As those of you paying close attention might have noticed, Thursday is generally feminism day here at Accismus. I have to run off this morning, but wanted to call attention to three things, all from Feministe:
About human trafficking:
A distant relative of mine was trafficked. Depending on what you’ve read and seen in the media, you may not expect this story to look like this: he is male, and wasn’t destined to become a sex slave, but a construction-site slave. Desperate for a job in Western Europe, he left his Ukrainian village with some sketchy individuals, was forced to trek through a marsh in freezing weather, and was eventually discovered on a train by police, still determined to reach his destination. This spring, an article on modern-day slavery was published in the L. A. Times – it warned readers that slavery is far from over, that, in fact, there are more slaves today than before, and that slavery has many faces and many forms.
…on 88% of violent crime in the U.S. being committed by men:
…The fact that, as the headlines above show, perpetrators of violent crime are assumed to be male unless stated otherwise shows just how normalized male violence is. Imagine how much we, as a culture, would be analyzing the socialization of girls if over the course of the past 10 years, 28 young women and no men had gone shooting up schools.
I’m often amazed at how invisible we make the identity of dominant groups in analyzing the behavior of their members, as opposed to the way we imagine that every member of a marginalized group is representative of the entire population of that group.
…and finally, on the male-heavy op-ed pages of our major newspapers:
Apparently a new study shows that academics chosen to write op-eds for three major newspapers are overwhelmingly male. The Wall Street Journal was the worst of the bunch, with 97% of their op-eds by academics written by men.
The study doesn’t get into the fact that this gender bias isn’t limited to op-eds by academics. At the New York Times (which features 82% male writers of op-eds by academics), two out of 11 regular op-ed columnists are women. At the Washington Post, two out of 16 columnists are women.
Now, I don’t necessarily think that having more women write op-eds would be helpful to women. New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd is a woman, and her ramblings seem to alternately expound on how ridiculous she thinks other women are and questioning the masculinity of any man who doesn’t act like a complete asshole.
I’ve said it before about Maureen Dowd: I suspect the Times hired her on purpose, precisely so that people, when observing how light the Times is on women columnists, would say just what is quoted above. There are tons of women who’d make fantastic columnists for the Times. I read their op-eds every day, both on blogs and in other publications.
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And one more thing – Silence of the City posts short pieces rejected by The New Yorker for its Talk of the Town section, and this particular piece (no permalink, but it’s ‘Measuring Up’ by Sari Wilson) is about a bra shop in SoHo that sounds heavenly. I am no longer a particularly bosomy lady (for now), but over a decade of my life was spent in wrestling with a pair of absolutely unmanageable breasts, which I’m convinced actually conspired with each other to make my life a living hell. One weird thing about boobs is that they seem to fluff up, like bread rising, as the day goes on. Has anyone else noticed this? You leave the house in the morning with everything all tucked in and your shirt spread smoothly over it, but then around 11:00 a.m., you look down . . . and you have four breasts. It’s the most peculiar thing. At any rate, I would have appreciated this:
At one point in the fittings, the Birkinstocked woman found herself maneuvered into a complicated, gargantuan paisley apparatus. After all the straps were adjusted and tightened and she was pushed and pulled into place, the model slipped on a trial T-shirt and it was revealed why there was a need for bra school. Her breasts were wholly transformed: no longer heavy and uncomfortable-looking, they appeared sprightly, lively, and well-formed. As she admired her slimmer, sleeker self in the mirror, the model smiled for the first time that evening.
Also, I love you so much and am so lucky to have known you since the boob-wars.
