Sunday, February 26, 2006

 

Who's Got the Force?

The rapidly brewing civil war in Iraq has the foul odor of a manufactured crisis, and the question is, who is doing the manufacturing? Which faction in Iraq would most benefit from civil war?

One commentator speculates that it's the Americans who have the most to gain from a disunified Iraq. It's an extreme view, but he might just be on to something.

Who would lose the most? Clearly, the poorest sectors of society would be the most torn up by the violence. And women, as usual, would be caught in the maelstrom.

It's disheartening to hear that the fundamentalist Shiite al-Sadr militias that "own" the streets of Baghdad this weekend are, among other things, harassing women for not appearing sufficiently modest in public--presumably this means, not covering themselves up from head to toe in fabric.

It's disheartening to hear the tone of resigned, benumbed fear in Riverbend's voice as she discusses last week's bombing of the mosque in Samarra.

"The situation isn’t good at all," she said. "I don’t think I remember things being this tense- everyone is just watching and waiting quietly. There’s so much talk of civil war and yet, with the people I know- Sunnis and Shia alike- I can hardly believe it is a possibility. Educated, sophisticated Iraqis are horrified with the idea of turning against each other, and even not-so-educated Iraqis seem very aware that this is a small part of a bigger, more ominous plan….People are scared and watchful. We can only pray."

Riverbend is describing a scenario of absolute civic disempowerment. I recognize it because I live it too. Of course things in Iraq are almost unimaginably extreme, and yet here in the heart of empire, in the cushioned, comfortable world I inhabit, I also feel so, so politically disempowered.

So many of us watched with horror as the World Trade Center towers fell on that fateful morning in September, 2001. We watched with equal horror as our political leaders wrapped themselves in the American flag and marched our young soldiers off to a vengeful war, first in Afghanistan (which seemed marginally justified) and then in Iraq (which seemed cynically opportunistic and totally misguided).

We knew that Saddaam was a bad guy, but after all, our diplomacy had created him, and presumably our diplomacy could take him down too. We'd done it before in Latin America, hadn't we (think Allende, Duvalier, Trujillo, Noriega, Aristide, and they tried with Chavez just recently). But no, it wasn't just about getting rid of Sadaam in Iraq, it was about seizing control of the country's oil wealth.

That short-sighted greed has cost the lives of thousands of Americans, and tens or perhaps hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. It has thrown Iraq into turmoil that it looks like it will take generations to resolve.

And we who predicted that a civil war would come of an American invasion of Iraq now sit on the sidelines and watch bitterly, in horror, as events unfold. Riverbend typing at her computer in Baghdad, I typing at mine in Massachusetts, both of us distraught, disbelieving, disheartened.

Those who created this mess do not want me to join hands with Riverbend and feel the power crackle between us as we connect. They want to keep us separate, and they don't want us to perceive the connections between, say, the recent coup in Haiti, the violence erupting at the oilfields in the Niger delta, and the continued outrage that is Guantanamo Bay.

We must make these connections, and state them loud and clear so others will begin to awaken from their media-induced stupor and see what is happening in our global society. The way it is is not the way it has to be.

We need to think outside the box, outside of what Frances Moore Lappe would call our "thought traps," and not only imagine, but begin to live alternatives. In the war of visions, the Darth Vaders of the world are ascendant. But not forever. Not for long.

Thursday, February 23, 2006

 

Rumbles at the U.S. Committee for UNIFEM

UNIFEM, the United Nations Development Fund for Women, is the only U.N. fund devoted specifically to empowering women in developing countries, through financial and technical support of innovative programs that help women become central players in their own socio-economic systems. UNIFEM has offices all over the world, staffed by local experts, who evaluate proposals and implement successful programs.

UNIFEM programs range from working with the government of Jordan to educate women in e-commerce and launch them in the digital economy, to working to bring women into the peace negotiations in conflict and post-conflict regions in Africa, to strengthening women's participation in politics and government in places like Iraq and Timor-Leste, to fighting the social causes of rampant HIV/AIDS infections in women throughout the developing world.

Working directly with governments, under the banner of the United Nations, it's fair to say that no international women's organization is as well-known and well-respected throughout the developing world as UNIFEM.

Not so here in the U.S., however, where hardly anyone knows what UNIFEM is or does. I've been on the board of my local Berkshire Chapter of UNIFEM/USA for several years now, and I'm constantly having to explain to people what UNIFEM is all about.

I put the blame for this on the U.S. Committee for UNIFEM, one of 15 or so national committees in the developed world that support the work of UNIFEM at the United Nations. The governments of countries like Canada, Denmark, Italy, France and Germany, to name just a few, each contribute funds to UNIFEM, and in addition each country has a civic arm of women, organized in chapters, who work on educational outreach and fundraising, contributing additional millions of dollars each year to UNIFEM.

Sadly, the United States is one of the countries in the developed world that contributes the least to UNIFEM, both as a government and through the grassroots. Recently, after much pressure, the U.S. Congress doubled the annual allotment to UNIFEM, from $1 million to $2 million. Given the hundreds of billions being spent annually to wage war, this is a paltry sum indeed to help the women of the world wage peace.

And the U.S. Committee for UNIFEM has been able to raise only $50,000 in the last year to help the world's women. This is truly a pathetic sum from the women of the world's most powerful nation, to help women in the world's most ravaged and impoverished nations.

What's the problem? Not surprisingly, it has to do with poor leadership. I have been serving on the Board of the U.S. Committee for the past two years, and I have been dismayed to see the lack of real commitment on the part of the executive council of the Board to increasing membership and communicating with the existing membership about the goals and mission of UNIFEM. This is another case of an organization trying to maintain a hierarchical power structure, with all the power concentrated at the top, and finding that--surprise!--there's no one there at the bottom to prop them up anymore.

Under the current leadership of the U.S. Committee, the organization has alienated members and actually lost chapters. It's hard to believe, but UNIFEM/USA only boasts six active chapters throughout the U.S., in New York, Washington D.C., the Berkshires, Florida, Atlanta and southern California. Nascent chapters in Boston and northern California have either become disenchanted with the national leadership and shifted their energies elsewhere, or have failed to get off the ground.

There is currently a movement afoot to dislodge the leadership of the U.S. Committee, and get new, more focused and talented leaders in to turn the ship around. The board president, Sheryl Swed, and her executive council, are digging in their heels and refusing to leave, despite clear signals from the United Nations that a change of leadership is desired.

It's interesting to watch the battle unfold, mostly in the form of a series of increasingly vituperative global emails among board members. The sad thing is that as the Board of the U.S. Committee fights for power, our focus on the women of the developing world wavers, and we end up squandering precious energy on in-fighting. Sometimes, however, there is no other way. Let's just hope the transition will be fairly swift, and that the new leadership of the U.S. Committee will be much more effective and vibrant than the old.

Sunday, February 19, 2006

 

Getting Out the Women's Vote: What Will It Take?

A lot of pundits, particularly of the Democratic variety, have been pondering lately about how to get out the women's vote in 2008. It's an important question.

In a commentary published by Women's ENews last week, Alex Sanger, grandson of Margaret Sanger, the feisty founder of the modern "family planning" movement, observed that "the feminist vote has become detached from a broad set of interests--such as enhanced health care and child care--in which women, as a group, show particular interest. Instead, it has come to be seen as an isolated and controversial single-issue focus on abortion rights that does not translate reliably into votes."

To remedy this, Sanger says, "feminists should be looking at ways to swing the women's vote--both in midterm elections and in 2008--by claiming the rubric of successful family life. They should represent parents' desires to have children when it is best to have them, to raise their children safely to adulthood, to get them to adulthood in good health and educated for the jobs of tomorrow....Feminists should talk about abortion, as well as birth control, in terms of family formation, not just as a right or a matter of individual autonomy."

Specifically, he suggests, feminists should look to win the crucial women's vote by focusing on issues like "child care, school quality, health care reform and national security in terms of the safety of families. Emphasizing these issues will get feminists out of the single-issue abortion pigeon hole and enable them to talk to U.S. women and men, on a broader set of issues about which every citizen has deep concern."

Sanger is right that the feminist appeal to women voters has to be made on a broader platform than just abortion rights. But I don't think his approach goes nearly far enough. What would it take to get me really excited about voting for a national political candidate?

Well, for starters, I'd like to see more women candidates. And I'd like to see women candidates who didn't all look like they're cut from the same WASP-y cookie cutter mold. She was only the candidate's wife, but I loved seeing Judith Steinberg on the campaign trail. Someone who wore running shoes in public! Who didn't have dyed, processed, permed hair! Who obviously wasn't fond of make-up! Who was a hard-working doctor with her own professional, personal, and political agenda! Who wasn't willing to kow-tow to the expectations of the press!

We might actually get more women candidates like Judy Steinberg if our political culture weren't so totally driven by TV. A woman can't appear on network TV news unless she's tall, thin, and has "regular" American features, or beautifully "exotic" Asian, Black or Latina features. And unfortunately, the same is true for politicians, who, after all, also have to pass the TV test.

Male pols get away with far more deviance from the Barbie & Ken TV norm, though. John Kerry's craggy face and wild hair was "interesting"--and at least he was tall and thin. His running mate, John Edwards, was actually chided for being too pretty! A woman candidate could never be too pretty.

But I digress. Back to Sanger's contention that if feminists want to attract women to the voting booths next November, and in 2008, we need to start talking up families as our issue, broadly conceived.

Okay, maybe I'm missing something here. But how exactly is this a progressive idea? Why should families be the special provenance of women in the 21st century? Why shouldn't the health and welfare of the American family be just as much a men's issue as a women's issue? And why shouldn't job creation, social benefits, and foreign policy be just as much women's issues as men's issues?

I am frankly disappointed to find Alex Sanger calling for feminists to rally around the American family as if that were an end in itself. His grandmother fought for women's reproductive rights as a means to a much more ambitious end: if women could be freed from the danger and drudgery of conceiving, delivering, and raising children for the whole extent of their child-bearing years, Margaret Sanger knew, they would be able to fully develop as human beings, able to productively contribute to all areas of society.

Margaret Sanger's battle has been largely won today in the United States. To be sure, there's still work to be done to make sure that sexual education, contraception and abortion are available to each and every American woman. But the fundamental right of women to control their own bodies has been legally established and I don't believe that even the new Supreme Court conservatives will dare to try to take that right away.

But the deeper issues challenging the vexed American family today have yet to be tackled in a serious, concerted way by the feminist community. And these issues should be the provenance not just of women, but of men too. Men as well as women need to focus on "the rubric of the successful family life," and debate what this would mean for both sexes. By the same token, women as well as men need to concern ourselves with the bigger picture beyond the confines of the family: the economy, the environmental crisis, trade imbalances, militarism.

The point being that Alex Sanger's appeal to women voters simply on the basis of our concern for our families is far too parochial to be a successful rallying cry for the 21st century feminist movement. Putting women back in the family box is not going to work, at least not as long as the capitalist system insists on sending both parents out into the workforce in order to provide the basics for their children.

If we want to reach out and motivate women to vote, we need to: a) put up more smart, individualistic, deeply ethical women candidates, candidates strong enough to resist the tremendous pressure to conform to the culture of celebrity and corruption that currently rules Washington; and b) appeal to women as smart, worldly, ambitious human beings who want success for themselves and their families on all fronts--personal, professional, familial.

Is that too much to ask?


Tuesday, February 14, 2006

 

V-Day Does It Again!

Last night I went to a rousing Simon's Rock College performance of Eve Ensler's "The Vagina Monologues," which I almost know by heart by now since I've been teaching it in my Intro to Women's Studies classes for years. No matter how many times I read the book or see the performance, it never fails to choke me up.

For those who have never seen the play performed, it's a series of monologues created as composites of hundreds of interviews that Ensler conducted with women of all ages, from all walks of life, talking about--their vaginas. An unlikely topic for a play, you might think, but in fact the stories that Ensler has created from these conversations are nothing short of amazing.

From the six-year-old girl who, when asked what her vagina smells like, responds, "Snowflakes," to the adolescent Black girl describing episodes of sexual violence in her childhood, and moving into an exhilarating description of her seduction by an older "bulldagger," to a painfully moving confession by an older woman of how her "down there" got "closed for business," the stories spin by in a mesmerizing litany of humor, pain, grief and joy.

I have seen the film of Ensler performing the monologues herself, but I think the college performances I've seen are more intense and more moving, because you can so clearly see the depths of the actors' passion for their subject. At last night's performance at Simon's Rock, one of the performers could not restrain her tears as she described a woman whose face was burned off by acid thrown on her by her abusive husband (a not-uncommon occurrence in parts of South Asia). The young woman who read the monologue of the raped women of Bosnia was pale and controlled, but clearly feeling the impact of every line.

And then there was the other side of the emotional coin--the sheer gutsiness and effervescence of the young women who read the monologues celebrating Vagina Power. "My vagina is angry," one performer declared, and launched into a scathing explanation of why, punctuated with assertive demands. Another performer held the audience spellbound with her description of a woman finding her clitoris for the first time in an orgasm workshop.

And then there was the monologue about the woman who switched careers, from prim corporate lawyer to dominatrix, specializing in women. The dominatrix's particular area of expertise is in eliciting from her female partners every type of pleasurable moan imaginable--and then some! To see this beautiful young woman get up before the packed audience last night and moan--I mean MOAN, loudly, creatively, and without any inhibitions--was truly a liberating experience, even for those of us just watching with vicarious delight.

What I love about "The Vagina Monologues" is how it manages to look sexual violence straight in the face, and yet also not lose sight of the pleasure-giving power of sexuality, especially female sexuality. Men are celebrated too, at least some men: last night's performance included a brilliant rendering of the monologue about "Bob," the ordinary, average guy who is transformed into someone heroic in his open-hearted admiration for a woman's vagina.

Last night's performance at Simon's Rock was a benefit for Berkshire Kids' Place, an advocacy program for women and children who have suffered first or second-hand sexual and physical abuse. BKP representative Ananda Timpane reminded the audience before the show began of some of the horrendous statistics about sexual violence--that one in four women will experience sexual assault at some point in their lives, for example.

We need to be aware of these statistics, and do whatever we can to empower women and channel male rage in other, more productive directions--if not eliminate it entirely. But in our concern over sexual violence we also must not lose sight of the beauty and delight of human sexuality. Even as it condemns sexual violence, "The Vagina Monologues" helps us remember what sex is supposed to be all about.

If you care: Visit the Berkshire Kids Place website to find out how you can help support their important work with women and kids at risk. Information about Eve Ensler's V-Day Foundation and its mission to stop the violence against women and girls worldwide is also available online. The list of hundreds of colleges performing the "Monologues" as part of the 2006 V-Day campaign is truly awe-inspiring and heartening!

Sunday, February 05, 2006

 

What Does It Take to Get Action?

Simon's Rock is in the midst of a slow-motion crisis, built of first one incident among the students, then another. It you weren't looking for pattern, it would be possible to miss it and lull yourself into believing that everything's okay.

But talk to most of the students at Simon's Rock about their personal lives, and you'll quickly realize that everything is not okay. Not at all.

Two weeks ago four Simon's Rock students went to the emergency room of the local hospital with acute alcohol and drug poisoning. The idea of someone dying from our refusal to come to grips with substance abuse on our campus doesn't seem at all far-fetched. And while less dire, issues of racism, sexism and elitism continue to plague our community.

It's time for us to start living up to our responsibility as educators--to lead by example, and to model the kind of behavior and engagement we want to see in our students.

Is that too much to ask?

This weekend I sent to the entire faculty and staff my proposal for a proactive approach to this many-headed problem: a required series of courses in social issues, offered to the students in small groups, each led by a pair of trained adult facilitators and a couple of older students as peer leaders.

I believe we should take the time and make the effort to explore the social issues that college students run smack up against every day of their lives--explore them intellectually, and also from the feeling place, hopefully developing enough trust within the group so that students feel comfortable expressing their true feelings, trying out new ideas, and remaining open to the possibility of growth.

Among the issues to be covered:
It will be very interesting to see the reactions of the faculty and staff to this new idea. Will we continue to bury our collective heads in the sand? As one student said to me recently, in an anguished tone of voice, "Are they going to wait until someone DIES at Simon's Rock before they take action?"

Friday, February 03, 2006

 

Teens, Sex and the Media

It's a no-brainer that kids are affected by exposure to the media, right? But amazingly, very little concrete research is being done to find out just how early and repeated exposure to media-generated sexual scenarios is affecting how kids go about their personal lives.

Jane Brody points this out in her January 31 New York Times article, "Children, Media and Sex: A Big Book of Blank Pages." She starts off the piece rather sensationally:

"In last summer's prize-winning R-rated film "Me and You and Everyone We Know," a barely pubescent boy is seduced into oral sex by two girls perhaps a year older, and his 6-year-old brother logs on to a pornographic chat room and solicits a grown woman with instant messages about 'poop.'

"Is this what your teenage children are watching? If so, what messages are they getting about sexual mores, and what effect will it have on their behavior?"

Our children are exposed to sexuality, of all kinds including the most bizarre and destructive, not just through fictional media like film and TV, or borderline genres like reality TV and pornography, but also, perhaps most disturbingly through the daily news. Does anyone believe that kids are oblivious to the sexual content of our constant debates about topics like abortion, gay marriage, priests and pedophilia, and Oval Office pecadilloes, for instance?

They soak it all in. And of course it affects how they view themselves as emerging sexual beings.

The strange thing is that when I express concern over the frequency of violence in media depictions of sexuality, I'm often branded (by students in my women's studies classes, for example) as an old-fashioned prude. Indeed, they make me feel like one sometimes. Is it a sign of advancing middle age that I often catch myself feeling nostalgic for the "good old days" of my own youth, when the internet did not yet exist, and our individual imaginations were so much more robust?

The scariest thing about the colonization of our pysches by the media is that we can no longer claim our fantasies as our own. Kids who have grown up watching the national average of 24 hours of TV a week, much of it cable, much of it "junk," find their minds simply awash with images that they could never have imagined on their own, but which become part of them in an insidious process of internal colonization.

Then, no surprise, like kids everywhere and in all times, they want to go try out in reality what they've fantasized about privately--except that "the private" no longer exists in this brave new world, and their own fantasies turn out to be media manipulations, often of the most unsavory sort.

The media has become a giant, out-of-control collective unconsciousness for our society, and is spreading rapidly throughout the world. Those of us who haven't been totally indoctrinated by the media need to fight back by advancing our own visions, our own stories, and insisting that these humble offerings have value.

I'm not a prude, I am all for teens experimenting with sex--I sure did it myself! But I am frightened of the crudeness and callousness that many teens I've talked with seem to take for granted as a "normal" aspect of human sexuality.

No, we can't spoonfeed them honey and roses; yes, ugliness exists and they should know about it. But they should also know the extent to which their own minds have been polluted by the media images they've consumed throughout their short lives.

And they should be encouraged to break free of that indoctrination and reawaken the most precious gift of all: their connection to their own deep feelings and their own unique imaginations.

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