A FEW THINGS TO DO

(Cartoon from the fabulous xkcd)

Here are some actions you can take, if you are so inclined.

Democracy for America has started an online petition to send a message to Governor Tim Kaine, newly appointed chair of the Democratic National Committee, requesting that he continue the 50 State Strategy. As implemented by Governor Howard Dean, the 50 State Strategy "will go down as one of the most successful long-term programs the Democratic National Committee has ever implemented. Not just for Barack but for candidates up and down the ballot all across the country.

"For example, only three years ago, Gov. Dean was mocked by party insiders and Washington Democrats for spending DNC resources in Alaska. This week, Alaskans watched Mark Begich swear in as their newly elected Democratic Senator.

"But while there has been a lot of talk about keeping it alive, all of the original DNC 50 State Strategy organizers have been let go.

"With special elections, local mayor and city council races all coming up soon, this is one decision that can't wait any longer. Call on Tim Kaine to immediately renew the 50 State Strategy and we'll make sure he gets the message." Click here to go to the petition page.

(Swanson ad featuring lesbian parents with a son -- click for larger view)

PFLAG is asking folks to take the time to thank Campbell's Soup for standing up to anti-lesbian/gay pressure from the (sic) American Family Association. Their request states:

"Recently, a LGBT-affirming ad ran in The Advocate for Swanson brand broth, which is owned by the Campbell Soup Company.

"The ad is part of Campbell's Home for the Holidays campaign and featured a lesbian couple with their son. Unfortunately the anti-LGBT American Family Association urged its members to contact Campbell's soup and criticize them for showing LGBT families in their advertising.

"Please take the time to counter their anti-gay message and thank Campbell's for their support of the LGBT and ally community! Let's give kudos to Campbell's for showing that all of our families are worthy of respect.

"We especially wish to thank Campbell's because they are a corporate sponsor for our upcoming 2009 Straight for Equality Awards Gala to be held February 5, 2009 in Times Square, New York City!

"Be sure to email Anthony Sanzio, the Group Director for Corporate and Brand Communications for Campbell Soup Company (anthony_sanzio@campbellsoup.com) and follow up with a phone call showing your appreciation as well (1-800-257-8443)!"

(From SomeECards)

And, another reminder to cast your vote for Driftglass for Best Individual Blogger in the 2008 Weblog Awards. As reported earlier at a post at Group News Blog, as well as many other progressive blogs, Drifty is still way behind a right-wing fanatic. You can go vote every 24 hours by clicking here.

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THE POWER OF NAMING OUR TERMS

(Cartoon by XKCD)

I'm going to reprint here in its entirety a great comment and introduction to another essay posted currently at Utne Reader online. The comment, by Steve Thorngate, is titled "The Perils of Gender Guy". The essay is referenced in his comment but I cannot send you directly to it because it's by subscription only. Hence, I'll let you read someone else's take on it.

"If you spend much time in office meetings or college classrooms, you’ve likely run into Gender Guy. He’s an alpha male and a liberal, and he likes to talk about gender issues—in the workplace, in society, in the book you’re reading, wherever. He pontificates and patronizes; he interrupts and shouts down. He makes the rest of the room endure his pissing matches with men less enlightened, or with those who share his general opinions but oblige his desire to quibble over details, loudly and at length.

"Gender Guy’s assumed expertise might come from overly simplified connections he makes between gender and race, or class, or sexual identity, or religion. It might be based on the fact that, as an intelligent and well-spoken man, he’s by definition an expert on everything. Or perhaps he thinks he understands gender because the word—unlike, say, “women”—suggests a subject that deals not with one gender’s concrete realities so much as, more abstractly, with the relationship between two.

"This last point in particular interests historian Alice Kessler-Harris. Writing in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Kessler-Harris considers the consequences for her own discipline when, starting in the early 1990s, gender history began to take over the ground previously held by women’s history (subscription required). She allows that “gender is a tempting and powerful framework”:

"Far more inclusive than the category of women, [gender] raises questions not so much about what women did or did not do, but about how the organization or relationships between men and women established priorities and motivates social and political action. While the history of women can be accused of lacking objectivity—of having a feminist purpose—that of gender suggests a more distanced stance… The idea of “gender” frees young scholars (male and female) to seek out the ways that historical change is related to the shape and deployment of male/female relations.

"And yet, something is lost:

"Gender obscures as much as it reveals… [I suspect] that in seeing the experiences of men and women as relational, we overlook the particular ways in which women—immigrants, African-Americans, Asians, Chicanas—engaged their worlds… We lose the power of the individual to shed a different light—sometimes a liminal light—on historical processes.

"In short, Kessler-Harris worries that abstracting “women” into “gender” can have the effect of silencing the voices of actual women—a danger not limited to the rarefied world of historians. The tension between analyzing gender relations and highlighting female voices is an old one, and it’s as broadly relevant as ever. While Gender Guy’s opinions may be impeccably feminist, how helpful is this if the abstraction “gender” gives him cover to go on and on, preventing the women in the room from getting a word in?"

(more after the fold)


Indeed.

The replacement of women's studies and women's issues with "gender" studies did not occur in a vacuum. It began during the Reagan years, and has accelerated during the Bush years. These two decades are marked by a reframing of public discourse using extremely conservative language and ideology; the increased conflation of masculinity with leadership and power; the removal of a healthy barrier between religion and government; flagrant disregard for our basic Constitutional principles; dismantling of most gains made by racial minorities and an appeal to covert and overt racist sentiment in the name of nationalism; a horrific widening of the gap between rich and poor, and virtual elimination of America's middle class; increased assaults on the rights of women and disabled people to control their own bodies; an explosion of pornography; unbelievably swift and total destruction of our personal privacy; and the conversion of our culture to one which overwhelmingly supports the making of (and profiting of by the few) from war.

Feminism, as it was defined by women (not necessarily "gender studies" scholars), has stood in opposition to all of these developments. I simply don't think it is coincidence that the effort to unroof and name our identities as women (raised with female conditioning) has been shackled at the same exact time masculinity- and male-conditioned behaviors have raged out of control.

Conservative tactics used to hijack rational conversation and logical thought include ridicule, valuing emotionality over justice, and (especially relevant here) refusing to acknowledge inherent, institutional power imbalances. Hence, we have two generations now who have difficulty understanding that racism cannot "flow both directions", that our society is profoundly class-stratified and absent of class mobility except for the publicized few, or that sexism does NOT disenfranchise and stunt the economic survival of men and women equally.

In some allegedly feminist circles, it's considered bad form to claim the identity woman, to talk about personal female experience such as girlhood, menstruation, pregnancy and mothering, or to hold any individual accountable for anti-woman behavior, because this so-called "essentialism" somehow discounts the reality of those who don't share it. It's a conservative fallacy, the idea that those who do not control the institutions and systems of oppression are still responsible for the feelings of those who are not the primary targets of a particular oppression. This confusion has begun to spread into the realms of thinking about race as well: Not just denial of white privilege, or blinding derangement about the dominance of white identity, but an actual reaction of claiming divisiveness and "hurt feelings" when racism is named by people of color and their allies.

Identity politics are not a final stage of liberation, but understanding the world view (complete with lies) that we were indoctrinated with, despite our most ardents efforts, from the moment of birth and spending the DECADES necessary to unravel the web of misinformation is not a stage we can hopscotch over with credit awarded for good intentions and an outward makeover.

As Adrienne Rich warned us at the beginning of this dim age of backlash:

"Truthfulness anywhere means a heightened complexity. But it is a movement into evolution. Women are only beginning to uncover our own truths; many of us would be grateful for some rest in that struggle, would be glad iust to lie down with the sherds we have painfully unearthed, and be satisfied with those. The politics worth having, the relationships worth having, demand that we delve still deeper."

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BROAD CAST 17 NOVEMBER 2007 -- GENDER MINDBENDERS

(Get us out from under, Wonder Woman)

The annual Gender Gap Index report (PDF) has been released by The World Economic Forum. Their press release states:

NORDIC COUNTRIES TOP THE WORLD ECONOMIC FORUM'S GENDER GAP INDEX
World makes progress on economic, political and education gaps; loses ground on health gaps.
"Geneva, Switzerland, Thursday 8 November – Four Nordic countries, Sweden (1), Norway (2), Finland (3) and Iceland (4) once again top the latest Gender Gap Index released today by the World Economic Forum. All countries in the top 20 made progress relative to their scores last year – some more so than others. Latvia (13) and Lithuania (14) made the biggest advances among the top 20, gaining six and seven places respectively, driven by smaller gender gaps in labour force participation and wages.

The performance of the United States (31) was mixed over the last year – its scores on political empowerment improved but this was offset by a bigger gap on economic participation – causing the United States to lose 6 places relative to its rank in 2006."

I've copied in the top 30 countries listed with their 2007 and 2006 ranks below:

GENDER GAP INDEX
Country -- Rank 2007 -- Rank 2006
Sweden -- 1 -- 1
Norway -- 2 -- 2
Finland -- 3 -- 3
Iceland -- 4 -- 4
New Zealand -- 5 -- 7
Philippines -- 6 -- 6
Germany -- 7 -- 5
Denmark -- 8 -- 8
Ireland -- 9 -- 10
Spain -- 10 -- 11
United Kingdom -- 11 -- 9
Netherlands -- 12 -- 12
Latvia -- 13 -- 19
Lithuania -- 14 -- 21
Sri Lanka -- 15 -- 13
Croatia -- 16 -- 16
Australia -- 17 -- 15
Canada -- 18 -- 14
Belgium -- 19 -- 20
South Africa -- 20 -- 18
Moldovia -- 21 -- 17
Cuba -- 22 -- n/a
Belarus -- 23 -- n/a
Colombia -- 24 -- 22
Lesotho -- 26 -- 43
Austria -- 27 -- 27
Costa Rica -- 28 -- 30
Namibia -- 29 -- 38
Estonia -- 30 -- 29
United States -- 31 -- 29

(“The Ring of Nibelung” by Arthur Rackham)

The Daily Texan at the University of Texas here in Austin reported last week about the effect of feminist writers on fairy tales.

Giving a talk on campus, fairy tale scholar Jack Zipes stated "The feminist movement made its way into fairy tale writing between 1979 and 1983, Zipes said. He said that during this period, male and female writers began an important dialogue about what constituted a fairy tale. As a reaction to sexist, racist and classist leanings of canonical tales, feminist writers began to subvert the older stories and create new ones."

The depressing aspect of this article, of course, is the fact that the prominent years of dialogue and creation are more than two decades ago.

Zipes appears to address this loss when he states "women are still continuing the trend of subverting traditional fairy tales and are also conceiving new ideas. He said influences can be seen in blockbuster animated movies like the 'Shrek' trilogy or 'Happily N'ever After.'

'The better writers of fairy tales - whether they're men or women - are trying to cope with the fact that our notions, our stereotypes of men and women fail us and they're lies, they're illusions and so on,' he said. 'But they don't want to abandon the work of the fairy tale or the fantasy.' Zipes said he is optimistic about younger generations taking up the cause."

My optimism was diminished by the fact that the first commenter on this article was a male expressing ridicule and disbelief about the very idea.

In a somewhat related story, Natasha at Homo Academicus applies the Alison Bechdel Rule to Pixar films for children.

The three characteristics of the Alison Bechdel Rule for watching movies (which, according to Alison, should actually be the Liz Wallace Rule):
1. There must be two or more women in it
2. Who talk to each other,
3. About something other than a man.
Some variants include the stipulation that the women have names.

Using this analysis, Natasha finds that childrens' films have 28% female characters.

Disturbing as this is, it gets worse. Amanda Marcotte at Pandagon points out that in recent children's movies, entire species have undergone "regendering...to make sure that male primacy is preserved": The female-dominant reality of bees and ants is reversed in Bee Movie, Antz, and A Bug's Life, and cows with udders are still given male personas in Barnyard.

The usual explanation for this idiocy is that little girls will watch anything but little boys have to see males in charge or else their heads will explode -- as if children are born with either open minds (girls) and 1950's-era biases (boys). Reminds me of the great Peter Alsop song, "It's Only A Wee-Wee":

As soon as you’re born grown-ups check where you pee
And then they decide just how you’re s'posed t'be
Girls pink and quiet, boys noisy and blue
Seems like a dumb way to choose what you’ll do...

It’s only a wee-wee, so what’s the big deal?
It’s only a wee-wee, so what’s all the fuss?
It’s only a wee-wee, and everyone’s got one
There’s better things to discuss!!

Oops. Yet another harkback to 1981, when feminism could still discuss the actual meaning of sexism. Gee, it's too bad movies for children or adults with strong female leads are simply not interesting to boys and men.


For a different kind of yardstick, how about the River Tam Rule as demonstrated in this XKCD cartoon? (Thx to Angry For A Reason for the link -- click on cartoon to see a larger version.)

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