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

Cross-posted here with permission from Bitch Flicks. 

Superhero films often exhibit assertive, outspoken female characters. Yet they often simultaneously objectify women’s bodies, reduce them to ancillary love interests or perpetuate gender stereotypes. So when I heard that Pepper Potts would have a more active role in Iron Man 3, I was excited yet remained cautiously skeptical.

Gwyneth Paltrow eagerly talked about putting on the Iron Man suit and getting tired of the “damsel in distress”:

“I was really hoping that Pepper would be more engaged in this movie…So I was really happy, not only that she was wearing the suit, but that you see her really on equal ground with Tony in their interpersonal dynamic, and as a CEO, and then she’s got all this action… I think in order to move things forward and keep it fresh, you can only be the damsel in distress for so long, and then it’s old.”

Producer and Marvel Studios President Kevin Feige also said they wanted to “play with the convention of the damsel in distress…there is fun to be had with “Is Pepper in danger or is Pepper the savior?” over the course of this movie.” Okay, okay, this all sounds awesome to me.

Now I’m all for subverting gender norms. But is Pepper really empowered? Or does she really remain a rearticulation of the Damsel in Distress trope?

When Pepper puts on the Iron Man suit, it’s not of her own volition. It’s not because she cleverly thought of it. Tony, who can now recall his arsenal of Iron Man suits on command, remotely puts it on Pepper to save her during an attack. Once she’s in the suit of armor, Pepper does make the most of it as she gets scientist Maya (who of course has to have had a sexual past with Tony) to safety and protects Tony from a falling ceiling as well.

However, when Gwyneth Paltrow discussed putting on the suit, I envisioned an assertive move by Pepper — that she boldly decides to put on the armor so she can go out and save Tony. Not something she passively has placed on her body by a man. What could have been an interesting exploration of Pepper and gender becomes a wasted opportunity.

Just because Pepper donned the Iron Man suit for like two minutes, doesn’t mean she isn’t a “damsel in distress.” She still is for a majority of the film. Archvillian Aldrich Killian kidnaps Pepper and ties her up, using her as bait to lure Tony and blackmail him. Yep, that sounds like a passive damsel to me.

In Iron Man, Pepper is Tony’s personal assistant and according to him, his only true friend. In Iron Man 2, she becomes the CEO of Stark Industries. By The Avengers, they co-exist as a team, partners both in romance and work as Pepper helps Tony develop Stark Tower and the Arc Reactor. In each film, Pepper grows and progresses to have a more important role. So how did Pepper — Tony’s friend, partner and brilliant CEO of Stark Industries — get reduced to an objectified and victimized “damsel in distress” yet again?

“So the damsel trope typically makes men the “subject” of the narratives while relegating women to the “object.” This is a form of objectification because as objects, damsel’ed women are being acted upon, most often becoming or reduced to a prize to be won, a treasure to be found or a goal to be achieved…The damsel in distress is not just a synonym for “weak,” instead it works by ripping away the power from female characters, even helpful or seemingly capable ones. No matter what we are told about their magical abilities, skills or strengths they are still ultimately captured or otherwise incapacitated and then must wait for rescue. Distilled down to its essence, the plot device works by trading the disempowerment of female characters FOR the empowerment of male characters.”

Surprisingly, as it revolves around Tony, Iron Man 3 passes the Bechdel Test. Huzzah! A brief conversation transpires between Pepper and Maya, the botanist who invented the Extremis virus. Maya laments being naïve about science, just wanting to help people and how her ideals became distorted. Pepper reassures her, telling her that Stark Industries once carried out military contracts so she shouldn’t be so hard on herself. What a nice moment. But don’t get too cozy. This moment of sisterly bonding shatters when Maya betrays Pepper. Sidebar, it’s interesting that Maya has a change of heart not after talking to Pepper but after talking to Tony later in the film.

There’s a telling exchange near the end of the film when Killian tells Tony he injected Pepper with the Extremis virus because he wanted to make Pepper perfect. Tony, ever the good boyfriend, retorts, “That’s where you’re wrong. She already was perfect.” This could have been a nice albeit clichéd message about accepting and appreciating people how they are, rather than trying to change them. But 5 minutes later, when Pepper asks if she’s going to be alright because she’s got the unstable virus in her, Tony says he’s going to “fix” her because that’s what he does, he “fixes things.” Ahhh the mechanic imagery strewn throughout the film comes full circle.

It’s a strange juxtaposition between “she’s perfect the way she is” and “I’ll fix you,” especially in proximity to one another. This dialogue could have easily been altered to show Pepper’s agency — that either she wanted to keep the virus and harness the superpower or have it removed. We could have seen things from her perspective. But instead, it’s all to convey how Tony is decisive and protective of his woman and how he’s grown emotionally.

Taking place after The Avengers, we see a changed Tony Stark. Due to the stress of combating aliens and traveling through worm holes, Tony suffers anxiety, insomnia and PTSD. I was pleasantly surprised at the film’s respectful depiction of mental illness. Although its treatment of people with disabilities is abhorrent. We see the weight of Tony’s obsession creating Iron Man suits straining their relationship. Pepper is frustrated that his suits come before her. But they never resolve their issues. It’s as if Pepper said, “Oh I almost died, got injected with some fiery shit and now you fixed me? Okay, we’re good now!” Um, no.

So what’s the lesson here? Don’t worry, ladies. The right man will fix you and all your problems.

Pepper isn’t an empowered, self-actualized character in Iron Man 3. Instead she’s used as an object for the two dudes to fight over. She’s used to show that Killian is a villain who never really loved her while she’s used as an incentive for Tony to fight and to realize what truly matters in life. Tony and Killian battle it out with Pepper as a trophy to the victor, aka the better dude.

As film critic Scott Mendelson said: “For Potts, the movie was about other men giving her temporary agency/power and then quickly taking it away again.” Despite her intelligence and success, she possesses no agency of her own. Men bestowed power upon Pepper. Any power she appears to exert stems from men. Now some superheroes (Spiderman, Wolverine) have their powers given to them by others, either by accident or against their will. But once they have their powers, they decide what to do with them. They decide through their intelligence or cunning how best to utilize their powers. But Tony and Killian make all the decisions for Pepper. She doesn’t make any for herself. Pepper doesn’t choose to don the suit. Tony does. Killian decides to inject her with the Extremis virus that grants superhero powers. She doesn’t choose to keep the Extremis virus or have it removed. Tony decides to remove the virus. Even though she has a brief romp with superpowers and briefly kicks ass, Pepper somehow remains less empowered in Iron Man 3 than in the other films. Men decide her fate.

If the film really played with the conventions of a “damsel in distress,” rather than playing out every other superhero trope, Pepper wouldn’t have been kidnapped or if she had, she would have saved herself, rather than needing Tony’s rescue. At the film’s climax, we do see Pepper, injected with the Extremis virus, kick ass and save Tony. Oh and of course she does it in a skimpier, sexy outfit. So even in the shadow of empowerment, Pepper must be anchored as a sex object, intertwining power and sexuality. Again, it isn’t about Pepper’s growth and development. It’s about how Tony sees her.

While she acknowledges it “isn’t perfect on gender issues,” Alyssa Rosenberg posits that Iron Man 3’s “progressive gender play is noteworthy when you consider the kinds of roles actresses in superhero movies usually get stuck with.” But no, no it’s not progressive. Did we watch the same movie? Having women scientists and women CEOs in your film, while a good start, isn’t smashing gender stereotypes if you ultimately reinforce the same old tired gender tropes and clichés. It isn’t actually showcasing powerful women if you continually undercut women’s agency.

While action sequences are enjoyable, fighting is probably not what audiences find empowering. It’s characters’ decisiveness, assertiveness, ingenuity, struggle to survive — all of which can be conveyed through a visual manifestation of action sequences.

Sure, it was nice to see Pepper kicking ass. But let’s be clear here. Just because a female character wields a sword or shoots a gun or uses her fists to punch a villain, doesn’t automatically make her emotionally strong or empowered. Possessing agency to speak her mind, make her own decisions, chart her own course — these are what make a character truly empowered.

The problem with the Damsel in Distress trope is that it strips women of their power and insinuates that women need men to rescue or save them. And yet again it places the focus on men, reinforcing the notion that society revolves around men, not women.

Maybe I’m a greedy feminist but four minutes of ass-kicking does not automatically make an empowered female character shattering gender tropes, nor does it satiate my desire for a depiction of a nuanced, complex, strong female character. Sigh.

Photo credit: Marvel.com

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.

PATH asked filmmakers from around the world to create films on the theme “Female Condoms are (fill in blank)” for a contest.  And filmmakers did!  A dozen of the finalists are now posted on a branded PATH channel on YouTube.

An international nonprofit organization working around the world on transforming global health through innovation, PATH will announce winners at a special event at the Women Deliver 2013 conference in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, on May 28.2013.  The first prizewinner will be awarded $5,000 cash, and two other winners will received $2,000 and $500.

In announcing the contest, PATH wrote:

Female condoms may be one of the most promising health technologies that people don’t know or hear much about. We’re hoping you will help us change this by bringing your creative energy and fresh ideas to the Female Condoms Are_______ Film Contest.

….We’re looking for creative and compelling short films that make a case for female condoms. In 1:00 to 5:00 minutes, your film should tell a story about how female condoms can enhance your life or the lives of others and be used in a sex- positive manner. We want your film to thematically address at least one of the questions below:
• Why does the world need female condoms? Are male condoms enough or do we need something more?
• What do female condoms mean to you and women and men in your community?
• How would different types of female condoms affect your lives or the lives of men and women globally?
• How are female condoms different, special, or sexy in your experience or the experience of others?

Films from around the world are represented in the dozen finalists.

• Female Condoms are … by Nawaa Deane, which uses a sexy musical background to show several women preparing for a date, and ends with lettering on the screen: Loving yourself means using a female condom.

• A selection, Female Condoms are Your Reliable Friends, by Ming Yin, which has collected the most views on YouTube with its Woody Allen-style anthromphized sperm that can’t get through the condom barrier.

• An entry by Lisa Russell, Female Condoms are for Dudes, Too, in which two men discuss international travel and the bliss of the female condom.

• Female condoms are freedom by Denisse Arancibia, made in Bolivia, in which a woman, speaking Spanish, explains her dating philosophy, saying, don’t judge me, as she inserts a pre-date female condom.

• A slice of life film of a woman searching out an unusual source for the female condom in Female Condoms are a Necessity not a Novelty by Florence Adu, who calls it “Our declaration of independence.”

This post is originally published on VITAMIN W.  It is cross-posted with permission.

Former winners Zadie Smith and Barbara Kingsolver are among this year’s finalists in the Women’s Prize, formally known as the Orange Prize.

Last year, the prize lost its original sponsorship. But Cherie Blair, entrepreneur Martha Lane Fox and novelist Joanna Trollope were among the many private donors who stepped in to save the U.K.‘s only prize for women.  The relevance was clear: women writers do matter. This week also saw the first annual Stella Prize, a new literary award given to Australian female authors. That prize has been mostly funded for the next three years by philanthropist Ellen Koshland, a granddaughter of jeans mogul Levi Strauss.

What’s even more surprising, winner Carrie Tiffany’s called her fellow nominees to the stage and announced she would donate $10,000 of the $50,000 prize to the other shortlisted authors–adding to the growing number of women raising the profile of women writers.

Controversy has surrounded the relevance of literary prizes aimed at women, but while there is no shortage of books written by women worldwide, the numbers are low when it comes to the attention these books deserve.

One example: of the 108 Nobel Prizes awarded in Literature, only 12 have been awarded to women.

The Women’s Prize Google Plus Page will feature a conversation April 19 with Women’s Prize co-founder and bestselling author Kate Mosse discussing each of this year’s shortlisted books with the 2013 judges.  The winner will be announced June 5.

If you’re looking for something to read, try going through the Women’s Prize Shortlist:

Bring Up the Bodies, by Hilary Mantel

Flight Behaviour, by Barbara Kingsolver

Where’d You Go, Bernadette, by Maria Semple

Life After Life, by Kate Atkinson

May We Be Forgiven, by A.M. Homes

NW By Zadie Smith

Photo Credit: Women’s Prize for Fiction Website

When I was a young the first I heard about sex and all that jazz was through friends.  Most of what they ‘knew’ isn’t worth speaking of now but as far as I was aware at the time they were fountains of knowledge on the matter and not to be questioned.  I went to a Catholic primary and secondary school, in primary school we were deemed much too young and thus were never told anything about anything even though at ages 11 – 13 some of us were clearly hitting puberty with a bang.  Up until then I had absolutely no sexual experience at all (I was 12) but had I started ‘meeting’ a boy I would have gone by what little and wrong information I knew as I had been told nothing else.

Before I went to secondary school I asked my mother for a book about the birds and the bees, thankfully this cleared up a lot for me!  But still in an all girls secondary school we never received any sort decent sex ed.  The most we got was a biology lesson.  My brother went to an all boys school and had a similar experience but with one difference, they got a talk on STD’s (with very graphic pictures included).  No-one ever attempted to talk to any of us about feelings, love, other emotions, respect, sex, proper sexual health, rape, boundaries or consent.  We got NOTHING.  So at 16, 17 and 18 years old we were finished school and off to take on the big bad world armed with biology, old wives tales and the blind leading the blind when it came to sex.

I remember a friend of mine had an older boyfriend while we were still in school and we were hearing all about her first time.  When I heard the details I was a little shocked (it did not sound like how it was in the movies).  The truth is she wasn’t really ready and she wasn’t really into it but he didn’t stop.  She knew it didn’t feel right but she didn’t know what to do so she lay there.  Knowing now what I didn’t know then was that for her first time she had been raped by her boyfriend.  Maybe if someone, ANYONE with a bit of real knowledge and experience had sat us down and explained to us about boundaries and consent she wouldn’t have ended up staying with a rapist for several months after that because she didn’t know any better.  (I am in no way blaming her for anything that happened, all of the blame lies solely on the person that raped her).

In the digital age we live in now it is harder than ever to grow up.  There is social media, more peer pressure and mixed messages seem to be everywhere.  Take the Steubenville case, some people actually still believe that those boys did nothing wrong.  In the UK children as young as 8 are ‘sexting’ and sending naked pictures of themselves to their friends.  They don’t see anything wrong with it because they haven’t been told any different.  There have been respected retailers selling t-shirts with slogans saying ‘keep calm and rape them’ on them, someone obviously assuming there would be a market for them.  A tumblr account called facebook- whores exists consisting of pictures of “dumb bitches” found on facebook.  Just this week a 17 year old boy in Belfast is being investigated for boasting about an alleged rape on facebook.  His post claimed he had sex with a woman after misleading her about who he was.  The post received over 1000 ‘LIKES’.  Then there are TV shows like Jersey and Geordie Shore where girls are openly talked about and treated like objects and sex acts with numerous random strangers happen more often than the cast members have hot dinners (that is what apparently passes for entertainment these days).  Not to mention the damage hardcore pornography is doing to kids.

No wonder children and teens are growing up completely confused.  In a way you cannot entirely blame them when there are mixed signals everywhere they turn.  Not enough is being done to change their young minds and show them right from wrong and just how important consent, respect and boundaries are.  Now it is more important than ever that no child ever feels any sort of confusion on these matters.  Ending these mixed messages for good could potentially stop another Steubenville from happening in the future.

After seeing Oz the Great and Powerful, I was annoyed. And angry.

Everything in the film revolves around one dude: James Franco as Oscar Diggs aka Oz. Bleh. It’s a patriarchal dream come true.

Women in the film fawn over Oz, swoon over him, make googly eyes at him, get enraged by him and arguably wreck their lives because of him. Glinda (Michelle Williams), Evanora (Rachel Weisz) and Theodora (Mila Kunis) all repeat throughout the film that Oz is there to save them. Even after Glinda who’s wise to his shenanigans, knows he’s not really a wizard, she still perpetuates the façade that he’s a savior, the one person who will bring the land salvation. Oz literally puts a female character, the broken China Girl, back together. Oz catalyzes Theodora’s destructive transformation from naïve and sweet, albeit with a quick temper, to heartless and wicked. Oh and of course we get women pitted against each other. Just for funsies.

The film is boring and vapid. The tissue-thin characters lack depth, wasting the tremendous talents of Rachel Weisz, Michelle Williams and Mila Kunis. Hideous gender stereotypes get tossed around. In her fantastic review, Natalie Wilson points out the film’s many weaknesses, including reinforcing the trope that women are wicked and erasing the feminism of the books.

One of the reasons that made Wicked and The Wizard of Oz so special — they focus on the women for a change. As Bitch Flicks writer Myrna Waldron astutely points out, the Oz series boasts powerful women in leadership roles. The women aren’t princesses (aside from Princess Ozma in the books of course). The women are either “ordinary” or witches, dismantling the “all witches are evil” trope. The women in Oz lead, give advice, scheme, make decisions on their own, go on journeys, forge friendships. They may work cooperatively with men but they don’t sit around and wait for men to save them.

So how did this happen? How did a female-centric, feminist series devolve into male pandering? It comes down to an aspect of the film’s production that to the best of my knowledge I haven’t seen anyone else raise: the need for “a fairy tale with a good strong male protagonist.”

“When [screenwriter] Mitchell [Kapner] starts talking about that man behind the curtain and how he got there, this storyline immediately strikes me as a great idea for a movie for a couple of reasons. One was because I love The Wizard of Oz. But this character is only in the last few minutes of that film and we have no idea who he is.

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,