Feminism in News and Popular Media

[femmeInterrupted]

"The Gulabi Gang is an extraordinary women’s movement formed in 2006 by Sampat Pal Devi in the Banda District of Uttar Pradesh in Northern India. This region is one of the poorest districts in the country and is marked by a deeply patriarchal culture, rigid caste divisions, female illiteracy, domestic violence, child labour, child marraiges and dowry demands. The women’s group is popularly known as Gulabi or ‘Pink’ Gang because the members wear bright pink saris and wield bamboo sticks. Sampat says, “We are not a gang in the usual sense of the term, we are a gang for justice.”

The Gulabi Gang was initially intended to punish oppressive husbands, fathers and brothers, and combat domestic violence and desertion. The members of the gang would accost male offenders and prevail upon them to see reason.
The more serious offenders were publicly shamed when they refused to listen or relent. Sometimes the women resorted to their lathis, if the men resorted to use of force.

Today, the Gulabi Gang has tens of thousands of women members, several male supporters and many successful interventions to their credit.
Whether it is ensuring proper public distibution of food-grains to people below the poverty line, or disbursement of pension to elderly widows who have no birth certificate to prove their age, or preventing abuse of women and children, the Pink sisterhood is in the forefront, bringing about system changes by adopting the simplest of methods - direct action and confrontation.

Although the group’s interventions are mostly on behalf of women, they are increasingly called upon by men to challenge not only male authority over women, but all human rights abuses inflicted on the weak."



One day when Sampat Pal Devi, a simple woman living in a village in Northern India, saw a man mercilessly beating his wife. She pleaded with him to stop but he abused her as well. The next day she returned with a bamboo stick and five other women and gave the rogue a sound thrashing.

The news spread like wild fire and soon women started approaching Sampat Pal Devi in droves requesting similar interventions.
Many women came forward to join her team and in the year 2006 she decided that the sisterhood needed a uniform and a name and thus the pink sari was chosen, to signify the womanhood and understated strength.

The Gulabi Gang kept a watch on all community activities and protested vociferously when they saw any manifestation of injustice or malpractice.
On one occasion, when Sampat Pal went to the local police station to register a complaint, a policeman abused and attacked her.
She retaliated by beating him on the head with her lathi. On another occasion she dragged a government official out of his car to show him a crumbling road that was in need of urgent repair. After all, what cannot be endured must be cured!
http://www.gulabigang.in

[femmeInterrupted]

[Allison W]

Originally Posted by femmeInterrupted

the Gulabi Gang

This is pretty great. And somewhat amusingly, it's an example of problems being effectively solved through a little judicious violence. But I've long believed that the patriarchy won't come tumbling down until women take their share of ownership in the use of force, rather than violence being owned almost solely by men. So I pour a glass every time I hear of a woman, or women, giving a righteous ass-whooping. Excuse me while I go do so.

[femmeInterrupted]

[femmeInterrupted]

http://jezebel.com/rape-and-death-th...-rea-476882099

[Kobi]

By now, you’ve likely seen the new Dove “Real Beauty” campaign, which purports to change the way women see themselves by attempting to show that women judge themselves and their appearances too harshly. Simultaneously, we have Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg promoting her new book, Lean In, touted by corporate media as the new feminist manifesto, encouraging women to “lean in” to their work environments and further their careers.

And so it appears that feminism is having a corporate moment. But rather than embrace this new feminist facade, the truth remains that when feminism becomes embroiled in corporate interests, the already-marginalized in our society are sidelined, omitted, and simply oppressed under a more progressive guise.

Sheryl Sandberg should not be excluded from feminism because she is a corporate businesswoman. That’s no different than excluding a woman on welfare from feminism because of her economic status. But Sheryl Sandberg isn’t just being included in feminism; she is largely being heralded as the face of the feminist movement. A COO of a major American corporation rapidly ascends to the forefront of feminism because of one book, while thousands of online feminists and grassroots activists have been doing community organizing and feminist theorizing for years, to little public fanfare. And it’s no wonder that Sandberg, a white, thin, heterosexual, cisgender, able-bodied woman of distinct economic and educational privilege, is incessantly framed by corporate media as the new feminist leader: she’s the perfect package of privilege to promote a water-down brand of feminism.

In the meantime, we see Dove seemingly challenging the hegemonic beauty norms that for years, have made their parent company Unilever (also the owner of Slimfast and Axe Body Spray) billions of dollars. The campaign reveals that “we are more beautiful than we think,” but according to whose standards? Against whose beauty standards are we measuring ourselves? We have internalized the regulatory practices perpetuated by Dove’s own advertising to the point that it is entirely naturalized, as evidenced by this campaign.

Women have been conditioned for decades to believe that they are never enough, that if you buy this cream, this pill, this soap, you will temporarily feel better until it’s time to go out and buy more cream, more pills, more soap. This new advertising campaign from Dove is simply another corporate ploy to make you spend your money on their product. Dove is not interested in your well-being; if they were, their parent company Unilever wouldn’t be promoting sexist and exploitative Axe Body Spray ads like this. Dove’s new advertising campaign is nothing more than a faux feminist bandage on a corporate exploitative wound.

So what do Sheryl Sandberg and the Dove “Real Beauty” campaign have in common? They are both mainstream, corporate visions of feminism, sidelining actual critique in place of a narrow reaffirmation of the virtues of capitalist consumerism. There is a vibrant online feminist community, dedicated to interrogating oppression and challenging the patriarchal power structures that perpetuate misogyny, racism, heterosexism, cissexism, ableism, and other forms of bigotry. But that community is completely absent from the mainstream corporate visions of feminism, and for good reason; much of the online feminist community exerts substantial energy to critique capitalist and consumerist oppression. Corporations hoping to profit from feminist posturing avoid the wealth of feminist work that critiques the very power systems that they themselves perpetuate.

“Corporate feminism” is an oxymoron. Feminism cannot hope to be a real movement for social change if it is pandering to the same structures it is supposed to be critiquing. Social justice movements are meant to challenge and dismantle oppressive power structures, not silently profit from them. Sheryl Sandberg may be a voice within feminism, but she cannot be lauded as the face of the movement any more than Dove can be commended for taking a stand against the very sexism and exploitation from which it profits. If we truly want a feminist movement that will work to eradicate misogyny and end patriarchal oppression, we cannot align ourselves with the corporate system that actively oppresses us every day. If we’re looking for a radical movement for social change, we need look no further than ourselves.

http://www.policymic.com/articles/37...orate-feminism

[Allison W]

So I was in the library today, and while I was there, I stopped to flip through this month's issue of The Atlantic. In it I found a rather surprising article about a study that claims to have found that female candidates are actually now coveted by both of the United States's major political parties and are no longer perceived in a harsher light than male candidates. I don't know how accurate the study itself is or exactly what it means about gender and patriarchy in our society at large even if it is true (and I'm not going to assume it's false out-of-hand just because the results are surprising), but the article was intriguing, and so I dredged up the online article to share here.

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/...s-edge/309284/

Why Both the Dems and the GOP Now Think Voters Prefer Female Candidates

A woman's edge?

Molly Ball Apr 24 2013, 9:58 PM ET

In the two-year cycle of the political calendar, it is candidate-recruitment season—the time when Washington operatives fan out across the country to size up the political horseflesh. In the months to come, they will meet with scores of state legislators, small-town mayors, community activists, and upstanding business owners, gauging which ones might have what it takes to run for a House or Senate seat, or for governor or state treasurer. These political scouts will take many qualities into account, from life story to speaking ability to baby-kissing skills. But they will be looking, in particular, for a few good women.

These days, political consultants take for granted that, all else being equal, women make more desirable candidates. Which means that Democratic and Republican operatives alike yearn for nothing more than to discover the next Heidi Heitkamp, a Democrat and former natural-gas-plant director who was elected the junior senator from North Dakota last November, or Deb Fischer, a previously little-known state legislator who won a tough Republican primary and then beat former Senator Bob Kerrey on her way to the Senate last year. Democrats recently failed in their efforts to recruit the actress Ashley Judd to run against Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell next year, but the 2014 election cycle will nonetheless feature a legion of eagerly anticipated female political prospects, from Pennsylvania’s Allyson Schwartz, a Democrat preparing to seek the governorship, to West Virginia’s Shelley Moore Capito, a Republican running for Senate. “Women make wonderful candidates for Republicans,” Mike Shields, the chief of staff at the Republican National Committee (formerly the political director of the National Republican Congressional Committee), told me. “It’s no secret our party needs to make progress with women voters, and for that, we need more women leaders.” Democrats feel the same way, according to Andrew Myers, a Democratic pollster who works with an array of local, statewide, and congressional candidates. “We are always looking for more women to run,” he said.

(SIDEBAR: In one study, an inexperienced female candidate was viewed as stronger, more honest, and more compassionate than an inexperienced male candidate.)

This preference for women candidates may surprise you if you’re accustomed to thinking of female politicians in terms of the barriers they face—from Geraldine Ferraro’s being asked on Meet the Press in 1984 if “the Soviets might be tempted to try to take advantage of you simply because you are a woman,” to Hillary Clinton’s being heckled at a rally in 2008 by men shouting “Iron my shirt!” Women in politics, it has long been assumed, are trapped in a disabling web of double standards—presumed by voters to be weaker and less capable leaders, but punished for violating gender norms if they do act tough or get angry. Even though women were elected to Congress in record numbers in 2012, their representation still languishes at just 18 percent in the House and 20 percent in the Senate.

And yet the political operatives may be onto something. Evidence suggests that double standards may have once applied but don’t any longer. Shields and Myers prefer female candidates for a simple reason: voters, they say, tend to assume women are more trustworthy, less corruptible, and more in touch with everyday concerns. In a white-male-dominated political system, women are seen as outsiders. “Voters want change,” Shields said. “A woman candidate personifies change just by being on the ballot.” Myers added that, in these intolerably gridlocked times, “voters believe women are more likely to compromise and find common ground and solutions, and less likely to argue and triangulate for political advantage.” Both consultants also emphasized that women are harder to criticize than men. Sharp-edged attacks, particularly by male rivals, risk running afoul of the societal bias against, essentially, hitting a girl. The classic example: Clinton’s 2000 Senate race, in which her opponent, Rick Lazio, left his podium during a debate to demand that she sign a campaign-finance pledge. Lazio’s physically confrontational gesture was regarded as bullying, and helped sink his campaign.

In 2009, Deborah Jordan Brooks, a Gallup researcher turned Dartmouth professor, set out to investigate just how much bias female candidates still face, by conducting a series of controlled experiments with a large representative sample of American adults. As Brooks describes in her forthcoming book, He Runs, She Runs: Why Gender Stereotypes Do Not Harm Women Candidates, she distributed an array of made-up newspaper articles about a fictional politician who, in various scenarios, ran for office, “erupted” at a colleague, cried, made threats, and got important facts wrong in a public appearance. Half the survey participants read about “Congresswoman Karen Bailey,” while the other half read about “Congressman Kevin Bailey.” Only the first names and pronouns were different, and the respondents didn’t know what the study was designed to measure. After they read the articles, the participants were asked to rate the candidate’s characteristics.

On such traits as competence, empathy, and ability to handle an international crisis, the hypothetical male and female candidates were viewed almost identically. Nor was the woman candidate held to different standards of behavior: though perceptions of Congresswoman Bailey dimmed when she cried and raged, the same was true for Congressman Bailey. “It is tough to win over the public as a candidate,” Brooks said, “but there is no indication that it is tougher for women than for men.” The only exception to this general parity was in the scenario in which “Karen” and “Kevin” were described as first-time candidates with no experience in politics (“Mrs. Bailey … has owned and operated a chain of eight dry cleaning stores located across the state for the past 10 years”). In this case, the inexperienced female candidate was viewed as stronger, more honest, and more compassionate than the inexperienced male candidate. “One potential explanation is that, as members of a group who have traditionally been underrepresented in Congress and elsewhere, women new to politics get an ‘outsider bump’ when they run that is not accorded to men,” Brooks said.

But what about the media? In describing male and female candidates identically, might Brooks’s study have failed to account for the unequal way men and women are portrayed publicly? Here, too, research fails to find evidence of any systematic bias against women. After the 2010 midterm elections, two Washington political scientists, Danny Hayes of George Washington University and Jennifer Lawless of American University, conducted a massive analysis of nearly 5,000 newspaper articles covering 342 congressional races. They found that women candidates got just as much coverage as men, and were no more likely to be described in terms of their clothing, appearance, or family life. The women were just as likely as the men to be portrayed as having leadership abilities; the men were just as likely as the women to be described as empathetic. Whatever’s hindering women, Hayes and Lawless concluded, it’s not prejudiced news coverage.

So what is holding them back? Brooks believes that women’s own perceptions haven’t caught up with reality. When women run for office, they win just as often as men do. But fewer women run in the first place, perhaps because they’re convinced they will have a tougher time, face more scrutiny, and be subjected to unfair attacks and double standards. In one 2008 survey conducted by Lawless and another researcher, 87 percent of women said they thought the electoral environment was more challenging for women than for men. “That old conventional wisdom that women are at a disadvantage really needs to be debunked if we’re going to fix the pipeline problem,” Brooks told me.

To that end, prospective female politicians might do well to take a cue from Mary Teresa Norton, who in 1925 became one of the first women ever to serve in the House of Representatives. “I’m no lady,” she said, “I’m a member of Congress, and I shall proceed on that basis.”

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I will say there's one implication the article makes that I do like, and that is that it now is the time for women to step up and take power.

[Kobi]

NEW YORK (AP) -- When Lisa Parker was new to corporate coaching, a senior-level colleague she respected brought her in as his No. 2 for a series of training seminars. Time and time again, he introduced her as smart, capable and beautiful.

"I was so uncomfortable," she said. "The first time it happened I remember standing there waiting to take the front of the room and thinking, 'Oh my gosh, I can't believe he just said that.'"

Parker asked him to stop. Embarrassed, he responded: "But you ARE beautiful." That was a decade ago and he never did it again. The two have happily worked together many times since.

Sound familiar? Fast forward to April 4, when President Barack Obama introduced California's Kamala Harris at a Democratic fundraiser as brilliant, dedicated, tough and "by far, the best looking attorney general in the country."

The remark — the two are friends — raised a few eyebrows over whether it amounted to sexism. The president, who has similarly complimented men before, called Harris and apologized. A Harris spokesman assured the world she remains an Obama supporter.

But the question lingers. Male-to-female, female-to-male, peer-to-peer, superior-to-subordinate: Are workplace compliments focused on looks or other personal details like dress ever OK? Is the alternative a more sterile professional life? When do such remarks rise to actionable harassment, or become worthy of a friendly rebuff or a trip to HR?

"If we all end up trending toward the center we become pure vanilla. It's boring and it's a huge loss," said Parker, the New York author of the March book "Managing the Moment."

Parker, compliance experts and human resource managers agree that tone, context and a pattern of behavior are everything when it comes to unwanted remarks.

"Personally I'm not offended by a compliment, but I do take the issue very seriously," said labor lawyer Ingrid Fredeen, once in-house counsel for General Mills and now a vice president for ethics and training at Navex Global, a supplier of computer-based training tools.

"Whenever you're in some kind of a male-dominated world, there are always many sides to a compliment. Some of them are just pure. They don't mean anything other than, 'You have a nice jacket on.' End of story," she said.

Others are dripping with innuendo. "They're about power, and so using a compliment is a way to change the power dynamic between two individuals, and there's some tension there. That happens very frequently."

According to the nonprofit group Catalyst, which works to expand opportunities for women in business, sex discrimination charges amount to about 15 percent of allegations handled by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in 2011. That includes sexual harassment, defined as "unwelcome sexual advances, requests for sexual favors and other verbal or physical conduct of a sexual nature" that unreasonably affects employment or a work environment.

Nearly all large employers in the U.S. had harassment grievance policies in 1998 and 70 percent of U.S. companies provided training related to sexual harassment, according to research published in 2007 in the American Journal of Sociology by Frank Dobbin of Harvard University and Erin L. Kelly of the University of Minnesota.

But where does that leave the casual remark? "If it's made in public, laugh it off in the moment and then privately speak to the person," Parker counsels.

Fredeen notes: "When you're thinking about the legal landscape, compliments alone don't typically constitute unlawful sexual harassment."

Donna Mazzola, who recently retired after 30 years in HR in the banking and insurance industries, said the way codes of conduct are enforced is important. Even then, atmosphere from department to department, floor to floor, is everything.

"In the sales office, the women gave it right back to the guys and you would almost never have a complaint," she said of one large insurance company where she worked. "It's very common to have a sales guy say, 'Gal, were you out drinking, what the hell are you wearing today? Jeez, your dress is awful short.' In corporate you would have never said something like that."

Much also depends on personal relationships, Mazzola said. "Is this someone you hang out with in the lunch room? Or is this a more senior person or a colleague who you're not that close with?"

Such remarks are definitely not restricted to men, she said, recalling a female senior executive who once hauled a female vice president into her office to chide her about the way she dressed.

"'You dress way too sexy for this company and for your role,'" Mazzola recalled. "The VP said, 'Well, have there been complaints?' And this woman said, 'No, but I see the way men look at you in training sessions.'"

The vice president's response? "Well, if there are no complaints, I don't understand."

Parker said appearance can indeed be a legitimate target of complaints if a person creates a distraction.

But falling short of that, is it OK to compliment an outfit or a coworker's new hairdo? Why risk a compliment or a casual remark if the intent is innocent? Why not stick with ball scores, the weather or the latest movie?

"We're human and we form close bonds with the people we work with and we care about them," Fredeen said. "At the end of the day, for most, nothing bad is going to come of me telling you, 'Gee, you look terrific.'"

http://news.yahoo.com/ever-ok-compli...155428104.html