Feminism in News and Popular Media

[Kobi]

It was a key match in the World Cup of Ideas. The teams vied furiously for the ball. The all-star feminist team tried repeatedly to kick it through the goalposts marked Widespread Social Problems, while the opposing team, staffed by the mainstream media and mainstream dudes, was intent on getting it into the usual net called Isolated Event. To keep the ball out of his net, the mainstream's goalie shouted “mental illness” again and again. That “ball,” of course, was the meaning of the massacre of students in Isla Vista, California, by one of their peers.

All weekend the struggle to define his acts raged. Voices in the mainstream insisted he was mentally ill, as though that settled it, as though the world were divided into two countries called Sane and Crazy that share neither border crossings nor a culture. Mental illness is, however, more often a matter of degree, not kind, and a great many people who suffer it are gentle and compassionate. And by many measures, including injustice, insatiable greed, and ecological destruction, madness, like meanness, is central to our society, not simply at its edges.

In a fascinating op-ed piece last year, T.M. Luhrmann noted that when schizophrenics hear voices in India, they’re more likely to be told to clean the house, while Americans are more likely to be told to become violent. Culture matters. Or as my friend, the criminal-defense investigator who knows insanity and violence intimately, put it, “When one begins to lose touch with reality, the ill brain latches obsessively and delusionally onto whatever it’s immersed in -- the surrounding culture's illness.”

The murderer at Isla Vista was also repeatedly called “aberrant,” as if to emphasize that he was nothing like the rest of us. But other versions of such violence are all around us, most notably in the pandemic of hate toward and violence against women.

In the end, this struggle over the meaning of one man’s killing spree may prove to be a watershed moment in the history of feminism, which always has been and still is in a struggle to name and define, to speak and be heard. “The battle of the story” the Center for Story-Based Strategy calls it, because you win or lose your struggle in large part through the language and narrative you use.

As media critic Jennifer Pozner put it in 2010 about another massacre by a woman-hating man,

“I am sick to death that I have to keep writing some version of this same article or blog post on loop. But I have to, because in all of these cases, gender-based violence lies at the heart of these crimes -- and leaving this motivating factor uninvestigated not only deprives the public of the full, accurate picture of the events at hand, but leaves us without the analysis and context needed to understand the violence, recognize warning signs, and take steps to prevent similar massacres in the future.”

The Isla Vista murderer took out men as well as women, but blowing away members of a sorority seems to have been the goal of his rampage. He evidently interpreted his lack of sexual access to women as offensive behavior by women who, he imagined in a sad mix of entitlement and self-pity, owed him fulfillment.

#YesAllWomen

Richard Martinez, the father of one of the young victims, spoke powerfully on national TV about gun control and the spinelessness of the politicians who have caved to the gun lobby, as well as about the broader causes of such devastation. A public defender in Santa Barbara County, he has for decades dealt with violence against women, gun users, and mental illness, as does everyone in his field. He and Christopher Michaels-Martinez's mother, a deputy district attorney, knew the territory intimately before they lost their only child. The bloodbath was indeed about guns and toxic versions of masculinity and entitlement, and also about misery, cliché, and action-movie solutions to emotional problems. It was, above all, about the hatred of women.

According to one account of the feminist conversation that followed, a young woman with the online name Kaye (who has since been harassed or intimidated into withdrawing from the public conversation) decided to start tweeting with the hashtag #YesAllWomen at some point that Saturday after the massacre. By Sunday night, half a million #yesallwomen tweets had appeared around the world, as though a dam had burst. And perhaps it had. The phrase described the hells and terrors women face and specifically critiqued a stock male response when women talked about their oppression: “Not all men.”

It's the way some men say, “I’m not the problem” or that they shifted the conversation from actual corpses and victims as well as perpetrators to protecting the comfort level of bystander males. An exasperated woman remarked to me, “What do they want -- a cookie for not hitting, raping, or threatening women?” Women are afraid of being raped and murdered all the time and sometimes that’s more important to talk about than protecting male comfort levels. Or as someone named Jenny Chiu tweeted, “Sure #NotAllMen are misogynists and rapists. That's not the point. The point is that #YesAllWomen live in fear of the ones that are.”

Women -- and men (but mostly women) -- said scathing things brilliantly.

-- #YesAllWomen because I can't tweet about feminism without getting threats and perverted replies. Speaking out shouldn't scare me.

-- #YesAllWomen because I've seen more men angry at the hashtag rather than angry at the things happening to women.

-- #YesAllWomen because if you're too nice to them you're "leading them on" & if you're too rude you risk violence. Either way you're a bitch.

It was a shining media moment, a vast conversation across all media, including millions of participants on Facebook and Twitter -- which is significant since Twitter has been a favorite means of delivering rape and death threats to outspoken women. As Astra Taylor has pointed out in her new book, The People’s Platform, the language of free speech is used to protect hate speech, itself an attempt to deprive others of their freedom of speech, to scare them into shutting up.

Laurie Penny, one of the important feminist voices of our times, wrote,

“When news of the murders broke, when the digital world began to absorb and discuss its meaning, I had been about to email my editor to request a few days off, because the impact of some particularly horrendous rape threats had left me shaken, and I needed time to collect my thoughts. Instead of taking that time, I am writing this blog, and I am doing so in rage and in grief -- not just for the victims of the Isla Vista massacre, but for what is being lost everywhere as the language and ideology of the new misogyny continues to be excused... I am sick of being told to empathize with the perpetrators of violence any time I try to talk about the victims and survivors.”

Our Words Are Our Weapons

In 1963, Betty Friedan published a landmark book, The Feminine Mystique, in which she wrote, “The problem that has no name -- which is simply the fact that American women are kept from growing to their full human capacities -- is taking a far greater toll on the physical and mental health of our country than any known disease.” In the years that followed, that problem gained several names: male chauvinism, then sexism, misogyny, inequality, and oppression. The cure was to be “women’s liberation,” or “women’s lib,” or “feminism.” These words, which might seem worn out from use now, were fresh then.

Since Friedan’s manifesto, feminism has proceeded in part by naming things. The term “sexual harassment,” for example, was coined in the 1970s, first used in the legal system in the 1980s, given legal status by the Supreme Court in 1986, and given widespread coverage in the upheaval after Anita Hill’s testimony against her former boss, Clarence Thomas, in the 1991 Senate hearings on his Supreme Court nomination. The all-male interrogation team patronized and bullied Hill, while many men in the Senate and elsewhere failed to grasp why it mattered if your boss said lecherous things and demanded sexual services. Or they just denied that such things happen.

Many women were outraged. It was, like the post-Isla Vista weekend, a watershed moment in which the conversation changed, in which those who got it pushed hard on those who didn’t, opening some minds and updating some ideas. The bumper sticker “I Believe You Anita” was widespread for a while. Sexual harassment is now considerably less common in workplaces and schools, and its victims have far more recourse, thanks in part to Hill’s brave testimony and the earthquake that followed.

So many of the words with which a woman’s right to exist is adjudicated are of recent coinage: “domestic violence,” for example, replaced “wife-beating” as the law began to take a (mild) interest in the subject. A woman is still beaten every nine seconds in this country, but thanks to the heroic feminist campaigns of the 1970s and 1980s, she now has access to legal remedies that occasionally work, occasionally protect her, and -- even more occasionally -- send her abuser to jail. In 1990, the Journal of the American Medical Association reported, “Studies of the Surgeon General's office reveal that domestic violence is the leading cause of injury to women between the ages of 15 and 44, more common than automobile accidents, muggings, and cancer deaths combined.”

I go to check this fact and arrive at an Indiana Coalition Against Domestic Violence website that warns viewers their browsing history might be monitored at home and offers a domestic-violence hotline number. The site is informing women that their abusers may punish them for seeking information or naming their situation. It’s like that out there.

One of the more shocking things I read recently was an essay in the Nation about the infamous slaying of Catherine “Kitty” Genovese in a neighborhood in Queens, New York, in 1964. The author, Peter Baker, reminds us that some of the neighbors who witnessed parts of her rape and murder from their windows likely mistook the savage assault by a stranger for a man exercising his rights over “his” woman. “Surely it matters that, at the time, violence inflicted by a man on his wife or romantic partner was widely considered a private affair. Surely it matters that, in the eyes of the law as it stood in 1964, it was impossible for a man to rape his wife.”

Terms like acquaintance rape, date rape, and marital rape had yet to be invented.

(continued)

[Kobi]

Twenty-First Century Words

I apparently had something to do with the birth of the word “mansplaining,” though I didn’t coin it myself. My 2008 essay “Men Explain Things to Me” (now the title piece in my new book about gender and power) is often credited with inspiring the pseudonymous person who did coin it on a blog shortly thereafter. From there, it began to spread.

For a long time, I was squeamish about the term, because it seemed to imply that men in general were flawed rather than that particular specimens were prone to explain things they didn’t understand to women who already did. Until this spring, that is, when a young PhD candidate at the University of California, Berkeley, told me that the word allowed women to identify another “problem with no name,” something that often happened but was hard to talk about until the term arose.

Language is power. When you turn “torture” into “enhanced interrogation,” or murdered children into “collateral damage,” you break the power of language to convey meaning, to make us see, feel, and care. But it works both ways. You can use the power of words to bury meaning or to excavate it. If you lack words for a phenomenon, an emotion, a situation, you can’t talk about it, which means that you can’t come together to address it, let alone change it. Vernacular phrases -- Catch-22, monkeywrenching, cyberbullying, the 99% and the 1% -- have helped us to describe but also to reshape our world. This may be particularly true of feminism, a movement focused on giving voice to the voiceless and power to the powerless.

One of the compelling new phrases of our time is “rape culture.” The term came into widespread circulation in late 2012 when sexual assaults in New Delhi, India, and Steubenville, Ohio, became major news stories. As a particularly strongly worded definition puts it:

“Rape culture is an environment in which rape is prevalent and in which sexual violence against women is normalized and excused in the media and popular culture. Rape culture is perpetuated through the use of misogynistic language, the objectification of women’s bodies, and the glamorization of sexual violence, thereby creating a society that disregards women’s rights and safety. Rape culture affects every woman. Most women and girls limit their behavior because of the existence of rape. Most women and girls live in fear of rape. Men, in general, do not. That’s how rape functions as a powerful means by which the whole female population is held in a subordinate position to the whole male population, even though many men don’t rape, and many women are never victims of rape.”

Sometimes I’ve heard “rape culture” used to describe specifically what’s called “lad culture” -- the jeering, leering subculture in which some young men are lodged. Other times it’s used to indict the mainstream, which oozes with misogyny in its entertainment, its everyday inequalities, its legal loopholes. The term helped us stop pretending that rapes are anomalies, that they have nothing to do with the culture at large or are even antithetical to its values. If they were, a fifth of all American women (and one in 71 men) wouldn’t be rape survivors; if they were, 19% of female college students wouldn’t have to cope with sexual assault; if they were, the military wouldn’t be stumbling through an epidemic of sexual violence. The term rape culture lets us begin to address the roots of the problem in the culture as a whole.

The term “sexual entitlement” was used in 2012 in reference to sexual assaults by Boston University’s hockey team, though you can find earlier uses of the phrase. I first heard it in 2013 in a BBC report on a study of rape in Asia. The study concluded that in many cases the motive for rape was the idea that a man has the right to have sex with a woman regardless of her desires. In other words, his rights trump hers, or she has none. This sense of being owed sex is everywhere. Many women are told, as was I in my youth, that something we did or said or wore or just the way we looked or the fact that we were female had excited desires we were thereby contractually obliged to satisfy. We owed them. They had a right. To us.

Male fury at not having emotional and sexual needs met is far too common, as is the idea that you can rape or punish one woman to get even for what other women have done or not done. A teenager was stabbed to death for turning down a boy's invitation to go to the prom this spring; a 45-year-old mother of two was murdered May 14th for trying to "distance herself" from a man she was dating; the same night as the Isla Vista shootings, a California man shot at women who declined sex. After the killings in Isla Vista, the term “sexual entitlement” was suddenly everywhere, and blogs and commentary and conversations began to address it with brilliance and fury. I think that May 2014 marks the entry of the phrase into everyday speech. It will help people identify and discredit manifestations of this phenomenon. It will help change things. Words matter.

Crimes, Small and Large

The 22-year-old who, on May 23rd, murdered six of his peers and attempted to kill many more before taking his own life framed his unhappiness as due to others’ failings rather than his own and vowed to punish the young women who, he believed, had rejected him. In fact, he already had done so, repeatedly, with minor acts of violence that foreshadowed his final outburst. In his long, sad autobiographical rant, he recounts that his first week in college,

“I saw two hot blonde girls waiting at the bus stop. I was dressed in one of my nice shirts, so I looked at them and smiled. They looked at me, but they didn’t even deign to smile back. They just looked away as if I was a fool. In a rage, I made a U-turn, pulled up to their bus stop and splashed my Starbucks latte all over them. I felt a feeling [of] spiteful satisfaction as I saw it stain their jeans. How dare those girls snub me in such a fashion! How dare they insult me so! I raged to myself repeatedly. They deserved the punishment I gave them. It was such a pity that my latte wasn’t hot enough to burn them. Those girls deserved to be dumped in boiling water for the crime of not giving me the attention and adoration I so rightfully deserve!”

Domestic violence, mansplaining, rape culture, and sexual entitlement are among the linguistic tools that redefine the world many women encounter daily and open the way to begin to change it.

The nineteenth-century geologist and survey director Clarence King and twentieth-century biologists have used the term “punctuated equilibrium” to describe a pattern of change that involves slow, quiet periods of relative stasis interrupted by turbulent intervals. The history of feminism is one of punctuated equilibriums in which our conversations about the nature of the world we live in, under the pressure of unexpected events, suddenly lurch forward. It’s then that we change the story.

I think we are in such a crisis of opportunity now, as not one miserable, murderous young man but the whole construct in which we live is brought into question. On that Friday in Isla Vista, our equilibrium was disrupted, and like an earthquake releasing tension between tectonic plates, the realms of gender shifted a little. They shifted not because of the massacre, but because millions came together in a vast conversational network to share experiences, revisit meanings and definitions, and arrive at new understandings. At the memorials across California, people held up candles; in this conversation people held up ideas, words, and stories that also shone in the darkness. Maybe this change will grow, will last, will matter, and will be a lasting memorial to the victims.

Six years ago, when I sat down and wrote the essay “Men Explain Things to Me,” here’s what surprised me: though I began with a ridiculous example of being patronized by a man, I ended with rapes and murders. We tend to treat violence and the abuse of power as though they fit into airtight categories: harassment, intimidation, threat, battery, rape, murder. But I realize now that what I was saying is: it’s a slippery slope. That’s why we need to address that slope, rather than compartmentalizing the varieties of misogyny and dealing with each separately. Doing so has meant fragmenting the picture, seeing the parts, not the whole.

A man acts on the belief that you have no right to speak and that you don’t get to define what’s going on. That could just mean cutting you off at the dinner table or the conference. It could also mean telling you to shut up, or threatening you if you open your mouth, or beating you for speaking, or killing you to silence you forever. He could be your husband, your father, your boss or editor, or the stranger at some meeting or on the train, or the guy you’ve never seen who’s mad at someone else but thinks “women” is a small enough category that you can stand in for “her.” He’s there to tell you that you have no rights.

Threats often precede acts, which is why the targets of online rape and death threats take them seriously, even though the sites that allow them and the law enforcement officials that generally ignore them apparently do not. Quite a lot of women are murdered after leaving a boyfriend or husband who believes he owns her and that she has no right to self-determination.

Despite this dismal subject matter, I’m impressed with the powers feminism has flexed of late. Watching Amanda Hess, Jessica Valenti, Soraya Chemaly, Laurie Penny, Amanda Marcotte, Jennifer Pozner, and other younger feminists swing into action the weekend after the Rodgers killing spree was thrilling, and the sudden explosion of #YesAllWomen tweets, astonishing. The many men who spoke up thoughtfully were heartening. More and more men are actively engaged instead of just being Not All Men bystanders.

You could see once-radical ideas blooming in the mainstream media. You could see our arguments and whole new ways of framing the world gaining ground and adherents. Maybe we had all just grown unbearably weary of the defense of unregulated guns after more than 40 school shootings since Sandy Hook Elementary School in December 2012, of the wages of macho fantasies of control and revenge, of the hatred of women.

If you look back to Betty Friedan’s “problem that has no name,” you see a world that was profoundly different from the one we now live in, one in which women had far fewer rights and far less voice. Back then, arguing that women should be equal was a marginal position; now arguing that we should not be is marginal in this part of the world and the law is mostly on our side. The struggle has been and will be long and harsh and sometimes ugly, and the backlash against feminism remains savage, strong, and omnipresent, but it is not winning. The world has changed profoundly, it needs to change far more -- and on that weekend of mourning and introspection and conversation just passed, you could see change happen.

http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/2...vista-massacre

[Kobi]

WASHINGTON — It was, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg later said, “such a delightful surprise.”

In a 2003 Supreme Court opinion, Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist suddenly turned into a feminist, denouncing “stereotypes about women’s domestic roles.”

Justice Ginsburg said the chief justice’s “life experience” had played a part in the shift. One of his daughters was a recently divorced mother with a demanding job.

Justice Ginsburg’s explanation in 2009, though widely accepted, was but informed speculation. Now there is data to go with the intuition.

It turns out that judges with daughters are more likely to vote in favor of women’s rights than ones with only sons. The effect, a new study found, is most pronounced among male judges appointed by Republican presidents, like Chief Justice Rehnquist.

“Our basic finding is quite startling,” said Maya Sen, a political scientist at the University of Rochester who conducted the study along with Adam Glynn, a government professor at Harvard.

The standard scholarly debate about how judges decide cases tends to revolve around two factors: law and ideology. “Here, we’ve found evidence that there is a third factor that matters: personal experiences,” Professor Sen said. “Things like having daughters can actually fundamentally change how people view the world, and this, in turn, affects how they decide cases.”

The new study considered about 2,500 votes by 224 federal appeals court judges. “Having at least one daughter,” it concluded, “corresponds to a 7 percent increase in the proportion of cases in which a judge will vote in a feminist direction.”

Additional daughters do not seem to matter. But the effect of having a daughter is even larger when you limit the comparison to judges with only one child.

“Having one daughter as opposed to one son,” the study found, “is linked to an even higher 16 percent increase in the proportion of gender-related cases decided in a feminist direction.”

The authors also looked at the same judges’ votes in a separate set of 3,000 randomly chosen cases. There was no relationship between having daughters and liberal votes generally. Daughters made a difference in only “civil cases having a gendered dimension.”

Researchers have found similar “daughter effects” in other areas. Members of Congress with daughters are more likely to cast liberal votes, particularly on abortion rights, one study found. Another study showed that British parents with daughters were more likely to vote for left-wing parties, while ones with sons were more likely to vote for right-wing parties.

The new study on judges considered some possible explanations. Perhaps judges wanted to shield their daughters from harm. But the voting trends showed up in only civil cases, like ones involving claims of employment discrimination, and not criminal ones, including rape and sexual assault.

Or perhaps daughters tend to be liberal and succeed in lobbying their parents to vote in a liberal direction. But the judicial voting trends were limited to civil cases in which gender played a role.

The study was lukewarm about the possibility that judges acted out of economic self-interest — to avoid, say, having unemployed daughters.

The most likely explanation, Professor Sen said, was the one offered by Justice Ginsburg. “By having at least one daughter,” Professor Sen said, “judges learn about what it’s like to be a woman, perhaps a young woman, who might have to deal with issues like equity in terms of pay, university admissions or taking care of children.”

In the 2003 decision that so delighted Justice Ginsburg, Nevada Department of Human Resources v. Hibbs, the Supreme Court considered whether workers could sue state employers for violating a federal law that allowed time off for family emergencies. Chief Justice Rehnquist, who had long championed states’ rights, had not been expected to be sympathetic to the idea.

Instead, he wrote the majority opinion sustaining the law. It was, he said, meant to address “the pervasive sex-role stereotype that caring for family members is women’s work.”

Chief Justice Rehnquist was 78 when he wrote that. He died a couple of years later, in 2005. In the term he wrote the opinion, he sometimes left work early to pick up his granddaughters from school.

“When his daughter Janet was divorced,” Justice Ginsburg told Emily Bazelon in the 2009 interview in The New York Times, “I think the chief felt some kind of responsibility to be kind of a father figure to those girls. So he became more sensitive to things that he might not have noticed.”

I asked Professor Sen what her study suggested about how to think about the Supreme Court.

“Justices and judges aren’t machines,” she said. “They are human, just like you and me. And just like you and me, they have personal experiences that affect how they view the world.

“Having daughters,” she said, “is just one kind of personal experience, but there could be other things — for example, serving in the military, adopting a child or seeing a law clerk come out as gay. All of these things could affect a justice’s worldview.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/17/us...ghts.html?_r=2

[Kobi]

Did you know there are only 13 feminist bookstores left in North America?


1. Antigone Books* (Tucson, AZ) Established in 1973, Antigone Books is the oldest feminist bookstore in the country.

2. Bloodroot (Bridgeport, CT) Selma Miriam and Noel Furie co-own Bloodroot, a vegetarian restaurant and bookstore.

3. Bluestockings (New York, NY) Kathryn Welsh founded Bluestockings, a collectively owned and volunteer-run bookstore and cafe, in 1999.

4. BookWoman* (Austin, TX) opened in December 1974 and will celebrate its 40th anniversary at the end of this year. Current owner Susan Post, who started out as a volunteer, has been with the bookstore since its inception.

5. Charis Books and More* (Atlanta, GA) Sara Luce Look and Angela Gabriel co-own Charis Books and More, which will celebrate its 40th anniversary in November.

6.Common Language* (Ann Arbor, MI) Opened in 1991. Common Language’s biggest sellers include lesbian fiction, gay studies, trans studies, women’s studies and children’s books, particularly those children’s books that spread a message of diversity.

7.In Other Words (Portland, OR) was founded in 1993 by Johanna Brenner, Kathryn Tetrick and Catherine Sameh. (It’s also where the feminist bookstore sketches are filmed for the TV show Portlandia.)

8. Northern Woman’s Bookstore (Thunder Bay, ON) Margaret Phillips is the owner of Northern Woman’s Bookstore, the only feminist bookstore in Canada.

9. People Called Women* (Toledo, OH) Owned by Gina Mercurio , People Called Women opened in 1993. The bookstore specializes in multicultural children’s books, non-fiction, memoirs, lesbian fiction and romance in addition to mainstream books.

10. A Room of One’s Own Books & Gifts* (Madison, WI) Owned by Sandy Torkildson, A Room of One’s Own offers new and used books in conjunction with Avol’s Bookstore.

11. Wild Iris Books* (Gainesville, FL), which opened its doors in 1992, is co-owned by Cheryl Krauth and Lylly Rodriguez.

12. Women and Children First* (Chicago, IL) Established in 1979, Women and Children First was listed for sale by owners Linda Bubon and Ann Christopherson last October. (They are currently in negotiations with a buyer and anticipate a seamless transition.)

13.Womencrafts (Provincetown, MA), which opened its doors on the tip of Cape Cod in 1976, is owned by Kathryn Livelli.

http://feminismandreligion.com/2014/...marie-cartier/

[vagina]

http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandst...minist-country


Iceland has just banned all strip clubs. Perhaps it's down to the lesbian prime minister, but this may just be the most female-friendly country on the planet.





The following correction was printed in the Guardian's Corrections and clarifications column, Saturday 27 March 2010

Iceland's prime minister, Johanna Sigurdardottir, was wrongly credited with being the country's first female head of state. That honour goes to Vigdis Finnbogadottir, who served as president from 1980 to 1996

Iceland is fast becoming a world-leader in feminism. A country with a tiny population of 320,000, it is on the brink of achieving what many considered to be impossible: closing down its sex industry.

While activists in Britain battle on in an attempt to regulate lapdance clubs – the number of which has been growing at an alarming rate during the last decade – Iceland has passed a law that will result in every strip club in the country being shut down. And forget hiring a topless waitress in an attempt to get around the bar: the law, which was passed with no votes against and only two abstentions, will make it illegal for any business to profit from the nudity of its employees.

Even more impressive: the Nordic state is the first country in the world to ban stripping and lapdancing for feminist, rather than religious, reasons. Kolbrún Halldórsdóttir, the politician who first proposed the ban, firmly told the national press on Wednesday: "It is not acceptable that women or people in general are a product to be sold." When I asked her if she thinks Iceland has become the greatest feminist country in the world, she replied: "It is certainly up there. Mainly as a result of the feminist groups putting pressure on parliamentarians. These women work 24 hours a day, seven days a week with their campaigns and it eventually filters down to all of society."

The news is a real boost to feminists around the world, showing us that when an entire country unites behind an idea anything can happen. And it is bound to give a shot in the arm to the feminist campaign in the UK against an industry that is both a cause and a consequence of gaping inequality between men and women.

According to Icelandic police, 100 foreign women travel to the country annually to work in strip clubs. It is unclear whether the women are trafficked, but feminists say it is telling that as the stripping industry has grown, the number of Icelandic women wishing to work in it has not. Supporters of the bill say that some of the clubs are a front for prostitution – and that many of the women work there because of drug abuse and poverty rather than free choice. I have visited a strip club in Reykjavik and observed the women. None of them looked happy in their work.

So how has Iceland managed it? To start with, it has a strong women's movement and a high number of female politicans. Almost half the parliamentarians are female and it was ranked fourth out of 130 countries on the international gender gap index (behind Norway, Finland and Sweden). All four of these Scandinavian countries have, to some degree, criminalised the purchase of sex (legislation that the UK will adopt on 1 April). "Once you break past the glass ceiling and have more than one third of female politicians," says Halldórsdóttir, "something changes. Feminist energy seems to permeate everything."

Johanna Sigurðardottir is Iceland's first female and the world's first openly lesbian head of state. Guðrún Jónsdóttir of Stígamót, an organisation based in Reykjavik that campaigns against sexual violence, says she has enjoyed the support of Sigurðardottir for their campaigns against rape and domestic violence: "Johanna is a great feminist in that she challenges the men in her party and refuses to let them oppress her."

Then there is the fact that feminists in Iceland appear to be entirely united in opposition to prostitution, unlike the UK where heated debates rage over whether prostitution and lapdancing are empowering or degrading to women. There is also public support: the ban on commercial sexual activity is not only supported by feminists but also much of the population. A 2007 poll found that 82% of women and 57% of men support the criminalisation of paying for sex – either in brothels or lapdance clubs – and fewer than 10% of Icelanders were opposed.

Jónsdóttir says the ban could mean the death of the sex industry. "Last year we passed a law against the purchase of sex, recently introduced an action plan on trafficking of women, and now we have shut down the strip clubs. The Nordic countries are leading the way on women's equality, recognising women as equal citizens rather than commodities for sale."

Strip club owners are, not surprisingly, furious about the new law. One gave an interview to a local newspaper in which he likened Iceland's approach to that of a country such as Saudi Arabia, where it is not permitted to see any part of a woman's body in public. "I have reached the age where I'm not sure whether I want to bother with this hassle any more," he said.

Janice Raymond, a director of Coalition Against Trafficking in Women, hopes that all sex industry profiteers feel the same way, and believes the new law will pave the way for governments in other countries to follow suit. "What a victory, not only for the Icelanders but for everyone worldwide who repudiates the sexual exploitation of women," she says.

Jónsdóttir is confident that the law will create a change in attitudes towards women. "I guess the men of Iceland will just have to get used to the idea that women are not for sale."

[Kobi]

As one of the few African-Americans in her law school class, Paulette Brown noticed career counselors steering her and other black students toward legal service or public defender jobs assisting the poor, instead of more prestigious jobs in big law firms. But she refused to go down that path, eventually serving as in-house counsel for several Fortune 500 companies.

Since those law school days, Brown, a partner in the Boston law firm Edwards Wildman Palmer LLP, has fought against subtle racism, discrimination, and small slights known as “micro-inequities.” For much of her career, she has pressed firms to hire and promote more women and minorities; mentored hundreds of lawyers, mostly women of color; and trained many others on diversity in the workplace.

Now Brown, 63, has a platform to expand her mission even further. Last month, she became the first black woman elected to lead the 400,000-member American Bar Association, which, until 1943, did not allow African-Americans to join.

In a profession where only 7 percent of partners are people of color and the number of female associates has fallen for the past five years, Brown is focused, among other things, on raising awareness about implicit bias in law offices, the legal system, and American society. How is it that defendants of different races who commit the same crime get different sentences, she asked. Why are more black and Latino children suspended from school?

“Once you recognize that it’s a possibility that you could have some unconscious bias, then it hopefully will adjust your behavior. You will take a second to say, ‘Wait a minute, am I reacting this way because I could have some sort of bias in this situation?’ ” Brown said. “As a result, I think that you will be more fair in any kind of deliberation that you are engaged in.”

Brown grew up attending segregated schools in Baltimore, the fourth and youngest child of a truck driver and a stay-at-home mother, who later did clerical work. As with others who have had to overcome obstacles in order to succeed, she is tough — and persistent.

Once, when a judge kept telling her to be quiet, Brown slammed her checkbook down on the table and said, “You can fine me whatever you want, but I am talking today.” And the judge left her alone.

Her son, Dijaun, now 30, whom Brown adopted out of foster care on her own when he was 8, recalled his mother sneaking into his fifth grade class to teach him a lesson. Brown slipped into the desk behind him, caught him reading an Easy Rawlins mystery tucked inside his social studies textbook, and tapped him on the shoulder: “Why are you not paying attention?” she asked.

At the same time, friends and colleagues describe Brown as a warm, engaging woman who wins people over wherever she goes — even those on the other side of her legal cases. Shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, she was taking a deposition from a state trooper in a whistle-blower case. During a break, they got to talking about whether she could take a pecan pie through security for Thanksgiving.

The trooper later called her at her office — even though contacting opposing legal counsel is forbidden — to tell her he checked with the Transportation Security Administration and her pecan pie would be just fine.

Brown is also a notorious prankster. Her son recalls going to the airport with his mother to send her off on a three-week trip to conduct mediation training in Ghana. When Dijaun, who was 11 at the time, started to cry, his mother revealed her surprise: “You’re going with me!”

“The seriousness she brings to her work, she brings that same dedication to her jokes and trying to make people smile,” Dijaun said.

Paulette Brown has pressed law firms to hire and promote more women and minorities.

Neither of Brown’s parents went to college, nor did her siblings. But Brown was determined to go. She studied political science at Howard University in Washington and earned a full scholarship to law school at Seton Hall University in New Jersey. She began her career doing health and pension plan work at a steel company in Wayne, N.J., then served as in-house counsel for Prudential Insurance Co. of America and other Fortune 500 companies.

Later, she opened her own firm, focusing on employment, civil rights, and product liability law, and served as a municipal court judge. She joined Edwards Wildman as a partner in 2005.

Along the way, she successfully defended companies in discrimination cases involving sexual harassment, age, race, and wage and hour claims, while working to make her profession more diverse. In 2006, Brown helped the bar association produce a study showing that a growing number of minority women were leaving the country’s biggest law firms. Women of color make up less than 2 percent of partners nationwide; at Edwards Wildman, it is 1 percent.

In 2008, Brown was named one of the National Law Journal’s “50 Most Influential Minority Lawyers in America.”

When she takes the helm of the American Bar Association next summer, her already full plate will get even more crowded. Brown, who specializes in labor and employment law, practices mainly out the firm’s location in Morristown, N.J., although she keeps an office in Boston. She is the firm’s chief diversity officer, requiring her to travel around the world to Edwards Wildman’s 16 offices to conduct trainings.

In between all this, she monitors elections in low-income communities to ensure that they are conducted fairly.

As busy as she is, Brown turned down Edwards Wildman’s offer to put aside her legal practice and devote herself to diversity training full-time. “Contributing in more than one way provides you with more credibility,” she said.

As a result, Brown’s free time is scarce — and not exactly leisurely. She has done five 60-mile walks to raise money for breast cancer research. They aren’t races, but she checked the time of her last event anyway: She finished 22d out of 4,000 participants.

Cooking is a big hobby, including the peach cobbler she makes for her secretary every summer and the pumpkin bread and pickled tomatoes she brought from New Jersey for a dinner party at the home of Matt McTygue, the partner in charge of the Edwards Wildman Boston office.

Brown is a “classic example of somebody who has succeeded through her own will and an amazing amount of effort,” McTygue said. “I don’t even know if she sleeps at all, but if she does it’s very little.”

The women who Brown mentors say she has had a strong influence on their lives. Courtney Scrubbs, a first-year associate at the Boston office of Edwards Wildman, said while most people tell Scrubbs she’s doing fine, Brown pushes her to work harder. People in corporate America normally do a “a lot of smiling and nodding,” to keep from offending others, Scrubbs said, but not Brown.

“It’s helpful,” she said, “to have someone who’s just going to give it to you [straight].”

http://www.bostonglobe.com/business/...?event=event25

[Kobi]

CoverGirl's easy, breezy, beautiful ad campaign has undergone a shocking makeover at the hands of Roger Goodell protestors who are adept at Photoshop.

The "official beauty partner of the NFL" launched a football-themed ad series recently, touting eyeshadows and makeup looks to coordinate with teams' colors.

But over the course of the past several weeks, the NFL's image has been severely tainted, mainly by the video leaked by TMZ showing Ravens running back Ray Rice knock out his then-fiancée Janay Palmer in a hotel elevator.

The ensuing backlash against NFL Commissioner Goodell — and his failure to handle the Rice situation (initially, he only issued a two-game suspension) — has been swift. One form that such backlash is the doctoring of a CoverGirl "Get Your Game Face On" ad to show a girl with a bruised eye in a display of domestic violence.

The image took off on Twitter this weekend with the hashtag #GoodellMustGo. Goodell has not been fired from his position, nor has he stepped down.



Women's advocacy group Ultraviolet also plastered the hashtag on banners that were flown over several NFL stadiums during Sunday's games. Ultraviolet has not come forward as the creators of the Photoshopped CoverGirl image, nor has the group responded to Mashable's request for comment.

CoverGirl has not specified if their "Get Your Game Face On" campaign will be pulled. The brand's website was down on Monday, stating the site was currently under maintenance.

As of Sept. 10, however, CoverGirl seemed to still be shooting ads for the "Game Face" series.

Last week, CBS restructured its Thursday night pregame footage, pulling a theme song sung by Rihanna. CBS Sports chairman Sean McManus said in light of the Rice incident, the song — and additional lighthearted pre-game elements — would not be the appropriate "because of time or tone." Rihanna has experienced domestic abuse; in 2009, the singer's then-boyfriend Chris Brown assaulted her.

http://mashable.com/2014/09/15/cover...roger-goodell/