SAGE

My Shame is TL;DR: So You Want to Arm the Teachers

Sat, 22 Dec 2012 17:13:09 -0500

My Shame is TL;DR: So You Want to Arm the Teachers:

My son is in preschool right now. Since Newtown, I’ve been staring at his school, at his building, at his classmates, and thinking of all those kids who are dead now. I don’t think any parent can help that.

And, hey, I am willing to do whatever it takes to stop that from happening again….

D Spar, President of #Barnard College, on Why #Women Can't Have it All

Fri, 28 Sep 2012 22:09:52 -0400

D Spar, President of #Barnard College, on Why #Women Can't Have it All:

A well written article about the shape an form of feminism today, and its possibilities for tomorrow coming from Barnard College’s very own President D Spar.

A sad truth in many parts of society, SAGE - Student Association for Gender Equality hopes to help combat :”[men] don’t know how to make the right changes and are generally not party to the conversations that women have among themselves. All too often, women are scared of raising the topic of gender with men, thinking it will brand them as radicals or troublemakers, while men are terrified of saying or doing anything that might classify them as politically incorrect. The result, of course, is that no one says anything productive at all. Women mutter to themselves about their continued exploitation, men mumble platitudes and hire high-priced diversity consultants, and nothing changes.”

True? “[The problems we have] come partly from the media, partly from society, partly from biology, and partly from our own vastly unrealistic expectations”

and, just for kicks, one of the replies in the comments section (beware: hilarious/absurd/sexist):

“I recently worked at a company in which it was 75% plus female. I hated it. I’ve always got along well with girls in social situations, but boy are they god damn catty towards each other. You can never get to the bottom of things, since they sugarcoat like its no tomorrow. Too much politeness, and shields.Just get to the goddamn point and stop talking behind your backs like little girls. Be a “man” and say it front of everyone. Oh wait, your girls, you can’t break social structure and live off emotional highs and lows- and that’s a fact.

Contrary to what feminists think, a 50/50 workplace is much better than an all girl one. Keeps the attitude at the door. Much more calm environment.But I think most of the people ranting on here have been disregarded by society in one way or the other. Sorry, not everyone is beautiful. I’ve found that really attractive girls are usually much more open and secure than the fugly girls who complain about everything.

No surpise mosts feminists are pretty damn ugly and such is shunned by society which places a lot on beauty. No wonder they are so bitter. Its always better to deal with a douchebag than a bitchy fugly girl. At least with men we can settle it outside.” ^^

safespacenetwork: If you’re networked across Tumblr, you may...

Tue, 11 Sep 2012 17:01:42 -0400

safespacenetwork:

If you’re networked across Tumblr, you may know we’ve been kicking up a storm about this coming September 13th- “R U Ok” Day.

It’s a day to inspire people of all backgrounds to regularly ask one other “Are you okay?”

By raising awareness about the importance of connection and preventing unhealthy isolation we can empower people to support each other through life’s ups and downs. This day is to help end suicide, depression and to help people deal with the feelings they have, by helping people to make a difference through open and honest conversation.

This is an encouragement to reach out to people in your community and ask, ‘Are you ok?’

Asking for help can be difficult, especially when everyone can tell you to not cry, to be optimistic and when being interdependent is seen as weak and undesirable.

But there is nothing wrong, with asking for help.

There is nothing wrong with needing help.

There is nothing wrong with getting professional help.

It doesn’t make you weak.

It doesn’t make you selfish.

It doesn’t make you less than anyone else.

Your feelings are always valid.

To spread awareness of this day, Safespacenetwork is running an event;

From September 13th, to October 13th; submit your Art, submit writing, submit videos and projects and collages and stories.

Send us things that tell us what you think about this day, how it HAS helped you, how it could have helped you. Send us stories of kindness, where people did ask if you were okay, send us art with people asking if you’re okay, send us projects that spoke of what could have been.

The guidelines are simple; Submit whatever you have, don’t use weighted slurs against another person, and have fun.

When October 13 comes around, we’ll take a look at which submissions got people talking the most, and we’ll send the top three, a self-love kit (customisable to your likes, dislikes and needs.)

And if you can’t submit anything? Spread the word about September 13th, get your tumblr and blogs involved, and make this the best day yet!

Good luck and stay safe everyone!

~Maddy

FSU Feminist: Black Transgender Woman Murdered in Oakland. Nobody Cares.

Tue, 01 May 2012 14:19:04 -0400

FSU Feminist: Black Transgender Woman Murdered in Oakland. Nobody Cares. :

zorascreation:

A murder occurred in Oakland early Sunday morning. As of this posting, there is exactly one — count it — one, article about the incident in the media, at least as measured by Google News hits for Oakland murder.

37-year-old Brandy Martell was sitting behind the wheel of…

wewantrevolutiongirlstylenow: Riot Acts: Flaunting Gender...

Tue, 01 May 2012 01:47:16 -0400

wewantrevolutiongirlstylenow:

Riot Acts: Flaunting Gender Deviance in Music Performance is a documentary about trans* people who make music. The documentary is embedded above in its entirety.

Feds honor 66-year-old East Flatbush transgender woman: Victoria Cruz honored by Justice Dept.

Mon, 30 Apr 2012 00:59:51 -0400

Feds honor 66-year-old East Flatbush transgender woman: Victoria Cruz honored by Justice Dept. :

Transgender advocate Victoria Cruz was recently awarded a top honor by the Department of Justice for her work helping victims escape abuse.

The feds are watching one of Brooklyn’s toughest ladies.

East Flatbush resident Victoria Cruz, a transgender woman who has been “out” since grade school, is a Justice Department 2012 pick as one of the nation’s top crime fighters.

The 66-year-old Latina, known simply as “Vicki,” advises abuse victims from across the city based on lessons she learned surviving years of sexual and physical torment during an era when homophobia was rampant.

“I’ve survived many crimes; been there done that,” said Cruz, a senior domestic violence counselor New York City Anti-Violence Project.

Attorney General Eric Holder honored Cruz and 11 others as life savers Friday in the National Crime Victims’ Service Awards ceremony in Washington D.C.

They transformed “their own experiences into a positive force for sweeping change,” Holder said in a statement.

New Yorkers dominated the power list. Girls Educational & Mentoring Services, a Harlem based nonprofit helping teens escape the world of sex trafficking, was also cited; along with city Correction Commissioner Dora Schriro and Common Justice, an alternative to Brooklyn criminal court for low-risk criminals.

Still Cruz stood out. The feds said she “empowers her clients to stand up and speak for themselves.”

The Red Hook native was born brazen, never hiding her sexual identity growing up in the 1950’s as a boy.

“I always knew that I was different,” Cruz said. “When I was in middle school they would call me ‘queer.’ ‘Gay’ at the time meant a jovial person.”

Cruz, like many women, was drawn to abusive relationships.

She made headllines in 1997 while working at the Cobble Hill Nursing Home part of a welfare-to-work program when she accused a group of female nurses of groping her while screaming “anti-man” and “battyman,” gay bashing slurs used by West Indians. A criminal court judge found two nurses guilty of harassment and acquitted two others.

AVP then hired Cruz transforming the victim into an advocate.

“I am passionate about the work that I do,” Cruz said. “People are coming out at a younger age. And putting themselves at risk.

This award is making the invincible, visible.”

Hey! I run stop-slavery. thank you for sending that link, I've been looking for that <3

Sun, 29 Apr 2012 15:22:31 -0400

No problem! Glad to share! If you think there’s anything we should know, feel free to post on our blog!

Thanks!

Being a Feminist means not being afraid of who you are

Sun, 29 Apr 2012 14:10:56 -0400

whoneedsfeminism:

Being a feminist means not being afraid of who you are.
Every human being needs that. This is not just about women; it’s about you too, men.

I’m a feminist, and I will not be afraid of myself.

Who Needs Feminism?: i need feminism because it hurts my heart to think that the majority...

Sun, 29 Apr 2012 14:04:36 -0400

Who Needs Feminism?: i need feminism because it hurts my heart to think that the majority...:

whoneedsfeminism:

i need feminism because it hurts my heart to think that the majority of societies in the world condemn people for just simply being who they are, whether it be gay, straight, bi, none of the above, all of the above, asexual, gender-queer, pansexual, cis, transgendered, or something else…

Tuesday is our last discussion of the term! We will be meeting...

Sun, 22 Apr 2012 17:09:09 -0400

Tuesday is our last discussion of the term! We will be meeting in Hamilton 607 at 8 pm. Come talk about sex with us (or your love of Salt-n-Pepa).

Prostitution in Brazil - The WRONG message

Mon, 09 Apr 2012 19:41:05 -0400

Prostitution in Brazil - The WRONG message:

In Brazil, sex with a child under the age of 14 is considered violent, and classified as rape… except a recent ruling decides that child prostitutes don’t count.

“Whether they were mature enough to consent had to be decided with reference to their wide sexual experience, not just their age.”

Disgusting.pr

nostanding-justdancing:

A court in Brazil decides that some children are less equal than others

Scott Walker Quietly Repeals Women's Equal Pay Law in Wisconsin

Mon, 09 Apr 2012 19:33:10 -0400

Scott Walker Quietly Repeals Women's Equal Pay Law in Wisconsin:

mohandasgandhi:

A Wisconsin law that made it easier for victims of wage discrimination to have their day in court was repealed on Thursday, after Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R) quietly signed the bill.

The 2009 Equal Pay Enforcement Act was meant to deter employers from discriminating against certain groups by giving workers more avenues via which to press charges. Among other provisions, it allows individuals to plead their cases in the less costly, more accessible state circuit court system, rather than just in federal court.

In November, the state Senate approved SB 202, which rolled back this provision. On February, the Assembly did the same. Both were party-line votes in Republican-controlled chambers.

SB 202 was sent to Walker on March 29. He had, according to the state constitution, six days to act on the bill. The deadline was 5:00 p.m. on Thursday. The governor quietly signed the bill into law on Thursday, according to the Legislative Reference Bureau, and it is now called Act 219.

Walker’s office did not return repeated requests for comment.

State Sen. Dave Hansen (D-Green Bay) and Rep. Christine Sinicki (D-Milwaukee), the authors of the Equal Pay Enforcement Act, criticized Walker on Thursday for not informing the public of his actions on SB 202.

“We are finally starting to see progress here in Wisconsin, yet like their counterparts across the country, Legislative Republicans want to turn back the clock on women’s rights in the workplace,” said Hansen.

Women earn 77 cents for every dollar that men make. In Wisconsin, it’s 75 cents, according to the Wisconsin Alliance for Women’s Health (WAWH), which also estimates that families in the state “lose more than $4,000 per year due to unequal pay.”

Business associations lobbied in support of SB 202, according to the state’s Government Accountability Board. Groups like Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce, and the Wisconsin Restaurant Association all backed a repeal.

Sara Finger, executive director of WAWH, said that the repeal was a “demoralizing attack on women’s rights, health, and wellbeing.”

“Economic security is a women’s health issue,” she said. “The salary women are paid directly affects the type and frequency of health care services they are able to access. At a time when women’s health services are becoming more expensive and harder to obtain, financial stability is essential to maintain steady access.”

(Read more)

I’m sorry, what century is this again?

Why is it that after a few weeks of outrage, our collective...

Fri, 30 Mar 2012 21:17:09 -0400

Why is it that after a few weeks of outrage, our collective memory seems to have amnesia?

People have gotten angry, but this issue has not been resolved, and we cannot let it be forgotten.

keepyourboehneroutofmyuterus:

@eleanorstrouser:

Went to get my taxes done and they insisted on performing a transvaginal ultrasound. This is getting out of hand.

And I’ll use this as a reminder that we are on day 53 (FIFTY THREE) here in Texas of actual forced transvaginal ultrasounds before abortion. So, this is funny but it also reminds me that here in Texas actual people are being forced to endure this procedure without being able to consent to it.

"Women’s mental health: The Facts —Depressive disorders account for close to 41.9% of..."

Tue, 27 Mar 2012 20:01:52 -0400

“

Women’s mental health: The Facts

—Depressive disorders account for close to 41.9% of the disability from neuropsychiatric disorders among women compared to 29.3% among men.
—Leading mental health problems of the elderly are depression, organic brain syndromes and dementias. A majority are women.
—An estimated 80% of 50 million people affected by violent conflicts, civil wars, disasters, and displacement are women and children.
—Lifetime prevalence rate of violence against women ranges from 16% to 50%.
At least one in five women suffer rape or attempted rape in their lifetime.

”

- http://www.who.int/mental_health/prevention/genderwomen/en/

the-ugly-lover: Charcot’s hysteria portraits Hysteria Copy and...

Tue, 27 Mar 2012 17:22:00 -0400

the-ugly-lover:

Charcot’s hysteria portraits

Hysteria

Copy and pasted from Wiktionary entry:

From New Latin hysteria, from hysteric, from Latin hystericus, from Ancient Greek ὑστερικός (hysterikos, “suffering in the uterus, hysterical”), from ὑστέρα (hustera, “womb”).

Behavior exhibiting excessive or uncontrollable emotion, such as fear or panic.
(medicine) A mental disorder characterized by emotional excitability etc. without an organic cause.

radical-cunts: Dean Spade: Trickle-Up Social Justice An...

Sat, 24 Mar 2012 13:38:27 -0400

radical-cunts:

Dean Spade: Trickle-Up Social Justice

An excerpt from the lecture “Trans Politics on a Neoliberal Landscape,” delivered on February 9, 2009 at Barnard College. This video was created by the Barnard Center for Research on Women. Visit www.barnard.edu/bcrw for full-length audio podcasts of this event and others like it.

Watch the whole thing! It is a fantastic talk.

http://www.deanspade.net/

On Transmisogyny

Sat, 24 Mar 2012 12:58:00 -0400

Recently, I am sad to say a conflict I am heavily invested in has resurfaced on the internet regarding the relationship between (some!) trans women and (some!) cisgendered lesbians.

An example: Put your brain guards on for this.

Background: Let us define for now a trans women as a person who was coercively assigned male at birth (CAMAB), but has since self-identified as a woman. On occasion, when financially enabled, trans women can elect to undergo surgery to make them more “biologically” female, but can also elect not to. Additionally, a trans women identify as asexual, heterosexual, queer, demisexual, pansexual, homosexual or none of the above. Just to make it clear for the dull: Homosexuality in this case implies that trans women are sexually attracted to other women.

The Controversy: Some members of the trans community have charged some members of the feminist (particularly second wave) community with transmisogyny. There have been instances of women-only discussion groups consciously excluding transwomen voices as part of the development of the “Womyn born Womyn” movement (nice wikipedia article outlining this here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Womyn-born_womyn). The people charged with transmisogyny have maintained that it is their right to congregate so as to fit a need — in this case, the need to have a space removed of any perceived male-ness in an otherwise male dominated culture.

What we now see with the “cotton ceiling” issue is this tension written across sexual identity. To quote, “The cotton ceiling is a theory proposed by trans porn star and activist Drew DeVeaux to explain the experiences queer trans women have with simultaneous social inclusion and sexual exclusion within the broader queer women’s communities. Basically, it means that cis [non-trans] queer women will be friends with us and talk day and night about trans rights and ending transmisogyny, but will still not consider us viable sexual partners.”

Transwomen attracted to women face being called “pretendbians” — and if the comments of the post linked to above is any indication, their sexual identity is being questioned as some highly elaborate male ploy to sexually threaten women. The psycho-social tumult of self-identifying as a woman in the face of a unilaterally disapproving society (and on occasion the financial and physical burden of under-going sexual re-assignment surgery) is not something a person would take on willingly.

The prestige: I can’t argue that someone feel attraction for X. But perhaps we can all do well to more actively recognize the constructed-ness of gender, and (dare I say?) even “biological sex”. The conversation quoted in the link above illustrates more than anything the universal need to step back and make sure all participants are talking using a similar language. I can only suppose the transactivist was talking about the queer community as the community of people actively problematizing gender roles and notions regarding sex. If members of this community consistently got “hung up” on what society has made into highly gendered symbols (like the color pink, penises and GI Joe Dolls) then it would be self-defeating, if not hypocritical. Having a strict definitions of male-ness is not queer. Realizing that attraction in all of its quadrillions of forms is historically contingent as well as socially constructed allows a person more freedom to subvert and play with their individual reactions. The result of these small scale modifications may be a change in — to borrow King Mab’s terminology :D — the collective vocabulary regarding sex and gender.

Certainly, cisgendered lesbians can be considered queer in this way insofar as the traditional notion of womanhood includes attraction exclusively towards men. But the interlocutor in this exchange seems to have taken queer to mean broadly “non-heterosexual” — which too is valid. From there, however, it seems as if each part of the conversation was addressing completely different things.

Hey, sentient creatures, can’t we all just get along? “No means no” and “gender is a construct” are not mutually exclusive propositions. What do you think Tumblrians?

-Lady Godiva Chocolate (speaking, as always, on behalf of xerself, yo.)

Is Power a Zero-sum Game?

Fri, 23 Mar 2012 23:49:00 -0400

Cribbed from Wikipedia:

“In game theory and economic theory, a zero-sum game is a mathematical representation of a situation in which a participant’s gain (or loss) of utility is exactly balanced by the losses (or gains) of the utility of the other participant(s). If the total gains of the participants are added up, and the total losses are subtracted, they will sum to zero.”

An example: There are 42 unicorns between 2 people. They both start out with 21. If one were to acquire 22, that would mean the other has one less unicorn. There are no new unicorns produced nor destroyed, so there is no change in the overall number of unicorns. Any change in the distribution of unicorns is a matter of proportionate losses and gains. These gains and losses are of like kind and quantity.

Well, there is a tacit notion in American political culture that the expansion of rights for one ‘class’ of people p necessarily threatens the freedom of people q. Establishing the rights of p in the face of oppression works to proportionately oppress another group who historically has faced no such privation of power.

This in-power or privileged group is typically (but not unproblematically) white, heterosexual, economically advantaged, cisgendered males. Thus there are critiques of any advocacy in the name of equality as being unilaterally anti-white, anti-heterosexual, anti-cisgender and anti-male. This group has all the unicorns and sees any attempt for any one else to get more unicorns as a direct threat to their magical horde.

In the zero-sum interpretation, when a monarch (concentrated political, economic and social power) is overthrown in favor of a more egalitarian system of government (like an oligarchy or democracy), there is the same amount of power in the overall system. The revolution here does not mean any new ‘unicorns” were generated At stake was merely the distribution of unicorns.

This is an understanding of the complexity of human relations that is not only used for oppressive ends, but my intuition is that it is plain ol’ wrong. I am just starting to articulate why the zero sum model is not accurate in political systems just like it is not accurate in economic systems, but I would love to hear tumblr’s thoughts. Right now I am taking a very Rousseau inspired turn.

As society grows in complexity the vocabulary of freedom and the expression of power changes. Sometimes this results in more insidious forms of societal coercion (I’m looking at you Foucault!) but there is no reason to think that some “trade-off” is occurring that preserves a value quantitatively constant across time. Freedom of the press, right to privacy, the right to bear arms, the separation of church and state – all of these abstract rights would have been intelligible at certain points in history. New technologies (both physical and social) develop and action is given conceptual meat. Pre-societal humans may have been able to act however they fancied, but they had no freedom. The presence of limits demarcating what is x as opposed to y, that very first step of conceptual vocabulary also introduced freedom into the world as it introduced choice. Concepts give us new ways to act and new ways to transgress. And concepts (or societal concepts as codified into laws) can get outmoded or lose their relevance. When power is located in a narrative and not in some abstract but strangely finite quantity, I think we can wrest it from the eternally reactionary zero-summers.

When I am fighting for something I am reforming concepts and not attacking you, bro.

King Mab

Video

Wed, 21 Mar 2012 23:40:35 -0400

International Women’s Day, Ecuador’s Female Role...

Fri, 09 Mar 2012 13:49:36 -0500

International Women’s Day, Ecuador’s Female Role Models