I’ve spent quite a bit of time over the last 9 years worrying myself sick about what Trump has done, is doing, and might do in the future to our country and our lives. I’ve spent many sleepless nights lying awake because of anxiety. But now Trump has decided to reassure us women. He says he’s doing what’s best for us, even though we don’t realize it. I know you’ve probably seen the message he sent to women on Truth Social, but I’m going to post it again here:
Donald J. Trump
@realDonaldTrump
WOMEN ARE POORER THAN THEY WERE FOUR YEARS AGO, ARE LESS HEALTHY THAN THEY WERE FOUR YEARS AGO, ARE LESS SAFE ON THE STREETS THAN THEY WERE FOUR YEARS AGO, ARE MORE DEPRESSED AND UNHAPPY THAN THEY WERE FOUR YEARS AGO, AND ARE LESS OPTIMISTIC AND CONFIDENT IN THE FUTURE THAN THEY WERE FOUR YEARS AGO! I WILL FIX ALL OF THAT, AND FAST, AND AT LONG LAST THIS NATIONAL NIGHTMARE WILL BE OVER. WOMEN WILL BE HAPPY, HEALTHY, CONFIDENT AND FREE! YOU WILL NO LONGER BE THINKING ABOUT ABORTION, BECAUSE IT IS NOW WHERE IT ALWAYS HAD TO BE, WITH THE STATES, AND A VOTE OF THE PEOPLE – AND WITH POWERFUL EXCEPTIONS, LIKE THOSE THAT RONALD REAGAN INSISTED ON, FOR RAPE, INCEST, AND THE LIFE OF THE MOTHER – BUT NOT ALLOWING FOR DEMOCRAT DEMANDED LATE TERM ABORTION IN THE 7TH, 8TH, OR 9TH MONTH, OR EVEN EXECUTION OF A BABY AFTER BIRTH. I WILL PROTECT WOMEN AT A LEVEL NEVER SEEN BEFORE. THEY WILL FINALLY BE HEALTHY, HOPEFUL, SAFE, AND SECURE. THEIR LIVES WILL BE HAPPY, BEAUTIFUL, AND GREAT AGAIN!
When Trump takes charge, everything will be wonderful and we will no longer think about abortion. Because Donald knows what’s best for us and that is that we should accept that we aren’t really people like men are. We can relax and just be vessels for men’s offspring if we are young enough or child care workers if we are too old to have our own babies. Finally this man is giving us the truth. We don’t own our bodies or our minds. We should just relax and follow the dictates of men like Trump.
It is so much nicer being a woman, now that Donald Trump is in charge!
You barely remember the Biden times at all, except in nightmares. In the dreams, regular eggs cost as much as Fabergé eggs. All the food at the grocery store is too expensive — if you made it to the store at all without being killed, sometimes twice. Also you were always thinking about abortion.
But then you wake up all the way and Donald Trump is protecting you and you are not thinking about abortion.
Mostly you feel wonderful all the time, happy and confident and not depressed because all that has been fixed. Every single problem the country had! Poof! And all you had to do was stop thinking about abortion.
Now, Donald Trump is back and you are not thinking about anything. All your anxieties are gone, now that men are handling all the country’s problems. It would have been a mistake to put a woman in charge! Fortunately, that did not happen. Fortunately, Donald Trump is guarding you. You are guarded! You are not worrying your pretty little head. Donald Trump is protecting you, just like the Bible said should happen. It did not mention him by name, but that was implied.
It was so tough in the before times, when you had to act as though you were a person. It was exhausting, like a dog standing on its hind legs all day. Of course, you weren’t a person, not really, and it is so much nicer to get to stop pretending. Much more restful this way. You are not thinking about abortion. Abortion is back in the hands of those who know best. The choice was the exhausting part; now, you get to be a blessed vessel and raise up as many children as they have decided is best. It is much nicer now….
Thank God the national nightmare of forcing you to make choices — as though your thoughts and desires mattered — is at an end. You wake up and smile at the picture of your patron saint, Donald Trump. You go to the market (JD Vance is in charge of eggs now; he has been lecturing the hens about the need to fertilize more of them) and buy one dozen. They cost exactly the right amount. You are not thinking about abortion.
It’s so much easier, now that I understand I’m not actually a person.
Former President Donald Trump is trying a new approach to winning over women voters by telling them that they are depressed, poor, anxious, unsafe and thinking about abortion ― but as their “protector,” he will change all that.
Alice Duer Miller
“I always thought women liked me,” Trump said at a rally in Pennsylvania on Monday. “I never thought I had a problem, but the fake news keeps saying women don’t like me. I don’t believe it.” [….]
Trump read an extended version of an all-caps rant he posted last week on his Truth Social website as he insisted that women are in dire need of his protection.
“Because I am your protector,” Trump said. “I want to be your protector. As president, I have to be your protector, I hope you don’t make too much of it. I hope the fake news doesn’t go, ‘Oh, he wants to be their protector.’ Well I am. As president, I have to be your protector.”
“You will no longer be abandoned, lonely or scared. You will no longer be in danger, you’re not gonna be in danger any longer. You will no longer have anxiety from all of the problems our country has today. You will be protected and I will be your protector,” he added. “Women will be happy, healthy, confident and free. You will no longer be thinking about abortion.”
Read a number of Twitter reactions to this message at the HuffPost link.
Donald Trump has always been wildly sexist. Generally, his sexism takes the form of reducing women to their looks, either praising their sex appeal or denigrating them as ugly. In private, of course, Trump behaves like a sex pest.
But his new campaign riff to women voters is something altogether more disturbing. He sounds like a domestic abuser….
Trump casts himself as a kind of husband to America’s women. “I am your protector,” he declares repeatedly. He presents himself as the solution to all the problems he imagines they are having in their personal lives:
You will no longer be abandoned, lonely, or scared. You will no longer be in danger. You’re not gonna be in danger any longer. You will no longer have anxiety from all of the problems our country has today. You will be protected, and I will be your protector. Women will be happy, healthy, confident, and free. You will no longer be thinking about abortion.
“You will no longer be abandoned, lonely, or scared. You will no longer be in danger. You’re not gonna be in danger any longer. You will no longer have anxiety from all of the problems our country has today. You will be protected, and I will be your protector. Women will be happy, healthy, confident, and free. You will no longer be thinking about abortion.”
Trump’s message to women is notably infantilizing.
What makes it so creepy is that he implicitly acknowledges that women are reluctant to support him and that their disagreement over abortion is the reason. But rather than claim that his abortion stance is more reasonable than they assume or that they should vote on the basis of other issues — that is, the way you would try to win over a voter who has rational concerns — he presumes women are crazy.
Trump addresses what he believes is the underlying distress that is causing women to think they don’t want Trump to serve another term as president. Women “are more stressed, and depressed, and unhappy than they were four years ago,” he says. This is because they are “lonely and abandoned.”
Their “anxiety” is being misdirected into the belief that they want abortion to be legal. But their actual problem, he insists, is loneliness and abandonment, which will be resolved by giving themselves over to Trump….
That is not an argument you’d make to free citizens. It is quasi-authoritarian appeal, Trump as national father figure, with an unmistakable undertone of menace. Women of America, you may think you don’t want to be with Trump. But you are wrong, and you are crazy, and if you return to Trump, you’ll realize he was right, and you will leave the worrying to him.
Honestly, this is worse than anything I heard about women’s place in the world back in the 1950s and 1960s. It’s difficult to believe it is really happening.
One night in March of 2023, Amari Marsh went to the bathroom and suffered a miscarriage. “I screamed because I was scared, because I didn’t know what was going on,” she recently recalled. An at-home pregnancy test in late 2022 had come back positive. But the South Carolina college studentsaid she continued to have her period—at least that’s how she interpreted the bleeding—so didn’t seek out prenatal care, figuring the test result must have been wrong.
Dorothy L. Sayers
Then, a few months later, Marsh told a reporter from KFF Health News, she began to experience severe cramping, “way worse” than regular menstrual pain. Two emergency room visits later, the 22-year-old biology major learnedshe was pregnant after all. Back at home that night, the contractions returned. Marsh woke up, rushed to the toilet, “and when I did, the child came.”
Miscarriages are extremely common in the US; among confirmed pregnancies, 10 to 20 percent will end in a loss. What happened to Marsh next is also becoming horrifically frequent in the post-Roe v. Wade era, according to a new report by the legal advocacy group Pregnancy Justice. Instead of treating her miscarriage as the health crisis and personal tragedy it was, prosecutors eventually charged her with murder/homicide by child abuse—punishable by 20 years to life in prison. Marsh spent three weeks behind bars, followed by another 13 months on house arrest, tracked by an ankle bracelet. She was finally cleared by a grand jury this past August, KFF said.
The Supreme Court’s landmark 2022 ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization “open[ed] the door to government intrusion into pregnancy in unprecedented ways,” Pregnancy Justice says, “throwing suspicion on pregnancy loss, particularly outside medical settings.” In the first year after Dobbs, at least 22 women around the US faced criminal prosecution after suffering miscarriages, stillbirths, or the death of babies born prematurely, the organization reports.
The Dobbs decision didn’t just unleash a raft of laws restricting and banning abortion—it also seems to have made authorities more skeptical of women whose pregnancies end prematurely for reasons that have nothing to do with abortion. “Most of the time, we don’t know why a pregnancy or infant demise happened,” says Wendy Bach, a law professor at the University of Tennessee Knoxville, who co-authored the report. “But in this post-Dobbs era, pregnancy loss is extremely suspicious. It can lead to criminal investigation, criminal charges, incarceration, and family separation.”
Pregnancy-loss cases represented just a fraction of the prosecutions tallied by Pregnancy Justice over 12 months. In total, Bach and her team found at least 210 cases in which authorities initiated charges against pregnant people for crimes related to pregnancy or birth. That’s a record number of pregnancy-related prosecutions in a single year—and, the researchers say, it’s almost certainly an undercount.
George Conway, the ex-husband of former Donald Trump aide Kellyanne Conway, is helping bring attention to the sexual assault claims against the former president as he seeks a second term in the White House.
On Wednesday, Sept. 25, the attorney’s political action committee launched ads featuring two of the Republican presidential nominee’s sexual assault accusers.
“At one point, Melania went upstairs to change her clothes for the next photo shoot, and Trump said to me, ‘I want to show you this beautiful painting, this beautiful room.’ He leads me to this room, pushes me against the wall, and starts kissing me forcefully,” she says. “I tried to push him. He kept coming back at me.”
“I was in shock and smothered, and he had his hands here against my shoulders. I felt sick inside. I felt horrified, and thank goodness the butler charges into the room,” she continues. “Like many women, I blamed myself. So Trump turned to me and said, ‘You know we’re going have an affair, don’t you?’ and Melania was approaching. I was horrified.”
Leeds said she encountered the former president at a charity event just two years after their alleged plane interaction, where he insulted her with a “crude remark.”
While Trump denied the claims in the Times article, Leeds vividly recalled the alleged encounter in the new ad, saying, “The airplane took off, and all of a sudden Donald Trump started groping me. He was trying to kiss me and I’m trying to push him away, he was basically overpowering me.”
“When he started putting his hand up my skirt I got out of the seat, grabbed my purse, and went back to my original seat and I certainly was shook up by the whole thing,” she adds.
Abuse of women isn’t the only negative result to come out of the radical right wing Supreme Court. Last night the Court allowed the state of Missouri to murder an innocent man.
Marcellus Williams was executed on Tuesday night in the US state of Missouri after spending more than two decades on death row.
Williams, who had two previous executions stayed, maintained he was innocent in the 1998 fatal stabbing of Felicia Gayle in a St Louis suburb, and a wide swath of people had opposed his death sentence.
An attorney representing Williams argued there was racial discrimination in selecting jurors and that DNA evidence in the case was mishandled.
Williams was denied a last-minute reprieve from the US Supreme Court, after Missouri’s top court and governor rejected his clemency requests early this week.
In a rare move, the three liberal justices on the US Supreme Court – Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson – said on Tuesday they disagreed with the conservative majority and would have granted a stay. They did not give a reason.
There were problems with the case against Williams:
Lawyers for Williams had said there were concerns over the handling of his case, arguing black jurors were wrongly excluded from his trial.
They also said there was no forensic evidence linking Williams to the crime scene and that the murder weapon had been mishandled, raising questions over DNA evidence.
Marcellus Williams
The trial prosecutor has said he followed procedure at the time by touching the murder weapon without gloves after it was tested in a crime lab….
The victim’s family had supported a life sentence instead of the death penalty, while local prosecutors had pressed to have the conviction overturned.
His execution had been stayed twice – once in 2017 and once in 2015 – due to the discovery of male DNA on the murder weapon that did not match Williams.
The state’s then-governor, Eric Greitens, a Republican, formed a panel to examine the case after granting the second stay, but he then left office amid a scandal and the panel never formed a conclusion.
Also concerned about the DNA, the local prosecuting attorney, Wesley Bell, requested a hearing.
But at that point it was discovered that the DNA evidence was spoiled from someone in the prosecutor’s office touching the knife without gloves, and the hearing was cancelled.
“This outcome did not serve the interests of justice,” Mr Bell said in a statement on Tuesday.
Donald Trump was meeting privately in mid-September with one of his oldest friends, Steve Wynn, when the casino mogul and Republican mega-donor delivered the former president a blunt warning: You’re off message, and it isn’t helping.
Trump had been distracted, in Wynn’s view. The former president at the time was promoting a conspiracy theory that Haitian immigrants were eating people’s cats and dogs in Ohio, among other things. To drive home his point, Wynn showed Trump polling and suggested the former president would be better off focusing on policy issues where Republicans see his opponent, Kamala Harris, as vulnerable, according to two people briefed on the meeting and granted anonymity to describe it.
The meeting underscored a key point of tension inside the Trump campaign. While polls show the race is incredibly close, some of Trump’s allies are concerned that his impulses and coarse approach to campaigning are undermining him against Harris, a rival who has proved far stronger than his previous opponent, Joe Biden.
In interviews, more than a dozen Trump allies described the former president as reaching a crossroads — faced with the choice of continuing with the missteps that have overtaken the past several weeks of his campaign or embracing a more calculated approach aimed at appealing to a small subset of undecided voters who are likely to sway the outcome of the election. In recent weeks, he has brought into his fold destabilizing forces like social media provocateur Laura Loomer and his controversial former campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, plugged commemorative Trump coins, and asserted that if he loses, Jews would be partly to blame.
“It’s not that he’s going backwards,” said one Trump ally granted anonymity to speak freely. “But he should be doing better.”
Kamala Harris is planning a network interview, but I doubt if it will shut the media critics up.
Vice President Kamala Harris will be interviewed by Stephanie Ruhle in Pittsburgh Wednesday night, in what will be her first one-on-one network interview since becoming the Democratic nominee.
The interview will air on MSNBC at 7 p.m. ET and coincides with Harris’ fourth visit to the area since launching her campaign, according to a news release from the Harris campaign. Pennsylvania is a key battleground state; no Democrat has won the White House without the Keystone State since 1948.
MSNBC’s announcement follows criticism over the lack of media interviews the vice president has done. Reporting from Axios and The Telegraph earlier in September revealed that the Harris-Walz campaign were giving fewer interviews.
Oh, boo hoo.
That’s all I have for you today. Take care everyone, and if you’re a women, assert your personhood!
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Yesterday we lost bell hooks (born Gloria Watkins), feminist theorist, poet, and activist.
I’m ashamed to admit that I’ve never read her work, but I was impressed by what I read about hooks this morning. Dakinikat was inspired by her, so perhaps she will share her thoughts today and/or tomorrow.
Our nation lost a prolific author, activist, and trailblazer. bell hooks’ profound and positive influence will be with us for generations to come. May she rest in power. pic.twitter.com/6yklT75Qqw
Gloria Jean Watkins, better known by her pen name bell hooks, has died aged 69.
Her niece Ebony Motley tweeted: “The family of @bellhooks is sad to announce the passing of our sister, aunt, great aunt and great great aunt.”
She also attached a statement, which said that “the family of Gloria Jean Watkins is deeply saddened at the passing of our beloved sister on December 15, 2021. The family honored her request to transition at home with family and friends by her side.”
The author, professor and activist was born in Hopkinsville, Kentucky in 1952, and published more than 30 books in her lifetime, covering topics including race, feminism, capitalism and intersectionality.
She adopted her maternal great-grandmother’s name as a pen name, since she so admired her, but used lowercase letters to distinguish herself from her family member. hooks’ first major work, Ain’t I a Woman?, was published in 1981, and became widely recognised as an important feminist text. It was named one of the 20 most influential women’s books in the last 20 years by Publishers Weekly in 1992.
She went on to write Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center in 1984, All About Love: New Visions in 2000 and We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity in 2004, continuing to draw on themes of feminism, race, love and gender.
Since 2004, she taught at Berea College in Kentucky, a liberal arts college that offers free tuition.
In 2016 hooks wrote in the Guardian that Beyoncé’s album Lemonade was “capitalist money-making at its best”, but criticised the notion of “freedom” depicted in the lyrics. “To truly be free,” wrote hooks, “we must choose beyond simply surviving adversity, we must dare to create lives of sustained optimal wellbeing and joy.”
“I want my work to be about healing,” she said in 2018 when she was inducted into the Kentucky Writers’ Hall of Fame. “I am a fortunate writer because every day of my life practically I get a letter, a phone call from someone who tells me how my work has transformed their life.”
From The Literary Hub:
hooks’s first published work of theory, Ain’t I A Woman: Black Women and Feminism, was published when she was 29 but written when she was an undergraduate, launching a four-decade-long career of writing and teaching, with a focus on classroom accessibility. hooks’s extensive body of scholarship and poetry—that remains and will continue to remain relevant—was consistent in its generosity, emphasizing the importance of loving communities to challenging systemic inequalities. Hooks believed a “militant commitment to feminism” was not at all at odds with joy and humor; in fact, that love “is the necessary foundation enabling us to survive the wars, the hardships, the sickness, and the dying with our spirits intact.” As she told The New York Times in 2015,
“We cannot have a meaningful revolution without humor. Every time we see the left or any group trying to move forward politically in a radical way, when they’re humorless, they fail. Humor is essential to the integrative balance that we need to deal with diversity and difference and the building of community. For example, I love to be in conversation with Cornel West. We always go high and we go low, and we always bring the joyful humor in. The last talk he and I gave together, many people were upset because we were silly together. But I consider it a high holy calling that we can be humorous together. How many times do we see an African-American man and an African-American woman talking together, critiquing one another, and yet having delicious, humorous delight? It’s a miracle.”
The late bell hooks, one of the great writers and cultural critics of the 20th century, “believed criticism came from a place of love, a desire for things worthy of losing ourselves to,” @huahsu writes.https://t.co/XpxFrJfy5o
I came to her work in the mid-nineties, during a fertile era of Black cultural studies, when it felt like your typical alternative weekly or independent magazine was as rigorous as an academic monograph. For hooks, writing in the public sphere was just an application of her mind to a more immediate concern, whether her subject was Madonna, Spike Lee, or, in one memorably withering piece, Larry Clark’s “Kids.” She was writing at a time when the serious study of culture—mining for subtexts, sifting for clues—was still a scrappy undertaking. As an Asian American reader, I was enamored with how critics like hooks drew on their own backgrounds and friendships, not to flatten their lives into something relatably universal but to remind us how we all index a vast, often contradictory array of tastes and experiences. Her criticism suggested a pulsing, tireless brain trying to make sense of how a work of art made her feel. She modelled an intellect: following the distant echoes of white supremacy and Black resistance over time and pinpointing their legacies in the works of Quentin Tarantino or Forest Whitaker’s “Waiting to Exhale.”
Yet her work—books such as “Reel to Real” or “Art on My Mind,” which have survived decades of rereadings and underlinings—also modelled how to simply live and breathe in the world. She was zealous in her praise—especially when it came to Julie Dash’s “Daughters of the Dust,” a film referenced countless times in her work—and she never lost grasp of how it feels to be awestruck while standing before a stirring work of art. She couldn’t deny the excitement as the lights dim and we prepare to surrender to the performance. But she made demands on the world. She believed criticism came from a place of love, a desire for things worthy of losing ourselves to….
This has been a particularly trying time for critics who came of age in the eighties and nineties, as giants like hooks, Greg Tate, and Dave Hickey have passed. hooks was a brilliant, tough critic—no doubt her death will inspire many revisitations of works like “Ain’t I a Woman,” “Black Looks,” or “Outlaw Culture.” Yet she was also a dazzling memoirist and poet. In 1982, she published a poem titled “in the matter of the egyptians” in Hambone, a journal she worked on with her then partner, Nathaniel Mackey. It reads:
ancestral bodies buried in sand sun treasured flowers press in a memory book they pass through loss and come to this still tenderness swept clean by scarce winds surfacing in the watery passage beyond death
I enjoyed reading this piece from 2019 by Min Jin Lee in The New York Times: In Praise of bell hooks.
In 1987, I was a sophomore at Yale. I’d been in the United States for 11 years, and although I was a history major, I wanted to read novels again. I signed up for “Introduction to African-American Literature,” which was taught by Gloria Watkins, an assistant professor in the English department, and she was such a wonderful teacher that I signed up for her other class, “Black Women and Their Fiction.”
Gloria — as we were allowed to address her in the classroom — had a slight figure with elegant wrists that peeked out of her tunic sweater sleeves. She was soft-spoken with a faint Southern accent, which I attributed to her birthplace, Hopkinsville, Ky. She was in her mid-30s then but looked much younger. Large, horn-rimmed glasses framed the open gaze of her genuinely curious mind. You knew her classes were special. The temperature in the room seemed to change in her presence because everything felt so intense and crackling like the way the air can feel heavy before a long-awaited rain. It wasn’t just school then. No, I think, we were falling in love with thinking and imagining again….
I was 19 when I took hooks’s classes, and I was just becoming a young feminist myself. I had begun my study of feminism with Mary Wollstonecraft, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Virginia Woolf, Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem, among other white women, and perhaps, because I was foreign-born — rightly or wrongly — I had not expected that people like me would be included in their vision of feminist liberation. Women and men of Asian ethnicities are so often neglected, excluded and marginalized in the Western academy, so as a college student I’d no doubt internalized my alleged insignificance. bell hooks changed my limited perception.
Her book of theory taught me to ask for more from art, literature, media, politics and history — and for me, a Korean girl who had been born in a divided nation once led by kings, colonizers, then a succession of presidents who were more or less dictators, and for millenniums, that had enforced rigid class systems with slaves and serfs until the early 20th century, and where women of all classes were deeply oppressed and brutalized, I needed to see that the movement had a space for me.
What else is in the news? January 6 and the never ending pandemic.
January 6: Could it be that the investigation is really heating up?
Ed Yong at The Atlantic: America Is Not Ready for Omicron. The new variant poses a far graver threat at the collective level than the individual one—the kind of test that the U.S. has repeatedly failed.
Have courage and enjoy the present moment. There’s no telling what will happen next.
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Fasten your seat belts, newsjunkies. I’m feeling very much like Natalie Maines in her song/video, “Not Ready to Make Nice.”
I have a couple questions for us as a society.
To the right [viaNYC Light Brigade]: The night before the 50th anniversary celebrations of the March on Washington, the NYC Light Brigade travelled to DC to shed light on Dr. Martin Luther King’s message to End Militarism, and contrast that with the current administration’s drone warfare policy which has resulted in the death of untold civilians throughout the world.
For what exactly are we marching and showing solidarity for this 28th of August in the year 2013?
I know it’s terribly disturbing-of-all-things-party-unity, which is all the more reason why I must ask you all to think seriously about what happens to a feminist dream deferred?
What feminist dream, you ask?
Let’s go with the Hollie McNish spoken word poem I shared with y’all a couple months ago. To refresh, here’s both the transcript and video (scroll down for the latter)… I know it’s long, but it’s worth it (especially if you just scroll down, click play, and listen for yourself):
Poem: Reverse:
I would love to reverse things for a day
A short break for those who say its all ok
I’d have an MTV where every male celebrity was dancing on a pole in pants
While all the female, fully clothed, stood back, just singing
As they can, cos that’s their talent
For just one day
The women’s lifestyle section of the magazine rack stands would
See a sea of choice of topics
Not just cooking, home or looking grand
But politics and sport and art, design and science, top shelf porn perhaps
And watch as men look all forlorn and wonder why their lifestyle section is full of naked pouting men on cover
Licking gadgets in their underwear
For just one day I swear I’d scream
To see young male celebrities standing on tv next 2 50 year old female copresenters
Watching as this token eye candy giggles politely at everything she says
I said for just one day I would pay to see a newspaper take a double spread about what the president eats for tea
ten pages to talk about David Camerons choice of socks and hand cream
While focusing on Kate Middletons degree and how she feel about personal freedom
Next to images of Price Williams top ten jackets worn this Summer
For just one day I’d read the sports pages and undercover news reporting without watching as men gawp at 18 year old tits while I’m trying to make the point that women can be more than this
And page three licks should be in specialist magazines not newspapers anyone can grab and read and
For just one day I wonder what would happen
If there were airbrushed half dressed posed male teens on the front of every women’s magazine and airbrushed half dressed posed male teens on the front of every mans magazine
And airbrushed half dressed posed male teens on the front of every shop window
And airbrushed half dressed posed male teens on the front of every tv screen
And loads of fully dressed women in photos everywhere
Cameras staring at their faces in shoulder shots, their wrinkles photoshopped deeper like every male magazine man feature
For just one day
Music award ceremonies would award
Rihanna for her singing
And think about not giving awards to Chris brown
And women with amazing voices would be awarded for their amazing voices and they would show their amazing voices on stage by singing
And Men with amazing voices would be awarded for their amazing voices and they would show their amazing voices on stage by singing whilst also shaking their crotch and pretending to shag the floor, snogging other men with amazing voices while dancing around poles in gold stringed jock straps and swimming trunks
And lunging forward
And bending over with cameras pointed at their arses
For just one day I’d go to parties where the women, like the men, dressed for the weather and walked the high street to the club in coats and jumpers as the rain and snow fell down
For just one day
And for just one day
I might those men around me say:
For fuck sake,
I don’t like gay porn so why do I have to watch naked fucking men all day
I might hear those men say
Is it really ok to show two men in g strings pretending to fuck one another in a dance routine on X factor at 7 oclock in front of my sons
And I might hear those men say
Is it not enough that he is an amazing singer or rapper or songwriter and musician, why does have to wear a flashing crocodile toothed jock strap everytime he performs on stage
And I might hear those men say
Maybe, I might hear those men say,
Ok, I get it,
You’re not just on your period.
Perhaps you have a point.
Maybe you’re not just jealous of her tits
Maybe there’s more to this than you being annoyed by the way women are portrayed in the media.
And for just one day
I might wake up and not worry about my daughter growing up to be a women in this place where newspapers prey on teenage tits and tell me this is all ok
For just one day.
I’d like to see what those men who mock me say
If everything was the other way around.
So, what happens to this feminist dream deferred exactly?
If you think a woman in a tan vinyl bra and underwear, grabbing her crotch and grinding up on a dance partner is raunchy, trashy, and offensive but you don’t think her dance partner is raunchy, trashy, or offensive as he sings a song about “blurred” lines of consent and propagating rape culture, then you may want to reevaluate your acceptance of double standards and your belief in stereotypes about how men vs. women “should” and are “allowed” to behave.
Sincerely,
Now, let’s take a look at another late August milestone/anniversary, August 26, 1970 [via Haymarket Books]:
The Women’s Strike for Equality was a National strike which took place in the US on August 26, 1970—the 50th anniversary of the passing of the Nineteenth Amendment. The rally was sponsored by the National Organization for Women (NOW). Defying mounted police, almost 50,000 marched down NY City’s Fifth Avenue. Dutch women marched on the US embassy in Amsterdam to show support, while French feminists demonstrated at the Arc de Triomphe, carrying a banner that read, “More Unknown Than the Unknown Soldier: His Wife.”
The strike primarily focused on equal opportunity in the workforce, political rights for women, and social equality in relationships such as marriage. It also addressed the right to have an abortion and free childcare.
Alice Paul was chair of a major committee (congressional) of the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) within a year, in her mid-twenties, but a year later (1913) Alice Paul and others withdrew from the NAWSA to form the Congressional Union for Woman Suffrage. This organization evolved into the National Woman’s Party in 1917, and Alice Paul’s leadership was key to this organization’s founding and future.
Alice Paul and Militancy:
In England, Alice Paul had taken part in more radical protests for woman suffrage, including participating in the hunger strikes. She brought back this sense of militancy, and back in the U.S. she organized protests and rallies and ended up imprisoned three times.
[…]
Equal Rights Amendment (ERA):
After the 1920 victory for the federal amendment, Paul became involved in the struggle to introduce and pass an Equal Rights Amendment (ERA). The Equal Rights Amendment was finally passed in Congress in 1970 and sent to the states to ratify. However, the number of states necessary never ratified within the specified time limit and the Amendment failed.
Alice Paul and Peace:
Paul also was active in the Peace movement, stating at the outbreak of World War II that if women had helped to end World War I, the second war would not have been necessary.
If American women would increase their voting turnout by ten percent, I think we would see an end to all of the budget cuts in programs benefiting women and children.
In the words of Dr. Dorothy Height (from her memoir Open Wide the Freedom Gates, p. 200-1):
As economic pressures tightened, the black woman found herself trapped in a triple bind of racism, sexism, and poverty.
America, be true to what you said on paper. And, connect some dots already.
If it’s not Miley’s buttcheek, it’s Rihanna. If it’s not Rihanna, it’s Britney. If it’s not Britney, it’s Janet Jackson’s tit.
If it’s not Janet Jackson, it’s Honey Boo Boo Child and her mom or whatever their names are. (I thought we loved those very same characters in Little Miss Sunshine, but I guess that was only for Hollywood’s benefit.)
If it’s not the Honey Boo Boos, it’s the entire Real Housewives franchise cast of Bravo TV trying to keep up with those evil Kardashian women… (But, never ever Ryan Seacrest…)
Or, it’s Paula Dean:I’ve tried to connect some dots and vignettes here for you, that I think present a social and political commentary/context for discussing what we should be marching for–I’m going to stop here, because if I haven’t made my point clear by now, you’re probably not reading anymore anyway 😉
Also, I want to stop just short of offering my explicit answers so you can fill in the blank(s) yourself, below in the comments:
Today I march/pledge my solidarity for .
And, with that I’m going to turn the soapbox over to you Sky Dancers. Do your thing!
Sisterhood…Solidarity, forever.
Oh, and… Hillary 2016:
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I see “Batman” is still trending on my social media feeds for the second day in a row. Gahhhh. Please alert me when the next super-shero blockbuster is due out, thanks.
Honestly, I’ve been super busy this week and really out of the loop news-wise, and even just feminist junkie wise this week, so y’all please chime in, in the comments, with whatever you’ve got on your blogging list this weekend. All I know is I still believe in equal rights for every last person on this earth! And, I really love this graphic from “Have a Gay Day” on fb.
Speaking of human rights for ALL–I’ll start with a super depressing story on one of the most marginalized and forgotten populations I can think of, then build my way up to some more inspiring stories.
Next month, Christine Stark—a student with the University of Minnesota, Duluth, who is completing her Master’s degree in social work—will complete an examination of the sex trade in Minnesota, in which she compiles anecdotal, first hand accounts of Aboriginal women, particularly from northern reservations, being trafficked across state, provincial, and international lines to be forced into servitude in the sex industry on both sides of the border.
Stark’s paper stems from a report she co-wrote, published by the Indian Women’s Sexual Assault Centre in Duluth in 2011, entitled, “The Garden of Truth: The Prostitution and Trafficking of Native Women in Minnesota.” Through the process of researching and penning this report, Stark kept hearing stories of trafficking in the harbours and on the freighters of Duluth and Thunder Bay. The numerous stories and the gradual realization that this was an issue decades, perhaps centuries, in the making, compelled Stark to delve further into what exactly is taking place.
She decided to conduct an exploratory study, “simply because we have these stories circulating and we wanted to gather information and begin to understand what has happened and what currently is happening around the trafficking of Native American and First Nations women on the ships” said Stark, in an interview with CBC Radio’s Superior Morning. “Hearing from so many Native women over generations talking about the ‘boat whores,’ prostitution on the ships or the ‘parties on the ships,’ this is something that… was really entrenched in the Native community and we wanted to collect more specific information about it.”
Through her independent research and work with the Indian Women’s Sexual Assault Centre, Stark interviewed hundreds of Native women who have been through the trauma of the Lake Superior sex trade. The stories she’s compiled are evidence of an underground industry that’s thriving on the suffering of First Nations women, which is seemingly going unchecked and underreported.
I don’t even have the energy this afternoon to rant. I’m glad Stark is researching this story. This is just so sad.
And, appalling, racist, misogynist, capitalist/classist, the whole she-bang of despicableness that is patriarchy:
In an article written for the Duluth Star Tribune, Stark describes one disturbing anecdote of an Anishinaabe woman who had just left a shelter after being beaten by her pimp—who was a wealthy, white family man. He paid her bills, rent, and the essentials for her children, but on weekends, “brought up other white men from the Cities for prostitution with Native women…he had her role play the racist ‘Indian maiden’ and ‘European colonizer’ myth with him during sex.”
Another important snippet:
I spoke with Kazia Pickard, the Director of Policy and Research with the Ontario Native Women’s Association based in Thunder Bay. Their organization has also been researching this issue. Kazia told me over email: “People assume that trafficking always takes place across international borders, however, the vast majority of people who are trafficked in Canada are indigenous women and girls from inside Canada and sometimes, as we’re now starting to understand, across the US border.”
In an earlier interview with the CBC, she also alluded to the possibility that there was trafficking taking place across borders in Southern Ontario as well. She made it clear to me that the image most people imagine when they think about “human trafficking” often isn’t accurate: “The majority of women who are trafficked in Canada are indigenous women and girls. So it’s not that you have people being trafficked across international borders in shipping containers or something like that.”
This is all too reminiscent of what I call the “stranger danger from within”… the manipulators and abusers with which women and children share a community, as opposed to the creepy guy no one ever knew:
Well, now that I’ve sufficiently depressed you, how about a pick-me up? H/t to Joyce Arnold on this one–it’s a Bert and Ernie montage to Macklemore’s “Same Love”… Enjoy! … :
Here’s another one for smiles, just because:
Okay keep those warm and fuzzies somewhere nearby in your spiritual reserves, because this next one is depressing again…a not-so great development on a not-good story we’ve been following here at Sky Dancing…
Storage tank leak sparks fears more could follow suit
Tokyo Electric Power Company workers have detected high levels of radiation in a ditch that flows into the ocean from a leaking tank at the crippled Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant.
Japan’s nuclear watchdog said Thursday the leak could be the beginning of a new disaster – a series of leaks of contaminated water from hundreds of steel tanks holdng massive amounts of radioactive water coming from three melted reactors, as well as underground water running into reactor and turbine basements.
A new disaster? Uh, have we even resolved any of the previous disasters?!
This just sounds horrible, and I don’t want to be alarmist…I defer to experts on this stuff in our Sky Dancing community who can make better sense of all this of course, but WTF?!! Is this like a domino effect of Fukushimas? :
Tokyo Electric Power Co. says about 300,000 litres of contaminated water leaked from one of the tanks, possibly through a seam. The leak is the fifth, and worst, since last year involving tanks of the same design at the wrecked Fukushima Dai-ichi plant, raising concerns that contaminated water could begin leaking from storage tanks one after another.
“That’s what we fear the most. We must remain alert. We should assume that what has happened once could happen again, and prepare for more,” Nuclear Regulation Authority chairman Shunichi Tanaka told a news conference. “We are in a situation where there is no time to waste.” The watchdog also proposed at a weekly meeting Wednesday to raise the rating of the seriousness of the leak to level three, a “serious incident,” from level one, “an anomaly,” on an International Nuclear and Radiological event scale from zero to seven.
The watchdog urged TEPCO to step up monitoring for leaks and take precautionary measures.
Yeah, I’m not holding my breath waiting for TEPCO to do that. /sigh
I think I could use some more feminist lolcat, how about you? I really love this one:
And, as the trend of this post has been established, yes, I’ve got another sad one for you… via SocialistWorker, Struggling for their lives:
Orlando Sepúlveda reports from Chicago on a struggle led by immigrants whose loved ones are being denied a place on transplant lists at local hospitals.
Some of the hunger strikers at the Our Lady of Guadalupe Anglican Catholic Church (Orlando Sepúlveda | SW)
IMMIGRANT RIGHTS activists in Chicago held a memorial march, followed by a daylong occupation outside Northwestern Memorial Hospital following the death of Sarai Rodriguez, a 25-year-old undocumented woman who was in critical need of a liver transplant, but had been denied by the hospital last March, according to her mother, because she was uninsured and couldn’t afford the procedure.
Once again, I’m so exhausted by this. We can and must do better. This is an inhumane system. Human beings are not illegal. Insurance is not healthcare. And, healthcare is not a privilege–it is a right.
Here’s something cool to end with on Howard Zinn’s birthday:
“I feel very lucky to have been Howard Zinn‘s student. He was a very creative, magical teacher. He taught us how to think for ourselves, to analyze, to question what we read, and speak truth to power. He was just engaging in every way. . . .I don’t think I would have survived at Spelman in the late ’50s without Howie. But he was extraordinary. He didn’t just teach; he lived what he taught.” — Marian Wright Edelman
Continue reading this and other stories collected by the Zinn Education Project from former students in honor of Zinn’s birthday today and in honor of the impact of powerful teachers every day. Please read and share: http://bit.ly/1bQtaGI
Well, that’s what caught my eye this afternoon, Sky Dancers. Please share what’s caught yours and have a great Caturday!
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Hi, I’m baaaack. How have you been, newsjunkies? As you know, a week is a whirlwind in sex and politics, so… prepare yourself for a very un-fancy link feast…starting with some items on Our Gal Gals, of course.
I really am wary of this “perceived inevitability” crap in the progressive feeding trough, though. We’ve been to that rodeo before–pass on Meet the Beast all over again. Hillary’s likely running–we see all the political movement opening the way for her to essentially be drafted into doing so. But, she’s not inevitable, thank you very much David Axelrod and co.
Please, remember as a true Hillary stalwart–Peter Daou–has cautioned in his “A Reader’s Guide to Anti-Hillary Themes.” Repeat after me, Sky Dancers: Hillary is not inevitable. “No matter what she says about working hard, staying focused and not taking anything for granted, detractors create this perch then try to knock her down from it.” –Daou
And, though I can’t see the lovely Liz Warren primarying Hillary, damn the debates we could have from a match-up of that kind would be epic and exhilarating. If only the late Stephanie Tubbs Jones were still alive (not that she would primary Hill either). Now, that would really be a primary season to savor.
Wonkgirl daydreams aside… I *welcome* a healthy primary contest. May the best shero win–it will only make her stronger as a candidate and Madame president. Maybe good ol’ Joe can change his name on the ballot to Robinette Biden. I know, bad Wonk. Just can’t help myself. I still remember his philosopher king distinction on the campaign trail in ’08 that “girl-girls are tougher than boy-girls.” (I would link if I could find a source that wasn’t batshit rightwing. Google at your own peril. I do remember Joe Biden saying this, though. Just nobody on the left wanted to look at it because he was on the Obama ticket by then.) Seriously, I can’t wait for a healthy primary debate.
If they think Hillary fatigue is a concern this far out, they ought to actually worry about Hillary/Woman hater fatigue. The more desperate they get in their respective Hillary and Obama derangement, the more they will “radicalize hundreds of thousands of us” that will turn into millions and millions of us scary hairy feminists who “don’t give a flying frigidaire about your Boehners, Weiners, or Spitzers” at the national ballot box or elsewhere. Or, you know. Just normal everyday people who don’t want a bunch of Newt Gingrich clones on stupid-steroids running this country into the ground with a Second Contract against America.
Chris Christie: Teanderthal extraordinaire
Flashback to last August:
“For instance, I hear people talk all the time about female voters. I think it’s condescending to women to say we have to have a different message for women than we have with men. I’m going to lay out a message for our party tonight [at the Republican convention] that I think will resonate just as much with women voters as it will with men voters.”
An old but classic gem from the Guardian in 2009 that popped up in my radfem reads this week: Sandi Toksvig’s top 10 unsung heroines. Love this list. Do you know who invented the cotton gin? Hint: Her name wasn’t Eli Whitney. (Incidentally, she’s also the wife of American Revolutionary War general Nathanael Greene.)
Be-YOU-tiful, Sky dancers! Have at it in the comments. I’ll talk to y’all later tonight.
Right now, I’m off to go take care of a few things before my doctor sister’s White Coat ceremony this evening. This is the girl who rolled her little eyes at me for making her do “really hard” book reports on pandas when I played teacher and she, reluctant/only teacher’s pet. Well, look at her now. My Little Sweetheart forever, all grown up! I may be older than her by a gazillion years, but she inspires me to keep going…
…not unlike Hillary or Harriet Tubman. (“If you hear the dogs…keep going.” –Hills, DNC 2008.)
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The Sky Dancing banner headline uses a snippet from a work by artist Tashi Mannox called 'Rainbow Study'. The work is described as a" study of typical Tibetan rainbow clouds, that feature in Thanka painting, temple decoration and silk brocades". dakinikat was immediately drawn to the image when trying to find stylized Tibetan Clouds to represent Sky Dancing. It is probably because Tashi's practice is similar to her own. His updated take on the clouds that fill the collection of traditional thankas is quite special.
You can find his work at his website by clicking on his logo below. He is also a calligraphy artist that uses important vajrayana syllables. We encourage you to visit his on line studio.
I’ve spent quite a bit of time over the last 9 years worrying myself sick about what Trump has done, is doing, and might do in the future to our country and our lives. I’ve spent many sleepless nights lying awake because of anxiety. But now Trump has decided to reassure us women. He says he’s doing what’s best for us, even though we don’t realize it. I know you’ve probably seen the message he sent to women on Truth Social, but I’m going to 
From The Literary Hub:
Gloria — as we were allowed to address her in the classroom — had a slight figure with elegant wrists that peeked out of her tunic sweater sleeves. She was soft-spoken with a faint Southern accent, which I attributed to her birthplace, Hopkinsville, Ky. She was in her mid-30s then but looked much younger. Large, horn-rimmed glasses framed the open gaze of her genuinely curious mind. You knew her classes were special. The temperature in the room seemed to change in her presence because everything felt so intense and crackling like the way the air can feel heavy before a long-awaited rain. It wasn’t just school then. No, I think, we were falling in love with thinking and imagining again….
Some of the hunger strikers at the Our Lady of Guadalupe Anglican Catholic Church (Orlando Sepúlveda | SW)
peej
Carissa
bostonboomer
dakinikat
ecocatwoman
mablue2
Mama Lopez
peggysue22
quixote
skydancingguestblogger
Mona (aka Wonk the Vote)
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