feminism for root vegetables

"word vomit by an unattractive feminist"--a fan

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r/MensLib moment

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a while back people got onto a twitter feminist (moira donegan) for pointing out women may require state intervention in violence against us because we’re smaller than men by joking about asian people being smaller than non-asians like it was some great dunk. but like. if society were historically organized so as to funnel all asian people into intimate dependency on and obedience to non-asians who were both naturally and via socialization stronger than them, and if violence was routinely used to enforce that dependency and obedience, then sure I might be concerned!

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somehow I have the feeling that a cis woman who wore fetishistically large prosthetic breasts would not be protected by ontario’s gender id law even if she said it was because of her gender id. just a hunch

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ironically I think Vanderb*lt (and many other pediatric-inclusive gender clinics) are actually performing very few e.g. pediatric mastectomies and many probably not any at all (yes, I know it does happen) but their determined desire to look like radical advocates for children defying the oppressive man or whatever is really coming back to bite them in the ass

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The Harsh Realm of “Gentle Parenting”

The approach flourishes because it caters to a child’s inner life. What does it neglect?

…One of the major themes in “Brain-Body Parenting,” and in gentle-parenting discourse generally, is that children don’t defy for the sake of defiance, but that their challenging behavior is a physiological response to stress and should be seen as essentially adaptive. The assumption unto itself is questionable: if little Timmy is on the front lawn tossing gardening implements at traffic, his motivations are probably obscurer than stress. This is one of the most confounding dilemmas of parenting, especially as kids exit the toddler stage: that sometimes a child tests or destroys boundaries for the thrill of it. Under the gentle-parenting schema, a child’s every act must be seen through a lens of anxiety and threat-detection—which heightens the parent’s dual role of child psychologist and emotional-security guard.

And why does this child feel so threatened, so stressed? The answer might be found on an episode of “Unruffled,” in which Lansbury addresses a mother whose five-year-old keeps hitting and pinching his younger sister. “He doesn’t feel safe to open up and share himself,” Lansbury explains. “He feels attacked. He feels judged. He feels misunderstood. . . . He feels he has to defend himself rather than having his mother or father or both of them being really curious about what’s going on.” In a post from 2012, Lansbury adopts the perspective of a toddler with aggression issues. “If I keep repeating the behavior,” the imaginary toddler declares, “it’s because it doesn’t feel resolved for me. Either you aren’t being convincing enough, or you’re being too intense and emotional.” If, toddler-Lansbury goes on, “there’s anger in your voice when you say ‘Don’t hit!,’ it unnerves me and I’m compelled to keep behaving that way until you can give me a calmer response.” These scripts are an inversion of the look what you made me doschool of authoritarian discipline: the child gets to be the one who will turn this car around right now.

For the most part, though, “Unruffled” is digital-audio Xanax; bingeing a few episodes always adds some levity, even serenity, to the day-to-day parenting project. To witness the true blame-Mom wing of gentle parenting, look to Einzig’s heavily moderated Facebook group, “Visible Child: Respectful/Mindful Parenting,” where the tone toward the parent-supplicants is one of weary passive-aggression edging into contemptuous disbelief. (Disclosure: I was blocked from “Visible Child” after objecting to a post in which Einzig expressed disdain for members of the group whose partners have authoritarian parenting styles.) Once, a mother asked about her young son, who hit and kicked her after she told him that she would be taking a break from playing with him to do some cleaning. “He’s telling you very clearly that right now he needs your presence,” Einzig replied—the housework should wait. (So much for setting firm boundaries.) She went on, “If you don’t want him to hit you (perfectly reasonable), look at your part in the things that result in that.”

What is bewildering about some tenets of gentle parenting is their presentation of a validated child as a solitary child, and a mother as only Mother. When Lansbury counsels the mother of a child who hits, there is no acknowledgment of the little sister’s experience being hit, even though she may also feel “attacked”; there is no expectation of her mother “being really curious about what’s going on” inside the girl after she’s been hit, no recognition that the girl may wonder why her brother hitting her should not be “judged,” no thought given to the social consequences of being known as a hitter or of how those consequences might adversely shape a child’s self-perception. The housework that Einzig says to put off is a synecdoche for everything that the gentle parent—and, perhaps, the gently parented child’s invisible siblings—must push aside in order to complete a transformation into a self-renouncing, perpetually present humanoid who has nothing but time and who is programmed for nothing but calm.

Delahooke, to her credit, never goes to such extremes. “Brain-Body Parenting” is a warm, forgiving book—there’s even a passage on the childhood importance of coziness, including an endorsement of hygge. That’s why it’s odd that she presents “Hurry up! You’re making us late!” as the stuff of a mommy-forum struggle session. Then again, catastrophizing such a small incident is useful, because it plants the grain of doubt. The reader may have assumed that her own parenting missteps were minor; now her tuning for major and minor has changed….

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workshopping a new biological essentialism that isn’t based on sex but on our individual monkey brains placing differing values on social conformity in general

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when you’re trying to be super enlightened about gender but reinforce an inescapable reproductive teleology

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praying for j*de d*yle to get some peace by simply talking about feminist issues in whatever way he finds most ethical or accurate and not trying to control the way others talk about it

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stop it. this is not the way

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There is a better way. And it's a pretty simple one: we must increase female representation in all spheres of life. Because as more women move into positions of power or influence, there's another pattern that is becoming even more apparent: women simply don't forget that women exist as easily as men often seem to.

Women in the film industry are more likely to employ women. Female journalists are significantly more likely to center a female perspective and to quote women. Female authors do the same: 69% of US female biographers wrote about female subjects in 2015, compared to 6% of male biographers. The emphasis by women on female voices and perspectives extends to the academy. Between 1980 and 2007, female history faculty in the US rose from 15% to 35%--meanwhile across a similar time period (1975-2015), US history faculty specializing in women's history rose from 1% to 0%--a tenfold increase. Female academics are also more likely to assign female authors to their students....

Women are also leading the way when it comes to closing the gender data gap. A recent analysis of 1.5 million papers published between 2008-15 found that the likelihood of a study involving gender and sex analysis 'increases with the proportion of women among its authors'. The effect is particularly pronounced if a woman serves as a leader of the author group. This concern for women's health also extends to the political sphere: it took a woman (Paula Sherriff, the Labour MP for Dewsbury) to set up the UK's first All-Party Parliamentary group for women's health in 2016. It was two rogue female Republicans who scotched Donald Trump's attempts to repeal Obamacare (which would have disproportionately impacted women), voting three times against his proposals.

And women are making a difference in politics more generally. It was two women, Melinda Gates and Hillary Clinton, who spearheaded the UN-backed organization Data2x that is aimed specifically at closing the global gender data gap. ...

And when the worst happens, women are there too, filling in the gaps left by male-biased disaster relief. Researchers found that the 'masculine and muscular image[s] of relief workers' that dominated the media post-Katrina were belied by women who were 'working tirelessly and courageously' behind the scenes. The same thing has happened in Puerto Rico, all but abandoned by the US government after Hurricane Maria devastated the region in 2017. 'The reality is that when you go to communities, mostly it is women as leaders and as community organizers,' Adi Martinez-Roman, executive director for a non-profit that provides legal assistance to low-income families, told journalist Justine Calma. These women have collected data by 'wad[ing] into flooded neighborhoods' and canvassing the abandoned communities. And they have developed and provided evidence-based solutions. They've set up soup kitchens. They've raised money and rebuilt roads. They've distributed 'solar-powered lights, generators, gas, clothes, shoes, tampons, batteries, medication, mattresses, water'. They set up 'free legal aid societies to help families navigate the confusing and ill-designed processes required to file FEMA claims'. They've even managed to source some communal, solar-powered washing machines.

The solution to the sex and gender data gap is clear: we have to close the female representation gap. When women are involved in decision-making, in research, in knowledge production, women do not get forgotten. Female lives and perspectives are brought out of the shadows. This is to the benefit of women everywhere, and as the story of Taimina, the crocheting maths professor shows, it is often to the benefit of humanity as a whole. And so, to return to Freud's 'riddle of femininity', it turns out that the answer was staring us in the face all along. All 'people' needed to do was to ask women.

–Caroline Criado-Perez, Invisible Women (2019)

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America's Girls Podcast

For 50 years, the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders have been a global phenomenon, endlessly photographed, televised, and commercialized. They beg

For 50 years, the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders have been a global phenomenon, endlessly photographed, televised, and commercialized. They began as an experiment and became America’s sweethearts, a very Texas hybrid of pageant beauty, good-girl etiquette, and come-hither slink. But what’s always been missing from their story is the voices of the cheerleaders themselves—until now. Bestselling author Sarah Hepola hosts this journey through the wild and glamorous saga of a sideline spectacle that changed sports, fashion, entertainment, and countless childhoods of boys and girls like her.

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The data that we do have is unarguable: as we continue to build, plan and develop our world, we have to start taking account of women's lives. In particular, we have to start accounting for the three themes that define women's relationship with that world.

The first of these themes is the female body--or, to be precise--its invisibility. Routinely forgetting to accommodate the female body in design--whether medical, technological or architectural--has led to a world that is less hospitable and more dangerous for women to navigate. It leads to us injuring ourselves in jobs and cars that weren't designed for our bodies. It leads to us dying from drugs that don't work. It has led to the creation of a world where women just don't fit very well.

There is an irony in how the female body is apparently invisible when it comes to collecting data, because when it comes to the second trend that defines women's lives, the visibility of the female body is key. That trend is male sexual violence against women--how we don't measure it, don't design our world to account for it, and in so doing, allow it to limit women's liberty. Female biology is not the reason women are raped. It is not the reason women are intimidated and violated as they navigate public spaces. This happens not because of sex, but because of gender: the social meanings we have imposed on male and female bodies. In order for gender to work, it must be obvious which bodies elicit which treatment. And, clearly, it is: as we've seen 'the mere sight o a woman' is enough for the viewer to 'immediately elicit a specific set of associated traits and attributions'. To immediately class her as someone to speak over. Someone to cat call. Sometime to follow. Someone to rape.

Or maybe just someone to make the tea. Which is where we run into the third trend, which is perhaps the most significant in terms of its impact on women's lives worldwide: unpaid care work. Women are doing far and away more than our fair share of this work--this necessary work without which our lives would all fall apart. And, as with male violence against women, female biology is not the reason women are the bum-wiping class. But recognizing a child as female is the reason she will be brought up to expect and accept that as her role. Recognizing a woman as female is the reason she will be seen as the appropriate person to clear up after everyone in the office. To write the Christmas and birthday cards to her husband's family--and look after them when they get sick. To be paid less. To go part-time when they have kids.

Failing to collect data on women and their lives means that we continue to naturalize sex and gender discrimination--while at the same time somehow not seeing any of this discrimination. Or really, we don't see it because we naturalize it--it is too obvious, to commonplace, too much just the way things are to bother commenting on. It's the irony of being a woman: at once hyper-visible when it comes to being treated as the subservient sex class, and invisible when it counts--when it comes to being counted.

–Caroline Criado-Perez, Invisible Women (2019)

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Homelessness has historically been seen as a male phenomenon, but there is reason to doubt the official data on this issue. Joanne Bretherton, research fellow at the University of York's Center for Housing Policy, explains that women are actually 'far more likely to experience homelessness than men', while in Australia the 'archetypal homeless person' is now 'a young woman aged 25-34, often with a child, and, increasingly, escaping violence'. But this 'serious social problem' has been grossly underestimated--and it's a gender data gap that is in many ways a product of how researchers define and measure homelessness. According to the Canadian Center for Policy Alternatives (CCPA) 'much of the research on homelessness [...] lacks a comprehensive gender-based analysis'.

Homelessness is usually measured by those who use homeless services, but this approach only works if men and women are equally likely to use these services, and they aren't. Women made homeless as a result of domestic violence are often likely to seek refuge in domestic-violence shelters rather than homeless shelters. In the UK this means that they will not be counted as homeless. They are also likely to live in precarious arrangements with other people, 'without their own front door, privacy and their own living space, and without access to any housing of their own to which they have a legal right'. Sometimes, as witnessed by the recent rise in 'sex for rent' agreements across the UK, they will, like women in refugee camps, be sexually exploited.

According to Canadian research, women fall into these precarious arrangements because they don't feel safe in the official emergency accommodation, especially when it's mixed sex. And these safety issues are not a product of women's imaginations: the CCPA calls the levels of violence experienced by women in shelters 'staggering'. Supposedly 'gender-neutral' services that are 'presumed to be equally accessible for men and women', concludes the CCPA, 'actually put women at significant risk'.

Female homelessness is therefore not simply a result of violence: it is a lead predictor of a woman experiencing violence. Women in the US are choosing to live rough rather than access shelters they perceive as dangerous. Katharine Sacks-Jones, director of women-at-risk charity Agenda, explains that in the UK homelessness services are' often set up with men in mind', and that they 'can be frightening places for vulnerable women who've experienced abuse and violence'.

–Caroline Criado-Perez, Invisible Women (2019)

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In an email to humanitarian news agency IRIN a spokesperson for the Regional Office of Refugee Affairs in Berlin (LAF) wrote that 'After countless conversations with shelter managers, I can assure you that there is no unusual occurrence [of sexualized violence] reported from emergency or community shelters.' Despite multiple accounts of sexual harassment and abuse they were, they said, 'confident there is no significant problem'. Similarly, news website BuzzFeed reports that in Europe the possibility that male border guards might trade sex for entry is all but denied. And yet a 2017 Guardian report revealed that 'Sexual violence and abuse was widespread and systematic at crossings and checkpoints. A third of the women and children interviewed said their assailants wore uniforms or appeared to be associated with the military.'

The LAF substantiated their claim of 'no significant problem' by pointing to the 'very low numbers of police reports', with only ten cases of 'crimes against the sexual freedom of a person' involving women living in refugee shelters registered by Berlin police in the whole of 2016. But are police statistics a reliable measure of the problem, or is this yet another gender data gap? When BuzzFeed reporters contacted the national police of the major European transit countries (Greece, Macedonia, Serbia, Croatia and Hungary) for any information they had about gender-based violence, many simply did not respond to 'repeated requests for information'. The Hungarian national police did reply, but only to say that 'it does not collect information related to asylum-seekers, including reports of rape or attempted sexual assault'. The Croatians said they 'could not disaggregate crime reports by victim category', although in any case they 'had no reports of asylum-seekers experiencing gender-based violence'. This may of course be true, although not because it's not happening. Several women's organizations who work with refugees point out that although many of the women they work with have been groped and harassed at shelters, a mixture of cultural language barriers mean that a 'very, very high number of sexually motivated attacks go unreported'.

The data gap when it comes to sexual abuse is compounded in crisis settings by powerful men who blur the lines between aid and sexual assault, exploiting their position by forcing women to have sex with them in order to receive their food rations. The data gaps here are endemic, but evidence we do suggests that this is a common scenario in post-disaster environments, and one which has recently hit headlines worldwide, as first Oxfam and then various other international aid agencies were rocked by allegations of sexual abuse by their workers, and subsequent cover-ups.

–Caroline Criado-Perez, Invisible Women (2019)

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We didn't have firm data on the sex disparity in natural-disaster mortality until 2007, when the first systematic, quantitative analysis was published. This examination of the data from 141 countries between 1981 to 2002 revealed that women are considerably more likely to die than men in natural disasters, and that the greater the number of people killed relative to population size, the greater the sex disparity in life expectancy. Significantly, the higher the socio-economic status of women in a country, the lower the sex gap in deaths.

It's not the disaster that kills them, explains Maureen Fordham. It's gender--and a society that fails to account for how it restricts women's lives. Indian men have been found to be more likely to survive earthquakes that hit at nigh 'because they would sleep outside and on rooftops during warm nights, a behavior impossible for most women'. In Sri Lanka, swimming and tree climbing are 'predominantly' taught to men and boys; as a result, when the December 2004 tsunami hit (which killed up to four times as many women as men) they were better able to survive the floodwaters. There is also a social prejudice against women learning to swim in Bangladesh, 'drastically' reducing their chances of surviving flooding, and this socially created vulnerability is compounded by women not being allowed to leave their home without a male relative. As a result, when cyclones hit, women lose precious evacuation time waiting for a male relative to come and take them to a safe place.

They also lose time waiting for a man to come and tell them there's a cyclone coming in the first place. Cyclone warnings are broadcast in public spaces like the market, or in the mosque, explains Fordham. But women don't go to these public spaces. 'They're at home. So they're totally reliant on a male coming back to tell them they need to evacuate.' Many women simply never get the message.

–Caroline Criado-Perez, Invisible Women (2019)

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Post-conflict and post-disaster zones are also particularly vulnerable to the spread of infectious diseases--and women die in greater numbers than men when pandemics hit. Take Sierra Leone, the country at the heart of the 2014 Ebola outbreak, and which has the highest maternal mortality rate in the world: 1,360 mothers die per every 100,000 live births (for comparison, the OECD average is fourteen per 100,000), and one in seventeen mothers have a lifetime risk of death associated to childbirth. The government has recently released data revealing that at least 240 pregnant women die every month in Sierra Leone.

Throw Ebola into the mix and women suddenly had two types of death to fear: from childbirth and from Ebola. In fact it was worse than that, because pregnant women were at increased risk of contracting Ebola due to their high levels of contact with health services and workers: the Washington Post reported that two of the three largest outbreaks of Ebola 'involved transmission of the virus in maternity settings'. The fact that Ebola decimated healthcare workers (themselves mainly women) made the feminized risk even higher: the Lancet estimated that in the three countries affected by the virus, an extra 4,022 women would die every year as a result of the shortage.

The reluctance to factor gender into relief efforts is partly due to the still-persistent attitude that since infectious diseases affect both men and women, it's best to focus on control and treatment 'and to leave it to others to address social problems that may exist in society, such as gender inequalities after an outbreak has ended'. Academics are also at fault here: a recent analysis of 29 million papers in over 15,000 peer-reviewed titles published around the time of the Zika and Ebola epidemics found that less than 1% explored the gendered impact of the outbreaks. But, explains a WHO report, the belief that gender doesn't matter is a dangerous position which can hinder preventative and containment efforts, as well as leaving important insights into how diseases spread undetected.

Failing to account for gender during the 2009 H1N1 (swine flu virus) outbreaks meant that 'government officials tended to deal with men because they were thought to be the owners of farms, despite the fact that women often did the majority of work with animals on backyard farms'. During the 2014 Ebola outbreak in Sierra Leone, 'initial quarantine plans ensured that women received food supplies, but did not account for water or fuel'. In Sierra Leone and other developing countries, fetching fuel and water is the job of women (and of course fuel and water are necessities of life), so until the plans were adjusted, 'women continued to leave their houses to fetch firewood, which drove a risk of spreading infection'.

Women's care-taking responsibilities also have more deadly consequences for women in pandemics. Women do the majority of care for the sick at home. They also make up the majority of 'traditional birth attendants, nurses and the cleaners and laundry workers in hospitals, where there is risk of exposure', particularly given these kinds of workers 'do not get the same support and protection as doctors, who are predominantly men'. Women are also those who prepare a body for a funeral, and traditional funeral rites lead many to be infected. In Liberia, during the 2014 Ebola epidemic, women were estimated to make up 75% of those who died from the disease; in Sierra Leone, the 'epicenter' of the outbreak,' UNICEF estimated that up to 60% of those who died were women.

A 2016 paper also found that in the recent Ebola and Zika epidemics international health advice did no 'take into account women's limited capacity to protect themselves from infection'. In both cases, advice issued was based on the (inaccurate) premise that women have the economic, social or regulatory power 'to exercise the autonomy contained in international advice'. The result was that already-existing gender inequalities were 'further compounded' by international health advice.

–Caroline Criado-Perez, Invisible Women (2019)

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The data on the impact of conflict (mortality, morbidity, forcible displacement) on women is extremely limited and sex-disaggregated data is even rarer. But the data we do have suggests that women are disproportionately affected by armed conflict. In modern warfare it is civilians, rather than combatants, who are most likely to be killed. And while men and women suffer from the same trauma, forcible displacement, injury and death, women also suffer from female-specific injustices.

Domestic violence against women increases when conflict breaks out. In fact, it is more prevalent than conflict-related sexual violence. To put this in context, an estimated 60,000 women were raped in the three-month Bosnian conflict and up to 250,000 in the hundred -day Rwandan genocide. UN agencies estimate that more than 60,000 women were raped during the civil war in Sierra Leone (1991-2002); more than 40,000 in Liberia (1989-2003); and at least 200,000 in the Democratic Republic of the Congo since 1998. Because of data gaps (apart from anything else, there is often no one for women to report to), the real figures in all these conflicts are likely to have been much higher.

In the breakdown of social order that follows war, women are also more severely affected than men. Levels of rape and domestic violence remain extremely high in so-called post-conflict settings, 'as demobilized fighters primed to use force confront transformed gender roles at home or the frustrations of unemployment'. Before the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, the average age for marriage for a girl was between twenty and twenty-five years; in the refugee camps during and after the genocide, the average age for marriage was fifteen years.

Women are also more likely than men to die from the indirect effects of war. More than half of the world's maternal deaths occur in conflict-affected and fragile states, and the ten worst-performing countries on maternal mortality are all either conflict or post-conflict countries. Here, maternal mortality is on average 2.5 times higher, and this is partly because post conflict and disaster relief efforts too often forget to account for women's specific healthcare needs.

–Caroline Criado-Perez, Invisible Women (2019)