Category: feminism

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4 More Years: Forward

It is so, so good to live in a country that makes sense to me. Thank you, all of you, but thank you so much to all the women of this country. We rocked it.

Rape apologists voted out, & a feminist President re-elected.

Wisconsin (woot!) elects the first openly gay U. S. Senator with Tammy Baldwin. New Hampshire now has a female governor and two female senators, which is pretty damned cool, too. & There were a ton of other victories for women all over the country in all kinds of races.

Maine votes in same sex marriage by ballot. Maryland approves same sex marriage too. (It’s leading in Washington, too, which would mean a total of 9 states would legally recognize same sex partnerships. That’s just about a fifth.)

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Speaking of Foreign Policy…

… did you know Romney/Ryan plan to bring back the Global Gag Rule? No, I didn’t either.

Mr. Romney has pledged that, on his first day in the White House, he would reinstate the “global gag rule,” the odious restriction that has been used to deny federal money for family-planning work abroad to any organization that provided information, advice, referrals or services for legal abortion or supported the legalization of abortion, even using its own money.

and

The gag rule did nothing to prevent use of government financing for abortions because that was already illegal under federal law. But it badly hampered the work of family-planning groups overseas, forcing clinic closures, reduced services and fee increases. It also violated principles of informed consent by requiring health care providers to withhold medical information from female patients. And, by stifling political debate on abortion-related issues and violating free speech principles, the gag rule badly undermined America’s credibility as it tries to promote democracy abroad.

So again, no difference between candidates, my radical friends? This one is huge.

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The Truth About Romney’s Binder

As it turns out, Mitt Romney didn’t ask for the binder full of women, even. He was given it.

What actually happened was that in 2002 — prior to the election, not even knowing yet whether it would be a Republican or Democratic administration — a bipartisan group of women in Massachusetts formed MassGAP to address the problem of few women in senior leadership positions in state government. There were more than 40 organizations involved with the Massachusetts Women’s Political Caucus (also bipartisan) as the lead sponsor.

They did the research and put together the binder full of women qualified for all the different cabinet positions, agency heads, and authorities and commissions. They presented this binder to Governor Romney when he was elected.

So there you have it. He’s not even as woefully un-sexist as he claims to be; he’s even more sexist than that.

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Balpreet Kaur

Okay, she’s my new hero.

Some jackass took a photo of her and posted it on Reddit in order to mock her appearance. A friend saw it & told her about it. So Ms. Kaur wrote to the jerk:

“Hey, guys. This is Balpreet Kaur, the girl from the picture. I actually didn’t know about this until one of my friends told on facebook. If the OP wanted a picture, they could have just asked and I could have smiled 🙂 However, I’m not embarrased or even humiliated by the attention [negative and positve] that this picture is getting because, it’s who I am. Yes, I’m a baptized Sikh woman with facial hair. Yes, I realize that my gender is often confused and I look different than most women. However, baptized Sikhs believe in the sacredness of this body – it is a gift that has been given to us by the Divine Being [which is genderless, actually] and, must keep it intact as a submission to the divine will. Just as a child doesn’t reject the gift of his/her parents, Sikhs do not reject the body that has been given to us. By crying ‘mine, mine’ and changing this body-tool, we are essentially living in ego and creating a seperateness between ourselves and the divinity within us. By transcending societal views of beauty, I believe that I can focus more on my actions. My attitude and thoughts and actions have more value in them than my body because I recognize that this body is just going to become ash in the end, so why fuss about it? When I die, no one is going to remember what I looked like, heck, my kids will forget my voice, and slowly, all physical memory will fade away. However, my impact and legacy will remain: and, by not focusing on the physical beauty, I have time to cultivate those inner virtues and hopefully, focus my life on creating change and progress for this world in any way I can. So, to me, my face isn’t important but the smile and the happiness that lie behind the face are. 🙂 So, if anyone sees me at OSU, please come up and say hello. I appreciate all of the comments here, both positive and less positive because I’ve gotten a better understanding of myself and others from this. Also, the yoga pants are quite comfortable and the Better Together tshirt is actually from Interfaith Youth Core, an organization that focuses on storytelling and engagement between different faiths. 🙂 I hope this explains everything a bit more, and I apologize for causing such confusion and uttering anything that hurt anyone.

The bold is mine.

And that is just too amazingly cool. I wish I had half the nerve, the confidence. I never even found out how much facial hair I might have been able to grow, and now I kind of wish I had. That said, I’m gonna guess she might have PCOS too, in which case she should be careful about being pre-diabetic.

But damn.

The cooler thing still is that the jerk who posted it actually had his opinion changed and apologized for being an asshole. And now, if you really need to, you can go look at the photo.

(via Jezebel.)

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Race & Gender & Life Expectancy

So this is shocking news: whites who don’t graduate high school have a life expectancy that’s four years shorter than it used to be. And look at this:

In 2010, American women fell to 41st place, down from 14th place in 1985, in the United Nations rankings. Among developed countries, American women sank from the middle of the pack in 1970 to last place in 2010, according to the Human Mortality Database.

Uneducated white women are now living not even as long as black women with the same lack of education. That is honestly shocking. The life expectancy of uneducated black women has always been horrible, but now even more women are dying at the same rates.

But then there’s this guy:

“There’s this enormous issue of why,” said David Cutler, an economics professor at Harvard who was an author of a 2008 paper that found modest declines in life expectancy for less educated white women from 1981 to 2000. “It’s very puzzling and we don’t have a great explanation.”

Um, what? Bad health care, single parenting with little to no safety net (which can cause more stress), substance abuse (especially of prescription drugs and cigarettes), sexual violence… is this really hard to work out?

The one good part, I suppose, is that the percentage of everyone without high school diplomas is down from 22% to 12%.

So much for feminism being redundant in America, eh?