They said it, not me!

So, a rational person might ask, why would a woman living in 21st Century America want to get married? One answer is that women are influenced by their religious beliefs and encouraged by cultural attitudes supporting marriage. Religion and culture, however, reinforce traditional gender roles that require married women to, at the very least, do more housework and put up with a less satisfying sex life than their single counterparts.

Is marriage so bad for women? I guess that depends on how much you hate scrubbing the toilet. Or how much you value your sex life.

From the mouthes of Morman Housewives.

I just discovered a new website today and I know it’s going to eat my time. Ladies, gentlemen, and everyone in between, may I present to you:

Feminist! Mormon! Housewives!

I like this post discussing gender roles, and this post discussing the etymology of the word ‘vagina’.

I’m noticing a trend in feminism — possible only with the internet, no doubt. So much discussion these days seems to revolve around “how can I be a (housewife, breadwinner, christian, muslim, prostitute, man, woman, trans person, gay, lesbian, bi, person of color….) and also a feminist?”

On the one hand I’m glad that voices that were formerly silenced (and yes feminists haven’t always been the most un-bigoted people ever to exist) are now speaking up, but on the other hand it can become tiresome to follow all the conversations that more or less end up in the same place: yes, people from all walks of life can be feminists. Next?

What is next? Are all these ‘feminisms’ heading toward a unified effort?

After a careful review of events and educating myself about various drugs, I am fairly sure my drink was spiked last night.

I was at a birthday party at a bar with friends I trust. My third drink I did leave unattended while I used the restroom. When I came back, I drank 1/3-1/2 of it, which me feel bad, seek out said friends who were smoking outside, sit on the ground, lie on the ground, vision blur, puke, try to sleep, get swept up by two trustworthy man-friends who took me to their house where I napped, threw up a bit more and then felt relatively fine.

Spiked drinks are acts of terrorism! I should not have to worry about my drink just because I have to frigging pee, although I can assure you I will do so every single time I drink at a bar from now on. Such acts of terrorism are part of the vast conspiracy to keep women in fear of going out by themselves.

Also can I just say that anyone who thinks it’s fun to make someone sick, for any reason and especially for sexual gratification (?), is a little bit more troubled than I can get my head around.

In this installment I’d like to point out that the point of this series is to remember women who have been recognized for bringing peace to the world. As I was reading their bios, I was reminded that most of these women espoused different views, especially surrounding reproduction, than I and most feminists do today. (To state what I hope is the obvious: I’m pro-choice and anti-eugenics.) My takeaway from this is that we’re all under different pressures and influences when we’re forming our opinions about the world. All of the women in this set grew up in a different world than you or I did. Even some of the early founders of the modern feminist movement had backwards and harmful attitudes about class and race. So while I’m not going to gloss over our disagreements, I’m not going to let them damp a little admiration for the positive influence these women had on so many lives.

1976: Betty Williams/Mairead Corrigan (UK) - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betty_Williams_%28nobel_laureate%29
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mairead_Corrigan

Betty Williams became a peace activist after witnessing the death of three children who were hit by the car of an IRA (provisional Irish Republican Army) fugitive. This incident inspired her join forces with the aunt of the children, Mairead Corrigan, in forming the the group called Women for Peace, which later became the Community for Peace People. Williams and Corrigan famously organized a street rally of 3500 people for peace between Republican and Loyalist factions in Nortern Ireland.

Mairead Corrigan is a pro-life activist. Betty Williams said that if there were a way to non-violently kill George Bush, she would.

1979: Mother Theresa (Albania/India) - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mother_Teresa

Mother Theresa is perhaps the most famous woman winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. Her name has become a colloquialism for selflessness. In fact, her life was such an extreme example of anti-materialism that it occasionally drew criticism:

Despite Mother Teresa’s success in growing the Missionaries of Charity’ worldwide, both the philosophy behind her approach and its implementation have faced some criticism. Whilst noting how little evidence Mother Teresa’s critics were able to find against her, David Scott writes that Mother Teresa limited herself only to keeping people alive rather than tackling poverty itself. She has also been criticized for her view on suffering: According to an article in the Alberta Report, it was her opinion that suffering would bring people closer to Jesus. On the more practical level, the quality of care offered to terminally ill patients in the Homes for the Dying has been criticised in both The Lancet and the British Medical Journal, which reported poor living conditions, such as using cold baths for all patients, reusing hypodermic needles and an anti-materialist approach that precluded the use of systematic diagnosis.

To be fair, Mother Theresa applied her principles equally to her own life. She lived in poverty, and she donated all her peace prize money to the poor in India.

Mother Theresa was also pro-life. She singled out abortion as the “greatest destroyer of peace in the world”.

1982: Alva Myrdal (Sweden) - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alva_Myrdal

Born in Uppsala, she first came to public notice in the 1930s, coauthoring a book entitled Crisis in the Population Question and was one of the main driving forces in the creation of the Swedish welfare state. The basic premise of Crisis in the Population Question is to find what social reforms are needed to allow for individual liberty (especially for women) while also promoting child-bearing. While heralding many sweeping social reforms seen as positive for Sweden, the book also incorporated some of the zeitgeist of the 1930s, in its promotion of the idea of positive eugenics. A long-time prominent member of the Social Democrat party of Sweden, in the late 1940s she became involved in international issues with the United Nations, appointed to head its section on welfare policy in 1949 and from 1950 to 1955 she was chairman of UNESCO’s social science section - the first woman to hold such prominent positions in the UN.

I just had to laugh at the headline of this Fox news piece:

Study: More than 1 in 7 Women Depressed Before, During, After Pregnancy

Oh yeah? Well, I have determined through careful internet research that at least 1 in 7* women experience depression before, during, or after eating a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. (’Before’ defined as 13.5 months preceding the sandwich, ‘during’ defined as the day of the sandwich, and ‘after’ defined as the 13.5 months following the sandwich.)

I don’t even know what these people are trying to say. Considering that depression is a known symptom of childbirth… Then as I read the article it started to make slightly more sense:

Postpartum depression, which affects 400,000 women in the United States, can inhibit a woman’s ability to bond with her infant, relate to the child’s father, and perform daily activities, the authors wrote.

Translation: women who are depressed cause problems for men and babies, and are less effective as unpaid manual labor. Therefore, we should address the issue of depression in women of childbearing age.

“The biggest news here is that we need to manage depression as a chronic condition in women of childbearing age, rather than assume depression is a temporary condition that can be either triggered or relieved by getting pregnant or giving birth,” Whitlock said. “Women with a history of depression should be closely monitored for depressive symptoms during prenatal and postpartum care.”

Whoever thought that childbirth would relieve depression, anyway? The same people who push the “magic mommy hormones” crap? This article makes me feel so depressed. I’m going to have a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

* .5x + x = .1
1.5x = .1
x = .066
men are 6.6%, women are 13%  likely to be depressed.

13% is just about 1/7.

I was thinking of Nobel Peace Prize winners because Aung San Suu Kyi has been in the news, what with the violence and repression in Mynamar/Burma. So I looked up her story in Wikipedia, and that lead me on the tangent of looking up the rest of the women who earned Nobel Peace Prizes. In over a hundred years of Nobel Peace Prizes, there are only nine. I’m going to talk about them in three sets of three:

1905: Bertha von Suttner (Austria-Hungary) - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bertha_von_Suttner

Fun Fact! von Suttner was the house keeper of Alfred Nobel for one week.

Suttner became a leading figure in the peace movement with the publication of her novel, Die Waffen nieder! (Lay Down Your Arms!) in 1889 and founded an Austrian pacifist organization in 1891. She gained international repute as editor of the international pacifist journal Die Waffen nieder!, named for her book, from 1892 to 1899. Her pacifism was influenced by the writings of H. T. Buckle, Herbert Spencer, and Charles Darwin. Though her personal contact with Alfred Nobel had been brief, she corresponded with him until his death in 1896, and it is believed that she was a major influence in his decision to include a peace prize among those prizes provided in his will, which she won in 1905.

1931: Jane Addams (US) - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Addams

Jane Addams is perhaps best known for starting Sutter House in Chicago, which was a “settlement house” — something like a community center that included “a night school for adults, kindergarten classes, clubs for older children, a public kitchen, an art gallery, a coffeehouse, a gymnasium, a girls club, a swimming pool, a book bindery, a music school, a drama group, a library, and labor-related division.”.

Indeed her work was really the beginning of community work in America. She combined the central concepts of symbolic interactionism with the theories of cultural feminism and pragmatism to form her sociological ideas (Deegan, 1988). She was also actively involved with Pi Gamma Mu, the social science honor society, from the 1920s until her death, because of its emphasis on social service and the humanization of the social science disciplines. In 1998 the British Columbia Branch of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom commissioned Canadian artist Christian Cardell Corbet to create a bronze medallion of Jane Addams to celebrate her life and achievements. The medallion has since been collected by several important museums.

1946: Emily Greene Balch (US) - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emily_Greene_Balch

There’s not much of a bio for Emily Greene Balch in Wikipedia. It says that she was best known for her work with the Women’s International League of Peace and Freedom, which exists to this day:

Founded in 1915, the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) is the oldest women’s peace organization in the world. It is a non-profit non-governmental organization working “to bring together women of different political views and philosophical and religious backgrounds determined to study and make known the causes of war and work for a permanent peace” and to unite women worldwide who oppose oppression and exploitation. WILPF has National Sections in 37 countries.

I got tagged by Tigtog (try saying that three times fast!)

• An interesting animal I had:

When I was growing up, my family kept goats, chickens, pheasants, turkeys, dogs, guppies, frogs, goldfish, a parrot, and guinea pigs. But one of the most otherworldly animals I ever kept was a praying mantis. (I’m having a problem getting the image sized right so you’ll just have to bear with me and click the thumbnails to enlarge. At least check out the sea dragon below — it’s lovely!)

I found a mantis on a tree one autumn, and, being the science nerd that I was, I couldn’t resist the opportunity to meddle with her life.



I put her cage on the front porch with a screen top, and soon enough, two male mantises showed up to mate with her. I opened the cage, and they had a very awkward threesome with the unlucky dude jizzing sans penetration and no one getting eaten. Apparently, Ms. Mantis was overfed.

Then I waited for a week or two, and since she didn’t lay any eggs I let her go.

• An interesting animal I ate:

I had a bite of inky black octopus when I was in Barcelona. Squeamish factor is high for black soupy seameat thingies though so I couldn’t really eat more than that.

• An interesting animal in the museum:

Leafy seadragons! Prettiest fish ever. I believe they’re found primarily or exclusively in the waters of Australia? *waves to Tigtog*

• An interesting animal in its natural habitat:
  Well I don’t know if there is anything that could be described as a “natural habitat” in San Francisco, but I live across the street from Golden Gate Park, and I did see a coyote pup slinking around a few weeks ago. It looked like it was about the size of the pup in this picture, which is from Yellowstone Park. Yellowstone is a few hours south of me. (Photo by Max Waugh)

And now I’m tagging:
Geek Buffet
Vishvamitra
Sherwood
Aswell
Archer
Leach

Study shows that businesses run by women are more profitable than those run by men.

The researchers behind the study say that the results give credence to the idea that taking women better into account can offer companies a clear competitive edge.
However, they say that it would be wrong to claim that replacing the present male managers with women would automatically improve profitability.
The study was conducted on Finnish limited liability companies, which employed at least ten people in 2003. Such companies number 14,020.

Speaking of competitive edges, a piece in Computer World, claims that the US faces a competitive disadvantage from lack of women in the tech field:

Discrimination against women and minorities is putting the U.S. at a disadvantage in technology innovation, according to the chancellor of the University of California at Berkeley.

Robert Birgeneau said of the top 50 university computer science department jobs in the U.S., not one is held by a woman of color. “How embarrassing,” he said. “It’s an astounding waste of talent in an increasingly competitive world.”

From the Guardian UK: Women in full-time work still earn 17% less than men

Neither the Equal Pay Act nor the Sex Discrimination Act nor the EOC could create momentum in a world where men held economic, political and cultural power. So, 32 years on, women in full-time work still earn on average 17% less than men, £330,000 over a lifetime. And for all the excellence of girls’ academic results, discrimination appears alongside their first jobs - a discrimination that will only grow as they have children, care for elderly parents, and finally become pensioners themselves. For girls who do not choose higher education, things are worse. They converge on the “five Cs” - cleaning, catering, cashiering, caring and clerking - which condemns them to a life of low pay.

The Canadian Press reports that, adjusting for education and job experience, women still earn on average 15% less than men. The article also notes:

But when it comes to jobs with influence in the corporate world, women fill less than 10 per cent of those positions.

As well, little progress has been seen at the board level, where women represent only about 12 per cent of directors.

The Scotsman reports:

FEMALE doctors in the UK face a glass ceiling in the clinical academic sector, even though more are entering the medical profession, a study shows.

Research published in the Journal of Medical Education suggests that women suffer discrimination and are under- represented, particularly at the most senior levels.

Lest we forget the plights of the rich WASPS in NYC, the New York Times reminds us that making money can present new problems for women:

Ms. Hess’s quandary is becoming more common for many young women. For the first time, women in their 20s who work full time in several American cities — New York, Chicago, Boston and Minneapolis — are earning higher wages than men in the same age range, according to a recent analysis of 2005 census data by Andrew Beveridge, a sociology professor at Queens College in New York.

…

The shift is playing out in new, unanticipated ways on the dating front. Women are encountering forms of hostility they weren’t prepared to meet, and are trying to figure out how to balance pride in their accomplishments against their perceived need to bolster the egos of the men they date.

Interesting… does fanfic make (women) poor? (SFW)

Obviously the title of the essay is sensational — obviously fanfic isn’t causing poverty. But it is possible that it’s serving as a surrogate for other (better?) possibilities.

One of my friends IM’d me while I was away from my computer last night to point out that crazy people that I rant about are not normal.

It depends on how you define normal. That’s the second time within a few months that someone has asked me to marry him on the street point blank, the last time was also during the day by a man who didn’t seem to be a traveler, hippie, druggie, or otherwise weird. I was annoyed then too, but I didn’t rant about it because he bugged off quickly. Not counting marriage proposals, I have suffered violent hate speech on a bus, old men trying to sit with me in empty cafes, a teenage boy delivering a monologue in Spanish -with the intent to harass- at the bus stop, solicitations, and two instances where I was beyond any reasonable doubt being followed with ill intent.

I realize that ’street harassment’ wouldn’t happen in an environment such a small college campus.  And I realize that it is often a class issue. But as far as I am concerned, ‘normal’ is defined not by how not-like-me the harasser is, but the frequency with which I have to put up with it.