How can you be anti-enfranchisement in the 21st century?

Misogynists say the darndest things. Take, for example, the claim, verbatim, that “women’s suffrage destroyed western civilization.” It sounds like something Stephen Colbert would say, but it’s something a real live blogger and YouTube sensation actually wrote… on the Internet… on purpose… in the 21st century.

For your enjoyment, we’ve rounded up some of the people who are freaking out that women are enfranchised, and some of the reasons female enfranchisement is freaking some people out.

1. Women’s suffrage: Responsible for the evil that is Cam and Mitchell, the gay parents on “Modern Family.”

Earlier this month, David Barton explained the origins of women’s disenfranchisement in the United States. Now, Barton isn’t just the founder of WallBuilders, an organization whose mission is “educating the nation concerning the Godly foundation of our country.” Barton also fancies himself a historian and has not only a Bachelor of Arts degree from Oral Roberts University but an Honorary Doctorate of Letters from Pensacola Christian College. Barton is responsible for… discovering the (non-existent) causal correlation between banning school prayer and an increased rates of crime and alcoholism. So, we must take his historical analysis seriously. And his analysis reveals that our Founding Fathers’ decision to deny women the vote in the Constitution had nothing to do with bigotry and everything to do with… you guessed it… god!

As Barton explains: “The bigotry we’re told they held back then, they didn’t hold.” Bigotry? What bigotry? Certainly no bigotry was coming from the framers of the Constitution, committed as they were to justice, equality, and turning black people into fractions. No. These slave-holding men weren’t anti-anyone. They were just pro-family: “And what they did was they put the family unit higher than the government unit and they tried to work hard to keep the family together.” Just as removing prayer from public school (and, you know, recognizing that whole separation of church and state thing) took away our livers and lives, bestowing women with the vote has ruined the family: “And, as we can show in two or three hundred studies since then, the more you weaken the family, the more it hurts the entire culture and society.”

Barton is that rare breed of historian who is so talented and expert he doesn’t need to look at history or provide evidence. Though he does provide some data: “We’ve moved into more of a family anarchy kind of thing, the ‘Modern Family’ kind of portrayal.” You want evidence? Turn on ABC every Wednesday at 9pm.

2. Women can’t be trusted, trust me! I’m a woman.

Feminists will be thrilled to learn that women are just as capable of sexism as men. Take Janis Lane, a Central Mississippi Tea Party president, who rues the day the vote was granted to… well… her: “Our country might have been better off if it was still just men voting.” Why would our country benefit from the disenfranchisement of women? Because of the devil.

“There is nothing worse than a bunch of mean, hateful women. They are diabolical in how they can skewer a person.” These females are not to be trusted: “The whole time I worked, I’d much rather have a male boss than a female boss. Double-minded, you never can trust them.” And if you can’t trust a female boss, how can you trust a female politician? Surely, women should be excluded from the entire political system, right? Well, not exactly. Lane has an explanation for her simultaneous participation in politics and contempt from women in politics: “Because women have the right to vote, I am active, because I want to make sure there is some sanity for women in the political world. It is up to the Christian rednecks and patriots to stand up for our country. Everyone has the right to vote now that’s 18 or over (who is) a legal citizen, and every person that’s 18 and over and a legal citizen should be active in local politics so they can make a change locally, make a change on the state level and make a change in Washington, D.C.”

In other words, though it is lamentable that women have political rights, because they do, Lane will do her best to fight for a world in which, one day, they won’t.

Read the rest of this post at Alternet.org

Central Davidson High School senior Violet Burkhart wanted to mark her last day of ever being a high school student by dressing up. “I thought my last day was going to be great and exciting,” explained Burkhart. Instead, the school, “pretty much ruined it for me.” Burkhart recalls that at 1 PM, with only two hours of school day left, her teachers ”took me in a crowded hallway and told me to grab my crotch….while they measure[d] it in front of everyone.” After determining that the length of the dress violated the school’s dress code by a half an inch, the school sent Burkhart home.

This wasn’t an isolated incident for the school. After the news site WGHP posted the story on their Facebook page, a woman posted: ”My daughter goes to the same school and she was sent home. Not for the length but she was told it enhanced her figure too much. Central Davidson high school is a joke.”

Sadly, Central Davison is not the only school humiliating and slut-shaming its female students. As we’ve blogged about before, a Utah high school recently photo-shopped the year book photos of certain female students so their necklines would be higher and their sleeves would be longer. A school in Canada sent female students home for wearing tank tops that revealed their bra straps. Another student at a different school got sent home for the same bra-strap related infraction. Another–you guessed it–female student got sent home over the length of her shorts. And a 17-year old girl got sent home from a prom for provoking “impure thoughts.” The silver lining to this puritanical persecution is that some of the people being targeted are calling it out by making statements, putting up posters, and talking to the press.

Amy Redwine, Burkhart’s mother, is the latest person to respond to body-policing in a creative way. She recalls being upset by the way the school treated her daughter: “I literally looked back at the clock and I’m thinking, it’s 1:00 in the afternoon on her last day of her senior year. My daughter — it’s supposed to be one of her best days and she’s there crying.”  So Redwine decided to really wear her heart on her sleeve–or dress–and don the very dress that got her daughter sent home to her daughter’s graduation. “If her dress is too short, then my dress is too short and I’m going to wear it in front of everybody and be proud just like she should have been able to on her last day.”

You can read the video transcript here. 

Related:
Why Bruce Willis & Demi Moore’s daughter wants us to see her nipples
Quote of the Day: “I’m not responsible for some perverted 45 year old dad lusting after me.”
Utah high school photoshops female students’ yearbook photos to show less skin

I guess we shouldn’t be surprised that a party which is opposed to science and so in favor of legislating (so-called) morality is promoting ex-gay conversion therapy, also known as “reparative therapy.” This weekend, 7,000 delegates at the Texas GOP Convention at the Forth Worth Convention Center ratified a platform which recognized the “legitimacy and value of counseling which offers reparative therapy and treatment to patients who are seeking escape from the homosexual lifestyle.”

This “treatment,” not surprisingly, is so ineffective and harmful that it’s been discredited as junk science by every major medical and mental health organization. As the American Psychological Association says, “Despite the general consensus of major medical, health, and mental health professions that both heterosexuality and homosexuality are normal expressions of human sexuality, efforts to change sexual orientation through therapy have been adopted by some political and religious organizations and aggressively promoted to the public.”

Bipartisan efforts to ban ex-gay therapy (of minors) is another sign of just how abhorrent the practice is. Both California and New Jersey have passed laws prohibiting reparative therapy for minors. And last week, a judge ruled that Jews Offering New Alternatives for Healing may be liable for damages it inflicted on its clients subjected to ex-gay therapy. As New Jersey Superior Court Judge Peter F. Bariso Jr. said, “JONAH’s conversion therapy damaged the individuals it was meant ‘to cure,’” and thus “any subsequent costs of repairing Plaintiff’s mental or emotional health are the direct and proximate result of JONAH’s actions and, hence, should be borne by JONAH.”

So, what damage does this therapy cause? A study conducted by Beyond Ex-Gay, a community for survivors of ex-gay conversion therapy, revealed that 92 percent of the people who had left the therapy experienced harm: 16 percent said it “devastated my life,” 31 percent said that they were “harmed a lot,” 22 percent said they stopped the therapy because they had nervous breakdowns. Eighty percent reported feeling shame, 79 percent emotional harm, and 72 percent depression. A particularly scary finding was that 41 percent of those who said they were harmed said the therapy made them feel suicidal.

I would be remiss if I failed to mention the Texas GOP’s other homophobic platform planks including, for example, opposition to “any government agency to force faith-based adoption or foster care organizations to place children with same-sex couples.” Totally predictably, the platform defines “marriage as a God-ordained, legal and moral commitment only between a natural man and a natural woman.” And while “homosexuals” shouldn’t be given any protections from discrimination, of course, homophobes deserve to be protected from the endless persecution they face: “We oppose any criminal or civil penalties against those who oppose homosexuality out of faith, conviction, or belief in traditional values.”

The party did edit out one gem which had been written into the platform in 2012: “The practice of homosexuality tears at the fabric of society and contributes to the breakdown of the family unit.” They replaced that with ”Homosexuality must not be presented as an acceptable alternative lifestyle, in public policy, nor should family be redefined to include homosexual couples.” Which is so much better! Said no one ever.

Welcome to another weekly War on Women round up! So much has happened over the past seven days. Where to begin? Well, we have an exciting update for you about a story we reported on last week, in which a Utah school decided to photoshop female students’ necklines and sleeves. But first — America’s natural disasters. A study this week from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign looked at 90 years of hurricane data and discovered that hurricanes with female names killed more people than hurricanes with male names. No, it’s not because female hurricanes, just like us female human beings, are just that much more dangerous, twisted, and evil. No, no, no. There’s a logical explanation here. Wait for it…

It’s because people respect them less.

Yes, apparently, it’s sexist thinking which makes people take male-named hurricanes more seriously, while underestimating those pussy female ones (here’s looking at you Katrina). Sharon Shavitt, a behavioral scientist at the university and a coauthor of the paper explains, “The femininity of the name influences the degree to which people feel the storm is dangerous, and that affects how they respond to it. We had a hunch that there would be some gender biases, but we were quite stunned by the degree of this effect.”

Luckily, Stephen Colbert has a solution. Spoiler alert: “Hurricane Butch McBalls.”

Sexism is Making Us Pee Our Pants

Of course, sexism isn’t only killing Americans — it also makes us piss ourselves. (I mean, ladies, who hasn’t become incontinent waiting on an endless line?) Apparently, the only place where this wouldn’t be a problem is — you guessed it — an Apple conference. This telling photo taken from Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference this week. Silicon Valley, I think we have a problem.

Not your mama’s Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue

In better news this week, the plus-size swimwear company Swimsuits went viral when they shot a calendar featuring sexy women who happen to not weigh less than average.  It shouldn’t be news-worthy, but it is, especially since one of the photos features three plus-size models in a pose from this year’s Sports Illustrated swimsuit cover. See if you can guess which one is which.

And check out this video from the shoot.

Melissa McCarthy Launching Plus size line 

Speaking of plus-sized beauty, there was even more good news this week: Melissa McCarthy is launching her own plus-size fashion line. The bad news, however, is why she had to do it. McCarthy told Redbook that fashion designers have refused to dress her.

“When I go shopping, most of the time I’m disappointed. Two Oscars ago, I couldn’t find anybody to do a dress for me. I asked five or six designers — very high-level ones who make lots of dresses for people — and they all said no.” Guess they missed the memo. No one puts McCarthy in the corner.

Male students can be topless, but female ones can’t show collarbone

Last week, we told you about the lovely Wasatch High School in Utah, where administrators took it upon themselves to photoshop the yearbook pictures of certain female students. These temptresses had made the mistake of showing too much upper arm, revealing a tattoo, or having a neckline that was deemed to low.

The school entered into The Onion territory when it apologized — for not being more aggressive in its digital crusade. But, like Dan Savage promised, it gets better. It turns out that this same school is A OK with male students appearing topless in their yearbook photos. They did no photoshopping of the following page:

In all fairness, the near-nudity was done in a very tasteful way, as you can see. The page is called “Wasatch Stud Life,” and it boasts a classy and clever headline: “Studs doin’ what studs do best!” I guess the tattoos, boxers and nipples are OK because they are so clearly in the service of art.

Tune in next week, for more double standards.

What do you do when you’re accused of fighting a “War on Women” because you, for instance, force them to purchase abortion insurance in case they get raped? If you’re the Michigan GOP, you turn it into a hilarious joke.

Republican Congressmen Peter Pettalia, Roger Victory, and Ben Glardon totally shattered the idea that they’re anti-woman by posing for a photo while reading Glamour and Harper’s Bazaar.  Michigan Public Radio Network reporter Jake Neher tweeted the photo along with this zinger which Pettalia uttered ”a couple of times” because it is that funny: “Don’t say we don’t understand women.”

In response, four women members of Michigan’s Democratic House delegation, tweeted their own photo of themselves reading proposed bills, with the caption “Real Women read bills not fashion mags.”

Whether they read fashion mags or bills or both, I’m sure Michigan women will see through this pathetic attempt to distract from the GOP’s consistently anti-women positions and policies.

Related: 
GOP candidate claims she can’t be fighting a war on women because she’s…a woman

The media is quick to mock and dismiss Scout Willis’s topless protest against Instagram and her campaign to “Free The Nipple.” But if more celebrities used their social media, high profiles and boobs the way Scout Willis did, the world would be a better place. Because as Willis herself knows, the issue is bigger than her own nipples. Scout Willis, the daughter of Bruce Willis and Demi Moore, had her Instagram account deleted for “instances of abuse.”  The abuse was posting a photo of herself in a sheer top and another photo of a jacket with the image of her two friends bare-breasted.

So, last week, to protest Instagram’s censorship, Willis decided to walk around New York City topless and document it on Twitter.

Of course, and predictably, Willis has been mocked by the mainstream and the right wing media. But she’s also been criticized, of course, and predictably, by people who support challenging the patriarchy. In The Guardian, Jamie Peck writes, “But can this type of protest – one that mainly involves showing off a body the male gaze is likely to enjoy – ever be terribly subversive on this (or any other) front?” In an article called “Scout Willis needs better women’s studies classes,” Anissa Ford criticizes Willis for failing to understand that “the liberation of the female body will not begin until women are financially capable of making incredibly comfortable livings without having to sell their bodies either by profession or in outdated, uncongenial marriages that keep women financially afloat.” OK. So, Willis has not been able to disrupt patriarchy or abolish capitalism. But is she doing anything of value? I would dare to say yes.

First of all, Willis is not oblivious to her privilege. As she explained in XOJane on Monday,

I understand that people don’t want to take me seriously. Or would rather just write me off as an attention-seeking, over-privileged, ignorant, white girl. I am white and I was born to a high profile and financially privileged family.

It is her very privilege, she realizes, that enables her to attract attention to the issue:

I didn’t choose my public life, but it did give me this platform. A platform that helps make body politics newsworthy.

Willis is very clear that she’s not a persecuted minority or victim: “My situation was in no way unique; women are regularly kicked off Instagram for posting photos with any portion of the areola exposed, while photos sans nipple — degrading as they might be — remain unchallenged.” Nor does Willis portray herself as a revolutionary, trailblazing savior: “I am certainly not doing anything novel. A group here in New York called Topless Pulp gathers in parks to read topless regularly, and the Free The Nipple campaign has been protesting for the same rights for the last four years. If my coming from a high-profile family could help spread their message, so be it.”

Willis could have made her fight a parochial one that focused solely on her spat with Instagram. Instead, as her statement and Twitter feed demonstrate, Willis is connecting the dots between nipple policing and larger issues of gender, sexuality, slut-shaming, victim-blaming, and body politics:

Why can’t a mother proudly breastfeed her child in public without feeling sexualized? Why is a 17-year-old girl being asked to leave her own prom because a group of fathers find her too provocative? Why should I feel overly exposed because I choose not to wear a bra? Why would it be okay with Instagram and Facebook to allow photos of a cancer survivor who has had a double mastectomy and is without areolas [sic] but “photos with fully exposed breasts, particularly if they’re unaffected by surgery, don’t follow Instagram’s Community Guidelines.”

(Interestingly, this is the inverse of the Facebook problem with breast cancer photos. In the case of Facebook, images of mastectomies were banned as inappropriate. They were hyper-sexualized. In the case of Instagram, the breasts of women who have had cancer and have had their aureolas removed are de-sexualized. Obviously, both trends are problematic and inappropriate. )

Sadly, the facts are on Willis’s side, as institutions continue to police and control the way people dress and present their bodies. Just over the course of the past week, we learned about a Utah high school that photo-shopped the year book photos of certain female students so their necklines would be higher and their sleeves would be longer.

In a page straight out of the “you can’t make this shit up” book, the school did indeed apologize– for not being more aggressive and vigilant in their puritanical digital altering.

And between 20 and 30 female students in Canada’s Newfoundland and Labrador province were sent home from school for daring to wear tank tops that revealed their–wait for it–bra straps! Though some male students were also made to leave the school over their lack of sleeves, they were not slut-shamed or reprimanded for inviting lust or sexual attention. One female students said she was told to go home “because of our bra straps, and that it was inappropriate because some of the male teachers, and male students, found it distracting for them.” Another female student recalled being told bare shoulders could “invite unneeded attention” from male students and that “boys will be boys.”

The good news is people are fighting back. Fourteen-year-old Tallie Doyle called out her school’s sexism after she was reprimanded for wearing a spaghetti-strap tank. And after 15-year-old Lindsey Stocker was berated and humiliated by the vice-principals over the length of her shorts, she responded by printing and posting these posters around her school:

We should commend Willis just as much (no more and no less) as we commend these students and everyone who challenges a system which tries to moralize, legislate, criminalize and pathologize people’s bodies. Hollywood is widely and justly characterized as insulated and out of touch with the real world. When stars  take up movements or causes, they tend to be on behalf of others with whom they have little in common culturally or geographically. Willis’s awareness of her self, her role, and her connection to the lives of other people and larger struggles is rare, especially for a celebrity.

You may not know who Rachel Carson is. But she changed the air you breathe and the food you eat.

No, Rachel Carson was not a yogi or breathing guru, or nutritionist or a fad diet endorser.  Carson was a marine biologist, conservationist, and writer whose book Silent Spring helped launch the global environmental movement. We have Carson to thank (or hate on, if you’re Rick Perry) for the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency as well as the ban on DDT, a pesticide which targeted insects but had deleterious effects on other species and contains carcinogens. Carson’s raised people’s awareness through her ground-breaking book Silent Spring, which was first published serially in four additions of The New Yorker in 1962.

Not surprisingly, the pesticide industry responded with a campaign of disinformation and sexism. As Mark Stoll details in a remarkable multimedia history, Carson’s gender, looks and un-married status were all seized upon by her critics, who called her a “hysterical woman,” a “priestess of nature” and a “spinster.”  An executive of the American Cyanamid Company warned, “If man were to faithfully follow the teachings of Miss Carson, we would return to the Dark Ages, and the insects and diseases and vermin would once again inherit the earth.” And one scientist wrote an article entitled “Silence, Miss Carson.” An agricultural “expert” told a reporter, “You’re never going to satisfy organic farmers or emotional women in garden clubs.” And in a letter to President Eisenhower, Secretary of Agriculture Ezra Taft Benson asked why a “spinster was so worried about genetics.” Because some things never change, Monsanto got in on the fun and printed a brochure parodying the book.

Luckily, Carson was prepared for these attacks. Born in Pennsylvania in 1907, Carson was told as young science student that “there was no future for women in science apart from teaching in high schools or obscure colleges” and that “science was too rigorous a field for women.” Yet by the time she wrote Silent Spring, Carson was an accomplished scientist and successful writer. In addition to penning several articles, Carson had written three best-sellers, The Sea Around Us, The Edge of the Sea, and Under the Sea Wind.

Carson continued to work on the issue of pesticides and testified before congress. The fact that she was battling multiple illnesses, including arthritis, an ulcer, staphylococcus infections, and cancer, makes her that much more impressive. She died of breast cancer in 1964. Learn more about Rachel Carson and how her legacy lives on.

Last week, a jury convicted Cecily McMillan of getting her breast grabbed and bruised by an NYPD officer, getting shoved by the officer and then having the nerve to have a seizure in front of several police officers, who responded by doing absolutely nothing for several minutes (link is to a pdf). The conviction has drawn criticism and outcry. Formerly incarcerated Pussy Riot* members are speaking out on behalf of McMillan, with whom they identify and whom they visited in jail over the weekend. Yesterday, New York residents and elected officials held a protest against McMillan’s conviction. But what is much more surprising, and revealing, is the fact that the very jury which found McMillan guilty is outraged and remorseful. 

Of course, Cecily McMillan, a 25-year-old graduate student and Occupy organizer, wasn’t officially convicted for being assaulted. She was convicted of Second Degree Assault, specifically of intentionally assaulting Police Officer Grantley Bovell in order to “prevent him from performing his lawful duty.” She was convicted despite the existence of overwhelming evidence exculpating McMillan and incriminating the officer: videotape footage of her seizing on the pavement, photographs of a bruise on her breast in the shape of a hand print, and a record of violence on the part of the police officer.

So, how did this happen? As Kathryn Funkhouser explains in her article at The Nation, the case was extremely misrepresented by an overzealous and either dishonest or willfully ignorant prosecutor and the incredibly biased judge. The prosecution claimed that McMillan faked the seizure, inflicted the injury which caused a hand-shaped bruise on her right breast (which seems pretty hard to do), and intentionally elbowed the officer without being provoked. But no claims or evidence relevant to Bovell’s record were allowed. In fact, the Judge, Ronald Zweibel, ordered that the officer’s files be sealed. He excluded, for example, Bovell’s involvement in running a teenage boy on a dirt bike off the road and kicking a suspect in the face while the suspect was lying on the ground. He barred the testimony, or even mention, of Austin Guest, another Occupy protester arrested the same day as McMillan, who said that Bovell and another officer lifted him up and slammed him head-first into each row of seats on a bus which transported prisoners. There were two eyewitnesses to this abuse. But the judge dismissed the claim and blamed the victim, saying (out loud!) “He must have been resisting!” The judge also, conveniently, excluded the majority of the video footage and only allowed a select clip without sound to be played for the jury. In case that wasn’t enough to make the judge’s position clear, Zweibel imposed a gag order on McMillan’s attorneys and refused bail.

On top of being given a very one-sided version of the evidence (their only view of the case since juries aren’t allowed to do independent research), the jury wasn’t told of the draconian sentence — of up to seven years in prison — McMillan was facing. When they found out, they were shocked. Nine out of 12 members of the jury wrote this letter asking for leniency:

We the jury petition the court for leniency in the sentencing of Cecily McMillan. We would ask the court to consider probation with community service. We feel that the felony mark on Cecily’s record is punishment enough for this case and that it serves no purpose to Cecily or to society to incarcerate her for any amount of time.

Zweibel will sentence McMillan on May 19th. But I’m not holding my breath. Neither is McMillan’s legal team, which is already planning an appeal.

*This deserves a post in itself. The last time I wrote about Pussy Riot, people commented that Maria Alyokhina and Nadezhda Tolokonnikova were no longer part of the collective. Six anonymous members of Pussy Riot did disown the two in an open letter, stating that their institutionalized activism  and “advocacy is hardly compatible with radical political statements and provocative works of art – just as gender conformity is not compatible with radical feminism.” Alyokhina and Tolokonnikova, however, maintain that they never left the group, saying, “Pussy Riot can be anyone, and no one can excluded from Pussy Riot… Pussy Riot can only grow.”