Ug ug ug. Today is just shitty all around. I can't believe how much the upsetting news of all of my friends is upsetting me. I can't tell if it's empathetic or self-centered to say that, either, which just makes me feel vaguely shitty about myself.

And I got not enough sleep last night, so I am crabby and tired. For the first time, I'm not looking forward to Regulation of Gender this afternoon.

I'm bailing on the doggie training class on Thursday in order to volunteer at a Stop Domestic Violence event. I have on idea if the event (which includes a performance by Lisa Loeb, a short film and a speaker) will be any good at all, but I told myself I was going to get more involved in actual feminist activities here, and by God I am.

For all that's worth.

Love your body day:

I love my body because my skin and hair feel nice to my touch
I love my body because it allows me to adequately enjoy baths
I love my body because it allows me to see, to hear, to smell, to touch
I love my body because of the way it feels to stretch out in bed in the morning
I love my body because it is a vessel through which I can play with my dog
I love my body because it gives me sexual feeling
I love my body because it has round parts and narrow parts and identifies me as female
I love my body because I am a fast typist
I love my body because of the ultra-comfortable feeling I get after a great meal or a couple of beers
I love my body because it can dance and sing, not well, but joyfully.

Why do you love your body?

I walked Chance into an amazing golden sunrise this morning. It almost made being up at 7:30 when I don't have class until 2 worth it. Almost.

I have a stupid group project meeting at the massively inconvenient hour of 9am this morning. Then I'm coming back here and working (read: coming back here and taking a nap) before 2 o'clock class.

So far, having my schedule split into work week and school week seems to take a lot of pressure off.

I am trying to decide if I want to submit a paper/which paper I want to submit to the Women's Studies Colloquium thing. I am tempted to submit an abstract of the paper I am going to write for PD on HPV, since I would like to get more into women's health policy work, and presenting some would be good for the resume. However, I feel weird about signing up to present a paper I haven't written yet. Hrm...The deadline for abstracts is Nov. 14, so the chances of me writing it before then are pretty low, too.

Still, I think that's what I will do.

I am going to try to have grits for breakfast. We'll see how that goes.

I'm done with the Warbird, the Ms. boards are becoming a less and less friendly space...I'm thinking maybe it's time to start some boards of my own. Susan says she's interested, so we're going to talk about it tonight (we are going to see Kill Bill). I am trepidatious--what if nobody wants to post on my boards? What if moderating is really hard and puts me in horrible positions all the time? I am not just looking for a place to house my clique, you know? I really want to find a place where women can meet and talk and support and discuss and yeah, even argue, without completely disrespecting each other and treating each other like dogshit. I want a community, the kind that I keep trying to make out of Ms. with damn poor results.

Is it even possible? If I post about this on Ms., how many of the people from there will come over and hang out? Is there a way to make it easy to use/user friendly? I know I can use Ezboards, but I really dislike that format. I'd much rather have something that looks more like Ms. or like the Warbird. Is that expensive? It can't be that expensive, since Rich can apparently afford it. But does it take a ton of technical know-how? I have next to none. I know Susan (and especially Tony) have some...

I don't know why this is so important to me, but it is. I really want this space to exisit, and it has become more and more apparent that's only going to happen if I get off my ass and do something to create it.

A new feminist community for anyone who is interested: The Phoenix. Please come on over and join us!

So far I can't believe how well it's going. Only a bit over 24 hours and there are over 50 registered members already and everyone is talking, and behaving civilly. A lot of my favorite Ms. posters are there, and a whole swarm of people I'd like to get to know better are there as well. There are a few more people (well, lots, really) that I am hoping I can convince to come on over as well.

THings are good.

Update your blog, she says. So update my blog I will.

School is just kicking my ass. There is no other way to put it. Suddenly I have rounded the corner from happily overwelmed to freakily overwelmed, and I am not enjoying it. If I could just get a good day's work done I know I'd feel much better, but I am so tired and so distractable...it's not happening. I work for a little while, then I check my email, read The Phoenix, see if anyone needs to be authorized, pet the dog, get some cookies...it's ridicluous.

To be fair, though, I did crank out a PFM memo in fairly short order this morning. I have no idea if it is any good or not (my guess is no), but it is one more thing I can cross off my list. If I have time to go back later and edit it, all the better. If not, so be it. I have other stuff to do.

The Phoenix is rocking and rolling with 75 members and over 700 posts in the past 3 1/2 days. I feel a sense of accomplishment, which is nice. Unfortunately, I am letting it keep me from stuff I really should be focusing on, like my fucking econ midterm. Oh well.

The weather here has turned a little chilly and windy, as if it's really fall. As long as it doesn't last too long, I'm all for it. The trouble is that it feeds right into my urge to curl up in the papasan and read, not do the work I need to get done. Esh. Are you sensing a theme, here?

I did school Day of Service volunteer stuff yesterday. It was pretty much a waste of time. My group was assigned to paint this multimedia room at Johnston HS, which would have been cool, except the guy in charge of the project was in no way ready. He didn't have neccessary supplies, the room wasn't cleaned, blah blah. It was a hassle. I stuck it out for almost three hours, but then I bailed. I got a pretty cool bright green tshirt out of the deal, though. Next time I will follow my gut instincts and go for the library book-sorting project. :)

OK. Back to work. I swear.

Finally, some progress on my paper. I'm halfway through page 7 and things are moving along much more smoothly. Thank God.

Getting into all this HPV stuff pisses me off to no end. I wrote an impassioned thing on The Phoenix about my HPV experiences the other day, and it drew very few responses. It doesn't seem to be much of a resonating feminist issue. Makes me wonder if it's really all that important, or if I just think it's important because it has affected me personally?

I do think it's important, though. Something about millions of women trooping dutifully in every year to have Pap smears when they have no fucking clue what they are being tested for rubs me the wrong way. It seems unethical. Don't people have the right to know what the fuck they are being tested for? Or do only men have that right?

The reasons for not making the connection more explicit make some sense, but they all come down to stigma against female sexuality. Unlike breast cancer or endometrial cancer or whatever else, cervical cancer isn't a "blameless" disease. You got it from sex. No, you didn't necessarily h ave to have multiple partners or even have gone unprotected, but the bottom line is that saying a woman has cervical cancer is saying she has fucked, and nobody wants to admit that women fuck. It is supposed to be burnt or frozen off quietly and not mentioned, rather than talked about, because while cancer makes you a martyr, sexually transmitted infections make you a whore.

So what happens when the two collide? Lots of lying and looking the other way, apparently.

I'm not sure the paper is going to be any good, policy-wise. At least not in this incarnation. Hopefully I can have it whipped into shape for either or both of the conferences, though, if either of them accept me.

I'm increasingly interested in lesbian health issues. Again, the whole idea of stigma and misinformation. Hopefully I can get further into that in the future.

A lot of people think that public education campaigns are "soft" policy. What do you think?

Having given some more thought to my Bennifer Breakup Disappointment, I think it is about fairy tales. In my adult life, Hollywood suffices for fairy tales, make believe, too much of the time. And given that it's supposed to be "too good to be true" it is sad that the relationships never work out. So when a couple for whom I actually have some positive feeling breaks up, it makes me question whether or not I believe in fairy tales.

If that makes any sense, which, now that I write it down, it doesn't.

To further humiliate myself, I will admit that I hope Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston are very happy as well.

Moving on, today was a really good day. It was rainy and gray and my head hurts a lot still, but it was still really nice. Hung out at home, had an excellent and ass-kicking workout--all in all, good stuff.

I think it is going to be possible for me to go to Washington in April for the March for Choice, which makes me really happy. I knew I wanted to go, but I didn't think it would be fiscally possible. The North Texas PP, however, is giving scholarships to full-time students so we can go for only $75, and that pays for airfare and two nights in a hotel. SWEET!! So as long as my application gets there before all the slots are full, which it should, I think, I should be in. So all I have to figure out is how to get from here to Dallas and back for the flight (and I'm sure there will be carpools for that). So that's exciting. I think it will be a really re-energizing feminist experience. Or at least I'm hoping so, because I could really fucking use one of those sometime soon.

The Phoenix really does drain me. I really want it to realize its full potential, but my hope of that actually happening gets slimmer with every ridiculous in-fight. And nobody is immune, you know? It's not just people I don't like who are tempted to get in their jabs, is folks I really do like as well (and I'm certainly not above a low blow or two myself, to be fair in taking my part of the blame). I don't know why we like to shit on each other, but for some reason we do, and that really disturbs me. Is it just that this is how women in our society are taught to treat each other? Is this what happens in all frustrated progressive circles (I'm thinking of the New Left infighting now, or the gender problems and other problems in the Civil Rights Movement)? Or is it a problem with online communication in general, and none of us would do this in real life? I don't know what to blame it on, but I know it exhausts and depresses me, and some days, like today, I feel better if I just stay away (which is an abdication of responsibility that makes me feel guilty, but whatever, you can't win 'em all).

I'm beginning to worry myself a little bit with the diet/weight loss thing. I don't want to be turning into a calorie counter who sucks the joy out of food, you know? It shouldn't be a point of personal pride to me that I am down 9 pounds, because those are just numbers on a scale, and it shouldn't be a point of pride either that I burned 1000 more calories than I consumed today. I should be focusing on how I feel (which is actually pretty damn good, but I think that is due almost entirely to working out and has very little to do with food restriction), not what my numbers are. But it is harder every day to divorce my feelings from the numbers, and I think more and more about how I can get the numbers lower, what foods I can sneak out (for instance, it's amazing what limiting all beverages to water or tea will do for your calorie count)...I don't know. It seems unhealthy to me even from my internal vantage point, so I can't imagine it looks good to others.

And the bottom line is that yeah, I want to be in better shape and not have back problems like my mom and all that, but basically I'm fucking vain and I don't want to be fat. This all boils down to me not wanting to be fat. And that makes me feel like ass. So what if I am fat? Why should that matter to me? Why is my self-worth so connected to my body? Haven't I learned anything?

Apparently not.

But the chances I am going to quit thinking about it that way seem slim, so I just have to moderate myself as much as I can. Focus as much as possible on excercise and as little as possible on calories. And I have to promise myself that when I reach the goal weight, or when I reach the deadline, whichever comes first, then I am going to STOP counting calories. Because I am so fucking obsessive about entering every mouthful in to the website, and I know that can be a bad behavior.

Really I'm not worried about developing an eating disorder or anything dramatic like that. Rather, I just don't want to get any more fucking vain and self-indulgent.

Funny that I am blogging about not wanting to be so self-indulgent! As if this blog is ANYTHING but self-indulgence...

Something unpredecented and unpleasant happened to me this afternoon.

I was walking from the parking lot towards the building where I had class. My school is next door to a presidential library that has a big, if strange exhibition ending today, on President's Day, so there were people all over. It took me like 20 minutes to find a place to park.

Anyway, I was walking along, wearing baggy jeans and a semi-fitted t-shirt with no bra. This is a pretty standard school day uniform for me. Yes, I should probably wear a bra. But I don't like wearing a bra, so if there is any way I can avoid it, I do. Suddenly, someone leaned out the window of a passing car and yelled "boingy boingy boing! Nice tits, bitch!"

What, you ask, is so unprecedented about that? Street harassment is something I complain about all the time, though I have noticed it happens far less here than it did at home.

The individual leaning out the window and yelling at me was unmistakably a woman.

I've been called every derogatory name in the book, had all of my body parts complimented or criticized, been propositioned at least 100 ways, all from passing cars. But I've NEVER been yelled at by a woman before. And it's SO much worse.

When I first started reading the Ms. Magazine message boards (three years ago? Four?), it was with a mixture of awe and disgust. Some of what I saw going on there was amazing, awe-inspiring--it was online feminism, women connecting with one another with no regard for the boundaries of race or age or nationality or physical proximity. It was wonderful. Usually, the disgust followed the awe pretty closely, though, because the nasty undercurrent was there from the beginning. However, I was so enraptured by what I was seeing that my initial skepticism wore off and after awhile I felt like a real member of the community. I put my shyness and feelings of inadequacy aside and I jumped in and started posting.

I was an active member there for two and a half years, and much as I hate to say this, much as I know it makes me sound like a Republican pundit on TV talking about the decline of family values in America, I watched it decline. What had been a pervasive but generally ignorable undertone of racism, misogyny, and joy in the pain of other women when I started out became something much darker, and it clouded the waters over and over again. Every time there was clarity or a brief reprieve, I hoped that my community was on the way back up, and every time I was disappointed.

I could spend thousands and thousands of words giving examples of the horrible things that went down at Ms., but I'll limit myself for your sake as well as my own. Basically, a small group of women calling themselves "radical feminists" made their presence known in nearly every thread, and they made it known in the most hurtful and vile of ways possible. There are only half a dozen to a dozen of these women there, but they have for years now spewed hatred with a consistency and determination that would be laudable if it were dedicated to actual feminist activity. Lowlights include various racist and anti-Semitic comments, horrible class bias, and intolerance bordering on hatred of women with non-lesbian sexualities, but the worst thing was always the general nastiness pointed towards posters who had been deemed "non-radical" and apparently not fit for human form. Examples of this include telling a board member the world would be better of if she committed suicide, referring to mothers on the board as "breeders" and worse, questioning not only the feminism, but the humanity of nearly every post some of us made for months. There is no way I can count the number of times one of the few women in this destructive pod wrote something to me that had me in tears, and I don't cry easily. And I am not alone, either. I am one among dozens of women who were routinely abused in exactly this fashion in what they had come to depend upon as their community online.

After months of attempting to fight this and seeing more and more of the posters I really respected wisely jump from the boards like they were a sinking ship, in October of last year I finally gave up, left, and started The Phoenix. The Phoenix has been wonderful for these past months, providing me and a lot of other women with a safe feminist space. It doesn't and probably never will have half the traffic Ms. did, so it suffers from a greater skewing in age, race, nationality, etc. that I regret and want to try to fix, but the environment there is almost wholly positive and I am proud to have created it.

Since I left, things at Ms. seem only to have gotten worse. I have lurked there from time to time but haven't posted much if it all. The moderation was always spotty--sometimes there daily, sometimes no presence for weeks, etc.--but it seems to have worsened considerably, including the bannings of some wonderful long-time posters for infractions that were retaliatory, at worst. Having lost contact with some of these women, I truly hope that they have found better communities elsewhere. The moderators have also persistently refused to hear complaints about the core group of so-called "radical feminists" who have caused all of these problems.

Recently, the situation escalated in a way I wouldn't have thought possible. A long-time board poster committed suicide, and board members turned this tragedy into one more excuse for in-fighting, back-stabbing and brutality towards one another. My level of disgust now is as high as it was when I left, even after having six months to cool down. This is NOT a feminist space. It is quite simply a catfight. If the patriarchy had planned it themselves they couldn't have done it any better--it's women as women's worst enemy, and when we're all busy destroying each other, who is left to destroy them?

For these past months, I've had this back-of-my-mind hope that the place would return to the mostly-good state in which I found it years ago, and that all of us who abandoned ship could go back and rebuild it. But that's not going to happen. What could be a locus of hope, communication, strength, activism and friendship for women from all walks of life, worldwide, is nothing more than a mud pit, where women go to beat up on each other, sling filth at one another, and generally participate in the destruction of their own sex, all for the pleasure of what I really hope is an imaginary audience. But what if it's not? These boards are open, and the women there are happy to give any lurkers all the inside help they need in defeating a feminist movement that still--perhaps now more than ever--desperately needs all of our strength.

This is the part where I'm supposed to say what I have learned from all this and how it's made me a better person, but I'm honestly not sure it has. Because of the creation of The Phoenix, and because of the excellent friends I've made through Ms., I do feel as if something good has come out of it, but as far as my growth as a feminist, I suspect my participation there has been counterproductive. I used to trust other women more than I do now. I used to like other women more than I do now. And I want my old self back.

In a few minutes, I am on my way to a town hall meeting to discuss sexism in the community in my school. I am quite sure that more than two but probably less than four people will have the nerve to say that they don't see sexism as a problem. And that may well be the easier part of the discussion. So stay tuned, I should be back to rant about how I hate my school and my species in about an hour and a half...

(Title courtesy of Ani.)

**Warning: This post will most likely contain many, many curses.**

Wow. That was a collosal waste of time and increase in blood pressure. Fuck this place, anyway. It's impossible to even get folks here to agree that sexism might ben an itty-bitty problem, much less talk about actual solutions or real ways to move forward. We sat there for an hour and people talked about sensitivity, they talked about what life is like in the "real world," they talked about how it hurts "learning moments" and conversation to use -isms. They talked about victimization and who has the responsibility to speak up. One woman (this has to be my favorite part) actually made some obviously very well thought-out claims about how men and women just think and communicate differently, and it's nobody's fault, we just need to learn to understand each other's styles.

They talked about just about everything except for the real problem. And I can't say I helped things much. I'm not comfortable here, I'm not going to get comfortable here, and honestly I find it really difficult to muster up much caring at all about what an old-boy's-club hellhole this place has really turned out to be. I'm just waiting, putting in my time, getting through my recs, and then I will get the hell out of here. Out into that mythical "real world" where I am assured things will be so much worse.

The next person who trys to talk to me about the real world as if I've never been a part of it is going to get a big smack in the face. I'm not even kidding. Could you be any more fucking condescending? I don't need you to tell me about the real world, Mr. Dean--let me tell you about my real world. In my real world, I have to put serious thought into what I wear to school or work every day, lest I be misjudged in my intentions due to my clothes. In my real world, I get to sit through disparagements of my gender, subtle and overt, multiple times a day. Every day. In my real world I can't walk outside alone at night, I drive with my doors locked, and I regularly have nightmares about being raped. To be more school-centered, my real world includes an impossible class schedule juggle to try to get classes with female professors. It includes having to find classes outside of my program that focus on gender because there are so few of them here. And above all, today, my real world is comprised of sitting fairly still, with a near smile, for over an hour while people surrounding me belittled what has been the only serious attempt I have seen here to deal with sexism. My real world sucks at the moment, thanks.

On today's edition of "what not to read with breakfast":
A slew of emails from "progressive" men telling women how they should be dealing with sexism. My favorite bit? One man thinks that the thing standing in the way of putting institutional mechanisms in place to deal with sexism is APATHY.

Yep, you heard it here first, folks. I am not a victim of discrimination because I'm too ugly/pretty, tall/short, fat/thin, smart/dumb, or just because I'm too damn female. I'm a victim of sexist discrimination because I am APATHETIC!! If only I cared enough to do something about it, the world would surely change.

This is the list of celebrities supporting the March for Women's Lives in a couple of weeks. Gives me an idea of some folks I may be supporting who I wouldn't have expected. Cindy Crawford? Ed Asner?

My elation is wearing into exhaustion at this point, but nothing has ever been so worth it.

I think the March for Women's Lives may well have been the most amazing thing I've ever seen. Right up there, anyway. I'm trying to decide where it falls on the continuum, and it's definitely in the first-Ani-concert/Renn Faire (which is NOT a Renaissance Faire) area. A million people (or 800,000, or whomever's estimate you want to believe), most of them women, marching on the capitol to demand what is rightfully ours. All smiling, singing, shouting, waiving signs and flags. I can't imagine another time when I will be able to see so much beauty and so much hope in one place.

It really reminded me of a part of my politics (and my life, really) that has gotten away from me lately--hope. One of the pre-march speakers used that Che quote about optimism being the weapon of the revolution, and I remembered how I used to believe that. And then, looking around me, I really felt like it was true again. We may be under the harshest regime this country has seen in decades, atrocities might be committed falsely in our names both at home and abroad, but we are not cowering and we will not give up.

I really am exhausted, and in theory I am supposed to perform some odd ritual known as "homework" tonight, so I'm going to leave this here. More reflections tomorrow, hopefully. To close, though, to my sisters who are reading this and weren't able to make it to the march yesterday, your presence was felt. I know I thought of you often. And to my sisters who were, thank you for marching with me.

Go to Margaret Cho's blog and watch her little film clip (top lefthand corner). It's good stuff.

I'm sure everyone is going to be all over this in a matter of minutes, but I can't resist.

Martha Stewart got 5 months in jail, 2 years probation and a $30,000 fine for her shady stock deal.

Fuck that. As Bitch rightly pointed out, this is a fucking witch hunt. Yes, she fucked up, but Jesus H. Christ--Ken Lay does shadier things before he gets out of bed in the morning! In a man, the behavior is good business. Just ask Vice-President Enron.

I am so sick of this country's hypocrisy I could scream.

By the way, the new Blogger writing/editing screen rocks my world. Except that yesterday I wrote a long post about my triumph over Linda, and when I tried to spellcheck, it crashed. That was no good.

The following came across my email this afternoon:

Dear Friends and Supporters of BookWoman,

We are writing to ask your help. The still sluggish economy, our rising rent, and the difficulties of the construction project on Lamar Blvd. are all colliding to make this our most challenging summer ever. BookWoman is having a severe cash crisis! We are asking that you come shop at BookWoman right away and tell all your friends! If 160 people each spend $25 here in the next two weeks we would be able to pay our August rent on time. Why not start your holiday shopping now!

Or if you are able to give a small donation of $10, $25, or $50, it would be most gratefully and lovingly received. Although BookWoman is not traditional non-profit, we exist to serve all the women of Austin and all our diverse communities- both in the selection of the products that we carry and the in-store programming that we support and provide.We are actively looking for more economic digs...any leads will be welcome. It is really hard to believe, but we are nearing our 30th anniversary. It's a huge and humbling milestone. Hopefully we will be able to continue our work.

Susan, Kristen, Marla & Jennifer
BookWoman
918 W.12 St.
Austin, Texas 78703
www.ebookwoman.com

First thing is first--if you have any spare money lying around and an inclination to help keep a really wonderful store in business, go on down there, if you are local, or go to www.ebookwoman.com and buy something, if you aren't.

Secondly, this is the third or fourth feminist book store in trouble I've heard about lately. There are no words for how much this pisses me off. It is ESSENTIAL that we keep these businesses going. Given the social and political climate around us, protecting our safe havens is more than a good idea, it's a necessity. These stores were some of the first places in the past few decades for women to gather, to be safe, to talk and laugh and cry and be together. They carry books, magazines, music that other stores won't touch, full of information that we need to have access to, as well as entertainment that makes our lives richer. This is a service to the feminist community, and it is one that doesn't pay for itself. If we don't get off our collective asses and support these stores, they won't be here much longer.

As anyone who has been anywhere near me recently is undoubtably sick of hearing, I just read this really great book. It's called Odd Girl Out: The Hidden Culture of Aggression in Girls. Basically, a writer took the time to talk to a bunch of groups of elementary-to-high school aged girls about how and why they are mean to each other. Teaching girls not to be aggressive, the author postulates (and I think she's right), backfires into girls putting their aggressions into all of this underhanded, backbiting meanness. Rather than just getting in an argument or a even a fight and getting it over with, girls spread rumors, exclude, keep secrets, use particular kinds of body language, "kill with kindness," etc. And it causes psychological damage that haunts us for the rest of our lives, sometimes sutble ways, sometimes in clear-cut ones, like abusive romantic relationships, self injury, and eating disorders.

Ponder.

Dear Fabulous Feminist Family and Friends,

The staff, volunteers, and board of In Other Words.

The fans make it all worthwhile...

And you may not want personality tips from me but you need them from someone; you are tiresome and humorless. You give feminists a badname. I realize you're stuck in a college-town mentality but fucking grow up! One day hopefully, you'll look back and giggle and say "God,I was such a self-righteous boring prig."

So I'm lying around today, trying to stop feeling like shit. (Huge sinus/throat/bronchial infection, requiring three freaking weeks of antibiotics. Fabulous.) And I come upon a daydream that I have had off and on for years, but is particularly appealing to me right now.

A world with no men.

Just for a little while. I'm not saying kill all the men, I'm not saying I want to move to a women-only commune for the rest of my life. What I am saying, though, is that I think I could benefit HUGELY from woman-only time and space. I'm fucking sick to death of men.

Mostly, I'm sick of working with men, seeing men on the street, etc. I'm sick of either having to pretend I didn't hear sexist jokes or make a big deal out of them. I'm sick of being looked at like meat. I'm sick of the assumption that I must be the "secretary," being a girl and all. I'm sick of the double standard when it comes to how dressed up one needs to be for work.

Most of all, I'm sick of the entitlement. I'm sick of being interrupted when I talk. I'm sick of the fact that Mark thinks it is fine to talk to me when I am obviously doing something else. I'm sick of having men in my space, taking up my time, all the time.

For a long time, I thought it was just that I want to be alone completely, and sometimes it is, but it's more than that. I want to feel like a part of a community of women, too. I want a circle of close female friends. I want girls time, lots and lots of girls time.

But I'm not gonna get it. I live with a boy and a boy dog. I work with at least 90% men. Sucks.

(First off, the title for this post is taken from the title of Christine Stansell's brilliant book. You should read it.)

It has taken me several years to figure out exactly what was meant by leading a "woman-centered" life. In earlier years, I found the term not only confusing, but also insulting--as if it implied that by choosing to have men present in my life, I was less of a feminist.

I think I'm starting to get it now. Lately, I just don't want to surround myself with men. Or, more precisely, I don't want men taking up the time and space in my life that I'd rather devote to women. I'm irritated by working with so many men. I'm irritated by seeing so many men wherever I go. I want space and time with just women; space and time without feeling like I am constantly being summed up, judged, and then dismissed.

I know women aren't perfect. I have known quite a number of women that I just plain do not like. But that isn't what this is about. This is about wanting to surround myself with other members of my gender, take part in the rituals of my gender. I want to listen to women's music, read women's books, listen to other women talk about their lives. I am fucking sick and tired of men's lives! I've spent 25 years hearing about men--I know enough about men. I am oversaturated with living in a man's world, and I want to live in a woman's world for awhile.

Partially, I think the problem is my job. It's been a long time since I have worked with men, and I don't think I've ever worked with this many. The best job I ever had (in terms of working conditions and coworkers, not in terms of pay or responsibilities) was in an all-woman office (if you still read this, hi Sarah!). The job I had after that was in a large office, but there were a core group of female admin staff that hung pretty close. Those women are a great example, actually. I had so little in common with most of them--class, education, age, religion were all very far apart--but I connected with them on the basis of being a woman. I cherish the experience. Finally, the last job I had before this one was once again in all-female (or at least vast majority female) office. Once again, I felt safe. Even if I didn't like all of the women there, I felt a certain security in knowing they were women (and made a very good friend there, as well--bonus!). Here, though, I work on a majority male team, have mostly male work friends, and am surrounded every day by a world that is undeniably male-driven. For the most part, they are perfectly good guys. But they are guys. And they don't get it. They will shut up when I tell them they are being sexist, but they won't actually think about why it is I am objecting.

Part of it about being tired of being an educator. Mark tries so hard, and bless him for that, but he's still a man, and he still reeks of male privledge. I still have to point things out to him, and even if he is generally very open to having things pointed out, sometimes you just get tired of having to explain it, you know?

None of this is to say that I am going to quit my job, or leave my relationship. It's just to say that I could really, really use some woman-only space, both in terms of a retreat from my usual life, and in terms of an ongoing oasis in my day-to-day life. But where does a straight-by-default girl find that space? If it isn't at work and it isn't at home, where should I look for it?

Note: This is written mostly in response to comments from my last post...I just had too much to say to leave it all in the comments.

We all know how to identify overt sexism. When someone tells you "a woman's place is in the home," that's sexist. When the president of Harvard says that girls are just not as good at science as boys are, that's sexist (and hopefully career-ending, but that's another story). Being expected to make less money, have a baby, do the dishes, and give a blow job, then be happy with your lot in life, all due to your assigned gender, is sexist.

None of that is what I was talking about in my last post. I am not sick of men due to their overt sexism. I don't spend a hell of a lot of time with overly sexist men, at least not when I'm not around my family. But covert sexism, and even what I would call covert misogyny, is rampant in nearly ALL of the men I know, all of the men I've ever known. You don't want to see it, because they are such nice guys, you like them (sometimes you even love them), but you scratch the surface and its there. And that's the part that is exhausting to me. They have so much potential, and most of the time, they are great. Then you let your guard down and someone says something that gives you pause. You shake it off, telling yourself you are being "too sensitive." But then you wake up in the middle of the night and think about it, and goddamn it, you were right, that was a sexist or misogynist thing to say, and goddamn it, it doesn't matter if he thinks he was kidding, because this joke isn't funny anymore. Not when you have to listen to some variation on it everywhere you go, every day, for your whole life. Not when it is expected to define you.

It is difficult to give examples of covert sexism and misogyny, because when looked at singularly, they often seem trite, especially to people who don't want to look for sexism in their friends, family, or colleagues. When I try to give examples here, it is more than likely that comments will come back saying "that's no big deal" or "that doesn't bother me." And so the blame will be turned around on me, for overreacting, for being man-hating, for being too sensitive or overthinking. It's a trap, and I see it before I even walk into it.

That being said, my days are full of examples, and I'll give some.

• I have asked Mark to stop using "bitch" and "pussy" as insults at least twenty times. Sometimes, to humor me, he even tries to stop using the words. But it never lasts. They are part of his lexicon, and until he sees actual worth in taking them out of his vocabulary on his own, it's not going to happen.

• I share an office with one woman and one man. The man, who I honestly love to death most of the time, finds it perfectly appropriate to discuss strip clubs and to email around pictures of obese women for laughs (this is slightly beside the point, but he's obese himself). And sure, I can (and have) asked him not to do those things, at least not in my presence, and like Mark, he remembers for awhile, then it slips his mind, because he is just doing it to humor me anyway, he doesn't get why it's such a big deal. The same man also finds it appropriate to assume any grouchiness on the part of myself or my female officemate has to be PMS-related.

• On my "work team," there are five women and ten men. Of the men, five of them have wives who do not work outside the home (three have working wives and two are single). From these men, I have heard long explanations about why it is better for a wife to stay home. They are never saying that all women belong in the home, though. Oh, no, that would be sexist! Their cases are always the exception. 'My wife is subservient because she wants to be. She's really in charge, she just lets me pretend to be in charge to keep the peace. My wife likes to keep house. It's OK that she does all the housework and cooking and my laundry--I pay the bills!' And on and on. (Just as a sidenote, two of the five have small children at home, and those situations are somewhat different.)

• Length of time I have worked here: 6 months. Number of discussions I've been in regarding why women MUST shave their legs and pits: no less than 5

• Quickest way to get nice-but-sometimes-irritating coworker to leave my office? Say menstruation.

• Favorite word to describe nasty female manager? Cunt.

But I'm not going to. For the same reason that no amount of hatred for the U.S. government is going to get me to expatriate. This country, office, house, whatever belongs to me just as much as it does to them, and I am not going to let them push me out. Because I am not leaving, it would be easier, probably, to ignore than thousand small things a day that get under my skin, to save my battles for rapists and abusers, or at least for men who intentionally say nasty things. But I'm not going to do that either, because that is how we got here. Every time a woman says "well, I may not have actual equality, but it's better than it was before, and it's good enough," we don't just not move forward, we move a tiny step back. It we actually want to be equal human beings, then all sexism, no matter how trite it seems, is unexcusable.

Feminists have a lot to fight against. I mean, obviously there is the Patriarchy (TM) in general, but there are also a million small, insidious things that make feminist progress so hard.

One of them, as I am rediscovering over the past few days, is that women give up on each other far too easily.

I could give you a dime for every woman I know who hasn't stayed with a loser guy for too long at some point in her life (and this doesn't just mean boyfriends and husbands--fathers, brothers, and friends all fit into this category as well) and still have plenty of change in the emergency jar. Women are socially programmed to never give up on men, no matter what they do. Even when they are non-responsive, even when they are mean spirited, even when they are abusive. Women find the ability within themselves to keep giving, keep trying, just keep on, often for far longer than is healthy or good. Giving up on other women, however, is a whole other thing.

This goes beyond just judging each other harshly, which we also do. This is about writing each other off, thinking that other women are just not worth the trouble, not worth arguing with, not worth teaching and learning from, just plain not worth it. Rather than the innumerable chances we give men to learn, to change, to apologize, to explain, we give each other so very few. How many women have you known with whom you lost touch for reasons you can no longer even recall, mostly because they were so minor and could have so easily been mended if one or both of you had just been willing to keep on keeping on?

Why do we do it? I think partially it's about our self-worth, and how we are taught to view the worth of other women. You have only to look at the myriad of women throwing their best girlfriends over for the guy of the week to see where our priorities are supposed to lie. Sometimes, not giving up takes a sacrifice, it takes other things having to be shelved for a bit, and we're just not as willing to do that for women as we are for men.

Just as we are taught that the value of women is lower than that of men, we are simultaneously taught to expect more from women than from men. We are harder on each other when we screw up because it's less expected, and I can even remember saying to other women, in anger, "I'd expect that shit from a man, but not from you!" This double standard puts us in the position of thinking that women's small transgressions are bigger than they really are, and of not being able to accurately gauge how angry we should be.

Another part of it, I think, is that it is easier and safer for us to get angry and stay angry with each other than it is to get or stay angry with men. This is something that can be seen, for example, when a man leaves his girlfriend or cheats on her with another woman. Who is the bad guy in this scenario? In my experience, the bulk of the hate is generally directed towards the "other woman." Why is that? Why would a woman have higher expectations of another women, who she may not even know, than of a man who she presumably has a relationship with? Could it be, in part, because we can feel fairly secure that if we get into a disagreement with another woman, we won't come back from it with a black eye or a broken arm?

The bottom line is that, no matter how many reasons there are for women to give up on each other so easily, it's hurting us. If we could give each other the benefit of the doubt in even half as many cases as we give it to men, we'd be so much stronger.

Do your politics fit between the headlines?
Are they written in newsprint,
are they distant?
Mine are crossing an empty parking lot.
They are a woman walking home,
at night, alone.
They are six strings that sing
and wood that hums against my hipbone.
-Ani DiFranco

So...things have been coming to light, lately. Things I don't want to write, or say, or even think, but I need to get out so that I can carry on. Like everything else, it's a learning experience, but this has been a particularly brutal one.

It is not enough to say that you are a feminist if you hate women. That much has become abundantly clear. If at the end of the self-righteous ranting day, you cannot treat other women with love and respect, as sisters, then nothing you ranted about means anything. It is easy to talk. It is easy to read Dworkin and MacKinnon (well, not that easy, but go with the rhetoric here). It is easy to take Women's Studies classes. It is easy to learn what the feminist party line of any given group is and to spout it ad naseaum. It is less easy, though, to listen to other women's stories and value them, even when they directly conflict with your own experience. It is difficult to value other women enough to treat them with patience and kindness. It is hard to move through the world in a way that shows respect to the very people who we have been taught our entire lives to view as competition, at best.

In recent days, I've had some firsthand experience with women who say they are feminists, who talk a good game, but who are unable or unwilling to listen when I speak, to treat me with anything resembling respect. These are women I used to look up to, model my feminism after. But I've had my moment of doubt, and come through it even more certain that the best thing I can do, the most feminist thing I can do, is to be true to myself and how I feel, and to be secure enough in that to treat other women as I would like to be treated. Theory and all of its resulting arguments are secondary--how I treat people is real. And how I treat people is and will continue to be the important part. To hell with their theories; to hell with the idea that I have to live up to a vision of feminism created by someone else. I know what I have to do.

Of the top 25, there are 3 women. Three. Rosa Parks, Oprah Winfrey, and Eleanor Roosevelt.

Bah.

My opinion on Kos has never been high. In fact, I don't read it, cuz it pisses me off. But like other women in the Blosphere, I have to point you to this, if you haven't read it yet. Damn right.

My very best friend from high school and I have tentatively decided to go to Michigan Womyn's Festival this August. I am both really excited and really terrified. It's one of those nearly-Utopian experiences that I have been hearing about for years, and the build-up has been quite something. So I am on the hunt for stories about Mich Fest/from Mich Fest, meet-up offers from blog readers who are going to be there, whatever. I know I can read a lot (and have been reading a lot) on the Mich Fest website, but I'd like to hear if any of you have any tidbits as well.

I'm so excited!!

I am a woman in the United States of America. About 51% of the people in this country are also female (U.S. Census). 11% of the highest court in the land, the folks who decide, among other things, whether or not I'm forced to carry a fetus to term inside my own body whether or not I want to, are going to be female.

What the fuck am I supposed to say about that?

To make matters worse, I just tried to link to some information on this candidate from NARAL, and couldn't get to it because my state-of-Texas webfilter has "Pro-Choice" as a filtered (i.e. profane) category. Isn't that special?

In the comments to my original post about Atticus, Scand asked me to speak about why I have all-male pets, as feminist. She also asked why I gave Atticus the name I did. So I thought I'd answer those things:

If I hear one more time that we're "past identity politics" and it now doesn't matter if Bush's next Supreme Court nominee is male or female, I'm going to fucking scream.

It matters to me. I am part of the 51% female portion of the United States' population, and having an 11% female Supreme Court matters a whole fucking lot to me. And-gasp!-I don't think it would be too much of a stretch to get a nominee who is BOTH qualified AND female!

I know Bush is going to appoint a conservative. I don't like it, but hey, that's how the rules work. I can deal with that. But it incenses me to hear people--both men and women--say that we're beyond gender, that it doesn't matter anymore. The implication there, that those of us for whom it matters quite a lot, are somehow behind the times, somehow beating a dead horse, is sickening. Fuck that. I not only want a woman, I want it to be unapologetically OK to DEMAND a woman. I want HALF of the Supreme Court to be made up of women. Liberal women, conservative women, black women, Latina women, Asian women...I want the Supreme Court to look like what our country looks like. And until they do, I don't have a lot of faith in the decisions they make.

More than anything else, though, I want people to stop saying it doesn't matter. It matters to me, and goddammit, that ought to be worth something.

Twisty has a brilliant review of Margaret Cho's new book-and-DVD combo on her site, and that is what got me thinking about writing this, though it has been in my head for some time. While I haven't read the book, I Have Chosen to Stay and Fight, I did see a live performance of Cho's Assasin tour (which is what the DVD is), so I am pretty familiar with what Twisty's talking about. And my reaction was very much like her's.

First, let me come right out and admit that this post is my submission to the #3 Carnival of Feminists. The theme is 1970s feminist thought, or, more specifically, relating 1970s feminism to modern issues, "1970s into 2000s." Which, of course, made me think of my cervix. Because really, who were more into cervixes (cervi?) than 1970s feminists? With all of those hand mirrors and speculums, you'd think they'd invented the damn things. Plus, being born in 1979, my cervix was made in the 1970s, so what could be more appropriate?

In the 2000s, though, my 1970s cervix has been nothing but trouble.

It started in 2001, when I was very poor, having just graduated from Reed and not having any kind of job, or any real prospects for one. My poverty drew me to try to sign up for several medical research studies. I was hoping to get in on one of the ones where you spend a weekend there, they examine your sleeping patterns or whatever, and then they give you $500. What I got instead, though, was an afternoon in a well-appointed waiting room, answering a long list of questions about my pap smear history (I'd gotten one every year since I was 13 and they were all normal) and my number of sexual partners (I'm not going to tell you how many, but it was under the cut off for the study). After going over my questionnaire, a nurse practitioner informed me that I was eligible for the study. It would require a series of appointments, each with an injection, then monthly pap smears, then pap smears at 3 month intervals, then 6 months. With some stuff about taking my temperature every day and keeping records of it, and later on some "vaginal self swab samples." They'd pay me $50 for each appointment.

I agreed before I even knew what the study was for, or what they'd be injecting me with.

As it turns out, they were testing a vaccine for HPV. Something which, even three decades after my feminist foremothers sat in circles and looked at their cervixes with hand mirrors, I knew absolutely nothing about. Though I'd been getting annual exams with pap smears for eight years at that point, no doctor had even uttered the acronym in my presence. It never came up in a health class. I never discussed it with a friend.

And, I'm retrospectively ashamed to say, I went about my merry way and got my injections and my first few pap smears and collected my $50 checks without bothering to learn much. After all, this was just a way to buy groceries. I wasn't actually interested. Why should I be? Sexually transmitted viruses, after all, were something that happened to other people.

And then I got my first abnormal pap.

It was, the kind nurse on the phone explained, Class 2 atypical. This meant that the atypical reading could be caused by an infection or injury of some kind, but another pap would be required to make sure there wasn't something else going on, so I'd need to come back in. No problem, I said, not particularly worried, assuming I'd scratched myself or something. I went back in.

The next reading was clearer. This time, the nurse on the phone called it Class 3, or "low grade dysplasia." What that meant, she explained, was that there were changes on my cervix that were considered "pre-cancerous."

I freaked out. I'd already lost enough people in my life not to take the c-word too lightly.

The nurse calmly went on to explain that these kinds of changes are thought to be a direct result of one of the few "cancer causing" strains of HPV, the sexually transmitted virus the study was vaccinating against. These pre-cancerous changes on my cervix were, effectively, a positive test for HPV.

So I not only had cancer, I ranted, I had sexually transmitted cancer! I immediately gave my boyfriend the third degree. How had this happened? I'd been fine in previous months! What had changed? What did he bring home? He swore up and down that he'd done nothing, and finally talked me into calling the nurse back to get more information. When I did, she explained that HPV can live dormant in your body for years, and that there was no way to know if the virus was new or old. So Mark was off the hook.

But I was still faced with the frightening and oddly humiliating prospect of pre-cancerous cervical changes, caused by a sexually transmitted infection. And I was scared.

When I'm scared, I research. So that's what I did. I scoured websites, called the nurse back a couple of times, and bought a new version of Our Bodies, Ourselves. Over the course of the next few days, I became an expert in HPV, its transmission, and its treatment. Sadly, this makes me an unusually commodity among my peer group.

A few weeks later, I had a colposcopy and a cone biopsy. The biopsy itself removed the abnormal cells, so I didn't have to have a LEEP procedure. Since then, I haven't had more than one abnormal pap smear in a row, though I have had a couple of scares. My 1970s cervix has been behaving fairly well.

And now, I'm an advocate. I've been involved in more conversations than I can possibly count about pap smears. I know many feminist women who consider the requirement of an annual pap smear in order to get a prescription for birth control to be invasive and patriarchal. Frankly, I don't. While I understand that pap smears are unpleasant experiences (I've had over 30 of them by my count, and they don't get much easier with quantity), I still don't have much sympathy for women who don't want to have them done. The truth is that the great majority of us are at risk for HPV-caused cervical cancer, even when we think that, due to our monogamy, or our lesbianism, or our religious condom use, we're not. And serious consequences, or even death, from this affliction are almost completely preventable with regular pap smears. Yeah, having the colpo was unpleasant, and the cone biopsy hurt, and it bled, and I don't think LEEP, which I accept that I'll most likely eventually need, will be a picnic either. But it beats the hell out of the alternative.

In the 1970s, there were strong, brave, smart women who learned about their own bodies and took charge of their own health, and as a result of doing so, felt compelled to help other women do the same. These women did things like start the Boston Women's Health Book Collective, open women's clinics, lead workshops, and even learn to perform abortions. Intellectually, my feminism is deeply indebted to these women. I strongly believe in the sort of do-it-yourself ethic they exemplified, and I try to be a feminist who helps to create needed institutions where there weren't any before. I think there is a danger, however, in my generation of feminists misinterpreting the work that feminist women's health activists before us did. They advocated for increased knowledge about the female body, both by health practitioners and by patients, and for women demanding their own say in what happens to them when they are pregnant, birthing, or sick. They did not, however, advocate for ignoring the health of a body part because getting to it is unpleasant and uncomfortable, or ignoring sound reasons for tests. They did not advocate forgoing preventative care. Sadly, this is what I see too many women my age making of their work. Resisting the patriarchy means being proactive, insisting that your medical practitioner speak to you openly, insisting that you make your own medical decisions. It does not mean ignoring your need for medical care all together.

At the moment, my 1970s cervix seems more or less healthy. I went for my annual exam just two weeks ago, actually, and everything looked fine. It wasn't my ideal way to spend 15 minutes, but that was all it took, and I can rest assured that the three strains of HPV that were eventually identified in my body are not currently causing any problems. What's better, though, is that I am secure in the knowledge that if they do start to cause problems, I'll be ready to fight them. I am getting the preventative care I need to catch any new abnormalities early, and I am very well-educated as to what my options will be if and when that happens. In part, I think I have those 1970s feminists, with their mirrors and speculums, to thank for my being so educated. Because of them, at least in part, the information I needed is available, even if I never got it from the sources that maybe I should have. Moreover, because of them I feel comfortable sharing this story with other women. I may not be ready to hold the flashlight while another woman performs the speculum and mirror routine on herself, but I am more than ready to drive her to the doctor, hold her hand in the waiting room, and even sit with her during her colpo if she wants me to. I am ready to volunteer to be a patient teacher, helping medical students learn to do thorough, compassionate pap smears. I am ready to foist copies of Our Bodies, Ourselves off on any woman, of any age, who doesn't already have one. I am ready to speak out about HPV, how we don't need to be embarrassed about it, and how it kills women and it doesn't need to. I will do whatever I can to teach other women about HPV and cervical cancer, and to help them through it if they are in the same boat I've been in, or a worse one. We're all in this together, and we can help each other, teach each other, learn from each other. That's a message worth transcending generations.

feministcarnival

Nyarly and Portia have both written excellent posts recently about the evil of Target, so I won't go into too much detail. Suffice it to say that they've proved themselves to be profoundly unwilling to protect the reproductive rights of women by allowing their pharmacists to refuse to fill prescriptions for Emergency Contraception. While this may not be unusual, it is completely unacceptable.

And so, Target and I are breaking up.

I've thought for several days about writing this post/making my commitment to stop shopping at Target public, because I am going to miss Target like I've never missed a lover or a friend. Target has been a constant part of my life for years, and I'm there at least weekly. I fucking love Target. Probably 80% of my discretionary spending is done at Target. Quitting Target cold-turkey is going to be really fucking hard.

But it has to be done. As a feminist, as a woman, and as someone who at least tries to be a concientious consumer, I cannot contribute my money to a corporation that refuses to defend my basic right to get the medicines prescribed to me. So I'm not going to. And I am going to write a letter to Target, detailing how much money I spend there and how I won't be doing so any longer because of this policy. If Target reverses this policy and issues a public apology, I'll reconsider. If not, I will find somewhere else to buy my worthless plastic crap. It's that simple.

This is the way in which the free market is democractic, folks. We vote with our dollars. I'm not personally a big fan of this system, and it would certainly be easier just to pretend it doesn't matter what Target's policies are--after all, I don't need EC. But it does matter, and taking a hit to the bottom line is the only way this or any other bullshit policy is ever going to be reconsidered by Target or any other bigass corporation. So we have to put our money where our mouths are and refuse to contribute to our own oppression. And, no matter how tough it is, that's exactly what I intend to do.

In case anybody was wondering what to say, here is what I'm saying:

Target Executive Corporation
TFS 1AX
PO Box 9350
Minneapolis, MN 55440

To Whom It May Concern:

I am writing to inform the Target Corporation of the loss of my business. I have been a Target shopper for over ten years, and in recent years have shopped at Target nearly exclusively for many food items, personal care products, house wares, clothes, etc. I estimate that my household spent about $5,000 at Target last year. Recently, I started filling my several hundred dollars per month worth of prescriptions at Target. I have always been very happy with Target's selection, prices, and customer service. I am sad to say that all of my business will cease immediately.

Target's recent decision to allow pharmacists to not fill customers' prescriptions for Plan B irrevocably changes all my previous good will towards your corporation and your stores. I am incensed that the Target Corporation finds it acceptable to allow its pharmacists to discriminate against women in this way. No pharmacist should have a right to refuse a patient a legal prescription. Target's excuses for this policy, that it "protects the civil liberties" of your employees, leaves me even more angry. How will you protect these "civil liberties" when you hire someone who doesn't want to sell condoms or Viagra? How about someone who thinks Harry Potter books are Satanic and doesn't want to stock the shelves with them, or ring them up at the register? It is clear that this explanation is simply an excuse to allow discrimination against women, and that is something I absolutely refuse to support.

I would love to be able to resume my business with Target. However, until this policy is reversed and a public apology issued, I will not. While it may well be more expensive and more inconvenient for me to take my business elsewhere, I will continue to shop at other stores rather than Target until I hear that these actions have been taken. I will encourage my friends and family to do the same, and several of them have already agreed to boycott your stores. It is my understanding that other people all across the United States are taking or preparing to take the same action. Coming into the holiday season, I am sure many of us would have been making major expenditures at your stores, and due to this discriminatory, anti-woman policy, we will now be making those expenditures elsewhere.

I am fiercely disappointed in Target for enforcing this policy, and for issuing such a blatantly false explanation for it. I sincerely hope that the economic consequences of your discriminatory behavior haunt you this Christmas season, and I will do everything within my personal power to make sure that is the case.

Sincerely,

Grace Mitchell

In the fall of 1978, our heroine, P., was 19. She'd graduated from high school the previous spring and spent the summer living in a far away town with her sister and her sister's new husband, cooking in a restuarant. She didn't like the restuarant and didn't like being away from home, so she returned to the small town where she came from that fall, starting taking some classes at the community college, and found a job. P. had several boyfriends in high school, but was generally more interested in being the student body president, the yearbook editor, and a basketball star than she was in doing a lot of serious dating. It might of been lack of experience, then, that led her to have unprotected sex with D., a man she had been casually dating. Or he might have pressured her. Or she might have just plain forgot.

It was around Thanksgiving when P. got pregnant, and by her 20th birthday in January she knew she had to make a decision. After seeking the advice of her sisters and an aunt she was close with, she decided abortion was the best option. While she very much wanted to have children, it was clear by this point that she and D. were not going to be together. He was a fine looking man, but was also an alcoholic who was in the process of being kicked out of the Air Force and had no real prospects. And he didn't want to marry her, and he didn't want a kid. So P. made an appointment for an abortion in about an hour away.

On the morning of her abortion appointment, P. woke up feeling very sick to her stomach. She threw up as soon as she tried to get out of bed. Too sick to keep the appointment, she called to cancel. When the person on the phone asked if she'd like to reschedule, she surprised herself by saying no. Staying in bed with her stomach bug gave her several days to think, and by the time she could eat solid food again, P. had decided to keep her child.

In August, P. gave birth to a little girl, G. G. was a difficult child from the start, and things were never easy. P. worked at a service station, lived alone with her baby in a small house, and made do. Her family was very supportive. Though he had not been around through the pregnancy or there for the baby's birth, D. soon decided he wanted the child in his life as well, and the two reached an amicable custody agreement, where D. took the baby every other weekend and paid $50/month in child support. Neither of these things happened on schedule, but both of them happened sometimes, and mostly P. didn't complain. She knew she'd made the right decision.

Nearly 27 years later, P.'s daughter, G., is still very proud of her mom and of the choice her mom made. She is proud that when faced with pressure from all sides, her mom listened to her heart and made the choice that was best for her and her potential child. Though many have tried to spin stories like her's into cautionary tales, warning her how close she came to non-existance, that is not the way G. sees this story at all. To her, it's not a story of a close call. It's a story about a woman who was entrusted to make her own choices regarding her own body and life, who agonized over those choices, and who then made the choice that was best for her. G. doesn't think about the circumstances surrounding her conception and birth and think, "I could have been aborted!" Rather, she feels positively indebted both to the woman who made the decicision to have her and to the society that allowed room for it to be a decision.

These days, G. and P. have some very different political views. One thing they agree on, however, is that it is essential for all women who find themselves in the situation P. was in to have the range of options P. had. Whether or not they make the same decision P. did is singularly and wholly up to them. The important thing is that they have the choice.

In honor of Blog for Choice Month (thanks to Dr. B for the heads up).

As it turns out, the blogging for choice to which I referred in my last post is not a month, but a day. January 22, which is, in an eerie coincidence, considering what I wrote, my mom's birthday. So here's what I am doing, and what you should do, too:

1. Go here and sign up to commit to blog about choice on January 22.
2. When January 22 rolls around, write at least one blog entry having to do with choice issues.
3. On January 22, go check out some of your fellow bloggers' words on the same subject.

That's it! Easy-peasy!

Oh, you could also add the Blog for Choice sticker to your sidebar, like I'm about to do. That'd be cool, too.

Thanks to my e-friend Bomb for straightening me out on all of this.

(Title courtesy of Ani.)

I just watched the other day's episode of Rollergirls. And suddenly I understand why I feel so terrible.

The espisode centered around Clownsnack. Clownsnack was a founder of the Lonestar Roller Derby, but she quit last season because her mom was sick. This season, she wanted to come back. Rather than welcoming her back, some of the current roller derby members (in positions of power) put her through the audition and hazing process of a new member, then they told her she didn't make a team. Ultimately, some of the TXRD's other members protest about Clownsnack's treatment and she's granted another audition and gets back on to her team.

The reasoning given for not wanting Clownsnack back by the women who are keeping her out varies, but it basically centers around her expecting special treatment because she's been in the league before, her being "flaky" for having quit (even though her reasons for quitting seemed very good to me), and the league being something different now than the it was when she was involved. Basically, they seemed to argue that they'd outgrown her and that they wanted their league to be something different than the one she was familiar with, so she wasn't welcome.

Ding ding ding.

It is incredibly painful to watch something you put your time and heart into be taken away from you, and that's how this had to feel. To have people for whom you have worked and to whom you have given decide they are beyond you, or they want different things than you do, so you should just go away quietly, please. On the show, Clownsnack and her supporters refuse to let her be shut out, and she ends up back on the team, but I can't help but think it must be a pretty hollow victory. After being humiliated and insulted like that, I don't see how she could go back at all. On the other hand, though, why let something she loves be taken from her just because a vocal minority are big assholes?

That is the question.

The bigger question, though, is why is it so impossible for a group of women to get together and do anything without these types of battles? Why does someone always have to be "out" in order for everyone else to feel secure being "in"? And why is the cruelty with which we perpetuate these crimes against each other necessary?

Honestly, it makes me want to give up. It makes me want to give up on the entire idea of a community of women. It makes me want to give up on believing that we deserve better than the treatment we give each other. It makes me want to give up and hide in my house and never try to be a part of anything again.

Remember how I said I don't much like short stories? Well, I don't generally much like vignette-style films, either. In general, a short piece of a story isn't enough to get me involved in the characters and caring about what happens to them. But this film is the exception that proves the rule.

Written and directed by a man, Rodrigo Garcia (most notable for TV direction and cinematography, including Gia and several episodes of Six Feet Under and Carnivale), Nine Lives is nine short (10-15 minute) films, each done in a continuous shot. Each one centers around some element in the life of one women. There are some intersecting characters between the films, but their intersections are more incidental than important, and each piece stands on its own.

1. The first of the stories is about an inmate, Sandra, played by Elpidia Carrillo (Bread and Roses, Things You Can Tell Just By Looking at Her). She seems calm and collected until she is unable to talk to her visiting daughter due to a faulty phone; then she loses it. Later, in another vignette, we see her get arrested, but we never know what crime she has committed.

2. The second story is the one that seems to be getting the most press. In it, Robin Wright Penn's (White Oleander, Forrest Gump) Diana runs into an ex-lover, Damian (played by Jason Isaacs , who plays Lucius Malfoy in the Harry Potter movies but looks very different here), in a supermarket. Both of them are married, Diana is pregnant, and yet the tension between them is palpable and it is easy to see how they could fall back into their old relationship. The scene is incredibly well-played and Wright Penn shows off her acting chops with an understated performance that is hard to watch and easy to identify with.

3. The third tale is the most heart-wrenching. It is a scene between a woman, Holly (brilliantly portrayed by Lisa Gay Hamilton from The Practice) and her sister (a nice supporting turn by the very lovely Sydney Tamiaa Poitier--yep, daughter of that Sydney Poitier). Holly has returned to the house where she grew up, ostensibly to "make amends" with her abusive father, but rather than showing their conversation, the focus is on the discussion between Holly and her sister before her father's arrival. It's sparsely and painfully done, leaving detail to the viewer's imagination, and is carried perfectly by both good dialogue and the strength of Hamilton's acting.

4. The fourth vignette indirectly refers the viewer back to Diana's story, as it co-stars Damian, from the grocery store, and his wife, Lisa, played by Molly Parker (Iron Jawed Angels, Waking the Dead). They are in a new apartment, and are visited by Sonia, played by Holly Hunter (Thirteen, The Incredibles, O Brother Where Art Thou?) and her boyfriend, Martin (Stephen Dillane, seen before in The Hours and The Gathering). The focus of the story is the fucked-up relationship between Sonia and Martin. This was probably the least compelling of the vignettes for me, even though Holly Hunter was as fantastic as always.

5. Next, in the story that was the most moving of the film for me, we meet Samantha, played by Amanda Seyfried (Mean Girls, Veronica Mars). The power of this scene doesn't come from Seyfried, however, but from the brilliant Ian McShane (Deadwood, Sexy Beast), who plays her disabled father. The scene follows Samantha as she is pulled back and forth between her father, with whom she seems to have a good relationship, though he is obviously quite ill with what seems to be a degenerative disease of some sort, and her mother (played by Sissy Spacek), who comes off as cold and tired. We see how dedicated young Samantha is to her father, and how resentful the situation makes her mother, and how terrible the whole situation is. The best part, though, is the dark comedy in the banter between Samantha and her dad, and I attribute that both to good writing and to McShane's immense talent.

6. We next see Lorna, played by Amy Brennemann (Judging Amy, Things You Can Tell Just By Looking at Her), on her way to a funeral with her parents. As it turns out, the funeral is for the wife of Lorna's ex-husband, Andrew (William Fichtner, best known for his war movies, and recently seen in The Longest Yard). When Lorna and Andrew have sex at the funeral home, during the viewing of the body, it is unclear whether their affair has been ongoing or whether it has been sparked by the events underway, but the viewer is once again asked to think about relationships and whether or not they are ever really over.

7. The seventh vignette takes the viewer back to Samantha's story, but this time it centers around Sissy Spacek's (If These Walls Could Talk, In the Bedroom) character, Samantha's mother, Ruth. The scene takes place in a hotel, where Ruth seems to be about to embark on an affair with her daughter's school counselor, played by the unusually goofy Aidan Quinn (Legends of the Fall, Practical Magic). Though Ruth's behavior in this scene is less traditionally sympathetic than it was in her prior scene, where she was at home taking care of her family, I still felt more towards her character here, where you could see how very tired and starved for fun she is. The scene twists when Ruth witnesses another woman being arrested (Sandra from the first vignette), and it ends with her leaving the hotel without having consummated the affair.

8. The second-to-last scene is also quite moving. It is fairly straightforward, showing a conversation between Camille (played by Kathy Baker from Boston Public) and her husband, Richard (portrayed by a very well-cast Joe Mantegna from Joan of Arcadia). Camille is lying in a hospital bed, waiting to go into a masectomy. Scared, angry, and belligerent, Kathy Baker knocks the role of Camille out of the park, and the story leaves you both hopeful for how things will turn out for Camille and furious at hospital system that is treating her like a piece of meat when she's in this frightening position. Characters from other scenes show up here as well, with Holly as Camille's nurse and Lorna's mother as her anesthesiologist.

9. There has been some criticism of the film's final scene, but it was one of my favorites. It shows a visit to the cemetery by Maggie (the always incredible Glenn Close, whom I most recently enjoyed in last season's The Shield) and her daughter, Maria, played by Dakota Fanning (Man on Fire, War of the Worlds). While you watch the scene, it is unclear who the two are visiting, and the film's surprising final shot shows this vignette, too, to be about a woman-specific type of grief.

Each one of the nine scenes is beautifully shot, nearly perfectly acted, and tightly written and directed. Even the stories I cared less about (specifically Lorna) are extremely well-done, and those I cared more about are heart-wrenchingly beautiful. The actresses are all top tier, and the movie is blessedly free of oversexualization (with the single exception of an obnoxious focus on Amanda Seyfried's breasts in Samantha's story). Instead, it focuses on telling simple stories of women's lives, with humor, sadness, wistfulness, longing, and a subtle intelligence that is very difficult to find in contemporary movies. This is a film I will think about and remember for a long time to come, and I highly recommend it. I will certainly be on the lookout for Garcia's next offering.

Since I blew my story about my mom pre-blogging for choice, I haven't been sure what to write about today. I don't have an abortion story of my own to tell here--I have never, to my knowledge, been pregnant. Like just about any woman who sleeps with men, though, what would happen if I found myself pregnant has been occupying my thoughts on and off for the past eleven years.

There was a time when the choice would have been clear, if not easy. In high school, when my life was unformed and my relationships were fleeting, I almost certainly would have aborted. In college, when my relationship was long-term, but not conductive to children, and my life was embryonic, I almost certainly would have aborted. In the period between college and graduate school, when Mark and I were getting on our feet and I was struggling with both depression and low-paid, low-interest jobs, I likely would have aborted.

Now, however, there would be no "good" reason to have an abortion. I am in a relationship I consider to be permanent, and it is steady and stable and healthy and good. I have a job that pays a salary I could raise a child on. My partner has a career path. We own a house. We have proved ourselves over and over again to be responsible adults. We're in our mid-to-late 20s. It is, in many social strata, baby-making time. There are many people who would have supported my getting an abortion ten years ago, or five years ago, or even two years ago, who would not support the decision now.

But that isn't what choice is about. Choice isn't about terminating pregnancies that you are not in the proper stage of life for. Choice is about a woman deciding if, at this time in her life, she wants to carry a pregnancy to term. And, much of the time, it's about her deciding if she wants to raise a baby. Whether or not her life seems to be in the place where becoming a mother would be socially sanctioned has nothing to do with that woman deciding what is best for her body and her life.

From the story I told earlier, you can see that I support women who are not in the period of life where having a baby is socially sanctioned having their babies anyway, if that is what they want to do. My mother did it and I think she did a great job. I think she made the right decision in not aborting. She knew she was ready, and that carrying her pregnancy to term and being a mother was what she wanted. In many ways, I am the opposite. While I may seem to be in a much better position to carry a pregnancy to term and become a parent than my 19 year-old mom was, I'm not. I may be old enough, and responsible enough, and I may have a stable relationship and even be able to financially support a kid, but I still don't want one.

That's the bottom line thing that many people, even supporters of a woman's right to chose, don't want to admit. That sometimes women who "shouldn't" have babies due to their situations in life want them, and sometimes women who "should", like me, don't. The choice to have an abortion is not always spurred by not being able to afford a baby, or not being in a place in your relationship to provide two parents. Sometimes, it's spurred by not wanting to parent regardless of your circumstances.

Obviously focusing on this "selfish" reason for abortion is not politically a good idea, given the environment in which we currently live. However, I think it needs to be considered. The whole premise that deciding that you do not want to have a child is selfish should be questioned, as should the premise that having a child is an unselfish sacrifice. When my mother is asked about the sacrifices she made to have me, she is as likely as not to say that it was not about sacrifice--she did what she wanted to do. Why would it not be equally legitimate for me to do what I want to do with my body and my life and decide not to give birth?

The point is that those of us who support and agitate for choice need to be careful to define correctly, for ourselves and for those we speak to about it, what exactly choice is. Choice is not just being able to get an abortion when you are in a situation that "warrants" one--although that's the part we focus on. Choice is each woman being able to decide for herself whether or not she wants to become pregnant, and if she does, whether she wants to carry her pregnancy to term or terminate it, and whether she wants to a raise a child or not. Choice is being able to make the decision I'm making not to become pregnant and having accessible and reasonable options to keep that from happening. Choice is being able to make the decision my mom made to have a baby even when the chips were stacked against her. Both of these decisions, and all those in between, should be supported. Pro-choice isn't just pro-safe and legal abortion. Pro-choice is pro-mother and non-mother; adopted and biological; gay and straight; partnered and single. Pro-choice isn't just about abortion, or even birth control--it's about letting women decide and respecting the decisions they make. It's about respecting my mother's decision to have me and my decision not have children equally, as they are both examples of a woman taking control of her own body and doing what she thinks is best.

My friend T. recently asked me for a list of my favorite feminist books, to use for a book review website project he's putting together. Unable to contain myself with the joy of this task, I put together a fairly comprehensive list (though I edited it down quite a bit). It was so much fun, I thought I'd share it here. Disagree with my picks? Think I left something essential out? Comment--I'd love to hear what you think!

Foundations

1. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman by Mary Wollstonecraft (W.W. Norton and Company, 1987)
2. The Second Sex by Simone DeBeauvoir (Everyman's Library, 1993)
3. The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan (W.W. Norton and Company, 1963)

It's tempting to me to skip these books altogether, because I don't like any of them, but I think they are necessary as foundation if you really want to get into this stuff.

Histories

4. The World Split Open: How the Modern Women's Movement Changed America by Ruth Rosen (Penguin, 2001)
5. Personal Politics: The Roots of Women's Liberation in the Civil Rights Movement & the New Left by Sara Evans (Vintage, 1980)
6. Tidal Wave: How Women Changed at Century's End by Sara Evans (Free Press, 2003)
7. No Turning Back: The History of Feminism and the Future of Women by Estelle Freidman (Ballantine Books, 2003).

If you only read one book about feminism, the Ruth Rosen book gets my vote. It's very comprehensive, yet easy to read, and it has an amazing bibliography, sorted by subject. It's a great place to start. Personal Politics is also important, as it situates 2nd wave feminism in the other social movements of the time, which is something people are likely to miss. I haven't read Tidal Wave, but given what a good historian Sara Evans is, I can't imagine it's anything but good. Freedman is also a top-notch historian, and her book is excellent. It does a better job than the others with feminism before the 1960s.

2nd Wave
8. Sisterhood is Powerful: An Anthology of Writings from the Women's Liberation Movement edited by Robin Morgan (Random House, 1970)
9. Dear Sisters: Dispatches from the Women's Liberation Movement edited by Rosalyn Baxandall and Linda Gordon (Basic Books, 2001)
10. Sexual Politics by Kate Millett (Doubleday, 1970)
11. The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution by Shulamith Firestone (Vintage, 1971)
12. The Female Eunuch by Germaine Greer (McGraw Hill, 1971).

Of the first two, which are both document/essay collections, I'd say Sisterhood is Powerful is probably the better book, but Dear Sisters is a lot easier on the eyes and more reader-friendly. Both are definitely worth reading. The other three are all books written by activist women during the late 60s and early 70s. Kate Millett's has to do with sexism in literature, while Greer's and Firestone's are more broad-reaching.

3rd Wave

13. To Be Real: Telling the Truth and Changing the Face of Feminism by Rebecca Edby Walker (Anchor, 1995)
14. Manifesta: Young Women, Feminism, and the Future by Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000)
15. Listen Up! Voices from the Next Feminist Generation edited by Barbara Findlen (Seal Press, 1995)
16. Cunt: A Declaration of Independence by Inga Muscio (Seal Press, 2002)

I'm not a huge fan of most of the 3rd wave writing, but I think Manifesta gives a nice overview, and I am a big fan of nearly everything Rebecca Walker has written. Listen Up! is also a primer of sorts--short, easy-read essays. There is actually a newer version of it as well, Listen Up 2 Edition, which was published in 2001, but I haven't read it. Cunt is a must-read.

Radical Feminism

17. Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism by Mary Daly (Beacon Press, 1990)
18. Pornography: Men Possessing Women by Andrea Dworkin (E.P. Dutton, 1989)
19. Feminism Unmodified: Discourses on Life and Law by Catharine A. MacKinnon (Harvard University Press, 1988)

This is a category I am not all that well-versed in, but I've read Pornography, and got quite a lot out of it, and the other two books seem to be standards.

Women of Color

20. Feminism is for Everybody: Passionate Politics by bell hooks (South End Press, 2000)
21. Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism by bell hooks (South End Press, 1981)
22. Women, Race, and Class by Angela Y. Davis (Vintage, 1983)
23. Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches by Audre Lord (Crossing Press, 1984)
24. Colonize This! Young Women of Color on Today's Feminism edited by Daisy Hernandez and Bushra Rehman (Seal Press, 2002)

I am ashamed to say that I don't know nearly as much as I should about this category. However, I can vouch for both the Davis book and Feminism is for Everybody, and I have heard nothing but good things about Ain't I a Woman. Sister Outsider is mostly short stuff, and I have read most of it and loved all I've read. Colonize This! is anther one I haven't read, but since the rest of these are older writings/writings by older women, I think it's good to include a younger perspective as well.

Sexual Minority Feminism

25. Tales of the Lavender Menace: A Memoir of Liberation by Karla Jay (Basic Books, 1999)
26. Stone Butch Blues: A Novel by Leslie Feinberg (Firebrand Books, 1993)
27. Female Masculinity by Judith Halberstam (Duke University Press, 1998)
28. Amazon to Zami: Towards a Global Lesbian Feminism edited by Monika Reinfelder (Continuum International Publishing Group, 1996)

Again I haven't read all of these, but have heard good things about all of them. I can personally vouch for Tales of the Lavender Menace and Stone Butch Blues, and neither should be missed, in my opinion.

Beauty/Body Image

29. The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty are Used Against Women by Naomi Wolf (Anchor, 1992)
30. Body Outlaws: Rewriting the Rules of Beauty and Body Image edited by Ophira Edut (Seal Press, 2003) (Formerly Adios, Barbie! Young Women Write About Body Image and Identity, Seal Press, 1998)
31. Girl Culture by Lauren Greenfield and Joan Jacobs Brumberg (Chronicle Books, 2002)

The Beauty Myth is an all-time favorite of mine, and I think it holds up well over time. Body Outlaws is more fun to read, however, and is also quite good. Girl Culture is a photo essay book, and it's amazing.

Memoirs/Autobiographies

32. In Our Time: Memoir of a Revolution by Susan Brownmiller (Delta, 2000)
33. Heartbreak: The Political Memoir of a Feminist Militant by Andrea Dworkin (Basic Books, 2002)
34. Saturday's Child: A Memoir by Robin Morgan (W.W. Norton and Company, 2000)
35. Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions by Gloria Steinem (New American Library, 1992)

For my money, memoirs are the best way to get into reading feminist writers, especially someone like Andrea Dworkin. The Brownmiller and Morgan memoirs are both excellent, and Steinem's is a bit too wishy-washy for my taste, but you can't argue with her selling power or her staying power.

Misc

36. Against Our Will: Men, Women, and Rape by Susan Brownmiller (Ballantine Books, 1993)
37. Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women by Susan Faludi (Crown, 1991)
38. Promiscuities: The Secret Struggle for Womanhood by Naomi Wolf (Random House, 1997)
39. Femininity by Susan Brownmiller (Ballantine Books, 1985)

These are about a variety of topics, obviously, but they are books I think are important and beneficial that don't fit in elsewhere.

I previously mentioned that I've been watching Rollergirls on TV and was interested in seeing it for myself, since the league that they made the show about is local. Last night, Mark and I, along with The Princess and C-Man, went to check out the Texas Roller Derby Lonestar Rollergirls. (The name, I have learned, is important, because the TXRD Lonestar Rollergirls are not the only roller derby game in town--there is another league, with a disconcerningly similar name, the Texas Rollergirls Rock N' Roller Derby. Why there are two leagues instead of one bigger league is a mystery I have yet to unravel.)

It was so. fucking. cool.

The bout was between the Holy Rollers and the Putas del Fuego. As anyone who has been watching the show knows, the bout between these two teams last year was a nailbiter, coming down to a one-point Holy Roller victory in the last seconds. So this was a bit of a grudge match, I guess. Between that and the publicity generated by the show, the place was packed packed packed. We got there about 20 minutes before the doors opened and the line was around the building. We ended up getting in by virtue of having pre-purchased tickets online, but the venue sold out and I'd guess there were 500-1000 people there. It was crowded enough that we couldn't get sufficient seats on the bleachers and I had to stand most of the evening. In two-hour hold cowboy boots. But it ruled so much that I don't care how badly my feet hurt today.

It took quite a long time for things to get started, so I had a while to scope out the crowd. It's a really interesting mix. There are the requisite young Lonestar-drinking hipsters, as would be expected, but also enough middle-aged people that they can't all be participants' parents, and a fair number of average looking folks, people with kids, etc. I'd been kind of worried that the vibe could be either hipsterer-than-thou or intimidating-drunk-WWF, or, worse, a strip club kind of thing, but none of these worries proved true. In general, the crowd seemed very respectful (though less so as the night wore on and people got drunker), excited, and in to having a good time. People had obvious awe for the women skating, and not in an exploitative way.

When things finally did get started, it became clear that TXRD has found the perfect balance between a really fun good time and serious competition. These girls are not fucking around; this isn't Jello wrestling. They are impressive on their skates, and they would be no matter how they dressed. While part of it is definitely about theater and spectacle, there's also an honest athleticism that I really wasn't expecting. Puta Chingona didn't just trash talk the crowd and wear a backless shirt, she also skated circles around her opponents and scored probably 30 points by herself. It was nothing but amazing to see this super-thin, very pretty, quite young woman kicking ass and taking names like that. Puta captain Chola is a similar case. She's hot. Hot hot hot. Looks like Salma Hayek hot. She wears pleather pants with her name embroidered on the ass. She also fucking rocks the rink, and is obviously way more concerned about how her team is doing than she is about how many fans are drooling over her. That's what I mean. On the surface, it all looks very sex-positive and post-feminist, but in truth, TXRD was one of the most feminist things I've seen in a long while. Women run the show, and they are obviously doing it not for the sake of being on display, but for the love of doing it. And it's not just the skaters in the rink, either--the whole thing seems to be run by the players. They're taking tickets, they're selling t-shirts, they're running around keeping things organized. They're making the rules and I hope they're making a profit (given the crowd, they have to be). It's fantastic.

But back to the bout. It was very much not a repeat of last year's close battle. This year, the Putas outclass the Holy Rollers by quite a lot. Part of this must be due to injury. Holy Roller star Miss Conduct (left--and she seriously is a star; people were having their picture taken with her all over the place) is out with an injury, as is co-captain Punky Bruiser. The Holy Rollers were very dependant on their amazing captain, Smarty Pants and what seemed to be a bunch of newbies. And it showed. As bad-ass a skater as Smarty Pants is, the Holy Rollers still lost by like 30+ points.

So let's talk about how they dress. Yep, they are sexified. The Holy Rollers schtick is that they are Catholic school girls, and they all wear tiny plaid skirts and white shirts, modified as the players see fit with garters, fishnets, visable bras, whatever. The Putas tend towards black and flame logos, but they're similarly tarted up. They show their briefs often, and tend to have things written on them. And, given the propensity in this group for piercings and tattoos, yeah, they look a little bit like the Suicide Girls. But they're not. For one thing, this is sport, not porn, and it's clear when you watch it that the sport comes before the tarting. Secondly, the tarting isn't mandatory. The Putas have a new team member, Bones, who chooses not to play the tart game and skates in pants and a tank top, and nobody stopped cheering because they couldn't see her ass. I also have to love that all bodies really do seem to be accepted here. There's a wide variance, from very small girls to girls by size and above, and nobody, teams or crowd, seems to differentiate between the two. It's not hard for me to see that as empowering.

What I saw last night wasn't alterna-girls parading in front of a male crowd for shallow accolades, dressed in uncomfortable clothing they didn't choose and trying to fit someone else's standard of beauty. What I saw were women who have created and are keeping control of their own thing, dressing in a way that amuses them and makes them feel attractive, and focusing more than anything on their sport and on their support of each other. And I feel damn good about that.

I added it to my blog roll, but I neglected to mention the fantastic new project I'm taking part in. Avast! Feminist Conspiracy! is a new feminist group blog. The group gathered there is pretty fantastic, and we represent a number of different takes on feminist issues and sets of experiences, so I highly recommend taking a look.

Also, I posted the little mini-epitaph to Betty Friedan I wrote over there, rather than here, so if you want to read that, it's here: Epitaph for Betty Friedan.

(Cross-posted at Avast! Feminist Conspiracy!)

by Liza Featherstone
Basic Books, November 30, 2004

This excellent, interview-based book follows the case of Dukes v. Wal-Mart, the gigantic class-action suit brought against Wal-Mart by its female employees. Journalist Featherstone talks to what have to be a hundred current and former Wal-Mart employees, managers, lawyers, etc. in her effort to get the whole story, and the story isn't pretty. The picture painted is one of institutional discrimination against women on a scale of over a million. The discrimination permeates all levels at Wal-Mart, with women making less than men for the same jobs, being sexually harassed, and all of the usual crimes. The thing that makes Wal-Mart different, though (or at least this is the case the prosecution will be making) is that the policy of discrimination is not limited to a given man, or a given store, but to the entire, huge company. As women fight their ways up the management ranks at Wal-Mart, things get worse rather than better, and eventually nearly all women top out. For all of its rhetoric about being woman-friendly and family-friendly, Wal-Mart does worse by women than any other company its size.

(Cross-posted at Avast! Femininst Conspiracy!)

I don't know if you are seeing this billboard in your city, but it is all over mine.

And it pisses me right off.

At first, I thought it just pissed me off because it was ass-backwards, and that if it said something like, "Breasts were made for feeding babies," I'd be OK with it. After all, of all the things a person is "born" to do, is being breastfed really at the top of the list? It just seemed...trite.

But thinking more about it, the other way would piss me off just as much, if not more. Because yes, breasts are used to feed babies. I understand the biology there. But as a feminist, I take issue with what I choose to do with my body taking back seat to the biology of what my body can do (or what I assume it can, I mean, I don't know that I could breastfeed, and some women who would like to can't, so that's another problem). Men, this city, this state, this country...they already own my body to a degree that I am uncomfortable with--the last thing I need is billboards to dictate to me what my body parts are for. The capacity to bear and nourish a child is not and should be conflated with the decision to do so.

Given the anti-breastfeeding factions in this country, as well as the massive miseducation about breastfeeding, I understand the need for pro-breastfeeding campaigns, and campaigns that focus on how breastfeeding is a natural, healthy thing and not something that should cause women shame. I support public breastfeeding for women who choose to do so. I'm all for it. But that does not change my dislike for being told what to do with my own body, whether it is by some dude or the media or the La Leche League. At the end of the day, my breasts, just like my uterus and every other part of me, are for whatever I say they are for. We may be mammals, but we are not beasts. We can and have in many arenas moved beyond our biology and made decisions based on other criteria, and there is no reason childbearing and nourishment should not be one of those arenas. Just because my body (again, assumedly) can bear a child does not mean I have a responsibility to do so, and just because my breasts have the capacity to nourish does not mean that I am under any obligation to choose to use them that way. My biology is not my destiny.

The 9th Carnival of Feminists is up at Mind the Gap. It's completely worth your time to go through it (at least it's worth mine so far--I'm not finished yet). And I'm not just saying that because I have a post included, I swear.

Next month, I am participating in a benefit walk for Safe Place, a fantastic local women's shelter/organization combating domestic and sexual violence. So, I'm soliciting contributions to sponsor my walk. My current goal is to collect $300 for Safe Place. If you think you might want to contribute, please go to my walk web page.

Thanks in advance!

Did you miss me?

Hardly noticed I was gone, huh?

Things have been pretty busy. Today was the first day of my third week at my brand new job, and it is nonstop. Basically, without going into too much incriminating detail, things are in a big tangled mess. Once I get all of the knots teased out, I'm pretty sure I'm going to like it a lot, and be very good at it, but the knots are definitely going to take a while. And things march on in the meantime, so it's a pretty steep learning curve. Good, but definitely tiring.

To your left, you see a sign I spotted in a bookstore the first night I was in Minneapolis. It caught my eye, and I have since been thinking about chick lit.

From what I can tell, chick lit covers any book by a woman or about a woman. And it is-surprise!-a derogatory term for these works. They aren't real literature. They're literature lite. Literature for girls. Diet literature. Chick lit.

I finally finished watching the season of "Rollergirls" last night. And I loved that show all the way through.

Parts of it were really stupid, and obviously dramatized to a point that docu-drama may have been a better genre for it than reality show. But be that as it may, it was fun to watch (and not just because it's set here!) and it made me feel good about womankind.

In the season finale, one of the skaters (Sister Mary Jane, for those playing along at home) says something about roller derby teaching her to love women again. And you could see that, and I think that's a big part of what got me about the show. The women who created and participate in Lonestar Rollergirls really seem to love each other. They fought a lot, all season, and there was way, way more catty bullshit than I wanted there to be, but at the end of the day, they created something together, fought for it, worked for it, and loved each other. And I don't see much of that, in my real life, in my online life, or even on TV. Groups of women creating things that matter and that last and that are fun and benefit them is something I'd really love to see more of, everywhere.

Maybe it's stupid to get that serious about something like roller derby, but I honestly don't think it is. We are trained to take men's organizations and interests, including and especially their sports, seriously, but not women's. And make no mistake, these women are athletes. I can't even fucking stand up on skates, and I know they're athletes. And general badasses, too. What the group of women involved in TXRD have done, in terms of business, in terms of athletics, and in terms of building a truly woman-run organization, impresses the hell out of me.

And it helps that some of the women featured on the show resonated with me so much. Some (Catalac...) didn't, but that was more a function of reality TV always needing a bad guy than anything else, I think. Others, like Punky Bruiser, Lux, and SMJ, I really wish I knew in real life.

Which is another thing I loved about the show. For the first time since I watched Angela Chase in MSCL in 10th grade, I finally saw some women on TV who reminded me of me and my friends. Only more than Angela, because these are real (or at least mostly real) women, not the figment of a TV writer's imagination. Helps too, I guess, that they are women in my town, women near my age, etc. But it's more than that. These are women who wear the same clothes in multiple episodes, have jobs they really don't like, settle for only barely suitable men, and often throw up their hands at the whole damn thing and just have another drink. Just like the ones I know.

So yeah. "Rollergirls" was good fun to watch, and it gave me a lot of food for thought about women's organizations and the bullshit that they face both from without and from within (I think I blogged about the "Clownsnack" episode a bit back--that was a really good example). I recommend it.

It took me a long time to see this movie, which may be surprising, given that it's about sexual harrassment and labor rights. There were two big reasons for that. The first was that I thought it would be depressing (and it was); the second was that I thought Charlize Theron would bug me (and she did).

First thing first: I am sick to death of seeing Charlize Theron "uglied up" to play "white trash" characters. While Josie, Theron's character in this film, isn't a serial killer like Eileen Wuornos, and I don't think they had Charlize gain any weight for this role, she's still a woman of a certain class, and watching Theron play women of this class turns my stomach. It feels like a bad, insulting impression. And the northern Minnesota accent she puts on for this one makes it even worse.

That being said, this movie wasn't as bad as it could have been. Above all else, I guess, I like to see stories like this one told, and depressing as it is, I like to see them told the way they are here, without an ending that conflates happiness with winning a lawsuit (a la Erin Brokovich). It's defeating, though, to watch women so mistreated, and realize that even if the lawsuit is won (which, of course, you know it will be, or they wouldn't have made the movie), things aren't really going to change all that much.

The film is dreary and depressing. It gives you the sense of constantly being cold, except for the scenes inside the mill, which give you the sense of being suffocatingly hot. It's hard to watch. And it should be, so I don't hold that against it. At least not as much as I hold Charlize Theron against it. Who the hell decided she was a good folk hero? Good Lord.

Frances McDormand, however, is amazing here as always. Watching her makes me happy. However, watching her play (SPOILER ALERT) a character who is slowly dying is less than thrilling. It is improved by Sean Bean playing her husband, though. More movies should have Sean Bean in them.

So...this is probably a movie you should see, but don't expect to enjoy it. And, if the film isn't depressing enough, keep in mind that the real story is much, much worse.

Today is the day to blog for GLBT families. In support of all of the GLBT families out there, and particularly the ones over on my blog roll, I wanted to put something up to acknowledge that.

I thought quite a bit about it, and decided that the best thing I can do is to hit it from my perspective, which is that of a functionally heterosexual woman (i.e. a woman in a different sex relationship--we've been over this ground before) watching what is happening to her gay and lesbian (well, just lesbian, to be honest) friends and they families they are creating.

And what I see happening is a lot of bullshit. I see amazing women building great families, with or without children, and not having those families recognized in most basic ways by the state. I see these women having to fight, litigate, and make awful choices just to get the recognition that those of us who are not in same-sex partnerships take for granted. And it really, really sucks.

It seems to me that the right to create families and have those families recognized is a basic right of citizenship in this country, or even a basic human right. Even when we strip away someone's citizenship rights, we don't dare take away someone's family. We don't tell a prisoner, for example, that s/he has no legal or social ties to his/her partner, parents, or children anymore. We would find that too intolerably cruel. Why, then, is it OK to do it to someone based solely on the her gender being the same as her partner's? What kind of logic is that?

Given the very basic level at which these injustices strike, it's hard for me to imagine how much they must hurt--to have people who know nothing about you or your family make arbitrary distinctions between whose baby your child really is, or who serves as next of kin to your partner--it's unthinkable. And I cannot express how much admiration I have for the gay and lesbian families all over this country who are doing the hard work every day to create the families they need and demand recognition of those families, one painstaking piece at a time. I really, really wish it were easier for all of you, and I know it will be some day.

So I'm currently obsessed with Gilmore Girls, as I've made clear. But I have to tell you, Rory and Loralei pissed me right off today. As did Luke. I just started the third season, and in one of the first episodes, the vingnette at the beginning features Loralei and Rory sitting in Luke's cafe while he complains about a messy, loud table with kids that doesn't buy much. OK, whatever. Then one of the women at the table starts breastfeeding her baby, and Luke goes apeshit about how that's gross and she's exposing herself and women should go in a barn or a cave or something to do that. And Loralei and Rory don't say anything to correct him. They even chime in on the grossness factor. Bad, bad form.

It was a bit of an a-ha to me, because most of my conversations on the subject of breastfeeding have been with people who are all for it, and I honestly didn't really think that "ew yucky breastfeeding!" was still the popular opinion, at least not among the generally fairly women-friendly (among whom I would count the Gilmores and Luke, and yes, I know they aren't real people, I'm just making a point). Guess I was wrong.

I'm not going to stop watching the show or anything, but if I were watching in real time, instead of many years after the fact, I'd be firing off a nasty email to the creators and the station and everyone else I could think of right now. And I hope someone who was with it enough to watch the show when it was on originally did just that.

I've been following a conversation on one of the feminist message board I frequent which centers around naming--specifically, it's been about what, if anything, women chose to do with their last names when they marry, and whose last name kids get. This is something I've pondered before, as I'm surprised that so many of my married/mommy feminist friends took their husbands' last names when they married and passed those names on to their kids. As we are all aware, I think, this is a patriarchal tradition. We can and probably do disagree about how important a tradition it is, but its roots are undeniably in the patriarchy, and I would think refusing to change your name upon marriage or assume your offspring will bear your male partner's name would be one way for heterosexual feminists to fairly easily usurp the status quo (though I realize that is easy for my unmarried, non-mom self to say). So I'm surprised by how seldom it seems to actually be done.

For the record, my plans are as follows:
1. Don't get married.
2. If I do get married, make no change to my name.
3. Don't have kids.
4. If I do have kids, hyphenate their last names, probably with my last name before the hyphen and Mark's after the hyphen, but that's negotiable.

For me, that's what makes sense. Mark and I are already the Mitchell-Harnett family/household. When I fill out paperwork for our dogs, I put Mitchell-Harnett as their surname. Why would it be different for children? I'm Mitchell, he's Harnett, our kids are Mitchell-Harnett. Seems easy enough.

But of course people have arguments against hyphenating. The most common one is that it isn't a long-term solution, as people's names will get too long if they keep hyphenating in future generations. And that's a problem, but all naming conventions I can think of have problems, and frankly, I'd rather let future generations work those out for themselves than keep on with an archaic tradition like the one we have now. Plus, as my friend Tishie pointed out, that problem can be solved by parents with hyphenated names choosing only one of their two names to pass on, thus passing something on from both sides.

If keeping your own name and hyphenating kids' names is so easy, though, why haven't any of my feminist friends done it? Generally, they give one or a combo of the following reasons for taking their husbands' names:
1. They don't care, names don't mean anything anyway, it's more important to him, since it's not important, it's not a feminist battle worth fighting, etc.
2. They want their whole family to have the same last name.
3. They want to divorce themselves from their former last name.
4. It's just easier.
5. You have a man's last name either way, at least your husband's is chosen (unlike, presumably, your father's).

As much as I admire and love and respect any number of women who have made this decision, and used one or all of the above reasons for doing so, the reasons just don't cut it for me. To begin with, I just don't get names as not being important. Names are, besides our appearances, our primary identifiers. They are ties to our families, our cultures, etc. And, if they really don't matter, why is changing them important? Why is it even a custom? I just can't imagine giving up my name and not feeling as if I've lost something.

In the case of women who have a specific reason for wanting to be rid of the name they've grown up with (often abuse, etc.), I don't understand why taking a different "by default" name (a husband's) would be preferable to choosing another name for yourself. I can totally see why renaming yourself would be an important part of healing and important way to sever ties with an abusive family, etc., but I don't see how this wouldn't be even more the case if you choose the name you change to, rather than just taking someone else's.

As far as families all having the same name, it probably is easier. But easier isn't necessarily better, and as often as not, easier reinforces the status quo. So why it may indeed be easier for an individual woman to take her husband's last name and pass it on to her children, minimizing confusion, etc., is it really easier for women as a class, in the long run? And as far as the family all having the same name, why do we assume that the only way for that to happen is to use dad's name? What's wrong with dad changing his name? The whole family choosing something new? Mixing names? Hyphenating? If having all family members have the same last name is really important to you (and it's not to me, but I grew up with a different last name than the people I lived with, so my perspective comes from there), there are lots of ways to do it.

Basically, I think women do themselves, if not as individuals, then as a class, a disservice by changing their names when they marry and not insisting that some element of their names be passed on to their children. In my mind, it ends up being one more way for women to subsume their own identities to those of men, and I don't like that.

I can't get the Willard Suitcase Exhibition out of my head. I even dreamed about it last night. So this post will contain "spoilers," as it were, and I highly recommend you click the link and take a look for yourself before you read it.

I wrote my first anti-uniform piece when I was 16. I was a member of a local newspaper's teen team, and I fought to be assigned the anti-uniform stance in a point-counterpoint article (front page of the section!). As a picture to accompany the article, the girl who wrote the pro-uniform side was given a small budget and told to go to Target or Wal-Mart or wherever and buy clothes she would consider an appropriate uniform for high schools. I was told to come in my own clothes, whatever I thought best reflected my typical style. Then they took our pictures back-to-back and printed our pieces. She came in navy pants with an elastic waist, a plain white polo shirt, and plain dark shoes. I came in jeans I inherited from my stepfather, a hand-tooled leather belt from the 70s (with someone else's name on the back of it), a striped v-neck, and Birkenstocks. We were equally comfortable and able to move around. We were equally "covered up." We both felt, I assume, that what we were wearing said something about ourselves as individuals.

More than ten years later, I have no idea what my "opponent" (whose name I've forgotten) thinks about dress codes and uniforms. As for me, though, my stance hasn't changed much. Now, as then, uniforms make my skin crawl, and I abhor dress codes. It's not so much about the mystical ability to "express myself" through my clothes as it is about control. The way I see it, dressing is an extension of body autonomy, and I don't want someone else telling me what parts of my body need to be covered, by what, etc. It irritates me in employment situations (which are, mostly, voluntary) and it enrages me in schools (which are, mostly, not).

I spent much of high school pressing the dress code issue. My high school did not have a particularly stringent code, but certain things (midriff tops, shorts or skirts that were too short, spaghetti strap tanks, hats, etc.) were not allowed. I wore all of them at one time or another. It wasn't about being sexxxxeeee, or about showing off my body. It was about testing boundaries. It was about exercising my own autonomy, and seeing how far I could push.

Interestingly, when I moved to college, where there was no dress code (literally none, we had naked students at Reed), I started caring a lot less about my clothes. I had my own uniform, of a sort--baggy cargo pants or BDUs, a t-shirt, a hoodie. I did a few wild things with my hair, pierced my navel (not allowed in high school), got my first tattoo (also not allowed), but basically, I kept myself covered up and didn't think much about it. As an adult, working in professional environments, I wear clothing that is, by and large, appropriate. I do wear sleeveless shirts and dresses, which some people find inappropriate (particularly because it shoes my upper arm tattoo), but none of my employers have had any problem with this, so I guess it's fine. Having the freedom to dress the way I see fit hasn't turned me into some kind of monster. If anything, it's let to me chilling out about the whole situation.

Dress codes and uniforms, in most cases, are about control. They generally come about through dictates rather than community processes, coming down from a superior as rules for inferiors. This is the case in schools, in places of employment, and in prisons. I object to this kind of control. I buck against this kind of control, and I think a lot of people do. And moreover, I think we should, particularly women. Because in truth, there's not much difference between someone with power over you telling you to cover it up and telling you to take it off. Either way, someone who is not you is exercising control over your body decisions, and I think it's right to fight that.

My basic premises are as follows:

1. People should be left to dress as they see appropriate, with the exception of dress codes needed for safety reasons and uniforms needed for identification purposes (i.e. police officers, fire fighters, etc.);
2. If left to their own devices, people will generally dress in a way that is deemed "appropriate" for whatever their position/station is;
3. If left to their own devices and not dressing "appropriately," people generally aren't hurting anyone or anything anyway.

I honestly don't understand what is so hard about that. It seems to me that uniforms and dress codes are just unnecessary rules in nearly all cases, and I don't see any point to restricting people unnecessarily. The so-called benefits of dress codes seem mostly invented to me (safer? less distracting? less classist? really? are you sure?), and the drawbacks are much larger than people realize.

I'm so sad about Ann Richards' death yesterday that I haven't been able to figure out what to say about it here. As a woman, as a "progressive," and as a transplanted Texan, I've long admired Governor Richards' work and looked to her as proof that sometimes Texas can be something good, even something great. We'll miss her.

I've long been interested in the subject of female aggression, or, put simply, why women and girls are so damn mean to each other. This interest is largely personal, as I've been on the end of a quite a bit of female-to-female bullying, both as a child and as an adult, and I've been on the bully side more often than I'd care to admit as well. It's partially theoretical or academic, though, as the more involved I've become in feminist academic and social circles, the more sure I am that the biggest barricade in the way of real feminist change is, in fact, women's attitudes towards each other.

Which is a fairly controversial statement, really. A lot of feminists do not see it that way, and many are even insulted by the idea, as they think it implies that it's women’s own fault they are oppressed. Which isn't at all what I mean. I believe that the ways in which women abuse each other are highly patriarchally conditioned.

A lot of scholars on the subject of female bullying agree. There are several good books about this, the most famous and easily accessible of which is probably Rachel Simmons' Odd Girl Out: The Hidden Culture of Aggression in Girls (others worth checking out are Phyllis Chesler's groundbreaking Woman's Inhumanity to Woman and Leora Tanenbaum's Catfight: Rivalries Among Women--from Diets to Dating, from the Boardroom to the Delivery Room, which focuses on the competitive aspects of conflicts between girls and women). In her search for an explanation for the way she was treated and the way she treated others as a girl, Simmons interviews girls of various ages, races, classes, and backgrounds, as well as does significant secondary source research. She comes to the conclusion that the best explanation for the passive-aggressive nastiness young girls show each other (behavior including spreading rumors, exclusion, trying to turn others against someone, etc.) is that girls aren't taught any other way to express disagreement. In short, girls don't know how to fight in a healthy way, so they fight in a supremely unhealthy one.

Simmons and her theory make a guest appearance on the most recent piece I saw on this subject, the CBC/National Film Board of Canada Production It's a Girl's World. This short film alternates between interviews with and footage of a clique of 10 year-old girls in Montreal and their families and interviews with the family, friends, and tormentors of 14 year-old Dawn-Marie Wesley, a British Columbia girl who committed suicide after being bullied. Filmmaker Lynn Glazier simultaneously explores the most serious possible consequences of bullying, telling the story of the Wesley case, and the sources of bullying behavior and how it plays out, observing the Montreal girls.

The most interesting part of the film for me was Glazier's footage of the Montreal girls' parents (mostly their mothers, as (tellingly?) only one father seemed to be involved). Their reactions went from taking the situation very seriously to completely avoiding reality and brushing everything off with "they'll outgrow it." Especially interesting were the very different reactions of the parents of the two biggest bullies in the group. One set of parents was very pro-active, talking at length with their daughter about her behavior, keeping her home from activities if she did not socialize nicely, etc. The other mother denied that her daughter would have anything to do with bullying behavior until very late in the game.

The parents of all of the girls in the group got together on several occasions to discuss the issue, at one point bringing Simmons in as an "expert." In what I found to be the film's most telling scene, the girls' parents sit around a table, watching footage of the group of girls having a discussion about bullying with Simmons. In the discussion, the girls display typical behavior--one whispers to another behind her hand, several gang up on another and tell her she should be talking, one belittles another for not speaking up. Then the mothers display very similar behavior, one brushing off another's concerns, a second drilling a clearly upset woman about her parenting tactics, and several sitting quietly, looking as if they wished they were anywhere else.

To me, it was that scene, more than anything else in the film, which really drove the point home. Not only is bullying a dangerous, extremely harmful force in childhood, but we don't necessarily outgrow it. This is bad for us, individually and collectively, and bad for our kids. How can we expect a group of 10 year-olds to learn to disagree constructively and treat each other with respect when their mothers can't do it either? And who polices the mommies? Where does it end?

The same thought entered my mind watching an interview with one Dawn-Marie Wesley's bullies and her grandmother. Both the teenage girl and her grandmother did little but make excuses, saying that Dawn-Marie engaged in the same behavior, it was normal, doing everything but calling her suicide an overreaction to a completely average situation. With an attitude like that coming from the adult in her life (her grandmother), how could the teenage bully ever expect to be any different?

I don't completely agree with Simmons' bullying theories. Or, I agree with them, but think they are only part of a very complicated picture. I can certainly see her argument for girls' passive-aggressive behavior being largely due to not being socially able to be out-and-out aggressive, but even if girls were to be more "masculine" in their behavior towards each other, to bully with fists and punches more than glares and whispered rumors, we'd still have a problem, you know? And I believe a lot of that problem comes from the massive unresolved anger many woman and girls carry around with them. We're right to be angry--we live in a world that systematically devalues us at ever turn. The problem is that we turn that anger on each other, because we're too afraid to band together and turn it on those who really deserve it. The boys. We spend so much energy attacking each other, standing in our own and each other's way, and it's time and energy we could spend attacking them. But keeping us at each other's throats is all part of the plan, isn't it? It's much easier to dominate a population hell-bent on dominating each other.

The answers the film suggested were ultimately unsatisfying, at least to me. While I was glad to see the Montreal girls' parents taking bullying seriously and talking to their children about it, I don't much think it's going to help, even in their specific cases, much less overall. Forcing a girl to apologize for her past behavior, or encouraging her to make other friends if the ones she has are mean to her, don't really address the issue. I never heard any mother tell her daughter she was right to be mad, or offer to help her figure out who she was really mad at. And I'm not surprised. I've spent a good deal of time thinking about this stuff-more than most, probably-and I still can't figure out who to be mad at most of the time. I only pray that if I ever have a daughter, she and I can both learn.

In the comments to that last post regarding It's a Girls World, my friend Scand asked an interesting question. As I have been a bully myself, what would I have said I was angry about, if asked, during my bullying days?

I wish I had an answer. But I don't. Part of the problem is that my experiences with bullying, both as a victim and a perpetrator, are very hazy. I know I came home from school crying and never wanted to go back and had no friends at times, and I know I participated in a "slam book" and was a terror to other girls at other times, but I don't have any really specific memories--certainly no memories that are clear enough that I can tap into how I felt at the time.

I'm surprised by how clear man women's memories of their childhood bullies seem to be, and I wonder what it means that mine aren't. I honestly don't feel like I was scarred for life by being bullied as a child. It was horrible at the time, I'm sure, but I don't think I suffer from it as an adult. Many women clearly do. What made my experiences different? Was it just that I didn't undergo the kind of terrorizing that some women did? Or is it that I was sometimes on the other side as well?

As I mentioned in my previous post, I believe that one of the root causes of female-to-female bullying and aggression is unresolved anger. Women aren't allowed to be angry, and we have ever so much to be angry about. I think this is part of the reason girls who don't fit a stereotypically feminine mold are often singled out for aggression--they make a good target for other girls who wish, consciously or not, that they didn't have to fit that mold either. Even as an adult, with what I hope is more awareness of my motives and behavior than I had as a child, I can sometimes feel myself becoming angry and resentful at women who are somehow able to live outside of boundaries I feel corralled by. Could the same thing that makes me resentful as an adult have made me a bully as a child? Is that part of the equation?

As I mentioned before, there seem to be two current leading theories of why girls bully each other. The first is Simmons' theory, that girls are not taught how to argue or fight in a healthy way and so they begin to act in mean, petty, passive-aggressive ways. The second, discussed in Leora Tanenbaum's Catfight, is that female aggression is based largely on competition. Women and girls are nasty to each other out of jealousy and competition for scarce resources (time, jobs, men, whatever). Tanenbaum's reasoning resounds with me as much as Simmons' does, but again, I think there is more to it. I think it may be less about "scarce resources" and more about resentment of other girls and women who seem to be getting off easier when it comes to being female.

I truly believe that just being born female in this world is enough to keep you mad for a lifetime. The unending, heartbreaking unfairness of it is enough weight all by itself to piss me off, before any details even come into play. As women, we are reminded a thousand times a day that we are considered inferior, and that everything is going to be harder for us simply by virtue of our sex. So perhaps seeing other women seem to deal with it easier, not be bothered by it, or fit naturally into roles that we have to contort ourselves into feeds into this anger, and we (wrongly) target those women for being better contortionists, rather than blaming the guys who created the boxes.

It's not a perfect theory by any means, but instinctively it feels reasonable to me. As a 27 year-old woman who has given a lot of time and thought to being a woman, I can admit that I'm angry all the time. Every day. And it is a lot to carry around. I hope that I don't take it out on other women, but if I am honest with myself, I know at times I have. And how much harder is it if you can't admit that you're mad? Or if you don't even know you're mad, or you do, but you have no idea why? It's not really surprising that the helplessness and confusion leads to misguided rage.

But how to get beyond the rage--or, better yet, use it for something constructive? That's the real question. And I still don't have an answer. For myself, all I can do is try to take people one at a time, for who they are. Try to err on the side of kind. But I know it's not enough. It's never enough.

I've always been a big supporter of Madonna. No matter what crazy-ass thing she did, from the Sex book to the fake British accent and Kabbalah, I've defended her both as a brilliantly self-inventing and reinventing businesswoman and as a certain kind of artist (though not so much the kind she thinks she is). But this time, I have nothing good to say.

Being a news-avoider (both the real kind and the entertainment kind), I had only been vaguely aware of Madonna's adoption plans when my friend S. filled me in last night. Basically, as I understand it, Madonna visited Malawi on some sort of charity trip, donating a bunch of dough ($3 million?) to children there who are being ravaged by poverty and AIDS. Then she decided she wanted to take one of those babies home. Malawi law doesn't allow international adoption. However, rather than starting the labor-and-time intensive international adoption process from a country that does allow international adoption of its orphan children, Madonna decided that her celebrity status would allow her to bypass this bit of "red tape" and picked out a kid.

Yeah. Picked out a kid. One year-old David Banda, who has been living in an orphanage, but who is not an orphan. While David's mother died shortly after his birth, his father is still alive and is involved in his life (sounds like he's at the orphanage due to his father's extreme poverty and inability to care for him).

So not only is Madonna insisting on adopting a child from a country that doesn't allow international adoption, she's also adopting a child who has a father who wants him.

Making matters worse, while waiting for travel documents/permission to take David out of the country, Madonna and her husband, Guy Ritchie, left the country, leaving the baby with employees. Yep. So attached to the kid they couldn't wait a few weeks.

And that's pretty much where it stands now. Her adoption is being challenged, various organizations are arguing over whether it's a good idea, the baby's father has said that he did not support the adoption, but was told by the orphanage that he should, etc.

This is fucking infuriating, for a couple of reasons. First there are the obvious problems with this particular instance--Madonna's complete lack of respect for other people's laws and customs, for the adoption process, and for this boy's existing family. But beyond that, there's what the media around Madonna's baby-buying (because really, that is what this sounds like) does to people who adopt internationally for the right reasons, within the laws, and with years of forethought.

The obvious counter-example to the Madonna story, since we're talking celebrities, is Angelina Jolie. Angelina has two adoption children, both orphans. Her son Maddox is from Cambodia and her daughter Zahara is from Ethiopia. There have been piles of press about these adoptions, both positive and negative, and no shortage of insistences that Jolie bought her babies. However, this story is a lot different than Madonna's--it includes legal adoptions, of orphans, from countries with international adoption laws. And Jolie reportedly spent up to 18 months in Cambodia with Maddox before she was cleared to take him out of the country. While Madonna and Ritchie couldn't spare a few weeks.

The more important thing, though, is what this does to regular families who were brought together through international adoption. It's a subject near and dear to my heart because my best small friend, H., came to her parents, S. and T., by way of international adoption from China. Over the time period we've been friends with S. and T., we've watched much of the adoption process, from the beginning gathering of paperwork through multiple home visits, the months of wondering when the referral will come, the joy when the referral finally does show up, the arduous trip to China, the bonding of the new family, and H.'s first two years on American soil. Being an observer to this process has given me tremendous respect for people who choose to go this expensive, heart-wrenching route, and knowing this family and all of the good, true, right reasons they chose to expand in this way has made me livid at hearing international adoption scoffed at as accessorizing your boho family, as baby-buying. Which it is. Often. And sometimes by otherwise reasonable folks. How much more of this is Queen Madonna bringing down upon those adopt these kids by the rules and for the right reasons? And what fucking right does she have?

Many thanks to Squid for posting a link to this great spot from Dove's Campaign for Real Beauty, showing the transition from a model to a billboard. I think it's meant to teach little girls that what they see in advertisements and magazines isn't real, but that's something this not-so-little girl could use an occaisonal reminder about as well.

In support of Canadian feminists protesting the new goverment's hamstringing of the Status of Women's Canada (SWC), and in blatant copying of some great bloggers, here are five things feminism has done for me:

1. Got me born to an unresentful mama. My conception was not intentional. And my my mother had a choice to whether or not to have me. She considered her options. She made the decision to have me. It wasn't decided for her. And I can't help but believe that started my life out on a better foot than otherwise would have been possible.

2. Allows me to structure my partnership the way that I choose. It is because of feminism and the work feminists have done that I don't feel I have to marry my partner just because that's what traditionally happens next. This is very important to me. It's clearly not yet perfected, as many people are not free to structure their parternships in the ways that best suit them, but for me it has worked out that way.

3. Allows me to say yes when I want sex and no when I don't. All by itself, this is huge.

4. Increases my comfort in my body. As uncomfortable as I sometimes am in my XL skin, I know things would be exponentially worse if I lived in a world where nobody had ever tried to deconstruct the beauty myth.

5. Provides me with a mirror with which to look at other types of inequality. As a woman who believes woman are and have been an oppressed class, I am much more able than I otherwise would be to sympathize with, and hopefully begin to understand, the battles other oppressed classes of people are fighting, and to do what I can to assist them in those battles.

And that's just off the top of my head. The truth is that there are few, if any, aspects of my life that the advent of feminism hasn't positively affected. Without generations of women fighting for equality there is simply no way I could be who I am today.

So it's a small thing. Or is it? One's name is both a meaningless marker and an encapsulated identity. Both a small thing and not a small thing at all.

I just got off the phone with the vet's office. I love my vet. Love. But I don't love the reception staff, who just can't seem to get the name thing straight. All of the pets' intake forms list their last names as Mitchell Harnett. My name on everything there, from consent forms to credit cards receipts, is Grace Mitchell. And when I called just now, I said, verbatim, "This is Grace Mitchell. I'm calling to schedule an ultra sound for my dog Leo. You may have him listed under Harnett."

So when the receptionist got back on the phone and said, "Mrs. Harnett..." should I have been surprised?

How about when we received a very nice card from Mark's grandmother this weekend, addressed to Mark and Grace Harnett? Mark's grandmother is not senile. She knows Mark and I aren't married (leaving aside, for the moment, that my name would not change even if we were). So who is Grace Harnett?

I'd prefer people not assume Mark and I are married. But I know they will, and that, given our genders and our obvious relationship, it's a statistically probable assumption. And, if you assume we're married, that we'd have the same last name (his) is also a statistically probable assumption, for someone who doesn't know us. So I understand how a stranger would come to the conclusion that my last name is Harnett. However, if I have told you MULTIPLE TIMES what my freaking name is, it just feels disrespectful for you to continue calling me by something else. It's not just that I'm irritated, as a feminist, at the insistence that even if I haven't taken Mark's name, I should. It's that I feel a little piece of my identity, the one I've had my entire life, chosen by my mother, being negated when my name is misrepresented. And this is particularly exhausting when it is at the hand (or lips) of someone who knows me, either personally or professionally. So get with it.

*Ani, "In Or Out"

As a follow up to the Dove piece I posted a few days ago (and is making its way around the Internet in a million other forums as well), I have to share something Nyarly brought to my attention. If you go here, then click on "portfolio" and "before/after," you can see celebrity photographs pre and post-digital enhancement.

One example, a picture of Mariah Carey, is shown below. Others are similarly revealing.

This entry is specifically for any Oregon readers I might have (and bless you for being here, too--I love to think that there is someone from home reading this), but also for anybody with a parental notification measure on their ballot, or a possibility of one in the future.

Folks, you have to vote no on these. As much as it may make sense to you that an underage girl should discuss having an abortion with her parents before she does it, you and I both know that legislating that is a bad idea, not in the least because so many girls would have their right to choose negated by having to get parental permission, and also because of the possibility of harm or violence to a girl who has to tell her parents. Not everyone has good parents, understanding parents, reasonable parents, and parental notification legislation assumes they do.

In the specific case of Oregon's ballot Measure 43, things are even a little bit worse. What Measure 43 requires is for doctors to send a form letter via certified mail to the parents of any minor seeking abortion services. There are no exceptions for rape, incest, or abusive homes. This means that in some terrible cases, notification of a girl seeking an abortion could be sent to the very man who made her pregnant against her will. I can't imagine anything more destructive to choice than that, not to mention how dangerous it might be for the girl herself.

Parental consent is both one brick in the wall against choice for everyone and a separate and infuriating slap in the face of body autonomy for teenaged girls. It is incumbent upon all of us who are safe in our abilities to make our own decisions about our bodies to protect the rights of those whose autonomy is threatened, particularly in cases like this, where the young women who would be effected aren't even allowed to cast their votes on the legislation that could so drastically impact their lives.

Please vote NO on Measure 43, and spread the word.

For more on Measure 43, see:
NARAL Oregon
No on 43
Oregon Education Association
League of Women Voters of Oregon
ACLU of Oregon

Once again, it is Blog for Choice Day, and as such, I am compelled to say something about why I am a pro-choice woman.

There are a million reasons, and they are the same million reasons that everybody else who is acknowledging Blog for Choice day is likely writing about. The biggest single one, though, is that I believe very very strongly that each person's body must be his or her own in order for us to really consider ourselves free people. And for a woman, upon whose body the burden of reproduction is enacted, part of body autonomy is having absolute authority over if, and under what circumstances, pregnancies are carried to term.

Abortion is a distasteful subject for a lot of people, and if I'm being honest, I'll admit it's not my favorite subject either. I don't like the idea of removing fetuses from wombs. It's unpleasant. Far more unpleasant, though, is the idea of having something growing in your body without your consent. To me, that's the stuff horror movies and dystopian novels are made of. And while it is true, for me, that a child growing inside me would probably not be considered there without consent for very long, I can see how that is not true for women in many circumstances, and for some women under any circumstances. Given, then, that pregnancy can occur unintentionally, allowing women full authority to remove fetuses from their bodies is the only way women can be allowed true free personhood.

Like a lot of people, I'd rather it were the case that abortion was never needed. I'd rather All pregnancies were rejoiced, rather than bemoaned, and that all fetuses developed into happy and healthy babies. But that's not the world we live in. In this world, birth control is inaccessible, or ineffective, or not used for any of a million other reasons. In this world, not everybody wants to have a baby, and even those who do are not automatically in situations were having a baby is a good choice. And given those constraints, legal, affordable, and accessible abortion services are absolutely key to granting full citizenship to women.

Even though I have a whole category called "Other People's Blogs," I rarely link here to stuff I read elsewhere that moves me. I dunno why, I just don't much do it. This post, by Flea, guest-blogging at Feministe, however, needs to be read.

Suzanne has a post at BlogHer challenging women to post photos of themselves in their swimsuits, to remind all of us that we're the real women with the real bodies out here, and that's OK--more than OK, actually, fabulous. She posted hers and there are/will be others in the comments. I am 100% for it and wanted to share. Since the most recent one of myself I can find is from 1997, I'll be attempting to do one of me tonight, digital camera battery willing.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with the skin we live in, y'all.

I am back, finally, after sickness, recuperation, and a fantastic weekend spent with my college chums, about which I will attempt to post later. First, though, something that has been brewing for a bit:

I recently had occasion to take Plan B for the first, and hopefully last, time. The circumstances that led to my needing to take it are less important than the thing itself, so I'll skip over those. Procuring the Plan B was easy, but confusing. I had a prescription for it that was over a year old, which I had requested from my doctor some time ago when I was afraid it was not going to be approved over the counter. I took this prescription; along with a corresponding prescription my doctor provided for an anti-nausea medication, to my regular pharmacy (a CVS) and dropped it off at the drive-through with the promise to come back for it in a few hours. A few minutes later, a clerk from the pharmacy called and said that they did not have any Plan B in stock, but that they would be happy to fax my prescriptions over to another store in their chain, which was a couple of miles away. As I travel by car, that was convenient enough for me, so I said sure. An hour or so later, a clerk from the second CVS called, and told me that their store had plenty of the over-the-counter version of Plan B, which I could come pick up at any time, along with the anti-nausea prescription, which they had filled, but that they did not currently carry the prescription Plan B which my scrip was actually for.

This puzzles me. Is there a difference between prescription and over the counter Plan B at this point? I see no evidence of this on the web page.

So I showed up at the pharmacy and was given my insurance-covered anti-nausea prescription ($10) and my non-insurance-covered OTC Plan B ($45). I took them home. This was on Friday night. I read the Plan B instructions, and it clearly stated that I was to take the two tablets 12 hours apart, so I decided to wait until Saturday morning to take the first one. I popped it at about 10:30 AM on Saturday. I spent the next few hours a bit nauseated, but not terribly. I took an anti-nausea pill and went directly to sleep for a few hours, so that didn't seem like the best plan. I took the second pill Saturday night and repeated the process.

Everything seemed to go very smoothly. The nausea wasn't fun, but it wasn't dehabilitating.

Fast forward to 2 AM Sunday night/Monday morning, when I wake up throwing up and proceed to do so for the next twelve hours, along with some even less savory stomach symptoms. At about 8 AM, Mark is concerned enough about me to call the campus nurse advice line.

Once the nurse on the phone hears that I have taken Plan B, she says that my symptoms are side effects, even though it was over 24 hours before when I took the second pill, and even though Mark shares some of the symptoms. She not only won't hear other possibilities (including being exposed to a stomach virus and eating shrimp), she gives me the distinct impression that I somehow deserve to be this sick. I ask how long I should expect it to last, and she says 24 to 48 hours. I ask if there is anything I can do for it, and she offers the sage advice, "take small sips of water." I hang up on her when I start barfing again.

I proceed to be as sick as I've ever been, at least in the stomach realm, for two days. Mark is similarly afflicted, and I'm pretty sure it's either a virus or (most likely) food poisoning. But I'm still pissed at that nurse.

All in all, my Plan B experience wasn't bad. I don't think it was the cause of my violent illness, I didn't have any particular trouble getting it, and, as I seem to be starting my period today, I assume it worked. I'm very pleased that getting it over the counter seems to be relatively easy here (though I did have to go to two pharmacies, the personnel at both were helpful, if seemingly confused at the prescription/non-prescription status of the drug). It was good of my doctor to provide the anti-nausea prescription, but I think I'd have been OK without it. It's certainly nothing I want to take recreationally, but in my experience it seems to have worked exactly as intended, as an accessible and relatively inexpensive emergency method. This is somewhat encouraging.

I've never been a particular fan of Jennifer Baumgardner. Although my age plants me firmly in the Third Wave, my philosophies often don't, and Manifesta just didn't quite work for me as a feminist treatise, though I think it was well intentioned. Still, when I saw that she was interviewed in the latest Bitch, on the heels of the release of her new book, Look Both Ways: Bisexual Politics, I was excited to read the article. I don't see a lot of ink spilled on bisexuality in the feminist media (or any other media, really), and I was curious to see what Baumgardner, of Amy Ray-dating fame, had to say.

Turns out I should have kept my skepticism.

I have a new piece up today at As We Are, and I'm kind of proud of it, so if you'd go over there and check it out, I'd appreciate it.

Last year, I participated in NaBloPoMo, as envisioned by one of my favorite bloggers, the frighteningly amusing and inventive Eden. My contribution to the 2,000ish dedicated daily bloggers was my series on history making women. Though I was very into the project, I didn't get through the whole list, stopping abruptly at #78, Gloria Steinem sometime in February. This means that there are 27 women left on the poster to be profiled, which is a pretty good number to tackle during this year's NaBloPoMo, in November. So that's what I'm going to do. A lot of advance warning, I know, but I just wanted to let you know to watch this space for that, and invite all of you to participate in NaBloPoMo as well--it's great fun!

Last month, I posted about my irritation with the Bitch interview with Jennifer Baumgardner, the author of Look Both Ways: Bisexual Politics. I was very disappointed with the interview, but at that time said I'd still read the book, as maybe she had more to say than she'd let on.

Once again, I'm disappointed.

The book is just as bad, if not worse, than the interview was. Baumgardner honestly seems to see a special place for herself and other bisexuals (or at least bisexual women, she has very little to say about bisexual men) in the gay (specifically lesbian) community. Not only does she expect to be welcomed as queer, regardless of her partnership status, but she seems to think she's a really special kind of queer, even "queerer" than lesbians, or something. Which is both infuriating and kind of amazing in its narcissism.

My reviewing a book about bisexuality does not mean I give you a pass to post porn links in my comments.

Assholes.

Have you checked out Heroine Content lately? Don't you think maybe you should? I have a new post up today, detailing the exercise in disappointment that was Alien 3.

Perhaps I'm getting prudish in my old age. Honestly, though, I don't think that's the problem. There have been stories and blog posts all over the Net about how Halloween has turned into an excuse/expectation for women and girls, even young girls, to dress provocatively and to male fantasy standards. Naughty nurse, sexy cat, sexy cop, French maid, etc. I personally hadn't given this a whole lot of thought. When I was in fifth grade, one of my classmates came to our Halloween carnival dressed as a ten year-old Playboy bunny. Everyone was aghast. I thought this was something like that--something odd that happened occasionally with young girls and was not generally considered acceptable. As for adult women, I've long ago accepted that a great majority of us will dress in a stupid way if given half the chance and hardly find it surprising when the line between provocative and sluttified is crossed and re-crossed.

Then, yesterday, I went to buy Halloween candy. While I was in the store, I checked out some of the costumes for sale.

Oh. My.

It seems that every women's costume, adult and child alike, has been sexified. There are no witches, just sexy witches; no pirates, just sexy pirates. Slutty superheroes, bad kitties, tavern wenches (OK, so that one was actually kind of cute, and at least it was for a grown up), and even children's outfits that screamed nothing so much as BDSM. Several versions of "pimp" and "ho" costumes! And then something that I can just barely describe, which I think was called a "dollar girl" costume, and seemed to be a short dress made entirely of plastic dollar bills?

Who lets their kids wear this stuff? Are the trick or treaters that come to my door tonight going to be dressed this way? Wasn't it bad enough when little girls were all expected to be fairies and princesses and ballerinas? Now they have to be sexy fairies, dominatrix princesses, and lap dancers?

I'm really not anti-sex, or even anti-sexy dressing. And I can totally see how and why Halloween is a fun night for women to dress more sexily than they would otherwise. I've done it myself. But not as a small child! At the age at which girls now are presumably dressing as "dollar girls," I dressed as a Care Bear, a (non-sexy) pirate, and one banner year, a book! And I had a great time on Halloween and all was well and I wasn't being asked to sell my body before I even knew what it was.

I find these sexy costumes for kids really distressing. The beauty of Halloween as a kid, to me, was imagination. It was thinking about what you could become that would be fun, being allowed to act out and look weird. This seems like just an escalation of the pressure young girls feel every day, at younger and younger ages, to meet a male sexual ideal, whether it works for them or not. And if that is what Halloween is going to be about, then I'd rather skip it all together.

Yes, I know I've written about this before. It's important. I'm writing about it again.

There are only a handful of independent women's bookstores left in the United States. The email I got today from my local and once-again threatened store, BookWoman said that they are one of 12. The Feminist Bookstore Network site lists more than that, but not nearly enough, and I suspect some of those listed are either not there anymore or not independent. chora's list only has six. However many there actually are, it's not many, and many of them are under constant pressure to remain open. Right now, my biggest worry is BookWoman, which needs to raise $50,000 before mid-December in order to keep on keeping on. But tomorrow it could be the one nearest you.

So here's what I think we should do, you and I. I think we should do some of our Christmas shopping at our local feminist bookstore, if we are so lucky as to still have one. I think we should do as much of it there as we can. And in case you don't know what's near you, here are a few I know are still in operation:

Antigone Books
411 N. 4th Ave.
Tucson AZ 85705
520-792-3715
antigonebooks@qwest.net

Word Is Out
2015 10th Street
Boulder, Colorado 80302
303-449-1415
louiseknapp@wordisout.net

Bloodroot Restaurant and Bookstore
85 Ferris St.
Bridgeport CT 06605
203-576-9168

Wild Iris Books
802 West University Ave.
Gainesville FL 32601
352-375-7477 Fax -375-7719
wildirisbooks@bellsouth.net

Charis Books and More
1189 Euclid Ave. NE
Atlanta GA 30307
404-524-0304 Fax -522-6663
info@charisbooksandmore.com

Women & Children First
5233 N. Clark St.
Chicago IL60640
773-769-9299 * 888-923-7323
Fax 773-769-6729
wcfbooks@aol.com

Womencrafts Inc.
376 Commercial St. / Box 190
Provincetown MA 02657
508-487-2501
Fax 508-487-2629
info@womencrafts.com

Amazon Bookstore Cooperative
4755 Chicago Ave. S
Minneapolis MN 55407
612-821-9630
Fax 612-821-9631
amazon@amazonbookstorecoop.com

In Other Words - Women's Books & Resources
8 NE Killingsworth St
Portland, OR 97211
Tel: 503-232-6003

Book Woman
918 W. 12th St.
Austin TX 78703
512-472-2785
bkwomanpost@aol.com

A Room of One's Own
307 W. Johnson St.
Madison WI53703
608-257-7888 Fax -257-7457
room@itis.com

And if one of these fine establishments doesn't happen to be in your neck of the woods, maybe consider them instead of Amazon.com for your next online order? And the one after that? Yeah, it's gonna cost you a bit more, but this is one of those things that we've got to work to preserve, or y'all, it's gonna disappear.

So following my post yesterday about supporting your local women's bookstore, I got a question (not in comments) about why one should care whether or not she has a local women's bookstore. What are these places for? Why are they important? And it's a fair question, albeit one with a lot of possible answers, so I thought I'd take a shot at it.

Rachel Corbett wrote an article a couple of year ago about the importance of women's bookstores. She makes several salient points, but the big ones I'd hit on are as follows:

1. Independent women's bookstores are important venues for books, zines, etc. by women that otherwise have few markets, which in turn increases demands for these products in a time where it is hard to get anything published (as small presses disappear).

2. Independent women's bookstores are venues for events, including book clubs, lectures, music, etc. that have a hard time finding other homes. They also provide more general and very necessary explicitly feminist public space.

The article goes on to argue that it might be OK that these places are disappearing, since feminism is becoming more ingrained into other types of communities, and since there is ample feminist space online. I think that's a cop-out, frankly. While I cannot note strongly enough how important I think feminist online space is, it does not replace the need for local, in-the-flesh venues where women can meet, talk, listen, buy and sell, etc. And online space doesn't speak at all to the need for women writing non-mainstream things to have a place to sell those things.

As far as the cultural integration of feminism, few things make me madder faster than the claim that feminism has done its work and should go home now, and that's where that leads for me. Feminism isn't integrated into anything. Just because things are better than they were in the days when indie women's bookstores started to take hold doesn't mean they are all fine and dandy now and we can all stop fighting. While women are still being raped, we still need to fight. While women are still being underpaid, we still need to fight. And while there is so little support for the work of women that the nation is down to a handful of stores dedicated to that work, we goddamn well still need to fight.

This picture is of my 1976 edition Our Bodies, Ourselves book. It's probably kind of a silly prized possession, as this same book can be had on Amazon Marketplace for $.01, but it is a prized possession anyway. I also have a mimeographed copy of the much less accessible first edition of the book, but it doesn't make as pretty a picture.

I got this book while I was writing my undergraduate thesis, which was about Our Bodies, Ourselves and Ms. magazine's health care coverage in the 1970s. And honestly, I probably did get it from Amazon for $.01 or similar. But it's not monetary value that draws me to it, it's what it stands for. Our Bodies, Ourselves was and continues to be an amazing project, and it was with this edition that I learned about that. Plus it's just a really cool old hippy book. I recently added the 1978 Ourselves and Our Children (found at the Goodwill) to my collection, and it's quickly becoming a prized possession too.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, I was a Sassy girl. Though I was a wee bit young for the demographic, being only nine or ten when the magazine started publishing and sixteen or so when it stopped, I loved my every issue of Sassy. It spoke to me. It taught me. It understood my freaky teen aged self.

And, according to Kara Jesella and Marisa Meltzer, authors of How Sassy Changed My Life: A Love Letter to the Greatest Teen Magazine of All Time, I was very much not alone. They posit that there are a whole nation of us Sassy girls, including luminaries like Bitch founders Andi Zeisler and Lisa Jervis and Bust creator Debbie Stoller, all of whom credit Sassy as a major influence in their work. And the book, as much as being about Sassy, is about us.

OK, so I have been called, more than once by now, a man hater. Honestly, it's not something that much bothers me, or that I even correct much of the time. But this is a post I've been sort of putting off writing for a while, and now is as good a time (and this as good a reason) as any.

First, to be clear: I am partnered with a man and have been for years. While it's not perfect, this partnership is happy and healthy. The man is a good man. This man is a man with whom I have every intention of spending my life. My last serious relationship with also with a man. While it wasn't always happy and healthy, whose is in their late teens and early twenties? Parts of it were great, and I don't have any ill will towards that man either. I am neither a lesbian nor a separatist.

I also have other men in my life. Some of them (co-workers, family members) are in my life by chance, but the majority of them are chosen. They are my friends.

I have never been a victim of serious abuse at the hands of a man. Sure, my dad is a fuck-up, but he's never had a large role in my life. I got into with my step-dad a few times as a kid and teen, but he's a mostly good guy. I've never been raped or molested. I've suffered only fairly inconsequential sexual harassment. I've never hit the glass ceiling. Yeah, I've had some bad experiences (a boss calling me a cunt when I was 14 comes immediately to mind, as does every time some dude has ever grabbed my ass), but nothing bad enough to be considered out-of-the-ordinary.

Despite all of the above, I don't find it hard to make a categorical statement against men. I don't find it particularly insulting to hear myself called a "man-hater." Why? Because just because these horrible things haven't happened to me doesn't mean that they haven't happened. Because it is possible to despise men as a class and still like and even love a few specific ones. Because my brain is big enough to hold more than one idea at a time.

The reality is that men as a class are very, very bad for women, as a class. From huge crimes like beating us, raping us, and killing us, to the more mundane expecting us to do all the housework and paying us less for the same job, they're not good for us. And it is both dangerous and stupid to let yourself forget that because the men in your life aren't like that, or it isn't happening to you. First, some of it is probably happening to you, whether you like to admit it or not, and secondly, even if it's not happening to you, it's happening. All over the world, all the time. And that's a damn good reason to hate. There's a word for only caring about things that happen to you directly--narcissistic.

What does it mean, then, to "hate" men and still have them in your life? Well, for me, mostly, it means caution. I have a higher natural level of caution towards men in general, and particularly towards men I don't know, than towards women. That could, I suppose, be called sexism. Given the world in which I live, I'd call it good sense.

It also means that I go out of way to involve women in my life rather than involving men. I choose female doctors, I frequent women-only or mostly-women spaces. This is, at least in part, because I believe that I am safer with women than with men, but it's also because I prefer to be around women. Even if they are in no way directly threatening me, men are likely to irritate me. Your average man (no, not EVERY man, your average man) doesn't think a whole lot about his privilege. That bugs me. And I don't want to have to spend every minute of every day trying to cajole, convince, and educate. I'd much rather be surrounded by people who get it already, and those people are more likely to be women.

So yes, if it makes you feel better to call me a man hater, go right ahead. It might do you some good to think, though, not about why I hate men (because I've been abused or had bad relationships seem to be the going theories), but why you don't. Do you really disbelieve the harm men have collectively done? They've been in charge for centuries, and look where they've gotten us! Or is it maybe just because it's easier to believe the problem is little hysterical me and not something as monolithic as an oppressor class? Maybe thinking about the systematic problem caused by men as a class would bum you out, or cause you to have to change the way you're living your life?

Just a thought.

OK, in the comments to that last post, Simon wrote:

I demand a more abstract reason for you hating Disney princesses, because: A survey listing reasons each movie princess is regressive, reactionary, racist (or other R-word) doesn't break down the specific overall reason for hating them. Not that I'm all super stoked on princesses. If we're going to barrage young girls with very specific gender programming, we should pick one that will have positive results in the long run - like porn stars (not their real lives, just their on-camera personas) or politicians (ditto). I personally prefer the porn star route, but that's because I'm an awful, awful person. Also, more hormones in the milk, please. But seriously - gimme an intro and conclusion to your post, even if it's a seperate post entirely.

Because I would rather stab myself repeatedly in the liver than ever discuss porn with Simon again, I'm going to ignore that part of the comment and address the point. That last post was intellectually lazy. I can do better.

I have multiple problems with the Disney princesses, both individually and collectively. I touched on my individual problems with them in the last post, but didn't say much about the collective. My biggest problem with them collectively is their very sameness. From Snow White in 1939 all the way through Disney's most recent "princess," Mulan, not a whole lot has changed. Disney pays lip-service to diversity (first through princesses with differing hair colors, and more recently with the non-white princesses), and to increasing "spunk" among the princesses, but really, the story remains the same (as do the big-eyed tiny-waisted princesses themselves). It nearly every narrative, the princess gets in some kind of trouble, generally due either to some mistake she herself makes or to the meddling or stupidity of another woman in the plot, and is rescued by a prince, always "handsome" and usually someone she barely knows. The details differ, but the princesses are never shown with human female friends (woodland creatures and talking dishes are fine, though), and are often in competition with other women. The message that sends is pretty clear--women are against you, but if you're pretty enough and suffer enough, some handsome man will come and sweep you away.

Aside from the old, tired, regressive handsome prince story, I also hate the class overtones many of the princess stories take. The handsome princes in their lives don't just "rescue" them from endless sleep (Sleeping Beauty, Snow White) and entrapment/marriage to icky men (Belle, Jasmine) but from poverty and/or being "ordinary" (Cinderella, Belle, Aurora, Mulan). The message is not only that normal lives aren't good enough, but that you need to be rescued from being mundane from some dude.

Honestly, I could go on and on. I get so irritated when trying to write about this that I have trouble making a logical argument. Which I recognize, again, is intellectually lazy. But here's a start, anyway.

So as soon as I hit save on that last post I started thinking that there was much more I should say. See, April is "Sexual Violence Awareness Month." Last night, there was a Take Back The Night rally on campus. All over the country, similar events are taking place to acknowledge the sexual violence in our lives and recommit ourselves to fighting against it. Sexual violence, the majority of it against women and children, continues to be a literal monster in the lives of so many people, all over the world. The horror cannot be overestimated.

And here I sit, writing about the connection between sex and violence on a television show. A show that, I realize more and more the farther into it I get, has sex and violence as one of its primary foci. In a way that is not always critical. The interplay between sex and violence is, if I am honest, one of the most intriguing elements of the show for me. So how do those things balance? My commitment, as a feminist, as a woman, as a human being, to the eradication of sexual violence, and my fascination with the fictional portrayal of it? How do they balance for any of the millions (?) of women who watched with baited breath while Spike and Buffy fought and fucked until the house fell down around them, squirmed when they saw the beaten and shirtless Angel? For the smaller but still significant number of women who have interacted with this show (and other examples of similar) not just as viewers, but as writers, as critics, as scholars, as fans? How do we acknowledge the dark sexuality of our own natures without minimizing our commitment to standing up against the violence, the rape and abuse, that has been plaguing us for centuries?

How does it all fit in?

I wrote what I think is probably my best Heroine Content piece yet this week, and it hasn't garnered a single comment. Which makes me sad. So I'm linking to it here in hopes someone will go and read it?

Firefly and Serenity.

Hear ye hear ye!

The 21st installment of the Carnival of Feminist Science Fiction and Fantasy Fans will be hosted by my other blog baby, Heroine Content. Co-parent Skye and I are super anxious to see what you've all got to add to the carnival, so please send in submissions ASAP. This carnival's specific topic suggestion is "Who Do You Love?" but anything blogged between February 7 and April 28 is game, as long as it is a feminist perspective on fantasy and/or science fiction.

Submissions should be sent to me or Skye before April 28. The carnival will be posted May 1.

For more general info on the Carnival, please go here.

Jenny asked for my thoughts on this article. I am only too happy to comply.

My first reaction is to ask, as I always ask, who are these crazy people who thought we were in post-feminist space? Who really thought that we'd done all we needed to do and we now live in an equitable world? I'm always puzzled by that. The article implies that you have to be out of your 20s to really "get" how sexist the world is, that nothing other than a decade in the workplace will teach you. I think that's bullshit. Sure, we face sexism in the workplace, but we were already facing it in the media, in our schools, in our families. I'm hard pressed to think of the moment when I first knew sexism existed--not because I never noticed it, but because it has always been there. I absolutely believe progress has been made by each "wave" of feminism, but to pretend it's over is just ridiculous, and it's hard for me to have much respect for someone who needed what has happened to Clinton to prove we still live in a sexist society.

That being said, I do think HRC's run for president and some of the reactions to it have made the depth of the sexism and the misogyny in which we are still steeped a little bit easier to grasp. Some of the bullshit leveled at her has been so outlandishly obvious in its sexism, it's hard to miss, even, I would expect, for those who had previously chosen to believe feminism was no longer needed. Things like why we find her voice "grating" or are more concerned about her "aging" than a male counterpart are subtle, but the Hilary nutcracker sure isn't.

What I am not willing to say, though, is that sexism is "worse" than racism in the U.S., or that the sexism towards Clinton has been worse than the racism towards Obama. It's a bit of a hard thought to put into words, but I have trouble separating sexism and racism from each other. They come from the same place, I think. The land-owning white men who devised this country thought of both Black human beings and female human beings as property, and to my mind, we're still living with the effects of that in both cases, probably more or less equally. I see the slights against Clinton more clearly, I think, because I am used to being a woman in this society, but that doesn't mean the slights against Obama, often brought to my attention by people of color, aren't there.

If people who were previously asleep to sexism are now coming awake, then Clinton's candidacy is worth even more to me than I thought it was. I can only hope that they'll remain alert and not stick their heads back in the sand once the election is over.

Top Five Myths About Feminists

1. Feminists are ugly. Feminists are not ugly. Well, I'm sure some feminists are, just like some of anybody, but I know a lot of very attractive feminists. And there are some famous attractive feminists as well. Ashley Judd? Charlize Theron? Geena Davis? Ani DiFranco? I rest my case.


2. Feminists hate sex. The feminists I know, whether they are in same-sex or different-sex relationships (or single!), do not hate sex. They enjoy sex and they have sex. They have all kinds of sex, single and partnered, and often enough they even get pregnant and have babies.


3. Feminists have no sense of humor. This is possibly the wrongest of all of the myths. Feminists definitely have a sense of humor. Some of the funniest people I know are proud feminists. So are some famous funny people, like Tina Fey and Margaret Cho.


4. Feminists suffer from group think. Given the years of impassioned discussions and arguments I've had, both online and not, with other feminists, this one always makes me roll my eyes. Feminism is not a theory, or an ideology. It's lots of them. For as far back in feminist history as I'm aware, there have always been lots of divisions and disagreements in "the movement." It's likely one of the reasons certain goals have been thwarted as long as they have. There are socialist feminists, liberal feminists, radical feminists, eco feminists, etc. etc. etc. Not so much with the group think.


5. Feminists hate men. This is probably the biggie. No, most feminists do not hate men. Some of us likely do, and I'd go out on a limb and say some of us have every reason to. But most feminists have lives that include men that we love and respect. Feminism isn't about hating men. In fact, it's not really about men at all. That seems to be the part that people have the worst time wrapping their heads around--something that isn't. about. men.

So there's the top five myths I can think of. What about you? Are you a feminist? What myths would you add?

Additions suggested, a running list:

• Feminists are not/do not want to be mothers.


• Feminists are intimidated by masculinity.


• Feminists are lesbian separatists.


• Feminists do not shave their legs/wear skirts/wear makeup.


• Feminists are just looking for things to be offensive.


• Feminists burn their bras.


• Feminists are pushy and demanding.

Remember my Women Making History series? I've been wanting to revisit it. In particular, I wanted to highlight some of my favorite entries. These are the ones I was most pleasantly surprised by, or most impressed by, or just most into. So, without further ado:

Top 5 Women Making History (in no particular order)

• Nellie Bly (1864-1922): Gotta love a muckraking journalist, and Nellie Bly was one of the first women to really get into it. I knew nothing about her before the series.


• Dorothy Day (1897-1980): I love Dorothy Day. She basically believed that everyone deserved a chance and that it was her privilege and responsibility to do whatever she could to help. The world needs more like her.


• Dolores Huerta (b. 1930): I'm a big sucker for a labor activist, and Dolores Huerta is one of the best.


• Dian Fossey (1932-1985): Another personal hero of mine, Dian Fossey revolutionized the way we think about primates. She was a scientist, a radical, and a hell of a woman.


• Dorothea Dix (1802-1887): This one was a sad story I knew nothing about previous to doing this project. Dix was a very early activist on behalf of the mentally ill. And she died in a mental hospital.

Wanna read about some incredible women today? There's a place to start.

Dear Mr. President,

I know it is early in your administration to be asking you for favors, and up until now I have done my very best not to expect too much from you. You've inherited quite the mess, and the last few months have only added to it. Though I haven't agreed with everything you've done so far, I've understood why you did most of it, and have been trying very hard to remain hopeful and keep my desires to myself.

However, I heard some news this morning that forces me to break my silence and ask you to prove your advocates right and your detractors wrong in a decision you will soon be making.

Supreme Court Justice David H. Souter is retiring in June. This leaves a vacancy on the court for you to fill. Of all of the many decisions you will make during your presidency, this will likely be one of the most important and long-lasting. As a law professor, I'm sure you know just how vital it is not to mess this one up.

You'll be getting a lot of advice, from all sides, about how to best fill this position. You'll hear calls to be bipartisan (ignore them). You'll be hearing about the importance of a justice who will support X or Y reading of the constitution. You'll have a team to vet the credientials of any possible candidates. It will all be very complicated.

In comparison, what I am going to ask you to do is simple. There is only one criterion by which I don't trust you to choose the next justice, and it is that criterion I must insist you fill.

The next justice has to be a woman.

There are nine justice on the court. One of them shares the gender of half of the country's population. Over the entire history of the Court, there have been 110 justices; 2 have been women. It is far past time for the highest court in the land to better represent us.

As the country's first Black president, you know a little something about the importance of minority representation in goverment. As the man who defeated the most serious female presidential contender in our history, you know a little something about the importance of gender representation in goverment.

I am hoping that means you get it--you understand the importance, both symbolic and literal, of putting a woman on the court. And I'm expecting you to get it. I helped get you elected. So far, I am not at all sorry I did so. However, if you make some lame excuse about identity politics and appoint yet another man to fill this position, we are going to have a serious problem.

Your hopeful contituent,

Grace

P.S. If you are interested, you can read the post I wrote the last time I was failed on this issue.

We're having a pre-BlogHer meet up locally tomorrow and it has me all excited thinking about this year's conference. I went in 2007, but missed last year, and I am REALLY stoked to get to go again.

Will any WINOW or Heroine Content readers be there? I'd love to meet you.

I've been looking over the schedule, and these are the break-out sessions that are piquing my interest:

Friday:
Break-Out Session #1: Business of You: Bloggers are Pioneers in a Post-"Employee" World
Break-Out Session #2: Leadership: Writing Your Op-Ed
Break-Out Session #3: Leadership: What is "Pro-Woman" in a Post-Palin World?

Saturday:
Break-Out Session #1: Business of You: Advanced Social Media, Syndication and Stats
Break-Out Session #2: Identity/Passions: FoodBlogging in the Time of Recession
Break-Out Session #3: Identity/Passions: Enough About You...Who's Reading You?

I'm also really excited to see the Community Keynote on Friday night. And, you know, pick up as much as swag, meet as many awesome women, and learn about as many new blogs as possible.

I am geek girl, hear me roar.

Relatedly, I was looking at the list of sponsors for this year's conference, and I'm pleasantly surprised. Sure, there are the expected sponsor's for a conference of women--Green Works, Tide, Wal-Mart, Ragu, Playskool, Mary Kay, etc. But there are also some sponsors of the type that women's magazines yearn for--Chevrolet, Microsoft Office, Liberty Mutual, Motorola, Intel. It feels like progress, folks.

In one of my earlier posts about BlogHer, I mentioned that I was surprised and happy to see the breadth of the sponsors list for the conference. Now that the final sponsors list is up, I wanted to say a bit more about that.

First, here are the sponsors (this list is pulled directly from BlogHer's site):

Platinum Conference Sponsors

• Chevrolet


• Green Works


• Walmart


• PepsiCo


• Tide & Bounce

Gold Conference Sponsors

• Microsoft Office and Bing.com


• Ragu


• Liberty Mutual's Responsibility Project

Premium Conference Sponsors

• Bill Me Later


• Ketchum


• Wiley


• Hanes


• PLAYSKOOL


• all


• McDonald's


• Elations


• National Pork Board


• BISSELL


• Suave and Degree


• Wild Planet


• Motorola


• Mary Kay


• Brother


• Ann Taylor


• Michelin


• Disney Consumer Products


• VTech


• T-Mobile


• Bertolli


• Eucerin


• HP


• Geek Squad

Exhibiting Conference Sponsors

• Blue Avocado


• Picnik


• ZESPRI Kiwifruit


• Safety 1st


• CHPA Educational Foundation


• Sprout


• Safe Kids USA


• springpad


• JumpStart®


• Nikon


• The Johnson & Johnson Family of Consumer Companies

Other Participating Sponsors

• LeapFrog


• eos


• Johnson & Johnson


• Intel


• Intelius


• Pearl of Wisdom Campaign


• Orbitz


• PBS Parents


• Gilbert Guide


• Motherproof.com


• Hasbro


• 20th Century Fox's Strawberry Shortcake


• PBS Frontline


• Nokia


• Dove

A couple of caveats:

First, some of these are companies with whom I strongly disagree on major issues. Some of them are even companies that I boycott. I'm not going to write about that here. I don't censor myself on those issues on this blog, and I may well write again about those companies, but that's not the purpose of this post and I don't want to get bogged down in it.

Secondly, I honestly and completely appreciate each of these companies being willing to sponsor BlogHer. I know they're doing it for business reasons--there is absolutely something in it for them--but I still appreciate it.

Now then:

I've been interested in advertising towards women for a long time, in particular since I wrote my thesis at Reed on Ms. magazine. One of the major problems with Ms. early on was that there both unable to entice advertisers who weren't "traditional women's labels" (cosmetic companies, appliances, etc.) and unable to appease their readership on the subject of morality of advertising "anti-feminist" products. This issue still exists today, obviously, and BlogHer is a great example of how it plays out.

When I last attended in 2007, one of the sponsors was Curves Cereal and Snacks. Some of the people to whom I spoke, particularly those on a panel about blogging and body image, took issue with that. It was a particular problem, I learned, because Weight Watchers had been a sponsor in 2006 and there had already been backlash about that. For my part, I was perhaps not thrilled with Curves' inclusion, but I was generally very happy to see so many companies that are not traditionally "women-focused" on the sponsorship list that year.

This year is even better. Yes, there are some sponsors who are definitely the same ones Ms. would have drawn ire from their readers for all those years ago: Mary Kay, Ann Taylor, eos, and Dove, which are obvious, as well as GreenWorks, Tide/Bounce, Ragu, all, etc., since advertisers still seem to think only women cook and clean. There are several more who are clearly there for the mommy bloggers: Playskool, Disney Consumer Products, Sprout, JumpStart, etc. But there are also a long list of sponsors Ms.'s advertising department would have given up their fringed ponchos for--honest to God gender neutral companies. Some of them are the non-surprising tech companies that go along with a blogging conference, gendered or not, like Microsoft Office/bing.com, Bill Me Later, Motorola, Brother, and T-Mobile. Others, though, I have trouble connecting in any obvious way with women or with blogging, and that makes me inordinately happy. The big one is Platinum Sponsor Chevrolet, but there are also Liberty Mutual's Responsibility Project, public relations agency Ketchum, technical publisher Wiley, Elations (a glucosamine condroitin supplement company), Michelin, and PBS Frontline, among others.

What does it mean that these companies have chosen to put their support behind a fast-growing conference of blogging women? Dare I hope it's respect for women's buying power, not just as mothers, cleaners, or purchasers of clothes and cosmetics, but as full-share American consumers who buy cars and cameras and pork (yep, the National Pork Board is another sponsor) and make investments and watch Frontline? Could they really be seeing us for what we are?

Time will tell. I'll be sure to report back next week on how these sponsors conducted themselves and what impressions I got from them at the conference. In the meantime, again, thanks to our sponsors!

I've tweeted about this a couple of times over the past two days, but I'm writing about it here, too. I apologize for the redundancy--I guess I'm more than 140 characters worth of pissed off.

BlogHer is, as far as I know, an organization which considers promotion of women in blogging to be among its primary goals, if not its very utmost purpose. The conference, in general, reflects this goal. There are some missteps, but the atmosphere is, in general, one I would consider pro-woman.

The attendance, while not 100% female, is very largely so. I haven't seen more than 20 or 30 male attendees since I've been here.

The first one I saw just after arriving, at a restaurant in the hotel. I noticed him due to his shirt. It showed a graphic of a woman with her breasts exposed, her nipples replaced by @ signs. It read "show me your tweets."

Then, not an hour later, I saw a man sporting a shirt saying something along the lines of "I love mommy bloggers--they put out." The next day, the same man attended a party, hosted by an ostensibly feminist website, sporting a shirt reading "I am having very spiritual thoughts about your breasts" or some similar nonsense.

This is not OK. It's not just that these shirts are crude and demeaning, though they are. It's that these men are making a point to bring these crude and demeaning words and images into what is, or should be, women's space. They're the visitors here. This is our culture.

I know who both of the t-shirt wearing bloggers are. Both of them advertised their blog names on the offensive shirts. Getting that kind of attention, clearly, was the purpose (and no, I won't be linking to them). That does nothing towards making it acceptable. Clearly, it is successful--after all, I hadn't heard of either of them before noticing their shirts (though it's not like I'm rushing out to add them to my reader now). But, at the cost of alienating and offending women--the people for whom this space was created--are a few extra hits on your site worth it?

The grrl power vibe at BlogHer can get a little bit nauseating at times. There are lots of people around talking about women as tastemakers, as marketing targets, and as important, cutting edge users of new media. Why, if we're such an important and respected cohort, are we here, in what should be a space in which we make the rules and issue the invitations, dealing with exactly the same stupid, sexist shit we face every day everywhere else?

There is a breakout session for men at BlogHer this year. The title has something to do with being vaginally challenged. Space, it seems, has been made for the guys who chose to come here. I wonder why? Isn't every other technical conference in the world space enough? Do we need to cater to them here, too?

Most of the women to whom I have spoken about these shirts (though thankfully not all of them, or this would likely be my last BlogHer) seem willing to roll their eyes, laugh them off, and not think much more about it. I have no idea whether they really aren't bothered, or whether it's just easier not to think much about it. It's easier, when you are a woman and something offends you, to pretend it doesn't, lest you be labeled a prude or a killjoy.

Well I'm taking a stand on this one. I'm fucking offended. Really fucking offended. These shirts, in whatever small way, undermine the whole point of being here for me. If I wanted to hang out with sexist geek guys, there are lots of other places I could be. Pretty much any place, actually.

All this rah-rah pro-woman stuff is great. I get as choked up about the beauty of seeing a ballroom full of girl geeks all deep in conversation as the next person. But how seriously can I really take it when, among all those rad women, are a few assholes using their very bodies to advertise just how little they really respect the people who created this great space? When, even though we have a numerical advantage that is well more than overwhelming, nobody approaches them, nobody calls them out? What is the real message? The one I'm reading is coming through pretty damn clearly. Even here, in a space made by and for women, a space focused on the power of our thoughts and communication, rather than our bodies, we can easily be reduced to pieces of meat, intended for the pleasure and amusement of even just a few men. And we let them do it. All these forums to tell our stories and share our thoughts, and mostly, we'll all be silent.

So that last post about sexist shirts at BlogHer? Should have thought a bit more about what I was biting off before I hit publish on that one. Not that I take back a single word of it--I don't--but I wasn't quite prepared to have so much response.

Reading through the comments, I'm struck by the number of people who are offended that I implied that men shouldn't be at BlogHer at all. I hadn't really considered that opinion to be surprising. That there are a group who prefer that women's spaces are women-only spaces is pretty much a truism in any sort of feminist activity. The debate over whether or to what degree men should participate goes hand in hand with most feminist events. It's an argument that's often just not worth having anymore, because people's minds are made up and everybody just gets pissed off. (If you want to read a bit more about why women-only spaces are needed, there is a pretty good article at Rad Geek People's Daily.) Personally, I am of the opinion that there are some spaces that ought to be reserved for women exclusively, that claims that this is "reverse sexism" ought to be met with nothing more than an eye-roll, and that men who insist that they, too, belong in these spaces are much more interested in their own egos than they are in actually supporting women.

The question remains, however: is BlogHer one of those spaces?

Until this time around, I honestly hadn't thought it was. BlogHer's mission statement is: "To create opportunities for women who blog to pursue exposure, education, community, and economic empowerment." When asked if guys could be at BlogHer, the founders responded resoundingly that that they could. "Gentlemen, if you are interested in learning more about women who blog, please accept our invitation to the greater blogging community to attend BlogHer conferences." That was their ruling, it is their organization, and it made sense to me. Men who were interested in learning more about and supporting female bloggers, are welcome. I'm down with that. It's not a protected, women-only space, but it's a woman-centered one. Women who blog are, put simply, the point.

I met, I think, two men at BlogHer 07. They both seemed to clearly understand that they were there in support of women, not as their own interest group. They weren't second-class citizens in BlogHer's world, but they were aware that they weren't the focus, and they were fine with that.

That is what I saw as changed this year. It wasn't just the t-shirts, which I've already discussed and I don't want to get into again. It was the "noise," for lack of a better word, that the presence of guys this year seemed to make. They had their own panel, which I mentioned, but there was something else, as well. Something a bit less tangible. A friend (who I won't identify in case she doesn't want to be brought into this shit storm) said that it seemed like just showing up with a penis made men at BlogHer special. I got that feeling too. And, for me, at does take away from the mission.

It is telling to me that in their comments on my post about their shirts, neither Adam (Avitable) or Karl (Secondhand Karl) mentioned wanting to support women as being their reason for attending the conference. In mind, that is the essential difference between the men who should be at BlogHer and the ones who shouldn't. And there is no way to keep out the ones who are there for the wrong reasons.

So what to do? Previous to having read the comments on my last post, I would have suggested a woman-only conference policy. Not that it's going to happen, but that would have been my position. Reading through the comments, though, I am realizing that maybe it is me who is in the BlogHer minority. I think of BlogHer as a women's conference. Other people don't. And if you don't think of it that way, of course the idea of making it women-only is ridiculous. Maybe I'm injecting feminism where there simply isn't any.

No post here today, folks. Instead, go over to Heroine Content and check out my review of Whiteout!

There have been rants all over the place for a long time about Go Daddy's smarmy and sexist advertising. Remember the Super Bowl ad? Well, I'd almost forgotten it. I've never used Go Daddy, but also hadn't given them a lot of thought lately.

Then, just now, I saw a Go Daddy ad on TV, featuring the "old Go Daddy Girl" schooling the "New Go Daddy Girl" on what would be expected of her. And then the ultra disgusting CEO popped up and made the innuendo that she'd also be expected to strip for his pleasure or something. I wish I could find it online, but I don't see it anywhere. Anyway, you've probably seen it. It's real class.

So, PSA: Go Daddy is not the only place to secure a reasonably priced URL. Mine are through Domain Site. I pay about $18 for two years of ownership on each domain, have had no issues, and they aren't, as far as I know, sexist asswipes.