Category: Feminism

The Trump resistance can be best described in one adjective: female

Women, of course, have long played key but under-acknowledged roles in the great movements of American history, from the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s to Ferguson and Standing Rock. With the anti-Trump resistance, though, the preponderance of women is so noteworthy and significant that failing to name it obscures the movement’s basic nature – and distorts the larger political conversation surrounding it.

Why have so many articles, blog posts, and tweets invoked the resistance without acknowledging who is doing most of the day-to-day work of resisting? It might be because the majority of pundits, commentators, and advice-givers on the left still come from the very demographic group that’s so strikingly underrepresented among the forces fighting Trump: men.

(ed: not forgetting the role played by women in the abolition of slavery!)

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/jul/23/trump-resistance-one-adjective-female-womens-march?

Sweden to cut aid to groups applying Trump abortion ban

A Swedish government agency on Tuesday threatened to cut aid to NGOs which have suspended abortion services over fears of losing US funding due to a decree signed by President Donald Trump.

The Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency (Sida), which aims to tackle global poverty, said it has decided that “partner organisations that receive aid to work on sexual and reproductive health and rights but also accept the president’s orders, can no longer receive aid”.

http://www.safeabortionwomensright.org/sweden-to-cut-aid-to-groups-applying-trump-abortion-ban/?

UN experts call for resistance as battle over women’s rights intensifies

A group of UN independent experts* has warned that women’s rights are facing an alarming backlash in many parts of the world. They said that it is critically important to press on with further setting of standards on gender equality, including through the repeal of all laws that discriminate against women on traditional, cultural or religious grounds and laws that exclusively or disproportionately criminalize action of behavior by women and girls.

“We feel it is time to reiterate the backlash against the progress which has been made in promoting and protecting women’s human rights. The polarization in the battle for rights is being demonstrated increasingly, and regressive positions have become a serious threat to the human rights legal framework.”

http://www.safeabortionwomensright.org/un-experts-call-for-resistance-as-battle-over-womens-rights-intensifies/?

Without the basics, Indigenous girls still can’t participate in society

Reports earlier this week that Aboriginal girls from remote communities had been missing school during their periods came as little surprise to me.

On reading these reports, I saw a number of charitable organisations devoted to the provision of menstrual products to those in need step up and encourage people to donate so these girls had supplies available for them to access. The work such organisations do with homeless women, low socioeconomic status women and Indigenous communities in need is to be commended. Yet in my opinion, the very fact that we have to rely on the work of charities to provide pads and tampons in the first place is incredibly troubling.

Around half the population will undergo the normal, natural process of menstruation throughout the course of their lives. It’s bad enough that there are corporations getting rich off that fact while producing ads about blue liquid. It’s even worse that the government sees fit to continue having a tax on these items, treating them as luxuries rather than necessities and effectively financially penalising those who dare to bleed. Yet combine capitalist gain and government greed with service provision in remote areas: suddenly women and girls are expected to pay $10 per packet for the privilege of menstruating.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/jul/05/without-the-basics-indigenous-girls-still-cant-participate-in-society?
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2017/jul/03/indigenous-girls-in-remote-areas-skip-school-because-they-lack-pads-and-tampons

David Gonski is “diametrically opposed” to gender quotas.

Disagreeing with Gonski, Carol Schwartz stated that quotas are the “perfect” solution to this underrepresentation. In order to tackle the underlying belief systems and unconscious bias that keep women from leadership roles, Schwartz says there needs to be a “paradigm shift which will actually move the dial.” For that, “the only answer is quotas,” she says.

Schwartz says quotas need not aim for exact gender parity every time, “that is way too rigid,” she says. Instead, she proposes a “quota for men of 40 per cent, a quota for women of 40 per cent, and 20 per cent floating.”

In 2015, Independent Senator Nick Xenophon introduced a bill so that this 40/40/20 formula would become mandatory for all Australian government appointments, but it was rejected.

Professor Cordelia Fine of the University of Melbourne, put forward a social justice argument in favour of quotas. She said that based on U.S. data, women and minorities are more compassionate, other-minded and egalitarian, and also tend to take greater account of the welfare of employees, communities and the environment.

https://womensagenda.com.au/latest/david-gonski-diametrically-opposed-gender-quotas/

NSW government accused of “sanitising” its review of scripture in schools

The NSW government’s review of scripture in public schools deleted a section of a 2015 draft report showing children were exposed to lessons on the conservative Christian concept of “headship” – where women “submit” to their husbands – and negative messages on homosexuality.

The draft ARTD Consultants report found an unidentified major Christian publisher’s lesson material taught “the concept of ‘headship’ and that women should submit to their husbands, abstinence only sex education, negative LGBTI messages and that sexual intimacy is only acceptable to God between a married man and woman”.

The concept of “headship” is most strongly supported in the Sydney Anglican Diocese where women cannot be priests, but it divides even Christian groups. Some delegates walked out of a recent evangelical women’s conference in Sydney after a speaker suggested women should submit to men at home, in church and in the workplace where they should consider themselves “helpers” of male colleagues.

http://www.smh.com.au/nsw/nsw-government-accused-of-sanitising-its-review-of-scripture-in-schools-20170618-gwtl5f.html

Feminist Camille Paglia On Transgenderism: ‘The Cold Biological Truth Is That Sex Changes Are Impossible’

Asked by Jonathan Last why there has not been an open confrontation between feminism and transgenderism, Paglia responded that there has already been such a confrontation in the United Kingdom, citing the transgender community’s attacks on iconic feminist Germaine Greer and radical Australian feminist Sheila Jeffreys, the author of Gender Hurts.

Then, the shot straight from the hip: “The cold biological truth is that sex changes are impossible. Every single cell of the human body remains coded with one’s birth gender for life. Intersex ambiguities can occur, but they are developmental anomalies that represent a tiny proportion of all human births.”

Paglia added, “Like Germaine Greer and Sheila Jeffreys, I reject state-sponsored coercion to call someone a ‘woman’ or a ‘man’ simply on the basis of his or her subjective feeling about it.”

http://www.dailywire.com/news/17591/feminist-camille-paglia-transgenderism-cold-hank-berrien
[category: global, reproductive rights, feminism]

‘I felt like one of my father’s songbirds, let out of its cage’: driving as a woman in Saudi Ara bia

In 2011, as the Arab spring brewed, I began a campaign to allow women to drive in Saudi Arabia, mobilising them via Twitter and Facebook.

Saudi women rarely wear anything but black abayas in public. When I saw Wajeha in pink, I giggled, thinking that she was even more fearless than me. No doubt, she was thinking that if we got arrested, at least she would look stylish.

I drove neither fast nor slowly, but I could feel myself looking at the familiar streets and buildings that I had never seen from a vantage point other than the passenger seat. I couldn’t help glancing in the direction of the police station as we passed. It was the same place where two days later I would be detained.

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2017/jun/12/i-felt-like-one-of-my-fathers-songbirds-let-out-of-its-cage-driving-as-a-woman-in-saudi-arabia?

End the system that fosters misogyny

Today, women occupy 65% of the paid workforce, but still perform 66% of the unpaid caring work in Australia. Despite these victories, there is something fundamentally wrong with this system. Capitalism can live with women in the workforce just as long as we know our place and continue to accept the double standard and the double burden.

Imagine if quality child-care was free, there was free health, dental and hospital care for all, community restaurants provided cheap and nutritious meals, education was free and domestic chores were paid for by the state. Life for families, and especially women, would be very different. But this sort of arrangement would mean that a proportion of the profits currently pocketed by the ruling class would have to be spent on providing such services.

Neoliberalism is moving society in the exact opposite direction to this vision. We are seeing attacks on welfare, the dismantling of universal health and free education. This is putting huge strain on families and, by extension, on women. We cannot take the gains that working women have won for granted. But they are limited and temporary — just look at the attacks on penalty rates, on the right to organise in a union, the fight for equal pay.

https://www.greenleft.org.au/content/end-system-fosters-misogyny

The John Laws skirt saga: why do successful women defend sexism?

This week the great relic announced in his ancient, gravel tones the women he employs must wear skirts to work to please him.

Yet there they were, excusing Laws’ sexist ways and tone and skirt diktat on TV. “He’s actually a really good, decent man,” Rowe said.

No, he’s not – he’s someone treating professional work colleagues as objects of decoration.

“He’s a lovely man,” Buttrose echoed.

This is what Laws says of ogling his female staff: “I love them to look feminine. A skirt on a beautiful body is a very, very feminine thing.”

That’s not lovely. That’s the exploitation of a power dynamic in which workers are obliged to service the skeezy pleasure of the boss on top of doing their day job. Australian law says sexual harassment is not on, and the community knows anything close to sexually questionable behaviour at work is not on.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/may/18/the-john-laws-skirt-saga-why-do-successful-women-defend-sexism?