I’m pretty happy to have got my Feminism F.A.Q.s mojo back with this new edition: Did Feminists Burn Bras?

You may notice I have a bit of a new look for the videos and I’ve improved the sound quality significantly. I have two more new ones I’m in the process of editing and I re-filmed 3 of the older ones using the better mic and lighting, so I’ve removed those from my YouTube and the Feminism F.A.Q.s page on this website until that’s done.

As usual, please comment below if you have any topics you’d like me to cover in future videos , and these videos are designed as a resource for other feminists and bloggers to help you deal with these questions in an accessible, and succinct format. So feel free to share!

Special thanks to Anita at Feminist Frequency for sharing her experience and helping me resolve some of my tech issues.

(photo in the video is from Duke University Special Collections, via Media Myth Alert)

by Matilda Branson

A girl is born into a very poor family living in a remote rural village. As she grows up, it becomes apparent to her parents that her limbs don’t function the way they should and is unable to walk. Rumours flit about the village that the girl’s mother may be cursed for giving birth to such a child. The child is kept at home, hidden away, a constant source of shame and embarrassment to the family. She does not go to school. She associates only with her family and is confined to the home. In her teens her father begins to sexually abuse her. As she reaches adulthood, she remains at home. Socially, culturally, economically, she is not seen as what a woman should be. She will never marry, bear children, or work. That is her lot in life.

It may seem pretty heavy, but the above scenario could be any one of the many case studies in a range of countries on gender and disability. Throughout the world, 650 million people – 10% of the world’s population – live with disabilities (Beijing Platform for Action, 1995). I’m not going to blab on about definitions of disability as that’d take forever – but yes, definitions vary, and yes, one shouldn’t necessarily make “disability” a huge umbrella term. But the point is that women with disabilities in general are particularly vulnerable to gender-based violence; lack access to economic opportunities, health, and education; and experience conditions of poverty and forced medical interventions to control their fertility.

While mainstreaming gender into the disability sector is becoming more and more common, all too often you see that women with disabilities are perceived as asexual, passive beings, in need of constant care. What’s with that? Protective instincts? Surely we’ve moved beyond that though, in this age of rights, choice and autonomy. Quite a common issue the parents of young women with disabilities face, or refuse to face, is the fact that their daughter is a sexual being who may be keen to have boyfriends, have sex, get married and have children. This issue pops up in the shocked conservative Australian media from time to time about irresponsible parents choosing (imagine!) to allow their sons with disabilities to visit a brothel – yet these stories only seem to centre around boys with disabilities.

Regardless of whether we’re talking about developing or developed contexts, the real question is how do you, the people around you and wider society perceive gender and disability?  Is there any way that you – in your school, uni, workplace, wherevs – can perhaps help to mainstream the issue a bit more? Educate people; transform some of the persisting attitudes into seeing women and people with disabilities as empowered, autonomous individuals who can make up their own minds about things.  It just makes sense, right?

(photo CC-licensed, part of the Geograph Project)

Chloe at the Ms. Magazine blog writes about why it makes sense to celebrate access to birth control on Mother’s Day.

-Jarrah

• How to do stage makeup
• How to pick stinging nettles
• That it’s important to take care of yourself
• How to make Ukrainian Easter Eggs
• That we are all inextricably connected to the Earth and it is important to protect her
• The difference between banana slugs and garden slugs
• That embarrassing childhood pictures are fair-game for showing to your adult friends
• That religion doesn’t have to be oppressive
• To have the patience it takes to find great things in a thrift store
• That having someone who is always there to listen when you’re having a bad day or a bad week or a bad month is priceless.

Happy Mother’s Day to my mom, Eve, and everyone else engaged in mothering.

Chanel Dubofsky’s work has appeared in the Forward, Tablet, the Jewish Women’s Archive, and the Pursuit of Harpyness. She is the creator of the Marriage Project, an interview series on marriage in imagination and reality, at her blog, Diverge. She lives in Brooklyn, New York. 

I was once what you might call “bad” at Mother’s Day. When my mother was alive, I would constantly forget it, make plans on the day of, not call, etc. This was due to the incredibly complicated relationship I had with my mother, to her long illness and me not being the kid she thought she’d have, and also because I thought Mother’s Day was stupid.

Everybody calm down – I also think Father’s Day and Thanksgiving and Arbor Day are stupid – but Mother’s Day gets to me in a particular way, and it’s not just because my mother is dead (that essay has been written already). It’s also because of the elaborate co-opting of what was a feminist action, and is now a conflagration of capitalism and sexism.

It’s a pretty convenient move to erase, or at least bludgeon to the point of obscurity, Julia Ward Howe and  the Mother’s Day Proclamation from popular memory, especially if what you replace it with is pink, lacy, smells like really expensive flowers. Mother’s Day marketing is about femininity and not the ass kicking sort. Instead, the kind that’s self sacrifcing to the fullest extent possible, that erases desires, goals and personalities in favor of the ultimate demonstration of womanhood-being a mother. And of course, we have to reward this, even though it’s  dangerous and unrealistic and unattainable, because if you love someone, you buy them stuff.

Mother’s Day, of course, is only one example of how capitalism thrives on the distortion and co-opation of feminism and all movements for liberation. It perpetuates lies and essentialism – women need children and men to give us purpose, without these things, what else would we do? Who would we be? Father’s Day isn’t exempt, by the way – it’s just different. Those gifts celebrate traditional notions of masculinity and stereotypes of fathers: Sports! Meat! Work!

Capitalism is based in the practice of manufacturing and selling us dichotomies-success/failure, male/female, love/hate, married/alone. These are packaged and we buy them, for many reasons, one being because it’s easier to accept that things are simple than it is to look deeply for radical truth.

“We will not have great questions decided by irrelevant agencies,” Julia Ward Howe wrote in 1870. “Let women now leave all that may be left of home for a great and earnest day of counsel.”

Let’s take some shit back, shall we? Instead of putting money into an economic system that hurts all of us, isolates us from each other and profits from keeping that isolation going, let’s refuse to participate in the structure in the way we’re told we should. (Don’t worry. Being part of the revolution doesn’t mean you don’t love your mom.)

(photo by Michael Prudhomme, CC licensed via Wikimedia Commons)

by Matilda Branson

Correct me if I’m wrong – and I always hope I am – but I doubt many are familiar with the current status of Nepal’s political situation. Basically, it is politically unstable and has had a transitional government at its helm for the past few years. On the 27^th May 2012 the new Constitution will come out, hopefully including within it the rights of many of the country’s minority groups.

One such group currently lobbying the government for their rights to be included within the Constitution are Dalit women.

Who are Dalits? Think of the caste systems prevalent in South East Asia, established centuries ago, intertwined with Hinduism used as a mode of ensuring social stratification and the maintenance of social hierarchy. Right at the bottom of the caste system sit the Dalits, the ‘untouchables’, viewed as ritually impure, polluting and regarded as sub-human. To be a Dalit, and a woman- it’s double discrimination all the way, from not being allowed to share the same water tap at school with your classmates (if you are lucky enough to even get to school), to being killed for marrying outside of your caste.

What is the interest of an Australian feminist in the situation of Nepal’s Dalit women? I currently have the privilege to be working with the Feminist Dalit Organisation (FEDO), a national level NGO dedicated to promoting Dalit women’s rights, eliminating caste and gender-based discrimination and promoting justice and equality in Nepalese society. I don’t really want this to turn into an NGO plug, but these guys really are awesome. As well as advocating at the national level for Dalit women’s rights (with the constant risk of arrest), FEDO runs a range of programs in health and sanitation, education, institutional development, peace-building, economic empowerment and political representation. Since 1994, FEDO has helped put Dalit women and Dalit rights on the map, in a society where Dalits, particularly Dalit women, had never before been considered. They currently have over 2000 women’s groups and 50,000 directly engaged members benefiting from their projects throughout Nepal – no small achievement, given the size of some of the Himalaya they need to get over to deliver the projects.

Right now, Dalit women are definitely doing it for themselves – lobbying the government for Dalit women’s rights, as the date to the release of the new Constitution gets closer, protesting, having sit-down strikes, being arrested, imprisoned, then doing it all again. They have exhausted the softer forms of advocacy, which have largely have gone unheard, and are stepping up the pressure on the government in the only ways it seems they can be heard.

It’s feminist advocacy at its greatest – it warms the heart and puts a tingle down my spine seeing these women fighting for their rights.

(photo by Gamdrup via Wikimedia Commons)

Jessica Mason McFadden writes, studies and mothers in Western Illinois, where she lives with her wife and daughters. Jess graduated from Western Illinois University in 2006 with a B.A. in English. She will be pursuing a graduate education in English next fall. Jess identifies as a queer feminist and manages a wrecking blog at masonismymiddlename. blogspot.com.

Visceral reactions are where it’s at when it comes to Time Magazine’s cover story, “Are You Mom Enough?” While the topic of attachment parenting is relevant and in need of intelligent discourse, it’s the cover that’s making headlines. It isn’t the issue of attachment parenting that concerns the majority, it’s the gut reaction it produces in them. Does a provocative image have the power to educate? Does it create a space in which learning might occur or does it close the space entirely? These are the questions raised by this kind of moment of mass hysteria. Since the provocative image in the issue of Time most certainly elicits a response that speaks to feminism, it is important that feminists use this as an opportunity to contribute to, and thus shape, the conversation.

Since Time has a pretty grand bully pulpit from which to preach, even about messages they might not intend to teach, it is essential that feminists from around the globe make themselves heard in response to the article. It isn’t likely the article itself will determine the nature of the discourse, given that it’s the image that’s making headlines. The course and content of the conversation largely rests with the types of community involvement that it might engender. We can let the majority reaction come from outside the feminist community, or we can make this a Feminist Moment by making it by and about us – a collective of individuals coexisting peacefully and sharing feminist –egalitarian– values.

So what does this feminist have to say? Well, a lot of what I have to say is viscerally induced but also intellectually processed. I, like you, had my initial reaction to the cover. It went something like, “Wow, is that really on the cover of Time?” And that was before I saw the title of the issue. The image was powerful, indeed – particularly, Jamie Lynne Grumet’s confident, lackadaisical expression. No one can deny that the image is powerful. And any form of power can be used for good or evil, for or against equal rights and humanitarianism. I sense in its power a shade of revolutionary non-violent resistance: my favorite form of power. Whatever is written about the image and however it is characterized does not diminish its aesthetic power.

Some of the first responders to the article have mentioned what Grumet is wearing (tight jeans, for instance). I think it’s unwise to focus on what she’s wearing or what portion of the population she represents physically by being thin and white. Tori Amos wore an open jacket and an ambiguous expression when she posed breastfeeding a baby pig on the back cover of the CD insert for “Boys for Pele.”  As for me, I’d prefer to wear trousers and an open waistcoat or a torn up Geneva gown for my débuts de la résistance, but what can ya do?  To each breastfeeding or bottlefeeding woman her own (wardrobe)!  And, besides, it’s what Grumet’s not wearing that’s causing the jaws to drop. More than that, it’s who she is wearing – her three-year-old son – that is stirring the pot of dichotomizing forces and filling the House of Social Media with the sour-milky aroma of controversy.

After my brainless gut reaction to the photo, the next semi-intelligent response I had was to imagine myself in Grumet’s shoes. I imagined the ways in which I would represent my version of motherhood if I were given the opportunity to stage it on a popular magazine cover. I thought about my breastfeeding experiences with each of my daughters. If I had to do two separate magazine covers for each of my girls, each cover would be dramatically different. If I had only one image from which I could represent my breastfeeding experience; it would feature me, sitting on a bench, split in half.

One half of me would be surrounded by a starry night – that half of me would feature a red-faced, angry baby child not breastfeeding but rather clenching my shriveled up breast and its clogged duct in her fist. My hair would be standing on end; the blubbery folds of my tummy would be bubbling over one another, making invisible any evidence of the giant belly cave that formerly was my bellybutton; the milk from the clogged breast would be on my face instead of in my child’s mouth; and half of my face would look like one of Aileen Wuornos’ mug shots.

The other half of me, in front of the clear-blue sky and white light of day, would feature a half-face of delight and peace, a drenched acid reflux cloth draped over one shoulder, a Harry Potter book in hand, a cup of tea within reach, and a baby child pleasantly dozing blissfully into dreamless fulfillment. Yes, night and day – that sums up my two and a half years of breastfeeding. Was I Mom Enough?  If you asked one-half-of-me, she would have said, “Hell, yeah.”  If you asked the other half, she would have said, “No, no, no; I’m defeated.”  And the halves of me don’t even begin to encompass the continuum in which breastfeeding experiences exist.

We’re all Mom Enough if the circumstances line up well enough, but we can just as easily become Not Enough. That’s why it’s so important to honor individual experiences. The title of the article will mislead some to equate Being Enough with fulfilling whatever the image represents to them (whether it be avid breastfeeding, or militant and extreme parenting styles, or loving and nutritionally sound parenting styles). Being enough is what creates the whole parenting quandary, the philosophical divide, in the first place. So many of us are raised, or somehow manage on our own, to yield to external pressures in our pursuit of becoming ourselves. “Are You Mom Enough,” at a very basic level, validates and exacerbates the general pressure that women face to be something for someone else or for some cause other than themselves.

At the same time, we have the chance to respond to the question that Time has posed. We have the ability to say, “YES, I am Mom Enough. Yes I am.”  We can answer – whether we adhere to attachment parenting styles, or not; whether we breastfeed, or not; whether we feel positively about extended breastfeeding, or not; whether we, ourselves, would put ourselves in Jamie Lynne Grumet’s shoes, or not. We have voices, as women and mothers, and we have the right to answer. The great thing about posing a question is that it solicits a response.

Let’s keep the conversation going so that the answer resounds equally as powerfully as the question. The answer will be different for each of us. The question may not be a good one to begin with. It may be derived from faulty logic or futility. It’s too late, though. It has already been asked. We cannot eliminate the question or deny its existence. What we can do is empower ourselves in the answer. A question is only as powerful as its answer. All parenting and breastfeeding issues aside, this is a moment in time in which women’s voices are undoubtedly in demand and CALLED for. If Time has initiated a dialogue, let’s engage!  Where this conversation will lead, I suppose, ironically, Time won’t tell. It’s up to you and me.

This past week Funny or Die released another video on reproductive rights. This one features Judy Greer, Kate Beckinsale, and Andrea Savage, sending the message to Republicans that what women really want is more government in their lady-parts.

by Soraya Chemaly. Originally posted at Fem2pt0.

I remember reading these words at a Women to Women International meeting a few years ago. They were spoken by Patrick Cammaert, the Deputy Force Commander of the United Nations Mission to the Democratic Republic of Congo, in 2008, who said “It is probably more dangerous to be a woman than to be a soldier in modern conflict.” This exact equation has been demonstrated and repeated hundreds of times since.

How can that be? War evokes images of young men, literally led to slaughter. For most people in our world, exposure to violent conflict comes in the form of occasional newspaper pages filled with pictures of young men and a few women who die as soldiers fighting wars in other countries. We don’t see pictures of women who die as civilians or those who are raped violently and repeatedly in conflict as a war strategy. We tend to think of children and women as collaterally damaged during war, when in truth, all over the world, they are fully, bodily engaged in conflict involving the regular use of men’s bodies as weapons against them.

In the span of one year, between 2006 and 2007, more than 400,000 women were raped in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. This is 48 women raped every hour. In Columbia, between 2001 and 2009, a period of violent insurgency, 500,000 women reported being raped.

It is exceedingly difficult to obtain accurate data regarding the incidence of rape even in daily, civilian life. Obtaining it during times of war and in cultures where the stigma attached to being a rape victim results in ostracization or death, it is exponentially more difficult. On thing is certain however, rape is when men weaponize themselves and conflict is the time when rape as a mass phenomenon of power and control is most obvious and widespread.

Can rape during conflict be stopped? This is the goal of The International Campaign to Stop Rape & Gender Violence in Conflict, a collaboration between more than 400 Nobel Peace Laureates, international advocacy organizations, and groups working in conflict zones that launched this week.

The campaign, based on the practice of three principles, PREVENT, PROTECT, PROSECUTE, urges political leaders to acknowledge the widespread use of rape as a weapon during conflict and to protect civilians and those already victimized, often repeatedly, by these crimes. It requires that perpetrators of rape be identified, arrested and prosecuted – often by the very regimes engaged in the practice.

The Campaign is currently focused on four countries that need urgent attention: the Democratic Republic of Congo, Kenya, Burma, and Colombia. In these countries, rape continues to be used in widespread ways as a systematic method of control and terror.

I am including here a trigger warning for the following four paragraphs.

The Democratic Republic of Congo is hell on earth for women. It is known as the “rape capital of the world.” Despite an almost ten-year-old peace agreement, conflict is pervasive and deadly. Between 2006-2007 at a rate of 48 rapes an hour, the level of sexualized violence was terrifying. During this period, girls and women, assaulted with weapons, including bayonets, made daily make decisions between starving and being raped as they search for food. There were widespread reports of rebel rape camps and regular, frequent gang rapes, often including baby girls. Children conceived in rape, also died in rape. Rape is now a “normal” part of life involving civilians and members of various militias, including state forces and rebels. Men rape to humiliate, control, terrorize. Some believe it provides them with “magical powers” before fighting. The occurrence of rape remains high and common and is notable because it is now happening in women’s homes, where rape is largely accepted and perpetrators entirely unpunished. Several aid organizations have also begun tracking a high incidence of male rape, increasingly recognized worldwide as a frequent occurrence in conflict, even harder to document.

In Burma, a report produced by ShanWomen.org, a grass-roots organization, documents the repeated rapes of more than 625 girls and women and the use of violent sexual assault as a weapon. These girls and women were often raped by commanding officers in front of their troops, as part of an ongoing program of torture, shame and violence including choking, suffocation and various forms of mutilation. Twenty-five percent of rapes ended in death. Out of the total 173 documented cases, only one man was punished. On the other hand, women coming forward to report their rapes, were imprisoned, assaulted and sometimes killed.

In Columbia, a country were low-grade conflict regularly involving civilians has existed since the 1940’s, girls (as young as at least eleven) and women are regularly subjected to rape and assault by members of the military, paramilitary and guerilla forces. A survey on the incidence of sexual violence due to conflict in Columbia found that six girls and or women were raped every hour between 2001 and 2009. “82.15% of the 489,678 women victims of some type of sexual violence (meaning 402,264 women) did not report the abuses. 73.93% of the victims consider that the presence of armed actors…is an obstacle to reporting sexual violence.”

Lastly, Kenya, where, although there is no ongoing war, rape is used as a tool of ethnic subjugation defined as conflict related to 2007 post-election violence. A study conducted by The Centre for Rights Education and Awareness in 2008 found that “The Kenya Police Crime Report data for 2007 indicated that there were 876 cases of rape reported, 1,984 cases of defilement, 181 cases of incest, 198 cases of sodomy, 191 cases of indecent assault and 173 cases of abduction reported in the year.” Post-election rapes in Kenya included incidences of forced genital mutilation and widespread gang rapes. The next Kenyan election is in 2013.

The Sudan, Liberia, Peru, Sierra Leone, Rwanda, Cambodia, Bosnia, Guatemala, Haiti, Nicaragua, Mexico. These are places where mass conflict-driven rape were and sometimes are still common – as a weapon of ethnic cleansing. Women, described as sperm “envelopes” to be passed from man to man, are subject to violent forced impregnation or sterilization, psychological terror, humiliation and bodily mutilation. Gender inequities are at the core of these assaults because even though girls and women are overwhelming victims, men in these communities are often the primary targets. Girls and women are viewed as property and an attack on them is a form of theft and destruction against men. In this way, rape is a strategy and a reward both. Raping females is one of the most effective ways of eviscerating the social fabric of a community at every level.

The four countries above have been identified as those requiring the most immediate and urgent help. But, they are not the only ones in which conflict-related sexual violence is taking place.

Rape used in these ways, first defined as a weapon of war in the 1990 after the atrocities of the Bosnia-Herzegovina and Rwandan wars, is now recognized by the Geneva Conventions torture, a human rights violation and a war crime. Despite this, rape is used widely and systematically in conflict areas worldwide. It is often explicitly ordered by commanders, who participate themselves and penalize those that don’t. In the countries above, a major problem is a consistent pattern of government and political inaction or complicity in the face of obvious and grave injustice and violence. Despite the work undertaken by humanitarian aid groups, grass-roots organizations, activists and human rights advocates, perpetrators remain largely free to do as they like. Rapes like the ones described above continue to be conducted and reported in conflict areas around the world. The highly gender-specific nature of this crime against humanity means that it is more often than not still thought of as sexual and “relatively” harmless. Rape is about power and humiliation and control and degradation. The consequences are devastating. War and conflict, relying as they do on the dehumanization of men to fight, is the perfect environment for an exponential increase in the dehumanization of women, already assumed to be subhuman.

So, what can you do? The organizers are aware that the goal of eliminating conflict-driven rape and sexual assault seems improbably to many, if not most, people. But, there are conflicts where widespread rape does not occur. If that is the case, then there is noting inevitable about it. In which case, it is indeed preventable.

The Campaign, launched this week, is designed to raise awareness and brings supporters together online. www.stoprapeinconflict.org. Events will be taking place throughout the week of May 6-13, in countries around the world. Everyone interested should take the initiative’s Pledge, which involves a series of action steps related to using social media to share information, raising funds and generating political momentum to change the way government perceive and deal with this issue. You can do other things as well – for example, taking a photo of your #IPLEDGE and sharing it on the StopRape in Conflict wall; contacting your local government official and informing them of the Campaign and your pledge; sharing the information on your Facebook wall, and encouraging others to learn more. If you are a Tweeter, use the hashtag #IPLEDGE. Tweet your representatives and make sure you include @stoprapecmpgn in your Tweets.

It’s not impossible.

The International Campaign to Stop Rape & Gender Violence in Conflict is the first ever global collaboration between Nobel Peace Laureates, international advocacy organizations, and groups working at the regional and community levels in conflict.  The Campaign demands urgent and bold political leadership to prevent rape in conflict, to protect civilians and rape survivors, and call for justice for all—including effective prosecution of those responsible. These three pillars of the Campaign—PREVENT, PROTECT, PROSECUTE—signal a comprehensive effort to stop rape in conflict.  Join the campaign by taking the pledge.  Then, tweet about it to @stoprapecmpgn using #IPLEDGE.

(note: photo licensed Creative Commons via Flickr)

When you think Ashton Kutcher, I doubt the first word that jumps into your mind is “respectful”, but his recent ads for Pop Chips, in which he sports brownface makeup and attempts an Indian accent, may have hit a new low even for him. As Colorlines points out, the CEO of Pop Chips was forced to (sort of) apologize last week.

But luckily for those of us who were still not quite satisfied, a couple of folks have made some  clever video responses using humour to expose what was wrong about the ad. This first one is by Hasan Minhaj (warning: some NSFW language):

Second, check out “To Ashton Kutcher, Love Kimmy Patel” by and starring Puja Mohindra.

-Jarrah