O rly?

It is with much dis-gusto that I present to you the Make Me Skinny Jacket by Rebecca Taylor.

Listen. Blazers and fitted jackets can indeed produce the illusion of a small waist, hourglass figure, and other features that translate to "flattering" by today's dominant beauty standards. This is one of the many, many things I love about them. (In the "black blazer" category alone I have three. This should tell you something.)

However. I must point out that they do not actually change one's body composition, and that while it is not this or any one company's fault that we have a national obsession with thinness, marketing products on the basis of future or illusory thinness (usually both) is really unhelpful to everyone (except the ones counting the cash, I suppose). This is just such a pathetically transparent and tasteless example of it that I actually couldn't quite believe it when I saw it.

That's all, really. Carry on.

Huzzah!

Two women become judges in Islamic courts in the West Bank.

Nothing to add to Faith's post--just go read it.

Violence, domestic

The leading cause of death for African-American women aged 15-45 is partner abuse. Jesus H. Christ. Is the world listening yet? How bout the country? The men?

I don't really know what to say about this either. In both this case and the case of the Iraqi suicide bomberesses all I can say is that it's wrong. It's dehumanizing, it's weaponizing or panaceazing, it's using. It's awful. It makes me sick.

Women are human beings, goddammit.

The U.S. House of Representatives has reworded its rules to be gender neutral. Hallelujah!

Revolutionary language

Oh man, this is actually kind of wonderful.

I'm not actually talking about the economic plan--I'm talking about this:

Aside from the commitment to what sounds like a great progressive stimulus plan, one sentence struck me: Will your job or your husband’s job or your daughter’s job be the next one cut? Read that closely. In a speech about universal fears and hardship, he is addressing his primary listeners as women. Never have I heard sentence construction like that from a president -- women addressed directly in a non-"women's issues" setting as legitimate, fully fledged and very concerned and invested breadwinners. The effect is stunning.

Target: Women

Oh, Sarah Haskins, how I love thee.

(Rachel Maddow is still my TV girlfriend, though.)

Post-feminist, bitchez

Melissa McEwan has a typically insightful post up about a political reframing that's taking place around women's reproductive health services.

Question: How long do you think it will take before history is rewritten so that the legislation which would "provide pregnant women with health care, child care and money for education -- services that could encourage them to continue their pregnancies" becomes the sole province of the Very Serious Centrist Men (possibly including our new president-elect) who found the "middle ground" on abortion that extremists on both sides couldn't find, despite the reality that feminists have been advocating for exactly these social services for longer than I've been alive?

Don't answer that. It's rhetorical.

I find it fascinating (where fascinating = completely bloody infuriating) that these ideas will probably only now get a hearing at long last because the frame has switched from "things women need, irrespective of their circumstances" to "things that will ensure women make more babies."

Post-feminist, bitchez.

Feminine wiles?

Andrew Sullivan sez:

The damage John McCain's baldfaced sexism and Sarah Palin's cocktail waitress act have done to American feminism has yet to be fully assessed. Palin has actually forced me to realize that, however much I despise Hillary Clinton, I have never doubted her professionalism and capacity to fight and win on her own terms in a male-dominated world by meeting and exceeding the standards of any male counterpart. (It was not her fault she ran against the political genius of his generation.) I cannot even imagine her winking and flirting on stage, although the New Hampshire tears were a bit of a stunt.

Thatcher remains the standard. She was not above using feminine wiles in charming individuals; but in public, in debate, in the Commons, she beat men at their own game, using nothing but knowledge, forensics, expertise, argument and courage.

From Thatcher to Palin is not a slide downwards for conservative women. It's a free-fall. And McCain did it.

I call major bullshit. I would be absolutely shocked if Andrew Sullivan has not attributed Hillary Clinton's success in part to Bill's coattails, as I hear many people doing in discussions of her merit. Guess what, male politicians benefit from nepotism as well--why is it suddenly a problem when it's a woman? Oh, right, she doesn't belong there.

And I love his description of Thatcher. Feminine wiles to charm individuals in (it is implied) not-public? Take that like a step further and then think about it real hard. Lovely, Sully. I'm sure Thatcher would be delighted with your assessment.

His larger point about Palin's winking and flirting is true. But I will be so damned glad when this election is over and the constant spewing of sexism from the media and almost all other directions aimed at any and all women in politics at least slows down to more normal levels.

Mommies and Mamis

I am quoting this post by Maegan “La Mala” Ortiz from
Racialicious in its entirety because I think it's so spot on in terms of why Sarah Palin's being hailed as a progressive moment bugs me. [Note: I have placed all Spanish words in italics. I would rather not have done so as it violates the integrity of Ortiz's bilingualism and alienates the Spanish words, but I have seen people mistake them for misspellings or bad grammar before and I wanted to avoid that.]

Last night, Alaska Governor Sarah Palin accepted the nomination to the vice-presidency at the Republican National Convention.

Originally the buzz about Palin, focused on her having a vagina. Her presence was analyzed as a calculated McCain strategy to lure disgruntled, hard core Hillary Clinton supporters.

Then the shift went internal, to her uterus, her identity as a mother to five, the youngest with some form of developmental delay, and a 17 year old daughter, unmarried and pregnant.

So what does this Palin parranda of information and analysis mean to mamis of color, Latina mamis like me? Not surprisingly, nada.

Sarah Palin wants to put herself out there as “every woman”. She wants to be seen as “just your average hockey mom”, and other mommies see themselves and their reality reflected through Palin, except, mamis of color, that is.

The talk returns to mommy wars, not mami wars, because the entire conversation excludes Latinas and other moms of color. We are not even soldiers. Even for so called progressive white feminist, the war is fought by them and maybe, if mamis like me are lucky, we’ll reap some benefit. When I was a pregnant teenager, in a Latin American country where abortion was and still is illegal (Chile), there was no opting out of pregnancy or working. Which is why the debate of how Palin could go back to work after having a baby with special needs or how a pregnant unmarried teenage daughter is being used, feels like a sideshow with little significance in reality. The politics of choice is being raised, with the emergence of a woman who is anti-choice, even in cases of rape or incest and with no talk of how for women of color, choice goes beyond an abortion and means the very right to have children (forget 5!) Imaginate if Michelle Obama had five children? Imagínate if one of the Obama children were older and pregnant? Imagine the hate and stereotypes that would be unleashed? Oh wait, I don’t have to imagine, as a single mami of color, I live it. Palin’s large brood isn’t seen as a strain on the system. They are a beautiful portrait of an “American” family making every other family, families like mine, ugly.

And let’s talk about the perceived double standard, that if a man had five children no one would be making a big deal of it, that men are held to a different standard, as stated in the video above. Claro if you take race out of the picture, it’s easy to follow along, pero if Obama was the father to five instead of two children, you don’t think the media and politicos would be making all sorts of references to black men and their hyper-sexuality? Or black men and responsibility? I hear no one telling Palin’s husband to put on a damn condom.

Just as many of women of color couldn’t get behind Clinton and her campaign because of racist attacks on Barack Obama, attacks that asked women of color to choose a candidate based not on a complex and painful history and reality, but rather because of perceived shared genitalia. Palin positions herself as continuing Clinton’s struggle, as continuing the struggle set forth by Geraldine Ferraro, the first woman to run as a vice-presidential candidate. Let’s not forget that Ferraro called Obama “lucky” for being black. Is Palin then lucky for having five children, like my abuela did before being forcibly sterilized? You wanna talk about Palin’s uterus or the uterus of her daughter? I want to talk about my abuela’s uterus, how it’s power was deemed dangerous because of it’s power to bear brown Spanish speaking babies, my uterus and it’s abortions, miscarriages, and pregnancies, violations upon it, the uterus of an immigrant woman being viewed as a weapon in a culture war and the need to put those immigrant women in chains as they push babies from them and the need the U.S. government has to separate mamis and babies and deport and dispose.

My uterus and my head is tired.

I feel like hell.

However:

This is the only thing that ever made me consider teaching in my irrational heart. Still not happening, but definitely worth reading--comments as well.

Apparently the nation's largest bike-sharing program will kick off at the Democratic National Convention (sorry--couldn't get the link to work).

Finally, this is a fascinating essay on capitalism, feminism and social justice.

Oh, man. Oh man oh man oh man. SO MUCH FUNNY.

(It's a takedown of an essay about how blue jeans are "proletarian garb" designed by feminists and the Rockefeller Foundation to ruin feminity and the family. No, I am not joking in any way.)

Sigh. Rush Limbaugh sez:

"I've got a theory about the motivations. Well, I don't know that I could -- I don't know that I can put this one on the air." Discussing his "theory," Limbaugh said, "We know -- we've been told that Elizabeth Edwards is smarter than John Edwards. That's part of the puff pieces on them that we've seen. Ergo, if Elizabeth Edwards is smarter than John Edwards, is it likely that she thinks she knows better than he does what his speeches ought to contain and what kind of things he ought to be doing strategy-wise in the campaign? If she is smarter than he is, could it have been her decision to keep going with the campaign? In other words, could it be that she doesn't shut up? Now, that's as far as I'm going to go." Limbaugh later added, "It just seems to me that Edwards might be attracted to a woman whose mouth did something other than talk." Limbaugh went on to say in a subsequent segment: "my theory that I just explained to you about why -- you know, what could have John Edwards' motivations been to have the affair with Rielle Hunter, given his wife is smarter than he is and probably nagging him a lot about doing this, and he found somebody that did something with her mouth other than talk."

Via Media Matters.


Bah freakin humbug, you asshole. It's totally brilliant, talented, passionate Elizabeth's fault her husband cheated on her because she wouldn't suck cock.

Holy shit this is awesome.

http://punkassblog.com/2008/07/21/and-every-time-i-read-one-i-remember/

That is an absolutely essential post and everyone should read it.

All I can say is, listen to your children (when we all grow up) when they tell you something's wrong.


In other news, this Tennessee tragedy continues to make me sick.

Basically, a bitter man who couldn't get a job, was about to be taken off food stamps, and had been divorced by a woman who attended a particular UU church decided to walk in with a shotgun and just start shooting. He killed a man and a woman, 61 and 60 years old. Some people there said the man protected others with his body.

His stated reasons for doing this were that he hates liberals, who are ruining the country, and gays. (The church had been supportive of LGBTQ members and hosted a sex ed event for teens, among other things).

I hope Karl Rove & Co. are happy. Not because they managed to BLAME TEH LIBERULZ OMG IT HURTZ but because, as always, these divisions are largely imaginary and created; and they are created in rhetoric, in language, advertisements, coded phrasing. Rove's electioneering tactics have been instrumental in furthering this one.

This is an absolutely fabulous and beautiful post on bodies and the ownership thereof that I found through the 61st Carnival of Feminists. (It's likely I'll end up passing on more posts as I work my way through.) A sample:

It also reminds me of a dance competition at my school. One of the female dancers did a not-quite-appropriate-for-school kind of dance, and some boys in the audience jeered, called out "slut" and the like. The boys were dealt with, but likely not enough for them to understand their error. I'm guessing they reacted to her power. Desire can be scarey business. And they couldn't have her themselves, so they tried to wreck her for everyone else by disparaging her. Standard. But they also misunderstood her performance as an offering to anyone watching. What they were being offered was the opportunity to see her dance, nothing more.

But I'm ignoring the sense of the line that suggests that if I'm showing off my body, then you have a right to stare or touch or whatever. So, it follows that if I don't want your specific attention, I must choose a tent dress, perhaps a bag on my head. That's just silly. Do we really want people to hide their beauty to keep a few lug-nuts from finding them too irresistible to look away? Beauty is to be enjoyed, not possessed.

[...]

I am in awe of the human body. I know that barely repressible urge to touch a stranger's body. It's exactly like the urge to touch the glasswork in a gallery. Because I really want to, because the stunning beauty is drawing me in, capturing my full attention, doesn't give me the right to without explicit permission. Art is on display for our admiration, not ownership.

You can't own me, but I'm sometimes willing to share myself, let you touch and taste. You can look but only respectfully, with appreciation, not appropriation. If you're standing too close, or reaching out to touch, I'll kindly ask you to step back.

In addition, because I've given up on self-restraint, you will find below a bunch of posts I liked from the Carnival. As always, go ahead and ignore if you like.

Bloke Coke -- the relationship between sex and food, and how it's gendered.
How it ought to be -- experiences of a former stripper and her boyfriend of five years.

Oh, bizarre.

Gender testing for women Olympic athletes, eh?

Basically, they want to make sure none of them are really men, and they do this by testing chromosomes (because that's the only place that gender is located, right? Right. No genderqueer consideration here!). Of course, some women have other chromosomal abnormalities, so if that comes up there's a physical exam (which makes little sense to me--why the chromosomes if we can just check up your skirt?), which is gross and invasive, and them some women are STILL barred from competing.

As far as I can tell, they don't test men this way. Because, of course, the assumption is that women couldn't possibly be that good at sports, so some of them are probably men in shorter shorts.

Cute.

oh shit oh shit oh shit

http://www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com/archives/16218.html

The government (the Bush administration) is trying to define many common forms of contraception--like, oh, the pill--as abortion. And cut off federal funding to hospitals and clinics that compel their practitioners to offer them to women.

If this kind of legislation ever passes in this country it would be one of the few things that would have me seriously considering hauling my ass off to Europe. I don't like fearing my government, and I don't like the idea of living in a country where such fundamental aspects of my agency and personhood are so restricted and vilified.


Seriously, why the fuck do they hate women so much? And why is women having sex--as a personal choice and for, oh, fun, pleasure, emotional connection, WHATEVER, rather than as a means to tying oneself to babies--so fucking scary to them?

I mean, for the love of god:

According to the HHS draft, “abortion” takes on a very broad meaning: “The Department proposes to define abortion as ‘any of the various procedures — including the prescription and administration of any drug or the performance of any procedure or any other action — that results in the termination of the life of a human being in utero between conception and natural birth, whether before or after implantation.’”

That necessarily means that common birth-control methods — including the birth control pill and IUDs — would be designated as “abortion.”

IT'S AN ABORTION EVEN IF YOU WEREN'T FUCKING PREGNANT YET. ("Before implantation.") Basically, if you have sex and don't get pregnant for any reason other than sheer bloody luck, it was an abortion and ain't no federal money going there. (Don't know where they stand on condoms, but since that's something that men have more control over as opposed to women they probably aren't too bothered.)

And you know what follows. If it all counts as abortion then all the anti-choice activists can jump on it and find ways to restrict more and more aspects of "abortion" until birth control is effectively illegal or inaccessible--see South Dakota, where most women would have to drive three hours to get an abortion if they can have one at all.

Guys, donate to Planned Parenthood sometime soon. I know I am.

This is about child marriage in Yemen.

And when I say "child," I mean "girl," of course, because strangely enough this only ever seems to happen to female children.


In Yemen, girls are often married as young as 8 or 9. Sometimes it's because their families can't support them, sometimes it's because their families are afraid they'll be kidnapped and forcibly married by someone else (the article just sort of mentions this offhand, but WHAT THE FUCK), but largely because, as the article says, the fight against Communism in South Yemen (back when Yemen was divided) was won with its replacement with fundamentalist Islam. Just like, oh, Afghanistan. What was that about containment again? Boy, the Cold War sure was great, huh? (More on this later).

When Yemen was still divided, there was a law in the South saying that girls could not marry before age 16, boys not before 18. Since reunification and the rise of hardline Islamism (I have no idea if that's how, say, President Bush would use the word, but I know what I mean by it--again, more on that later [I decided this was too long and I'd save it for another time]), the law was revised to say that girls could get married whenever so long as they didn't move in with their husbands till age 15. Right. Fat chance.

The article was spurred by the fact that Nujood, a ten-year-old girl, ran out of her husband's owner's house, hailed herself a taxi (in rural Yemen? Nobody explained how this was possible), and went to the courthouse. It was the first time she had ever traveled anywhere by herself. The judge granted her a permanent divorce--she was lucky enough to find a sympathetic judge, rather than one who would have disregarded her and had her husband or father stand for her in court, which would no doubt had left her still "married" (I refuse to dignify this situation with that term).

Now she wants to be a human rights lawyer like the one who took her case, or maybe a journalist.

It just breaks my heart. When I read that last bit I could just hear a little ten-year-old girl's voice saying, "When I grow up..." and it's so terrible. Neither she nor the other girl profiled in this article had ever even been told what sex WAS before they were repeatedly raped and beaten before even reaching puberty. Yemen has one of the highest maternal mortality rates in the world (Afghanistan's still worse, though), because girls are having massive numbers of children before they're physically ready.

When challenged, conservative Yemenis defend the practice as traditional, etc (there's even a proverb about how an 8 year old bride guarantees a great marriage) and point out that the Prophet Muhammad married a nine-year-old. Now, from what I understand (although no one can really know), he married her for political reasons, not for domestic servitude or sex, and he did not use her as such. It would definitely be an incredible act of hypocrisy to preach what he did about marriage and women and then do such a thing. (Such acts have, of course, been seen, but rarely have they taken place among successful prophets to my knowledge.) He seems by many accounts to have been pretty much devoted to his first and primary wife.

All that aside, there are three two [same as above: got too long] things I want to discuss here.

1: I know you have all heard it before, but it cannot be repeated enough and it would be a disservice to omit it: women and girls are little better than property in places like these. They are domestic slaves. Rural Afghan men usually take a second wife when their first is too physically worn out to work the fields, haul water, grind flour, etc. day in and day out, let alone have more children. The first wife will stay in the house, take care of babies, and do some cooking and cleaning while the new, strong, young wife (anywhere from 8-18 or so) does these incredibly arduous chores--alone, or with other women in the family. The men hunt for prestige and chat with each other. Opium farmers marry off their daughters to pay off debt, for Christ's sake.

And if you think there is no relationship between that sort of thing, honor killings, etc. and the way women are framed as objects, prizes, and/or babymakers here in this country (amazing, isn't it, how starlets change overnight from WYLD PARTY GRRL to Loving!Mother! as soon as they show a bump), then in some sense I envy you because your life is a lot less depressing than mine.


2: I want to discuss the relationship to the Cold War. The containment policy has been repeatedly cited as a model of international policy that combined force with diplomacy, caution/restraint with courage, and pragmatism with principle. This is all true, and our lame duck president et.al. could have learned a lot from the practitioners of containment.

However, the fundamental flaw in containment and, in fact, in every bloody thing the glorious "West" has done since we first figured out we could take brown people's land, is underestimating or misunderstanding the people we are trying to manipulate.

The people fighting the Cold War didn't think it mattered who replaced the Communists when they got rid of them. This was because rather than seeing the Yemenis, or the Afghanis, etc. as people with a grievance in need of an outlet, a hope, and a strategy, they saw them as brainwashed pawns of Stalin and Mao. (There was a doctrine whose name I forget that promoted international development because poverty was the best seeding ground for Marxism, but even that--while on the right track--had a paternalistic overtone). And they figured once that brainwashing was dealt with, they would go back to being powerless, harmless, dumb-ass little brown people.

Only it doesn't work like that. Inequity among nations continued to grow, the people were no less poor and hopeless than they were before, and fundamentalist Islam took root in the wake of Communism--in part as a backlash to some of the Communist ideology (atheism, gender equality, sexual freedom, and so on). And guess what? Different name, same problem, they're still pissed at us and they still know how to shoot.

I just think it's incredible how little it is discussed in the public discourse the degree to which we have created our own problems. The West colonized. The West fought wars that it couldn't quite win (I'm talking about the British way back when, not us now) and left chaos. The West drew borders to fit its own interests, never stopping to think how those borders might affect the situation on the ground and how that, in turn, might cause it problems. And the West (with the U.S. having taken over from Britain) continues to strut around like everybody's cocky big brother who you're just itching to punch.

Yet we talk about "radical Islam" and terrorism and this and that like they're endemic. Like they just grew out of the ground without any help.

Someone on Shakesville once discussed the U.S.'s profound lack of a sense of history. I think it's very deeply tied to our political cycle ("What? That wasn't me, that was the other guy! Clean slate!") as well as to our constant conviction that we can create ourselves, as exemplified in the American dream, the lucky break, the second chance, etc. Our pasts do not have to define us, so our mythology goes.

It's a wonderful attitude, but sometimes it's just not workable. In the case of the Middle East, it's plain stupid.