Helen Boyd Kramer's journal on gender and stuff
I’ve just been reading some good stuff over at On the Issues:
It’s a fantastic resource, OTI. Do go check them out.
You magazine, of the UK, gave Caster Semenya a make-over, so now she looks like this:
& I guess I’m happy for her, but the whole thing makes me terrifically sad. We just can’t seem to accept people as they are.
There’s one great article about women in the world which to some degree states clearly that feminism is not dead & shouldn’t be, and another article, a book review, talks about the relationship between money and sex as laid out by the sex workers who wrote the essays in Hos, Hookers, Call Girls and Rent Boys
Friday they had a good article about Caster Semenya written by Alice Dreger.
Can I just ask, how is it these people who are protesting the Cash for Clunkers program AND national health insurance have never cared about anything before? Is it just Fox News all of a sudden having an investment in getting these people out of their chairs? Maybe. I don’t know. I’d just like to say that I find it astounding that Americans can be so absurd as to be totally enraged by isses about health insurance but a fake war is no big deal.
Baffling.
If I see one more woman on TV who knows nothing about her family finances who has swallowed her husband’s dumbass politics hook line & sinker who doesn’t understand the first goddamn thing about how women and children would benefit the most from a national health insurance system I’m going to go find them & smack them.
They embarrass me, besides, going on television knowing nothing but the freaking republican talking points. I mean, shouldn’t they feel some shame in admitting they never gave a shit about politics before? Enough shame to keep them off TV?
Talk about triggery, but this piece on “corrective rape” in South Africa is absofuckinglutely horrifying.
Corrective rape, for those who haven’t heard the term (it’s less than ten years old, since it was just recently coined by human rights activists) is the criminal phenomenon where LGBT people, especially lesbians, are raped by a member of the opposite sex as a means of trying to “correct” their sexual orientation. It’s a particularly vile practice, and while it’s not exclusive to South Africa, the country has become especially notorious for it. So notorious in fact, that the Triangle Project, a South African LGBT organization, is now saying that they deal with up to ten new cases of “corrective rape” each week.
My On The Issues piece, How a Feminst Found Her Sexism, is now up on Bilerico.
Has everyone seen this article about girls & superheros from Thursday’s NYT? Interesting stuff.
Little girls don’t embrace superheroes as often or avidly as boys. That may in part be developmental. With the big blinking caveats that there are vast variations within — as opposed to between — the sexes and that nature is heavily influenced by nurture, research on sex and play indicates that little boys are more readily drawn to competitive, rough-and-tumble activities, while little girls (again, big blinking caveat, see above) strive for group harmony over individual dominance. Beyond that, let’s face it, the choices for girls have not exactly been compelling: who can even remember Batgirl’s secret identity? (She was Commissioner Gordon’s daughter, Barbara.)
I like her big blinking caveats myself, but I’m going to bold them, anyway.
(h/t to Sarah for sending it)
I’ve been Simming for nine years – played TOS (The Original Sims), Sims 2, & now Sims 3. I was even one of those people who test-piloted TSO (The Sims Online) because they apparently had my name on a list of people who really freaking loved the game. Betty & Bob Newbie and Mortimer & Bella Goth are all familiar names in our house.
& While I have reasonably successfully ignored Will Wright’s being a BOR (Big Old Republican), recently EA has just been teh suck when it comes to women.
I’m not even that offended by the “booth babe” idea, but what DOES offend me is the lack of recognition that someone might prefer a “booth boy” or that any of the people who might want to post with a “booth babe” might be women.
& All this while GLAAD is trying to get a conversation started about homophobia in gaming.
I am, sadly, setting aside my Sims playing until EA gets its shit together.
What bothers me even more about all this is that Wright is a right-winger of the Libertarian bent who should have no patience for this kind of heterosexist & sexist crap. As a capitalist, which I’m sure he is, he shouldn’t want to estrange any market. Sims always had the same-sex “woohoo.” Civil unions were in the first release of Sims 2, which came out in 2004, & they stayed put even through the great nudity scandal of 2005. Same sex marriage is possible in Sims 3… all of which all gave me the idea that this trans amorous het dyke was, um, welcome in the Sims community. Apparently not.
Will Wright, it’s time to issue a real apology to women, and to the LGBT communities, for encouraging this kind of bullshit. (& Yes, he’ll be sent a copy of this.)
(You can follow #EAfail on Twitter, too.)
An old friend of mine wrote a cover article for the Times Literary Supplement about the first hunger striker, Marion Wallace-Dunlop. What interesting about his research is that it’s not about her alone, but about the way she understood media – in her case, at the time, painting – and its relationship to politics. He writes:
Wallace-Dunlop’s innovation was to create a kind of political theatre in a prison cell, its impact more dramatic than any she could have made on the image of women in art.
Very cool article about a very cool woman – whose life occupies a nice intersection of colonialism, feminism, suffrage, political strategy, art, and theatre.
This morning, the House Appropriations Committee’s subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services and Education (Labor HHS) eliminated traditional sources of funding for abstinence-only programs by passing the appropriations bill for FY 2010.
The Labor HHS subcommittee and the Obama Administration has recognized what we already knew: abstinence-only sex education programs do not work. The evidence is irrefutable that spending for abstinence-only education is not only wasteful, but also the programs put young women’s health at risk. A 2004 study by the House Committee on Government Reform, conducted at the request of Rep. Henry Waxman (D-30-CA) found that over 80% of the curricula used in the largest federally funded abstinence-only programs contained “false, misleading, or distorted information about reproductive health.” >In addition to pulling the plug on funding for failed abstinence-only sex education programs, the bill eliminates a ban on syringe exchange programs, which have been proven to be a highly effective strategy for preventing HIV.
(via email from FeministMajority.org)