Feminist Law Professors

to footbinding.
Yes, yes, yes,

to sneakers with soul.

After admiring the success of the recent immigration marches, Barbara O’Brien at The Mahablog put a great post up outlining what she thinks makes an effective protest.

On a less serious note, last September Rox Populi wrote a post entitled “Liberal Crap I Never Want to Hear Again” and noted, “Personally, I could go a whole lifetime without hearing the offkey caterwauling of “All we are saaaaaaaaaying …is give peace a chance.”” Her commenters chimed in with offerings such as:

“Hey Hey Ho Ho” — that damn chant has got to go!

Well “the people united can never be defeated” seems to be a fairly common pre-defeat refrain,

and

“A slogan! Exhausted! Should never be repeated!”

Volume 6 is here. The Journal’s archives page is here. So much to read and think about!

You can listen to a “conversation” between Harvey Mansfield, author of “Manliness,” and doofus professor of government at Harvard University, and Katha Pollitt, columnist for The Nation and author of the forthcoming book “Virginity or Death,” here.   Via Nancy at Heavens to Mergatroyd.

Joan Walsh reviewed Caitlan Flanagan’s new book for Salon, and the piece is topped by this burb: “I never cared that Caitlin Flanagan calls herself an at-home mother, even though she’s a magazine writer with a staff of helpers. But now she’s using her battle with cancer to denounce feminism and extol her traditional virtues — and I’ve had it.” That gives you some idea of the tone and content of the article. Here is an excerpt:

…I picked up Flanagan’s new book, “To Hell With All That: Loving and Loathing Our Inner Housewife,” and I lost my equanimity. It’s mostly a lightly reworked compilation of her New Yorker and Atlantic Monthly essays from the last few years, but dressed up with a more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger introduction blaming feminism for causing women “heartache,” and a truly below-the-belt conclusion, on how surviving breast cancer confirmed Flanagan’s conviction that traditional marriage and motherhood is best. I put the book aside for almost two months because even though I’m tough, I’m not tough enough to kick someone with cancer, and Flanagan deserves a kick for the dishonest and divisive gloss these new essays give the book, and her whole career. But I guess I learned something new about myself in this process: Apparently I am tough enough to kick someone with cancer, but only after feeling bad about it for a while.

I haven’t read Flanagan’s book and don’t expect to. I’ve read some of her work in the Alantic Monthly and in the New Yorker, and I think she makes a lot of facile generalizations about people to construct “arguments” that support her particular world view. Her apparent belief that being an anti-feminist helped her survive cancer is truly creepy and despicable, and makes about as much sense as someone else arguing that maybe if she had been a feminist she’d never have gotten cancer in the first place, which is to say, none.

–Ann Bartow

Get the details at The G Bitch Spot. Afterwards you might want to scroll around a bit while you are there, because it looks like a great blog.

From this site:

The marriage debate dominated the opening weeks of the legislature after a Baltimore judge sided with 19 gay men and women, ruling that Maryland’s 33-year-old law defining marriage between a man and a woman was unconstitutional. The discussion shows few signs of dying down.

Sen. Nancy Jacobs, a Republican who represents Harford and Cecil counties, engaged in an impassioned debate with Jamie Raskin, a constitutional law professor from American University, over the influence of the Bible on modern law.

“As I read Biblical principles, marriage was intended, ordained and started by God – that is my belief,” she said. “For me, this is an issue solely based on religious principals.”

Raskin shot back that the Bible was also used to uphold now-outlawed statutes banning interracial marriage, and that the constitution should instead be lawmakers’ guiding principle.

“People place their hand on the Bible and swear to uphold the Constitution; they don’t put their hand on the Constitution and swear to uphold the Bible,” he said.

Via “jdfeminist.”

–Ann Bartow

It’s here. This link will take you to the site directory (scroll down). Via Pen-Elayne. The site is a little visually cluttered but has links to a lot of useful information. I like perusing the old advertisements. This page displays the “Silent Purchase” Modess Menstrual Pad Ad from June 1928. Women who were too embarassed to ask a clerk for sanitary napkins could hand over a “silent purchase coupon” to wordlessly indicate what they needed. Now we can pull boxes of napkins ourselves from the shelves at drug stores, but we have to ask a clerk for cold medicine. Strange world.

Great post called “Liberalism unbound: Shifting the center of gravity in American politics” at The Reaction. Rather than trying to convince you to go read it with the first few sentences, in this case the final paragraph should do nicely:

Remember that America is fundamentally a liberal society. If presented with conviction and compassion, a liberal vision for America will resonate once again with Americans. Don’t expect 1964 all over again, but there’s no reason why liberals can’t balance out conservative efforts to define the parameters of American politics. If they succeed, if we succeed, America may soon look and act more like itself again.

Via Mad, Melancholic Feminista.

Of all the comments directed at me in the comments threads at Sadly, No, the above was among the most painful, because it came from a blogger I really liked. [EDIT]: I’ve delinked from his blog, because he apologized in the comments here and via e-mail. His comment above is actually pretty funny, even though it stung, and far from the worst I received. Or, truth be told, have dished out upon occasion. [End of edit.]

Yes, I’m still reeling a bit. I had no idea a few brief comments at a blog I thought was liberal would provoke such a vitriolic, ongoing stream of name-calling and nastiness. The University tech folks even took this blog down for a few hours last Friday, for reasons I will be gingerly addressing with them next week. I guess killing this blog would be sweet triumph for some of the Sadly, No people, the Arch Enemy Defeated and all that, but probably I’ll just find another host if I need to. We’ll see. But here are some of the good things that came out of all this: Very nice support from extraordinary women and men of legal academia and/or the blogosphere. You know who you are, and I thank you kindly. Also, I’ve been powerfully reminded to try to look out for other people, particularly women, in unmoderated comments threads. I doubt I could stop a stream of abuse, but at least I could let someone know she wasn’t alone in the room, as folks did for me. Take good care. –Ann Bartow

Shakespeare’s Sister wrote a thoughtful post about the Duke Lacrosse rape situation in which she noted:

…I have often found myself in the position of having been given a”pass”by a group of straight guys. Some women will immediately know what I’m describing:a group of male coworkers, perhaps, who let down their guard in your presence, after one of them, invariably, anoints you a”cool chick,”as if differentiating you from the rest of womankind is some kind of praise. It doesn’t matter whether these guys are conservatives or liberals; they are, however, always the kind of guy who thinks the highest compliment one could give a girl is treating her like a man with tits.

This is always a weird situation, especially since I have never coveted an entrè into such a group, but let a couple of dirty jokes fly in your presence sans objection, and you’ll find yourself being led behind the curtain in no time.

And among this particular kind of guy, it’s pretty damn ugly back there.

Back there is where”jokes”like the one above get told. And if you ever laughed at a blowjob joke, they expect you to laugh at that kind of”joke,”too.

I, of course, being me, tell them that violence against women isn’t funny, and ask them why they think it is.

“Oh, come on,”they say, and that’s when the eye-rolling begins.”It was a joke.”

“How so?”I ask.”What’s funny about it?”

Of course, there’s nothing funny about”jokes”like that, so they do the only thing they can. Attack.

“Dude, I thought you were different. You’re just a feminazi like every other chick. No sense of humor.”

This is where they expect me to get hysterical, to prove their point. And it’s where I say,”Actually, I do have a sense of humor, but I just don’t get this particular joke. Explain it to me. What’s funny about it?”

Evenly. Calmly. And I wait.

“Whatever, dude. Pfft.”And the curtain closes once again.

Sara Anderson of “F-Words” read that and it reminded her of something she had witnessed. She explained:

About a year ago, I was in an ice cream shop with my spouse deciding over cookies and cream or orange sherbert when a group of about six or seven late high school or early college-aged guys came in, with a blonde girl of the same age in tow. These guys were of the jocky type, with basketball shorts and expensive cell phones, tanned and lean. The group quickly overtook the small shop while my husband and I sat back to eat our ice cream, eventually just quietly taking in the show that these kids were putting on for us. The one female in the group seemed a little nervous but eager – like she was finally getting to play with the big boys. The joking and teasing began to turn sexual and slightly obscene, with the majority of the teasing and joking being directed at the girl. She smiled along with it, feigning ignorance as to what they were talking about when they asked her if she enjoyed certain euphemistic sexual acts, and even giggled nervously when one guy grabbed her and pulled her into his lap. You could see that she was embarassed but not sure what to do about it without jeapordizing her newfound social status.

It was at that point that I understood exactly how gang rape occurs. These guys were competing with each other, showing off their virile desire to sleep with the young blonde thing. Not only that, they were competing to see who could humiliate her the most – this girl doesn’t even know what a “pearl necklace” is, what a prude. It was a game where the winner was the one who could extract the most sexual power from humiliating her.

By the time they left, I was really quite scared. I knew I’d been in situations like this before – one particularly bad one where I was in high school, drunk, and all of the sudden the only girl at a party full of college students – and did just as much this time as I had the last time. I wish so deeply that I’d had the presence of mind and courage to pull her aside and ask her if she wanted a ride home or to call a friend or for me to give these guys a piece of my mind. It still haunts me, and the only thing I’m glad about is that it affected me enough to make me vow to never stand by and let that happen again.

I was interested to see Sara make the connection between sexist jokes, and more frightening aspects of misogyny and gendered oppression. I wish we lived in a world where it was easier for women to say, “that’s not funny” without risking marginalization, ostracism or worse.

Although I can’t find anything to link to which would document this, I have a distinct memory that when the late comedian Gilda Radner was first diagnosed with ovarian cancer, she said very somberly in an interview that there just wasn’t anything funny about cancer. People were expecting her to be cracking one liners about chemo and hair loss, and she just didn’t have it in her.

Our culture expects women who have careers based in part on their physical beauty to always BE beautiful in public. If they gain weight, wear unattractive clothing, or simply try to go for a walk without full make-up and expertly coiffed hair, entire sectors of the media are devoted to photographing them and humiliating them for their appearance transgressions as extensively as possible. This abuse, it is sometimes argued, is something “celebrities” bring on themselves when they chose to become actors or musicians or models or otherwise enter a very unforgiving “public eye.”

Radner was a comedian, so she was expected to discuss her cancer in an entertaining and amusing way. She got a bit of a pass on her phyical appearance because of her illness, although if you go back and review news accounts from the time, you’ll still see fairly heartless observations about her weight and general visage.

Amazingly, Radner later wrote an autobiography, It’s Always Something, that was quite humorous, and she actually did find some funny things to say about cancer. She died very soon afterwards, so we didn’t get much time to laugh with her about it.

Everyone has a different idea of what is funny and what isn’t, in any given situation. It would be nice to live in a world where people didn’t feel privileged to pressure others into laughing at something that hurts.

–Ann Bartow

P.S. On a somewhat related topic, let me recommend Mythago’s post entited “The only girl in the room.” It is a fairly blunt broadside against women who like to be “one of the guys” and then complain about a dearth of female friends.

Eric Muller of Is That Legal has an interesting post up about social science research that highlights internal biases based on race and gender. He reports:

[In one] experiment, subjects had an email exchange with somebody they thought was a Harvard student, but was actually the researcher. At some point in the exchange, the researcher mentioned her SAT scores. Some of the subjects were corresponding with a person whose email address was “chen@harvard.edu,” some were corresponding with a person whose email address was “Amy@harvard.edu,” and some were corresponding with a person whose email address was “ac@harvard.edu.” After the exchange, subjects were asked to recall their correspondent’s SAT scores. Those who were corresponding with the email address that implied Asian ancestry (“chen@harvard.edu”) remembered that their correspondent scored higher on the math test than the verbal test. And those who were corresponding with the email address that implied their correspondent was female (“Amy@harvard.edu”) remembered that their correspondent scored higher in verbal than in math.

Read the post.

Lizardbreath at Unfogged thinks so.   Here’s an excerpt:

People end up in a double bind — admitting you’ve got romantic interest in someone is tantamount to an immediate agreement to sex, but casual, frivolous sex is bad. So you can’t admit that you’re interested at all, unless you’re certain enough that you really want to be in a full scale relationship with the target person that sex is allowable — you have to go from zero (just friends) to sixty (true love) in no time flat. And you kind of have to do this simultaneously, so that neither one of you looks unattractively overeager. (This is complicated by a certain amount of sexual double-standard, making it harder, or at least less likely, for women to make the first move, but that’s not the basic problem.)

Steve Gilliard at The News Blog has an interesting post on this topic that starts out as follows:

You know, people like to say that Americans will do ANY job if it pays enough.So why won’t they become nurses? A job shortage, high wages, choice of employment. Yet, every year there is a shortage of nursing school students and nurses. So why is that? Maybe because they get treated badly? Once there was a pool of women who gladly became nurses. Now, half of medical school classes are female. Maybe status has a little to do with this.

As noted previously, extensive coverage is available at Justice 4 Two Sisters, which provides links to media coverage, and commentary as well. It does a much more comprehensive job than this blog could ever hope to, and is a great illustration of the power of the single issue blog.

Here is the beginning of her post:

my partner is from kyrgyzstan. she received political asylum 2 years ago in san francisco based on the persecution she suffered in her home country due to her sexuality. luckily for us, she had a very, VERY sympathetic judge who listened to her case for three hours (she is a brilliant woman who defended her own case) and now she is one of the few women in the united states who have been granted political asylum based on their sexual identification–like i said, she is an amazing woman.

i went to the trial with her as a witness where i had to disclose of our sexual activities to prove that she was indeed a lesbian. my testimony, along with her medical records documenting her abuse, her own legal research that she did, and her own testimony persuaded the judge to grant her plea for asylum. the department of homeland security, which threated to file motion of appeal against her, eventually did not. …

Read it in its entirety here.

I’ve alway had a lot of admiration for Flea of One Good Thing, and I’m hardly the only one. She writes movingly, and with great talent about very difficult things; rape, abortion, the challenges one of her children faces, and you can’t spent two minutes at her blog without noticing what a kind heart she has. Plus, her writing is often hilarious, especially when she writes about sex, and who couldn’t love that? She stood up for me in the recent ugliness of the comment threads at Sadly, No. It didn’t have any effect on the asshole contingent, but it meant the world to me. I’ve thanked her, this part of the post is another tiny nod in that direction, and I truly hope that in defending me she has not brought upon herself the ugly comments, e-mails and harassing phone calls I’ve been receiving. (Comments here are now in “heavy moderation” mode and careful records are being kept in the event that some people can’t stop making violent references, or show any indication of acting on them.) She is obviously a very strong person and I know she can handle whatever comes her way, but I am loathe to add to her burdens.

I explain all this to preface what follows because I want to be absolutely clear about the fact that I respect Flea greatly, and draw attention to what follows because I think it is thought-provoking and interesting: Flea’s FAQ on “Women Friendly Porn.” Here is an excerpt:

If you want straight porn that makes an effort to be feminist (as opposed to Digital Playground’s “woman-friendly” philosophy), with no implants, no starving women, more body acceptance, and female leads controlling the action, then yes, I’m going to recommend Urban Friction again, starring a real life girlfriend/boyfriend and shot right here in Chicago. (The feedback I’ve been receiving is that most straight men prefer the Digital Playground stuff to Urban Friction, so keep that in mind if you’re specifically getting it to watch with your husband/boyfriend.)

My question is, why is it that the only “feminist” porn Flea has identified, “with no implants, no starving women, more body acceptance, and female leads controlling the action,” is something that feedback suggests straight men do not want to watch? That if you want to watch porn with a man you are in a relationship with, the best you can really hope for is that he will enjoy something “women-friendly,” but still shy of being actually feminist?

So a while back Plastic Assets surfaced, a faux credit card company purporting to offer “free breast implants with every card,” and “free lip injections for every friend you refer.” The site was an entrant in the Contagious Festival, a contest at The Huffington Post to create high-traffic parody sites.

According to this CanWest News Service article, Plastic Assets was designed by Shari Graydon, author of In Your Face: The Culture of Beauty and You and Canadian media critic, who was troubled by the number of people who appeared to be fooled. She said:

“Women who are willing to undergo breast implant surgery and to play Russian roulette with their health are relying on information that’s pervasively available but not very credible” …

“The degree to which our site was believed to be credible despite how over the top it was underlines the fact that people aren’t bringing critical thinking skills to what they read on the Internet.” …

…”It was quite depressing to see how many people bought into it some of them extremely educated people who you’d think would’ve brought greater skepticism to what they were looking at,” says Graydon, who has spent the past few days e-mailing everyone who signed up for the credit card.” …
The site now directs visitors to a top-10 list of “reasons to avoid breast implants like the plague,” and a database of information on breast augmentation hosted by the National Research Center for Women & Families.

The Museum of Hoaxes had a different reaction, which was:

“…I’m skeptical about how many people really were fooled. I don’t think there’s any correlation between the number of visitors the site had, or even the number of applicants it received, and the amount of people who believed it to be real. I figure that most of its visitors recognized it as a joke, and probably filled out the application as a joke also.”

Well, now you do! Via Tiffany at Black Feminism.org, who has also written an interesting post about Sheryl Swoopes.