Misogyny and Sexism in the News

[AtLast]

Originally Posted by Greyson

I was unsure as to where to post this. I decided to put it here because I initiated the thread and yes there is misogyny and sexism in the history and experience of the Pachuca. There is also racism, homophobia, Transphobia, cultural politics, on and on.

Many times here on the site we find ourselves discussing the harder topics such as gender, race, sexism, class. Most of you know I am Mexican American and raised in Los Angeles. I think it would be an eye opener for many here to read this book, "The Woman In The Zoot Suit." It is written by Catherine S. Ramirez.

The Pachuca, Chola, Low Rider, she is a piece of recent history and yes, is still with us in some cultures. The Pachuca is female masculinity. The Pachuca is queer, the Pachuca is straight. She made and makes her own rules. Much like many of us in here.

Most of the time when discussing gender, masculinity we do it framed in a "white" framework. I am not saying that is necessarily a horrible thing. It's true there are white people but the fallacy is in believing that it is the superior or the only context in which to see our history, our gender, our sexuality, our world.

http://nsrc.sfsu.edu/article/zoot_su..._man_and_woman

http://feministreview.blogspot.com/2...tionalism.html

http://www.dukeupress.edu/books.php3...-0-8223-4303-5

So glad to see info that speaks to this! The addition of our looking at cultural (including religious) and ethnic variables along with race in these matters is important. There is so much more to it all! Makes me think about two-spirit gender and the native American cultures, too.

[AtLast]

I watched the Susan Stanton interview on Larry King tonight (glad King was not the interviewer) and found her comments about now working as a woman (MtF) as a city manager (same position fired for a few years ago due to transition) was fascinating. She honed in on what experiencing male privilege from the other side is like. Her awareness of sexism from this perspective is obviously quite unique (although it was obvious that she has had this awareness all along, but is now on the other side and very aware of this fact).

She also talked about the fact that she most likely had an easier time with the costs of transitioning due to class (can throw race/white privilege in there, too) and that this is just not the case for most trans individuals. She talked a little about the fact that she did have the financial means to carry out her transition.

The CNN special - Her Name Was Steven airs Saturday night. Tonight’s interview was an hour long and quite detailed about her transition journey. And very open concerning surgical hair removal procedures. Something else that struck me was her very deep regard and sensitivity for what her teenage son and ex-wife were subjected to in this process. And that she really does not come from a political space about her lifelong struggle with knowing she is a woman and in a male body. This is true for a FtM that I have known for many years and long before ever being a member of the B-F community.

I have followed her case somewhat since her firing in Florida and consequent decision to not seek legal remedy against the city she was a city manager for (which she received a lot of criticism about from trans political & legal organizations for). I had a much better understanding of the fact that she made a very conscious choice not to as a means to not add more stress for her family. And, for her, it was about moving toward her personal human completion and living her life as a woman. Although difficult for her ex-wife, snippets from the documentary of her talking demonstrated that they both were very loving with each other through this, really and wanted to make it as easy as possible for their son.

But, her discussion of sexism in the workforce as a woman as compared to doing the exact same job as a man was quite interesting (hope there is more about this in the documentary). She seems to be doing well and strikes me as a very warm and caring woman, which she was as a man. She and her ex-wife remain close friends and her son is quite an awesome kid! I do want to catch the special.

[Soon]

Then + Now: The Disembodied Woman

[Soon]

Major Victory Against Rape Apologist Hate Speech in South Africa

[Enigma]

Tight Pants Ban Takes Effect In Indonesia

MEULABOH, Indonesia — Authorities in a devoutly Islamic district of Indonesia's Aceh province have distributed 20,000 long skirts and prohibited shops from selling tight dresses as a regulation banning Muslim women from wearing revealing clothing took effect Thursday.

The long skirts are to be given to Muslim women caught violating the dress code during a two-month campaign to enforce the regulation, said Ramli Mansur, head of West Aceh district.

Islamic police will determine whether a woman's clothing violates the dress code, he said.

During raids Thursday, Islamic police caught 18 women traveling on motorbikes who were wearing traditional headscarves but were also dressed in jeans. Each woman was given a long skirt and her pants were confiscated. They were released from police custody after giving their identities and receiving advice from Islamic preachers.

"I am not wearing sexy outfits, but they caught me like a terrorist only because of my jeans," said Imma, a 40-year-old housewife who uses only one name. She argued that wearing jeans is more comfortable when she travels by motorbike.

more...here:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/0..._n_593796.html

[Nat]

School district blames disabled student for own molestation

When a teacher's aide at Saddleback High School in Santa Ana, CA was arrested for molesting one of the special-ed students under his care, the school district's first impulse was to cover the incident up and hope no one would find out.

Now the student's parents have sued the Santa Ana Unified School District for negligently keeping on an employee that other parents had been complaining about for years. The district's lawyers have responded by not only blaming the mentally disabled girl for her own abuse but asking that the judge dismiss the charges and make the victim's family pay the district's legal fees.

The seventeen-year-old victim, who has cerebral palsy, has the mental capacity of a seven-year-old and is confined to a wheelchair. Because she is unable to speak, no one knows exactly what was happening when another school employee found her alone in a room with Alonso Manuel Gonzalez, with her shirt pulled up and her breasts exposed, but the incident resulted in the aide's arrest for a "lewd act with dependent adult."

The school's immediate reaction was to attempt to keep the incident under wraps. Saddleback teachers told the OC Weekly they had been told not to discuss the incident with anyone. Parents were not notified and a school representative refused to discuss the matter with a reporter. Over the next few months, the school district made no public acknowledgment of the arrest, either when Gonzalez was arraigned or several months later when he pleaded guilty to child abuse and endangerment.

The parents of other disabled students, however, quickly came forward with their own complaints about Gonzalez, going back to at least 2005. They told the OC Weekly that a group of parents had met with Saddleback's principle and the head of the district's special-ed program to complain that Gonzalez made the students uncomfortable and seemed to want to spend time alone with female students, but that the district ignored their concerns.

Now, a year after the aide's guilty plea, the parents of the student have brought a civil suit against Gonzales for causing mental and physical trauma to their daughter and also against the school district for negligence. As a result, the district's lawyers are fighting back -- hard.

In a filing with the Orange County Superior Court, the attorneys claim that the wheelchair-bound girl "chose to encounter the known risk" of being alone with Gonzalez, that she "consented to" him lifting up her shirt, and that her injuries were the result of her having "failed to use due and reasonable care for her own safety and protection."

They also charge her parents with having "negligently, carelessly and recklessly supervised, monitored, controlled and instructed the minor plaintiff so as to legally cause and contribute to her injuries and damages, if any."

"As a grand, caring finale, the district asked presiding Judge Luis A. Rodriguez to not only dismiss all charges against them but to make the victim's family pay all legal fees," the OC Weekly concludes, adding, "Since when did the Santa Ana Unified School District take its directions toward sex abuse from the Diocese of Orange?"

[Soon]

No, Sexual Violence Is Not 'Cultural'

By LISA SHANNON

A month into my first trip to eastern Congo, site of the deadliest conflict since World War II, I had heard plenty of horror stories — from forced cannibalism to the burning alive of the inhabitants of entire villages. I was no longer easily shocked. But one exchange with an aid worker stopped me cold.

I arrived in Baraka, a town on Lake Tanganyika that was overrun with Congolese soldiers and international aid workers, in February 2007. I asked a disheveled European woman working with the United Nations about security. She enthusiastically described her pet video project, to convince refugees in neighboring Tanzania that it was safe to return home.

“Foreign militias are gone,” she said. “Just rapes and looting for the moment. No attacks.”

Stunned, I asked, “You don’t consider rape a security threat?”

“Rape here is so common,” she said. “It’s cultural.”

That was the first of many times I would hear mass rape in Congo dismissed as “cultural.”

The sexual violence in Congo is among the worst on the planet. The U.N. estimates that hundreds of thousands of women have been gang-raped, tortured and held as sexual slaves since the conflict began in 1998.

That’s when armed groups began behaving like mafias, battling for control of the minerals in eastern Congo. To control territory, militias use rape as their weapon of choice.

In May, the U.S. Senate included a provision in its financial regulation bill requiring publicly traded companies to ensure that “conflict minerals” are not purchased from militia-controlled mines in Congo. Such efforts are welcome, if grossly overdue.

Still, we in the West too often find it easier to perceive rape as an accepted part of an unfamiliar culture rather than as a tool of war that we could help banish. Too often, the enemy becomes all Congolese men rather than men with guns terrorizing the Congolese people. By casting the chaos and violence as “men vs. women” or dismissing the crisis as “cultural,” we do a profound injustice to Congolese men. Rather than help, we send an implicit insult: It’s a pity, but, well…it’s just who you people are.

This perception is widespread. I work full-time for Congolese women, and I find myself devoting an inordinate amount of energy to defending Congolese men, whether arguing with a gazillionaire at a backyard barbeque over “Africa’s tribal rape rituals” or sitting on a panel with a human rights activist who waxes on about “the cultural roots of the sexual violence in Congo.”

Margot Wallstrom, the U.N. secretary general’s special representative on sexual violence in conflict, recently described such thinking as the “lingering assumption that sexual violence is a tradition, rather than a tactic of choice.”

Any Congolese will tell you rape is not “traditional.” It did occur in Congo before the war, as it does everywhere. But the proliferation of sexual violence came with the war. Militias and Congolese soldiers alike now use sexual violence as a weapon. Left unchecked, sexual violence has festered in Congo’s war-ravaged east. This does not make rape cultural. It makes it easy to commit. There is a difference.

Analysts often use the phrase “culture of impunity” to describe Congo. John Prendergast, who has worked in African conflict zones for 25 years, explains: “The rule of law breaks down and perpetrators commit crimes without fear of conviction or punishment. Over time, this leads to further breakdown of societal codes and the very social fabric of a community.”

The media, aid workers and activists alike have consistently failed to tell the stories of Congolese men who were killed by fighters because they refused to commit rape. In interviews with hundreds of women, I heard countless stories of men who chose to take a bullet in the head, literally, rather than violate their child, sister or mother. In Baraka, one survivor recalled: “They tried to make my older brother rape me. He refused and was killed. So they raped me.”

Describing the violence in Congo as “cultural” is more than offensive. It is dangerous.

The European aid worker who dismissed the violence as “cultural” implied that Congolese women should expect to be raped. In so doing, she dismissed her responsibility to so much as warn returning refuges about the extreme security threat.

Later that day in 2007, I met 20 Congolese women who had returned from refugee camps in the last six months. In that time, half had been raped.

“Cultural relativism legitimizes the violence and discredits the victims, because when you accept rape as cultural, you make rape inevitable,” Ms. Wallstrom explained in a recent opinion essay co-authored with the Norwegian foreign minister, Jonas Gahr Store. “This shields the perpetrators and allows world leaders to shrug off sexual violence as an immutable — if regrettable — truth.”

When we blame all Congolese men for sexual violence, not only do we imply that rape is inherent to the African landscape, we avoid critical questions, particularly regarding the role that we in the West play.

Who has been silent during 12 years of mass rape and off-the-charts atrocities? We have.

Who funds the bloodshed with our hunger for the latest computer processor and smart phone produced with minerals from Congo? We do. Perhaps unwittingly, but we do.

Who helped the fighters get their guns? We did.

This prevents us from taking the basic steps required to end the crisis: a coordinated international effort to choke off the militia leadership, some of whom reside in Europe and the United States; requirements that technology companies spend the extra penny per product that would guarantee conflict-free gadgets; and an aggressive plan to end the culture of impunity through justice and accountability measures.

When we label rape in Congo “cultural,” we let ourselves off the hook. And that is a cultural issue. Ours.

Lisa Shannon is founder of Run for Congo Women and author of “A Thousand Sisters: My Journey Into the Worst Place on Earth to Be a Woman.”

[Linus]

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/0..._n_630800.html

[Medusa]

Originally Posted by Linus

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/0..._n_630800.html

"Parker argues that his style is female in nature because like women, Obama tends to act more passively and form circles to talk out problems instead of taking immediate action"

Im glad that these journalists can recognize that President Obama isnt a fucking hotheaded ogre but the whole "like women" thing? REALLY?
Written by 2 female journalists?!!!

[Angeltoes]

This is kind of random and may not even fit in this thread, but I'm getting so sick and tired of how acceptable it's become to throw around terms like 'bitch' and 'ho.' I mean, whatever people call each other behind closed doors is perfectly fine in my book. I'm kind of kinky myself, so it's all good. It's just this new way that women are embracing those terms for women in general. I find myself being disgusted on the LGBT News Facebook page to see queer women and gay men using the most derogatory names for women and everybody thinks it's a big joke. I wonder, am I being uptight? I'm pretty sure it wasn't too long ago that those were fighting words. It just feels ugly. I don't know, maybe I'm old fashioned. I feel old to say this, but I do not like it at all.

[Kobi]

[Kobi]

CBS Houston sports blogger has come under fire for questioning whether an Oklahoma City Thunder Girl was "too chunky" to be an NBA cheerleader.

Blogger Claire Crawford targeted Oklahoma City Thunder cheerleader Kelsey Williams' looks on the court after the Houston Rockets faced off against the Oklahoma City Thunder in the first round of the NBA Playoffs.

"The Rockets looked terrible in Game 1, but some say they weren't the only bad-looking people on the court," Crawford wrote.

While she conceded Williams was a "pretty blonde," she wrote Oklahoma City fans had criticized her for "having 'pudginess' around her waistline."

"But if she's comfortable wearing that tiny outfit and dancing for NBA fans, then good for her," Crawford wrote. "Besides…not every man likes women to be toothpick skinny. I'd say most men prefer a little extra meat on her bones."

A poll asked attached to his column asked readers what their opinions were on Williams in the Oklahoma City Thunder cheerleader outfit.

Voters could choose from three options. Either they thought Williams had "the perfect look to be an NBA cheerleader," "she could use some tightening up in her midsection," or "she has no business wearing that outfit in front of people."

Williams politely fired back at the post on Twitter.

"To be womanly always, discouraged never," she wrote.

"We wouldn't know what blessings were if we didn't go through trials. Thank you to EVERYONE for the compassion and love today. I'm in awe," she tweeted on April 24.

CBS Houston has since removed the post from its website, but a cached version of the page is still available online.

The Houston Chronicle reported that Crawford was a pseudonym for Anna-Megan Raley, who once blogged for the paper and posted a video of her audition to be a Houston Dynamo soccer team cheerleader. Raley's Twitter accounts, under her name and her alias, Crawford, have been deleted.

This isn't the first time a professional sports team cheerleader has been criticized for her looks.

Former Green Bay Packers cheerleader Kaitlyn Collins took to YouTube to post a video in response to a cruel post where she was called "ugly" and "an eyesore" on an unofficial Chicago Bears Fan page in February.

http://gma.yahoo.com/sports-blogger-...opstories.html

---------------


Good example of internalized sexism and misogyny.

[Cin]

Originally Posted by Kobi

Raped and Impregnated at 14, Girl Must Now Share Parental Rights with Her Attacker
Rapist's paternity rights locks victim into 16-year relationship with him.

http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-pol...s-her-attacker


BOSTON (CN) - A rape victim sued Massachusetts to stop it from subjecting her to "a court-ordered 16-year unwanted relationship with her attacker" by giving him paternity rights over the child born from the rape.

H.T., of Norwood, Mass., sued the Commonwealth of Massachusetts in Federal Court.

"The plaintiff, a rape victim in a state criminal matter, became pregnant in 2009 at age 14 as a result of the crime and gave birth to her attacker's child," the lawsuit states.

"The defendant in the state criminal proceeding, age 20 at the time of the impregnation, was convicted of rape in 2011 and was sentenced to 16 years probation. Conditions of probation include an order that he initiate proceedings in family court and comply with that court's orders until the child reaches adulthood. The plaintiff here seeks to enjoin enforcement of so much of the state court's order as violates her federal rights by binding her to an unwanted 16-year legal relationship with her rapist."

H.T., who recently graduated from high school, says the order forces her to participate in unwanted court proceedings for 16 years with the man who raped her, and to spend money on legal fees.


"Melendez pleaded guilty to rape in September, 2011 (Norfolk Criminal Docket No . CR200900499) and was sentenced to probation for 16 years. As a condition of probation, Melendez was ordered to initiate proceedings in family court, declare paternity as to the child born of his crime, (paternity had already been determined in the criminal case, via DNA testing), and comply with the family court's orders throughout the probationary period. The plaintiff and her mother were adamantly opposed to participation in family court proceedings and repeatedly expressed this sentiment to state officials." (Parentheses in complaint).

In June 2012, H.T. found out that Melendez was seeking visitation rights with the child.

After a family court judge ordered Melendez to pay $110 a week in child support, he Melendez asked for visitation rights, and offered to withdraw his request in exchange for not having to pay child support, according to the lawsuit.

"Melendez had no prior contact with the child and had expressed no interest in the child, but no Massachusetts law forbids the enforcement of visitation rights by a biological father who causes a child's birth through the crime of rape," the complaint states.

The sentencing judge in the state criminal court denied H.T.'s request to order Melendez to pay criminal restitution instead of child support, and release her from any legal proceedings involving him.