One of the pleasures of hosting such a carnival is that of being lifted gently out of parochialism, the tendency to become preoccupied with the most burning issues at home. It reminds me of opening the window on a spring day, when the fog has lifted, to reveal a spectacular view, no longer restricted to a few gnarled trees in own garden, but stretching to the distant coastline and the edge of the horizon. Contributions from over the oceans predominate, yet it is striking to see just how much we have in common no matter what corner of the globe we occupy: the struggle for access to political power, violence (albeit with huge differences in degree), autonomy, full humanity and control of one’s own body and, with it, destiny, as illustrated most potently with abortion and gender reassignment. In spite of the controversy, the occasional bouts of mutual recrimination, wounding inflicted intentional or otherwise one of our primary virtues is open-mindedness, our willingness to reassess our preconceptions, examine our flaws and blind spots and focus on what unites us as women, whether we were born with female reproductive organs or not. Feminism is diverse and can accommodate many strands. Some might regard this as a weakness that splits us into warring factions so that we dissipate our energies in bitter battles over ascendancy and definition, rather than channelling them into ending oppression, whether of the overt or the more insidious stealth variety. I do not advocate stifling disagreement, quite the opposite, conflict is not pathological, but the inevitable outcome of competing claims and a source of vitality as opposed to a force which saps it. Exchanging views, however vigorously, can clarify our thought, challenging our cosy assumptions and allowing us to perceive where, perhaps, we have been insensitive.

US Elections

Being a spectator of American politics on a superficial level is a peculiar feeling, as I can watch the most ferocious battles with almost complete detachment, an impossibility when caught up in squabbles nearer home.

Over here, media coverage has almost completely ignored the Republican campaign, speculating on whether voters will overcome their gender- or race-based prejudices. This trend became even more pronounced once Mitt Romney had dropped out of the race, as the press had discerned a certain novelty value in a Mormon running for office. On a spare afternoon in Nicosia on mission, I watched CNN, the only English-language channel available, listening in with grim fascination as Romney gave a perfect summary of everything I find most repugnant (as a left-wing fully-recovered former fundamentalist and confirmed atheist) about American conservatism: let the poor starve, they are all undeserving detritus anyway, bring fathers back into the home, as women lack the ability to instil discipline, they are too tender-hearted and boys won’t listen to them. As he threw down the gauntlet to feminists with his unapologetic reassertion of patriarchal authority, I shuddered when I realised his statements were being greeted not by derision, but enthusiastic cheers and terrifyingly sincere howls of dismay when he actually got as far as his announcement: “The threat to our culture comes from within. The 1960’s welfare programs created a culture of poverty. Some think we won that battle when we reformed welfare, but the liberals haven’t given up. At every turn, they try to substitute government largesse for individual responsibility. They fight to strip work requirements from welfare, to put more people on Medicaid, and to remove more and more people from having to pay any income tax whatsoever. Dependency is death to initiative, risk-taking and opportunity. Dependency is a culture-killing drug—we have got to fight it like the poison it is!

The attack on faith and religion is no less relentless. And tolerance for pornography—even celebration of it—and sexual promiscuity, combined with the twisted incentives of government welfare programs have led to today’s grim realities: 68% of African American children are born out-of-wedlock, 45% of Hispanic children, and 25% of White children. How much harder it is for these children to succeed in school—and in life. A nation built on the principles of the founding fathers cannot long stand when its children are raised without fathers in the home.

The development of a child is enhanced by having a mother and father. Such a family is the ideal for the future of the child and for the strength of a nation. I wonder how it is that unelected judges, like some in my state of Massachusetts, are so unaware of this reality, so oblivious to the millennia of recorded history. It is time for the people of America to fortify marriage through constitutional amendment, so that liberal judges cannot continue to attack it!”

And on the subject of Europe, my ears were assailed with blood-curdling lunacy: “Europe is facing a demographic disaster. That is the inevitable product of weakened faith in the Creator, failed families, disrespect for the sanctity of human life and eroded morality. Some reason that culture is merely an accessory to America’s vitality; we know that it is the source of our strength. And we are not dissuaded by the snickers and knowing glances when we stand up for family values, and morality, and culture. We will always be honoured to stand on principle and to stand for principle.”

Against this backdrop, my ambivalence towards the vulgar, brash, showy, glitzy, chintzy, somewhat surreal world of US politics, I hope, become slightly more understandable. I cannot escape my acculturation in entirety. British politics are bland, staid and bloodless by comparison. Over here, we take a certain (misplaced) pride in our cynicism, our worldly-wise disillusionment with the whole charade. We don’t want to be saddled with another Bush amoeba, butbeyond that, we don’t mind who wins. From the outside, Americans seem to be far more passionate about their politics, evincing depths of feeling that we, steeped in our British reserve, find hard to fathom.

A victory for either candidate (not the nomination, but the Presidency itself) would be symbolically extremely potent, as Holly Ord of Menstrual Poetry acknowledges in Voting for Hillary Just because She’s a Woman?, roundly rejecting the idea of gender-based partisanship: “Are people counting on the population of feminists to secure Hillary’s standing in the presidential election? Are people counting on the population of women as a whole to secure Hillary’s standing? I think some are, but in a way I feel that that specific way of thinking is doing nothing but addressing women as nothing but sheep who believe that just because a woman is looking to find her way into the white house that other women will help her get there. I do not believe that by being a woman, or by being a feminist, that I am trumped to vote for Hillary no matter what just because she’s a woman.

This argument also reaches to Obama. Are black people voting for Obama just because he’s “one of them?” When putting it that way, of course it sounds racist, but by believing women will vote for a woman candidate based purely on reproductive organs, it is treating that situation the exact same way if people were to come right out and say “Well the only reason you’re voting for Obama is because you’re also black.” Or the same goes for McCain with “You’re only voting for McCain because he’s an old, white man and you also happen to be an old, white man.”

What ever happened to voting for a candidate based purely on how they stand on issues you feel strongly about?”

Staunch Hillary supporter Christine of Me, My Kid and Life in Think Before You Vote asks: “As a man, would you rather have any man in office than any woman? Be honest. Would having a woman as president put your old boy’s club status (which all men belong to regardless of race) in jeopardy? For a lot of American men I believe the answer is yes.

Obama may be an underdog due to his race, but I believe Clinton is more of an underdog due to the misogynistic rhetoric we live with in our daily lives which runs rampant in American culture. Clinton has never once played the ‘gender’ card. Obama is freely and continually playing the ‘race’ card and it’s getting out-of-hand”.

Ultimately, her message is the same as Holly’s: “Don’t vote race. Don’t vote gender. Clear your thinking from the rhetoric and stigmas and please choose the person you truly believe can best meet the needs of American citizens. It’s really important this time around. We are in new territory, internationally, and we better be careful”.

To give a flavour of how the elections are being tackled in the British press, I quote journalist Libby Brooks in This is about power, not shared sexual characteristics (The Guardian, 7^th March 2008) who arrives at a similar conclusion to Holly and Christine: “Polemics about female ambition and sisterly duty provoked by the Clinton candidacy show feminism is evolving.

That the personal is political has ever been a central tenet of the women’s movement. But never has it caused such conflict, generational collision and soul-searching for American feminists as when contemplating whether to support Hillary Clinton for the Democratic presidential nomination.

To have a female leading the world’s most powerful democracy remains an intoxicating prospect for many women. This week, with that possibility renewed, it’s worth reflecting why. With women at this level of influence still an extreme exception, it’s inevitable that they will primarily be viewed through the prism of their gender, and not only by men. Is the election of a woman head of state as symbolic as it once was? And what can her candidacy tell us about contemporary attitudes to sisterhood, ambition and power?

Feminists of all hues have been quick to challenge the misogyny that has afflicted Clinton’s campaign: the incessant carping about her appearance and demeanour; the double standard whereby she is at once too rigid and too emotional; the sneers that she will never be more than her husband’s wife (and a betrayed wife at that). But it is evident that women are not basing their voting choices on gender solidarity alone: despite her gains on Tuesday, national polling has shown support from Clinton’s core female constituency slowly draining to Obama over the past month.

Axiomatically, nor should they be expected to vote on the basis of shared secondary sexual characteristics”.

Brooks continues: “While it’s true that women are encouraged by the prevailing culture to perceive ambition as unseemly, unfeminine and greedy, our own experience of powerful women is more complex. First, the expectation that any female would necessarily be more attuned to her own gender’s concerns is countered by the freakish exceptionalism of an individual who has successfully combined extreme talent with extreme drive. For all Clinton may struggle to integrate the cookie baker with the commander-in-chief, she’s a world away from the conflicts that most working mothers face. That exceptionalism inevitably distances her from the lack of power that so many women experience – to the extent that her femaleness almost ceases to be a valid identity”.

MW of Divided We Stand United We Fall addresses the question of media distortions motivated by a desire to squeeze out every drop of drama from the contest between Hillary and Obama, which fail to look beneath the surface in “The Story” in Ohio and Texas: “This is the dynamic – Clinton is such a polarizing personality, that if a primary is perceived by voters as a popularity contest, or even just a mechanism for allocating delegates, Obama wins. If, in the voting booth, the voter is simply answering the question “Who do I like better?” – they tend to vote for Obama. It is only when the voter clearly understands that they are voting for the end of the 2008 Democratic party selection process, that the dynamic changes”.

Desiree of Baser Instincts in My Own Private Hillary likewise ponders media depictions of Hillary’s perceived personality defects: “It must suck to have people doubt your capabilities for no other reason than you were born with a slit.

And I truly feel that that is the gist of it. Hillary’s less admirable characteristics wouldn’t really be a big deal if she were a man”.

Desiree then turns to her own recent promotion and the barrage of insinuating and snide comments she has had to endure from her envious male colleagues, viewing her workplace as a microcosm: “This speaks to a much bigger issue of course. Women in the workplace still don’t get the respect (and in many cases, the money) they deserve, even when they prove themselves, their brilliant, competent selves, time and time again.

Brilliant, competent women in the workplace are called bitches. Crazy bitches.

Brilliant, competent men in the workplace (and even men with talent that’s mediocre at best) are called CEO’s”.

That certainly struck a chord with me.

Abortion

My own position will not come as a surprise: I support full abortion on demand without having to jump through hoops, justify yourself and be poked, prodded and patronised by doctors who assume you are mentally impaired by virtue of your hormones at the best of times, a handicap only exacerbated when up the duff. Armed with their superior knowledge, and the authority bestowed upon them by the Order of the White Coat they delude themselves into believing that they are better placed to determine what is best for you with only the most cursory knowledge of the constraints you are forced to function within. Given the massive pressures to fulfil our nurturing role, the social stigma of contravening it and the idyllic images of peach-skinned beaming babies that abound, no woman takes the decision to have an abortion lightly.

By way of a preface, I believe it is worthwhile reminding ourselves exactly what is at stake and the most profound and eloquent statement I have thus far been able to locate is Susan Bordo’s Are Mothers persons? (in Unbearable Weight, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1995, pp71-97). Our culture has never been particularly sympathetic to women’s sense of themselves as participating in full humanity: “(…) sometimes entirely mechanistic conceptions of the body dominate, conceptions from which all concern from the inner self have vanished. In practice, our legal tradition divides the human world as Descartes divided all of reality: into conscious subjects and mere bodies (res extensa). And in the social expression of that duality, some groups have clearly been accorded subject-status and its protections, while others have regularly been denied those protections, becoming for all medical and legal purposes pure res extensa, bodies stripped of their animating, dignifying and humanising ‘subject-ivity’” (p73).

This prejudice has seeped into judgements banning women from drinking alcohol whilst pregnant, for example: “(…) ontologically speaking, the pregnant woman has been seen by our legal system as the mirror-image of the abstract subject whose bodily integrity the law is so determined to protect. For the latter, subjectivity is the essence of personhood, not to be sacrificed even in the interests of the preservation of the life of another individual. Personal valuation, choice, and consciousness itself (…) are the given values, against which any claims to state interest or public good must be rigorously argued and are rarely granted. The essence of the pregnant woman, by contrast, is her biological, purely mechanical role in preserving the life of another. In her case, this is the given value, against which her claims to subjectivity must be rigorously evaluated, and they will usually be found wanting insofar as they conflict with her life-support function. In the face of such a conflict, her valuations, choices, consciousness are expendable” (op. cit., p79).

Advances in medical technology could easily be wielded as a pretext to curtail abortion rights in a climate where we witness: “(…) the increasing subjectification of foetal being. For, strikingly, as the personhood of the pregnant woman has been drained from her and her function as foetal incubator activated, the subjectivity of the foetus has been elevated” (op. cit., p85). In short, the rights of the foetus would be allowed to take precedence over those of the woman, surely perverse given that the adult woman is already a fully-fledged member of human society unlike the foetus, which only possesses the potential to become one.

We need to tease out the wider implications of any changes to the law: “What gets obscured when abortion rights are considered in abstraction from issues involving forced medical treatment, legal and social interference in the management of pregnancy, and so forth, is the fact that it is not only women’s reproductive rights that are currently being challenged but women’s status as subjects, within a system in which – for better or worse – the protection of ‘the subject’ remains a central value (…) So long as the debate over reproductive control is conceptualised solely in the dominant terms of the abortion debate – that is, a conflict between the foetus’s right to life and the woman’s right to choose – we are fooled into thinking that it is only the foetus whose ethical and legal status is at issue. The pregnant woman (whose ethical and legal status as a person is not constructed as a question in the abortion debate, and which most people wrongly assume is fully protected legally) is seen as fighting, not for her personhood, but ‘only’ for the right to control her reproductive destiny.

The nature of pregnancy is such, however, that to deprive the woman of control over her reproductive life – whether by means of involuntary or coerced sterilisation, court-ordered Caesarean, or forbidden abortion – is necessarily also to mount an assault on her personal integrity and autonomy (the essence of personhood in our culture) and to treat her merely as pregnant res extensa, material incubator of foetal subjectivity” (op. cit., pp93-4).

At the same time, Bordo warns: “Attempts to devalue foetal life, on the other hand, have fed powerfully into the right-wing imagination of a possible world in which women would be callously and casually scraping foetuses out of their bodies like leftovers off a plate. This image – so cruelly unrepresentative of most women’s experiences – must be challenged, must be shown to be a projection of ‘evil mother’ archetypes, reflective of deep cultural anxieties about women’s autonomy rather than the realities of its exercise” (op. cit., p95).

Holly Ord of Menstrual Poetry, draws attention to a deeply disturbing phenomenon in Crisis Pregnancy Centres Having to Tell People Lies? Hell, Yes!

By way of background, for the benefit of those, such as myself, who are unfamiliar with the Centres, the report by the NARAL Pro-Choice Maryland Fund, The Truth Revealed, (from which the quotes below are drawn) is illuminating. Its findings are based on visits by trained volunteers posing as clients to eleven Centres during 2007 and on an analysis of websites and pamphlets handed out. The Centres began to appear in the 1960s as laws making abortions illegal were removed from the statute books. Furthermore, the Centres (of which there are approximately 2,500 to 4,000 in the United States) are funded by churches and run by volunteers of an evangelical Christian persuasion who have no medical training, although they offer a range of services, including “pregnancy testing and counselling, adoption information, parenting classes, financial assistance for baby clothes and supplies” and ultrasound scans. As such, their operations constitute a rearguard action against terminations, their main objective being to dissuade women from undergoing the procedure. In order to achieve this, they employ a variety of underhand and morally reprehensible tactics, extending from blatant lies (for example, that abortion increases a woman’s risk of contracting breast cancer by as much as 80%, or that they run the risk of “Post Abortion Stress Syndrome”), wheedling their clients into putting matters off in a deliberate and cold-blooded attempt to prevent the abortion from taking place (“In addition to providing false information on abortion risks, CPCs often encourage women considering abortion to wait before making a decision. One counsellor stated: “Don’t panic. Abortion is legal through all nine months of pregnancy, so you have plenty of time to make a decision.” However, Maryland does not have a single provider who will perform an abortion after viability”), employing emotional blackmail (“(…) most centres failed to maintain the professional neutrality that is a commonly accepted tenet of counselling. Every centre that investigators visited used some type of emotionally manipulative tactic, such as offering congratulations for a positive pregnancy test, referring to the pregnancy as a baby, and giving the investigator hand-knitted baby booties. One volunteer disclosed that she had adopted two children herself and strongly encouraged adoption. At two separate centres, the counsellors disclosed that they themselves were pregnant. Another CPC provided an investigator with a model of a 12-week-old foetus (even though they had estimated her gestation to be six weeks), and was told to “show this to your boyfriend when discussing options.”), through to outright intimidation, preying on those who have nowhere else to turn to (“One of the most unsettling aspects of CPCs is their effective targeting of the most vulnerable: young, poor, and minority women. According to a 2006 CPC newsletter, 69 percent of their clients were under the age of 24.17 CPCs often advertise in high school and college newspapers. For example, our campus activist group at the University of Maryland, College Park reports that a nearby CPC advertises regularly in the school paper, The Diamondback. CPC advertisements can also be found in the school newspaper at Montgomery Blair High School in Montgomery County.

CPCs appeal to low-income women by offering free services, some of which can be costly in the private sector, such as ultrasounds. They also often target minority populations and exploit specific vulnerabilities in order to dissuade women from choosing abortion. One investigator, who posed as a Latina immigrant, was told, falsely, that it would be “very, very difficult” for her to obtain an abortion if she was not a legal resident of the U.S.”).

Once the foetus has been ejected from the womb, however, their concern quickly fades and their charity along with it, cutting the hapless mother adrift holding the baby literally and metaphorically, callously indifferent to her and her offspring’s fate (“All eleven CPCs offered assistance to women who decided to parent, but the assistance was typically limited to six months to one year after the child was born. In addition, many volunteers failed to acknowledge realistic considerations like childcare, employment, housing or education. In one case, an investigator expressed concern about being able to pursue her education if she continued the pregnancy. The volunteer told the investigator that she was early enough in the pregnancy to finish out the semester and that later the investigator’s mother could provide childcare. The investigator stated that her mother was not an option for childcare because she worked full time. The volunteer offered no other solutions for childcare or information on programs that assist young parents in college, stating instead: ‘Even so, having a baby isn’t that hard. I’m sure you can handle it.’”). Let’s not forget that the mother is only of interest to them as the repository of a male’s sperm, as a warm, mobile incubator. Once she has outlived her usefulness as such, she is consigned to the ranks of benefit scroungers (to lapse back into my native British vernacular).

What I find so shocking is that in Britain we set great store by the impartiality of information furnished by institutions dispensing medical advice, whereas these Centres appear to dispense abhorrent, toxic lies, manipulating culturally-inculcated shame and doubt, playing on ignorance in the name of superstition, glutting on fear and anxiety. Since they cannot coerce women to go through with the pregnancy in the physical sense, they resort to underhand tactics.

As Holly informs us, a ray of sanity is about to penetrate this gloom, as the Maryland state senate is weighing up making it mandatory for the CPCs to issue a disclaimer to the effect that they are not required to provide accurate information. I sincerely hope that this will be enough to enable the clients to treat what they are being told with due scepticism (given that, as the NARAL report makes clear, a standard ploy on the part of the CPCs involves spuriously invoking an aura of medical authority).

Holly’s conclusions echo my own: “I do not believe that crisis pregnancy centres like this should not [I am assuming that this second negative is extraneous] be able to practice. They should not be able to brainwash desperate women and guilt them into believing that abortion is not the answer to their unwanted pregnancy when an abortion is what they are seeking. Not to mention, Planned Parenthood clinics who support women and support the informed choices that women are able to make on their own–Imagine that!”

By way of a minor digression, Sophie of Life Junkie, in Indecent questions highlights the immense cultural differences surrounding where the boundaries of acceptable conversation are drawn. French attitudes could hardly be less prudish than those evinced by the staff of the Crisis Pregnancy Centres.

Tracee of Blog Fabulous on Stop Abortion Vote Healthcare! proves that even a self-professed believer with an aversion to abortion can adopt a more compassionate approach.

She directs us towards a report by the Guttmacher Institute setting out the Facts on Induced Abortion in the United States, highly informative reading matter. Through my own subjective filter the following snippets stood out for me. Firstly, attesting to the abiding potency of religious faith: “Forty-three percent of women obtaining abortions identify themselves as Protestant, and 27% as Catholic”.

Secondly, and this certainly puts paid to the myths of selfishness and fecklessness (in British rhetoric politicians are fond of talking about parasitical lone mothers jumping the council housing queue): “The reasons women give for having an abortion underscore their understanding of the responsibilities of parenthood and family life. Three-fourths of women cite concern for or responsibility to other individuals; three-fourths say they cannot afford a child; three-fourths say that having a baby would interfere with work, school or the ability to care for dependents; and half say they do not want to be a single parent or are having problems with their husband or partner”.

Thirdly and finally: “Only 8% of all abortion providers offer abortions at 24 weeks”. So all the hysterical reports about viable foetuses being callously dumped in dustbins like so much human refuse and being rescued by neighbours or council workers is a blend of rank nonsense and scaremongering.

Tracee spotlights the harsh realities: “Compared with men, women are less likely to have employer-sponsored health care coverage because they are more likely to work part-time, on contract, or freelance and to take time out of the workforce to care for their children and their family members. They are also more likely to be covered as dependents on their spouses’ employer-sponsored health plans. As a result, women are more vulnerable to losing their coverage if they are widowed or divorced.

There are 21.5 million uninsured women and these are the same women who are most likely to seek an abortion because they have no access to healthcare. This statistic doesn’t even include women who carry only catastrophic insurance and therefore have to pay for all healthcare expenses on top of their high premiums. These women frequently can’t afford basic OB/GYN care, including contraception.

No one likes abortion. If the goal is to reduce the number of abortions in the United States then pro-lifers should jump on the opportunity to drastically reduce the number of lives lost by providing equal and affordable access to healthcare for women”.

Before examining two courageous first-hand accounts of abortion from the blogosphere, allow me – without seeking to diminish or belittle the pain and trauma she suffered – to bring out the contrast with more conventional narratives by quoting from an interview of Jo Woodgate by Natasha Courtney-Smith (Daily Mail, 6^th March 2008) I had one of Britain’s first legal abortions … 40 years on, I’m still torn apart by guilt: “How could I admit that all I could think about was the baby I’d killed and what might have been?

We’re always told time is a great healer, but for me – at least when it comes to the termination I had – it has proved to be the opposite.

I had an abortion believing it was the right thing to do, and I presumed I would move on from the procedure without so much as a backward glance.

But I was wrong in thinking abortion was the easy way out of what, at the time, felt like an intolerable situation.

With hindsight and maturity, I now know that I could have coped, and with each year that has passed I’ve only felt a growing sense of guilt and regret over my actions.

It makes my blood run cold when I hear of the many young women today who see abortion as little more than a form of contraception.

No doubt many of them go into it, just as I did, thinking little beyond their desire to get rid of the baby that, for whatever reason, they don’t feel they are ready for.

I wonder how many stop to think that perhaps they, too, in 40 years’ time will still be feeling the ramifications of their actions”.

The abortion was carried out just short of 12 weeks: “Like so many young girls, I just saw it as an easy way out of a messy situation. With maturity, I’ve realised that life is complicated, and that getting rid of a baby to solve an immediate problem is not always the obvious solution it appears to be.

I feel that today the law on abortion is far too lax.

In an ideal world, I would like to see it brought forward to a 12-week limit. After that, the foetus, although tiny, is fully formed, and in my opinion you are technically killing a child.

I think a young woman should have an abortion only if she is 100 per cent sure it is what she wants, and if her physical or mental health is truly at stake.

To my mind, too many women are using it as a form of contraception, thinking that afterwards life can return to normal.

They have no understanding that life will never be the same again”.

Audrey of Audrey and the Bad Apples – I am sticking to her blogging pseudonym – devoted one of her mainstream media columns to the subject of abortion, which – predictably – elicited a slew of vilifying reactions to the extent that she issued an appeal to her more sympathetic blog-followers to rally round. It is very different from the sackcloth-and-ashes, wring-out –the-hankie stories journalists seem to think makes good copy without any appreciation of how the endless repetition of such tales of woe might have a deterrent effect: “I’ve had not one but two abortions. I know I’m supposed to grovel and scrape my belly along the ground for all eternity begging the world’s forgiveness.

I’m supposed to kowtow and claim they were each the hardest decision I ever made, that I think about them every day, that I fall into violent pits of depression because I feel such intense agony over the fact I’m such a heartless, baby-killer.

Bollocks to that. I feel no shame regarding either of them.

I acted in my own best interest, a fact I refuse to apologise for.

It wasn’t the “hardest decision I have ever had to make”. It was actually really, really easy.

The only thing I felt afterwards was intense relief.

Does this mean I enjoyed it? Of course not.

It just means that I’m honest.

I don’t believe that a 12-week-old foetus qualifies as a baby.

Oh, the anti-choice (and let’s not be mistaken about this, anti-choice is the only way to describe those that seek to denigrate the fully formed life of a woman to somehow less than that of a cluster of cells) movement would have everyone believe the majority of abortions are requested by fickle women bursting at the seams with a baby the size of a 10-year-old, and the whole procedure’s feverishly led by a maniacal doctor.

But you know what mostly happens in that little thing I like to call real life? The majority of abortions are performed within the first 12 weeks”.

As alluded to earlier, the anti-choicers’ priorities are somewhat skewed: “Many in the anti-choice movement will passionately attribute a range of emotion and feelings to a tiny zygote, yet they seem incapable of empathising with the one-in-three women who have terminations.

Ridding ourselves of this compulsion towards shame is a huge step in the battle against people who’d seek to make our established life less important than that of a potential one”.

Stef of The ex-expat blog in A Forgotten Story in the Abortion Debate recounts her experience: “Because like all my good stories, this one starts in Asia where the local condom production is not as good as back home and I found myself pregnant. I did my best to contact the male with whom I had had a casual fling but he was not answering his phone and I was left to make the decision by myself. I was living alone in a foreign country thus did not have the means to support a single mother lifestyle nor give the baby up for adoption in a society that still frowns heavily upon non-married sexually-active women. I was also taking medication for my skin that amongst its many side-effects also causes severe foetal abnormalities thus my decision was a humane one.

However getting an abortion proved quite difficult because abortion in that country is technically illegal. My gynaecologist would not perform the procedure due to the heavy fines imposed by the state. However she referred me to another clinic that did perform the procedure. After doing my research, I was confident the clinic was legit and went through with the procedure but not before coughing up over $1000US in bribes and medical fees plus a *boyfriend* to sign off on the procedure before I would be *permitted* to have one”.

Deborah of In A Strange Land, in “Legal, safe and rare” – what does it mean? cautions against the use of trite phrases in a cogent analysis: “Aside from the anti-abortion crowd, even people who say that they support a woman’s right to choose often tag it with saying that abortion should be “legal, safe and rare”, a tag that I think is inherently contradictory. And that exposes those who use the phrase as not really accepting abortion, as being deeply ambivalent about it. Sure, women should be able to access abortion, but really, they shouldn’t use it at all. The unspoken justification is that abortion is wrong, that it shouldn’t happen, but they will accept it as an evil necessity.

I also suspect that people who use the phrase haven’t given thought to what making something legal, safe and rare actually entails. When it comes to minimising abortion, then we need easy access to effective contraceptives, and good education about contraceptives. Abstinence won’t work; the genie of sexual freedom is long out of the bottle, and it won’t be going back. In any case, who really wants to return to the repressed and repressive world on the 1950s?

Even then, contraceptives do fail. So we need easy, reliable access to the emergency contraceptive pill. But that’s not failsafe – I have friends who ended up pregnant despite using both condoms and the ECP. They had twins.

My friends were lucky – they were in a position to continue the pregnancy. But many women aren’t. If the “legal safe and rare” crowd really want to make abortion rare, then they need to ensure that women are not penalised for continuing the pregnancy. And that will entail ensuring that mothers have adequate financial support, that young children can be well fed, clothed, housed and educated. A woman faced with an unexpected pregnancy should not need to engage in feverish calculation about whether or not she can actually support a child, if people really want abortion to be rare. Alternatively, mothers need access to high quality child care, and flexible work, so that they can continue to work, and support their children themselves. Even then, they would need to have social supports available too, so that they can get a break from the demands of parenting and working, and juggling, juggling, juggling all the time”.

Carla Kulwicki of The Curvature in Pregnant Women and Drug Addicts: They’re People Too responds to an odious piece of legislation in the pipeline in Arizona, which, if adopted, would mean that pregnant women who are addicted to methamphetamine could be taken into custody and held in treatment programmes against their will as child abusers (the foetus having been elevated to that status).

Here, respectability appears to be a key element, whereby mothers are consigned into one of two categories: controlled fertility as acceptable and promiscuous fecundity unacceptable. As Carla points out, such classifications possess both a class and a race dimension. Her lucid examination reminded me of Beverley Skeggs’ reflections in Class, Self, Culture (London, Routledge, 2004): “(…) class divisions are also drawn on the basis of respectability. Those receiving benefit are separated into the deserving and the undeserving poor. Benefits are seen to be bad for the recipients, trapping them in a culture of dependency. There is a growing tendency to describe and explain poverty in cultural terms: for example, blaming the poor for their own circumstances.

(…)

The sign of the ‘single mother’ once operated as that onto which all dependency, fecundity and disorder was crystallised. It was used consistently throughout the Thatcher years and had its US equivalent in the ‘benefit mother’ (which was racialised in a way that the UK version was not). But ‘New Labour’ rhetoric also deployed it, both to justify state welfare cuts and to promote the normative white heterosexual bourgeois family. However, the rhetoric seems to have diversified, so whilst the single mother is still shorthand for the undeserving, it has also produced some resistance amongst middle-class single parents, who can access circuits of symbolic representation to challenge their pathologising by association. The pathological crystallization process has been spread into other signifiers, and women’s bodies are less central” (pp88-9).

Returning to Cara: “(…) there are a lot of people who support the rights of Good Women to have Legitimate Abortions. Arguing that the Bad Women who are addicted to drugs have a right to not be forcibly locked up just because they’re pregnant? Well, that’s a little bit trickier.

Or, it’s a bit trickier in terms of convincing those people who think that they’re all liberal-minded and supportive of women’s rights, but only do support women whose behaviour they personally approve. You know, there are the Good Abortions — abortions by women who used birth control but got pregnant anyway and simply cannot raise a child due to financial concerns, and really it’s what’s best for the woman and potential child. And there are the Bad Abortions — abortions by women who didn’t use birth control, who have more than one sexual partner, or who can afford to raise a child but simply don’t want to, the ones at whom we can shake our heads and say tsk-tsk while feeling superior, the stupid horrible sluts who we couldn’t possibly relate to, and luckily, whose shoes we therefore never have to wear to walk a single step. Of course, those with this point of view could never possibly have a Bad Abortion themselves. The Bad Abortions are for other women, because otherwise it would defeat the whole purpose, which is to fit some bizarre and arbitrary cultural morality that says abortion is very icky and wrong, that is unless the woman has a very good reason that can pass each individual citizen’s personal legitimacy test.

You see, for many people, supporting the right to an abortion has very little to do with female bodily autonomy at all. It’s about securing a right that they feel they or a close family member may personally need one day. And few people ever anticipate themselves or a loved one having a crippling drug addiction”.

Cara cuts swathes through the obfuscations: “It also turns out that (as of 2002, at least) women still make up a minority of metamphetamine users. So by targeting pregnant women specifically and openly, we’re not only talking about discrimination on the basis of sex, we’re also talking about discriminating against a group that does not make up a majority of the meth-using population. But hey, the woman-haters will argue, it’s not the legislators’ fault that only women can get pregnant! Yes, I’m sure that if men could get pregnant, we would not only still argue over abortion rights, we would also incarcerate men who take drugs while pregnant and handcuff them to hospital beds during labour. It’s not that our society hates women, it’s that our society hates anyone who has the capacity to bring another human life into this world. And biology just made it so women get stuck with the job. Tough break, huh? Nothing to do with prejudice at all.

Clearly, we don’t want pregnant women to use drugs, particularly one as dangerous as methamphetamine. Many would argue that this is because of the risk placed on the foetus. And certainly, we do want to discourage practices that are avoidable and could result in a baby being born with medical problems. But personally, I don’t want pregnant women using methamphetamine not because of what’s in their uteruses, but because I don’t want women using methamphetamine. The drug isn’t good for foetuses, but it sure as hell isn’t good for born adults, either.

Who wants to do to non-pregnant women what this bill proposes doing to pregnant women? Who wants to send sheriffs around to their homes, pick them up and force them into treatment facilities against their will, with no input from family, no choice whatsoever? A few people, I’m sure, but probably not most. We don’t want to do this because it would be dehumanizing, senselessly discriminating on the basis of sex and a violation of basic human rights, including those of proper due process. This doesn’t mean that we don’t care about drug users (though certainly many people don’t), it means that we still see them as people. So why the hell don’t we when the women are pregnant? Clearly, it’s because we’re used to reducing pregnant to objects and political arguments”.

Cara also mentions Jill Filipovich of Feministe’s essay from May 2007, chronicling the defeat of a similar move to reclassify foetuses as children in New Mexico (which was thankfully quashed) in Good News out of New Mexico. Had the law been amended, the “rights” of the foetus would have cancelled out those of the (supposedly) fully incorporated member of society, the woman: “Child abuse and drug trafficking statutes refer to “persons.” For a mother to be tried for child abuse or drug distribution for her neo-natal drug use, the foetus must be considered a person under the law. This is problematic for all the obvious reasons. While establishing foetal personhood for the purpose of criminal prosecutions will not immediately wipe out abortion rights, it lays very strong legal groundwork for eliminating abortion rights in the future. It is very, very difficult to argue that the foetus is a “person” for the purposes of child abuse and drug distribution, but not a person when you’re ending its very existence. I do think that the argument can be made, but only if we radically re-shape the legal grounding for abortion rights, which isn’t going to happen anytime soon and which does not fit into the Roe framework. That is, we would have to assume that the foetus is a person with all the rights and protections that people in this country receive, and from there argue that a person does not have a legal right to use someone else’s body for his own existence, and if a person objects to having their body used, they have a right to remove the attached person. (…) So the establishment of foetal personhood is a very bad thing, because if Roe ever does fall, states have already set a legal standard for foetuses to be considered people under the law. It’s not much of a leap to argue that abortion should therefore be illegal”.

Delicate Flowers, Birds and Bees

Imelda Whelehan, in Overloaded (London, The Women’s Press, 2000), tackles the men’s rights movement: “Many of the issues raised by various men’s movements are feminist ones too – for instance that men may suffer from lack of choice in their adult role by the fact that their primary identity is supposed to be realised through work rather than their family. In this equation women also clearly suffer because of the association of childcare and domestic responsibilities with their essential selves. Feminists have tried to show how structural ideological inequalities overlay these oppositions and complicate matters – not least (…) the conception that a man without work is unemployed, a woman with a family without work is a housewife. To effect possible transferability between roles, you need to alter the consciousness of those who make these associations. Such a transformation of consciousness might make it easier to convince employers that greater flexibility serves a useful purpose, but should also prompt a revolution of unimaginable proportions in the domestic sphere.

Feminists are looking forward; many of their ideas have to rely upon the envisaging of a utopia which cannot be fully predicted until we are nearer to formal equality. The men’s movement, conversely, seems to favour some kind of stasis, or rather a backward-looking return to the sixties, since they are repeatedly citing changes over the last thirty years as the cause of their ills (a period obviously associated with the rise of second-wave feminism). For groups such as the UK Men’s Movement, fatherhood and masculinity are essences of a human nature which is static and unchanging, especially in the personal sphere of emotions. While attacking women for having more power today than men, they are really also attacking women for overstepping the mark and not keeping their part of nature’s bargain” (pp122-3).

The stark truth is that: “Women have made some gains and these men want to get even – which means that they want to return to a system of naturalised social inequity. To make this happen they will play the equality card, using feminism’s own rhetoric against it and exploiting the fact that the language of equal opportunity cannot assure ‘fair play’ at all times” (p123).

This brings us on to a glorious, sarcasm-laced demolition of the men’s rights movement, Rage Against the Man-chine’s MRAs: A bunch of fucking crybabies?

Although I would dearly love to reproduce the entry in full, I will restrict myself to picking out just a couple of Rage’s delicious rebuttals: “The right to equal treatment in custody battles. I’ll say up front that I think fathers, unless they’re total assholes, ought to be involved in their children’s lives. I had one around and it was an important factor in my personal development. That said, most fathers are fairly minor actors in the raising of children, which is simply a manifestation of the fact that our culture places the onus of childcare on women, and the fact that childbearing and rearing is seen in our society as nearly synonymous with womanhood. If these MRAs want to get all butt-hurt about the fact that our court system tends to favour mothers in custody hearings (which I doubt anyway), they ought to at least take these factors into account. I’m willing to bet that a lot of these disgruntled fathers, if they were honest with themselves, would have to admit that before the end of the relationship, it was the mother who provided most of the care for the child(ren), otherwise the judge would be unlikely to award custody to the mother in the first place. That men feel entitled to a woman’s labour in the form of childcare, and then to custody of the child(ren) that she raised in the event that the relationship dissolves, is pretty unreasonable”.

Susan Maushart’s Wifework (London, Bloomsbury, 2001) is highly relevant here: “Our new egalitarian convictions have made it even harder to penetrate beyond the veil, as it were. Both males and females in our society publicly profess their dedication to the ideal of what social researchers call ‘companionate marriage’ – a covenant between two equally loving and nurturant partners, in which the division of labour and leisure are negotiated rationally, equitably and, above all, without reference to gender.
But when a woman marries, what she sees is not what she gets. The exterior architecture of the contemporary marriage emphasises fluidity, simplicity and light. No wonder it’s got such fantastic street appeal. Venture inside, however, and you’re in for a nasty shock. Notwithstanding the tastefully renovated façade, the interior of today’s marriages remains as dusty, cramped and overelaborated as a Victorian drawing-room. It looks awful. And it feels worse” (pp2-3).

She spells out what getting hitched actually entails: “Beyond the lip service paid to ‘equal marriage’ by both men and women, the contemporary family remains primarily, and profoundly, organised around gender. Beneath the veneer of its sleek post-feminist contours, the divisions of labour within the family remain rigidly gender-specific. Females within marriage are strenuously, overwhelmingly, outrageously responsible for the physical and emotional caretaking of males and offspring. (…)
Research conducted throughout the English-speaking world continues to show that wives, whether employed or unemployed, perform 70 to 80 per cent of the unpaid labour within families. And husbands whose wives work full-time for pay do no more domestic labour than husbands of women who are not in paid employment at all. What such dreary and familiar statistics conceal, however, is that wives also contribute 100 per cent of the husband care – the myriad tasks of physical and emotional nurture that I call ‘wifework’.
By anybody’s reckoning – if only somebody would reckon it – wifework is a time-consuming, energy-draining and emotionally exorbitant enterprise. Centred primarily on the care and maintenance of men’s bodies, minds and egos, wifework is a job that violates every principle of equal-opportunity employment – often, chillingly, in the name of ‘love’. For there is no counterpart to wifework, no reciprocal ‘husbandwork’ driving males to provide caregiving to their female partners at the expense of their own well-Being” (pp9-10).

Depressingly: “As (…) marital researchers have stressed, parenthood exaggerates and hardens gender differences within marriage, pushing husbands to become more ‘husbandly’ and wives more ‘wifely’ – and then leaving them there to get on with it. After the birth of her first child, the research suggests, a wife will do even more housework, cooking and shopping than ever before, and she will also work fewer hours outside the home and for less pay. And all of this will be in addition to assuming major, and in many cases overwhelming, responsibility for child care. The new father, by contrast, will perform even fewer household tasks, and work longer hours for pay outside the home” (p123).

Indeed: “Researchers estimate that, in the US, women still do about 80 per cent of the child care – as much as in the 1960s. And most of the time men do spend with their children takes the form of what sociologists call ‘interactive activities’ rather than ‘custodial activities’. In other words, Dads play – and Mums pay. According to research published in 1997, the arrival of a first child more than doubles a wife’s domestic load, working out to an average increase of thirty-five hours a week. One large-scale study conducted in 1991 found the increase in domestic labour to be as high as 91 per cent for new mothers – while the fathers’ (lower to begin with, of course) did not increase by a single minute. To put it bluntly, Mummy becomes the work horse and Daddy the show pony” (p128).

Dirty nappies are not even the half of it: “It is precisely this mental work – the ‘remembering, planning and scheduling’ thing – that is the most arduous of all parenting tasks. It also happens to be the work that married fathers steadfastly avoid doing. Married mothers not only carry out the lioness’s share of parenting work, whether they work for pay or not. They shoulder the additional burden of administering the endless minutiae if family life – a task which consumes untold gigabytes of a woman’s intellectual hard-drive. Husbands may go shopping, but wives still write the list, Dad may take baby to the playgroup, but Mum will enrol her, pack her nappy bag, organise her lunch, and settle her to sleep when she comes back home again” (p131).

Maushart’s findings are corroborated by more recent research by Dr Caroline Gatrell of Lancaster University (as interviewed by Kate Hilpern, The Guardian, 2^nd February 2008, in ‘Well, why haven’t my shirts been ironed?’): “It is still the case that the washing of clothes and bed linen and ironing are seen as a woman’s responsibility, as are things such as packing the lunchboxes and managing the kids’ activities, explains Gatrell. ‘This is despite the fact that the amount of housework trebles when you become a parent. In some ways, it is linked to maternity leave – the woman is there at home at the beginning and it becomes assumed that she is available to do everything’.

Of course there are men who do help out, often a great deal, Gatrell says. But here lies the problem: deep down, many see it as just that – ‘helping’ women fulfil the maternal role. Little wonder so many feel at least some angst about the woman returning to work.

‘This isn’t stuff they’d say outright or probably at all in front of their partners,’ says Gatrell. ‘In fact, most said they liked the idea of being with this independent woman who does her own thing. I think they genuinely want to be with an equal. But you spend some time with them, you chat away about these complex issues and sometimes some ambivalence comes out’.

It is easy to imagine Gatrell extracting people’s hidden beliefs and values, perhaps even surprising themselves at what comes out of their mouths. She has an unusual mixture of warmth and fervour. Her most-publicised finding in recent months is a stark contradiction of previous research that has always found that, despite more women returning to work after having babies, fathers remain work-oriented and distant from their children. Conversely, Gatrell has discovered that men are spending more time with their kids than ever before. The problem, which the media has labelled ‘the daddy wars’, is that what men are really doing is trying to reassert their power in the relationship. ‘Put simply, I found that some men feel disempowered because they have lost their traditional role as breadwinner and are seeking to reassert their authority in the home by becoming far more involved in childcare. They want to be the number one parent,’ she says.

What the press didn’t really pick up on, which surprised Gatrell, was her finding that these fathers ‘cherry pick’ the time they spend with their children. ‘Dads aren’t just spending more time with their kids; they’re spending more one-to-one direct time with them,’ she explains. ‘This is the critical bit for me – men’s desire to have an equal parenting role does not extend to child-related domestic chores such as washing clothes or packing lunchboxes’.

Indirect childcare is tedious and does not further fathers’ power in the household, she explains. ‘With one exception, all the mothers I spoke to found themselves responsible for most child-related domestic work’

Eleanor, a senior education manager, told Gatrell, ‘What’s really important is what has to be done every single day to keep the family ticking over. Women still bear the brunt of that, even women in professional jobs, because women are thinking ahead all the time. I’m thinking, ‘We haven’t got any bread for the sandwiches in the morning; we’ve run out of loo-roll.’ I make sure that the school uniforms are washed and ironed and all that sort of stuff – the boring detail of everyday life’.

A worrying consequence for women such as Eleanor, says Gatrell, is that while fathers get more quality time, mothers get less. She’s just too busy around the house. ‘The people I spoke to also said that they don’t have a lot of time for one another, and the women said they had no time whatsoever for themselves,’ she adds.

So strongly do some men feel about seizing all the quality time with their children that they even resent women for breastfeeding, according to Gatrell. ‘Some fathers regard it as an inconvenient barrier to the establishment of paternal closeness to babies,’ she says.

William, an architect, is typical in stating, ‘My partner is breastfeeding and that is the catch, I find. I’m generally holding him when he’s crying’.

One woman deeply regretted not breastfeeding her daughter – she felt she’d given in to her husband ‘elbowing’ his way into her maternal space. When she exclusively breastfed her son, her husband spoke of his relief when it stopped. ‘I found a very satisfying identity being an active parent with my daughter and I felt very sad, quite lost about not having this very direct involvement with my son,’ he said”.

Rosie Boycott, in The world is still organised to meet the wishes of men (The Guardian, 28^th February 2008), drawing on the results of a survey by Dr Gillian Paull, provides further confirmation: “The 1969 Divorce Act had meant that women could leave a marriage, confident that they wouldn’t be forced leave their children behind. The establishment of the Equal Opportunities Commission made it illegal to sack a woman for being pregnant and introduced statutory maternity pay.

We didn’t think it would be easy; even so, it did feel that we were finally entering a new world. Feminism, I always believed, made sense for both sexes. Wasn’t it just as much of a trap for a man to be consigned to go to work every day of his life, earning the money to support his wife and children, as it was for a woman to be relegated to stay at home and look after them? Surely, men would welcome living in a more equal world, where childcare and breadwinning could be shared between parents?

Thirty-six years on, the answer is, sadly – and shockingly – no. Far from wanting to share the childcare, men are still just as happy as my father was to leave the task to their partners. Before the arrival of children, more than four out of five (85%) working women in Britain are in fulltime employment, working more than 30 hours a week. But once they become mothers, the proportion is much lower: only a third (34%) of working mothers with pre-school children are employed fulltime, and only 41% of working mothers with a youngest child of school age”.

Once again the evidence speaks volumes: “Instead of sharing childcare, the proportion of men working fulltime increases once they have children. And women’s talents and skills are wasted as they get shunted sideways into part-time jobs, or no jobs, as they frantically juggle their lives to bring up their kids.

What this survey shows horribly clearly is that real equality between men and women is still a pipe dream. It only exists in the years when men and women are inhabiting the same planet as human beings, unencumbered by children, who have the right to sit at a desk – part of our modern work culture, which insists that you not only do your job but be seen to do it every hour of the day between nine and five. Once children enter the picture, this fragile veneer shatters, exposing the deep, sexist divide that still dominates our culture.

It now seems naive to remember my own optimism in those early feminist years. The dreams of universal childcare have remained just that, and the reality is a free market in which only the richest can afford the sort of childcare that means a working mother can fulfil herself as both a parent and a worker. The world, in short, is still organised to meet the wishes of men”.

Rage also deals with divorce: “MRAs assume women ought to be left at the mercy of their husbands in the event of divorce. I understand that they find the thought of having to give up a portion of their assets disquieting, but I imagine that fear is a little easier to deal with than the fear of being abandoned with no money and no job skills, which is something that many women, especially those in the generation before ours, are faced with. Men can’t expect the freedom to divorce dependent partners at will, and also the freedom to leave those partners with nothing with which to support themselves. And community property laws work both ways; if a woman earns a larger amount of money than a man, she may also be required to turn a portion of her income over to him after a divorce”.

For these unreconstructed and delusional chauvinists, women are nothing but disposable commodities and to be traded in for a newer model, as the cliché would have it, with impunity. Wouldn’t they just love to walk away, letting her fester in poverty and regret?

Rage’s debunking is particularly enlightening in relation to the law (note the figures on the number of women in positions of genuine power): “After a tradition of defining citizenship through maleness for over 2000 years, women have been awarded citizenship by men (despite the fact that legal rights purportedly transcend the rule of man) just in the last century or so in the western world. But equality before the law, which all men enjoy in America, is something that American women have not yet attained, despite being recently included in the category of “citizen” that ought to have guaranteed equality before the law according to the foundations of our own legal philosophy. We still, 43 years after the Civil Rights Act that awarded equal rights to all men under the law, do not have an Equal Rights Amendment for women. Additionally, as of today, men still make the laws in America; of 435 members of the House of Representatives, only 70 are women, and of the 100 members of the Senate, a mere 16 are women. For those who are worried about “legislating from the bench,” there is ONE woman on the Supreme Court. I find it difficult to take pity on men for their supposed lack of legal rights within a system that they have created, that they control, and that they administer according to their own needs”.

One last quote before moving on: “(…) these men see a zero-sum game when they look at relations between men and women. When women gain, they lose. MRAs are expressing the kind of anger that comes from feeling threatened but not being able to say clearly why. They feel entitled to the privileges they have come to see as their birthright, and when women want the same kind of treatment that they feel entitled to, they feel that their territory is being encroached upon. That mental process is understandable (though not excusable), but it’s intellectually weak and dishonest to argue that men’s “rights” are in danger. What these guys are doing is fairly transparent: they’re arguing for the maintenance of male entitlement and privilege and for the limitation of women’s rights vis-à-vis men, not for the protection of men’s rights. They can euphemize that in any terms they want to, but they still sound like a bunch of fucking crybabies”.

One of the real remedies to unwanted pregnancies rather than harping on about abstinence, the sickly romanticisation of girlhood innocence and our culture’s morbid obsession with virginal “purity” is putting an end to enforced ignorance about the mechanics of reproduction. Ex-pat Christine of Me, My Kid and Life in The French School System and Sex Education casts a critical eye over the French system, as relayed to her by her daughter: “In France, every teen has the right to free contraception and abortion without their parent’s permission and without needing to inform the parent. I wish the States had the same policy in place.

There are centres set up where teens can get free contraceptives and it’s nobody’s business but their own. Honestly, I’ve never seen a pregnant teen, in France, in the year-and-a-half I’ve lived here.

I want Sophie to have free and easy access to both contraception and abortion. If it’s her life or that of the unborn, I vote for Sophie’s life. She’s already here and her life matters just as much as anybody else’s and more so than someone who doesn’t even exist yet. Killing the future of one life in lieu of another makes no sense.

If Sophie was afraid to tell me she was pregnant, I’d much rather that she have a free, safe and legal abortion than finally confront me with the issue when she was four-to-five months pregnant, showing and it was too late to doing anything about it and then have that affect the rest of her future. Talk about oppression. Yikes!”

Refreshingly frank though it may be in comparison with, say, what passes for sex “education” in British schools, the lessons are only as good as the specific individuals in charge of giving them: “This speaker, a male gynaecologist, said that if a woman wasn’t excited by sex than it was her own fault because she wasn’t into it. I laughed when Sophie told me this. She knows how I feel about sex. Sex should be a fabulous encounter for both people and if the woman isn’t getting off then something is wrong because there are two people there and both should be sexually satisfied. I told Sophie that the man was clearly a bad lay and a selfish lover. If a man isn’t taking the time to make sure the woman is reaching orgasm he’s simply missing one of the most beautiful experiences in life… and as a result this man should be passed by.

It’s so important that parents have open communication with their children. Kids hear the most incredible things. They need us to balance things. They need us as their sounding boards. The male speaker/doctor said that if a man hits a woman she should leave. He says that if she doesn’t leave, then she deserves it. I was stunned when Sophie told me this. Of course, Sophie knew he was wrong and didn’t need to ask me about it, more she was relaying the highlights of the talk”.

Rape

Ken of The Feminist Pulse in a sensitive and moving examination Rape Is A Social Issue, discusses the ripple effect of the crime, its impact on friends and relatives: “(…) the utter devastation that comes along with knowing that this has happened to someone you love. I was completely powerless, both to prevent it, and also to fix it. I cannot make this go away. Its been four months, and still, even today while taking the city bus to school it was all I could do to keep from crying in front of everyone. As men, we are taught to be strong, to remain in control, well you can’t be strong in the face of this- it will tear you apart. Strength comes not from the ability to fight back the feelings; it comes from the willingness to experience them. Today, for the first time, it was an empowering sorrow. There are different types, I have found. Its not just tears, sometimes they are mixed with rage, despair. Sometimes the pain comes out in gasps, like dying. I don’t tell you these things so you will feel sorry for me. I tell this story, because I want people to understand that rape is not an isolated event, it is not just a single person who is hurt. It is her husband, her children, her parents”.

Marcella Chester of the indispensable abyss2hope catalogues the warning signs betraying a propensity to commit rape in Advice for Rape Survivors: Personal Safety: “What doesn’t help is the typical victim-blaming safety advice like don’t drink, don’t go to parties, etc. This advice/lecturing focuses on the rape victim’s behaviour when what is needed to improve your personal safety is to focus on the behaviour of rapists and could-be rapists and to have allies who will genuinely do the same.

Nobody sensible would blame a bleeding carjacking victim who is shoved out into a crime-ridden area if that crime victim were subsequently raped. Yet wrongful blaming is what happens to many rape victims. The trauma of rape can leave victims disoriented and defenceless.

Despite what many victim blamers want people to believe, when it comes to rape there is no neighbourhood or place which is guaranteed rapist-free. Rapes happen at wild parties and rapes happen in churches by those who are in positions of trust”.

Lamenting the binge-drinking “epidemic” in the UK, newspapers have printed photograph after photograph of young women draped senseless over benches in pedestrian areas as if post-pub crawl disorientation were the only situation in which any of us are at risk (the inference being that if we are attacked it is our own silly fault). Marcella forcefully puts paid to such misguided propaganda: “Any discussion of personal safety for rape survivors must include dangers which have nothing to do with alcohol. Rape victims who avoid alcohol and stereotypical dangerous places can be in as much danger as those who get drunk and pass out at a party.

It is the vulnerability due to trauma which brings out so many predators.

Unethical professionals such as clergy members and counsellors have raped those they are sworn to help. Some of these rapists rationalize that they are better people than rapists who took advantage of rape victims like me. Because the rape survivor may still be lost in the trauma which follows rape, alcohol and overt violence may not be needed.

Quietly raping a sober survivor who barely knows which way is up is real violence. I have heard of some men who told rape survivors that reconstructing their rape, with him as a safe stand-in for the rapist, will be therapeutic. Those who call rape survivors stupid for cooperating with someone who turns out to be a rapist are wrongly dismissing the impact of real trauma.

These professionals are likely to call their rapes and other sexual abuse an affair or a sexual relationship. This is a lie. In some states certain professionals are forbidden by law from having any sexual contact with their clients because of the level of danger for those clients. These criminal statutes don’t allow consent as a viable defence.

My advice for rape survivors who are still deep in trauma is to realize this danger and respect any sense that something isn’t right. Better to bolt from a room because something innocent triggered you than to stay because what is troubling you might be nothing. These types of rapists are likely the type who will use manipulation and isolation to disable you.

Any professional who asks a rape survivor to keep any secret about what the professional is doing or saying raises serious red flags. If helping professionals get offended at not being given the rape survivor’s complete trust, my advice is to find another professional”.

Dispatches from the Outcast Fringe

I settled upon this heading with tongue firmly in cheek, but a serious purpose in mind, namely that of accentuating how, for all our warm and fuzzy proclamations of sisterhood we sometimes push those who do not perfectly conform to our take on feminist philosophy to the periphery, leaving them marginalised. In the most general of terms, if we are guilty of attempting to impose a single vision in a sterile or exclusionary manner accompanied by an offhand dismissal as opposed to a genuine debate (and confrontation of our own shortcomings and biases) we should hardly be surprised if this provokes bitterness and anger. Perhaps certain mutually antagonistic positions can never be fully reconciled (the best example being the pro-/anti-porn divide), but I firmly believe our diversity is something to celebrate, not stifle. We shouldn’t be doling out disapproval – we have more than sufficient enemies ready to malign us as it is.

In a powerful and eloquent claims-staking, Lisa of Questioning Transphobia in Transphobia and Sophistry vehemently objects to being excluded: “Why do so many radical feminists waste their time trying to define trans women as not women, trying to characterize us in insulting, offensive, misogynist ways if you’re not transphobic? I mean the actual meaning of the word, not your shifted goalposts meaning. If that’s still too much for you, why the hell are you such bigots about us? Are we oppressing you? Are we perpetrating sexism? Does our position as migrants from one sex to the other (or, as with many transgender people, outside the gender binary entirely) grant us some unique patriarchal power?

There’s one thing that’s true about bigotry and prejudice that has always been true – you can’t trust the privileged to deny their privilege to the oppressed. You can’t trust this because the privileged are blind to their privilege, protective of it, or both. Men don’t like to admit to sexism, white people don’t like to admit to racism, and cis people don’t like to admit to transbigotry, transphobia, transmisogyny, you name it.

So when anyone – not just radical feminists, but anyone – proudly proclaims how they don’t accept trans women as real women, or don’t want us around, or construct elaborate theories about how we’re really patriarchal and gender oppressors, I find it difficult to take them at their word when they turn around and say “Oh, I’m not a bigot.” Please forgive me, but you’re not in a position to be the judge of that”.

She vividly conveys the distress of not being permitted to belong anywhere and the resulting spiritual and emotional homelessness: “My oppression comes from the fact that women are supposed to be A and men are supposed to be B, and while I was born male-bodied, I am A and that is wrong and bad, and I get this from mainstream society, from religion, from talk show hosts, from people cheering on the murder of trans women, from people who casually joke about the murder of trans women, and so on. From radical feminists, I get, “No, you’re really B, and you can never ever change, nor should you want to, because changing like that is wrong!” And then some of them accuse me of being a gender essentialist.

If you think that transgender, genderqueer, etc are about upholding the gender binary, you don’t understand that either”.

If you wish to acquaint yourself with the debate in greater depth, I recommend the original post on Buried Alive, Radfemphobia; belledame222 of Fetch me my axe in Still more people unclear on the motherfucking concept and a further response by Renegade Evolution, Transpeople.

George Norton of q-sputnik in Cyberqueer and the importance of transgender representations in the internet for gender politics furnishes us with a valuable and stimulating overview of the literature concerning the political potential of cyberqueer.

Renegade Evolution of the eponymous blog shatters preconceived ideas of the composition of the sex-positive camp in an entertainingly combative Young, Dumb, and Full of Cum: “Hehehe, you knew we’d get there sooner or later, right? The appearance and fucking issues? Well of course we would, because that’s what it all seems to come down to in so many ways. The older wiser feminists have it all figured out, have the ins and outs of appearance related issues down to a fine art and the politics of fucking mastered with the ease of a Machiavellian student. Because they are older and wiser and smarter or something. They know! They have seen! They long ago put away childish things! And it pains them, akin to torture, to see all these sex positive feminists co-opting and corrupting the movement, what with their heels and work out routines and short skirts, their “perky tits”-real or fake- and their eyeliner and lipstick. And oh yes, with all that sex talk! Who they’re banging, when they’re banging, how they’re banging- in such unfeminist ways! Engaging in BDSM and power dynamics and rough sex or even just plain old PiV intercourse with one or more people…gah…sometimes male people! With their blowjobs and anal sex and condom drives! With their ambivalence towards or even more dreadful, their support of, pornography and bondage art and alternate lifestyles.

Gads, maybe if those tramps would just stop fucking and worrying about their selfish orgasms maybe, just maybe, they would grow up and see the error of their ways and become real feminists and stop fucking up the movement, right?

Right?

Smirk. Hate to break it to you, but hell, not even all us sex positives have sex. Some are women in menopause, or have other reasons for not boinking like the drunken party girl bunnies you make us all out to be. Some of us see our sexuality as a very huge part of our female being. Oh, and we do see it as ours. Some of us look at all the window dressing as not only something we enjoy, but a damn good way- much like plumage in nature- to attract someone we are attracted to and want to fuck…solely because we want to fuck them! Because fucking feels good! Hell, maybe we are way less concerned with our own choices, made as adults, in regards to appearance and sexuality than you are! Maybe not every choice we have to make has to be a feminist one…especially if it denies us our own voices and opinions, our pleasures and our individuality, our sense of expression and a very real and large part of ourselves, or in one old sex poxes case, the way she happily makes a living. Maybe there is more to us as people than a cause. And hell, maybe the fact that we’ve not felt burned by men, or society, or the pat, or sex plays a little bit into it…Hell, no one else was gonna say that, so I figured I better”.

She joyously hurls a feline amongst the rats of the city skies: “Maybe it just makes us different. Thank god, goddess, and all the minor deities. Because I sure as hell could not live that way. I’ve gotten naked for and or fucked more dudes than most people can imagine, for fun and for money, I get degraded and screwed on film regularly, by choice. I’ve willingly cut up my body to have it look a way I not only find more attractive but is more man approved™, I wear heels even if they do hurt sometimes, I’ve lived and worked in absolute hell-holes, I’ve cleaned someone else’s blood and cranial fluid out of my carpets, and I would take all of that, the good and the bad, to the smug, condescending, grim desperation y’all seem to offer: a world where men are the absolute enemy, we’ve already lost the war, plans are things that exist in some nebulous place, and anyone who admits to liking conventional girly shit, unapproved sexual practices, or being attractive to the gender she is attracted to is a traitor and one day, will be up against the wall! Or, oh wait, she’s a deluded victim who cannot make choices or operate autonomously and one day, she will by crying on your shoulders…and then, and only then, will she have repented sufficiently and be allowed her own persondome”.

I agree that finger-wagging is a real turn-off: “I don’t think feminism is about some women telling other women how to dress, alter or adorn their bodies, how to earn a living, or who and how to fuck. I never have. Choice goes beyond abortion and all. And you know what else? I have yet, in all my deluded, fuck-obsessed years, to see any sex positive telling you how to dress, adorn yourselves, what jobs to have, or who and how to fuck. Imagine that? Most of us have overbearing elder figures in our lives, and didn’t come to feminism to find new ones. We came because we thought it was something positive”.

My only slight quibble is with the term “sex-positive”, as if those of us not out there wrapping ourselves around poles in skin-biting leather outfits were nothing but dowdy, fat frumps whose concept of undergarments is limited to granny bloomers with industrial-strength gussets, sublimating our desires by guzzling the umpteenth slice of cheesecake – but enough about boring old me!

Eliot Spitzer Scandal

Ah yes, Mr Clean’s comeuppance… Our political masters, so keen to meddle in every aspect of our lives with their moralising and petty rules, whereas none of them, regardless of affiliation, is as pure as the driven snow, not unless it happens to be snow that has been driven over by a lorry with dog excrement stuck between its treads and stained the pristine white accordingly.

The ever-witty Madeleine Begun Kane of Mad Kane’s Political Madness regales us with An Ode to Eliot Spitzer, whilst Therapydoc of Everyone Needs Therapy in What Would Freud Say: Eliot Spitzer presents us with a mischievous, Sigmund-for-Dummies-style dissection of the disgraced sleaze-buster’s drives and motives. Here is but a brief sample: “The pundits keep saying, when they talk about Eliot Spitzer, the governor of New York, recently indicted for soliciting the services of a high-priced prostitute,

What was he thinking?

So I have to wonder, What would Freud say?

Yes, even though his paradigm has melted away for me like good chocolate, when I think of sex and human behaviour, certain Freudian ideas come flooding back. We family therapists smile at Freud and Jung (although that Jungian concept, the collective memory, really appeals to me) and solidly reject the idea that the therapist should be an omniscient nod behind a screen, smoking a cigar, optimally.

But when it’s about sexual attachments, it’s Freud I turn to for an explanation, and I think you probably could use one, too. So let’s trot out some of that old-time psychoanalytic lingo. I’ll wait while you go and make a sandwich and grab a little Diet Coke if you want. Food is an object of attachment, if you talk Freud, beginning with breast milk”.

A Tapestry Woven of Multitudinous Threads

Lori Jewett of Between Us Girls in Ending Violence Against Women, cites some harrowing statistics compiled by the United Nations Development Fund for Women, urging us to support its campaign UNite to End Violence Against Women: “At least 1 out of 3 women in the world has been beaten, coerced into sex or otherwise abused in her lifetime.

For women aged 15-44, violence is a major cause of disability or death.

In a 1994 study, World Bank data showed that women age 15-44 had a greater risk of becoming victims of rape and domestic violence than they did of suffering cancer or being involved in a motor vehicle accident.

1 in 5 women will become a victim of rape in her lifetime”.

Louise of Socialist Unity rightly deplores the state harassment of Pauline Campbell, whose daughter died in Styal prison in 2003 and who has been arrested for the fifteenth time whilst protesting about another young woman’s suicide in the same institution, on this occasion charged with obstructing a public highway. As Louise writes: “Pauline is absolutely right when she says that this prosecution is vindictive and disgraceful. It is outrageous that this woman, who has been arrested 15 times, should be treated in such an inhumane way. She has courageously campaigned and highlighted the shocking reality of the number of women who have needlessly died in prison and who will continue to die.

Yet it’s Pauline who ends up in the dock and not Jack Straw”.

Kate Smurthwaite of Cruella Blog in Stop the Strip Pub Blog, showcases the movement to prevent Satchmo’s from being granted a licence to put on strip shows, the 26^th March deadline for protesting to the local authorities looming large. She outlines the key objections, which reveal the seamier side of the sex industry and its very tangible negative impact: “This area is very much family orientated with a large number of residents with children. It is not appropriate for such an establishment to be located in a family area;

There are a number of religious places of worship within close proximity to Satchimo’s. Additionally, I am aware that the premises directly adjacent to Satchmo’s’s is used during the week for educational purposes and at weekends as a place of worship. To locate a sex encounters premises is entirely inappropriate in such close proximity to places of worship;

In addition to places of worship in the vicinity I am also aware that there are a number of buildings used for educational purposes very close to Satchmo’s including schools and nurseries. To locate a sex encounters premises is entirely inappropriate in such close proximity to educational establishments;

There will be a substantial increase in noise and disturbance caused by patrons outside the premises smoking; and

I also am concerned that there will be an increase in harassment to residents, crime and disorder”.

Tali Shapiro of The Pin-Up Shop Blog scrummily illustrates for us the proposition that Gay Men Still produce the Best Beefcake.

Raymond of Money Blue Book on The Millionaire Matchmaker Show – Revealing Traditional Stereotypes About Men, Women, Money, And Love reviews the kind of programme I assiduously avoid (as I would find it profoundly depressing not to mention inane), waxing lyrical about its format: “You’re not going to find any feminist trailblazers on this show. What you’ll get is no-nonsense traditional views of what men and women want when it comes to love and relationships, especially when money is no limitation. Caveman tenets of lust, love, and attraction apply – with men being attracted to beauty, youth, and fun; and women being attracted to material possessions, confidence, and power. It’s the age old swap of money for beauty. Just from watching a few episodes, it’s clear that millionaire dollar men feel entitled to a higher standard and quality of women than common folk. As the show astutely points out, millionaires choose women the same way they would order a new car off the lot – they want the perfect, newest trophy model gift wrapped to suit their existing lifestyle without the flaws”.

Although he describes the programme as one of a genre of “trashy reality television shows”, I can’t help but feeling that he veers too uncomfortably close to endorsing the very stereotypes the title suggests we ought to be moving away from. How else am I to interpret an assertion like this?: “Whether the traditional values promoted by the show are right or wrong is not for me to say, but I think the reality is that despite the modern progress men and women have had in terms of human relations, in many ways we’ve stayed the same. Many commentators have blasted the show for perpetuating traditional stereotypical views of women and I understand why they are upset. But at the same time, the show is about hooking up men and women who want love, not about political correctness. Love is a crazy thing where traditional ideas still hold true”.

Or, referring to Patti Stanger: “According to Patti’s values for there to be matchmaking success, this means men need to be chivalrous, they need to be generous with their money, and they need to take charge and be confident with women. Females on the other hand are encouraged and taught that they must accentuate their physical qualities – if they have nice “assets” they must flaunt it, they must dress alluringly to appeal to male tastes, and they must show a little leg here and there – basically don’t dress like you’ve just left work. Another disturbing but perhaps real life lesson is that she also lectures women on the need to downplay their own professional accomplishments – basically if you are a doctor, never introduce yourself as one initially – because when it comes down to it, men don’t want to compete in that department”.

This smacks of, there’s no getting away from it gals, if you want happiness you have to give him what he wants (and that’s looks, not brains or opinions, dear). Set aside all your feminist qualms, downplay your intelligence, lighten up and simper and giggle as you flick your opulent tresses – you know I’m right. Ugh!

Ken of The Feminst Pulse contemplates the nature of activism in Do you consider yourself an activist?

Neena Chaudhry of Womenstake.org warns us of A Stealth Attack on Title IX.

Again some background for the uninitiated is useful:

“Fewer than 32,000 women participated in college sports prior to the enactment of Title IX, and today that number has expanded to more than 160,000 women. Female participation in high school athletics has increased from fewer than 300,000 to over 2.8 million. These opportunities have provided huge benefits to a new generation of female athletes. Playing sports promotes responsible social behaviour, greater academic success, and increased personal skills. Compared to their non-athletic peers, athletes are less likely to smoke or use drugs; have lower rates of sexual activity and teen pregnancy; have higher grades; and learn how to work with a team, perform under pressure, set goals, and take criticism”.

In spite of the positive effects listed in the foregoing: “In March 2005, without any notice or public input, the Department of Education issued a Title IX ‘Clarification’ that lowers the bar for what schools have to do to provide equal sports opportunities for women and girls. This new policy allows schools to show compliance with the law simply by sending an email survey to all female students and then claiming that a failure to respond indicates a lack of interest in playing sports”.

Moreover: “The new ‘Clarification’ shifts the burden to female students to show that they are entitled to equal opportunity. Prior law put the burden on schools that are providing women with less than their fair share of sports opportunities to show that they are nevertheless fully meeting the interests and abilities of their female students. But the new ‘Clarification’ shifts the burden to women, forcing them to prove that their schools are not satisfying their interests and that they are entitled to more opportunities”.

An increasingly popular tactic.

Chaudhry is completely justified in lambasting the manoeuvre: “The Clarification is the Department’s attempt to do under the radar what it was unable to do publicly—change Title IX. The notion that schools can decide whether women are interested in additional sports opportunities by sending a mass email is ridiculous. What if the email gets stuck in a female student’s spam filter or the student just doesn’t read it (hard to believe, I know)? The Department of Education thinks, in another Orwellian manoeuvre, that a failure to respond, even under these circumstances, shows that the student is not interested in playing sports. If that’s such a good idea, maybe the Department should propose using this method to decide whether schools should field men’s football and basketball teams”.

As a self-confessed computer gaming addict I empathised with the frustration expressed by Redwall33 of The Mind of Genevieve in I’d like to stab you, but I might mess up my hair! I completely understand the rapid onset of irritation after the initial enthusiasm about a new Facebook application called Knighthood. The default assumption on the part of programmer teams is mired in the dim and distant past when only pimply adolescent males lurked in darkened rooms on sunny afternoons whilst their more athletic peers engaged in infinitely more serious pursuits, such as the ritual combat of kicking a leather ball around a pitch. Those responsible for the graphics always give the impression of having graduated from the Lara Croft School of Design…that they can only overcome their reluctance to include female characters at all by endowing them with delectable (and for the most part grossly exaggerated) attributes.

Redwall33 assesses the skimpy outfit in which the Lady is clad: “Contrast her with the male knight (and the Baron). You could not tell what either of the male knights’ hair colour or style was. But the female knight’s has to be long and blond. The men were covered and battle-ready–the girl has NO chainmail and nothing but a tiny dress. The dudes get huge swords, her weapon looks like a glorified bread knife. Her pose isn’t active, it’s come-hither. All of the men had bodies which showed physical readiness to fight–I obviously have nothing against skinny girls as I am one myself, but I’m well aware of the fact that I’m not exactly in shape to get into life-and-death battles with people. Knights should have muscles. If they can draw in her bosom, they can give her some biceps, triceps, quadraceps…
Oh, and she doesn’t have a shield. Tiny blade, no protective clothing, and NO SHIELD”.

And as for the viscountess: “My first thought upon seeing this was–oh, so she’s wearing a ball gown now? But no, it’s not, it’s just a swirling cape accompanied by plate armour (finally real metal stuff) fitted to look like a ball gown top. Her arms are still mostly bare, her upper chest region is still completely exposed (because showing off the cleavage is FAR more important than protecting the throat, don’tcha know?) Sword’s good, I suppose…still no shield…

But back to the cape…what’s up with this apparent billowing of it? If the wind is affecting her cape, it should be affecting her hair (which for once is not ridiculously long and blond–does having more power make your hair darker? How’s THAT for stereotyping?) It’s not, though–which makes me think that the dudes who drew it must’ve thought: “Well, she’s got a seriously cool sword and some actual armour now…let’s make her cape look like a princess dress to accentuate the fact that chicks STILL can’t fight!”

Greg of Greg Laden’s Blog cogitates over whether including images of semi or fully naked women as illustrations in serious blog posts is an inherently exploitative act in Squat toilets, Sexy People, and The Nature of the Internet.

If he is genuinely recommending the Sociological Images: seeing is believing website then what he writes is either slightly baffling (or subtly ironic). Comparing the fortuitous traffic spike resulting from a picture of a squat toilet (the Beijing Olympics an occasion when many surfers anticipate having to avail themselves of such facilities for the first time in their lives) with the traffic spike that inevitably follows when naked female flesh is slightly disingenuous. The latter takes place in a context of relentless exploitation, and is therefore no coincidence. In other words, no parallel can be drawn unless you completely ignore the cultural backdrop. Oglers attracted to the site by a photograph of a famous model probably have the attention span of the proverbial newt – no offence to small amphibians intended. They will feast their eyes and quickly move on. You would have to look at the number of minutes spent on the page to gauge whether the engagement with the actual contents of the site went beyond consuming the image. Whilst it is sad that serious posts are overlooked, the majority of Internet users are not particularly interested in them, apparently. Unless they are trawling to crib for essay assignments.

We live in a social environment where the commodification of women is rife – some members of the female sex might earn a tidy profit from collaboration/ collusion, from putting their bodies on display and they are perfectly entitled to do so – I, for one, am, not about to sit in judgement upon them – they have to make a living somehow and posing for the titillation of men is one avenue open to them in the patriarchy.

Greg invites us to examine the question of each poster’s motive rather than whether inclusion of such images deliberately perpetuates exploitation. – Greg himself pleads innocence by reconstructing the circumstances leading up to his decision in detail (in the course of which he reminds us of his credentials: “I was engaged at the time with developing a course on gender, sexuality and race (yes, they are connected topics), a course which I later taught on a regular basis, to widespread acclaim, for several years”). His motive was therefore “unsullied”.

In his case, the choice of image resulted from one of his preoccupations at the time, pregnant women. Since he was writing about why no male pill has materialised, he could potentially have culled the poster for Junior (1994) with a swollen-bellied Arnie to comic effect. For me, this would have been the more obvious choice.

The power of representations derives from their cumulative effect. Each individual picture acts like a Foucauldian micro conduit. Gorgeous women are held up for emulation, admiration (all the better to sell cosmetics and surgical procedures to you, my dear…), reinforcing the message that a woman’s value derives from her appearance, not her intellect. From her childbearing function, not her unique and precious individuality.

Greg wonders: “Was this exploitative and objectifying of me? I can tell you, since I was there, that if it was, I was acting as a dumb cog on a gear running in a massive machine of patriarchal oppression. Indeed, [Elle] McPherson would presumably also have been a dumb cog on one of those gears as well, because she probably did not do this shoot at gunpoint”.

In a second contribution, Board Room Gender Gap, Greg publicises a study published by the Women’s Executive Circle of New York on the glass ceiling in businesses in New York State: “The findings indicate that while about half the workers in these companies are women, less than 15 per cent of the board and executive officer positions are held by women”.

Management stubbornly remains a male preserve. For the fiscal year 2006: “On boards of directors, women represent less than 16 per cent of the 1,129 board seats in the 100 largest public companies in New York; 14 percent have no women; 24 percent have one woman; and 21 percent have three or more women.

Women serve as executive officers in less than 12 percent of the 354 executive officers in the 100 top public companies in New York; 67 companies have no women executive officers; eight companies have two or more women executive officers; and four companies have a woman serving as CEO”.

Tellingly: “The companies given top marks for women leadership are Avon (47 percent of board directors and executive officers are women), The New York Times (38 percent), Estée Lauder (35 percent), Ann Taylor Stores (33 percent) and NYSE Group (31 percent)”.

What would a Carnival of the Feminist be without a contribution from the Founding Mother, Natalie Bennett of Philobiblon? In Women, nature and history: combining my interests, she reviews Sylvia Bowerbanks’ Speaking for Nature: Women and Ecologies of Early Modern England with her trademark blend of balanced and judicious analysis, sincere appreciation and a knack for singling out the most entertaining and intriguing passages. Just enough to whet your appetite. It is a conspiracy to bankrupt me, I swear – Natalie only ever gives blogroom to the kind of book I want to grace my already groaning shelves…

Librarylapin of The Feminist Pulse shows how Youtube does not have to be nothing but a sprawling archive of sexist rubbish in Re-Genderication.

Lisa Sabater of Awaerness Blog likewise unearths a Youtube link worth watching in Searching for Scandal, I Found Angela Davies.

Since we are in Youtube mode, I cannot resist the temptation to link to an excerpt from Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life, the outrageous, irreverent and oh-so-deadly swipe at religion and patriarchal pomposity, Every Sperm is Sacred