Feminism in News and Popular Media

[Kobi]

Janet Louise Yellen (born August 13, 1946) is an American economist. She is the Chairman-designate of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, and current Vice-Chairman.

Previously, she was President and Chief Executive Officer of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, Chair of the White House Council of Economic Advisers under President Bill Clinton, and Professor Emerita at the University of California, Berkeley's Haas School of Business. On January 6, 2014, the United States Senate confirmed Yellen's nomination to be Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors. Yellen is slated to be the first woman to hold the position, taking office February 1, 2014.

[Happy_Go_Lucky]

^ Kicked and Recommended

[Happy_Go_Lucky]

"Kicked and Recommended"

That means the person kicking and recommending wants the op to stay front and center due to what they believe is important and germane. Hence, I want to keep the thread alive.

[Kobi]

By the end of this week, half of the nation’s state legislatures will be back to work for the year, but don’t expect to see a lot of women on the floor of state legislatures.

There are exactly 5,600 male lawmakers, compared to 1,783 female lawmakers, according to a new count from the bipartisan National Conference of State Legislatures. That means that just under one in four state legislators is a woman. And there hasn’t been much progress in gender parity over the past year — the ratio today is the exact same as it was five years ago. Arkansas saw the most growth since 2009, with women now accounting for 23.7 percent of state lawmakers, up from 17 percent. Alaska saw the biggest decline. There, women now make up 20 percent of the legislature, down from 28.3 percent in 2009.

Just four states can claim to have more than one in three female lawmakers: Vermont (41 percent), Colorado (41 percent), Arizona (36 percent) and Minnesota (34 percent). In the four states with the lowest share of female legislators, women make up less than 15 percent of the legislature. Their share is smallest — about 12 percent in Louisiana. Next is South Carolina, followed by Oklahoma and then Alabama.

Women make up nearly one in every three state Democrats, compared to about one in six Republicans. Among female state lawmakers, 1,134 are Democrats while 634 are Republicans.

There are also few women in leadership. In only nine states does a woman serve as the Senate president or president pro tem, according to NCSL. Six states have a female House speaker. Overall, there are just 62 women in major positions in the states.




http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/...in-five-years/

[Kobi]

[Kobi]

Do not bother to call. She’s planning to celebrate in Botswana. “I thought: ‘What do I really want to do on my birthday?’ First, get out of Dodge. Second, ride elephants.”

Gloria

[Kobi]

Wed. May 14th
5:00 PM Pacific / 8:00 PM Eastern
Participate LIVE and have full access to download the
webinar at any time.

Something big is happening for us as women. We’re on the brink of an evolutionary shift with the potential to alter the course of history. Millions of us around the world are feeling a calling to reclaim the feminine, and in so doing, to awaken our authentic power to co-create the future of our lives and shape the future of our world.

You may be experiencing it as an impulse to evolve yourself, to realize the potential of your creative gifts and talents and to make your greatest contribution. You may yearn for deeper experiences of love, intimacy and connection and feel a longing to come more fully alive. You may even intuitively sense that you have a unique purpose and a critical role to play in shaping the future of our world. And you may well be right.

Never before have we, as women, been holding so much power to shape the future.

For the first time in history, women outnumber men as graduates from American colleges. Over 40% of women in the US are also the primary breadwinners in their households, and as of January this year women outnumber men in the work force. In October 2012, CNN declared that women would become the “saviors of the global economy” and the Dalai Lama prophesized that “the world will be saved by the Western woman.”

Paradoxically, studies show that we’ve never been more unhappy.

Yet, despite the amazing success and privilege we’ve gained over the past 50 years, numerous studies continue to reveal a startling truth: that women’s overall sense of happiness and well-being has actually been on a significant and steady decline since the early 1970s.

For all the amazing benefits that feminism has brought us, its fruits have not necessarily included personal or spiritual fulfillment. If you’re feeling subtle, yet persistent anxiety or depression in spite of the possibilities for greatness you can sense, you’re not alone.

In fact, the majority of women today experience a profound and painful gap between the highest potentials we intuit for our lives and the way that our lives actually show up on a day to day basis.

We sense the possibility for so much more….

While we’ve gained the freedom to do, be and have anything we want, we haven’t necessarily cultivated the power to cause our lives to flourish and thrive.

Rather than having arrived in the land of milk and honey, as we’d hoped we would, we now find ourselves wrestling with a new kind of discontent—a new “problem that has no name.”

We’ve been cultivating a masculine version of power.

By wholeheartedly embracing a masculine version of power (that was so necessary to level the playing field 50 years ago), we’ve dramatically elevated our standard of living, while at the same time, severely diminishing our quality of life.

We now have more freedom, money, education and opportunity than any other generation of women in history. Yet we often feel powerless to create those things we most value and care about: love, intimacy, connection, belonging, creativity, self-expression, aliveness, meaning, purpose, contribution and a brighter future for generations to come.

We think our struggle to create these things we long for is a personal failure—but it’s actually a collective problem, symptomatic of our larger evolutionary journey as women. The restlessness we’re feeling is actually a critical calling, an impulse to evolve.

Awakening a new, co-creative feminine power holds the key to our personal and planetary potential.

The good news is that there is a vibrant, life-enriching alternative to masculine power that is fully within reach for every awakening woman. We call it “feminine power”–and it has the power to transform your life from the inside out.

Unlike masculine power, which is the power to create things that can be controlled, feminine power is the power to manifest that which is beyond our control, including those things that our heart most yearns for–intimacy, relatedness, creative expression, authentic community and meaningful contribution.

Through our pioneering research and intensive work with thousands of women from around the world, we’ve identified the specific principles, processes and practices by which women can awaken this new, co-creative feminine power in their lives.

We’ve discovered that there are three very distinct sources of feminine co-creativity that give access to three different kinds of power: the power to change your life, the power to realize your destiny and the power to transform the world. We call them “the three power bases of the co-creative feminine.”



The Keys to Awakening Power Base #1:
THE POWER TO CHANGE YOUR LIFE

Why most popular approaches to transforming core beliefs don’t work for women, and the brand new, leading edge process that really does
Liberate yourself and others from the tyranny of old disempowering patterns, graduating forever from the dynamics of the past
How to have a generative, empowered relationship with your feelings and emotions, and why you absolutely must know how to do this in order to realize your greater potentials

The Keys to Awakening Power Base #2:
THE POWER TO REALIZE YOUR DESTINY

Experience the joy of being radically alive and dynamically engaged in the co-creative process of life
Master the ability to discern your inner guidance such that you begin navigating life from an assured sense that you are on your “destiny path”
Learn how to access the unlimited support and resources of All of Creation to cause the full flourishing of life everywhere you go

The Keys to Awakening Power Base #3:
THE POWER TO TRANSFORM THE WORLD

Learn why we cannot be become ourselves by ourselves, and how to create evolutionary partnerships that will unleash the full realization of your unique gifts and contributions
How to harness the power of the collective field to cause unprecedented transformations in our lives and in our world
How to become a powerful agent of change and consciously join with others to co-create the future of our world

We can’t wait to be with you for this Global Online Webinar &
Gathering on Wednesday, May 14th!

http://femininepower.com/online-cour...-class/fbpost/

[Kobi]

LOUISVILLE, Ky. (AP) — In the male-dominated world of horse racing, Anna Rose Napravnik (nah-PRAHV'-nik) figured she'd have better luck if nobody noticed a woman's name in the track program.

She started out her career disguising her gender, riding under the initials A.R. Napravnik.

Nine years later, Rosie Napravnik is one of the rising stars in the sport, having long ago discarded her ruse. Now the 26-year-old from New Jersey will try to make even bigger history and become the first woman to ride a Kentucky Derby winner.

She's achieved firsts before. She was the first woman to win the Louisiana Derby, and did it twice. She also was the highest-placing female rider in the Kentucky Derby.

http://news.yahoo.com/rosie-napravni...1757--spt.html

[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

[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."