Femicide: Not enough outrage

Femicide: There’s not enough outrage
http://TheStar. com – The Toronto Star, August 12, 2009
Antonia Zerbisias

`There’s not enough outrage,” lamented one women’s rights activist at a candlelight vigil for the three women cut down last Tuesday night in a Pittsburgh-area aerobics class.

As the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette noted, only 75 people showed up to mourn Heidi Overmier, 46, Elizabeth Gannon, 49, and Jody Billingsley, 38, massacred by a man, who didn’t know them, simply because they were women. That’s unusual as the vast majority of femicide victims are killed by their intimate partners or male relatives.

But, as Toronto author Brian Vallee points out in his 2007 book The War on Women, nobody counts the dead, nobody connects the dots, nobody calls out the problem.

“Compare the raw numbers,” he writes of the period 2000-06. “In the same seven-year period when 4,588 U.S. soldiers and police officers were killed by hostiles or by accident, more than 8,000 women – nearly twice as many – were shot, stabbed, strangled, or beaten to death by the intimate males in their lives. In Canada, compared to the 101 Canadian soldiers and police officers killed, more than 500 women – nearly five times as many – met the same fate.”

There’s not enough outrage.

As we all know now, George Sodini, 48 – whose racist and misogynist online diary reads like a terrorist manifesto – couldn’t get a date, couldn’t get sex, couldn’t lure any women to his modest side-split furnished with, as he points out in a spooky video, “Couch and chair; they match. The women will really be impressed.”

Well, they weren’t.

And so Sodini’s “exit plan” was to go down in history in a blaze of gunfire, taking as many women with him as he could. Just like Marc Lépine, who hated “the feminists” so much he slaughtered 14 women at Montreal’s École Polytechnique in 1989, just like Charles Carl Roberts who executed Amish school girls three years ago, and, arguably, even like Virginia Tech shooter Seung-Hui Cho, a reported stalker of female students who took up-the-skirt photos, yet another violent act of misogyny takes place.

No, no, we say. They were just loners, losers, crazies with guns.

There’s not enough outrage.

That only feminist bloggers and a very few mainstream pundits called last week’s fitness club massacre the hate crime it was should jolt us out of our sexist complacency. “We profess to being shocked at one or another of these outlandish crimes, but the shock wears off quickly in an environment in which the rape, murder and humiliation of females is not only a staple of the news, but an important cornerstone of the nation’s entertainment, ” The New York Times’s Bob Herbert noted on Friday. “The mainstream culture is filled with the most gruesome forms of misogyny, and pornography is now a multi-billion- dollar industry – much of it controlled by mainstream U.S. corporations. “

When I blogged about the massacre last week, my “men’s rights activist” regulars – whose comments did not get past the goderators – expressed little or no sympathy.Instead, they complained that “feminists” demand special treatment for female victims of crime.Two blog readers even pointed to the recent Wisconsin episode of the philandering husband – who has since been charged with child and sexual abuse – whose penis was glued to his abdomen by a trio of vengeful women as somehow having equivalence to the Pittsburgh massacre.

Cruise the men’s rights forums and you’ll be shocked by the sickening posts calling for the legal and sexual subservience of women and praising Sodini as a “hero” and “for being asymbol for the consequences of denying men sex … But something like this has to happen, perhaps hundreds of times over again, before feminists get the message.”

There’s not enough outrage.

Antonia Zerbisias is a Living section columnist. azerbisias@thestar. ca. She blogs at thestar.blogs. com.

A society saturated by misogyny

This blog is for original comments but this op ed piece by Bob Herbert, New York Times, deserves to be reprinted here.

 August 8, 2009

Women at Risk

By BOB HERBERT

“I actually look good. I dress good, am clean-shaven, bathe, touch of cologne — yet 30 million women rejected me,” wrote George Sodini in a blog that he kept while preparing for this week’s shooting in a Pennsylvania gym in which he killed three women, wounded nine others and then killed himself.

We’ve seen this tragic ritual so often that it has the feel of a formula. A guy is filled with a seething rage toward women and has easy access to guns. The result: mass slaughter. Back in the fall of 2006, a fiend invaded an Amish schoolhouse in rural Pennsylvania , separated the girls from the boys, and then shot 10 of the girls, killing five. I wrote, at the time, that there would have been thunderous outrage if someone had separated potential victims by race or religion and then shot, say, only the blacks, or only the whites, or only the Jews. But if you shoot only the girls or only the women — not so much of an uproar.

According to police accounts, Sodini walked into a dance-aerobics class of about 30 women who were being led by a pregnant instructor. He turned out the lights and opened fire. The instructor was among the wounded.

We have become so accustomed to living in a society saturated with misogyny that the barbaric treatment of women and girls has come to be more or less expected. We profess to being shocked at one or another of these outlandish crimes, but the shock wears off quickly in an environment in which the rape, murder and humiliation of females is not only a staple of the news, but an important cornerstone of the nation’s entertainment.

The mainstream culture is filled with the most gruesome forms of misogyny, and pornography is now a multibillion- dollar industry — much of it controlled by mainstream U.S. corporations. One of the striking things about mass killings in the U.S. is how consistently we find that the killers were riddled with shame and sexual humiliation, which they inevitably blamed on women and girls. The answer to their feelings of inadequacy was to get their hands on a gun (or guns) and begin blowing people away.

What was unusual about Sodini was how explicit he was in his blog about his personal shame and his hatred of women. “Why do this?” he asked. “To young girls? Just read below.” In his gruesome, monthslong rant, he managed to say, among other things: “It seems many teenage girls have sex frequently. One 16 year old does it usually three times a day with her boyfriend. So, err, after a month of that, this little [expletive] has had more sex than ME in my LIFE, and I am 48. One more reason.”

I was reminded of the Virginia Tech gunman, Seung-Hui Cho, who killed 32 people in a rampage at the university in 2007. While Cho shot males as well as females, he was reported to have previously stalked female classmates and to have leaned under tables to take inappropriate photos of women. A former roommate said Cho once claimed to have seen “promiscuity” when he looked into the eyes of a woman on campus. Soon after the Virginia Tech slayings, I interviewed Dr. James Gilligan, who spent many years studying violence as a prison psychiatrist in Massachusetts and as a professor at Harvard and N.Y.U.

“What I’ve concluded from decades of working with murderers and rapists and every kind of violent criminal,” he said, “is that an underlying factor that is virtually always present to one degree or another is a feeling that one has to prove one’s manhood, and that the way to do that, to gain the respect that has been lost, is to commit a violent act.” Life in the United States is mind-bogglingly violent.

But we should take particular notice of the staggering amounts of violence brought down on the nation’s women and girls each and every day for no other reason than who they are. They are attacked because they are female. A girl or woman somewhere in the U.S. is sexually assaulted every couple of minutes or so. The number of seriously battered wives and girlfriends is far beyond the ability of any agency to count.

There were so many sexual attacks against women in the armed forces that the Defense Department had to revise its entire approach to the problem. We would become much more sane, much healthier, as a society if we could bring ourselves to acknowledge that misogyny is a serious and pervasive problem, and that the twisted way so many men feel about women, combined with the absurdly easy availability of guns, is a toxic mix of the most tragic proportions. http://www.nytimes. com/2009/ 08/08/opinion/ 08herbert. html?_r=1

Sotomayor, Sexism and Senate Elections

By Terry Jacques

There are some forms of sexism that produce a universal reaction in women at a level so deep, no analysis is required. We see it, we feel it, and it hurts. Our stomachs clench involuntarily, and a burning ball of anger wells up within us. Some of us can brush off jokes or excuse a poorly worded phrase, but a paternalistic attitude assaults our very essence as women.

This is part of the daily-ness of sexism, experienced by all women, whether perpetrated by a boss or co-worker, a family member or someone we barely know. It could be the loan officer, the repairman or the salesman, but we all have suffered assaults on our competence from multiple directions, over and over again. And so whenever condescension rears its ugly head, we each react as if we were its direct target. When we see one woman talked down to, we know that all women are being demeaned.

This reaction crosses the boundaries of political ideology, generation, class and race. One need not ascribe to, or even like, feminism. No explanation about well-meaning intent and no set of talking points can change our reaction. It is what it is.

The Sonia Sotomayor hearings presented not one, but an ongoing string of incidents over several days. The image was tremendously powerful—a panel of predominantly middle-aged white men talking down to a woman whose education, relevant experience and accomplishments far outweighed their own. And it was clear that this attitude was embraced solely by the Republican members of the committee.

Time and time again, they led with an acknowledgment of Sotomayor’s impressive record, only to transition to the “but” that would introduce their true line of questioning and render their praise disingenuous. What they essentially said was, “You have a long, distinguished record as a judge, but we don’t care about that. Instead of asking about your actual judicial decisions, we’re going to focus on what you said out of court, whom you have associated with and what anonymous sources tell us about your character.”

 The message to women was unmistakable:

- Are you, as a woman and a nonwhite, capable of rendering nonbiased decisions like those of us who are white men?

- Do you have a “temperament problem”? Even though we’ve heard the same about a certain male justice, we can’t tolerate assertiveness from a woman. Perhaps you are, like many women, controlled by your emotions, or worse yet, the stereotypic “bitch.”

- How dare you think that ”a wise Latina woman” could ever render a better judgment than a white man! We are deeply concerned that you might have the audacity to think you are better than us.

- We’re going to lecture you over and over again about your poor choice of words so that we can be sure that you have grasped our meaning. Perhaps we should speak more slowly and use shorter words.

- Do you have anything to say for yourself, young lady? I think you should apologize. – I want you to take some time to reflect upon your behavior. You go on “time out,” and we’ll talk about it tomorrow.

Few women could watch so much as a portion of the hearings and not cringe at the dripping praise and overblown, often infantilizing, criticism rendered by Republican committee members. Even women hoping for Sotomayor’s demise as a judicial nominee would take issue with her treatment as a woman.

If the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and the DNC are smart, they’ll start looking for and preparing women and/or Latino candidates now to run against these Republicans. Although Tom Coburn of Oklahoma is the only one running in 2010, footage of the hearings will keep, given that the issue is attitudinal and not related to policy. Since the behavior of these committee members is reflected in the talking points of the party as a whole, the same footage could be used against the Republican leadership and any senator that has been seen on television parroting these sentiments.

Arlen Specter almost lost his seat during the height of his bi-partisan popularity because the women of Pennsylvania were incensed by his aggressive treatment of Anita Hill and his cavalier attitude toward sexual harassment. Hillary Clinton was able to carry her presidential candidacy well beyond the point when she lost, mainly because women across the country bristled at the thought of a younger man ascending to power in the place of a more experienced woman. The McCain campaign recognized the power of sexism as a motivator to conservative women, although they also demonstrated a superficial level of understanding, by nominating a token woman for the vice-presidency.

The Sotomayor hearings remind us how important it is to have more women in positions of leadership, while at the same time illustrating a disturbing attitude among conservative Republicans—that it is acceptable opposition strategy to openly put women in their place. If given a viable choice, many women will vote accordingly. Democratic leaders hoping to solidify their majority in the Senate would do well to remember this.

Sowing a climate of hatred reaps violence

By Jane Lane

The commentators I saw on cable television yesterday who were interviewed about the 89-year-old who shot and killed a guard at the Holocaust Museum went to great lengths to distinguish between true conservatives and “the fringe.” A couple of them even gratuitously added that there are radical fringe elements on the left as well as the right, for example, environmental terrorists. This sort of disclaimer thinking does nothing to address the problem of violence in our society – of the numbers of people who go out shooting, whether it’s a public place or in their home.

The discussion is always about the motive, as if this is purely an individual issue, outside of the context of society, and not a symptom of things that may be wrong in society itself. One of the discussions was in response to the standard question of “what made him snap,” ignoring all of the evidence that this was a man who had been consumed with racial hatred and bitterness all of his life.

One commentator mentioned economic pressures. This is nothing but pulling out the same old line of thought that is standard in the news articles including domestic violence homicides when a man kills his wife (and sometimes children) and then kills himself.  What was the motive? What made him snap? Were there economic pressures?

 Nothing is going to change as long as the people driving these discussions and reporting them are using the same old dialog interminably cut and pasted into the next article, and the next discussion, and the next cable TV show.

There is a climate of hatred and anger in this country. People who act out their anger do it with violence. The Bush administration fostered fear and hatred of people who were “others” – whether they were the 9-11 terrorists or anyone being scapegoated for them.

The reality created by that administration relied on citizens continuing to be afraid, angry, and vindictive. Now we have an administration that wants to build bridges between people by finding common ground. But the GOP strategy is to be the “Party of No.”

In order to be the Party of No, there must be an opposite party (in this case, the Party of “Yes We Can.”) This party of opposition strategy wasn’t devised since Obama was elected to be president; it is from the old bag of tricks from the 1930s.

What happens when your strategy is to oppose everything the “other side” does? You spend time attacking the people, not the policy. You don’t have to promote positive policy, you just object and obfuscate and obstruct so that the other party can’t get anything done. You don’t limit your attacks to the message, you attack the messenger.

How do you attack people? By reinforcing the very worst in us – our desire to be around people who are like us, and to be afraid of and avoid people who are different. Reinforcing narrow group think, you point out all of the things that make the other side different – their race, their ethnic background, their religion, their beliefs, their culture, their language, their sex, their sexual preference, their lifestyle, their politics, their socio-economic status. All of the things that define them – as opposed to “us” – become not just the things that make people different that we should tolerate in others, but sins, errors, mistakes, wrong, and bad. For example, there is no sympathy for people in poverty – it must be their own fault they’re poor.

We can be intellectually lazy. We don’t have to be open to new ideas. We can reinforce the fences that we felt like building. We can build a wall between our country and theirs. We can make them go home unless they begin talking the way we talk.

We are absolved of any responsibility for others. We are not our brothers’ keeper. We shouldn’t have to spend tax money to help take care of “them” whether that means that we don’t ourselves get access to health care, or mental health programs, or good public schools, or continuing education, or substance abuse programs, or prenatal care, or even bridges that don’t collapse under our cars. We aren’t responsible.

And “they” don’t need rights. Why should people accused of being terrorists be entitled to lawyers, and trials, and courts, and decent prisons? Or not to be tortured? As long as “my group” is strong and right, there is no danger of me being picked up off the streets of America and thrown into a prison or a prison camp without being provided any rights. As long as I know I’m part of the right group, I don’t care if I lose my individual freedom to privacy – who would want to listen in on my phone calls? Or search my home or computer?

So if I don’t need these rights, neither does anyone else.

And my group is right – therefore, we represent the “real, true Americans.”

 This was the campaign message of Sarah Palin – appealing to the people who are entrenched in group think and who do not know how their lives are diminished by their xenophobic fear and hatred of everyone else. And who do not recognize that while they proclaim that they are the true patriots and protectors of our country’s foundation, the Constitution, they are the ones undermining it every time they can’t see why they need the rights established in it.

They harp about their ”freedoms” without even the most minimal understanding of what those are — except, perhaps, for a misconstrued understanding of the Second Amendment right to bear arms.

And as long as there is also a group mindset on the part of the media that reinforces that violence is an individual abberation, and not a systemic problem, nothing will change. If we can’t see the connection between what we sow and what we reap, nothing will change.

The wasteland?

By Jane Lane

A question I posed to the Feminist Advisory Board 4 Obama group.

Twitter has been a great place to visit where I can meet other feminists, but I wouldn’t want to have to communicate in 140 character messages all the time!

I need to talk about the importance of place. And practice. And sustenance for feminists no matter where we are located geographically.

I have a quiet farmhouse to live in where I can do the practice part MadamaAmbi mentioned. It happens to be in a very “red” part of what was a “red state.” We few Democrats and feminists were tolerated in
our sparesely populated part of the state during all of the terrible years of the Bush administration and our senator was Marilyn “get a gun and stop gay marriages” Musgrave.

Then, in the last election, our state turned Blue! Hurrah! And a woman Democrat ousted Musgrave.

But the right wingnutty political perspective that is the majority in this area has no intention of settling in and accepting these changes — they’ve become completely unhinged. The state senator representing this area (with his “God-given, Bill of Rights protected right” — as he tweeted — to have guns) and a large
group of other anti-government, private property, protectors of the patriarchy are lining up already to see who is going to unseat our Senator in two years, and are up at the state capitol today engaged in a “tea party” and are talking about the 10th Amendment movement.

So instead of it being easier to live in this environment since the election, it is getting harder. I went to the cafe the other morning to have breakfast and there was a racist Obama cartoon on the bulletin board, so I tore it down and left. I’ve enountered anti-Obama remarks from the bank teller who was waiting on me, at the lumber yard, and at the hospital in a community meeting.

We thought we were moving into a more tolerant world, but are finding ourselves in the middle of the blowback.

So. How much of having a “quiet place to write” (or to have a spiritual life, or a sense of self and center from which to be an activist, or fill in the blank _______) is PLACE and how much is PRACTICE?

Is there a critical mass of wingnuttiness that gathers in a geographical area beyond which a hard core, solid feminist trying to live a quiet but activist life can no longer practice without having to move to a new place?

It is dry out here in rural feminist land. It is arid. It is a hostile environment. I have been online since 1995 building safe virtual places where we can try to nourish each other in our long distance relationships. But we are still not bridging that gap between rural women and feminists, or even rural feminists and feminists.

I’m turning to this new list with an unorthodox request for nourishment and new ideas about how to connect the marginalized rural feminists with the rest of the movement. And, for personal support.

Because one of the big differences that I see between feminism and the tough individualistic type of rural woman we have out here (or the self-promoting Sarah Palin, for example) is that we understand that the personal is political, we do not live in isolation, and we help pull each other up rather than leave each other to fend with our own bootstraps because we are part of a caring movement.

Can we live isolated in hostile places and still maintain our practice?

Is there a way to hold our banners up while keeping our heads down in what feels like permanent hunting season?

Can we build bridges between feminists and rural women that nourish them where they are?

Is there the perfect coffee shop bookstore feminist space somewhere just waiting for us to leave our windy spaces and move into the neighborhood?

“Jane Lane”

Ag Census: Growing Diversity in U.S. Farming

Census of Agriculture Shows Growing Diversity in U.S. Farming

The USDA press release issued this month claims that farms are becoming more diverse:

WASHINGTON, Feb. 4, 2009 – The number of farms in the United States has grown 4 percent and the operators of those farms have become more diverse in the past five years, according to results of the 2007 Census of Agriculture released today by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS).

The 2007 Census counted 2,204,792 farms in the United States, a net increase of 75,810 farms. Nearly 300,000 new farms have begun operation since the last census in 2002. Compared to all farms nationwide, these new farms tend to have more diversified production, fewer acres, lower sales and younger operators who also work off-farm.

In the past five years, U.S. farm operators have become more demographically diverse. The 2007 Census counted nearly 30 percent more women as principal farm operators. The count of Hispanic operators grew by 10 percent, and the counts of American Indian, Asian and Black farm operators increased as well.

The latest census figures show a continuation in the trend towards more small and very large farms and fewer mid-sized operations. Between 2002 and 2007, the number of farms with sales of less than $2,500 increased by 74,000. The number of farms with sales of more than $500,000 grew by 46,000 during the same period.

The 2007 Census found that 57 percent of all farmers have internet access, up from 50 percent in 2002. For the first time in 2007, the census also looked at high-speed Internet access. Of those producers accessing the Internet, 58 percent reported having a high-speed connection.

Census results are available online at www.agcensus.usda.gov .

The press release claims that the number of black farm operators has increased. At the same time, not all farmers who filed for claims in the Pigford caase have received their awards. The 1999 Class Action Lawsuit Settlement Pigford v. Glickman, was to award 20,000 Black farmers $2.5 billion in damages for loan discrimination practiced committed by the federal government.

The Black Farmers and Agriculturalists Association is a non-profit organization “created to respond to the issues and concerns of Black farmers in the U.S. and abroad. They “are committed to securing justice for small farmers and combating environmental injustice facing rural people around the world.”

BFAA was also organized to monitor the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the settlement in the Pigford case.

They are hold the National Black Land Loss Summit this month. More information about the summit.

Feminist Peace Network says too much testosterone in the room

Feminist Peace Network says there are not enough women involved in creating the solution to a problem created by men. Read the whole post.

To the male powers that be who royally effed up the economy: go pour your own damned coffee, bring us a cup while you’re at it and sit down, shut up and listen. We’ve got a whole lot more experience cleaning messes up than you do and you’ve got a wad of ’splaining to do.

Obama appoints Native woman to mediator’s post

After an eight-year void in the White House, President Barack Obama has appointed an American Indian to a high-profile intergovernmental job to be the “eyes and ears” of Indian Country.

The Obama administration named three people to posts in its intergovernmental affairs office on Friday, including Jodi Archambault Gillette, a member of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe. The Lakota woman will serve as a deputy associate director in an office that functions as a mediator between the administration and state, tribal and local governments.

“This is the first time we’ve had an American Indian that close to the White House, dealing with intergovernmental affairs,” said David Gipp, president of the United Tribes Technical College in Bismarck, N.D., where Gillette previously served as director of the Native American Training Institute, a tribally operated nonprofit organization. Complete Story from The Missoulian

Spot the Difference!

Spot the Difference! | Menstrual Poetry

Posted using ShareThis

Poll on stimulus bill: Obama 67, Republicans in Congress 31

President Obama enjoys a higher approval rating than Congress in the debate over passing an economic stimulus package, according to a poll released Monday by Gallup.

The public gave Obama a 67 percent approval rating for his efforts, compared to 31 percent for Republicans in Congress, according to the poll.

Story