Her essay is available here. An excerpt:

Fashion Police has a recurring segment called “Starlet or Streetwalker,” which is exactly what it sounds like. The panel, made up of George Kotsiopoulos, Kelly Osbourne and Giuliana Rancic, are shown pictures of women with their faces covered. Based on the outfit, the panel then has to vote if the woman in the photo is a starlet or a streetwalker. If the woman turns out to be a celebrity, her face is shown, if its a woman in the sex industry, her face remains blacked out. The panel, the studio audience and I’m sure the viewers watching at home laugh at these women and their ‘tacky, trashy clothing.’ The first time I saw the segment, it took me a minute to realize that the women whose faces were covered up were actually real women in the sex industry. I then watched with growing discomfort as I realized that these women, poor women, desperate women, drug-addicted women, women under the control of a pimp, women who are victims of violence and exploitation, were being used to highlight wealthy celebrities’ poor fashion choices. Haha.

As their faces are covered, it’s unlikely that E! asked these women for consent to use their pictures. It’s also highly unlikely that anyone from E! did a background check to find out if all the pictures they’re using for comedy fodder are even of age. It’s unlikely, aside from any legal issues, that they care.

Years ago, one of the girls from GEMS was unwittingly filmed for a cable documentary about the sex industry. Although she was just in the background her face, and her naked breasts, were clearly visible. When the show aired, strange men began walking up to her in the street telling her they recognized her, asking her to show them her breasts, asking her for sex. She was 15 at the time of shooting, had been a trafficking victim since the age of 12 and was under the control of a violent pimp who would later try to pay someone to have her murdered and leave her body in the dumpster. While her story may seem shocking, its all too commonplace in the world of ‘streetwalkers.’

I’m not comfortable with everything Lloyd says in her essay, but I respect her tremendously for speaking out on this issue, especially given a pervasive social climate in which a site like this is touted as feminist.

–Ann Bartow

Feminist Law Professors

Paul Ford writes in The Age of Mechanical Reproduction (here) of his experiences with assisted reproductive technology and the quest to have a child via IVF:

When I tell people what we are doing, they want to hear about the room where you produce. I tell them that there is a lot of paperwork. That they take your picture and look at your license. Then they walk you back to the room. You are handed a list of instructions and some stickers and a plastic cup. The cup has a forest-green lid.

In the room is a VCR. I like to write down the names of the videos so I can share them with my wife and friends . . . .

No one sets a clock, but there is a sense of time passing. You get to work and try not to think about things.

The things not to think about are: the money you are spending. How they can’t find the problem—my sperm is better now, once I quit hot baths and Diet Coke, and my wife’s plumbing looks normal on the hysterosalpingogram. Don’t think about the other dudes jacking it five feet away. Just try to keep the chair from squeaking. Try to hit the cup.

When it is complete you screw on the forest-green lid, write your name and your wife’s name on the label, put it all in a biohazard bag, and ring the buzzer. Along comes a woman, another nurse. She takes the bag and holds it up to the light. If you read the paperwork there is a request that you don’t make any jokes during this moment.

The worst thing that can happen in that room is “failure to produce.” They warn you about it. Men go in and hours later have not come out. They’re sobbing and their arms are sore. Their wives or partners are out in the waiting room, surly from hormone treatments. No one has sympathy for a man who can’t produce. They should have sympathy but they don’t. You do not want to be that guy. And so far I have not failed. Just in case, I have special videos on my phone.

The full piece is here, in  The Morning News.  Mr. Ford’s story will resonate with anyone who has ever visited (or worried about visiting) a fertility clinic.  The intense stress of infertility crackles in every paragraph.

-Bridget Crawford

image source here

Feminist Law Professors

From Temma Berg (English, Gettysburg College), this “Save the Date” notice:

Saturday, March 31, 2012

2012 Annual Women’s Studies Conference sponsored by the Central Pennsylvania Consortium and the Women, Gender, & Sexuality Studies Programs of Dickinson College, Gettysburg College, and Franklin & Marshall College

“Gender, Sexuality, and Poverty”
2012 Conference to be held at Gettysburg College
8:30 am to 4:00 pm

Keynote speaker: Dean Spade, Seattle University School of Law, Author and Founder of the Sylvia Rivera Law Project
2:00 p.m

We welcome faculty and student presentations, panels, poster sessions, and exhibits.
Call for proposals: early September
Deadline for proposals: December 1

No other additional information provided at this time, so look for a CFP in September.

-Bridget Crawford

Feminist Law Professors

This article in the UK Guardian explains the recent history behind the SlutWalk, an in-the-streets form of women’s activism that also uses social networking sites to organize and mobilize:

When a police officer from Toronto went on a routine visit to Osgoode Hall Law School to advise the students on personal safety, little did he know that he would unwittingly inspire a movement that has caught fire across Canada and the US.

“You know, I think we’re beating around the bush here,” Michael Sanguinetti began, blandly enough, as he addressed the 10 students who turned up for the pep talk. Then he said: “I’ve been told I’m not supposed to say this – however, women should avoid dressing like sluts in order not to be victimised.”

Fast forward three months from Sanguinetti’s unfortunate remarks, and a movement that was born in riposte to his loose talk has now gone international. “SlutWalking” is attracting thousands of people to take to the streets to put an end to what they believe is a culture in which it is considered acceptable to blame the victim.

Some 2,351 people have signed up via Facebook to attend a SlutWalk through Boston on Saturday, when they will chant “Yes means yes, no means no,” and “Hey hey, ho ho, patriarchy has to go.”

Further SlutWalks are planned in the states of Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Michigan, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, North Carolina, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Texas, Utah, Washington and Wisconsin.

And that’s before you get to Argentina, Australia, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Sweden and the UK.

***

Some women attended the protest wearing jeans and T-shirts, while others took the mission of reclaiming the word “slut” – one of the stated objectives of the movement – more literally and turned out in overtly provocative fishnets and stilettos. But they were all united by the same belief: that rape is about the rapist, not his victim.

“We live in a society where rape isn’t taken as seriously as it should be,” said Katt Schott-Mancini, one of the organisers of the Boston SlutWalk.

“There’s victim blaming: the idea that the victim of rape did something wrong. What you are wearing doesn’t cause rape – the rapist causes it.”

Schott-Mancini said she was herself a survivor of abuse by a former partner. “People belittled me, implying that it was my fault and that I shouldn’t be an independent woman,” she added.

The SlutWalks have particularly taken off among college students, given the location of the officer’s remarks and the high prevalence of sexual violence on campus. The US government’s Centres for Disease Control and Prevention found that up to one in four women in US universities report having experienced an attempted or completed rape while in college.

For more info on SlutWalk Toronto, see the organizers’ website here.   A few of the group’s slogans:  “Sluts & Allies unite!” “Being a slut and getting pissed off.” Here are the group’s guidelines for organizing a SlutWalk:

We don’t believe you need to come from an activist background. We believe you just need to be inspired by your own passion to do something. SlutWalk is about expressing our unity, fighting to shed the stereotypes and myths of sexual assault and supporting a better understanding of why sexual assault happens, putting the blame where it belongs: on those who perpetrate it. We believe in working toward better partnerships and conversations with our protective services and our communities to help make this happen.

If you’d like to have SlutWalk in your community, we ask that you follow our guidelines:

• • SlutWalk is not about hate, and we do not use hateful language.
  • SlutWalk aims to reclaim the word “slut” and use it in a positive, empowering and respectful way.
  • Refer to sexual assault, not solely rape.
  • Do not frame sexual assault as something solely done by men to women.
  • Women are most often the targets and men are most often the perpetrators, but all genders are affected. SlutWalk recognizes all gender expressions as those that have been and can be negatively impacted. All genders can be sluts or allies.
  • Some communities/people are at a higher risk of sexual assault than others based on their status, work, ability, access, race, identity, and a variety of other factors. We aim to recognize this and come together, in all our diversity, as people who are all affected and unite as sluts and allies.
  • Use inclusive and respectful language when discussing the diversity of people affected: men/women and all gender expressions, racialized communities, people of different abilities, etc.
  • SlutWalk is an impassioned and peaceful stance that aims to engage others in dialogue.

See more here.

-Bridget Crawford

image source: mentalxpress.com, here

Feminist Law Professors

They are most likely working, looking for better opportunities and sending money home to the family members that have stayed behind.

The number of male and female migrants has increased as has the proportion of women (from 47% in 1960 to 49% currently, with differences between countries), but what really has changed over the past forty years is the fact that an increasing number of women is migrating independently in search of work, rather than as “dependent” family, traveling with their husbands or to meet with them abroad.

According to estimates by the UN Population Division by 1990, immigrant women from Latin America and the Caribbean were the first in the developing world to reach parity with male migrants and in 2005 and by 2010 they constituted 50.1% of total migrations from this region.

In the United States more women became Legal Permanent Residents, naturalized United States Citizens and were adopted during 2009.   The number of male refugees and asylees continue to be slightly higher.    Interestingly the estimates for the unauthorized migrant population in the United States indicate that women accounted for 52 percent of the 45 and older age groups of undocumented women in the United States.   It must also be noted that an estimated 1.3 million undocumented children live in the United States of those more than 600,000 are immigrant girls.  Immigrant girls represent 13 per cent of the total female unauthorized immigrant population in the United States.

The feminization of migratory process is also evident among migrants moving from Central and South America to Spain, where in 2001 70% of all migrants were women from Brazil and Dominican Republic. According to the United Nations population Fund Caribbean migrant women outnumbered men to North America since 1950s and are well represented in skilled categories.

IOM’s forthcoming publication “Crushed Hopes: Underemployment and Deskilling in Skilled Migrant Women”, gives voice to the plight of high skilled migrant women unable to translate their education and professional skills into decent work.  Previous studies have shown that under-employed and de-skilled women are likely to suffer from demoralization, shame, depression, powerlessness, stress, intense frustration, unhappiness, anxiety as well as feeling invisible and trapped.

As quoted by IOM, one woman migrant recounts: “I had always been very active and busy, making my own money so when I was stuck at home, had no job and was very dependant financially, I felt like a piece of my body had been cut off.” Generally, the more severely underemployed they are, the more likely they will be to experience several of these disorders.

Although migrant women represent 105 million international migrants, almost 50 per cent of the global international migrant population, and most are migrating in search of employment opportunities, they are still not offered the same opportunities as their male counter-parts and are, therefore, still often disproportionately affected by risks arising from mobility.

Still it must be highlighted that even if they earn less than immigrant men, gender also affects the amount and frequency of remittances that migrants send home. For example, immigrant women in Spain are responsible for 60 percent of the total remittances sent from that European country. At the global level female migrants send approximately the same amount of remittances as male immigrants, however, IOM notes that women send a higher proportion of their income, even though they generally earn less than men.

-Sheila I. Vélez Martínez

Feminist Law Professors

That is the question posed at IBTP in a post excerpted below:

It’s breast cancer awareness month! Awesome!

There is much patriarchy to blame when it comes to breast cancer awareness month. Such as Komen. Komen, as I have declaimed extensively, has brainwashed millions into believing that the act of buying pink crap turns them into selfless philanthropists. Snap out of it! All you are doing is buying pink crap. Komen is a patriarchy-replicating commerce facilitator. They do not reduce breast cancer occurrence. They do not reduce breast cancer deaths. All they do is hook up sanctimonious shopaholics with corporate leeches who want to shine up their tarnished public images.

One may also blame such vile entities as Estee Lauder, which bolsters its public image with gratuitous pornography (see photo). There is a bizarre connection in the public consciousness between hottt! cleavage and deadly breast tumors. Remember that “Boobython” freakshow? How many other cancers can be successfully advertised with sex? Can you picture an ad for prostate cancer featuring a delicate, manicured hand squishing a dude’s junk? It blows the lobe.

Feminist Law Professors

Hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee Subcommittee on Human Rights and the Law which took place yesterday (Wednesday, February 24, 2010)

View webcast here!

Panel I
The Honorable Ron Wyden
United States Senator for the State of Oregon

Panel II
Luis CdeBaca
Ambassador-at-Large
Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking In Persons
U.S. Department of State
Washington, DC

Beth Phillips
U.S. Attorney
Western District of Missouri
Kansas City, MO

Anita Alvarez
State’s Attorney
Cook County
Chicago, IL

Rachel Lloyd
Executive Director and Founder
Girls Educational & Mentoring Services
New York, NY

Shaquana*
Youth Outreach Worker and Trafficking Survivor
New York, NY

Feminist Law Professors

Those are two questions Historiann asks in this excellent post about yesterday’s NYT article, The New Math on Campus. The point of article in my view is to help sell the idea of making achieving gender balance at colleges a goal of the admissions process. There are certainly good arguments to be made in favor of gender balance as a general matter. A lack of gender balance in many quarters of the legal profession is deeply problematic. But not because law is supposed to be some kind of dating service. If men are not applying to or gaining admission to colleges proportionate to their population, hard questions should be asked, just as they should when women are not succeeding in any given environment.

Here are a couple of data points the NYT missed:

In 2008 despite the higher number of female applicants, 68 more men than women were offered a place in the class of 2012 – 9.8 percent of men : and just 7.5 percent of women : were accepted by Yale.

In Fall 2008 the College of William and Mary admitted 43 percent of its male applicants and 29 percent of female applicants.

And:

At Harvard University, for example, the pool of more than 22,000 applicants has remained equally divided between men and women, meaning that both sexes are admitted at an equal:if dauntingly low:9 percent. Harvard:again, a relative newcomer to coeducation:has seen its percentage of female undergraduates increase steadily over the past decade from 46 percent in 1997 to 49 percent in 2006. Princeton, Stanford, Rice, Duke, and Yale Universities are in the same boat; ditto for the elite liberal arts colleges such as Amherst, Williams, and Middlebury.

–Ann Bartow

Feminist Law Professors

From here:

According to the U.S. Department of State’s Trafficking in Persons Report, some 800,000 persons are victims of trafficking each year, seven times more than in 1960. The victims are mostly woman and children who are often used as sex slaves, forced to endure harsh labor or even to fight wars. The numbers do not always include those who remain enslaved in their own countries, and many believe figures on trafficked persons are much higher than officially reported. There are some 27 million people, who are living lives as slaves today around the world. It is widely believed that there are at least 2 million children used as slaves in the commercial sex industry worldwide. Prices for these modern day slaves are at an all time low, while profits remain high, leading some to believe the problem is worse now than during the days of legalized slavery.

See also Change.org.

–Ann Bartow

Feminist Law Professors

“Men who buy sex: Who they buy and what they know,” is a research study of 103 men who describe their use of trafficked and non-trafficked women in prostitution, and their awareness of coercion and violence, prepared by Melissa Farley, Julie Bindel and Jacqueline M. Golding, December 2009. Here is a short excerpt from page 15-16:

Fifty per cent of interviewees said that they had used a woman in prostitution who they knew was under the control of a pimp. As one man explained,”It’s like he’s her owner.”As another man put it:”The girl is instructed to do what she needs to do. You can just relax, it’s her job.”One-half of the research participants (51%) said that they had observed a prostituted woman who had a pimp. Nearly one-third of the interviewees (31%), often those who bought sex in the Soho area, used prostituted women who were controlled by women pimps. Twenty-five per cent of the men interviewed had encountered a woman in the sex industry who they believe was forced into a brothel, massage parlour or another type of prostitution. Some of the men described pimps as abusive, controlling, opportunistic, coercive and violent. They described beatings and forced addiction.”Pimps get their money and abuse them. They have no respect for them at all. They treat them virtually like dogs.”One man explained,”Some are really made to or forced – like raped – and they find there is no other hope for them. Some are being held hostage and in a brothel, not all of them but in situations where she is looking to get out. I felt a little bit guilty when I was in saunas and massage parlours.”A number of the men appeared to have a somewhat nuanced if rationalised awareness of the psychological dependence of women on pimps:”It’s a cold relationship from his part. But the woman does it because she’s in love with him and doesn’t want to
lose him.”

These men’s awareness of the sexual exploitation, coercion and violence associated with buying sex is confirmed by a significant literature on violence against women in prostitution. Watts and Zimmerman (2002) at the Department of Public Health and Policy of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine noted that trafficking for prostitution and violence against prostitutes was one of the most common and severe forms of violence against women in the world (2002). A study of 240 women prostituted in Leeds, Edinburgh, and Glasgow found that 26% of women in indoor prostitution had experienced some form of serious violence from the men who had bought them in the past six months (Church et al., 2001).

The interviewees were asked about their awareness of deception and trafficking for prostitution. Forty-three per cent of the men said that it was their impression that one-half or fewer of all those in prostitution were fully informed about the nature of prostitution. Of the men interviewed, 55% believed that a majority of women in prostitution were lured, tricked or trafficked. Thirty-six per cent said they thought that the women in prostitution they used had been trafficked to London from another country. Seeming to understand the levels of abuse and vulnerability of most women in prostitution, one man described prostituted women as”orphans or from other countries who are treated like family. But others can be treated like shit if they don’t pay their fees.”Another explained,”The guy at the top normally controls about a dozen brothels and they move them around. Some of the Chinese girls move on after just one week.”An interviewee said that in Amsterdam he assumed a woman was trafficked”because of the way it was set up with a big guy standing outside,”adding that”the woman looked younger than sixteen”and appeared to be”Polish, Russian, Albanian or Romanian.”One man described with some chagrin a prostituted and possibly trafficked woman who had told him that she was going on a holiday. Later he realised”It was against her will. When I went back two weeks later, they were not there. The phone number also did not work. They bring in girls and move them around to different points so she doesn’t know where she is… it’s sick.”Another said that he had seen women with”bruises, cuts and Eastern European accents in locations where lots of trafficked women and girls are.”

Similar estimates were made by an additional 223 men who bought sex in Scotland and the US. Fifty-six per cent of men who bought sex in the US and 63% in Scotland said that they also believed that a majority of all those in prostitution are lured, tricked or trafficked into it. Studies by Anderson and O’Connell Davidson (2003) and Di Nicola et al (2009) report that most men who buy sex are aware of and have witnessed exploitation, coercion and trafficking but this does not affect their decision to buy sex.

(Emphasis added).

Feminist Law Professors