US opens asylum to sexually abused women
This story caught my eye:
The Obama administration has opened the way for foreign women who are victims of severe domestic beatings and sexual abuse to receive asylum in the United States. The action reverses a Bush administration stance in a protracted and passionate legal battle over the possibilities for battered women to become refugees.
There are still strict criteria but the move is to be celebrated nevertheless.
It also struck me that in addition to foreign policy, the environment and a whole rage of domestic issues like healthcare and science – Obama really is trying to eke out a different agenda despite the establishment inertia. And yet there are still hard-left ranters who keep saying there’s little difference between Obama and Bush. It boggles the mind.
Hypocrisy and the Conservative family fetish
The Family – what does it mean, this ephemeral concept that makes Tory policymakers so very moist and excited? It doesn’t mean any old bunch of people bound together by blood and love. Ian Duncan Smith’s vision of The Family as propounded in his new policy paper, Every Family Matters, is the relatively recent kitsched-out 1950s incarnation of the nuclear heterosexual brood: you know, one man and one woman bound in holy wedlock, living together with their genetic offspring, him in the office, her in the kitchen.
Well, that rules out my family for a start, and probably yours too. And yet Tory wallahs – not even in power yet but already slavering to sink their teeth into Labour’s social reforms – get all gooey over The Family. All you need to do is have a shyster mention ‘ordinary families’, as distinguished from the rest of us scum, and Tory spinsters start wetting their little knickers.
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Selling abortion
A revised broadcast advertising code will force anti-abortionists to make their dangerous bias clear:
We pro-choicers were happy to note that the BCAP’s just-closed consultation on a revised advertising code included a proposal to allow abortion providers to advertise abortion services on radio and TV.
Equally cheering was the news that the code would include this new rule (11.11 in the code):
‘Advertisements for post-conception pregnancy advice services must make clear in the advertisement if the service does not refer women directly for abortion.’
BCAP’s argument – rightly – is that there ain’t time to waste if you’re thinking of getting an abortion: the longer you leave it, the riskier the procedure is likely to be (the BCAP reference is the renowned 2004 Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists’ paper on abortion safety and standards).
In other words – you need to know immediately if the ad you’re seeing is for a provider who offers balanced, accurate, post-conception information and abortion (or a referral for one) if that is what you want, or if you’re about to be drafted by an outfit that hopes to pull one back for Jesus Christ by neglecting to mention safe, legal abortion is available, and pumping you full of romantic notions about the realities of an unwanted child. continue reading… »
Silence is the enemy
A friend told me recently about an evening she’d just spent visiting an elderly uncle who was staying with her parents. Now this uncle, let’s call him Bob, is in his seventies, and is fond of telling stories about his past. This particular evening was no exception, and as my friend, her partner, and various other relatives (including his wife) settled down to chill out after a big family meal, Bob started off on one of his tales.
But this story turned out to be a bit different from the normal, everyday reminiscences the family was used to hearing: this one was about the time Bob was out in Libya doing his National Service, more specifically about the time he witnessed 6 or more of his colleagues line up and rape a young woman.
Apparently the soldiers had been given a night off and so had gone out to a small town close to where they were billeted. There, they’d come upon a local couple, and after a brief discussion among themselves about how they hadn’t seen a woman in ages, one of the group went over to the man and asked him how much he’d be prepared to take to let them have sex with his wife The two men negotiated, and eventually the husband settled on a price.
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Labour women: demonised and dismissed
Think what you will of Flint’s resignation – but don’t put your criticisms (or your photos) in gender-loaded terms. Personally I think Flint’s resignation was opportunistic, badly orchestrated and ultimately self-defeating; but I don’t think it was a “silly woman” losing her head because of oestrogen and an X chromosome.
Across the media, Flint was portrayed in starkly sexist terms. She’s “flounced out” of the cabinet in a “hissy fit”, throwing “a stiletto in the heart of government”.
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Dr George Tiller murdered by ‘pro life’ terrorists
In case you hadn’t heard, Dr George Tiller, one of the USA’s few late-term abortion providers, was shot dead by ‘pro-life’ terrorists in Wichita today as he was going to his Sunday morning church service.
Via Feministe:
Dr. Tiller was one of the few late-term abortion providers in the country. He had previously been shot, his clinic burnt down, harassed by ideological anti-abortion attorney generals, and threatened with death countless times. Still, Dr. Tiller continued to provide abortions to women who desperately needed them, to save their own lives or health, or due to tragic fetal deformities. He put the health of women above his own life. And now he is dead.
This is the first time an abortion provider has been killed in over a decade, although in that time countless numbers of brave men and women have faced death threats, attacks and intimidation and continued to do their jobs. My thoughts are with the family, friends and co-workers of Dr Tiller, and with all of those held morally and physically hostage by the crass hypocrisy of the mindless terrorists responsible for his murder.
Cath Elliott has more.
Boris Keep Your Promise campaign launches
A new campaign has launched today, called Boris Keep Your Promise. They say:
There is only one remaining Rape Crisis centre for the whole of London.
That’s one small centre for 3.9 million women. The staff and volunteers who run the centre work with constant danger of closing over their heads and can never be sure that their core funding costs can be met from year to year. During the run-up to his election, Boris Johnson promised, with much PR fanfare, to pay for three new centres and fund the only remaining centre for at least 4 years. That he will fulfill that promise, or even part of it, is now seriously in doubt.
Of course Boris Johnson breaking campaign promises is nothing new but this one matters a lot. Spread the word please! Here’s their website, Facebook group and Twitter page (#boriskeepyourpromise). There is also a fundraising event on 4th June.
Dail Mail admits exec rewrote story to add sexism
The Daily Mail legal team made an extraordinary admission today. The newspaper was today forced to pay out £10,000 to three women because it alleged they rated their careers and figures more highly than having children. That alone is a cause for celebration after it paid out “substantial damages” last week for allegations against Tom Watson MP in an article by blogger Iain Dale.
What’s remarkable about this story is the Daily Mail’s own admission that a senior exec re-wrote the story to make it more sexist.
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Feminists and allies: vote out the stupid!
There are going to be European elections soon, and the fascist British National Party are hoping to get an MEP elected. On top of the far-from-insignificantly fucking scary racism, xenophobia and homophobia that riddles their policy platform, the BNP are pushing a specifically and deliberately sexist agenda. Stopping these stupid bigots from gaining any more of a toehold in our nation is a feminist issue, too. Here’s why:
The BNP hate what they call, without a shred of irony, ‘feminazis’. By this they seem to mean not just self-identified feminists but any woman who, in the words of a recent BNP candidate, is ‘unnatural and vile… it is a strange kind of woman who would want to invest [her] energies into her job rather than into a man.’ The BNP are specifically and explicitly AGAINST equal rights between men and women. Party leader Nick Griffin has described the very idea of gender equality as ‘feminist poison’.
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Oh dear, Demos
Think-tank Demos last week launched their vision for how power should be “radically” devolved.
But Jenni Russell at Comment is Free went to the launch, and “no one mentioned women’s existence once”:
As I stood listening, I began to feel a rising tide of outrage. There was just one problem with this message of transformation and innovation – which was that every single one of the five speakers arguing for change was a man (white, at that). That every name mentioned as a new Demos adviser was that of a man. That no one mentioned women’s existence once. And that when we were shown a brief video about how power must be shared with the people, every silhouette and every symbol on the screen was – quite unselfconsciously – that of a man.
Very… er… radical.
(Crossposted from The F-Word)
Review: Jessica Valenti of Feministing’s new books
Jessica Valenti, editor of the popular blog Feministing, in an effort to make us all feel like we should get up earlier, has not one but two new books out. Both were released in the UK this week on May 7th.
‘He’s a Stud, She’s a Slut (And 49 Other Double Standards Every Woman Should Know)’ looks like one of those rather meaningless “gift books” that you buy for friends when you can’t think of anything else they’d like or you’ve only just remembered that it’s birthday drinks you’re heading to when you get to the train station with two minutes to spare.
But we know Valenti better than to expect anything so simple. Inside, chopped into sassy bite-sized chunks Valenti presents an overwhelmingly compelling case for the existence of a double standard for women in every branch of society.
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I’m taking a test tonight
I’ve been away from the blogosphere, trying to write a report for Red Pepper on the progress of abortion rights in Ireland and the new reproductive activist wave in London. I’ve also been nauseous, off my food and feeling generally off. It’s probably nothing. It could be stress. It could be coughing pig death. Or, I could be pregnant.
Despite a rigorous contraceptive routine, despite taking every precaution, despite the fact that I’m still bleeding, I could be pregnant. No method is 100% failsafe. Since I started blogging, I’ve had three pregnancy scares, not counting the frisson of gut-knawing panic that precedes the monthly gut-crunching pain.
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A wake-up call for the left
With the New Labour project almost over, we can be comfortable with two assumptions: the Tories are coming to power; the left will descend into civil war over future political direction. So I want to draw the battle lines as early as possible, and this is part of that. The question could be posed in many different ways, but this may be the simplest: What has been the left’s main problem over the last decade?
For me, it is the failure to illustrate an easily identifiable vision for the future beyond tired old platitudes, and build mass movements on those ideas. It is the failure to build wide-ranging popular coalitions that aren’t hijacked by the SWP hard-left. It is the failure to build organisational capacity and, more importantly, harness the energy of the people.
What do I mean by that?
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Men, feminism and the patriarchal con
In recent weeks, I’ve faced a lot of accusations of misandry for daring to point out that some bad things that happen are perpetrated almost exclusively by men, and for having the temerity to suggest that in some situations women get a raw deal simply because of their biological sex. I thought I’d respond to the critics with a few reasons why feminism and misandry are not synonymous, and why male and female feminists need to work together to break tired economic models of gender.
As feminists, the liberation of the y-chromosomed half of the human race has never been high on our list of priorities – historically speaking, we’ve had enough to worry about. However, it’s high time that we started a serious recruitment drive. Although the feminist movement has faced many obstacles and lost many battles, women have now won themselves enough social and economic capital that we can finally start to address the other half of the equation: the emancipation of men from capitalist patriarchy.
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Hitchens: drunk raped women ‘deserve less sympathy’
From his Daily Mail column today, erm, last year:
Women who get drunk are more likely to be raped than women who do not get drunk. No, this does not excuse rape. Men who take advantage of women by raping them, drunk or sober, should be severely punished for this wicked, treacherous action, however stupid the victim may have been.
But it does mean that a rape victim who was drunk deserves less sympathy. Simple, isn’t it? You can hate rape and want it punished, while still recognising that a woman who, say, goes back to a man’s home after several Bacardi Breezers was being a bit dim.
via Chickyog on Twitter
Shocking attitudes towards rape & Million Women Rise march
The Home Office yesterday published results of a poll on violence against women.
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Identity politics and the internet
I’ve been thinking a lot, over the past few days, with all the shilly-shallying around International Women’s Day and this whole issue of violence against women and whether or not it’s important. I’ve been thinking about what it means to be a feminist writing online, and whether I can hack the amount of abuse I’ve been getting recently. Whether it just depresses me too much to carry on. People have been telling me to shut up and get a real job for a while now. Perhaps I should listen to them.
On the internet, identity is fluid – and so choosing to adopt and pursue a female identity, or indeed any identity which deviates from white heteronormativity, is a statement with which makes a lot of people uncomfortable on a very basic level. Choosing to be proud of an identity that consciously others itself from the white, male consensus with which the internet, like so many other fiefdoms, emerged, is problematic. It can and does draw an horrific quantity of abuse, including on the pages of mainstream debate sites such as Comment Is Free, Lablist and even – sometimes – this site.
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Amnesty’s statistics on violence against women
Some commenters recently raised concerns about Amnesty UK’s statistic: ‘Each year, around 1 in ten women in Britain will experience rape and or other violence‘. So, Rachel North emailed them and got this response:
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A Few Facts about Teenage Pregnancy
Right, it’s time to give Derek Draper a lesson in how to do a proper rebuttal.
Yesterday, Don Paskini took Tom Harris MP to task for adopting the time-honoured gutter tactic of picking on teenage mums to curry favour with the Daily Mail crowd – time of post, 9:20am.
Almost exactly one hour later, a trackback arrived from Stuart Sharpe, who accuses the Don of being an ‘apologist for the welfare state’ – yes, it’s that tired old canard, yet again – before going on to offer up this comment on the Don’s post:
If Tony Blair was talking about it 10 years ago, everything must be perfectly fine, and Tom Harris’s points are completely invalid. Never mind that in those ten years the teenage pregnancy rate has continued to climb exponentially. Never mind that Tony Blair talking about something rarely ever amounted to Tony Blair doing anything about it.
All of which makes Stuart wrong on just about every substantive point of his argument. continue reading… »
Tom Harris MP and teenage mums
One of the many sad and pathetic things about Tom Harris MP slagging off teenage mums on his blog is that he obviously believes he is being brave in doing so.
Harris is a Member of Parliament, his argument draws on comments which Tony Blair made a decade ago and in content and tone he is regurgitating the prejudices found in national newspapers and conversations amongst the rich and powerful on a daily basis. You might have thought this would be sufficient support to take on the mighty lobby group that is 16 year old girls who have children.
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» Why does Phillip Blond see civil cohesion as a security issue?
» So what if the Labour candidates went to Oxbridge?
» Last night’s Labour hustings: will it get interesting or turn to torture?
» It’s now down to Ken to win London for Labour
» The Labour people need
» Blog Nation: what would you like to see discussed?
» The Labour leadership’s token contender.. and it’s not Diane Abbott
» In defence of these fraternal nominations
» Is this the end for the socialist left?
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