Misogyny and Sexism in the News

[Soon]

After historic tennis win, Eugenie Bouchard answers the most sexist question in post game interview

Who cares that Eugenie Bouchard became the first Canadian to advance to the semi-finals of the Australian Open last night? Apparently the most important thing is that she would like to date Justin Bieber.

Moments after knocking out Ana Ivanovic in a hard-fought three-set upset, Bouchard faced the double standard of the sports world head-on as the courtside interviewer Samantha Smith pointed up at a clutch of men in the stadium known as the Genie Army.

“You’re getting a lot of fans here,” noted Smith, a former British tennis champ. “A lot of them are male, and they want to know: If you could date anyone in the world of sport, of movies – I’m sorry, they asked me to say this – who would you date?”

Blushing like the teenager she is, Bouchard giggled and replied: “Justin Bieber.” As members of the Genie Army booed their displeasure, Bouchard looked at the camera and added: “Justin, if you’re watching … um: Hey!”

While Bouchard took the question good-naturedly, plenty of fans were offended on her behalf, venting their displeasure over Twitter.

“RIDICULOUS,” declared Katarina Williams, a sports reporter based in New Zealand. “Was there nothing tennis-related she could’ve actually asked instead?” Rick VanSickle, an Ontario wine writer declared: “Bizarre question to ask an athlete after historic tennis win.”

(Meanwhile, plenty of fans – primarily men – also took to Twitter to criticize Bouchard for her choice in men.)

If Bouchard was offended by the question, she didn’t show it. In a postmatch interview with the New York Times on Tuesday, she elaborated on her desire to meet Bieber.

“Don’t worry, it’s going to happen,” she told reporter Ben Rothenberg. “Yes. But I think I need to do something bigger to get his attention, like win a Slam, something like that. I won’t even have to do anything, and maybe he’ll just reach out, and we’ll tweet or something like that.”

[Soon]

Parents Hope Their Sons Are Geniuses and Their Daughters Aren't Fat

Another reason to feel bad for today's little girls: one day, the straight ones will grow up to face a dating selection consisting of doted upon nightmare boys raised by parents who used the power of the internet to validate their sneaking suspicion that their lil' All Star might be a genius. Meanwhile, the girls' parents used Google to determine whether or not their little princesses were fat. If the children are the future, the future is fucked.

According to Google analytics examined by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz at the New York Times, parents are two and a half times more likely to Google "Is my son gifted?" than they were to search for "Is my daughter gifted?" This despite the fact that, across the country, young girls do better in school than boys. They weren't particularly worried if their daughter was stupid, either; although parents tended to seek out confirmation that their son was the Alpha Boy, the One, the Luke Skywalker or the Harry Potter or the Jen from The Dark Crystal or whatever, they also were more likely to turn to Google to discover if their son was stupid, or slow, or behind in school than they were for their daughters. But they were still much more likely to think he was a genius.

Not that parents weren't worried about their little sugar/spice/everything nice concoctions; Stephens-Davidowitz notes that when it comes to daughters, parents are quite concerned that they might be — Quelle horreur! — fat or ugly. In fact, people were twice as likely to search for "Is my daughter overweight" than "Is my son overweight," despite the fact that childhood obesity is more prevalent in boys than it is in girls. They were also more likely to ask Google if their daughter was ugly, because that's a thing that Google knows. (Googling "Is my daughter ugly?" should automatically send an alert out to local child protective services, tbh.)

Most depressingly, Stephens-Davidowitz noted that there was no correlation between geographic distribution and tendency for internet users to want their sons to be geniuses and their daughters to be beauty queens; both the reddest of the red states and the crunchiest of the granola states took to Google to ask the same things for their offspring.

As Amanda Marcotte notes at Slate, this might not just be because parents are Part Of The Problem; it may be because parents understand the reality of the world where we live. And parents, for the most part, just want what's best for their kids; they want them to succeed, to be happy, and to be treated with respect by their peers. Men can achieve that by being intelligent. Women have an easier time if they're hot. Overweight women, or women who aren't conventionally attractive, are much less likely to be given a leg up in work (or in life) than women who are thin or conventionally attractive. Men, on the other hand, can get away with looking a lot sloppier. It's just like that episode of Tyra where she walked around in a fat suit secretly filming people be mean to her.

There's also the possibility that parents have a narcissistic stake in their children's social success. Asking Google "Is my son gifted?" can easily be a query with its own projected self-assurance, and corresponding confirmation bias. Kids, after all, are the result of parents combining their genes, and there must be nothing more disturbing to a person convinced that they're awesome than having to face their totally unremarkable DNA staring them back in the face, rocking their world with bland averageness, or worse, below averageness. Or maybe I'm just biased myself for having spent too much time dodging Brooklyn's herd of McLaren strollers.

But this also hints that as much as self-proclaimed progressives wantto exist in a world where looks don't matter to the point where they can be ignored, they still matter. None of us exist outside of the context of the society where we live, which is why the concept of being "color blind" or "gender blind" is false to the point of silliness. We're not individual entities free of baggage; we are baggage. No matter who we are, and where we live, it's impossible to escape the pervasive message that women are more valuable when they're more decorative and men are more valuable when they're the ones doing the thinking and deciding. And we don't need Google to tell us that.

[Kobi]

Mike Huckabee says Democrats make women feel helpless to control their libido by offering government-sponsored birth control.

The onetime presidential candidate and former Arkansas governor told the Republican National Committee during a speech Thursday that they can’t allow liberals to frame the debate any longer.

“I think it’s time Republicans no longer accept listening to the Democrats talk about a ‘war on women,’” Huckabee said. “Because the fact is, the Republicans don’t have a war on women. They have a war for women.”

He said Democrats convinced women they were victims, but Republicans wanted to empower them.

“Women I know are outraged that Democrats think that women are nothing more than helpless or hopeless creatures whose only goal in life is to have a government provide for them
birth control medication,” Huckabee said. “Women I know are smart, educated, intelligent, capable of doing anything anyone else can do.”

Huckabee made similar remarks Sunday during his Fox News program.

He said the Republican Party, which kicked off its annual winter conference by sending participants to the March for Life, stands for the equality of women.

“If Democrats want to insult the women of America by making them believe they are helpless without Uncle Sugar coming in and providing them for them a prescription each month for birth control because they cannot control their libido or their reproductive system without the help of government, then so be it,” Huckabee said.

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2014/01/2...m-uncle-sugar/

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I see the GOP has been advised to reframe the war on women to the war for women.

Allison, you might be clairvoyant. I am a leetle closer to calling someone a fuckie fuck face.

[Kobi]

Conservatives are attacking Texas state Sen. Wendy Davis (D) for misrepresenting her background, in particular the hardships she faced as a young single mother. But one Texas Republican is defending Davis' record, saying the gubernatorial candidate wouldn't be subject to the same criticism if she were male.

On Sunday, a Dallas Morning News article pointed out some discrepancies in the stories Davis has told -- including when she was divorced from her first husband, how long she lived in a trailer and how she paid for law school. In response, conservatives such as Rush Limbaugh have labeled her a "genuine head case" and claimed she had a "sugar daddy."

Some pundits have even suggested that Davis was a negligent parent for leaving her children with her second husband while she attended Harvard Law School in the early 1990s.

Becky Haskins, a Republican who served with Wendy Davis on the Fort Worth City Council, told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram on Tuesday that Davis was a hard worker who did what she needed to do for her daughters.

“If this involved a man running for office, none of this would ever come up,” Haskins told the Star-Telegram. “It’s so sad. Every time I ran, somebody said I needed to be home with my kids. Nobody ever talks about men being responsible parents.”

“They wouldn’t be talking about Wendy if she weren’t a threat," Haskins added.

Davis' main Republican opponent in the Texas governor's race, state Attorney General Greg Abbott, accused her of “systematically, intentionally and repeatedly deceiv[ing] Texans for years about her background."

Davis has admitted that she was 21 when she divorced her first husband, not 19 as previously stated. (She was 19 with a baby when the two were separated.) She has also acknowledged that her second husband paid for a portion of her education.

In a Monday release from her campaign, Davis responded to Abbott's attacks with defiance.

"[The attacks] won’t work, because my story is the story of millions of Texas women who know the strength it takes when you’re young, alone and a mother," Davis said in the release. "I’ve always been open about my life not because my story is unique, but because it isn’t."

And in an email to her supporters sent Tuesday, Davis said, "You’re damn right it’s a true story."

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/0...n_4645187.html

[Kobi]

*****Trigger Warning*****

“Ignore the barrage of violent threats and harassing messages that confront you online every day.” That’s what women are told. But these relentless messages are an assault on women’s careers, their psychological bandwidth, and their freedom to live online. We have been thinking about Internet harassment all wrong.

[Kobi]

"In a survey of high school students, 56% of the girls and 76% of the boys believed forced sex was acceptable under some circumstances. A survey of 11-to-14 year-olds found that 51% of the boys and 41% of the girls said forced sex was acceptable if the boy, "spent a lot of money" on the girl; 31% of the boys and 32% of the girls said it was acceptable for a man to rape a woman with past sexual experience; 87% of boys and 79% of girls said sexual assault was acceptable if the man and the woman were married; 65% of the boys and 47% of the girls said it was acceptable for a boy to rape a girl if they had been dating for more than six months."


This is from an internet conference from Harvard Law School that was held back in 2002. I cannot track down the study itself.

Even tho it is 12 years old, it still surprised me. It is a mindset that I expected back in my generation of the 60's and 70's.

Interesting reading tho. Access course here.

[Kobi]

This word describes so much of what we see in the cultural and systemic treatment of trans* women in our culture and ties in so clearly with feminism, and yet it’s not a word that many people know about or understand.

You may have heard of transphobia: the discrimination of and negative attitudes toward transgender people based on their gender expression.

And you’ve likely heard of misogyny: the hatred and denigration of women and characteristics deemed feminine.

Transmisogyny, then, is the confluence of these – the negative attitudes, expressed through cultural hate, individual and state violence, and discrimination directed toward trans* women and trans* people on the feminine end of the gender spectrum.

Who Is Vicitimized by Transmisogyny?

Transmisogyny targets transgender and transsexual women – male-to-female (MTF) people who were assigned a male gender at birth, but have transitioned to identify as women.

Transgender women are not the only people who experience transmisogyny.

Trans* people who do not necessarily identify as women, but who present feminine characteristics and/or identify along the feminine end of the gender spectrum are also on the receiving end of transmisogyny.

Transmisogyny is all about the hatred of the feminine, and it is not limited toward only those who identify as women. It includes transfeminine and feminine-identified genderqueer people, as well as many others who are feminine-of-center but were not assigned a female gender at birth.

So for the purpose of simplicity and brevity in this article, I will use the term trans* women (the asterisk used to mark inclusivity of those who are not necessarily transgender, but are also not cisgender) to refer to all people victimized by transmigogyny; when specifically referring to transgender women, I will use that terminology.

Why Does Transmisogyny Exist?

Transmisogyny is based in the assumption that femininity is inferior to masculinity.

It relies on an understanding of all those qualities that are associated with ”femaleness” and devaluing them, viewing them as less than those qualities associated with “maleness” and therefore as deserving of hatred, mockery, and violence.

This sounds a whole lot like sexism, doesn’t it?

Why should there be a specific word used to describe the experience of trans* people who are specifically feminine? How is this different from sexism and transphobia?

Trans* women experience a particular kind of sexist marginalization based in their unique position of overlapping oppressions – they are both trans* and feminine. They are devalued by society on both accounts.

Trans* people experience transphobia, or cissexism, due to a cultural and systemic obsession with the gender binary: the idea that there are two types of people – men and women – who are born, raised, and naturally associate with that gender and its accompanying characteristics. Our cultural and political institutions are based on this premise.

Transmisogyny reflects a hatred of those who do not fit easily into either side of the gender binary.

Trans* women are not always easily categorized, and for people and institutions whose understanding of gender relies deeply in the repressive gender binary, this is confusing, transgressive, and for some, worthy of hate.

The response to the existence of those who challenge the social understanding of gender, then, is extreme oppression and marginalization of trans* people of all gender expressions.

Trans-Femininity and Sexism

Our society is steeped in the notion that women and characteristics coded as feminine are inferior to men and those qualities coded as masculine.

In our sexist society, being a woman automatically places you in a position of less value.

But to give up one’s “important” position as a man, choosing (as trans* people are perceived to do) to be a woman and to be feminine, in a way, poses a fundamental threat to male superiority and may be seen as a rejection of the “superior male identity.”

Trans* women are not only a reminder to society that gender categories are not fixed, but also that womanhood and feminine gender expression is not something to be ashamed of.

In this way, understanding transmisogyny is absolutely imperative to our work as feminists, and makes clear just how integral trans* issues and rights are to our work around gender.

Not only is transmisogyny steeped in sexism, but the resulting oppression is parallel to what cisgender (those who identify with the gender of which they were assigned at birth) women face: physical objectification, over-sexualization, stereotyping, policing of bodies, a discrimination on all levels of society, and individual and systemic acts of violence.

The Violence of Transmisogyny

Transmisogyny rears its ugly head in many ways and on all levels of society.

We see it, for instance, in violence on an individual level.

Hate crimes against trans* people are disproportionately and tragically high, and the majority of this violence victimizes trans* women.

In fact, over half of all anti-LGBTQIA+ homicides were perpetrated against transgender women. And while we’re talking statistics, it’s important to note that nearly three-quarters of those homicides targeted people of Color.

We see transmisogyny in state violence as well.

1 in 5 transgender women (21%) has been incarcerated at some point in her life. This is far above the general population, and is even higher (47%) for Black transgender people.

According to the National Center for Transgender Equality, trans* people experience disproportionately high rates of poverty and homelessness caused by discrimination in jobs and housing, but they also experience greater incarceration rates, largely due to gender profiling by the police.

Gender is policed, quite literally by police officers who target, arrest, and often harass trans* women for looking “different” and therefore, “disorderly.” Trans* women of Color, in particular, tend to be perceived by police through racialized and gender stereotypes framing them as highly sexual and as criminal.

Trans* women are consistently targeted and arrested for being involved in sex work, even if they have no association with this work.

There have been many instances where trans* women, most often trans* women of Color, have been arrested for carrying condoms.

In New York, where having a condom on you can be used as evidence of involvement in sex work, trans* women are being profiled, searched, and arrested for being a trans* woman at the wrong place at the wrong time.

There’s also direct violence at the hands of police: A 2012 study by the National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs found that transgender people across the U.S. experience three times more police violence than cisgender people.

And nearly half of trans* people who reported hate crimes to the police experienced mistreatment from them while asking for help.

Trans* women experience abuse after being arrested as well, when they are most often forced to reside in men’s prison facilities, experiencing extremely high rates of sexual and physical violence – a study by the Department of Justice found that 1 in 3 are sexual assaulted in prison. In response, many prisons place trans* women in solitary confinement for extended periods of time “for their own protection.” (Meanwhile, solitary confinement is considered a form of torture.)

In the Media

While trans* men are generally ignored and made invisible by American media, trans* women are exoticized, their existence perceived as shocking and newsworthy. They are mocked, over-sexualized, and fetishized.

Trans* women are given an extremely two-dimensional portrayal in the news, where they are most often reported on in association of a hate crime. In these reports, their gender is consistently portrayed as confusing and illegitimate, appearing in countless headlines like this one: “Man Dressed as Woman Found Dead.

Our media portrays trans* women in archetypes – as the weak victim of a crime, or as the evil villain; as the mentally unstable character, or as the manipulative one.

They are often pathologized and sexualized, portrayed as someone manipulatively hiding their transgender identity to trick a man into engaging with them sexually or romantically.

They play countless television roles as sex workers.

They are shown as unattractive; they are the butt of jokes, their desire to be feminine mocked, their motives for transitioning questioned.

And while it is difficult to find complex and honest portrayals of trans* women characters on television, it is even more rare to find an authentic and respectful portrayal of a trans* woman of Color (though we have see a few recently, like the great Laverne Cox in Orange is the New Black).

In Queer and Women’s Spaces

Sadly, transmisogyny is also very present in LGBTQIA+ spaces, where trans* women, particularly trans* women of Color, are marginalized within an already marginalized group.

The mainstream LGBTQIA+ movement has been called out many times for excluding trans* people, and there is a pervasive sexism in the movement as well as in social spaces, that promotes transmisogyny and a denigration of feminine qualities.

Masculine privilege, like white privilege, does not disappear once one is in a queer space, and trans* women have been accused of “hurting the movement” due to the visible transgression of many of society’s norms involved in being a trans* woman.

And although it should be the last place where transmisogyny is present, sadly, we see it often in cis-women’s spaces.

Trans* women are excluded from many domestic violence shelters and other crisis spaces that exist in response to violence against women in our society.

Trans* women continue to be excluded from many women-only spaces and feminist events, while some “feminists” continue to speak out against the very existence of trans* women, arguing that they are not “authentic” women and that they are “hurting the movement.”

Trans* women have called these groups and spaces out, creating inclusive spaces in the meantime, citing that they experience sexism and homophobia in very real and concrete ways, and yet are excluded from the spaces which were created in response to these oppressions.

What Can We Do?

Transmisogyny, like sexism, is pervasive and structural, but it also exists in our everyday experiences. Once you understand it, you begin to notice it in personal interactions, on television, and in social movements and political campaigns.

Call it out! Name it for what it is. Transmisogyny, like, sexism, goes unnoticed too often because it is so entrenched in our sociocultural and political understanding of gender. Educate others about this issue.

And most importantly, don’t be afraid to call out other feminists or gay rights advocates for transmisoginistic words and actions. These are the spaces we need to make more inclusive.

It is so important that we work together to find a solution to the problem of transmisogyny’s existence in our movements and that we always act in solidarity with our trans* sisters.

If our movements seek to eradicate transphobia, homophobia, and sexism, then we must place transmisogyny, located at the intersection of these oppressions, at the forefront of our fight.


http://everydayfeminism.com/2014/01/transmisogyny/