Young women’s org: “Craigslist wrong target’

Posted on September 21, 2010 by margotmagowan

Mia Herndon, Executive Director of Third Wave, an organization run by and for young women and transgender youth age 35 and under, believes that shutting down Craigslist’s ‘adult services’ section is a simplistic and ultimately ineffective response to the complex issues around sex work and young people.

Herndon says, “Craigslist is one of the few sites that worked with law enforcement. It’s not the right target.”

Herndon says that it was mostly sex workers themselves who used the site to support their work. “Those ads on Craigslist were mostly paid for by the people providing services.”

I asked Herndon if Newmark’s silence on the issue and claims of censorship bothered her. She said that people have different responses to being attacked and that Third Wave is concerned about the health and safety of sex workers rather than the response of the Craigslist founder.

Herndon warns against law makers and the media conflating the issues of young people engaged in sex work versus sex trafficking and using blanket ‘victim language’ to talk about it all. She says Third Wave is committed to helping sex workers have a safe and healthy work environment from which they can support themselves.

I still believe Craigslist has a responsibilty to speak out instead of clamming up. It’s hard to get women’s and children’s issues on the front page and presented in an intelligent way. Here’s an opportunity for the media, law makers, and the public to get educated on sex trafficking, sex work, and young people. If Craig Newmark doesn’t want to be the expert to speak out, he should hire someone who is qualified to and who will.

Here is an excerpt from what I posted yesterday about media reports that most women’s organizations are refusing to take contributions from Craigslist, including burning an $100,000 check:

I’ve got to admire any organization that stands by its principles and burns an $100,000 check. I think that must have been an empowering act for the Center for Young Women’s Development. Though I also believe its challenging to claim any money is pure. Obviously all donors aren’t investigated. It seems like every cosmetic company on earth gives money to help eradicate breast cancer, including all the ones that test on animals and sell magical creams that promise to banish cellulite. Obviously selling girls is far worse than selling potions and lines have to be drawn. Oprah doesn’t carry ads in her magazine from cigarette or diet companies. Everyone’s got their limits. Or they don’t.

I’m most troubled that Craigslist founder, Craig Newmark, hasn’t said more about sex trafficking. I saw a much repeated CNN interview where a reporter kept questioning him about the ads on his site and he mostly stared back at her, stone faced. He seemed mad. Now he has a “Censored” sign over his adult section and that seems angry too. Especially because Craig Newmark isn’t being censored. He has a voice on CNN and any TV news or radio outlet or national magazine he wants. Why doesn’t Newmark use that platform to do something to help the powerless, voiceless kids who are victims of sex crimes instead of petulantly sulking that he’s being censored?

Read Third Wave’s statement on sex workers here.

Women’s rage against Craig deserved?

Posted on September 20, 2010 by margotmagowan

After coming under fire from women’s organizations such as The Rebecca Project, which successfully pressured law enforcement, Attorneys General from states across the country finally shut down Craigslist’s adult section. A victory for women and the power of women’s organizations: prostitution and sex trafficking was being advertised on the popular site out in the open as if it were no big deal and perfectly legal. Now its all been shut down! Hurray!

Center for Young Women's Development burns $100,000 check from Craigslist

But is Craigslist’s “erotic services” section closing a real victory for women and victims of sex crimes?

No doubt it’s shocking that sex and sex with children was being sold blatantly on the internet– and shocking that no one seemed shocked– letting it all just go on for years like no one cared and it didn’t matter at all except to a few fanatic feminist organizations. Not only was Craigslist perpetuating child abuse and illegal activities, but the company was making 36 million dollars from its adult section.

But is shutting down Craigslist’s adult section really just shooting the messenger?

Women’s organizations argue even if it is, that messenger is a key to facilitating crimes against women and children. Craigslist and sites like it provide the crucial PR and marketing arm for sex trafficking, without which sex crimes would not have the massive outreach they do.

But others argue shutting down Craigslist only pushes sex trafficking further underground. The site was a tool used by law enforcement to monitor all kinds of illegal activity, a telescope into the murky, secret world of sex crime is now lost.

As far as the millions of dollars Craigslist earned from its adult section, the company was donating 100% of proceeds to charitable causes, including organizations to help women. Though now, women’s organizations are rejecting that money. The Center for Young Women’s Development burned a $100,000 check.

Salon’s Tracy Clark-Flory thought this money from Craigslist going to women’s organizations posed an interesting dilemma for these non-profits and called several of them including NOW, Equality Now, and the Fair Fund, to ask what they thought. All of their spokespeople told Clark-Flory they saw no dilemma at all; they would take no money from Craigslist. Girls Educational and Mentoring Services told the New York Times the same thing: “That money has come from pimps and traffickers who have sold many of the girls who will then walk in my door.”

I’ve got to admire any organization that stands by its principles and burns an $100,000 check. I think that must have been an empowering act for the Center for Young Women’s Development. Though I also believe its challenging to claim any money is pure. Obviously all donors aren’t investigated. It seems like every cosmetic company on earth gives money to help eradicate breast cancer, including all the ones that test on animals and sell magical creams that promise to banish cellulite. Obviously selling girls is far worse than selling potions and lines have to be drawn. Oprah doesn’t carry ads in her magazine from cigarette or diet companies. Everyone’s got their limits. Or they don’t.

I’m most troubled that Craigslist founder, Craig Newmark, hasn’t said more about sex trafficking. I saw a much repeated CNN interview where a reporter kept questioning him about the ads on his site and he mostly stared back at her, stone faced. He seemed mad. Now he has a “Censored” sign over his adult section and that seems angry too. Especially because Craig Newmark isn’t being censored. He has a voice on CNN and any TV news or radio outlet or national magazine he wants. Why doesn’t Newmark use that platform to do something to help the powerless, voiceless kids who are victims of sex crimes instead of petulantly sulking that he’s being censored?

Is it that Newmark thinks, as Businessweek reports, that he’s not really mainstream, he’s an “alternative” site, still using the .org suffix even though he’s not a non-profit? Unlike Twitter, AOL, Yahoo, Facebook, and YouTube, Craigslist never hired extensive staff to monitor the site. Businessweek reports Newmark believes in “crowdsourcing.”

Craigslist believes that the Internet enables a new kind of small enterprise to create a global service that delivers a public good by tapping into the power of users who “crowdsource” content.

By becoming mired in a seemingly never-ending legal scrum over adult ads, Craigslist is forcing even Internet true-believers to question that model. “I have concluded over the years that crowd-sourcing isn’t enough,” says Eric Goldman, director of the High Tech Law Institute at California’s Santa Clara University. ‘There has to be enough of a human presence to make sure sites can deliver on the trust that users want to have in them. It could very well be that Craigslist is just understaffed, and there is no model for it to continue operating at the current level.’

Can the internet really monitor itself? Does Newmark really believe it can? Especially when kids are so often victims? This theory seems reminiscent of the unrealistic belief that capitalism is just supposed to take care of itself and then we’re all surprised when something like the mortgage crisis happens. This kind of libertarianism only works in a dreamworld where there are no powerless people. Newmark’s claim of censorship reminds me of the movie “The People Versus Larry Flynt” where the founder of Hustler was idolized as a proponent of free speech. I can’t really get behind Flynt or Newmark as some kind of icon of coolness, but at least Flynt used his bullhorn to speak whenever he could. I don’t get Newmark’s silence.

Here’s a statement I received on sex work from Third Wave, an organization for and run by feminists under age 35. (Full disclosure, I used to be on the board of the Third Wave.) I’m not sure what their position on Craigslist is, I’m talking to them tomorrow and will post about it, but I think they put out a great statement that begins to address the complexity of the issues around sex work and young people. Here it is:

Part of the solution: youth engaged in sex work & the sex trade

Third Wave Foundation supports the work of young people to make powerful change in their communities.

As a progressive philanthropic institution, we are committed to strengthening organizations led by-and-for young women of color and transgender youth in low-income communities. Our grant partners work on a broad range of issues and employ myriad strategies, including challenging violence and gender-based inequity and claiming rights to economic opportunity, education, and health care. Through the work of our grant partners and through our philanthropic advocacy, we seek to shift historic and systemic forms of violence and oppression that are rooted in gender, race, and class inequity.

We do not believe that sex work is a cause of that violence or oppression, nor do we believe that seeking to prohibit safe and consensual sex work or the demand for it is the solution to eradicating gender-based inequity or violence. In fact, these attempts to criminalize sex work often have the unintended consequence of leaving young people even more vulnerable. Prohibitions on sex work — even when targeted at third-parties such as customers and advertising venues — criminalize young people and force them further underground in order to meet their survival needs. As a result, they are more vulnerable to violence and isolated from one another and from rights advocates.

Third Wave supports young people engaged in sex work and impacted by the sex trade as critical partners in ensuring health and justice. We at Third Wave are deeply concerned about the ways in which young women and transgender youth may be subject to abuse and violence in any aspect of their lives. Over the last decade of supporting this work, we have learned that young people come to sex work and the sex trade through a wide range of experiences that include choice, circumstance, and coercion. Our community of grant partners and allies includes sex workers, people involved in the sex trade and street economies, and people who have been trafficked. Regardless of how young people are involved in or are impacted by the sex trade, they must be considered partners in the work of advocating for rights and achieving justice.

We recognize and affirm a difference between sex work and trafficking, and urge policymakers and allies in human rights advocacy to approach these issues with respect for that difference.

These are nuanced and deeply complex concerns. Pursuing a plan of action to address violence, coercion, or trafficking without considering the needs and leadership of young people with direct experience in sex work and the sex trade will result in solutions that do not fully address the harms that young people face. Nor will advocates benefit from the depth of their expertise.

With our support, young people engaged in sex work and who are impacted by the sex trade are organizing in their communities and achieving wins.

Across the US, our grant partners are supporting one another to create smart solutions that are rooted in their day-to-day realities.

* They conduct research on the needs of their own communities, mapping the complex social service systems that they must navigate successfully in order to seek support.

* They operate their own health care clinics with state and city-level health partners.

* They advocate for and participate in city taskforces that address youth housing needs.

* They have developed their own programs to secure legal advocacy for their communities.

* They organize and train one another to work within criminal/legal systems to advocate for their rights.

Together, they create innovative new models for peer support and education rooted in harm reduction principles and respect for young people’s power to make change in their own lives.

We value the full range of experiences of young people who do sex work and are impacted by the sex trade, and support work that builds their power and agency.

It is a step forward for policymakers and advocates to recognize that young people who do sex work or who are impacted by the sex trade are not criminals. We must also recognize that not all young people who do sex work and who are impacted by the sex trade are victims.

Partnerships between young people and adult allies must support the vision and leadership of young people. We work in collaboration with young people to secure the resources they need to continue creating a healthy and just world. We urge policymakers who seek to protect young people from violence to include young people’s expertise at every level of their decision-making. We also urge our community partners and allies to center the voices and experiences of young people who do sex work and who are impacted by the sex trade when advocating for their human rights.

Invest in women, change the world

Posted on June 17, 2010 by margotmagowan

This week at San Francisco’s City Hall The International Museum of Women and San Francisco Arts Commission opened Economica: Picturing Power and Potential, a juried photo exhibition. The show features photography of women at work around the world, celebrating them as “economic participants and agents of change.”

To put on this show, the jury reviewed works by 150 artists who responded to an international call for submissions. In the end, 20 artists were selected: 6 from the Bay Area, 4 additional U.S. artists, and artists from Japan, Kenya, Brazil, the Netherlands, China, India, Iran, and Canada. The subject matter ranges from teen community leaders in Richmond to opera singers in Brazil to seaweed farmers in Zanzibar.

www.sfartscommission.org

Seaweed Farmers of Zanzibar, Joanna Lipper

This is an absolutely stunning exhibition. Looking at the gorgeous photographs, I felt as if I were visiting all the countries featured, getting an intimate look at women’s everyday lives while I traveled around the world. You will leave this show inspired and impressed by the strength of these women, and convinced that investing in them will help to change the world.

Here are some stats on the global status of women, dry numbers that these photographs illustrate in a deeply personal way:

Women make up 70% of the world’s poor, those who live on less than $1 a day.

Women work 2/3 of the world’s working hours, yet earn only 10% of the world’s income.

Women are responsible for producing 60 – 80% of the world’s food, yet hold only 1% of the world’s land.

Worldwide, over 60% of people working in family enterprises without pay are women.

The total value of women’s unpaid house and farm work adds 1/3 to the world’s GNP.

One of the winning photographers, Joanna Lipper, along with being a filmmaker, author, and a Sheila Biddle Ford Foundation Fellow at the W.E.B Du Bois Institute For African and African American Studies at Harvard University, is also a Fellow of the Woodhull Institute for Ethical Leadership, an organization I co-founded that trains young women to be leaders and change agents.

www.sfartscommission.org

Seaweed Farmers of Zanzibar, Joanna Lipper

Lipper’s series is Seaweed Farmers in Zanzibar. Her photographs are so serene and beautiful, they look like paintings, evocative of art from past centuries of other women working, like Van Gogh’s Two Peasant Women Digging. The aqua colors of the sea against the horizon are mesmerizing, and the photos have an incredible grace; the women working together and the water’s movement looks like a dance. The lighting in the photos is beautiful, showing the passage of time, is reminiscent of a series like Monet’s haystacks.

Lipper says that her art, and the whole show, presents “photographers as social activists, provoking engagement on an individual level.” Because this is a free exhibition in public space, the nature of the show further underscores the political nature of the art; everyone has access. The show’s existence illustrates not only that art influences politics, but also that we are all interconnected– to each other, to the economy, and to the environment.

Lipper explains that what’s valuable about the seaweed that these farmers work so hard to obtain is the algae it contains. The seaweed is sold to local brokers an then exported to Europe and Asia where the algae is extracted. Not only is the algae used in products like shampoo and mascara, but preserved algae turns out to be one of the best alternative green biofuels and best aborbants of carbon dioxide.

Lipper goes into further detail of the seaweed farmer’s world role on her site:

Zanzibar is at a disadvantage when it comes to profits derived from Seaweed cultivation because the islands lack the large-scale infrastructure and hardware needed to process seaweed and extract valuable algae. Therefore the raw materials are shipped abroad. Without microfinance loans, improved education, and community organization amongst laborers, there can be no further growth for seaweed farming as a cash-generating economically empowering occupation for rural village women and this form of labor runs the risk of becoming obsolete in Zanzibar.

www.imow.org

Jejus Grannies of the Sea, Brenda Paik Sunoo

The New York Times reports that Exxon has invested $600 million to create synthetic seaweed farms near their power plants to absorb Carbon dioxide.

Other incredible photography includes work by Brenda Paik Sunoo who photographed the “diving grannies” Vietnamese women in their eighties who hunt for Octopus. The salt mining pictures were also breathtaking, all black and white, women mining pillars of salt. There was a series of photos of girls in Tehran that made me feel as if I were inside their house and part of their family. There was a moving portrait of a woman soldier from the Middle East.

There is a Community Choice prize you can vote for here. The International Museum of Women is an online art gallery and all of the photos can also be seen here.

Keep mean girls out of office

Posted on June 10, 2010 by margotmagowan

How immature can Carly Fiorina get? She sounds like my six year old daughter on a bad day.

The Daily Beast reports:

Carly Fiorina, doing what she can to set back the cause of women in politics: The California Republican nominee for the Senate refused to apologize to Senator Barbara Boxer after she was caught on camera mocking her hair. Asked about the incident by Greta Van Susteren, Fiorina said, “I was quoting a friend of mine. My goodness, my hair’s been talked about by a million people, you know? It sort of goes with the territory.” She then brought up her battle with cancer, saying, “Especially when you don’t have any. As you remember, I started out with none.”

Carly Fiorina

So Fiorina’s friend said the hair comment first and that makes it OK?

Then Fiorina says that she’s been made fun of before, so she’s allowed to make fun of other people? Um, Carly: two wrongs don’t make a right.

Next: It “goes with the territory?” Meaning it’s just fine to make fun of women in power for the way they look? After all, everybody does it.

The point of getting women into power positions is to change that dynamic, not perpetuate it. (Not to mention lead, not follow.)

And finally, Fiorina attempts to switch the issue in a bid for sympathy, playing the cancer card.

Maybe I’ll invite Fiorina over for a playdate, hoping some better manners rub off on her. But I won’t be voting for her for California senator. Who wants mean girls in political office?

Prosecute ‘gender crimes,’ Van der Sloot first up

Posted on June 4, 2010 by margotmagowan

Joran Van der Sloot, the alleged killer of Natalee Holloway, the co-ed who disappeared in Aruba in 2005, was captured tonight in Chile. He’s under suspicion for the stabbing death of 21 year old Peruvian Stephany Flores. On June 2, Flores’s body was found in Lima, Peru in a hotel room registered to Van Der Sloot.

http://mylifeofcrime.files.wordpress.com

Joran Van der Sloot, Natalee Holloway

Van der Sloot was arrested twice for Holloway’s killing. He was released twice due to lack of evidence. Part of the “lack of evidence” included Van der Sloot talking on video about Holloway’s death and how her body was taken out to sea. This video “did not incriminate” Van der Sloot because he claimed he was just trying to “impress a drug dealer.”

Violence against women is epidemic, but perpetrators like Van der Sloot, too often don’t get punished and become repeat offenders. There is little public awareness of the ubiquity of the crimes, and insufficient funding for education, prevention, prosecution, or protection for women.

When the media covers stories about victims like Natalee Holloway, it’s usually in the most sensationalistic, ineffective way. If the women are attractive, white, and middle class, as she was, networks endlessly recycle former cheerleading or prom photos. But rarely do Larry King, Greta van Susteren, or Bill O’Reilly and co. accompany these horrific stories with facts about how widespread violence against women is, featuring direct service workers, experts in the field, who can educate the public with real statistics and solutions.

Today, in the Bay Area, Roselyne Swig, founder of Partners Ending Domestic Abuse took a step towards helping to stop the violence in a more effective way. Swig convened a summit in San Francisco with leaders from Bay Area organizations committed to ending violence against women. Swig’s hope is that these Bay Area organizations will collaborate, providing a leadership position, bringing public awareness to this widespread issue, taking action to end it.

JaMel Perkins, Board President of Partners, opened the summit by sharing terrifying statistics including some of these:

31% of American women report being physically or sexually abused by a husband or boyfriend.

Around the world, 1 in 3 women are beaten, coerced into sex or physically abused.

Women of all races and ethnicities are equally vulnerable to violence by a domestic partner.

Homicide is the leading cause of death for pregnant women.

77% of those deaths occur in the first trimester.

Abused women are 60% more likely to require hospitalization while pregnant.

90% of our homeless population are victims of abuse.

The health-related costs of rape, physical assault, stalking and Homicide committed by domestic partners exceed $5.8 Billion each year. Nearly $4.1 billion of this is spent on direct medical and mental health care services.

1 in 5 female high school students reports being physically or sexually abused by a dating partner.

The summit was attended by representatives from Bay Area organizations including SF Child Abuse Center, Blue Shield Against Violence (the leading private DV funder in the state), La Casa de la Madres, the police department and DA’s office who convened to network and collaborate.

“Domestic violence is something we should all be concerned about,” said Swig. “We need to create a collaborative voice.”

Marcia Smolens of HMS Associates, a local lobbying group, urged advocates to use social media to bring awareness to the issue of domestic violence to create change.

Judy Patrick, President and CEO of the Women’s Foundation of California, said that the goal of her foundation is to ensure that women and families are safe, healthy, and economically secure.

www.cbsnews.com

Stephany Flores

Marj Plumb of the Women’s Policy Institute trains women leaders who work in direct service to affect change in Sacramento. Women working on the front lines need the skills to lobby legislators to make policy that will help women and prevent violence.

Plumb had the women at the summit break into groups and identify problems and solutions to eradicate violence. Most groups felt that education was key, including curriculum for kids at middle school level, educating families, cultural awareness, and men.

I wish the media was a better educator. It’s such a missed opportunity. Domestic violence, and all violence against women, should be renamed as “gender crimes,” receiving the elevated level of attention and punishment that hate crimes do. The word “domestic” has always softened the crime for me, a crime that’s already not taken nearly seriously enough. Too often, crimes against women are written off as cultural issues, a misunderstanding, a married woman can’t possibly be raped by her husband or alcohol was involved so no one is to blame, or she’s to blame, or the guy who said he raped her was “just bragging.”

If the Taliban had been named worldwide for what it was– gender apartheid– maybe there would have been the universal outrage against it that people felt for South Africa’s racist government. Instead, most Americans, even good old San Francisco liberals, looked away, ignoring a regime where women were beaten and murdered, daily by their husbands and fathers as part of “cultural ritual.”

This year Yale student Annie Le was murdered and stuffed into a wall; UVA star Lacrosse player, Yeardley Love was murdered by fellow lacrosse player, George Hughley; Bruce Beresford-Redmond, a producer of the show “Survivor” is the prime suspect in the murder of his wife, Monica Beresford-Redmond, who was found dead in Mexico.

All of these killings received media attention, because these women were young, attractive, or middle class. Would we know about Peruvian Stephany Flores if Natalee Holloway hadn’t been killed by the same suspect? Maybe, her father is wealthy, but she’s got a strike against her: she’s not white. How many gender crimes happened today worldwide that we don’t know about? How many are happening right now?

Statistics say that in America 3 women are murdered by their husbands and boyfriends every day.

Time is now for gender equality

Posted on May 25, 2010 by margotmagowan

Pulitzer Prize winning author of Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide, Sheryl WuDunn, gave a free talk at the Palace of Fine Arts Monday night, telling the audience the best way to stop poverty and end terrorism worldwide is to achieve gender equality. WuDunn argued that gender equality is the most important struggle of this century, and that the key to world economic progress is unlocking women’s potential.

www.plannedparenthood.org

Sheryl WuDunn, Pulitzer Prize winning author of Half The Sky

WuDunn said that the paramount moral challenge of the 19th Century was slavery, in the 20th, totalitarianism, and in the 21st century, it’s gender quality.

WuDunn told the audience we are wasting half our resources by failing to educate and honor women. After her talk, she told me that she was inspired to write her book, because of all the missing women worldwide; they’d just vanished. No one had written about a book about them.

At the beginning of her talk, WuDunn asked the audience: Are there more women or men in the world?

About 98% of the audience (including me) believed there were more women in the world. We knew women generally lived longer than men. But this statistic only holds true in the developed world. In the developing world, women are vastly outnumbered.

Approximately 60 – 100 million women have gone missing.

Women die due to poor health care; they die in childbirth; they die from violence by men; girls are kidnapped into sex trafficking, never surfacing again, and female fetuses are aborted.

I’ve been a fan of WuDunn and her husband/ co-author/ New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof ever since Half the Sky came out. About a year ago, the book was featured as the cover story of the New York Times Magazine. With the publication of this one book, national attention began to shift back to feminism and gender equality, bringing a renewed awareness in the media and in the public about the oppression of women worldwide and how that oppression affects and limits us all.

The very basis of the Taliban, of course, is oppression against women. While there was worldwide outrage about Apartheid in South Afriica years ago, no one seemed to care much about the gender crimes of the Taliban until 9-11. Even since 9-11, it’s been a challenge to keep the focus on educating women, in Afghanistan and all over the world.

WuDunn laid out a simple path to creating a better, safer, stronger world, as logical as a tenth grade geometry proof:

Overpopulation is the biggest indicator of poverty. When women are educated, they marry later and have fewer children, and they are more likely to make sure these children are educated.

WuDunn said governments must make it their highest priority to educate women.

WuDunn was asked by an audience member: Why is now women’s time?

She referred again to the missing women, then adding “Brawn used to matter.” In agricultural and farming societies, physical strength was seen as crucial to success. Now we’ve entered a period of technology and brain power, and its the opportunity for women to get ahead.

WuDunn argues again and again that the best way to bring about change is by investing in women. We’re losing our most valuable resource. When people in the audience asked what they could do to help women worldwide, WuDunn said give money to support women’s organizations. She said she loves Doctors Without Borders but we need to create Bankers without Borders, Lawyers Without Borders. We must rally our governments to commit to educating women.

Kavita Ramdas, CEO and President of the Global Fund for Women, was also speaking. The Global Fund is the world’s largest grantmaking foundation focused exclusively on international womens’s human rights. Ramdas told the audience. “If you can’t help women in the Sahara, help women in East Palo Alto. Here in the United States, 70% of those in poverty are women.”

www.abcdlady.com

Kavita Ramdas, President and CEO of Global Fund for Women

Listening to the talk, I couldn’t stop thinking about what a horrible example my home state of California, in my home country of the United States, sets with its bankrupt public educational system. How can we insist countries of the world educate women when we are are so substandard at home?

When a male high school student in the audience asked Ramdas what he could do to help women worldwide, she said, “I have a sixteen year old daughter. I worry about her. Set an example in how you treat your peers. Don’t use the words bitch and whore.”

The talk was fascinating, listening to WuDunn and Ramdas circle the globe and came back home to the Bay Area. They highlighted again and again, that until conditions improve for women, humans will not reach anything close to our potential.

Margot Magowan

I blogged about this a couple days ago. Here are some sad stats about the lack of women in America’s leadership positions. More women are going to law school but they’re not becoming law partners; they’re in medical school but they’re not chief surgeons. Women in America get paid less for doing the same work as men, and the Equal Rights Amendment was never passed in this country. It’s worldwide problem, our worst problem. We need to recognize it exists, identify it and then eradicate it everywhere. Order sEXISTs stickers and T-shirts here, one dollar from every item sold goes to the Woodull Institute for Ethical Leadership.

Sheryl WuDunn’s talk was free to the public because it was sponsored by Facing History and the Allstate Foundation.

Facing History is an international educational and professional development nonprofit organization whose mission is to engage students of diverse backgrounds in an examination of racism, prejudice, and antisemitism in order to promote the development of a more humane and informed citizenry. By studying the historical development of the Holocaust and other examples of genocide, students make the essential connection between history and the moral choices they confront in their own lives.

The Allstate Foundation partners with non-profit organziations and community initiatives that promote safe and vital communties, tolerance, diversity, and economic empowerment.

Join the Rumplestiltskin Campaign! sEXISTs EXIST

Posted on May 21, 2010 by margotmagowan

At first, it sounds empowering, it’s a woman to woman CEO winning relay. How often does that happen? Well, Never! Fortune.com reports:

Anne Mulcahy, who last decade turned Xerox around and last year turned over the CEO reins, today gave up the chairman title to Ursula Burns, her CEO successor. It’s all quite historic since Burns is the Fortune 500’s first black female CEO. Theirs was the first-ever woman-to-woman CEO hand-off in the ranks of America’s largest corporations.

www.rttnews.com

The bummer is, of course, the female CEO switcheroo keeps the gender CEO stats of Fortune 500 companies in their exact same pathetic state at 3% female. Robin Marty reports on www.Care2.com:

Women CEOs lead in only 15 of the 500 companies, or 3 percent. Even worse, there was no gain in female leadership since last year; for every woman who entered the list, another was lost.

Here are some facts about American women, who make up 52% of citizens in the country of the free and the brave and 46.5% of our labor force.

Women hold 15.2% of seats on the boards of Fortune 500 companies.

Women are 19% of partners in law firms.

Women represent 17% of the United States Congress.

Throughout our history only three women have held the office of Supreme Court Justice.

There are only seven female governors.

Women make up 14% of all guest appearances on the influential Sunday television talk shows; among repeat guests, only 7% are women.

Only 15% of the authors on the The New York Times best seller list for nonfiction are women.

Only about 20% of op-eds in America’s newspapers are by women.

In Hollywood, women make up:

8% of all writers

17% of all executive producers

23% of all producers

18% of all editors

2% of all cinematographers

I’m so tired of people acting as if we live in some postfeminist era, as if we’ve achieved equality, and everything is groovy now.

Sadly, people take sexism even less seriously than racism, often attributing gender crimes to cultural beliefs instead of the political practices they are. When I was in college and everyone was protesting aparthied in South Africa in the quad, in my sociology class next door I was learning that female gender mutilation was just fine because that’s “their culture.” Not only that but “women do it to each other” so it can’t really be sexist. It took me years to undo the relative ethics dogma I learned in my college education in early the nineties.

When I was producing talk radio programs later in that same decade, I wanted the liberal talk show host I worked with to discuss the Taliban. I’d tell him: “It’s gender aparthieid. The laws are completely different for women and men and nobody seems to care at all.”

At that time, one of the only vocal, public figures in America even speaking about the Taliban was Mavis Leno, Jay Leno’s wife. I’m serious. Mavis Leno. That’s how I found out about about the slavery of women across the world, not through my president, other politicians, the New York Times, campus protests or liberal talk show hosts like the one I worked for. When I insisted to the host the Taliban mattered, that you can’t isolate those kinds of sick beliefs, he said, “Come on, how does the Taliban affect people in the Bay Area?”

Too often, sexism today is invisible to us, whether it’s too geographically distant or we’ve just become immune to witnessing women treated like objects instead of like humans. In 2010, just naming the enemy, calling it out, seems to be half the battle.

Margot Magowan

Rumplestiltskin Campaign

In her new book Committed, Elizabeth Gilbert’s used a Rumpelstiltskin simile which is totally applicable here. Rumpelstiltskin is, of course, the story about a girl forced into slavery, spinning straw into gold. She will only be freed when she can name one of her captors. When she discovers his name and calls it out, he loses his power and sets her free. Gilbert wrote, “Some fears can be vanquished, Rumpelstiltskin-like, only by uncovering their hidden, secret names.”

So today, I’m launching The Rumpelstiltskin campaign: sEXISTs EXIST. Post it where you see it on ReelGirl. Photos welcome. Stickers and signs are here. Logo needed. It won’t end sexism but at least it’s a step towards setting us free.

Congresswomen introduce ‘Healthy Media for Youth Act’

Posted on April 15, 2010 by margotmagowan

Tammy Baldwin (D-WI) and Shelley Moore Capito (R-WV) have introduced “the Healthy Media for Youth Act to “authorize grants to promote media literacy and youth empowerment programs, to authorize research on the role and impact of depictions of girls and women in the media, to provide for the establishment of a National Task Force on Girls and Women in the Media…”

Feministing.com reports:

The bill, which draws on research by Girls, Inc. and the Girls Scouts Research Institute, among others, focuses on the most harmful aspects of media, including unrealistic representations of female beauty, sexualized images of young girls and teens, and violence against women as entertainment.

The bill also mentions the Geena Davis Institute on Gender and Media:

The Geena Davis Institute on Gender in the Media found that the majority of female characters in children’s movies are praised for their appearance or physical beauty rather than their personality, intelligence, or other talents, and are often short-sighted and narrowly fixated on romantic relationships that lack substantial connections or courtships. Girls and boys watching children’s programming may vicariously learn that beauty is an essential part of being female and critical for gaining attention and acceptance.

The bill never mentions photoshopping. I don’t get why. It’s already illegal to lie in advertising, so why photoshopping is so prevalent and still permitted is beyond me. I guess it’s because photoshopping’s victims are primarily women, and probably those women are supposed to be grateful they get to eat an extra donut and save money on plastic surgery.

The bill does refer to ‘narrow and restrictive’ gender roles. What could be more narrowing than Filippa Hamilton’s story?

Hamilton is a 23 year old former Ralph Lauren model. She was horrified when she saw the photoshopped images in the ad pictured below right. You can see that the width of her hips is narrower than width of her head. The real 5’8 120 lb model is pictured on the left. Hamilton worked for Ralph Lauren since she was fifteen years old, but said the company fired her after telling her she could no longer fit into their clothing. Ralph Lauren claimed that they let her go “as a result of her inability to meet the obligations under her contract with us.” I wonder if those obligations included avoiding puberty?

www.posh24.com

Thank Goodness there’s a brave model speaking out about what really happened to her. Often women are quiet because they’d prefer not to be called fat or ugly publicly or otherwise humiliated into silence. And it doesn’t make it easier to improve things when the US government has a congress that’s only 17% female, only seven female governors, and throughout our entire history, only three women who have ever held the office of Supreme Court Justice.

Thank you to Democrat Tammy Baldwin and Republican Shelly Capito for insisting on media education. A ‘Healthy Media for Youth’ bill gives me hope that a couple representatives in our government understand that when an advertiser alters an image of a woman and then she loses her job for not conforming to it, that’s not trivial, but an issue that affects all girls and the women they will grow into.

Here’s more on the Wisconsin bill from feministing.com

The bill, which has been referred to committee, proposes a three-pronged strategy to combat potentially dangerous media images: Media literacy, further research on the impact of consuming media that depicts women and girls in a less than positive light, and the formation of a national task force, run by the NIH, on girls and women in the media. You can read the whole bill here.

How flipping awesome would it be to know that federal money is going toward “countering the perpetuation and damaging effects of narrow, restrictive gender roles, stereotypes, and expectations, including the sexualization of female children, adolescents, and adults”? How about “teaching youth how to create and use media that contribute to social change, especially in their communities” or “facilitating connections between girls and women, and boys and men, as mentors”?

Reel Girl

Imagining gender equality in the fantasy world

Category Archives: Politics