âStevie Nicks was the first woman I ever heard say she had chosen not to have children because she cared more about her career. The first that ever warned me men might not like it if there are things more important to me than they are. The first that ever said that that was fine: sometimes, you have to leave them behind. Wherever she goes, she surrounds herself with girls. âI canât imagine you in a bathing suit,â someone says in an interview for Rolling Stone, when Stevie says she likes to play in the pool in her backyard. âYeah, well, you never will,â Stevie says. âThere is never - ever - a man in the backyard. If there is, he is banished to the front of the house.â Men donât get to look at Stevie Nicks unless Stevie Nicks wants men to look at Stevie Nicks. In her songs, even when sheâs talking about how she has to change, she proclaims her power, her ability, her worth. She is a queen, she is a witch, she is a dragon, she is in control. She isnât polite. Sheâs competitive. Sheâs bossy. She claimed all the things the men around her claimed â she spent as much money as they spent, had as much sex as they had, was as reckless as they were, stood at the front of the same stage â and never questioned that that was her right. The world tells us women are there for men, but despite all the boyfriends and the jokes about how sheâs so easy and the sex-symbol status, she isnât there for men at all. She does it without ever giving in to the men that dismiss her. Sheâs emotional. Sheâs dramatic. She raises her voice as much as she can. She thinks sheâs pretty, she thinks sheâs a star, and when her fans crowd up to the edge of the stage, crazy, she welcomes them, with open arms. She revels in it. Sheâs too much of a girl for you? She revels in it.â
Europeans: âI donât understand you Americans, if your working conditions, wages, and social safety net are so bad, why do you not simply unionize or strike?â
remember when amazon asked the spanish police to stop their workers from going on strike? and that the police confusedly had to explain to them that its their right to go on strike and stopping them would be very illegal?
yeah. its because when they do it at home it Works.
this would be why the republican party spent the last few decades trying to woo the lower class workers to be âconservativeâ by appealing to âfamily valuesâ and religion despite almost nothing about the republican party being in favor of low class workers- because these are the people who have a need to unionize and priority is to convince them unions are bad so vote for anti-union politicians
Browning onions is a matter of patience. My own patience ran out earlier this year while leafing through the New York Times food section. There, in the...
JEEZ but the mere sight of the article title had me muttering âYES GODDAMMIT!!â
I read this when it was published in 2012 and I think about it at least once a month. I donât think Iâve ever related to anything written by a man so much as this article.
No lie, this article changed the way I read recipes and made me a better, more confident cook.
It took me 3 hours to caramelize the onions when I made French onion soup.
BUT if you are cooking only a quarter of an onion on a medium high heat with a bunch of oil then you can get it done in about 10 to 15 minutes. But thatâs only one serving of carmelized onion.
Every time I hear mention of a youtube celebrity itâs a new one of these stock image looking people who seemingly appeared out of the void two weeks ago, fully formed with five million followers and the capacity to commit horrible crimes against another youtube celebrity which they will tearfully apologize for in a fifteen minute video
Mylar truly wishes he could take back what he has done and only hopes that you, the fans, can forgive him.
Hereâs the thing: I made this post with nobody in particular in mind and people keep reblogging me and saying that itâs in direct reference to [_____] or asking me if itâs about such and such and itâs someone new each time which probably means that thereâs, like, a problem.
Woman doing the cleaning and cooking in an advert on TV ?
Woah thatâs so sexist and degrading and will influence people and reinforce gender roles and woah imagery in adverts can have a powerfull impact we must protest this !
First page on pornhub : ÂŤDaddy fucks daughter while mom is outÂť, ÂŤSluts destroyed and drink pissÂť, ÂŤTeaching a whore a lessonÂť, ÂŤBlack cunt dominated by white dickÂť, ÂŤPetite teen used and abusedÂť,
woah, this is totally cool, sexy and liberating, nothing wrong with this, this has no effect whatsoever on viewers, the brain becomes suddenly immune, no negative influence on how men treat women, anyway why are you such a prude you need to get fucked heyyy
âIâm a hick,â I recall saying to him. âNo,â Harrison answered. âYou think youâre less than you are. Youâre a smart hick.â And then, âYou have the eyes of a doe and the balls of a samurai.â
What do Elton John, Sarah Jessica Parker, Ricky Martin and Nicole Kidman have in common? The answerâââhappily reported by celebrity site Glamour Magazineâââis that all had babies with the help of surrogate mothers. And these stories are invariably accompanied by photos of the couples holding their babies and beaming with joy. Well, if you asked me, I âd answer rather differentlyâââthey are all participating in reproductive prostitution and child trafficking.
Surrogacyâââor âcontract pregnancyââââinvolves a woman being either inseminated or having an embryo implanted in her uterus. When she gives birth nine months later, she surrenders the child to the commissioning parentsâââand almost always in exchange for money. Since the 1970s, over 25,000 babies have been born in the USA via surrogacy. But the practice is increasingly outsourced to countries like India, Ukraine, Thailand and Mexico. In India alone, the surrogacy industry is valued at over 450 million USD per year. Countries all over the world are faced with the question: ban or regulate surrogacy?
The media mostly portrays surrogacy as a win-win situation: childless couples can fulfil their dream for a child, and poor women can earn money by helping others. Hello! magazine showcases Elton John saying that surrogacy âcompletes our family in the most precious and perfect way.â Vanity Fair features Ricky Martin and his twins, declaring: âI would give my life for the woman who helped me bring my sons into this world.â And Nicole Kidman comments: âOur family is truly blessed ⌠No words can adequately convey the incredible gratitude that we feel for everyone ⌠in particular our gestational carrier.â Martin and Kidman conspicuously avoid the word âmotherâ when speaking about the women who bore children for them. The gratitude of the recipients of the surrogacy arrangements is paraded as success, but ultimately disguises the inherent power inequity in the arrangement: the parent is the one who pays, not the one who bears the child.
If we turn to philosophers and sociologists such as Helena RagonĂŠ, H.M. Malm and Christine Sistare, surrogacy is seen as equally positive, but they describe it as a way to âbreak the biological paradigm,â to deconstruct nuclear families and heterosexual norms and to âallow women to transcend the limitations of their family roles.â These two narratives seem to be in conflict, yet they both support surrogacy.
But surrogacy is far from liberating. As a feminist and a humanist, I argue that surrogacy is emerging as a new form of womenâs oppression which has more in common with prostitution than one might think. While the sex industry commodifies womenâs sexuality, surrogacy commodifies womenâs reproduction. As Elizabeth Kane (a US surrogate mother who became opposed to surrogacy) has written, surrogate motherhood is nothing more that the transference of pain from one woman to another. One woman is in anguish because she cannot become a mother, and another woman may suffer for the rest of her life because she cannot know the child she bore for someone else. Surrogacy also turns children into commodities and is, effectively, baby trade.
The trade in pregnancy originated in the USA back in the 1970s. Following the Supreme Court decision in landmark Roe v. Wade (1973) which legalised abortion, the supply of newborns for adoption decreased drastically. While many US couples turned to international adoption, some did not want to adopt a child with a different ethnicity from themselves. Soon, advertisements began to appear asking for fertile young women who were prepared to be inseminated and then give up the resulting child. These ads were often placed by the men whose wives were infertile but still wanted children genetically related to themselves. Agencies sprung up in response to this new market, connecting childless couples with young women, often from working class backgrounds. By the 1980s, this had grown into an industry whose unethical strategies for signing up potential surrogates were revealed by investigative journalists such as Susan Ince, who went undercover as a potential surrogate.
The trade in pregnancy originated in the USA back in the 1970s. Agencies sprung up in response to this new market, connecting childless couples with young women, often from working class backgrounds. By the 1980s, this had grown into an industry.
When custody battles started taking place after a number of surrogate mothers such as Mary Beth Whitehead in 1985 changed their minds after giving birth, many US courts declared surrogacy contracts invalid. They said the rights to a child could not be handed over in exchange for money, and the birth mothers were found to have righteous claims to their children. But the surrogacy industry devised new ways to get around the courts. The intended parents would now also hire an egg donor, so that the surrogate mother would carry a child that was not genetically related to her. This became known as âgestational surrogacyâ, and in cases where the birth mother changed her mind and wanted to keep the baby, courts would state that she was not the mother, only a âcarrierâ. Embryo implantation also enabled the industry to move to countries such as Indiaâââan Indian woman could now carry a Caucasian or Japanese child for a much cheaper price. As Indian surrogate mother Salma tells researcher Amrita Pande:
âWho would choose to do this? I have had a lifetimeâs worth of injections pumped into me. Some big ones in my hips hurt so much. In the beginning I had about 20â25 pills almost every day. I feel bloated all the time. But I know I have to do it for my childrenâs future. This is not work, this is majboori (a compulsion). Where we are now, it canât possibly get any worse. In our village we donât have a hut to live in or crops in our farm. This work is not ethicalâââitâs just something we have to do to survive. When we heard of this surrogacy business, we didnât have any clothes to wear after the rainsâââjust one pair that used to get wetâââand our house had fallen down. What were we to do?â
Last year, the Indian government banned surrogacy for foreign singles and gay couples in an attempt to stop the country from becoming a haven for reproductive tourism. This has led to discussions of morality, sexual identity and definitions of what constitutes a ârealâ family. Critics of surrogacy are called conservative, moralist and anti-gay. As a feminist, I think surrogacy should be discussed not on the basis of who the intended parents might be, but on the basis of what surrogacy itself is. My questions are: Is surrogacy reproductive prostitution? And: Is surrogacy baby trade?
The first question startles many. At first surrogacy looks like the reverse of prostitution: it is reproduction without sex, not sex without reproduction. We see images of cute babies and happy families, not of seedy brothels. The âholy uterusâ, not the vagina, is put on the market. The archetype of the benevolent Madonna, not the whore, is projected. Yet in spite of these differences, they are both about selling a part of the female body. They both perpetuate the ideology that womenâs bodies exist for the purpose and purchase of others. We are told that women need to offer sex to men who are single, disabled or have special needsâââas if sex were a human right. We are told that gay couples, single men and infertile women need childrenâââas if having children were a human right. In both cases, women are obliged to surrender: to have sex without wanting it, to give birth to babies without getting to know them. Women are turned into factories: have sex for the purpose of others, have children for the purpose of others. In both industries, women are used as tools, not as human beings with feelings of their own.
Swedish intellectual Nina Bjork has written that one sign of an affluent society is having difficulty distinguishing desires from needs: we learn to desire the things we donât need and to call these desires needs. And our so-called needs become ever more specific: the longing for children becomes the right to use another womanâs womb for our own purposes. Behind this slippery logic stands the forceful, violent logic of profitability which makes it all too easy for the wishes of economically strong groups to be transformed into self-evident rights.
The forceful, violent logic of profitability which makes it all too easy for the wishes of economically strong groups to be transformed into self-evident rights.
The second question concerns the children. This is where surrogacy differs from prostitution. We are no longer speaking only of a buyer and a seller but also of a third party: the child. In commercial surrogacy, the child is de facto turned into a product. A few thousands dollars are paid to the mother when she delivers the newborn baby. This, by all definitions, constitutes baby trade. It is the buying and selling of children. But even in altruistic surrogacy, there is a drastic change in the way we look at children: as products to be exchanged through contracts. The children are denied the right to be with the mother who carried them in her body for nine months.
Lately, American children born from the early wave of domestic surrogacy in the 1980s have begun to speak up. Thirty-year old Jessica Kern campaigns to outlaw surrogacy and said to the New York Post: âLike I would choose this for myself? When the only reason youâre in this world is a big fat paycheck, itâs degrading.â âBrianâ writes on his blog Son of a Surrogate: âYes I am angry. Yes I feel cheated ⌠Itâs a shame and it sucks for me. Hell it sucks for all of us.â
Do all children born of surrogacy feel this way? Of course not. But the stories of Jessica and Brian should make everybody stop and think twice about surrogacy. We are dealing with an industry that, if we don´t stop it, will grow as big as the prostitution industry. In both cases, capitalism is expanding into the most basic structures of what it means to be human. What is being commercialised are our origins themselves. The surrogate sells not a âthingâ she produces, but her own body and her child. In another unfortunate mirroring of prostitution, we are seeing reports of women being trafficked into Thailand and China for the purposes of surrogacy.
No matter how much we might feel for Elton John, Ricky Martin or Nicole Kidman, we must ask ourselves the question: are there some things in life that should not be bought and sold? Such as the most important thing: ourselves, our origins, our bodies? If the answer is yes, I call on everyone to help stop the surrogacy industry before it is too late.
Read also: Renate Kleinâs Surrogacy: A Human Rights Violation.
