Hello lovely revolutionaries! Welcome to 2010! ObjectifyThis has recently relocated to New York, delaying posts on this blog in favor of searches for shelter, income, and long-lost friends.
However, I’ll be sure to get back atcha as soon as my schedule allows. I look forward to any semblance of monotony, believe me.
In the meantime, here’s an intense and haunting memorial to Emma Bee Bernstein, a feminist and photographer after Francesca Woodman’s troubled and troubling vision of the female.
Let’s celebrate her insight and her work while recognizing that, as her collaborator and friend Nona Ellis Aronowitz reminds us more than once, suicide is not romantic.
Emma and Nona waitressed and hostessed to afford a heady, two-month road trip across the U.S, speaking to women along the way about feminism and the roles that sex and gender play in their lives. The book of their writing and photography, GirlDrive, is an informed, Read more »
The argument (whose title is drawn from Mary Wollstonecraft’s venerable A Vindication of the Rights of Woman) is basically that to degrade a woman for her expression of her sexuality is not so different from degrading a woman for her sex. Part of granting women agency is granting them the ability to do things that other people think are tawdry or lewd.
It’s interesting to note that all of the commentators with their panties in a twist about Lena Chen’s lewdness are sitting at home at their computers, choosing to look at photos of Ms. Chen and then smacking themselves in the cheekbone. Read more »
Palin Doesn’t Convince the Pro-Life Movement, Either:
Stephanie Mencimer at Mother Jones reports that a Pro-life movement, the American Right to Life, believes that Palin is secretly pro-choice.
Dispute Over Repercussions of Health Care Reform Act?
At the NPR health blog Shots, Julie Rovner explains that neither abortion rights groups nor anti-abortion groups believe that HR3962 will work for their aims. Abortion rights groups believe it is a huge step backwards, while anti-abortion groups believe that women can buy extra coverage or pay out of pocket for their abortions, so their rights are not lost.
Andrea Seabrook Breaks Down the Language of the Stupak Amendment on All Things Considered here. Ah, clarity! She says, “If you get your health insurance through your state, as in Medicaid, your state could buy supplemental abortion coverage for everyone it insures. And 17 Read more »
Last week, the long-awaited passage of health care reform came at a hefty cost. Bart Stupak’s amendment to HR 3962 prevents women receiving federal subsidies from buying health insurance that covers abortion.
Sometimes, the left wing doesn’t know what the right wing is doing.
Unfortunately, the long-awaited passage of health care reform leaves us with little to crow about. Bart Stupak’s amendment to prevent anyone receiving a federal subsidy from buying a health insurance plan that covers abortions is a shocking attack on women on welfare.
What’s also appalling is the strength of the case that the pro-life movement is an anti-modern-woman movement, inasmuch as the modern woman can be expected to work or have her own life outside of caring for her children.
Here’s an example: until recently, I believed that the pro-life movement wanted to preserve unborn fetuses at all costs. I was, I thought, as in-the-know as I’d ever be.
A discussion in the wake of Kevin Drum’s recent post about abortion politics over on Mother Jones has taught me otherwise. Read more »
The following is John Pilger’s acceptance speech for the Sydney Peace Prize. It comes to you courtesy of Zcom, where the verbose, informed radicals hang out.
“Thank you all for coming tonight, and my thanks to the City of Sydney and especially to the Sydney Peace Foundation for awarding me the Peace Prize. It’s an honour I cherish, because it comes from where I come from.
I am a seventh generation Australian. My great-great grandfather landed not far from here, on November 8th, 1821. He wore leg irons, each weighing four pounds. His name was Francis McCarty. He was an Irishman, convicted of the crime of insurrection and “uttering unlawful oaths.” In October of the same year, an 18 year old girl called Mary Palmer stood in the dock at Middlesex Gaol and was sentenced to be transported to New South Wales for the term of her natural life. Her crime was stealing in order to live. Only the fact that she was pregnant saved her from the gallows. She was my great-great grandmother. She was sent from the ship to the Female Factory at Parramatta, a notorious prison where every third Monday, male convicts were brought for a “courting day”—a rather desperate Read more »
Who defends women in the Department of Defense? Not Republican senators, apparently.
When Al Franken brought forward legislation to combat the horrifically hostile and sexually abusive environment found in the Department of Defense and amongst its contractors on October 6th, a block of thirty white men rose up in opposition.
It’s worthy of note that “two-thirds of female service members experience unwanted, uninvited sexual behavior in the military,” according to Terri Spahr Nelson’s book For Love of Country: Confronting Rape and Sexual Harassment in the U.S. Military, discussed further in this post, Jane Doe.
While women in the military are often college-aged, there is a completely separate standard of sexual respect in colleges. This legal distinction between the sexual rights of young women working for the Department of Defense and young women who can afford to pay for schooling implies a class-based Read more »
Christopher Hedges extemporized about his new book, The End of Literacy and The Triumph of Spectacle, when he stopped in Berkeley, CA on his tour last summer. But his take on the spectacular is not without some convoluted ironies.
First, I feel that I should disclose that I have not read his book. In that light, my attendence of his lecture and subsequent criticism could be construed as just the sort of illiteracy and subsequent enjoyment of the spectacular that he decries so often.
Like Hedges, I am appalled that real, informed, Read more »
Yes, the Yes Men are awesome. Yes, they are fixing the world, or at least promoting a movie about it.They’re committed to demonstrating that corporations’ dignity is not as important as human dignity.
So is Reverend Billy and the Church of Life After Shopping, who are concerned with helping us all look past capitalism and into the political issues in our communities — with a large spoonful of theater and a psuedo-Evangelist spirit. Reverend Billy is also the Green Party candidate for mayor of New York, running against Bloomberg and his henchmen.
Working Girls and Johns share their perspectives on sex work through two linked projects by British journalist and blogger Susannah Breslin. Their human perspectives help to illustrate why legalizing prostitution might do some good.
On Porn:
This Recording discusses how women are changing the sex industry from inside.At The Rumpus, Katie Ryder comments on the dissonance between sex positivity and psuedo-violent porn.
This video, featuring Dr. John D. Clarke, won the Center for Disease Control (CDC)’s contest and will air as their public service announcement about avoiding H1N1, the swine flu virus. Unlike Dr. Dre, Dr. Clarke has a medical degree, and unlike Jay-Z, his PSA is not about being “CEO of the ROC”. He’s been spitting”health hop,” as he calls his brand of conscious hip-hop, since 1997. For more about Dr. Clarke, read this article from NPR. Enjoy.
The New York Timesreportsthat a recent study shows that women’s shoes hurt their feet.
Women mostly have sex because “it feels good,” according to a new study reviewedon Salon.com by Tracy Clark-Flory.
Also, the only sexual assault prevention tips guaranteed to work are those given to rapists, according to Lynn Harris, also at Salon.
She’s right that the majority of anti-rape education is aimed at women, while those who are actually responsible for the rape are generally men. Judging from that scary (but hopefully dated?) statistic at the top of the “Rape Index” post—the one that stated that 35% of college men would rape someone if they wouldn’t be caught, as of December, 1984—there needs to be some more education in that direction.
Trigger warning:This post contains references to rape.
Anyone who reads feminist blogs has come across “trigger warnings” before graphic images or descriptions of rape or violence to women.
The intent of a trigger warning is to advertise the potentially emotionally triggering content of a piece, which might revive memories of rape or sexual assault for survivors.
Survivors of sexual assault are especially sensitive to such images because they are traumatized, and like other traumatized people, this may affect their whole world-view. Some survivors experience post-traumatic stress disorder.
My work and acquaintance with survivors of sexual assault has taught me that the world can be a fairly triggering place — and for good reason: rape is more frequent than most of us would like to think. Although figures are difficult to pin down, the less disputed number is 13% of American women. While men are also raped, this Read more »
In the words of Harper’s Magazineeditor Roger Hodge,the magazine’s monthly Index is “a statistical poem.” He presumeably meant that it allows the reader to experience it and come to his or her own conclusions.
Today, instead of explaining a position, I offer a ‘statistical poem’ about rape. Each statistic is preceeded by the month and year that it ran in Harper’s. Find sources here.
12/84–Percentage of college men who say they might commit rape if there were no chance of being caught: 35
Link
3/85—Percentage of married women in the United States who say they have been raped by their husbands: 14
States in which marital rape is not a crime: 27
1/86—Percentage of female college students who say they have been raped: 16
Professor Mary Koss (Kent State University)
Percentage of those who say the rapist was someone they were dating: 57 Read more »
If there was a takeaway message from Sarah Palin’s abominable performances on 60 Minutes with Katie Couric, it seems to have been: do not answer her questions.
In the clip after the jump, Glenn Beck refuses to explain what he means by ‘white culture,’ if what he’s talking about is spelled that way and not White Culture or White Kkkulture. I mean, what’s so secret that you can’t talk about it on national TV? I have some guesses: racism or smug racism.
In his sidling around the question, Beck bluffs: “George Bush says, uh, my grandmother, was a typical African-American, that had, uh, that had, uh, her views bred into her. . .”
It’s all there, in the word “bred,” as he leans across the camera and makes eye contact with Couric beyond it. We do not breed citizens; we breed animals or slaves. George Bush did not have a black grandmother; Obama had a black grandmother. It seems that Beck is stating that slavery has such a profound effect on the African-American people that it devalues their grandmothers’ viewpoints to this day. And thus devalues Obama? Here we ignore the facts, as Read more »
