Feminism in News and Popular Media

[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/

[Kobi]

NEW YORK (AP) — An all-women sports show premieres Tuesday night with perfect timing.

NFL domestic violence cases have dominated the headlines for weeks. A core panel of a dozen female commentators will appear on "We Need to Talk," which airs on cable channel CBS Sports Network. The weekly, hour-long, prime-time show is the first of its kind.

CBS executives say it will be a traditional sports program offering a different perspective. The main panelists are a mix of veteran broadcasters and former pro athletes.

CBS has shown its commitment to the show by promoting it during hugely popular NFL and SEC broadcasts. The audience for "We Need to Talk" will be limited, though, by the distribution for CBS Sports Network, which is in fewer than half of the country's homes with televisions.

http://www.cbssportsnetwork.com/weneedtotalk

[Kobi]

Radicals react to the sex-based gender hierarchy by seeking to destroy gender.

Liberals react to the sex-based gender hierarchy by seeking to destroy (the concept of) sex.



http://womensliberationfront.org/

[Kobi]

Feminism is about inclusion. It is about ensuring no woman is marginalized as a result of gender and other oppressions which intersect with it.

Feminism is also about exclusion. It is about safeguarding a woman’s right to set her own physical and mental boundaries, and about defending her right of refusal against anyone who seeks to overstep them.

These two principles should not contradict one another. A fully respected human being should be able to defend his or her own personal space while also sharing communal space and rights of recognition with others. That it has not been easy for feminists to achieve this is a measure of just how regressive our beliefs about “what women are” remain.

Time after time, wave after wave, feminists are accused of being exclusive and bigoted simply for defending the space that each woman should have for herself – the mental and/or physical room of one’s own. We make demands that would never be made of men, whose boundaries remain inviolable. It is only women – and to be specific, female women – who are expected to include and include to the point of self-abnegation. We are told what we are, how we think, what we should call ourselves. Our inner lives – experiences of our own bodies, our female socialization, the discomforts we have suffered from birth – are considered accessible and transparent. We are permitted no complexity. We are the opposite, the complement, the helpmeet, the foil that grants definition to anyone who is not us. We exist, but not as complete entities in our own right.

For all our talk of the need to challenge cis norms, we have reached a point where it is expected that all those born female will enter into feminism as “traditional” women – those flexible, juggling, accommodating, motherly creatures who put everyone else’s needs before their own. That is how we are socialized to think of ourselves and, like it or not, that is what we demand of others. It is antithetical to a social justice movement which priorities a woman’s right to active consent, but we do it anyway. We demand that gender norms are questioned while at the same time expecting females to perform in the same way as always: giving, giving, giving, never making their own imprint but always bearing that of others. For that is inclusion, is it not? Never daring to be so fickle, so mean, so exclusive, as to say “no – that is where you end and this is where I start”.

It does not surprise me one bit that an increasing number of young women declare themselves genderqueer or non-binary. It has become the one remaining get-out clause for consent. As an older woman who is a mother, it has been made clear that such a get-out clause is not available for the likes of me, regardless of what I know my relationship with gender to be. Someone has to be Cis Woman™, on hand to do the ideological equivalent of wiping arses, scrubbing floors and shutting the hell up. Widespread terror at the thought of not having such a person – the SWERF, the TERF, the whorephobe, the pearl-clutcher – available as a means of deflection is palpable. Now that we no longer do witch trials it’s fair to say that if the TERF did not exist, patriarchy would have to invent her (oh look! It did!). She is woman at her most hollowed out, a blank screen for projection, the cause of original sin – otherwise known as male violence – and a vessel to contain all bile.

It is true that if some women have to be positioned as the TERF, others may feel they don’t have to. It grants the latter a temporary place of safety. This is not the same as self-definition – the number of defensive contortions one has to go through in order not to be tarred with the TERF brush increases by the day. To give up on words – woman, man, female, male, gender – which describe the fundamentals of one’s own oppression is no small sacrifice. To do so because one has effectively been coerced, due to a culture of fear and misrepresentation, is nothing short of an intrusion on women’s mental, linguistic and psychic space.

This matters to me because the feminism that is exclusion – being able to close the door and say “this is MY understanding of what I am” – is just as important as the feminism that is inclusion. Like most women I know what it is to experience sexual and physical abuse. I know how hard it can be to feel safe within one’s own body and I don’t think we should underestimate how much this matters as regards one’s own mind. A feminism that is forceful and intrusive, denying swathes of women the right to their own inner lives, is no feminism at all. A feminism that dismisses reproductive difference and denies women the basic tools with which to describe what happens to people like them is worse than no feminism at all.

It is easy to make the majority of women say yes when they want to say no. It is easy to make them acquiescent and self-effacing. It is easy to make them consent to things they do not feel and say things they do not believe. Patriarchy has been doing this for millennia, using fear and coercion. Feminism should be granting us a safe space in which we can finally say no. This is not about whether you agree with me on gender or sex work or any other specific issues; I just want you to know that you, as a woman – any woman – should have the right to define your own body, your own experiences and your own internal boundaries.

http://glosswatch.com/2014/10/16/an-unspeakable-post/

[Allison W]

http://feministing.com/2014/09/29/ca...e-consent-law/

By MAYA | Published: SEPTEMBER 29, 2014

We’re giving a very enthusiastic “hell yes” to this news. The so-called “yes means yes” bill passed by the California state legislature last month, which establishes a standard of affirmative consent on college campuses in the state, has been signed into law by Governor Jerry Brown.

Gov. Jerry Brown announced Sunday that he has signed a bill that makes California the first in the nation to define when “yes means yes” and adopt requirements for colleges to follow when investigating sexual assault reports.

State lawmakers last month approved SB967 by Sen. Kevin de Leon, D-Los Angeles, as states and universities across the U.S. are under pressure to change how they handle rape allegations. Campus sexual assault victims and women’s advocacy groups delivered petitions to Brown’s office on Sept. 16 urging him to sign the bill.

De Leon has said the legislation will begin a paradigm shift in how college campuses in California prevent and investigate sexual assaults. Rather than using the refrain “no means no,” the definition of consent under the bill requires “an affirmative, conscious and voluntary agreement to engage in sexual activity.”

This paradigm shift has been a long time coming and is desperately needed. The idea that mutual desire, not the mere absence of “no,” should perhaps be the standard for an activity that’s generally agreed to be pretty fun hardly seems radical. And there’s nothing that makes me sadder about the state of our sexual culture than the fact that this bill was met by such resistance.

Hopefully the affirmative consent standard will extend to college campuses in other states and, as Alexandra suggests, eventually to civil law suits for sexual assault as well. Above all, I look forward to the day when the proposal that we should only be having sex with people who are clearly excited about having sex with us is considered so obvious it doesn’t even need to be said.

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Really, I think this should be the legal standard everywhere, and not just California college campuses.

[Soon]

Monday, November 3rd — Thistle Interviews Sheila Jeffreys

TUESDAY, 28 OCTOBER 2014 | ACCESS HOUR
Thistle Pettersen conducts a live interview with controversial feminist Sheila Jeffreys. 7 PM Wisconsin time, the time of the radio show, is 10 AM the next day in Melbourne, the time zone that Sheila is in.

Air Times:

US: 7pm Central, 11pm Pacific, 8pm Eastern

UK: 1am

AU: 10am Perth, 1pm Canberra

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From the Event Page:

“Last spring, I invited Sheila Jeffreys to engage me and the Madison community (and beyond) in an hour-long discussion of women’s liberation and transgender politics. She accepted and I have been formulating questions for our radio show ever since.

Jeffreys is Professor of Feminist Politics in the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Melbourne, Australia. She recently released the book “Gender Hurts: A Feminist Analysis of the Politics of Transgenderism”

We will also be speaking with Elizabeth Hungerford, Lesbian Feminist lawyer who co-penned the infamous “Letter to the UN on the Status of Women” in 2011. She will talk about changes to current laws that are pushing back women’s rights and protections.

In addition, Blake Abney will join us with her perspective as a detransitioning woman. She was transgender until she realized the harms it was doing to her body and her mental health. She will tell some of her story and provide information for people who are considering transgendering.

Tune-in on the internet LIVE the night of the show: http://www.wortfm.org/ Just click on the right-hand side at the top of the page to the orange bar that says “Listen Live”

We will discuss the term “transphobic” and examine how it is used to shut-down and silence feminist discourse and organizing. In addition, we will talk about the harms of transgendering to those who do it and to their family and friends.

Call the station the night of the show at 608 256 2001 or toll free at 866 899 9678 to let them know you support giving lesbian feminist women a platform to talk about feminism and that you would like future programming to include lesbian feminist perspectives.”