Feminism & Women’s Issues

On Giving Credit to Feminist Writers

Sady Doyle writes “For the Record” on sadybusiness:

…and I’m mad at the trend of anonymizing and erasing women who do feminist work, attributing every single fucking idea and cultural gain to vaguely defined “feminists” rather than the actual people who sat down, wrote the pieces, made deadline, and endured harassment over it, only to find themselves literally erased in the coverage.

I was also pissed off by the way that Patton Oswalt’s re-thinking of rape jokes — which was genuinely just great! I loved it! I was such a fan! — was reported as Patton Oswalt randomly birthing a beautiful brain-baby, in all but one or two outlets, one of which I actually worked for. (The other one was Entertainment Weekly, which was just bizarre.) Actually, that post was the result of years of activist work, not least by Molly Knefel, but also by Lindy West, Melissa McEwan (who called Oswalt out for re-enacting a rape in one of his comedy specials, and has not let up in the years since — I had more than a feeling that she was the “idiotic blogger” he referred to in his Tosh tweet), and a decade’s worth of women who have worked on changing this conversation. There have been people, writers, working on this for a long-ass time, says [that blogger]. [That blogger’s] feeling is that, since they’re women, and feminists, there’s a real drive to cast their voices as both amateur and illegitimate. This, in [that blogger’s] opinion, is a way to keep anti-sexism from ever comprising a crucial and accepted role in both cultural criticism and social interactions.

But they’re not remembered. Their names — like my name — are erased. Their work — like my work — is cast as the work of a collective.

Sady Doyle writing about the pernicious tendency to not give credit to women doing the difficult and unrewarding work of feminist writing, even while accepting and appropriating their thoughts and writing.

Having just read the Patton Oswalt piece where he rethinks his ideas about rape jokes, I’m so glad she made this point, because yeah, I was ready to take what he said as a complete win without considering that there were a lot of hard-working women who worked on changing his mind and none of those women got a shout-out in his piece. Or get a shout-out ever. Given the quality of Sady’s writing, she should have a much bigger profile than she does.

Erasing the individual women who’s writing has influenced thinking about women is flat out sexism, and unfortunately the ability to easily appropriate people’s work without attribution on the internet means that an entire generation of talented female writers is easily ignored.

I wish that Sady had a more permanent archival home on the internet than she does now – tumblr is too ephemeral for her writing and it’s hard to see the full record of her work, which is amazing, thoughtful stuff.

Female Writer from Hill's Manual of Social Business Forms

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Multiple Deadly Attacks on Women in Pakistan

NBC News: Pakistan militants bomb women on bus, then seize hospital in deadly attack

“QUETTA, Pakistan — Militants in western Pakistan bombed a bus carrying women university students on Saturday and then seized part of the hospital where survivors of the attack were taken, killing at least 12 people, officials said.”

CNN News: Pakistan militants target women on bus, go after survivors at hospital

U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon condemned the attacks, saying “violence against women and educators has increased in recent years. The aim being to keep girls from attaining a basic right to education.”

Yahoo News: Pakistan police storm hospital, ending standoff

“QUETTA, Pakistan (AP) — Pakistani police stormed a hospital that had been taken over by gunmen Saturday, freeing hostages and ending a five-hour standoff that began with a bombing just outside the emergency room and left five dead, officials said.”

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The Standard You Walk Past Is The Standard You Accept

The Standard You Walk Past Is The Standard You Accept via Yes Means Yes Blog.

Nice blog post – specifically about how officials in Australia’s Army are changing things for women in the army, but broadly about women and their place in the world, and about power and how it should not be built on humiliating others.

Nice quotes in the post:

No-one has ever explained to me how the exploitation or degradation of others enhances capability or honors the traditions of the Australian Army.

and

The standard you walk past is the standard you accept.

also

NCOs and officers who cannot keep their own troops from victimizing each other have not achieved the necessary unit cohesion to expect troops to operate effectively in the field.

what you will allow is what will continue

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TED Talk: Violence & Silence – Jackson Katz on Gender Violence

Excellent TEDx talk on Gender Violence and why it’s a men’s issue by Jackson Katz.

Why you should listen to Jackson Katz:
Jackson Katz, Phd, is an anti-sexist activist and expert on violence, media and masculinities. An author, filmmaker, educator and social theorist, Katz has worked in gender violence prevention work with diverse groups of men and boys in sports culture and the military, and has pioneered work in critical media literacy. Katz is the creator and co-founder of the Mentors in Violence Prevention (MVP) program, which advocates the ‘bystander approach’ to sexual and domestic violence prevention. You’ve also seen him in the award winning documentary “MissRepresentation.”

To learn more about TEDxFiDiWomen.

In the spirit of ideas worth spreading, TEDx is a program of local, self-organized events that bring people together to share a TED-like experience. At a TEDx event, TEDTalks video and live speakers combine to spark deep discussion and connection in a small group. These local, self-organized events are branded TEDx, where x = independently organized TED event. The TED Conference provides general guidance for the TEDx program, but individual TEDx events are self-organized.* (*Subject to certain rules and regulations)

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Wikipedia Is Quietly Moving Women Off Their American Novelist Page

From Jezebel: Wikipedia Is Quietly Moving Women Off Their American Novelist Page

If you go to Wikipedia’s page for American Novelists, you might notice something strange: Of the first 100 authors listed, only a small handful of them are women. You could potentially blame this on the fact that there simply are more famous male authors than there are female (a-whole-nother can of worms), but the real reasoning is much more intentional. Wikipedia editors have slowly been moving female authors to a subcategory called American Women Novelists so that the original list isn’t at risk of “becoming too large.” Bad luck, ladies. They need to make room and someone has to go first. Why shouldn’t it be unimportant literary folk like Harper Lee, Harriet Beecher Stowe or Louisa May Alcott?

Novelist Amanda Filipacchi was the one who — very recently — first cottoned on to what Wikipedia was doing. The edits, she noticed, have been happening gradually and mostly alphabetically by last name though in a few special cases the editors jumped ahead because they just couldn’t wait for R and T to get Ayn Rand and Donna Tartt off the list. Filipacchi herself was one of the authors to get booted to the subcategory.

More reporting on this:

Wikipedia’s Sexism Toward Female Novelists [New York Times]

“American women novelists” segregated by Wikipedia [Salon]

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Androgyny: The Bem Sex-Role Inventory Test

Androgyny, Bitches

Courtesy Wikipedia:

The Bem Sex-Role Inventory was created by Sandra Bem in an effort to measure androgyny. It was published in 1974. Stereotypical masculine and feminine traits were found by surveying 100 Stanford undergraduate students on which traits they found to be socially desirable for each sex. The original list of 200 traits was narrowed down to the 40 masculine and feminine traits that appear on the present test. Normative data was found from a 1973 sample for 444 males and 279 females and a 1978 sample of 340 females and 476 males all also from Stanford University undergraduates.

My score on the Gender Traits Test: -6

GENDER TRAITS SCORES:
Masculine: -20 and under
Nearly Masculine: -19 to -10
Androgynous: -9 to +9
Nearly feminine: +9 to +19
Feminine: +20 and over

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Death of a Revolutionary: Shulamith Firestone

Susan Faludi in The New Yorker writes about the death of radical feminist Shulamith Firestone and what it means in the context of contemporary feminism.

In the late nineteen-sixties, Firestone and a small cadre of her “sisters” were at the radical edge of a movement that profoundly changed American society. At the time, women held almost no major elected positions, nearly every prestigious profession was a male preserve, homemaking was women’s highest calling, abortion was virtually illegal, and rape was a stigma to be borne in silence. Feminism had been in the doldrums ever since the first wave of the American women’s movement won the vote, in 1920, and lost the struggle for greater emancipation. Feminist energy was first co-opted by Jazz Age consumerism, then buried in decades of economic depression and war, until the dissatisfactions of postwar women, famously described by Betty Friedan in “The Feminine Mystique” (1963), gave rise to a “second wave” of feminism. The radical feminists emerged alongside a more moderate women’s movement, forged by such groups as the National Organization for Women, founded in 1966 by Friedan, Aileen Hernandez, and others, and championed by such publications as Ms., founded in 1972 by Gloria Steinem and Letty Cottin Pogrebin. That movement sought, as now’s statement of purpose put it, “to bring women into full participation in the mainstream of American society,” largely by means of equal pay and equal representation. The radical feminists, by contrast, wanted to reconceive public life and private life entirely.

Few were as radical, or as audacious, as Shulamith Firestone. Just over five feet tall, with a mane of black hair down to her waist, and piercing dark eyes behind Yoko Ono glasses, Firestone was referred to within the movement as “the firebrand” and “the fireball.” “She was aflame, incandescent,” Ann Snitow, the director of the gender-studies program at the New School and a member of the early radical cadre, told me. “It was thrilling to be in her company.”

A very long article with lots of great background on the feminist movement. I’m nsure I would not be happy living in the complete upend of society that Shulamith Firestone envisioned, but looking at her background and how she arrived at the radical notions she did – I can see, given the open sexism they were fighting against even on the supposedly progressive left, how she arrived in that place. I wonder if I would have had a similar trajectory if I had been her age in that time period.

This bit… “That intensity emerged in Firestone early, and it was a source of antagonism within her family. She was the second child and the oldest daughter of six children—three girls and three boys…” emphasis mine. Interesting.

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How Movies Teach Manhood: Colin Stokes

More about this TED Talk:

When Colin Stokes’ 3-year-old son caught a glimpse of Star Wars, he was instantly obsessed. But what messages did he absorb from the sci-fi classic? Stokes asks for more movies that send positive messages to boys: that cooperation is heroic, and respecting women is as manly as defeating the villain.

Why you should listen to him:
Colin Stokes divides his time between parenting and building the brand of Citizen Schools, a non-profit that reimagines the school day for middle school students in low-income communities in eight states. As Managing Director of Brand & Communications, Colin helps people within the organization find the ideas, words and stories that will connect with more and more people. He believes that understanding the human mind is a force that can be used for good and seeks to take advantage of our innate and learned tendencies to bring out the best in each other and our culture.

Before starting a family, Colin was an actor and graphic designer in New York City. He starred in the long-running off-Broadway musical I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change, as well is in several musicals and Shakespeare stagings. But he jokes that he seems to have achieved more renown (and considerably more revenue) for his brief appearances on two Law & Order episodes.

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