Just days since a massive campaign was launched by a coalition of more than 40 groups and individuals, advertisers have already begun to act swiftly about seeing their ads adjacent to images depicting rape and violence against women on Facebook. Indeed, the response has inspired hope that the demands in the Open Letter to Facebook may just be met.

For those who missed it, organizers of the campaign are asking Facebook to take action about gender-based violent imagery and pages that proliferate on the site, while its moderators act quickly to remove similarly graphic and hurtful content that is racist or homophobic. Examples of these pages include Fly Kicking Sluts in the Uterus and Violently Raping Your Friends Just for Laughs. This is not new. Back in November 2011, I wrote about several pages on Facebook, including It’s Not Rape if you Yell Surprise and Kicking Sluts in the Vagina Because it’s Funny Watching Your Foot Disappear. When you combine this with tolerance, or even implied approval, of photo memes that depict violence against women with taglines like, “This bitch didn’t know when to shut up,” it adds up to a long history of a corporate culture that is a willing participant in spreading gender-based hate speech and rape culture.

As the coalition explains in an official statement:

Specifically, the group demands that the social media giant take three specific actions:

1. Recognize speech that trivializes or glorifies violence against girls and women as hate speech and make a commitment that Facebook will not tolerate this content.
2. Train Facebook’s content moderators to recognize and remove gender-based hate speech.
3. Train moderators to understand how online harassment differently affects women and men, in part due to the real-world pandemic of violence against women.

The message to Facebook is accompanied by a massive social media campaign, calling on advertisers such as Dove and American Express to pull their advertising from Facebook until they can be assured it won’t appear next to content that promotes rape or domestic violence.

And so far, several advertisers are not just listening, but reacting to the campaign. Half-a-dozen companies, including Candyopolis and Nissan UK, have pulled their ads after receiving campaign information released on May 21. At least as many companies have responded and have said they are looking into the situation, one of which being American Express. Unfortunately, a few companies including Dove, VistaPrint, and Audible, have declined to take action.

It’s time for Facebook to change and we’re glad to see that so many advertisers agree! (You can get updates on where companies stand on the Women, Action & the Media campaign page.)

We at Feminism 2.0 are proud to have signed on to this campaign (as well as this author, as The Sin City Siren) and we want to thank the campaign organizers for their diligence and hard work to launch and follow through with this seminal campaign, which may just change the landscape of Facebook and social media.

Follow the latest on the facebook campaign here and by using the hashtag #FBrape on twitter.

Image by Geoff Livingston, via Creative Commons.

*Trigger warning*

Starting on May 21, a coalition of more than two dozen organizations — including Led by Women, Action & the Media, The Everyday Sexism Project, and author Soraya Chemaly — are calling on Facebook to end its complicit approval of memes and pages that promote violence against women and gender-based hate speech.

As the coalition explains in an official statement released today:

Specifically, the group demands that the social media giant take three specific actions:

1. Recognize speech that trivializes or glorifies violence against girls and women as hate speech and make a commitment that Facebook will not tolerate this content.
2. Train Facebook’s content moderators to recognize and remove gender-based hate speech.
3. Train moderators to understand how online harassment differently affects women and men, in part due to the real-world pandemic of violence against women.

The message to Facebook is accompanied by a massive social media campaign, calling on advertisers such as Dove and American Express to pull their advertising from Facebook until they can be assured it won’t appear next to content that promotes rape or domestic violence.

Examples of these pages include Fly Kicking Sluts in the Uterus and Violently Raping Your Friends Just for Laughs. This is not new. Back in November 2011, I wrote about several pages on Facebook, including It’s Not Rape if you Yell Surprise and Kicking Sluts in the Vagina Because it’s Funny Watching Your Foot Disappear. When you combine this with tolerance, or even implied approval, of photo memes that depict violence against women with taglines like, “This bitch didn’t know when to shut up,” it adds up to a long history of a corporate culture that is a willing participant in spreading gender-based hate speech and rape culture.

Indeed, the ubiquitous nature and incredible cultural power of Facebook has been leveraged as a unique tool for rape culture and to promote violence against women. Last month, Retaeh Parsons killed herself after more than a year of cyber bullying following her sexual assault in 2011. Her very attackers posted photos of the incident on Facebook and proceeded to use that evidence to mock and harass her for months on end until, finally, she could take no more and ended her life. And she is not the only one.

That alone would be enough. The very fact that the power of social media sites — Facebook being nearly the king of the hill, so to speak — can be harnessed for such malevolence is a testament to its power to harm. So, when a brand like Facebook allows the “humor” sites like What’s 10 Inches and Gets Girls to Have Sex With Me? My Knife to proliferate, there is a very real consequence to that act.

And let’s be clear. For all its hand-wringing and cries of First Amendment rights, Facebook has a history of acting to remove anti-Semetic, Islamophobic, and homophobic speech. Facebook is a public forum, yes. But it is governed by the same rules and laws that prohibit me from walking into a crowded movie theater and shouting, “Fire!” when there is none. We have Freedom of Speech, but speech is not free.

Further evidence to the misogynistic culture that Facebook is either willfully or indirectly complicit in is the fact that the company has a long history of removing another kind of page and photo memes: That of breast-feeding women. It’s a curious thing that the Facebook will protect the rights of misogynists who want to promote rape culture but not the rights of women who want to promote a biological act which feeds infants.

This is a fight we can win. Facebook is not too big to listen, just ask the UFC. Two years ago, I joined a coalition of organizations to take on the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) to get them to enact a code of conduct to address rape jokes and homophobic speech that fighters were proliferating on social media. There was a lot of resistance from UFC CEO Dana White, until advertisers like the US Marines started pulling their ads and support for the organization until they cleaned up their act. Earlier this year, the UFC enacted a code of conduct, and used it to suspend a fighter for transphobic comments. If a brand like the UFC, which has built itself partially on a kind of hyper-masculinity that tends to dovetail into rape culture, can change its ways, so can Facebook.

In an open letter to Facebook, feminist coalition partners said the following:

In a world in which hundreds of thousands of women are assaulted daily and where intimate partner violence remains one of the leading causes of death for women around the world, it is not possible to sit on the fence. We call on Facebook to make the only responsible decision and take swift, clear action on this issue.

It doesn’t get any clearer than that. Be a part of the solution, Facebook.

Photo by Chase Carter via Creative Commons

Read here  the open letter to Facebook

Olivia Harris as Wonder Woman. When asked why she isn’t smiling she said, “Because Wonder Woman doesn’t smile.” Take that street harassers!

What did you want to be when you were a little kid? I wanted to be a ballerina until I saw Lynda Carter spin into Wonder Woman on my black-and-white TV. Sure, I had already seen Christopher Reeves as Superman. He was pretty great and all, but the only quasi-strong woman in that story is reporter Lois Lane. And while I did eventually grow up to be a reporter, it had nothing to do with Lois. After all, she was just another damsel-in-distress, a prop to show Superman’s emotional side. But Wonder Woman… Now there was a woman who was smart, fierce, and stronger than any man and never apologized for it. That was a hero to inspire my little heart as I watched breathlessly as she foiled bad guys and saved the world from Nazis.

And that’s when I started begging my mom to buy me comic books.

By now, you’ve probably done the mental math and can tell I was born in the 1970s and came of age in the 80s and early 90s. I’m of that generation. No, not Gen X, although that label probably fits. No, I’m of the Comic Book Geek generation. In particular, the women-who-like-comic-books generation. Indeed, we’re not just here, we’re demanding parity in characters and, at the publishing level, to include more female-created books. And now, as we raise our own children, we feel the friction of a world that has not moved as quickly to embrace strong women as the world of comics, which has come a long way from the likes of the seminal but singular Wonder Woman. Today there are whole teams of female superheros, including a Storm-led team in the Uncanny X-Men. Over at Captain Marvel, Maj. Carol Danvers has saved no less than the galaxy and led The Avengers.

It’s been a somewhat uneasy relationship for women in comics, not unlike the real world for women in a patriarchal society. There are many female characters that came into their own in the 1970s and 80s including Jean Gray/Phoenix, The Dazzler (a personal favorite), Barbara Gordon/Batgirl, Ms. Marvel, Hawkwoman, and Black Widow. The 90s brought in characters like Xena the Warrior Princess, Tank Girl, and the animated Powerpuff Girls, not to mention Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which successfully jumped from movie to television to comics after the show ended. In the modern era, we’ve seen both heroes and villains who are women portrayed with vacillating levels of real or pseudo-feminist characteristics and sexist tropes. We can see this play out in the not-quite fully actualized character of Pepper Potts as conceptualized in the Iron Man movies and contrast it with Anne Hathaway’s Cat Woman in the last Batman.

So with this growing wealth of self-actualized (or at least progress toward self-actualized) women in the comic book universe and an ever-growing legion of female fans, it is a wonder that parents of girls are still struggling to outfit their tiny heroes. In my own home, my toddler is infatuated with all things Spiderman (just like her dad), Batman, and pretty much any character that appears to be a superhero. (Although, to my chagrin, she is a bit apathetic to Wonder Woman, which she thinks is me. So, any compliment that might be taken as is immediately diminished by the fact that she thinks her mom is not that interesting.) She loves playing with her Wonder Woman invisible jet and Batman workshop, both from Fisher Price, equally. And last Halloween, at the last minute (of course), she shrugged off the Elmo costume she had originally picked out and opted instead to wear her Spiderman pajamas to go trick-or-treating. Because she loves Spidey so much, it has forced a kind of gender discussion early in her young life. We routinely have to travel to the “boys” section to find clothes and toys that suit her fancy. In turn, she is routinely called a boy, which is not an issue for me but one I find interesting in a sociological and feminist-perspective way.

My little girl loves Spiderman!

How is that when a child chooses to not wear pink, that decides her gender identity? How is it that in an age when there are more and more female heroes and villains in the comic book world, there are still such static labels on who should be the target audience?

A lot of times I can shrug it off or even welcome the conversations that my daughter’s clothes may spark as a micro-level teaching opportunity about construct of gender and about letting children just be kids, without labels, free to choose the apparel and toys that suit their spirit. Why box a kid in (or out)? Why limit who that child can be? One could argue that even by the mere fact that my husband and I call our child “daughter” we have already labeled part of her identity. But at least we’re trying to crack the door open and take away as many boxes as possible.

All of this has been a kind of prelude to one of the biggest disappointments in my daughter’s young life. On the cusp of turning three, my child is deep in the potty training phase. And as any parent knows, you want that process to go as smoothly as possible. It’s a big change in their young lives. It’s a time of liberation and learning that you have control over your body and also about fears (toilets are loud and scary) and anxieties (feelings of failure when having an accident). We want to help our kid through this process as guides and also as partners in her growth and learning.

One thing we read was to get your kid excited about potty training by taking them to buy their first underwear. So, I took my daughter to the store. She was very excited to see all the underwear, “just like mommy and daddy.” She’s not into princesses, yet, so most of the girl-branded pink underwear weren’t that interesting to my kid. What she really got excited about — like jump up and down in the aisle excited — was the package of Spiderman underwear. It was marketed to boys and sewn with the boy-style flap. But I bought a package (along with a “plan B” style, just in case). I wanted my kid to feel excited about potty time. And I wanted her to feel like she had control over her life in some small way. She could choose her underpants! (Which is really saying something, considering the gender-coding of the diaper aisle, which is almost exclusively branded out not just in shades of pink and blue but corporate characters that intensify that gender-coding.) Sadly, when my kid tried the Spidey underwear on, it just didn’t feel right. And it upset her. She didn’t want to put on the plain green, blue, or pink underwear. She wanted Spidey.

I took to internet, scowering hand-made websites like Etsy, auction sites, mass-retailer sites. I posted to all my social media sites. I was a mother on a mission! All I found was that a lot of other parents — and I mean A LOT — have the exact same problem. (Going the other way, too. With parents of boys wanting princess or “girl” themed underwear.) This was a real capitalism-fail moment. The demand is here! So where is the supply? I immediately signed the petition, which was started by another mom of a girl who loves Spidey.

So, maybe that’s why I was so excited to see this female superhero meme started by artist Alexandra Law, who finds pictures of girls dressed as superheros and turns them into comic book-style drawings of bad-ass characters. Isn’t that what it’s all about? Don’t we want every kid to see themselves as awesome superheros, with powers that amaze and delight? Isn’t that what my daughter wants when she puts on her Spidey costume? Or when she throws on the Batman rash-guard with a pink tutu to go to the water park?

As we get ready to celebrate Mother’s Day, I wish that the kids in our lives can be their true selves, explore their world without judgement, and be celebrated for who they really are and what they really love without shame. Because all I want, for Mother’s Day or any day, is for my kid to be happy. And maybe a pack of Spiderman undies for girls, size 4T. Thanks.

Dear Anti Sex Ed Crowd:

Greetings and salutations! I bet you’re surprised to hear from me. After all, you’ve spent some time lately calling me a terrible mother (on television no less) because I advocate for a much-needed update to Nevada’s sex education standards — originally passed at the height of the AIDS-panic-1980s — that at its core is a mandate for abstinence-only scare-tactics about diseases on your privates. But we’ll get to that.

Maybe because Mother’s Day is right around the corner, I’ve been thinking about you and your unsympathetic, aggressive campaign against bringing comprehensive sex education to Nevada. Surely, you only compare things to Hitler and Nazis when they really, really deserve to be villianized as lacking any moral compass whatsoever. You don’t just go around TEXT SHOUTING onto the public record that sex education in schools is a PARENTAL COP OUT unless you have some solid data to back that up, right? I mean, that would be an irresponsible abuse of the standards of basic human decency and decorum that we live by in a civilized society. And, I know you’d never be one of those people who physically threaten violence when someone tells a story you disagree with at a public hearing. Because that would be immoral.

You’re very fond of talking about morality. It makes me wonder what would Jesus do if He saw you up on that moral-high-ground perch you’ve climbed onto. Not a lot of passages in the Bible about Jesus telling people to judge others — at least, not in the Bible I read at church every Sunday.

But with all your wisdom about morality, I’m sure you know that comparing a bill about school curriculum to Nazi genocide is immoral. They’re not even in the same league, and it belittles the real suffering of people who went through the Holocaust. Stop that. The same goes for calling whole groups of people terrible parents because they advocate for public education. That is immoral. Threatening violence against another person simply because you disagree with them, well, we know that’s immoral. Because if I’ve learned one thing from the pictures of dead fetuses you like to send me, it’s that you have a reverence for life. Your zest for life is so super-charged, it elevates a fetus above a fully formed, sentient woman any day of the week (twice on Sunday)! Now that’s a respect for life!

When I was sitting in church this past week, I was thinking about you. And yes, it’s a real-deal, Christians-who-love-Jesus United Church of Christ church. I was thinking about how you might be sitting in church at that same moment, reading or listening to scriptures from the Bible and nodding affirmingly to whatever sermon you were hearing. I was sitting next to my husband of almost 16 years (we’re high school sweethearts even!) and our beautiful daughter, the joy of our lives. Probably not that much different than what you do on Sundays either, right? So, I was thinking about you as my reverend was talking about forgiveness and grace; that we as Christians are charged to live by example and to take God’s shining light into the world. We are charged to give of ourselves, to lift up the down-trodden, and to go forth humbly because none of us are without sin. I was nodding. I was saying, “Amen!” But secretly, I was thinking about you. And I was wondering how I could ever forgive you for the things you are saying, not just about me, but about our neighbors and fellow Nevadans.

How can I forgive you for hating me and everyone I am trying to lift up — when we have never even met? Would you say those things to my face? Would you call me those names in front of my two-year-old? After all the times you’ve called me an evil whore, a baby-killing slut, and godless jezebel who will feel the fires of hell — and that was before you started calling me a bad mother — I must admit to struggling mightily to find a way to turn the other cheek. Again. And again. I struggle to just ignore you, let alone forgive you.

Because I can’t understand, let alone forgive, a person who would deny others a right to a complete public education. How can I forgive a person who wants to use my religion as a bludgeoning tool? How can I forgive a person who speaks on the public record about how homosexuality is “deviant behavior” and a “lifestyle choice” — as if Jesus made a distinction between who was worthy of His love and forgiveness and who was not? How can I forgive people who work to stop education that could save lives? Do you really think God approves of leaving young people in ignorance of their bodies? Do you really think that God wants young people to get diseases or have unintended pregnancies that they are not emotionally or financially ready for? If you so revere life, why wouldn’t you want to save lives by making sure people know how to protect themselves? Why wouldn’t you want to make sure there are less abortions because there are less unintended pregnancies causing them?

The only answer I can see is that you have absolutely no idea what the concept of morality is.

Because willfully denying people education that can save their lives — and make no mistake, understanding safer sex practices helps stop the spread of diseases like AIDS that kill people — is a public health issue. It is immoral to stand by and let people die out of ignorance. You are not just enabling ignorance, you are encouraging ignorance and that is true immoral behavior! And even as I feel the power of the Lord in my life as I write this, I feel certain that God weeps when people die of preventable diseases.

But let’s set the diseases aside for a moment. Because disease is not the only symptom of an uneducated, ignorant community — and let’s be clear that is what you are advocating when you rally against sex education. There is more to the health and well-being of a person than just worrying about diseases. Let’s look at teen pregnancy. Nevada has the fourth highest teen pregnancy rate in the nation. And you are fond of negating that statistic with the fact that our teen pregnancy rate has declined by nine percent. True. But that’s why we’ve gone down from being first in the nation to being fourth. Are you really proud of still being in the top five worst states for teen pregnancy? Is that really something to applaud? Whoopidydoo! We’re not the worsty-worst!

How about asking yourself why we are so terrible at helping our youth prevent unwanted pregnancies? I’ll tell you why: Abstinence-only. Nevada’s current sex education curriculum requires a unit on AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases as well as “sexual responsibility,” with an emphasis on abstinence. And while comprehensive sex education standards also emphasize abstinence, the difference here is that Nevada’s current law only gives abstinence information. In most cases, there is little to nothing about birth control. There is nothing about what consent means — and why a lack of consent to sex is the definition of rape. And that’s if — and only if — you happen to live in one of Nevada’s 17 counties in which there is actually a designated educator for the sex education unit. According to testimony in the 2011 Legislature for a similar bill, by their own admission, many Nevada counties do not have a sex education curriculum or designated educator for their curriculum. They are willfully breaking the current law. So, I guess the students in those counties are just, well, screwed. Is it moral to treat students unequally? I thought the point of public education is that the standards are equal, so all people are treated to an equal education.

Abstinence-only is not only demonstrably a failure in Nevada, it’s a failed sex education system across the board. A Congressional study already confirmed that abstinence-only education does not work and the American Academy of Pediatricians has recommended a comprehensive sex education approach, which includes but is not limited to abstinence education. Indeed, studies show that medically accurate, comprehensive sex education actually results in a delay of the first sexual experience. Probably because when young people get all the facts, they realize that they are not ready for sex!

So, if you’re goal is to prevent kids from having sex, then teaching kids comprehensive sex education is actually exactly what you want!

But I can just hear you now, shaking your fist at the computer screen, saying, “But I don’t want the schools to teach my kids about sex. That’s my job!”

And I say to you: Go forth and teach your kids sex education! I hope you know what you’re talking about. Do you know what to say about sexting? How about cyber-bullying? Rape? What does herpes look like? Can boys get HPV?  … Whew! It’s a lot to cover on your own. Good luck!

The reason why I can happily wave to you as you trot off to not-talk-to-your-kids-about-sex-because-it-scares-you, is that there is an escape hatch for folks like you built right into the law. You can opt-out of letting your kid(s) get educated! In fact, it’s probably one of the few times in your parenting career when you will face little-to-no shame for willfully removing your child from the classroom. Think about it. You can’t opt your kid out of math, science, or reading, but you can opt them out of sex ed? What a country! That’s because there is no graduation requirement to have sex education in Nevada. And, like I said before, you can totally opt your kid out!

Now, you may have heard that the proposed comprehensive sex education law, AB230 in the Assembly, is changing the parental permission standards. True. It’s going from a permission slip to be allowed to be IN class to a permission slip to be taken OUT of class. Right now, Nevada is one of only three states with an opt-in requirement, meaning that parents actually have to sign a permission slip to allow kids to have sex education. About four percent of students end up sitting out of sex education simply because they forgot to get the permission slip to their parents (or forgot to return it). So, really we’re talking about the four percent of kids who are missing out on education that their parents want them to have just because of a paperwork problem. That’s the dumbest reason ever for a kid to miss a class!

The other thing I can hear you screaming at me is that the new comprehensive sex education bill would “take away local authority.” Or, actually, the exact opposite. AB230 has a requirement for a local committee to oversee and approve regular updates to the curriculum. It’s actually pretty much the same thing we have now. I know, I’ve sat in on the Clark County committee before. True story: They didn’t want to allow a text book because it had a drawing of human anatomy. So, there’s your local control, working hard to control any kind of enlightenment whatsoever.

And don’t get me started on the hypocrisy of people from rural counties with legal brothels that pay their property taxes being against sex education. (Not that all rural folks are against sex ed.) What do you think the people at the brothels are doing? How is it possible that you can drive right by the brothel that pays for your fire department services and turn in to a meeting to talk about how we should never, ever, ever, ever talk to kids about penises and vaginas? It boggles my mind. And you do realize that rural counties have a much higher rate of teen pregnancy than anywhere else in the nation, right?

And come on, those are just red herrings anyway. Be honest now. You are just terrified about talking about sex with your kid(s). You don’t want them to learn that there are different people in the world, some even that you judge to be “bad” people. But just because you don’t like those people, it doesn’t make them disappear from existence. Just because you don’t like thinking about your child having sex, it doesn’t make them not have sex. Please! If that worked, I wouldn’t be alive! Yes, I am the product of a teen pregnancy statistic! (Cue: Gasps)

Tsk. Tsk. Tsk. I can feel you judging my mother right now. Yes, she was a teen mother. She also dropped out of college and raised me in poverty because of it — two things that are highly correlated to teen pregnancy, in fact. But right about now, I bet you’re sort of wishing she’d had that abortion when she was pregnant with me. Because then maybe you wouldn’t have to put up with this pain-in-your-ass prochoice, Christian, suburban, married, stay-at-home mom (really, we have so much more in common than you like to think) who keeps talking about why our state needs comprehensive sex education. I was there on April 1 when you were testifying before the Assembly committee about “unwed teen pregnancy” being a “natural punishment” for premarital sex. As if my childhood wasn’t hard enough, I have had to deal with people like you my whole life talking about my very existence as a punishment for my mother’s bad decisions. What was that thing the reverend said on Sunday? Oh yes: Judge not, lest ye be judged. But thanks for belittling my existence by implying that in my case there was no “miracle” to my conception, but rather a Job-like sentence made flesh, from a wrathful God. Thanks for that. On behalf of all “bastard” children everywhere, I thank you for your charity, kindness, and loving spirit in God’s name. You’re really nailing it.

That sort of brings me back to where we started when I sat down to write this letter. I wanted you to get to know me, your apparent foe. Because from what I can tell by what you are saying about me online and on TV and on the public record in legislative meetings, you don’t know me at all. You’ve created a sort of convenient caricature of me, and people like me. You’ve cast me as a godless sodomite who seeks to destroy the fabric of our society by advocating that public education has a minimum standard that includes sex ed curriculum that is medically accurate and age-appropriate. You’ve vilified me as a terrible mother because I recognize that not all families are whole and functional. Indeed, not all people are whole and functional. Some of us are ill-equipped to tackle big topics like sex education with our kids. And not everyone is as lucky as me to have friends who work as professional sex education instructors. Does it make us bad parents if we seek outside resources to shore up our weaknesses? I don’t have a clue how to teach my daughter Calculus. If she expresses a desire to learn it, am I a failure as a parent because I can’t teach her myself? I seem to recall some of you testifying that you checked out materials from the public library to teach your own kids sex ed. So, you can access publicly funded educational materials, but if we seek to make that available to everyone in a classroom setting, we’re abdicating our parental responsibility?

No. You’re wrong. You’re a hypocrite. You do not have the moral high-ground just because you throw God and Jesus’ names into the mix. You do not know more about being a parent than me because you have more children than me. You do not know what is best for my daughter. I do. And in the face of you hurling insults and mischaracterizations at me, I still respect you enough to make sure that you can legally decide what you think is best for your child(ren). It doesn’t matter if I think you’re wrong in how you raise your kids. I respect that you have that right. I was perfectly happy to turn my cheek again and again. Because unlike you, I don’t claim to know what’s best for your child(ren). I don’t take some imaginary moral high-ground and call you a simpleton or a fear-monger or a closed-minded bigot because you’d rather teach people to hate those who are not like them than to just simply acknowledge that they exist, without judgement (as that guy Jesus commanded). I don’t shame girls for having sex or making decisions about their bodies. I don’t threaten people with violence because they do not agree with me. I don’t create a culture of fear in the classrooms of young men and women so that they are too afraid to ask the important questions that need asking. The questions that can lead to valuable information that maybe, just maybe, might save a life. I advocate for comprehensive sex education because I want my daughter to have comprehensive sex education.

I think standing in the way of education is morally bankrupt. I think standing up and judging people (for their purported mistakes, like being raped) in a public forum is an abomination in the eyes of the Lord. And I think that just because I believe in Jesus and I have a path that is right for me, that does not give me the right to force other people down that same path. I don’t demonize those who have a different faith (or none at all) than me. That’s not my business. And it’s not yours either.

You claim to be standing up for your beliefs. I’m doing the same. I’d like to think we can each have our opinions and debate them in a peaceful, respectful way. But that would require you to be a peaceful, respectful person. Everything you show me is quite the opposite. You want to attack any person who is not exactly like you, who does not believe exactly like you. That’s not the country we live in. We live in a country founded on the idea that people have a right to worship as they please, and to pursue happiness. You don’t get to decide what everybody else believes and what makes everybody else happy. And whether you believe in God or little blue fairies, it doesn’t change the fact that comprehensive sex education saves lives and prevents pregnancies (which in turn, prevent abortions and we all know how you feel about abortions).

It’s too bad that you don’t like comprehensive sex education, but that’s your right not to like it. But I’ll be damned if I let bullies like you silence me or anyone else from advocating for it. Because when you try to smear us or brand us as bad people, you are being a bully. And you are trying to keep me quiet. But I have right to say my piece.

And just one more thing: I want you to look around for a moment. I want you to remember the children, those very same little humans you are always claiming to be doing everything for. They are watching us. They are watching us have this debate. What are they learning from you right now? What are they learning about how to have a civilized, peaceful debate with somebody? What are you teaching them about your own ethics and morals right this minute when you call me a whore or a terrible mother because I disagree with you? Is that good parenting? I think actions speak louder than words, my friend.

I know we are far from finished with this debate. Going forward, I do hope for one thing: That we can have this debate as respectful adults, not children on a schoolyard. I hope that when we disagree — and we probably will — that neither side resorts to petty name-calling. But I really hope I never, ever again see a group of so-called Christians sit in a public hearing and make jokes during testimony from a rape survivor. That is grotesque cruelty. Be the people you say you are. Act as you believe God would want you to act. Really and truthfully think about what that means. Does God command us to go out and bully others to think like us? Or, does He ask us to lead by example in humble service to the world? Let’s discuss this thing as peacefully as possible. Open your heart to new possibilities and understanding. And at the end of the day, let’s remember that we are each other’s neighbors.

And for the love of God, stop calling names to those who are on the opposite side of the issue as you! There’s nothing morally superior about that!

Respectfully,

Emmily

This piece was originally posted on the The Sin City Siren and it’s cross-posted here with permission.

Photo Credit: Paree from Creative Commons

There’s been a lot of bitching on the feminist interwebs about this whole #FemFuture: Online Revolution, proposed by Valenti Martin Media, aka Feministing co-creators Vanessa Valenti and Courtney Martin at a launch event at Barnard College on Monday. At its core, the #FemFuture project seeks to unify a disparate online feminist landscape and help the success of feminist social justice campaigns by bringing in monetary backers to end the cycle of “unpaid martyrs,” as Zerlina Maxwell called it in an Ebony article on the launch.

She went on to say:

Online activism is often referred to as “slactivism” and in many ways this idea that online petitions and tweets are all that online feminists are doing is misguided. Online feminists are transforming cultural norms and the way many Americans think about gender related issues. For example, the harmful impacts of rape culture don’t reach the mainstream but for the persistence of online feminist spaces breaking into the mainstream conversation.

…

No movement can sustain itself if there is no funding and nothing to support the most loyal and active who too often burn out and leave the movement when life gets in the way. Online feminists shouldn’t have to be unpaid martyrs for the cause; Other aspects of the women’s and progressive movement are backed up by sponsors so that their efforts can be long lasting. In the past decade, feminists haven’t been in hiding, they’ve been online and on social media, telling stories, supporting each other’s experiences, debating, and shaping both public opinion and public policy. It’s time for a little recognition and funding to keep this momentum going.

Before I go any further, I feel like we need to unpack all this. There’s a lot to chew on in these paragraphs and in what Valenti Martin Media is proposing with #FemFuture.

Many know Valenti as the creator of Feministing, an online feminist blog and activist space. As online media changes and grows, Feministing has remained a beacon of how to do it well. Indeed, I launched The Sin City Siren six years ago because I loved Feministing so much. And while I have yet to realize my dream of multiple authors for the site, I am happy to have built this feminist outpost in the land of the lost (feminists). Las Vegas is a uniquely American city with an unparalleled contribution to misogyny and rape culture. To be a feminist in Las Vegas takes guts. And it doesn’t hurt to be a little crazy. But what has kept me sane has been this touchstone to so many other feminists, both here and elsewhere. The community we’ve built together at SCS has made Las Vegas a tolerable place. It gives me hope. So, I feel a great debt to Feministing, in a fundamental sense. I owe them an acknowledgement for a road paved.

Here’s the scoop from the #FemFuture executive summary:

Young women have used online tools to successfully pressure Facebook to take down pro-rape pages, to get Seventeen Magazine to stop photoshopping girls’ bodies in their pages, and to reverse the Komen Breast Cancer Foundation’s decision to remove funding from Planned Parenthood Federation of America. Beyond these more measurable impacts, countless young people, many of them feeling isolated and/or misunderstood in their own towns, discover feminism online and are transformed by it; conversations on blogs and tumblrs are often called “consciousness raising for the 21st century.” Online feminism is arguably the largest and most effective innovation in feminism in the last 50 years.

The online feminist ecosystem primarily consists of blogs, organizations that run online campaigns, online petition platforms, and individual thought leaders who leverage Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, and other socialmedia platforms.What makes this ecosystem distinct is that it is decentralized and accessible, unapologetically intersectional, community-oriented, catalyzes rapid, large-scale action, and is very often youth-led. In this way, it is a powerful pipeline for the next generation of feminist leadership.

But for all the progress that online feminism has made, it is unquestionably hindered by being largely unsupported and uncoordinated. Most young feminists leveraging online tools are doing so as a “third shift”— after their paid job, and their on-the-ground, unpaid activism. Most online feminist entities—whether blogs or more formal organizations—are operating on profoundly inadequate budgets, pieced together from individual donors, third party ad revenue, or some combination. No philanthropic institution yet exists that has funding specifically available for online feminist innovation.

This is unhealthy for individual feminists who are overworked, often uninsured, and burned out, but it’s also dangerously unhealthy for the movement as a whole. Online feminism has mostly been exercised in ad-hoc and reactive ways. The longer it remains unsupported, the more it will become a province of the already privileged, who can afford to donate unpaid labor to their favorite cause, and the more that anti-feminist forces will use the tools we’ve invented to push progress back.

But there is hope.We believe that forging partnerships between feminists—online and off, young and wise, poor and wealthy, organizing at the grassroots and strategizing at the treetops—will have far-reaching consequences.

It will foster the formation of new connections between grassroots advocacy and service organizations, educational institutions, coalitions, unions, convenings, conferences, legacy media, policy makers, politicians, entrepreneurs, etc. Online feminism has the capacity to be like the nervous system of this modern day feminist body politics.

I can’t say I disagree with much of this. Despite getting syndicated two years ago, for the majority of the six years I’ve been doing SCS, it has been an unpaid passion project. Indeed even now with syndication, I do not always break even each quarter. In truth, even though I work SCS like a day job, I take on other work as a consultant and freelance journalist to actually pay my bills. It is also the reason why my toddler only goes to dayschool part-time and stays home with me the rest of the time. I simply can’t afford to pay for child care to do work that is largely unpaid. To say that SCS is my “third shift,” would be a huge understatement. For me, the writing and activism I do through SCS is like my first-through-third shifts. Even though I know that Valenti and Martin are using “third shift” as an allusion to the storied “second shift” that women work doing the majority of housework after a first shift of their paid work, The Sin City Siren often subsumes any time I would have for housework or even sleep. (You do not want to know how often I must wait until everyone else is in bed before I write my posts.)

Do I wish that my writing and activism through The Sin City Siren were monetarily rewarded the same way my husband’s work is at his job? Abso-fucking-lutely! But I also accept that the kind of work I do is often not rewarded in a monetized way. Perhaps it is my background in journalism that has prepared me for this. When I worked full-time in journalism, I never once — NOT ONE TIME — got paid overtime (or holiday pay). And I worked every holiday except Christmas. I worked 50+ hours a week, standard. So, I guess I just come with the built-in understanding that the market does not value my talents and skills. In fact, now more than ever because of the evolution of online media and entertainment, the audience expects content to be free and they do not care if the people who are providing it are getting paid.

And then there’s the issue of what getting paid means. If I take ad money, am I beholden to advertisers? If I align my blog with an organization, do they get some control over content?

Okay, so maybe it sounds like I’m saying that I’m not down with what the #FemFuture project is trying to do. Not at all. And while I can’t speak for the people having conversations I’ve been seeing (and having) on twitter, I can see where there are some issues. #FemFuture proposes an annual conference, bootcamps, a kind of feminist Craigslist and more. Sure. Yes. Why not? What I keep wondering is, who is paying for all this? And how will this change anything?

As far as I can tell, it’s an outline of the model we are all already working with. If I want to go to a conference, I have to pay out of my own pocket. If I need skills or services, I have to seek them out and work out trades or payment. But there are already conferences and bootcamps that are designed to help feminist blogging. I don’t go to them because they are all, generally speaking, on the East Coast and thus cost- and time-prohibitive. To me, what this structure outlines is just another exasperating instance of “that’s not really for me.” If I can’t afford to access it, it might as well not exist. And let me tell you, the sparse feminist community in places like Nevada, Wyoming, Alaska, and other outlier Western states could really use some stuff like this!

And no doubt, there are many other communities who feel blocked to access the kind of online feminist utopia #FemFuture is offering. You can’t participate in online activism, after all, if you can’t get online. Libraries are closing. And you can’t worry about online activism if you lack access to stable housing, a safe environment to work, or even have the time to dedicate to such work. As always, feminist leaders in the movement have to be careful to not isolate or alienate the many splendored thing that is the feminist community. LGBT individuals, women of color, differently abled people, homeless people, and more — we are here, even if we are sometimes excluded from the dominant memes. And we will not be excluded even if the dominant discussions — from within and without feminist circles — continue to be relegated to the middle-class delusion of “having it all” or “opting out.”

But I don’t want to dismiss #FemFuture out of hand. I think that’s a disservice to what is being offered. There is something valuable to what Valenti and Martin are exploring. There’s a discussion to be engaged. And there’s a chance to learn from, rather than deny, our feminist roots and the work of previous generations and waves.

As a coincidence of fate, I happen to have started reading Girls to the Front: The True Story of the Riot Grrrl Revolution by Sara Marcus. While I can’t say I ever formally affiliated myself with the Riot Grrrl movement, I am of that age and generation. And no doubt, my feminist outrage was stoked by the punk music I listened to, which was in-turn influenced by Riot Grrrls demanding parity in music and society. More than the movement itself, I identify with the immediacy that the Riot Grrrl movement allowed.

Rather than feel that we were all “suddenly” onto the global secret of misogyny and rape culture, I look at it now and see that every new generation is “suddenly” onto the global secret of misogyny and rape culture. In the same way that teenagers and young adults are always discovering the ways of the world and (hopefully) looking at them through a intersectional-feminist lense. What Riot Grrrl did do was allow for an immediate reaction to what I was seeing and feeling in ways that had not been done before. Yes, I had a zine. (More than one.) I got a job at my university’s women’s center. I organized my first rallies and protests. I look on my punk-fueled, radical-feminist, college years with the kind of nostalgia that is probably not that unlike the Baby Boomers who wistfully remember the 60s. Because being a punk-feminist in the age of Riot Grrrls meant that there were a whole lot of us. We were visible. And in the per-internet age, we managed to find ways to connect — sometimes across great distances.

Emmily and her best friend Josh, circa 1995.

As Marcus writes (and forgive me as I transcribe this from the book):

These girls weren’t all punk, they didn’t all have bands, and while they were the coolest girls I’d ever met, they were cool in a way that drew me closer instead of shutting me out. They were courageous, profane, and powerful. They would have socked that fitting-room attendant [who menaced me with the threat of sexual attack] in the face. They would have redone the NOW club’s bulletin board [from 'Feminism: It's about choices'] to read ‘Maybe I wouldn’t have to be a feminist if you weren’t such an asshole.’ … [The] severity [of being a teenage girl] and the specific tone of its miseries were political, which meant they were mutable. I felt powerless not because I was weak but because I lived in a society that drained girls of power. Boys harassed me not because I invited it but because they were taught it was acceptable and saw that no one intervened. These things weren’t my fault, and we could fight them all together.

And really, I see blogging and the online activism I do as a direct out-growth of my earlier pre-internet Riot Grrrl-era days. What was a hand-pasted zine in those days looks like blogs and tumblr now. The punk-influenced idea of using our bodies and clothing as a direct confrontation to political and societal oppression — such as writing on our bodies with sharpies or wearing combat boots everywhere — is now captured in vignettes on instagram and pinterest. The personal is still political.

As much as things die of irrelevancy, they grow and evolve and crop up again in new forms in new eras.

What we have to be careful of now is that in the #FemFuture that we’re all writing and recording, is that we don’t just say the same things over and over again. That in our haste to blaze new trails, that we are not repeating the same mistakes of the past. There is a reason that many people of color and LGBT people disdain the feminist movement, and those reasons are rooted in real issues. We have left them out. Time and time again. The forms change, but the mistakes remain.

So, as I look at #FemFuture, what I hope is that this is a new beginning that is actually new. That we are actually going somewhere together. Because I like to think Marcus’ memories of the Riot Grrrl movement — of finding a home in a community — is something we can still do today. But better. And without the cheesy name.

The piece was originally posted on the Sin City Siren blog and it’s cross-posted here with permission

Photo credit: The Sin City Siren Blog,

I’ve been updating this post all day as I see new stories on #FierceFlores. Scroll down for complete list of news.

Well, helloooo internet! I am truly amazed by the phenomenon that is now the #FierceFlores meme! It has gone viral, and then some!

Thanks to all of you out there, Nevada Assemblywoman Lucy Flores knows without a doubt that she is not alone. Faced with death threats after she told the story of having an abortion as a teenager as an example of why Nevada needs a new comprehensive sex education law, Lucy Flore didn’t need us to tell her she was doing the right thing. But that doesn’t mean she has to do it alone! We showed those that would silence through acts of violence that we stand with Lucy Flores!

And you let the world know via twitter, Facebook, tumblr, and more!

Of course, we rally around Flores because no one deserves to be shamed or threatened with violence because they shared their story about abortion. Indeed, nobody deserves to be threatened with violence simply for exercising their First Amendment rights!

So this whole #FierceFlores business started with a post I passed around, starting early April 4. I’m sure you’ve seen this pic by now:

THOUSANDS of you have shared this, liked it, and tweeted it! And now there are more from those, like Planned Parenthood, who want to add to the #FierceFlores meme:

I also saw this one tweeted out by anonymous the @MemeNVLeg satirist who tweets about the Nevada Legislature:

The early success of the #FierceFlores meme started with many of my friends and colleagues on the East Coast — particularly those at Fem2.0, RH Reality Check, Think Progress, Women Centric, Education for Choice, NARAL Prochoice Virginia, Catholics for Choice, and Planned Parenthood President Cecile Richards. I even saw a retweet from Sen. Al Franken! (Wow!)

More than anything I have seen a tremendous out-pouring of support for not just Lucy Flores, but for me, too. I am touched and honored that so many amazing friends, fans, journalists, activists, and feminist bloggers have taken up this cause!

This would not have taken fire like it has without all of you! Shout-outs to PLAN’s Bob Fulkerson for being the first person I saw use the #FierceFlores hashtag. And thank you to so many great Nevada organizations and people, including Planned Parenthood of Southern Nevada, ProgressNow Nevada, the Henderson Democrats, Nevada Women’s Lobby, Ralston Reports, Ray Hagar… and so many I am forgetting right now. (Sorry!)

And thankfully, many Nevada Legislature insiders — including some legislators, such as Assemblyman Elliot Anderson — are showing their support for the assemblywoman, too. This is so important because those threatening messages sent to Lucy Flores can also work to silence other lawmakers who fear being similarly targeted. To the members of the Legislature: I encourage you to take a look at the #FierceFlores meme on twitter! That support isn’t just for Lucy. It’s for all lawmakers who dare to be brave and work toward much-needed change in Nevada!

But my favorite message of all has to be the one I got from Lucy Flores herself:

Right back at ya, Lucy! Although we’ve never met and I don’t even live in your district, without a doubt, you have inspired me.

And I’m not the only one who has been inspired by Lucy Flores today. There have been some great stories on her and the #FierceFlores meme, too:

• Think Progress: Nevada Lawmaker Receives Death Threats After Talking About Her Abortion
• Reno Gazette-Journal: Assemblywoman Flores receives threats after testimony that she had abortion at 16
• Ralston Reports: Discussing Lucy canceling her appearance because of death threats, as well as her testimony
• (New!) Huffington Post: Lucy Flores, Nevada Legislator, Receives Threats After Admitting She Had An Abortion
• (New!) Raw Story: Nevada lawmaker gets death threats after revealing her abortion at sex ed talk
• (NEW!) Ms. Magazine: NV State Congresswoman [sic] Threatened After Sharing her Abortion Experience
• (NEW!) Social News Daily: Lucy Flores Testimony Sparks #FierceFlores, #IHadAnAbortion hashtags

But as amazing as all this has been, I don’t want the most important part of this to get lost. I started the #FierceFlores meme because I was outraged that someone was being silenced by blatant terrorist tactics just for speaking at a public meeting. (Because when you use fear tactics and death threats to silence someone, that is the very definition of terrorism.) Regardless of anyone’s opinions about abortion, no one should be threatened with violence for talking at a meeting!

The other reason why I started #FierceFlores is because I don’t want the anti-choice bullies to distract from the reason why we were at that meeting: Getting comprehensive sex education in Nevada! Don’t be fooled! Arguing about abortion rights is a red herring! Assemblywoman Flores did not get up and talk about abortion at the April 1 hearing to make a point about abortion. She spoke about her experience with abortion as a consequence of a lack of sex education.

And on Thursday Lucy released a statement about the intention behind her testimony:

“This week, I shared an extremely personal story about a difficult decision I made as a teenager to have an abortion. I shared that story because I felt it was relevant to the importance of sex education in Nevada schools, and my belief that our children need to be armed with good information in order to make good choices.  While I am heartened, and deeply moved, by the support I have received from far and wide since my testimony, I want to ensure that we don’t lose focus on the real issue at hand. I don’t want the weight of a serious issue like abortion rights to overwhelm the purpose of this bill, which is meant to ensure that other young people are empowered with information that I simply didn’t have as a young person.

I maintain that educating our children is one of the most important things we can do as legislators, and that should include sex education. I look forward to working with my colleagues to pass AB230. AB230 is an important piece of legislation that is sorely needed in our state. Nevada’s young people need to have access to information in order to make informed choices, and hopefully avoid having to make difficult decisions as I had to.”

We are the only state with legalized prostitution but we have an abstinence-only based sex ed law. We vote to commodify sex work on the one hand and then vote to withhold potentially life-saving information from our youth with the other hand. Nevada has the fourth highest rate of teen pregnancy. The cognitive dissonance is startling and it hurts us all!

If you really do stand with Lucy Flores, then remember the point of her message. It’s time for comprehensive sex education!

It’s time, Nevada!

This piece was originally posted on the The Sin City Siren website and it’s cross-posted here with permission

Photo credits: The The Sin City Siren Website

Any feminist worth their salt has no doubt seen at least one mention of the latest Victoria’s Secret dust-up. This time, the retailer has struck the ire of conservatives and feminists alike for the reported launch of a hyper-sexualized line of lingerie marketed to tweens. Or did they?

It wouldn’t be surprising that a brand that has faced constant backlashes for not just one racist incident, but two racist incidents in less than two years. Need I remind you of the “geisha outfit” and the Sioux-style war bonnet incident? And then there’s the whole “fair trade” fiasco, in which cotton underwear marketed as fair trade were actually made by abused African children. (Note to Victoria’s Secret: The definition of fair trade is to empower normally oppressed populations with work that pays a fair wage and sets a precedent for a fair work environment.)

So cue a Liz Lemon-style eye roll, when reports started surfacing on the internet and in the media at large — I’ve counted stories on FOX News, MSNBC, ABC News, Huffington Post, and more — that Victoria’s Secret was up to no good, again. And this time the story has been framed largely by an outcry from “angry moms.” Now as a mother myself, I have to find out which kind of “angry moms” these are. Color me Glinda, asking the internet: But are you angry moms the good kind, or the bad kind?

The genesis for this current shit-storm seems to originate with anti-choice “mom of seven sillies” and “homeschooling guru” Amy Gerwig via the Black Sphere in a an article titled, “Victoria’s Secret is coming for your Middle Schooler.” Sound the alarm!

Gerwig proceeded to denounce a new spring collection called “Bright Young Things,” marketed to teens and tweens. We’re going to circle back to that in a sec, but for the time being let’s stick with what Gerwig said about the line, which includes thongs and underwear with suggestive slogans on the them including “Wild,” “Feeling lucky?” and “Call me.”

Gerwig writes:

Our country is replete with an unprecedented number of young girls suffering from eating disorders and body mutilation, while pushing the limits of sexual promiscuity. Is this racy underwear modeled by unrealistically thin girls really the best that we have to offer our girls? In this age when female sex trafficking is becoming a wide-spread crisis, reaching into the depths of our inner cities, is it really responsible for Victoria’s Secret to entice our impressionable young girls with this “come hither” message?

Here, Gerwig hits upon messages that, in part, overlap with many feminist themes. We feminists frequently call out products and marketing campaigns that enable the misogyny of our society — including imagery that encourages people to have unrealistic beauty myth ideals, which can lead to eating disorders and other forms of self-harm. Gerwig really lights it up by including human trafficking. Well done, Gerwig.

From here, several outlets — both conservative and feminist — picked up the meme. Notably, Rev. Evan Dolive, of Houston posted an open letter to the company, imploring them to scale back their role in the sexualized media-assault on young women and girls. Dolive’s letter gained a lot of traction, perhaps more than Gerwig’s piece. I admit, I posted it on my social media feeds, as I was surprised by the relatively inclusive tone (there’s a hint of LGBTQ acceptance here) and the message that fathers care about the negative messaging girls are receiving.

I believe that this sends the wrong message to not only my daughter but to all young girls.
I don’t want my daughter to ever think that her self-worth and acceptance by others is based on the choice of her undergarments. I don’t want my daughter to ever think that to be popular or even attractive she has to have emblazon words on her bottom.

I want my daughter (and every girl) to be faced with tough decisions in her formative years of adolescence. Decisions like should I be a doctor or a lawyer? Should I take calculus as a junior or a senior? Do I want to go to Texas A&M or University of Texas or some Ivy League School? Should I raise awareness for slave trafficking or lack of water in developing nations? There are many, many more questions that all young women should be asking themselves… not will a boy (or girl) like me if I wear a “call me” thong?

Then came the Jezebel piece that sort of tossed a grenade into this whole meme, pointing an accusatory finger at conservatives for co-opting feminist themes and at the feminists who may have been duped by it, or even been among the 40,000 who signed a petition to stop the line.

Victoria’s Secret is not “launching” an underwear line “for pre-teens.” Pink is a standalone Victoria’s Secret brand marketed at older teens and 20-somethings. “Bright Young Things” is the advertising tag-line the company gave to a Pink collection that hit stores in time for spring break. Spring break is a university vacation. It has nothing to do with pre-teen girls. …

Gerwing’s dog-whistling to conservative values couldn’t be more obvious. Social conservatives aren’t interested in fighting the objectification of women in advertising or the sexualization of young girls: they’re interested in the social control of women’s sexuality, plain and simple. They are not feminist allies. …

But the seed was planted. The notion that Victoria’s Secret was out there, and it was coming for Your Daughter was established. The media then took hold of the story. Many outlets repeated the untrue assertion that the company was actually launching a line “targeting” tweens. Others merely devoted valuable column inches to far-right rhetoric about the need to protect the “innocence” of “our” girls (it’s always “our” girls, because while boys know they belong only to themselves, girls are raised from birth in a society that tells them their bodies are never fully their own) from the potential harm of their own sexuality

So there it is. Victoria’s Secret is not coming for the tweens, the girls, or their virginity (because that’s the implied fear, right?). The uproar about what amounts to a retail marketing campaign is, either wholly manufactured or (less likely) a gross misunderstanding of the facts. I am led to believe that these “angry moms” are not the angry moms I am looking for.

But there’s something unsatisfying about tying this up in such a neat little — haha, you’ve been suckered — package. I’ve been working within the feminist movement for more than 20 years. I have a minor in Women’s Studies. And, yeah, I’m a parent. So, was I really that off-base to find a thread of empathy with the words of a Protestant pastor and father? (I didn’t even read or know about Gerwig’s piece until I was researching this post.)

I must cop to bristling at Jezebel writer Jenna Sauers’ accusatory tone. Because the open message of her piece is to question the bona fides of any feminist who agreed with any part of Dolive’s post. Yes, Gerwig’s alarmist piece is base pandering to folks I have little (if anything) in common with. But I can’t simply write off Dolive’s more reasonable defense of the innocence of childhood and a need to dismantle the damaging messages girls (and boys) receive. He might not have gotten it completely right — in a feminist sense — but as my daughter nears her third birthday, I find myself worrying about the many ways that social messaging tries to rob kids (of all genders and gender identities) of their right to a childhood without sexualization, without problematic body image campaigns, without forcing the issues of sex and sexuality before their time.

Before you get the pitchforks and torches, hear me out. I disagree whole-heartedly with the idea that “our girls” must be protected by the “natural” predatory instincts of boys. I disagree with labeling teens (of any gender) who have sex or express interest in sex as whores, sluts, or in any way wrong. I disagree with fretting that girls are not virginal, or the phallacy of a rape culture system of oppression that says there are “good” girls and “bad” girls. Full stop. I’m against all that shit.

But those problems are not the only problems I see with a lingerie line — in this case imagined — that on its face flirts with a hyper-sexualized view of girlhood, femininity, or gender identities that conform to a “weaker sex” model. As a survivor of sexual abuse, I was introduced to sex acts and sexualization well before my mind and body were developmentally ready for it. I think there is something right about protecting children from that and that has nothing to do with being feminist or anti-feminist. It has nothing to do with being religious or atheist. It has nothing to do with upholding sexist views about gender roles. What I’m talking about is a true form of, well, protecting the children. As a survivor, I have a problem with clothing, products, and marketing campaigns designed to rob kids — and by kids I mean people who are pre-pubescent — of actual childhood innocence, fun, and joy. (And, by the way, I do not agree with using this kind of argument as a way to fight against comprehensive sex education. There is a difference between medically accurate, age-appropriate education and retailers trying to sell sex to five-year-olds.)

If you want to revoke my feminist card for saying that, go ahead.

So, yeah, I take umbrage to the tone Jezebel takes. I’m glad they are dismantling the troubling, anti-feminist elements of this meme. Gerwig’s ideas seem like true anti-feminist troll-think. But I am disappointed at the limited view Sauers takes on the totality of the subject. Gerwig’s alarmist article was designed to stir up a conservative base that is more interested in maintaining the status quo of misogyny and rape culture, without a doubt. But there is an opportunity for a much broader discussion here. How do we raise feminist kids and still do an appropriate amount of watch-dogging of media and messaging that are actually harmful? Where’s the line? Is it underwear marketed to teens? Is it Disney movies that propagate the gender binary and covert racist and homophobic messaging? Is it photoshopped ads and magazine covers? Where is that line?

Because the real discussion that we could be having is about what can we do to be feminist parents and help parents participate in feminism. Sure, there are obvious signs. Purity balls and virginity pledges are obvious tools of misogyny. But is a parent’s worry about hyper-sexualized clothing automatically anti-feminist? I think that line is a lot grayer than some of the folks in this debate are willing to admit. And rather than castigating parents for their worry, how about we give them a hand by offering some help? How about we help parents in how they frame the discussion about things like the not-actually-real Bright Young Things campaign?

Because I think the last thing parents — feminist or not — need is one more group of people judging them for worrying about their kids. The last thing I need is one more person, group, or media outlet telling me I’m doing it wrong.

Photo credit: jm3 via Creative Commons

Join us next week (1/22) from 1-2 pm EST for our #RoeAt40 tweetchat.  We’ll be joined by the Women’s Information Network, DC Abortion Fund, Jodi Jacobson (Editor in Chief at RH Reality Check), and Caroline R. O’Shea (Deputy Director of NARAL Pro-Choice Virginia).  Follow the conversation at #RoeAt40.

This year marks the 40th anniversary of the landmark Roe v Wade Supreme Court decision handed down on Jan. 22, 1973. The case validated a woman’s right to privacy, a right guaranteed by the due process clause within the 14th Amendment.

Perhaps it is no accident that it is the 14th Amendment — the very same that provides a broad enough definition of citizenship to overrule the Supreme Court’s (1857) Dred Scott v Sanford ruling that black people could not be citizens — that set a precedent for women’s reproductive rights in America. After all, at its core, the arguments against women having access to abortion are predicated in a mindset that has determined — whether consciously or not — that women are not actually capable of making this medical decision for themselves. (Or doctors, for that matter).

According to the Guttmacher Institute, seven in 10 Americans getting abortions report a religious affiliation. Catholics have abortions at a slightly higher rate (22 per 1,000) than Protestant women (15 per 1,000). As a feminist Christian myself (we do exist), I feel that my religion has been hijacked by a loud, strident minority who sometimes employ terrorist tactics. Because make no mistake, bombing clinics and killing doctors are acts of terrorism. But so is telling a woman that her only value in life is to be an incubator for a fetus!

The anti-abortion side wants to frame the argument as one about morality, religiosity, and a belief that life starts at conception. But this framework is a straw man: The argument is defined by usurping the humanity and value of a woman with that of a fetus. If we are to judge the antis by their actions — lobbying for feticide and personhood laws — it is not merely about “saving a life.” Because in many cases, the only “life” they are trying to save is that of a fetus. Every time a woman’s actions during pregnancy are criminalized by a feticide law; every time someone argues that a cluster of cells has the same civil rights as a fully formed person (does that mean a fetus has the right of eminent domain over my uterus?); every time something like the Let Women Die bill passes one of the houses of Congress, it is just further evidence that the anti-abortion movement is not about saving lives. It is not about helping people — already born people anyway. And it is certainly not about helping babies born into circumstances beyond their control like poverty, illness, addiction, mental health issues, conception by rape or molestation, or for the death of a mother who could not live through a pregnancy.

And while we may not like the moniker of the War on Women, in recent years there is no denying that the anti-abortion side has been on a roll. There were a record number of anti-abortion bills enacted in 2011, according to Guttmacher.

In the 50 states combined, legislators introduced more than 1,100 reproductive health and rights-related provisions, a sharp increase from the 950 introduced in 2010. By year’s end, 135 of these provisions had been enacted in 36 states, an increase from the 89 enacted in 2010 and the 77 enacted in 2009.

In fact, laws past in recent years have included Utah’s 72-hour waiting period (the longest in the country), Arizona’s court-challenged 2012 law that starts counting gestation two weeks before conception (huh?), and an increase in abstinence-only “education” (despite its widely publicized failures and the fact that most parents support comprehensive sex education). And we haven’t even talked about ultrasounds, transvaginal or otherwise.

All of these laws and campaigns have one thing in common: They do not show any respect toward women. There is no compassion. They are here to strip us of our humanity and dignity, even if it takes another 40 years. In fact, the one thing these bills and laws have in common is their laser-beam focus on dehumanizing women and forcing them into increasingly humiliating and unaffordable circumstances.

Forty years later and the nation and (mostly white male) legislators are still trying to pry open women’s legs and peer into that private reproductive space inside a woman.

The antis may be winning the battle against abortion providers and enacting a record number of laws, but women are still having abortions:

However, what the opposition has done is effectively create a caste system when it comes to reproductive health care. While white women have more abortions (at 36 percent compared to African-Americans, 30 percent, and Hispanics, 25 percent) women of color and poor women are disproportionately more likely to have abortions because of a higher rate of unintended pregnancies, according to Guttmacher Institute. This stems largely from a lack of access to contraceptives, affordable health care, comprehensive sex education as well as a higher level of poverty among people of color.

This video breaks this down well (share it with your friends):

The things is, women who can afford an abortion will always be able to get one. They will be able to afford to travel the long distances in states with only one or two abortion provider(s) (or none, if things go sideways in Mississippi). Or cross state (or national) borders to obtain an abortion. (Only 13 percent of all US counties have an abortion provider.) For the women who can afford the average cost of $451, time off of work, childcare (6 in 10 are already mothers), transportation, waiting periods, costs of additional testing (ultrasounds) and/or state-mandated counseling, abortion will be available.

But what about the other women? The poor women a demographic whose unintended pregnancy increased 50 percent among between 1994 and 2006 while unintended pregnancies went down by 29 percent for higher-income women. The women of color who are at the center of a propaganda campaign that links abortions with racism. Antis who continue to spread the mythology that abortion doctors are racists attempting a long-con genocide are blind to the reality in which they are complicit in a socio-economic framework that systematically oppresses women of color by, among other things, denying them affordable access to quality health care.

No wonder Planned Parenthood has announced that they will be dropping the “pro-choice” terminology from their campaigns to keep women’s health care safe, affordable, and available to all. Because, let’s face it, for many women there is no choice involved. Whether for reasons of cost, social or religious stigma, or simply not having access to a provider at a reasonable distance, many women find that the choice to have an abortion is not on the menu.

Forty years into the age of Roe, and I have to wonder not only where the privacy has gone, but just how low the anti-abortion movement is willing to go. A lot has changed since 1973. Gone are 8-tracks, rotary phones, and rabbit ears on TVs. We’ve seen so many advancements come and go from betamaxes to laser discs to the Apple II. But in all this time, this one issue has remained a constant, a defining boundary of a woman’s autonomy. What other organ, system, or process in the human body is as heavily regulated or heavily debated as that of a woman’s reproductive system? As long as I am defined by how, when, or if I use my uterus, my cultural marker as a second-class citizen will remain — writ large on the American psyche.

If Hester Prynne had to bear her stigma with the Scarlet A, surely we women are all branded with a bold W, a reminder that we are not only women but can at any time be shamed as whores for simply speaking our minds.

There is an irony here about all this public discourse about abortion — and by extension the entire female reproductive health gamut. Even as we shame legislators for using medically accurate terms for female anatomy, the unwritten rule is that women are public property. Even as the Supreme Court has ruled that we have a Constitutionally protected civil right to privacy, there is no private space for women. We are branded sluts when we use contraception. We are branded sinners when we make medical decisions with which some don’t agree. (And I haven’t even mentioned those who don’t fit into traditionally defined gender norms, such as those in the LGBTQ community).  Every inch of our lives is measured in the public sphere by a ruler that marks not time but reproductive cycles.

After 40 years, the debate rages on. And don’t be fooled. This debate is not about fetuses. This debate is about whether or not women are people. Perhaps what we need now is our own Dred Scott case, in which women are at long last recognized as deserving our full humanity and full autonomy over every aspect of our lives. And to be able to live, work, and govern our lives privately.

Images via Guttmacher Institute.

Anti-choice advocates have a friend in feticide laws.

Akin to personhood laws, as far as I can tell, there is no upside to feticide laws. The supposed intent of such laws is to add a charge of murder to anyone who kills a fetus through violence. However, these laws are often really about criminalizing the behavior of pregnant women and penalizing them for mistakes or even miscarriages.

Take the case of Bei Bei Shuai, the Indianapolis woman whose infant daughter died in her arms at a hospital shortly after birth. Months later, Shuai was arrested and charged with murder and attempted feticide because, while pregnant, Shuai had eaten rat poison in an attempted suicide. The case — which I’m sure will eventually wind up in the Supreme Court for all its implications on the abortion debate — once again casts a pregnant woman as merely an incubator, making her life and choices matter only in as much as they might have an effect on a fetus. Instead of concern or action to address the mental health and emotional needs of pregnant women — as many as 23 percent of pregnant women experience depression — this case serves to shame Shuai for potentially harming a fetus. (There is no evidence that the rat poison led to the death of her child after birth.)

We tell women that their own health and welfare are irrelevant (see: abortion bans even to save a woman’s life). Where are the murder charges for doctors who let a pregnant woman bleed to death rather than perform a life-saving abortion? No. No. No. That wouldn’t happen because that would require outrage that a woman — who is already full formed and alive by all objective and scientific standards — to be protected under the law and held in higher esteem than a fraction of a life, a fetus. For all our worship of Motherhood, women must find joy in pregnancy and parenting no matter how painful or difficult it may be emotionally, financially, or physically. (Shuai attempted suicide after the father of her baby dumped her when she was 30 weeks into the pregnancy.)

Of course, in our society failure is not an option. While I can understand the desire to mourn the loss of a new life — infant mortality is always sad — we must not do so on the backs of women, as if they are our gestational slaves. (Indeed, I see no similar public mourning of the fact that America has the highest maternal mortality rate of any industrialized nation.)

There is no question that feticide is just another brick in the wall that defines how women are second-class citizens to men. Perhaps the patriarchal hierarchy isn’t as simple as the belief that men subjugate women. Perhaps the hierarchy actually goes more like this: men first, then fetuses, then white women, then white children, then “other” women, then gay women… If the stalled reauthorization of VAWA — left to die in Congress because people actually wanted to protect ALL women, including Native American women, immigrants, and gays — is any indication, this may be more true than not.

I don’t care if this is an unpopular statement, but here it is: ALL fully formed people deserve equal protection under the law. Fetuses are not fully formed human beings. And yet, by the laws that we pass, we elevate them above the women who carry them. When you take away someone’s autonomy by enacting law after law that takes away their choices (trying to “think” for them because they are not capable of rational thought on their own) and dehumanize them to such an extent that they are worth less than a cluster of stem cells, that is the very essence of oppression.

This post is originally published on The Sin City Siren.  It is cross-posted with permission.

Photo credit Sydigill via the Creative Commons License.

When my editor sent out a request for us to ponder which woman inspire us, I posted the question on Facebook. I was curious if there would be a consensus (there wasn’t). And I was curious to know what kind of woman it was that invoked such an awesome emotion. After all, to inspire someone is pretty magical.

There were quite a few nominations for Secretary of State Hillary Clinton as well as Vandana Shiva. Others nominated were Frances Fox Piven, Mother Theresa, Kathleen Hanna (love that!), Aung San Suu Kyi, Kathleen Zellner and many more. Indeed, I was impressed by how many women there are to be inspired by! A few people mentioned that they were inspired by people who are not politicians or at all famous, including family members.

As much as I am inspired sometimes by famous women, the truth is when I think about which woman, or women, inspires me most I always go back to my grandmothers.

My grandmothers could not have been more different, even though they were born and raised in the same Midwest state, less than 50 miles from each other. I had what you might call a Country Grandma and a City Grandma, but for all their differences, both of them taught me so much about life and being a smart, fierce, strong woman in this world.

My Country Grandma was born, raised, and died on the same farm. Widowed and left to raise three young girls on her own, she stared bravely into the face of an American culture of the 1960s that did not take kindly to single mothers. Having survived a sexual assault as a girl, she taught all her girls how to shoot guns and drive a car before they were 15. Life was hard on the farm and they were miles away from anywhere. But she put herself through night school and became a nurse in the maternity ward of the very same hospital where I was born. (She gave me my first bath!) As she continued to have a productive cattle farm (her livestock was sold for meat), she had to make men respect her, even as they looked down on her barely 5-foot frame. And when my mother became another unplanned teenage pregnancy statistic of 1976, my grandmother took us in and became my rock. No matter how strange things got with my often inept young parents, my Country Grandmother was there, full of spit and fire and a sureness about life that was at once comforting and, indeed, inspiring. What I learned from her more than anything else is that you have to respect yourself before anyone else will respect you. And that sometimes you have to make a lot of noise and make people really uncomfortable before they will give you a seat at the table. But you won’t get anywhere if you give up.

On the other side of the coin was my City Grandmother. Where my Country Grandmother would dole out folk-wisdom and fill a room with a hearty bellow of a laugh, my City Grandmother was all class. She was a lady in an era of ladies. She wore an apron and her garden always had beautiful flowers smiling up at you. But this is not to say that my City Grandmother was conventional. As a young woman, she got a music scholarship from playing the violin, which meant she left home and went to college in an age when that was quite rare. After college, she worked as a teacher even after she married my Grandfather. (Working after marriage! Such a rebel!) And she continued to juggle her many talents — from teaching, to secretarial work, to work as a seamstress and tailor — throughout my father’s childhood. When I was girl, my City Grandmother, then working as a librarian, taught me how to write a well-crafted, hand-written letter (my first foray into story-telling), and she encouraged me to use my imagination to turn the mundane — like metal tins full of old buttons — into a thrilling afternoon, dancing around her living room with home-made maracas. If my Country Grandmother taught me to walk with a big stick, my City Grandmother was the one who helped me understand how to speak softly while using it. And perhaps because the world around her couldn’t understand her desire to work outside the home and to use her artistic side to create beautiful things — she was once made me a life-size baby doll, making every stitch of the doll, its clothes and hair — my City Grandmother always reminded me that having a big imagination and marching to your own beat is a blessing, not a curse.

Together my two grandmothers showed me the strength and power of being a woman. They taught me the thrill of making mud pies and the thrill of making something beautiful. Each of them encouraged me to be my authentic self and never let the outside world force me to compromise my spirit for the sake of fitting in or being popular. They also were living examples of the fact that there is no such thing as “women’s work.” There is just work. And it needs to get done.

Sadly, both of my grandmothers have now passed away. I think of them all the time, especially now that I am raising my daughter. But the lessons I received will be passed down and I can only hope that I can match my Country Grandmother’s fire and my City Grandmother’s imagination in my daughter’s eyes.

Here’s hoping that whomever you see as inspirational, that you use that to propel you forward in 2013!

Photo credit: Jason A. Samfield via photopin cc