Photo: Mikemol (CC)

A lot of visitors to disinformation could learn a lesson from these two. Joanna Schroeder, a feminist, and David Byron, an anti-feminist, write at the Good Men Project:

JS: So, David, you and I have a pretty interesting history, don’t we?

DB: I have talked with feminists on-line for years, and been thrown off hundreds of feminist sites.  I am always looking for someone I can talk to, but I didn’t think you were a good prospect at first.

JS: Yeah, maybe I wasn’t at first. I have always been open-minded, but I started off pretty righteous.

As far as I remember it, you and I first met online at The Good Men Project in the comments section of a piece I wrote called The (Quiet) FeministRevolution. I was pretty sure I had written something so deeply based in common sense, that the whole world would read it and say, “Oh wow, now I get it!”. I was truly flabbergasted at the reaction I received.

It was very naive and short-sighted of me.

My basic assertions in the piece were that people do acts of feminism which counter Rape Culture every day, probably without knowing it. I used two examples, one which was of my father explaining to me why he would’ve been cautious asking the woman whom we’d just seen on the side of the road in a snowstorm if she needed help, had I not been with him. And he told me not to get into cars with men I didn’t know.

DB: The article continued a discussion about women’s fear of men that had been going on at the Good Men Project for a little while and perhaps dating back to a flap in the atheist community on-line over “Elevatorgate”.  Elevatorgate was a discussion about an incident where a woman was approached by a man in an elevator at an atheist conference.

It became a discussion about whether it is legitimate for women to treat the strange men they meet as if they were “potential rapists.”  Although the Men’s Rights Movement usually talks about legal rights and not emotional issues, I have always seen the fear and suspicion levelled at men as a huge burden.  Even if it is private feelings, it is profiling to think, “I know who the dangerous people are — they are the men”.

JS: At first you leveled some pretty strong opinions toward me and my piece, including “This piece should come with a warning: Not all women are like this!”  And I basically totally ignored you and every other commenter who was saying anything negative. I wasn’t in a place yet in my development to hear past the anger to your issues.

Finally, you said something that truly shocked me. At first I laughed, and even posted it on my Facebook wall. Then I was confused and offended, and wondered, Even if you disagree, why would you throw so much hate at me?

This was it:

DavidByron: “…I come away from reading this very angry indeed at women. And it isn’t their fault. It’s not all women who are this disgusting and sexist. You know what? If it was me in the car and Joanna was the one stuck in the snow going to freeze to death I think I’d tell her.  “Oh what? There’s no nice woman to save you today? You want to get rescued by the potential rapist do you? Oh I am sorry but I couldn’t possibly put you through that risk. No, no, you can stay out here waiting for a woman. I wouldn’t want to contribute to the rape culture.”

And then drive off.”

JS:  So, tell us what happened there, David?

DB:  I got angry with someone on the Internet. I didn’t know you and I didn’t respect you. Just another feminist attacking men. When trust falls below a bare minimum, there’s no give in the conversation. There’s no more energy to be patient. I don’t mean trust you with my bank account. I mean trust you to be a genuine participant in the conversation.

You replied asking, “Don’t you realize that you are talking to a human being?” But that was just what I had been trying to say to you. Just as you disliked being on the receiving end of anger, men don’t like being on the receiving end of fear. Even when you know it’s completely unwarranted, it can still stab at you.

Read more here.

From reclaiming the F word to objecting to objectification – there’s a new feminist army determined to finally flatten the patriarchy. But here’s the really radical news: patriarchy is dead. It’s dead simplistic, dead inaccurate, and no longer a useful way of framing gender inequality in the UK. Forget about castrating patriarchy – it’s time to corral kyriarchy, the system identified by Harvard theologian Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza, which explains how ethnicity, class, economics and education, as well as gender, intersect to oppress us all, men as well as women.

So, kyriarchy: the substitution of one elitist, etymological hair-splitting term for another, I hear my newly estranged sisters cry – just what feminism needs. But this is a neologism with a difference. Where patriarchy – literally, rule of the father – explains only how traditional male authority dictates to, and subjugates women, kyriarchy (from the Greek: kyrios – lord/master; archion – dominion/rule) relates how each of us, whatever our gender, is a bundle of privileges we can all too readily abuse by invoking the “master power”, whether that’s as a black female barrister, a mixed-race trans male teacher, or a white immigrant male labourer. At the same time, the term’s connotations of elite authority perfectly tap into the legacy of oppression that western feminists, from Mary Wollstonecraft to Germaine Greer, have dedicatedly derided.

Scoff at my linguistic parsing, but terminology matters. Just as contemporary feminism is so keen to detox the term “feminist”, so “patriarchy” carries a whole truckload of outdated assumptions about male-perpetuated oppression that blinker us all. Take porn for example. Patriarchy just isn’t useful when we want to talk about how its proliferation is negatively impacting on men and women alike. Kyriarchy, by contrast, accounts for the increasing numbers of men who are suffering from sexual performance anxiety or emotional disconnection with women, which can be related to x-rated overconsumption, and how female performers, who can make good money out of being the object of both male and female desire and envy, can argue they are somewhat empowered by doing so. This isn’t to claim porn stars as emancipated feminist role models; it’s just to recognise that sexual allure and money, rightly or wrongly, accord power that oppresses too…

Read more here.

Photo: Tawheed Manzoor (CC)

Vandana Shiva on Al Jazeera English explains how, as mega-chains venture into industrial farming, they have created an epidemic of hunger- and generated billions in profit.

New Delhi, India – In November 2011, when the UPA government announced that it had cleared the entry of big retail chains such as Walmart and Tesco into India through 51 per cent Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) in multi-brand retail, it justified the decision saying that FDI in retail would boost food security and benefit farmers’ livelihoods.

But the assurance that FDI in retail would ease inflation did not resolve the political crisis the government was facing; it deepened it. Parliament was stalled for several days of the Winter Session, after which the government was forced to withdraw its decision.

The story of FDI in retail goes back to 2005, when Prime Minister Manmohan Singh signed an agriculture agreement with the US, along with the nuclear agreement. On the board of the US-India Knowledge Initiative in Agriculture, as it is called, sit Monsanto (the world’s leading producer of GM seeds), ConAgra (among the world’s biggest agribusinesses, along with Cargill) and Walmart (the world’s largest retail giant).

Protests had prevented Walmart’s entry into retail, but, in 2007, it did get a backdoor entry through a joint-venture with Bharti (their stores go by the names of Easyday and Best Price Modern Wholesale). No back-end infrastructure has been built so far, one of the other claims of the government about why we need retail giants.

Farmers’ suicides spike in India

The way the UPA government tried to ram through the decision on FDI in retail – without consulting the opposition parties, or even its allies – was clearly undemocratic. But the decision itself was also flawed. It illustrated a disconnect between an ideology based on market fundamentalism – which is the leaning of the present government – and the Indian reality of small farms and small retail…

Read the rest on Al Jazeera English

The recent illustrations of Siri, the iPhone 4S voice-recognition based assistant, failing to provide information to users about abortion, birth control, help after rape and help with domestic violence has gotten a lot of notice.

Siri can answer a lot of health related questions perfectly well, why shouldn’t we expect it to be able to answer reproductive health related queries too? Why treat reproductive health as a walled-off garden that the general public can’t or shouldn’t be exposed to?

I’ve often found myself trying to explain to people that rape culture and patriarchy aren’t just bad for women. If you draw attention to a form of violence that is primarily aimed at women by men, and a form of social oppression that is intended to provide men with dominance over women, a lot of people will think you must be hostile to men, or want to take something away from men. Nothing could be further from the truth. Patriarchy and rape culture are clearly more harmful to women, but they also cause men great harm, and I engage in anti-violence work to help men as much as I do to help women or anyone else. Here’s why:

The patriarchal “ideal” of male toughness and invulnerability creates the following problems for men:

1. Men are often expected to endure hazardous conditions, with the attitude that any expression of fear is a sign of weakness. This means that men are likely to find themselves in dangerous jobs, or in risky physical conflicts ranging from fist fights to actual combat.
2. Men are often afraid to admit emotional weakness, making them less likely to seek help for depression and other mental health issues, or to be accurately diagnosed, which increases their suffering with these conditions. Perhaps as a result, men are more likely to commit suicide than women.
3. Men are less likely to seek medical help when they have a physical problem, leading to unnecessary suffering and, at times, death.
4. Men are more likely to attempt to “prove” their toughness with risky acts that sometimes lead to injury and death.
5. Instead of emotionally engaging the pain they feel due to racism, poverty, and colonization, many men feel compelled to show “toughness.” This prevents effective resistance movements.
6. Violence aimed at boys is likely to be minimized or dismissed by adults, leading to increased acceptance of bullying.
7. The belief that it is more masculine and therefore better to be entirely independent and invulnerable (never disabled, never sick, never vulnerable) leads to a collective failure to provide social services such as health care, unemployment insurance, welfare benefits, and other benefits that help everyone, including men and boys.
8. Social services believed to serve only women (as if women somehow exist in a vacuum) are often targeted most vigorously by those adhering to a belief in the ideal of atomized, independent men as the core of a healthy society. The cultural belief that men are independent, and that their lives are not linked to women’s, allows many men to remain apathetic in the face of these policies, which harm them immensely.

Read more here.

Jailbreak the Patriarchy genderswaps the world for you. When it’s installed, everything you read in Chrome (except for gmail, so far) loads with pronouns and a reasonably thorough set of other gendered words swapped. For example: “he loved his mother very much” would read as “she loved her father very much”, “the patriarchy also hurts men” would read as “the matriarchy also hurts women”, that sort of thing.

This makes reading stuff on the internet a pretty fascinating and eye-opening experience, I must say. What would the world be like if we reversed the way we speak about women and men? Well, now you can find out!

More on Jailbreak the Patriarchy

Computer science has always been a male-dominated field, right? Wrong.

In 1987, 42% of the software developers in America were women. And 34% of the systems analysts in America were women. Women had started to flock to computer science in the mid-1960s, during the early days of computing, when men were already dominating other technical professions but had yet to dominate the world of computing. For about two decades, the percentages of women who earned Computer Science degrees rose steadily, peaking at 37% in 1984.

In fact, for a hot second back in the mid-sixties, computer programming was actually portrayed as women’s work by the mass media. Check out “The Computer Girls” from the April 1967 issue of Cosmopolitan magazine. It appeared between pieces called “The Bachelor Girls of Japan” and “A Dog Speaks: Why a Girl Should Own a Pooch.”

There were many reasons for the unusual influx of women into computer science. Partly, it was just a result of the rise of the commercial computer industry in general. There was a tremendous need to hire anyone with aptitude, including women. Partly, it was the fact that programming work itself was not yet fully defined as a scientific or engineering field. In fact, many computer science programs were first housed within a variety of departments and colleges, including liberal arts colleges where women had already made cultural inroads. Not least of all — and you knew this was coming — women quickly noticed that some programming work could be done at home while the children were napping.

And then the women left. In droves.

From 1984 to 2006, the number of women majoring in computer science dropped from 37% to 20% — just as the percentages of women were increasing steadily in all other fields of science, technology, engineering, and math, with the possible exception of physics. The reasons women left computer science are as complex and numerous as why they had entered in the first place. But the most common explanation is that the rise of personal computers led computing culture to be associated with the stereotype of the eccentric, antisocial, male “hacker.” Women found computer science less receptive professionally than it had been at its inception.

Why do we care about a long-gone moment in early computing history when the presence of women was unexceptional?

Because it looks like women are now returning to computer science. In the past year, the number of women majoring in Computer Science has nearly double at Harvard, rising from 13% to 25% (still nowhere near the 37% of 1984).  And — because Harvard is not actually the center of the universe — it’s nice to know that the trend has been spotted elsewhere.

Women are God-fearing and don’t challenge institutions. Men, on the other hand, are skeptical and rational, and go out of their way to publicly call bullshit on faith and religion — which is why today’s well-known secular thinkers, especially in the ranks of the New Atheism movement, are all male.

These statements should sound ridiculous because, of course, they are. From Madalyn Murray O’Hair, the founder of American Atheists, whose 1963 Supreme Court lawsuit brought an end to prayer in public schools, to Sergeant Kathleen Johnson, who started an organization for atheists in the United States military, to Debbie Goddard, founder of African Americans for Humanism, countless women have worked as successful atheist activists. They’ve penned books, run organizations, and advocated on behalf of religiously repressed citizens. But you might not guess that from the popular portrayal and perception of atheism in America, which overwhelmingly treats the contemporary class of non-God-fearing freethinkers (also known as secularists, skeptics, and nonbelievers) as a contentious, showboating boys’ club …

Read the whole story via Bitch Magazine

(One would presume that the ad was effective, as Massachusetts’ male voters rejected women’s suffrage. Women were given the ability to vote five year later by the federal government in the form of the 19th Amendment.)

SlutWalk protest in Toronto, 3 April 2011. Photo: Anton Bielousov (CC).

Violet Blue explains why the new SlutWalk protests are “a significant tipping point in cultural evolution” — and she’s serious. “Yes: I think scantily clad girls marching in the streets around the world are agents of change for our species.”

It started in April when a Toronto cop said that to stay safe from rape, women “should avoid dressing like sluts”. Soon “my clothes are not my consent” protests erupted, and the event “had an international identity within a few months,” representing “a huge reclamation and restatement about boundaries and women’s bodies.”

Now sex workers, young exhibitionists, high-heel feminists and random pissed-off women are marching “for the right to dress as they like while having their boundaries respected,” and Violet calls them the true punk rockers — the disruptors. “They’re the ones with the brass ovaries enough to dress like sluts and tell the world to STFU about what they should, or shouldn’t do, with their sexiness.”

“Maybe that’s why its critics are panicking and handwringing as if Invaders From Mars have come out of a time machine from the future in heels and hose, reminding everyone that their face is up here!”

At the “Egalia” preschool, staff avoid using words like “him” or “her” and address the 33 kids as “friends” rather than girls and boys.

From the color and placement of toys to the choice of books, every detail has been carefully planned to make sure the children don’t fall into gender stereotypes.

Egalia doesn’t deny the biological differences between boys and girls — the dolls the children play with are anatomically correct. What matters is that children understand that their biological differences “don’t mean boys and girls have different interests and abilities.”

The taxpayer-funded preschool which opened last year in the liberal Sodermalm district of Stockholm for kids aged 1 to 6 is among the most radical examples of Sweden’s efforts to engineer equality between the sexes from childhood onward. Breaking down gender roles is a core mission in the national curriculum for preschools, underpinned by the theory that even in highly egalitarian-minded Sweden, society gives boys an unfair edge.

Egalia’s methods are controversial; some say they amount to mind control. But director Lotta Rajalin says that there’s a long waiting list for admission to Egalia, and that only one couple has pulled a child out of the school.

If new guidelines from the Kansas health department are enforced, the last three abortion clinics in the state could be forced to shut their doors this summer. A court fight over the rules is almost inevitable. But anti-abortion groups like Operation Rescue are already claiming success in making Kansas “the first abortion-free state.”

The state’s latest approach—with its remodeling requirements and so forth—is often referred to as “Targeted Regulation of Abortion Providers.” TRAP laws are intended to make it difficult, if not impossible, for clinics to operate, and they have become increasingly common around the country.

The new requirements require facilities to add extra bathrooms, drastically expand waiting and recovery areas, and even add larger janitor’s closets, as one clinic employee told me—changes that clinics will have a heck of a time pulling off by the deadline. Under the new rule, clinics must also aquire state certification to admit patients, a process that takes 90 to 120 days, the staffer explained. Which makes it impossible for clinics to comply. And clinics that don’t comply with the rules will face fines or possible closure.

Women seeking abortions already have a tough time in Kansas, where providers face death threats and evictions. Earlier this year, the state approved one law banning abortion after 20 weeks gestation, and another restricting private insurance coverage for abortions.

The cover of The New York Illustrated Times for February 23rd, 1878 depicts the arrest of the notorious abortionist Ann Lohman, alias “Madame Restell,” by the moral crusader Anthony Comstock. Flanked by reporters and deputies, the statuesque crime-fighter is pictured with a search warrant in hand, which he reads to the lady villain in the attitude of a holy messenger, banishing evil by its sacred words. Comfortably situated amongst the opulent furnishings of her Fifth Avenue mansion, Madame Restell wears a cool, appraising expression, as if to say “Ah, Comstock, my nemesis—I have been expecting you.” Her right hand is clenched into a fist, which overlaps the womb of a veiled woman who weeps with shame in the background.

Dubbed the “wickedest woman in New York,” Madame Restell built an empire of cruelty; promoting vice, and profiting upon the mistakes of married women and wayward girls. She plied her trade openly, publicizing her services through thinly-veiled advertisements in the penny press. Though she was object of perennial public scandals and outbursts of moral outrage, she shamelessly flaunted her wealth, parading about the city in a showy carriage with four horses and a liveried coachman. She evaded justice by bribery, by clever legal maneuvering, and by threatening to expose the identities of her wealthy clientele—or so, that’s how the story goes.

Ann Lohman and her relations left no journals or correspondence to offer us insight into her true actions, personal feelings or motivations. She has been the subject of two modern biographies, Allan Keller’s Scandalous Lady and Clifford Browder’s The Wickedest Woman in New York. Each of these, in weaving its narrative, has been forced to rely heavily upon hostile newspaper accounts, courtroom transcripts, police memoirs, and anti-abortion tracts, as these are virtually the only sources now available. History has recorded the story Madame Restell almost exclusively in the voice of public condemnation—a circumstance that immediately begs the question: who was she, really?

[Full Article at Victorian Gothic]

The story is an interesting and ironic example of a number of things — the literal erasing women’s accomplishments, and religious fundamentalists’ use of technology in postmodern fashion in their efforts to turn back society’s clock. From New York’s Daily News:

A Hasidic newspaper got into the business of revisionist history Friday when it printed a Situation Room photo that was doctored to remove Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

The Brooklyn-based publication Der Zeitung published the now iconic photo showing only men present to monitor a daring 40-minute Navy SEALs raid that killed Osama Bin Laden, the world’s most wanted terrorist. National Security team member Audrey Tomason was also scrubbed from the historic image.

As a rule, Der Zeitung does not run images of women that could be considered “sexually suggestive,” Jewish Week writer Rabbi Jason Miller said. Miller speculated in a column that the newspaper may have edited out Clinton because its editors “don’t like the idea of a woman with that much political power.”

He added that he considers the altered image an “act of censorship [that] is actually a violation of the Jewish legal principle of g’neivat da’at (deceit).”

Below, from the documentary Punk in London, performing circa 1977.

In light of hysteria over a photograph in J. Crew’s new catalog depicting a mother painting her son’s toenails pink, Smithsonian Magazine explores how we got to this point:

For centuries, children wore dainty white dresses up to age 6. “What was once a matter of practicality—you dress your baby in white dresses and diapers; white cotton can be bleached—became a matter of ‘Oh my God, if I dress my baby in the wrong thing, they’ll grow up perverted,’ ” Paoletti says.

The march toward gender-specific clothes was neither linear nor rapid. Pink and blue arrived, along with other pastels, as colors for babies in the mid-19th century, yet the two colors were not promoted as gender signifiers until just before World War I—and even then, it took time for popular culture to sort things out.

In 1927, Time magazine printed a chart showing sex-appropriate colors for girls and boys according to leading U.S. stores. In Boston, Filene’s told parents to dress boys in pink. So did Best & Co. in New York City, Halle’s in Cleveland and Marshall Field in Chicago.

Today’s color dictate wasn’t established until the 1940s, as a result of Americans’ preferences as interpreted by manufacturers and retailers. “It could have gone the other way,” Paoletti says.

When the women’s liberation movement arrived in the mid-1960s, with its anti-feminine, anti-fashion message, the unisex look became the rage—but completely reversed from the time of young Franklin Roosevelt. Now young girls were dressing in masculine—or at least unfeminine—styles, devoid of gender hints. Paoletti found that in the 1970s, the Sears, Roebuck catalog pictured no pink toddler clothing for two years.

Feminists, do not focus upon male rape generally, or male prison rape in particular. This is unsurprising, and not, in itself, particularly problematic.

What is problematic with feminist discourse about male rape is not that they don’t discuss it at all – clearly they do – or that they don’t discuss it enough. The problem is that they anomalise it, that is to say, they treat it as some kind of anomalous variant of rape which, according to them, is something which normally happens to women. The latter is simply “rape”. Rape that happens to men in prison is “prison rape”. Rape that happens to men outside of prison is “male rape”. The word “female” is sometimes used as an adjective with “rape” to contrast it with male rape, but “female rape” is not used by feminists as a category designation in and of itself. It’s just “rape”. “Male rape” and “prison rape” sometimes get their own threads, effectively discoursive ghettos. But they are often excluded from threads about “rape”.

If rape that happens to women is “rape”, it follow that “rape” is something which happens to women. This equivalence is reinforced by the interchangeability in feminist (and, due to its influence, in mainstream) discourse between the ostensibly gender-neutral (but implicitly gendered) functional category “rape” and the explicit gender category “violence against women”. The overall effect is to render male rape invisible outside of the ghetto.

What the ghetto threads do is give the appearance of addressing these issues positively, while ensuring that male sexual victimisation remains a marginalised topic. Since male victims are already marginalised to the point of invisibility within mainstream society, the effect is to preserve and extend gender inequality contrary to feminism’s stated aim.

Read more here.

Frequently, I receive requests to provide a definition of the term “rape culture”…

Rape culture is rape being used as a weapon, a tool of war and genocide and oppression. Rape culture is rape being used as a corrective to “cure” queer women. Rape culture is a militarized culture and “the natural product of all wars, everywhere, at all times, in all forms.”

Rape culture is 1 in 33 men being sexually assaulted in their lifetimes. Rape culture is encouraging men to use the language of rape to establish dominance over one another (”I’ll make you my bitch”). Rape culture is making rape a ubiquitous part of male-exclusive bonding. Rape culture is ignoring the cavernous need for men’s prison reform in part because the threat of being raped in prison is considered an acceptable deterrent to committing crime, and the threat only works if actual men are actually being raped.

Rape culture is 1 in 6 women being sexually assaulted in their lifetimes. Rape culture is not even talking about the reality that many women are sexually assaulted multiple times in their lives. Rape culture is the way in which the constant threat of sexual assault affects women’s daily movements. Rape culture is telling girls and women to be careful about what you wear, how you wear it, how you carry yourself, where you walk, when you walk there, with whom you walk, whom you trust, what you do, where you do it, with whom you do it, what you drink, how much you drink, whether you make eye contact, if you’re alone, if you’re with a stranger, if you’re in a group, if you’re in a group of strangers, if it’s dark, if the area is unfamiliar, if you’re carrying something, how you carry it, what kind of shoes you’re wearing in case you have to run, what kind of purse you carry, what jewelry you wear, what time it is, what street it is, what environment it is, how many people you sleep with, what kind of people you sleep with, who your friends are, to whom you give your number, who’s around when the delivery guy comes, to get an apartment where you can see who’s at the door before they can see you, to check before you open the door to the delivery guy, to own a dog or a dog-sound-making machine, to get a roommate, to take self-defense, to always be alert always pay attention always watch your back always be aware of your surroundings and never let your guard down for a moment lest you be sexually assaulted and if you are and didn’t follow all the rules it’s your fault.

Rape culture is victim-blaming. Rape culture is a judge blaming a child for her own rape. Rape culture is a minister blaming his child victims. Rape culture is accusing a child of enjoying being held hostage, raped, and tortured. Rape culture is spending enormous amounts of time finding any reason at all that a victim can be blamed for hir own rape.

Read more here.

There’s some exhibit at a museum in Pittsburgh featuring never before seen photos of Marilyn Monroe. Now, I’m not some retrograde star fucker who pines for the golden age of Hollywood when all the men were either latent homosexuals or confirmed rapists and all the women were hopped up on pills. But seeing Monroe’s ethereally beautiful mug plastered all over this city quickly became one of a few bright spots on my otherwise dreary morning commute.

To my horror, this morning I saw that someone defaced one of the billboards touting the exhibit. Under the copy, in awkward, sloppy lettering, stood the hastily spray painted profundity ‘women are not objects’ followed by some bastard amalgam of an anarchy sign and the symbol for female. I guess the self defense class let out early last night and someone was feeling frisky.

I’d like to address the trog that wrote this, or in the very least some of her proxy sisters. You. Janeane, or Betty, or Andrea, or Gloria, or whatever the hell you call yourself at the height of orgasm; you, the joyless, festering hold out to old timey feminism, who still believes and asserts to whomever is listening, in no uncertain terms, with a straight face no less, that American women are oppressed; you who believes that admiring a picture of a long dead Hollywood icon is akin to objectifying women; here is what you should have written on that billboard: “Beautiful women make me uncomfortable, as I am not beautiful.”

Read More on First Church of Mutterhals

Naomi Wolf. Photo: David Shankbone (CC)

Are women really less happy now than they were 40 years ago? Naomi Wolf stirs up the debate, writing at More:

In September 2009, Marcus Buckingham—a motivational speaker and trainer who now claims the improbable job title of “the world’s leading expert in personal strengths”—rolled out Find Your Strongest Life: What the Happiest and Most Successful Women Do Differently. His headline? Women have become less happy in the past 40 years. Unstated but clear: What happened 40 years ago is that feminism reappeared on the scene.

Buckingham’s announcement immediately stirred a press sensation. His findings were featured on the home page of the Huffington Post and worried over by Maureen Dowd on the op-ed page of the New York Times. Blogs, newsmagazines and daytime talk shows all agonized over the notion that feminism—all that freedom, all those choices!—was making women sadder. The data seemed to touch that ever-sensitive nerve: Could feminism be, at its essence, bad—not just for men, but for women themselves?

If, like me, you are over 40, you’ve seen this very same media firestorm a couple of times now in your adult life. Remember the giant 1986 feeding frenzy when Newsweek misread data and warned that an educated woman of a certain age was more likely to be killed by a terrorist than to get married? An entire book—Susan Faludi’s Backlash—was devoted to showing the holes in that interpretation of the research, and to shooting down the various urban legends that were cropping up at the time to “prove” that emancipation made women into lonely, downbeat losers.

But here we are again, as the media swallow whole a new set of data points asserting that something fundamental about feminism is making women—fill in the blank: crazy, solitary or, this time around, simply miserable.

Did women in fact tell the researchers that they are sadder, gloomier, less happy? Not exactly. One of the studies Buckingham cites—the General Social Survey, which has tracked American trends since 1972—does ask “How happy are you?” But Buckingham’s conclusions are also based on answers to more specific questions in the GSS that ask women about satisfaction, which is quite different. The wording of one, for example, was “How satisfied are you”—with your job, your marriage, your children.

Now, if 40 years of the women’s movement have done anything definite, they have taught women to be less “satisfied,” if what that means is less complacent…

[continues at More]

I read an article in Jezebel that irked me, which is why I don’t usually read Jezebel. I’m not a huge fan of anyone who feels the need to loudly assert that they are a card-carrying feminist. These are the same people who balk when you fail to assert the same and immediately assume that you must be some docile Nazi house wife.

The article mournfully retells the story of a female business blogger, who claims assuming a man’s identity online improved her standing in the fast paced, super-elite world of business blogging (nevermind the fact that her real sex was listed on her blog and available to everyone with two eyes and one functioning finger). In her words:

Business opportunities fell into my lap. People asked for my advice, and they thanked me for it, too.

No hassles. Higher acceptance. And gratifying respect for my talents and round-the-clock work ethic.

Full Article at Black Sun Gazette

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, women will likely overtake men in the American workforce some time this month or next. In August, women held 49.9 percent of the nation’s 132 million nonfarm jobs. Why? Because 80 percent of the 5.1 million people who have lost their jobs in this recession are men; and women are gaining the vast majority of jobs in the few sectors of the economy that are growing.

Doesn’t having, then raising children keep many women out of the workforce? Not so much. A chart posted to the NY Times’ Economix blog notes that women across the board have entered the labor market in higher numbers over the last three decades, but the biggest increases have been among mothers with young children.

What does this mean for men, you ask? John Broome, author of “It’s a Woman’s World,” a science fiction story that appeared in the DC comic book Mystery in Space (#8), asked the same thing way back in July 1952. As the panels shown here demonstrate, Broome predicted that women would one day cruelly discriminate against men — force them to work in the home, while women ran businesses and fought wars.

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