Aug
29
I am floored that
-
- 1) The media is actually talking TO us for once, instead of lining up the typical role call of men to talk ABOUT us and
- 2) THAT THEY EXPECT IT TO WORK. (One pair of ovaries is the same as any other, and we’ll be voting on that basis amirite?)
What dimension am I in?
McCain chooses a woman as his Vice Presidential candidate and now we have entreaties from them that the war on the glass ceiling doesn’t have to end with Hilary! Ahem. Drafting a woman to prop up your misogynist policies, when you pay attention to issues that affect women AT ALL, will not get me to vote for you. It’s a slap in the face. Nor can you pat yourself on the back for being so “progressive” as to choose a woman and proclaim that you can finally overcome the glass ceiling. I will believe this when women have TRULY REPRESENTATIVE numbers in government. The white hetero male monopoly on government will not be transformed into a place that all of a sudden welcomes women and minorities thanks to a woman Vice President, or EVEN a woman President. But yes, she really does expect us, as someone chosen by a man for a very specific purpose, to believe that she can “shatter the glass ceiling once and for all.”
And sending Huckabee – Mike Huckabee as an ambassador to tell women that there’s a PLACE for us with the Republicans is probably the MOST LAUGHABLE THING I have heard all week. This is a man who signed a 1998 FULL PAGE USA Today Ad advocating that a wife “submit herself graciously to the servant leadership of her husband even as the church willingly submits to the headship of Christ.”
This is the man who pardoned a rapist during his term as governor because he felt the man was put away for “political” reasons. This was despite NUMEROUS letters from the women(sluts) he had raped, including one of Clinton’s cousins(democrat sluts less deserving of justice). This rapist then went on to RAPE AND MURDER TWO MORE WOMEN. I wonder what kind of judgment your god has in store for you Huckabee. And yet, he has the gall to try and appeal to us (The article on this circus is here.):
“Sarah Palin is a pleasant surprise for those of us who had hoped that Senator McCain would pick a principled and authentic conservative pro-life leader,” former presidential candidate Mike Huckabee said.
Huckabee also used the Palin pick to reach out to women.
“Governor Palin … will remind women that if they are not welcome on the Democrat’s ticket, they have a place with Republicans,” he said.
Pleasant surprise… so lukewarm! Kind of makes me snicker to think how he must feel about a woman being appointed over an oh so godly man like him. Lovely invitation but I won’t be accepting, as I’m not interested in fulfilling your vision of woman as faithful servant to husband and fetus incubator, only for you to want to trot me out when convenient. Don’t try to sell me on a candidate who thinks the antidote to sexism is “work harder, don’t say anything”. (PLEASE say this to the women working at Wal-Mart with a straight face.)
I really like the way Melissa McEwan put it at Shakesville:
You know, there are a lot of reasons I’m feeling pissed about John McCain’s selection of Sarah Palin.
I’m pissed at the Dems because it feels like they let Clinton get beat to fuck against that glass ceiling until she was black and blue only for the fucking Republicans to make use of her sacrifice, while the Democrats gave us a total dipshit who made fun of his wife being educated in his acceptance speech.
And I’m pissed at the GOP who, chief among them John McCain, have made patently clear while going after Obama that the experience threshold for a national ticket is beyond what he has, and that said threshold is non-negotiable, but nonetheless chose someone who failed to pass that threshold, ergo heavily suggesting that Palin is merely a token.
And I’m pissed at everyone who’s using the nomination of a woman to a national ticket to unleash yet another torrent of misogyny, whether to demean or to “honor” her.
But mostly I’m pissed that John McCain and Karl Rove and the GOP shat all over a historic moment in our nation’s history and couldn’t give Obama one. goddamn. day. to be rightfully celebrated as a candidate of national historical significance. Everyone should be talking about that speech today. Everyone should be contemplating what it means to have that barrier broken, should be thinking about fucking bookends.
Edited to add: Some of this may be construed as an attack on Palin herself. Don’t mean to characterize her as a mindless borg, but I do think that the men of the Republican party are using her for a very specific purpose.
Other posts I really enjoyed on the matter:
McCain Chose Palin?! >> Karnythia at The Angry Black Woman
Colluder of the Week: Sara Palin >> Renee at Womanist Musings
Firedoglake: Sarah Palin Broke the Law to advocate the defeat of environmental initiatives.
Jump off the Bridge: My Problem with Palin
Aug
28
Dear Steve – Get a Life
Filed Under Feminism | Leave a Comment
Coming home from work is always so entertaining, being I get to listen to the ultimate amateur in talk radio, and a premier conservative misogynist, Steve Malzberg. I may not agree with Sean Hannity or Rush Limbaugh, but at the very least they’re “good” at what they do.
Today (August 25th) Steve was harping on Gwen Ifill and Michelle Obama. Basically, half his show consists of tearing apart any woman with an independent thought in her head. He didn’t like Gwen Ifill’s assessment of the American people’s reaction to Michelle Obama… his first response? “Get a life.” Oh so articulate!
I’d love a count of how many times he calls Andrea Mitchell, one of the premier news correspondents, MRS. GREENSPAN on his show – it really pisses him off that Andrea Mitchell is “too feminist” to take her husband’s name. Because goddess forbid she or any woman actually have an identity apart from their husband… Dear Steve: the adoption of a man’s name upon marriage is not a woman’s biological imperative. Fuck off.
Today he was trying to drive home the point to misogynists everywhere that Michelle Obama is NOT your “average mother” or your “average housewife.” Because apparently these “average” women would never dare to criticize America, nor would they dare, especially if they are BLACK women to have an opinion on race. Seriously… I want to know, WTF is he implying when he says this shit? What is your “average mother” or your “average housewife”?
I’m never quite sure what these people think we’re supposed to do in terms of change. She criticized America, therefore she’s NOT A PATRIOT!!! It matters little to me whether she is or not. What matters to me is someone who sees the issues and resolves to face them, to change them. The idea that we’re supposed to shut up and sit down isn’t patriotism. I suppose this is the problem. They are so out of touch that they don’t feel there’s ANY need for change. There’s no racism, there’s no sexism. There’s no need to alleviate poverty. Things are just fine. Now give me my SUV!
Anyway… Listening to good old Steve reminded me of a recent post of Twisty’s over at I Blame the Patriarchy about NPR’s coverage of the ever so pressing topic of the fashion of the First Ladies. I shall quote it here:
Is it sexist to analyze firstladyal fashion? Not at all, says Jackie Kennedy’s stylist. Their husbands are men of action in blue-suit-red-tie uniforms, but first ladies are symbols.
Of what? Of male dominance. Of the nuclear family, of the dutiful wife, of the absolute necessity of womanly beauty practices, of the unquestionable heterosexuality of the president. First ladies must exude, in perfect balance, femininity, self-sacrifice, motherhood, a gentle, quiet respectability, and the notion that they are fairly intelligent, but not more intelligent than the president. They do this, not just by looking the other way when their husbands can’t keep it in their pants, but by selecting their fashion designers and plucking their eyebrows with utmost care. For presidential spouses, dressing symbolically is both a science and an art. It’s “walking the fashion tightrope,” says NPR.
What the NPR non-story neglected to mention is that, while first ladies get more news coverage, the fashion tightrope is not their exclusive purview. All women are symbols who are expected to prop up patriarchal myths by exuding perfect balances of impossible, degrading, bogus constructs.
Meanwhile, men are free to roam the countryside, without shaving their legs or contemplating the social implications of the plunge of their necklines, doing stuff.
Hate to break it to you people, but Jackie did a lot more interesting things than look pretty.
Aug
27
SOMEONE ACTUALLY SAID IT OUTRIGHT
Filed Under General | Leave a Comment
My jaw dropped.
Deval Patrick’s DNC speech -
The poor are in terrible shape. But the middle class are one paycheck away, one serious illness away from being poor.
I see this attitude a lot. It’s like, the poor are poor and that sucks but they’ll always be poor, and obviously if they’re poor they deserve it, oh well! But now the middle class are impacted, and that’s a real issue! The middle class don’t deserve to be poor, now we need to fix things!
ETA: The transcript of the speech has him saying “and.” So while it wasn’t intentional, I think it a pretty appropriate slip!
Aug
25
Been slowwwwwwwwwly reading my way through Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky, a compilation of talks Noam Chomsky has given and came across this today…. feel like it really pertains to my last post:
Look, there isn’t any true capitalist society in the world, it couldn’t survive for ten minutes, but there are variations on capitalism, and the U.S. is towards the capitalist end of the world spectrum – not very far towards it, I should say, but towards it at least in values. And if you had a truly capitalist society, everything would be a commodity, including freedom: there would be as much of it as you can buy. Well, since the U.S. is towards that end of the spectrum, it means there’s an awful lot of freedom around if you can afford it. So, if you’re a black organizer in the ghetto, you don’t have much of it, and you’re in trouble – they can send the Chicago police in to murder you, like they did with Fred Hampton [a Black Panther assassinated by the F.B.I. in 1969]. But if you’re a white professional like me, you can buy a lot of freedom.
Aug
21
….and covering all sorts of things that don’t qualify as news there are things going on in the country that actually need to be covered!! Perhaps to some people this is an obvious statement. Isn’t one of the pillars of democracy a thriving, independent media?
I do tend to live under a rock, but I’m betting this wasn’t covered because everyone was too busy having fits about Britney’s parenting skills. (None of this is a knock on Spears – not interested in helping drag yet another woman through the mud.) A Los Angeles community farm was destroyed in 2006 for the purpose of a warehouse for the clothing store Forever 21. Again, thanks to my feed, from brownfemipower. (I feel like I should just put together a feed of my favorite blogs in place of my own blog, because I consistently just want to link every entry I read and say LOOK HERE!!!)
The fight for the land is still on, but the farm is gone. Apparently the Mayor of LA had championed it during his bid for election, but is now staying suspiciously quiet thanks to 1.3 million in donations from the Forever 21 camp. Hmmmm….. Gotta love democracy.
Original brownfemipower entry with lots of links and comments that make me tingle.
The South Central Farm website – information and opportunity to donate.
An extensive article about how the deal went down.
The Documentary – The Garden
A look at Forever 21’s record, quoted from South Central Community Farm: Not dead yet by Tom Philpott –
When developer Ralph Horowitz bulldozed South Central Community Farm in 2006, rumors swirled that the site would be converted into a vast warehouse for Wal-Mart. But now Forever 21 — a clothing chain noted for its flimsy clothes, its past abuses of immigrant workers [PDF] in L.A.’s sweatshop district, its blatant knockoffs of haute fashion, and the fervent Christianity of its owners (John 3:16, anyone?) — wants to lay down roots on the former farm site.
…
The L.A. Times piece doesn’t mention it, but Forever 21 got tangled up in a sweatshop scandal in the first half of this decade. While other scandal-plagued brands like Nike and Gap were caught abusing workers in places like Honduras, brazen Forever 21 was doing it right in downtown Los Angeles. In 2001, 19 workers, who worked at sweatshops spread throughout L.A., sued the company for abuse. (The number of plaintiffs later grew to 33.) Here’s what they charged (PDF):
Sub-minimum wages
No overtime
Worked 10-12 hours per day
Worked Saturdays and Sundays
Had to take work home
Dirty, unsafe factories with rats and cockroaches
No potable water
No health insurance
Fired for asking for small wage increases or for asking for the minimum wageFor three years, Forever 21 denied the charges and refused to pay the hundreds of thousands the workers say they were owed in back pay. Instead, Forever 21 counter-sued the workers, charging them with defamation. The company held fast against a national boycott called to protest the sweatshop conditions. Finally, in 2004, Forever 21 settled with the workers for an undisclosed sum. (The struggle to force Forever 21 to comply with labor law is laid out in the 2007 PBS documentary “Made in L.A.“)
It’s odd to see Mayor Villaraigosa, who won office in 2005 amid much progressive hoopla, hop in bed with such a company. But hop in bed he has, the L.A. Times reports. Villaraigosa recently appointed Forever 21 Senior Vice President Christopher Lee to the city’s Industrial Development Authority. And get this:
Lee and Forever 21 founder Don Chang were two of several business leaders who accompanied Villaraigosa on his trade mission to Asia in 2006. Six months later, Forever 21 gave $100,000 to Villaraigosa’s successful campaign to elect three new school board members. In recent months, the company agreed to give $1 million to Villaraigosa’s Million Trees L.A. initiative, which encourages residents to plant more trees.
The company also gave $150,000 to Villaraigosa’s staging of the annual U.S. Conference of Mayors meeting in Century City last year, a donation so significant that Lee was given a speaking role at the event’s closing reception at the Griffith Park Observatory.
Forever 21 is threatening to leave L.A. altogether if it can’t plunk down a warehouse on the former farm site. The farmers, for their part, are urging the city to require an environmental-impact study before allowing Forever 21 to break ground on the warehouse. In place of a highly productive urban farm, they say, such a warehouse would bring in 2,400 daily exhaust-spewing truck trips to a neighborhood already choked with warehouses and semis.
Aug
17
Loooooooooooooove it….
Filed Under General | 2 Comments
Though I’ve been somewhat diligent about posting lately, I’ve been taking a long break from reading other blogs. Took a look at some of my feeds today and as usual, Brownfemipower is writing amazing stuff about why “private matters” are not just “private matters.” Also as usual, the comments are top notch.
An excerpt:
even more to the point–while young promising male congressional employees hobnob and network with other men to get to the or high power senator position, young promising women congressional employees are being manipulated and fucked with by dirty old man fuckwads. or they’re marrying dirty young man fuckwads in the hopes of helping their own careers.
and queer women of color are being thrown in prison for giving the police the finger. is it any wonder that cynthia mckinney had her run ins with the law? if a black woman can’t be fucked, what good is she/what the hell is she doing at the doors of Congress?
And my latest favorite picture -
Aug
16
Aperture 1.56 Gallery
Filed Under Photography | 2 Comments
I’ve been working my way through an Aperture lesson book (image organizing/light photo editing program) and didn’t think I could stand looking at and reading the dry text about sending one’s photos to scout “locations” with your “selects” for “a possible a job” one more time. Figured I’d liven up the web gallery lesson by using my own pictures and uploading to the site.
As easy as it was to get something decent looking, there doesn’t seem to be any way to mix vertical and horizontal images without getting ugly gaps on the index page. Unless I’m missing something, that’s an epic fail. And as usual, severe desaturation in Firefox!! Argh technology.
Some of the stuff has been uploaded before, some not. Had great success with some color saturation editing tonight and am pretty excited about it.
gwytherinn.com aperture gallery
Aug
13
Solace
Filed Under Photography | 2 Comments
Aug
9
Well. In the previous post I tried to weave a common thread through a bunch of things, but I’m not sure I really succeeded. I’m sick of this idea that freedom and democracy are about having the “choice” to own things like an SUV and about the “right” to consume an inordinate amount of the world’s resources while others pay for it in very serious ways. While narrowing access to birth control, weakening civil rights, and the torture and rape of men and women in overseas prisons isn’t a violation of any of this, as long as you can drive your choice of car and disturb places you have no business going. I feel like our idea of the concepts of freedom and choice, our rights, has become completely twisted, and I wanted to share one of the quotes that first directed me towards that line of thinking. (Favorite part bolded.)
I can only articulate my understanding of the laws that have survived and been bequeathed to me. I understand that the laws were obeyed not through armed force that was alienated from the people – such as the police, army, etc. – but rather because the people agreed with the laws. In fact, they formulated them in the best interests of the community.
Therefore I can understand democracy. The will of the people was sacred to our leaders. This is one of our strongest traditions. No Native person accepts his or her leader’s direction as a command. Conversely, only fools accept that a society that requires force to ensure proper social conduct is a democratic one. Without the voice of the trammelled and the dispossessed, democracy is but an echo in the canyons of the minds of lunatics.
I understand that my foremothers were an austere, disciplined people and were absolutely opposed to waste of any sort. Their standards of honesty were established by those people who contributed most to the well-being of the community and the nation as a whole. It was criminal to use another to enrich oneself; by this, I understand that exploitation of the land or people, in the interest of profit, was prohibited.
- I am Woman: A Native Perspective on Sociology and Feminism
Aug
1
Today a coworker alerted me to the latest development of Bush and the Christian Right’s bid to declare official ownership of my reproductive organs. Apparently they are considering a ruling that will classify birth control as abortion, making it more difficult to get.
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services is poised to put in place new barriers to accessing common forms of contraception like birth control pills, emergency contraception and IUDs by labeling them “abortion.” These proposed regulations set to be released next week will allow healthcare providers to refuse to provide contraception to women who need it.
…
These rules pose a serious threat to providers and uninsured and low-income Americans seeking care. They could prevent providers of federally-funded family planning services, like Medicaid and Title X, from guaranteeing their patients access to the full range of comprehensive family planning services. They’ll also build significant barriers to counseling, education, contraception and preventive health services for those who need it most: low-income and uninsured women and men.
I know it’s a general difficulty to grasp, but please consider that I’m a human being and not a walking fetus incubator. Another more technical post about it here – HHS Moves to Define Contraception as Abortion.
I’ve been encountering more of the “It’s my right to own an SUV” set lately when I listen to Sean Hannity’s show on the way home from work. They were lambasting Obama today because he was suggesting that – get this – people should take responsibility for the maintenance of their cars so they use less gas. Wait, what? Taking responsibility for something?? These people don’t seem to get the idea of responsibility unless they’re shoving it down someone else’s throat. (But then, apparently birth control isn’t good enough. Apologies for missing the patriarchal purity ball, but I’m not interested in abstinence.)
I love the continuous strain that runs through the show of how they (The radical environmentalists and radical left – don’t you know radical is a compliment?) are “taking away our freedoms.” They want to stop you from driving your SUVs! The environmental extremists won’t let us drill in ANWR!!! They’re stopping us from developing nuclear power!!!!! Speaking of ANWR, I found a lovely post the other day on the subject of drilling in ANWR.
Apparently their take on freedom is “I’m a well off white person and they’re not letting me consume as much as I want.” What it takes to maintain this standard of living and carry out these things is apparently inconsequential. That the planned storage site for nuclear waste is Yucca Mountain, Navajo ancestral lands? To be concerned about that would mean you’d have to think of someone other than yourself, and furthermore, people of color. Would also mean you’d have to stop being discriminatory towards Native American religious beliefs, but that’s not something we hear about in the news – especially with a “war on Christmas” to fight. ANWR Drilling would mean possibly destroying the Gwinich’in tribe’s way of life, as it is dependent upon the caribou and their migration patterns. According to the previous link, 229 tribes oppose ANWR drilling. (Shit, now I’m really being a hippy treehugger, huh?)
The Patriot Act, Guantanamo Bay (This had been a prison for Haitians with AIDs before its infamy – can be read about in Paul Farmer’s book Pathologies of Power.), and Abu Ghraib on the other hand, do not factor into these people’s definition of freedom. At least some of you can sleep better at night thinking that narrowing civil liberties and torturing/raping people will actually protect one’s way of life (As always, others rot for it and bear the brunt of it – but maybe not for long at this rate.) from terrorism. And while we can’t seem to get our dander up over the violation of these living people’s rights and freedoms we’ll count every (white) fetus that has been aborted (murdered!), whether through the procedure itself or goddess forbid – an egg does not get implanted on the uterine lining because of BIRTH CONTROL! (1. There is NO scientific proof of that. and 2. THAT’S THE POINT.)
Squawking about personal responsibility is just fine when you’re trying to force abstinence on women, scoffing at those who can’t get by on their Wal Mart minimum wage or demonizing immigrants. But when it comes to your damn SUV, your American right (freedom!) to guzzle gas, and a fine cocktail of ignorance and manifest destiny, step aside.
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