Feminism in News and Popular Media

[Kobi]

Do not bother to call. She’s planning to celebrate in Botswana. “I thought: ‘What do I really want to do on my birthday?’ First, get out of Dodge. Second, ride elephants.”

Gloria

[Kobi]

Wed. May 14th
5:00 PM Pacific / 8:00 PM Eastern
Participate LIVE and have full access to download the
webinar at any time.

Something big is happening for us as women. We’re on the brink of an evolutionary shift with the potential to alter the course of history. Millions of us around the world are feeling a calling to reclaim the feminine, and in so doing, to awaken our authentic power to co-create the future of our lives and shape the future of our world.

You may be experiencing it as an impulse to evolve yourself, to realize the potential of your creative gifts and talents and to make your greatest contribution. You may yearn for deeper experiences of love, intimacy and connection and feel a longing to come more fully alive. You may even intuitively sense that you have a unique purpose and a critical role to play in shaping the future of our world. And you may well be right.

Never before have we, as women, been holding so much power to shape the future.

For the first time in history, women outnumber men as graduates from American colleges. Over 40% of women in the US are also the primary breadwinners in their households, and as of January this year women outnumber men in the work force. In October 2012, CNN declared that women would become the “saviors of the global economy” and the Dalai Lama prophesized that “the world will be saved by the Western woman.”

Paradoxically, studies show that we’ve never been more unhappy.

Yet, despite the amazing success and privilege we’ve gained over the past 50 years, numerous studies continue to reveal a startling truth: that women’s overall sense of happiness and well-being has actually been on a significant and steady decline since the early 1970s.

For all the amazing benefits that feminism has brought us, its fruits have not necessarily included personal or spiritual fulfillment. If you’re feeling subtle, yet persistent anxiety or depression in spite of the possibilities for greatness you can sense, you’re not alone.

In fact, the majority of women today experience a profound and painful gap between the highest potentials we intuit for our lives and the way that our lives actually show up on a day to day basis.

We sense the possibility for so much more….

While we’ve gained the freedom to do, be and have anything we want, we haven’t necessarily cultivated the power to cause our lives to flourish and thrive.

Rather than having arrived in the land of milk and honey, as we’d hoped we would, we now find ourselves wrestling with a new kind of discontent—a new “problem that has no name.”

We’ve been cultivating a masculine version of power.

By wholeheartedly embracing a masculine version of power (that was so necessary to level the playing field 50 years ago), we’ve dramatically elevated our standard of living, while at the same time, severely diminishing our quality of life.

We now have more freedom, money, education and opportunity than any other generation of women in history. Yet we often feel powerless to create those things we most value and care about: love, intimacy, connection, belonging, creativity, self-expression, aliveness, meaning, purpose, contribution and a brighter future for generations to come.

We think our struggle to create these things we long for is a personal failure—but it’s actually a collective problem, symptomatic of our larger evolutionary journey as women. The restlessness we’re feeling is actually a critical calling, an impulse to evolve.

Awakening a new, co-creative feminine power holds the key to our personal and planetary potential.

The good news is that there is a vibrant, life-enriching alternative to masculine power that is fully within reach for every awakening woman. We call it “feminine power”–and it has the power to transform your life from the inside out.

Unlike masculine power, which is the power to create things that can be controlled, feminine power is the power to manifest that which is beyond our control, including those things that our heart most yearns for–intimacy, relatedness, creative expression, authentic community and meaningful contribution.

Through our pioneering research and intensive work with thousands of women from around the world, we’ve identified the specific principles, processes and practices by which women can awaken this new, co-creative feminine power in their lives.

We’ve discovered that there are three very distinct sources of feminine co-creativity that give access to three different kinds of power: the power to change your life, the power to realize your destiny and the power to transform the world. We call them “the three power bases of the co-creative feminine.”



The Keys to Awakening Power Base #1:
THE POWER TO CHANGE YOUR LIFE

Why most popular approaches to transforming core beliefs don’t work for women, and the brand new, leading edge process that really does
Liberate yourself and others from the tyranny of old disempowering patterns, graduating forever from the dynamics of the past
How to have a generative, empowered relationship with your feelings and emotions, and why you absolutely must know how to do this in order to realize your greater potentials

The Keys to Awakening Power Base #2:
THE POWER TO REALIZE YOUR DESTINY

Experience the joy of being radically alive and dynamically engaged in the co-creative process of life
Master the ability to discern your inner guidance such that you begin navigating life from an assured sense that you are on your “destiny path”
Learn how to access the unlimited support and resources of All of Creation to cause the full flourishing of life everywhere you go

The Keys to Awakening Power Base #3:
THE POWER TO TRANSFORM THE WORLD

Learn why we cannot be become ourselves by ourselves, and how to create evolutionary partnerships that will unleash the full realization of your unique gifts and contributions
How to harness the power of the collective field to cause unprecedented transformations in our lives and in our world
How to become a powerful agent of change and consciously join with others to co-create the future of our world

We can’t wait to be with you for this Global Online Webinar &
Gathering on Wednesday, May 14th!

http://femininepower.com/online-cour...-class/fbpost/

[Kobi]

LOUISVILLE, Ky. (AP) — In the male-dominated world of horse racing, Anna Rose Napravnik (nah-PRAHV'-nik) figured she'd have better luck if nobody noticed a woman's name in the track program.

She started out her career disguising her gender, riding under the initials A.R. Napravnik.

Nine years later, Rosie Napravnik is one of the rising stars in the sport, having long ago discarded her ruse. Now the 26-year-old from New Jersey will try to make even bigger history and become the first woman to ride a Kentucky Derby winner.

She's achieved firsts before. She was the first woman to win the Louisiana Derby, and did it twice. She also was the highest-placing female rider in the Kentucky Derby.

http://news.yahoo.com/rosie-napravni...1757--spt.html

[Kobi]

POKHARA, Nepal (AP) — When Lucky, Dicky and Nicky Chettri tried to break into Nepal's male-dominated trekking industry 20 years ago, competitors tried to run them out of business. They say men threatened them, harassed them — even filed bogus police reports against them.

"The men said this is a business for the men and we should leave it alone," said Lucky, the eldest Chettri sister in the 3 Sisters Adventure Trekking Company. "They would even accuse us of trying to take away food from their table."

Now the sisters have a booming business and a waiting list of Nepalese women who want to join their six-month training program for mountain guides.

The rise of the Chettri sisters' business in many ways reflects the increasing clout of women in Nepal, which remains in most ways a deeply patriarchal country.

Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay first climbed Mount Everest in 1953, but it was another 40 years before the first Nepali woman reached the peak. Since then, women have made progress in politics, education and business.

About 5 percent of Nepali politicians were female in 1990, but women won a third of the seats in the 2008 parliamentary election. Some discriminatory laws have been changed, including one that allowed only sons to inherit parental property.

Shailee Basnet, who led a 10-member Nepali women's team to Everest in 2008, said the number of women in trekking and mountaineering has risen as well, and she gave credit to the Chettri sisters.

"They have started a trend for women to take up this profession. Women guiding foreign trekkers in the region has become a normal thing now," she said.

The Chettris came up with the idea of opening a woman-run trekking agency when they heard from foreign female travelers who were harassed, even sexually assaulted and threatened by their own male guides while trekking remote mountain trails.

"These girls were really afraid and felt insecure," said Lucky, 48, at their office next to the picturesque Phewa lake.

The sisters once led trips themselves, but had trouble finding more women who knew trekking, spoke English and were willing to spend days walking with the foreigners away from home. Their solution was to bring the women to Pokhara and train them for months.

"At the beginning it was very unusual for the women to join our program because they had to leave their homes for many days, working with Westerners," said Nicky, the youngest of the sisters. "Some thought it was against our culture because women are expected to be at home doing household work."

But soon the word spread. "These women began to like the idea that they don't need to depend on their husbands for money," Nicky said.

Gam Maya Tilicha, 25, once planned to become a teacher but is now a full-time guide at the agency.

"I never imagined that I would be a trekking guide. But the income is very good and I like what I am doing — meeting people from all over the world and traveling to new places in Nepal," she said.

The sisters take in 40 students every six months, giving them free housing, food and clothing. The money earned from the trekking agency supports the training.

Once they graduate, they make about $3,000 a year from guiding tourists, a better-than-average salary in this poor Himalayan nation. Monika Rai, a 19-year-old student, hopes it leads to something better.

"I am here to learn the skills of trekking and English language so that I can become a guide and make more money than in any other jobs," she said.

The Chettris have 150 women guides who lead close to 1,000 foreign trekkers a year. They cater to those who travel the lower mountain trails, not the mountaineers who go beyond Everest's base camp and up to the world's tallest peak.

Mountaineering and trekking is a big business in Nepal, where half the foreign visitors come to explore the mountains. According to the Nepal Mountaineering Association, some 340,000 foreign tourists ventured on treks last year.

Many of the visitors are single women who prefer to have female companion, including Sophie Whitwell, a 25-year-old marketing executive from London who signed up with 3 Sisters.

"I would definitely want a female guide. I am sure it would be fine if you went with a male guide but you just don't know, and you are walking with them potentially alone for several hours a day," she said. "If you are in a scenario where you need a rescue ... a female guide is just as capable of walking to the next town to get help or make a phone call."

http://news.yahoo.com/women-reach-to...105449701.html

[Kobi]

The most common criticism of radical feminist theory is that we are gender essentialist because we believe that women’s oppression, as a class, is because of the biological realities of our bodies.

Radical feminists define sex as the physical body, whilst gender is a social construct. It is not a function of our biology. It is the consequence of being labelled male/female at birth and assigned to the oppressor/sex class. The minute genetic differences are not reflected in the reality of women’s lived experiences.

Gender is the coercive process of socialization built upon a material reality that constructs women as a subordinate class to men. As such, radical feminists do not want to queer gender or create a spectrum of gendered identities; we want to end the hierarchical power structure that privileges men as a class at the expense of women’s health and safety.

This assumption is based on a misunderstanding of radical feminist theory, that starts from the definition of “radical” itself, which refers to the root or the origin: that is to say, the oppression of women by men (The Patriarchy). It is radical insofar as it contextualizes the root of women’s oppression in the biological realities of our bodies (sex) and seeks the liberation of women through the eradication of social structures, cultural practices and laws that are predicated on women’s inferiority to men (gender).

Radical feminism challenges all relationships of power that exist within the Patriarchy including capitalism, imperialism, racism, classism, homophobia and even the fashion-beauty complex because they are harmful to everyone: female, male, intersex and trans*. As with all social justice movements, radical feminism is far from perfect. No movement can exist within a White Supremacist culture without (re)creating racist, homophobic, disablist, colonialist and classist power structures. What makes radical feminism different is its focus on women as a class.

Radical feminists do not believe there are any innate gender differences, or in the existence of male/female brains. Women are not naturally more nurturing than men and men are not better at maths and reading maps. Men are only “men” insofar as male humans are socialized into specific characteristics that we label male, such as intelligence, aggression, and violence and woman are “woman” because we are socialized into believing that we are more nurturing, empathetic, and caring than men.

Women’s oppression as a class is built on two interconnected constructs: reproductive capability and sexual capability. In the words of Gerda Lerner in The Creation of Patriarchy, the commodification of women’s sexual and reproductive capacities is the foundation of the creation of private property and a class-based society. Without the commodification of women’s labour there would be no unequal hierarchy of power between men and women, fundamental to the creation and continuation of the Capitalist-Patriarchy, and, therefore, no need for gender as a social construct.

Radical feminism recognizes the multiple oppressions of individual women, whilst recognizing the oppression of women as a class in the Marxist sense of the term. Rape does not require every woman to be raped to function as a punishment and a deterrent from speaking out. The threat therein is enough. Equally, the infertility of an individual woman does not negate the fact that her oppression is based on the assumed potential (and desire) for pregnancy, which is best seen in discussions of women’s employment and men’s refusal to hire women during “child-bearing” years due to the potential for pregnancy, which is used as a way of controlling women’s labour: keeping women in low-paying jobs and maintaining the glass ceiling. Constructing women as “nurturers” maintains the systemic oppression of women and retains wealth and power within men as a class.

Even something as basic as a company dress code is gendered to mark women as other. Women working in the service industry are frequently required to wear clothing and high heels that accentuate external markers of sex. Sexual harassment is endemic, particularly in the workplace, yet women are punished if they do not attend work in clothing that is considered “acceptable” for the male gaze. The use of women’s bodies to sell products further institutionalizes the construction of women as object.

There is a shared girlhood in a culture that privileges boys, coercively constructs women’s sexuality and punishes girls who try to live outside gendered norms. The research of Dale Spender, and even Margaret Atwood, dating back to the 1980s has made it very clear that young girls are socialized to be quiet, meek and unconfident. Boys, on the other hand, are socialized to believe that everything they say and do is important: by parents and teachers, by a culture which believes that no young boy would ever want to watch a film or read a book about girls or written by a woman. Shared girlhood is differentiated by race, class, faith and sexuality, but, fundamentally, all girls are raised in a culture which actively harms them.

Radical feminists are accused of gender essentialism because we recognize the oppressive structures of our world and seek to dismantle them. We acknowledge the sex of the vast majority of perpetrators of violence. We do so by creating women-only spaces so that women can share stories in the knowledge that other women will listen. This is in direct contrast to every other public and private space that women and young girls live in.

Sometimes these spaces are trans-inclusive, like A Room of our Own the blogging network I created for feminists and womanists. Sometimes these spaces will need to be for women who are FAAB only or trans* women only, just as it is absolutely necessary to have black-women only spaces and lesbian women-only spaces.

There is a need for all of these spaces because socialization is a very powerful tool. Being raised male in a patriarchal white supremacist culture is very different to being raised female with the accompanying sexual harassment, trauma and oppression. The exclusion of trans* women from some spaces is to support traumatized women who can be triggered by being in the same space as someone who was socialized male growing up. This does not mean that an individual trans* woman is a danger, but rather a recognition that gendered violence exists and that trauma is complicated.

It is our direct challenge to hegemonic masculinity and control of the world’s resources (including human) that makes radical feminism a target of accusations like gender essentialism. We recognize the importance in biological sex because of the way girls and boys are socialized to believe that boys are better than girls. As long as we live in a capitalist-patriarchy where boys are socialized to believe that aggression and anger are acceptable behaviour, women and girls will need the right to access women-only spaces however they define them.


- See more at: http://www.feministtimes.com/the-pro....hrv9wRr6.dpuf

[Kobi]

Capital New York reports on Thursday that feminist writers Rebecca Traister and Amanda Fortini will be joining Elle as contributing editors. Last month, Cosmopolitan hired longtime Feministing blogger Jill Filipovic to cover politics on the website. It seems the hot trend this season is political awareness.

Cosmo, especially, has come a long way from oral sex tips. The magazine's web presence is now decidedly feminist — the leading story as of this writing is about Columbia University's sexual assault problem. Ex-Jezebel blogger Anna Breslaw is now the sex editor at the site. In a Reddit AMA earlier this year, she wrote "I was hired to make the site funnier, more feminist and less about creepy servile blowjob magic." It seems to be working. As Capital's Nicole Levy notes, NARAL Pro-Choice and the National Institute for Reproductive Health honored Cosmo and editor-in-chief Joanna Coles this year "for their roles in shaping public discourse in favor of women’s reproductive health and rights." Coles herself asserted back in December that the magazine is "deeply feminist."

Elle's EIC, Robbie Myers, seems eager to hop on the bandwagon. She said in a statement today,

[Traister and Fortini] were both strong voices in the cultural conversation that erupted surrounding sexism during the 2008 presidential election, and their work continues to push the feminist reawakening we are experiencing in this country forward. I think the next few years are going to be a groundbreaking time for women in our culture, and in politics in particular, so I’m excited to have Rebecca and Amanda on board to interpret that for our readers.

Here's hoping the feminist reawakening stays in style for years.

http://www.thewire.com/culture/2014/...gazine/370964/

[ProfPacker]

http://www.lostateminor.com/2014/04/...en-everywhere/