The Naked Truth About BP

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May 282010
 

I’ve been saying that the only way to stop the patriarchal madness that is killing our world is to get naked.  Diane Wilson and the women of Code Pink decided to give it a whirl in Houston to protest BP’s ecocidal corporate commodifying of our planet.  Here is Medea Benjamin’s report:

So Diane put out a call for people to join her in Houston on Monday, May 24, to protest at the BP headquarters. Looking for a creative way to expose the company’s criminal behavior (and entice the media, who rarely cover protests in Texas), Diane was inspired by the example of a group of women from Nigeria who took over a Chevron oil rig and threatened to strip naked if the company didn’t hire more local workers and invest in the community. Faced with just the threat of nudity, Chevron gave in.

“If the Nigerian women could use their bodies on the Niger Delta, why can’t we do it in downtown Houston?” Diane reasoned.

Diane doesn’t take nudity lightly. She didn’t grow up in a hippie commune, but in a fundamentalist Pentecostal family in rural Texas. “I was taught that flesh is sinful, it’s the devil. I was so modest that if my sister said the word ‘bra’, I would climb under the table. I was horrified by anything intimate. So for me, using nudity to expose the truth about BP was WAY outside my comfort zone. But I realized that it’s the destruction of our ecosystem by corporate greed that’s obscene, not a woman’s body.”

To prepare for the action, Diane got 100 pounds of fish from her fishing buddies, old fishing nets to drag the dead fish and fake oil to dump on them. She and one of her daughters made beautiful signs saying “Expose BP” and “The Naked Truth about Drill, Baby, Drill” and put them on big sandwich boards. “You could say we was cheatin’ because we decided to use sandwich boards to cover our private parts, but that’s about as nude as those of us from Texas can get,” laughed Diane. “We’ll leave the full-on nudity to the women from California.”

More pics and info here.

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 Posted by on May 28, 2010

Pushing Back Against The Barbie And Ken Paradigm

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May 172010
 

Just watch it:

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 Posted by on May 17, 2010

The Feminist Frequency (Or More To The Point Not) In Movies

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May 062010
 

Next time you watch a movie, try this little test:

H/t to Rebecca Whisnant for pointing us toward this video.

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 Posted by on May 6, 2010

What You Find When You Clean The Basement

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May 032010
 

Every thirty years or so, I spend a day cleaning my basement, and yesterday was that day.  Among the cobwebs and things that we used to think were treasures were some old files.  I hauled them up and found among many other things, some old cartoons which still bring laughter today.  They are too fantastic to throw back in the files without sharing, so here are a few of the gems that I found:

Old Cathy Cartoon1

Old Cathy Cartoon2

And finally,

UN Womens Conf Cartooon

There was quite a bit more, including some very early feminist writing of mine, didn’t have time to sort through it all, but may post more at a later date.

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 Posted by on May 3, 2010

I Feel The Earth Move–Boobquake 2010

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Apr 272010
 

I have to confess that when I first heard about Boobquake, I wasn’t moved–boobs in your face as a form of protest, how un-feminist is that? But then I got to thinking that for all the times women are blamed for things because of what we wear, what we don’t wear, how we act, yada yada, maybe it is time once and for all to put all that to rest. So I clicked on over to Jen McCreight’s Blag Hag blog to read all about it, within 2 seconds I was on board.

So how did it go? You’re reading this aren’t you? Boobquake was organized to determine definitively whether women dressing immodestly caused earthquakes as an Iranian cleric recently claimed. McCreight details, quite scientifically, the surprising findings:

Not only did all of the earthquakes on boobquake fall within the normal range of magnitudes, but the mean magnitude actually decreased slightly!

Now, this change isn’t statistically significant, but it certainly doesn’t support the cleric’s claim. In fact, I think it develops an even more interesting alternative hypothesis: Maybe immodest women actually decrease the amount of earthquakes! Man, that would certainly be a fun way to provide disaster relief. Of course, before we can make any claims about that, we’d have to greatly increase our sample size. You know, I have this gut feeling that a lot of people would like to do our boobquake experiment again…

Obviously this study had its flaws. We didn’t have a large sample size, and we didn’t have a control planet where women were only wearing burkas. We didn’t have a good way to quantify how much we increased immodesty (what’s the unit of immodesty anyway? Intensity of red on blushing nuns?). Maybe women did dress immodestly, but we didn’t lead men astray enough. Maybe God really was pissed, but he couldn’t increase earthquakes for us because that would provide proof for his existence (or maybe it’s his existence that’s the problem).

Or of course, maybe God is just biding his time. If you hear a news report in the next couple weeks saying a bizarre Indiana earthquake killed a science blogger, well, then maybe we’ll have to rethink our conclusions a bit.

No word yet on further actions but if shaking it and showing it subverts the paradigm, count me in.

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 Posted by on April 27, 2010
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