Recently in Feminism, Politics, and Society Category

When I heard a knock on our door at 5:30 in the morning, I was pretty confused. The UPS folks don't usually come by until about, oh, 12 hours later than that. And while we do have one annoying neighbor, these days he saves his critiques of our lawn management for people who aren't me.

I was awake and C-Man was not, so I pulled on my robe and went downstairs. I turned on the light. I saw a uniformed Austin police officer. That made me feel perfectly safe, so I opened the door.

The officer, and his partner who showed up soon thereafter, were not looking for us. (If they had been, I would have been even more confused. I do not have time for criminal behavior right now.) They were looking for a young man who got in a fight and now has a warrant out for his arrest. (Why he wasn't arrested at the time is beyond me.) He gave our address as his home address. (Why they didn't check his ID is beyond me.) I visited with the extremely polite officers for several minutes about who lived in the house, how long we had lived here, the rental history of the house before we bought it. I told them I had never seen the man on the arrest warrant. They thanked me for my time, apologized several times for waking me up, and departed.

I went back to bed.

There are so many issues wrapped up in that one encounter between a homeowner and two police officers. When I answered the door, they encountered a thin, pretty, white woman speaking well-organized English with an American accent. When I told them we owned the house, they probably made some assumptions about our financial situation. And even before they got to the house, they drove into a well-kept residential neighborhood that's mostly occupied by white folks. There was almost nothing I could have added to make them more likely to treat me politely, except possibly a nightshirt with "I Love Jesus" cross-stitched on it.

This is privilege, people. Race privilege, class privilege, the privilege that comes with having a body and mind that currently operate the way society thinks they should, the privilege that comes with passing for straight because I can use the term "husband" as long as I don't mention my undying love for Mira Sorvino, and so on.

How many of my privilege categories could disappear before they would have insisted on searching the house and waking up my family? What if my previous encounters with police meant that I didn't even feel safe opening the door? How many of the categories would go before the encounter was 100% likely to end with a police officer pulling out a gun?

Cops have to make risk assessments. It's part of their job. But when my dad says that if you end up in jail you most likely did something wrong, that's crap. How could cops not be just like the rest of us? Heads shoved full of racist and other garbage by the society we live in? Giving me the benefit of the doubt because I look right, act right, live in the right neighborhood. For all they know, I could have a meth lab in my kitchen. (Which I don't. My mother in law's steamed chard is plenty hazardous enough for me, thanks.)

If anything had gone awry that morning and I had ended up in jail, or shot dead, it would have hit the news. It would have been unusual and shocking. But because of my privilege, I didn't have to think about that much when I opened the door. Having the police show up before sunrise was little more than a curiosity.

I'm pretty sure it's not that way for most people.

This, from a female college professor who identifies as a feminist:

"Who really needs another boring mommy blog about crockpots and carpool schedules?"

Really?! This is your feminism? Dismissing a whole category of women's writing like it's a joke?

Get out of the goddamn classroom before you poison our nation's youth.

So there's this blog called Frou Frou Fashionista, which is all about lingerie. 99% of my wardrobe consists of jeans and tank tops and all my cotton underwear is from Target, so I am not the kind of person who typically reads fashion blogs, let alone lingerie blogs. Regardless of topic, though, most good blogs share certain things in common regardless of the topic - enthusiasm and a personal viewpoint being among them. The Frou Frou Fashionista gals definitely have that, and I have nothing against their blog specifically.

(It does seem likely to give me the same body image / appearance issues that caused my breakup with Glamour magazine years ago, since both are filled with images of women who are, let's say, unnaturally compliant with bizarre cultural beauty standards? But that's not specific to them, that's a nationwide epidemic, so we're going to ignore that part for right now.)

One of their recent posts was a startling reminder of how far removed my day to day thoughts must be from the rest of the world. The Lake & Stars - Spring 2010 is a collection of photographs produced to highlight a new lingerie collection. The images include what look to me like a lingerie-clad woman in the following situations:

• being pulled by a rope tied around her midsection
• being stalked by a man holding an axe
• caught in a net in the back of a truck
• floating dead in a lake

When I saw that there were over 30 comments on the post, I scrolled down to check them out, expecting to see some controversy. Instead, every single comment praised the photography, the lingerie, and the creativity of the photo shoot.

I was stunned. In my world, SOMEONE would have said something like "Um, yeah, because what's sexy is women being captured, stalked, and killed. Wait, WTF?" I am aware that some non-sexist people find images of people tied up to be sexy, and I'm not taking a position on that here. I'm just so unaccustomed to spending time in environments where no one would point out that these images have the potential to be problematic.

If you go on to the The Lake & Stars Spring/Summer 2010 Lookbook itself, you can see the entire sequence of images in the order they were published, along with the "captions and a bit of a dangerous story" mentioned in the Frou Frou post.

In context, the unsettling images are a bit more "suspense thriller" and a bit less "exploitation." The woman is in the woods running, setting traps, and spying on her unnamed opponents with binoculars. The caption that goes with the axe photo is this:

When a guy suddenly comes at you with an axe, it usually means he's as unprepared as you are. Remember, an axe is rarely a weapon of choice.

The caption that goes with the picture of her in the net is this:

Sometimes, your opponents will be sure they have the upper hand. That's when they're most vulnerable.

Taken altogether, I'm not as disturbed by the set as I was by the subset presented on Frou Frou Fashionista. However, I'm still a little freaked out by the fact that in over 30 comments on the post, no one raised even a slight concern.

Either I'm completely off-base, or I spend too much time in the feminist blogsphere, or I should spend ALL my time there because the rest of the blogosphere is too unsettling. I can't decide.

This is how lucky I am.

When I was digging up weeds yesterday, I was maintaining property that I own, not trying to make enough money to feed my family on someone else's land. The conditions where I was digging were safe and I could stop whenever I wanted.

When I came in and took a shower, I had electricity, clean hot water, and a reasonable expectation of safety and privacy.

When I broke the soap holder off the wall while drying my leg and sliced the bottom of my foot open on the broken pieces, someone was home to help me.

When I had to hop around naked holding a clean maxi-pad on my foot trying to stop the bleeding while getting some clothes on, it was in front of my child care provider, a relative who loves me (and saw me give birth already).

When I could not stop the bleeding and needed medical attention, I didn't have to worry about how we would pay for it.

When I needed information about where to get that medical care, I was able to look for a provider on my high-speed internet connection. I could read and understand the information, find the correct phone number, and make a savvy decision about where to go for treatment.

When I needed a ride to the urgent care center, my husband had the flexibility to leave work and drop me off so that my child care provider could take my two year old to his gym class as scheduled. Our family did not lose any income as a result.

When I got to the urgent care center, they had someone check on me me right away even though my scheduled appointment was in two hours. I waited for a doctor in a comfortable private room. I was treated with respect by every member of the staff who interacted with me.

When it took over three hours on a weekday morning to deal with the incident, I did not get in trouble with my boss or lose any income.

When I needed to keep my foot propped up, I could resume working from the comfort of my home, seated in a chair.

Unlike migrant farm workers. Unlike people who are poor. Unlike people who are in prison. Unlike people in abusive relationships. Unlike people who get paid hourly and have no sick time. Unlike people whose families and friends aren't dependable. Unlike people who have no health insurance or who depend on public programs to pay for their health care. Unlike people who are doing their best to survive in a country where they don't yet speak or the language fluently.

I wish everyone understood how much of what I have is because of luck. It was luck that my mother in law was home to help, and that the cut wasn't deeper or longer because then hello stitches, but it's even luck that I had a soap holder to cut it on in the first place. Looking at my son, who was born with even more advantages than I was, I don't know how anyone can believe that there's a level playing field. I grew up with money, skin color, nationality, health, family dynamics, education, and knowledge of how to navigate bureaucracy on my side, and he will too. He is starting out so far ahead, just like I did.

I have worked hard at times in my life. But most of the adults and a good percentage of the children in the world work harder in a day than I do in a week. They don't get to sit at comfortable desks and push pixels around. They're already putting in their time and then some. How are they supposed to work harder to cover the distance between where they are and where I am? Why are we so surprised when many people don't have that strength, already working harder than I ever have and battling barriers I never had to face?

And when one of those people cuts their foot in the shower, why do so many people think it's okay for their experience to be so much different from mine? That if they want to achieve what I have, they will simply work harder?

For the second time this year, I have run across a blog post suggesting that people work together to read the entirety of one of the health care bills... by each reading one page. Today's find is 1,502 at conservative blog bRight and Early.

Am I the only one here who has ever READ a bill? They don't come in 1-page chunks.

Here's a comment from one of the readers of the Baucus bill (PDF):

Page 774 establishes quality standards by the Secretary, Who ever that is, for the "Pilot Program". [...] My concern is the "Secretary" seems to have the ability to do what he wants, when he wants, how he wants. Maybe some other part of this bill tells us his regulated powers, but I doubt it!

My guess? The Secretary is defined somewhere else in the bill, and the powers are defined elsewhere in the bill. If not, that's a legitimate criticism. But if you don't even check, what's the point of this exercise?

Would I want to read a 1,502 page bill all myself? No, and it wouldn't make any sense to try. I applaud the idea of working together to produce a summary and analysis. But page by page makes no sense. I can only imagine what insights will be gleaned from all the pages that start mid-sentence.

They do section the dang thing, y'all. There's even a table of contents.

So I'm over at Wired reading an article about Newsy, an up and coming news website/service thingy. They assemble video clips of coverage on a single issue from multiple sources so people can see how the issue was reported differently on different news outlets.

This, my friends, is cool. People, including me, need to have their certainty messed with regularly.

Then I got to this part:

Newsy [...] does a fine enough job of presenting competing viewpoints from global news sources in a condensed video format. But it's content to stop there, shying away from the next logical step of analyzing these competing viewpoints to figure out which one is the most accurate, the way FactCheck.org does.

Another piece of the puzzle, to be developed with some of the new funding, will be ranking system where the crowd votes up and down which of the news sources are closest to getting it right.

I'm sorry, WTF? Double WTF? WTF with a side of are you high? How the hell does the crowd have a clue who got it right? Popularity and correctness are not the same thing.

I headed over to Newsy to learn more. This is how Newsy describes what they do on their About page:

By monitoring the world's new coverage, we provide immediate analysis of news perspectives so you can form your own opinion. You'll find it an informative and a convenient resource that you will want to check daily. We will not change the news, but we will change your view of it. Global access to multiple perspectives helps provide the real story.

On the page called Story Selection, it says this:

We work together to research, write and edit our stories, paying close attention to providing our audience with unique perspectives and analysis of the differences in coverage. Our stories are written by a diverse team of people with many voices working together to create a unique final product.

I watched two videos: Obama to Choose Afghanistan Path and Catching Rays and Resentments.

Oh the underwhelm.

What do you get when you combine teensy clips from news broadcasts with a "host" who describes for you what angles each media outlet is concentrating on while reporting on the topic?

Nothing. Absolutely nothing. If it's an event you're unfamiliar with, you get barely enough information to even know what happened, let alone make any sense of the micro-coverage that follows. Even if one could make the argument that juxtaposing different coverage of the same topic is analysis in and of itself, which I would dispute, Newsy seems to fail miserably at even that.

Part of the problem with today's journalism is an overreliance on the "they said this, the other people said the opposite" form of reporting where no attempt is made to weigh both claims and arrive at a conclusion - even on something that is empirically verifiable. Newsy is like the MTV version of that syndrome.

Seriously, take a look and tell me if I got it all wrong. Does a Newsy clip offer you anything in the form of information, analysis, or exposure to a range of perspectives?

Mom says Springfield boy, 11, who committed suicide was repeatedly bullied at school

11-Year-Old Hangs Himself after Enduring Daily Anti-Gay Bullying

Hat tip to fem.men.ist for the news.

Earlier this year, Maria Niles wrote a post on BlogHer called Why I'm Pro-Choice. Maria is a great writer, so I read it. While discussing how we can find common ground on abortion, she said this:

What I would love to see is that we focus our energy towards loving women.

To me, this seemed like the perfect description of feminism. When you love someone, you try to help her, and you want her to grow into the person she was meant to be, using all of her talents and gifts to the fullest extent possible. No one is perfect, of course, so the WAY we love is sometimes messed up by our own individual dramas. If you can pare that all away, though, real love is something wonderful.

Borrowing from Maria's words, to me being a feminist means loving women.

That definition might not work for everyone. I'm specifically thinking about women of color here. Quite understandably, women of color might need more details, since they're fed up with white feminists like myself claiming they care about all women but only focusing on middle- and upper-class white women's concerns. That behavior by white women is racist. We're letting our f&*%ed up cultural behavior hurt the people we should be loving. In my personal universal definition of feminism, to truly love someone and love them well, you have to hear them, respect them, and find out what they need to be happy - not just what you think they need. It's hard work. And if you're running around focusing on yourself and your needs exclusively while claiming to help others, you're dong it wrong.

So if we can agree (at least for the purposes of this post) that I actually mean loving ALL women properly and not just when it's convenient or self-serving, then let's also talk about conservative Christian women.

If you've read any conservative blogs in the past six months, you may have run across a somewhat bizarre claim. According to some of these folks, the mortgage crisis came about because banks were forced by the government to make loans to low-income people and minorities who could not pay them back and should not have gotten loans in the first place. Furthermore, it is the Democrats' fault for creating the regulations that forced these banks to enter into such unwise arrangements.

Now granted it's been a few years since my graduate coursework in affordable housing, urban poverty, and public policy. Off the top of my head, though, I did recall some lending requirements on banks contained in a piece of legislation called the Community Reinvestment Act. Perhaps this is what these folks were referring to?

Of course, the CRA was passed in 1977 and advocates have been complaining ever since about how the feds won't enforce it and too many institutions not covered by the CRA have gotten into the mortgage lending business.

Many advocacy groups that represent low-income folks have also been quite concerned about what they call "predatory lending" in the housing market. Basically, they've been worried that low-income borrowers were being targeted for subprime loans, and they had spent years pushing for government regulation to prevent lenders from enticing people with unaffordable mortgages before the meltdown began.

So it was difficult for me to envision how a 30 year old law and a bunch of liberals had forced all the banks to make bad loans while the institutions that would have been doing the forcing were operating under a Republican president.

Luckily, I happen to know a Professional Economist, so he helped me out with some info on the debacle. Yes, it's the CRA that's being blamed, and yes, it's a bunch of b.s. Did Liberals Cause the Sub-Prime Crisis? has the best explanation I've seen so far of exactly why. A few salient quotes:

• [...] half of sub-prime loans came from those mortgage companies beyond the reach of CRA.
• Independent mortgage companies, which are not covered by CRA, made high-priced loans at more than twice the rate of the banks and thrifts.
• In the mid-1990s, new CRA regulations and a wave of mergers led to a flurry of CRA activity, but [...] that activity "largely came to an end by 2001."
• In late 2004, the Bush administration announced plans to sharply weaken CRA regulations, pulling small and mid-sized banks out from under the law's toughest standards. Yet sub-prime lending continued, and even intensified...
• [...] even lenders have not fingered CRA.

Seriously, people. There are plenty of REAL things to dislike about any political party and their preferred laws no matter which side you're on. No need to make stuff up.

This came out in mid-September, but I just found out about it today.

Sen. Joe Biden gave $3,690 to charity... over 10 years.

In case you're interested, here's more about all four of the candidates' giving.

Conservatives have scolded him quite harshly for this, and I have to say that in the absence of any additional information - which I did not locate with el Google - I agree. That's pathetic, especially for a person in elected office.