Feminism in News and Popular Media

[Kobi]

POKHARA, Nepal (AP) — When Lucky, Dicky and Nicky Chettri tried to break into Nepal's male-dominated trekking industry 20 years ago, competitors tried to run them out of business. They say men threatened them, harassed them — even filed bogus police reports against them.

"The men said this is a business for the men and we should leave it alone," said Lucky, the eldest Chettri sister in the 3 Sisters Adventure Trekking Company. "They would even accuse us of trying to take away food from their table."

Now the sisters have a booming business and a waiting list of Nepalese women who want to join their six-month training program for mountain guides.

The rise of the Chettri sisters' business in many ways reflects the increasing clout of women in Nepal, which remains in most ways a deeply patriarchal country.

Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay first climbed Mount Everest in 1953, but it was another 40 years before the first Nepali woman reached the peak. Since then, women have made progress in politics, education and business.

About 5 percent of Nepali politicians were female in 1990, but women won a third of the seats in the 2008 parliamentary election. Some discriminatory laws have been changed, including one that allowed only sons to inherit parental property.

Shailee Basnet, who led a 10-member Nepali women's team to Everest in 2008, said the number of women in trekking and mountaineering has risen as well, and she gave credit to the Chettri sisters.

"They have started a trend for women to take up this profession. Women guiding foreign trekkers in the region has become a normal thing now," she said.

The Chettris came up with the idea of opening a woman-run trekking agency when they heard from foreign female travelers who were harassed, even sexually assaulted and threatened by their own male guides while trekking remote mountain trails.

"These girls were really afraid and felt insecure," said Lucky, 48, at their office next to the picturesque Phewa lake.

The sisters once led trips themselves, but had trouble finding more women who knew trekking, spoke English and were willing to spend days walking with the foreigners away from home. Their solution was to bring the women to Pokhara and train them for months.

"At the beginning it was very unusual for the women to join our program because they had to leave their homes for many days, working with Westerners," said Nicky, the youngest of the sisters. "Some thought it was against our culture because women are expected to be at home doing household work."

But soon the word spread. "These women began to like the idea that they don't need to depend on their husbands for money," Nicky said.

Gam Maya Tilicha, 25, once planned to become a teacher but is now a full-time guide at the agency.

"I never imagined that I would be a trekking guide. But the income is very good and I like what I am doing — meeting people from all over the world and traveling to new places in Nepal," she said.

The sisters take in 40 students every six months, giving them free housing, food and clothing. The money earned from the trekking agency supports the training.

Once they graduate, they make about $3,000 a year from guiding tourists, a better-than-average salary in this poor Himalayan nation. Monika Rai, a 19-year-old student, hopes it leads to something better.

"I am here to learn the skills of trekking and English language so that I can become a guide and make more money than in any other jobs," she said.

The Chettris have 150 women guides who lead close to 1,000 foreign trekkers a year. They cater to those who travel the lower mountain trails, not the mountaineers who go beyond Everest's base camp and up to the world's tallest peak.

Mountaineering and trekking is a big business in Nepal, where half the foreign visitors come to explore the mountains. According to the Nepal Mountaineering Association, some 340,000 foreign tourists ventured on treks last year.

Many of the visitors are single women who prefer to have female companion, including Sophie Whitwell, a 25-year-old marketing executive from London who signed up with 3 Sisters.

"I would definitely want a female guide. I am sure it would be fine if you went with a male guide but you just don't know, and you are walking with them potentially alone for several hours a day," she said. "If you are in a scenario where you need a rescue ... a female guide is just as capable of walking to the next town to get help or make a phone call."

http://news.yahoo.com/women-reach-to...105449701.html

[Kobi]

The most common criticism of radical feminist theory is that we are gender essentialist because we believe that women’s oppression, as a class, is because of the biological realities of our bodies.

Radical feminists define sex as the physical body, whilst gender is a social construct. It is not a function of our biology. It is the consequence of being labelled male/female at birth and assigned to the oppressor/sex class. The minute genetic differences are not reflected in the reality of women’s lived experiences.

Gender is the coercive process of socialization built upon a material reality that constructs women as a subordinate class to men. As such, radical feminists do not want to queer gender or create a spectrum of gendered identities; we want to end the hierarchical power structure that privileges men as a class at the expense of women’s health and safety.

This assumption is based on a misunderstanding of radical feminist theory, that starts from the definition of “radical” itself, which refers to the root or the origin: that is to say, the oppression of women by men (The Patriarchy). It is radical insofar as it contextualizes the root of women’s oppression in the biological realities of our bodies (sex) and seeks the liberation of women through the eradication of social structures, cultural practices and laws that are predicated on women’s inferiority to men (gender).

Radical feminism challenges all relationships of power that exist within the Patriarchy including capitalism, imperialism, racism, classism, homophobia and even the fashion-beauty complex because they are harmful to everyone: female, male, intersex and trans*. As with all social justice movements, radical feminism is far from perfect. No movement can exist within a White Supremacist culture without (re)creating racist, homophobic, disablist, colonialist and classist power structures. What makes radical feminism different is its focus on women as a class.

Radical feminists do not believe there are any innate gender differences, or in the existence of male/female brains. Women are not naturally more nurturing than men and men are not better at maths and reading maps. Men are only “men” insofar as male humans are socialized into specific characteristics that we label male, such as intelligence, aggression, and violence and woman are “woman” because we are socialized into believing that we are more nurturing, empathetic, and caring than men.

Women’s oppression as a class is built on two interconnected constructs: reproductive capability and sexual capability. In the words of Gerda Lerner in The Creation of Patriarchy, the commodification of women’s sexual and reproductive capacities is the foundation of the creation of private property and a class-based society. Without the commodification of women’s labour there would be no unequal hierarchy of power between men and women, fundamental to the creation and continuation of the Capitalist-Patriarchy, and, therefore, no need for gender as a social construct.

Radical feminism recognizes the multiple oppressions of individual women, whilst recognizing the oppression of women as a class in the Marxist sense of the term. Rape does not require every woman to be raped to function as a punishment and a deterrent from speaking out. The threat therein is enough. Equally, the infertility of an individual woman does not negate the fact that her oppression is based on the assumed potential (and desire) for pregnancy, which is best seen in discussions of women’s employment and men’s refusal to hire women during “child-bearing” years due to the potential for pregnancy, which is used as a way of controlling women’s labour: keeping women in low-paying jobs and maintaining the glass ceiling. Constructing women as “nurturers” maintains the systemic oppression of women and retains wealth and power within men as a class.

Even something as basic as a company dress code is gendered to mark women as other. Women working in the service industry are frequently required to wear clothing and high heels that accentuate external markers of sex. Sexual harassment is endemic, particularly in the workplace, yet women are punished if they do not attend work in clothing that is considered “acceptable” for the male gaze. The use of women’s bodies to sell products further institutionalizes the construction of women as object.

There is a shared girlhood in a culture that privileges boys, coercively constructs women’s sexuality and punishes girls who try to live outside gendered norms. The research of Dale Spender, and even Margaret Atwood, dating back to the 1980s has made it very clear that young girls are socialized to be quiet, meek and unconfident. Boys, on the other hand, are socialized to believe that everything they say and do is important: by parents and teachers, by a culture which believes that no young boy would ever want to watch a film or read a book about girls or written by a woman. Shared girlhood is differentiated by race, class, faith and sexuality, but, fundamentally, all girls are raised in a culture which actively harms them.

Radical feminists are accused of gender essentialism because we recognize the oppressive structures of our world and seek to dismantle them. We acknowledge the sex of the vast majority of perpetrators of violence. We do so by creating women-only spaces so that women can share stories in the knowledge that other women will listen. This is in direct contrast to every other public and private space that women and young girls live in.

Sometimes these spaces are trans-inclusive, like A Room of our Own the blogging network I created for feminists and womanists. Sometimes these spaces will need to be for women who are FAAB only or trans* women only, just as it is absolutely necessary to have black-women only spaces and lesbian women-only spaces.

There is a need for all of these spaces because socialization is a very powerful tool. Being raised male in a patriarchal white supremacist culture is very different to being raised female with the accompanying sexual harassment, trauma and oppression. The exclusion of trans* women from some spaces is to support traumatized women who can be triggered by being in the same space as someone who was socialized male growing up. This does not mean that an individual trans* woman is a danger, but rather a recognition that gendered violence exists and that trauma is complicated.

It is our direct challenge to hegemonic masculinity and control of the world’s resources (including human) that makes radical feminism a target of accusations like gender essentialism. We recognize the importance in biological sex because of the way girls and boys are socialized to believe that boys are better than girls. As long as we live in a capitalist-patriarchy where boys are socialized to believe that aggression and anger are acceptable behaviour, women and girls will need the right to access women-only spaces however they define them.


- See more at: http://www.feministtimes.com/the-pro....hrv9wRr6.dpuf

[Kobi]

Capital New York reports on Thursday that feminist writers Rebecca Traister and Amanda Fortini will be joining Elle as contributing editors. Last month, Cosmopolitan hired longtime Feministing blogger Jill Filipovic to cover politics on the website. It seems the hot trend this season is political awareness.

Cosmo, especially, has come a long way from oral sex tips. The magazine's web presence is now decidedly feminist — the leading story as of this writing is about Columbia University's sexual assault problem. Ex-Jezebel blogger Anna Breslaw is now the sex editor at the site. In a Reddit AMA earlier this year, she wrote "I was hired to make the site funnier, more feminist and less about creepy servile blowjob magic." It seems to be working. As Capital's Nicole Levy notes, NARAL Pro-Choice and the National Institute for Reproductive Health honored Cosmo and editor-in-chief Joanna Coles this year "for their roles in shaping public discourse in favor of women’s reproductive health and rights." Coles herself asserted back in December that the magazine is "deeply feminist."

Elle's EIC, Robbie Myers, seems eager to hop on the bandwagon. She said in a statement today,

[Traister and Fortini] were both strong voices in the cultural conversation that erupted surrounding sexism during the 2008 presidential election, and their work continues to push the feminist reawakening we are experiencing in this country forward. I think the next few years are going to be a groundbreaking time for women in our culture, and in politics in particular, so I’m excited to have Rebecca and Amanda on board to interpret that for our readers.

Here's hoping the feminist reawakening stays in style for years.

http://www.thewire.com/culture/2014/...gazine/370964/

[ProfPacker]

http://www.lostateminor.com/2014/04/...en-everywhere/

[Kobi]

Originally Posted by femmepacker

http://www.lostateminor.com/2014/04/...en-everywhere/

Ok, a female artist who is tired of gender inequality in the arts, decides to "create" mini penises so women can take their "dicks" to the table.

What am I not getting here? Seriously, I dont get how this is suppose to be empowering to women.

[Kobi]

Over the past few weeks, the meme "not all men" — meant to satirize men who derail conversations about sexism by noting that "not all men" do X, Y, or Z sexist thing — has exploded in usage.

But, it would appear that not all men (and not all people generally) are fully caught up on the meme, where it comes from, and the point it's getting across. Here's a brief history of the term, and why it's taken on such resonance lately.

1) What is a man?

Might as well start here. A man is an adult male of the species homo sapiens. To clarify, "adult" here does not mean someone who's able to pay their own rent, or treat others with respect. Adult simply means that this male has gone through puberty and is no longer a boy.

Some additional notes about men:

A man is someone who pays his female employees less.
A man is someone who interrupts a woman when she's in the middle of saying something.
A man expects his wife to do all the cooking and cleaning.

What's that you say? Not ALL men pay their employees less? Not ALL men interrupt women?

Thanks for pointing that out. You're who this meme is about.

2) What is "Not all men"?

Let's say a post is written on the internet about how men do not listen to women when they speak and interrupt them more often than men, an observation borne out by empirical research. At a blog or site of sufficient size, it's practically inevitable that a commenter will reply, "Not all men interrupt."

This phrase "Not all men" is a common rebuttal used (most often) by men in conversations about gender in order to exempt themselves from criticism of common male behaviors. Recently, the phrase has been reappropriated by feminists and turned into a meme meant to parody its pervasiveness and bad faith.

3) How did "Not all men" start?

The exact origins of "not all men" are muddy at best. As Jess Zimmerman noted in Time, "'not all men' erupted in several places on the Internet simultaneously and independently, like the invention of calculus."

"Not all men" may be a shortened version of "Not all men are like that" or NAMALT, which appeared on the chat forum eNotAlone as early as 2004. The Awl's John Hermann traced mentions of "Not all men" back to 1863.

The first use of "Not all men" in a popular medium is what Shafiqah Hudson calls her "tweet heard round the world," which she published in February of 2013.

4) What's so bad about "Not All Men"?

When a man (though, of course, not all men) butts into a conversation about a feminist issue to remind the speaker that "not all men" do something, they derail what could be a productive conversation. Instead of contributing to the dialogue, they become the center of it, excluding themselves from any responsibility or blame.

"Men who just insist on you having that little qualifier because it undermines your argument and recenters their feelings as the central part of the dialogue," Hudson says.

On a very basic level, "not all men" is an interruption, and interrupting is rude. More to the point, it's rude in a very gendered way. Studies have shown that not all interrupting is equal. The meta analysis by the University of California at Santa Cruz was conducted on 43 studies about interrupting. It was found that men interrupted more than women only marginally, but they were much more likely to interrupt with an intention to usurp the conversation as a sign of dominance, or intrusive interrupting. Additionally, a study of group conversation dynamics showed that the gender combination of a group affects the method of interrupting. In an all-male group, the men interrupted with positive, supportive comments, but as women were added to the group, the supportive comments dwindled.

"Not all men." Fine. But pointing out individual exceptions doesn't help us understand or combat behaviors that really are mainly committed by men, from small things like interruptions up to domestic violence and rape. Not all men beat their partners, but people who beat their partners are mostly men. Pointing out that you're not one of them doesn't help us figure out how to understand and deal with that problem.

5) Wait. So how is "Not all men" different from "mansplaining"?

Mansplaining is a term used to describe an explanation that is given in a condescending, patronizing tone. Though a woman could be guilty of mansplaining, the idea originated from men talking down to women in order to explain things, often things the women in question understand better than the mansplainer does.

The "not all men" interruption could be considered a subset of mansplaining, because it attempts to redirect a current conversation in a way that privileges mens' perspectives over women's. Also, like mansplaining, it's rude.

6) How does "Not All Men" fit into the history of feminism?


"Not all men" is just the latest iteration in a long tradition of feminists pointing out the ways in which language can be used by men to defend practices that benefit them and harm women.

"The very semantics of the language reflects [women's] condition. We do not even have our own names, but bear that of the father until we change it for that of a husband," the second-wave feminist activist Robin Morgan wrote in her book Going Too Far. She cited seemingly innocuous examples of sexism in language with words like "chairman" and "spokesman," and problematic language differences like a single male being called a "bachelor" while a single woman is called a "spinster" ("bachelorette" was only coined in the 20th century, while "spinster" and "bachelor" are both from the 14th century). The way we think and deal with gender gets expressed in language — and that includes, say, interrupting someone with a corrective "not all men."

Some analysts, like Sara Mills, have drawn a distinction between two forms of sexist language: overt and indirect. Overt sexism is embodied in hate speech, when a person is actively trying to hurt someone because of their gender. Indirect sexism includes things like gender stereotypes, misogynistic humor, and conversation diversion. Mills argues that overt sexism has been driven underground, only to create an environment where indirect sexism flourishes. And derailing tactics like "Not all men" are a prime example of indirectly sexist language.

Unfortunately, identifying indirect sexism in practice is hardly enough to stop it. When asked how the "Not all men" phenomenon has influenced her conversations on the internet about sexism, Hudson said that it hasn't. "I can't even talk about sexism without this ridiculous interrupting," she said.

7) So what can I do?

You can not interrupt, because interrupting is rude, and use that time instead to think about whether or not injecting "not all men" is going to derail a productive conversation.

You can also try making a "Not all men" joke with your favorite pop cultural shows like "Not all Aquamen".

http://www.vox.com/2014/5/15/5720332...on-into-a-meme

[Kobi]

****Trigger Warning****


This article is amazing in its clarity, theoretical analysis, and sociological perspective. It is in the first half and end of the article.

Midway thru, the author clearly warns readers of potential trigger stuff before it occurs.

The trigger stuff is very graphic, and in your face.

Your choice to proceed or not.

--------------------------------------

I have been a radical feminist for as long as I can remember. As I witness the marginalisation of radical feminism in the cultural discourse, in publishing, and in women's studies programs, I see the feminist movement I once loved become powerless to explain what is happening to women -especially the horrific levels of violence against women.

This failure has reached a new level following the massacre by Elliot Rodger of students at UC Santa Barbara. The media is on fire with women, and some men, writing about misogyny as the cause, as if that explains why Rodger targeted young women and rambled on about "sluts" refusing to date him.

Misogyny is not something created out of thin air, to be caught much like a cold, that drives those infected to commit horrendous acts of violence. It is an ideology produced and disseminated by social and cultural institutions that work seamlessly together to create a social reality that normalises, legitimises and glorifies violence against women.

Karl Marx was one of the first theorists to explain that ideology is not a free-floating set of ideas, but rather a coherent system of beliefs that are purposely and carefully created by the elite class to promote their interests. Using their ownership of key cultural institutions, the elite then set about distributing these ideas until they become the dominant ways of thinking.

Misogyny has now become the catch-all term to explain why men murder women, and that explanation is true as far as it goes. But if we see misogyny as an ideology, then the key question--too rarely asked - is where the norms, values and beliefs that constitute misogyny come from. Unless we believe that men are born misogynists, however - and feminists know only too well how dangerous the "biology is destiny" argument can be - then it is incumbent upon us to explain why some men hate women enough to rape, maim, and kill us. Blaming misogyny without delving into its aetiology is lazy social theory, and it does not cast any light on the specific institutions and processes that result in mass murders like Rodger's.

The more I read about Rodger's unspeakable acts, the more enraged I become with the unwillingness of the mainstream feminist movement to take on the elephant in the room: a well resourced, multi-billion dollar a year industry that doesn't just produce misogyny, but actually ties it to male arousal and ejaculation. Mainstream porn has now become so violent that when radical feminists describe it in debates and presentations, we are accused - including by other feminists -of exaggerating and only focusing on the very worst of porn.

In the best case scenario, this is because most mainstream feminists have never actually spent time on the most traveled porn sites, and in the worst case, it is a wilful desire to not rock the boat with boyfriends, husbands, brothers, publishers, and tenure committees.

So here is a test, and one that comes with a trigger warning because trigger warnings are not some right wing plot, as recent media stories would have us think, but ways to avoid re-traumatising victims of violence. I am going to quote extensively from a popular website that was made even more popular by the outing of Duke student "Belle Knox" as a porn performer.

We all know her name, - or at least her porn name - but does anyone know the name of the porn site where she was gagged almost to unconsciousness, smeared with semen to the point that she couldn't open her eyes, slapped, and penetrated so roughly that she was gasping in pain and sobbing? At one point she was pushing the male performer/abuser away because she couldn't breathe, and in typical porn-sex behaviour, he dragged her closer to his penis by yanking her hair, spitting in her face and screaming at her to shut up.

The site is called Facial Abuse, and the images and videos that populate it can only be described as torture. With no pretence that this is about consensual or mutually enjoyable sex, the text describes, in unbearable detail, what they are doing to the women:

" Big Tits. Check. Airhead. Check. Daddy Issues. Check. Brook Ultra has all the makings of being the next big deal in big tit porn. I can totally see the LA companies gobbling up this cunt, but we had her first. Today, she was trained to be a submissive little whore, taking cocks in all three holes. Pauly Harker blew her asshole out with his giant knob. We shot some great fucking anal gapes with this pig... so much that you could see what she had for dinner last night. Another well rounded scene with a model who's top shelf. Enjoy this... and when you see her all over the place, remember who taught that cunt the ropes . "

While most social and political institutions create woman-hating ideology, name one other that delivers it in such a crisp, succinct, unambiguous manner. Name one other cultural institution that prides itself on torturing women as its raison d'être. Porn is now the major form of sex education in the western world, and it produces an ideology that makes women seem disposable "sluts" who are undeserving of dignity, bodily integrity, or the slightest shred of empathy. Whatever psychological disorders Rodger had, he was sane enough to internalize the pornographic ideologies so perfectly embodied in Facial Abuse and the thousands of other websites that tell the same story.

Mainstream commentators and feminists tie themselves in knots trying to avoid any discussion of the way porn is implicated in violence against women. They talk about porn as empowering, as fun, as a celebration of women's sexual agency, and then express outrage when men act out the woman-hating messages that are the constituent elements of porn.

Radical feminists who make porn a central part of our activism are not (pick your slur) anti-sex, prudish, man haters, censors or ugly bitches who are jealous of porn stars. Rather, we fight the porn industry because we know that as long as this tsunami of woman-hating ideology continues to shape masculinity, there will be a never-ending supply of Elliot Rodger laying in wait for their next batch of victims.

http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/gail...b_5427951.html