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

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,

Editor’s Note

The Breast Implant Information Project is a project of the National Research Center for Women & Families. The project provides info that women need about breast implants, based on the latest research and talking to thousands of women with implants. Dr Diana Zuckerman, President of the National Reseach Center for Women & Families told us when we met in person last week:

By launching our new website and joining Facebook  & Twitter  we hope to talk more with women of all ages, and especially young women, about the importance of making careful, informed choices for their bodies and reminding them to stay healthy and beautiful everyday of their lives”

Breast implants as therapy?  Not so much

More than 300,000 teens and women in the U.S. decide to get breast implants every year.  To hear them talk about it, you’d think they were getting therapy instead of surgery.  They almost never say “I want larger breasts” (or even “I want better boobs.”)

What they say is “I don’t like my body and I want to feel better about myself.”  And plastic surgeons will tell their patients “this will really improve your self-esteem.” But their advertisements seemed designed to make us feel insecure about our bodies, not better about ourselves.

Unfortunately, breast implants don’t deliver on that promise of feeling more self-confident. 

On the contrary, the breast implant companies’ own studies prove it.  There are 2 major breast implant companies in the U.S., Allergan and Mentor.  Both tried to prove to the FDA that breast implants helped women’s self-esteem and both failed miserably.  Allergan used 12 different quality of life measures to compare augmentation patients before surgery and 2 years later.  Nine of the 12 (75%) were worse after the women got their breast implants, including self-esteem. 

The results were similar for women getting Mentor breast implants.  The women got worse in their self-reported physical health and mental health, with most showing no difference in their self-concept or how they felt about their body.

Why do they feel worse?  For some women, it is the disappointment that even after plastic surgery they are still not beautiful enough.  And for some women, the complications from breast augmentation — numb nipples, hard or painful breasts, and for some women chronic fatigue or other problems – make them feel physically messed up and guilty because they “made a stupid decision and now I’m paying for it.”

Myth and Reality

Where does the myth of breast augmentation as therapy come from?   Wouldn’t you think that any cosmetic surgery would make women feel better about themselves?

If you ask women (or men) who had plastic surgery how it influenced them, many will say that they feel better about themselves.  But, memory can play tricks on us.  For example, some of us have mostly wonderful memories of our childhood and others have mostly sad memories, but those memories aren’t always accurate.  The best way to find out what the impact of breast augmentation – or any cosmetic surgery – is to interview the people before the surgery and again after they have completely recovered from surgery and gotten used to the “new me.”

Study after study shows that men and women who get plastic surgery usually feel better about the body part that was “fixed” but they don’t feel better about themselves and they don’t feel better about their relationships or their lives.  How we feel about ourselves is a central part of who we are.  It doesn’t change easily. For example, a “good hair day” or a great outfit can help us feel more attractive, at least for a while, and can help us have a good day, but it doesn’t make us feel more worthwhile as people or happier in our lives in general.

Psychologists explain that this is the difference between a “state of mind” (feeling good because I’m having a good hair day) and a personality trait (how I feel about myself because of my high or low self-esteem).

Plastic surgeons like to believe that they make magic by making people feel better about themselves.  And the “beauty industry” helps convince us that if we just buy the right product (whether it is a cosmetic, an outfit, or a surgery) will make all the difference.  For example, “makeovers” – whether in magazines or on TV – work by making the women feel awful about themselves at first and then “curing” their shortcomings.

Teenagers are the most vulnerable

Teenagers are especially likely to feel bad about how they look.  But every year throughout the teen years, boys and girls tend to feel better about how they look.  By the time they are 18, they feel much better than they did at 13 or 14, for instance.  If they get plastic surgery as teens, they think that’s the reason they feel better, but the truth is that even teens who don’t get plastic surgery and don’t necessarily look better than they used to, still feel more comfortable with how they look as they get a few years  older.

One more thing to keep in mind: women who get plastic surgery once tend to want more plastic surgeries.  In other words, after fixing one perceived flaw, they find other flaws that bother them and that they want to fix.  That’s another sign that breast augmentation and plastic surgery are not the way to improve self-esteem.

Therapy vs. Plastic Surgery

Why are so many women so unhappy with how they look, and especially with their bodies?  The standards seem to be getting more unattainable.  Let’s face it: thin bodies with very large breasts don’t happen in nature very often.

I’ve talked to actresses about this and I call it the trickle down insecurity effect.  Beautiful women are more likely to become actresses or models than plain Janes, but as they struggle to make it in Hollywood or the beauty industry, they are told they are not quite beautiful enough.  They try extreme diets, personal trainers, professional make-up artists, the best hairdressers, and the most gorgeous outfits.  When even that isn’t enough, they get plastic surgery.  Then regular girls and women see them and feel inadequate as they think “Why can’t I look like that?”

Of course, even movie stars don’t always look as good as they do in magazines or movies.  In real life, there is no photoshoping, airbrushing, or flattering lighting to fix the imperfections.

But the bottom line is: if you want very large breasts, breast implants can help.  If you want to feel better about yourself, breast augmentation isn’t the answer.  Therapy might be.  And, it can also help to stop comparing yourself to women whose images aren’t real, but have instead been manufactured into unattainable ideals of beauty.

Both the Western and worldwide media does not pay attention to women until they take off their clothes. This isn’t news to anyone. Sites decrying the lack of young people’s morality also have gossip pages detailing lasciviously the nip slips and crotch shots of our favorite rehab bound women. With the preoccupation of women’s bodies is many a celebrity blogger’s paycheck made. It is in this light, this raunch culture, that I look at the activism of FEMEN with considerable cynicism.

FEMEN exploded onto the activist movement in 2008, its members quickly became internationally recognizable for going topless, and now naked, to protest sex tourists, sexism and other social ills in the Ukraine. The movement has since spread internationally. They have recently been in the news for the activist actions of a young women from Tunsia, Amina Tyler as well as April 4, 2013 International Topless Jihad Day. While I pray for the safety of Amina and the end of oppression the world over I also see that FEMEN is using her as the poster-child of a movement that runs on shock-value, and often speaks over the voices of the women they seek to ‘liberate’. Most recently FEMEN attacked sex workers taking to the stage in Paris to shove a nude woman who had been giving a lapdance on stage onto the ground repeatedly. While yelling, “Go rape yourself”, because apparently using nudity is only appropriate when FEMEN decides it is. They stated:  Mainstream sex industry is allowing millions of user to download each day billions of disgusting images staging women in the most humiliating way as possible to satisfy the beasty lust of patriarchy. It’s a bizarre ideological mash-up when the irony of harming a woman to fulfill their goals seems to escape them.

FEMEN is all over the place ideologically speaking recently, they have even sought registration as a non-governmental organization. They even have the good fortune of  a wealthy male benefactor Jed Sunden, the owner of KP media.

It troubles me that naked women with banners are being presented in the media as the new wave of feminism. It troubles me that Inna Shevchenko seems to think she invented nude activism. It troubles me that journalists declare FEMENS actions a gloriously crude protest with an article that makes clear the authors titillation. Male gaze, anyone?

Taking off your clothes to protest is not a new thing. Nor is it soley the tactic of the white, tight bodied frustrated advocate. In Nigeria, Kenya, and Libya nude protest has taken place over a century. What a testament to Eurocentric thinking it is to assume that FEMEN or any other Western organization, looking at you PETA, has invented this style of activism.

FEMEN is opportunistic with their use of the young and attractive female body in order to draw attention. Perhaps more insidious is that Ms. Shevchenko’s ‘beauty as a weapon’ philosophy enhances that shallow binary between “feminists” as the ugly old movement and “Femen” as the young virile fierce beauties. Intersectional feminist theory reminds us to ask ourselves what women are represented and in FEMEN the answer seems to be the young and the luscious. Oh but there are less than perfect members of FEMEN who are active, people tell me. And undoubtedly there are, but these are not the women in the majority of the clips shown by the media or, tellingly, by FEMEN themselves.

Further, the west is decidedly Islamophobic at worst and ignorant at best about Muslims. The media at large misrepresents Islam, often portraying the Middle East as the Islamic capital while Indonesia actually boasts a larger Islamic population. FEMEN doesn’t seem to be doing any better. When Muslim women rally against FEMEN they are called brainwashed and ‘stupid slaves’ by the FEMEN supporters on Facebook. Miriam Cooke, professor of modern Arabic literature and culture of Duke University reminds of of the inherent colonialism in the concern for the oppression of women under the thumb of Islam she says, “so extreme is the concern with Muslim women today that veiled, and even unveiled, women are no longer thought of as individuals: collectively they have become the Muslimwoman.”

What Femen, and feminism, needs to remember is that all women have choices. All of us, as women, have power and our choices to respond how we want to. It’s not as though women who aren’t feminists are brainless they are people with their own experiences and power. They get to decide what they are doing with their lives.

Most of the pushback for Amina is coming from the west while Inna Shevchenko lives in France, where nude protests may be shocking—the penalty for doing so is not lashes. The repeated criticism by women actually practicing Islam and living in the countries that FEMEN seeks to ‘liberate’ is that white women are not bringing feminism to Muslim countries it has existed there before. There’s a lack of cultural sensitivity to charge into a country and assume that you know better, that you are able to save them.

In a civilized society, everyone should have the right to peaceful protest. No FEMEN member should be harmed for the frustration shown through nudity…is liberation making Muslim women available for scrutiny under the male gaze? The argument for nudity is that shock is what causes people to pay attention. But is it shock? Nudity is EVERYWHERE in the western society. There is a deeply Eurocentric mindset to much political discussion among white radicals in discussions of feminism and the struggle for women’s rights. Now the spotlight is being shone on Ms. Shevchenko and her considerable bodily charms—and I’ve never felt further away from progress.

Photo Credit anw-fr  via Creative Commons

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

Some things you just have to laugh at, because, really…

I realize that I should not be surprised by this, but even the Fox News anchor haltingly continued her broadcast as the pictures appeared on the screen. As she said words like “Women’s History Month,” “women’s accomplishments in Connecticut,” “Young Women’s Leadership Program,” a constant stream of women’s breast shots accompanied her narration.

Can’t make this up.

Credit for the cover photo Stephan Baudy via Creative Common

In John T. Bristow’s What Paul Really Said About Women, the Seattle Pastor sheds light on much of what the Judeo-Christian religions have interpreted to be the will of God when it comes to women’s roles.  One of the most enlightening sections addresses the idea that women should cover their heads while in public, particularly while in prayer.  Why is this? Bristow writes:

Jewish women were required to wear their hair bound up whenever they left their homes. Unbound, flowing hair was regarded as sensual and almost a form of nudity. If a woman let her hair down in public she was seen as tempting men to sin.

Women who wore their hair uncovered were thought to be either prostitues or Pagan worshippers.  While in prayer, Christian women of certain faiths are supposed to cover their heads not just because it would be temping to the men, but also to the angels who look down upon them.

And so this idea that women’s sexuality is a temptation that no man can withstand against goes back far in our culture.  It is, I believe, one reason why we constantly judge what women wear when they are being raped.  Or what a woman did to entrap a highly respected man in her web of sexual misconduct.

It is why, when Wired Magazine put together a list of the 15 Most Dangerous People in the World, they decided to include Paula Broadwell.

Because let’s be honest, this temptress – who couldn’t know her place and at least be gracious enough to have kept her desire to ruin a man’s career to herself – is a threat to one and all of us.

Now, don’t get me wrong. While I’m the last person in the world to claim that what someone does in the privacy of their own bedroom should be subject to the judgment of the public, there is a caveat there – and that is to those lives who are given up to the public.  General Patraeus was a public servant, and of the highest-rank.  It wasn’t just his commitment to serve the public, which I believe demands a level of moral leadership, but also his specific case that made this affair so troublesome and so dangerous, exposing the CIA to blackmail, among other potential landmines.

But in looking at Paula Broadwell – the biographer behind a bestselling book about the General, and a self-described National Security Analyst – one has to wonder if a certain point hasn’t escaped the writers over at Wired Magazine.  Paula Broadwell is not a public servant. Nor is she a four star General.  Nor is she a member of the President’s cabinet. Nor is she entrusted with the safety and security of the nation. She’s a woman who pursued an affair with a married man.

Surely, I have as little love for a woman who commits adultery as anyone else, but is she really the dangerous one? Wired Magazine admits that “she didn’t mean to wreck any careers.” But her actions – daring to become involved with one of the most respected military men of his generation – put the entire country at risk.

And yet, here’s what I’m missing: Where was General Petraeus in all this? When we look at cases of sexual misconduct – from adultery to assault – we are always looking for where to place the blame.  Whose fault was it? Who can we tar and feather in a public forum to show our moral outrage and indignation?

And it seems to me that the person to blame is always the woman, and the person to sympathize with is always the man.  Our society is rampant with this idea that men are all sexually aggressive little boys who can’t control themselves in the presence of a woman, and anything a man does with said woman is her fault. Women shouldn’t wear short skirts because it is tempting to men.  Women shouldn’t leave the house with their faces uncovered because it is tempting to men.  Women shouldn’t flirt with men because they won’t be able to help themselves.

Personally, I wonder that even men aren’t insulted by this.  Paula Broadwell did no one any favors here, but to put her on a list of the 15 Most Dangerous People in the World implies that her sexual wiliness is far too much to expect any normal man to handle.  It was she who lured General Petraeus into her den and entrapped him in her secret web of treachery and deceit.

After all, what is General Petraeus, but a man? A highly decorated 4-star General who then served as Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (let’s leave that irony for another time) and a member of President Obama’s cabinet.  And we expect a simple, plain-spoken man such as this to avoid the overpowering sexuality of a woman? Nonsense.

And so we’ve acknowledged that Paula Broadwell – the only woman on this list of the 15 Most Dangerous People in the World – is a serious threat.  Let’s take a quick look at just two others who made the list:

Joaquim “El Chapo” Guzman – a notorious billionaire Mexican drug lord who runs the Sinaloa Cartel and is responsible for much of the bloodshed, murders, and violence related to the narco-trafficking trade.

Bashar al-Assad – Current President of Syria, originally hoped to bring change and reform to his country, but instead who has continued human rights abuses and brutal government crackdowns in a civil war that has claimed  between 40,000 and 55,000 thousand lives.

Let’s be honest, when it comes to luring a man into behavior that is not only sexually inappropriate but also a threat to national security, funding the drug war and brutally cracking down on civilians don’t really seem all that bad, right?

General Petraeus has resigned from his position as Director of the CIA and publicly apologized to his family and the public at large.  Ostensibly, he used “poor judgement.”

But I have to wonder when the public will start to be as outraged at him as we are at Paula Broadwell.  When we will start to hold him responsible for his actions, instead of blaming them on a woman who surely could not have had more to do with the affair than he did?

If Wired Magazine is going to put together a list of the 15 Most Dangerous People in the World, and is determined to mention the Broadwell-Petraeus affair as wrecking havoc on the globe, perhaps the author and editors should have considered General Petraeus, the man who betrayed his country and exposed us to such risk, instead of a woman who had pledged neither her life nor her career to the American people.

Photo Credits: NRC Online, ISAF via Getty Images.

IKEA is scrambling to explain the fact that they photo-shopped women and girls out of the IKEA catalog distributed in Saudi Arabia. Last year, in December, Jewish women in the United States and Great Britain joined together to confront a similar situation in which they took photographs of themselves holding up a sign that read “Women should be seen and heard” in a campaign to fight an ultra-Orthodox movement to remove females from billboards in Jerusalem.

IKEA dodged and burned and erased women right out of brushing their teeth, putting away their groceries, eating dinner. Not even a scantily clad lass in the bunch. Just women in spaces with men. As Katie J.M. Baker put it in Jezebel, “Are the women clad in lingerie and doing strip-pole dances on Signum shoe organizers? Hardly. Flip through the slideshow above and you’ll see a woman having dinner with her husband at home replaced by a totally empty table (no family at all > ladies, it seems), as well as a woman brushing her teeth in her pajamas Photoshopped out while the rest of her family remains in the bathroom…even an IKEA designer was Photoshopped out, while the other three male designers remained.

IKEA is sorry and the kingdom of Saudi Arabia is not.

Maybe what IKEA needs is a “CAVE TO RELIGIOUS EXTREMISTS AND MISOGYNISTS WOMEN’S CATALOG MONTH?” During that month they can publish catalogs filled with women to demonstrate that women do indeed have an equal role in their marketing communications strategy.

And, what about the “us” part?

Well, yesterday, I mortified one of my 13 year olds when I talked to her history teacher about making sure that the curriculum included both the Vindication of the Rights of Women and the Seneca Falls Declaration of Sentiments.

You know what those are, right? Because all children are taught about Mary Wollstencraft’s 1792 manifesto in defense of women’s education named, aptly, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. I mean, who doesn’t know about this philosopher’s influential contribution to feminist thought and impassioned defense of educating girls?

No, well, then, in that case, you must remember Abigail Adams, a founding mother – now there’s a phrase every school child in America learns, right? She wrote letters to her husband, in which she said things like:

“I long to hear that you have declared an independency. And, by the way, in the new code of laws which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make, I desire you would remember the ladies and be more generous and favorable to them than your ancestors.”

“Do not put such unlimited power into the hands of the husbands.”

“Remember, all men would be tyrants if they could. If particular care and attention is not paid to the ladies, we are determined to foment a rebellion, and will not hold ourselves bound by any laws in which we have no voice or representation.”

I mean, during her lifetime women in New Jersey had the right to vote (granted in that state’s 1776 Constitution) and had that right taken away from them in 1807.

Can you imagine that? I mean, imagine taking the right to vote away from men in New Jersey today.

Oh well, at the very least, you must have been asked as a child to memorized portions of the 1848 Seneca Falls Declaration of Sentiment and Resolutions? I mean, what kind of culture erases from its textbooks a document that revises the Declaration of Independence to make it include the female half of the country (well, white at least)? Compare:

Declaration of Independence:

“When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.”

Declaration of Sentiments?

“When, in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one portion of the family of man to assume among the people of the earth a position different from that which they have hitherto occupied, but one to which the laws of nature and of nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes that impel them to such a course.”

Independence? “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable.”

Sentiments? “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights.”

For a fun and nostalgic review of topics that you, undoubtedly were immersed in when you went to school, check this point by point comparison of the two documents out.

What did the women of 1843 have to say about this problem?

“The history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman, having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world.”

Well, maybe if we’d all been taught what they said we wouldn’t STILL BE SAYING the same thing. Like, for example,

“He has never permitted her to exercise her inalienable right to the elective franchise.” (click here or here or here for an update to this idea)

“He has compelled her to submit to laws, in the formation of which she had no voice.” (Gee…I didn’t realize Congress also held panels on women’s health care in the 19th century.)

“He has withheld from her rights which are given to the most ignorant and degraded men–both natives and foreigners.” Now, some of these women, like some of our founding fathers, were not interested in racial equality. The Seneca Falls Declaration, made in 1848, was preceded by 15 years by the 1833 DECLARATION OF SENTIMENTS OF THE AMERICAN ANTI-SLAVERY CONVENTION. The people who are seeking to disenfranchise people today are treating “native and foreign men and women” equally by pursuing rights suppressing voter ID laws. In most analyses however, you don’t hear that 32 million people, of varying shades of color but unified by their possession of xx chromosomes, will potentially be unable to vote.

“He has monopolized nearly all the profitable employments, and from those she is permitted to follow, she receives but a scanty remuneration.” He closes against her all the avenues to wealth and distinction  which he considers most honorable to himself.  He allows her in Church, as well as State, but a subordinate position, claiming Apostolic authority for her exclusion from the ministry, and, with some exceptions, from any public participation in the affairs of the Church.” That last bit is self-explanatory.

“He has created a false public sentiment by giving to the world a different code of morals for men and women, by which moral delinquencies which exclude women from society, are not only tolerated, but deemed of little account in man.” In modern parlance, Jessica Valenti’s He’s A Stud, She’s A Slut (and 49 Other Double Standards Every Woman Should Know)

For the life of me, I cannot figure out why people, so horrified by IKEA’s poor business decision aren’t outraged by the writing of women and girls out of history, science, religious thought, philosophy being taught in our schools every single day. Or, the way in which women’s work is habitually ignored or made inconsequential in media. For example, earlier this week the Mother Jones ran a story about President Obama’s crack digital marketing strategist – but left out all the women. They updated the piece with this explanation after readers responded negatively to their completely leaving women strategists out of the entire piece…”  As many readers pointed out, there was one glaring oversight in what was meant to be a snapshot of the Obama digital world: women.”

I’d say IKEA just got called out when others rarely are.

Image credit Dougtone via the Creative Commons License.

Add my big congratulations to New Jersey teens Sammi Siegel, Elena Tsemeris, and Emma Axelrod for having the chutzpah to question their elders at the Commission on Presidential Debates and educate the American public while they were at it. The young women asked why had it been 20 years since the last women moderated a presidential debate and they started a petition. Earlier in the week, due to their efforts, CNN’s chief political correspondent,  Candy Crowley was named the first woman since Carole Simpson in 1992 to moderate a presidential debate. On October 16, at Hofstra University in New York, Crowley will facilitate the town hall format discussion between President Obama and presumptive Republican nominee Mitt Romney.

Additionally, ABC’s Martha Raddatz was chosen to moderate the vice presidential debate between Joe Biden and Paul Ryan on October 11. PBS’s Gwen Ifill moderated the VP debates in 2004 and 2008.

Crowley, who hosts CNN’s State of the Union, has over two decades experience covering electoral politics, will no doubt do a fine job moderating and facilitating a conversation between the candidates and the assembled crowd. She’s a seasoned moderator of Senate campaign debates and if she is taking notes from her colleague Soledad O’Brien, she’ll ask incisive follow-up questions if there is any confusion in what Obama or Romney is putting forward to the audience.

And I do hope in her follow-up that Crowley brings the conversation around to specifically ask how a policy position will effect women. We’ve had an unprecedented year of politicians attempting to roll back the gains women have fought for over the past decades, it’s only right that we have a voice to ask the candidates what they plan to do for over half the voting population. And women do vote more often than men! The economy, job creation, and energy policy as well as health care and education need to be considered though the experiences and needs of women.

It is disappointing that Crowley will be in charge of the only debate where the moderator is unable to directly ask questions to the candidates. The town hall format allows undecided voters to formulate the questions asked to Obama and Romney and the Gallup Organization chooses the voters. Crowley will be able to ask follow- up questions. The other debates will be moderated by Jim Lehrer of PBS and CBS’ Bob Schieffer. Both men have moderated debates in the past, with Lehrer performing the task on 11 prior occasions.

In the meantime, let’s start planning for 2016. We cannot allow 20 years between women journalists moderating debates. A reason why it’s been over a generation since a woman has moderated may be because there are only  3 women out of 17 on the Board of Directors for the Commission on Presidential Debates. A change in the composition of its board is in order. With the inclusion of more women in the commission’s leadership, perhaps there will be a broader pool of women journalists to choose from?  And in that spirit, here’s my short list of women moderators for 2016.

In a fair and just world, ABC and CNN’s Christiane Amanpour should be moderating one of the debates slotted to Lehrer or Schiffer this year. I’d love to hear her ask President Obama and Mr. Romney their thoughts on our relationship with Russia and Syria and what, if anything, they intend to do about the increasing humanitarian crisis in Syria. Follow up question about Russia’s involvement in Syria.

I was really hoping that Gwen Ifill would be called on this year. She’s shown her expertise and finesse time and again. Washington Week is amazing because of her.

MSNBC’s newcomer Melissa Harris-Perry would also be stellar. If she can keep a classroom full of undergraduates in line, moderating presidential candidates should be a cake-walk. Her nuanced questioning might trick the candidates into giving a thoughtful answer rather than generally canned responses.

Soledad O’Brien keeps making headlines for simply doing her job as journalist by keeping her interviewees honest. I certainly would not miss a debate she was moderating.

Amy Goodman from Democracy Now! I’m confident that any presidential candidate would come out on the other side  the debate a better leader for enduring her tough line of questioning.

And finally, is there anyone out there who doesn’t want to see Rachel Maddow moderate? If Jim Lehrer could moderate all the debates in 1996, I see absolutely no reason why Maddow shouldn’t be allowed to do the same in 2016.

I know there are so many other excellent choices for women moderators. Who else should be on this list?

Photo credit CNN.