Visual Insights: Dennys Photo Gallery: Invisible Women Around The World

Visual Insights: Dennys Photo Gallery: Invisible Women Around The World Remember International Womens Day is 8 March 2011

Mass Murder of Women

Bob Herbert: Women at Risk

"I actually look good. I dress good, am clean-shaven, bathe, touch of cologne — yet 30 million women rejected me," wrote George Sodini in a blog that he kept while preparing for this week's shooting in a Pennsylvania gym in which he killed three women, wounded nine others and then killed himself.

We've seen this tragic ritual so often that it has the feel of a formula. A guy is filled with a seething rage toward women and has easy access to guns. The result: mass slaughter.

Back in the fall of 2006, a fiend invaded an Amish schoolhouse in rural Pennsylvania, separated the girls from the boys, and then shot 10 of the girls, killing five.

I wrote, at the time, that there would have been thunderous outrage if someone had separated potential victims by race or religion and then shot, say, only the blacks, or only the whites, or only the Jews. But if you shoot only the girls or only the women — not so much of an uproar.

Or, can you imagine if the gunman was Arab, Muslim or black. The news would be filled with analyses of black violence or Muslim misogyny or whatever. Just look at how some people try to make Mark Lepine into a secret Muslim, so that the violent impulses can be blamed on his Algerian-ness instead of his male-ness. Why is it when a white man commits a similar act, neither whiteness nor maleness are examined?

According to police accounts, Sodini walked into a dance-aerobics class of about 30 women who were being led by a pregnant instructor. He turned out the lights and opened fire. The instructor was among the wounded.

We have become so accustomed to living in a society saturated with misogyny that the barbaric treatment of women and girls has come to be more or less expected.

We profess to being shocked at one or another of these outlandish crimes, but the shock wears off quickly in an environment in which the rape, murder and humiliation of females is not only a staple of the news, but an important cornerstone of the nation’s entertainment.

The mainstream culture is filled with the most gruesome forms of misogyny, and pornography is now a multibillion-dollar industry — much of it controlled by mainstream U.S. corporations.

One of the striking things about mass killings in the U.S. is how consistently we find that the killers were riddled with shame and sexual humiliation, which they inevitably blamed on women and girls. The answer to their feelings of inadequacy was to get their hands on a gun (or guns) and begin blowing people away.

What was unusual about Sodini was how explicit he was in his blog about his personal shame and his hatred of women. “Why do this?” he asked. “To young girls? Just read below.” In his gruesome, monthslong rant, he managed to say, among other things: “It seems many teenage girls have sex frequently. One 16 year old does it usually three times a day with her boyfriend. So, err, after a month of that, this little [expletive] has had more sex than ME in my LIFE, and I am 48. One more reason.”

I was reminded of the Virginia Tech gunman, Seung-Hui Cho, who killed 32 people in a rampage at the university in 2007. While Cho shot males as well as females, he was reported to have previously stalked female classmates and to have leaned under tables to take inappropriate photos of women. A former roommate said Cho once claimed to have seen “promiscuity” when he looked into the eyes of a woman on campus.

Soon after the Virginia Tech slayings, I interviewed Dr. James Gilligan, who spent many years studying violence as a prison psychiatrist in Massachusetts and as a professor at Harvard and N.Y.U. “What I’ve concluded from decades of working with murderers and rapists and every kind of violent criminal,” he said, “is that an underlying factor that is virtually always present to one degree or another is a feeling that one has to prove one’s manhood, and that the way to do that, to gain the respect that has been lost, is to commit a violent act.”

Life in the United States is mind-bogglingly violent. But we should take particular notice of the staggering amounts of violence brought down on the nation’s women and girls each and every day for no other reason than who they are. They are attacked because they are female.

A girl or woman somewhere in the U.S. is sexually assaulted every couple of minutes or so. The number of seriously battered wives and girlfriends is far beyond the ability of any agency to count.

There were so many sexual attacks against women in the armed forces that the Defense Department had to revise its entire approach to the problem.

We would become much more sane, much healthier, as a society if we could bring ourselves to acknowledge that misogyny is a serious and pervasive problem, and that the twisted way so many men feel about women, combined with the absurdly easy availability of guns, is a toxic mix of the most tragic proportions.

I don't for a minute believe that all men hate women or that all men are violent or whatever the right wing wants you to think feminists believe, but that there is an undercurrent in our culture which accepts too much violence in general and too much violence against women in particular.

We need to take a good honest look at our society and take responsibility for these sick people we raise. We need to promote healthier ways to deal with anger and other strong emotions. We desperately need a healthier masculinity. We also need to abandon our antisocial and ultra-competitive society that rewards domination.

Gender, Jobs, Recession... and bad math

Usually the Toronto Star has pretty decent writing, but this was one of the poorest pieces I've seen in a while. There are some good points made, but the headline ("In shrinking workforce, women may surpass men") is misleading, and the writing jumps around without leading to any reasonable conclusion.

Perhaps this is nitpicky, but there is some sloppy math here. The article claims "there's a possibility women will soon outnumber men in the job force." The numbers quoted in the same article don't really bear that out, unless you define "soon" as "probably never".

According to StatsCan, there were 7,295,900 men with full-time jobs in January 2005 and 6,297,400 women working full-time.

By January 2008, that number had dropped to 7,186,800 for men and to 5,339,200 for women. And as of last month, it fell further, to 7,095,000 full-time jobs for men and slightly for women, to 5,339,000 full-time positions.

So the trend shows in the longer term women losing significantly more full-time jobs than men (from 2005-2009, men lost 200,000 while women lost 958,400 jobs, or put another way men lost 2.7% of their full-time jobs while women lost 15.2%). From 2008-2009, men lost 91,800 jobs and women lost only 200. Now there are 1,756,000 more men than women employed full-time. If this trend were to continue, exactly as is, it would take over 19 years for the number of men and women employed full time to equalize. I don't know about you, but I don't consider 19 years as "soon". In addition, most stimulus money is targeted to male-dominated industries, so if the stimulus package has any effect, traditionally masculine industries will see a boost, slowing or reversing this trend.

If they had included part-time work as well, maybe the conclusion would be justified (women's part-time job participation is about three times that of men). Here's the most recent Statcan numbers.

If it were true that women were surpassing men in the full-time paid workforce, why is this a problem? Aren't we supposed to be living in the land of equality?

One reason this is indeed a problem is that women still make less money than men, partly because pink-collar jobs typically offer lower pay and fewer benefits. Women-headed households are on average much poorer, even when there are two parents.

Economists also point out that men have lost high-paying jobs with health care and pensions but women are supporting families with jobs that are not necessarily as good.

The article also points out:

This trend can also mean a shift in family dynamics. "If more men find themselves home, that has important implications for the way families operate," said Julie McCarthy, assistant professor at Rotman School of Management. "It's not a bad thing – most men are amazing parents but traditionally, it's not their primary role. Perhaps this trend will facilitate that."

Why shouldn't men stay home and watch the kids half the time? Many men I know would love to have more time with their kids. And most kids would love to have their fathers around more.

Wouldn't it be nice if mommy's salary was enough to support the family while daddy took care of the cooking, cleaning and kids. Or perhaps, his EI benefits could help the family pay the bills (except that like Diane Finley said, "We do not want to make it lucrative for them to stay home and get paid for it, not when we have significant skills shortages in many parts of the country." This government wanted to make it easier for women to stay at home, but I guess the same doesn't apply to men.) Or perhaps a decent subsidized daycare system could help out when both mommy and daddy need their crappy minimum wage jobs, or when mommy is single.

Then I don't think we would worry so much about equal job participation rate among men and women.

WW2 Cooking Lessons

Via Treehugger:

Invisible cricket balls, thrifty grandmothers, and unbelievably spoiled and lazy young boys – there’s nothing like a bit of 1940s nostalgia to get you in the sustainability mood. “Two Cooks and a Cabbage” is a war time public information film from the UK’s Ministry of Food, and it's just one of the lessons we can learn from our grandparents.

Lessons learned: Shred the cabbage, add just a little water, cover it with a lid, and save the water for gravy. Or, just get yourself a young girl to cook it for you. Preferably Sally.

The Inside and Outside of Bodies and Transgression of Boundaries

I'm reading a really interesting book right now by Robyn Longhurst, called Bodies: Exploring Fluid Boundaries. She is attempting to embody geography, to bring material bodies into academic discourse, and she makes some very interesting points. So I thought I would like to share a few cool quotes.

First, on "managerial bodies in public space", she writes:

I argue, first, that highly tailored, dark-coloured (often black, dark grey or navy) business suits function to seal the bodies of (men and women) managers. Firm, straight lines and starched creases give the appearance of a body that is impervious to outside penetration. They also give the appearance of a body that is impervious to the dangers and threats of matter from inside the body making its way to the outside. It is considered inappropriate for matter to make its way from the inside to the outside of bodies (for example, farting, burping, urinating, spitting, dribbling, sneezing, coughing, having a ‘runny nose’, crying, and sweating) in most inner city workplaces. This suited, professional, respectable body, however, can never be guaranteed. Like all bodies it is continually monitored and disciplined but inevitably proves itself to be insecure.

It made me wonder, why are we disgusted and/or embarrassed and/or frightened by the transgression of things on the inside of our bodies appearing on the outside? For instance, blood:

An advertisement for sanitary napkins (pads)... showed blue liquid being poured on and seeping into the pad. The aim seemed to be to demonstrate the pad's absorbency... Although the pad is designed to absorb menstrual blood (various shades of red) the advertisers choose to use a blue liquid to illustrate the product's absorbency capacity.
[...]
If advertisers were to use red fluid to represent blood they might invoke in viewers and potential customers feelings of dirtiness, disgust and even death that would dissuade them from purchasing the product. Clear blue liquid, on the other hand, is often associated with purity and cleanliness. There are potential links with running water, the colossal cleaning capacity of the ocean, blue granules in cleaning products and laundry powers, and blue rinses (both for clothes and for (often wealthy) elderly women’s greying hair). It is also inevitable that a connection may be made with the term ‘blue blood’. Blue blood refers to

that which flows in the veins of old and aristocratic families … who claimed never to have been contaminated by Moorish, Jewish, or other foreign admixture; the expression probably originated in the blueness of the veins of the people of fair complexion as compared with those of dark skin.(Compact Oxford English Dictionary 1991:147)

On all accounts blue blood seems to be preferred over and above red blood.

But of course, women leak red. This transgression of bodily boundaries relates also to pregnant women in public places. She says:

When pregnant women occupy the public spaces (of Rational Man) they are often represented as ‘matter out of place’ (Douglas 1966:35). Women are often thought to threaten and disrupt a social system that requires them to remain largely confined to private space during pregnancy. Pregnant women can be seen to occupy a borderline state that disturbs identity, system and order by not respecting borders, positions and rules. The pregnant body, it is thought, threatens to expel matter from inside – to seep and leak. The pregnant woman may vomit (morning sickness), cry (she is constructed as ‘overly’ emotional), need to urinate more frequently, produce colostrum which may leak from her breasts, have a ‘show’ appear, have her ‘waters break’, and sweat with the effort of carrying the extra weight of her body. Even more than these leakages, she ‘threatens’ to split her one self into two – another human being is about to cross the boundary of the ‘eroticised orifice’ – the vagina (Grosz 1990:88). The pregnant body is neither subject nor object but rather exemplifies the impossible, ambiguous and untenable identity of each. Consequently, the pregnant body is often constructed as abject. It is a body that is considered dangerous and to be feared. It is also considered to be a body that needs to be controlled.

There are many ways in which attempts are made to control pregnant bodies. First, the fetus is often treated as though it were a public concern. Pregnant women’s rights to bodily autonomy are considered to be questionable. Second, this leads to pregnant women’s stomachs being subject to public gaze and often touch. Their ‘bodily space’ is frequently invaded. Third, pregnant women tend to be constructed by lovers, husbands, partners, friends, family, strangers, health workers and themselves as being in a ‘condition’ in which they must take special care in order to protect the well-being of the fetus. Fourth, pregnant women are subject to dietary regimes in an attempt to control what enters their bodies.

This reminded me of a recent public lactation "incident", which you can read about here:

Dozens of nursing mothers crowded into a downtown Vancouver H&M clothing store over the lunch hour on Thursday to protest the way the chain treated a breastfeeding mother last weekend.

Manuela Valle said three store employees told her last week that H&M policy did not allow her to nurse her eight-week-old baby in the store because it might offend other customers, and ushered her to a backroom.

Breastfeeding advocates reacted by organizing a protest — dubbed a "nurse-in" — at the store on Thursday.

The comments are interesting. Aside from mostly supportive comments, there are the usual reactions to "women's issues", from disagreement ("I think this is getting to the point of ridiculous. Of course breastfeeding is natural. But I don't think its too much to ask to cover up while doing it.") to dismissive ("Lighten up folks, lighten up! There are so many far more serious issues that all of us, including nursing moms, need to focus our time and energies on that this issue pales by comparison.")

Too Many People?

You know, I get really irritated when people talk about overpopulation. So does this guy. To me it seems like a way of shifting blame. It is about blaming people who live in the global south for environmental problems that were caused by exactly not them. I think a far more pressing need is to reduce our constant striving for unlimited economic growth and overconsumption.

The places where population is growing fastest — sub-Saharan Africa, rural China and Bangladesh — have virtually no carbon emissions, and pitiful food consumption rates. The gap is so huge that to be responsible for as many gas emissions as one British person, a Cambodian woman would need to have 262 children. Can we really sit in our nice homes, with a fridge-full of food we will mostly chuck away and an SUV in the drive, and complain that she is the problem?

Of course, there's only so many people we can fit on the earth- and, you know, feed.

But if this is a problem, is there a solution that isn't abhorrent? Some people seem to reach instinctively for authoritarian answers. The government of China has bragged that its "greatest contribution" to the fight against global warming has been its policy of punishing, imprisoning or sterilising women who have more than one child. Some environmentalists — a small minority — eye this idea jealously.

There is a far better way — and it is something we should be pursuing anyway. It is called feminism. Where women have control over their own bodies — through contraception, abortion and general independence — they choose not to be perpetually pregnant. The UN Fund For Population Activities has calculated that 350 million women in the poorest countries didn’t want their last child, but didn’t have the means to prevent it. We should be helping them by building a global anti-Vatican, distributing the pill and the words of Mary Wollstonecraft.

So we do need to reduce our population growth to something manageable, but improved social justice, security, and women's rights take care of that pretty neatly. For instance here in Canada, where women can be pretty independent, with (mostly) good access to birth control, and a relatively comfortable economic situation, we have a below replacement fertility rate (1.53 per woman). Reproductive rights are a very important part of the puzzle (Unless you're China) - just one more reason we must keep fighting that fight. As I wrote previously:

Give women more choices and they won't have as many babies - they may work outside the home, delay marriage, and use contraception. Children are expensive and less of an asset in industrial, urban societies as opposed to agricultural societies. Wealthier populations tend to also be healthier, which means less infant mortality (which generally correlates with having fewer babies).

It seems that population growth is inversely proportional to the degree to which a society is egalitarian, urbanized and economically secure. You can play with this yourself using Gapminder. Just press "play" to see how the indicators change over time.
Here, correlated with total fertility rate, is Life expectancy at birth. As life expectancy increases, fertility rate decreases. This one shows under 5 mortality rate. This one relates total fertility rate to the percentage of girls who complete primary school. Again, the trend is clear. Similarly, an increased Urban population also correlates to a lower fertility rate. Finally, increased income per person means fewer babies born.

What They Said

What she said, and what he said, and her too. And them, of course.

And especially, what she and he said, and him too.

Of course these are just a few of the thoughtful posts from today, the anniversary of the Morgentaler decision, in which the Supreme Court of Canada ruled the abortion provision in the Criminal Code was unconstitutional, as it violated a woman's right to "security of person".

Blogging for Choice: The Jane Collective

I'm too tired to write a proper post (plus there's so much amazing stuff out there already today - a lot of really great stuff), so I'll just give you a video to watch on The Jane Collective, an underground abortion service which operated in Chicago from 1969 to 1973. During a time of dangerous illegal abortions, the women took matters into their own hands, and learned to perform abortions. They saved a lot of lives:

"If you needed an abortion, for whatever reason, you took your life into your own hands – and you were terrified, absolutely terrified," recounts a member of the collective of the late 1960s. "All you knew is that you might die, that this person didn't know what he was doing and you were going to pay hundreds of dollars... to bleed to death in some hotel room."

Heather Booth, then a student at the University of Chicago involved in civil rights and antiwar movements, found herself sought out by a few young women who were pregnant, scared, and desperate. They had somehow heard that Booth knew of a safe abortionist. Soon others began to call, prompting Booth and several other young feminists to found JANE, an anonymous abortion service that provided counseling and acted as the go-between for pregnant women and doctors willing to perform the procedure.

Appalled at the exorbitant procedure fees and upon discovering that their main abortionist wasn't a licensed physician, the women of JANE learned to perform illegal abortions themselves. Eventually, the underground collective performed over 12,000 safe, affordable abortions. Word of the illegal alternative was spread through word-of-mouth, cryptic advertisements, and even by members of Chicago's police, clergy, and medical establishment.

12000 abortions and nobody died.

Currently, the abortion mortality rate for illegal abortions is 100-1000 per 100,000 in developing countries. In the United States, the death rate from legal abortion is 0.6 per 100,000 procedures.

Legal abortion is more likely to be safe.

Safe abortions save lives, something the Jane Collective was well aware of.

Miss Landmine Angola

In places in the world that have experienced war, especially if protracted as in Angola, bodies are far less likely to be "whole" and more likely be missing limbs. Even here in the West, people with disabilities are too often invisible, and a "whole" or "perfect" body is a precondition for the designation "beautiful". When was the last time you saw a model in a magazine or an actress on television who was missing a limb, or was even in a wheelchair? Can we not bear the fact that bodies reflect their experiences, sometimes in very visible ways? Would we rather the scars stay psychological, intimate, secret - so we don't have to be invested in others' pain? Or can we not wrap our minds around the fact that a wounded body does not necessarily mean a victim to be pitied? Do we not also then miss out on something important - the strength and bravery and, indeed, beauty of survivors?

A line at the upper left-hand corner of the picture reads "Everybody has the right to be beautiful." The woman standing below is surely that, dressed in beauty-pageant regalia, Atlantic waves meeting Angolan sands behind her. She is Miss Landmine Angola 2007. Showcased in the photograph are the attributes classically aligned with feminine beauty: high cheekbones, full lips, a curvaceous figure. Yet it is what the photograph, shot from the waist up, hides that makes her beauty a thing unparalleled, unusual, both tragic and wonderful. The lower half of her left leg is missing, a testament to her encounter with a landmine. She is one of several women featured in the Miss Landmine Angola project to raise awareness about the world's plague of landmines and to empower those who have survived them. Learn about the project and see this year's contestants at Miss-Landmine.org. Via Utne

Whatever one thinks of beauty pageants, this one has a positive message. The crowning of the world's first Miss Landmine will be taking place in Luanda, Angola on April 4th, 2008, the UN International Day for Mine Awareness and Assistance in Mine Action. Vote for candidates here.

Thoughts?

Tories say "nanner nanner" to Scary Veiled Women

New bill to ban veiled voters

October 27, 2007

OTTAWA -- The Harper government yesterday introduced legislation requiring all voters - including veiled Muslim women - to show their faces before being allowed to cast ballots in federal elections.

This same manufactured controversy is getting old.

Do I have to bring out the parable of the old lady and the biker again?

Some sectors of the population just love it when the mainstream legitimizes their bigotry. And politicians long ago discovered that they earn popularity points with them whenever they do or say something against marginalized minorities. Scapegoating can be good for the polls. The power differential means the bullies can have their way; how many Muslim women will get to vote on this bill?

White Woman in a Pant Suit Rescues the Dark Masses

This article which I noticed while writing my last post annoyed me so much I though it deserved its own post.

Laura Bush helps women in Saudi Arabia
First lady Laura Bush helped launch a screening facility in Saudi Arabia Tuesday as part of a U.S.-Saudi initiative to raise breast cancer awareness in the kingdom where doctors struggle to break long-held taboos about the disease.

Bush's trip to Saudi Arabia, her first to the oil-rich kingdom, is part of a regional tour that aims to highlight the need for countries to share resources and unite in the fight against breast cancer.

"Breast cancer does not respect national boundaries, which is why people from every country must share their knowledge, resources and experience to protect women from this disease," Bush said in a speech at the King Fahad Medical City in Riyadh.

Course we don't expect American pharmaceutical companies to share their knowledge, resources, and treatment drugs.

"The cure for breast cancer can come from a researcher in Washington or a young doctor in Riyadh," she added.

Well shut my mouth! They have doctors in the desert?

Bush, who wore a navy blue pant suit, arrived in Riyadh from the United Arab Emirates, her first Mideast stop. Visiting female dignitaries are not required to don the traditional black cloak that all women in Saudi Arabia must wear in public. She was greeted by Prince Faisal bin Abdullah, the king's son, who is honorary president of the Saudi Cancer Society.

She's so modern and advanced, she wears PANTS! But hey, I want to know what the prince wore, too.

Bush visited the Abdul-Latif cancer screening center, the country's first, where she met with Saudi women affected by breast cancer.

She later witnessed the signing the U.S.-Saudi Arabia Partnership for Breast Cancer Awareness and Research agreement at a packed auditorium at the King Fahad Medical City.

Saudi became the third country to take on the program, which was organized by the State Department and includes the Susan G. Komen Foundation with MD Anderson Cancer Center in Texas, Johns Hopkins Medicine in Maryland, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia.

Before the agreement was signed, Dr. Samia al-Amoudi, who was diagnosed with breast cancer in April, spoke about the pain she felt when her 10-year-old daughter asked her if she would one day be stricken with the same disease.

She said she told her daughter "hopefully you will be able to tell your children there was once a disease called breast cancer that killed women, but it no longer is the problem it once was."

Al-Amoudi, a gynecologist, said about 70 percent of breast cancer cases in Saudi Arabia will not be reported until they are at a very late stage, compared with 30 percent or less in the U.S. She also said 30 percent of Saudi patients are under 40 years old.

Al-Amoudi said many of the hurdles in Saudi Arabia are not medical. For instance, until recently, it was widely considered socially improper to refer to the disease by name in the kingdom, she said.

"People would refer to breast cancer as 'the bad disease' or 'that disease,'" said al-Amoudi.

"But today, when we talk to the highest levels of authority or are speaking in front of all kinds of media about this issue we name the disease for what it is: breast cancer," she added.

I don't know about you but I think women like this doctor are doing an amazing job on their own. Personally I'd rather hear more of what she has to say. First of all, becoming a doctor (getting through med school) is a hell of an accomplishment for anyone. She is providing essential services to women in her community. She is speaking out despite fear of reprisal (in this context, speaking the name "breast cancer" publicly is an act of bravery). Having the First Lady of America supporting your cause can bring helpful media attention, can maybe even exert pressure on the Saudi state, but how sad is it that women like al-Amoudi are eclipsed by a White Western Wealthy Wife?

Dr. Abdullah al-Amro, head of the King Fahad Medical City, said that almost one-fifth of all women with cancer in Saudi Arabia have breast cancer.

Bush, whose mother and grandmother suffered from breast cancer, was also scheduled to meet with King Abdullah and with breast cancer survivors during her visit. She will then travel to Kuwait, where she will meet with women democratic reformers, legal advocates and business leaders.

Laura Bush last visited the Middle East in 2005, stopping in Jordan, Egypt, Israel and the Palestinian territories to promote freedom, education and the role of women.

Ugh. Gag me with a spoon.

Much worse than the story is the picture that went with it:

"Unidentified Saudi female doctor"? You couldn't ask her for her name? And doesn't Bush look so smug? And the darn medical equipment is blocking my view of her perfect perfect pant suit.

Women Being Kidnapped and Sexually Exploited: Oh That's So Odd and Quirky

In recent news of the odd, a man in a position of power extorts sexual favours from women prisoners in exchange for candy. Another man kidnaps a Malaysian woman who turns down his marriage proposal. Haha, that's so odd, so trivial, good for a laugh or two before I go read the real news. You know, the important stuff:

Amazon.com makes lots of money.
O.J. Simpson blah blah blah.
AT&T makes lots of money.
Laura Bush raises breast cancer awareness in Saudi Arabia.
New York Times makes lots of money.

Via Shakesville, with this comment:

I don't understand why I need to explain why a woman being kidnapped should not be filed under "odd news," but, because I evidently do, here's the lowdown (again): In recent months, I've read under the heading of "Odd News" stories about a man branding his wife with a hot iron, a man coercing his wife into having plastic surgery to look like his deceased first wife, wives/girlfriends/exes being held against their will in various "odd" places including a coffin, women being traded for "odd" objects or offered as reparations for "odd" transgressions, "odd" forms of abuse against women, and women doing notable things good and bad, that, while newsworthy, only seem to be "odd-worthy" because they were done by women, all reported alongside such frivolous fare as "Chocoholic squirrel steals treats from shop".

More on the Laura Bush Story to come.

My Last Conversation With Aung San Suu Kyi

By John Pilger, on Znet:

As the people of Burma rise up again, we have had a rare sighting of Aung San Suu Kyi. There she stood, at the back gate of her lakeside home in Rangoon, where she is under house arrest. She looked very thin. For years, people would brave the roadblocks just to pass by her house and be reassured by the sound of her playing the piano. She told me she would lie awake listening for voices outside and to the thumping of her heart. "I found it difficult to breathe lying on my back after I became ill, she said."

That was a decade ago. Stealing into her house, as I did then, required all the ingenuity of the Burmese underground. My film-making partner David Munro and I were greeted by her assistant, Win Htein, who had spent six years in prison, five of them in solitary confinement. Yet his face was open and his handshake warm. He led us into the house, a stately pile fallen on hard times. The garden with its ragged palms falls down to Inya Lake and to a trip wire, a reminder that this was the prison of a woman elected by a landslide in 1990, a democratic act extinguished by generals in ludicrous uniforms.

It's sort of hard to read or listen to an interview with Aung San Suu Kyi and not fall just a little bit in love. She has distinguished herself as one of the great heroic figures of our time, although she is quick to dismiss it:

"People I've spoken to regard you as something of a saint, a miracle worker."

"I'm not a saint and you'd better tell the world that!" "Where are your sinful qualities, then?"

"Er, I've got a short temper."

"What happened to your piano?"

"You mean when the string broke? In this climate pianos do deteriorate and some of the keys were getting stuck, so I broke a string because I was pumping the pedal too hard."

"You lost it ... you exploded?"

"I did."

"It's a very moving scene. Here you are, all alone, and you get so angry you break the piano."

"I told you, I have a hot temper."

I tend to disagree with hero worship, since it discounts the daily struggles of the people. But a hero provides an entry point, an interviewable spokesperson, and 30-second sound bytes that drive today's media. Put simply, a hero gets on TV. And a hero can more easily be emulated. Aung San Suu Kyi may not be a saint, but she is indeed a hero, and so are the monks, the Karen, and other regular people in Burma. Their people power faces the immense military power of the junta; we in the West could certainly learn from them.

... no matter the regime's physical power, in the end they can't stop the people; they can't stop freedom. We shall have our time.

Read the rest of the article here

The Shape of a Mother

The Shape of a Mother shows the beauty of the female form during and post pregnancy.

One day I sat in a restaurant in Anaheim, California eating breakfast, when a woman passed by my table with her infant carrier in tow. As she lifted it up to fit between the tables, her shirt raised and I saw that, although she was at a healthy weight and her body was fit, she had that same extra skin hanging around her belly that I do. It occurred to me that a post-pregnancy body is one of this society's greatest secrets...

I don't know about you but I think the photo on the right is absolutely gorgeous. You can see the life weight of her heavy breast and the aesthetic texture of her stretch marks. Whereas this photo is artistic, most of the other photos are more like snapshots. There are photos of lovely round bellies, babies, and stretch marks.

This is a very cool site. Check it out. Reminds me of another really interesting project which shows photographs of normal breasts (Obviously NSFW).

(Via Cranky Fitness)

Uganda: Women Start Own Bank, Building on their Savings Group

I first read about these savings groups in a very cool book: Shadow Cities: A Billion Squatters, A New Urban World. Sometimes known as a merry-go-rounds or savings circles, these grassroots groups build on both the self-help and cooperative models.

Here's an example of how they can work: a group of neighbourhood women get together and they each contribute a small amount on a regular basis (say, a dollar a week) to the pot. Then at a predetermined period of time, say, each week, one woman gets the entire pot. She can use this money to pay for her kids' school, to improve her (usually self-built) home, pay off debts, to purchase materials for a small business, or whatever else she may need. The next week, the next woman in line gets the pot. And it keeps going around and around, meaning each woman can rely on a tidy sum of money a couple of times a year.

Recently, in Uganda, one of these groups, grown too large to handle the savings circle model, expanded to something resembling a community bank.

It started five years ago as Nigiina, a village group where women meet, discuss development issues, party and exchange gifts on a merry-go-round basis.

Bukesa Women Kwagalana Group has since graduated into something more serious - a village bank with 320 'shareholders'. <AllAfrica.com>

More:

A 320-member women’s merry-go round group, (Nigiina), is in the process of transforming itself into a Savings & Credit Cooperative (SACCO).

The group started five years ago as a gift-giving group.

Every week, they would come together, deposit money or gifts in a pool and give it to a member. But as the group grew, the members had the good sense to realise their business model had limitations.

For starters, the bigger the group grew, the longer the intervals between gifting for a member. Secondly, it was only a matter of time before differences of opinion about how to employ the monies tore the group apart.

In a SACCO, there are well laid out rules and procedures for how surpluses are created and spent. <New Vision>

Yep, good thing they have us, those helpless women, those Africans, those Third-Worlders.

Three Things to Read - Especially for Women

I'm back in town and trying to catch up on my reading and these three articles crossed my path within a few minutes of each other, and they are tossing around in my head, in a magical cosmic salad of sorts.

I'm too tired to write anything coherent about them at the moment, so without further ado (plenty of ado tomorrow, I promise) I direct your attention to these three posts:

Firstly, check out Wrong, Wrong, Wrong, Misogynist, Wrong, from Fundie Watch (who somehow always manages to turn these fundie rants from freaky to funny).

After reading that (yes, I think the order is important), visit a cat and twenty, for in defense of male-bashing... because, well, she's got a point.

And the multifaceted Poor Bashing...the sexualization of poor wimmin is actually the erotic oppression of ALL wimmin from Dark Daughta. This is of particular interest to me, as I'm currently trying to navigate all the political implications of sexuality in my own life.

men... women... relationships... power... sexuality... anger... fear... There's a lot in these articles. So grab a hot drink and get readin'.

Interview with a Young Afghan Girl: "If I go to school who is going to take care of my little brother and sister? "

Every day her mother makes her some Bolani (Afghan fast food) and sells each one for 5 afg, almost ten cents.

She is 9 years old and wishes to go to school one day. She wishes that one day they'll have food at home and a schoolbag for her brother. She wishes for the day when he will have shoes on his feet. She is tired.

I asked her if she likes to go to school.

"If I go to school who is going to take care of my little brother and sister? Who is going to feed my mother? We don’t have a home, we don't have food, and we don't have money. That is why I am coming to the street to sell Bolani and earn a little money, to buy food for my family", she answered.

I looked down at her feet in the old torn shoes. Her toes came out and were terribly harmed. She suffers from her long walks to reach this place to sell her bread.
"Look I have no shoes to go to school; I walk 30 minutes to get here. And here I am not comfortable also, because the traffic comes towards me, forcing me to leave this place. At night when I go back home I am tired and I can’t play. So I go to sleep and early in the morning I wake up again and take me and my breads back to this place", she said.

Interview by Afghan Lord.

Legalizing education for girls, and even building schools isn't enough to ensure the education of girls (or boys). The ongoing fighting and the resulting lack of stability means little economic activity and much grinding poverty for much of the Afghan population. Poor children, as illustrated here by this interview, cannot attend school, even when it is available. They do what they can to survive. Until the airstrikes and heavy fighting stop, the country cannot truly be rebuilt, poverty and womens rights cannot be dealt with, and things like womens' rights and the education of girls will continue to be only a dream. As I've said before, Canada and the other NATO countries are using the women of Afghanistan to justify their military occupation to their own people. For the Afghan people, the Taliban pose only as much a threat as the warlords pose - the warlords we are allied with.

- Every 30 minutes, an Afghan woman dies during childbirth
- 87 percent of Afghan women are illiterate
- 30 percent of girls have access to education in Afghanistan
- 1 in every 3 Afghan women experience physical, psychological or sexual violence
- 44 years is the average life expectancy rate for women in Afghanistan
- 70 to 80 percent of women face forced marriages in Afghanistan
Source: IRIN News, March 8, 2007

Or maybe, as the Fraser Institute thinks, making them pay for education is the answer.

Women & Children are 14 Times More Likely to Die During a Disaster, yet Gender Perspective Missing in Climate Change Discussions

UNITED NATIONS, Aug 2 (IPS) - When the United Nations concluded a two-day debate Wednesday on the potential devastation from climate change, it covered a lot of territory: deforestation, desertification, greenhouse gases, renewable energy sources, biofuels and sustainable development.

But one thing the debate lacked, June Zeitlin executive director of the New York-based Women's Environment and Development Organisation (WEDO) told IPS, was a gender perspective.

"Women and children are 14 times more likely to die than men are during a disaster," she said.

In the 2004 Asian Tsunami, 70 to 80 percent of overall deaths were women. And in the 1991 cyclone disasters that killed 140,000 in Bangladesh, 90 percent of victims were women.

"Similarly in industrialised countries, more women than men died during the 2003 European heat wave," Zeitlin told a panel discussion Tuesday, in advance of a first-ever thematic General Assembly debate devoted exclusively to climate change.

She also said that following the August 2005 Hurricane Katrina in the United States, African-American women who were the poorest population in some of the affected states of Alabama, Louisiana, and Mississippi faced the greatest obstacles to survival.

She argued that women make up the majority of the world's poor, and in particular the world's rural poor, and are largely responsible for securing food, water and energy for cooking and heating.

"These statistics beg the question: Why? And what can we learn from this to fashion more effective solutions to the climate change crisis," Zeitlin said.
[...]
Zeitlin of the Women's Environment and Development Organisation said women have always been leaders in community revitalisation and natural resource management.

"Yet women are so often barred from the public sphere and thus absent from local, national and international decision-making related to natural disasters and adaptation."

There are plenty of examples where women's participation has been critical to community survival.

In Honduras, she said, La Masica was the only community to register no deaths in the wake of Hurricane Mitch in Central America in 1998 due to an early warning system operated by women in the community. (Full article at IPS News)

Women and children bear the highest degree of effect from disasters caused by climate change. Not coincidentally, they also have the least ability to effect decision-making power in the greater public sphere.

Proposal: in a true democracy a person would have input into a decision in the proportion to which that decision affects her or him. In the case of pregnancy and abortion, women, not men, should have veto power. Those who live in a neighbourhood should have power over what kind of development that neighbourhood will undergo, more so than the developer whose only interest in the neigbourhood is to build, make money, and skedaddle. People who are dying because of pollution in their town should have say in where factories can be located and how industry conducts itself in their town.
It's pretty simple, really.

Underpaid women: Stupid Letters to the Editor

You know, I have no one to blame but myself. I know how the National Post makes my head spin, and yet some macabre force compells me to read it.

Anyways, today I found this little gem of a letter to the editor:

Underpaid women
Re: Why Men Earn More, editorial, July 23.

The bottom line is that if women want to earn as much as men, they have to behave like men in the employment marketplace. That usually means: work longer hours at intellectually challenging, personally unrewarding careers that offer a poor workplace environment, physical hazards, pay linked to performance, an imposition on nonworking lifestyle choices or some combination of the above.

Furthermore, women would have to take on more responsibilities, make family sacrifices and be more productive in the jobs they have. That's how men do it. Women can do it too, if they so choose.

Now I could politely tell the author to climb back into the cave from whence he came, and let us women go back to eating bonbons while our menfolk hunt for our dinner, but I think I'll take the high road today. Some facts might be a better response.

First, we need to get to the heart of his argument, which appears to be that women, compared to men:

1. work shorter hours in more rewarding and challenging careers
   
2. experience better workplace environments, and fewer physical hazards
   
3. are payed based on something other than performance
   
4. make poor lifestyle choices
   
5. take less responsibilities and make fewer family sacrifices
   
6. are less productive in their jobs than men.
   

Are any of these true?

1. Do women work shorter hours in more rewarding and challenging careers? When all women are compared with all men in paid employment, women's earnings in 2003 averaged only 63.6% of men's. This is indeed due in part to womens' shorter average paid working hours. (Of course, when unpaid work is added, women and men both work nearly 9 hours a day). Often paid working hours are not a matter of choice; women are overrepresented in part-time, contract and temporary work, and women are less likely to be paid for overtime hours. When adjusting for the difference in working hours, the gap decreases to 70.5% - that is, women make 70.5% of the average earnings of men working full-time for a full year. Lastly, more women than men head single parent households, which significantly impacts the quantity of paid hours worked. (Most data from here, here, and here) As to whether women work more rewarding jobs, that is probably fairly subjective, but we do know that women are overrepresented in the lowest paying jobs like cashiers, food service, and child care jobs and underrepresented in the highest paying occupations like senior managment, law, and dentistry. I suppose a case could be make that scanning bar codes all day is more rewarding than looking at nasty teeth, but otherwise I think most people would prefer the higher paying jobs - for the pay, the challenge, and the status.
   
2. Men do represent about 3/4 of those injured in the workplace - however, we do have labour laws for a reason. Willingness to be injured is fortunately not a requirement for a decent wage. This means we should continue trying to reduce workplace injuries overall, not demand women experience a greater share. There are other risks women face more than men: including sexism on the job, sexual harrassment, repetitive stress injuries, toxic chemicals. Do women have better working environments? Hard to say, but probably men and women both have equally shitty workplaces.
   
3. Are women paid for something other than performance, more often than men? This appears to be true, but it is not exactly a good thing. Pay-for-performance tends to result in higher pay not lower pay. So, yes please, we'd like some more of that, thank you. I expect it isn't likely to happen any time soon since the kinds of jobs that reward performance aren't typically nursing, teaching, and clerical.
   
4. Women make poor lifestyle choices. Where to even begin with this one. Most likely the letter writer is referring to having children, since I can't imagine what other lifestyle choices affect employment so differently for men and women. One thing: it takes both a man and a woman to make a baby, so why should a woman be poorer just because it is her body in which the fetus must grow? But, the fact is, we do, which is part of the reason reproductive choice is so important.
   
5. Women take less responsibility and make fewer family sacrifices. This is sort of funny. I suppose if you were to remove child care, and husband care, and elder care from the picture, then it could be true. Also, one of the things women know when they start a family is that they are making a big sacrifice - their job opportunities and pay almost certainly decrease - unlike men, who experience the opposite. That could be one of the reasons women are delaying marriage and children longer and longer.
   
6. Women are less productive than men. This I couldn't find any data on, either way. We know two things definitely improve productivity - one is technology, since improved technology allows fewer labour hours to accomplish more. The second is training and education. Neither of those are related to gender.
   

It is true than when women behave like men (mostly meaning not having any children), they tend to make similar wages.

The thing is, women, in some people's eyes, don't do the same work as men. They stay home having babies and knitting dirndls while the men are out hunting bear and fending off the Visigoths, so naturally they get paid less... It's easy to caricature this view (dirndls versus Visigoths, etc), but there may be some truth in it. Some research suggests that when women behave as men do--not having babies, mainly--the income gap largely disappears. If so (I won't claim the matter has been definitively settled), the question facing women is a stark one: What do you want, kids or cash?<Straight Dope>

Not very family friendly, is it?

One of These Countries is Not Like the Others

Let's play a game.

What do these countries all have in common:

Chile
Philippines
Sri Lanka
India
Bangladesh
Pakistan
Israel
Mozambique
Liberia
UK
Germany
Canada

... something not shared by that beacon of women's rights, the United States of America.

Yep, these nations, and many others, have been run by women.

In America there has been no woman president. Only 16% of congress are women. Well, someday perhaps the USA will catch up. Maybe the Philippines or India can come and liberate American women.

In Canada, we aren't exactly doing so well, either. No women lead any of the four major parties. We have never had more than 21% women in parliament, with few of these coming from aboriginal, immigrant or other minority women.

Granted, attaining gender parity in politics may not be the most urgent and pressing matter facing women, but it is one visible marker that helps us guage our progress.

Inspired by India electing its first woman president, Pratibha Patil.