All the single ladies

Via Dammit Janet:

Crazy right wing lady conbot Phyllis Schlafly, self-styled as America's ''leader of the pro-family movement since 1972,'' exhausted from her travails against gays and lesbians, uppity women, healthcare advocates, liberals, anti-gun activists, etc. etc. etc., has now set her sights on that scourge of western society ... the single welfare mother!

Unmarried women, 70 percent of unmarried women, voted for Obama, and this is because when you kick your husband out, you've got to have big brother government to be your provider."

On Thursday, in an interview with Talking Points Memo, Schlafly repeated her link of single women, Obama and welfare, and added.

"Yes, I said that. It's true too. All welfare goes to unmarried moms.''

No, there are no single welfare dads. No welfare disabled. No welfare elderly. No welfare veterans. No welfare gun victims. No welfare anything except Single! Welfare! Mothers! and their bastard babies (but Heaven forbid that they have abortions, eh Phyllis?)

And you thought the Harris regime was over?

Happy Birthday Gloria Steinem!

76 and still going strong.

Apologies for the shaky quality of this video, shot during a speech Gloria Steinem gave last year at the 2009 William K. Rashbaum, MD, Abortion Provider Award Ceremony.

No apologies for her words.

How I wish that this warrior woman might have laid down her arms by now because the struggle for women's equality had been won. But we are going backwards, as we have seen both in the U.S. and Canada this week.

P.S. The comments on the YouTube site -- like many of the comments that never get posted on this blog -- are indicative of how much hatred there is for women. Consider yourself warned.

H/T I am Dr. Tiller.

Bread and Roses

Happy International Women's Day.

So much more work to be done. Get involved.

UPPITY WOMAN DATE: What Judy said.

While no doubt thousands of women and men will still join together to celebrate IWD and in some cities still go into the streets, there is little question that the women’s movement is a shadow of its former self. The strategy of second wave feminism was firmly rooted in the welfare state. Women’s equality depended on social programs like social assistance, women’s services and child care. The neo-liberal turn begun by Brian Mulroney in the 1980s and continued by every government since put not only the women’s movement itself but almost all the policies we had fought for under attack. It was no accident that the National Action Committee on the Status of Women was the first organization to protest Mulroney’s neo-liberal turn towards free trade.    NAC saw that the turn represented by the Free Trade Agreement with the United States would impact disproportionately on women, through loss of jobs and attacks on social programs.   Women political scientists like Janine Brodie and economists like Marjorie Cohen have documented the impact of free trade and  corporate globalization on women’s economic and social equality. 

Please read the whole thing.

Electile dysfuntion

Here's an absolute must-read by my Star sistah Susan Delacourt.

It's all about how the Liberals are wining that ''left-wing fringe group'' called women while PM Stephen Harper is playing to the oil guys and cowboys -- at the expense of the environment and Canadian unity, according to my other Star sistah Chantal Hebert.

Not surprisingly, its headline reads ''PM from Mars, Iggy from Venus?'' and it shows how Harper's Johnny-come-lately position on maternal healthcare, not to mention his utter disdain for the plight of our own First Nations kids, could make all the difference during the next election. I added the boldface.

... when Harper talked to Sports Illustrated this week about the "tough and aggressive and ambitious" traits of the Canadian national psychology – comparing it to the skills needed for hockey – it's entirely possible that those words found their mark with women. And child care may be as much a men's issue these days as it is a concern for women.

What may have an effect, though not strictly down the gender divide, is Ignatieff's rather risky decision to raise the subject of abortion.

He did it on Tuesday in the context of Harper's new foreign-aid priority – the Liberal leader asking whether help for women abroad would include aid to organizations that support access to safe abortions. This is a hot-button issue for largely Conservative, anti-abortion advocates. In fact, support for abortions is exactly what groups such as Campaign Life were asking Harper to avoid in the wake of his announced new focus on foreign aid for women.

Officially, Harper's office dismissed the Ignatieff announcement, accusing him of playing political games with an issue of conscience and morality.

Conservatives, however, are in a bit of a glass house when they throw rocks in that direction, with their own history of attacks on Liberals over sensitive issues such as anti-Semitism, patriotism and support for the troops. In many ways, this was a deliberate Liberal effort to turn those visceral, wedge tactics back on the Conservatives.

And unofficially, Conservatives were counselling each other to avoid falling into the Liberals' trap this week – to not get baited into another polarized debate on abortion, which, history shows, tends to drive more voters away from the Conservatives than it attracts.

The irony is, the Con men are caught between a rock and a hard place here. If they say they don't want to re-open the abortion debate -- as if it ever closed -- they'll anger their socially regressive base. If they do start talking about abortion, and let all those caucus members, overwhelmingly anti-choice, start yapping, then the Cons will drive away the fiscal conservatives who are socially progressive.

Heh.

Meanwhile, NDP leader Jack Layton, who today announced that he is battling prostate cancer, is getting in on the maternal healthcare action. Monday, he's holding a newser to ''challenge his three federal counterparts to seek common ground to make the concerns of women and children in Canada a priority in the next session of Parliament.''

Heh-heh.

Guess we're gonna see a lot more blue sweaters and kittens during the campaign.

Feminists don't have a sense of humor

Found on Feministing:

Nelly McKay tells feminists where to get off. (Didja notice her evil pitbulls?)

Pink and the brain

Okay, first the photo at right. My sister Irene and me, circa some year I prefer not to reveal. I am about seven years old. The dress I am wearing, which came with a matching coat. It was a gift from my childless Aunt Phyllis and Uncle Jimmy who lived in the US who would frequently visit us bearing all sorts of goodies.

I still have the Ponytail ''My Treasures'' box Irene and I each got. For once I got the pink one, because it wasn't clothing, I guess. Ponytail was THE thing back then. I also had a hair curler box, a diary and an autograph book, none of which came in pink. (This is relevant, believe me.)

Anyway, about the dress. It was baby blue. Irene got a pink one, which made me crazy with jealousy. (I imagine she's not wearing it in the photo as she was a tomboy and probably got it dirty.) Irene always got the pink outfits while I got the blue ones. This was because, as was explained to me, I was the fair one and blue was more flattering while pink looked better with Irene's olive skin.

Yeah. Try convincing a seven year old with an answer like that.

My mania for pink continues today, as anybody who walks through much of my house soon learns.

Seems that little girls' are now obsessed with pink  -- as any modern parent can confirm. This, apparently, at least according to a couple of sisters in the UK who have launched PinkStinks.com. Here's The Guardian on their colour war.

For maybe the past decade or so, little girls have inhabited a universe that is, almost entirely,  pink. It is made up not just of pink princesses and fairies and ballerinas and fluffy bunnies, but of books, bikes, lunchboxes, board games, toy cookers, cash registers, even games consoles, all in shades of pink.

This Christmas is no exception. There is a pink globe, specially for girls. Scrabble has been repackaged in pink (the tiles on the front of the box spell FASHION). Monopoly has gone pink, with the dog, thimble and shoe pieces replaced by flip-flops, a handbag and a hairdryer, houses and hotels becoming boutiques and malls, and utilities turned into beauty salons. In at least one major supermarket chain you can now buy slices of bright pink ham, cut into heart shapes and called Fairy Hearts.

Something, plainly, has changed. "There's been," says Abi Moore, a 38-year-old freelance television producer, "a wholesale pinkification of girls. It's everywhere; you can't escape it. And it needs to change. It sells children a lie – that there's only one way to be a 'proper girl' – and it sets them on a journey, at a very, very early age. It's a signpost, telling them that beauty is more valued than brains; it limits horizons, and it restricts ambitions."

Oh come on. For real?

As the Guardian explains, it used to be that pink was  for boys, way back when. Blue was seen as more appropriate for girls, ''because of its associations, in art, with the Virgin Mary.''

It wasn't until after the second world war that the colour code was reversed. In 1948, as the author of an authoritative item in the Chicago Reader notes, "royal watchers reported that Princess Elizabeth was obviously expecting a boy, because a temporary nursery in Buckingham Palace was gaily decked out with blue satin bows".

Some claim the tide turned for innate biological reasons. Research into colour preferences in monkeys have apparently shown that females prefer warm colours such as pink or red, perhaps because the pink face of a baby primate brings out the mother's maternal instincts. A widely reported study at the University of Newcastle in 2007 asked 200 men and women to choose their preferred colour from rectangles on a computer screen. It found that women showed a distinct preference for reddish colours. The researchers speculated that the gender d ifferences may be genetically determined: "Evolution may have driven females to prefer reddish colours – red, ripe fruits, healthy, reddish faces".

But the study failed to take full account of cultural factors: the enormous combined impact, for example, of parental preference, peer pressure and, above all, consumer marketing.

Now I will not for a minute disagree that little girls are targeted by marketers in many more ways than boys. There's no doubt that, today, despite the fad for pink dress shirts some years ago, no guy would be in the pink, at least not clothing-wise. 

But should pink be such a concern to feminists? Does ''pinkification'' determine gender roles and careers, futures and psyches?

Why, though, does pointing this out, as Abi and Emma have done, strike such a raw nerve? "Guilt," says Sue Palmer, education writer and broadcaster and author of Toxic Childhood. "The obvious reaction is denial. When you don't buy into the whole competitive consumerist status quo, you have to be dealt with – and that's done by either bullying you or mocking you into submission: you're either mad, or a lesbian."

Commercial marketing, Palmer insists, is behind pinkification. "When you're two and a half or three,' she says, "you have two key instincts. The first is towards inclusion: the overpowering need to be part of the group. And at the same age, children become aware of gender. So there's this deep emotional need to be part of a group, and the group you want to be part of is your gender group – so that's how you capture them. Quite simply, the medium for catching girls is pink. The marketers have been at it, driving gender stereotypes, for 20 years; it's immensely insidious and it's mostly gone on under parents' radar."

The only reason our ''Proud Member of that Left-Wing Fringe Group called Women'' tees turned out black was because black is more flattering and goes with more colours. Based on the feedback, all of us define ourselves as feminist. Pink didn't screw us up.

After all, the colour has many positive associations. "In the pink'' is to be happy and healthy. ''Rose-coloured glasses'' denotes optimism, although perhaps naively so. The opposite? ''The blues.'' ''Black and blue.'' Okay, I am stretching it a bit. But I loved how Canada was always coloured pink on our classroom wall maps, and that public healthcare was ''a pinko'' concept, somewhat socialist but not quite ''Red.'' This is why I like to call our home and native land The Great Pink North.

The real problem is not pink, or lilac which is another little girl fave. It's the insidious way that corporations make girls become women wracked with with insecurity and self-loathing over body image -- and PinkStinks.com does recognize that.

It took a lot more than pink to convert us from the Our Bodies, Ourselves confident women of the feminist movement of the 1970s to a culture where botox and fake boobs have become a $15 billion a year industry.

As Ed Mayo of Co-operatives UK, former head of the National Consumer Council and co-author of Consumer Kids: How Big Business Is Grooming Our Children for Profit, tells The Guardian: "It's as if the women's movement had never existed.''

Being pretty in pink is the symptom, not the cause.

Memento Mori

Some links, comments and thoughts on the 20th anniversary of the Ecole Polytechnique Massacre...

The guys who don't get it: The Blogging Tories, brought to you by the ever-watchful Canadian Cynic who notes that none of the drooling Con fans care a whit about violence against women. Only one (at the time of my posting) has even noted the massacre, but just to knock down any links to the long-gun registry.

Guys aside from Cynic who get it include POGGE, Matt and Dr. Dawg. 

Dawg raises a number of points worth further exploration.

First, how, in post 9/11 Canada, so much is being made of the Dec. 6 shooter's paternity.

There's a gaggle of xenophobic yokels who call him Gamil Gharbi these days, as though to score some kind of point. The Montreal Massacre as a narrative about Islam? Perhaps for those whose politics are little more than a slobber of prejudice.

Even in the Globe and Mail.

It's almost as if these people, who are harping on the fact that his birth name was Arab/Muslim, are suggesting that his targeting of women students was ''honour killing'' on a massive scale. I won't stoop to providing links to some of the more hateful examples.

Second, and also from Dawg, there continues to be denial that the massacre had anything to do with woman-hatred.

(T)here will be those who argue that the women's movement, too, has long hitched its political wagon to this rotten star. Some certainly made claims of that kind at the time. They insisted that it was "opportunistic" for a movement dedicated to advocating for the rights of women to speak out about the Montreal femicide. I continue to find this very odd. What on earth was the women's movement supposed to do about this horrific condensation of social misogyny? Be silent?

If a man had entered that polytechnic twenty years ago and ordered all the Gentiles to leave, and proceeded to murder fourteen Jews, would anyone seriously criticize the Canadian Jewish Congress for speaking out about anti-Semitism?

Strangely, while some continue to live in denial, others -- as I pointed out in yesterday's post  -- think the killer was a hero. Just read the first comment here, which I found via JJ. (I swiped the rose image from her as well.)

Marc Lepine was a MARTYR in the war against feminism.  

As Dawg reminds us, members of Canada's Airborne once held a mess dinner to honour the killer. As this moving short film by Ling Chiu recalls, in the aftermath, at least two men treated the massacre like a joke, publicly pranking people into thinking another one was underway. Then, there's this. And this. And this.

Why am I posting links to these woman-haters again? Because some readers of this blog think I exaggerate when I say there is real and frightening misogyny in this world. Just read the hatefest compiled by Ruth.

Note that many of the haters just LOVE their guns.

On a different note, you might want to catch up with Pale, Brebis and, especially, Hysperia's thoughts on this how far women have come, or haven't come, in Steven Harper's Canada.

I, for one, want to make it hurt.  I want to keep sorting out the links between these rightwing policies and liberal betrayals and putting them out there.  I want to defeat the HarpyCons but I also want to make it dead clear that, as a woman, I can’t find a blessed party that truly represents me and my sisters and others for whom I care.  I reject a “headlong retreat into fantasy”.  I’ll not sit around waiting for this culture to die.  That might all sound a little melodramatic but there it is and it suits me just fine.

On this day, December 6th, 2009, when I want to reflect and grieve the women’s lives lost in Montreal in 1989 and all the women of this country who died before or since as a result of intimate partner violence and public violence against women – all those whose names we don’t know – I’ve actually had to time defending my right to define, with my sisters, the meaning of the event and the meaning of those lives and deaths.  When women are murdered because they are women, we still have to fight to say so.  We are so far away, still, twenty years later, from doing those things that must be done to begin the end of male violence against women that we still struggle for the definition itself.

I wish no person physical harm.  But I do want to make that hurt by defeating this government and any other government that thinks it can lead a country while ignoring the needs of half its population.

Indeed.

 

UPPITY WOMAN DATE: Sharon Fraser has some interesting memories.

At around the same time, a young friend of mine was walking into Tim Horton’s to buy some doughnuts. There were two men in front of her carrying a newspaper with a screaming headline about the murdered women and one of the men said something along the lines of, “way to go, buddy.”

FED-UP WOMAN DATE: Sister Sage brings it on home.

14 Candles

The F-Word

I've just read the front page piece by my Star colleague Catherine Porter, the one commemorating the Ecole Polytechnique massacre of Dec. 6, 1989.

She interviews Nathalie Provost, who was shot four times and survived, when a gunman burst into that engineering school 20 years ago. (I won't name him because I prefer to remember his victims.) Here's a snip:

"We are not feminists."

A young, incredulous Nathalie Provost said those words to Marc Lépine 20 years ago Sunday. It was a bid to save her and her fellow students' lives – the women Lépine had isolated in a university classroom before opening fire on them with a semi-automatic hunting rifle.

Provost was one of the lucky four who survived. "At the time, I thought to be a feminist meant you had to be militant," says Provost, who today is overworked and feeling skittish as the anniversary approaches. She was the young woman who, from her hospital bed a couple days later, urged Canadian girls to not be frightened by the event and to pursue engineering careers. She was also my introduction to feminism in life, not just theory. And to the concept that the personal is political.

"I realized many years later that in my life and actions, of course I was a feminist. I was a woman studying engineering and I held my head up."

If you go through the comments section, which seems to have been invaded by the gun nuts and some of the angrier men's rights activists, you'll see:

1. That there's a lot of denial that the long-gun registry, which Parliament is set on eliminating, has anything to do with preventing violence against women.

This is unmitigated crap, as I have said over and over again. And Statistics Canada proves it. Check it.

Can it be a coincidence that, since the registry was established, the number of femicides by rifles -- which the preferred method of shooting one's spouse to death -- has declined drastically? Fact is, having a gun in the home will make somebody more likely to use it.

True, the numbers were already on a downward trend but, research shows, much of that can probably be explained by the fact that, thanks to the feminist movement, women were becoming more economically independent and a network of shelters and other services was being built. Women who have the means to get out will more likely get out -- although, sadly, that's when they are at the most vulnerable to being stalked and killed.

Just read men's rights activist regular Keith in the comments in my previous post on this subject where he attempts to justify these murders by writing:

''How many women who are the ultimate victim of violence, were killed by a gun due to social policies which enslave men to pay the female victim money, in the form of so called child support, to make the women independant while making the man destitude?''

Charming. The system sucks so you shoot the mother of your children. Poor victimized men's rights activist.

But I digress.

Eliminating the gun registry is not only a slap in the face to the Dec. 6 victims and their families, it's also another insult to women by the Conservatives. But they don't get it, as The Star's Susan Delacourt reports today:

The potential demise of Canada's long-gun registry cast a shadow Friday over any attempts by federal politicians to mark the 20th anniversary of the massacre of 14 women at Montreal's l'École Polytechnique.

In the Commons, Bloc Québécois MP Thierry St-Cyr (Jeanne-Le Ber) said the survivors of the tragedy have been let down by the "hypocrisy" of a government that helped usher in recent private member's legislation to wind down the gun registry.

Quoting Heidi Rathjen, one of those survivors, St-Cyr said: "It is a slap in the face of the victims of Polytechnique, as well as of all other victims of firearms."

But Conservative MP Sylvie Boucher, parliamentary secretary for the status of women, said the Bloc should be ashamed to be playing political games on the backs of women's deaths. Conservatives are proud of all the law-and-order measures they've introduced to combat violence against women and punish those responsible, noted Boucher.

Oh please. Many men who shoot their wives have no criminal records. You can't preemptively lock them up. But the gun registry allowed the police to take away the rifles of men who did have priors.

Get it?

However, one thing they often do have is personality disorders, such as depression. Well, let me tell you, if a guy does go around acting suicidal and has guns, he won't get to keep those guns if the police hear about it.

Get that?

The gun nuts say that the gun registry was too costly -- although the money has mostly been spent. Throwing out the billions spent is like saying ''Oh, the house cost two billion to build, which is too much, so let's blow it up.''

Operating the gun registry now only accounts for some $8 million a year, chump change for the government, especially considering the cost of domestic violence. How much does it cost to try and incarcerate a killer? How much does it cost to place the children under the care of social services?

What's the worth of a woman?

If the gun registry costs $8 million a year, which is the most oft-cited figure, and 16 women are killed by rifles per year, that's $500,000 per woman. Speaking for myself, I think that a woman's life is worth at least that much.

Do you Keith?

2. That, despite all the evidence, there are still people out there who claim that the Dec. 6 shooter was just a lone madman -- who had a violent father, by the way -- and that the massacre had nothing to do with feminism.

Give me a break.

Not only did he deliberately separate men from women, he also wrote this before he packed up his arsenal and shot up the school. Some excerpts:

Would you note that if I commit suicide today 89-12-06 it is not for economic reasons (for I have waited until I exhausted all my financial means, even refusing jobs) but for political reasons. Because I have decided to send the feminists, who have always ruined my life, to their Maker.

<CLIP>

Being rather backward-looking by nature (except for science), the feminists have always enraged me. They want to keep the advantages of women (e.g. cheaper insurance, extended maternity leave preceded by a preventative leave, etc.) while seizing for themselves those of men.

Gee. Sounds familiar. Too familiar.

Happy St. Marc's Day

December 6 is celebrated around the world in English speaking countries as

International Marc Lepine Day

It seem that almost every week some distraught suicidal young man takes a rifle or pistol and shoots people at a school, a shopping mall, or a city. These are called horrible events by our media, and invariably used as reasons to hate men by the feminists, their blue gun thug Gestapo, and their talking head lackeys. The young men are almost always emotionally distraught, driven to desperation by a feminazi society that has tried to trample him into dust.

Every year, every month, every day, every hour, men are driven to suicide by the evil feminazi hate machine...

And:

Marc Lepine tells women and feminists YOU DON'T HAVE TO BE MONTERS ANYMORE. He tells these thousands of women and feminists who have stolen their partner's house, their car, their money, he tells those who have stolen their ex-husband's children, their jobs and drove them to suicide: STOP TO BE MONSTERS, stop to secretly dream of killing men and planning gendercide, and we will perhaps begin again to love you some day. This is a powerful message, A MESSAGE OF LOVE, worthy of a new Christ.

I guess the Dec. 6 shooter was not such a loner, hunh?

Yes, dear reader, there are men out there who consider the killer to be a hero.

I wonder if those guys have guns.

One more thing: Here's some mealy-mouthed memorializing on the part of Helena Guergis, the Minister of State for the Status of Women, in today's National Post. It's almost all about what those foreigners do. Nothing about what good old boy Canadians with their guns do.

Just saying.

UPPITY WOMAN DATE: Judy Rebick adds this:

I am writing this from Montreal where I am attending a colloquium to examine the massacre twenty years later. Journalist Francine Pelletier,  who was one of the women on the hit list found in his suicide note,  told the hundreds of women attending that she now believes this was a political act, an anti-feminist act, different than the every day incidents of violence against women.  “If he had wanted to target women, he would have gone to a nursing school,’ she said. “He was targeting women who had the audacity to want to do a man’s job.” Dominique Payette of Laval University agreed calling it a classical act of terrorism designed to strike fear in the hearts of women not so different than the Taliban throwing acid in the faces of little girls who want to go school.

 

I think it was both an act of terrorism and an extreme form of the violence women face every day.  As one participant said in the discussion, male violence in intimate relationships increases when the woman tries to become more independent.  It is used to keep women in their place through fear.

 Please read the whole thing.

FED UP WOMAN DATE: Sooey makes the point over in Cynic's comments that the killer's suicide note says almost nothing ''men's rights'' activists and even well-known pundits make on a routine basis.

An extract from his suicide note:

"Even if the Mad Killer epithet will be attributed to me by the media, I consider myself a rational erudite that only the arrival of the Grim Reaper has forced to take extreme acts. For why persevere to exist if it is only to please the government. Being rather backward-looking by nature (except for science), the feminists have always enraged me. They want to keep the advantages of women (e.g. cheaper insurance, extended maternity leave preceded by a preventative leave, etc.) while seizing for themselves those of men."

Sounds like any number of Feminist-hating pundits these days to me.

Er, except for that Grim Reaper bit, of course. That's pretty out there.

Maria, I just met a girl named Maria

Okay, here's the first thing.

Maria Sharapova is a very talented tennis player. Right now, she's ranked No. 14 in the world. That's fantastic.

Let's not kid ourselves. At No. 14, the main reason she gets so much attention is not so much for her backhand but for her backside.

The way I see it, the Williams sisters, far better players, have even better back. But Sharapova is white, blonde, and conventionally pretty in that sort-of East Europe-meets-USA runway model way.

Can you imagine Venus or Serena getting an ad like this? (Although, admittedly, Serena did just pose for this.)

The other thing is, no way would a male sports star would be celebrated in a commercial for his looks. It would be for his prowess, speed, agility, power, ferocity and/or, yes, maybe his size if it's relevant -- say like in basketball. 

Sure Sharapova is unsmiling in this, yes she ignores the people singing about her, and yeah, she caps it off with a slamming swing, but ultimately it still is about her looks which she exploits for mucho dinero.

Sure it's a great ad. But what is it selling?

(H/T to my friend Joanne Thomas Yaccato)