I didn’t sleep well last night, had a nightmare that there was a belated celebration of Halloween where everyone looked like they were about to go for tea with Alice. Who the hell invited those folks to the political party? Oh wait, …seriously, after staying up way too late last night, I showed some extra self love and stayed in bed late this morning and huddled under the covers with my safety blankie before staggering out to face the carnage.
In the early morning quiet, a few thoughts occurred:
The one issue that has gotten very little traction this election cycle is the ongoing fundamental issue of vote integrity. Are our votes being counted accurately is a question because not much of jack has been done to truly address the problem despite it being proven time and time again that electronic voting machines can be easily tampered with. Then there are the usual issues of voter intimidation and suppression (see this about the issue in Wisconsin where Russ Feingold lost to a guy who believes global warming was caused by sunspots).
We also need to have a fundamental conversation about such things as the relevance of the Electoral College, the ridiculously long and expensive length of our campaign seasons (and by expensive I mean both cost and time), the Supreme Court’s decree that buying elections is the American way, and the huge damage done by a media that remains primarily a bunch of white, male talking heads with a desperate need to see themselves in the political mirror. Until those questions are addressed, the primary question is going to be do you take one lump of sugar or two and would you like a spot of milk in your tea.
So starting right now, first things first, let’s do a bit of de-toxing and check out feminist-friendly/informed election wrap-up coverage (I’ll be adding to this list later, this is just a quick beginning list of links)–we need to listen to/read these voices and spread the word with our ‘progressive’ friends–the conversation game changer starts now:
Seen a piece that should be added to this list? Add it in the comments. What should be abundantly clear from this far from complete list is that there is no shortage of informed feminist progressives and we need to be listening to what they say.
Addenda: I just caught up with last night’s live coverage on Comedy Central where the only female voice heard on The Daily Show was a woman asking if she looked hot. Stephen Colbert however rocked not just because of his awesome Hawaii Five 0 opening but this segment with The Nation’s Katrina Vanden Heuvel who rocked it severely:
Upon hearing of the recent deaths of both Barbara Billingsley and Bob Guccione, my first thought was that between the image of June Cleaver portrayed by Billingsley and the faux-ified images of women hawked by Guccione’s Penthouse, a tremendous amount of damage was perpetrated on our perceptions of female worth and identity. And while June took off her pearls and heels a long time ago, the skewering of female reality in the media and in entertainment continues unabated. Consider these examples:
As theFeminist Peace Network blog pointed out recently, the pornography business is gargantuan and has become so ubiquitous that it becomes a de-facto part of what is normal.
In a recent piece on the Ms. Magazine Blog, Carolyn Heldman calls out Disney for their appalling portrayal of sexual slavery, and at that, geared towards very young children,
As many as 4 million people–most of them women and children–are sold into slavery globally each year, according to the United Nations, and 70 percent of those women are trafficked for commercial sexual exploitation [PDF]. An estimated 200,000 American children are at risk for sex trafficking each year, and the International Human Rights Law Institute estimates that 30,000 sexual slaves die annually from abuse, torture, neglect and disease.
So why is Disneyland still asking us to laugh at an overt depiction of sexual slavery in its popular Pirates of the Caribbean ride?
For a fascinating look at how women fare in so-called reality television shows, check out Jennifer Pozner’s Reality Bites Back. Pozner writes that in these shows, women are portrayed as, “golddiggers, bimbos, and bitches, and women of color are violent, “low class” whores”.
And then there are advertisements like this for Lost Abbey Witch’s Wit beer which makes light of a period of history where women who were labeled as witches suffered unimaginable brutality and were murdered by the millions.
The examples are endless, these are merely ones that have crossed my desk during the last few weeks.
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But purposeful misogynist misrepresentation goes beyond media, entertainment and advertising; it is an integral part of our historic narrative as well. Or more to the point, women’s lives are not shown as an integral part of that tale. Last week I had the opportunity to contemplate the story that we are given in our daily lives from three rather interesting vantage points, on a tour of the United States Capitol, a lecture by Judy Chicago on the life and art of Frida Kahlo at the National Museum for Women in the Arts and a visit to the Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History and Culture in the Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library at Duke University.
While on a trip to Washington, DC, I accompanied my son on a visit to the Capitol. As we entered the Visitors’ Center, we were surrounded with statues and pictures of people who were pivotal in the history of the United States and yes, you guessed it, they were predominantly male images. The almost complete erasure of women (save a few tokens) from the narrative of our country is inescapable, it is as if we are supposed to believe that men did it all by themselves while women just sat passively by.
The following day, we went to hear artist Judy Chicago give a lecture at the National Museum of Women in the Arts on her new book, Frida Kahlo: Face to Face, co-authored with Frances Borzello. Unlike most of the museums in Washington, this one is a privately run museum, necessary because as Chicago noted and the Guerrilla Girls have pointed out so many times, most of the art in traditional museums, even the so called National Gallery of Artmostly contain art by men and represent the male gaze. Before the lecture, I made a quick trip to the restroom and my son waited for me at the reception desk which had several very thick books listing the names of charter members and supporters. My son, knowing that I was a charter member, started looking for and then found my name, which he showed me when I returned. For me, seeing my name as one of the many who have supported the museum was a wonderful experience. I wasn’t just there to see the art. In my small way, I was part of the her-story that made it possible for that art to be there. It was a very powerful feeling.
Hearing Judy Chicago was a dream come true for me. Her work has been enormously important to me, giving me context during the years that I worked as an artist, allowing me to reclaim women’s artistic history and and sense of rootedness. During her lecture, Chicago made several points about Kahlo’s work that I think are applicable far beyond the discussion of Kahlo’s work:
Describing women’s work as reactive rather than proactive denies women’s agency.
and,
It is important to look at women in their own context, not as part of the male context.
And finally, in my tryptych of vantage points, I had the delightful opportunity to visit with the wonderful staff at the Sallie Bingham Center for Women’s History and Culture in the Rare Book, Manuscript, and Special Collections Library at Duke University. The Center’s Director, Laura Micham graciously set out a table of some of the treasures that have been given to their care–Robin Morgan’s archives, a copy of the New York Times with a picture of Alix Kates Shulman, papers from the local chapter of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, and so much more. Precious, rarely seen pieces of our her-story, there for me to see, to touch on a table in their beautiful reading room.
I’m not sure that I can adequately describe my reaction to this cornucopia of women’s heritage on which my eyes feasted and my fingers rested. It was a sharp contrast to the feeling of dis-ease that I experienced at the Capitol where I felt almost physically disenfranchised by the official telling of his-story that is supposed to be our story. One of the first things that popped into my head was what if what I was seeing in this beautiful library was considered a crucial part of our story that must be told as vigorously as that of the founding fathers, what if we listened to the mothers too? Here, I was surrounded by women and a deep feeling of connection, of foundation, of belonging.
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Which brings me to this: there is a terrible price to be paid for the systemic misogynist invisibilizing, trivializing and misrepresentation of women’s lives.
On Wednesday night, Delta Kappa Epsilon pledges marched through Yale’s Old Campus — where most first-year female students are housed — chanting, “No means yes, yes means anal!” The fraternity pledges were marched blindfolded while barking like soldiers … with marching orders of anal rape. They also threw in, “My name is Jack, I’m a necrophiliac, I fuck dead women.”
We see it when Virginia Thomas asks Anita Hill to apologize to her husband the Supreme Court Justice for calling him out for sexual harassment as if the perpetrator can somehow magically become the victim and the real victim’s extraordinary courage could possibly be considered wrong. And we see it when candidates like Todd Lally in Kentucky’s 3rd Congressional District can blatantly say that they don’t think women are discriminated against and still be taken seriously as a candidate to represent the people, more than half of whom are female.
We see it when the Washington Post reports that Tim Proffitt may not be arrested for stomping on Lauren Halle’s head at a Rand Paul rally,
It looks as if this may not result in an arrest. Based on the footage of the incident, cops are treating the case for the time being as a fourth degree assault case, which puts this in the realm of domestic violence scuffles and barfights, she tells me. She says they’re treating this as a “misdemeanor, not a felony.”
And yet guys like Lally who sees equality where there is none and guys like Paul who attract hooligans like Proffitt who thinks that the woman whose head he stepped on should apologize to him claim they can represent “the people”. The very bad news is that they stand a very good chance of getting elected on Tuesday. And the young men at Yale will likely go on to be leaders in government and industry.
As I was writing this, I happened to see Ann Jones’ piece in The Nation on the use of women soldiers to communicate with Afghan women, the description would be laughable in its absurdity if it weren’t horribly true. Jones points to the abusive expectations placed on women in the U.S. military and a deeply misogynist arrogance and ignorance systemic in U.S. military policy towards Afghan women. This too is part of the toxic damage wreaked by his-story on her-story. And somehow that is supposed to be okay, just part of the political process that our national narrative supports. But it isn’t okay. Rather, it is part of the toxic legacy of misogyny which played out again at the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear which styled itself as a meeting at the commons for all yet all but excluded women from the podium.
Come Wednesday morning, when the electoral ruckus begins to settle, we need to take a deep look at the story we are telling, the plot is long overdue for revision.
Via email, Ingrid Quinn shared her reasons for making the film, the message she hopes to convey and how she hopes to further the implementation of 1325.
Q: What motivated you to make the film?
A: I think the combination of design and new media offers a multitude of possibilities for the development sector. Working in countries impacted by war and disaster, I wanted to merge design thinking and new media with human rights to create new ways understanding, perceiving and engaging.
UN1325 Engage Understand Act came out of twocore motivations; Firstly, I wanted translate UN1325; a technical legal document, into an accessible visual language. My intention with the film is to engage the viewer, provoke thought and stimulate discussion; what does it mean?’ ‘how does it affect me?’ ‘do I have a role?’
Secondly, I wanted to act upon the many stories I’d heard over the years from women who have experienced war and disaster. Their experiences are often marginalized and their rights ignored.
Creating a bridge between women’s experiences at the grassroots and global policy is vitally important to me. I wanted to create an advocacy tool that brings together the experiences of women to inform decisions made by the global architects of policy. The 10th anniversary of UN1325 provided a great opportunity.
Creating the animation UN1325 Engage Understand Act was very much a collaborative effort with artist Pippo Lionni.
Q: What are the key points you are trying to get across about UNSCR 1325?
A: The realities of war are not experienced in a moment, an hour or a day – the impact is life changing. I wanted to emphasis the strength and critical role of women as decision makers, change agents, survivors. Women are not asking anymore, we’re doing!
Q: How do you see this movie as a catalyst for implementation of 1325, do you have specific goals regarding what you hope to achieve with this film?
A: The film is a first in many ways. UN1325 is the first UN Security Council Resolution that specifically addresses issues relating to women and war. UN1325 Engage Understand Act is the first animation of UN Security Council Resolution. It is the first in a series of animation projects that I have planned in collaboration with Pippo Lioni.
I intend to give impetus to action; to go beyond the jargon and the technical language to engage a larger audience with the realities of conflict and to challenge stereotypes and mis-perceptions about women.
A press release for the film’s debut provides additional information:
The animated film UN1325 ENGAGE UNDERSTAND ACT produced by gender specialist and social researcher Ingrid Quinn and French/American artist Pippo Lionni and distributed by Videoseeding.com will go viral/global across social media sites on 20 October 2010 (YouTube, Facebook etc). It will be screened throughout the upcoming UN Peace Fair in New York, 26-29 October 2010.
The 31st of October 2010 marks the 10th anniversary of UN Security Council Resolution 1325 Women, Peace and Security (‘UN1325’). UN1325 was passed unanimously and is the first formal and legally binding instrument from the United Nations Security Council that requires parties at war to: respect women’s rights, protect women and girls in conflict, increase the influence of women in decision making and peace negotiations and involve women post-conflict rebuilding. The resolution underscores the responsibility to protect women and girls from human rights abuses, including gender- based violence.
UN1325 is among the most effective yet under-utilized tool for both civil leaders and citizens to hold states and individuals accountable to ensure women’s full participation in preventing and resolving conflict, promoting peace and security and protecting women in times of conflict and peace.
The film UN1325 ENGAGE UNDERSTAND ACT is a call to action. The film intends to provoke thought on the disproportionate impact, inequalities and struggles faced by women in war. It calls for the urgent implementation UN1325.
When it comes to media, gender parity is still a long way off. Women’s voices are under-represented and our lives are under-reported. From the Fourth Global Media Monitoring Project (2010):
24% of the people interviewed, heard, seen or read about in mainstream broadcast and print news are female.
Women have achieved near parity as givers of popular opinion in news stories. At the same time, less than one out of every five experts interviewed is female.
An analysis of media coverage on selected issues of special concern to women contained in the Beijing Platform for Action reveals such issues receive an average of less than 1.5% media attention each.
Almost one half (48%) of all news stories reinforce gender stereotypes, while 8% of news stories challenge gender stereotypes. Women tend to be portrayed in their roles as wives, mothers, etc. News stories by female reporters are almost twice as likely to challenge gender stereotypes than stories by male reporters.
Only 12% of news stories highlight issues of gender equality or inequality.
Only 9% of news stories mention gender equality policies or human and women’s rights legal instruments.
Discouraging to say the least. Which makes programs like Global Girl Media all the more exciting. This excellent organization empowers high school age girls from under-served communities through media, leadership and journalistic training to have a voice in the global media universe and their own futures.
In the long run, it is unquestionably projects like this that will change the damaging and inequitable media paradigm.
August 26th is Women’s Equality Day. If we were being honest, we would call it Women’s Inequality Day. Yes indeed, we did win the right to vote 90 years ago, but that does not equal equality. In that regard, we’ve still got a long way to go. As Catalyst notes,
Women hold 16.8% of seats in the U.S. Congress, while less than 20 female world leaders are in power. Women hold only 3% of positions of clout in mainstream media. Less than 10% of TV sports coverage in the United States is devoted to female athletes. And of the 250 top-grossing movies produced last year, 7% were directed by women.
Hell, we’re even discriminated against when it comes to naming streets–turns out that only 7% of the traffic circles in our nation’s capitol are named after women and when it comes to economics, that the faces on our paper money are all male should tell you something.
Bella Abzug
While Women’s Equality Day represents more of a wish than reality, I decided I wanted to learn more about it, and found this on Wikipedia,
Every president has published a proclamation for Women’s Equality Day since 1971 when legislation was first introduced in Congress by Bella Abzug. This resolution was passed designating August 26 of each year as Women’s Equality Day.
In a section on the modern observance of the event, there is also this informative tidbit:
GoTopless.org, a US organization, claims that women have the same constitutional right to be bare chested in public places as men. They further claim constitutional equality between men and women on being topless in public. In 2009, they used August 26, (Women’s Equality Day) as a day of national protest.
That this is the best example the authors of this page could find to illustrate the impact of Women’s Equality Day certainly lends credence to the fact that we’re just not there yet.
But it isn’t just Wikipedia that doesn’t get it. Earlier this week, the New York Times ran a profile of political hopeful Reshma Saujani, or more accurately, they ran a profile about her shoes,
Finally, as we returned to her office, I asked: About those shoes?
“They’re the Kate Spade wedges,” she said, sagging slightly, as if she had only just then been reminded that she had feet. “They’re these politician-woman shoes.”
I’m not a big fan of high heels, so I might be inclined to vote against Ms. Saujani if such things mattered. But actually, I’d rather know where she stands on issues such as climate change, education and oh yeah, women’s rights. Long time political activist and writer Jill Miller Zimon sums it up nicely,
Women politicians should be covered by the media for their issues and character and leadership abilities, based on their experiences, accomplishments and vision for how they’ll fulfill expectations in public office should they win. Exactly as men politicians.
It’s beyond the pale now: there is NO QUESTION that the NYT did this story to get up hackles and in the end, throw serious political reportage of women candidates under the bus. It’s an inexcusable dog and pony show for readers and frankly, if I were that candidate, I would have demanded a different article.
Now – lest I be picked on for saying that a woman politician should be able to choose being portrayed anyway she wants, fine.
BUT I would then ask: WAS SHE GIVEN A CHOICE? Did the Times say to her: we can either do a fashion piece on you and connect shoes to women running for office, or we can do a piece on how you and Maloney differ and what you bring to the table that she doesn’t.
Let’s celebrate all that we’ve accomplished, and honor our foremothers for all of their hard work. And then let’s get back to work, because when it comes to equality for women, we’re not there yet.
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To learn more about Women’s Equality Day, click here.
I didn’t sleep well last night, had a nightmare that there was a belated celebration of Halloween where everyone looked like they were about to go for tea with Alice. Who the hell invited those folks to the political party? Oh wait, …seriously, after staying up way too late last night, I showed some extra self love and stayed in bed late this morning and huddled under the covers with my safety blankie before staggering out to face the carnage.
