnancy creates an abnormal uterine environment that permanently changes the baby’s brain, pancreas, fat tissue and other biological systems, said a co-author of the study, Dr. David Ludwig.”

(A note: some of what follows may be triggering for people who have experiences with eating disorders.)

And, of course, since the womb is a baby’s first environment, this is one more thing that pregnant women can be policed on. “As more and more Americans struggle with obesity, the role of early prevention is key [and] early prevention may also extend to the development of the fetus,” said Dr. Jennifer Wu, an obstetrician/gynecologist. William Callaghan, acting chief of the maternal and infant health branch of the CDC added The Lancet paper “just adds more fuel to the fire that [managing weight gain] is an absolutely critical part of preconception care and prenatal care.” Of course, the doctors both go on to mention the importance of good nutrition and and exercise, serving once again to conflate weight with health.

When I was pregnant with A, I became highly attuned to the ever growing list of things I was and was not supposed to be doing. There were the obvious things (drinking alcohol, smoking cigarettes, using various controlled substances), and the less obvious things (not eating cold cuts). But the list went on and on and on. Restrictions on fish, cheese, processed foods, sprouts, spinach, caffeine, sugar substitutes, hot tubs, any activity where I might fall down, sleeping position, you name it. And every time I casually mentioned that I would give anything for a blue cheese burger and a beer, I would get a very stern “But the baby! You don’t want to risk it!” response.

I see a role here for practitioners to engage with their patients about eating habits, in no small part because pregnancy is enormously taxing on your body and it’s good to make sure you’re getting enough vitamins and drinking enough water. (I’m actually surprised that this isn’t already a part of what practitioners talk about with patients.) However, I do not recommend the strategy one of the midwives took with me early on in my pregnancy, which was to lecture me about my BMI and losing weight. (Keep in mind here that I’m on active duty: my job requires working out 5 days a week, passing regular fitness assessments, and maintaining either a specified weight or body fat percentage.) Ultimately, I gained very little weight during my pregnancy, and lost it all rapidly after delivery owing to some truly horrific medical complications from the delivery. When my daughter was two weeks old, I went back in for follow up and mentioned that I was really worried about how much weight I’d lost. In two weeks, I’d lost all of the weight I gained during the pregnancy plus another 10 pounds. The doctor laughed. “Oh, women don’t normally worry that they’ve lost weight after a pregnancy.” I glared. “I don’t care about that. I’m asking because I am worried. Losing thirty pounds in two weeks isn’t normal, even if you’ve just had a baby.” “Oh, well, I think you’re fine from a health point of view, but let us know if you keep losing weight. You’re really lucky.” In case anyone was wondering, being hospitalized for eight days and having hideous medical complications makes a girl feel really lucky that at least she lost weight.

I’ve got concerns about two different ways this could go. First, there’s even more pressure on women than there was before about losing weight, dieting, and the moralizing and guilt that follows. It’ll just be amplified when it comes to pregnancy: “Well, it’s fine if you want to be selfish and overweight, but think of your baby! Dooming a child to a life of being overweight!” We already live in a world where the word policed doesn’t just mean social pressure and stigma for some women for conduct during pregnancy: it means criminal prosecution. This has the potential to become just one more thing where pregnant women are judged, shamed, and guilted about not providing a perfect uterine environment. (As though there is such a thing and that women are able to control it like that. Environmental exposures, anyone?)

The study’s authors conclude “In view of the apparent association between birthweight and adult weight, obesity prevention efforts targeted at women during pregnancy might be beneficial for offspring.” Well, yes, it might, if done in a way that’s constructive, understanding of the fact that significant and sustained weight loss is not a realistic goal, and focuses on good eating habits as part of a healthy pregnancy. But I’m not particularly optimistic that’s how it’ll shake down. You’re likely to wind up with people saying truly asinine things like “The idea that a big baby is a healthy baby, and a crying baby is probably a hungry baby who should be fed, are things we really need to rethink,” Dr. Birch said. Spoken like someone who’s never had an infant.