EQUALITY MYTH

Abolition, The Declaration of Sentiments, and Seneca Falls: We’re Loving Suffrage History!

Don’t be fooled by the title. In “What Hath Feminism Wrought,” a post yesterday on the Atlantic, Ta-Nehisi Coates writes about a new book (“What Hath God Wrought”) about the history of the antebellum south. It includes a long exploration of the links between abolitionists and the early women’s rights movement, and ends at the 1858 Seneca Falls Convention, where attendees came surprisingly close to prioritizing ordination over the right to vote. Coates quotes from the Convention’s “Declaration of Sentiments,” a re-write of the Declaration of Independence to include women. It’s chilling. Read it:

The history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman, having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world. 
He has never permitted her to exercise her inalienable right to the elective franchise. 
He has compelled her to submit to laws, in the formation of which she had no voice.
He has withheld from her rights which are given to the most ignorant and degraded men—both natives and foreigners. 
Having deprived her of this first right of a citizen, the elective franchise, thereby leaving her without representation in the halls of legislation, he has oppressed her on all sides. 
He has made her, if married, in the eye of the law, civilly dead.

Should Women Flirt Their Way to the Top? Damn Straight, Says Forbes.

Well this is sure to cause an uproar. In today’s ForbesWoman, author Jenna Goudreau posits that women who don’t flirt are ignoring “one of their greatest career assets”—a valuable strategic tool (if used effectively), she says, to climb up the corporate ladder.

“Using flirtation is just smart,” Nicole Williams, the author of Girl on Top: Your Guide to Turning Dating Rules into Career Success, tells her. “If you need someone’s help, use the tools available to you. It’s naive to think it has no place at work.” (Oof.)

The commenters are already weighing in, of course, calling Goudreau shallow (and worse). But the real question is: is she right? Consider what we’ve already got stacked against us: working women in this country still make just 77 cents on the male dollar; we face the challenge of balancing motherhood with career, and whether or not we decide to have children, many of us struggle to scale the corporate ladder. We are navigating the workforce, meanwhile, in a culture of plumped lips and airbrushed bodies that hold us to an unattainable ideal—and where, in a corporate culture that still largely excludes women, female competition is more cutthroat than ever.

Which brings us to this: If we acknowledge that we’re being judged on our looks anyway—and that they’re indeed crucial to our career success (see recent disturbing Newsweek survey)—why wouldn’t we use them, own them, empower ourselves through them? Wouldn’t that be—dare we say it—the feminist thing to do?

It’s not as cut and dry as Forbes’ “Secrets of Professional Flirting” (oof, did they really need to go there?) but it’s something to think about. And it doesn’t make you a slut if you do.

The Beauty Advantage: How Beauty Can Affect Your Job, Your Career, Your Life

God we love this photo, despite the weird overly buff dude. Wanted to send out a link to Newsweek’s massive package on the role of looks at work, which includes pieces on: the double bind that women face, what would happen if women ruled the world, why women should shun that beauty ideal, and, of course, a feminist man’s perspective. There’s also a poll of hiring managers asked about the importance of looking good at work.

It’s a couple months of work, and well worth a look, if we can say so ourselves. There are also many breathtaking visual elements, including ladyfriend Cara Phillips’ series of photos chronicling plastic surgery offices around the country, called Singular Beauty, an interactive graphic of 100 years of beauty ideals, a gallery looking at beauty rituals around the world, and various other elements.

An excerpt:

Economists have long recognized what’s been dubbed the “beauty premium”—the idea that pretty people, whatever their aspirations, tend to do better in, well, almost everything. Handsome men earn, on average, 5 percent more than their less-attractive counterparts; pretty people get more attention from teachers, bosses, and mentors; even babies stare longer at good-looking faces (and we stare longer at good-looking babies). A couple of decades ago, when the economy was thriving—and it was a makeup-less Kate Moss, not a plastic-surgery-plumped Paris Hilton, who was considered the beauty ideal—we might have brushed off those statistics as superficial. But in 2010, when Heidi Montag’s bloated lips plaster every magazine in town, when little girls lust after an airbrushed, unattainable body ideal, there’s a growing bundle of research to show that our bias against the unattractive is more pervasive than ever. And when it comes to the workplace, it’s looks, not merit, that all too often rule.

Check it out! www.newsweek.com/BEAUTY

-jessica

Eleanor Clift Welcomes the Mama Grizzlies to the Feminist Arena. We Do Too.

Our colleague Eleanor Clift has a very smart column today about whether Sarah Palin’s Mama Grizzlies are feminists. She writes:

Win or lose elections, the Mama Grizzlies have proven adept at breaking through the noise and getting more than their share of attention, just like their benefactor, Sarah Palin. Like Palin, they have found their voice. They don’t want anybody telling them how to raise their children, or taking their guns away. Thirty years late to the battle for women’s rights, they’re claiming the mantle of feminism.

It’s nice they’re embracing feminism after demonizing the term for so long, and I welcome them to the arena. Let’s see if they can do for women what their sisters on the left have done since the ’70s, breaking down the barriers for women in all areas of American life including politics.

The column, unlike a lot of the discourse on whether or not Palin and others are “feminist enough,” manages to challenge Palin’s politics but avoid the knee-jerk take excluding those whose positions many feminists find objectionable. We agree with Clift: welcome ladies.

-jesse

In Which We Talk to Lady-Crush Doctor, Astronaut, Dancer, Sometime Model, Etc. Mae Jemison in Greater Detail

Y’all already know we love her. Well we talked to her some more.

The best bits:

How do you think discrimination affects women psychologically?

I remember one of my freshman science classes. I would ask a question, and the professor would look at me like it was the dumbest question he’d ever heard, and then move on. Then a white guy down the row would ask the same question and [the professor would say,] “Astute observation.” It makes you start to really question yourself. You start to think, “Am I stupid?” After hitting the wall so many times, it makes a difference in terms of your zest and your zeal.

What would you say to those who attribute the lack of women in stem fields to innate differences in aptitude?
Society’s expectation of women truncates their ability, but it also truncates our ability to hear them. You have to understand that intelligence tests, when they were first made and developed, were adjusted in order to conform to ideas of who was thought to be smart. There was an adjustment of the SATs so that boys would score better in English. Some of this is specious. Some of this is because people want to make it so.

Why do these stereotypes persist?
Sciences are still sort of steeped in mysticism—a lot of us aren’t comfortable with them. And I think in a lot of instances we don’t think it makes any difference who does the science—but it does.

Why?
[Scientists] get to choose the problem, interpret the data, and draw the conclusions. It’s not just about filling the pipeline with some folks. It’s the diversity of experience, thought, perspective that can make solutions much more robust.

What’s it going to take?
That question came up with some white, male tenured professors. They said, “Make the tenured guys responsible for increasing the pool. Make their funding contingent upon [it].” Right now, usually that [job] is [the responsibility of] the minorities or the women themselves. But these guys said, “You want it done? Make them responsible. [Because] right now they don’t have any skin in the game.”

-Jesse

Why the Jezebel vs. Daily Show War is Just, Well, Wrong.

We know what it’s like to get called out by Jezebel. When we wrote about institutionalized sexism at our own magazine—and in media in general—we were called out for being non-inclusive. It stung, both cause we liked them, and because they gave us no props whatsoever for sticking our necks out and getting our magazine to publish a story critical of the treatment of women at our own magazine. It felt like we were deemed unworthy of speaking up. Like doing so put us at risk of public shaming, so we should have therefore kept quiet.

Well, Jezebel is at it again. This time calling out The Daily Show for the lack of female representation. Irin Carmon writes:

[The Daily Show] is also a boys’ club where women’s contributions are often ignored and dismissed.

It’s a pretty serious accusation to level at place you’ve never worked. Not surprisingly, the women of the show responded, saying, among other things:

The truth is, when it comes down to it, The Daily Show isn’t a boy’s club or a girl’s club, it’s a family - a highly functioning if sometimes dysfunctional family. And we’re not thinking about how to maximize our gender roles in the workplace on a daily basis. We’re thinking about how to punch up a joke about Glenn Beck’s latest diatribe, where to find a Michael Steele puppet on an hour’s notice, which chocolate looks most like an oil spill, and how to get a gospel choir to sing the immortal words, “Go f@#k yourself!”

We get why they’d want to say F-U to someone who purports to tell you your own reality. It’s belittling.

But there’s some truth to Carmon’s criticism. There are not enough women (or minorities) on camera there, or at virtually any other night show, or in media in general. Plus, amidst these conversations, everyone seems to forget that the show is a spoof of the largely white, male dominated nightly news.

Ironically, the reasons for this are best expressed in the original post. Carmon quotes a former Daily Show writer who says:

“I don’t think Jon is sexist. I don’t think that there is a double standard at the Daily Show. I do think that by the time it gets to the Daily Show it’s already been through the horrible sexist double standard of the universe. You’re not hiring someone right out of school. By the time they get to the candidates of the Daily Show, the herd has been thinned by the larger societal forces.” Of the greater talent pool of comedians, she said, “All that’s left are white men and Aziz Ansari.”

Hey, we’re journalists, we get that this kind of nuance isn’t quite as catchy as sweeping allegations of rampant sexism. But what really bothers us is that Irin spends all of forty words responding to the letter penned by the show’s current female staffers. She, well, ignores and dismisses them.

All of this reminds us of the backlash against Tina Fey, who was accused of “not being feminist enough.” It’s an ongoing problem—one of missing the forest for the trees, we think—which threatens to spin into an increasingly inclusive, nit-picky, and, ultimately, alienating conversation.

Sure, it’s important to keep challenging each other. But it’s also important to hear each other. And let us speak for ourselves.

(PS: why does everyone keep forgetting about Kristin Schaal, above? We went to a Halloween party at her house many lifetimes ago and it was SUPER fun.)

-jesse

OK, We Get It: The Pay Gap is Unjust. But Burning Money In Protest? Sweden, We Expected More.

From the land of mandated paternity leave (and a finance minister who calls himself a “feminist”) comes this odd protest, from Sweden’s Feminist Initiative: burning $13,000 in protest of the Wage Gap.

“It may seem desperate to burn 100,000 kronor [Swedish dollars],” said Party leader Gudrun Schyman. “But the situation is desperate as well.”

Now, as you’ll recall, we too believe the pay gap is a very, very bad thing, whether it’s 23 cents to the dollar in the U.S. or 19 cents in Sweden. But couldn’t that BBQ of charred bills have been, well, better spent?

Here’s an idea: how bout we buy bras for all those crazy topless Mainers? (Ed: Jesse just got back from Maine, but I can assure you she is fully clothed.)

-jessica

Feminist Hulk—The Ms Mag Interview: HULK WILL SMASH PATRIARCHY

We’re mildly obsessed with the Feminist Hulk, the imaginary fighter of all things good and feminist, WITH A GOAL OF SMASHING PATRIARCHY (he also writes in all caps). Since the FEMINIST HULK hit Twitter last month, he’s gathered some 10,000 fans who follow his 140-character commentary on gender, patriarchy and feminism. The Hulk conducted his first interview (ever) with Ms. Magazine. Excerpts:

Ms.: Feminist theory often gets a bad rap for being too hard to follow and intimidating. Are you trying to translate theory for a general audience?

feministhulk: HULK LOVE POLYSYLLABIC WORDS. HULK NUZZLE BIG GREEN FACE INTO RICHLY WRITTEN FEMINIST TEXTS. ALSO, THIS JUST HOW HULK TALK.

Ms.: We can’t all be superheroes like you. What recommendations do you have for those who might want to nurture their inner Feminist Hulk?”

feministhulk: PATRIARCHY NOT WORK ALONE. SEXISM, RACISM, CLASSISM AND HOMOPHOBIA REINFORCE EACH OTHER. HULK SAY TO FOLLOWERS: SMASH ON MULTIPLE FRONTS. AND, JUST IN CASE YOU STUMBLE, BRING EXTRA PAIR OF PURPLE SHORTS.

Lady Gaga On Feminism (Again, Love It): ‘Perhaps We Can Make Women’s Rights Trendy.’

We’re confused as to how this (webTV show?) got a TWO HOUR interview with Lady Gaga (subtext: we’re jealous!) but they’ve got some great quotes on what feminism means to her. Excerpts:

“I am a feminist. I reject wholeheartedly the way we are taught to perceive women. The beauty of women, how a woman should act or behave. Women are strong and fragile. Women are beautiful and ugly. We are soft spoken and loud, all at once. There is something mind-controlling about the way we’re taught to view women. My work, both visually and musically, is a rejection of all those things. And most importantly a quest. It’s exciting because all of the avant-garde clothing, and musical style and lyrics that at one time was considered shocking or unacceptable are now trendy. Perhaps we can make women’s rights trendy. Strength, feminism, security, the wisdom of the woman. Let’ make that trendy.”

Who Died and Made You The Arbiter of “Feminism”?

Today, a Washington Post reader calls out Jessica Valenti’s recent piece, “The fake feminism of Sarah Palin” for some flawed logic:

While claiming “there’s no grand arbiter of the [feminist] label,” [Valenti] nevertheless said that it is “absolutely” possible to exclude women such as Sarah Palin from the feminist camp — in other words, that there is a grand arbiter, and her name is Ms. Valenti.

There is room in Ms. Valenti’s feminist tent for racists and those who oppose same-sex marriage, but there is no quarter for women who oppose abortion. The “manipulated buzzword” of feminism is no more or less than a cover for that.

While we completely get why protecting women’s authority over their own bodies would be considered by many to be a touchstone of the feminist movement, we also get (from, ahem, some personal experience) why it’s vexing to see women accuse other women of “not being feminist enough.” And given what we know about running letters to the editor, that the Post published this letter likely means that it wasn’t the only one like it.

Lady Gaga Talks Feminism: “It Really Doesn’t Mean ‘Man-Hating’”

Gaga talks feminism with the Times of London, which gives us a great excuse to post the Lady Gaga barbie collection. On feminism:

“Do you know what that girl at the bar said to me?” Gaga says, sipping her Scotch. “She said, ‘You’re a feminist. People think it means man-hating, but it doesn’t.’ Isn’t that funny?”

Earlier in the day, conversation had turned to whether Gaga would describe herself as feminist or not. As the very best conversations about feminism often will, it had segued from robust declarations of emancipation and sisterhood (“I am a feminist because I believe in women’s rights, and protecting who we are, down to the core”) to musing on who she fancied. (“In the video to Telephone, the girl I kiss, Heather, lives as a man. And as someone who does like women, something about a more masculine woman makes me feel more… feminine. When we kissed, I got that fuzzy butterfly feeling.”)

We had concluded that it was odd most women “shy away” from declaring themselves feminists, because “it really doesn’t mean ‘man-hating.’”

Maureen Dowd on Kagan and ‘Unmarried’: When Does a Woman Go from Single to Unmarried?

Ladyfriend/colleague Sarah Ball got us thinking about Maureen Dowd’s column in today’s Times, in which she takes on the White House use of “unmarried” to describe Elena Kagan. The question, Dowd asks, is when does a woman go from single to unmarried? “Single” carries the connotation of eligibility and possibility—single gals are fun! Like Sex and the City!—while “unmarried” implies a sad, lonely old spinster. Perhaps attractive women can be single at any age, but if you have a weight problem and bad hair, the assumption,” Dowd writes, “is that you’re undesirable, unwanted—and unmarried.”

In their eager effort to squash the rumors that Kagan is gay, Dowd writes, the White House has effectively landed themselves in a “pre-feminist fugue.” “

You’d think that they could come up with a more inspiring narrative than old maid for a woman who may become the youngest Supreme Court justice on the bench.

There are too many things that disturb us about the Kagan sexuality obsession to name, but, to begin, the strange way her friends and colleagues (and the White House) have chosen to trumpet her sexuality. Really, Eliot Spitzer, she’s straight, but you didn’t do her? Really, Harvard roommate, you’d talk about “who in our class was cute?” Really, she had an endearingly ditzy streak?

Remind us why we’re having this conversation?

If I Had a Hammer, I’d Smash Patriarchy: The Equalism v Feminism Debate

Anna Spysz of the Krakow Post has a nice post on her blog about embracing “equalism” over feminism, because, as she puts it, “to me it signifies in the simplest, most elegant way, the goal of the movement: complete gender equality.”

Equalism, of course, has had various waves of popularity over the years: as a more inclusive way of proclaiming feminist ideals; as a term without the baggage that the f-word carries; as a way of including not just gender but racial equality as well. But Spysz’s own take is that, for a generation removed from those early feminist battles, “equalism” is a term much easier to relate to. She writes:

Growing up in the 90s in the U.S., I took it for granted that I could do anything a boy could do, could grow up to be anything a man could be. Those initial battles had already been fought for me, and I couldn’t imagine that the gains would ever be taken away. In essence, equalism is just post-feminism, for those who never really experienced feminism in its initial struggles.

So, equalism: Any better than feminism?