The only thing that would have made this better is if Samantha Bee had used The Daily Show, with it’s 80%+ male guest  and correspondent list as an example:

And then there’s this (via Common Dreams):

To help address this, Republican National Committee co-chair Jan Larimer is committed to recruiting more women candidates to run under the party’s banner. It seems, however, that Larimer is running into a little trouble.

“Women sometimes need a little more handholding, or they need their friends to help them make a decision. And by our going in and talking to them and recruiting and educating and training them to either get involved in a campaign or become a candidate, we’re giving them the tools so that they can do that on their own,” Larimer added [emphasis added].

On a related note, right-wing radio host and Republican powerhouse Rush Limbaugh told Fox News this morning, “I’m a huge supporter of women…. I don’t know where all this got started. I love the women’s movement — especially when walking behind it.”

As a general rule, this blog is devoted to the rights of real, live human women. In this case we make an exception in posting this plea for Sylvia (and her wonderful creator)–we owe her many smiles and much laughter, and woman-positive media is precious and necessary, so please, let the Trib know you want to save Sylvia!

1. Click here to send an email to the Tribune editors , Jane Hirt and Geoff Brown*, telling them how you can’t live without her.

Be sure to copy Nicole Hollander, so she can keep you close to her heart and updated on our struggle!

2. Forward this email to all your friends who love Sylvia as much as you do.

Love you madly, Nicole and Sylvia

The following provides more information ( see also Providing Gender Responsive Aid in Haiti)  about addressing the needs of Haitian women in the aftermath of the earthquake:

Donations to the International Planned Parenthood Federation’s Profamil program will help them get their clinics and mobile health units in Haiti back to being fully operational.

Since 1984 PROFAMIL has provided low-cost, quality sexual and reproductive healthcare. As a leader in the field, PROFAMIL meets regularly with the Minister of Health to develop strategies for increasing access to sexual and reproductive healthcare.

Programs that Profamil offers include:

* Sexual & Reproductive Health Services: PROFAMIL clinics provide family planning, early detection of breast and cervical cancers, high-quality sexual and reproductive health clinical services for men and women, and pre-and-post natal services.

* Mobile Health Clinics: PROFAMIL brings health providers directly to the rural communities where the people are totally isolated. Approximately 200 men, women and children are provided with basic health care services at each visit.

* HIV/AIDS Prevention: PROFAMIL conducts voluntary testing and counseling for HIV/AIDS, educates the public about prevention and ensures widespread access to condoms.

* PROFAMIL Youth Program: PROFAMIL provides youth-friendly clinical and educational services to young people aged 10-25.

* Health Education: PROFAMIL covers issues such as promoting family planning and presenting various methods; cervical cancer and the need for routine pap smears; relationships; gender issues; domestic violence; HIV/AIDS prevention with regular condom demonstrations. In 2006, PROFAMIL educated over 225,000 people.

Peacewomen has a list of numerous organizations that are working with women in Haiti here.

The UNFPA has launched a flash appeal to fund programs that will allow them to:

• Refurbish maternity wards to handle emergency obstetric care and other life-saving health services;
• Deploy skilled health professionals, such as midwives, obstetricians and nurses, to affected areas to provide maternal health and emergency obstetric care;
• Provide emergency safe delivery and reproductive health medicines and supplies to temporary clinics and health facilities being set up;
• Help safeguard the personal hygiene and dignity of women and girls by providing related sanitary supplies;
• Facilitate access of affected populations, especially young people, to psychosocial counselling and other services; and
• Carry out interventions to prevent gender based violence.

The Women’s Refugee Commission has a list of the ten most pressing needs that must be met to ensure the well-being and safety of those displaced in the aftermath of the earthquake.

Amnesty has issued a statement regarding the need to protect women against sexual violence and exploitation in the wake of the earthquake.

The Global Fund for Women is  asking Haitian women to help them formulate long-range responses and to inform the fund of their perceptions of need.  (Note–while this perhaps sounds non-specific, I particularly like that they are asking what is needed, rather than telling those whose  lives have been impacted what they see as the needs.  Given that women are hugely under-represented in the organizations that organize aid in response to disasters, this is a very important shift  in formulating response policy.)

AWID has an excellent piece by Masum Momaya on the role of women in the Haitian Economy, a subject that is the basis for the film Poto Mitan:

And WomenArts has this wonderful page about Haitian women in the arts including a poem entitled Mud Mothers by Lenelle Moise, here are just a few lines from the poem which I urge you to read in its entirety.

Mud Mothers

the children of haiti
are not mythological
we are starving
or eating salty cakes
made of clay

because in 1804 we felled
our former slave captors
the graceless losers sunk
vindictive yellow
teeth into our forests

what was green is now
dust & everyone knows
trees unleash oxygen
(another humble word
for life)

Please also see Providing Gender Responsive Aid in Haiti.  H/t to Change.org for pointing to many of the links provided here and Sue Katz for pointing to the WomenArts link.  Also, although not women-specific, h/t to Global Voices for providing updates from independent voices on the ground in Haiti.

Abigail Disney, producer of the phenomenal film, Pray The Devil Back to Hell  along with Gini Reticker have a new project, Women, War & Peace, a mini- television series for Thirteenwnet.org.  Here is what they posted on the PDBH Facebook page about their new project:

As we found ourselves immersed in the making PDBH, we realized time and again that this story about women’s centrality in war, peacemaking, and post-conflict rebuilding was at once both ancient and strikingly contemporary, crucial to understanding local context, yet truly global in its contours. And yet, this story hasn’t been told.

These thoughts followed us into the edit room for PDBH – we found that there was a stunning lack of relevant archival materials for us to work with. If we had been making a film about child soldiers, about combat, about warlords, or even about the heroics of the journalists themselves, there would have been no shortage of material. Despite the fact that every eyewitness to the events confirmed, in strikingly similar language, what the women had told us they had done, it appears that mainstream media wasn’t interested, or the footage resulting from those days was not deemed important enough to archive. Ultimately, most of the footage we used that showed the women in action came from private sources.

The difficulty of getting relevant footage from credible public sources highlighted an important reality for us. Everyone we spoke to, from regular citizens to policy leaders, credited these women with enormous influence on the outcome of the peace process and ensuing events, including the disarmament process and the election of Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, and yet that influence was nowhere in the journalistic or official record. And so their accomplishments, however stunning, were doomed to become part of an easily dismissed “mythical” narrative, and not included in history’s document of record. The women, in other words were being erased – and right before our eyes.

In order to make sure that this erasure of history doesn’t continue to happen to women in conflict zones around the world, we have joined forces with Pamela Hogan at the New York PBS station THIRTEEN/WNET.ORG, to create Women, War & Peace.

Here is a trailer for the series:

You can contribute to making this project happen here.

After my post last week regarding the mixed data on the value of mammograms, I got a slew of mail the gist of most being, yes but what should I do? The only answer I can give is that you have to decide for yourself what makes the most sense, no easy thing when things aren’t clear cut combined with it being difficult to trust the information you get.  Our Bodies Our Selves has an excellent summary of the history of this issue which is informative and I hope useful.

For me, even though I’ve never had to face this disease myself, I find that I am extraordinarily fearful of it, and one of the things that I find empowering is to work on reclaiming the frame in which we talk about breast cancer by refocusing the discussion on cause rather than cure.  Clearly the current approach is less than satisfactory in terms of how patients are treated and what we are told about it.  Which leads me to highly recommending No Family History, which,

turns the debate about breast cancer upside down by proposing before solutions about prevention, rather searching only for a cure.

There are a lot of unknowns when it comes to breast cancer, and we need to ask some hard questions about what we ‘know’ so far and insist that cause be the starting point for treating this most difficult disease.