Archive for 2001
Sisterhood is Powerful — Unless You Happen to be Stuck in Afghanistan
At the end of October, the Village Voice ran an interesting article by Sharon Lerner examining feminist attitudes toward the war against Afghanistan. In hindsight some of the comments look downright silly, but women’s rights advocate Hibaaq Osman’s take on the war is downright chilling.
Lerner notes that last year Osman gave a speech at the United Nations in which she said that the only place in the world where military force might be justified would be to overthrow the Taliban. But with such a war actually underway, Osman had a change of hart. She told Lerner,
I said it, but I was just making a point. This predicament is a test for feminists. We have seen our worst nightmare — women being dehumanized and shot in public — and it makes us more radical. It makes us angry enough to entertain the idea of war. But do I support war? No. No. No. War is not OK under any circumstances. The whole thing simply breaks my heart.
Which, of course, is precisely what people who hang prostitutes in stadiums filled with thousands of people (as the Taliban did) want to hear.
Meanwhile, the article also quotes Susan Sontag who wrote a controversial New Yorker criticizing the war against Afghanistan. Sontag tells Lerner that, “I continue to wish with all my heart for the [Taliban] regime to be overthrown; I just don’t think the U.S. military can do it.” Apparently military analysis is not exactly Sontag’s forte.
Source:
What women want. Sharon Lerner, The Village Voice, October 31 - November 6, 2001.
Tags: Afghanistan
Canada Gives Parents a License to Kidnap
A recent decision by a jury in a Canadian child kidnapping case gave a new meaning to the word bizarre.
The case started with Carline Vandenelsen, 39, who kidnapped her three children from her husband, Craig Merkley, 45, who had custody of the children. Vandenelsen thoroughly planned the kidnapping, confided in several people that she planned to kidnap her children, then hid them in her trunk while she crossed over the border into the United States. Yet, a jury recently acquitter her of kidnapping by agreeing with her defense’s bizarre legal theory.
See if this makes sense to you. Under Canadian law, parents accused of kidnapping can be acquitted if they committed the crime to prevent the children from imminent harm. Vandenelsen argued that she believed a court was about to sever her parental rights over her children. She reasoned that if her children were deprived of her by the courts, that they would suffer harm. Therefore, she argued, she was acting lawfully to protect her children when she kidnapped them.
And a jury agreed with this idiotic theory. This is especially puzzling since Canadian law requires that there been an objective need for a protective abduction, and it is hard to see a court order regarding custody of children fulfilling that criteria (in fact, the jury implicitly undermines its own decision by agreeing with this reasoning).
The jury did not get to hear the evidence a judge used to first limit Vandenelsen’s visits with her children to alternate Saturdays. Merkley tape recorded calls between Vandenelsen and her children. A court psychiatrist who analyzed the tapes testified that Vandenelsen was so emotionally abusive to her children that her access to them should be restricted to special occasions (the tapes are sealed per a court order). The judge in the case was set to make a final decision on the matter before she fled the country.
Even though the didn’t hear the tapes, it is still difficult to understand why a jury would buy Vandenelsen’s defense. As Merkley put it, “I think that they’ve just declared open season for anyone who wants to abduct their children.
Source:
Abduction of triplets a ‘necessity,’ jury rules. Francine Dube, National Post, October 27, 2001.
Tags: Uncategorized
Ann Quindlen: Women Should Have to Register for the Draft, Just Like Men
Newsweek columnist Anna Quindlen wrote a column the other day noting that although 1 in 5 new military recruits are women, men are still singled out and required to register with selective service for a potential future draft. Quindlen argues that this is a sexist anachronism. But, really, the entire selective service process is an anachronism.
To be sure, if there’s going to be mandatory draft registration, it should not discriminate against sex. Quindlen writes that when Jimmy Carter restored draft registration after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, both he and the Army chief of staff wanted registration to apply to both men and women.
Congress, however, rejected that idea and the Supreme Court held that since women were not allowed to serve in combat positions, it didn’t make sense to require them to register for the draft. But now women are actively engaged in combat in Afghanistan, so that argument doesn’t hold much water anymore.
But as much as I agree with Quindlen about the discriminatory nature of a male-only draft, the problem is really with the draft itself. For example, Quindlen chides feminists for not being more vocal about including women in the draft,
In 1980 NOW released a resolution that buried support for the registration of women beneath opposition to the draft, despite the fact that the draft had been redesigned to eliminate the vexing inequities of Vietnam, when the sons of the working class served and the sons of the Ivy League did not.
Huh? On this point I agree with the National Organization for Women — the draft is in principal wrong, and the Selective Service registration requirement should be eliminated. But, beyond that, as NOW put it in that 1980 resolution, people should “oppose any registration or draft that excludes women as an unconstitutional denial of rights to both young men and women.”
Opposition to the draft is not, as Quindlen implies, solely based on the class-based inequities of the Vietnam-era draft. In fact, at this point the selective service is largely symbolic with the Pentagon itself acknowledging in 1993 that eliminating it would have “no effect on military mobilization requirements, little effect on the time it would take to mobilize and no measurable effect on military recruitment.”
Draft registration is an anachronism whose time is long past. Lets kill the program outright, not waste time trying to reform it to be sex neutral.
Source:
Uncle Sam and Aunt Samantha: It’s simple fairness: women as well as men should be required to register for the draft. Anna Quindlen, Newsweek, November 5, 2001.
A Dishonorable Discharge for Selective Service Doug Bandow, Cato Institute, September 20, 1999.
Tags: National Organization for Women
9/11 Attack: Remember the Women?
For some inexplicable reason, Caryl Rivers, who works with the National Organization for Women’s Legal Defense and Education Fund, saw it necessary to write an article casting the 9/11 terrorist attacks along sexual lines.
According to Rivers,
Working women are on the front lines of what is being called ‘America’s new war.’
The terrorist Osama bin laden has said that he wanted to make war on all American males, but it seems that women are, more than ever before, in the lie of fire. No longer do they have a special status that protects them — if they ever really did.
What the hell is wrong with Rivers? Bin Laden and other Islamic extremists have made it clear that they are out to kill Americans whether they are men, women, or children. But would the 9/11 attacks have been any less horrific if only men had died?
In fact, Rivers seems to think that the terrorist act was specifically intended to kill women, claiming that, “…in the terrorist war against the United States, women are being blindly attacked as engines of American life and commerce. Seven employees of the TJX retail company died aboard one flight out of Boston because they were traveling on business. In the World Trade Center, we do not know exactly how many working women perished, but the number will be saddening.”
What I find saddening is this obsessive feminist need to reduce every issue to rather parochial men vs. women distinctions. The reality is that based on current information, most of the victims of the 9/11 attack were men.
The Associated press conducted an analysis of 3,000 people listed as missing or dead and found that 75 percent of the victims were men, whose average age was only 40.
Following the Rivers model, this should be the point where this article would go on about men’s contributions to society and how bin Laden is targeting men qua men, but that exercise is absurd regardless of sex. Bin Laden hates Americans, hates our liberal democratic society, and wants to terrorize us — he’s not assembling some manifesto about sexual politics in the United States.
Sources:
WTC victims were mostly young men. John Kelly, Associated Press, October 26, 2001.
Tags: National Organization for Women
Should Americans Have More Babies for the Fatherland?
Some Islamic extremists claim that the United States is doomed because of our cultural degeneration, best exemplified by the general toleration (if not formal legal sanction) of homosexuality and casual sexual relationships. Conservative author and columnist Maggie Gallagher agrees with much of this analysis, claiming that America’s biggest threat is its own internal cultural problems.
Gallagher writes,
Here is my best guess at honest self-examination: The Achilles’ heel of AmerEuropean civilization is our sexual culture, which even to many Americans looks not only deeply destructive, but ugly. Fatherless children, fragmented families, the demotion of sex into a product — these are the surface symptoms of an even deeper problem: a hollowing out of sexual meaning and purpose.
…
Sex has no deep-seated meaning, no public purpose beyond providing an enjoyable set of internal physical or emotional sensations. Sex is a consumer good. People who believe this end up having unstable marriages, fragmented families or no families at all.
Clearly social institutions still lag the advent of effective birth control and the ensuing sexual revolution it made possible, but to suggest that American and European civilizations are tottering on the edge of internal collapse is stretching this point into absurdity.
For Gallagher, the transformation of sex ties into another concern of conservative thinkers — the so called “depopulation bomb.” The 20th century saw a massive increase in the world’s population that affected pretty much every country of the world. Toward the end of the 20th century, however, the population of developed countries in Europe began to level off and, in countries such as Spain and Italy, the population actually began to decline. Today, the United States is the only developed nation whose population is still increasing, and a good deal of that increase is due to America’s relatively liberal immigration policies.
But in the developing world, population continues to grow, albeit at rates that continue to slow year by year. Some conservative columnists see an outright disaster in this trend of population decline in the developed world combined with large population increases in the developing world. Gallagher cites historian Paul Johnson who believes that the differing population growth rates of Islamic and Christian countries will inevitably lead to a clash between the two blocs.
Gallagher endorses this position, writing that,
For hundreds of years, traditional Islam has failed to produce a society that is attractive: regimes of secular corruption alternate with regimes of religious repression. But Islam remains a successful civilization because it fulfills the two minimum functions any culture must: It channels intense social energy of individuals into the two great sacrifices of self: war and babies. The children in Islamic societies suffer, and the women even more. But though individuals suffer, the family system itself works. The society perpetuates itself. …
The way forward is never the way back. Still, up until about 1970, Western civilization combined democracy, freedom, capitalism and neighborliness with a functioning family system. Who can now say the same?
This claim is even more absurd. Note that Gallagher first derides Americans and Europeans for not making necessary sacrifices for babies, but fails to note that many of the Muslim states she is referring to have dramatically failed their infants and children, with childhood mortality rates and other measures that would be considered intolerable if they persisted in the United States.
Similarly, while Gallagher claims that Islamic societies are mo re successful at perpetuating themselves, she forgets to mention that one of the things that Muslim extremists despise about the West is its culture that is steamrolling over traditional Islamic values, just as it steamrolled traditional Christian values. The emergence of Islamic extremism is simply the latest rebellion against the strongly individualist ideology that originated in the West and has been sweeping the globe over the past few centuries.
Source:
The Demographic Bomb. Maggie Gallagher, Yahoo!.Com, October 15, 2001.
Tags: Maggie Gallagher
Pornography Is Just Like Terrorism — It Destroys a Society
The Salt Lake Tribune ran a profile recently of a Utah group that calls itself Women for Decency. Formed earlier this year, the group campaigns against pornography, which its director, Janalyn Holt, seriously compared to the 9/11 terrorist attack. According to Holt,
The parallels between [smut and terror] are uncanny. Pornography destroys families. It’s not a one-time shot like an airplane flying into the World Trade Center. But little by little, blow by blow, it can be just as destructive. We are getting bombarded on all sides.
High on the list of pornographic publications that are terrorizing the United States are Better Homes & Gardens, which ran a Spiegel ad showing a woman leaning against a naked man, and, of course, women’s magazines like Cosmopolitan and In Style which are typically displayed at supermarket checkout counters. Women for Decency is participating in a nationwide campaign to persuade supermarkets to put covers in front of Cosmopolitan, Glamour and other magazines.
Women for Decency recently met with Utah’s porn czar, Paula Houston, who herself has been on the job for eight months now. What’s she been up to while drawing her $80,000 salary?
Aside from viewing a lot of pornography, Houston told the Associated Press that she’s fielded about 1,500 complaints about pornography. Most of the complaints, however, stem from advertisements and magazine covers. As an example, over 1,000 Utah residents signed an Internet petition against a Victoria’s Secret ad which featured a nude women strategically covering her breasts with her hands.
Legally, of course, Houston can’t do much about such vile filth, but like Women for Decency, she thinks that pornography kills families by spreading the idea that sex might occur outside of marriage,
It portrays a mindset that people buy into — of objectification, of not having a primary relationship. Pornography promotes free sex and that’s not good for marriages or families. I absolutely believe the only way to stem the tide is through grass roots efforts and understanding the law.
Meanwhile, Andrew McCullough, an attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union, made the astute observation that, “She’s harmless enough, but it’s a terrible waste of taxpayer’s money. She is not doing anything important for society. She is making people feel good.”
Or, at least, trying to prevent people from feeling good.
Source:
Women uniting for war on porn. Mark Eddington, The Salt Lake Tribune, October 14, 2001.
After eight months, Utah’s ‘porn czar’ handles 1,500 complaints, instructs others on laws. Catherine S. Blake, The Associated Press, October 15, 2001.
Tags: American Civil Liberties Union
Ms. Magazine: Rush Limbaugh is “Like The Taliban”
On its web site, Ms. Magazine recently posted an article in which it bizarrely compared Rush Limbaugh to the Taliban. The author of the article, Marcia Ann Gillespie, wrote,
No, they are not the Taliban. No, our internal terrorists aren’t named Osama bin Laden. Our homegrown terrorists have names like the Lambs of God and William Pierce (author of the Turner Diaries). And then there are the Jerry Falwells who clutch their holy books while spewing hate speech, blaming and damning and demonizing feminists and homosexuals for this assault on America. Or Rush Limbaugh who routinely and obscenely labels people who believe in the social, economic, and political equality of women and men — as the dictionary describes feminism — as “feminazis” on America’s airwaves. No, they are not the Taliban, but like the Taliban, the demonization and oppression of women to save us, or purify the race, or preserve the family, or uphold patriarchy is central tot heir beliefs. And like the Taliban, many of them use religion to justify their words and actions.
First, although he holds to some utterly disgusting views, it is a bit odd for Gillespie to label William Pierce a terrorist since he has never been convicted of an act of violence to my knowledge. Pierce certainly writes racist, inflammatory books and gives speeches that advocate violence, but as far as I know he’s never engaged in an act of violence or terrorism.
It was odd that Gillespie mentioned Limbaugh after first mentioning Falwell, because her comments about the radio commentator are just as absurd as were Falwell’s nutty claims that the terrorist attacks occurred because America had turned its back on God by allowing homosexuality and abortion.
Limbaugh is quite clear that “feminazi” applies to the leaders in the pro-abortion movement. Such euphemisms are repugnant, but Gillespie herself is engaging in precisely this tactic when she compares Limbaugh to the Taliban. Or, as kids on the playground might retort, takes one to know one.
The scary thing is that Gillespie refers to Limbaugh’s use of the term “feminazi” as obscene, which may just be rhetoric, but may actually be meant literally given that she characterizes Falwell’s comments as “hate speech.” It’s a bit incongruous to see someone decrying the Taliban while turning around and endorsing the idea of hate speech, which is much closer in accordance with the ideals of the Taliban than is Limbaugh’s euphemisms for abortion advocates.
Source:
Ms. responds to the terrorist attacks of September 11. Marcia Ann Gillespie, Ms. Magazine, undated editorial, 2001.
Tags: Ms. Magazine, Rush Limbaugh
Feminists and the War Against the Taliban
In an op-ed piece for The Washington Post, Amy Holmes wonders why the National Organization for Women seems to be largely ignoring the United States’ war against the Taliban.
Holmes notes that NOW did put out a press release a few days ago quoting NOW Action Vice President Olga Vives saying, “In this time of national and global turmoil, the reasons we celebrate Coming Out Day are more visible and more important than ever,” but aside for demanding more money for Afghani refugee camps in Pakistan, NOW is silent about the U.S. attack on Afghanistan.
Which is weird since if you search on “Afghanistan” in NOW’s web search engine, you will find numerous press releases condemning the Taliban, including on urging the world to Stop the Abuse of Women and Girls in Afghanistan! But now that a Republican president is actually attempting to end the Taliban regime, there’s not a peep.
Holmes contrasts this with Eleanor Smeal and the Feminist Majority Foundation which maintains that “the United States has a unique obligation to end the Taliban’s atrocities toward women” and explicitly calls for the United States to remove the Taliban and replace it with a constitutional democracy which will guarantee the rights of women in Afghanistan. Though that may not be possible — although the Northern Alliance, the main threat to the Taliban, is certainly an improvement over the Taliban, they are hardly a group of liberal democratic constitutionalists.
Holmes doesn’t mention it, but the obvious question is whether or not NOW would maintain this weird silence over the war in Afghanistan had it been prosecuted by Bill Clinton or Al Gore. The few things NOW has released related to the terrorism attacks are meshed in with NOW’s theme of fighting George W. Bush and the Right. I suspect that for NOW giving Bush credit for trying a government run by misogynistic religious fanatics simply wouldn’t mesh very well with their theme that Bush is “like a vampire who will suck our rights away” as Patricia Ireland described him last October.
Source:
Feminism goes to battle. Amy Holmes, The Washington Post, October 14, 2001.
Tags: Afghanistan, Eleanor Smeal, Feminist Majority Foundation, George W. Bush, National Organization for Women
Are Female Executives Too Tough?
In August the New York Times ran a bizarre story about female executives attending a Silicon Valley program designed, essentially, to teach them to be less confrontational and more “lady like” at work. Called, Bully Broads, this is an absurd versions of corporate sexism.
The program is run by Jean A. Hollands of the Growth and Learning Center. Hollands is the author of the forthcoming book, Same Game, Different Rules: How to Get Ahead Without Being a Bully Broad, Ice Queen or Other ‘Ms. Understoods’, which advises women to ditch their assertive styles in favor of a softer, more appraoch (for example, she urges women to go ahead and cry at meetings if they feel so inclined).
Ron Steck, Hollands’ son-in-law and a vice president at the Growth and Leadership Center, gave the Times the bottom line about what the Center deals with. “With a male executive, there’s no expectation to be nice,” Steck said. “He has more permission to be an ass. But when women speak their minds, they’re seen as harsh.”
This is absurd. The problem here is not assertive women but corporate cultures at a company that expects different behaviors from male and female executives.
Source:
Toughness has risks for women executives. Neela Banerjee, The New York Times, August 10, 2001.
Tags: Uncategorized
Does a Genetic Disorder Cause Some Anorexia Cases?
A claim popularized by feminists is that anorexia (and other eating disorders) are caused by unhealthy media images of thin women. In the past decade this claim has been undermined by cross-cultural studies of societies with very different ideal female body images, but a recent Dutch survey is the first to provide any evidence that anorexia may have a genetic as well as psychological component.
American researchers began by studying mice who experience an eating disorder similar to anorexia. Research determined that the mice were deficient in a protein called agouti, which was involved in the formation of skin pigment. The substance had a second use, however — its presence in the brain was necessary to stimulate the mice to eat. Those mice who produced too little of this protein suffered from an anorexia-like eating disorder.
Dutch researchers then turned to human beings. Taking blood samples from 145 patients diagnosed with anorexia, the researchers found that 16 of the patients had genetic mutations of the gene that produces the agouti protein in human beings.
This follows up on earlier research that found high risks of anorexia in people whose relatives also suffered from the disorder. According to the BBC, studies of twins have shown that when one twin suffers from anorexia, the other twin has an extremely high 50 percent risk of suffering from anorexia as well. Having a family member who suffers from anorexia increases the risks of suffering from the disorder from 1 in 200 to 1 in 30.
Rather than being simplistically caused by images of thin females in the media, anorexia is turning out to be a very complex disorder with a number of likely factors contributing to its development.
Source:
Anorexia ‘has genetic basis’. Marlene Smits, The BBC, October 7, 2001.