Two-faced

There's a debate going in the comments section of my post Dangerous Curves earlier this month over who, if anybody, is responsible for the obsession with thinness in media images of women. Is it men? Women? Gay men? All of the above? Some of the above?

Of course, it's not just thinness which is at issue but also the computer enhancement and airbrushing of photos that make models and celebrities look younger, thinner, flawless. By now you've probably already seen this viral video ''Evolution'' documenting the process from boring to billboard-worthy. And that's without cosmetic surgery!

Turns out that so many models are so thin that magazines which promote fitness actually have to airbrush muscle definition on some of their cover girls!

As this opinion piece by Sheri Graydon, a former president of Media Watch and now a director of Media Action/Action Media, points out, there's an increasingly popular trend among the celeb tabs to show the stars barefaced, without the benefit of stylists, lighting and photo doctoring. The irony is, even though websites doing the same are all over the Internet -- and always trashing women by the way, as if men don't get Photoshopped -- this pretense and the pressure to look the same never goes away.

ILLUSTRATION BY PATRICK CORRIGAN

Here's Graydon on recent moves in the U.K. to put a little more truth in beauty, accompanied by a brilliant take on the Mona Lisa by The Star's Patrick Corrigan:

It should be an old story. Women's groups have been protesting unattainable beauty standards for decades. Here in Canada, Media Watch spent more than 25 years conducting research, delivering educational seminars, meeting with regulators and mobilizing consumers around the need for more responsible media portrayals.

Despite such activism, and greater public awareness, some aspects of the situation have gotten worse, not better. Magazine cover stories sensationalize celebrity crimes against body image every week; reality TV shows regularly invent new ways to exploit women's insecurities; and the digital distortion of Photo-shopped images fuels exponential growth in cosmetic surgery procedures, despite the health risks attached to many.

So the move by British magazine publishers to explore the development of an ethics code on retouching is long overdue. Why shouldn't magazines be held to the same ethical standards that newspapers follow? Consumers have a right to expect authenticity from the photos they disseminate. If we can't trust that the images we're looking at reflect reality, why should we credit the words that appear alongside them with any greater truth?

An even more compelling case can be made for the images that appear in ads. When cosmetic companies claim that their lotions and creams will reduce the appearance of wrinkles and cellulite, it's reasonable to expect that the photographs purporting to illustrate such results have not been altered. How is "truth in advertising" served when models promoting dietary aides and foundation makeup have achieved their slim silhouettes and flawless complexions with the help of an airbrush artist?

Which is a good point. If automobile manufacturers advertised that their cars could float or fly and not deliver, there would be repercussions. But flip through a typical fashion magazine's ad pages and you'll find dozens and dozens of pitches for products that not only don't work, but don't even work for problems that really don't even exist.

All of which keeps women, whose self-esteem is under constant assault, enslaved to cosmetics counters and wasting time, money and energy in a never-ending quest to be pretty. Imagine if all those resources were redirected into their studies, careers, or sports or hobbies.

Speaking for myself as a natural curly-haired girl who grew up in a time when the long straight "London look'' hair was in style, if things were different, I might have grown up to be a rocket scientist or a brain surgeon had I not wasted so much time trying to tame the frizz.

Even now I struggle...even with the invention of flat-irons, blowdryers, and all sorts of straightening lotions and potions.

Oh, and speaking of struggle, I am down exactly 20 pounds as of Saturday. That's with three-four walks daily with Jericho, about 15 minutes each plus three small meals and three small snacks daily. It even includes a few lapses while on vacation in the Caribbean and various social occasions, including a staggering Passover Seder on Saturday.

Now to face the challenge of Greek Easter at home with the family in Montreal.

See you next week.

Swept away

A fear that I share with many of my girlfriends is that we will end up one of those stereotypical cat food-eating poor old women, especially those of us who took time from work to stay home and look after kids and things. Me, I lost some of my peak earning years when I quit a great job to move to another city because it was what my ex-husband needed to do for his career. I played the wife, mother, hostess, shopper, and a whole bunch of other unpaid roles. It cost me who knows how much in salary and RSPs.

I was lucky. I managed to get back into the workforce -- at The Star -- and recover some of the lost ground. But many women never do. This despite their talent, determination, education and readiness to work, and work hard. And, if the marriages break up, they are often up the proverbial creek without a decent pension.

Of course, things are much better than they used to be for women on their own, thanks to the fact that so many do work outside of the home for pay. They are not dependent so much on their husbands. And though they suffer from the stress of having to handle so much, they can take comfort in knowing that, if push comes to shove, they can take care of themselves.

But still ...

I have to say that, every time I see an exhausted-looking woman pushing a shopping cart loaded with garbage bags of stuff, I think, ''There by the grace of ... ''

Which brings me to today's treeware column, about the woman who comes around every two weeks to collect the empty liquor and beer bottles from our recyclables. For the past year or so, they've been worth 10 or 20 cents each at the Beer Store, a move which is aimed at keeping them out of the landfill sites and lessening the load in the blue bins.

But, thanks to the city's new megabins, those who supplement their income by picking up what we throw away are being tossed off.

I don't know her name. I only know that she always comes around mid-morning, after we've hauled our stuff to the street and before the trucks have passed.

She always has what strikes me as a furtive and embarrassed look as she paws through the bins picking out the booze bottles, good for nickels and dimes when she returns them to the Beer Store.

We Riverdalers can't be bothered, I guess.

Middle-aged and neatly groomed, she can't be doing this for fun, scavenging through our peanut butter jars, looking for empty bottles of pinot grigio at 20 cents a pop.

That's why I always made a point of leaving my empties at the top of my recyclables, separate, where she could easily find them.

But now it's different.

With this new system, everything is a jumble. And the bins are deep. Most of their contents will always be more than an arm's length away. If she were to reach down, the damn things could topple.

She doesn't look as if she could handle that. Which could explain why her bundle buggy seemed emptier than usual on Wednesday.

Maybe there really was something left in the bins' wake after all.

Human debris, blown off by the winds of change.

The column struck a chord with many readers who said that picking through the recyclables is, strictly speaking, stealing...from the city. As one ''dumpster diver'' reader wrote to me:

There's an easy way out of this dilemma: if residents place
deposit-return bottles (wine and liquor bottles) *beside* they recycling
bins, they are easier for scavengers to find and avoid the question of
who 'owns' them. It is also easy to make an arrangement with a scavenger
you know to leave bottles in an accessible location elsewhere. At twenty
cents per bottle, the return is not huge, but it is an important income
source for economically marginalized residents.

In fact, according to this in last year's Eye Weekly, written by the aforementioned reader and her husband:

(W)e question Toronto’s blanket prohibition of scavenging because those it “outlaws” are often already in socially and economically precarious positions, including the poor and homeless, elderly, disabled and others excluded from Toronto’s conventional relations of production and consumption. For many Torontonians, scavenging is an important subsistence strategy.

<SNIP>

Historian Susan Strasser observes in Waste and Want: A Social History of Trash that “what is rubbish to some is useful or valuable to others, and the ones who perceive value are nearly always the ones with less money.” At a time when our wants have produced a nearly insurmountable surplus of waste, Sasser’s comment is especially telling because it suggests that acts of salvage can reframe our notions of value. How might they do so? In part, by reminding us that our waste may be the truest mirror of our own character.

Me, I have decided not to retire my old blue box. From now on, it's going to be my booze bottle bin. I won't put it out all the time -- hey, I don't drink that much -- but, when I do, it will be full.

I hope you do something similar.

 

The Worst Place in the World for Women

This is a situation so appalling that my words fail. So I will let others tell you about it. I'll just add the links.

First, my colleague Olivia Ward, in today's Star:

For women, the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo is the heart of darkness: a territory where they are sexually attacked, mutilated and killed in ways so vicious that the United Nations calls it unprecedented.

Many people credit Eve Ensler, author of The Vagina Monologues, for focusing the world's attention on what amounts to the wholesale femicide in Congo. Here she is in Glamour magazine:

How do I tell you of girls as young as nine raped by gangs of soldiers, of women whose insides were blown apart by rifle blasts and whose bodies now leak uncontrollable streams of urine and feces?

<SNIP>

Before I went to the Congo, I’d spent the past 10 years working on V-Day, the global movement to end violence against women and girls. I’d traveled to the rape mines of the world, places like Bosnia, Afghanistan and Haiti, where rape has been used as a tool of war. But nothing I ever experienced felt as ghastly, terrifying and complete as the sexual torture and attempted destruction of the female species here. It is not too strong to call this a femicide, to say that the future of the Congo’s women is in serious jeopardy.

<SNIP>

This country has been tortured for more than 120 years, beginning with King Leopold II of Belgium, who “acquired” the Congo and, between 1885 and 1908, exterminated an estimated 10 million people, about half the population. The violent consequences of genocide and colonialism have had a profound impact on the psyche of the Congolese. Despite a 2003 peace agreement and recent elections, armed groups continue to terrorize the eastern half of the country. Overall the war has left nearly 4 million people dead—more than in any other conflict since World War II—and resulted in the rape of hundreds of thousands of women and girls.

<SNIP>

When we begin talking, Nadine seems utterly disassociated from her surroundings—far away. “I’m 29,” she begins. “I am from the village of Nindja. Normally there was insecurity in our area. We would hide many nights in the bush. The soldiers found us there. They killed our village chief and his children. We were 50 women. I was with my three children and my older brother; they told him to have sex with me. He refused, so they cut his head and he died.”

Nadine’s body is trembling. It is hard to believe these words are coming out of a woman who is still alive and breathing. She tells me how one of the soldiers forced her to drink his urine and eat his feces, how the soldiers killed 10 of her friends and then murdered her children: her four-year-old and two-year-old boys and her one-year-old girl. “They flung my baby’s body on the ground like she was garbage,” Nadine says. “One after another they raped me. From that my vagina and anus were ripped apart.”

Nadine holds onto my hand as if she were drowning in a tsunami of memory. As devastated as she is, it is clear that she needs to be telling this story, needs me to listen to what she is saying. She closes her eyes and says something I cannot believe I’m hearing. “One of the soldiers cut open a pregnant woman,” she says. “It was a mature baby and they killed it. They cooked it and forced us to eat it.”

In an unprecedented (for him) attack on the United Nations, Stephen Lewis, in the current edition of The Nation writes:

Largely as a result of this growing clamor against the war on women in the Congo, and the fact that Eve Ensler herself testified before the Security Council, the United Nations resolution that renewed the mandate for the UN Peacekeeping force in the Congo (MONUC, as it's called) contained some of the strongest language condemning rape and sexual violence ever to appear in a Security Council resolution, and obliged MONUC, in no uncertain terms, to protect the women of the Congo. The resolution was passed at the end of December last year.

In January of this year, scarce one month later, there was an "Act of Engagement"—a so-called peace commitment signed amongst the warring parties. I use "so-called" advisedly because evidence of peace is hard to find. But that's not the point: the point is much more revelatory and much more damning.

The peace commitment is a fairly lengthy document. Unbelievably, from beginning to end, the word "rape" never appears. Unbelievably, from beginning to end, the phrase "sexual violence" never appears. Unbelievably, "women" are mentioned but once, lumped in with children, the elderly and the disabled. It's as if the organizers of the peace conference had never heard of the Security Council resolution.

But it gets worse. The peace document actually grants amnesty—I repeat, amnesty—to those who have participated in the fighting. To be sure, it makes a deliberate legal distinction, stating that war crimes or crimes against humanity will not be excused. But who's kidding whom? This arcane legal dancing on the head of a pin is not likely to weigh heavily on the troops in the field, who have now been given every reason to believe that since the rapes they committed up to now have been officially forgiven and forgotten, they can rape with impunity again.

<SNIP>

The Secretary-General of the United Nations has said that violence against women is one of the gravest issues of our time. Well, if that's the case, surely he can understand that speeches aren't enough. And if he truly believes what he says, then let him stake his tenure on it. I believe that the struggle for gender equality is the most important struggle on the planet: Ban Ki-Moon should say to the 192 countries that make up the United Nations: "Either you give me evidence that we're going to prevail in this struggle or you find yourself another Secretary-General."

"Ah," people will say, "Lewis has finally lost it." I don't think so. We're talking about more than 50 percent of the world's population, amongst whom are the most uprooted, disinherited and impoverished of the earth. If you can't stand up for the women of the world, then you shouldn't be Secretary-General.

More information — if you can bear it, and I hope you can — is here.

According to the International Rescue Committee's latest study of mortality in Congo, death rates there remain unchanged since the end of the regional war that tore through Africa's Great Lakes region from 1998 to 2004. By the end of this and every month, 45,000 more Congolese—half of them children—will die from hunger, preventable disease, and other consequences of violence and displacement.

Congolese women and girls in particular bear the vicious brunt of this crisis. Indeed, eastern Congo right now is perhaps the worst place in the world to be a woman or a girl. The sexual violence and rape exists on a scale seen nowhere else in the world as it is part and parcel of the conflict. It mutilates and humiliates. Its nature is brutal and vicious; it defies both description and imagination. Often successful in its intent to destroy and exterminate, rape as a weapon of war is causing the near total destruction of women, their families, and their communities.

There's a new HBO documentary, The Greatest Silence: Rape in the Congo, debuting tomorrow on TMN. Here's the trailer.

Women suffer all over the world. But this is intolerable.

Silence kills.

So spread the word. Tell your friends. Write your MP and Prime Minister Stephen Harper and demand that Canada fight for women at the U.N.

Don't let this be swept under the political rug.

Systemic Abuse

Michael Veillette killed himself early yesterday morning. Hanged himself in an Ohio jail cell. He's the former Quebec man facing charges that he murdered his wife, and then burned down the house with his four young children in it. That was in January. He'd actually admitted to a reporter that he wasn't exactly innocent.

Prosecutors alleged that Veillette fatally stabbed his wife during an argument in January over a mistress, then set the blaze at their Brackenview Court home to cover up her slaying. A daughter Marguerite, 8; son, Vincent, 4; and 2-year-old twins, Mia and Jacob, died from smoke inhalation, authorities have said.

Veillette told the Enquirer in an exclusive interview that he killed his wife after she attacked him with a knife and frying pan. He claimed that she set the fire with gasoline before the assault and that he tried to save the children but couldn’t.

Well, we'll never know for sure, will we? But I guess I can now close my clipping file on this case. But the pile of clippings and bookmarks on other cases of domestic violence continue to grow. Which is what prompted today's treeware column:

If my partner were beating me, I'd think twice before calling the cops.

Especially after last week.

Two Sundays ago, three children were murdered in Merritt, B.C. Their mother, Darcie Clarke, had apparently fled to the town to get away from her husband Allan Dwayne Schoenborn.

But there was no escape.

The week before her children were killed, the court allowed her violent husband to walk after he threatened a child, as well as the principal, at his daughter's school.

B.C.'s chief judge Hugh Stansfield says that justice of the peace Fraser Hodge was not aware of Schoenborn's having repeatedly violated a peace bond that was supposed to keep him away from Clarke if he had been drinking, or if she or the police wanted him gone.

Meanwhile the RCMP says all the documents on the case were faxed to Hodge.

Whatever. The system failed.

This, just months after Victoria businessman Peter Lee violated his court-imposed conditions after staging a car crash intended to kill his wife. He ended up returning to the family home, killing her, their 6-year old son, as well as her parents, before committing suicide.

The system let them down, too.

Meanwhile, in Toronto, we had the twisted saga of Noellee Mowatt.

She's the heavily pregnant 19-year-old who was incarcerated on a material witness warrant. It was supposed to force her to testify at the trial of her putative sperm supplier, who faces eight charges including assault with a weapon, forcible confinement and failure to comply with probation.

On Friday, Mowatt, who had eluded authorities for months, was a hostile witness who left the courtroom on bail after retracting her videotaped statement that he had repeatedly attacked her.

Whether he actually gave her those cuts and bruises she showed police is yet to be determined by the courts and, in any case, is irrelevant to this column. That the alleged victim was in jail for eight days is.That's some message to women now trapped in violent relationships, who may already be hesitating to leave for fear of more violence.

I would love to stop talking about this issue but, you know, there's always something.

The thing is, it's a very complex issue. It's not as simple as saying men bad, women victims. All kinds of social, cultural, psychological and economic factors come into play. Women stick around for many reasons, including fear. A large percentage of women are killed after they separate.

Yes, I recognize that men are often victims as well, and that there aren't as many resources for them. People like these guys never let me forget that, actually.

But the facts are the facts, and women are victimized far more often than men -- and almost four times as many end up dead, sometimes with their kids.

Let's face it. Women are the ones who stay home with the kids. They have less money. They are in much less of a position to move, find decent housing where their kids can be safe, get childcare so that they can earn a living and obtain legal assistance so they can avoid ''stalking by court'' over custody and support.

Even the police acknowledge that its not strictly an enforcement issue.

It's also about fighting poverty, having a national daycare strategy, building affordable housing.

Maybe if all that were in place, those Schoenborn children would still be alive, instead of dead in a trailer home.

By the way, their father was caught today.

The Click

The other night I was yakking with a Star colleague, a journalistic dynamo who is 32. The conversation went from recent stories about wife abuse to female to our obsession with weight to eating disorders to female media images to why women her age seem to be not so preoccupied with feminism or, more specifically, with fighting to preserve some very hard-won rights for women.

She admitted that, while acknowledging the fact that she'd never be where she is today without the women my age (and older) who kicked down the barriers in newsrooms, she did not believe there was anything left to fight for.

I told her about Bill C-484, the so-called ''Unborn Victims of Crime Act'' but officially is "An Act to amend the Criminal Code (injuring or causing the death of an unborn child while committing an offence)." Its most vehement supporters are all against a woman's right to choose. Why? Because the bill, if enacted, will open the legal door to declaring a fetus a person.

And you know where that leads.

My friend got it.

It reminded me of the early 1970s, when Ms. magazine used to have a section where readers could contribute personal experiences of sexism and/or misogyny. It was about ''the click,'' the point at which they clued into what the feminist movement was about.

Now obviously, not all young women are as complacent as my young friend, as the women who shape Feministing, Jezebel, Antigone, Shameless and elsewhere amply demonstrate.

Understand that I am not asking that women perpetually march on Parliament Hill waving placards and chanting slogans about ending poverty, getting decent daycare and building affordable housing -- all of which are needed most by women and their children. Although if we were, maybe there would be some necessary changes made.

I just wish more people would clue into the misogyny that is out there.

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about the sexism aimed at Hillary Clinton. I received I don't-know-many emails. Lots. They fell into two camps. The first, obviously, agreed with me, and thanked me for the column. But the second accused me of exaggeration, and of the possession of an overactive imagination.

Then yesterday, via Salon, I saw this video, a rather melodramatic compilation of media attacks on Clinton in which you'll see her being accused of sounding like a ''scolding mother'' and a ''nagging wife'' who orders her husband to ''take out the garbage.'' She's compared to ''everybody's first wife'' and even to Lorena Bobbitt, the woman who cut off her abusive husband's penis after he repeatedly attacked her. (Of course, nobody remembers her motive, just what she did.)

Obviously, the video is a shameless plug for Clinton, especially in its sappy latter half.

But that doesn't minimize the very real misogyny.

Note: After I posted it to my Facebook account yesterday, my writer/activist friend Scott Piatkowski commented that the video isn't fair to MSNBC's Keith Olbermann, whom I adore. That's because the clips from his rant were justified, and not at all sexist. He was on about how Clinton had to disavow herself from former vice presidential candidate Geraldine Ferraro's remark that the only reason that Barack Obama was still in the race for the White House was that he is black. After Obama's senior foreign policy advisor Samantha Power stepped down for calling Clinton ''a monster,'' said Olbermann, Clinton had a special obligation to kneecap Ferraro and fast.

That aside, the video is very revealing. And it hit my girlfriends right between their sleepy eyes. It also made some of the male readers who brushed off my recent column on the subject -- and were still emailing me about it -- admit that maybe, just maybe, there was truth to what I wrote.

Roll the tape, and hear the click.

 

And women are accused of talking too much?

Last year at a University of Windsor conference marking the coming 20th anniversary of Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, social justice activist Judy Rebick and I got to talking about why so few women stand up and speak their minds publicly.

Maybe we just want to be liked? Maybe we just want to avoid conflict? Maybe we think we have nothing to say anybody wants to hear? Maybe we've been told to shut up and look pretty too often? Maybe we know ''our place?''

Now obviously, not all women are like this. Otherwise, we wouldn't have prominent opinionators such as The Star's Rosie DiManno, Chantal Hebert and Carol Goar and The Globe and Mail's Christie Blatchford and Margaret Wente, CBC's Heather Mallick and a gaggle of great broads in the U.S. including my heroine, the late Molly Ivins. Plus there are outspoken women politicians -- but percentage-wise, not as many as there are men -- and other activists, such as Maude Barlow. That's without going into so many of the bloggers I link to on the left.

And nobody accused Ann Coulter or Rachel Marsden of being a shrinking violet.

But clearly these are the exceptions. Otherwise, the world would not be run by men.

Today I stumbled on this story, on Salon's Broadsheet.

Lindsay Campbell, the host of a daily Web show called Moblogic, makes her living by conducting man-on-the-street interviews, and she recently had something to get off her chest: Women just aren't talking to her. Her show, which bills itself as a "running conversation about the news," consists mostly of interviews about current events, and, according to her, female interviewees just aren't stepping up to the plate.

Campbell made a video about it, showing all the women who won't speak, or let their men speak for them. Check it out -- and no, sorry, I can't do anything about the very brief car ad.

So, I wonder. Did all those women say no because they were having bad hair days? Did they have no thoughts? Were they just too busy? Were they afraid of being punked? Or as Salon asks, were they just too smart, knowing how video can be used and abused?

Maybe some of everything.

But I know one thing. If we don't speak up, nobody will ever hear us scream.

 

Dangerous Curves

When my editor Lesley Ciarula Taylor sent me this story from Australia's The Age, I got all excited.

Woo-hoo!

More Australian men will choose size 14 over size eight when it comes to the body shape of their ideal woman, igniting debate on what it means to be thin.

Men's magazine FHM conducted an online survey asking whether its readers found a size eight, size 12 or size 14 model most attractive.

The survey drew 60,000 responses. Four-fifths said they were more attracted to the size 12 and 14 models than the size eight model pictured.

Most votes went to the size 12 woman, with 41 per cent of respondents saying she had the body shape of their "ideal girlfriend".

The size 14 body was preferred by 39 per cent, while the size eight came a distant third with 20 per cent.

FHM editor Ben Smithurst said the findings were good news for women.

"A piddling 20 per cent of readers selected our size eight model pictured as their ideal girl physique, while the size 12 and 14 models easily outscored their skinnier rival," he said.

"Which proves one thing, ladies: crack a beer, hoe into a hamburger and we'll love you just as much."

Okay, so it was an online survey, which doesn't make it scientific.

Still, it is encouraging news that real men like real women and not the plastic fantastic creatures too many of us aspire to be.

But before you do your plus-size dance around your computer cubicle, know one thing. Australian (and British) sizes are not the same as those in North America. Their size 12 is our size 10. In other words, if you were buying an imported dress, you'd need to go up a size.

Which means that you can't be ''hoeing'' into that many hamburgers, especially the North American super-sized versions.

But don't be discouraged. There's hope in these numbers -- and my sense is that a similar survey on this continent would get not very different results, only one size smaller.

After all, Marilyn Monroe would probably have been a size 10 today. (And yes, I know that she may have worn a 12 or even a 14, but as we've become bigger, so have dress sizes.)

Which brings me to the great debate over Chloe Marshall, a finalist in the Miss England contest.

Is she FAT? At least one dietitian -- and former pageant judge -- thinks so.

Feted and fawned over for her courage in daring to break the mould, Chloe boasts she wants to be an "ambassador for curves".

Who on earth does she think she's kidding? What she's demonstrating isn't bravery but a shocking lack of self-control.

Instead of flaunting her figure, Chloe ought to own up to the truth. She is fat and she got that way by over-eating.

The 17 year-old beautician and model is 5'10", weighs in at about 175 pounds, and measures 38DD-32-42. Seems healthy to me especially since, as she claims, she works out and is fit.

But her body type is not the leggy pageant queen usual. She's bottom heavy like so many women. You can't see her ribs like you can with so many celebrities and models today.

But at least she isn't part of the media machinery which encourages so many young girls to starve themselves to death and makes others hate themselves.

I suppose what's really horrifying is that (1) there are still stupid pageants like this and (2) women's bodies are still up for public flagellation.

So I think I'll stop writing now ... and move to Australia.

Memory wipe

The U.S. administration's assault on women's rights continues unabated.

Day after day I stumble on story after story from south of the border about yet another attack on women's reproductive rights. Like the bill in Missouri that would classify the morning-after pill as ''abortifacient'' and allow pharmacists to refuse to dispense it. Or the potential violation of some 2,000 women's medical privacy. Or the senate candidate who legally changed his name to ''Pro-Life.'' Or the hijacking of the hit Dr. Seuss movie, Horton Hears a Who, by anti-abortion activists. (And, speaking of Whoville, what is the deal with the sexism injected into the movie?)

Here in the Great Pink North, we have Bill C-484, now before Parliamentary committee.  Officially titled "An Act to amend the Criminal Code (injuring or causing the death of an unborn child while committing an offence)" it is usually called "The Unborn Victims of Crime Act."

Its supporters say it protects pregnant women from violent attacks which harm or kill their fetuses. But it does nothing of the kind.

Meanwhile, women's groups recognize it for what it is...the beginning of the end of a woman's right to choose.

Those who oppose a woman's right to control her body and destiny are all for the bill. Those who believe women have the right to choose are against it.

Which says plenty.

But not nearly as much as something going on in the feminist cybersphere. There's a ''call-out'' going on, a challenge to anti-abortion bloggers to come up with a single legitimate ''established organization working against violence against women that publicly endorses this bill.''  So far, nada.

So all this is the context for today's treeware column, about the wipeout of ''abortion'' as a search term in a major database on reproductive health. (I have added some links.)

If you think that some of the Bush administration's conservative politics – and Orwellian moves – in the U.S. can't affect Canada, then you have some research to do.

Ten days ago at the University of California in San Francisco, librarian Gloria Won was running through POPLINE (POPulation information onLINE), billed as "the world's largest database on reproductive health." Maintained by Baltimore's Johns Hopkins University, and freely available to medical schools, health organizations and the public, it is funded by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).

Won was stymied. Entering the keyword "abortion," she kept getting the message "No records found." Odd, because she had done a similar search in January and found thousands of scholarly and peer-reviewed articles on the subject. When she emailed POPLINE, database manager Debra Dickson replied: "We recently made all abortion terms stop words."

Which means that, just like "the" and "and" and other words databases and browsers such as Google ignore, POPLINE would not recognize "abortion."

Because?

"As a federally funded project, we decided this was best for now," explained Dickson, who suggested that Won search with "fertility control" or "postconception" instead.

George Orwell would have called this a "thoughtcrime."

That's because, on his very first full day as U.S. president in 2001, George W. Bush resurrected the "global gag rule," which makes nongovernmental organizations certify that they "will not perform or actively promote abortion as a method of family planning" if they want USAID funding.

First enacted under Ronald Regan and briefly rescinded by Bill Clinton, it's estimated that this restriction has cost the lives of some 70,000 women who have sought out back-alley abortions.

By late last week, censorship was the talk of the librarian community. And no wonder. This is the kind of thing China does when you search "Tiananmen Square."

Now, if you read the whole thing, and I hope that you do, you will learn that nobody ordered the POPLINE people to make ''abortion'' a stop word. It was an overreaction to a call from USAID, which took exception to two -- out of some 25,000 -- articles in the database.

Because they were advocacy materials, they did not meet the criteria for inclusion in the database. The agency informed POPLINE administrators who removed them from POPLINE.

<SNIP>

POPLINE administrators took the additional step of temporarily restricting "abortion" as a search term while the database was examined for other information that might not have been consistent with USAID guidelines.

USAID did not request this action, although the agency was informed that it had been taken. POPLINE administrators did not inform management of the Bloomberg School of Public Health of their decision.

The word has been restored, and the Johns Hopkins people stepped in quickly to denounce its excision exorcism.

Such is Bush's America where you have to watch what you say – and where women have to watch what they do.

And so, rather than risk losing its funding, an organization dedicated to health research and medical information would send "abortion" down the memory hole.

But there's more than a word at stake here – it's an indicator of how, both in Canada and the U.S., women's reproductive choices, are also threatened with erasure.

Whistle stop

Some 27 years ago, back when I was young and even more reckless, I was assigned a piece for Flare called "Confessions of a Sex Object.'' Then deputy editor Rona Maynard, who would go on to helm Chatelaine through the late 90s and beyond, asked me to write about what it was like to be traffic-stopping gorgeous.

She wanted it in the first person, bless her.

As flattering as that was, I still interviewed other women who I thought were stunningly sexy, including my then-CBC colleague Katie Malloch and a couple of Playboy playmates who were in town for a boat show or something like that.

To me, it was not women who were being exploited by Playboy, I wrote, but the men who were paying a premium price to gawk at their airbrushed images. The two centerfolds were making a very nice living off their looks, thank you very much. I also noted that, if I walked by a construction site and the men didn't hoot and holler, it was a bad looks day.

Well.

Letters poured in from feminist readers who took great exception to my views, and were outraged that Flare, which was then much less of a pure style mag, would stoop to publish such trash. How dare I condone the objectifying of women?

I wonder how that story would play out now. Probably a lot easier. But those were different times, when feminists were still struggling to get equal rights for women in the workplace -- and in the law.

There was a movement. There was movement. Now?

  Anyway, here's the thing. Last week in the U.K., a major construction company banned its workers from whistling at women.

Leading construction firm George Wimpey announced today that it was to ban its workers from wolf whistling over fears the “outdated tradition” could put women off visiting their sites in search of property.

Sales and marketing director Richard Goad said he made the decision following a conversation with a female friend who had been whistled at by builders while visiting another site.

“She said it made her feel uncomfortable and embarrassed,” said Mr Goad. “I know lots of women don’t mind it – my wife is thrilled if she gets a whistle, and she’s not happy about me bringing this measure in – but it does make many women feel uncomfortable.

"If you went into a car showroom, you wouldn’t expect to be whistled at or to have that kind of attention directed at you, - why should you when looking at a new home?”

The edict was issued to workmen in the Bristol area at nine am this morning, and has been received well according to Goad. “They have been angered in the past by wolf whistles at their partners, so they understand why we have introduced this measure,” he said.

This is not another example of political correctness gone mad, however, insists Goad. “It is not a case of being PC”, he said. “We are simply trying to look at the overall picture - we are selling homes, we’re a shop in effect, our building sites are our shop windows – it doesn’t do to make people feel uncomfortable when you’re trying to sell something.”

So, this is purely an economic decision -- and has little or less to do with decorum or respecting women.

This British writer welcomes the ban.

You walk out of work, and stride down the road, not even conscious of your gender, just thinking your own busy thoughts. Then a builder turns round. And there it comes: the long, swooping two-note innuendo, half-cocky, half-ironic, wholly irritating. That put YOU in your place, didn't it? Suddenly you're not a person any more – and you're definitely not an executive. You're a bit of fluff, a walk-on bint in a Sixties sex comedy. You thought you had dressed for work, for comfort, for style. Silly you! You'd dressed for the delectation of the paunchy man with the hard hat and the dirty overalls.

You think about retaliating. Maybe you could jovially tell him to keep his eyes on his drill/shovel/cement mixer? A mistake; he'd only turn it into some kind of double entendre. (Trust me: builders can make brickbats without straw.) You could stamp your foot and swear at him, but that would be (a) evidence of "no sense of humour" and (b) to use Mr Blair's phrase for Israel's response to Palestine, totally disproportionate. So there's nothing for it. You simply have to smile and pass by. You overhear him mumble to his mate: "See? They like it."

No, we don't. We tolerate it, and then we grow older, and navvies' silence starts to feel like an insult. You can't win. The whole damn thing is an annoyance.

The truth is, I miss the wolf whistles of my younger years -- although I admit I still get the once over from older men on the Danforth.

Mind you, they're Greek. They probably look every woman over.

Covering the gray

At first, I thought this story from Australia was a late April Fool's joke.

WOMEN should have to sign a contract before sex to combat false rape allegations, if proposed new laws are passed, independent MP Ann Bressington says.

She told Parliament the planned new laws – which make it an offence to continue a sex act with a person after consent if they changed their mind – would make it easier for men to be accused of rape.

She also claimed "one-night stands" and casual relationships would become a "high-risk activity".

"Perhaps this parliament could devise a contract which men could carry around in their pocket, next to their condoms," she said during a speech to Parliament.

"There could be a waiver should a man meet up with a woman who has had a couple of drinks before they engage in sexual intercourse.

"The contract may contain the name and address of the women, with her driver's licence number, so that the man can see the signatures match, clauses that state that the woman has or has not been drinking or taking drugs – licit or illicit – and that she consents to foreplay."

It turns out that the MP has changed her mind about the contract idea.

Ms Bressington has now said she was not serious in her Parliamentary comment about introducing formal contracts, but she said men may not have an alternative defence.

"Having to have a consensual sex contract is ridiculous but having these laws that don't protect men's rights are also ridiculous," she said.

"I think we need to be more mindful when we're putting through legislation that every stakeholder in the community is protected."

While false rape charges, just like false abuse charges, can and do happen, and often make men suffer, let's not kid ourselves. How many women end up getting sexually assaulted after too many cocktails, a little too much flirtation and maybe a face plant on the nearest sofa?

Plenty. In fact, some young feminists believe clubs exploit girls to increase revenues. Others disagree.

Is being falling down drunk tantamount to a falling in bed yes, even if you never said yes? Even if you're too hammered to fight it?

This form of sexual assault even has a newish name, and a dubious one at that. "Gray rape'' because it's a ''gray'' area, because, according to one controversial writer, men can't be expected to know when yes means no or no means yes -- even if the women can't string a coherent sentence together and can't hold her head up.

Oh, the gray area -- that insidious "if I hadn't gone to that party" place, that "if I had only stopped after one beer" place, that "if I hadn't worn such a revealing top and come on to that hot guy" place where young women go when someone they probably know lays siege to their most private parts and everyone assumes it was at least partly their fault. More than half the time, they're drunk and can't remember details, and most of the time they don't press charges. ...some defense lawyers and even some students have taken to calling such episodes "gray rape" out of a mistaken belief that when both parties have been drinking heavily, responsibility for what happened falls into a gray area.

Excuse me? Unless you have consent, from a person who is in her right mind, it's sexual assault. This is a case Jessica Valenti of Feministing has been making.

Instead of looking to the predictable girls-gone-wild excuse, which only reinforces the sexist notion that sexually active women were “asking for it,” we should be proactively teaching young women and men about sex, power, and affirmative consent.  Let’s make sure that young people understand that there’s no “gray” area when it comes to rape.

Precisely.

While we're on the subject, I thought I'd share some mad-as-hell-making stories on the subject of sexual assault I have recently bookmarked.

Like this one, about the British politician who does not believe that rape=rape and no=no.

"None of us want men to rape women," (John) Redwood ... writes, "but there is a difference between a man using unreasonable force to assault a woman on the street, and a disagreement between two lovers over whether there was consent on one particular occasion when the two were spending an evening or night together."

Oh really? Especially since most rapes are acquaintance rapes -- and not cases of crazies attacking women out alone at night.

Then there's this story, about Australian MP Bob Such.

During his speech Mr Such also questioned how someone could be charged with rape if consent was withdrawn "part way through intercourse".

"I am aware in Western Australia men have been convicted of rape on the basis that they were part way through sexual intercourse and did not stop.

"I am interested in the Attorney's justification for that. I think that the everday person - male or female, and I have spoken to men and women about this - finds it hard to understand how, if intercourse is underway someone can say "stop the world I want you to get off" and how that is really a reasonable action that could result in someone being charged with rape.""

And finally:

So what reality does lie behind the rape hype? I believe that it's the booze-fueled hookup culture of one-night, or sometimes just partial-night, stands. Students in the '60s demanded that college administrators stop setting rules for fraternization. The colleges meekly complied and opened a Pandora's box of boorish, promiscuous behavior that gets cruder each year.

This culture has been written about widely. College women -- as well as men -- reportedly drink heavily before and during parties. For the women, that drinking is often goal-oriented, suggests Karin Agness, a recent University of Virginia graduate and founder of NeW, a club for conservative university women: It frees the drinker from responsibility and "provides an excuse for engaging in behavior that she ordinarily wouldn't." Nights can include a meaningless sexual encounter with a guy whom the girl may not even know.

In all these drunken couplings, there may be some deplorable instances of forced and truly non-consensual sex. But most campus "rape" cases exist in the gray area of seeming cooperation and tacit consent, which is why they are almost never prosecuted criminally.

Read Broadsheet for a thorough evisceration of the writer's ''arguments.''

But really, does ''tacit consent'' mean not protesting because you're comatose?

Maybe those pre-sexual contracts aren't such a bad idea after all.

Not that many women ever report these rapes. But at least this way, nobody can blame the victim.