Tag Archives: equality

Art, Idea Soup, Technica

Back to the Future

France_in_XXI_Century_Latest_fashionJust over a hundred years ago, at the turn of the 19th century, Jean-Marc Côté and some of his fellow French artists were commissioned to imagine what the world would look like in 2000. Their colorful sketches and paintings portrayed some interesting inventions, though all seem to be grounded in familiar principles and incremental innovations — mechanical helpers, ubiquitous propellers and wings. Interestingly, none of these artist-futurists imagined a world beyond Victorian dress, gender inequality and wars. But these are gems nonetheless.

France_in_XXI_Century._Air_cabSome of their works found their way into cigar boxes and cigarette cases, others were exhibited at the 1900 World Exhibition in Paris. My three favorites: a Tailor of the Latest Fashion, the Aero-cab Station and the Whale Bus. See the full complement of these remarkable futuristic visions at the Public Domain Review, and check out the House Rolling Through the Countryside and At School.

I suspect our contemporary futurists — born in the late 20th or early 21st-century — will fall prey to the same narrow visions when asked to sketch our planet in 3000. But despite the undoubted wealth of new gadgets and gizmos a thousand years from now the challenge would be to see if their imagined worlds might be at peace and with equality for all.
France_in_XXI_Century_Whale_busImages courtesy of the Public Domain Review, a project of the Open Knowledge Foundation. Public Domain.

 

Idea Soup

LGBTQ Soup

LGBTQ_flag.svgAt some point we will have all moved on to a post-prudish, post-voyeuristic, post-exploitative, post-coming-out, post-gender identity world; we’ll all be celebrated as individuals, and discrimination will no longer exist.

Slap! Well, that’s quite enough of the pipe-dream for today, let’s get back to the complexity of present day reality. So, here’s a quick snapshot of where we are on the gender-label issue. Keep in mind, the “snapshot” is courtesy of the Guardian and the “we” refers to the British — both very peculiar institutions.

From the Guardian:

When Rugby League’s Keegan Hirst came out as gay this week, he said that he had been hiding for a long time. “How could I be gay? I’m from Batley, for goodness sake. No one is gay in Batley.” If the 27-year-old Yorkshireman had been a few years younger, he might have found some people in his hometown who are at least sexually fluid. A YouGov poll this week put the number of 18- to 24-year-old Brits who identify as entirely heterosexual at 46%, while just 6% would call themselves exclusively gay. Sexuality now falls between the lines: identity is more pliable, and fluidity more acceptable, than ever before.

The gay-straight binary is collapsing, and it’s doing so at speed. The days in which a celebrity’s sexual orientation was worthy of a tabloid scandal have long since died out. Though newspapers still report on famous people coming out and their same-sex relationships, the lurid language that once accompanied such stories has been replaced by more of a gossipy, “did you know?” tone, the sort your mum might take on the phone, when she’s telling you about what Julie round the corner has been up to. And the reaction of the celebrities involved has morphed, too, into a refusal to play the naming game. Arena-filling pop star Miley Cyrus posted an Instagram of a news story that described her as “genderqueer” with the caption, “NOTHING can/will define me! Free to be EVERYTHING!!!”. Kristen Stewart, who has been followed around by insinuations about the “gal pal” she is often photographed with for a couple of years, finally spoke about the relationship in an interview with Nylon magazine this month. She said, simply, “Google me, I’m not hiding”, but, like the people surveyed by YouGov, refused to define herself as gay or straight. “I think in three or four years, there are going to be a whole lot more people who don’t think it’s necessary to figure out if you’re gay or straight. It’s like, just do your thing.”

It’s arguable that celebrities such as Stewart are part of the reason for those parameters becoming less essential, at least in the west. It shouldn’t fall to famous people to define our social attitudes but, simply, visibility matters: if it is not seen as outrageous or transgressive that the star of Twilight will hold hands with her girlfriend in the street, then that, in a very small way, reinforces the normality of it. If Cara Delevingne tells Vogue that she loves her girlfriend, then that, too, adds to the picture. The more people who are out, the more normal it becomes; the less alone a confused kid in a small town looking at gossip websites might feel; the less baffled the parent of a teenager who brings home a same-sex date might be. Combine that with the seemingly unstoppable legislative reinforcement of equal rights, too – gay marriage becoming legal in Ireland, in the US – and suddenly, it seems less “abnormal”, less boundary-busting, to fall in love or lust with someone of the same gender.

“I would describe myself as a bisexual homoromantic,” says Alice, 23, from Sussex. For the uninitiated, I asked her to explain. “It means I like sex with men and women, but I only fall in love with women. I wouldn’t say something wishy-washy like, ‘It’s all about the person,’ because more often it’s just that I sometimes like a penis.” She says her attitude towards sex and sexuality is similar among other people in her peer group. “A lot of my friends talk about their sexuality in terms of behaviour these days, rather than in terms of labels. So they’ll say, ‘I like boys’, or ‘I get with girls too,’ rather than saying, ‘I’m gay, I’m a lesbian, I’m bisexual.’”

She says that even among those who exclusively date people of the same gender, there is a reluctance to claim an identity as proscriptive as “gay”. “Most young people who are gay don’t see it as a defining property of their character, because they don’t have to, because society doesn’t constantly remind them of their difference.” However, she is careful to point out that this is very much the case in the small, liberal part of London where she lives now. “[Not defining] is something I feel entitled to as a person who lives in London, but I didn’t feel entitled to it in a small town in the home counties. I’ve never experienced discrimination about my sexuality, but I’m aware that it’s because I ‘pass’ [as straight].”

In fact, among the young British people I spoke to, geography is vital. Lucy, 25, wonders if the number of people who say they are not straight really tallies with the number of people who are actually acting upon those desires. “Saying you’re sexually fluid means you’re part of a movement. It means you’re seen as forward-thinking,” she says, suggesting there is a certain cachet attached to being seen as open that does not come with affirmed heterosexuality. She also believes it is more of a metropolitan story than necessarily representative of Britain as a whole. “If I went back to my home town in the Midlands, we wouldn’t sit around talking about ‘sexual fluidity’. You’re a ‘dyke’, or you’re not. There’s only one type of lesbian there.”

Read the entire story here.

Image: Gay Pride Flag. Public Domain. Courtesy of Wikipedia.

BigBang

Emmy Noether, Mathematician

Emmy-NoetherMost non-mathematicians have probably heard of Euclid, Pythagoras, Poincaré, Gauss, Lagrange, de Fermat, and Hilbert,  to name but a few. All giants in their various mathematical specialties. But, I would hazard a wager that even most mathematicians have never heard of Noether. Probably because Emmy Noether is a woman.

Yet learning of her exploits in the early 20th century, I can see how far we still have to travel to truly recognize the contributions of women in academia and science — and everywhere else for that matter — as on a par with those of men. Women like Noether succeeded despite tremendous (male) pressure against them, which makes their achievements even more astonishing.

From ars technica:

By 1915, any list of the world’s greatest living mathematicians included the name David Hilbert. And though Hilbert previously devoted his career to logic and pure mathematics, he, like many other critical thinkers at the time, eventually became obsessed with a bit of theoretical physics.

With World War I raging on throughout Europe, Hilbert could be found sitting in his office at the great university at Göttingen trying and trying again to understand one idea—Einstein’s new theory of gravity.

Göttingen served as the center of mathematics for the Western world by this point, and Hilbert stood as one of its most notorious thinkers. He was a prominent leader for the minority of mathematicians who preferred a symbolic, axiomatic development in contrast to a more concrete style that emphasized the construction of particular solutions. Many of his peers recoiled from these modern methods, one even calling them “theology.” But Hilbert eventually won over most critics through the power and fruitfulness of his research.

For Hilbert, his rigorous approach to mathematics stood out quite a bit from the common practice of scientists, causing him some consternation. “Physics is much too hard for physicists,” he famously quipped. So wanting to know more, he invited Einstein to Göttingen to lecture about gravity for a week.

Before the year ended, both men would submit papers deriving the complete equations of general relativity. But naturally, the papers differed entirely when it came to their methods. When it came to Einstein’s theory, Hilbert and his Göttingen colleagues simply couldn’t wrap their minds around a peculiarity having to do with energy. All other physical theories—including electromagnetism, hydrodynamics, and the classical theory of gravity—obeyed local energy conservation. With Einstein’s theory, one of the many paradoxical consequences of this failure of energy conservation was that an object could speed up as it lost energy by emitting gravity waves, whereas clearly it should slow down.

Unable to make progress, Hilbert turned to the only person he believed might have the specialized knowledge and insight to help. This would-be-savior wasn’t even allowed to be a student at Göttingen once upon a time, but Hilbert had long become a fan of this mathematician’s highly “abstract” approach (which Hilbert considered similar to his own style). He managed to recruit this soon-to-be partner to Göttingen about the same time Einstein showed up.

And that’s when a woman—one Emmy Noether—created what may be the most important single theoretical result in modern physics.

 …

During Noether’s stay at Göttingen, Hilbert contrived a way to allow her to lecture unofficially. He repeatedly attempted to get her hired as a Privatdozent, or an officially recognized lecturer. The science and mathematics faculty was generally in favor of this, but Hilbert could not overcome the resistance of the humanities professors, who simply could not stomach the idea of a female teacher. At one meeting of the faculty senate, frustrated again in his attempts to get Noether a job, he famously remarked, “I do not see that the sex of a candidate is an argument against her admission as Privatdozent. After all, we are a university, not a bathing establishment.”

Social barriers aside, Noether immediately grasped the problem with Einstein’s theory. Over the course of three years, she not only solved it, but in doing so she proved a theorem that simultaneously reached back to the dawn of physics and pushed forward to the physics of today. Noether’s Theorem, as it is now called, lies at the heart of modern physics, unifying everything from the orbits of planets to the theories of elementary particles.

Read the entire story here.

Image: Emmy Noether (1882-1935). Public domain.

 

Idea Soup

Justice Kennedy

Anthony_Kennedy_official_SCOTUS_portrait

This story from the Guardian sums up the historic decision on same-sex marriage issued by the US Supreme Court on June 26, 2015.

An excerpt from the 103 page opinion written for the majority (5-4) by Justice Anthony Kennedy:

The Constitution promises liberty to all within its reach, a liberty that includes certain specific rights that allow persons, within a lawful realm, to define and express their identity. The petitioners in these cases seek to find that liberty by marrying someone of the same sex and having their marriages deemed lawful on the same terms and conditions as marriages between persons of the opposite sex. 

 

The momentous legal opinion paves the way for a little more equality. Thank you, Justice Kennedy — and now the work in welcoming the four arch-conservative justices into the non-constructionist, non-textualist 21st century must continue apace.

From the Guardian:

His prose may lack the fiery eloquence of his US supreme court colleagues Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Antonin Scalia, or the razor-sharp precision of chief justice John Roberts, but the majority opinion written by Justice Anthony Kennedy – granting a constitutional right to same-sex marriage across the United States – will go down as one of the most important legal documents in the history of the American civil rights struggle.

Court-watchers were left in little doubt where most of the nine justices stood on marriage equality after two and a half hours of extended oral arguments held the hushed halls of the nation’s highest tribunal spellbound in April.

On one side, the court’s traditional liberals: Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan were withering in their view of the arguments advanced by Republican-controlled states that wanted to hold back the growing tide of legal rulings that backed gay marriage.

On the other side of the bench were the more reliably conservative members of the supreme court – Scalia, Samuel Alito and the typically silent Clarence Thomas – who believed not just that marriage should remain solely between a man and woman, but that the court had no right to voice its opinion on the matter at all.

More inscrutable, however, were Roberts, who barely said a word throughout the entire hearing, and Kennedy, who seemed genuinely unsure which way to lean: he expressed concern for the consequence of either ruling.

Kennedy, the 78-year-old former lawyer from California appointed to the bench by Republican president Ronald Reagan a generation ago, is seen – in theory – as one of the conservative majority. But in practice, he has long been the most enigmatic of the swing voters on some of the most defining stories in American history.

On Thursday, he had joined Roberts in defending Barack Obama’s healthcare reforms from yet another legal onslaught by conservative critics.

But on Friday, the day same-sex marriage became the law of the land, Roberts had decided to stay firmly in the conservative camp.

And so Kennedy became the one man to effectively determine a decision that will directly affect millions of Americans in love – and redefine a core legal and social bedrock for all of them, perhaps forever.

…

The closest Kennedy came to capturing the emotion felt by campaigners and protesters on both sides of the argument was when he was describing the institution at the heart of the argument.

“No union is more profound than marriage, for it embodies the highest ideals of love, fidelity, devotion, sacrifice and family,” he wrote. “In forming a marital union, two people become something greater than once they were.”

Those who know the court best are in little doubt as to the significance of Kennedy’s words.

…

But on a day when a funeral for victims of the Charleston church shootings cast a long shadow over the ongoing battle for racial equality, the decision was a source of hope for many.

“America should be very proud,” said Barack Obama in an emotional statement from the White House rose garden.

“There’s so much more work to be done to extend the full promise of America to every American,” he added. “But today, we can say in no uncertain terms that we’ve made our union a little more perfect.”

Read the entire article here.

Image: Anthony Kennedy, Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, 2011. Public Domain.

Idea Soup, tD

Iran, Women, Clothes

hajib_Jeune_femmeA fascinating essay by Haleh Anvari, Iranian writer and artist, provides an insightful view of the role that fashion takes in shaping many of our perceptions — some right, many wrong — of women.

Quite rightly she argues that the measures our culture places on women, through the lens of Western fashion or Muslim tradition, are misleading. In both cases, there remains a fundamental need to address and to continue to address women’s rights versus those of men. Fashion stereotypes may be vastly different across continents, but the underlying issues remain very much the same whether a woman wears a hijab on the street or lingerie on a catwalk.

From the NYT:

I took a series of photographs of myself in 2007 that show me sitting on the toilet, weighing myself, and shaving my legs in the bath. I shot them as an angry response to an encounter with a gallery owner in London’s artsy Brick Lane. I had offered him photos of colorful chadors — an attempt to question the black chador as the icon of Iran by showing the world that Iranian women were more than this piece of black cloth. The gallery owner wasn’t impressed. “Do you have any photos of Iranian women in their private moments?” he asked.

As an Iranian with a reinforced sense of the private-public divide we navigate daily in our country, I found his curiosity offensive. So I shot my “Private Moments” in a sardonic spirit, to show that Iranian women are like all women around the world if you get past the visual hurdle of the hijab. But I never shared those, not just because I would never get a permit to show them publicly in Iran, but also because I am prepared to go only so far to prove a point. Call me old-fashioned.Read the entire article here.

Ever since the hijab, a generic term for every Islamic modesty covering, became mandatory after the 1979 revolution, Iranian women have been used to represent the country visually. For the new Islamic republic, the all-covering cloak called a chador became a badge of honor, a trademark of fundamental change. To Western visitors, it dropped a pin on their travel maps, where the bodies of Iranian women became a stand-in for the character of Iranian society. When I worked with foreign journalists for six years, I helped produce reports that were illustrated invariably with a woman in a black chador. I once asked a photojournalist why. He said, “How else can we show where we are?”

How wonderful. We had become Iran’s Eiffel Tower or Big Ben.

Next came the manteau-and-head scarf combo — less traditional, and more relaxed, but keeping the lens on the women. Serious reports about elections used a “hair poking out of scarf” standard as an exit poll, or images of scarf-clad women lounging in coffee shops, to register change. One London newspaper illustrated a report on the rise of gasoline prices with a woman in a head scarf, photographed in a gas station, holding a pump nozzle with gasoline suggestively dripping from its tip. A visitor from Mars or a senior editor from New York might have been forgiven for imagining Iran as a strange land devoid of men, where fundamentalist chador-clad harridans vie for space with heathen babes guzzling cappuccinos. (Incidentally, women hardly ever step out of the car to pump gas here; attendants do it for us.)

The disputed 2009 elections, followed by demonstrations and a violent backlash, brought a brief respite. The foreign press was ejected, leaving the reporting to citizen journalists not bound by the West’s conventions. They depicted a politically mature citizenry, male and female, demanding civic acknowledgment together.

We are now witnessing another shift in Iran’s image. It shows Iran “unveiled” — a tired euphemism now being used to literally undress Iranian women or show them off as clotheshorses. An Iranian fashion designer in Paris receives more plaudits in the Western media for his blog’s street snapshots of stylish, affluent young women in North Tehran than he gets for his own designs. In this very publication, a male Iranian photographer depicted Iranian women through flimsy fabrics under the title “Veiled Truths”; one is shown in a one-piece pink swimsuit so minimal it could pass for underwear; others are made more sensual behind sheer “veils,” reinforcing a sense of peeking at them. Search the Internet and you can get an eyeful of nubile limbs in opposition to the country’s official image, shot by Iranian photographers of both sexes, keen to show the hidden, supposedly true, other side of Iran.

Young Iranians rightly desire to show the world the unseen sides of their lives. But their need to show themselves as like their peers in the West takes them into dangerous territory. Professional photographers and artists, encouraged by Western curators and seeking fast-track careers, are creating a new wave of homegrown neo-Orientalism. A favorite reworking of an old cliché is the thin, beautiful young woman reclining while smoking a hookah, dancing, or otherwise at leisure in her private spaces. Ingres could sue for plagiarism.

In a country where the word feminism is pejorative, there is no inkling that the values of both fundamentalism and Western consumerism are two sides of the same coin — the female body as an icon defining Iranian culture.

It is true that we Iranians live dual lives, and so it is true that to see us in focus, you must enter our inner sanctum. But the inner sanctum includes women who believe in the hijab, fat women, old women and, most important, women in professions from doctor to shopkeeper. It also includes men, not all of whom are below 30 years of age. If you wish to see Iran as it is, you need go no further than Facebook and Instagram. Here, Iran is neither fully veiled nor longing to undress itself. Its complex variety is shown through the lens of its own people, in both private and public spaces.

Read the entire essay here.

Image: Young woman from Naplouse in a hijab, c1867-1885. Courtesy of Wikipedia.

Arts and Letters, Idea Soup

It’s a Woman’s World

[tube]V4UWxlVvT1A[/tube]

Well, not really. Though, there is no doubting that the planet would look rather different if the genders had truly equal opportunities and pay-offs, or if women generally had all the power that tends to be concentrated in masculine hands.

A short movie by French actor and film-maker Eleonoré Pourriat imagines what our Western culture might resemble if the traditional female-male roles were reversed.

A portent of the future? Perhaps not, but thought-provoking nonetheless. One has to believe that if women had all the levers and trappings of power that they could do a better job than men. Or, perhaps not. It may just be possible that power corrupts — regardless of the gender of the empowered.

From the Independent:

Imagine a world where it is the women who pee in the street, jog bare-chested and harass and physically assault the men. Such a world has just gone viral on the internet. A nine-minute satirical film made by Eleonoré Pourriat, the French actress, script-writer and director, has clocked up hundreds of thousands of views in recent days.

The movie, Majorité Opprimée or “Oppressed Majority”, was made in 2010. It caused a flurry of interest when it was first posted on YouTube early last year. But now it’s time seems to have come. “It is astonishing, just incredible that interest in my film has suddenly exploded in this way,” Ms Pourriat told The Independent. “Obviously, I have touched a nerve. Women in France, but not just in France, feel that everyday sexism has been allowed to go on for too long.”

The star of the short film is Pierre, who is played very convincingly by Pierre Bénézit. He is a slightly gormless stay-at-home father, who spends a day besieged by the casual or aggressive sexism of women in a female-dominated planet. The film, in French with English subtitles, begins in a jokey way and turns gradually, and convincingly, nasty. It is not played for cheap laughs. It has a Swiftian capacity to disturb by the simple trick of reversing roles.

Pierre, pushing his baby-buggy, is casually harassed by a bare-breasted female jogger. He meets a male, Muslim babysitter, who is forced by his wife to wear a balaclava in public. He is verbally abused – “Think I don’t see you shaking your arse at me?” – by a drunken female down-and-out. He is sexually assaulted and humiliated by a knife-wielding girl gang. (“Say your dick is small or I’ll cut off your precious jewels.”)

He is humiliated a second time by a policewoman, who implies that he invented the gang assault. “Daylight and no witnesses, that’s strange,” she says. As she takes Pierre’s statement, the policewoman patronises a pretty, young policeman. “I need a coffee, cutie.”

Pierre’s self-important working wife arrives to collect him. She comforts him at first, calling him “kitten” and “pumpkin”. When he complains that he can no longer stand the permanent aggression of a female-dominated society, she says that he is to blame because of the way he dresses: in short sleeves, flip-flops and Bermudas.

At the second, or third, time of asking, interest in Ms Pourriat’s highly charged little movie has exploded in recent days on social media and on feminist and anti-feminist websites on both sides of the Channel and on both sides of the Atlantic. Some men refuse to see the point. “Sorry, but I would adore to live such a life,” said one French male blogger. “To be raped by a gang of girls. Great! That’s every man’s fantasy.”

Ms Pourriat, 42, acts and writes scripts for comedy movies in France. This was her first film as director. “It is rooted absolutely in my own experience as a woman living in France,” she tells me. “I think French men are worse than men elsewhere, but the incredible success of the movie suggests that it is not just a French problem.

“What angers me is that many women seem to accept this kind of behaviour from men or joke about it. I had long wanted to make a film that would turn the situation on its head.

Read the entire article here.

Video: Majorité Opprimée or “Oppressed Majority by Eleonoré Pourriat.

 

Art

The Power of the Female Artist

Artemisia_Gentileschi-Judith_Beheading_Holofernes

Despite progress gender equality remains a myth in most areas of our modern world. In most endeavors women have made significant strides in catching men — vying for the same levels of attention, education, fame, wealth and power. It is certainly the case in the art world too — women have made, and are continuing to make, progress in attaining parity — but it is still a male dominated culture. That said, some female artists have managed to rise above the male tide to capture the global imagination with their powerful works and ideas.

Jonathan Jones over at his On Art Blog lists for us his top ten most subversive female artists from the last several hundred years. While it would be right to take issue with his notion of subversive, many of the names on the list quite rightly deserve as much mind-share as their male contemporaries.

From the Jonathan Jones:

Artemisia Gentileschi

When she was a teenager, this 17th-century baroque artist was raped by a painter. She responded by turning her art into a weapon. In Gentileschi’s repeated paintings of the biblical story of Judith slaying Holofernes, the Israelite hero is helped by her muscular servant. As one woman holds down Holofernes on his bed, the other saws through his neck with a sword. Blood spurts everywhere in a sensational image of women taking revenge on patriarchy.

Hannah Wilke

In her SOS Starification Object Series (1974-82), Wilke was photographed with blobs of chewing gum stuck on to her flesh. Dotting her face and bare body, these bizarre markings resembled a modern form of tribal scarification (this was before ritualistic body modification became fashionable) and resemble vaginas. Or are they eyes? Wilke’s “starification” marked her with the burden of being objectified by the male gaze.

Adrian Piper

In her Catalysis performances (1970), Piper turned herself into a human provocation in public places such as the New York subway. In one performance, she rode the subway after soaking her clothes in pungent substances for a week to make them stink. She muttered in the street, entered the elevator of the Empire State Building with a red towel stuffed in her mouth or simply made eye contact with strangers. Her purpose was to dramatise social unease and ultimately the unspoken tensions of race in America.

Georgia O’Keeffe

In the early 20th century, Georgia O’Keeffe posed nude for her lover, the modernist photographer and art impressario Alfred Stieglitz, and painted abstractions that have an explicitly vaginal beauty. Compared with some artists in this list she may seem soft, but her cussed exploration of her own body and soul mapped out a new expressive freedom for women making art in the modern age.

Claude Cahun

In photographs taken from the 1920s to 1940s, this French artist often portrays herself in male clothes and hairstyles, contemplating her own transformed image as she experiments with the fictions of gender. Cahun’s pioneering art is typical of the freedom the surrealist movement gave artists to question sexual and social convention.

Louise Bourgeois

The labyrinthine mind of the last great surrealist envelops the spectator of her art in memories of an early 20th-century French childhood, intense secret worlds and the very interior of the body. Collapsing the masculinist art form of sculpture into something organic and ripely carnal, she is the spider of subversion weaving a web that has transformed the very nature of art.

Read the entire list here:

Image: Judith Beheading Holofernes, Artemisia Gentileschi, c1612. Courtesy of Wikimedia.

Idea Soup

Everyday Sexism Project

The passing of Nelson Mandela reminds us that while great strides for freedom and justice were made in South Africa much still remains to be done. Unfortunately, racism and discrimination, in all its forms, continue to rear their ugly heads in all nooks and crannies of our world. So, the fight for equality continues; one great example is the Everyday Sexism Project.

From the Guardian:

The campaign for women’s liberation never went away, but this year a new swell built up and broke through. Since the early summer, I’ve been talking to feminist activists and writers for a short book, All The Rebel Women, and as I tried to keep up with the protests, marches and talks, my diary became a mess of clashing dates. The rush was such that in a single weekend in October, you could have attended a feminist freshers’ fair in London, the North East Feminist Gathering in Newcastle, a Reclaim the Night march in Edinburgh, or a discussion between different generations of feminist activists at the British Library (this sold out in 48 hours, was moved to a room four times bigger, and sold out again).

You could have joined one of the country’s 149 local grassroots groups, or shared your experience of misogyny on the site Laura Bates, 27, started in April 2012. Her Everyday Sexism Project has proved so successful that it was rolled out to 17 countries on its first anniversary this year, tens of thousands of women worldwide writing about the street harassment, sexual harassment, workplace discrimination and body-shaming they encounter. The project embodies that feminist phrase “the personal is political”, a consciousness-raising exercise that encourages women to see how inequality affects them, proves these problems aren’t individual but collective, and might therefore have political solutions. This year, 6,000 stories that have been sent to the project about harassment or assault on public transport – the majority never reported to authorities – were used to train 2,000 police officers in London, and create a public awareness campaign. In its first few weeks, says Bates, the reporting of harassment on public transport soared. Everyday Sexism currently has more than 108,000 followers on Twitter. Of course, following a social media account isn’t the same as joining a political party, but to put this engagement in perspective, Tory membership is now at 134,000.

Welcome to the fourth wave of feminism. This movement follows the first-wave campaign for votes for women, which reached its height 100 years ago, the second wave women’s liberation movement that blazed through the 1970s and 80s, and the third wave declared by Rebecca Walker, Alice Walker’s daughter, and others, in the early 1990s. That shift from second to third wave took many important forms, but often felt broadly generational, with women defining their work as distinct from their mothers’. What’s happening now feels like something new again. It’s defined by technology: tools that are allowing women to build a strong, popular, reactive movement online. Just how popular is sometimes slightly startling. Girlguiding UK introduced a campaigning and activism badge this year and a summer survey of Mumsnet users found 59% consider themselves feminists, double those who don’t. Bates says that, for her, modern feminism is defined by pragmatism, inclusion and humour. “I feel like it is really down-to-earth, really open,” she says, “and it’s very much about people saying: ‘Here is something that doesn’t make sense to me, I thought women were equal, I’m going to do something about it.'”

As 2013 unfolded, it became impossible to ignore the rumble of feminist campaigners, up and down the country. They gathered outside the Bank of England in early July, the first burst of a heatwave, dressed as aviators, suffragettes and warrior queens, organised by Caroline Criado-Perez, 29, shouting for women’s representation on bank notes and beyond.

They demonstrated outside the Sun headquarters, organised by Yas Necati, 17, in a protest against Page 3, the biggest image of a woman that appears each day in the country’s biggest-selling newspaper – a teenager or twentysomething smiling sunnily in her pants. Necati, a student at sixth-form college, laughed shyly as she told me about the mocked-up pages she has sent Sun editor David Dinsmore, suggesting feminist comedians, artists and writers to appear on the page instead. One of her favourites showed a woman flashing bright blue armpit hair. The the No More Page 3 petition started by Lucy-Anne Holmes, 37, in August 2012,, has been signed by 128,000 people.

Ikamara Larasi, 24, started heading a campaign to address racist and sexist stereotypes in music videos, just as students began banning summer hit Blurred Lines on many UK campuses, in response to its sexist lyrics. Jinan Younis, 18, co-founded a feminist society at school, experienced online abuse from some boys in her peer group – “feminism and rape are both ridiculously tiring,” they wrote – and wasn’t deterred. Instead, she wrote an article about it that went viral. When I spoke to her in September, she was juggling shifts in a call centre, babysitting for neighbours, preparing for university, while helping out with a campaign to encourage feminist societies in schools countrywide. UK Feminista, an organisation set up in 2010 to support feminist activists, has had 100 people contact them this year, wanting to start their own school group. In late August, their national day of action against lads’ mags included 19 protests across the UK.

Thousands more feminists raised their voices online. Bates and Soraya Chemaly, 47, were among those who set up a campaign against misogynist pages on Facebook, including groups with names such as “raping a pregnant bitch and telling your friends you had a threesome”. Supporters sent more than 60,000 tweets in the course of a swift, week-long push, convincing the social media behemoth to change its moderation policies.

Southall Black Sisters protested outside the offices of the UK Border Agency against racist immigration laws and propaganda – including the notorious “Go Home” vans. They also marched in solidarity with protesters in Delhi, who began a wave of demonstrations following the death of a woman who was gang raped in the city last December, protests against rape culture that soon spread to Nepal, Bangladesh, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. The African LGBTI Out & Proud Diamond Group demonstrated opposite Downing Street after allegations emerged of the sexual abuse of women held at Yarl’s Wood immigration removal centre.

The Fawcett Society continued to show how cuts to benefits, services and public-sector jobs pose “triple jeopardy” to women (in 2013 women’s unemployment reached a 26-year high). Rape Crisis South London spearheaded a successful campaign to criminalise the possession of pornography that depicts rape. And 40 Days of Choice challenged the anti-abortion campaigners who have become worryingly prominent in the UK recently.

The Edinburgh fringe hosted a surprising run of feminist comedians, including Mary Bourke, with her show Muffragette. Bourke memorably noted in a BBC interview this summer that the open-mic circuit has become a “rape circle” in recent years. Feminist standups were ready to respond. Nadia Kamil, 29, performed a set including a feminist burlesque, peeling off eight layers of clothing to reveal messages such as “pubes are normal” and “equal pay” picked out in sequins. She also explained the theory of intersectionality through a vocoder, and gave out badges with the slogan “Smash the Kyriarchy”. (She hoped audience members would look up any words they were unfamiliar with later, such as “kyriarchy” and “cis”.)

Bridget Christie, 42, won the Foster’s Edinburgh comedy award with A Bic for Her, in which she railed against sexist comments by racing driver Stirling Moss, and talked about “ethical filing” – taking sexist magazines off shop shelves and dumping them straight in the bin. She wasn’t encouraging other people to do this, she emphasised. She just wanted to point out that she had been doing it for months – months – with no problem at all.

Women marched through London for Million Women Rise and Reclaim the Night, and organised events in 207 countries for One Billion Rising, a day of demonstrations to highlight the UN statistic that one in three women will be raped or beaten in her lifetime. As part of this event, the UK parliament debated whether sex and relationship education should be on the national curriculum, and six months later, in her summer holidays, Lili Evans, 16, started the Campaign4Consent with Necati, calling for consent education in schools.

A chorus rose against online misogyny. Criado-Perez highlighted the string of rape threats sent to her on Twitter, writer Lindy West published the comments she received, (“There is a group of rapists with over 9,000 penises coming for this fat bitch,” read one), and the academic and broadcaster Mary Beard, Lauren Mayberry from the band Chvrches, and Ruby Tandoh from The Great British Bake Off, all spoke out on this issue. If you want to know how deeply some people resent the idea of women’s advancement, the stream of online misogyny has been perhaps the most obvious, ugly backlash yet.

But bald attempts to silence women only made the movement larger and louder. They convinced those who had never thought about misogyny before that it was clearly still alive, and convinced those who were well aware of it to keep going.

Read the entire article here.

 

 

Idea Soup

A Female Muslim Superhero

Until recently all superheroes from the creative minds at Marvel and DC Comics were white, straight men. But over time — albeit very slowly — we have seen the arrival of greater diversity: an Amazonian Wonder Woman, an African-American Green Lantern, a lesbian Batwoman. Now, comes Kamala Khan, a shape-shifting Muslim girl, from New Jersey (well, nobody’s perfect).

Author Shelina Janmohamed chimes in with some well-timed analysis.

From the Telegraph:

Once, an average comic book superhero was male and wore his pants on the outside of his trousers. We’ve been thrown some female heroines along the way: Wonder Woman, Lara Croft and Ms Marvel. The female presence in comics has been growing over the years. But the latest announcement by Marvel Comics that a 16-year-old Pakistani Muslim American girl from New Jersey will be one of their lead characters has been creating a stir, and for all the right reasons. Kamala Khan is the new Ms Marvel.

The series editor at Marvel, Sana Amanat says the series is a “desire to explore the Muslim-American diaspora from an authentic perspective”. Khan can grow and shrink her limbs and her body and ultimately, she’ll be able to shape shift into other forms.

Like all superheroes she has a back story, and the series will deal with how familial and religious edicts mesh with super-heroics, and perhaps even involve some rule breaking.

I love it.

As a teenager, I wish I could have seen depictions of struggling with identity, religion and adolescence that reflected my own, and in a way that made me believe I could be powerful rather than confused, marginalised and abnormal.

Kamala Khan will create waves not just for teenagers though. Her very existence will enable readers to see past the ‘Muslim’ tag, into a powerful and flawed multifaceted human being. Fantasy, paradoxically, is a potent method to create normalisation of Muslim women in the ordinary mainstream.

Usually, Muslim women in the public eye including fictional ones, are cast in a long tradition of one-dimensional stereotypes, meek, submissive, oppressed and cloaked females struggling to escape from a violent family, or too brainwashed to know that she needs to escape.

Instead, Marvel Comics has created the opportunity to investigate the complexity of a Muslim female character to the backdrop of a different history: the tradition of superheroes. Fraught with angst in her daily life, we can now explore Muslim women’s relationship with power (and in Khan’s case, with giant fists). She is contextualised not through politics but through the world of superheroes.

Comics and cartoons are increasingly giving space to Muslim women to be explored in new contexts, offering the opportunity for better understanding, and ‘normalisation.’ Yes, I’m using the word again, because sometimes that’s all we long for, to be seen as normal ordinary women.

Just yesterday, the hashtag ‘#AsAMuslimWoman’ was trending on Twitter, offering mundane self descriptions from Muslim women such as: “Early mornings irritate me & I enjoy chocolate”, “I hate the District line in the morning. It’s cramped. And it smells funny”, and I’m “running my business, enjoying motherhood and living my Dreams”.

Read the entire article here.

Image: Kamala Khan, Marvel’s new Muslim superhero, on the cover of the new Ms. Marvel comic. Courtesy of the Marvel / Independent.

Idea Soup

The Best Place to be a Woman

By most accounts the best place to be a woman is one that offers access to quality education and comprehensive healthcare, provides gender equality with men, and meaningful career and family work-life balance. So where is this real world Shangri-La. Some might suggest this place to be the land of opportunity — the United States. But, that’s not even close. Nor is it Canada or Switzerland or Germany or the UK.

According to a recent Global Gender Gap report, and a number of other surveys, the best place to be born a girl is Iceland. Next on the list come Finland, Norway, and Sweden, with another Scandinavian country, Denmark, not too far behind in seventh place. By way of comparison, the US comes in 23rd — not great, but better than Afghanistan and Yemen.

From the Social Reader:

Icelanders are among the happiest and healthiest people on Earth. They publish more books per capita than any other country, and they have more artists. They boast the most prevalent belief in evolution — and elves, too. Iceland is the world’s most peaceful nation (the cops don’t even carry guns), and the best place for kids. Oh, and they’ve got a lesbian head of state, the world’s first. Granted, the national dish is putrefied shark meat, but you can’t have everything.

Iceland is also the best place to have a uterus, according to the folks at the World Economic Forum. The Global Gender Gap Report ranks countries based on where women have the most equal access to education and healthcare, and where they can participate most fully in the country’s political and economic life.

According to the 2013 report, Icelandic women pretty much have it all. Their sisters in Finland, Norway, and Sweden have it pretty good, too: those countries came in second, third and fourth, respectively. Denmark is not far behind at number seven.

The U.S. comes in at a dismal 23rd, which is a notch down from last year. At least we’re not Yemen, which is dead last out of 136 countries.

So how did a string of countries settled by Vikings become leaders in gender enlightenment? Bloodthirsty raiding parties don’t exactly sound like models of egalitarianism, and the early days weren’t pretty. Medieval Icelandic law prohibited women from bearing arms or even having short hair. Viking women could not be chiefs or judges, and they had to remain silent in assemblies. On the flip side, they could request a divorce and inherit property. But that’s not quite a blueprint for the world’s premier egalitarian society.

The change came with literacy, for one thing. Today almost everybody in Scandinavia can read, a legacy of the Reformation and early Christian missionaries, who were interested in teaching all citizens to read the Bible. Following a long period of turmoil, Nordic states also turned to literacy as a stabilizing force in the late 18th century. By 1842, Sweden had made education compulsory for both boys and girls.

Researchers have found that the more literate the society in general, the more egalitarian it is likely to be, and vice versa. But the literacy rate is very high in the U.S., too, so there must be something else going on in Scandinavia. Turns out that a whole smorgasbord of ingredients makes gender equality a high priority in Nordic countries.

To understand why, let’s take a look at religion. The Scandinavian Lutherans, who turned away from the excesses of the medieval Catholic Church, were concerned about equality — especially the disparity between rich and poor. They thought that individuals had some inherent rights that could not just be bestowed by the powerful, and this may have opened them to the idea of rights for women. Lutheran state churches in Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Norway and Iceland have had female priests since the middle of the 20th century, and today, the Swedish Lutheran Church even has a female archbishop.

Or maybe it’s just that there’s not much religion at all. Scandinavians aren’t big churchgoers. They tend to look at morality from a secular point of view, where there’s not so much obsessive focus on sexual issues and less interest in controlling women’s behavior and activities. Scandinavia’s secularism decoupled sex from sin, and this worked out well for females. They came to be seen as having the right to sexual experience just like men, and reproductive freedom, too. Girls and boys learn about contraception in school (and even the pleasure of orgasms), and most cities have youth clinics where contraceptives are readily available. Women may have an abortion for any reason up to the eighteenth week (they can seek permission from the National Board of Health and Welfare after that), and the issue is not politically controversial.

Scandinavia’s political economy also developed along somewhat different lines than America’s did. Sweden and Norway had some big imperialist adventures, but this behavior declined following the Napoleonic Wars. After that they invested in the military to ward off invaders, but they were less interested in building it up to deal with bloated colonial structures and foreign adventures. Overall Nordic countries devoted fewer resources to the military — the arena where patriarchal values tend to get emphasized and entrenched. Iceland, for example, spends the world’s lowest percentage of GDP on its military.

Industrialization is part of the story, too: it hit the Nordic countries late. In the 19th century, Scandinavia did have a rich and powerful merchant class, but the region never produced the Gilded Age industrial titans and extreme concentration of wealth that happened in America back then, and has returned today. (Income inequality and discrimination of all kinds seem to go hand-in-hand.)

In the 20th century, farmers and workers in the newly populated Nordic cities tended to join together in political coalitions, and they could mount a serious challenge to the business elites, who were relatively weak compared to those in the U.S. Like ordinary people everywhere, Scandinavians wanted a social and economic system where everyone could get a job, expect decent pay, and enjoy a strong social safety net. And that’s what they got — kind of like Roosevelt’s New Deal without all the restrictions added by New York bankers and southern conservatives. Strong trade unions developed, which tend to promote gender equality. The public sector grew, providing women with good job opportunities. Iceland today has the highest rate of union membership out of any OECD country.

Over time, Scandinavian countries became modern social democratic states where wealth is more evenly distributed, education is typically free up through university, and the social safety net allows women to comfortably work and raise a family. Scandinavian moms aren’t agonizing over work-family balance: parents can take a year or more of paid parental leave. Dads are expected to be equal partners in childrearing, and they seem to like it. (Check them out in the adorable photo book, The Swedish Dad.)

The folks up north have just figured out — and it’s not rocket science! — that everybody is better off when men and women share power and influence. They’re not perfect — there’s still some unfinished business about how women are treated in the private sector, and we’ve sensed an undertone of darker forces in pop culture phenoms like The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. But Scandinavians have decided that investment in women is both good for social relations and a smart economic choice. Unsurprisingly, Nordic countries have strong economies and rank high on things like innovation — Sweden is actually ahead of the U.S. on that metric. (So please, no more nonsense about how inequality makes for innovation.)

The good news is that things are getting better for women in most places in the world. But the World Economic Forum report shows that the situation either remains the same or is deteriorating for women in 20 percent of countries.

In the U.S., we’ve evened the playing field in education, and women have good economic opportunities. But according to the WEF, American women lag behind men in terms of health and survival, and they hold relatively few political offices. Both facts become painfully clear every time a Tea Party politician betrays total ignorance of how the female body works. Instead of getting more women to participate in the political process, we’ve got setbacks like a new voter ID law in Texas, which could disenfranchise one-third of the state’s woman voters. That’s not going to help the U.S. become a world leader in gender equality.

Read the entire article here.

Idea Soup

It’s About Equality, Stupid

[div class=attrib]From Project Syndicate:[end-div]

The king of Bhutan wants to make us all happier. Governments, he says, should aim to maximize their people’s Gross National Happiness rather than their Gross National Product. Does this new emphasis on happiness represent a shift or just a passing fad?

It is easy to see why governments should de-emphasize economic growth when it is proving so elusive. The eurozone is not expected to grow at all this year. The British economy is contracting. Greece’s economy has been shrinking for years. Even China is expected to slow down. Why not give up growth and enjoy what we have?

No doubt this mood will pass when growth revives, as it is bound to. Nevertheless, a deeper shift in attitude toward growth has occurred, which is likely to make it a less important lodestar in the future – especially in rich countries.

The first factor to undermine the pursuit of growth was concern about its sustainability. Can we continue growing at the old rate without endangering our future?

When people started talking about the “natural” limits to growth in the 1970’s, they meant the impending exhaustion of food and non-renewable natural resources. Recently the debate has shifted to carbon emissions. As the Stern Review of 2006 emphasized, we must sacrifice some growth today to ensure that we do not all fry tomorrow.

Curiously, the one taboo area in this discussion is population. The fewer people there are, the less risk we face of heating up the planet. But, instead of accepting the natural decline in their populations, rich-country governments absorb more and more people to hold down wages and thereby grow faster.

A more recent concern focuses on the disappointing results of growth. It is increasingly understood that growth does not necessarily increase our sense of well-being. So why continue to grow?

The groundwork for this question was laid some time ago. In 1974, the economist Richard Easterlin published a famous paper, “Does Economic Growth Improve the Human Lot? Some Empirical Evidence.” After correlating per capita income and self-reported happiness levels across a number of countries, he reached a startling conclusion: probably not.

Above a rather low level of income (enough to satisfy basic needs), Easterlin found no correlation between happiness and GNP per head. In other words, GNP is a poor measure of life satisfaction.

That finding reinforced efforts to devise alternative indexes. In 1972, two economists, William Nordhaus and James Tobin, introduced a measure that they called “Net Economic Welfare,” obtained by deducting from GNP “bad” outputs, like pollution, and adding non-market activities, like leisure. They showed that a society with more leisure and less work could have as much welfare as one with more work – and therefore more GNP – and less leisure.

More recent metrics have tried to incorporate a wider range of “quality of life” indicators. The trouble is that you can measure quantity of stuff, but not quality of life. How one combines quantity and quality in some index of “life satisfaction” is a matter of morals rather than economics, so it is not surprising that most economists stick to their quantitative measures of “welfare.”

But another finding has also started to influence the current debate on growth: poor people within a country are less happy than rich people. In other words, above a low level of sufficiency, peoples’ happiness levels are determined much less by their absolute income than by their income relative to some reference group. We constantly compare our lot with that of others, feeling either superior or inferior, whatever our income level; well-being depends more on how the fruits of growth are distributed than on their absolute amount.

Put another way, what matters for life satisfaction is the growth not of mean income but of median income – the income of the typical person. Consider a population of ten people (say, a factory) in which the managing director earns $150,000 a year and the other nine, all workers, earn $10,000 each. The mean average of their incomes is $25,000, but 90% earn $10,000. With this kind of income distribution, it would be surprising if growth increased the typical person’s sense of well-being.

[div class=attrib]Read the entire article after the jump.[end-div]

Environs

Best Countries for Women

If you’re female and value lengthy life expectancy, comprehensive reproductive health services, sound education and equality with males, where should you live? In short, Scandinavia, Australia and New Zealand, and Northern Europe. In a list of the 44 most well-developed nations, the United States ranks towards the middle, just below Canada and Estonia, but above Greece, Italy, Russia and most of Central and Eastern Europe.

The fascinating infographic from the National Post does a great job of summarizing the current state of womens’ affairs from data gathered from 165 countries.

[div class=attrib]Read the entire article and find a higher quality infographic after the jump.[end-div]