Wednesday, September 30, 2009

Tomboy Chic

http://www.feministing.com/archives/014132.html

H&M: Tomboy Chic

I recently came across a copy of the H&M Magazine (h/t to Tanya), and on the cover was the title Hype: Unisex. Get the Boyfriend Look! The article is here.

The basic premise is this "the metrosexual man is old news, and now it's the women's turn--the tomboy has come to stay." The feature does a good job of talking about the history of women's fashion and the moments when women (like Coco Chanel) subverted norms by introducing traditionally masculine items of clothing into her designs. But the first subhead for the article tells the whole story: Straight from your boyfriend's closet.

This is about using masculine fashion elements in a normative way--just make sure you look like you borrowed your boyfriend's jeans sweetie! They also mentioned a few queer women (like Samantha Ronson, Lindsay Lohan's infamous girlfriend and DJ) without talking about how these trends might connect to being queer. This is about fashion, after all.

It's not surprising to see a fashion magazine dealing with the gender categories and even fashion gender bending in such a normative way. This also gets at a discussion that occurred in the comments of Professor Foxy's column this weekend about the acceptability of cross dressing in women versus men.

At least when it comes to fashion, it is definitely more acceptable for women to appropriate elements of men's fashion. Pants for example, suits, baseball caps and even ties. But there is a moment when this crosses an unspoken line from acceptable to transgressive. I think it's the moment when any hint of boyfriend leaves the picture. H&M tell us "Don't forget to add your own special feminine touch." What happens when there is no feminine touch?

As someone who wears mostly men's clothing, I can tell when I've crossed the line. It can create some not so safe or pleasant situations. It's a similar situation for men, although I think the line is closer and better policed. Pink may be the new black, but don't even think about wearing a skirt. Even these moments of gender fluidity still fundamentally reinforce heteronormativity and the gender binary.

Posted by Miriam - March 09, 2009, at 03:54PM | in Fashion , Gender , Queer Issues

Teaching Kids About Sexism

ways-to-teach-kids-about-sexism--including-by-example?skyline=true&s=x

Ways To Teach Kids About Sexism — Including By Example

By Kate Harding, 3:40 PM on Wed Sep 30 2009, 9,639 views

Yesterday at Alpha Mummy, Carol Midgley posted a list of 10 ways to teach kids [specifically, daughters] about sexism. Sounds great, until you realize that about half the list involves sexism. With bonus heterosexism.

To be fair, let's start with the stuff I can completely agree with. #2: Teach them about the difference between fixed-up, professionally photographed and Photoshopped models and what people actually look like without a team of professionals enhancing them. #3: Have them compare ladymags to ladmags, and note that "while female magazines focus heavily on man-pleasing, lads' mags do not focus on woman-pleasing. At all. They focus on man-pleasing. A lot." #6: Teach them to watch Disney princess films with a critical eye. "Cinderella hoping the Prince will fancy her - what if she finds him a boring arse? And why are all middle aged women cast as bitter, expendable trouts? Explain that television works in a similar way." And finally, #9: Never EVER say 'I think you'd should wear the blue one because your backside looks smaller.'"

Excellent advice, all of it. Now for the rest.

#1: "Make a small bonfire of Bratz dolls. As their creepy baby doll- faces, colleague lips, wisp-thin waists and fishnet tights begin to melt into a toxic blob, encourage your daughters and her friends to clap and chant "Burn the freaks!""

Ho ho! Violence against girls in effigy! What an awesome way to teach respect for women. (Also, what are "colleague lips"?)

#5: "Explain to them that though many young women idolise Victoria Beckham and want to be as thin as her no man in the known world finds her attractive. Given the option, they'd rather spend an evening with her husband."

Because men's opinion of your appearance is the whole point, right? (Also, Victoria Beckham is ugly! Neener!) It's not that men's opinions shouldn't define your self-worth, it's that you're misreading those opinions. Every girl wants to have boys like her, duh. See also #8: "When your teenage daughter is getting ready for a date... give her a quick summary of what her teenage 'paramour's' preparations are likely to be for the evening: the same clothes he's had on all day and, if she's really special to him, a wash of his hands after he's been for a wee."

If your teenage daughter dates girls, Carol Midgley's got nuthin'. All girls like boys. All girls want boys to like them. These are universal truths, so what would be the point in challenging them, just because you're trying to teach her about sexism?

#10: "If she ever talks about wanting cosmetic surgery, simply leave a large photo of Jocelyn Wildenstein on the table and withdraw backwards from the room."

Oh, ha! It's funny because she's disfigured! Once again, the best way to teach girls about body image and sexism is to tell them that succumbing to the pressure might just make them ugly. And if they're ugly, boys won't like them.

Carol Midgley is funny, yes. But it would be nice if her advice about teaching girls how to recognize sexism didn't involve criticizing other women's appearances, ignoring the existence of lesbians, and reinforcing the idea that male approval is what we're all after. (Not to mention chanting "Burn the freak!") Call me a humorless feminist, but some jokes are just not worth it.

Carol Midgley: 10 Ways To Teach Kids About Sexism [Alpha Mummy]

Why There's Still a Wage Gap

http://tinyurl.com/ybrzob4

Why There's Still A Wage Gap (With Apologies To Peggy Olson)

By Doree Shafrir, 3:00 PM on Wed Sep 30 2009, 10,833 views

A couple weeks ago on Mad Men, Peggy got recruited to go to another, much larger ad agency. Instead of saying yes right away, she went into Don Draper's office to see if she could get a raise.

She's a copywriter, but she gets paid much less than the other copywriters, all of whom happen to be male. And so she invokes the recently passed Equal Pay Act. "It's a law now," she says. "Equal pay for equal work." Don looks at her as though she's speaking another language. "Peggy, it's not a good time," he tells her. Then he asks her if she wants a drink.

When Peggy confronts Don, it's 1963, and the median annual income for women was around 60 percent of men's. Today, it's around 77 percent—a gain, to be sure, but hardly anything to be thrilled about. While some of the so-called gender gap can be explained by the fact that women tend to work in lower-paying fields—such as education and child care (I'm going to bracket the debate about whether these deserve to be lower-paying fields at all)—there's still a five percent wage gap for male and female college graduates, even after controlling for things like age, race and ethnicity, region, marital status, children, occupation, industry, and hours worked, according to testimony given in April to the United States Joint Economic Committee. The conclusion? "It is reasonable to assume that this difference is the product of discrimination."

But it's slightly more complicated, I think, and it raises uncomfortable questions about the differences between men and women—whether they're socially determined or not. A couple years ago, there was another study that focused on men vs. women in negotiations; men, it showed, will take the initiative and ask for things like more money or a promotion, while women will wait to be asked. And this can have major repercussions:

If a 22-year-old man and a 22-year-old woman are offered $25,000 for their first job, for example, and one of them negotiates the amount up to $30,000, then over the next 28 years, the negotiator would make $361,171 more, assuming they both got 3 percent raises each year. And this is without taking into account the fact that the negotiators don't just get better starting pay; they also win bigger raises over the course of their careers.

It's hard not to look at these studies and think about anecdotal evidence from my own life. At my first job out of college, I was offered just that salary: $25,000 a year. I didn't even think about negotiating. Sure, you could argue that I wasn't exactly coming from a position of strength, as a 22-year-old college graduate with little experience who was desperate for a job. But over the years, I saw how certain people—and nearly all of them were men—were able to ask for things that I wouldn't even have thought of to ask for: Extra vacation days. Bonuses. When I was in graduate school, better teaching schedules (and better professor assignments). A few years later, I was offered another job at what I now considered a laughable salary, $35,000 a year. I countered at $65,000. We settled on $57,000, with a guaranteed raise to $60,000 after three months. And I came up with a new motto: "You don't ask, you don't get."

I bring specific salary numbers in part because women, it seems to me, are generally less comfortable discussing money than men—which also leaves us in a position of weakness. At yet another job I had (salary: $38,000), the founders of the company told us, with straight faces, that one of the bad things about unions were that everyone knew what everyone else was making. The employees all nodded solemnly, like, OMG, wow, what a horrible thing to know. Talking about money is taboo, of course! It was only later that I realized, duh! Of course they wouldn't want everyone to know what everyone else is making, because then everyone would ask for more money.

These days, when people are desperate for work and employers admittedly have the upper hand, it can seem as though we're all Peggys in a Don Draper world. But Peggy, I suspect, just might have the last word.

The Gender Wage Gap 2008 [Institute for Women's Policy Research]
Equal Pay for Equal Work? New Evidence on the Persistence of the Gender Pay Gap [AAUW]
Salary, Gender and the Social Cost of Haggling [Washington Post]

Thursday, September 24, 2009

A Dandy's Guide to Girl Watching

http://www.doublex.com/section/life/dandy%E2%80%99s-guide-girl-watching?page=0,0

A Dandy’s Guide to Girl-Watching

Checking out girls in shorts ... tastefully.

Posted: Thursday, August 27, 2009 8:20am
By Troy Patterson

Photograph of men watching a woman walk by Photodisc/Getty Creative Images.

I write to you at one of the three peak seasons for girl-watching in North America. Sweater-sheathed Ms. October will knock 'em out in the fall, and the darling buds of May will spring fresh in their sundresses all too shortly, but meanwhile this is sultry deep August—impossibly flimsy fabrics, exquisite lengths of limb. Addled by murderous heat, provoked by brutal hot-to-trotness, I here risk gathering some modest notes on visual experience and modern manners.

Shall we define our terms? When I say girls, I am employing a common archaism meaning women, also known as chicks. For the purposes of this discussion, any woman who is older than a child and younger than a matron is a girl. By watching, I mean checking out. Despite all the many philosophical inquiries into beauty since the Greeks and into sidewalk scenes since Baudelaire, there is an acute shortage of discourse on the subject of checking out hot chicks, a silence all the more appalling because they are famously difficult to ignore.

To understand this lack of critical inquiry, we might revisit a New York Observer piece written 11 Augusts ago by a hot and bothered George Gurley. He described “a standoff between men and women” in public spaces: "While the happy gains of post-feminism may have given women permission to wear skimpy garments in the city heat, the earlier and more sober gains of feminism have made it very uncouth indeed for any civilized man to acknowledge the delights that meet his eye." Not much more interesting has been said on the topic. What academic work there is on the subject tends to get bogged down in a male-gaze sound bite from the critic John Berger: “Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at.” That quote is also a favorite of people producing social-science papers on body image, sexual harassment, and gender equity. Those are all very serious issues, none of which will be addressed here, this not being a very serious article, I hasten to clarify for those readers already drafting indignant letters to the editor.

The rest of us can get our bearings by recognizing girl-watching and people-watching as distinct activities. An illustration: The alert people-watcher observes that two girls going out about town together, each clad in shorts, are very likely to be wearing shorts of precisely the same length. The girl-watcher, confronted in the flesh by a pair of shorts-clad women, may not notice the identical brevity of their garments, concentrating as he is on how one of the girls is wearing her shorts beautifully. The pleasures of people-watching are anthropological; those of girl-watching are aesthetic.

Modern girl-watching began in 1954, when Harper published The Girl Watcher's Guide. It is still the great text on the topic, a delightful and occasionally profound novelty book constructed on the model of birding manuals: "Although we believe that girl watching has it all over bird watching, we feel that these two hobbies do share one important feature. They are both genteel. They both respect the rights of the watched ... A girl watcher never leers, nor does he utter any sound which might betray his joy."

Author Don Sauers wrote The Girl Watcher's Guide during hours stolen from his job as—what else?—a New York City ad man. Indeed, there is a distinct Mad Men vibe to the production, much helped along by the va-va-voom illustrations from Eldon Dedini. In fact, Sauers went on to design girl-watching-themed ad campaigns for Pall Mall and Diet Pepsi. For nearly a decade-and-a-half—until about the time of the Miss America Protest of 1968—the author received invitations from the likes of the Tonight Show, Expo 67, and Life (where he once helped out with a photo spread about ski pants).

Sauers' recommended "girl watching centers" in Manhattan include Fifth Avenue between 49th and 59th Streets, and 58th Street between Madison and Sixth Avenue, selected on their strength as shopping areas. Employing that standard, the Manhattan girl-watcher is today best served by Prince Street between Sullivan and Elizabeth, where some girls distinguish themselves through their alluring poise, others through flamboyant bralessness. In order to investigate possibilities further uptown, I arranged a lunchtime rendezvous with a friend who works on the same block that Sauers did, Fifth Avenue between 57th and 58th. Before embarking on our field trip, we digested the book's instructions on "mastering the once-over," which are predicated on the idea that "it is never in good taste to look down after watching a beautiful girl's face." Rather, after sighting a striking face, you quickly look at girl's shoes, then "slowly, taking about three seconds, raise your eyes ... remembering always not to move the head." That last directive reminded my companion of instructions he'd gotten on his golf swing.

Put off by the fanny-pack’d tourists of Midtown, we turned north, discovering a great density of impressive subjects on Madison between 59th and 72nd, which is to say between Barneys and Ralph Lauren’s Rhinelander Mansion. This stretch has its limitations, given the notably homogeneous collection of subjects it presents—cf. the marvelously diverse Union Square—but we nonetheless managed to excite our eyes, each murmuring internally about fine necks and necklines. It happens that Ralph Lauren isn’t very far from Lenox Hill Hospital; thus, near the end of our excursion, I chanced to discover that it can be entirely gratifying to check out a girl clad from ankle to v-neck in sea-green medical scrubs if she holds herself well. I impulsively shared this observation with my companion who, contrary to protocol, moved not just his head but his whole body and shanked.

Though Sauers' three-second bottom-to-top once-over is quite a useful guideline, adhering rigorously to it is not without complications. For one thing, the human eye more naturally moves downward in attempting to pursue an approaching target smoothly; working up from a well-turned ankle to a pretty face, it more likely fixes a series of looks. Which is to say—indulge me a whim here— the most correct girl-watcher apprehends passing loveliness in a sunny flutter—as a series of little thrills to the soul. (Watching a stationary girl—or the mobile rear of a girl—is a whole different thing and affords a rather more meditative experience of physical virtue.)

For another, the human eye has a whole new range of eyefuls to reckon with these days, as mores are not what they were in Sauers' day. Any given girl might be watching the watcher with aesthetic or anthropological or plainly libidinous interest. The counterwatching complicates things, sometimes enrichingly. And notions of decorum have very agreeably shifted such that it is not uncommon for girls pushing baby strollers to strut as if working a catwalk. And it may be the case that a liberated girl may court extended mental admiration in any number of ways—by coquettishly tossing her hair, say, or pedaling a Schwinn while wearing a miniskirt. The contemporary girl-watcher may permit himself an extra moment of wonder or an extra degree of frankness in certain contexts, exercising his best discretion in the matter of how little discretion to exercise.

To be a gazer, some say, is to place oneself superior to the gazed, which works fine as a tenet of film theory and feels notably more dubious as a premise of girl-watching analysis. The girl may be an objectified being, but it is practically a subclause of the social contract that we all objectify ourselves in the mirror every morning. Meanwhile, the girl-watcher is subject to the absolute rule of his powers of vision and carries a distinct whiff of comic pathos. Figure, carriage, finish, charm, flesh, cool—these are omnipotent. It is the nature of beauty that the girl-watcher is helpless before the wonders of nature.

Tags: fashion, women

Is supporting women and girls just another fad?

http://jezebel.com/5366937/is-supporting-women-and-girls-just-another-fad?skyline=true&s=x

Is Supporting Women And Girls Just Another Fad?

By Anna N., 3:20 PM on Thu Sep 24 2009, 2,305 views

Yesterday the Clinton Global Initiative hosted a panel on "Investing in Women and Children," and panelists spoke movingly about the need for more funding for female empowerment. But for big business, are women and girls another passing fad?

Edna Adan, founder of a hospital in Somalia, laid out the inequalities women face in her country. She said Somalian women were dying in childbirth "because nobody cares... [People think] she's dying because she was meant to die. She was not meant to die. She could be safe." She added, "the decision of whether she has treatment must be left to the woman. Often it's a husband or a brother or a father who decides whether she will be taken to the hospital or not." Zainab Salbi of the nonprofit Women for Women International told listeners that oppression of women isn't just a third-world problem, and that one in four American women suffers from domestic violence. "It is really a global issue," she said. She also argued that "we can't actually get into environmental issues or climate change or ending poverty or wars if we don't invest seriously in women."

It's a common statement these days. Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn are giving issues affecting women and girls lots of exposure, and arguing that resolving these issues will actually reduce poverty and violence. And panelist (and Goldman Sachs CEO) Lloyd Blankfein's statement that "investing in women is investing in families" is no longer controversial. But does that mean the corporate world really cares about women and girls?

Panelist Rex Tillerson, chairman and CEO of ExxonMobil, said,

Philosophically, we are committed because it's critical to our own sustainability in the countries in which we operate. A large part of our activities today and in the future are in less-developed parts of the world. So our longer term success is built around the ability to have a productive work force, have communities that are stable. And it's not just financial commitment, but human-resource commitment. [...] funding is not the issue. Not necessarily.

But according to Zainab Salbi, funding is the issue, because women still get only one cent of every development dollar spent around the world. And even those who agree that money is necessary may not care so much about helping women and girls as an end in itself. Jos at Feministing writes, "for the businessmen on the panel 'empowering' women seemed to be more about using them as the person that funds go through." And Blankfein called investing in women "a recruiting tool and a retention tool" for Goldman Sachs.

Helping women and girls seems to be the method du jour both for reducing global poverty and for looking like a socially responsible business. Insofar as this actually leads to the improvement of female lives around the world — and there's evidence that microfinance efforts, at least, do — this is a good thing. And if helping women also results in helping families and societies, that's good too. But Tillerson's lip-service to women's issues and Blankfein's use of them as a recruiting tool are troubling because they suggest that big business leaders think supporting women and girls is the hip thing to do right now. This hipness could lead to real change, but it could also lead to high-profile, low-impact efforts that don't do much good. Environmentalism is in a similar state right now — it's cool to be photographed wearing "green" clothing, but we need a lot more than Cameron Diaz in an organic shirt to stop climate change. And we need more than an oil exec talking about "human-resource commitments" to stop women dying in childbirth. Let's hope we get it.

Global Power Gals [The Daily Beast]
Clinton Global Initiative: Investing In Girls And Women [Feministing]

Wednesday, September 23, 2009

Are Female Students 'a Perk of the Job'?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/mortarboard/2009/sep/23/kealey-female-students-perk

Are female students 'a perk of the job'?

A vice-chancellor is encouraging lecturers to enjoy gazing at, even fantasising about, attractive female students

Terence Kealey, vice chancellor of the University of Buckingham

Terence Kealey: 'Look but don't touch'. Photograph: Martin Argles

We've had a week of sex scandals in schools. Now Terence Kealey, vice-chancellor of Buckingham University, seems intent on stirring things up on the academic front.

Female students, he declares, are a perk of the job for male university lecturers – though they should look, not touch.

In an article for the Times Higher Education magazine on lust, part of a feature on the seven deadly sins of universities, Kealey wrote: "Normal girls – more interested in abs than in labs, more interested in pecs than specs, more interested in triceps than tripos – will abjure their lecturers for the company of their peers, but nonetheless, most male lecturers know that, most years, there will be a girl in class who flashes her admiration and who asks for advice on her essays. What to do?

"Enjoy her! She's a perk."

Flashing a few literary allusions, he continued: "She doesn't yet know that you are only Casaubon to her Dorothea, Howard Kirk to her Felicity Phee, and she will flaunt you her curves. Which you should admire daily to spice up your sex, nightly, with the wife."

Displaying a more surprising familiarity with the etiquette at lapdancing clubs, Kealey added: "As in Stringfellows, you should look but not touch."

The magazine's academic readers were outraged, including otototototoi who wrote: "I'm amazed that Terence K has a position in any university, and I'll be damn sure never to apply for a job at Buckingham. Why did the THE print this awful, ugly nonsense?"

Kealey, who has been vice-chancellor at Buckingham, the country's only independent university, for eight years, said it was a myth that an affair between student and lecturer was an abuse of power, saying accountability has meant that "the days are gone when a scholar could trade sex for upgrades".

But he added that some female students still fantasised about their lecturers.

Kealey's comments were attacked by Olivia Bailey, women's officer at the National Union of Students.

She told the Telegraph: "I am appalled that a university vice-chancellor should display such an astounding lack of respect for women.

"Regardless of whether this was an attempt at humour, it is completely unacceptable for someone in Terence Kealey's position to compare a lecture theatre to a lapdancing club, and I expect that many women studying at Buckingham University will be feeling extremely angry and insulted at these comments."

Should Kealey be allowed to have his fun? Or has he badly misjudged how students and staff feel about this issue?

Tuesday, September 22, 2009

How Porn Affects What We Believe About Sexual Pleasure

http://bitchmagazine.org/post/readers-strap-on-your-response-to-rear-ended-by-porn-1

And speaking of the interlocking oppressions of race, class, and gender. . .

http://rabble.ca/columnists/2009/09/flu-cases-surge-first-nations-communities

Flu cases surge in First Nations communities

By Jessica Yee

| September 17, 2009

For Canada's First Nations communities, being denied our basic and fundamental human rights is, sadly, not at all a surprise. So after last week's report that the Canadian government had postponed the delivery of much-needed alcohol-based hand sanitizers to reserve communities with massive outbreaks of the swine flu virus out of apparent "fear" of theft driven by alcoholism in the community, I stopped to think about it for a second. "Same old stupid government perpetuating the colonization of our people," I thought. But there's more going on here that needs to be addressed.

Let's review the facts. In the two and a half weeks that the government deliberated over whether to send hand sanitizer to reserve communities, this is what happened:

• More swine flu cases developed

• Chiefs, community leaders, nurses and community health representatives scrambled to deal with the escalating outbreak without help from a non-responsive government

• Families, children, elders and community members in these areas had no choice but to wait and see if they were going to get any type of diagnosis or care as conditions worsened

• The wider Canadian population heard occasional reports of the virus developing more in First Nations communities but not enough to warrant a national outpouring of support.

Access to necessary health-care services is an ongoing problem for many indigenous people around the world, and Canada is no exception. But universal health care and non-insured health benefits (which First Nations and Inuit individuals receive in Canada) don't mean anything if you live somewhere you still cannot get household plumbing, let alone a visit to the doctor.

Advertising

The statistics are everywhere: this month, a report from a Senate subcommittee on population health highlighted the inadequacies and inequities of First Nation health systems and services that contribute to "third-world health conditions." This is what the report says:

Canada is generally perceived as one of the greatest countries in the world in which to live. It has a vast and diverse geography rich in natural resources, clean air and a vast territory. When it comes to health, however, we unfortunately have serious disparities. Some Canadians live their lives in excellent health with one of the highest life expectancies in the world; paradoxically others spend their life in poor health, with a life expectancy similar to some third world countries. The unfortunate Canadians who suffer poor health throughout their lifetime are frequently less productive, adding to the burden on the health-care delivery system and social safety net. We cannot correct this inequity through the health-care delivery system itself, regardless of the expenditure we devote to it.

This is not even to mention that First Nations nurses get paid about 20 per cent less than nurses who work for Health Canada. But I want people to start talking about why and how the Canadian government oppresses First Nations communities.

Canada is still a colonial state. The country operates under colonial-type laws that undermine the self-determination of First Nations people -- and means we have to see if it's okay with the government to get services to people who need them. There is promising legislature in British Columbia: a tripartite agreement between governments and First Nations health-care services, and similar legislation under way in Saskatchewan and other provinces. But we nonetheless have to tiptoe around policymakers while our people perish mentally, physically and spiritually every day in both big cities and remote northern territories.

It doesn't matter that the government thought it had "legitimate" reasons for withholding alcohol-based hand sanitizers from communities desperately seeking help -- the truth remains that even if chiefs were saying they didn't want them, it didn't have non-alcoholic sanitizers ready anyway. During this entire waiting period it let people suffer, panic and scream in frustration -- alone. But I guess it's something they're used to doing

Tags:

health care aboriginal Aboriginal rights aboriginal issues H1N1 swine flu poverty First Nations

Friday, September 18, 2009

Man Pad - Tampax's new ad campaign

Man Pad

Tampax quietly unveiled a viral ad campaign in June that I stumbled on a few weeks ago and my feelings about it remain complicated.Despite the hours spent turning it over in my mind, my conclusion is that the campaign--documented entirely on one site, zack16.com,and chronicling the adventures of a sixteen-year-old boy who wakes up one day with a vagina--is many things in turn: edgy, challenging, steeped in stereotypes, possibly transphobic, and potentially subversive in its exploration of gender. ALL AT THE SAME TIME.

Zack Johnson, the central figure of this ad campaign--which, it seems important to note, was created by a major corporation--finds himself suddenly transbodied after living a life unquestioning of gender. The idea is interesting and deeply surprising. Zack's adventures are divided into nine brief episodes, where he is forced to rexamine his relationship to his best friend, his sister, and his body. The "sell" doesn't even come until the last few episodes, when it becomes clear that Zack is going to have to navigate his first period (which, I should note, he handles with far less anxiety and grief than I did mine.)

Stop what you're doing and watch the first four webisodes in this twelve minute mini-filmhttp://zack16.com/the-film/

As you can see, the campaign slides into simplistic and sexist stereotypes regularly, like when Zack immediately bonds with his sister by baking brownies and watching a romantic movie. Girl parts make you emotional! His final assesment of the female biology--"Fifty percent of the population has a vagina, and they seem to be doing pretty well"--is not exactly a "Hear me roar" kind of statement. There are moments thatverge on transphobic, too, like when Zack thinks that his crush won't be interested in him because of his "equipment"--um, I think a hell of a lot of women with similarly-bodied partners would disagree with that assesment.

On the other hand--and this is the part that bowls me over--Zack's experience with the boys he's friends with is, well, very transteen. He is worried about being "discovered" by his teammates, who are portrayed as sexist assholes. We are asked to sympathize with Zack, and not just in a gender-binary pity fest. His body has changed in a way that doesn't reflect his understanding of himself, and he is forced to rexamine what it means to be masculine and feminine from the perspective of one who is both and neither all at once. This aspect of the campaign is an accurate description of my adolescence, and the complexity of Zack's reaction is surprisingly well portrayed.

Ultimately, I wouldn't argue that this is a progressive, gender bending ad campaign. However, perhaps by accident, Tampax has created a documentation of a nonnormative gender experience that is not dismissive, hateful, or single-mindedly exaltant of binary norms. Zack's panic about de-pantsing on the soccor field may be one of the most sensitive portrayals of a trans experience that I have ever seen. Or, perhaps, I am being optimistic. What do you think?

Thursday, September 17, 2009

UN to Establish Single New Agency to Deal with Rights of Women

UN TO ESTABLISH SINGLE NEW AGENCY TO DEAL WITH RIGHTS OF WOMEN
New York, Sep 15 2009 5:05PM
Four United Nations agencies and offices will be amalgamated to create a new single
entity within the Organization to promote the rights and well-being of women worldwide
and to work towards gender equality.

The General Assembly <"http://www.un.org/News/Press/docs//2009/ga10854.doc.htm">adopted a
resolution late yesterday on improving system-wide coherence within the UN, and the text
spells out the support of Member States for a new consolidated body - to be headed by an
under-secretary-general - to deal with issues concerning women.

The resolution means the UN Development Fund for Women
(<"http://www.unifem.org/news_events/story_detail.php?StoryID=931">UNIFEM), the Division
for the Advancement of Women, the Office of the Special Adviser on Gender Issues and the
UN International Research and Training Institute for the Advancement of Women
(<"http://www.un-instraw.org/">UN-INSTRAW) will be merged.

In a statement issued today by his spokesperson, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said he
was "particularly gratified" that the Assembly had accepted his proposal for "a more
robust promotion" of women´s rights under the new entity.

"An important step has been made in strengthening the United Nations´ work in the area of
gender equality and empowerment of women, as well as in ensuring the effective delivery
of its operational activities for development, which constitutes the other key components
of the resolution," the statement noted.

Mr. Ban said in the <"http://www.un.org/apps/sg/sgstats.asp?nid=4066">statement that he
had appointed more women to senior posts than at any other time in the history of the UN,
including nine women to the rank of under-secretary-general. The number of women in
senior posts has increased by 40 per cent under his tenure.

The Assembly´s resolution tasks Mr. Ban with providing Member States with a comprehensive
proposal outlining the mission statement, structure, funding and oversight of the new
entity so that it can be created as soon as possible.

The resolution also calls for greater measures to harmonize business practices within the
UN development system, ways to improve the funding system for such activities, and other
steps to streamline practices within the world body.

After the resolution, UNIFEM - which currently operates in autonomous association with
the UN Development Programme (<"http://www.undp.org/">UNDP) - issued a statement
welcoming "the unanimous strong support" among Member States, which follow three years of
extensive consultations on the structure and operational details of the new body.

"UNIFEM trusts that deliberations can resume soon to ensure an informed and swift
establishment of the composite entity," the statement said.
________________

For more details go to UN News Centre at http://www.un.org/news

Can a Man be a Feminist?

http://jezebel.com/5361789/can-a-man-be-a-feminist?skyline=true&s=x

Can a Man be a Feminist?

Recently relaunched "pro-feminist" men's site XY has a lot of great content. But what's a "pro-feminist" anyway? Do men who support women's rights need a special word?

XY Founder Michael Flood writes,

XY is a pro-feminist website. It is guided above all by a commitment to feminism. XY is intended to advance feminist goals of gender equality and gender justice. XY is intended therefore to encourage men to involve themselves in personal and social change towards gender equality. It inspires men to develop respectful, trusting, and egalitarian relations with women, to promote equitable and liberatory ways of living and being, and to join with women in projects of gender equality and social justice.

The website offers a bunch of great resources for men and women, from an essay examining sexism in an anarchist community to a zine about rape culture and radical consent. In an essay excerpted on the site, Jennifer McLune points out that some men admit to and apologize for misogyny as a way of "repackaging of the same old woman-hating," and self-identifying as a feminist can sometimes be a way for men to abdicate responsibility for male privilege. It's always a little creepy when a man says "men are dicks, but I'm different." But XY appears to be the real deal — the writers featured recognize the influence of patriarchy on their own behavior and attitudes, and want to work against this influence both in their lives and in society.

So, can they? Can men be effective advocates for feminism? Given that men are voters, bosses, dads, teachers, friends, and partners, and that they still have more than their share of influence over policy in this country, we better hope the answer is yes. And the writing on XY is certainly a good sign. But can should men call themselves feminists? Julian Real writes,

A man who I consider to be profeminist is Byron Hurt, and I wish far more men were far more like Byron. In a comment he made to Jennifer [McLune] on her Facebook page, he noted how he's been challenged by feminists to also identify himself as a feminist because, for them, the term "profeminist" makes it seem like the man is not really willing to stand up with feminists, but rather will find it sufficient to somewhat passively support feminists, applauding from the sidelines. (I see the argument here, and once upon a time called myself "feminist" for precisely that reason.) Other feminists have challenged him to call himself profeminist, noting that men who call themselves "feminist" are far too often attempting to co-opt the various women's movements and struggles toward Women's Liberation.

He continues, "In my experience there are so few men who call themselves either that we really needn't take much time debating this." It's sad but true. Most men, even if they are progressive in every other way, balk at calling themselves feminist, and plenty of men who support equal pay and reproductive rights still think feminism itself is ugly, "strident," or lame. So what a man calls himself probably doesn't matter too much — as long as he's capable of confronting a problem that he might be a part of.

In his article, "Going to places that scare me: Personal reflections on challenging male supremacy," Chris Crass writes about confronting his own sexism after a woman in his anarchist group pointed it out:

It was tremendously difficult. My politics were shaped by a clearly defined dualistic framework of good and bad. If it was true that I was sexist, then my previous sense of self was in question and my framework needed to shift. Looking back, this was a profoundly important moment in my growth, at the time it felt like shit.

This process of changing a mental framework — and of "feeling like shit" — is something everyone from a privileged group has to deal with in order to work honestly and effectively with a less-privileged group. White people need to do it in order to work for racial equality, straight people need to do it in order to be LGBT allies. It's difficult, and it's probably the reason more progressive men aren't feminists — because becoming a feminist man means giving up the idea that you're one of the good guys, and recognizing that male privilege affects everyone, good guy or not. If men can recognize this — and continue recognizing it, as being aware of one's own privilege is a constant process — then, as far as I'm concerned, they can call themselves anything they want.

Tuesday, September 15, 2009

Crystal Renn - Plus Size Model's Memoir

http://jezebel.com/5359894/lettuce-with-a-side-of-batshit-less-lucrative-than-actual-food

"Lettuce With A Side Of Batshit" Less Lucrative Than Actual Food

By Sadie, 2:00 PM on Tue Sep 15 2009, 8,805 views

'Now I'm able to tell people, "Avoid the diets, because you will gain it back, most likely, and you're just going to live in a hellish world while doing it."' Preach it, formerly-starving-now-plus-size-model-memoirist Crystal Renn:

As Margaret wrote, Crystal Renn is the highest-paid plus-sized model in America. Discovered at 14 and told to basically change her body, Renn went on to a successful modeling career - but also a serious struggle with anorexia and bulimia. Eventually, Renn - and her body - couldn't take it anymore, and with her agency's support, she segued into plus-size modeling, where she's a major star. And while I'm generally skeptical of 23-year-old's memoirs, as a Salon interview with our friend Kate Harding shows, she's got some important things to say in Hungry: A Young Model's Story of Appetite, Ambition, and the Ultimate Embrace of Curves .

Asked how the industry can change, Renn says,

I think, ideally, it starts with sample sizes. A Size 10 for the sample sizes would be a great start — up from, like, what? A 2? A 0? That's a huge step. Then they could pin the clothes to very thin girls, the ones who are naturally thin, but curvier girls, like a size 14, could get into them. I know that, because I'm a 12, and I've been able to get into sample sizes — you know, with a lot of effort [laughs] — but I do editorials all the time, and sometimes we have to work with it. And you can absolutely pin the clothes down. I have size 24s pinned to me all the time. So I think a 10 would be a great starting place so no one could say, "Oh, well, the sample sizes are the reason we don't hire bigger girls."

As to her ultimate hopes, Renn is pragmatic.

Nobody should look on the runway and see only 14s. That's ridiculous. I think there should be all different sizes on the runway, and I think that should be what's modern. Let's stop making one body type cool for a decade and start to say all shapes and sizes are accepted — and not only accepted, but absolutely ideal, the most beautiful. Health! Health is the most beautiful.

And that's a crucial point: the idea is not merely a token spread per year featuring only plus-size models (like the upcoming Glamour shoot, in which Renn features) but to showcase a range of healthy body types. It's important to remember, of course, that Renn is still a model: at size 12, she's not large by average American standards, and her proportions are, of course, "conventional." She has the genetic gift of being photogenic that few women possess. And the message to take away should not necessarily be, "ooh, I should be a model, too!" -I'd hate for this story to glamorize another unrealistic scenario - but that a few more young girls could be, and make a success, without needing to starve themselves. (And as an interview with Glamour insta-star Lizzie Miller shows, the typical plus-size experience is less exalted.) My point is, this should still not necessarily be the dream - and that's a bigger issue - but it's wonderful that she's shown one can be healthy and true to one's self, and achieve hers.

Dying To Be The Next Gisele [Salon]

Lizzie Miller's Glamour Shot [LA Times]

Monday, September 14, 2009

WomenCAN - online resource for women

http://www.womencan.ca/redesign/index.php

Saturday, September 12, 2009

More on Caster Semenya

http://bitchmagazine.org/post/are-they-god

Are They God?

The Body Electric blog post by Page McBee, September 13, 2009 - 2:00am; tagged Caster Semenya, gender.

According to the Associated Press, Caster Semenya's father recently asked--regarding the people insinuating that his daughter is not a woman--"Are they God?" The eighteen-year-old South African world champion track star, who first drew attention because of her "masculine" appearance, has been the subject of a media shitstorm lately. Her situation highlights the absurdity of discreet gender categorization, as well as the "sympathy" of a public who would like to think themselves above the other spectators at the circus.

I love science, like most of modernity, but I don't always trust the reductionist perspective of the humanity that invented it. The reality of the intersexed, (a reality that Semenya is rumored to share), is that even almighty biology opposes the black and white sex system. We who defy easy categorization--and there are a hell of a lot of us--have known this instinctively as the shamans and Two-Spirits before us. Semenya is not an anomaly, and this will be just as true if her biology proves to transgress the arbitrary divide humanity has created "between" the sexes.

Presumably, the support for Semenya stems more from the possibility that she has a medically-recognized condition than a genuinely nuanced perspective on gender and mulitplicity. Her sex testing won't bear results until November, but the IAAF's general secretary, Pierre Weiss, noted in a stunning display of ignorance last week, "It is clear that she is a woman but maybe not 100 percent." Wow. It's a good thing we have so many real men and women out there, eliminating complication for us. Perhaps the IAAF, like everyone else, could stand to adapt to the reality of the incredible diversity of the bodies we live in, rather than expect our bodies to be defined by their regulations.

National Association of Women and The Law is looking for young women volunteers

ARE YOU INTERESTED IN BEING PART OF FEMINIST LEGAL AND POLICY ACTIVISM IN
CANADA? If so, NAWL wants YOU!!
The National Association of Women and the Law (NAWL) is looking for young
women who are engaged in thinking about and acting on issues related to
law and public policy as it affects women in this country.

If you are a law student or are engaged in public policy or legal studies
about women¡¦s equality, we invite you to apply to participate in our
Think Tank/Strategy Session on November 7-9 in Toronto, with all your
expenses paid by NAWL.

The goal of this strategy session will be to engage in focused discussions
and strategic planning regarding what it would take to re-invigorate local
and vibrant NAWL caucuses across the country. We anticipate a lot of work
¡V and a lot of fun!

---------------------------------------------------------------------------Our
History
NAWL has historically worked closely with law school caucuses, but in
recent years the capacity to facilitate and assist in organizing these
caucuses has decreased. With renewed energy and internal capacity, we are
hoping to revitalize this important part of NAWL by facilitating a focused
discussion with young women about your interests and issues. What would it
take to actively engage you in creating a vibrant NAWL caucus on your
campus?
---------------------------------------------------------------------------How
to Apply for the Think Tank/ Strategy Session
We will select 10 ¡V 12 women to participate in the strategy session along
with the young women members of NAWL¡¦s National Steering Committee.
If you are interested, please send us a letter, no longer than 2 pages,
telling us about:
„X your background in public policy/legal studies, feminist activism,
social justice or lobbying work; AND
„X what you think you would bring to this meeting, why you want to come
and how you could follow up at your own campus.
„X If you are a recent graduate, please tell us how you remain connected
to your faculty.
Please provide us with the name and contact information of someone we can
talk to so that we may learn more about your passion and involvement in
policy/legal studies, feminist activism, social justice or lobbying work.

We will be selecting women who reflect the diversity NAWL seeks to reflect
as well as who have experience with feminist organizing. Please note that
while the meeting will be held in English, we encourage Francophone women
to apply and participate in French. [While we are not able to offer
English to French interpretation services throughout the meeting, a NAWL
Steering Committee member will provide French to English interpretation
services for women who are most comfortable expressing themselves in
French. Special moments during the meeting will also be planned for
conversations in French only.]
---------------------------------------------------------------------------For
more information about NAWL, visit our website: www.nawl.ca
Application deadline is: October 2, 2009
Applications from current, recent undergraduates and graduate students are
welcome!If you have any questions or to submit an application, please
contact:
Pamela Cross, Director of Strategic Planning at pcross@xplornet.com

Choosing Male Children in India

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/land-of-the-rising-son/article1285122/

Land of the rising son

A girl amongst the audience looks on during an event against female feticide organized by Delhi Commission for Women, in New Delhi, India.

Globe and Mail correspondent Stephanie Nolen examines India's very public battle to halt the shocking decline in the number of girls being born. Technology has made it easy for mothers to choose the gender of their babies. But why, she asks, is the obsession with boys most pronounced among those who are well off?

Caster Semenya Case: Gender-Testing and Race

http://www.feministe.us/blog/

Caster Semenya Case Opening Old Wounds

Posted by: Monica Roberts in Beauty, Body image, Gender, Guest Blogging, International Issues, Race & Ethnicity, Social pressure, Sports

caster-Semenya3 I was watching the track and field championships in Berlin last month when Caster Semenya won her 800m gold medal in the fifth fastest time ever run by a woman.

But as I know from my time on planet Earth, if an African descended female athlete excels in spectacular fashion, we get accused of cheating or have ‘that’s a man’ shade hurled at us.

When you combine it with the hypercompetitive world of international sports in which national pride and prestige is on the line, it was inevitable that somebody would try to find a way knock this talented runner out of international competition, especially with the 2012 London Olympic Games on the horizon.

Gender testing for female athletes exists thanks to the blatant cheating of Nazi Germany in 1936, several former Communist bloc nations sending female athletes into competition with questionable external gender characteristics, and the East Germans feeding their female athletes steroids for more than a decade,

But in 18 year old Caster Semenya’s case, it’s ripping the scab off some old wounds. The ripple effects of this case are reverberating across the African diaspora.

For us African descended people in North America, we see it as the continued centuries old attack on the images of African descended women and our femininity.

williams sisters3 It’s even more acute for Black women involved in sports. The Williams sisters have not only dominated the sport of tennis in the 2K’s, but these proud, statuesque ladies are making history off the court as well.

I and many other tennis fans found it quite curious when the 2009 Australian Open website omitted them from their list of the 10 Most Beautiful Women.

It wasn’t surprising that the list was full of Eastern Europeans in addition to fawning commentary about Jelena Jankovich’s ‘Number One body to go with her (then) Number One ranking’.

The old saying is beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Black women have always been seen thanks to racist myths rooted in slavery as ‘unfeminine’ vis a vis the vanilla flavored beauty standard.

If you think I’m off base, here’s a challenge for you.

Go to your favorite bookstore or drug store and head to the magazine rack. See if you can find a beauty magazine aimed at a predominately white female audience that has an African-descended woman on the cover.

And no, Oprah magazine doesn’t count.

Our continental African cousins see this in the context of the European colonial powers seeking to embarrass Africa.

Despite the fact that the current president of the Monaco based IAAF, Lamine Diack is from Senegal, the IAAF leadership since its inception in 1912 has been dominated by Europeans.

Continental Africans still haven’t forgotten how 800m runner and 2000 Olympic champion Maria Mutola of Mozambique was dogged throughout her illustrious decade long career by ‘that’s a man’ accusations despite passing test after test.

The way the Semenya case has been handled by the IAAF has only crystallized that impression on the mother Continent.

Caster-Semenya press conference It’s probably why officials in South Africa are backing her all the way. Makhenkesi Stofile, South Africa’s sports minister said that Semenya and her family maintain she was gender-tested without her consent and that lawyers were being consulted over possible action.

In addition, Stofile has written to the IAAF demanding an apology and seeking a response to those Australian reports claiming that she’s intersex.

Yes, if the IAAF had questions, they should have quietly done those tests. Somebody leaked the info in Berlin that got this hot mess started. It’s also not a coincidence that another leak in this case results in an Australian newspaper publishing those allegations that Stofile reacted to with “shock and disgust”.

You have to feel for Semenya in this case. It has not only put her personal business out there, but has been done so in the most humiliatingly public way possible

In the meantime, her athletic future rests on the results of the gender test and an IAAF Council meeting set to take place in Monaco November 20-21.

Semenya has also received some advice and support from India’s Santhi Soundajaran, the last woman to be subjected to this type of withering international scrutiny.

“She should not let them take away her medal or allow one test to determine her fate. “She is a woman and that’s it, full stop,” Soundarajan says. “A gender test cannot take away from you who you are.”

Even if the people behind this are determined to take away her 800m world championship.

Wednesday, September 9, 2009

History of Female Mental Illness

http://jezebel.com/5355606/mad-bad--sad-history-of-female-mental-illness-turns-into-indictment-of-psychotherapy?skyline=true&s=x

Mad, Bad & Sad: History Of Female Mental Illness Turns Into Indictment Of Psychotherapy

By Anna N., 3:40 PM on Wed Sep 9 2009, 4,445 views

From force-feeding to tooth removal to stomach surgery, mental patients throughout history — many of them women — have endured some pretty horrific therapies. In Mad, Bad & Sad, Lisa Appignanesi questions whether modern treatments are much better.

Subtitled A History of Women and the Mind Doctors, Appignanesi's book aims to trace the relationship between women's "madness, badness, and sadness" and their treatment by (usually male) professionals from the late 18th century to the present day. The book does a good job of describing the connection early physicians saw between physical and mental ailments — the "moving womb" theory of hysteria, the fits of numbness and paralysis supposedly brought on by a frightening sight or memory. The "mind doctors" of the 18th and 19th centuries were of course wrong about the specifics of these connections (breast milk, for instance, does not travel into the brain and cause insanity), but it's interesting to note that they understood what we sometimes forget — that the mind and body can influence each other, for good and ill.

Unfortunately, this awareness often led to sexism. Appignanesi notes that doctors in the second half of the 19th century believed that problems with the female reproductive system caused "nervous afflictions," and that,

Throughout this period, doctors and scientists seemed determined to raise the existing division of labor in the middle class to a universal given, and to transform women's place in the domestic sphere into a biological inevitability from which deviation of any kind would bring breakdown, not only of the mind but of the species. Women were understood as being fashioned by evolution for the home and maternity, nervously fragile, intellectually inferior. Moving away from that lesser birthright, allowing energies to be drained by intellectual or imaginative exertion would lead to nervous collapse or to that capacious list of symptoms which most often went under the catch-all diagnosis of neurasthenia or its near-neighbour hysteria.

Prejudicial theory was often matched by brutal practice. Pelvic surgery and force-feeding were common treatments, and Appignanesi tells the story of one woman fed so violently in an asylum that all her teeth were broken. Especially gruesome was early 20th-century hospital superintendent Henry Cotton, who believed psychosis was caused by "chronic pus infections" and who "treated" sufferers not only with tooth removal but with surgery on the stomach, tonsils, uterus, and colon.

There's an interesting book to be written about how fads in mental treatment have harmed and helped women's bodies and minds over the past two centuries. Mad, Bad & Sad is not that book. Appignanesi offers overlong and sometimes jumbled case histories in lieu of any real tracking of trends. Instead of a full picture of how culture has shaped women's diagnosis and treatment, we get scattershot portraits of such ailments as hysteria, neurasthenia, eating disorders, and borderline personality disorder without a coherent explanation of what brought each of these conditions to the fore. It's clear that aspects of mental illness are culturally determined — there's a reason why the diagnosis and even the symptoms of hysteria were prevalent in one century, BPD in another, but Appignanesi doesn't really examine what that reason is.

She does say that "therapies [...] can create their own best patients," and she seemed nearly as skeptical of modern SSRIs and cognitive-behavioral therapy as she does of tooth removal and pelvic surgery. Despite her graphic descriptions of blood-vomiting hysterics, she sometimes seems to think that mental illness is largely illusory, something imposed by doctors on women going through normal life phases like adolescence and childbirth. The only therapies she seems to support are journaling, psychoanalysis (with some reservations), and just growing out of your problems.

Appignanesi makes good points at the beginning of her book about the inherent sexism of early psychiatric theories. She might have used these insights to examine how modern-day therapists might transcend gender stereotypes and treatment fads to give their patients the best possible care. Instead, she seems to consider almost all mental health treatments to be forms of insidious social programming. Of course, psychotherapy does tend to reinforce social norms even as it helps patients deal with their very real pain. Whether the two necessarily go hand in hand is an interesting question. It's too bad Appignanesi doesn't make a serious effort to answer it.

Mad, Bad, And Sad: A History Of Women And The Mind Doctors [Amazon]