Lots of stuff to occupy your Thursday evening:
-The Mentoring Gap in Science. This article is fairly field-specific, but I know lots of female journalists and lawyers who have had similar experiences. And it’s always good to keep in mind the variety of factors that influence success in certain areas.
-Australia confronts porn (trigger warnings). I’m not too familiar with Australian pornography law, but it sounds like Victoria limits porn that portrays egregious violence or where actors pretend to be under 18 — but the law is regularly flouted. I don’t want to get into the porn wars here, but I do think it’s reasonable to limit some types of pornography. We already limit child porn in the U.S., but it’s a stickier issue whether we should limit porn where the actors are of age but are made to appear younger. And violence against women in porn is pretty standard — but is it different if the violence portrays something that wouldn’t be legal in “real” life, like rape or murder? It’s a fine line — after all, non-pornographic movies and art portray illegal things all the time, and defining what’s “porn” and what isn’t can be tricky — but I don’t think Americans are navigating it very well. Sounds like Australians aren’t doing so great either.
-Sexist ad? Check.
-An Oregon mayor lost her position because pictures of her in her underwear surfaced. Best part of the article: “Opponents said it wasn’t fitting for the mayor to be so depicted. They said they also disagreed with her on issues about water and the local golf course.” Well OK then.
-Pro-choicers in Britain are calling Cameron out on his bullshit anti-abortion support.
-The Assimilated Negro interviews the creator of Stuff White People Like.
-Another woman is charged with homicide after giving birth to a stillborn baby. Ugh. I’ve written about this issue a lot, but I’ll point out again that this is very much about race and class, not about protecting children or fetuses. No one wants pregnant women to use drugs. No one disputes that drug use is bad for developing fetuses. But charging drug addicts with murder is cruel and, in my opinion, unconstitutional. See previous posts here, here, and, most comprehensively, here.
-Football players are treated like meat during recruiting — prompting everything from offense to emotional break-downs from the players. And it does sound like an awful process. It’s interesting, though, how the author of this piece is using feminist language to describe what the men go through.
-A Planned Parenthood employee responds to a set-up phone call by anti-choicers by making an insane, racist comment. Hopefully she’s already been fired; there’s really no excuse for that.
-Sister Mary Soledad Perpinan is one of my feminist heroes. “Sr. Sol sees herself as a pioneer, an international and public figure, a feminist, an eco-feminist, a peace and social activist, even a radical. But she insists that she has never challenged church doctrine and has even been praised by the church for her work. Pointing out the subordinate role of women in the church was “just stating the facts,” and never brought any censure.” She battles trafficking without shaming sex workers, creating safe havens for them to stay and teaching them about safer sex practices, condom use and reproductive health. She focuses on HIV/AIDS care. And she’s all-around pretty awesome.
-What do two high-profile serial murder cases in the UK tell us about misogyny, policing and sex work? That sex workers just aren’t considered as important as “normal” women. And a third man is found guilty of brutally murdering women. Both articles illustrate how intense hatred of women — and particularly hatred of women’s sexuality — is a cornerstone to male violence.
-The trouble with Juno – birth mothers weigh in on the realities of teen pregnancy.
-Slamming doulas in the New York Times. This article is really unfortunate – as Miriam points out, there’s already limited coverage about doulas, and it’s really unfortunate to see them portrayed like this.
Enjoy. Thanks to everyone who sent these links on. And feel free to promote other stories and blog posts in the comments.
I think the insane racist comment you’re talking about was actually made by the caller, who claims to have been posing as an insane racist to entrap Planned Parenthood. The employee, who’s apparently a local fundraising director, was guilty of going along with the crazy racism, basically nodding and smiling over the phone, in order to get a donation. Which is still pretty bad.
I’m making my March donation to Planned Parenthood in honor of Lila Rose, who apparently organized the phone call to the Idaho PP.
Sometimes the best way to respond to idiots is to make donations to charities they hate in their name. It brings me great satisfaction, honestly, especially if I can get the charity to send a notification to the cretin in question. That’s not very nice, I admit, but damn, it feels good.
“No one wants pregnant women to use drugs. No one disputes that drug use is bad for developing fetuses.”
Actually, Jill, I thought the crack baby thing was proven to be entirely untrue, and that no one has proved that there are meth babies and that alcohol and cigarettes actually cause the most damages to developing fetuses.
Well.. yes and no. This is a tricky one to explain, but basically, the crack baby epidemic was a myth. Any drug use during pregnancy is not ideal. It doesn’t always (or even most of the time) cause issues, and a lot of the developmental problems associated with “crack babies” were actually more a product of poor nutrition and pre-natal care than anything else. But as a general rule, drug use is not good for fetuses.
I’m so happy that the media is starting to realize and actually criticize the vast inaccuracies in Juno concerning many aspects of adoption presented in that film. As a birth-mother, to hear so many people who have no knowledge on adoption praise the movie so highly, frankly disgusts me, because most people are going to take this film as fact while most birth-mom’s adoption stories are nothing like this movie and the emotional aftermath lasts longer than a day of crying at the hospital.
Thought experiment about porn: what if porn were only permissible if non-profit? What if none of the producers, directors or performers could be paid; what if sexually oriented material could be distributed free but not sold?
(I’m not suggesting an answer; I can forsee several outcomes that are in tension or mutually exclusive.)
Thomas, your thought experiment exposes one of the real problems with porn – our commodification of everything. Great question – I wonder what actual sex workers in porn would say about it.
[...] excited and didn’t want to leave anything out”. However, where Jill Filipovic called for her to be fired and Jessica Valenti stated that the heat PP Idaho are taking is well justified, the comments on [...]
I thought the Juno article missed the whole point of the movie. The movie was liberal in that it was about choices. The women in the article objected to Juno acting as she acted. but the article states:
Juno in the hospital shows “a little grief”. The women quoted in the article had a different reaction. It reminds me of the bumper sticker “Against Abortion ? Don’t have one.”
That shit uttered by the Planned Parenthood employee was well beyond unacceptable, and I’m glad you could say that without engaging in making excuses for the her or the organization just because they’re on “our side” or whatever. I’ve learned the hard way that a lot of supposedly liberal people have trouble with this, so that you clearly don’t, for the most part, is among the many attributes that makes Feministe probably my favorite political blog. Thanks, Jill.
Because my comment (#2) above is now being quoted elsewhere as indicative of my cluelessness, let me revisit it. It’s possible to be infuriated by the PP employee — and ask for her to be disciplined — while at the same time supporting PP’s larger mission and doing so in the name of Lila Rose, the WHITE UCLA student who rigged the “sting” operation. It’s possible to think the sting was sleazy while getting angry at what it revealed without contradicting oneself.
jill, i’m glad you linked to the story about the oregon mayor getting recalled. that was discussed somewhat in depth on the local oregon political blogs. what really saddened me about the comments i saw there was that the prevailing message was that she shouldn’t have been recalled because she looked really really HAWT in the photos. ::sigh:: what does that mean, if the viewing public deemed her unattractive then it would have been right to fire her from her job?
there’s just so much wrong there i didn’t have the heart to dive and start trying to talk to people about it.
The Chicago Tribune article about “Juno” you linked to prompted an interesting letter to the editor from a pro-lifer. I don’t feel like looking the damn thing up, but basically, he objected to reporting the remorse and regret of mothers who allowed their children to be adopted while not looking at corresponding feelings among women who had had abortions. His “feeling” was that there were a lot more of the latter.
This is a perfect example of how our political discourse has deteriorated. The words of actual living, breathing women, named in the article, count for nothing against someone’s “feelings.” Apparently, if you have a strong enough “feeling” or “belief” that something must be a certain way, it allows you to brush aside any amount of evidence to the contrary.
Re: hugo & donating to PP: There was a lot of discussion about the PP thing on feministing last week, and while everyone clearly felt that the employee was wrong and I believe she was fired, there was also justifiable outrage over this tactic by anti-choicers — you know this wasn’t their first call, I’m sure they called lots of clinics until they could find one where the employee who answered the phone would screw up. A lot of people don’t know what to do/say when confronted with blatant outrageous racism, and the employee probably was trained to not antagonize people and to not offend donors, and she totally messed up — obviously she should have said “no sir, we absolutely cannot accept or administer donations for racist purposes.” But it was a disgusting slimy trap to begin with, intended to smear the entire pro-choice movement and women’s RH providers, and THAT is what prompted several people to donate to PP in the wake of the incident (certainly not because they approved of what the employee did).
Has anyone here seen ‘Thank You for Smoking’? There’s a scene where the protagonist says that he pushes cigarettes because he has a mortgage to pay, a comment which the voiceover refers to as the “Yuppie Nuremberg defence”.
I was irresistibly reminded of this when reading the comment thread at Feministing, and elsewhere, regarding the PP phone call furore. She was young (she wasn’t). She was inexperienced (she wasn’t). She was trying to close the deal (so…?). She was under high pressure (from a phone call?). She was doing what she was trained to do (because following orders is a catch-all justification?).
Thing is, even if any of these excuses were factually true, they wouldn’t be good excuses, because they don’t actually *excuse* her. She said it was “understandable” to want fewer* black babies. She said she was “excited” by the prospect.
Some people think white feminists don’t give a shit about minorities. I can’t possibly imagine why.
* As an aside, if there were a group that I would quite happily see killed off en masse, it would be people who don’t know the difference between “less” and “fewer”.
I agree with you, Fuzz. She was the VP of Marketing. There was no excuse for what she did.