genfem
A fair question. Two quick answers:
1. Those of us lucky enough to live in the most progressive parts of the world tend to focus on how good we have it, and yet we still haven’t achieved true gender equality.
2. I’m over trying to pitch women’s magazines. If the story isn’t about slimmer thighs for summer, they’re just not interested.
This stuff is important, I’ll try not to make it too dry.
On Comments
I was feeling depressed about the kind of comments my Christian Science Monitor Op-Ed was getting. A lot of women interpreted my push for more career focused female characters on television to be some kind of put down of stay-at-home moms and homemakers. But I would never put down stay-at-home moms and homemakers, I’d just like to see other representations of women on television. Arguably, even more accurate representations, since so many women work outside the home.
A friend of mine said something interesting about blog comments. To paraphrase her: “Comments are always depressing, because most of the people that really read articles and mull on them - whether they agree or disagree - are not the ones commenting. I think it’s a very self selecting group. Sometimes when [the media company I work for] has an article like, ‘Hey maybe we should pay women the same as men,’ the bile in the comments is unreal. The most basic benign ideas of equality get these people into a state of frothy rage. So, i think the real vote is the traffic.”
Commenters may attack, misinterpret or dismiss feminists, but everything we do adds to the conversation. And what’s more important than people agreeing with us is people reading what we’re writing (my Op-Ed has so far received 288 Facebook “Likes” and 43 retweets and it was picked up by Yahoo News). All of us need to remember that when we write about gender equality, even the people that don’t want to hear us can’t help but listen. We just have to keep providing them with ideas to listen to.
A plus sized model dances with a “normal” sized model in PLUS Model Magazine’s January issue. Twenty years ago the average fashion model weighed 8% less than the average woman. Today, she weighs 23% less.
Happy 39th Birthday Roe Vs. Wade
It’s Blog for Choice Day 2012.
Reproductive rights are some of the most important rights American women have but the war on women has shown us that they are not guaranteed.
If you haven’t been keeping up, here is a list of ten ways in which Republicans are attacking women.
And here is a simple chart explaining why the right to have an abortion is still so important. Short version: Women will get abortions whether or not abortion is legal. But illegal, unsafe abortions will kill them. (We know this to be true from all the years that abortion wasn’t legal and safe.)
Caring about life means caring about women’s lives.
Relatedly, I really wish that any American who identified her/himself as “pro-life” would prove it by adopting a starving child. In Sub-Saharan Africa alone, one in eight children dies before the age of five due to malnourishment. Imagine how much of an effect pro-lifers could have on human life worldwide if they spent their money feeding impoverished children instead of attacking American women.
Sign the petitions, elect pro-choice candidates, stay informed. Keep abortion safe and legal.
The Magical New Beauty Product That Fixes All Flaws and Solves All Problems.
What’s Wrong With “Marrying Down”?
Sady Doyle wrote a great article about the ways in which women journalists writing about feminism, like The Atlantic’s Kate Bolick, still do so from a wealthy, white perspective. They “focus on the ladies’s-magazine variety of female concerns,” she writes, “motherhood, marriage, dating.”
Doyle takes issue with Bolick’s idea that only wealthy women are “literate” enough to care about women’s progress. She also takes issue with the idea that working class women are the enemy of wealthy women because their lack of ambition might be less intimidating to successful men.
Bolick seems concerned not that straight women will miss out on marriage, but that upper-middle-class women will have to “marry down.” She equates job attainment with desirability. She tells us what “we” could learn from “the African-American community” (implying that “we,” her readers, aren’t part of it).
I agree with Doyle’s points, but can’t help wondering why “marrying down” is still a thing. It reminds me of an article I published in YourTango almost two years ago now, called “Skip the Soul Mate, Find a Trophy Husband.” In a world with true gender equality, it doesn’t matter who makes the money or takes care of the kids. Successful women would choose their mates for the same reasons that successful men choose theirs. From my article:
Men who are accomplished will often settle for a wife who is attractive and pleasant, but not an intellectual match. A man doesn’t need a partner to validate him, so it doesn’t matter if her brains don’t measure up to his… Women want their partner to have it all. If [they] were to look for a less significant significant other, might [their] dating pool widen?
The feminist movement never equated “having it all” with having a wealthy spouse. If anything, we were supposed to replace the need for wealthy spouses with our own hard earned cash (see Gloria Steinem’s quote on becoming the men we wanted to marry). Men don’t fret about marrying down. Even if it’s obvious that a guy’s hot wife is only with him for his money, he’ll somehow turn it into a source of pride.
The idea that, across classes, women have to compete for the same “good” men or else they’ll have to (shudder) marry down means that no matter how accomplished a woman is, she still needs a man to validate her.
Here’s the thing: I will always want more women’s (and feminist) voices in the mainstream media, particularly in politics. There’s an overwhelming byline gender gap and that needs to change. But The Washington Post’s new lady blog, “She the People,” is not a step in the right direction….
