Feminist Law Professors

The Vegankid blog annointed today “Blog Against Sexism Day.” Looks like 170 blogs are participating, which is a terrific response and promises a lot of great reading (see also the Tenth Carnival of the Feminists).

Now, here is a personal observation. About a year or so ago I read the novel, “The Known World,” by Edward P. Jones, which is an amazing book that I highly recommend. One of the characters is a man with Native American ancestry, which sets him apart from both the white sphere and the world of the slaves. In one scene, he is present when a group of white man badly abuse a free black man. He’s happy to be socially included on the side of the oppressors for a change, rather than suffering once again for his skin color and heritage, but the omniscient narrator rather ominously warns that if things go a certain way, he could rapidly find out that he isn’t quite as white as he thinks he is.

When I read or hear a woman criticize another woman for her clothing, or hair, or body size, or general lack of femininity or sex appeal because it helps her curry favor with powerful men, I always think, if things go a certain way, she is going to find out that she isn’t as much “one of the guys” as she thinks she is. The men may laugh with her when she amusingly derides her sisters, but they will not trust her any more than the women she mocks will.

–Ann Bartow

Update: See also this article.

Update two: You’ll never go wrong by reading I Blame the Patriarchy.

Here, at Indian Writing!

Lots of great links and commentary!

At Avast! Feminist Conspiracy! Echidne writes:

“The Internet has had one consequence for my life which I didn’t anticipate: it has brought misogyny home. I have met misogynists before, sure. I have even shared a family background with some and read books written by others. But never before have I seen the brotherhood (and sisterhood, for there are female misogynists, too) of woman-haters all organized and fighting for their beliefs. This is exactly what the Internet lets me experience if I care to visit certain sites or even if I just wait long enough for a troll of this type to visit my blog.” …

“I sometimes hear the argument that some of these men whom I’d label misogynists don’t really hate women but feminist women. This is an odd distinction. Women who want equality are hateworthy but those who don’t are not hateworthy, because presumably they know their places which are somewhere far below. What would that mean in terms of my views of misogyny? Certainly I’d class this as woman-despising.

“And finally a confession. Before I started my adventures on the Internet I thought that misogyny was really quite rare. I have learned otherwise.”

Read the whole thing here. Echidne’s personal blog is here.

From the Executive Summary:

…”Collectively, unmarried women have the power to change our country. They are part of an emerging American majority as family structure has changed dramatically over the past 50 years, and the number of unmarried Americans has increased considerably. During the 1950’s, approximately 80 percent of Americans lived in households headed by married couples; now that number is just less than half. By 2008, more than half of households will be headed by an unmarried person. As America’s demographic profile continues to change, unmarried women, with their unique set of interests and concerns, have the potential to change American politics and become a core progressive constituency.

“Looking at it another way, in 2004, nearly a quarter of all voters were unmarried women. The Women’s Voices Women Vote Action Fund (WVWVAF) seeks to create change in this country by calling more attention to the issues that define the unmarried woman’s agenda:healthcare, jobs and the economy, retirement, and education:and by growing the base of unmarried women who vote on these issues. By speaking to these Americans about their sense of responsibility for becoming informed, participating in the political process as citizens, and calling on them to have their say on the issues that matter to them most, unmarried women can become a force that can change American policies and the dynamics of American politics.”

The full report is here.

At Brutal Women, Kameron Hurley writes movingly about why she is a feminist.

“Media Girl” remarks on the newspaper cover here. The article it advertises can be read here. See also Rox Populi’s post and associated commentary,

This NYT article got this reaction at the Workplace Prof Blog and also this reaction at Bitch Ph.D. All are worthy reads, if you have the time! Update: See also Law and Letters.

In my pre-law-professor life I often worked odd jobs to make extra money. For a while I was part of a team that traveled to a series of churches and community centers to interview people about health and beauty aids on behalf of the large corporation that manufactured and marketed them. I did consumer research on the way people reacted to toothbrushes, deodorant, mouthwashes, lipstick, pain relievers, and for one ponderously long interval of time, sanitary napkins. My job was to talk women into wearing a particular brand of sanitary napkin, and then agree to return the following day to answer an invasive series of questions about how wearing it made them feel, and yes, it was just as squicky as it sounds, but the women did get paid for their trouble. At first we offered twenty dollars, but got few takers. Even when the “honorarium” got boosted to $50, many women were squeamish about the idea, and it took a great deal of persuasion to get them to agree to participate, and I had a quota to meet, so I’ll always love the women who, after the honorarium was mentioned, said things like: “For fifty dollars I’ll wear it stuck to my head for you! Even if it has wings!”

So it was with some amusement that I read this article by Rebecca Traister at Salon.com, in which she observed:

If you’re an American woman between the ages of 20 and 40, the following passage will likely be familiar to you:

“I locked the bathroom door and attached a Teenage Softie to the little hooks on my pink belt. Then I got dressed and looked at myself in the mirror. Would anyone know my secret? Would it show? Would Moose, for instance, know if I went back outside to talk to him? Would my father know it right away when he came home for dinner? I had to call Nancy and Gretchen and Janie right away. Poor Janie! She’d be the last of the PTS’s to get it. And I’d been so sure it would be me! How about that! Now I am growing for sure. Now I am almost a woman!

“Are you still there God? It’s me, Margaret. I know you’re there God. I know you wouldn’t have missed this for anything! Thank you God. Thanks an awful lot…”

Those final two paragraphs of “Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret,” Judy Blume’s paean to pubescent faith, sweaty-palmed sexuality, and menarche in the Jersey suburbs of the late 1960s, are the climactic answer to Margaret Simon’s prayers that she will get her period. (An obsession she shares with her girlfriends, the Pre-Teen Sensations.)

But if you have a daughter who has a new edition of the book, this is how the same passage will begin:

“I locked the bathroom door and peeled the paper off the bottom of the pad. I pressed the sticky strip against my underpants. Then I got dressed and looked at myself in the mirror…”

Yes, it’s true: Margaret’s pink sanitary belt is history. In the late 1990s, Blume updated the portions of her book that describe 11-going-on-12-year-old Margaret’s purchase of (and practice with) a box of the kind of absorbent pads that used to be held in place by a belt worn under the clothes.

In fact, the era of the belt ended just a few years after the 1970 publication of “Are You There God?” leaving most of the book’s readers pretty mystified about what the hell all that hooking and unhooking was all about. By the early ’80s, the pre-tampon period years were all about pads that stuck right into your underwear, no belts required. (Thanks, God.)

Traister laments the change, arguing in favor of “the power of a story to chronicle an experience unavailable to many readers” and writing: “…while it may seem minor — so very minor, such a few small sentences in a 150-page book that’s just as much about God and making your boobs grow as it is about periods — I’m actually glad for the sense it gave me that as recently as five years before I was born, girls had very different hassles during puberty. I’m glad I know a bit about what they were. I’m glad that other young women know about some of the technology they can be grateful for (wings!) even if they, like me and many others, don’t share Margaret’s undiluted enthusiasm for the onset of monthly bleeding.”

At Pandagon, Amanda Marcotte concurs in a post entited “Not the belt, dear lord.” Me, I’m kind of agnostic about all this. Traister mildly peeved me off by situating the book’s relevance to American women “between the ages of 20 and 40.” I am 42 and was only seven years old when the book was first published in 1970. I was around nine when I read it for the first time, and had the humiliating experience of having my fourth grade teacher confiscate it from me as age inappropriate contraband. It was after reading “Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret” that I learned why some of the slightly older girls wore long rows of safety pins on their clothing. There was a short interval between belts and the deployment of napkins with adhesive strips in which sanitary pads came packaged with two safety pins, so that you could securely pin them to your underwear, and thereby forgo the belt. Wearing rows of pins on your jeans was a way of signaling to the teen and pre-teen cognoscenti that you had your period. By the time my day came, adhesive pads were in wide use, and there was no way I was going to walk around with an adhesive strip fastened to my clothing, so I had to affirmatively inform my friends about my puberty-reaching news, which seemed decidedly less cool than the safety pin rows. Oh well.

Below is what one edition of what the tome looks like. Using Google’s image search function I found several different versions, but am pretty sure the copy I read had a purple cover and a blond Margaret, who would be 48 years old now.

–Ann Bartow

This is a fairly creative approach to discouraging drunk driving:

But why is the ad agency that came up with it called The Wexley School For Girls, and why this weird website (make sure sound is on for the full effect) featuring “the half-naked statue lady with the censored boobies”? Sheesh. Via Bitch Lab.

Since 1993 thousands of Mexican women have been systematically abducted, raped, tortured and killed, and those responsible for the crimes have largely remained free. Carlos Reyes-Manzo documents in images and words a terrible and touching situation that shows no sign of abating. Below is an excerpt:

…”Since 1993 over 400 women from Ciudad Juárez, a large city on the US-Mexico border, have been murdered and over 70 are still missing, according to Amnesty International’s 2003 report “Intolerable Killings.” The victims are young women, generally under 29 years old. They are mostly poor, often workers in the maquiladoras (assembly factories), and live in the marginalized areas of the city. The Mexican authorites, under much pressure from human rights groups and NGOs, have so far failed to carry out proper investigations into the killings, and those responsible for the crimes remain unpunished.

“Why is this happening? People cite many reasons; lack of women’s rights, the devastating culture of impunity, and poverty. Following the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), Mexico began an industrialization programme on its northern border. Hundreds of maquiladoras were set up in Ciudad Juárez and the promise of new work attracted thousands of unemployed people, including many women, from all over Mexico and other countries in Latin America.

“However, the “NAFTA boom” never quite materialised; workers were paid only $4 a day and official Mexcian poverty levels rose by almost 5% six years after NAFTA was implemented. Now, facing increasing competition from China, where workers are paid even less at $1.91 a day, some of the maquiladoras are closing down. In 2003, over 130,000 jobs were lost in the maquiladoras. Those who still have their jobs face poor working conditions, and rampant labour rights violations.

“Ciudad Juárez’s geographic location as a border city makes it an important point for the trafficking of immigrants and drugs. In addition, judicial and government institutions are often corrupt and infiltrated by interests representing the drug trade. These factors add up to a city with one of the highest levels of criminality in Mexico, with little sense of local identity or community.” ….

Why else would they run this doofy “news” story: “How to Stuff a Wild Bikini Bottom” by Natasha Singer? Below is the charming illustration that accompanies it. If your behind doesn’t look like the one on the far left, according to Singer’s ace reporting you have an inferior posterior and need to wrap youself in shapeless bolts of burlap until you can undergo butt-corrective surgery.

Below in italics are a few excerpts from the text, followed by gratuitously sarcastic commentary in bold:

…“A casual observer might think that’s a pretty buttocks over there in the pink sweatpants with the narrow waist and full bottom,” Dr. Mendieta said one evening last month as he pointed to a young woman window-shopping on Lincoln Road in Miami Beach. Perched at an outdoor cafe table under an orange umbrella, Dr. Mendieta had agreed to a reporter’s request that he rate buttocks as they sashayed by : all in the interest of medicine of course.

“But, professionally speaking, I would enhance her buttocks by adding more fullness and projection at the middle and the top,” he said. “I can always make a pretty butt even prettier.” …

By the strangest coincidence, the man who “can always make a pretty butt even prettier” makes his living as a plastic surgeon, and according to Singer would charge about $20,000 to augment your ass. Hey, no conflict of interest here, your read end is *objectively* defective.

…”Some women over 50 get the surgery to bulk up deflating derrières, while younger patients say they want larger buttocks to complement prominent busts. “I always got compliments for my front but never for my back,” said Natalie Del Rio, 18, a high school student in Miami who had the procedure last month with Dr. Mendieta. “Now my mom says I look like a Coca-Cola bottle.” …

People were not remarking positively on this 18 year old woman’s behind, only her bust, and that was a problem that $20,000 worth of surgery solved, so teenagers everywhere should start saving their allowances.

…”Efforts to enhance the size of the posterior date to ancient Greece, when Spartan women performed a bottom-kicking dance, said Dr. V. Leroy Young, a plastic surgeon in St. Louis who is chairman of the emerging trends task force of the American Society for Aesthetic Plastic Surgery. “Women would kick themselves in the fanny to make themselves bigger and firmer.” …

Granted I am not a classics scholar, but color me cynical about there being a wealth of historical or anthropological evidentiary support for the bottom-kicking dance of the Ancient Greeks.

…”Each augmentation takes six to eight hours, Dr. Roberts said, and typically one to two pounds of fat are added to each side. Skinny patients are asked to gain 10 to 15 pounds before the procedure to create enough fat to work with, Dr. Roberts said.

“Fat grafting to the buttocks is such a new procedure that little is known about how safe it is, how well it works or how long it lasts. The most frequent complication is infection, which occurs in 2 to 3 of every 100 patients, Dr. Roberts said. Other surgeons have reported tissue necrosis, in which the fat dies and must be removed. Patients also may have scars at the injection sites that fade over time. As in all liposuction, there is a small risk that fat drops or blood clots will migrate to the lungs, causing respiratory problems and even death.” …

So it’s expensive, risky, you can’t sit down or lie on your back for weeks, and you have to wear a girdle afterwards. But you caught that part about how “Patients say they don’t mind the discomfort,” right? Why not? Because:

“In primeval days the butt was the primary sexual attractor, not the breasts,” said Galdino F. Pranzarone, a professor of psychology at Roanoke College in Salem, Va. “This is really a return to what cave men were originally interested in.”

Arrrrrgh.

–Ann Bartow

North Country tops list of most-important 2005 films for women:

“North Country was the most-important film for women to see in 2005, according to a survey released by New York Women in Film & Television. The film, in which Charlize Theron plays a miner who wins a landmark sexual harassment case, grabbed the top spot with 19 per cent of the vote, followed in order by the race-focused drama Crash, the dance documentary Mad Hot Ballroom, the gay-cowboy romance Brokeback Mountain and the cross-dressing dramedy Transamerica.

“As Hollywood gears up for Oscar season, the nonprofit women’s association also asked its 1,500 members to vote for the best female film director of 2005. In that category, Marilyn Agrelo, who helmed Mad Hot Ballroom, ranked first with 21 per cent of the vote, followed in order by Nicki Caro for North Country, Miranda July for the offbeat drama Me, You and Everyone We Know, Susan Stroman for the musical The Producers and Agnes Jaoui for the French-language film Look at Me.

“Though women have made monumental strides in the entertainment industry and are running more studios than ever before, female directors are still hitting that celluloid ceiling,” said Terry Lawler, executive director of the association, in a statement. “Our survey was designed to give women a way to support and bring attention to the works of women behind the lens; works that often are forgotten during Oscar season.”

“The percentage of female directors has dropped from 11 per cent in 2000 to seven per cent in 2005 for the 250 highest-grossing films, according to the association. Only three women have ever been nominated for an Oscar for best director: Sofia Coppola (Lost in Translation) in 2003, Jane Campion (The Piano) in 1993 and Lina Wertmuller (Seven Beauties) in 1976.”

You can learn more here.

Or at least, so says this article in the Economist, which notes:

…”Analysts at Goldman Sachs estimate that the global beauty industry:consisting of skin care worth $24 billion; make-up, $18 billion; $38 billion of hair-care products; and $15 billion of perfumes:is growing at up to 7% a year, more than twice the rate of the developed world’s GDP. The sector’s market leader, L’Oréal, has had compound annual profits growth of 14% for 13 years. Sales of Beiersdorf’s Nivea have grown at 14% a year over the same period.

“This growth is being driven by richer, ageing baby-boomers and increased discretionary income in the West, and by the growing middle classes in developing countries. China, Russia and South Korea are turning into huge markets. In India, sales of anti-ageing creams are growing by 40% a year, while Brazil has more”Avon Ladies”(900,000) than it has men and women in its army and navy. Although the industry’s customers are predominantly women, it is increasingly marketing itself to men too.” …

Below is an excerpt from an op-ed by Robert Jensen, a journalism professor at the University of Texas. You can read the entire piece here:

“Pornography’s business has always been the exposure of women’s bodies for the pleasure of men, and that was readily evident at the annual Adult Entertainment Expo in Las Vegas last month.

“But also exposed at the sex-industry gathering was the paradox of the pornography business at this particular moment: At the same time that the pornography industry and its products are more normalized than ever in the United States, the images they produce are more brutal and degrading toward women than ever. How can it be that a once-underground industry that lived at the margins of society has become mainstream, at precisely the same time that its sexual cruelty toward women is most pronounced?” …

“Pornography — though still resisted by some, from either a conservative/religious position or, on very different grounds, from a feminist point of view — has become just one more form of mass entertainment in a culture obsessively dedicated to the pleasure-without-thought-about-the-consequences principle. Not everyone likes it, but few see it as worth debating.

“But the paradox remains: At the same time that it is more accepted, pornography’s content is becoming steadily more extreme. In the”gonzo”style (those films with no plot or characters, just straightforward sex on tape) that dominates the market, directors continue to push the edge, filming increasingly rougher sexual practices involving multiple penetrations of women by two or three men at a time, or oral sex designed to make a woman gag, while the language used to insult women during sex grows harsher. Since legal controls on pornography began loosening in the 1970s, pornographers have pushed the limits of sexualizing the denigration of women.

“Though the pornography industry loves to talk about growing sales to women and the so-called”couples market,”men are still the vast majority of pornography consumers in the United States. Producers and distributors I interviewed at the convention all estimated their clientele was 80 to 90 percent men.

“What do these men want to watch? It turns out they like viewing sexual acts that the majority of women do not want to perform in their lives. While there is no survey data about women’s preferences regarding multiple penetrations or gag-inducing sex, informal investigation suggests such things are not common in the day-to-day lives of most people and not sought after by most women.”

“So, how can we explain the paradox? People typically do not openly endorse cruelty or the degradation of women. Yet just as those features of pornography are more extensive and intense than ever, graphic sexually explicit material is more widely accepted than ever. How can a culture embrace images that violate its stated values? Wouldn’t a society that purports to be civilized reject sexual material that becomes evermore dismissive of the humanity of women? There are two potential explanations.

“First, because of the way pornography works, most of the consumers don’t see the material as being saturated with cruelty or degradation; the sexual pleasure that pornography produces tends to derail critical viewing and thinking. When consumers are focused on the pleasure, the politics drop out of view. So, when fans I interviewed said they didn’t think the material they watched embodied male domination and female subordination, they likely were being honest. They don’t see it, because they are too absorbed in feeling the sexual pleasure to be thinking about such issues.

“But some men are quite clear about the gender politics in pornography, and they like it. Most of the advertising for the gonzo style highlights the subordination of women — one company brags it is in the business of”degrading whores for your viewing pleasure”– which suggests that’s exactly what some men are looking for.” …

Woman Among 17 Elected to Hall of Fame

“Effa Manley, a savvy businesswoman whose gravestone reads “She Loved Baseball,” became the first woman elected to the National Baseball Hall of Fame yesterday. She was among 17 people from the Negro leagues and the era preceding them in black baseball who were selected by a special committee. Manley, who was a co-owner of the Newark Eagles with her husband, Abe, handled the daily business operations of the team and was considered an expert in marketing and advertising. She was also diligent in fighting for better conditions for the players on the Eagles, who won the Negro leagues World Series in 1946.

“She learned early on not to be overlooked,” Heaphy said.

Read the whole story here.

From the BBC News:
“The Caribbean island of Jamaica is to have a female prime minister for the first time. Portia Simpson Miller, 60, was elected president of the governing People’s National Party in an internal vote. She will automatically become prime minister when the incumbent, PJ Patterson, steps down in the next few weeks after 14 years in the post. Mrs Simpson Miller, currently local government minister, narrowly beat the national security minister to the job. …

“She is seen as someone who has really risen through the ranks of the party, coming from a very, very poor section of Jamaica… to the top post,” Radio Jamaica’s Kathy Barrett told the BBC.

“She’s a woman who’s very determined, a firebrand type of politician who has really hit home when it comes to the majority of people – especially women, the poor and the unemployed.”

“Mrs Simpson Miller is expected to have taken over from Mr Patterson, Jamaica’s longest-serving prime minister, by April.” …