Our war did not liberate them

Thanks to Feminist Peace Network for sharing a link to this CounterPunch post about the failure of the US-led war effort to free the women of Afghanistan.

As Mohadesa Najumi writes:

Ask a women in Wardak or Kandahar if she feels the “liberation” of the western intervention and she will look at you with bewilderment. This is because the bells of freedom do not reverberate through Afghanistan. 87% of women continue to be illiterate. As many as 80% have faced forced marriages and life expectancy is 44 years. Why dont Oxfam or ActionAid publish these statistics? Or are they too telling of the failed war on Afghanistan? These figures are ones that expose Afghan women as the biggest losers of the war.

Laura Bush said it was the duty of the humane world to alleviate of the plight of women and children. Yet alleviate they did not.. 18 billion dollars and an occupation later, 1 in 4 children before they turn five and Afghanistan is still the worst place in the world for a woman to give birth. It may not even be wrong to argue that the situation has since exasperated. All the money, time and “noble” rhetoric did not manifest into reality. And the western world is still scared today to admit they failed Afghan women.

The price of heroism

I am sorry and shocked, but not necessarily surprised, to learn that Bradley Manning has been sentenced to 35 years in prison for releasing information to Wikileaks that showed evidence of US war crimes. Manning released an eloquent statement in response to the sentence. The statement is reproduced in its entirety below. This text is a rush transcript posted by Common Dreams, and refers to Manning's decision to seek a pardon from President Obama:

The decisions that I made in 2010 were made out of a concern for my country and the world that we live in. Since the tragic events of 9/11, our country has been at war. We've been at war with an enemy that chooses not to meet us on any traditional battlefield, and due to this fact we've had to alter our methods of combating the risks posed to us and our way of life.
I initially agreed with these methods and chose to volunteer to help defend my country. It was not until I was in Iraq and reading secret military reports on a daily basis that I started to question the morality of what we were doing. It was at this time I realized in our efforts to meet this risk posed to us by the enemy, we have forgotten our humanity. We consciously elected to devalue human life both in Iraq and Afghanistan. When we engaged those that we perceived were the enemy, we sometimes killed innocent civilians. Whenever we killed innocent civilians, instead of accepting responsibility for our conduct, we elected to hide behind the veil of national security and classified information in order to avoid any public accountability.

In our zeal to kill the enemy, we internally debated the definition of torture. We held individuals at Guantanamo for years without due process. We inexplicably turned a blind eye to torture and executions by the Iraqi government. And we stomached countless other acts in the name of our war on terror.

Patriotism is often the cry extolled when morally questionable acts are advocated by those in power. When these cries of patriotism drown our any logically based intentions [unclear], it is usually an American soldier that is ordered to carry out some ill-conceived mission.

Our nation has had similar dark moments for the virtues of democracy—the Trail of Tears, the Dred Scott decision, McCarthyism, the Japanese-American internment camps—to name a few. I am confident that many of our actions since 9/11 will one day be viewed in a similar light.

As the late Howard Zinn once said, "There is not a flag large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent people."

I understand that my actions violated the law, and I regret if my actions hurt anyone or harmed the United States. It was never my intention to hurt anyone. I only wanted to help people. When I chose to disclose classified information, I did so out of a love for my country and a sense of duty to others.

If you deny my request for a pardon, I will serve my time knowing that sometimes you have to pay a heavy price to live in a free society. I will gladly pay that price if it means we could have country that is truly conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all women and men are created equal.

The Bradley Manning Support Network has a link to a petition in support of a pardon for Manning.

Oh, cool.

Really, this won't crack my cynicism about Facebook, but I just found this on Facebook, which led me to the annotated online version of Dyke, A Quarterly.

Kewl.

A complicated mess

I'm actually rather cynical about Facebook, and don't log on there much. But when I do, I often find some amazing stuff. For instance, Kathleen Barry and Feminist Peace Movement both linked to this extraordinary post. Here's a short sample:

We, the undersigned 1960s radical feminists and current activists, have been concerned for some time about the rise within the academy and mainstream media of “gender theory,” which avoids naming men and the system of male supremacy as the beneficiaries of women’s oppression. Our concern changed to alarm when we learned about threats and attacks, some of them physical, on individuals and organizations daring to challenge the currently fashionable concept of gender.

Recent developments: A U.S. environmental organization that also calls itself radical feminist is attacked for its political analysis of gender. Feminist conferences in the U.K., U.S. and Canada are driven from their contracted locations for asserting the right of women to organize for their liberation separately from men, including M>F (male to female) transgendered people.

Deep Green Resistance (DGR) reports1 that queer activists defaced its published materials and trans activists threatened individual DGR members with arson, rape and murder. Bookstores are pressured not to carry DGR’s work and its speaking events are cancelled after protests by queer/transgender activists. At “RadFem” conferences in London2, Portland3 and Toronto4, trans activists accuse scheduled speakers of hate speech and/or being transphobic because they dare to analyze gender from a feminist political perspective. Both M>F transgender people and “men’s rights” groups, operating separately but using similar language, demand to be included in the Rad Fem 2013 conference in London called to fight against women’s oppression and for liberation.

I'm too tired to do justice to this topic tonight. In some ways, I have a lot of empathy with trans activists. In my own life, the question "Are you a boy or a girl?" has been a life-or-death issue. I don't doubt that trans people face violence and threats. But ultimately, I think the idea of "transgender" reinforces gender instead of undermining it. And I believe that people born into female-sexed bodies have the right to organize female-only space as a matter of resistance to our oppression.

That's not hate. That's a political opinion that trans activists strongly disagree with.

My admiration for the radical feminist post is tempered by a peculiar circumstance. it seems that the current operators of www.pandagon.net may have scooped up a Web address that the original operators inadvertently allowed to expire. The original Pandagon now appears at www.rawstory.com.

One of the original Pandagon folks, Amanda Marcotte, reacted with outrage to this. (Hat tip to Feminist Peace Network on Facebook for that link.) It's not clear exactly what connection the current operators of pandagon.net have to the authors of the radical feminist post, but it's a disquieting situation. I'm sad to see this difficult issue of gender politics blurred by this sort of confusion. It almost looks as if some radical feminists tried to get attention for their position (which I very much support and admire) by trying to make it appear that it came from people who are actually their political opponents.

I can't at all agree with Amanda Marcotte's characterization of radical feminists as "transphobic bigots," but I don't blame her for being pissed off that her url was swiped.

Fighting back against online sexism

Hat tip to Spinifex Press for posting this commentary by social psychologist Brianne Hastie about the persistence of online woman-hating and the need to resist it:

Rather than sticking with the commonly advocated refrain of “don’t feed the trolls”, women (and other minority groups) are starting to bite back against this online abuse. Increasingly, bloggers are calling on women to sink to the level of misogynists and out their attackers.

An abusive email sent to Feministing from a university student email address – which just happened to belong to the public relations officer for the Republican club of Southern Illinois University College in the US – is just one example. He was outed and various faculty members were contacted by blog supporters. As a result, he was removed from the Republican club and made a public apology on the blog comments (although this was more of a “sorry to have been caught” than a “sorry I did it”).

Criado-Perez and Creasy’s treatment has resulted in the arrest of one man on harassment charges and forced Twitter to address the way abusive tweets are reported.

A recent campaign targeting Facebook resulted in a commitment from them to address gender hate as strictly as other forms on their site.

Hastie reports that Caroline Criado-Perez (mentioned in the block quote above) was brutally threatened with rape and murder on Twitter because of her campaign to put novelist Jane Austen on the 10 pound note.

This definitely belongs in the "stranger than fiction category." As Rebecca Mead writes for the New Yorker, "Who could object to the honoring of genteel, beloved Jane?" As Hastie and Mead both report, quite a few somebodies could. And in this case, resistance has proved both necessary and effective.

Still trying to make sense of this heartbreaking news...

...I found this amazing interview with Alice Walker that Democracy Now!  did right after Trayvon Martin was murdered in March of 2012. Walker talks about how Trayvon came from the same section of Florida as Zora Neale Hurston. I can't really describe it at the moment, but it is well worth watching:



Ironically during this time period, the poet Adrienne Rich had also just died , of natural causes, after a a long and productive life devoted to poetry, essay writing, feminism, anti-racism and social justice. In my own experience, and in my reading of history, I have seen how anti-racism and feminism have been portrayed as somehow in opposition to each other. Rich, in her life, demonstrated the possibility of radical integrity.

Alice Walker notes in this interview (which followed on Democracy Now! the interview she had done about Trayvon Martin),

I think her legacy for all of us is to continue to believe in the power of art, especially in the power of poetry, and to keep moving and not to be dissuaded, not to be discouraged, but to take heart from a woman who lived for 82 years giving her very best, growing out of every shell that society attempted to force her into to become this really amazing figure of inspiration and hope and love.

Now is a time when we need such inspiration.

I hardly know what to say...

...in the wake of George Zimmerman's acquittal in the killing of Trayvon Martin. But let's start by watching this excellent piece from Democracy Now:

This, on the other hand, is definitely bad news

Rachel Maddow's blog posted this excellent but disturbing analysis of nationwide efforts to limit women's access to abortion in the U.S. since the November presidential elections.

Good news and bad news

The bad news is that the US government insists on treating NSA whistle blower Edward Snowden as if her were a criminal. The good news is, the people of the United States aren't falling for it.

Meanwhile, Snowden is reportedly still caught in limbo in the transit zone of a Moscow airport, as he and his supporters try to find asylum for him in a third country.

The Guardian maintains a Web page of background information and breaking news about the Snowden case.

The power of radio

This post by Amy Goodman on Truthdig details the creation of 1000 new low-power community radio licenses by the FCC, and how such licenses could be used to empower local communities and movements. It's good to see some hopeful news for a change.

Weed it and weep

I first learned about library weeding back when I was a custodian at the Eugene Public Library in Oregon back in the late 1990s. In advance of a move to a new building, the librarians removed huge numbers of books from the collection and threw them into trash barrels in the library garage. I discovered these barrels full of books -- including a large number of second-wave feminist classics -- one night when I came on shift.

The librarians assured me that this was a normal part of public library collection management, that the books were being removed because they circulated rarely or not at all. Public libraries needed to provide what was in demand among their patrons. The job of saving books belonged to academic libraries. While I was quite convinced that the librarians believed the story that they were telling me, it seemed to me that the practice of weeding had an unintentionally Orwellian result. Old and unpopular materials were removed from public view and sent "down the memory hole." I wrote about it at the time. Thanks to the miracle of the Wayback Machine, you can read that old essay now, if you'd like.

While it's true that the aggressive weeding of public library collections is a widely accepted practice among librarians, there are professional standards that govern it. The decision to remove an item from a library collection theoretically takes account of several criteria, including how often it circulates, its lasting importance, its physical condition, and its age. One widely used set of guidelines for weeding is published by the Texas State Libraries and Archives Commission, and is known as the CREW Manual. Whatever the shortcomings of this document, it makes clear that weeding is a practice that requires thoughtfulness, planning, and thought. In other words, librarians don't generally go through their collections and toss out every book that is more than 10 years old without considering other factors.

But according to information sent to me by one of my professors, exactly such a bizarre and extreme weeding program may have taken place recently at the Urban Free Public Library in Illinois. The story broke about a week ago in the local online news magazine Smile Politely. According to columnist Tracy Nectoux,

I was contacted about something extremely disturbing that had recently happened at Urbana Free Library (UFL). A weeding process had taken place that had discarded thousands of nonfiction books in a hasty, arbitrary way — a way that utilizes only one of the UFL’s stated selection criteria.*

Both UFL staff and the public (who were alarmed at the rapidly emptying shelves) spoke out, but the weeding continued until a library board meeting (and Mayor Laurel Prussing) was called. JP Goguen, a university library employee, was at the meeting, recorded it, and sent the recording to me (the board normally does not record meetings). The conversation at this meeting is alarming. Urbana Free Library's director, Deb Lissak, made a unilateral decision to weed books in the print collection by date alone. It seems that the Adult Services staff’s expertise and knowledge of the collection was neither consulted nor welcomed. In fact, Anne Phillips, Director of Adult Services, was not even in the country when the project began and was unaware that it was happening at all.

The library planned to mark all of its book with RFID tags. In order to speed up this time-consuming process, library director Lissak may have ordered the removal of any book in the collection that had been published before 2003. There are conflicting reports about this. An update to Tracy Netoux's orginal post has a link to this response on the Urbana Free Libary's Web site. Another update provided a link to an interview of Lissak by a local radio station, in which Lissak said the controversy came about because of miscommunication between the library staff and herself.

Others dispute Lissak's version of events. An overflow crowd of enraged citizens attended Monday night's City Council meeting, as reported by the East Illinois News-Gazette and Smile Politely. There is even a Twitter feed devoted to the controversy. Most tweeters seem outraged by the situation, but some support Lissak's position.

This summer I'm working on finalizing the prospectus for my library studies master's thesis. It's going to be about weeding. I think this is an important area of public policy that ought to be discussed more thoroughly with the public. This controversy shows exactly why public discussion of library weeding is so important.

The Boston Marathon bombing and the police state

Alternet has  posted this thoughtful commentary by education theorist Henry Giroux about the massive efforts to control the entire population of the area in the aftermath of the Boston marathon bombing.

April is the cruelest month

A couple of days ago, right after the bombing of the Boston Marathon, Feminist Peace Network tweeted "Thinking abt how we prioritize terror,what horrifies us,what doesn't but should,how many deaths go unnoticed,others are endless news cycles."

I think I know what she means. There is a certain vulture-like feeding on tragedy that seems to go on among the mainstream media, and endless stream of inconsequential "breaking news" details whenever something like the Boston Marathon bombing happens. And there are so many other situations of great horror that are ignored, maybe because these situations aren't happening in the United States.

Nevertheless, the situation in Boston was sad, and horrifying.

And what I found very helpful in trying to understand the sadness and horror were the following stories on Democracy Now:

• Boston Marathon a "Horrifying Scene" After Twin Blasts Kill 3 and Leave Scores Maimed, Wounded
• Peace Activist Carlos Arredondo Hailed as Hero for Aid to Boston Marathon Bombing Victims
• "Like a War Scene": From the Streets to Hospitals, Witnesses & Medics Rushed to Help Bombing Victims
• Sportswriter Dave Zirin: Prayers For the People in Boston, Baghdad and Mogadishu

 

So much for "post feminism"

I am sorry to say that I've never heard of Deborah Copaken Kogan before, but I'm glad I saw this excellent post of hers on thenation.com. It's heartbreaking and brilliant. Here's a short sample:

It's 2013, the day I sit down, with trepidation, to write this. The Times's obituary for Yvonne Brill, renowned rocket scientist, winner of the National Medal of Technology and Innovation, leads with, "She made a mean beef stroganoff, followed her husband from job to job and took eight years off from work to raise three children. 'The world's best mom,' her son Matthew said."

The past is not gone. Or as Faulkner wrote, "The past is never dead. It's not even past." Until it is, we should not be expected to get over it.

I'm proud of my nomination for a prestigious if controversial British literary prize given only to women. I'm honored to be mentioned in the same breath as my fellow nominees, whose books I've been tearing through of late with relish and awe. Past winners—Helen Dunmore, Anne Michaels, Carol Shields, Suzanne Berne, Linda Grant, Kate Grenville, Ann Patchett, Valerie Martin, Andrea Levy, Lionel Shriver, Zadie Smith, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Rose Tremain, Marilynne Robinson, Barbara Kingsolver, Téa Obreht and Madeline Miller—include authors whose novels I know well or not at all, but it is for the latter, as a reader, I am most grateful.

The Women's Prize for Fiction—and three cheers for the transparency of its new name—is not a "sexist con-trick" by any definition of sexism that I know. To the contrary, it redresses centuries of literary sexism, exclusion, cultural bias, invisibility. There's a reason J.K. Rowling's publishers demanded that she use initials instead of "Joanne": it's the same reason Mary Anne Evans used the pen name George Eliot; the same reason Robert Southey, then England's poet laureate, wrote to Charlotte Brontë: "Literature cannot be the business of a woman's life, and it ought not to be." In fact, I'm thinking about starting a women's prize here in the United States, to be given out once a year, every year, until gender parity in the arts is achieved.

I figure that should take me from now until my obituary.

Don't you want to read the rest of it now? You can do that right here.

Quidditch and Title 9 3/4

I don't have much time to look at mass e-mails these days, but the message that I recently received from the Harry Potter Alliance, bearing the title "Gender Equality at the Quidditch World Cup," was too intriguing to pass up.

Here's the story. The Quidditch World Cup, sponsored by the International Quidditch Alliance, is taking place this very weekend in Kissimmee, Florida. Inspired by a piece of legislation called Title 9, enacted by the muggle US government, the IQA has developed its own Title 9 3/4. This is the first Quidditch World Cup to be played under Title 9 3/4. Pretty cool, huh?

Well, I think it's cool, but if you're not familiar with the world of the Harry Potter novels, it probably looks like gibberish to you. I don't have time to explain any of this now, but if you'd like definitions of some of these unfamiliar terms, here are links to definitions for "muggle" and "quidditch" from the Harry Potter Wiki.

Julia Penelope

I just discovered the other day that radical dyke theorist Julia Penelope died in January. Author Victoria Brownworth has this remembrance. Here's a small sample:

Julia Penelope was from another era, an era that is truly bygone. Unlike those other theorists, her work was so controversial, so revolutionary, so for lesbians only that what she said often created outrage, even among other lesbians and feminists. Julia Penelope was never an assimilationist, she never approved of assimilation and she built her whole world–a world into which she tried to draw as many other women as possible–around lesbocentrism. She was a lesbian separatist–something anathema in our mainstreaming, assimilationist LGBT world where straight acceptance is often more important than queer freedom.

The entire post is well worth reading.

You can find more of Victoria Brownworth's excellent prose here and here.

Celebrate the rain!

Yesterday marks the 11-year-anniversary of my arrival in Oklahoma City. Over the years, many people have asked me why I left beautiful, lush, green, supposedly progressive western Oregon for Oklahoma. Though the real answer is considerably more complicated, I have often said "To get out of the rain."

As I write this, the temperature is about 38 degrees, and it is raining. It almost reminds me of a winter or early spring day in Oregon, except the rain is merely a gentle drizzle. In Eugene, it did not drizzle, nor did we have rain like the extreme Oklahoma gully-washers that sometimes come in spring. In western Oregon, the rain was hard, steady, cold, relentless and penetrating. And it lasted about 9 months of the year.

Really, it was a relief to get away from it. That was then.

Now, Oregon reportedly "less water and more wildfires." It's called climate change, and we are also experiencing its disastrous effects here in Oklahoma.

So, in the words of singer-songwriter Alice DiMicele, today I am ready to celebrate the rain.

Part of the solution

After not posting much for a long time, it seems that I've been posting a lot this week. It's Spring Break. I should be catching up on my school work, but darn it, sometimes a person needs to write a blog post.

So far this week, I've posted about the 10th anniversary of the Iraq War, the fight to stop the Keystone XL Pipeline, and the need to teach boys not to rape. Underneath all of this -- as always -- I have the conviction that there is the need for some type of deep structural change to US society to bring about a different world.

Below is a link to a page to register for a very cool conference that will take place in Oklahoma City on Friday and Saturday, April 4. Noted feminist author and filmmaker Jane Caputi will be speaking twice, and we'll have some excellent workshops. Attendance at the workshop is free, but if you want a t-shirt or lunch, we unfortunately need to charge for those.

And without further ado, here is the link to the Earth's Body, Women's Bodies conference home page.

Parents of boy children need to see this

Hat tip to CommonDreams for cross-posting this beautiful essay by Kim Simon in response to the Steubenville, Ohio rape case that has sparked such bizarre media attention. Simon doesn't attack mainstream news outlets for their insensitivity and their not-so-subtle support for rape culture. Instead, she goes to the heart of the problem, the things that parents should (and so often don't) teach their sons about empathy and sexuality.

For instance:

As uncomfortable as it is, the conversation needs to evolve as your boy gets older. Sex feels good. Sex is overwhelming. Sex is confusing. Sex tricks you into thinking that you are receiving what you need (physical satisfaction, comfort, companionship, love, respect). Sex education is more than just giving your child condoms and reminding them about STDs. As parents, we need to worry about our sons being respectful of their sexual partners, not just about them getting someone pregnant. Our boys need to know that they will find themselves at a crossroads one night, or on multiple nights. Their body will be telling them one thing, and their partner may be telling them another. It is a young man’s responsibility to listen to his partner. Explain to your son what consent looks like (and doesn’t look like). They need to know what sex looks like. Not the Playboy magazine/online-porn version, but the logistics of how it actually works. Teach them to ask their partners. Teach them to check in as they take the next step with someone. Teach them to stop if they don’t think they’re getting a clear answer.

I post this with a small amount of ambivalence, because I think Simon's post could be misread to lay the responsibility for men's behavior with women once again -- with their mothers, instead of with their sexual partners. In US society, at least, women are still stereotyped as being primarily mothers and primary care-givers for children. So, if boy children grow up to be arrogant, sexist men it must be the fault of their mothers.

But I don't think that's what Kim Simon is saying. Her message is clearly directed at parents, which means men, too. And her words clearly show that the reason that men rape has nothing to do with biology, and everything to do with social structure.

We can change that social structure, and we must.

Tar Sands Week of Action

Women's ENews correspondent Melinda Tuhus posted an excellent feature story about women working to stop the Keystone XL pipeline. A short excerpt:

WASHINGTON (WOMENSENEWS)--Melina Laboucan Massimo is a Lubicon Cree from northern Alberta, Canada, who wants people to understand the magnitude of tar sands mining devastation to her community.

One single site of tar sands extraction near where she lives is the size of Washington, D.C., she said. "So think of your city being completely scraped out, and that's what's happening to our homeland."

She and other women gathered at a restaurant here on the evening of the largest environmental demonstration in U.S. history, on Feb. 17, to tell their stories of opposing TransCanada Corporation's Keystone XL pipeline project, which would bring hundreds of thousands of barrels a day of tar sands from northern Alberta across the entire U.S. mid-section to the Texas Gulf Coast for refining and export.

Massimo discussed ancient forests that have been chopped down to create a moonscape.

"The boreal forest is an ancient forest," Massimo told the gathering. "It's pristine; it's beautiful. A lot of our medicines are there; a lot of wildlife. It's such a beautiful area they call it the Lungs of the Earth. There are already 2,600 oil and gas wells taking up 70 percent of our territory."

This week is Stop Tar Sands Week of Action. More than 50 organizations and 30 planned actions are involved -- including one yesterday in Oklahoma City.