Let me tell you, first of all, how uncomfortable I am with the title of this series. We know about the "war on women." The naked hatred society levels at women who defy traditional gender-role expectations, these days, isn't news to any of us.
The interesting question, at least to me, and one not reflected in the name of the series, is how are women responding to this hatred? Are they fighting back? How might we respond?
I've tried to address that, at least partly, in my partial news round-up for the previous week.
Reasons Feminism is Unpopular
Some women, clearly, respond to gender discrimination by caving to it. And the disappointing thing is, a number of prominent, accomplished women do just that.
Jezebel gives us quotes from famous women who disavow the feminist label, of which I'll highlight a few, starting with Marissa Mayer, the current CEO of Yahoo:
I believe that women are just as capable, if not more so in a lot of different dimensions, but I don't, I think have, sort of, the militant drive and the sort of, the chip on the shoulder that sometimes comes with that.
You aren't standing on anyone's shoulders, of course. The sacrifices of earlier women who weren't "nice," with their "militant drive" and a "chip on the shoulder" didn't benefit you, at all, you bucket of sunny joy, you. You perfect singularity.
This one is from fashion model and wife of former French President Nicolas Sarkozy, Carla Bruni:
[My generation] doesn't need feminism. There are pioneers who opened the breach. I'm not at all an active feminist. On the contrary, I'm a bourgeois. I love family life, I love doing the same thing every day.
Well, it's sure a relief feminism is "over" and we can have "family life" again! Thank goodness!
From Bjork, the singer-songwriter, explaining why she isn't a "feminist:"
Because I think it would isolate me. I think it's important to do positive stuff. It's more important to be asking than complaining.
Feminism is isolating! Rebellion is good, mind you, as long as you don't let your "radicalism" run away with you, I guess.
Reproductive Health
Environmental toxins are indiscriminately applied, but sometimes their unintended effects discriminate by gender.
Exposure to certain pesticides, now banned in the industrial world but still common in developing countries, can cause endometriosis, according to news out this week. Endometriosis is a painful condition in which the uterine lining grows outside the uterus in a woman's pelvis and abdomen. It impairs fertility. Despite having been banned here long ago, it shows up also in first-world food sources, chiefly fish and diary.
What's confounding is never knowing whether a specific case of endometriosis is linked to pesticides in the environment. We just have to chalk it up as yet more background-level poisoning of humans and the environment in the industrial age.
For a primer on pesticides and the environment, see Rachel Carson's book, Silent Spring.
For more on pesticides, human health, and the environment check out these interesting links.
Fashion Industry
Here is a blog by a woman who once worked for weight-loss industry, who apologizes to woman customers for products she sold.
It's remarkable stuff. Particularly remarkable are her apologies for having urged women to keep to 1,200- and 1,500-calorie diets (the norm for an adult is 2,000 calories per day), even teenaged athletes, even nursing mothers.
In recent decades, the diet industry and the mass culture have touted the scrawniness achieved through starvation as "attractive."
The blogger hints that this culture's problems with over-eating and mis-eating, and related ill-health, may indeed be the flip-side the self-denial promoted by misogynistic cultural actors including the diet industry.
What would it be like if all women mastered the art of eating according to their body's own signals, when the were hungry? Writer Anne Lammott describes this approach to eating as "radical" in a marvelous personal essay, "Hunger," included in her collection Traveling Mercies.
Politics and the Nobel Peace Prize
Why women don't win the Nobel Peace Prize as often as men, despite clearly deserving women candidates?
Indeed, according to this article, only 15 of the 100 Nobel Peace Prizes awarded to individuals since 1900 have gone to women. Likewise, not one winner of the Nobel Peace Prize has been openly gay.
This is despite appalling conditions that female and lbgt activists have effectively remedied, by challenging inequality in social institutions like the schools and prisons.
The reticence of the prize committee, traditionally consisting of conservative white men, can be due to squeamishness about the social issues these activists address, as much as it concerns invisibility of activists themselves.
Anti-lbgt discrimination, world-wide, is a raging problem. This sad incident occurred not two miles from my home in Oakland. The perpetrator was a student at Oakland High, a nearby public school where I've worked and volunteered and which I know very well.
We have yet to see a Nobel Peace Prize awarded for work for the lbgt community. Until we do, the discussion of anti-lbgt violence will be lacking and dishonest.
Arts and Entertainment
Think of the qualities of Disney princesses. They're young, beautiful, naive, and they always marry princes and live happily ever after. Now think of the real-life qualities of the prominent women who have been represented as Disney princesses on purpose, in this art. They often weren't young and nubile when they achieved their prominence, and they didn't do it through marriage. How awkward for myth-makers.