Women's Rights

The Case For Settling For Mr. Good Enough: Marriage Myths Galore

by Sarah Menkedick

categories: Feminism, Marriage, Media

Published February 09, 2010 @ 04:05PM PT

There's something tragic about Lori Gottlieb. Not the fact that she wrote an Atlantic article and later a book based on the assumption that any single woman who hits thirty is desperate to get married and start a family; not the fact that her abhorrent Atlantic piece exhorted women to settle now and start a family with "Mr. Good Enough"; not the fact that she sees herself as the only voice of reason in a sea of backwards feminist theory that harms women's innate desires for a husband and children; and not the fact that she has been justifiably vilified by feminists the world over. No.

It's the fact that her book, "Marry Him: The Case For Settling For Mr. Good Enough," and her whole resigned, martyred persona represent the ongoing and very much alive misconception that marriage, motherhood, and feminism are always at odds with each other.

Sure, you can see the ancient wisdom in her arguments. Of course it might be counter-intuitive to disregard a loving, passionate partner because he's named "Sheldon." Of course the search for perfection, for the (loathe saying it) "fairy tale" romantic comedy dream we're fed so often by Hollywood might not be healthy in the long term. And in the context of what the media wants to tell us about relationships -- that they are fairy tales, full of bubbly sweet passion and pseudo-disputes resolved with wine and flowers -- her argument sort of makes sense. Relationships are hard. They might not be perfect. Marriage, in particular, is a long and tricky road to navigate. As it happens, Elizabeth Gilbert manages to make this same point without pointing the finger at single women everywhere and calling them liars if they don't fess up to craving a husband and a baby.

But Gottlieb can't simply stop with exploring the intricacies of marriage and the pressure women feel related to it. She has to take on feminism as an institution, setting up the same bored false paradox between the feminist/raging/self-destructively demanding single woman and the resigned/tricked by feminism/"traditional" married mother who has seen the light.

Read More »

Military to Make Plan B Available in All Treatment Facilities

by Brandann Hill-Mann

categories: Contraception, Reproductive Rights, Women In Uniform

Published February 09, 2010 @ 12:03PM PT

A huge victory has been won for women in uniform, and I don't mind saying that a wash of relief and satisfaction washed over me when I read the headlines.

The military is implementing the recommendation of the Pentagon's Pharmacy and Therapeutics Committee, an advisory panel made up of medical professionals from the military services, that Plan B (the brand name for levonorgestrel, a.k.a. the "Morning After" pill) be made available in every military treatment facility.

Until now, the over-the-counter medication has been available in many, but not all, military pharmacies. Since it hadn't been made mandatory in TRICARE formularies, a servicewoman wasn't guaranteed access to emergency contraception. This has been a major issue for equality for women in the military, especially with Upper Brass making slanted policies that impact women soldiers' careers while being dismissive of the need for such medications.

This has been a champion cause of mine, for a long time. Normally I write with a feeling of grinding against an almost immovable wall, or as a role model of mine says, moving an ocean with a teaspoon. Today I write with great pride in my heart that this stride forward has been made for women in uniform.

While this is a moment of celebration, we cannot let up. We must press forward, and remind Defense Secretary Robert Gates, and other top leaders, that the victory needs to be solidified, so we don't lose this ground. Women in uniform need access to emergency contraception to ensure that when life takes unexpected turns, they still hold their options in their own hands. The military needs to take steps to ensure that each and every women has this option secured.

Photo credit: *mb**

New Hampshire Women Want to Be Included in the Constitution

by Alex DiBranco

categories: Politics, Sexism

Published February 09, 2010 @ 09:40AM PT

You let women get a little power, and what happens? They want to rewrite the whole constitution!

Good for them.

In the United States Senate, women fill less than a fifth of the seats. Pitiful. On the other hand, New Hampshire broke new ground in the 2008 election by voting a female majority into the state Senate, making it the first state in the nation to upset the tradition of male dominance. And women want the state constitution to recognize that they are here: proposed legislation would replace constitutional references to men with gender-neutral language, starting at the top, with "All men are born equally free and independent," according to the Boston Globe. Seems like a reasonable request. Lets see what reason the critics come up with!

First up to bat, we have the defense of the constitution as a sacred tradition that it would be wrong to fiddle with. It's not like the writers of the constitution provided for a way in which the document could be altered to reflect changing needs and justice, right? Oh wait, did they mean the sacred tradition of institutionalized sexism?

Well then, what about the beautiful music of the text? Republican Representative Jordan Ulery, argues, "There is a lyric quality, a literary quality, that expresses the ideals of the founding fathers. The bland gray socialist language just destroys all that."

Read More »

On One Florida Corner, "12th & Delaware" Finds Microcosm of Abortion Battle

by Ruth Fertig

categories: Reproductive Health, Reproductive Rights

Published February 09, 2010 @ 07:00AM PT

Last week I had the privilege of watching some truly amazing documentaries at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival. "12th & Delaware," directed by Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady ("The Boys of Baraka," "Jesus Camp"), explores the battle raging on a Fort Pierce, Florida corner where an abortion clinic and a pro-life pregnancy center sit across the street from each other.

Just before daybreak, a single pro-life protester awaits the arrival of an abortion provider to the clinic. When she sees him coming -- covered in a white sheet, sitting in the passenger seat of a bright yellow Mustang -- she lets loose a steady stream of supplications and accusations that continues until the car is safely inside the garage. "You don't have to do this." "Think of your grandchildren." "Shame on you." Throughout the film, we will see different permutations of this opening scene over and over again: protesters openly accosting clinic workers and clients, who hide behind jackets, curtains, and security cameras, their safety and privacy compromised.

Inside the abortion clinic, the covered up clients become real women, each with a different story and different reasons for being there. Some feel they're too young to have a baby, others too old, others too financially unstable. As they consult with the clinic counselor, the women often agonize over their decision to end their pregnancies, even when certain it is the right decision to make.

Across the street at the pregnancy center, we find similarly conflicted women facing a different ordeal: hearing from the center counselor that their risk of breast cancer and infertility increases after having an abortion, seeing ultrasound images on top of which technicians type "hi mommy," receiving teary-eyed looks and stony silences when they express an inclination to abort. These women often come in to the center accidentally, mistaking it for the abortion clinic at which they had an appointment. The staff at the pregnancy center attempts to undermine the women's resolve to abort instead of redirecting them across the street.

Read More »

The Super Bowl: Double Standards and Fighting Against Choice

by Alex DiBranco

categories: Media, Reproductive Rights

Published February 08, 2010 @ 09:06PM PT

Super Bowl Sunday is over, but the advertisements live on around the internet. The misogyny certainly rolled; my fav is Dodge Charger's Man's Last Stand, which you can read a great Feministing commentary summing up. But since we've been chattering about Focus on the Family's Tim Tebow ad for a while now, I'll weigh in on that (hopefully) one last time.

The ad was surprisingly cutesy and innocuous (if also vague and confusing), but Michael Jones over on the Gay Rights blog writes that even though it turned out not to spell out the extreme anti-choice message FoF is famous for, CBS was still wrong to air the advocacy ad. From the beginning, Michael's concern was the organization behind the ad, a homophobic organization that calls same-sex marriage a perversion and thinks queer people will "destroy the Earth." The founder of Focus on the Family, James Dobson, has also suggested that abortion had a hand in 9/11.

With the content as aired, what still bothers me is the pesky little double standard that never went away -- in the past, CBS wouldn't add a United Church of Christ ad in support of diversity. Oh, wait, how convenient: once the network began taking heat for accepting an ad from an anti-choice, anti-queer group, they discovered policy had changed. Even Focus on the Family didn't know there had been an explicit policy change, as Dana Goldstein reported at The Daily Beast, quoting a FoF spokesperson: "It was only last week that they [CBS] indicated that they changed any policy." But, gosh, you already knew they were running your ad.

If you follow the commercial's goal and go to Focus on the Family's website, you can see a follow-up to the ad, where Mr. and Mrs. Tebow talk about praying for "Timmy," promising God they would raise him to be a preacher man to fight for aborted fetuses. Pam Tebow urges pregnant young women to go to (lying) crisis pregnancy centers, who will "encourage" them to make God's "choice." Bob Tebow tells women outright, "Don't kill your baby."

Read More »

Abercrombie and Fitch Dislikes Disabled, Non-White, Non-Thin Women

by Sarah Menkedick

categories: Body Image, Work And Labor

Published February 08, 2010 @ 01:07PM PT

Here's to hoping that Abercrombie and Fitch is on the verge of a quick spiral into oblivion. The brand has earned a lovely reputation as a discriminator against Hispanics, Asians, African Americans and people with disabilities, and has been forced to settle lawsuit after lawsuit for its discriminatory and unfair unemployment practices.

It's hard to think of a store that more faithfully celebrates white, blond, excessively thin WASP-iness as a superior aesthetic and, indeed, a superior racial category. It does so with a "look policy" that stipulates how long employees' nails should be, how they should wear their hair, and how they should best represent the all-American (read: white, non-disabled, thin, young, blond) image.

Such a policy has been called out in a 2003 lawsuit by employees whose minimum wage earnings didn't allow them to buy Abercrombie clothes (Abercrombie settled for 2.2 million), in a 2005 lawsuit on the part of racial minorities discriminated against by the chain's hiring practices (Abercrombie settled for 50 million) and in a 2009 lawsuit by an employee who was spirited away to the stockroom because her disability wasn't all-American enough. In the last case, Riam Dean, a British law student taken off the shop floor after her prosthetic arm was discovered, won a whopping 25,000 pound lawsuit.

Read More »

Johnny Depp Defends Rapist

by Alex DiBranco

categories: Pop Culture, Sexual Assault

Published February 08, 2010 @ 09:30AM PT

Johnny, you make such a sexy Captain Jack Sparrow. And there will always be a special place in my heart for Edward Scissorhands. I have to admit, your version of Willy Wonka was just a little too creepy for me, but that didn't make me cherish your pirating days any less. Unfortunately, you've lost all your charm (and your place in my fantasies) with your defense of a child rapist.

It doesn't matter that you've joined a chorus of celebrity voices defending Roman Polanski for raping a 13-year-old. It doesn't excuse your comments that Whoopi Goldberg claimed what happened to the girl wasn't "rape-rape," although I don't know what else you would call it when a middle-aged man pleads guilty to statutory rape -- and the other charges of rape, sodomy, and drugging are only dropped to protect the victim from a having to undergo a painful and sensationalized trial. Where, apparently, a chunk of Hollywood would have come to her rapist's defense.

Depp thinks that, even though Polanski fled the country three decades ago to escape sentencing, now that we've finally convinced a country to arrest him so the United States could actually hold him responsible for his crime, we should let it go. And why? Well, because Depp thinks that his former director "is not a predator. He's 75 or 76 years old. He has got two beautiful kids, he has got a wife that he has been with for a long, long time. He is not out on the street." Um ... wait, if you don't want him in jail for his crime, doesn't that mean he is out on the street?

Not only does Polanski's current position fail to negate the crime he never served a sentence for, but, as a blogger points out on Shakesville, neither his age, wife, or status as a father mean that he won't rape again, or that it won't be another child. The Shakesville guest blogger writes, "The second man who raped me had a wife and children. ... While he was married. While his two young daughters were sleeping in the next bedroom." Depp is not only a rapist apologist, he also brushes off the rapes of women by married or older men as impossible occurrences, adding insult to injury for too many survivors. It's really the cherry on top of a constantly sickening situation.

Looks like I won't be watching Pirates of the Caribbean for the umpteenth time next weekend. It's just not as much fun when I can't get Depp's rapist-supporting remarks out of my head.

Photo credit: ATempletonPhoto.com