This website hosts a long collection of links to mainstream media news articles about acts of violence that reference antidepressants in some way. Of course this does not establish causation between taking antidepressants and violence, but it still may be of interest to anyone who studies issues related to products liability, disability law, health law, etc.
From hermanifesta, a new arrival in feminist cyberspace:
[B]logging can be interpreted as a feminist legal method, as an added method to Katharine Bartlett’s exploration of feminist legal methods (asking the”woman question,”feminist practical reasoning, consciousness-raising). * * *
[F]eminist blogging is doing the law in ways that are not currently valued or even recognized, but must be in the near future to understand the FLT of the third-wave and beyond. * * * [T]he internet is impacting all aspects of our culture, for better or worse, and feminists need to embrace this new form of activism. * * * [T]heorists should take note of the ways in which this phenomenon is changing the way we feminists DO the law!
Welcome to the blogosphere, hermanifesta!
-Bridget Crawford
Family law scholars have increasingly turned to the empirical sciences in their teaching and scholarship to help define problems worthy of exploration, provide the data necessary to develop and test hypotheses, and deepen their understanding of the interaction between law, human behavior, and families. Few problems in family law do not have an empirical dimension or a set of issues that cannot be enhanced through interdisciplinary connections. This conference addresses the growing interest in social science and family law by drawing together prominent family law scholars and some of today’s leading social scientists of the family.
Mirror of Justice has an account. Below is an excerpt:
“… As evidenced by a number of documents available on the internet [link], as well as by some rather angry, though sometimes humorous blogs [link], and by the experience and general mood and convictions of faculty and students, AMSL is engulfed in an atmosphere of fear – fear for one’s job, and for one’s future should one cross an administration that has shown itself determined to squelch all dissent. Faculty members, both tenured and tenure-track, have been threatened with termination. The Dean has pocketed ballots and stalked out of faculty meetings unilaterally declaring them adjourned.
“Although the faculty has maintained confidentiality regarding all the specific reasons for the vote of no-confidence in Dean Dobranski, one thing not confidential is the reaction of the Board of Governors to a detailed list of the Dean’s abuses: a bald reiteration of complete confidence in Dean Dobranski, followed by a year long refusal to have any substantive discussions with the faculty regarding issues of academic freedom and faculty governance. The Board also has refused repeated requests for intervention to see that the faculty’s views are taken into account in regard to the decision to close down the school and transfer its assets to Florida.
“We ask our colleagues at Mirror of Justice and elsewhere whether it is in keeping with Catholic Social Teaching – or even with basic standards of human decency – for a Board of Governors to simply ignore the faculty’s detailed allegations of the denial of appropriate faculty governance and academic freedom? Are threats to people’s jobs, should they dare speak out against a major change that may (indeed most likely will) bring ruin to the school, acceptable? What do conditions at AMSL tell us about Catholic legal education – especially if, as appears the case, Catholic law faculty from other institutions who serve on our Board of Governors are willing to let the school be destroyed in this manner? Finally, of course, we would ask for prayers and advice on how best to deal with this deplorable situation.”
“For Your Entertainment” by Kira Cochrane, in The Guardian, excerpt below:
… The publicity campaigns for many of these films flag up the prospect of watching a nubile young woman being tortured as a genuinely pleasurable experience. So, for instance, a recent US billboard campaign for the upcoming (mainstream) film Captivity featured the film’s star Elisha Cuthbert (just voted the 10th sexiest woman in the world by the young male readers of FHM magazine) in a series of four photographs. In the first (labelled ABDUCTION) a black-gloved hand covers her mouth. The second (CONFINEMENT) shows her, with bloody fingers, struggling to get out of a cage. The third (TORTURE) has her face encased in an odd white mask, tubes shoved up her nose, and apparently filled with blood. Finally, under the word TERMINATION, she is shown laid out, apparently dead.
The billboard attracted a barrage of complaints, with Jill Soloway (one of the writers of Six Feet Under) leading a campaign against it – the poster was soon taken down. In a piece on the Huffington Post website, Soloway wrote that the images were “the most repulsive, horrifying, woman-hating, human-hating thing I have ever seen in public” and didn’t just represent “horror, this wasn’t just misogyny … It was a grody combo platter of the two, the torture almost a punishment for the sexiness. It had come from such a despicable inhuman hatred place that it somehow managed to recall Abu Ghraib, the Holocaust, porn and snuff films all at once.” Joss Whedon, creator of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer TV series, agreed, writing in a letter to the MPAA, the US ratings board, that the ad campaign “is not only a literal sign of the collapse of humanity, it’s an assault … this ad is part of a cycle of violence and misogyny that takes something away from the people who have to see it. It’s like being mugged.”
Many of today’s torture porn films are being made on tiny budgets by little-known directors, but with the release of the new Tarantino/Rodriguez double-bill, Grindhouse – designed as a tribute to the ultra-violent B-movie programmes of old – the trend officially reaches the mainstream. Made up of two films plus a clutch of trailers for non-existent movies, Grindhouse bombed when it was released in the US last month. American audiences were said to have been put off by the three-hour running time, and last week it was announced that Grindhouse will be released in a different format in the UK, the two films sold as separate features. Whether either film is any good is still up for debate – I, for one, found them both suicidally boring. What isn’t in question is the disturbing attitude towards women in these films. …
Jody Raphael, Senior Research Fellow, DePaul College of Law, has recently published the third book in her women, poverty, and violence trilogy, a feminist work (a ten-year project) that uses women’s own voices to show how violence makes and keeps women poor. Publisher’s webpage here.
From the organizational website:
The United States and Canada face a dangerous shortage of trained abortion providers. In 2000, 87% of the counties in the United States had no provider (1). The”graying”of current providers (57% of whom are over the age of 50 (7) ), violence that targets physicians, and restrictive legislation threaten to drive these numbers even lower. In addition, medical schools are simply not addressing the topic; most physicians are graduating with little more than circumstantial knowledge of abortion.
Medical Students for Choice ® stands up in the face of opposition, working to destigmatize abortion provision among medical students and residents, and to persuade medical schools and residency programs to include abortion as a part of the reproductive health services curriculum.
Today MSFC is an internationally known non-profit organization with a network of over 10,000 medical students and residents around the United States and Canada. We are tomorrow’s abortion providers and pro-choice physicians.
Learn more here.
Mary Dudziak of the Legal History Blog was kind enough to tag this blog, so now I get to name five bloggers deserving of this award. Keeping the list at five is tricky, and many of my favorite bloggers have already received this award, so I will try not to duplicate winners. Here goes:
1. Siva Vaidhyanathan at Sivacracy: He drew me into blogging because he made it seem like so much fun. “Just for the fun of it” is a fantastic reason to blog.
2. Bridget Crawford at this blog: She is one of the smartest and coolest feminist law professors anywhere.
3. Ms. Jared at Sinister Girl: She writes in interesting ways about her life, and she is incredibly insightful.
4. Liz Spikol of The Trouble With Spikol: Honest, funny, and compassionate, she also makes me miss Philadelphia terribly.
5. All the law student bloggers at Ms. JD: I may not always agree with you, but your activism and sisterhood makes me very, very proud and hopeful for the future.
–Ann Bartow
The Ad Council, in conjunction with the U.S. Department of Justice and the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, has developed a series of “Online Sexual Exploitation” public service advertisements designed “to educate teenage girls about the potential dangers of posting and sharing personal information online.” You can read more about the campaign here. Now, as a general matter, given what I do for a living, I err in favor of believing that educating people is a positive thing. However, the fact that there is a whole campaign directed specifically at “teenage girls” is kind of a warning sign that there is going to be some creepy and sexist blaming and shaming going on. Remember “This is your brain on drugs. Any questions?” It’s worse. Do I exaggerate? Decide for yourself.
–Ann Bartow, via Law Professor Dundee
Update: Two great comments with links that deserve enhanced visibility: Diane Dees provides a link to the Ad Council, so you can give them your input about this abomination, and Liz Losh notes she has highlighted some other creepy PSAs.
A meditation on summer by the Tenured Radical. Here is a short excerpt:
If anyone ever asks why people go into college teaching there are many important things to say about the satisfactions this career can deliver. But there’s one thing we could all agree on, I think, regardless of our field, ideological bent, or temperament. To paraphrase Bill Clinton:”It’s the vacations, stupid.
Call for Proposals: Inaugural Texas Junior Legal Scholars Conference, August 10-11th, 2007
From the announcement:
We encourage submissions on a wide range of topics. We hope to present works from a multitude of perspectives:legal, economic, critical, historical, comparative, literary, political, sociological, philosophical, practical, and interdisciplinary. Possible panel/paper subject areas include – but are certainly not limited to –Antitrust, Civil or Criminal Litigation, Contracts, Corporate and Securities Law, Health Law, Immigration, Intellectual Property, International Law, Legal History, Property, Tax and Torts. Proposals from those who would like to organize panels of multiple papers are welcome. Depending on the number of participants, panels will be established based on similar topics.
The conference will be held at the Texas Wesleyan School of Law, located in downtown Fort Worth. The law school is less than thirty miles from Dallas. Downtown Fort Worth and the immediate vicinity provide a vibrant atmosphere with an attractive combination of cultural, shopping, residential, dining, and entertainment options.
Deadline for Submissions: June 1, 2007. Notification of Accepted Papers: June 18, 2007
Proposals will be accepted on a rolling basis. Submissions received after June 1 may be accepted on a space-available basis. Proposals must contain the following information: (1) Name, Address, Telephone, and E-mail; (2) Title of Presentation; (3) Brief description of presentation idea; and (4) School Affiliation and Position. Completed papers are not required, although are welcome. For full panel proposals, please submit the above information for each participant.Sponsored by Texas Wesleyan University School of Law in cooperation with Southern Methodist University, Dedman School of Law; South Texas College of Law; Texas Southern University, Thurgood Marshall School of Law; Texas Tech University School of Law; University of Houston Law Center.
E-mail submissions are preferred. Please send submissions to:
Professor Meredith Conway
Texas Wesleyan University School of Law
1515 Commerce Street
Fort Worth, Texas 76102
E-mail mconway@law.txwes.edu
From today’s WaPo:
A female freelance writer who blogged about the pornography industry was threatened with rape. A single mother who blogged about “the daily ins and outs of being a mom” was threatened by a cyber-stalker who claimed that she beat her son and that he had her under surveillance. Kathy Sierra, who won a large following by blogging about designing software that makes people happy, became a target of anonymous online attacks that included photos of her with a noose around her neck and a muzzle over her mouth.
As women gain visibility in the blogosphere, they are targets of sexual harassment and threats. Men are harassed too, and lack of civility is an abiding problem on the Web. But women, who make up about half the online community, are singled out in more starkly sexually threatening terms — a trend that was first evident in chat rooms in the early 1990s and is now moving to the blogosphere, experts and bloggers said.
A 2006 University of Maryland study on chat rooms found that female participants received 25 times as many sexually explicit and malicious messages as males. A 2005 study by the Pew Internet & American Life Project found that the proportion of Internet users who took part in chats and discussion groups plunged from 28 percent in 2000 to 17 percent in 2005, entirely because of the exodus of women. The study attributed the trend to “sensitivity to worrisome behavior in chat rooms.”
Joan Walsh, editor in chief of the online magazine Salon, said that since the letters section of her site was automated a year and a half ago, “it’s been hard to ignore that the criticisms of women writers are much more brutal and vicious than those about men.”
Arianna Huffington, whose Huffington Post site is among the most prominent of blogs founded by women, said anonymity online has allowed “a lot of those dark prejudices towards women to surface.” Her site takes a “zero tolerance” policy toward abusive and excessively foul language, and employs moderators “24/7” to filter the comments, she said. …
Read the entire article here.
Authors Moin A. Yahya and James Stribopoulos conclude that it does. Here is the abstract of their article:
A recent study by Cass Sunstein identified ideological differences in the votes cast by judges on the United States Court of Appeals in certain types of cases. He also found that these patterns varied depending on the ideology of an appellate judge’s co-panelists. In this study, we undertake a similar examination of the busiest appellate court in Canada, the Court of Appeal for Ontario. This study collects data on the votes cast by individual judges on that court in every reported decision between 1990 and 2003. Each case was coded by type, for example “criminal law”, “constitutional law”, or “private law”. In addition, the votes cast by individual judges in each category were tracked based on variables such as the type of litigant, the political party that appointed the judge, and the judge’s gender.
This study reveals that, at least in certain categories of cases, both party of appointment and gender are statistically significant in explaining case outcomes. Between these two variables, gender actually appears to be the stronger determinant of outcome in certain types of cases. While these findings are cause for concern, this study also points toward a simple solution. Diversity in the composition of appeal panels both from the standpoint of gender and party of appointment dampened the statistical influence of either variable. In other words, in the case of gender, a single judge on a panel who is of the opposite sex from the others, or in the case of political party, a single judge appointed by a different political party, is sufficient to eliminate the potential distorting influence of either variable. This finding suggests a need to reform how appeal panels are currently assembled in order to ensure political and gender diversity, so as to minimize concerns about the potential for bias.
Download it here.
It’s a long article, very pornography triumphant, full of jokey puns. Below are a few quotes pulled from the piece, with a bit of commentary. From the very first paragraph introducing “trim” and “boyish” pornographer Peter Acworth:
He had already worked for Baring Brothers in London and was on track to do analytical research on Wall Street.
Okay, we get it, “Baring Brothers.” Later:
It has long been noted that the San Fernando Valley is increasingly populated by strait-laced corporate managers and not by the oily, medallion-wearing men we once assumed. But succeeding on the Web, or simply surviving its escalating demands, has required more sophisticated entrepreneurial types. With the Internet pushing porn discreetly into the homes of conventional consumers, making it more a part of everyday life and less seedy-seeming, the industry has been better able than ever to attract that sort of employee. That is, as pornography becomes a more mainstream product, it becomes an equally mainstream career. If anything, Kink may be an exaggerated example of just how ordinary pornographers will get, despite the wince-inducing grisliness of its content, which even by porn-industry standards is morbidly eccentric.
So Kink.com is helping to “mainstream” content with “wince-inducing grisliness.” But the company’s employees seem to be strait laced, ivy league educated corporate types, so nothing to worry about here. Let’s see what those sophisticated entrepreneurs are up to:
… They were filming an update for the site Men In Pain. It would feature two players billed as Wild Bill and Claire Adams. Adams, who is 25, gave up on a philosophy degree to become a bondage rigger. (Last year, she tied up the actor Peter Sarsgaard for a bondage-themed spread in Vanity Fair.) She wore a fishnet top and a miniature barbell through each nipple.
She laid her leather jacket over a concrete slab, and she and Bill sat down, nuzzling. Then she looked into the camera and, very cordially, spoke:”I’m Claire Adams.”“And I’m Wild Bill.”“And welcome to a very special Men In Pain update.”Just like that, like the opener of some fireside holiday special. They interviewed each other. She asked if there was anything she shouldn’t do, any ground rules.”I don’t like my ears being slapped,”he said.
I think the choice to highlight the filming of a “Men In Pain” episode was an extremely instrumental and deceptive one, to obscure any imbalance that might exist between the number of productions focused on inflicting pain on women, versus the number featuring tied up and subordinated men. Somehow the author neglects to address any gender disparities among the Kink employees or within the Kink content. He doesn’t seem to have much interest in interviewing many “models” either, especially not out of earshot of company management. Now more about Acworth’s ascension through the porn hierarchy:
Initially, his instinct proved sound. But shortly after he moved to San Francisco to leap full time into the lavish free-for-all of online porn, Hogtied’s sales leveled off. Similar sites, often featuring the same licensed photographs, littered the Web. So Acworth started producing his own content in his spare bedroom. He would tether models to a homemade wooden scaffold, set up a tripod and film himself busily whipping, spanking and tickling them with various implements : all the while clicking still photos with a remote. He wore a black mask and called himself Peter Rogers in case he decided to abandon the stagnating business and return to Columbia.
That is one of the paragraphs I had the most trouble wrapping my mind around. We are supposed to believe that women went into his “spare bedroom” and allowed themselves to be tied up and whipped by a photographer wore a mask, and used a false name? Because he is so darned charming and trustworthy?
Later that afternoon, waiting for Wild Bill to be fitted with a gag, Cohen told me that a disproportionate number of Kink employees, himself included, graduated from the University of California at Santa Cruz.”And that’s funny,”he said, because he felt the faculty there was trapped in a very 1970s, antiporn mind-set. Another, more recent Santa Cruz grad overheard our conversation and disagreed. The two debated it. Cohen told her that all of his professors had read way too much Andrea Dworkin.”Everything there is like a Marxist-feminist analysis,”he said dismissively.
Soon, with Wild Bill tied to his column again, Adams coiled leather twine around his testicles and cinched it tautly to the back of a wooden chair, some feet away. She crouched and flicked him with her finger, hard. I saw Cohen turn away, wrenching his face in what looked like the empathetic cringe men make. But it wasn’t. He was yawning.
No enthusiastically pro-porn article would be complete without some derogatory reference to Andrea Dworkin of course. And yet in the very next paragraph, the author reveals that a Kink employee’s reaction to one person inflicting pain on another is to yawn. Exposure to a lot of pornography has made him numb to the obvious suffering of another person, just as Andrea Dworkin asserted it would.
Kink’s required pre- and post-scene interviews, like the one I watched Wild Bill and Adams tape, for example, are meant to break the fourth wall, assuring audiences that, as in real-life B.D.S.M. play, everything is negotiated in advance and rooted in a certain etiquette and trust : that everyone is friends. The company actually requires that each model be shown smiling during the segments.
Earlier in the piece the author inserted this parenthetical: “(There are rarely story lines in Kink’s porn, and acting is discouraged.)” Acting is discouraged, but each model is required to smile. But that isn’t acting or anything.
Three days after the shoot, 60 Mission residents protested in front of the armory. While some gladly denounced the filth they had seen, or merely imagined, on Kink’s Web sites, the protesters as a whole seemed to believe, officially at least, that not being O.K. with porn was somehow politically incorrect.
“We’re not making moral judgments against pornography,”one woman said over a megaphone as the rain started. Another assured me,”We’re not a bunch of conservative reactionaries.”They just didn’t want Kink in their neighborhood : not near several community-outreach centers and schools. Even Mayor Gavin Newsom’s office, in a statement sharing the neighbors’ general concerns, added the caveat,”While not wanting to be prudish. . . .”
Those paragraphs seem to encapsulate the thesis and purpose of the entire article. Most everyone is fine with pornography, and BDSM pornography deserves the shelter of this broad umbrella of cultural approval.
Surprisingly, the commingling of pain and sex, the very core of Kink’s business, has long been unnerving within even the porn industry itself. For decades, the conventional wisdom among mainstream porn producers was that mixing the two, specifically showing bondage and intercourse simultaneously, might invite an obscenity prosecution.”People assumed that it was in the federal obscenity statute, that there was some specification about bondage and penetration,”says I. S. Levine, a k a Ernest Greene, longtime video director and screenwriter in the San Fernando Valley.”It just became one of these things everybody believed.”Bondage, he adds, was typically only shown in films without any visible penetration and sometimes hardly any nudity. Even Kink waited until 2005 before daring to show a man having intercourse with a bound woman.
This self-imposed prohibition likely stemmed from the Meese Commission, the attorney general’s controversial report on pornography released in 1986. The commission determined that some women were forced to perform in porn : particularly”in the fringe areas of bondage [and] sadomasochism”: and questioned how people could know whether a given S-and-M scene was or wasn’t documenting actual rape.”Obviously we are not dealing with people that can act, so they can’t act the pain,”one law-enforcement agent testified. (Last month, a Brooklyn federal court found a man guilty of sex trafficking and forced labor when a female”slave”testified that S-and-M acts he filmed and posted online were not consensual.)
“Obviously we are not dealing with people that can act…” one nameless law-enforcement agent testified? Obviously we are supposed to dislike her/him and therefore dismiss her/his remarks. Now read that last sentence a couple of times and ask yourself why it is cabined within parentheticals, and why no further substantive details are provided.
…In the Reagan era, federal attorneys often had a video from a Southern California porn studio sent to places like Tulsa or Birmingham and prosecuted the company when it arrived. Thus they could lock in a far-more-conservative community standard than that of Los Angeles. But it has always been unclear what community standard applies to the Web. Moreover, while the Reagan administration fervidly prosecuted pornographers, the Internet sprung up smack in the middle of the Clinton years, a relatively tranquil time for legitimate adult businesses.
Now the author wheels out the trope about how Republicans and people in the Bible Belt hate porn, but Democrats and people on the coasts love it. Any actual statistics? Any studiers or case names to back up the obscenity prosecution claims? Any analysis of the fact that not many people had Internet access during the Reagan Administration, and that WWW access didn’t become widespread until the “Clinton years”? When “Girls Gone Wild” CEO Joe Francis was held accountable for filming underage girls, an article in The Nation painted this as some sort of unhinged obscenity prosecution by a right wing Christian who “tried unsuccessfully to force nude art-class models to wear bikinis.” Conflating arrests for actual wrongdoing with dire threats to the First Amendment is a fairly common rhetorical tactic. Still, you’d think there might be one or two New York Times Magazine editors who would realize that there is actual objective, verifiable historical data about obscenity prosecutions that could be referenced here. Why wasn’t it?
Like many companies, Kink has also developed a list of”shooting rules.”It bars things Acworth finds distasteful or dangerous, including crying, urination, blood and needle play,”forcing models to put their heads down the toilet,”filming anyone who is drunk or high and electroshocks above the waist : except in certain cases, like when using”nipple clamps where the nipple completes the circuit.”Several industry people told me that Kink is known for treating its models courteously and professionally.”They are very ethical,”says Mark Spiegler, a porn talent manager, “which is not the norm in this business, either.”
I’m sure that Spiegler, a man who makes his living off the earnings of “porn models,” is being entirely honest here and not at all self-serving, despite the fact that he has every incentive to lie, and to flatter Acworth. Now as an antidote, a few words from a truth-telling (not being sarcastic, I think he’s absolutely correct) lawyer:
Cambria, the attorney, says he sees pornographers of all stripes producing material now that they wouldn’t have touched eight or nine years ago.”Maybe many years with no consequences emboldened them,”he told me.”But it may very well have educated the public too, and that plays into the community-standard test.”The longer something is out in the open, and the more you see average people enjoying it,”the more you say, ‘Well, this is a part of America,’ “he explained.”Familiarity leads to acceptance.”
Which of course is what Andrea Dworkin, Catharine MacKinnon, and other feminists have long asserted.
–Ann Bartow
NB: A post about the San Francisco Chronicle’s love letter to Kink.com is accessible here. Also, there is a recent IBTP post about pornography with a long comments thread here.
I don’t really have a feminist angle on this topic, but I think you should read the posts here.
ChasingMoksha has an interesting story of everyday exploitation:
Yesterday when I was browsing some blogs, I ran across one that had a “blog sticker” in the left corner. The sticker said, “Stop violence against women.” I thought to myself how it would be a good sticker to display on my blog. So, I filled out the necessary request, which entails having to wait for activation. The activation cue was sitting in my spam folder today. I was about to delete it until I remembered what it was for. I did not know right away because instead of having a “stop violence against women” wording to it, it had a more generic “blog sticker request” title.
If one presses on someone’s “Stop Violence against Women” sticker, it will lead to this page. A page that is harmless enough. It lists several agencies that appear to be dedicated to stopping violence against women. However, when it comes time to actually get the sticker, I had to sort through what sticker I wanted. In other words, the whole “stop violence against women” was just a hook, an exploitation. I looked through the other sticker options and there was one available for the “Porn Lover.” Why would I want a sticker that has a pretense for stopping violence inflicted on women, when in the same breath it is distributing “Porn Lover” stickers, porn (not erotica or art, but PORN), the very culprit that inflicts and causes violence against many women. What a fucking joke.
Anything for a buck, because I know there is a buck involved.
The Situationist has an excellent post up about Amnesty International’s study about the sexual violence against Native American women in the U.S. The report itself is here.
I repost without comment (but a little extra bolding) the article below, which appeared in my local newspaper today, in its entirety, given the possibility that it will mysteriously disappear from the paper’s website:
‘Ban abortion’ signs bewilder S.C. By JASON SPENCER – jason.spencer@shj.com
SPARTANBURG : They’re not your typical dating or psychic reading signs.
But along roadways across the state, they’ve been springing up:
“Ban abortion! Make raped women have babies. Vote Republican.”
The message is in white capital letters against a red backdrop.
The earliest reported sightings in Spartanburg County came early last Saturday, along S.C. 221 near the I-26 interchange. That’s just around the corner from Dorman High School, where the local Republican Party held its county convention, which featured six GOP presidential candidates.
According to”The Chaser,”a conservative Web log, by Monday the signs had been spotted in and around Greenville, Newberry, Seneca and”all over Columbia.”
The sprinkling of signs around the Midlands and Upstate comes on the brink of the first major Democratic events in that party’s primary contest : the first nationally televised debate between Democratic candidates was Thursday in Orangeburg, and the state Democratic Party convention is Saturday in Columbia.
Beyond the politics, some find the signs disturbing.
“I have an 8-year-old. She can read now. We’re driving down the road, and she’s going, ‘Daddy, what does that mean?’ “said Greg Hinson, whose family owns a rental property management business.
No one has claimed responsibility for the signs, and nothing on them indicates who paid for them or where they were printed.
And despite the tone, the signs’ intended impact isn’t totally clear.
Among Republican presidential candidates, some : like little-known presidential candidate John Cox : believe in banning abortion”without exception.”Cox often tells a story about his mother being raped, pointing out that he wouldn’t be here today if she were allowed to have an abortion.
Sen. Sam Brownback, R-Kan., says favors abortion only in cases in which the procedure would save the life of the mother.
Other Republicans favor varying degrees of exceptions to outlawing abortion, some of them in the case of rape or incest.
Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani has said that while he hates the procedure, he believes the decision to have an abortion should be made between a woman and her doctor.
All of those men were in Spartanburg this past weekend and also stopped at conventions in Greenville and Richland counties.
As to the intended message of the signs, Spartanburg County Republican Party chairman Rick Beltram said,”I have no idea.”
“Most mainstream Republicans would be offended by that : trying to make something graphic out of abortion.”
Spartanburg County Democratic Party chairwoman Liz Patterson called the signs”mean and malicious.”
“It’s a way to create anger on both sides, and that’s not the way it should be,”Patterson said.”Whoever did that did it to make a point and to stir up to confusion.
“It’s not the correct way to handle politics or issues.”
Either way, Spartanburg County Environmental Enforcement director Don Arnold said that the signs were illegal and that if his employees saw them, they would be pulled up and destroyed.
Such signs are not supposed to be in the median or the public right of way. The only exceptions are political signs during election season, directional signs for churches or temporary real estate signs.
As for the”Ban abortion!”sign,”That’s not a political sign,”Arnold said.
“A political sign is put there by or for a particular candidate. Even though they may be pushing a Republican, Democratic or independent agenda, because they’re not speaking to a candidate but to an individual issue, those would be illegal signs.”
People caught putting up such signs face a misdemeanor charge, punishable by a fine (up to $500) on their first offense, Arnold said.
–Ann Bartow
After expressing my own skepticism about the “Blogswarm,” I noted with a relieved feeling of sisterhood that today Twisty posted these words:
… A thousand bloggers could write”it’s not cool to oppress women”on April 28, but sooner or later it’ll be April 29, and our little pet issue will turn into a pumpkin, and it’ll be dudely business-as-usual again on the World Wide Web.
Time for a Twisty bromide: Women’s oppression is a global humanitarian crisis. Any so-called political blogger who (a) who does not explicitly, strenuously, and regularly denounce it, and (b) condones an antifeminist commentarian zeitgeist, might as well rename their stupid blog”I Defend the Conviction that Male Abuse of Women Constitutes the Naturel Order, Now Where Are the Boobies?”
I am sorry to report that the number of functionally antifeminist liberal blogs is not insignificant. The spinster aunt finds, without even trying, that a gazillion examples are just a click away. It’s as easy as 1-2-3! Check out the Huffington Post. It’s the 8th most popular blog in the world! What’s the breaking news on the women’s oppression front today?
Bupkis!
Not that there’s no news about sexbots, i.e. the chick-related topic it’s cool to blog about. In fact, today’s HuffPo has got a groundbreaking post on Paris Hilton, who is facing jail time for drunk driving. According to astute columnist Chris Kelly, Hilton is a stupid skank with a 30-word vocabulary. Zounds! Not only is it thrilling to read such a refreshing and intellectually innovative viewpoint, it gives blog commenters the opportunity to do what so many blog commenters do best: reflect incisively on the female condition, i.e.”I hope [Hilton] has a horrible time in prison, and leaves as a woman.”…
Read the entire post here.
[NB: Twisty spelled “natural” correctly but when I do it above it crashes WordPress. I blame the patriarchy.]
–Ann Bartow
This Chicago Sun-Times article reports that companies like Chanel and Gucci are trying to discourage consumers from buying counterfeit products (which are illegal) and “knock offs” (which may not be illegal) by linking their production to child labor and sweatshop labor. My question, cynic that I am, is whether all of the members of the “International AntiCounterfeiting Coalition” will guarantee (and prove, if asked) that their “authentic” consumer goods are not made with child or sweatshop labor.
–Ann Bartow
Today’s NYT has a story about disparities in tariffs based on whether an article of clothing is intended for men, or for women. Here is an excerpt:
Congress, it turns out, plays fashion favorites.
Take bathing suits. It slaps a 28 percent tax on men’s imports, but just 12 percent on women’s.
Or overalls. The government imposes a 14 percent tariff on women’s, but only 9 percent on men’s.
Woven wool shirts? Men’s are hit with an 18 percent duty, more than twice as much as women’s.
There is no apparent pattern to the tariffs, which penalize men in some instances, and women in others. But the fees tacked onto clothing, shoes and swimwear as they enter the country’s ports may be the last legal form of sex discrimination in the United States, approved year after year by lawmakers and passed on to consumers.
For decades, apparel companies have grudgingly tolerated the peculiar disparities, writing them off as a vestige of smoke-filled, backroom trade negotiations.
But now, several major apparel makers, like Steve Madden, Asics and Columbia Sportswear, are challenging the tariffs in lawsuits against the federal government that have broad implications for the clothing industry, not to mention the battle of the sexes. …
Read the whole article here. It seems like a good piece of journalism, except for the NYT homepage teaser blurb which reads: “The fees tacked onto clothing as it enters the U.S. may be the last legal form of sex discrimination in the country.” Writer Michael Barbaro might want to stop by the Pentagon next time he is in Washington and learn a little bit more about the U.S. Military.
–Ann Bartow
More information here. The Pocket Part home page is here and it currently features essays by some very cool law profs, James Gibson, Wendy Gordon, and Rebecca Tushnet.
I can’t find an authenticatable source for this, just several blog entries, such as this one and this one. The first link seems to be to a real blog, at least. The second linked blog may be a piece of search engine optimizing astroturf, given its recent date of origination and the fact that other posts there include one entitled “Beijing’s Penis Emporium.” Or maybe not, who knows. Updates to follow as more information surfaces. Will law schools start taking other forms of online harassment more seriously too?
–Ann Bartow
Update: Another blog makes the same report here.
Update 2: Have solid confirmation. Here is the text of the e-mail:
April 25, 2007
To: Boalt Community
From: Dean Christopher Edley, Jr.
It has been a week since the distressing events involving a Boalt
student’s threat :a hoax : against the community at Hastings College of
the Law. I am writing to let you know that all our actions following the
incident have been taken with the intention of securing the safety and
well-being of our community and that at Hastings, while respecting the
procedural rights of the student.
On Wednesday, April 25, 2007, the Law School filed a complaint with the
U.C. Berkeley Judicial Affairs Office against the law student who
claimed responsibility for posting the threat on a website. We, the
administrative leadership of Boalt, believe that the student’s action is
clearly in violation of a number of regulations detailed in the Student
Code of Conduct. The case will be adjudicated by Judicial Affairs
according to campus regulations. Those regulations prohibit us from
disclosing the name of the student against whom we are proceeding.
Based on the facts as we understand them today, we have recommended
expulsion. This is based not only on the intrinsic wrongfulness of the
act itself, but also the disruption, turmoil and emotional toll on the
Hastings community and, to a more limited extent, the Boalt community as
well. I have received ample evidence of this through a great many
emails, some of them painful to read.
This incident has once again confirmed for me the strength and qualities
of the Boalt community. Even in this challenging circumstance, you have
engaged in thoughtful and productive discussions. We should all take
some pride in this, imperfect though we are.
Christopher Edley, Jr.
Professor of Law and Dean
Riverbend, the author of Baghdad Burning and Baghdad Burning II, has decided to leave Iraq. Read her post about this here. Via Heart.
A BLS report prepared by Sharon R. Cohany and Emy Sok. Below is the abstract:
The most striking feature of women’s labor market gains during the post-World War II period was the entry of married mothers into the work force. In 1948, only about 17 percent of married mothers were in the labor force. By the 1980s, labor force participation had become an integral part of their lives. In 1985, for example, 61 percent of married mothers were working or looking for work. (See chart 1.) By 1995, their labor force participation rate had reached 70 percent. In fact, married mothers accounted for most of the increase in total labor force participation during the post-war period.1
In recent years, however, the labor force participation of married mothers, especially those with young children, has stopped its advance.2 In 2005, the participation rate of married mothers with preschoolers was 60 percent, about 4 percentage points lower than its peak in 1997 and 1998.3 Married mothers with children under a year old (infants) showed the most dramatic changes. After reaching a peak of 59.2 percent in 1997, the participation rate for married mothers of infants fell by about 6 percentage points to 53.3 percent in 2000 and has shown no clear trend since then. In comparison, the participation rate of married mothers of school-age children (aged 6 to 17) fell by just 2 percentage points, from 77 percent in 1997 to about 75 percent in 2005.4 (See chart 2.)
This article explores the characteristics of married mothers of infants and recent trends in their labor force participation. The data in this article are from the Current Population Survey (CPS), a monthly survey of 60,000 households that provides a large amount of demographic, family relationship, and labor force information.5
Download the full article in PDF here.
From Jurist:
The North Dakota Legislative Assembly [official website] passed a bill [PDF text] Monday prohibiting abortion [JURIST news archive] in the state if the US Supreme Court [official website] ever declares that such a move would be constitutional. The measure, which Governor John Hoeven [official website] is expected to sign, passed the state House 68-24 and the Senate 29-16. In the event that the US Supreme Court overturns the 1973 Roe v. Wade [LII backgrounder; opinion] decision, the bill would subject anyone performing an abortion to a prison sentence of up to 5 years, a $5,000 fine, or possibly both. An exception would be made in cases of rape, incest, or where the life of the mother was in danger.
North Dakota has become the second state to pass this type of abortion law; Mississippi approved a similar measure [FMF report] last month. …
For more depressing news about the aftermath of Carhart, check out the Reproductive Rights Prof Blog.
Al Gore is too effeminate for Maureen Dowd. John Kerry is too effeminate for Maureen Dowd. John Edwards is too effeminate for Maureen Dowd.
Big surprise, Barack Obama is too effeminate for Maureen Dowd, and it’s all his wife’s fault. And, see also (“If Hillary is in touch with her masculine side, Barry is in touch with his feminine side.”)
And of course, she thinks Hillary Clinton is too masculine. Incredibly enough, in one 2005 column she wrote these words:
While a man writing a column taking on the powerful may be seen as authoritative, a woman doing the same thing may be seen as castrating. If a man writes a scathing piece about men in power, it’s seen as his job; a woman can be cast as an emasculating man-hater.
If she objects to being characterized as castrating or emasculating, why does she persist in pejoratively feminizing men?
–Ann Bartow
Update: While there are certainly plenty of reasons to criticize Maureen Dowd, calling her a drunken harpy who is bitter because she couldn’t find a decent man to father her children isn’t exactly claiming the moral high ground.
Katya Adler reports in the BBC News:
The other day I was waiting for a bus in downtown Jerusalem. I was in the bustling orthodox Jewish neighbourhood of Mea Sharim and the bus stop was extremely crowded.
When the Number 40 bus arrived, the most curious thing happened. Husbands left heavily pregnant wives or spouses struggling with prams and pushchairs to fend for themselves as they and all other male passengers got on at the front of the bus.
Women moved towards the rear door to get on at the back.
When on the bus, I tried to buck the system, moving my way towards the driver but was pushed back towards the other women.
These are what orthodox Jews call “modesty buses”.
The separation system operates on 30 public bus routes across Israel.
The authorities here say the arrangement is voluntary, but in practice, as I found out, there is not much choice involved. …
Read the whole article here.
Compare Wednesday’s decision upholding the federal ban on the safest form of late-second-trimester abortion with this passage from Roe v. Wade:
The statute makes no distinction between abortions performed early in pregnancy and those performed later, and it limits to a single reason, “saving” the mother’s life, the legal justification for the procedure. The statute, therefore, cannot survive the constitutional attack made upon it here.
Other than the fact that abortion cannot be entirely banned (that is still good law, right?), what exactly is left of Roe?
– David S. Cohen
Here is the entire article from Yahoo News:
DARLINGTON, S.C. – A jury has found a convicted sex offender accused of raping two teen girls in an underground bunker not guilty of kidnapping, sex crimes and assault with intent to kill.
Kenneth Glenn Hinson, 48, wiped his eyes and mouth and appeared to cry after the jury read its verdict, which followed about four hours of deliberations over two days.
“I think the verdict says it all,” he said as he was escorted from the courtroom.
Authorities had charged that Hinson snatched the 17-year-old girls from their bedroom last year and dragged them one at a time to the underground room hidden beneath a tool shed, where he raped and bound them with duct tape. Prosecutors said Hinson expected the girls to die because the room had no air supply.
However, Hinson testified during the six-day trial that the girls had consensual sex with him. He said they made up the story so they would be able to take drugs from the underground room, which he used to store marijuana.
The two young women were not in the courtroom when Hinson was acquitted. Their mothers and other relatives wept. They declined to comment after the verdict.
If convicted, Hinson had faced a mandatory life sentence without parole under the state’s two-strikes law because he was convicted of raping a 12-year-old girl in 1991.
The underground room was about the length and width of a mid-sized car with a ceiling about 4 1/2 feet high. Hinson testified Sunday that he had built the room behind his trailer where he lived.
Defense attorney Rick Hoefer spent much of his nearly two-hour closing argument Sunday picking apart what he called inconsistencies in the teens’ testimony, including how long it took them to call 911 after their alleged escape and whether they saw Hinson with a gun.
Prosecutors said any discrepancies in their stories might have been a result of the trauma the teens went through.
“We are shocked and stunned. We believed Mr. Hinson was guilty as charged. We still believe he is guilty as charged,’ said Attorney General Henry McMaster, who helped prosecute the case.
Hinson remained in custody on a federal firearms charge because he allegedly had a gun when he was arrested. Convicted felons are not permitted to carry weapons.
I wasn’t in “the dungeon,” nor in the courtroom while the case was tried, but based on media accounts of what happened, this verdict seems preposterous. Here is another account from a local news paper.
–Ann Bartow
Update: Jurors say they did not believe the accusers.
That is the title of this post at TaxProf Blog. Via Susan Franck.
Christian Science Mionitor article here. Via the Reproductive Rights Prof blog.
From the book’s webpage:
This collection draws together contemporary research into queer theory and practices, as they intersect with new media and communication technologies. It provides a synthesis of critical debates in these fields followed by empirical analyses of current and historical internet activities. These include, among others, a study of changing leathersex identities as meeting spaces moved from bars to online chat rooms, an investigation of the dynamics of racial identity as social sites moved from text-based to visually-based media and the tensions between community and audience identities inherent in commercial affinity portals.
The chapters investigate the relations between the technical, legal and industrial organization of online media and the queer practices that they facilitate. While scholarly and theoretically rigorous, its rich empirical detail makes Queer Online vital reading for activists and members of queer communities, in the academy and beyond.
At Adonis Mirror, Richard Leader has posted a provocative essay about expressions of rape and dominance in the evocation of metaphorical “tops” and “bottoms” in the mainstream political discourse. It’s an interesting if depressing essay, in which he writes:
In her 1983 Rightwing Women, [Andrea] Dworkin accused Democratic men of purposely failing to protect abortion rights out of their own selfishness, those men being bitter that feminists had abandoned the so-called sexual revolution. She wrote,”When feminist women have lost legal abortion altogether, leftist men expect them back:begging for help, properly chastened, ready to make a deal, ready to spread their legs again. On the Left, women will have abortion on male terms, as part of sexual liberation, or women will not have abortion except at risk of death.”
I’m confused about what is meant by an assertion that “feminists had abandoned the so-called sexual revolution,” but I do think the possibility that “liberal” politicians use reproductive freedom issues to manipulate women bears further consideration. The fact that 34 years after Roe v. Wade feminists are still having to devote so much time and energy to this issue demonstrates pretty powerfully that Democrats haven’t done a very good job of instantiating or defending abortion rights. In part, they know that they don’t have to, because Republicans are so much worse on the issue. But maybe they also rely on abortion as a way to deplete our resources, and deflect our attention away from issues that they prefer to dominate and control.
–Ann Bartow
Heart at Women’s Space/The Margins writes:
Iranian women activists who were part of the One Million Signatures Campaign Demanding an End to Discriminatory Laws Against Women were released April 15 after posting bail. They were arrested April 2, along with three others, for collecting signatures. I’ve blogged about the amazing and courageous Iranian women activists here, here, and here.
Learn more at the Equality for Change website.
Brian Leiter has an account here.
Today the NYT reports:
Computer forensics are playing a key role in the probe of the Virginia Tech gunman, with investigators revealing he bought ammunition clips on eBay designed for one of two handguns used to kill 32 people and himself. …
… A search warrant affidavit filed Friday stated that investigators wanted to search Cho’s e-mail accounts, including the address Blazers5505@hotmail.com. Durzy confirmed Cho used the same blazers5505 handle on eBay.
Virginia State Police spokeswoman Corinne Geller said investigators are ”aware of the eBay activity that mirrors” the Hotmail account. …
Here’s the “contemporary” part of all this that is new and unsettling: You can google blazers5505 and see some of this for yourself, including confirming the parts of the NYT article that say:
… He also sold many books about violence, death and mayhem. Several of those books were used in his English classes, meaning Cho simply could have been selling used books at the end of the semester. …
… Cho sold the books on the eBay-affiliated site half.com. They include ”Men, Women, and Chainsaws” by Carol J. Clover, a book that explores gender in the modern horror film. Others include ”The Best of H.P. Lovecraft: Bloodcurdling Tales of Horror and the Macabre”; and ”The Female of the Species: Tales of Mystery and Suspense” by Joyce Carol Oates — a book in which the publisher writes: ”In these and other gripping and disturbing tales, women are confronted by the evil around them and surprised by the evil they find within themselves.”
Books by those three authors were taught in his Contemporary Horror class. …
The next sentence in the NYT article is this: “Experts say things like eBay transactions can be hugely valuable in trying to figure out the motivation behind crimes.” I’m not sure that would be true about books that were purchased for a class. Some people claim that violent video games deeply affected Cho, but there doesn’t seem to be any evidence he actually played them. Others have asserted that violent movies may have influenced him so I guess it isn’t suprising that books he read are coming under scrutiny as well. It’s strange to be able to see some of the same evidence that investigators do simply by using a widely available search engine like Google, even though it may not be of any importance.
–Ann Bartow
From this site:
Chris Moriarty’s Spin Control was named as the winner of the 2007 Philip K. Dick Award at Norwescon 30, in SeaTac, Washington. The Philip K. Dick Award is presented annually by the Philadelphia Science Fiction Society for distinguished science fiction published in paperback original form in the United States.
Chris Moriarty is the pen name of the child of one of the smartest, nicest, coolest feminist law profs ever. If you like science fiction, put it on your list!
–Ann Bartow
According to this article in The Economist:
… In America, the proportion of site visits that are pornographic is falling and people are flocking to sites categorised”net communities and chat”:chiefly social-networking sites such as MySpace, Bebo and Facebook. Traffic to such sites is poised to overtake traffic to sex sites in America any day now.
Does this mean the internet has matured as a medium? After all, pornographic content is often the first to take advantage of new media, from photography to videocassettes to satellite television.”Sex is a virus that infects new technology first,”as Wired put it back in 1993. Once a new medium becomes popular, its usage is no longer dominated by porn. Although this may soon be true for the web, however, it is not true for the internet as a whole. Much pornographic content may simply have shifted from the web to peer-to-peer file-sharing networks, for example.
Or consider Second Life, the booming virtual world. It is regularly feted as a flourishing platform for virtual commerce, yet a large portion of its economic activity relates to sex. Exactly how much is unknown, but an employee of Linden Labs, the company behind Second Life, once ventured that 30% of transactions related to sex or gambling. Edward Castronova of Indiana University estimates that sex is”a substantial portion, perhaps even the majority”of economic transactions in Second Life. (Users must first buy genitalia for their avatars, who otherwise resemble Barbie and Ken dolls when unclothed.) …
YEAs —64
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NAYs —33
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Not Voting – 3
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Grudging props to Joe Lieberman, Susan Collins, Olympia Snow, and Lincoln Chafee on this legislation. The votes of Biden, Kerry and Edwards wouldn’t have made a practical difference, but it would have been nice for them to care enough to be there. And then there is this excerpt from a recent CNN article about Carhart:
“A lot of us wish that Alito weren’t there and O’Connor were there,” Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nevada, who opposed Alito’s nomination, said.
A lot of us wish Harry Reid wasn’t such a lying weasel, too.
–Ann Bartow
From News-Medical.net:
Issues of power, workplace culture and the interpretation of verbal and non-verbal communication associated with sexual harassment were the focus of a study by Debbie Dougherty, assistant professor of communication in the College of Arts and Science at the University of Missouri-Columbia. Working with a large healthcare organization in the Midwest, Dougherty examined the question: why does sexual harassment occur?
“Power,” she said. “It was the common answer. It came up repeatedly. However, what I found were multiple definitions of power.”
Those definitions varied by gender. Dougherty’s assessment was based on the opinions and perceptions of 23 participants (11 women and 12 men) representing a range of hierarchical levels and job types within the healthcare organization. The average participant’s age was 38, and each participant had been employed by the company an average of seven years. None were doctors. After being placed in discussion groups, they openly discussed sexual harassment and confirmed what some researchers have argued – sexual harassment is more about power than sex, Dougherty said. In fact, moderators never asked participants to address the issue of power.
The findings indicate that:
- For men, power comes from formal authority, and they view sexual harassers as primarily managers and supervisors. “I have power, so I sexually harass,” Dougherty said, citing a reason for such actions. Men acknowledged that coworkers could sexually harass one another, but co-worker harassment was mainly seen as a “misunderstanding.”
- Women view power in a more complex manner; formal authority is but one dimension in male-dominated workplaces. Power to women is a negotiated process between the harasser and harassed. Dougherty said women often perceive all members of an organization as possible harassers – thinking it can be initiated by any person who is perceived as having power.
- There is a discrepancy regarding the types of actions, behavior and communication that men and women consider sexually offensive. They also differ in their views of how power in the workplace can contribute to sexual harassment. In the study, the participants never recognized that they defined power differently, Dougherty said.
“The fact that men and women were using the same word to describe different behaviors may contribute to the continued existence of sexual harassment,” she said. “So if a man thinks that sexual harassment only comes from a supervisor, he may feel free to make sexual comments to a female coworker. The female coworker is likely to see the sexual comments as a quest for power and label it as sexual harassment.”
The study, “Gendered Constructions of Power During Discourse About Sexual Harassment: Negotiating Competing Meanings,” was published in Sex Roles.
For a law school related take on sexual harassment, read this article by Linda Krieger. Here is an excerpt:
… By late last week, the public inquiry had shifted from the sordid details of the encounter to whether the situation was in some way symptomatic of deeper structural problems with Boalt’s approach to sex discrimination, sexual harassment and sexual assault. By week’s end, the chancellor’s office had publicly announced that it would review the effectiveness of Berkeley’s sexual harassment policies, procedures and educational programs for students, staff, faculty and administrators.
This is good. As one of the Boalt Hall faculty members in whom this young woman confided before she eventually filed her complaint, I vehemently disagree with those who claim that this incident demonstrates that “the process works.”
This is working? As a teacher who sat with this student in my office as she wept, who watched protectively from a distance as she barely made it through her law school graduation, as a member of a faculty that has just lost a talented dean and colleague, and as a sex-discrimination scholar and lawyer who last summer could not figure out, even after many phone calls and much Cal Web site searching, what I was legally required to do with this information if the student chose not to report, I have a really hard time viewing this as “the system working.”
As Justice Sandra Day O’Connor once observed, the primary objective of civil rights laws, including laws relating to sexual harassment, is not to provide redress after the fact, but to prevent harm from occurring in the first place. If prevention is the goal, “the system” failed miserably here. …
–Ann Bartow
From Brian Leiter:
I post to ask a favor. I’ve heard from many readers that when you search Brian Leiter you don’t in fact get my law school ranking site as one of the top results, even though you get my blogs, my homepages, and my philosophy ranking site. So, dear reader with a blog, please post a link to Brian Leiter with the hyper-link to www.leiterrankings.com, for the benefit of all those souls in Cyberspace in search of my law school ranking site. Indeed, you can simply copy this post and repost it at your site.
Many thanks!
On April 28, crablaw.com will host a “Take Back the Blog! Blogswarm” in support of women’s rights. According to the organizers, a “blogswarm” is an “organized compilation of blog posts from a variety of bloggers on a given topic of urgent common interest. It is similar to a blog carnival except that the word “carnival” suggests…a place where you might stroll leisurely for pleasure down the street….A blogswarm, on the other hand, is not a stroll, but a focused march for justice.” Feministlawprofs and others are welcome to visit and/or write for the blog to support
the rights of women to participate fully in all aspects of our society, including specifically online in the world of blogging but indeed everywhere and at all times, day and night, without fear of harassment, intimidation, sexual harassment, online stalking and slander, predation or violence of any sort.
“Blogswarm” may be an awkward moniker, and the logo may be too “60’s-strike-lefty in feel,” at least for the blogger over at “I Speak of Dreams,” but it’s a great cause.
Content can be sent to the “blogswarm’s” editor at TBTB2007@crablaw.com. More details are available here.
-Bridget Crawford
A little good news! Live Free Or…Get Partnered! NYT story here.
Not the Supreme Court, that’s for sure.
In yesterday’s opinion, the Supreme Court continued its long-standing practice of spitting in the face of poor women who need abortions. It’s already said in Harris v. McRae in 1980 that there’s no constitutional requirement for Medicaid to pay for abortions, even if it comprehensively covers other healthcare needs, including those for men. And 1992’s Planned Parenthood v. Casey, although nominally upholding Roe v. Wade, upheld all of Pennsylvania’s restrictions on abortion that severely restrict poor women’s access to abortion. After all, who has a harder time waiting 24 hours? A poor woman with no means of transportation or with a punch-clock job or a wealthier woman with means to get to clinics, stay overnight when needed, and with a professional job and the flexibility that comes with it?
Yesterday’s decision continues in that vein. How? D&X, the outlawed procedure here, is a procedure that is, further along in the second trimester, often safer than the more standard D&E for a variety of medical reasons. Who’s more likely to need an abortion later in pregnancy? Poor women. By definition, they have a harder time accessing money to pay for an abortion (thanks Harris v. McRae!), which pushes them later into the pregnancy by the time they have found money or contacted their local abortion fund for assistance. They are also less likely to have adequate medical care to determine their options early on in pregnancy, which also pushes them later into the pregnancy to have the abortion. Later in the pregnancy, D&X is sometimes safer for them.
But after yesterday, they can’t have that often-safer procedure. But then again, who really cares about poor women’s reproductive health needs?
– David S. Cohen
