Author Archive for Anna

doing the [re-]jig

Published by
Anna
at June 11, 2007 in housekeeping. 3 Comments

Hi all. Wow, how long have I been absent from this blog? So long now. I needed a break. Thanks to Sarah for keeping it all up and running in my [extended] absence (and doing a fabulous job). I’ve been fiddling around with the template and the like (does anyone know how to get the title to be black instead of white?!- you can’t see it at present) so now the Wo! Front has a new skin. Do you like it?

Anyway, I’m not sure if this post signals a come back to the world of feminist blogging or for me but you never do know…you may be hearing more from me soon.

Anna

Inspiring news of the day.

Published by
Anna
at March 9, 2007 in sexism, sexuality and struggle. 1 Comment

Three NY High School students ignored directives from their teachers to not read excerpts from The Vagina Monologues at an open mic night. They were then suspended for daring to utter the V word. One of the students, Elan Stahl said:

“Our aim was not to get in trouble. We want to put the word (vagina) out there and make people comfortable with using it.

“If they can just admit that the word vagina shouldn’t have been censored because it’s not lewd or obscene … then that apology would be gladly accepted,” she said.

Congrats to these girls for being so switched on.

Still, how depressing that vagina is a word that people find offensive. I suppose if they’d changed it to ‘pussy’ or ‘hoo-ha’. It would have been alright *sigh*.

And the asshat of the month award goes to:

Published by
Anna
at January 29, 2007 in Politics and sexism. 6 Comments

This may be a new regular feature of this blog. Wo would like you, dear readers to vote for the Asshat of the Month for January.

The very deserving contenders are:

1. Japan’s health minister, Hakuo Yanagisawa, who just this Saturday in a speech on the falling borth rates described women as “birth-giving machines“. To quote:

“The number of birth-giving machines [and] devices is fixed, so all we can ask is that they do their best per head.”

That’s right friends. Some of us may be in need of an upgrade to our automated baby-making programming software. Does. Not. Compute. Asshat.

2. Israel’s President, Moshe Katsav, has refused to step down from his post following numerous rape and sexual assault allegations.

The President accused the media of leading a “brainwashing” campaign “against my good name” adding: “For six months my family and I have faced an unprecedented assault — with despicable information sullying my honour.”

Definite asshat.

Nominee number three would have to be our own PM, John Howard for his rhetorical campaign against feminism. It was on the cusp of this month and last month but I’m going to include it anyway. Howard says:

“Fortunately I think today’s younger women are more in the post-feminist period, where they don’t sort of measure their independence and freedom by the number of years they remain full-time in the workforce without having children,” Mr Howard told News Ltd newspapers.

“I think they’ve moved on from that demonstration phase… (when) they thought ‘I’ll be letting the sisterhood down if I don’t stay in the workforce until I’m a certain age’.”

Howard’s come out with this ‘post-feminist’ bullshit before. It kind of makes me wonder though, if feminism’s dead, why the hell are you still talking about it? Howard is doing his bit to ensure that women are now (always and forever?) merely considered ‘baby-making machines’. Him and his cabinet are living proof of the need for feminism. What with their attacks on reproductive rights and working mothers. One for the country indeed.

Feel free to nominate your own Asshat of the Month in the comments or vote for one of these. My vote’s going to have to go to Katsav due to the sheer unabashedness of being investigated for sexual assault and refusing to step aside as leader of your country. Although Yanagisawa definitely gets a point for stupidity.

Policing gender in our mainstream media

Published by
Anna
at January 24, 2007 in The workplace, femininity, indoctrination and sexism. 2 Comments

One of my daily internet visits is the site for the Sydney Morning Herald. If you too read the Sydney Morning Herald you know that they have a whole blogosphere dedicated to vapid crap such as Sam and the City. Sam basically just reproduces all the dating cliches in the book and gets paid for it. This entry isn’t about Sam and the City however because it seems over there at smh HQ they’ve added yet another vapid, boring blog to their arsenal of vapid boring blogs. This one is called “Beauty Beat“. As you can tell by the title it’s a blog that shares beauty tips for women. Now I don’t pass judgement on women wearing makeup and I don’t want to get involved in that whole ‘if you wear makeup your a bad feminist’ debate but the following I take issue with:

If you’ve ever wondered how make-up (or lack thereof) affects the way you’re treated in the corporate world, consider this: a study conducted by US economists Hamermesh and Biddle found that women who wear make-up earn 20 to 30 per cent higher incomes than women who do not.

A sobering stat to remember as you hit the snooze button for a third time tomorrow morning. Go on, get up and spend those extra few precious minutes slapping on some lippie - it could take you on the road to riches.

That’s right, don’t question the punishment women get for not conforming to patriarchal beauty standards, get up earlier you lazy wench. I clicked on the above article thinking there was going to be some analysis of the obvious discrimination against women who don’t wear make up but that was silly to think that wasn’t it? Of course the article wasn’t going to be about that.

The whole article seems to be straight out of the patriarchy handbook really. Here we have the rebuke for women who don’t wear makeup because goodness knows if you can’t be bothered to put gunk all over your face then who knows what else you couldn’t be bothered doing:

I recently read an article by a woman who believed that wearing make-up was a waste of time, right up until her friend pointed out her lack of ‘face’ was hurting her career. “If you don’t bother with lipstick, it makes people wonder what other details you can’t be bothered with,” the friend said. The buddy went on to recount “stories of qualified, talented women she’s known who she would never refer to clients or for business because of their appearance - long, unstyled hair, more-casual-than-professional clothes, no make-up”.

Besides the fact that she totally made up that conversation (j’accuse!), she refers to makeup the whole way through the article as her ‘face’ and how uncomfortable she would feel going to meetings without her ‘face’ on. I’m sure a lot of women feel that way and the pressure to conform is definitely present but the fact that the social policing of femininity is so high as to result in women who don’t like wearing makeup receiving 20-30 percent less of an income than women who do wear it (on top of the already lower salaries women get for simply being women) should be thought of as outrageous, a chance to expose the inner workings of the social conditioning of the patriarchal system not as a chance to rebuke women for not ‘putting their face on’ (who honestly still says that?) when they go to work.

If you have a corporate job, looking professional is part and parcel but the fact remains that women are held to a much higher standard of what this looking professional actually means. A smart looking suit isn’t enough. That women’s salaries should suffer due to a lack of mascara is a clear case of discrimination case in my opinion.

Pregnancy counselling and our ‘post-feminist’ world

Published by
Anna
at January 15, 2007 in Politics, abortion, breeding, choice, christianity and fundamentalism. 1 Comment

Apologies to all readers about the lack of updateliness over the festive season. I’ve had a bit of a break but it seems the patriarchy hasn’t.

As I’m sure most of you are aware, Minister for Health, Tony Abbott is up to his old tricks [link above]; restricting Australian women’s access to abortion in granting the Government funded Pregnancy Helpline contract to a company called McKesson Asia Pacific. What’s interesting about this is that McKesson is a company with no obvious bias towards faith-based healthcare provision and yet they have sub-contracted the training of counsellors out to the Catholic organisations, Centacare and the Caroline Chisholm Society. Organisations and individuals with ties to abortion providers were exempt from applying for the contract and yet here we have two organisations involved in the helpline with a most open bias in the opposite direction.

The Catholic stance on abortion is well-known. It has also recently been reported that Catholic hospitals refuse to provide Emergency Contraception/ The Morning After Pill to rape victims. It’s really not that surprising but considering Emergency Contraception prevents conception before sperm meets egg, if the doctors at those hospitals don’t know this, I really think their abilities to provide healthcare should be called into question. But as we all know it has never been about saving the bay-bees but punishing Eve, that wench.

One anti-choice organisation, the Australian Federation of Pregnancy Support Services (formerly known as the Australian Federation of Pro-life Pregnancy Support Services), which trades under the name Pregnancy Help Australia, has already received hundreds of thousands of dollars of Government funding. The AFPSS received $240,000 in 2003-04, $245,000 in 2004-05 and almost $300,000 in the last financial year. Considering their government funding seems to be rising and genuinely pro-woman counselling services are losing funding it seems the anti-choicers have achieved a monopoly over pregnancy counselling services in Australia.

Abbott says, “I hope that the availability of this kind of support service might, in the end, have some downward impact on the number of abortions.” Abbott’s continues to cite the bogus figure of 100,000 abortions each year. This figure is actually derived from a Medicare figure of 73,000 (exaggerating much?) for D&C which is a medical procedure performed for reasons including miscarriage which makes up two-thirds of that 73,000. So the actual number of abortions is closer to 25,000.

The demand for abortions has actually been falling steadily in the under-25 group (12 per cent in the past decade) and probably would continue to fall if faith-based organisations released their tenterhooks from women’s bodies. I wonder how many rape victims who didn’t get EC in time due to going to a Catholic hospital then had to seek an abortion?

Research by the Guttmacher Institute shows that abortion figures are much much lower in countries where it is safe and readily available and where attitudes to gender, sex and sexuality are much more progressive:

Most recent rates per 1,000 reproductive-age women

Legal

Belgium 7

Germany 8

Netherlands 9

Switzerland 9

United States 21

Illegal
Dominican Republic 47

Peru 56

Philippines 27

Uganda 54
Sources:Guttmacher Institute and WHO Regional Office for Europe.

As you can see in the countries where it’s legal the US leads the way in the number of abortions carried out, it also happens to be where the anti-choice movement is strongest. Coincidence? Or are pro-lifers killing the bay-bees?!

The theme for the next issue of Wo! is ‘Choice’ so if you have something to add to the discourse send to editor@wo-magazine.com . Features and articles don’t have to be focused on reproductive rights, the theme can be interpreted as broadly or creatively as you like.

Issue four pdf now live

Published by
Anna
at December 16, 2006 in In other news. 2 Comments

The pdf for Issue four is now live. Download here or read the magazine online.

UNICEF report: 7000 fewer girls born in India every day

Published by
Anna
at December 15, 2006 in World, struggle and violence against women. 1 Comment

In some states, the minister said, newborn girls have been killed by pouring sand or tobacco juice into their nostrils.

“The minute the child is born and she opens her mouth to cry, they put sand into her mouth and her nostrils so she chokes and dies,” Chowdhury said, referring to cases in the western desert state of Rajasthan.

“They bury infants into pots alive and bury the pots. They put tobacco into her mouth. They hang them upside down like a bunch of flowers to dry,” she said.

“We have more passion for tigers of this country. We have people fighting for stray dogs on the road. But you have a whole society that ruthlessly hunts down girl children.”

That’s the Indian Minister for Women and Child Development Renuka Chowdhury talking about the still prevalant practice of female infanticide in India. According to her 10 million girl children have been killed in India in the past 20 years.

Unfortunately it will continue to hapen until women gain even a semblance of equality in that country but that’s far from realised. Girl children will continue to be thought of as not only worthless but a burden until they have the means to economic equality, education and social acceptance.

Headline of the day

Published by
Anna
at December 14, 2006 in In other news. 0 Comments

The nature of the panopticon

Published by
Anna
at December 12, 2006 in sexism and wtf?!. 1 Comment

“She’s not very attractive”

I heard that sentence uttered in relation to Bindi Irwin the other day. Have we really got to a point in society where discussing the attractiveness of an eight year old is acceptable?

Is the line between women and girls being blurred so much that the atractiveness, or apparent lack thereof, of an eight year old becomes a talking point amongst grown men. That is just plain creepy let alone the societal implications of this. Me and a friend were discussing just the other day the increasing trend of young girls dressing like women.

I don’t know if I agree with Bindi Irwin’s pervasiveness in the media of late, the fintess dvd for kids (WTF?!), the shows, it sounds like an awful lot of pressure to be putting on a young child. But I don’t have any idea what’s going on inside the family, perhaps it’s what she actually wants to do. In any case what I find more worrying is this focus on whether she’s beautiful enough to be in the public eye. As if it’s offensive that anyone who doesn’t adhere to the [bullshit] mainstream ideal of beauty is in the media; that she shouldn’t be there, EVEN IF SHE’S EIGHT!

Are people so brainwashed into thinking that females, no matter their age, are there just as eye candy, that they should dress like women, that they should be taught from before the age of ten that it’s only their ‘attractiveness’ that matters in this world and who do you think you are appearing in the panopticon if you don’t bleach your hair, cake on the makeup and wear a short skirt - EVEN IF YOU’RE EIGHT!

Don’t answer that.

The mind boggles.

Did I mention we’re talking about an eight year old here?

BTW sorry for the absence. We shall be back to regular programming some time soon.

Issue four is up!

Published by
Anna
at December 5, 2006 in feminist media. 1 Comment

Well, issue four is now up. Head on over and check it out. There’s so much content it’s bursting at the seams. It was a bit of a rush and there’s still things to be finalised (such as the pdf) but never fear, it won’t take me as long to do this issue’s pdf as it took last issue, I promise!

I also still need to get around to writing an editorial about this issue’s theme. So, sorry for the delay in those things but there was only so much of my holiday I was willing to forfeit *smiles*.

I got back yesterday. Holidays are awesome.

Happy reading of Issue four folks.