AlterNet.org: Gender

Inside the Controversy Over Man Charged with Murder for Slipping an Abortion Pill to Pregnant Girlfriend

Mary Elizabeth Williams, Salon — Sat, 18 May 2013 12:36:00 -0700

Florida man told her it was an antibiotic.

John Andrew Welden is charged with the murder of a person who was never born.

As Tampa’s WFTS-TV news reports, Welden is facing first-degree murder charges for allegedly giving his pregnant girlfriend Remee Lee an abortion pill and telling her it was an antibiotic. Welden worked in his father’s Florida clinic, a “specialty infertility practice.” When Lee began bleeding and experiencing cramps, she went to her local hospital, where doctors informed her the container labeled as amoxicillin was in fact the labor-inducing Cytotec. The fetus died in utero. “I was never going to do anything but go full term with it,” she told reporters this week. “And he didn’t want me to.” It’s an appalling tale, which will once again force us to ponder what constitutes a human life — and when one has taken it.

Very different fetal-homicide laws are on the books in roughly 80 percent of American states. In Arizona, for example, the charge can apply toward “any stage of development” for a fetus, while Arkansas limits it to an “unborn child of 12 weeks or more gestation.” South Dakota stipulates the accused must have known, “or reasonably should have known, that a woman bearing an unborn child was pregnant.”

In Welden’s case, he’s being charged under the Protection of Unborn Children Act. His state has tough laws for killing the unborn that also include DUI manslaughter, vehicular homicide and willful killing. In Ohio, where kidnapping suspect Ariel Castro will stand trial, he faces possible charges of aggravated murder. Castro is accused of allegedly beating one of his reported victims until she miscarried the pregnancies she endured in captivity. Cuyahoga County prosecutor Timothy McGinty has said he will pursue “each act of aggravated murder” — and a conviction could lead to the death penalty.

And in Philadelphia, of course, Kermit Gosnell was convicted of three counts of first-degree murder for killing three infants — by severing their spinal cords – who were born live during the late-term abortions he provided. Pennsylvania law has a whole category of offenses, including first- and second-degree murder, for any unborn child “from fertilization until live birth.” What distinguishes the Gosnell case — and has often been lost in all the shouting about it — was that the murder charges were for babies, not fetuses. Yet the issue of what constitutes the taking a life is not always an easy one to discuss or decide.

As much as we need the law to be clear, the reality of life and death is often far more ambiguous. As Jon Hurdle and Trip Gabriel noted this week in the New York Times, much of the furor over cases like Gosnell’s is the question of “why a procedure done to a living baby outside the womb is murder, but destroying a fetus of similar gestation before delivery can be legal.” Remee Lee, meanwhile, was six weeks and five days pregnant when she lost her baby. Should taking a life that wouldn’t have been viable outside the womb carry the same consequences as killing an adult? Would the alleged crime be different if she’d been three months pregnant? Six months? Nine?

I believe that human life begins at conception. I believe that if you force a woman, either by violence or deception, to lose a fetus, you have taken a life. But I also shudder at the prospect of the anti-choice lobby exploiting revolting crimes to prevent women from access to their constitutional right to abortion. We have spent the last several years watching it happen, as abortion opponents have tried to leverage fetal-protection laws to chip away at choice. That’s why we need to continue to be vigilant in articulating the difference between a choice a woman makes and an act of violence against her body and her fetus, an act that robs her of that very freedom she is entitled to. We must be clear that being pro-choice is not tantamount to condoning repulsive, criminal behavior. Remee Lee told reporters this week that she’s grieving because she “dreams of becoming a mom.” And this, she says, “was my chance.”

NYPD Arrested and Committed Woman to Psychiatric Ward for Legally Baring Breasts

Courthouse News — Fri, 17 May 2013 07:24:00 -0700

The topless performance artist is suing the NYPD for repeated arrests, harassment and committing her to psychiatric institution.

MANHATTAN (CN) - "Topless paparazzo" Holly Van Voast claims in court that New York City police repeatedly arrested and institutionalized her for legally baring her breasts while wearing a Marilyn Monroe wig and Don Juan mustache.

Van Voast aka Harvey Van Toast sued New York City, Police Commissioner Ray Kelly, the Metropolitan Transit Authority and dozens of police officers in Federal Court. The 46-year-old performance artist calls going topless part of her commitment to "personal, artistic and gender freedom," inspired a "broad artistic community of punk drag" performers such as Little Kimchi, Misty Meaner and Mary Jo Cameltoe, according to the complaint.

Van Voast says the law has been on her side since 1992, when the New York State Court of Appeals dismissed an indecent exposure violation against Rochester woman Ramona Santorelli.

Ignoring the "clear command" of the Santorelli ruling, the NYPD "has stopped, detained, harassed, arrested, summonsed, charged and/or prosecuted plaintiff on dozens of occasions - solely for exercising her right to be to be topless in public in New York City. The NYPD has repeatedly charged and arrested Ms. Van Voast for appearing topless in public although she has committed no crime," the complaint states.

"On multiple occasions when plaintiff was peacefully going about her business in New York City, the NYPD has wrongfully detained and charged Ms. Van Voast, either with 'Indecent Exposure' pursuant to New York Penal Law § 245.01, or with a host of other sham charges. The NYPD has charged Ms. Van Voast on these occasions not because she was doing anything illegal, but for the impermissible and unconstitutional purpose of penalizing and deterring her from being topless in public."

The NYPD Deputy Commissioner Paul Browne told the Village Voice in June 2011 that toplessness was legal.

"The state's highest court established long ago that women have the same right as men to appear topless in public," Browne told the Voice.

Two months later, Van Voast says, police detained and charged her for toplessly waltzing into the Oyster Bar at Grand Central Station without a "permit." That charge was adjourned in contemplation of dismissal. Another indecent exposure charge for walking topless in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn on Oct. 23, 2011 was dismissed entirely.

On March 14, 2012, Van Voast says, she chose the P.S. 6 elementary school in Manhattan's wealthy Upper East Side neighborhood to send her message.

"Plaintiff chose that location to stand specifically to express her opinion that the sight of women's breasts is not dangerous to children, and that claims of 'protecting' children from toplessness were misplaced," the complaint states.

She claims that two unidentified officers took her for psychiatric evaluation to New York Presbyterian Hospital, where she was held against her will for about six days.

After she appeared topless at the Bronx Day Parade on May 20, 2012, police sent her for evaluation at Montefiore Hospital, where she was handcuffed to a bed for "an extended period of time," according to the complaint. Oblivious to irony, NYPD officers sent her to St. Luke's-Roosevelt Hospital for being topless in front of a Hooters restaurant in Midtown Manhattan, she claims. The complaint recites several more such incidents.

Van Voast claims the NYPD tried to justify its actions by issuing a "FINEST" message on Feb. 3 this year, instructing police to take "enforcement action" against "male or female individuals who are simply appearing in public unclothed above their waist." Van Voast demands punitive damages and legal fees for constitutional violations and negligent supervision.

She is represented by pugnacious civil rights attorney lawyer Ron Kuby and Katherine Rosenfeld, with the heavy-hitting law firm Emery Celli Brinckerhoff & Abady. A New York City Law Department spokeswoman told Courthouse News that the New York State Court of Appeals decision does allow women to be topless in public, but that the decision included "various qualifiers" prohibiting "lewdness," among other things.

"We will review the allegations in the complaint, which at this point are just that, allegations," the spokeswoman said. She said Thursday that the NYPD had not yet been served with the complaint. She added that she could not speak to whether the Santorelli qualifiers applied in this case.

The text of the Santorelli opinion is vague on that. The majority opinion states: "Considering the statute's provenance, we held in Price that a woman walking along a street wearing a fishnet, see-through pull-over blouse did not transgress the statute and that it 'should not be applied to the noncommercial, perhaps accidental, and certainly not lewd, exposure alleged.'"

The opinion does not state that New York Penal Law § 245.01 applied to lewdness, but a concurring opinion says the opposite.

"Nor can it be argued that Penal Law § 245.01 was intended to be confined to conduct that is lewd or intentionally annoying," the concurring opinion states. "First, there is absolutely no support in the legislative history for such a construction. Second, a construction of Penal Law § 245.01 requiring lewdness would be of highly questionable validity, since it would render Penal Law § 245.00 [prohibiting the exposure of 'intimate parts' 'in a lewd manner'] redundant."

Neither of Van Voast's attorneys replied to a request for comment.

Merida And The Disturbing Disney Princess Syndrome

Mary Elizabeth Williams, Salon — Wed, 15 May 2013 12:50:00 -0700

The taming of the flame-haired warrior princess doll is just the latest example of the sexualization of American girlhood.

If there’s one thing you can count on Disney for, it’s creating strong leading female characters in its movies – and then reducing them to wide-eyed idiots in their merchandising. The Belle who obsessed on books and the Tiana who scrimped and saved for her own restaurant, the warrior Mulan and the wise Pocahontas – they’ve all been reduced to flowing hair and off-the-shoulder dresses and coy looks in their post-cinematic incarnations. But when the mouse tried to give its “Brave” heroine Merida a “Stepford Wives” makeover, it finally went too far.

Last week, Disney announced that it was adding the headstrong, flame-haired heroine to its “Princess” collection. But it was the revamped image of Merida — her waist nipped, her eyes elongated, her messy tangle of hair a sexy tumble, her plain dress a shimmer of bling and her trademark bow and arrow nowhere to be seen – that set parents’ jaws dropping. Disney blandly told Yahoo Shine that “Merida exemplifies what it means to be a Disney Princess through being brave, passionate, and confident and she remains the same strong and determined Merida from the movie whose inner qualities have inspired moms and daughters around the world.” But it didn’t quell the disgust.

Fans quickly launched a Change.org petition against the “skinnier, sexier and more mature in appearance” Merida, asking Disney to “Keep Our Hero Brave!” And in an email to the Marin Independent Journal, “Brave’s” Oscar-winning co-writer and co-director Brenda Chapman — who originally envisioned Merida as “a different kind of princess,” said, “There is an irresponsibility to this decision that is appalling for women and young girls. Disney marketing and the powers that be that allow them to do such things should be ashamed of themselves … I think it’s atrocious what they have done to Merida. When little girls say they like it because it’s more sparkly, that’s all fine and good but, subconsciously, they are soaking in the sexy ‘come hither’ look and the skinny aspect of the new version. It’s horrible! Merida was created to break that mold — to give young girls a better, stronger role model, a more attainable role model, something of substance, not just a pretty face that waits around for romance.”

And so, while not acknowledging anything weird about its clumsy attempt at restyling, Disney quietly put the original messy, freckly, slightly overbitey, “strong, fearless, adventurous” Merida on its Princess page. She’s definitely the “one of these things that’s not like the others” among her sultry cohorts, but it’s a difference that’s beautiful. Of all the princesses, Merida is now the one who most looks like a normal teenage girl, with an open smile and a gaze that’s bright and direct – a far cry from the creepily “Hello sailor” action the other ladies are working.

But this isn’t quite a victory for substance over sexualization. Think Disney’s going to stop rolling out the Merida merchandise, including the shiny, glossy action figure, now? Doubtful. More than the Merida issue, though, there’s the whole bizarre, absurdly lucrative, damn near inescapable Princess Industrial Complex itself.

I have two daughters who have spent many happy years playing dress-up and skipping off to school in tutus. I am a girly girl myself; a woman who owns her own tiara, and who recently had lunch with someone who said, “You know, I don’t think I’ve ever seen you in pants.” But there’s something deeply disturbing and wrongheaded about the Disney princessization of American girlhood. The princesses, in their merchandise state, aren’t heroines. They’re just strange, sparkly happy endings. Not to be a buzzkill, but you do know that Belle, in her poufy yellow dress, is a prisoner, right? And that the pink-clad Ariel lining the toy aisle has recently sacrificed her power of speech? I’m just saying, context.

And if the chipper image of these pretty, happy princesses is a little out of whack, even odder is the more recent deluge of baby and toddler merch, known, freakily enough, as “My First Disney Princess” toys. Yep, skilled, smart characters are being shrunk down to helpless infants. Now baby Cinderella is getting married. And Baby Ariel has legs. Legs. I don’t even understand that. Your inconsistency is vexing, baby princesses!

The message – one that is now rammed down our daughters’ throats from birth, literally – is not one of effort or even action. Princesses don’t become princesses; they simply are princesses, even as babies. That Disney has left Merida relatively alone in one small corner of its brand doesn’t change that. There’s no narrative, no adventure, in the Disney princess world — just the simpering image of pretty girls with crowns on their heads. I just hope that no matter what Disney tries to pull, we as parents and consumers don’t forget the stories behind those princesses. Because in the movie, when they try to cram Merida into that lovely blue gown that her doll counterpart now smilingly sports, she grouses, “Curse this dress.” And she stretches herself right out of it.

State Decides Hermaphrodite Baby's Gender with Irreversible Sex-Assignment Surgery

Dan McCrue, Courthouse News — Wed, 15 May 2013 11:31:00 -0700

Adoptive parents sue, calling surgery unnecessary and potentially damaging.

CHARLESTON, S.C. (CN) - South Carolina's Department of Social Services ordered doctors to do irreversible, medically unnecessary sex-assignment surgery on a year-old child in state custody, her adoptive parents claim in court.
     Pamela and John Mark Crawford sued three doctors and four Social Services workers on behalf of their child, M.C., in Federal Court. M.C. is 8 years old.
     "This lawsuit challenges the decision by government officials and doctors to perform an irreversible, painful, and medically unnecessary sex assignment surgery on a sixteen-month-old child in state custody. Defendants performed this surgery for the purpose of 'assigning' the child the female gender despite their own conclusion that he 'was a true hermaphrodite but that there was no compelling reason that she should either be male or female,'" the complaint states.
     M.C. was taken into state custody because his mother was deemed unfit and his father had abandoned him, according to the complaint. The Crawfords say the parental rights of the child's biological parents were terminated.
     "At birth, M.C. was identified as a male based on his external genitalia. Shortly after birth, however, M.C.'s doctors discovered that M.C. had 'ambiguous genitals' and both male and female internal reproductive structures. As his medical records repeatedly indicated, M.C.'s doctors determined that he could be raised as either a boy or a girl," the complaint states.
     "Despite not knowing whether M.C. would ultimately grow up to be a man or a woman, and whether he would elect to have any genital surgery, Defendants, who include doctors at a state hospital and SCDSS officials, decided to remove M.C.'s healthy genital tissue and radically restructure his reproductive organs in order to make his body appear to be female."
     The Crawfords claim the doctors acted rashly upon Social Services' decision, going ahead with the surgery though there was no medically compelling reason to do so. The defendant doctors, Ian Aaronson, James Amrhein and Yawappiagyei-Dankah, cut off M.C.'s phallus to reduce it to the size of a clitoris, removed one testicle, excised all testicular tissue from the second gonad, and constructed labia, the complaint states.
     "The surgery eliminated M.C.'s potential to procreate as a male and caused a significant and permanent impairment of sexual function," the adoptive parents say.
     M.C. was not quite 16 months old, and "the defendant doctors knew that sex assignment surgeries on infants with conditions like M.C.'s pose a significant risk of imposing a gender that is ultimately rejected by the patient," the complaint states. "Indeed, one of the doctor defendants who performed the surgery on M.C. had previously published an article in a medical journal wherein he recognized that 'carrying out a feminizing-genitoplasty on an infant who might eventually identify herself as a boy would be catastrophic.'"
     The Crawfords say that since he was very young, M.C. has shown strong signs of developing a male gender, and that he is living as a boy.
     "His interests, manner and play, and refusal to be identified as a girl indicate that M.C.'s gender has developed as male. Indeed, M.C. is living as a boy with the support of his family, friend, school, religious leaders, and pediatrician," according to the complaint.
     The Crawfords say M.C. could have been raised as either a girl or a boy until he was old enough for his gender identity to emerge. At that point, they could have made appropriate decisions regarding medical treatment - including whether to have surgery at all.
     "Defendants usurped these intimate and profound decisions from M.C. when he was barely older than an infant, knowing that surgically mis-assigning M.C.'s sex would lead to disastrous results. Unfortunately, medical technology has not devised a way to replace what M.C. has lost," the Crawfords say.
     "By their actions, Defendants also interfered with M.C's future ability to form intimate, procreative relationships, choices central to his personal dignity and autonomy."
     They call the defendants' actions an egregious, arbitrary, and enduring invasion of M.C.'s bodily integrity. They seek compensatory and punitive damages for constitutional violations.
     They are represented by Kenneth M. Suggs of Columbia, S.C.

Men Step Up to Support Women's Rights and Fight Violence ... Stars and Regular Guys Say They Are Ready to Show Up

Eleanor J. Bader, AlterNet — Mon, 13 May 2013 11:58:00 -0700

Male feminism is a burgeoning movement around the country.

In the immediate aftermath of the Steubenville, Ohio rape trial, many men, both prominent and not, spoke out against sexism, misogyny and what has become known as "rape culture."

“All men should be feminists,” Grammy-winning singer John Legend announced. “If men care about women’s rights, the world will be a better place.” Olympian sprinter Andrew Reyes, Virginia Democratic senators Mark Warner and Tim Kaine, and Philadelphia Eagles defensive tackle Ronnie Cameron also got into the act, pledging their allegiance to the movement to end rape, sexual assault and domestic abuse.

One of my favorite reactions came from a young man named Charles that went viral on Facebook. Charles was photographed holding a hand-lettered sign that said, “I stand with Jane Doe because when I became a victim of a sex crime, no one asked me if I was drunk or what I was wearing or what I had done to make it happen.”

For at least some men,it seemed to be a click moment.Nonetheless, questions lurked in many women’s minds. Were these outspoken men truly embracing feminism or were they simply appalled by one horrendously awful incident? And, if they were claiming to be feminists, what exactly did that mean? Were they seeking to break down a rigid binary that positions men and women as gender opposites, or were they instead focusing more narrowly and working to end the behaviors that too often result in sexual assault?

Most women, whether part of the organized women’s movement or not, wanted to support this apparent groundswell of pro-feminist and anti-rape sentiment. At the same time, suspicion and distrust began to kick in. After all, the past four decades have seen overt anti-feminist backlash and the development of men’s groups that are hostile to the idea of women’s equality and the breakdown of ironclad gender categories. For example, Promise Keepers, an evangelical Christian men’s group, reinforces the notion of male dominance within (always heterosexual) marriage and family life. Secular groups such as the National Coalition for Men are equally male supremacist and promote the idea of male victimhood, purporting that women batter men and boys as frequently as the reverse. Their response to the renewal of the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) speaks volumes: “Boys, men and fathers increasingly will die at the hands of their violent mothers and wives as our worthless elected officials rush to issue press releases and pat themselves on the back, claiming victory for having ended ‘the War on Women.’”

Proof that women batter as frequently as men? It’s nowhere to be found.

In addition, a mythopoetic movement inspired by poet Robert Bly and Jungian psychologist Joseph Campbell encourages the cultivation of men’s “inner warrior” and masculine voice. While some mythopoets are apolitical, other mythopoetic strands posit men as sexism’s primary victims—yes, trumping women—because of socially imposed rules about gender roles and propriety. This ideology has led them to oppose the notion of gender as learned performance (a theory put forward by Judith Butler, Michel Foucault and others) and instead champion a worldview in which male and female are distinct species.

But let’s get back to the burgeoning movement of 21st-century male feminists, purportedly egalitarian individuals and groups that are taking aim at misogyny and the double standard that continues to limit who and what men and women—however they self-define--can be.

Sonia Ossorio, president of the New York City Chapter of the National Organization for Women, welcomes the spike in men’s involvement. “Just as in politics, you can’t get anything accomplished if you don’t work both sides of the aisle,” she says. What’s more, she says women’s attitudes toward men have shifted. “The Catholic Church abuse scandal ignited a change and people now realize that men can be victims, that abuse is as hurtful to men and boys as it is to women and girls.”

Recognizing this, writer and advocate Mandy Van Deven says, is an outgrowth of efforts to promote intersectionality, the linking of oppressions. “The idea of gender equity did not really permeate broad activist circles until the last decade or so,” she says. ”When intersectionality became more of an organizing principle among liberal and radical activists, when people began to talk more about social justice as a multi-issue movement, it opened the door for men to feel more comfortable in feminist spaces.” The downside, she says, is that movements are sometimes taken over by those who have traditionally held power, and money and attention can then get diverted from programs benefiting women and girls and given to programs run by and for men. Lastly, she says, some men who take on feminist issues “act as if they’re special and more deserving of accolades” than the women who’ve been working on these concerns for decades.

Still, for the most part, contemporary feminists are eager to include men in their organizing efforts. Choice USA, a national reproductive justice group, recently launched Bro-Choice, “to disrupt the dominant narrative that reproductive justice is a woman’s issue,” and groups including NOW and NARAL Pro-Choice America encourage male involvement and gender equity.

It’s an increasingly palatable message, according to New York artist Linda Stein. Stein has created a traveling exhibit/lecture that she calls “The Fluidity of Gender.” During the past three years she has taken the project to 16 colleges and museums across the US. “There are now men who are very much on the same page as feminists. They are trying to understand feminism and are open to listening and learning from women. I’ve seen a big change in attitude which I think comes from increased talk about bullying. My audiences are young, old, male, female, straight, gay and questioning, and they are getting the fact that masculinity and femininity are fluid categories. They get that it is not horrible for a man to be nurturing and raise a child. Obviously, we are nowhere near gender equity but each year I do this presentation I hear less hostility from men.”

Stein finds this development extremely encouraging. Nonetheless, she is acutely aware that it is essential for men to reach out to other men and boys. While numerous programs run by men, for men, exist, most are confined to stopping sexual violence, with only baby steps being taken to deconstruct mainstream ideas about gender or promote the fluidity Stein champions.

The exception is academia, where groups like the American Men’s Studies Association are ostensibly working—at least on paper and on screen-- to encourage the questioning of gender norms and theorize about how best to advance “the critical study of men and masculinity.”

But even this can be contested terrain. A.B., an untenured professor at a college affiliated with the City University of New York, reports that despite efforts to eradicate sexism and promote tolerance on campus, progress has been glacial—and not just in the classroom.

Unlike Linda Stein’s perception, A.B. says that male faculty “who claim to be feminists—and who write books and articles and deliver papers on the subject-- are often the worst colleagues. At least at the colleges in which I have worked, it seems as if the more vocal they are about their feminism, the more willing they are to use gender discrepancies to their own advantage. They delegate more service work and more work-intensive teaching assignments to female colleagues, and simultaneously congratulate themselves (not to mention increase their own opportunities for promotion through increased time for research) for offering such 'opportunities' to them. In many cases, claiming feminism is just another way for them to see themselves as better than the average person on the street. Their sexism has moved underground, and is better cloaked, but it is still obvious.”

A.B. is not the only academic to be disgusted by the veiled sexism she has encountered. C.D., a psychology professor who asked that neither her name nor her college be revealed, says she has seen so-called feminist men pressure female colleagues to have sex, as if doing so will liberate them from the constraints of bourgeois convention. She says these encounters invariably result in awkward personal dynamics that hamper productivity and limit scholarly collaboration.

It’s the kind of stuff that makes you want to crawl into a hole or scream in despair, at least temporarily. But as the responses to Steubenville indicate, many men are beginning to ask themselves why so many of their brothers rape, batter their partners, and think themselves superior. The resources of several longstanding feminist men’s groups are helping them formulate answers and strategize about changing male behavior.

The National Organization of Men Against Sexism (NOMAS) is one of the oldest efforts. (It has changed its name from the National Organization for Men, to the National Organization for Changing Men, to the current name, NOMAS.)

Robert Brannon, a retired college professor and member of the NOMAS National Council, recalls that, "back in 1975, a professor named Sharon Lord taught a women’s studies class at a college in Knoxville, Tennessee. Male students attended the class and she gave them a project: to plan and carry out the first national conference on men and masculinity. The conference was a big success. The second conference, in 1976, was scheduled to take place at Penn State, but a week before it was supposed to begin Penn State kicked the event off campus because of a program stance supportive of gay rights. Everything moved to a Holiday Inn.”

By 1980, Brannon continues, it became clear to many conferees that an annual gathering organized by an ad hoc committee was insufficient and a call was issued to not only plan the next confab, but to create a men’s group that would be pro-gay, pro-feminist, anti-racist, and open to challenging prevalent gender stereotypes.

“Many of us who got involved early on had come through the civil rights movement and all of us had been influenced by it,” Brannon says. “We wanted to be on the side of justice and right. At the same time we realized that if we were just a men’s auxiliary to the women’s movement, we weren’t offering much. We began to see the average Joe as a victim of sex roles. The demands on men—to control our emotions, to focus on work, to not have intimate friendships with other men—impoverishes us and we can live happier and more fulfilled lives if we unlearn social roles regarding gender.”

Self-interest, as well as overarching support for women’s equality, became central organizing precepts for NOMAS and the many men’s groups that have formed over the past 35 years.

Ted Bunch is the co-founder of A Call to Men, a 10-year-old organization whose website says it, “works to create a world where all men and boys are loving and respectful and all women and girls are valued and safe.”

“We were born out of the battered women’s movement,” Bunch told AlterNet. “Myself and Call co-founder Tony Porter were working with domestic violence offenders. From that work it became clear to us that men who batter have a lot in common with men who don’t. Batterers use violence selectively and direct it at women. It seemed to us that these guys had good anger management skills—they did not hit their bosses or coworkers. They could control themselves but had been taught to see women as objects and as property. This idea is embedded in most men, even those who don’t assault women. Most hold a belief that they should have the final word, that females are there to serve them.”

During the 10 years of Call’s existence Bunch estimates they’ve spoken to 100,000 boys and men in 30 states and seven countries. “We were forced to learn how to package and translate the message in a way that men can receive it,” he says. “It can’t sound like an indictment.” One of the keys, he adds, is speaking openly and honestly. “I talk about times when I wanted to tell my son not to cry, but then realized that he needed to express his hurt and fear. We talk about the fact that men can show anger; that’s the one emotion that is safe for us, but we have not been given the okay to show other feelings.”

Call to Men asks why this is so and also questions the role of homophobia in keeping men from bonding. “Homophobia stops men from getting involved in work that is supportive of women,” he says. “It makes us afraid to embrace each other or give affection to our sons. In addition, when you address homophobia you always get into bullying and challenge it since the bullied are often boys who don’t present with hyper-masculinity.”

Maintaining good relationships with women’s groups, Bunch says, is central to all Call's work. “When we first formed the women we reached out to were welcoming but a bit skeptical,” Bunch says. “Why would men do this work? Could they trust us? There was a fear that we’d do what men often do: Come in, take over, and say, ‘Thank you, little lady.’ Our board is majority women and we now have a good track record so this reaction has lessened.”

A Call to Men is presently working with coaches to discuss better ways to train athletes and model behavior that is less aggressive and rigid. CBS sportscaster James Brown and Baltimore Ravens’ defensive lineman Chris Canty are working with Bunch and other Call staff to reach this demographic.

Like A Call to Men, the Washington, DC-based Men Can Stop Rape challenges male supremacist attitudes and develops strategies to support non-violence. Through Men of Strength (MOST) clubs, mentors work with middle- and high-school-aged boys to discuss healthy relationships, empathy, machismo and essentialist beliefs about gender. The year-long program brings football players, computer geeks and troublemakers together and gives them 45 to 60 minutes a week to think and talk about masculinity. According to Patrick McGann, director of strategy and planning, “The goal is to make these young guys become change-makers in their schools, families and communities.”

The group has also launched a poster campaign of attention-grabbing artwork that is visible at bus stops and train stations throughout the District of Columbia, to make men aware of what they can do to stop abuse and harassment. ”When Karl kept harassing girls on the street, I said: Stop being a jerk. I’m the kind of guy who takes a stand,” says one poster. Another depicts a crowded party: “When Nicole couldn’t lose that drunk guy, I called her cell to give her an out,” says another.

Schools need to pay for MOST’s 24-week curriculum -- something cash-strapped programs often cannot do -- but Men Can Stop Rape also promotes dialogue through social media and its website. In addition, a grant has enabled it to partner with youth-advocacy agencies across the US to create a Healthy Masculinity Action project. The project is hosting town hall meetings throughout the country and sponsoring campus conversations to explore gender roles and promote women’s equality and non-violence. “We are basing the project on the assumption that the majority of men can be made to care about these issues and will do something to change their behavior. It’s about persuading men to care and act,” McGann says.

These three organizations are far from alone. Over the past few years, an array of websites have sprouted up, making clear that men are eager to engage with women around gender, sex roles, feminism, patriarchy and sexism. They include: XYonline.net, malefeminists.com, voicemalemagazine.org, blackmasculinities.com, goodmenproject.com, everydayfeminism,com and the Five Minute Feminist on YouTube.

Judge Denounces Obama’s Bizarre Opposition to Plan B Contraception As Harming Women and Teens

Katie McDonough, Salon — Sat, 11 May 2013 11:32:00 -0700

Administration's request called "frivolous," "politically motivated," and “something out of an alternate reality”

United States District Court Judge Edward Korman on Friday denied the Obama administration’s request to delay a court order to make emergency contraception available over-the-counter, calling the appeal “frivolous,” “scientifically unjustified” and “taken for the purpose of delay.” This isn’t the first time Korman has had harsh words for the administration’s politically motivated push to keep safe birth control off the shelves.

Choice excerpts from Korman’s cutting ruling (emphasis mine):

On the administration letting politics get in the way of safe medical care:

On April 5, 2013, I issued an order directing the defendants — the Commissioner of Food and Drugs and the Secretary of Health and Human Services — to grant the Citizen Petition filed by the plaintiffs and make levonorgestrel-based emergency contraceptives available over-the-counter and without point-of-sale or age restrictions. I did so because the Secretary’s action was politically motivated, scientifically unjustified, and contrary to agency precedent, and because it could not provide a basis to sustain the denial of the Citizen Petition.

Calling the administration’s justifications for appeal “something out of an alternate reality”:

I pause here before proceeding to a discussion of the merits of the motion to comment on the defendants’ analysis of the manner in which drug approval applications should be made. Thus, they tell me that “[a] drug approval decision involves scientific judgments as to whether statutory and regulatory factors are met that warrant deference to those charged with the statutory responsibility to make those decisions. The agency alone has the necessary information and scientific expertise to assess the data and information required to make a determination that a drug is safe and effective …” Yet, in something out of an alternate reality, the defendants seek a stay to pursue an appeal that would vindicate the Secretary’s disregard of the very principle they advocate.

On how Obama-supported point-of-sale and age restrictions will harm women and adolescents:

[W]hile there are some retail establishments that are open for longer hours than their pharmacy counters, the unjustifiable point-of-sale restrictions left in place under the Teva-FDA agreement will continue to present barriers to all women. Many women do not live near a store with an on-site pharmacy, and even when the drugstore or comparable facility has an on-site pharmacy, the difference between the hours of the pharmacy and the store itself is often significant …
Moreover, the Teva-FDA agreement does nothing to relieve the burden on younger adolescents who still require a prescription from a physician in order to obtain an emergency contraceptive.

The rest of Korman’s ruling is just as right-on, and well worth a read.

You can find the full statement here.

Katie McDonough is an assistant editor for Salon, focusing on lifestyle. Follow her on Twitter @kmcdonovgh or email her at kmcdonough@salon.com.

My First Baby Was Born with a Rare Syndrome -- I'm Pregnant Again, and Worried About What Could Happen

Heather Kirn Lanier, Salon — Fri, 10 May 2013 16:20:00 -0700

My first baby was born with a rare syndrome. Now pregnant with my second, I wonder: What could happen this time?

The technician pushed the plastic wand onto my belly, and there on the TV screen were white blobs and filaments in a black cone.

“There’s the cervix,” she said, as though I’d driven two hours to get the inside scoop on my cervix. “And there’s the placenta.” She ran a computer curser over a fuzzy white mass.

But I wanted a profile or a full-body shot, some image that would tell my brain, Yes, there’s a person in there, which would tell my heart, Yes, you can risk loving this person.

Right now it was still an it, and I still called it “Baby X.” Right now I still imagined a giant mathematical variable in my pelvis, offering a host of faceless unknowns.

But the tech held off on the print-worthy images and dwelled instead on organs. A flapping, four-chambered heart. A black marble of a spleen. Look, there’s the brain: two hemispheres inside a globe.

Finally, the face. “There,” she said.

Except it was not the usual ultrasound profile of sloping forehead, dainty nose, and chin. It was a square shot, and I saw deep and ghostly eyeball cavities. The angular bone structure of the cheeks. A black opening for a mouth, gaping wide. It was a skull in my uterus. A Halloween icon floating in my womb.

The tech almost sounded apologetic. “They look pretty skeletal at this stage,” she said.

I would have to remain patient, and it was hard. My first child already required regular trips to a children’s hospital. She will probably never live on her own. Could I love yet another child whose life is not necessarily the typical promise of a sunshiny future but a gray, worrying question mark?

* * *

A life, by definition, possesses the end of itself. This was what I’d thought 18 weeks back, when my husband and I started trying for our second kid. And this was what I’d thought two years before, when we’d tried for our first. But with my first, I was only thinking about the coexistence of life and death in some abstract way. O Life. O Death. The nouns could be capitalized and personified as in some shoddy poem.

Then, two and a half months into my first child’s life, a doctor suggested we get her chromosomes studied.

And three months into her life, the nurse explained what she was missing.

And four months into her life — into my life as her parent — I had the courage to Google her diagnosis, Wolf-Hirschhorn syndrome. I learned what that missing bit of her fourth chromosome could mean. Developmental delays and cognitive disabilities, yes. But also life-threatening seizures. Potential kidney failure. And a 1-in-3 chance of dying before age 2.

So with my second child, when I say I thought about how a life also possessed its end, I was not just waxing philosophical. I was holding everything I knew to be true about parenting — that it seemed as crazy as standing at the edge of a precipice and jumping off — and I was baffled by my urge to do it again.

Now here was my second baby. Not a plump, cooing thing, but a skull staring back at me, sending a message I’d hoped the ultrasound would erase: You are right to fear. Beneath life — beneath flesh and dew and blood — is always bone, is always death.

Shortly after the ultrasound, I bought Emily Rapp’s book, “The Still Point of the Turning World,” which had just come out. It was an odd choice for an anxious parent. Rapp’s memoir tells the story of mothering a child with Tay-Sachs disease. When I carted the book to my midwife’s office, with its cover image of a sweet baby’s face, I hoped nobody would ask what it was about. But I was spending nights sleepless and fretting about all the terrors and unknowns that faced my second child. I needed camaraderie, and I chose that of a mother who walked an even tougher road than mine.

* * *

My first daughter’s chromosomal deletion was not hereditary, so some think I shouldn’t worry, but the randomness of her syndrome has made the world all the wackier, all the less trustworthy. There are 22 other chromosomes that could have deletions, or additions, or extra copies. There are single genes that could wreak havoc on a body. There are too many ways to get sick, to die.

Since having Fiona, I’ve learned about not only genetic syndromes but also babies born with cords around their necks, babies born too early, babies with intestines on the outsides of their bodies. Babies and babies and babies who live nothing like most of the babies I see posted on friends’ Facebook walls, who are fat and smiley and cooing and/or babbling and/or doing what I’m told statistically most babies do.

I could have gotten an amnio, which at the very least would have told me if my unborn child has any chromosomal deletions or additions. But that would have put me in a 1-in-300 risk for miscarriage, and my daughter already has a syndrome that only 1-in-50,000 babies has. I see myself in the big, fat “1” on top of any fraction, no matter how large the denominator.

Besides, science can’t offer certainty. An amnio only reveals so much. As a geneticist once told my friend whose results came back normal, “Some things we can test for. Some things we can’t. But that’s what you sign up for when you sign up to be a parent.”

“I didn’t sign up for this,” I cried into a cellphone just a few weeks after learning about Fiona’s diagnosis. I was pumping gas, and the world, including the gas station, was filled with able-bodied people, and my child was not one of them, was now slated for a swallow-study to see if she could even handle her own spit without slowly killing herself.

But I was wrong — I had signed up for it. Or at least the possibility of it. I just didn’t know.

You, Aspiring Parent, thought you were signing up for burping and night feedings and fingerprints on your windows, for Little League and pubescent door slams and an eventual first day of college. You weren’t. You signed up for uncertainty. You signed up to stand at the edge of a cliff and jump off. You signed up for love, too, but whenever you sign up for love, you’re also signing up for the risk of loss, for the possibility of heartbreak.

And maybe that’s the reason why I carted Emily Rapp’s memoir to my midwife’s appointments. I needed to hear from a woman who intimately knew this risk, this heartbreak, a woman who understood the real contract a person signs when she or he looks at another and says, “Yes, let’s become parents.”

In one essay, Rapp talks about one of the most isolating sentences she hears as a mother to a Tay-Sachs kid: I cannot imagine. Within three years of life, a child with Tay-Sachs will die. She challenges people to imagine this kind of parenting. “In the end there are no limits to what one can imagine. It’s how humans are built; it’s how we survive. You could care for a dying child if you had to, because that’s what love would require.”

I cannot imagine having one of those babies I see posted on Facebook. A baby who does not raise alarms with her very first breath. Maybe because my first baby has a neurologist and a cardiologist and an orthopedist and a nephrologist and an early interventionist, a geneticist and a homeopath and a naturopath and a speech pathologist and an occupational therapist and a physical therapist. Maybe because my baby, while delightful and happy, will never reside in any realm of typical. Will always put those of us who love her in a precarious spot of worry, hovering over her bed at night to see if that strange breathing is a seizure, monitoring her kidneys with ultrasounds to see if there’s a warning of failure, scanning the workings of her heart to see if the hole closes or widens or just holds still.

I cannot imagine mothering a child who looks and feels and behaves as most babies do, who is dewy and fat with the promise of the future. A child who I can expect will outlive me, will drive cars away from me, will write her own bills for a house without me. Instead, as my belly button pops out and as my tent-shaped maternity T-shirts become too short, it seems more important to imagine a child whose days are not just unknown but clearly numbered, a child who challenges his mother to reinterpret much of what she knows about being human.

* * *

This year, at least three children with my daughter’s syndrome have died. One died just last week. A friend wrote that her thoughts went to all the families who parent kids with this syndrome because we “appreciate these fragile lives and know the importance of embracing every moment.”

To which I thought of all the times I did not embrace the moment. The times I checked my email while Fiona whined for me to play with her. The times I prayed she’d just go down for a nap so I could get this or that done.

Because my daughter’s syndrome doesn’t come with an absolute life end — because while some die at birth, others live on to middle age — I can forget how fragile she is. I can sometimes pretend I don’t live with zero ground beneath me.

Can you really hold the preciousness of a life every day, every minute? Is it possible to carry the true weight of our lives — which is the fragility of them — if we aren’t intimately reminded?

For my second child, the first ultrasound came back “normal.” No red flags. All systems go.

Still, I’ve worried.

“You’re afraid to let yourself love this baby,” an intuitive friend said after I described my sleepless nights.

“Yes,” I said, and teared up. The thought hadn’t occurred to me.

I love my daughter with a hugeness I’ve never known before, but it is a hard love. She is a clapping, music-loving joy, and at almost 2 years old, she is also a floppy, willowy creature who cannot make most vowels or consonants and is nowhere near crawling, much less walking. And loving her breaks my heart open. It can hurt almost as often as it heals. That I’m afraid to love again seems cold and cruel to the little one in my middle, whose nails are growing and whose organs are all present and whose eyes are just starting to open.

I crave the illusion of certainty, the pat on the shoulder and the words, “Everything will be OK,” and the courage, no, the naiveté to believe them.

About two months after the first ultrasound, I told the midwife that I couldn’t shake my worry. She thought she was being kind when she ordered a second ultrasound, which she called “therapeutic.” It would put my mind at ease.

The universe is a tricky bastard. It bit my quest for certainty and spit it back at me. The results indicated, not just a “too-big” baby, but a baby with a larger-than-expected abdomen. There were now health concerns. It took several versions of the question to get the midwife to answer, but eventually she told me the worst-case scenarios. A gastrointestinal issue, maybe. Microcephaly, maybe. The latter diagnosis, I knew, could be a marker for a host of other problems.

“Well, now I’m terrified,” I said.

To which the midwife said, “Yeah, it’s terrifying.”

* * *

Rapp makes clear that any lesson she learns as a result of mothering her son is not the reason he exists. “The meaning of Ronan’s life was not to teach me; we often say this about people who defy our notions of normal and I find it pathetic, patronizing … Ronan would have his own path that had nothing to do with me, and I would try to understand it in my limited way.”

Yes, yes, yes, I thought, and furiously underlined. Though my heart has repeatedly broken open as a result of mothering my daughter, she does not exist to transform me. She has her own purpose. Still, the experience of loving Ronan teaches Rapp lessons, many of which I’m slowly learning myself. For example: “It took this experience to help me see clearly, to understand that the bulk of the popular parenting advice champions an approach to living that completely complies with achieving bogus standards of success.” More furious underlining.

Rapp mentions the mothers who make “products” of their kids, the moms for whom parenting becomes yet another venture at which to succeed. In such a case, the child is not a person but a measurement of one’s success. But the limits of Ronan’s body refuse to offer Rapp the back-patting moments of typical modern parenting. Walked before age 1! Started signing at 9 months! Breast-fed immediately after delivery, that’s how smart he is! Instead, Rapp’s son played with his toys in reverse.

At 0 days old, my daughter already came out delayed. She was born at 41 weeks gestation, and some exam of her body’s natural movements had her pegged at 37. She was so small she didn’t even land on the growth curve — she fell somewhere off the bottom margin of the page.

Before Fiona’s diagnosis, I was susceptible to this achievement style of parenting. I’d read birth stories, for instance, from women who forewent the epidural and bragged that their children were consequently “so aware” and scored “perfect 10′s” on the Apgar. A perfect 10? That was like an A-plus. I was hell-bent on a natural birth from then on.

But my daughter never measured up to doctors’ expectations.

“Did you smoke?” a nurse asked within an hour of Fiona’s life? “Were you on any drugs?”

“It’s either bad seed or bad soil,” one of the hospital pediatricians said, meaning either I was the bad soil or my daughter was the bad seed.

Just as parents were asking me, “So is she sitting up yet? Eating solid food yet?” and on and on, I was learning that my child might never do these things, that to do even one of these things would be, not a given of development, not an aspiration to do “early” so that I could brag and say, “Look how smart,” but a major achievement that, if she’d do them at all, she’d do them far later than expected.

And the only way to survive this, at least with any joy, was to see what Rapp also had to see: that the desire to approach parenting as a race, as a series of achievements measured by the output of one’s kid, is a cultural sickness. That there is a deeper, more transformative way to parent.

I’ve found no greater teacher of this transformative way of parenting than Rapp. And maybe I’m reading her book while pregnant to highlight the real power of parenting. It is not to raise children who outlive us (Rapp: “My son was being destroyed, every minute of every day, by the lack of one stupid enzyme”), not to raise children who will eventually become the future as long as we teach them well à la Whitney Houston.

I think it’s to be brought to our knees with a love we have no choice over. To surrender to that love. To say, Yes, yes, yes, I will love whomever we find ourselves holding. Nothing seems to underscore this love more than the possibility of its loss.

Rapp: “What makes the situation with my son so horrible is that one can imagine such a loss; if you allow yourself to feel great love (which is not an option when you are rocketed by love for a child, a connection that allows for no option but to be all-in), then you must imagine gutting loss. You cannot have one without the other. To fully live is to tremble, always, on the lip of losing everything, which is why true love — of a child, of a parent, of a partner, of a friend, of a pet — is so terrifying, and why many people never allow themselves to feel it fully.”

Yeah, it’s terrifying, the midwife had said after my second ultrasound, and that was about all she could say, other than, Come back in three weeks for another measurement.

* * *

Today, at my third and hopefully final ultrasound, the first image I see surprises me. It’s not a scary skull, not a sweet profile, not even an indifferent blob of organ. As I crane my neck toward the computer screen, I immediately catch the intricate, long ripple of vertebrae up my child’s back. Her spine. It’s a tightly knit totem. A series of stepping stones. It seems holy. Evidence of my child’s life force. Each intricate bump is crucial, guarding the nerves as they weave through the spaces in the vertebrae to find the organs, to communicate to the brain.

I often feel crazy for doing this. I often shake my head at myself, amazed and baffled that I’ve asked to do this a second time: to stand at the precipice and jump.

But here I am. Seven-plus months pregnant. Having no DNA test to tell me who lurks behind the stretched skin of my abdomen. Having only one “normal” ultrasound and one “big-belly” ultrasound and no other clue, really, as to what this life holds, the life that will now become my responsibility.

My new daughter has shown me a skull beneath her face, and she has shown me a dazzling spine. She’s shown me that she possesses the inevitability of death, yes. But she is also living. And she is mine.

And as I stare at that third ultrasound while the technician clicks and measures her femur bone, her head circumference, her supposedly giant abdomen, I think this without even consciously meaning to: “Are you OK, my love? Are you OK in there?”

The white blobs and filaments in the black cone do not answer me. And yes, that is terrifying. But I notice she is no longer Baby X. She is “my love.” Whatever loving her entails.

Heather Kirn Lanier is the author of the memoir, "Teaching in the Terrordome: Two Years in West Baltimore with Teach For America." She blogs about her daughter, Fiona, at starinhereye.wordpress.com.

Cleveland Horror Caps Week of Violence Against Women

Leslie Savan, The Nation — Fri, 10 May 2013 12:06:00 -0700

These tales of misogyny should jolt us shine a stronger light on the violence against women that’s always there beneath the surface.

In just the last few days, we’ve seen a series of news stories involving violence against women. The violence comes in different forms -- physical, psychological, financial -- and from different quarters: a former school-bus driver in Cleveland, the NRA convention in Houston, the military, congress. And so it’s not surprising that the media, as usual, is delivering these stories as unrelated incidents. But arriving almost simultaneously, these tales of misogyny should jolt us all to connect the dots and to shine a stronger light on the violence against women that’s always there, just below the surface.

The story of the three Cleveland women who were found alive after being held captive (and, by all accounts, raped, beaten and bound) in a neighbor’s house for 10 years is the most shocking. The suspect, Ariel Castro, 52, reportedly let them outside only twice in all that time. Michelle Knight was 20 when she disappeared in 2002, Amanda Berry had been reported missing in 2003 when she was 16, and Gina DeJesus vanished at age 14 in 2004 on her way home from school. Berry’s mother died in 2006 of what friends say was “a broken heart” less than two years after a psychic on "The Montel Williams Show" told her Amanda was dead. DeJesus’ mother believed her daughter had been sold into the sex trade. On Monday, Berry and her 6-year-old daughter (possibly fathered by Castro) escaped with the help of neighbors Charles Ramsey and Angel Cordero. The other women came out shortly after. Berry and DeJesus are now home, while Knight remains in the hospital.

As this story unfolds, it will serve as fascinating cable TV filler: We’ll learn more of the horrific details and get to know the victims, their friends and families, and the suspect; we’ll urge neighbors to keep a closer eye on each other; and hopefully we’ll learn why the police didn’t follow earlier leads. But this shouldn’t be treated as just the latest incredibly sad and sensational crime story, as if it were devoid of social and political context -- or unrelated to the other news of anti-women violence that accompanied it this week.

When I first saw the photo of a freed Amanda Berry with her sister and daughter, and tried to imagine the women’s unimaginable captivity, I couldn’t get another set of images out of my mind -- that of the "Ex,” a target mannequin that squirts blood when you shoot her.

The Ex (variously called the "Ex-Girlfriend" and “Alexa”) is a large-breasted white woman, her clothes partly ripped off, and blood dripping from her mouth down her cleavage. The mannequinwas sold with other “bleeding zombie targets” at the NRA convention in Houston last weekend. A target mannequin that looks like Obama painted green (one happy customer calls him “Barry” in a video that has been removed) also made the news. Buzzfeed reported that the NRA asked the vendor, Zombie Industries, to remove it from display, but it continued to be sold, a reminder of the racism that fuels the pro-gun paranoia. But the NRA didn’t object to displaying the Ex, and she still appears on the company’s website, where one commenter writes, “This Zombie Bitch is awesome, reminds me of a girl I knew in High School.”

Up until yesterday Amazon was also selling the $89.99 product. (“Great for a bachelor party!” read the only five-star review. “This was a very original, cool way to kick off a bachelor party for a firearm enthusiast, such as myself.”)

Noting that "The Ex shooting target turns violence against women into a joke and promotes the idea that men should want to kill their ex-wives or ex-girlfriends,” the activist group Ultra Violet petitioned Amazon to stop selling it. In less than 24 hours, 63,000 people signed and the Ex was gone.

A similar, if real-life, ex target was Grimilda Figueroa, the former wife of kidnap suspect Ariel Castro. Castro was accused of beating Figueroa, breaking her nose twice, knocking out a tooth, dislocating her shoulders and threatening to kill her and their children, according to a filing in Cuyahoga County Domestic Relations Court. The filing also said that Castro “frequently abducts [his] daughters and keeps them from mother/petitioner/legal custodian.”

Figueroa’s brother, Jose Figueroa, told RadarOnline that in 1996, Grimilda and her children fled to a battered women’s shelter. “If she stayed with Ariel, he would have killed her,” Jose said. “She had gone to the hospital and called the police many times but they never did anything.” (Grimilda remarried and moved out long before Castro allegedly kidnapped the three women; she died of cancer last year.)

If Jose Figueroa’s account is accurate, his sister may have saved her life and her children’s, as so many abused women do, by finding refuge in a women’s shelter. But, as learned this week, men who abuse women will be able to corner them even more easily: The sequester is cutting some $20 million of funding for women’s shelters and protection programs over the next year.

Like all sequester cuts that don’t involve airplane delays, the cuts to shelters are not making the national news, but they are locally. From KSL.com in Utah:

Julee Smith, the director of Your Community Connection in Ogden, said she works with people every day who are running from violent situations. She said many abuse victims need a place to stay, and due to the lack of funding, she has had to start turning them away,
“We literally had a lady call, she had four children and begged to get in our shelter,” Smith said. “She said, ‘I have 45 minutes to get out.’ And we said ‘We’re sorry, we don’t have any room.’ And then the police call and say that she has been abused again.”

Tim Murphy of Mother Jones cites other shelters and domestic violence programs that are being reduced or completely eliminated in Louisiana, Kentucky, Rhode Island, Oregon and other states. “The projections are bleak,” he writes.

Sen. Tom Harkin’s (D-Iowa) office estimates that 70,120 fewer domestic violence victims will have access to recovery programs and shelters; 35,900 fewer people will get help obtaining non-shelter services such as restraining orders and sexual assault treatment. Cuts to programs related to the Victims Against Crime Act will hurt another 310,574 people.

This increased danger to women has been made possible by the same pols, mostly Republicans, who are too scared of the NRA to pass an expansion of background checks, checks that would block sales of guns to anyone convicted of domestic violence, among other crimes.

And you know that big-shock Pentagon report released Tuesday that estimates 26,000 sexual assaults took place in the armed forces in 2012, a 37 percent increase over 2010? The report that also said that fewer than 10 percent of the sex-assault cases end with a conviction at court-martial, while 62 percent of victims who dare to report an assault are rewarded with retaliation?

Well, expect those stats to get worse. The sequester is putting on hold Department of Defense plans to hire 829 “sexual assault response coordinators.” Army Secretary John McHugh and Chief of Staff Ray Odierno told the Senate Armed Forces Committee last month that sequestration will hurt efforts to reduce sexual harassment and assault in the Army in many ways, from “slowing hiring actions to delaying lab results, which hinders our ability to provide resolution for victims.”

Of course, as we also learned this week, the value of some of those sexual assault response coordinators is questionable to begin with. On Sunday, Lt. Col Jeffrey Krusinski, the chief of the Air Force Sexual Assault Prevention and Response program, was arrested in a northern Virginia parking lot for sexual assault. A police report says that Krusinski, 41, was drunk and had grabbed a woman’s breast and buttocks. She fought him off, and his mug shot has the cuts to prove it.

While millions of men worldwide and the institutionalized male establishment at large still believe it’s their right to subjugate women, let’s not leave the impression that only women are victims. In the Pentagon report above, an estimated 13,900 of the 1.2 million active duty men said they had experienced some form of sexual assault in the past year (a far smaller portion than the active duty women). About a quarter of the victims of non-family child abductions are boys. And from 1994 to 2010, about four in five victims of intimate partner violence were female, according to the Bureau of Justice stats. But that leaves one in five victims to be men.

As if to prove the exception to the female-victim rule, there’s Jodi Arias. She was found guilty this week of first-degree murder of her ex, Travis Alexander. It was a particularly gruesome murder, with a heavy sexual backstory. A media circus, led by CNN’s sister channel HLN, has been making ecstatic noises over the trial’s every salacious detail.

When the Cleveland story broke Monday, it was hard to tell if HLN resented it for overshadowing the climax of its Jodi Arias witch-burning or welcomed it as a replacement now that the Arias case is winding down.

But instead of another media circus over the story in Cleveland, let’s see if the media and its audience -- that is, all of us -- can more seriously address the violence against women that is woven into our culture and that politicians in Washington threaten to make worse.

Mad Science or School-to-Prison? Criminalizing Black Girls

Sikivu Hutchinson, Black Agenda Report — Thu, 09 May 2013 11:33:00 -0700

In many American classrooms, black children are treated like ticking time bomb savages.

“Stereotypes about dysfunctional violent black children ensure that the myth of white children’s relative innocence is preserved.”

High stakes test question: A female science student conducts an experiment with chemicals that explodes in a classroom, causes no damage and no injuries. Who gets to be the adventurous teenage genius mad scientist and who gets to be the criminal led away in handcuffs facing two felonies to juvenile hall? If you’re a white girl check Box A, if you’re an intellectually curious black girl with good grades check Box B. When 16 year-old Kiera Wilmot was arrested and expelled from Bartow high school in Florida for a science experiment gone awry it exemplified a long American-as-apple pie tradition of criminalizing black girls. In many American classrooms black children are treated like ticking time bomb savages, shoved into special education classes, disproportionately suspended and expelled then warehoused in opportunity schools, juvenile jails and adult prisons. Yet, while national discourse on the connection between school discipline and mass incarceration typically focuses on black males, black girls are suspended more than boys of every other ethnicity (except black males). At a Georgia elementary school in 2012 a six year-old African American girl was handcuffed by the police after throwing a tantrum in the principal’s office. [i]Handcuffing disruptive black elementary school students is not uncommon. It is perhaps the most extreme example of black children’s initiation into what has been characterized as the school-to-prison pipeline, or, more accurately, the cradle to grave pipeline. Stereotypes about dysfunctional violent black children ensure that the myth of white children’s relative innocence is preserved.

“Black students do not, in fact, ‘offend’ at higher rates than their white and Latino counterparts.”

Nationwide, black children spend more time in the dean’s office, more time being opportunity transferred to other campuses and more time cycling in and out of juvenile detention facilities than children of other ethnicities. Conservatives love to attribute this to poverty, broken homes, and the kind of Bell Curve dysfunction that demonizes “welfare queens” who pop out too many babies. Yet there is no compelling evidence that socioeconomic differences play a decisive role in these disparities. [ii] The fact remains that black children are criminalized by racist discipline policies regardless of whether they’re privileged “Cosby kids” or are in foster care or homeless shelters. According to Daniel Losen and Russell Skiba, authors of the Southern Poverty Law Center’s “Suspended Education” report, “ethnic and racial disproportionately in discipline persists even when poverty and other demographic factors are controlled. [iii]

National research such as the Southern Poverty Law Center’s study and the Indiana Education Policy Center’s 2000 “The Color of Discipline” report has consistently shown that black students do not, in fact, “offend” at higher rates than their white and Latino counterparts.[iv] Middle class African American students in higher income schools are also disproportionately suspended. This implies that black students are perceived by adults as more viscerally threatening. “The Color of Discipline” report found that black students were more likely to be referred out of class for lower level offenses such as excessive noise, disrespect, loitering and “threat.”[v] According to the Southern Poverty Law Center, “race and gender disparities in suspension were due not to differences in administrative disposition but to differences in the rate of initial referral of black and white students.”

“The ‘feminist revolution’ is lily white and over-exposed.”

When it comes to black girls, the widespread perception that they are dangerous, hostile and ineducable is promoted and reinforced by mainstream media portrayals. Historically, black women have never been regarded as anybody’s “fairer sex” because white women have always been the universal standard for femininity, humanity, and moral worth. On contemporary TV and in film, heroic white women abound as “new” models of bold, adventurous, breakthrough femininity. Writing on “women’s” TV portrayals recently in the L.A. Times, Mary McNamara gushed about how the current crop of small screen female protagonists were complexly layered, daring departures from the typical crone, slut and mother roles of the past. According to McNamara, “TV's female leads are breaking ground with their unexpected choices. Thanks to the feminist revolution and TV's increasing ascendancy, women are allowed to make mistakes without paying the ultimate price. It's all quite refreshing.”

Yet once again the “feminist revolution” is lily white and over-exposed. The article hails characters from “House of Cards,” HBO’s swaggering white-fest “Girls” and “Homeland,” then blithely acknowledges that the female protagonists of these shows are all white and mostly middle class. Previous pieces from both the L.A. Times and the New York Times have saluted the rise of ass-kicking female adventurers like those in the “Hunger Games”, “Zero Dark Thirty” and (even) Pixar’s animated movie “Brave” as evidence that Hollywood is becoming more receptive to strong independent female characters.

But back in the image ghetto, substantive, much less starring roles, for women of color are still less abundant than Aunt Jemima’s head scarf. The endless parade of reality show swill featuring hyper-sexual “out of control” brawling black women has long dwarfed dramatic mainstream portrayals of black women’s lived experiences, ambitions and narratives.

Thus, Kiera Wilmot’s arrest and expulsion is a national travesty. It is an indictment not just of the inveterate racism and sexism of American public education but of an image industry that still loves to see black women doing mammy, Jezebel and welfare queen to white women’s heroic explorers.

***

i See Jeff Martin and Jeri Clausing, “Police Handcuff Georgia Kindergartner for Tantrum,Huffington Post, April 17, 2012, (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/04/17/police-handcuff-ga-kinder_n_1430749.html). (Accessed January 31, 2013).

ii See Daniel J. Losen and Russell J. Skiba, “Suspended Education: Urban Middle Schools in Crisis,” Southern Poverty Law Center, 2010, p. 8. “If we assume that Black and Hispanic poverty rates are similar in these districts (as they are nationally) and if we assume that Black males and females have similar exposure to poverty it becomes difficult to explain why suspension rates are so much higher for Black males than for both Hispanic males and Black females.” Losen and Skiba cite previous research that has not identified a link between socioeconomic background or poverty and high rates of suspension (e.g., Skiba, 2002, Wallace 2009, APA 2008).

iii Ibid.

iv Ibid. pp. 3-6. Losen and Skiba report that there has been a 9 point increase in black suspensions from 1973 to the present, such that “Blacks are now more than three times more likely to be suspended than whites.” Based on data from 18 districts nationwide they also concluded that white females were the least likely to be suspended and black males the most likely out of all racial and ethnic groups. See also, Russell J. Skiba, et al. “The Color of Discipline: Sources of Racial and Gender Disproportionality in School Punishment,” Indiana Education Policy Center, Policy Research Report: SR1, June 2000, pp. 1-26.

v See also Losen and Skiba, p. 10.

Top General's Unbelievably Idiotic Comment About Rape in the Middle of Military Rape Epidemic

Katie Halper, AlterNet — Wed, 08 May 2013 11:48:00 -0700

A Pentagon report revealed that sexual assault had jumped 35% in just 2 years. The military continues being clueless.

This has not been a great PR week for the military. On Sunday a serviceman was arrested for sexual assault. And in what sounds like an Onion headline, the sexual assaulter really was the chief of the Air Force's sexual assault prevention unit. Tuesday, a Pentagon report revealed that sexual assault had jumped from 19,000 cases in 2010 to 26,000 in 2012. That's an increase of 35%! Another highlight of Tuesday was testimony from the Air Force's top commander, Gen. Mark A. Welsh III, before the Senate Armed Services Committee. Welsh managed to trivialize sexual assault both by emphasizing how common it was in society outside of the military and comparing it to consensual sexual interactions. Welsh noted that 20% of women report they had been sexually assaulted,

“before they came into the military…. So they come in from a society where this occurs…. Some of it is the hookup mentality of junior high even and high school students now, which my children can tell you about from watching their friends and being frustrated by it.”

Wow. Welsh is a true renaissance man. A general and a social scientist who studies sexual behavior. Somehow, however, he fails to grasp that really subtle distinction between sex between consenting adults and rape. In all fairness, he's doing a great job representing the military, which is unable to recognize or respond to sexual assault and rape.

Sexual assault in the military is systemic and rampant, not an isolated incident. In fact, a woman serving in Iraq or Afghanistan is more likely to be raped by a fellow service member than to be killed in the line of fire. Since 2006, more than 95,000 service members have been sexually assaulted in the U.S. military. More than 86% of service members do not report their assault. Less than five percent of all sexual assaults are prosecuted, and less than a third of those cases result in imprisonment. There are an estimated 13,000 homeless female veterans in the U.S. and 40% of them reported experiencing sexual assault. An Air force brochure on sexual assault advises women how to respond to rape: “It may be advisable to submit [rather] than resist,” As Spencer Ackerman writes, "it does not offer instruction to servicemembers on not committing sexual assault. Prevention is treated as the responsibility of potential victims."

Instead of shifting the blame and responsibility onto victims, attributing the epidemic to the prevalence of sexual assault outside the military, or to so-called "hook up" mentality, the military needs to take responsibility and enact policy changes.

Did Make-Up Give My Wife Breast Cancer? The Ugly Truth Hidden by the Cosmetics Industry

John Wasik, The Washington Monthly — Wed, 08 May 2013 10:38:00 -0700

The virtually unregulated beauty industry puts potential carcinogens in their products. Then they shower us with pink ribbons.

When Kathleen felt a lump in her right breast she began a journey that millions have experienced—or, sadly, will experience. After a painful biopsy and other tests confirmed it was cancer, my wife was thrown into a cauldron of tears, doubt, and fear for herself and her loved ones. Our two daughters were then just eight and twelve.

Like many cancer patients, Kathleen also experienced a stranglehold of guilt. Was it something she did or didn’t do that fed the tumor? Was it the meat in our diet? Our water? The air? Her genes? I assured her that we couldn’t be at fault. We had banned soda pop and anything with high-fructose corn syrup from our house more than a decade before. We tried to eat organic food, we were transitioning to more vegetarian fare, and she did yoga and took regular walks. We didn’t even have cable.

After a test showed that Kathleen didn’t have the BRCA breast cancer gene, her surgeon, Dr. Sonya Sharpless, suggested that environmental factors might be implicated. But what could they be? Kathleen had already thrown out a bevy of household cleaning products and plastic containers.

Then she discovered the work of the Breast Cancer Fund, a San Francisco-based advocacy group that for the last ten years has been focusing on cancer-causing agents in personal care products. Through a coalition of health and environmental groups called the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics (of which the Breast Cancer Fund is the principal sponsor), the organization has been drawing attention to the fact that known carcinogens—substances like formaldehyde—are used as preservatives in everything from suntan oil to makeup. Kathleen frantically threw out her all her expensive Clinique and Shiseido cosmetics.

Did a lifetime of using cosmetics cause or contribute to Kathleen’s breast cancer? We don’t know. But here are some facts that every American woman and her loved ones should absorb. The European Union bans nearly 1,400 chemicals from personal care products because they are carcinogenic, mutagenic, or toxic to reproduction. But in the United States, the Food and Drug Administration entrusts safety regulation of cosmetics to a private entity that is housed and funded by the industry’s trade association. To date, this entity has found only eleven chemicals to be “unsafe for use in cosmetics.” The FDA has no oversight of cosmetics products before they come on the market and, unlike the EU, leaves it to the cosmetics industry to determine which ingredients should be banned.

Because the American cosmetics industry is largely self-regulated, American women have to worry that they may be exposed to all sorts of cosmetics ingredients that may be dangerous to their health. Without greater powers for the FDA to regulate cosmetics, there is just no way that people like Kathleen who have cancer, or those who fear getting it, can know for sure. Indeed, even while in the hospital cancer patients are exposed to cosmetic products that the FDA has never evaluated and that activist groups like the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics say contain known or suspected carcinogens.

This happened to Kathleen. During her first round of chemo in 2009, some volunteers at the hospital came calling with a little red bag that contained products from Clinique, Estée Lauder, and Del Laboratories. Everything from eyeliner pencils to blush was in the bag, accompanied by a brochure that provided helpful advice on skin care and wig purchases.

Her well-meaning visitors were part of the Look Good Feel Better program (LGFB), which involves 16,000 volunteers who hand out $10 million worth of personal care products every year to women being treated for cancer. Behind this effort is a Who’s Who of the personal care industry: Alberto Culver, Avon, Chanel, Coty, Aveda, Johnson & Johnson, Neutrogena, L’Oreal, LVMH, Mary Kay, Procter & Gamble, and Unilever, among others. The sponsors, as Kathleen learned from the brochure, are the American Cancer Society and the Personal Care Products Council (PCPC), the leading national trade association representing the global cosmetic and personal care products industry, which, through its tax-exempt foundation, kicked in $8.6 million to LGFB in 2011.

No doubt many women who are feeling awful about the loss of their hair, breasts, and dignity are grateful for these gifts from the cosmetics industry. But Kathleen, even though the chemotherapy by this point had caused her hair to fall out and turned her skin ghostly white, was not one of them. Upon reviewing the contents of her LGFB bag, she realized that several of the products in it contained parabens—chemicals that mimic estrogen and that according to the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics are linked to cancer. You can image how that made her feel.

For a while, fighting the cancer was all we could do. After her mastectomy, Kathleen’s chemo treatments proved so debilitating that she ended up in the emergency room and in isolation wards twice in December of 2009. The drugs in her body were robbing her of hemoglobin and she became dangerously anemic, a common side effects of blasting the entire bloodstream with
toxic chemicals.

Kathleen could barely walk. Her immune system was also in shambles and needed frontline antibiotics. We had to get rid of our houseplants for fear of infection. Meanwhile, I was trying to hold body and soul together even as I lost my main source of income as a contract columnist for Bloomberg News.

Once Kathleen began to recover from the trauma of the chemo I decided, however, to throw myself into answering a basic question: How is it, I wanted to know, that the FDA, which was created by the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act of 1938, leaves the regulation of cosmetics largely up to the cosmetics industry?

Start with a fact that is hardly a secret yet still little known by the public:the FDA does not have the authority to test cosmetics ingredients before they go on the market. This is explained right on its Web site: “FDA’s legal authority over cosmetics is different from other products regulated by the agency, such as drugs, biologics, and medical devices. Cosmetic products and ingredients are not subject to FDA premarket approval authority, with the exception of color additives.”

Instead, as the FDA’s site goes on to explain, “Cosmetic firms are responsible for substantiating the safety of their products and ingredients before marketing.” In other words, the industry is largely responsible for regulating itself. How good a job do they do?

There exists an obscure entity called the Cosmetic Ingredient Review. According to the industry, the CIR is responsible for ensuring the safety of cosmetic products. On its board sit nine voting members. The voting members are all academics, and, according to the CIR, they must meet the same conflict-of-interest requirements as individuals serving on FDA advisory committees. However, there is no independent way to verify what conflicts of interest might actually exist. As a private organization, the CIR is not subject to the Freedom of Information Act, as I found out when I tried to make a FOIA request. Nor will the CIR publicly disclose its budget.

“Since we are not a part of FDA, there is no obligation to provide information under FOIA,” Dr. F. Alan Andersen, the CIR’s director, explained in an email, adding, “The annual budget is not a matter of public record, so that information is not available.” According to a search of the Internal Revenue System’s database of tax-exempt organizations, the CIR has not filed a Form 990, which would contain at least its budget. It is accordingly not known whether the cosmetics industry pays the “experts” on the CIR, much less how much.

The CIR does admit that its overall funding comes from the industry’s main trade association, the Personal Care Products Council. The PCPC has filed Form 990, and it shows that in 2011, the organization paid Dr. Andersen, the CIR executive director, a total of $372,151 in wages and other compensation, including a performance bonus of $55,675. And the form shows that PCPC paid a total of $292,257 in employee compensation and contracting fees to a Mr. John Bailey, “a key employee who retired from the Council during 2011 because of his former employment with the FDA.” (John Bailey’s wife also received $49,930 for her part-time work with the council.) There is no breakdown, however, of what the PCPC may have paid the CIR’s expert panel.

The two organizations both list their mailing address as 1101 17th Street in Northwest Washington, D.C., though one is in Suite 300 and the other in Suite 412. In Suite 412, the CIR goes about its business, which does not include conducting any clinical studies or trials. “The panel does not conduct its own research,” spokesperson Lisa Powers explained in an email, “but carefully examines all of the currently available scientific data.”

The CIR discusses its findings at four meetings a year that are open to the public, and publishes the proceedings on its Web site. It also publishes reports in the peer-reviewed International Journal of Toxicology.

Does that mean you should rest assured that your blush won’t give you cancer or damage your unborn children? At least on one occasion, the CIR has pronounced cosmetics ingredients to be safe despite protests that there was no scientific basis for doing so. For example, in 2002, the CIR pronounced that it was safe for the industry to continue adding possible endocrine and reproductive disruptors known as phthalates to cosmetics marketed to women of childbearing age. This decision was based on what the Environmental Working Group characterized as the “ad hoc calculations” by one of the trade association’s scientists during the course of its proceedings.

But the more salient reality is that, regardless of the quality of its research, the CIR has no power over the industry that finances it. How often has the industry taken action to reformulate products that contain harmful chemicals? According to the PCPC, the trade organization does not “keep a record of products that have been reformulated or removed from the market as a result of a CIR review.” Of the 12,500 ingredients used in personal care products, only a handful are not used in the U.S.

By law, cosmetics companies are supposed to do some kind of research into the safety of their products before putting them on the market. “If the safety of an ingredient as used in a cosmetic product has not been established by CIR,” a PCPC spokesman stated, “a company must possess other information to substantiate the safety of the ingredient for its intended use and make that information available for inspection by FDA upon request.” But the FDA’s review of industry-sponsored research, if it happens at all, won’t occur until the product is already on the market.

For example, in recent years, a substantial controversy has arisen over the use of lead in lipstick. Lead can be a pretty serious substance. The Consumer Product Safety Commission banned the use of lead in house paint in 1977, due to the brain damage it has been proven to cause in children. Because of its neurotoxicity, leaded gasoline has been entirely banned in the U.S. since 1995. The FDA also bans the presence of lead in candy bars in concentrations greater than 0.1 part per million.

Yet the FDA never got around to even testing lead in lipstick until 2010. When it did, it found concentrations as high as 3.06 parts per million—or more than thirty times the maximum allowed in candy bars. Whether this is an unsafe level for lipstick users I’ll leave to others to dispute, but the point is, under the current regulatory regime, lipstick users were exposed to these concentrations of lead for decades without their knowing it and without the FDA ever conducting so much as one test. For now, at least, the FDA says the lead in lipstick is safe, though if I were a woman, I wouldn’t be licking my lips.

And what if the FDA does determine that a cosmetic product being sold on the market is unsafe? “FDA does not have the legal authority to order a recall of a cosmetic,” a spokesman explained. “However, FDA works with firms to ensure that voluntary recalls are effective.” One exception provided by the FDA’s statutory authority is for cosmetics products with ingredients that are “adulterated and misbranded.”

The FDA’s lack of regulatory authority over perfumes and other fragrances is also troubling. In 2010, the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics and the Environmental Working Group tested popular colognes and body sprays and found fourteen “secret chemicals not listed on the label.” These substances are linked to hormone disruption, skin irritation, and allergic reactions, according to several studies. The FDA did not test, much less ban, the products, which included American Eagle Seventy Seven, Chanel Coco Mademoiselle, and Britney Spears Curious.

It’s the same story with hair products. In August 2011, under pressure from consumer groups such as the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics, the FDA tested hair straighteners produced by a California company called Brazilian Blowout. The agency found high levels of formaldehyde, a known carcinogen, but did not request the manufacturer to pull the product off the market. The state of California is suing the company while the product remains on the market. The company has agreed to disclose the presence of formaldehyde in Brazilian Blowout, which was previously labeled “formaldehyde free.” In the case of hair products used in beauty salons across the country, which often contain formaldehyde and other toxins, the FDA has even more limited authority to regulate.

The only exception to this pattern of lax regulation is telling: the FDA does vigorously regulate imported cosmetics. Just between January 2000 and December 2011, the FDA stopped more than 14,000 shipments from various countries abroad. That information led me back to the FDA. I wanted to know if they at least had any evidence of personal care products harming people in the U.S.

As it turns out, the FDA does collect reports of adverse reactions to personal care products through its Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition Adverse Event Reporting System (CAERS). (Should you care to drop them an email, the address is CAERS@cfsan.fda.gov.)

The FDA was kind enough to let me read through 543 pages of complaints from users of different cosmetics products. People reported about products that burned their skin or caused their eyes to water, and that in some cases sent them to the emergency room. The names of the people involved were all redacted. I wondered how or if the agency was following up on these reports. Despite my queries, the FDA didn’t respond directly, instead referring me to their Web site, which doesn’t have the answers either.

Kathleen’s greatest fear when she was diagnosed with cancer was that our daughters, who were just then getting to the age where they would start to use cosmetics, would be at risk. Again, we can’t know for sure. But there is no doubt that the lax regulation of cosmetics exposes American girls and women—and men and boys as well—to an unknown health risk they do not need to be taking, even if definitive, unbiased science is not always available to evaluate each particular ingredient.

We know, for example, that the skin, our largest organ, easily absorbs cosmetic ingredients, safe or toxic. Repeated low-level exposures may accumulate through a person’s lifetime (such as lead in hair dyes and mercury in skin whiteners). Girls often start using cosmetics at a very young age, thereby increasing lifetime exposure. Puberty is a critical development time for both girls and boys, and exposure to reproductive and/or hormonal toxins often starts before.

So why doesn’t the American public demand that we at least take a precautionary approach, and not use ingredients in cosmetics until they are proven safe, instead of waiting to see how many people they harm?

One explanation is the pervasive corporate influence over how most Americans even think about cancer. Have you noticed all the feel-good advertising that hundreds of companies have adopted to make it appear that they are “working for the cure”? Often they do this by releasing merchandise in pink, the color that has been chosen to show support for breast cancer victims and research. Companies have jumped on the bandwagon to promote everything from pink guns to pink vodka to pink fried chicken. Even NFL players wear pink shoes during the breast cancer awareness period. Some critics call this phenomenon “pinkwashing.”

The first such campaign originated with the cosmetics giant Estée Lauder, which gave $1.5 million worth of pink ribbons away in 1992 to show support for breast cancer patients and research. Cosmetics manufacturers have been in the forefront of pinkwashing ever since. Avon, for example, sponsors the Avon Walk for Breast Cancer. And, of course, with those Look Good Feel Better bags, the whole industry associates itself with being behind a cure or palliative for a devastating disease—albeit one it may be exacerbating. Don’t worry about what’s in your rouge; the money you spend on it goes to “cancer research,” and meanwhile, using more cosmetics will make you “Feel Better.”

When I challenged the industry’s trade group to disclose what chemicals might be in those bags, the PCPC responded, “In an abundance of caution, certain types of products and ingredients, which may be used safely in products for the general public, may not accepted for use in the LGFB kits … each product accepted into the LGFB program is subject to FDA oversight and has undergone multiple levels of review including safety, quality and regulatory reviews by the manufacturer, and is re-evaluated by Council staff before being accepted for use in the kits.”

Yet as we’ve seen, FDA “oversight” is, to put it mildly, weak. To make sure it stays that way, the PCPC alone spent $809,000 in direct lobbying in 2011, according to its disclosures to the IRS, plus $933,955 in conferences, conventions, and meetings, and $785,000 in travel. Meanwhile the staff of its putative research arm, the CIR, serves at the pleasure of the industry.

As public awareness has grown of the links between environmental chemicals and cancer, at least some politicians have responded. One is Illinois Democratic Representative Jan Schakowsky, who in 2012 cosponsored the Safe Cosmetics Act. It would have banned the use of ingredients linked to cancer and reproductive disorders while also requiring companies to include complete ingredient labels on fragrances and salon products. Sponsored as well by Wisconsin Democratic Representative Tammy Baldwin, who was recently elected U.S. senator of Wisconsin, the bill received strong support from the Breast Cancer Fund, along with other consumer groups. Nonetheless, it received just one hearing in the Republican-controlled House, and never left committee. Schakowsky has reintroduced her bill again this year.

Meanwhile, the PCPC and other industry groups, after a $3.5 million lobbying campaign, seeded the introduction of a weak, pro-industry bill called the Cosmetic Safety Amendments Act of 2012. Introduced by New Jersey Republican Senator Leonard Lance last year, the legislation called for registering product manufacturing facilities, disclosing product ingredients, and reporting adverse events from product use (which, as noted above, is already done through the FDA’s adverse report-
ing system).

The bill favored the industry, because it didn’t give the FDA any meaningful power to take harmful products off the market, and rubber-stamped research from the industry-funded CIR. The Lance bill (which has since died) would also have preempted tough state laws such as those found in California, while the Schakowsky bill would not.

In voicing the industry’s support for the Lance bill, the PCPC issued a statement in April 2012. It asserted, without apparent irony, that “FDA regulation of cosmetics has protected the public for decades, and this landmark legislation will enhance protections for millions of American consumers.”

When I requested further comment from the PCPC, spokesperson Lisa Powers replied, “We support increased regulation and authority by FDA over cosmetics. This increased regulation should allow and require FDA to set safety levels on ingredients found in cosmetic and personal care products. We look forward this year to working with Members of Congress on both sides of the aisle on discussion of these issues.”

Schakowsky is optimistic she can reach a compromise with Republicans. “We’re hearing that there’s some possibility that something on cosmetics might move,” she told me in a telephone interview in mid-January. As of this writing, the legislation has not been allowed to come to a vote.

Research for this piece was generously supported with grants from the Nation Institute Investigative Fund, the Chicago Headline Club, and the National Press Foundation.

Why the "Sexually Pure Good Girl" Is a BS Myth That Screws Both Women and Men

Lindy West, Jezebel — Wed, 08 May 2013 10:30:00 -0700

Why the idea that there are two kinds of women — "good girls" and everyone else?

Everyone else on earth is as annoyed with "purity" as I am, right? The idea that there are two kinds of women—"good girls" and everyone else, and one of them is good for fucking and the other one is good for marriage and never the twain shall meet and zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz? How is this fulfilling for anyone? Enough.

I came across two things this week that hurt to read. The first was a dumb collection of dumb shit written by a dummy, entitled "Why Good Girls Have Become As Extinct As Unicorns" (NSFW). In it, the anonymous male author explains that modern women are disgusting sluts who deserve to be taken advantage of, so if you manage to find a "good girl" (ideally by grooming her from kindergarten onward), you should legally cleave to her and imprison her in your bungalow posthaste before some other dude snatches up "your" prize. You can always cheat on her later when she gets "boring," which she definitely will, because she's not a person, she's just a vagina. This is "the mindset of men in the 21st century." Deal with it, ladies.

The second painful thing I read today—an utterly gutting counterpoint to the first—was a speech by kidnapping and rape survivor Elizabeth Smart. Speaking at a Johns Hopkins human trafficking forum, Smart explained why she didn't try to run from her captors, or even cry for help when they took her out in public:

Smart said she "felt so dirty and so filthy" after she was raped by her captor, and she understands why someone wouldn't run "because of that alone."
Smart spoke at a Johns Hopkins human trafficking forum, saying she was raised in a religious household and recalled a school teacher who spoke once about abstinence and compared sex to chewing gum.
"I thought, 'Oh, my gosh, I'm that chewed up piece of gum, nobody re-chews a piece of gum, you throw it away.' And that's how easy it is to feel like you know longer have worth, you know longer have value," Smart said. "Why would it even be worth screaming out? Why would it even make a difference if you are rescued? Your life still has no value."

Smart's reluctance to fight for her freedom isn't the cause of her rape or her harrowing 9-month imprisonment (her captors hold those distinctions entirely), but it's possible that she might have been rescued sooner had she not been socialized to believe dangerous ideas about female virtue and worth. Smart, understandably, internalized the things she had been taught all her life: that her value was inextricable from her "purity," that a woman without value had no reason to live, and, more obliquely, that her life and her body weren't really her own anyway. So what was the point? Why live? Why fight? The myth of female purity—the idea that "good girls have become as extinct as unicorns"—could very easily have contributed to years more sexual slavery for Elizabeth Smart. Or her death.

Fuck all of that.

Girls and women, if no one has ever told you this before, or if you just have trouble believing it: you are good, you are whole, you are yours. You do not exist to please men, and your value as a human being is not contingent upon your sexual capital. "Purity" is a lie. Do not even worry about any of this garbage, because it's about as real as a fucking unicorn. And like my Nana always used to say, "Never take life advice from a grown man who believes that unicorns are 'extinct.'"

And this "good girl" shit isn't just limited to odious ding-dongs like dude-who-doesn't-know-the-difference-between-extinct-and-fucking-mythological. I know plenty of progressive, liberal, adult men who openly say they're looking for a "good girl"—who prioritize some paternalistic illusion of "self-respect" over personality and chemistry. And to those dudes, I say, HOW DO YOU NOT SEE HOW CREEPY THIS IS. Can you imagine if women went around saying they were just looking for a "good boy" and sometimes they "jokingly" scout kindergartens for promising baby virgins?!?!?! Groooooooooss!!!!!

To clear up any confusion, let's take a comprehensive look at female purity and why it is bullshit.

You Can Tell Something Is Bullshit If All of the Justifications for It Are Bullshit

Okay, guy, so why do you feel like you want/need/deserve to settle down with a "pure" woman? I'm genuinely listening.

"Oh, it's because sluts are gross."

Too vague. Do better.

"Well, their vaginas are real stretched out and big."

No.

"Ummmmm, they probably have a bunch of diseases?"

Easy fix! Setting aside the fact that plenty of women contract STIs from monogamous partners or during "safe sex," it sounds like your real problem here is with illness, not sex. So I assume you'd be fine dating a promiscuous woman who practiced safe sex and happened to be STI-free?

"No, because I want a girl who's traditional and family-oriented."

Having sex doesn't mean you don't want to have a family. It just means that you want to have sex.

"Yeah, but a slut is more likely to cheat on me."

Really? Then why do couples in the Bible Belt have such a high divorce rate?

"The devil, I guess?"

NOPE.

"I just can't stand the thought of her getting fucked by all those other guys."

So you're about to have sex with a woman you're attracted to, you really want to have sex with her, but all you can think about is her getting pounded by tons and tons of dicks? That sounds like an entirely different issue.

"No! I just mean that I struggle with the same powerlessness and insecurity that all human beings do, so as a coping mechanism I take advantage of our culture's patriarchal power structure and exorcize my feelings of worthlessness by perpetuating shame-based proprietary attitudes over women's bodies. Basically I'm obsessed with controlling women's lives because I can't control my own."

Oh, honey. I know.

Men Are Lying

Men can't actually care whether or not women are "pure," because there is no way for "purity" to be verified. It's just not a real thing, and chasing some phantom virtue for your entire life is a great way to ensure that you waste your goddamn life. By Professor Unicorn's own admission, above, even if you claim to be "pure" he will probably just assume you're lying, and even if you can somehow prove your purity he will get bored with you eventually anyway, because boner. This entire "conversation" is just an effort to rig a system in which men get to determine female worthlessness no matter the input. There is nothing you can do to be pure. Meanwhile, they get to do literally whatever they want with anyone, to anyone, at any time. The double standard is so blatant it's almost too boring to point out.

If you spend any time at all browsing body-positive Tumblrs, you'll notice that they're constantly invaded by men determined to insert their big, throbbing, veiny opinions into women's personal spaces. Queer women, fat women, women in pain, women trying to practice very basic self-care and sexual reclamation—they're all subject to unsolicited male assessment and exploited for male arousal. Women can't even escape sexualization in the context of attempting to make a statement about their own sexualization. It's relentless.

I got catcalled outside the coffee shop in the middle of writing this article—my brain mired in thoughts about purity and sexualization and objectification. A dude drove by in a car, leaned out the window, and yelled "EXCELLEEEEEENT!" (I will concede that it's possible he just mistook me for Rufus.) So what is it—am I supposed to be modest and pure, or do I become a sexual commodity as soon as I step outside in a belted muumuu and janky flip-flops? Well, the two aren't nearly as incongruous as they appear. A catcall is entirely about reminding you that you are not yours. The purity myth is entirely about reminding you that you are not yours. The fetishization of female purity in a world where catcalls are an acceptable form of communication telegraphs one thing very clearly:

"Women, stop sexualizing yourselves—that's our job, and you're taking all the fun out of it."

The sexualization of women is only appealing if it's nonconsensual. Otherwise it's "sluttiness," and sluttiness is agency and agency is threatening and so, therefore, sluttiness must equal disposability.

Women's Unhealthy Choices Are Nobody's Fucking Business

Everyone makes unhealthy choices sometimes. Life is long and complex. Everyone has sex with partners they regret, and strays out of their comfort zone for the wrong reasons, and enters into self-destructive relationships with the best intentions. But those choices are unhealthy for the person making them, not for anyone else. And those choices have no bearing whatsoever on anyone's worth as a human being. Sometimes perspective, born out of pain, can actually make life richer. Your good choices are yours and your bad choices are yours too.

Would it be better for you in the long run not to send naked pictures of yourself to a manipulative sociopath? Probably. But that's not because sending naked pictures of yourself is an inherently "bad" thing to do. Nudity isn't bad. Sex isn't bad. Nipples aren't bad. Even chastity isn't bad. Literally all of this shit is arbitrary. The only "mistake" is placing your trust in the wrong person, and the culpable one in that scenario is the person who chooses to be untrustworthy—not the victim taken in by it.

Our culture deliberately socializes women to be taken in. We condition girls (explicitly! Not even covertly!) to believe that if they're not sexually attractive, they're nothing. They're garbage. They might as well not exist. We reinforce, over and over, that their attractiveness has an expiration date, so the only thing they can do is desperately leverage that attractiveness while they can. If they resist that conditioning, we sexualize them against their will, and if they give in to that conditioning—or worse, if they are raped by a predator—we reveal the trap: Now you're a slut, and it's your fault. Now you're tainted. Now you're worse than nothing. Now you might as well not even cry out when your rapist takes you to the gas station in a wig and sunglasses.

So, Girls, Fuck All of It

If you want to. Or don't fuck any of it, if you don't want to. Fuck women. Fuck men. Fuck no one. Point is, you get to fuck what you like, when you like, and your worth is not determined by some golden ratio of extreme boner tantalization vs. minimal boner touching. BONERS ARE NOT THE BOSS OF YOU. You are the boss of you.

The Growing Cost of Having Kids Is Tipping More Women Towards Ambivalence about Motherhood

Lisa Wade , AlterNet — Mon, 06 May 2013 18:25:00 -0700

Our family-unfriendly society exacts psychic and financial tolls that many women won't accept.

Samantha could not be more sure that she does not want to have kids. “Because it just looks awful,” is how she put it. I asked her to elaborate: “Because it looks exhausting. It looks like so much work. It just makes me tired. It makes me tired just looking at it.”

Samantha, a 34-year-old professional I interviewed for a research project about choices around childrearing, was a No Way. She was absolutely sure she didn’t want kids. Her certainty came from a combination of two things: a distaste for the daily life of parenting – “the little baby voices, and the screaming, and the tantrums, and the constant questioning. Not for me” – and a different kind of life that she was excited to pursue. She wanted to continue to excel in her career, travel, have delicious meals, and bask in quiet afternoons.

I‘ve interviewed plenty of No Ways and many are quick to articulate the time, energy and money it takes to raise children. They see parenting as a choice between further investment in their own “human capital” (their knowledge, skills and talents) and investing in someone else’s. The answer for them is obvious.

No Ways are contributing to the growing trend of childlessness. Many women today have not or will not become mothers by choice. One out of five American women over 40 is currently childless. Generation X is even more likely to decide against parenting; as many as one-in-three may skip parenting. While some of these women will face infertility, at least half will have very purposively chosen a childfree life, often alongside supportive partners. And, while traditionally it has been women with higher levels of education who have chosen childlessness, women with less education are looking more and more like their more educated sisters on this variable.

Happy (or Unhappy) Either Way

Interestingly, however, among those choosing childlessness, No Ways are the minority. Instead, I suspect that the majority of women who grow to old age without having children will do so not out of resolve, but out of a deep sense of ambivalence. Most women who are considering childlessness are Either Ways.

Callie, like Samantha, is a 34-year-old professional, but she’s an Either Way. This is how she describes her life:

I'm married and in a long-term stable very happy relationship and the question is, is it the intention that we go on together, [have a child] and see what happens… or is my life so full and happy the way it is that I don't want to do anything that could jeopardize that? I really do think that it’s gotten to a point where I'm going to be happy either way.

Knowing that she would be happy either way, however, didn’t alleviate what Callie experienced as a rather crushing pressure to decide. But she just couldn’t; so she decided not to decide. She is leaving it up to fate. She and her husband are going to let nature take its course (that is, use no birth control) for exactly three years. If she gets pregnant and has a baby, they’ll be parents; if she doesn’t, they’ll settle in to enjoy the pleasures of a childfree life.

Sometimes Either Ways, like Callie, feel ambivalent because their lives carry so much potential… with or without kids. Others are unsure not because they see a wide array of options for themselves, but because they don’t. They add up the costs of a child and subtract the lost wages that balancing work and a family might entail and came up with a “this may not be possible.”

In a society with a weak safety net, zero paid parental leave, and a minimum wage that fails to bring a family of two above the poverty line, more and more people are considering skipping parenthood because it’s just not financially feasible. A shrinking middle-class may mean shrinking families.

Pushed and Pulled into Childlessness

If there is a large group of women who could go either way, then their childbearing choices will likely be strongly affected by the opportunities and constraints of modern life. First, there’s the pull of childlessness, its draw. For middle- and upper-class women especially, childlessness may be attractive because it offers them the freedom to do other interesting things. This is a still rather new opportunity for women. Only since the women’s movement of the ‘70s have women had the opportunity to excel in challenging, respected and high-paying careers. For women who have access to these occupations, childlessness is a tempting choice precisely because having children is no longer the only way for women to feel like they’re doing something valuable with their lives.

And then there’s the push, the realization that having children may incur financial and psychic costs that a person can’t or doesn’t want to pay. The conditions for parenting today are, in many ways, incredibly averse. Whereas for most of human history, children contributed to households and communities, today they are a financial burden instead of a help. Alongside this development, the amount of time parents are expected to invest in children has skyrocketed, as have the demands on workers. The bars for good parenting is set higher than ever, spending significant amounts of time at work is non-negotiable for most, and social and state support has been waning. This turns life into a macabre version of the old spectacle of spinning plates.

It’s likely a life with which young women are all-too-familiar. Young women today are the second generation facing these conditions. They may remember their mothers struggling to balance work and family, their parents’ relationship straining under the burden of two jobs and a family, the fiscal struggle as they tried to make ends meet. They may have watched their mothers sacrifice career ambitions or experienced the economic tragedy that often comes with divorce. A third of single moms are in poverty; motherhood is the single strongest predictor of bankruptcy in middle-age and poverty in old-age. By the time these women are adults, some think that skipping the kids and focusing on the self, the job or career, and their partner, if they have one, sounds like a pretty great life.

A New Era

Both highly effective birth control options and abortion have been legal and accessible since the '70s (or so), so saying no to parenthood is more possible than ever before. And most women can think of good reasons not to have kids, whether they be optimistic reasons (like the hope for a life of leisure time and travel) or pessimistic ones (like the worry that they won’t be able to give their child a good life). In the meantime, the government is doing little to entice women into parenthood; we treat childrearing like a hobby, not the reproduction of the nation (which is what it actually is).

So, some women will say “no way.” Many others will be open to going either way, letting the trajectories of their careers, their relationships, and government indifference decide for them. Together, they will change what it means to be a woman, the nature of families, and life in America.

Chief of the U.S. Air Force Sexual Assault Prevention and Response Charged with... Sexual Battery

Katie McDonough, Salon — Mon, 06 May 2013 15:08:00 -0700

Air Force Lt. Col. Jeff Krusinski was arrested and charged with sexual battery in Virginia over the weekend

Chief of the Air Force Sexual Assault Prevention and Response branch at the Pentagon Lt. Col. Jeff Krusinski was arrested and charged with sexual battery in Virginia over the weekend.

Krusinski is accused of drunkenly fondling a woman in a parking lot, according to Arlington County police.

As reported by local news site ARLnow:

“A drunken male subject approached a female victim in a parking lot and grabbed her breasts and buttocks,” according to a Arlington County Police Department crime report. “The victim fought the suspect off as he attempted to touch her again and alerted police.”
“Jeffrey Krusinski, 41, of Arlington, VA, was arrested and charged with sexual battery,” police said. “He was held on a $5,000 unsecured bond.”
An Air Force spokeswoman confirmed Jeffrey’s rank, job title and the fact that he works at the Pentagon to ARLnow.com, but had no further comment.

The victim did not know Krusinski, according to the police report.

The incident comes less than a year after a report from the Department of Defense foundwidespread sexual assault and a culture of sexual abuse at Lackland Air Force Base, where members go through basic training.

According to the report, “weaknesses in institutional safeguards, leadership, and the instructor culture of self-accountability” led to an “ever-present” threat of abuse of power in basic training.

Why a Safe, Tiny Little Pill Scares the Hell out of Prude Christian Conservatives

Valerie Tarico, AlterNet — Mon, 06 May 2013 14:31:00 -0700

By opposing Plan B, conservatives show they are willing to sacrifice women, teens and pre-teens on the altar of patriarchy and religion.

You know the 11-year-old down the street who is dividing her after-school time between the park where she gets laid and the drug store where she buys her douches? Yeah, neither do I. But apparently a number of right-wing commentators live in a different world than we do, because in their world that girl is the reason all of us should have to show ID to get emergency contraception.

In their world, if we can get EC without showing our names and birthdates, so can she. Apparently, this girl’s fear of pregnancy is the only thing keeping her and her peers from even nastier sex lives. Think tweens gone wild. As columnist Kathleen Parker put it, “As long as there’s an exit, whether abortion or Plan B, what’s the incentive to await mere maturity?” Conversely, if we all are willing to put up with the minor humiliation of announcing our names and ages to drug store cashiers along with our contraceptive failures, that girl will instead turn to the wise, thoughtful parents whose supervision she’s somehow been evading. The mother and father will buy Plan B with their own 50 bucks instead of her allowance. And those parents, who have heretofore failed to notice their daughter’s precocious promiscuity, will carefully read the Plan B insert and coach her through the nausea—or at least coach her on how best to parent her baby.

And they will all live happily ever after.

In my world, where science and data matter, less than one percent of 11-year-olds have had sex, and for most of those, it was not "sex" but incest, rape, or some other form of sexual assault. For 12-year-olds, that number is two to four percent. When it comes to actually purchasing expensive EC, the percent of pre-teens who can scrape together $50 unnoticed may be as small as the percent who are sleeping around, like next to none. Tweens Gone Wild is a pedophilic fantasy.

However, teen sex isn’t. By age 15, about 13 percent of teens have initiated sex. The average age at which people start sexual activity is 17, and by age 19, 70 percent have had sex at least once. Fortunately, teens are starting sex later than they used to, but thanks in part to abstinence-only education, many don’t use protection till they have a scare. Teen pregnancy, when carried to term, trashes lives. Only 40 percent of girls who give birth between ages 15 and 17 ever graduate high school; fewer than 2 percent graduate college by age 30. Their offspring have higher rates of poverty, learning problems, health problems, criminality—and teen pregnancy. Even during the 20s, unintended pregnancy isassociated with economic struggles, reduced opportunity and less family flourishing.

In this world, where morality is about actually making people’s lives better, drug regulations are optimized to promote the general welfare. Public health officials do a complex risk benefit analysis to decide whether any given drug prevents more harm than it causes. Part of their responsibility is to assess whether men, women and children are best served by having that drug be available over the counter or under the scrutiny of a physician.

In the case of Plan B, every body of relevant experts—the American Medical Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, and the FDA scientists themselves -- believes that the public health is best served by having Plan B freely available to all who seek it. The primary question in their minds is whether other more effective forms of contraception (including more effective emergency contraception like ella and Paragard) should be freely available as well. Their recommendations are based on research that says Plan B is safer than Tylenol, and the risks of Plan B (and Tylenol) are many times lower than the risks from miscarriage, abortion, or—most risky of all—full-term pregnancy. That is why the presence of Plan B on regular drugstore shelves should be taken as a sign that the professional and regulatory bodies are doing their jobs.

So what goal does opposition to Plan B really serve?

Male Control of Female Sexuality.As futurist Sarah Robinson has eloquently described, every culture, society and religion on this planet is structured around the once universal and now obsolete fact of women having no control of their fertility. This reality gave males certain privileges that now are threatened. Every step toward better birth control drives another nail in the coffin of male privilege, which is why, as Robinson sees it, we’ll still be fighting this battle 100 years from now.
Fetal Personhood vs. Female Personhood. Despite all evidence to the contrary, conservatives continue to insist that every fertilized egg is a person-to-be and emergency contraception is abortifacient. In reality, the only established mechanism of EC action is delaying ovulation. Even the best emergency contraception available, the copper IUD (which isn’t available without prescription), prevents more fertilized egg suicides than it causes. But that hasn’t stopped the embryo advocates from insisting that Plan B murders teeny babies, which means it must be opposed by whatever means available.
Parent Rights over Child Wellbeing.In biblical law, children are property of men, as are women, slaves and livestock. Parental rights are inviolable to the point that a man can sacrifice his child and have it “counted as righteousness” rather than murder. Our culture has moved toward the ideal expressed by Kahlil Gibran in his famous poem, On Children, meaning that we house and nurture our children rather than own them. But the closer parents are to the traditional Abrahamic view, the more they mistrust tools that help teens to take care of themselves independently, even if these tools help young people to thrive.

By opposing Plan B access, conservatives betray the fact that they are willing to sacrifice women, teens and pre-teens on the altar of patriarchy and—let’s get real here--religion. The Plan B fight pits the power of the priesthood, authoritarian parents and prudes against the obligations of the public health establishment and medical care providers. The 11-year-old slut fantasy is brought to us by the same people who brought us pedophile priests, Jesus Camp, Child Evangelism and mandatory vaginal probes. Perhaps instead of tweens gone wild we should be worrying about clergy gone wild.

AlterNet.org: Gender

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