Tag: feminism

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Open Letter to Get in Shape for Women

Dear Get In Shape for Women:

Thank you so much for your congratulations on my new house! Nothing says “welcome to the neighborhood” like a postcard from a company that found me via an automated report from the United States Postal Service. I’m also touched and gratified that you care enough about my health to offer me an affordable, convenient option for losing weight so close to home.

Here’s the thing:

I don’t want to lose any weight.

I have no interest in losing any weight.

And if I decided I *did* want to lose some weight or join a gym, your marketing approach has completely ruined any chance of your getting my business. I’ll spare you the diatribe about the way constant media messages and images screw with women’s perceptions of what constitutes a normal, healthy body. I’ll refrain from quoting the statistics that show how much money the weight loss industry collects from women in their vain attempts to lose weight and keep it off.

Continue reading “Open Letter to Get in Shape for Women”

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April 15 Haiku: Oya and Aphrodite

oya
shrew. harpy. witch. dyke.
fallen woman. take the words–
reclaim their power.

aphrodite
fair aphrodite
dancing in the cooling breeze
early spring, white pine

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Marguerite Guzman Bouvard — Night Strides Across Borders

Excerpted from After Maillol

Night

Night strides across borders.
Hush, she commands the barking dogs,
the searchlights, the buckling barbed
wire fences. She cradles
the earth in her gleaming limbs
until the only sounds are those of mingled
breaths, the quick intake of the child’s,
the drawn out sobs of the aged
and the ill. Beneath her steady wings
soldiers dream of tilling fields,
prison doors slide open.

— Marguerite Guzman Bouvard
The Unpredictability of Light
Word Press. 2009: Cincinnati, OH.

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Review: Wife of the Gods

Wife of the Gods: A NovelWife of the Gods: A Novel by Kwei Quartey
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I found Quartey’s description of the divide between city and country culture in Ghana eerily similar to the same divide that exists in the USA. At times lyrical in description, with excellence characterization. A story about real people in Africa, not just the latest political or natural disaster.

View all my reviews

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Dear NOW: This Is Why I’m Not Giving You Any Money

Dear NOW:

I wanted to explain to you why I am not sending a contribution in response to your recent U.S. mail solicitation to me. I have three primary reasons for not wishing to send you my dollars:

1) As a queer woman, I am uneasy about supporting an organization that has a history of marginalizing “the lavendar menace” from the feminist movement.

2) The overt fear-mongering tone of your letter (“Do you want animals and clowns teaching your children about sex?) bore a marked resemblance to the emails I get from the Family Research Council. I believe strongly that hope and compassion conquer fear and loathing. Nixon’s campaign back in the middle of the last century appears to have had far-reaching consequences in the realm of national and local politics. One of the reasons Obama was so refreshing as a candidate, and why people rejoiced in his election, was because he ran on a platform of positive change rather than the fear and paranoia that marked the Bush administration. I expect the organizations I support to deliver the same sort of message.

3) I find that other organizations seem to be doing a better job of working for goals that I care about.

That being said, I am glad to see that you have joined the Web 2.0 revolution (hahaha) and will be following your actions via Facebook, Twitter, and email. I’m open to persuasion. So persuade me that your organization is still relevant and working toward the type of change that is in line with my own values.

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Belle De Jour Finally Outs Herself

Begging the question of whether whores (who get paid) or sluts (who don’t) are more reviled in our society, the infamous blogger Belle De Jour has finally outed herself. Not surprisingly, she’s a well-educated woman who works in scientific research — hardly a well-paid field despite its own kind of glamour and allure.

I couldn’t find a professional job in my chosen field because I didn’t have my PhD yet. I didn’t have a lot of spare time on my hands because I was still making corrections and preparing for the viva; and I got through my savings a lot faster than I thought I would. The difference between living in the Highlands and living in London is massive. I hadn’t really thought that one through.
[…]
I don’t know that prostitution would necessarily be one’s first choice, I say. Starbucks? Waitressing? Bar work? Bunking down on a friend’s floor? “Yeah, you could work behind a bar. But how many hours would you have to do just to pay your rent? I couldn’t even get an overdraft at that point, though of course once I started depositing so much cash they offered me a mortgage, about three months later! And I wasn’t prepared to borrow from friends or family. To be honest, the writing-up of a thesis takes up so much of your time and so much of your energy.”

So: hookerdom. “Yes. I didn’t object to the concept.”

Full article here: http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/article6917495.ece

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Sarah Palin and the Media Elite

Someone on my friends list posted a link to a Vanity Fair article that took a red pen to a transcript of Sarah Palin’s resignation speech. The speech itself — and the woman delivering it — is definitely not going to go down in history as a marvel of oratory. Posting the copy-edited version of it seems a cheap shot, though. The ex-copy-editor in me can’t help but get a kick out of the fact that people are still using the shorthand I learned years ago, and which used to be my bread and butter. The left-leaning Democrat in me loves the schadenfreude that comes with seeing Palin made a fool of. But haven’t we made enough of a fool of her?

And in a way, it seems to me that mocking her lack of verbal skills is just feeding into the class and cultural divides that gave us Red States and Blue States. Dubya was notorious for his lack of oratory, and New Englanders loved to make fun of him for it. But it didn’t stop him from keeping the highest office in the land for not one but two terms.

We can’t assume that people make rational decisions when it comes to politics. It’s much easier to look at things in terms of Red States and Blue States than it is to look at individuals and their motivations. But which is really the more conscious way of viewing an issue?

In the end, I think we can all agree that Palin has about as much a chance of becoming the next POTUS as Dan Quayle does. But we also can’t dismiss her because her speeches don’t stand up to Obama’s. Actions matter — but so does marketing.

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Alison Townsend in Mudlark: Demeter and Persephone

One of my favorite myths. From Demeter Faces Facts (second poem down)

Without even meaning to, she’s gone underground,

the face whose curve you shaped with your own hand,
fugitive, a sullen stranger’s you’ll never touch the same way

again. Still, you keep brushing and braiding, separating
the strands and binding them together again, as if they were

a rope by which you could hold her, tethering her to your body
as she was once anchored and fed, your blood hers. Before

she got big enough to cross the street without looking back
to catch your eye. When you were still everything she needed.

— Alison Townsend

The poems here don’t always inspire me with tight, bright language, but lately I’ve been inspired by writers whose work is less than perfect. Some deep inner critic, some just-sprouting bulb of defiance inside me says “if they can do it, why can’t I?”

Seeing a feminine moniker in the masthead also soothes the woman-shaped ire within.

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Don’t Just Vote. Vote for Obama.

This year I’ve come to realize something so important, so fundamental, about the way people vote, that it’s going to sound stupid when I say it out loud. The decision for a candidate is not made in a rational way.

Not usually, anyway.

People vote with their hearts as much as with their heads. People–myself included–respond much more strongly to irrational calls on their fears, their prejudices, their own personal and subconscious leanings, than they ever do to the realities of policy, or issues.

How else can you explain the thousands of Hillary Clinton supporters who have decided to vote for John McCain? The only thing the two candidates have in common is skin tone. What self-respecting feminist could possibly vote for a man whose record on women’s issues is abominable as McCain? Regardless of what he called his wife (that’s his second wife the hieress, not his first wife the disabled woman), just take a look at his voting record.

And take a look at McCain’s economic policy. Is it the folks making more than $250,000 a year who really need help in these tough economic times?

People come up with all kinds of reasons not to vote for Barack Obama, but the main one, the one that no one wants to talk about, is the one that AFL-CIO’s Richard Trumka pinpointed in a recent speech. In his words:

Continue reading “Don’t Just Vote. Vote for Obama.”

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Dear Tony Perkins, Head of the Family Research Council

I can’t get the Family Research Council (a.k.a. family fearmongers’ council) to take me off their damn spam list. What began as a way to keep track of what the other side was up to has turned into a daily dose of hate in my inbox. Faithful America is a nice antidote — a PAC that reclaims religious values from the far right.

I got fed up enough to send a strongly worded response to a particularly egregious email full of lies and half-truths. I’m sure it’s falling on deaf ears over in Tony’s inbox, but maybe it will amuse you, dear Intarwebs.

From a personal appeal for dough from Tony Perkins, President of this “Christian” organization:

I want you to hear something a California pastor said to me recently:

“If we lose, we go to jail.”

It’s just that simple, says Pastor Jim Garlow–if marriage loses in California, religious liberties everywhere will be next. [Funny thing, that: here in Sodom Massachusetts, religious liberties seem to be alive and well for Christians, Muslims, Jews, pagans, and others alike, gays can get married, and marriage as we know it is still intact.]

The fight for marriage in the states is our first priority.

But we can’t take our eye off Washington, D.C. politicians. Your support is vital as we stand up to liberals who want to criminalize your religious speech . . . threaten the religious liberties of employers . . . silence conservative and Christian broadcasting . . . raise taxes . . . and impose taxpayer funding of abortion and embryonic stem cell research.

And my response:

Tony, this is an incredibly offensive letter. Christians have never been sent to jail in this country for practicing the teachings of Christ. Untold numbers of homosexuals, though, have been rounded up by police, beaten, raped, and returned to the street without charges ever being placed. Recognizing a loving, stable union between two people is not an affront to marriage. Preaching hatred and intolerance is, however, an affront to Christ’s teachings. Shame on you, and shame on your organization. Turn off your computer and read your bible.

If I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but do not have love, I have become a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy, and know all mysteries and all knowledge; and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing.
And if I give all my possessions to feed the poor, and if I surrender my body to be burned, but do not have love, it profits me nothing.

1 CORINTHIANS 13:1–3 (NASB)