NCAA Makes a Statement

I'm listening to the news Tuesday morning of the NCAA sanctions of Penn State.  It's mostly good news for those of us who work for victim rights and an end to sexual violence.  But what does this say about all the sexual assaults that go un-reported and pushed under the rug under the guise of college athletics at many, many universities?
At a conference on Title IX and sexual assault two years ago, one of the keynotes, David Lisak, a Professor at UMass Boston who researches rapists, showed us a video, which is available on You Tube, on how to get a woman drunk so that you can have sex with her.  Dr. Lisak stated that if this was a video on how to get a child to submit to sexual abuse them it would be taken off the internet immediately by the Feds. 
Do you see where I am going here?  What happened at Penn State was horrible.  The abuse of children is horrible.  And our reaction as a culture to this horrific crime is appropriate.  But rape of women is JUST AS HORRIBLE as sexual abuse of children.  Until we, as a culture, begin to change our mindset that this is the case, the statistics I will quote below will continue to be relevant and perhaps worsen.  
"The National College Women Sexual Victimization Study estimated that between 1 in 4 and 1 in 5 college women experience completed or attempted rape during their college years (Fisher 2000)." ~www.feminist.com
"Also disturbing is the lack of prosecution for those who commit rape; according to RAINN (Rape, Abuse, and Incest National Network) only 9% of rapists face prosecution, and a mere 3% of rapists ever spend a single day in jail. 97% odds of evading jail time are not significant enough to deter sexual violence." span style= font-family: Georgia, serif;">These statistics should HORRIFY the NCAA.  Imagine the cultural change that could occur should national collegiate organizations like the NCAA were to take plain-old-every-day-sexual-assault and treat it with the same concern as what happened to those boys under Jerry Sandusky.  

Providence Restaurant Week

So, yes . . . I consider this blog The Feminist Critic on all things pop, political, etc., however this week I thought it would be fun to critique our first outing for Providence Restaurant Week.  I may be a feminist, but I am also, most definitely, a foodie! 

To learn more about restaurant week, check out www.goprovidence.com We took my husband's parent's out to dinner on Sunday, the kick off of restaurant week, for their 33rd wedding anniversary. We looked at numerous menus on the list and decided on four places we liked. Two of them, when we called for reservations, were not open on Sundays. So we ended up at the Waterman Grill. I had just had drinks there over a week ago, which I thought were good.


We sat inside, with a water view, because it was quite warm outside. We were given the Prix Fixe restaurant week menu and their regular menu, which also has a Sunday through Thursday Prix Fixe menu for only $24.95. Restaurant week's price is $29.95.


They brought us water. The server came over and took our drink order.Then they brought us amazing fresh baked herbed bread. I thought that was a good sign. After fifteen minutes, he came back to take our dinner order as our drinks were still being made. Jeff and his parents ordered off the restaurant week menu and I ordered off the regular Prix Fixe menu. I ordered the mussels, salmon with beluga lentils, and the flourless chocolate cake.


Twenty minutes after we arrived we got our drinks. I thought mine was a martini so I sent it back because it came served on the rocks. The server told me I should have told him I wanted it up even after I told him that was how it was served to me a week ago. I don't take too kindly to debates with the servers.
The mussels came and they were a little underdone, kind of slimy.  I had Jeff eat one to make sure I wouldn't get sick.  The broth they came in was very bland, just some onions and a little butter.  Jeff's mussels are MUCH better.  But I shall try for the sake of restaurant week not to compare everything to Jeff's talented culinary skills.  His mom had the coconut shrimp and he and his dad had the fresh mixed greens with goat cheese.  



I asked for a wine list so that I could order a glass of wine with my dinner. I ordered one. He brought me the glass and over 15 minutes went by before he returned with my wine. I said to the server, "the bar services is extremely slow." He went on to blame it on the bartender, saying something like "she's a nice person and all . . ." I also noticed the manager stop at the table near ours, with the upscale looking foursome and ask how everything was. I turned to Jeff and said "he should ask us."


Our meals came. My salmon was excellent . I loved the beluga lentils. Jeff had the pork tenderloin with apple slaw and baked beans. My mother in law had the linguine and clam sauce. She thought her pasta was a bit too al dente. My father in law had the pan roasted fluke. During dinner, Jeff ordered another glass of wine and it came right out.

Dessert was simple. The flourless chocolate cake had a ganache on top that I felt ruined the richness of the torte. Jeff had a banana cake with butterscotch topping. His dad had cheesecake.


When we got our bill, I saw I was charged twice for my drink as I had sent it back to have it made up. We decided not to mention it when we noticed one of our entrees was not listed. I figured it was a bonus. But the server came over and said he thought he'd charged us twice for the drink. He brought the bill back and it was exactly the same. So we paid it and left. When we looked it over at home, we were charged for the fourth entree but it wasn't listed. And we were charged for my drink twice, so we paid $8.50 more than we should have.

All in all, the food was pretty good but the whole process was slow and the drinks took forever to get to us. I am not sure if I will go back there. It also seems like a nice place to go in the winter as they have a fireplace and a lot of wood grilling.

Feminist Intensive--Day II

Day II of our Intensive, with the theme of Media, started at The Women's Media Center. "Founded by Jane Fonda, Robin Morgan, and Gloria Steinem–it has the goal of making women visible and powerful in the media.  The influence of the media is the most powerful economic and cultural force today.

By deciding who gets to talk, what shapes the debate, who writes, and what is important enough to report, the media shapes our understanding of who we are and what we can be. The Women's Media Center works to create a level playing field for women and girls in media through our monitoring, training, original content, and activism."  We spent almost three hours talking about becoming media experts in our fields and having a mini-workshop which mimics their Progressive Women's Voices training.  I hope to apply to this in 2013.  Their website is chock full of statistics on the lack of women in the media.  I'm also planning to invite their Vice-President to be part of my Feminist Media Literacy conference in Fall 2013 as part of the Zuckerberg Leadership Award I just won!

Then we went to AOL to see the trailer for the upcoming three-part PBS movie Makers.  This documentary chronicles over 100 women who were instrumental in the women's movement (all of them alive).  Their website http://www.makers.com/ is amazing.  You could spend a day just watching all these interviews with amazing women.  The first one we watched was Kathrine Switzer, the first woman to run the Boston Marathon.  Most of us teared up.  Her story truly is one of women pushing the boundaries of patriarchy and changing the world forever.  It was kind of cool to be in a very corporate NYC office, like AOL, although one of the members of our group called their 3 story office a "sad Google."

From AOL we went to Women's eNews.  If you don't subscribe you should.  They are an excellent source of honest news reporting on women around the world.  I love the "Cheers & Jeers" section.  They cover topics related to women that one would rarely find in the patriarchal news media.  

From there we were off to dinner with at Gloria Steinem's lovely home with Marcia Ann Gillespie, the former Editor of Ms Magazine, and random houseguest of Gloria's, Sheila Tobias.   

"Marcia Ann Gillespie is a trailblazer in the magazine industry, a leader in the women’s movement, a champion of gender of racial justice. A provocative writer and thinker, hers has been a consistent eloquent voice affirming the human potential for good, challenging inequality, pushing herself and others to hope, dare and strive for a better world. She is the author of Maya Angelou: A Glorious Celebration, an authorized biography published by Doubleday in April 2008, and is currently writing a memoir titled When Blacks Became Americans. She has been a driving force behind two of this nation’s most important women’s magazines, as the editor in chief of Essence from 1971-1980 and most recently as the editor in chief of Ms. from 1993-2001. Marcia is the current Professor of Diversity in Residence for the Johnetta B. Cole Global Diversity and Inclusion Institute at Bennett College." I was thrilled she remembered me from coming to campus in 1997, I think, as our keynote for Women's History Month

"Gloria Steinem is a writer, lecturer, editor, and feminist activist. She travels in this and other countries as an organizer and lecturer and is a frequent media spokeswoman on issues of equality. She is particularly interested in the shared origins of sex and race caste systems, gender roles and child abuse as roots of violence, non-violent conflict resolution, the cultures of indigenous peoples, and organizing across boundaries for peace and justice. She was a cofounder ofMs. magazine as well as Voters for Choice, the Ms. Foundation, the Women’s Media Center, the Women’s Political Caucus and many other pioneering feminist organizations. She is the author of several best-selling books, including Revolution from Within and Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions." She remembered coming to Woodland Commons five years ago and being in the strange concrete building.  


What resonated most from our talk with these amazing women, for me, was her focus on female friendship and how this is such an important aspect of organizing and feminism in general.  If we can't support each other, how can we even begin to change the world.  

 

Feminist Intensive--Day One Overview

Last week I attended Soapbox's Feminist Intensive for staff and faculty.  This event is normally run for 5 days for students in January and June called Feminist Boot Camp.  Soapbox is a feminist speakers bureau I have used since they began.  It was founded by writers & activists Amy Richards and Jennifer Baumgardner.  They are the authors of Manifesta:  Young Women, Feminism and the Future, which is an excellent book I have used in many of my classes. 

Each day we met with activists and of feminist organizations in NYC.  On the first day we met with Equality Now 's Global Director, Yasmeen Hassan.  This 20 year old organization focuses on four areas:  Discrimination in Law, Sexual Violence, Female Genital Mutilation and Trafficking.  Their mission is to achieve legal and systemic change that addresses violence and discrimination against women and girls around the world.  They have offices in NYC, Nairobi, and London with plans to expand.  The work specifically with organizations in the countries where a woman is in need of help, to provide legal and other support. 

You can join the organization and get on their Take Action list.  Equality Now

We ended up next for lunch at the home of Joanne Sandler. She is a consultant on women's issues worldwide.  She was the Executive Director for UNIFEM and had a role in creating a space for women at the United Nations.  She talked with us about the difficulty in getting the UN to understand the importance of women.  What sticks with me about her conversation with "we got what we asked for."  She meant that women have gotten to part of patriarchal institutions but we need to now take it a step further.  She also spoke of having younger women step in to lead feminist organizations and that it is time for her generation to allow for that space.

We spent our next meeting with Women's World Banking's VP of Development Jane Sloane.  Women' s World Banking "is a non-profit, microfinance institution, consisting of 39 financial organizations in 27 countries, providing low-income women access to financial services and information. WWB helps microfinance institutions move away from a strictly credit-led approach toward providing a broader array of financial products and service, including savings and insurance to help the poor build comprehensive financial safety nets."  We learned a great deal about micro-finance and financial investing with a "gender lens."  What this means is looking not only at what companies do, but how they treat their employees, for example, investing in a company that has equal pay for its female workers.

We ended our first long day at a restaurant in Brooklyn with Robin Morgan and Irshad Manji.  

"Irshad Manji is a New York Times bestselling author, professor of leadership and advocate of liberal reform within Islam. Irshad directs New York University's Moral Courage Project, which teaches people worldwide to challenge political correctness, intellectual conformity and self-censorship. As a faithful Muslim, she emphasizes Islam's own tradition of "ijtihad," or independent thinking. The Jakarta Post in Indonesia, the world's biggest Muslim-majority country, identifies Irshad as one of three women making a positive difference in Islam today. Her latest book, Allah, Liberty and Love, is sparking fierce debate internationally."  She spoke of how a woman was arrested for selling her new book before she had even sold it.  

"Robin Morgan is an award-winning poet, novelist, political theorist, feminist activist,and best-selling author, who has published more than 20 books, including the now-classic anthologies Sisterhood Is Powerful, Sisterhood Is Global, and Sisterhood Is Forever: The Women’s Anthology for A New Millennium. A founder of contemporary US feminism, she has been a leader in the international women’s movement for 25 years. She has traveled--as organizer, lecturer, journalist--across Europe, to Australia, Brazil, the Caribbean, Central America, China, Indonesia, Israel, Japan, Nepal, New Zealand, Pacific Island nations, the Philippines, and South Africa; she has twice spent months in the Palestinian refugee camps in Jordan, Lebanon, Egypt, Syria, West Bank, and Gaza, reporting on the conditions of women. In 1990, as Ms. Editor-in-Chief, she re-launched the magazine as an international, award-winning, ad-free bimonthly. Recently, she co-founded The Women’s Media Center," where we start day II.  More to come . . . .

Two in One Week

I normally try to blog on Wednesdays to be consistent and to hold myself to a schedule.  Yet this week we'll call "Bonus Extra Blog Week" because I am starting to feel very annoyed with the world as it is.

I want to start first with the term "girls."  I recently posted the following link to my facebook The Sexualization of Girls.  And while the whole video is great, I have been thinking a lot about her comment that when we were in college, we wanted to be called "women" and now young adult women want to be called "girls."  Then I had a work discussion with some male students who could not understand why I felt that showing three videos of drunk women on reality shows was inappropriate for orientation.  I was trying to explain it wasn't "balanced."  They didn't get it.

I'm normally an optimistic person.  Anyone who knows me  would attest to that, however, all the political fervor against women in terms of reproductive rights, birth control, and equal pay seems to connect too succinctly with not only the way women are represented in television (particularly the horrible reality shows so many of our women and men watch) but also the lack of awareness many young people seem to have of these issues.  For example, why it is important to be called a woman when you are over 18.  No one seems to think it's weird that we don't call men boys.  Girls and guys.  Or just guys.  One administrator recently spoke to the new students and called everyone guys.  That's a whole other issue to save for another date. 

I believe college is a place to learn about things outside yourself.  It's a place to have your old belief system challenged.  I wrongly expect that student leaders who are representing our university should be MORE aware than the average student.  And yes, I'm annoyed that in 2012 I now have to spend time trying to "prove" why a certain representation seems to be sexist or racist. And defending the importance of calling women, women. 

Even the recent HBO, supposedly feminist TV series, Girls has a young female creator who would rather be called girl than woman.  The power of language seems to escape many young people today and I am not so positive I have the will or the energy to fix it.  Maybe if the sun ever comes out I  feel less grim. 

Against Obama

This week the Senate blocked the Paycheck Fairness Act.  What we know is that EVERY Senate Republican voted against it.  Gee whiz, that's bi-partisanism at its best!  From The Huffington Post,

The Senate failed to secure the 60 votes needed to advance the Paycheck Fairness Act, which would have required employers to demonstrate that any salary differences between men and women doing the same work are not gender-related. The bill also would have prohibited employers from retaliating against employees who share salary information with their co-workers, and would have required the Labor Department to increase its outreach to employers to help eliminate pay disparities.
The final vote was 52-47, with all Republicans opposing the bill. That included female Sens. Kelly Ayotte (N.H.), Susan Collins (Maine), Kay Bailey Hutchison (Texas), Lisa Murkowski (Alaska) and Olympia Snowe (Maine).

President Obama said it was "incredibly disappointing" that Republicans would block a bill that would provide equal pay for women.  What he should have said is that it's "incredibly disappointing" that all the Republicans have on their agenda is not to give up anything that would appear in some way to support the President.  In the last six months of Obama's first term in office, it is apparent that Congress has become so politicized that they cannot even represent their constituencies.  Are you seriously suggesting to me that ALL the women from Maine who Collins and Snowe represent would have wanted this vote blocked?  I grew up in Maine and I can assure you there are many, many, many women who would appreciate a little government regulation in the equal pay department.  

For me this is just another example of a politics run amok.  How are we to vote with our conscience if it is clear that our Senators are voting for or against bills just to "give it to the President."  This type of behavior gets me thinking about revolution and resistance and opposition.  Maybe its time we Occupy the Senate.  If your Senator was one of those who voted against women, please share your concern with them.  Hold their feet to the fire.  And let them know you won't be checking a box next to their name in November if they keep dismissing the needs of their constituents.   

The war against women is really a war against Obama.  But for me, throwing women out the window in order to defeat Obama is a pretty shitty strategy.   

Losing Women

My life was touched by two women who left this physical world this week.  The first was my step-grandmother, Genny Jones. Grandmother, as many of us called her, took me in as one of her many grandchildren as soon as my step-father married my mother.  She was half Chippewa and spent much of her youth in the traditional BIA Reservation Schools.  She went to work as soon as she could.  After marrying Grandfather, she continued to work, even after having three children.  She de-boned chickens for Campbell's Soup for much of her life.  After retiring, she took care of the church next to her house, mowing the lawn and keeping up with her garden.  She was a good cook.  She was funny.  She had the most common sense of anyone I had ever met.  She was a woman of few words.  But my step-father, Clinton, was one of the nicest men you will ever meet, so I know she was a great mother.  While many might consider her a traditional working class housewife and mother, I do believe she was ahead of her time, living to the ripe old age of 90. 

The other woman was my friend and yoga teacher, Stephanie Matson.  I met her by working with her husband.  I started taking her classes and we got to be friends.  Her style of teaching inspired me to commit to my practice in a non-judgmental way.  When she was diagnosed with leukemia a year and a half ago, I tried to help recommend some folks to fill in for her.  One of those people I recommended suggested that I could teach for her.  I talked it over with the Fitness Center Director and we both felt we'd feel more comfortable if I was certified.  I did lots of homework and committed to an expensive and long 7 month 200 hour certification.  She was with me in spirit and on Facebook through the whole process, checking in, encouraging me and being a support. 

When she was through with the bone marrow transplant, I felt confident she would recover and I would again be her student.  Her remission was far too brief and the process of trying to put her back into remission, so she could attempt a non-donor transplant, was too much for her already compromised system to take. 

Her death is not so easy to write about.  She was my age.  She had two little boys.  Grandmother had a full long life.  But one thing both of these women taught me is that being true to who you are is the best way to live your life with integrity.  Staying present is the best way to be.  We can't fear what has not yet come.  We should not dwell in what has passed.  Today I am reminded by them to live fiercely.  Namaste Stephanie and God Bless Grandmother.