With this year’s Academy Awards ceremony just around the corner, Oscar has rounded up the usual suspects for filmmaking’s most prestigious honor.  Not surprisingly, the demographic profile of the nominees for the coveted Best Director award closely resembles that of the academy’s governors.  As Michael Cieply states in a New York Times’ Carpetbagger blog, “All are male, all are white, and most have been a presence at the Oscars before.”  He also notes that the average age of the nominees mirrors that of the academy’s governing board. 

In other categories, women who direct earned nominations in the documentary short subject category (Robin Fryday and Gail Dolgin for "The Barber of Birmingham: Foot Soldier of the Civil Rights Movement"; Rebecca Cammisa and Julie Anderson for "God is the Bigger Elvis"; Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy and Daniel Junge for "Saving Face"; Lucy Walker and Kira Carstensen for "The Tsunami and the Cherry Blossom"). And Jennifer Yuh ("Kung Fu Panda 2") is among the directors of the animated features nominated for an Oscar.

But all of the tallies and the resulting horserace coverage distract from a larger issue.  The annual under-representation of women on the list of Oscar nominees is merely a symptom of the larger illness ailing the mainstream filmmaking industry in this country.   According to the annual Celluloid Ceiling study released by the Center for the Study of Women in Television and Film, women comprised only 18 percent of all directors, executive producers, producers, writers, cinematographers, and editors working on the top 250 domestic grossing films in 2011.  This represents an increase of 2 percentage points from 2010 but a decrease of one percentage point from 2001.

By role, women accounted for 5 percent of directors, 14 percent of writers, 18 percent of executive producers, 25 percent of producers, 20 percent of editors, and 4 percent of cinematographers last year.  The abysmally low number of women working as directors is especially troubling, as women comprised 9 percent of directors in 1998—so much for creeping incrementalism.

The bottom line is that women can’t keep company with Oscar if they’re largely unable to gain employment in key roles.  It’s that simple.  The filmmaking and nomination processes engage, consciously or not, their participants’ comfort levels. People feel most comfortable telling stories that reflect their own reality.  People nominate individuals and stories they can relate to.  There’s no grand conspiracy here.  We feel most comfortable with those that look like us.

Thus, without significant intervention or motivation to change, male-dominated industries such as film tend toward a sort of demographic myopia.  Since filmmaking is, like it or not, in the business of cultural transmission, this employment issue translates into a larger social dilemma.  At the film and industry levels, the prolific media coverage that accompanies Oscar nominations and wins transforms mere mortals into near-mythic personalities.  Because women are largely excluded from powerful behind-the-scenes positions, they are largely excluded from the nominations.  In turn, their careers fail to benefit from the resulting visibility.  This lack of visibility feeds the following dysfunctional myths that maintain and even strengthen the status quo:  women aren’t interested in making studio films (especially tent-pole features), women self-select out of filmmaking, and films made by women and/or featuring women earn less at the box office.  At the cultural level, mainstream films reflect the worldviews of a shrinking portion of the U.S. population.  Men, almost all of them white, directed 94 percent of the top grossing films released in 2011.

As one of the most influential and visible organizations in the film business, the academy could do more to encourage those in positions of power to provide opportunities for members of more varied social groups to tell their own stories.   This year, the academy seemed to signal that it was ready for change when it appointed Dawn Hudson (pictured above), the former executive director of Film Independent, as its new chief executive.  But Hudson is a single individual at the top of an organization mired in tradition, and an industry almost impervious to change.  It seems likely that the most she will be able to accomplish is to nudge the academy in the right direction. 

The Oscars are regularly billed as a mega-event reflecting and celebrating the best of U.S. culture.  This strikes me as widely inaccurate.  Rather, the Academy Awards fete films made mostly by men featuring a majority of male characters intended primarily for a male audience, that are then critiqued by a largely male group of writers and critics.  Writing about Orson Welles and the “boy wonder syndrome” in a 2003 article for The Guardian, film scholar and critic B. Ruby Rich observes, “For women today, directing films is like playing against the house in a Vegas casino.  The odds suck, the game is rigged.”  The Oscars help juice this system, reinforcing a status quo in which white men rule virtually every step in the process.

Attorney Jalila Sayed (at left) left her native Bahrain, a tiny island nation, to go to college in France and then got her degree in finance and corporate law at Fordham University in New York City.

Now she practices in Manama, the capital of Bahrain. Financial and corporate law is how she makes her living. But Sayed, the 49-year-old mother of three children, takes on some cases pro bono. Currently, she’s involved in a notorious case that has received international attention—the trial of 20 medical professionals facing felony charges such as occupying Salmaniya Medical Center, storing weapons, and plotting to overthrow the government.

“These are highly educated people, fluent in Arabic and English. They were leading the life of any professional anywhere in the world,” Sayed said. “They are being portrayed as traitors, killers, and criminals. They being accused of ridiculous things like stealing blood to fake injuries. These people should have been applauded because they were working in such horrible conditions.”

The charges against the doctors stem from massive pro-democracy demonstrations that erupted a year ago this week at the Pearl Roundabout, a major traffic interchange near Manama's financial district. Medical workers were arrested after treating protestors injured in violent clashes with police and brought into Salmaniya. At a special military trial in September they were sentenced to from five to 15 years in prison. Due to intense international pressure, the convictions were overturned, and they are now being retried in civilian court.

Bahrain, which houses the United States Navy’s 5th Fleet, is a kingdom connected to Saudi Arabia by a 16-mile causeway. About 70 percent of the population is Shia, but the ruling family is Sunni, and many Shias complain of discrimination with regards to employment, housing, and education. The demonstrators last year, inspired by the successful uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia, were asking for political reform and equality.

Rula Saffar (right, below), president of the Bahraini Nursing Society, teaches at the College of Health Sciences, which is near Salmaniya. She volunteered to help treat protestors brought in with injuries from the police’s rubber bullets and tear gas. She was arrested, held, and tortured, she says, and now she is not allowed to work or to travel.  Saffar claims she and the others were targeted because they’re Shia—and for what they saw.

“We are being charged because we witnessed the atrocities of this government,” she said.

Bahraini government officials asked Saudi Arabia for help in March when the protests seemed to be getting stronger, and Saudi troops along with police from the United Arab Emirates came in, cracking down harshly on opposition. The Pearl Roundabout was bulldozed, and human rights groups charge that anti-government protestors were fired from their jobs and students were kicked out of universities. Government officials bulldozed some Shia mosques, saying the buildings were illegal.

The Bahrain Independent Commission of Inquiry report published in November found that the government’s security forces used “unnecessary and excessive force,” killed 35 protestors, and arrested thousands. It also stated that “many detainees were subjected to torture and other forms of physical and psychological abuse,” and that there was no evidence the accused medics possessed weapons or refused to treat Sunni patients.

Joe Stark, the deputy director for the Middle East division at Human Rights Watch, says government officials have targeted those they feel were part of the protests—including the doctors and nurses.

“They are punishing the population that are critical of the government,” he said. “That covers the destruction of the mosques, and dismissing students from the university—it covers a wide range of the violations.”

In spite of the dangers involved, women in Bahrain acted as opposition leaders, Sayed says.

“Definitely, women have played a major role at the heart of the protests from Day One,” she said. “Women have been imprisoned, fired, tried before military courts. Sometimes at the protests, there were more women than men.”

Saffar agrees that women were key in the protests.

“They have proved themselves during the uprising,” she said. “They have showed they’re strong—that they will stand up for what is right.”

The medics’ trial politicizes health care, Saffar says, with medical professionals afraid to offer their services in an emergency, nurses transferred to work outside their expertise, and sick people afraid to go to Salmaniya, which is now guarded by security forces. In addition, she says, police tear gas predominantly Shia neighborhoods outside the capital almost every night, causing a health hazard. While talking, Saffar continually pulls out her white iPhone to show pictures of kids and adults who she says were beaten by police or to show the effects of tear gas on houses and cars.  

Although the cases are being retried in civilian court, Sayed says the judges might not allow new evidence or witnesses. She adds that even after the report about confessions being obtained under torture, those confessions might not be suppressed.

Richard Sollom, the deputy director of Physicians for Human Rights, came to Bahrain in January to observe the ongoing trials, but he was not allowed in the country. Sollom says it’s totally unbelievable what is happening in a cosmopolitan, wealthy, highly educated country like Bahrain. He says when he visited the country last spring when the protests were beginning, he met patient after patient who had lost an eye from being shot with rubber bullets and many who had birdshot lodged in their skin.

“It’s my belief that the physicians at the main hospital have themselves become evidence. That’s why these physicians were systematically targeted,” he said. “The government would have us believe that these physicians committed treason and acts of sedition—it’s Orwellian. These are the good guys. They’re only doing their medical ethical duty of treating these people. When physicians see such abuses they have an ethical obligation to talk about them.”

Sayed says the situation is about as bad as it can get, with people being held without evidence under the special security court. This holds repercussions for all Bahrainis, she thinks.

“This impacts daily life of everyone in Bahrain,” she said. “It’s like a police state and anyone can be detained at any time. People are still ill-treated and tortured, beaten, assaulted, and deprived of basic rights.”

Last week, before the great contraception compromise, as the “old boys club” attacked President Barack Obama for daring to require religiously affiliated hospitals, universities, and social service agencies—but not churches—to provide birth control coverage free of charge to their employees, Rachel Maddow had a question.

Given that 28 states have birth control mandates with which Catholic institutions comply, that some major Catholic institutions provide contraceptive coverage, and that new polling shows that the majority of Catholics agree that female Catholic hospital and university employees should have the same right to contraceptive coverage as other women, Maddow asked: How does the Beltway media narrative get so entirely captured by the other side?

For one thing, even random drop-ins on the most popular TV news programs revealed a major contributing factor:  few women participated in the conversation (reportedly twice as many men as women appeared on cable shows to talk about the birth control battle).  Women like Jodi Jacobson of RH Reality Check and Sarah Posner of Religion Dispatches and many others were lighting up the blogosphere on the subject, and  if you watched Maddow you would have seen clips of three powerful senators—Barbara Boxer, Kristin Gillibrand, and Patty Murray—digging in their heels to defend women’s rights to contraception. But by and large, women equipped to talk about the issue from a feminist—and a Catholic—point of view on television were few and far between.

Day after day, there was Joe Scarborough, with four or five men  (Willie Geist, Sam Stein, Mike Barnacle, Michael Steel, and so on) often talking over—or, in the case of Scarborough, utterly dismissing—the barely audible points made by Mika Brezenski. A pinnacle was reached last Friday, when Scarborough brought in Washington D.C.’s Cardinal Donald Wuerl. 

As everyone was fawning all over the cardinal, Stein tried to ask an important question: What about the woman who needs birth control because she has ovarian cancer who won’t have her care paid for because of your position?  Scarborough apparently found humor in that. “Have you been talking to your mother, Sam?”  he chided.  Sam’s mother is an ob-gyn, who’d warned her son that “if he didn’t ask a serious question today, she’d kill him.”  Everyone laughed, including Wuerl, who promptly lapsed into his assigned talking points, declaring that “there is a difference between access and freedom….This is about freedom….The real issue is freedom…Our basic freedom,” thereby leaving the woman with ovarian cancer out in the cold.  Would that Loretta Ross of Sister Song Reproductive Justice Collective had been there to drop a quick counter punch, to note that “freedom of religion also encompasses freedom from religion,” as she said last week on Democracy Now.

Another factor in the lopsided way this debate played out was that the main religious players in this drama are men who head up a powerful institution that discriminates against women by closing them out of the ranks of clerical power while continuing to act as their reproductive overlords.  That sexist structure ensures is that no woman seated side by side with a Catholic bishop, archbishop, cardinal or even a collared priest will be perceived as having the same gravitas.  In that regard, however, President Obama has done something astonishing—particularly so to the nation’s 350 unhappy bishops.

Back when the health care reform battle was raging, Obama refused to play by the bishops’ rules, listening not only to the bishops, but also to a very brave and smart woman, Sister Carol Keehan, head of the influential Catholic Healthcare Association.  While the bishops refused to give their support even after they got what they wanted—no public money for abortion—Sister Keehan gave her public and unequivocal support.  That led to widespread relief among some Catholic members of Congress and the Catholic laity and helped pass the bill. 

As to the  birth control compromise that Obama unveiled last Friday—whereby health care insurers, not religiously affiliated employers, would communicate with, provide, and pay for birth control coverage for women working  for these employers—Archbishop Timothy Dolan, head of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), initially declared it to be “a first step in the right direction." By contrast, Sister Keehan did it again, lending her public full-throated support, which went a long way in leading disgruntled Catholics to fall in line.

One of those disgruntled Catholics was E.J. Dionne—a liberal Catholic who failed to support Obama on the birth control issue—approved the compromise.  He came down hard on the narrowing of the exemption to churches alone because that failed to recognize the religious nature of the missions of Catholic-affiliated institutions.  On the PBS NewsHour, Mark Shields made the similar point. 

In reality, the Catholic institutions we’re talking about today bend over backwards to show that they are NOT about the business of inculcating religion, evangelizing, or creating colonies of new Catholics; this is a crucial aspect of the church’s ability to attract non-Catholics—and their checkbooks—to these institutions.   They may say that they operate out of a Christian or Catholic tradition.  But the fact is that the mission of a Catholic college open to the public is to teach; of a Catholic hospital, to heal; of a social service agency, to provide care to needy populations.  

In all instances, these institutions must carry out this secular mission in accordance with laws that govern their activities:  hospitals have to meet standards to open a diagnostic and treatment center; universities have to take specific steps to get accredited; hospitals and universities have to meet the demands of the Americans with Disabilities Act; a meals program has to follow food safety regulations.  If an institution takes on these responsibilities, they have to follow the law.  If their beliefs interfere (e.g., making abortions unavailable for trafficking victims), and an accommodation cannot be made, then the religious institution should not get to do that work with public money.  On the trafficking issue, that is now the case.  

Regarding the compromise, New York Times columnist and NPR and NewsHour commentator  David Brooks declared it to be “a fudge and a subterfuge” as well as illogical, but still hailed it.  He thought it “showed respect and deference…especially to the Catholic workers who are doing the Lord’s work in these neighborhoods, serving the poor and the needy.”  I don’t know who he thinks those Catholic workers are, but they include caseworkers and food pantry staff, shelter counselors and secretaries, hospital cafeteria workers and cleaning ladies in Catholic dorms.  How refusing them the right to birth control is a sign of “respect,” he doesn’t say. 

By Sunday, while many were still considering the matter at least temporarily settled, the bishops had dug in their heels, rejected the compromise, and actually, come clean.  The fact is that protecting religious liberty, safeguarding the consciences of religiously affiliated hospitals, universities, and social service agencies, has never been the bishops’ goal. Rather, they seek the complete elimination of the mandate guaranteeing all American women access to birth control, without a co-pay or deductible, as part of a package of essential preventive services.

In a February 10 USCCB press release that followed the announcement of Obama’s compromise, the bishops argue that exemptions from having to provide or pay for coverage for birth control should be available not only to religious employers and insurers, but also to secular for-profit and nonprofit employers  as well as to individual employers with religious objections.  Arguing on behalf of those individual employers, Anthony Picarello, general counsel for the USCCB, complained to USA Today that “If I quit this job and opened a Taco Bell, I’d be covered by the mandate.” 
 
Bishops who led letter-writing campaigns that stooped so low as to characterize the government’s effort to insure that all women have preventive health care as a “bigoted and blatant attack on the First Amendment rights of every Catholic believer,” that branded HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius “a bitter, fallen away Catholic,” and went so far as to say “the devil wants to silence the Church’s voice” are unlikely to take their matches and go home.  Indeed, despite their compete lack of medical training and in the face of indisputable medical evidence that birth control is crucial for the health of women and babies, the bishops are poised to press on, arguing that birth control is not “preventive care.”

Wuerl trended in that direction on Morning Joe on Friday, paraphrasing what the bishops claimed in their letter last August to HHS that “prescription contraceptives, sterilization and related patient education and counseling” are "not ‘health’ services…they disrupt the healthy functioning of the reproductive system, and they are designed to prevent pregnancy, which is not a disease.” 

It’s useful at this point to recognize that this broad demand to end the birth control mandate, as well as the bishops’ successful campaign to forbid the use of public money for abortions in the ACA, are intimately related to the Catholic Church’s approach to sexual ethics.  That approach is based on natural law, the notion that there is an unwritten law embedded in all of creation, which humans can decipher through reason and use to build a universally binding moral system.  The church sees natural law as applying to everyone, not just Catholics. 

That is why the targets of the church’s sexual repression—right here, right now—are not just Catholic women, but all American women.   If that feels like mission creep, it is.   If that scares you, it should.

A couple of years ago as part of my work on Women and Hollywood I hosted a party for the great Australian director Jane Campion.  Campion is one of only four women nominated for a best director Oscar—in 1993 for her film "The Piano." (Only one, Kathryn Bigelow, has won.) At the party many of the female filmmakers talked about how hard it was to make films about strong female characters.  Fortuitously, also at that event was Kathryn Kolbert who had just launched the Athena Center for Leadership Studies at Barnard College.  We spoke, we conspired, and the Athena Film Festival was born. 

If we had realized at the time when we were planning how much work it would take to create a film festival, we both probably would have given up.  But I’m glad we didn’t, and the success of our first year in 2011 proved that we were on to something: We showed 25 films (features, docs and shorts), honored 13 women, and had 2,500 people attend over the weekend. 

From what I’ve discovered, women’s film festivals are struggling.  When many of them were created, women filmmakers couldn’t get their work into the more mainstream festivals.  Now, women’s work is everywhere and women filmmakers don’t want to be pigeon-holed as “women” directors, especially if the festival has a feminist bent. 

But the reality is that it is still much more difficult for women to become successful in the film business.  That’s not just anecdotal.  Look at the numbers—both in front of and behind the scenes. In 2011, women made up just five percent of the directors on the top grossing films of the year, and that lowly number is actually a two-point decrease from the previous year.  Women also make up only 30 percent of roles in front of the camera.  It’s not that women are not going to the movies.  Women buy 50 percent of all tickets according to the last data available by Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA).

The Athena Film Festival is unique in the world of women’s film festivals in that we are focused on women’s leadership.  By spotlighting the content of the films rather than on the gender of the director we distinguish ourselves.
That doesn’t mean we don’t try and get as many women directed films as we can.  But our mission is to create a cultural conversation about how vital it is for all of us—and for our future—to have more female leaders at all levels in our society.  And you can use movies, awards, and events to propel this conversation.  Using movies makes sense.  We live in a visual society where movies and TV shows are a large part of how we relate and communicate with each other.

But let’s be honest. Because there are far fewer films about women and far fewer women directors, it can be quite a challenge to program this type of festival.  So in order to find the films that make up the program that will roll out this week, we used a variety of different avenues to come up with the films.  We scoured film festival programs from across the globe; we had a submission process; we used a list of films from Women and Hollywood; and of course we asked colleagues for recommendations. 

The good news for us is the because we are not a competitive festival, we don’t need to focus on having premieres. As a result we can screen films that have been released over the last year that people may have missed.   Films like "Circumstance," "The Whistleblower," "Oranges and Sunshine," and "Tomboy" all played in theaters this past year.  But when they are pulled together in a program with documentaries—some of which have had minimal screenings like "Who Took the Bomp," "The Rescuers," and "Apache 8"—you look at those films in a different context.  It might not have made sense for the women’s leadership aspect to have been marketed at release, but now those aspects of a film can be highlighted.  Several of the films aired on TV: "Gloria in Her Own Words," "The Education of Dee Dee Ricks," and "Off the Rez" as well as the first two episodes of Danish series "Borgen," which shows us a fictional story of the first female prime minister in Denmark.

One of the most fun areas to program and one that doesn’t get enough attention is the shorts program.  It is important because shorts are a great place for a young director to get her or his feet wet, but I also love the shorts program because you can see an animated film about a young girl out for vengeance in the same program as a revisiting of the Harriet Tubman story and a piece about queer blues divas in the 1920s.  The shorts are the festival’s hidden treasures.

Come to Barnard this weekend where you can see a program of films that individually might not have gotten your attention, but when put together show the depth of women’s leadership and the possibilities for our future.

For the world to cope with its full range of problems, women must be agents of change. Unfortunately, historically and globally, women’s voices have been largely missing from positions of power and influence.

To address this issue, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton launched a bold new initiative late last year to increase the number of women in public service at the local, national, and international level. Developed by a founding partnership of the five leading women’s colleges—Barnard, Bryn Mawr, Mount Holyoke, Smith, and Wellesley—and the U.S. Department of State, the Women in Public Service Project (WPSP) will “provide vital momentum to the next generation of women leaders.” The project’s ambitious goal is global political and civil leadership of at least 50 percent women by 2050. On the way, the project plans to build “the infrastructure and conven[e] the conversations necessary to achieve this vision.”

WPSP will offer an annual summer institute in partnership with the women’s colleges, the first to be held this year at Clinton’s alma mater Wellesley. Emerging leaders from all over the globe will gain critical skills in public speaking, coalition building, networking, and mentorship, with State Department sponsorship for 40 participants from Middle Eastern and North African countries in political transition.

H. Kim Bottomly, president of Wellesley (which graduated not only Clinton but the first U.S. woman secretary of state, Madeleine Albright), said the college is “proud to play a leading role in the State Department’s first effort to tap the power of women’s liberal arts colleges for global benefit—along with the power of their international networks of influential women alumnae.”  Bottomly noted that although overall representation of women in public service is “far from balanced” (less than 20 percent of the world’s elected offices are held by women), “graduates of the leading women’s colleges are especially successful at holding positions in public office,” citing as an example of women now in crucial leadership roles Farah Pandith (Smith ’90), who is the State Department’s first special representative to Muslim communities.

Melanne Verveer, the State Department’s first ambassador for global women’s issues, says that there has been an overwhelmingly positive response and offers of support for the WPSP.  “I’m looking forward to welcoming more and more colleges and universities to the project,” she said. “And I very much hope that women leaders around the world will be able to point to their participation in this initiative as an important catalyst for their careers.”  WPSP also plans to establish a foundation to support its work with help from non-profits and corporate partners.

When Secretary Clinton announced the Women in Public Service Project in December at a colloquium at the State Department, she said she was personally “embarrassed” that the proportion of women in the U.S. Congress—17 percent—is even lower than the 20 percent global average of parliamentary seats. Women make up 25 percent of state legislatures in the United States. In her remarks, Clinton emphasized that the project was not just about fairness. “If you’re trying to solve a problem,” she said, “whether it is fighting corruption or strengthening the rule of law or sparking economic growth, you are more likely to succeed if you widen the circle to include a broader range of expertise, experience, and ideas.” In traveling around the world, she said she has been inspired by “the many different ways women contribute”—as human rights activists, entrepreneurs, and the “young women standing up for representative government in Tunisia, Libya, and Egypt.” Citing an example of the benefits of women’s perspectives, she said that “the World Bank has found that women tend to invest more of their earnings in their families and communities than men do,” adding that “those are the kinds of instincts and priorities we would all like to see” at the government level.

Clinton said the courageous young women who had been instrumental in bringing about changes in the Middle East expressed to her unease about entering politics. “My point was if you don’t make your own transition from having been part of this extraordinary historic revolution to actually doing the hard, and yes, sometimes boring difficult work of politics, you may not realize the gains and the hopes that you had demonstrated for.”

Clinton recalled her own personal “trepidation” when she was considering running for the Senate seat in New York. She was on a “rollercoaster of emotions,” until she got what she “chose to take as a sign” at an appearance at a high school gymnasium to promote a film on women in sports. The basketball team captain whispered the title of the documentary as she shook her hand after introducing her, saying, “Dare to compete, Mrs. Clinton. Dare to compete.” Entering the Senate race was, Clinton said, “one of the best decisions of my life.”

Why would an organization that has invested $1.9 billion over the past 30 years to save women’s lives, whose founder and first director was awarded a Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2010, and whose pink ribbon promotions have penetrated almost every American household need to defund another iconic organization that shares a common goal?  That’s the nagging question behind the uproar over the news that the Associated Press broke this week about Susan G. Komen for the Cure foundation’s defunding of Planned Parenthood to do breast cancer education and screening.  Could the answer be as simple as abortion politics?  Sadly, it seems so.

Komen has acknowledged that it needs to serve low-income women, and its own fact sheets lay out the disproportionate number of women of color who die from breast cancer.   To that end, it has been funding Planned Parenthood’s work for several years.  As recently as last year, according to RH Reality Check, Komen issued a statement of support: “While Komen Affiliates provide funds to pay for screening, education and treatment programs in dozens of communities, in some areas, the only place that poor, uninsured or under-insured women can receive these services are through programs run by Planned Parenthood.”

So why the about-face now?  Fingers have been pointed at internal staff leadership and specifically at Senior Vice President of Public Policy Karen Handel, an outspokenly anti-Planned Parenthood former Republican candidate for governor of Georgia.  How does an organization that purports to be non-partisan put someone with her profile in a key position of steering, or at least implementing, its public policy agenda?  During her tenure, Komen recently adopted a policy barring it from funding any entity that is “currently under a local, state or federal formal investigation for financial or administrative impropriety or fraud.” Conveniently and, it seems, intentionally, Komen formulated this policy shortly after Representative Cliff Stearns (R-FL) initiated an ongoing House committee investigation of Planned Parenthood.  According to a former staffer at Komen who spoke to Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic, the investigation gave Komen leadership, including its board, the perfect cover for extricating themselves from the relationship with Planned Parenthood (though it led to the resignation of another high-level officer).

Response from Komen itself was slow in coming.  Only after its Facebook page was deluged by comments did it post a perfunctory statement explaining its action.  Its affiliates, some of whom expressed cordial partnerships with Planned Parenthood in their states, were not unanimous in backing the decision.  The home page of the Montana affiliate, for example, emphasized that they did not participate in the decision and posted a letter sent to them by headquarters reiterating the official Komen statement and signed, “Warmest regards, Susan G. Komen for the Cure.”  How’s that for a personal touch from the national office? By Thursday, all seven California affiliates issued a statement opposing the action.

Since its initially slow response, given the urgency of the internet and the 24-hour news cycle, Komen has stepped up activity and obviously called in some help with crisis management.  A board member, John D. Raffaelli, gave some condescending comments to the New York Times regarding the link to D.C.: “People don’t understand that a Congressional investigation doesn’t necessary mean a problem of substance.  When people read about it in places like Texarkana, Texas, where I’m from, it sounds really bad.” Contrary to Raffaeli’s assertion, it seems like people understand quite well when politics trumps women’s lives.  That awareness puts Komen in the very uncomfortable position going forward of picking sides.

Founder and CEO Nancy G. Brinker, a former ambassador to Hungary and chief of protocol under George W. Bush, attempted to correct that impression with a belated video posted on the Komen website Thursday.   “We will never bow to political pressure,“ she asserted, though it is common knowledge that right-wing groups have been hounding Komen for several years to cut its ties to Planned Parenthood.

Dr. Fredrik Broekhuizen, medical director of Planned Parenthood of Wisconsin and a board member of Physicians for Reproductive Choice and Health, says he was taken by surprise, echoing responses by other affiliates reported in the press.  “I thought we had common ground,” he says.  Although none of the 17 affiliates that will be cut off from Komen funding are in Wisconsin, he is concerned about the possible ripple effect on breast cancer clinics to which Planned Parenthood refers patients following initial screenings.  He wonders if Komen would by extension stop funding clinics that take referrals from Planned Parenthood, pointing out that one of the biggest breast cancer clinics in the state is in a Catholic hospital.  “Eighty-five percent of our patients fall in the poverty level and have problems accessing traditional health insurance,” he says.  “And the state government recently cut 60,000 people off Medicaid.  We count on referring patients for breast and cervical cancer screening.  It’s an important part of what we do in our overall reproductive health care.”  He calls on women doctors and patients to mobilize and rise in protest.

The silver lining in this story has been the outpouring of support to Planned Parenthood.  National organizations from the American Association of University Women and Women of Reform Judaism to NARAL and the Association of Reproductive Health Professionals are urging Komen to put politics aside and reconsider its decision.  Both Credo and MoveOn have already reached more than half their individual goals of 500,000 signatures on petitions to Komen.  Planned Parenthood is collecting signatures for its own letter. It reported raising more than $400,000 from over 6,000 online supporters in less than 24 hours after the story broke. Since then,  New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg has pledged a $250,000 matching gift to Planned Parenthood, saying that “politics have no place in health care.”

Online response was instantaneous.  Thousands of messages flooded Facebook and Twitter, with hashtags like #occupythe cure, standwithplanned parenthood,  shameonkomen, and komenkills.  Negative responses to Komen’s decision outweighed positive responses by almost 3 to 1, according to a survey by Polipulse, a monitoring tool, with only 27 percent saying that Komen made the right decision.  Only about half the responses to the tepid statement that Komen initially posted on its own Facebook page (after reportedly deleting negative comments early on) gave it a “like.”  Steph Herold, a blogger who started the extremely effective I Am Dr. Tiller online project after the murder of Dr. George Tiller, posits that “the message is spreading so quickly because all kinds of people had a visceral reaction.  Playing politics with cancer is a particularly low blow.  Komen’s money went directly to breast cancer screenings, something that everyone and their grandma supports.”

Many of the responses have vowed to transfer donations from Komen to Planned Parenthood, while others tell personal stories of how access to breast screenings through Planned Parenthood saved their lives.  While plenty of responses praise Komen for cutting out Planned Parenthood, the foundation must certainly be reeling from what Nancy Brinker calls a “dangerous distraction” from its work.  Why Komen thought it could just make Planned Parenthood go away and didn’t anticipate the fallout is a puzzle.  As Jodi Magee, president and CEO of Physicians for Reproductive Choice and Health, put it matter-of-factly:  “It seems to us that Komen has caved into some anti-choice pressure.  Organizations like PRCH have to put up with that kind of pressure all the time.”

Much remains to be explored about Komen’s corporate and political relationships, as well as its emphasis on the “cure” rather than prevention.  Betty Pinson in the Daily Kos suggests some lines of inquiry. In the meantime, breast cancer specialist Dr. Susan Love makes a powerful pitch for shifting focus on her research foundation’s website:   “Rather than putting politics into the breast cancer movement, let’s rise above the political divisions and work together.  Let’s redirect all the money that will be spent on investigating Planned Parenthood into funding studies looking to find the cause and prevent the disease once and for all.  Let’s redirect our anger to making mammograms unnecessary because we know how to prevent the disease.

Debbie N. (not her real name) was a college student in the 1990s when she traveled to the Mediterranean to recover from an abusive relationship. Partying hard, a cultural norm for her immigrant family, she was diagnosed schizophrenic. Back in the States, using alcohol and drugs to numb her pain, she entered Harvard where she earned a master’s degree.  There, diagnosed bi-polar and prescribed Lithium (which permanently impaired her thyroid function), she was given anti-depressants and told she would require meds for the rest of her life.  Now, after several hospitalizations and agonizing self-doubt, she is free of medication, owns her own business, and leads a healthy lifestyle based on rest, nutrition, exercise and meditation.  “I consider myself to be a sensitive person who’s been through a lot of loss. I changed my lifestyle and took responsibility for my behaviors.  I’m a survivor.”

Stories like Debbie’s are ubiquitous, and so troubling that as the new Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or DSM-5, is being prepared for release in 2013, clinicians formerly involved in its preparation are calling for major reform of the text that has driven psychiatric diagnosis and treatment for decades.  Many of them will participate in “Boycott Normal,” a demonstration planned for May 5, when the American Psychiatric Association (APA) meets in Philadelphia and is likely to vote to go forward and publish the DSM-5.

“This is not a civil war between establishment psychiatry and so-called radicals,” says boycott organizer David W. Oaks, executive director of MindFreedom International.  We are trying to put the debate into a human rights framework because the DSM has been used to discriminate, to take away liberties, and to allocate resources.  It’s a quasi-legal document written by a few hundred people voted on by rich white males.”

Dr. Allen Frances, who chaired the task force revising DSM-4, is among those psychiatrists now calling for reform, along with organizations like the American Counseling Association, the British Psychological Society, and a division of the American Psychological Association. But that effort focuses on the process of deciding what diagnoses should be included in the “psychiatrists’ bible” and how those diagnoses should be determined within the existing framework of the DSM.

Many feminist psychologists, psychiatrists and social workers are calling for stronger actions, including a boycott of the DSM-5 by clinicians, and Congressional hearings to address psychiatric diagnosis and the damaging effects of labeling people deemed to be “mentally ill.”

Foremost among these advocates is feminist psychologist Paula J. Caplan, a fellow in the Women and Public Policy Program at Harvard’s Kennedy School, and the Joan-of-Arc of the new PLAN T Alliance (Psychiatric Labeling Action Network for Truth). The alliance is a coalition of individuals and organizations formed because of frustration with the unscientific nature of the DSM, the harm done to many people who receive arbitrary diagnostic labels, and the unwillingness of the APA to undertake serious reform.

“It is increasingly clear that the editors of the major psychiatric manual, which reaps huge profits for the APA, are ignoring the massive evidence of harm done by the labels of previous editions of the manual and of likely harm from what they plan to put in the [DSM-5],” says Caplan, who resigned from two prior DSM committees because “they were playing fast and loose with the unscientific research related to diagnosis.”

Critics of the alliance’s call to action believe its attempts at serious reform are what one called a “broadside” against psychiatry.  Many support a parallel petition seeking DSM-5 revisions.  While one prominent psychiatrist active in the development of previous DSMs acknowledges that there are serious problems with DSM-5, he argues that activist groups are criticizing the DSM-5 to smear all psychiatry in a way that is detrimental to people whom it could help.

But given what’s coming in DSM-5, the manual itself appears to be detrimental, especially for women, children and the elderly.  For example, grief after the loss of a loved one could be labeled “depression,” leading to medication if it lasts longer than two months.

“Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder,” PMS, is slated to return to the DSM, pathologizing many menstruating women.  “Binge Eating Disorder,” with alarmingly normal indicators, will be included, as will “Borderline Personality Disorder,” with roughly 75 percent of patients given that label being women. according to Dr. Dana Becker of the Bryn Mawr Graduate School of Social Work.

“Sexual dysfunctions” such as “Female Orgasmic Disorder,” defined as a “persistent or recurrent delay in, or absence of, orgasm following a normal sexual excitement phase” is another concern.  The diagnosis is “based on the clinician’s judgment that the woman’s orgasmic capacity is less than would be reasonable given her age, sexual experience, and the adequacy of sexual stimulation she receives.”  DSM-5 modifications describe further symptoms, an exercise NYU psychologist Dr. Leonore Tiefer calls an attempt at “rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.”

Feminist psychologists have been challenging DSM diagnoses since the 1980s when the Association for Women in Psychology coordinated a petition regarding DSM-III-R.  Today they are joined by others in a groundswell of opposition to the APA’s newest effort.

Al Galves, executive director of the International Society for Ethical Psychology and Psychiatry, is among them. He wants to see DSM-5 jargon replaced with relevant terms reflecting the stresses of modern life—loss, despair, loneliness, hopelessness—words relating to “emotional distress, spiritual emergencies, life crises, and difficult dilemmas.”  The question, he says, is “how do you get the psychiatric establishment and the pharmaceutical industry to revamp totally” so that they move away from the language of the medical model and use ordinary words to facilitate helping people who are suffering.

Dr. David Elkins, professor emeritus of Psychology at Pepperdine University, agrees it’s time to frame harm done by the DSM as a “social justice issue,” although he stops short of endorsing the PLAN T Alliance call for a boycott just yet.  In a letter to the DSM-5 Task Force and the APA on behalf of the division for Humanistic Psychology/American Psychological Association, he called for “an external, independent review” to ensure that the DSM-5 is “safe and credible.”

But perhaps Paula J. Caplan put it best in posting a petition at change.org:  “This call is not an attack on or a questioning of psychotherapy or even diagnosis across the board but simply an attempt to draw attention to this minimally investigated enterprise of psychiatric diagnosis and to find ways to protect people from the harm that can result.”

In 1977, Los Angeles was called the U.S. rape capital. Nearly 2,400 rapes were reported to police that year alone.  Many women in the movement  against rape suspected that only one out of ten rapes were actually reported, but in fact, no one took the crime seriously enough to study it. Victims suffered in silence; rape was not something people discussed in the city of glam and glitter.

In May of that year, I installed an oversized Fire Department map in the mall below City Hall.  Each day for three weeks, I stamped the word “RAPE” to mark the location of the reported crime, according to statistics I got from the police. I also placed shadow markings for those believed to have occurred, but went unreported. At the end of those three weeks, 84 rapes covered the map, a visual reminder that ignoring the abuse of so many people only protected their attackers.

Sometime last year the Getty Research Center approached me about recreating that performance as one of Los Angeles’ important works from the era. In considering recreation of any artwork, a practice now common 40 years after performance art began in Los Angeles, I had to first ask: what was different now?

Produced by LACE (Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions), the map is on display outside of LAPD Headquarters in downtown LA until February 1. Now named Three Weeks in January, the project is similar in spirit to May, and many of the individuals that collaborated with me then are involved today.

But the differences between May and January are significant.

2011 has had entirely different statistics. LA’s reported rape count stands at 683, a 20 percent decrease from the previous year. An approximate 60 to 65 percent are still never reported, but rape accusations are now enough to topple politicians, celebrities and entire football programs. That long-established code of silence has strained under the pressure of media and public scrutiny.

If I had to point to an overarching cause for this shift, it would have to be that the discussion of sexual violence has gone viral.  What started in feminist consciousness-raising groups moved to the offices of elected officials, law enforcement and the medical establishment. Campaigns like Denim Day, V-Day and Slut Walk have not only mobilized hundreds of thousands, but also fought off harmful myths. Now every significant effort to prevent sexual violence has an online presence, and a global reach.

Today, confronting rape can be done in 140 characters, like in Three Weeks in January’s “I know someone, do you? #RapeEndsHere” campaign. Or in the backlash against the #ItAintRapeif hashtag. Or Ms. magazine’s #RapeisRape action that successfully pushed the FBI to include other penetrative acts and male victims into the definition of rape.

The conversation is out in the open, and anyone with an Internet connection can join.  The ability to post anonymously has allowed people to express their unfettered opinion, and for myths to be exposed. Articles, blogs, private survivor forums and email make rape a common topic. It would be foolish to call the Internet a “safe space,” but there are sites where victims can find a community, support, or just some place to share their story without worry or shame.

Yes, we lose the intimate quality of a consciousness-raising session, but even without physical presence, sharing continues. The Internet simply allows for a larger group, one with more voices and a greater diversity of experience.

However the discussion on rape unfolds, at least this is certain: sexual violence thrives when we turn a blind eye and when victims are shamed or pressured to keep quiet to protect their assailants, or their families.  Rape is a crime of recidivism, which makes it a crime we all have to confront—by talking, by Tweeting, by commenting, and by gathering.  If the former rape capital can transform itself into a city bent on eradicating sexual violence, any city can do it. Someone just has to start the conversation.

Three Weeks in January invites all those who have been victims of sexual violence or know someone who has to join them in a Candlelight Ceremony on January 27 at 5 to 8 pm in front of the map, located at 100 West 1st Street in Los Angeles.

Every year, all over the world, 10 million girls are forcibly married before the age of 18, many as young as 12 years old. That is more than 25,000 girls a day. “I knew that there was an institution of child marriage,” said Archbishop Desmond Tutu of South Africa. “But I was devastated to discover how widely it occurs, and on such a huge scale.” Tutu is a member of an organization called The Elders, which has announced an ambitious goal to stop this abuse of girls “in one generation.”

The child brides often suffer sexual abuse and domestic violence in its many forms and are frequently forced to become mothers at an age that puts them at high risk of maternal injury and death. Because the harmful practice receives relatively little attention as it continues year after year, The Elders, independent global leaders brought together by Nelson Mandela in 2007, launched the Global Partnership to End Child Marriage with a campaign called Girls Not Brides.

Archbishop Tutu says that until The Elders began working on child marriage, “it had not occurred to me how little the girl child is even thought about in broader efforts to lift people out of poverty and defend basic human rights principles.” In a trip to the Amhara region of Ethiopia last year, meeting girls and women who had been married as young as eight, he witnessed the repercussions firsthand. “It’s one thing to hear experts talking about child marriage, but it’s quite another to meet these girls and hear their stories,” he says. “You realize this affects every aspect of their lives: they leave school before they can complete their education; their young bodies bear children before they are physically ready to do so; they’re unable to negotiate safe sexual practices with their older husbands. They really are some of the most vulnerable and voiceless people on earth.”

Mary Robinson, the first woman president of Ireland and another member of The Elders, says that it is hard “to exaggerate the scale of the problem.” The 100 million girls who will marry before reaching 18 in the next decade is, she says a “staggering level of lost potential.” In places like India, home to one third of the world’s child brides, this is not just a human rights issue, but a development issue as well. Says Robinson, “The benefits of delaying marriage for girls are felt community-wide. Girls stay in school and learn skills that will better equip them to work and contribute economically to their families and community.” Their children will benefit too. “Babies born to mothers under 18 are 60 percent more likely to be poor,” she says, “and are at much higher risk of dying in their first year of life than those born to older mothers.”

Tutu notes the disturbing reasons why parents arrange these marriages. “I am convinced that there is no mother or father on this earth who doesn’t want the best for their child,” he says. “Indeed, many parents marry off their daughters young because they feel it is in her best interest, often to ensure her safety in areas where girls are at high risk of physical or sexual assault.” Poverty is an important perpetuating factor. Tutu says, “Who am I to criticize the decisions of parents with large families to support who decide to marry their daughters young because they simply can’t afford to feed her, or because of the bride price that she can fetch?” He adds that in many communities where child marriage is practiced, “sadly girls are not valued as much as boys—they are seen as a burden. The challenge will be to change parents’ attitudes and emphasize that girls who avoid early marriage and stay in school will likely be able to make a greater contribution to their family and their community in the long term.”

Creating awareness of these social and economic interactions is one of the goals of the Girls Not Brides campaign, which harnesses the collective efforts and wisdom of 80 organizations from around the world to tackle child marriage at grassroots, national and global levels. Says Tutu, “Simply put, we do not have to accept that child marriage happens because it is just ‘how things have always been.’ What we want is for world leaders to make sure this change happens on a global scale.” Tutu is appearing this week at the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos to promote programs with proven results. “It’s the kind of work that’s being done already by people at a local level,” he says. “Now just imagine the scale of change possible if our leaders followed their brave lead.” On a panel with Michelle Bachelet, executive director of UN Women, and Sheryl Sandberg, CEO of Facebook, he will also address the issue Friday, January 27, during a WEF plenary session on “Women as the Way Forward”—in a panel moderated by New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof. Next month four members of The Elders, including Tutu and Robinson, will visit India to learn about the causes of child marriage there, and to encourage local efforts to end the practice.

Human Rights Watch, a member of Girls Not Brides, recently issued a report calling on the government of Yemen to introduce a minimum age of marriage in a country where more than half of girls are married before they turn 18. That’s a first step, says Mary Robinson, but “legislation alone will not end entrenched traditional practices.” Among the most effective efforts, she cites programs that “encourage dialogue among parents, religious leaders, village councils, teachers—everyone. Over time these people often come to a collective decision to stop marrying their daughters off very young. We’ve been impressed by the fact that these programs are changing the attitudes of men, some of whom have become the most active advocates for change.”

Tutu also credits “brave religious and traditional leaders” who “actively encourage their communities to end the practice.” They are still in the minority, however, in countries where child marriage is common. “We want to encourage men and boys to stand up for their daughters’ and sisters’ rights,” says Tutu. “Community leaders and religious leaders, fathers and brothers can all join the effort to end child marriage.”

Robinson says that above all, “we need to empower girls.” They need access to quality education, since “school attendance has been found to help shift attitudes,” she says. “We also need to provide support networks and create safe spaces where girls can gather and meet, reducing their sense of isolation and vulnerability.”

Ultimately, she says, “change will be made at local, national and international levels.” Through a global partnership informed by resources and information that Girls Not Brides members have collected, they will “bring home the fact that for 10 million girls a year their wedding day is a day of loss.”

To learn more or get involved, you can visit the Girls Not Brides web site and watch a Girls Not Brides short educational video here.

[Image 2: Elders Gro Brundtland (left), Desmond Tutu and Mary Robinson visit a project to support girls in rural Ethiopia. Photo: Ashenafi Tibebe/The Elders]

For years, I’ve been barking up the wrong steeple, confronting the misogyny that defines all religious fundamentalists: Islamists (the only ones most people bother to hate), ultra-Orthodox Jews, Christian Bible-thumpers, Hindu militants, even Buddhist and Shinto extremists. “Take back the law!” I cried, citing the UN Charter and Universal Declaration on Human Rights, which disallow any religious law being the source for or impediment to international rights. “Just feed them all!” I pleaded, when I thought economics drove the phenomenon. “It’s really cultural!” I argued, trying to be reasonable.

And back when I believed we were facing willful ignorance (because affirmed stupidity seems all the rage), I produced Fighting Words: A Tool Kit for Combating the Religious Right (Nation Books). It offers “verbal karate” for arguing, facts and Founders’ quotes like  “Question with boldness even the existence of a god” (Jefferson). Stuff like that.

Now I see this crisis is worse than willful ignorance. Religious fundamentalists are blatantly, commitment-to-the-funny-farm-ready, lunatic, cuckoo wingnuts. Serious people suffering from cognitive or emotional distress have everything to gain by getting help. But religious fundamentalists have everything to lose by becoming healthy, so they’ve embraced willful madness.

It has an epidemiological range from petty crazy (ubiquitous dating-service TV ads vowing to “find God’s match for you”) to scary psychoses (our home-grown Taliban exerting wildly disproportionate influence on our political system).

Fundamentalists have their fundaments—the Koran, the Shuras, the Pentateuch, the Bible. This last, for instance, has texts handy for justifying Inquisitions, Crusades, lynchings, apartheid, indentured servitude, racism, poverty, polygamy, war, wife battery, child marriage/abuse/murder, homophobia, and other holy terrors—plus some exquisite 17th century English poetry in the King James Version. An important new book, Fatal Self Deception: Slaveholding Paternalism in the Old South, by Elizabeth Fox-Genovese and Eugene D. Genovese (Cambridge University Press), exposes “family based Christian enslavement” as the cornerstone of the institution of slavery. It quotes Joseph Wilson (a 19th century Southern Presbyterian clergyman and, incidentally, father of President Woodrow Wilson) on how his deity devised slavery as an organizing element in the family so it could serve as the model for the state, emphasizing that a household under the gospel must “contain all the grades of authority and obedience, from that of husband and wife, down through that of father and son, to that of master and servant.”

Anyway. Sorry, I digress. That’s the naïve me surfacing again. After all, however much integrity an individual’s private spirituality may have, organized religion has always been about power. And all fundamentalisms share a political agenda and method. But there’s a madness to this method.

The evidence was there all along. A study by evolutionary scientist Gregory Paul in the Journal of Religion and Society (Vol. 7, 2005) found that greater degrees of social dysfunction in a society correlated with higher religiosity. Contrary to claims that secularism produces moral decay, secular societies—e.g., France, Scandinavian countries, Japan—have far lower rates of homicide, STDs, teen pregnancy, and abortion than the United States with our uniquely high rate of religionists. The American “blue states” also have lower rates of divorce, infant mortality, homicide, and violence than the “red states,” where religiosity bellows.
When I finally recognized the religious right as a global pandemic, evincing identical symptoms in disparate populations, I was as you can imagine quite alarmed. Should I rush out and warn everyone? Should I hide and gibber? Where could I safely hide and gibber? Then I decided that, being just a layperson, I needed to test my analysis against objective science. So I researched psychiatric authorities, including the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) for the categories of clinical disorders (Axis I). The DSM is the standard reference for mental disorders. It was so helpful. Fundamentalisms were diagnosable!

Phobias

Consider a recent New York Times story about women being the flashpoint of Israeli anger at the growing sociopolitical influence and numbers of the Haredim (ultra-Orthodox) community: women barred from speaking from the podium at a conference on women’s health and Jewish law; women’s faces blacked out on Jerusalem billboards; ultra-Orthodox men screaming “whore” while spitting at a terrified 8-year-old girl on her way to (religious!) school, because they decided she was immodestly dressed; the chief rabbi of the air force resigning when the army wouldn’t excuse Haredim soldiers from events featuring female singers; Dr. Channa Maayan, attending a Health Ministry ceremony to receive an award for her book on hereditary diseases, being forced to sit separately from her husband in a sex-segregated audience and having to watch a male colleague accept the award for her since she wasn’t permitted onstage. Israeli discourse is reportedly now dominated by the phrase hadarat nashim, the exclusion of women. By the way, though Israel boasts women heading political parties and the Supreme Court, feminists there have long decried the descent of what was founded (albeit on already inhabited land) as a secular, socialistic state into a swamp of capitalist, militaristic patriarchy. Now, already accused of practicing apartheid on its Arab population, Israel’s government is permitting an insatiable religious right to inflict de facto gender apartheid? That’s a drift toward theocracy.

But I forget! They’re daffy. Potty. Loony. Demented. So back to the DSM.

Delirium, Dementia, Amnestic and Other Cognitive Disorders

Take the folks who tote Down with Government! signs while yelling, “Hands off my Medicare!” or denounce government “intervention” through safety or environmental regulations, but applaud invasive laws that violate a women’s rights and body. Once I would have called that hypocrisy. But hypocrisy requires an ethical context and we’re dealing with ding-dongs, so Dissociative State fits better. Or take the Haredim living off Israel while denouncing its right to exist (because the messiah hasn’t touched down yet). More than 60 percent of these black-garbed guys, white dishtowels flapping at their waists and sideburns-gone-wild, gobble welfare subsidies to do full-time religious study, and a vast majority get exemptions from military service required of all other Jewish Israelis. Meanwhile, ultra-Orthodox women do work in the labor force—in addition to bearing and raising an average of 6.5 children. What are these women thinking? No, they’re too exhausted to think. Must be Cognitive Dissonance.

Messiah Complex

Speaking of messiahs, we should stop enabling delusional behavior. Why have we largely sacrificed use of the word “fundamentalist” to the Christian right’s “evangelical” or “pentecostal” as their self-styled terms of (respectful) description? Sure, we wanted to be inclusive, not judgmental, of the women. And we’re pluralists. But evangelizing means not just “bringing the good news” but “seeking to convert.” We should defend their right to proselytize, but we don’t have to defend their content, terminology, or tactics. Torquemada “evangelized,” too, you know.

Denial

A whopper category. Endless lists. Just three samples: Repressed Memory Syndrome (I figure that comes from the childhood trauma of finding yourself in a fundamentalist family), and PTSD (that must come from realizing you’re stuck in that family). Amnesia? A growth industry. Like the infamous coalition of extremist Christian groups, Islamists, and the Vatican (Crusades? What Crusades?) working to kill gains women were making at UN conferences throughout the 1990s. Or the recent collaboration of evangelical and Mormon leaders—forgetting their mutual loathing in service of a greater harm—to pass California’s Proposition 8 ban on same-sex marriage.

Anxiety Disorders

Paranoia, often with attendant Hallucinations, crops up here. Religious zealots interpret resistance to being imposed upon by zealots as an attack on zealots. Any noncompliance with such incursions is defined by the incursers as a direct assault on their way of life. It’s a through-the-looking glass, best-defense-offense reverse-reality expressed in phrases like “Your saying ‘Happy Holidays’ threatens Christianity!” and “Your same-sex wedding destroys my heterosexual marriage!” If expressed with enough outrage through Anger Management Disorder, it temporarily paralyzes ordinary people in sheer disbelief. Haredim men and boys now curse the police as “Nazis” during confrontations, and they’ve paraded young boys wearing Holocaust yellow stars. (There’s a ready-made Repressed Memory Syndrome for you.) The apparent inability of such fathers to care about the effect on their sons is a characteristic of Sociopathy, a personality disorder characterized by lack of empathy, shallow emotions, and egocentricity. Sociopaths are prone to antisocial behavior and abuse of others, and are disproportionately interested in or responsible for violence, though they sometimes can pass themselves off as average individuals. That could describe a whole range of guys, from Khalid Sheikh Mohammed to Randall Terry.

Delusions

So many ravings, so little time. We see delusions of persecution (the defense-offense syndrome above); of righteousness (dogmatic, solipsistic refusals to imagine that others might not want to share the same view); and of grandiosity (certitude that they alone speak for a god who watches over their every move—String Theory to the contrary).

Sexual and Gender Identity Disorders

Oh please. Scientific observation of the subjects’ definitions regarding “woman” and “man” proves the pathology. Last December, an Islamic cleric announced that women should not be allowed near bananas or cucumbers, so as to avoid “sexual thoughts.” (When I posted that on Face Book, people thought I’d made it up.) All fundamentalists afflicted under the DSM categories present with this disorder, in addition to any other symptoms. This is clearly the root cause of their multiple derangements.

There are too many categories for this space. But feel free to add your own. Like keeping Jewish kosher or Muslim haram laws, sensible customs thousands of years ago when desert heat rotted certain foods to toxicity, which today—since the Ark of the Frigidaire was given unto us—might qualify as Eating Disorders. Or the proposed recategorizing of Autism as a “social and communication disorder” in need of services  “promoting cultural tolerance and a degree of self-understanding.” Now that sounds promising! However, the fundamentalist population also displays Addictive Behavior, habituated dependency on “tradition” plus petrified resistance to change.

And all this time, citizens like you and me, believing in our species’ capacity for transformation, have been trying to deal with fundamentalists through reason, persuasion, and organizing, expecting some eventual response. We must have been suffering from Narapoia—the illusion that people are out to do you good.

It’s said that the correct diagnosis is a step in the right direction, so you know what you’re dealing with even if you don’t yet have a cure—line in the sand and all that. And I confess I don’t know how to heal these folks, short of putting anti-psychotic meds in the water of most states south of the Mason-Dixon line,  throughout the Middle East, and across swaths of South Asia. Yet even that wouldn’t cover all affected populations. Where is Big Pharma when you really need them?

One thing I know for sure.

It’s time for  an intervention.

Author’s note: Robin Morgan assumes that some readers of this essay will denounce her as anti-Semitic, anti-Christian, anti-Muslim, anti-male, anti-American, and even anti-mental-illness-patients. She apologizes only to the last group, if they felt understandably  insulted by being lumped in with fundamentalists. The others she refers to Jonathan Swift. Everyone else can rest assured that no zealots of any kind were harmed in the writing of this piece.

One year ago, the Egyptian people took to the streets demanding freedom, dignity and social justice. In 18 days full of sacrifice, solidarity and a touch of Egyptian humor, we succeeded in achieving what seemed to be impossible: the overthrow of the dictator, Mubarak. The euphoria of victory last February was palpable, but was soon followed by the sobering realization that you cannot do away with such a corrupt and brutal regime overnight.

One year later, many ask, what are the losses and gains, especially in terms of Egyptian women’s rights? History has shown that revolutions aren’t always very kind to women or marginalized groups. Already, women have seen the signs of potential setbacks. But there are also signs of amazing power and strength.

The current slogan is “the revolution will continue” because the job is not done. We may have deposed Mubarak, but the regime, led by the Supreme Council of Armed Forces (SCAF), is still intact. In the early days of the revolution, the military appeared to side with the people; today the people are against the SCAF and military rule. Why? Because the SCAF is trying to reinstate the old regime and people have lost faith in its ability to transition Egypt to a democratic future.

The situation in Egypt is tense. There is a very deliberate counter-revolutionary campaign propagated by official media channels—television, radio and newspapers—to mobilize public opinion against the revolution and protestors. Protestors in Tahrir Square are being labeled as traitors that follow “foreign agendas.” It is a vicious campaign to try and take us back to before January 25, 2011. With mounting economic problems, unbearable traffic in Cairo, and violent incidences where armed men are killing civilians, counter-revolutionary forces are scapegoating the protestors.

Another way that the ruling SCAF is trying to break the revolution is by targeting prominent human rights activists. The offices of civil society organizations were recently raided by the military. Since the revolution began, 12,000 civilians have been tried and convicted in military courts, and the ones challenging this injustice—human rights organizations—are now being targeted, their staff interrogated and imprisoned.

Lastly, while we have just had our first, relatively speaking, fair parliamentary elections, their results are not representative of the diversity in Egypt. A stark example is that only 1 percent of the elected members are women! Election monitors recorded many irregularities, such as vote selling or parties trying to influence voters while they waited in line to vote. Many of these irregularities could have been avoided; there are laws and regulations to ensure a fair process. But these were not observed, nor enforced by the SCAF who allowed the elections to be chaotic, particularly by enabling religion to be used in campaigning, hence emphasizing religious identity as grounds for determining political representation. The Muslim Brotherhood won approximately 50 percent of votes, the more extreme Islamist Salafis won 25 percent, and all the liberal and leftist parties, including the youth coalitions who triggered the revolution, won the remaining 25 percent.

Of the 498 elected members of the Parliament, only eight are women. We can’t just blame Islamists who didn’t run women candidates; liberal parties also failed to support women candidates. Despite the rule that one woman had to be included on every party’s lists, all of these women appeared at the end of the lists. Because of the proportional system, if eight names are listed, unless your name is in the top three or four, you’re unlikely to be elected. There used to be a quota for women, but quotas became synonymous with the old regime that used women for their own interest. Women’s rights organizations tried to lobby for reinstating the quota system but did not succeed.

Having said that, elections did happen. People had the opportunity to vote, most of them for the first time ever. And the turnout was unprecedented: over 50 percent of eligible voters came to the polls, including a very high percentage of women. The polling stations were divided between men and women, and the women’s lines were long, more than a kilometer in some places. For the first time, women and men felt their voice counted. This is a gain that cannot be taken away easily.

And then there was the truly wonderful and inspiring women’s march on December 20, 2011, bringing together an estimated 10,000 women. For many, this was their first demonstration. Everyone was clear on why we were there: we condemned the brutal violence directed by the SCAF against peaceful protesters, men and women; we refused the violation of women’s bodies with the aim of striking fear in the hearts of the people. The march renewed our spirit at a time when the revolution was going through a low moment. The march proved that people, women in this case, still had the power and stamina to continue fighting. The march also revitalized the women’s movement and injected energy and momentum.

My motto now is that optimism is a national and revolutionary duty. Why is the SCAF committing such brutal violence on the streets for everyone to see, including targeting women? These are all attempts to break our spirit and reinstate fear of authority. In the face of this, it is really important to hold onto hope and our newly found sense of empowerment. The people have found their voices. More than ever before, new spaces of resistance have been created. There is definitely light at the end of the tunnel. And we are here for the long haul.

Political women in Minnesota made history January 10 in special elections to replace retired state legislators. Democratic Farmer Labor candidate Susan Allen is going to the Minnesota House of Representatives as the first openly lesbian Native American to be elected to a state legislature. And Kari Dziedzic, also DFL, won election to the Minnesota Senate. Together they raise the number of women holding legislative seats in the state from 65 to 67—a number that is, however, still below the high of 70 of 201 seats held by women from 2006 to 2010.

Both elected from districts considered Democratic strongholds, they begin to reverse a trend whereby the number of women elected to DFL seats in 2011 decreased by 15 from 2009 while the number of women elected to Republican seats rose by 10. Dziedzic won with 80 percent of the vote over the Republican candidate and Allen with 55 percent of the vote over a progressive who ran as an Independent candidate.  Both Dziedzic and Allen were endorsed and supported by Womenwinning/Minnesota Women’s Campaign Fund, and both noted on their campaign websites and literature the importance of the financial and volunteer support that resulted from the Womenwinning endorsement.  “With tonight’s election of Susan Allen and Kari Dziedzic, womenwinning-endorsed candidates are 5 for 5 in legislative special elections!” was the post the organization’s Facebook page the night of the election.

In an interview with MPR’s Sasha Aslanian, Allen, a 48-year old attorney, said of her district, “It reminds me of a lot of the places I grew up; it’s 62 percent minority.” The district borders one represented since 1980 by Karen Clark, who is also openly lesbian. As noted by MPR’s Aslanian, Allen sees her experience as a single mother reliant on public transportation and assistance as an important perspective to bring to the legislature. Speaking to Indian Country Today Media Network, Allen said “This is a big win as an LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender) candidate, for communities of color and especially for the American Indian community. I felt that this is important to be running as an out lesbian, Native American. It is interesting that some publications for Native Americans they are reluctant to print that. I think that this is something that we’re struggling with in minority communities. I think it is really important to start talking about that and to have some sort of healing process.”

Allen’s election is particularly poignant in light of a measure that will be on the 2012 general election ballot in Minnesota.  Republicans, who had gained control of both legislative houses in 2010 for the first time in 40 years, passed legislation in the 2011 session to put an amendment on the ballot banning gay marriage. They resorted to a ballot question in order to bypass DFL Governor Mark Dayton, a long-time supporter of GLBT rights who indicated he would veto any legislation seeking to limit rights for GLBT citizens of Minnesota.

Dziedzic’s election means that for the first time in more than four decades, the central Minneapolis district that includes the University of Minnesota will be represented by a woman. Dziedzic was born, raised, and lived most of her adult life in the district, and although this is her first elective office, she is no stranger to government and politics—her father was a long-time Minneapolis councilman. Shortly after earning her degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Minnesota, Dziedzic took a job as an assistant to Senator Paul Wellstone when he was newly elected to the U.S. Senate in 1990.  In addition to work in the private sector, she ran several campaigns for Democratic candidates for state office. She currently works as a policy aide to a Hennepin County Commissioner.

Dziedzic survived a hard fought primary among five Democratic candidates, which saw a large turnout from the Somali community in support of Mohamud Noor who finished second to Dziedzic in the primary. Noor did support Dziedzic and campaigned for her within the Somali community for the general election.  Many political observers in Minnesota credit her win to Dziedzic’s ability to rapidly establish a highly organized campaign effort.  On her campaign website Dziedzic said she would be both gracious and relentless in representing her constituents.

[Image 2: Kari Dziedzic won her bid for the Minnesota Senate.]

Kickstarter, called “the people’s NEA” by The New York Times, recently sent out their 2011 round-up of success stories on their crowdsourced fundraising site, with women filmmakers taking significant applause on the roster—including Dee Rees’ “Pariah,” which won the Excellence in Cinematography Award, U.S. Dramatic Competition, at Sundance last January. While five Kickstarter films made it to Sundance in 2011, only “Pariah” broke out of the pack to be picked up by Focus Features (distributor of Sofia Coppola’s “Lost in Translation” and other Academy Award winners), making it the first film in Kickstarter’s game-changing, two-year history to do so.

“Pariah,” which began as an award-winning narrative short in 2006, explores a semi-autobiographical coming-of-age story through the eyes of a Brooklyn, New York, teenage girl, Alike (played with luminous fierceness by Adepero Oduye), who, as described on the Kickstarter website, “juggles conflicting identities and risks friendship, heartbreak, and family in a desperate search for sexual expression.” Following five and half years of fundraising that garnered support from The Sundance Institute and other sources, the feature version was shot in December 2009 over 19 days on location in Brooklyn. With the 35mm footage in the can, Rees and her producer, Nekisa Cooper, decided to launch a Kickstarter campaign to complete post-production in time for its premiere at Sundance.

Like many of the best Kickstarter videos, Rees chose direct audience address by appearing onscreen with her producer in the pitch. This personalized approach allows potential donors to connect with the back story, to witness the filmmaker-against-the-odds passion. In the case of “Pariah,” Rees and Cooper also evoked the viral “It Gets Better” YouTube series in support of questioning gay youth. While the comfort zone of most filmmakers remains behind the lens, this willingness to personalize the outreach in a confident but urgent conversation with potential supporters makes all the difference in a successful campaign and can often underwrite “the last leg of the journey,” as Rees requested in her video. The success of Dee Rees’s Kickstarter campaign adds to the accolades of a filmmaker recently named by Filmmaker Magazine as one of the “25 New Faces of Independent Film.”

In addition to “Pariah,” two of the other four Kickstarter Sundance entries this year featured significant contributions by women as co-writer/director (Lauren Wolkstein for “The Strange Ones”) and producers (Megan Griffiths and Lacey Leavitt for “The Catechism Cataclysm”).

While the “Pariah” fundraising goal of $10,000 managed to kick over to $11,011 in the final hours, women filmmakers in other extraordinary cases have managed unexpectedly to double or triple their goals, making Kickstarter’s top funders list.

In Jennifer Fox’s case for the successful documentary “My Reincarnation,” she broke all Kickstarter records and raised $150,000 to outstrip her original goal of $50,000.

Documentarian Alison Klayman, mid-shoot on a feature-length profile of iconoclastic Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, not only made the top funder list, but helped break the news of Ai Weiwei’s April imprisonment by the Chinese police in April, even appearing on the Colbert Report with the story.

These anecdotes and statistics are super-charged with possibility for women media makers. As Brenna Ehrlich of Mashable notes, “film reigns supreme when it comes to raising cash” on Kickstarter, indicating that women’s innate social media proclivities take on game-changing possibilities for the next decade of media production.

The genius of Kickstarter’s design is that small donations—as little as one or five dollars—can crowdfund the campaign to rollicking success. Kickstarter differs from sites like IndieGoGo, which allow campaigns to collect on whatever amount they raise. Kickstarter pinnacles on full goal achievement. If pledges do not meet the targeted amount by the final date, the entire campaign folds. The kinetic energy of the stakes involved and the sometimes frenzied use of Twitter and Facebook to broadcast the approaching zero hour often inspire complete strangers to invest in projects, with multiple $25 donations that can lead to a last minute angel wand waving to seal the deal. This year’s most dynamic underdog story involved the fundraising efforts of Los Angeles-based Aurora Guerrero for her feature film “Mosquita y Mari,” which managed to close a gap of $35,000 in just 48 hours. Kickstarter says it was “better than the playoffs.”

Kickstarter now has its top funder “Medici” list as well, meaning that for activists and supporters interested in helping to diversify images of women onscreen, donating to fledgling projects on the site can influence new narratives in media via crowdsourcing. Prior to the advent of crowdfund sites like this, the only way for non-film world cognoscenti to influence media was by viewing films and encouraging viewership after the fact at festivals, in theaters, or in their Netflix queue. Kickstarter and other crowdfunding sites now provide an opportunity for individuals to influence the discourse at the ground level.

The 2012 Sundance festival this month unveiled a total of seven out of 14 Kickstarter narrative and documentary film projects by women directors and co-directors, including Aurora Guerrero’s “Mosquita y Mari,” Alison Kayman’s “Ai WeiWei: Never Sorry”; Lisanne Pajot’s “Indie Game: The Movie”; Erin Greenwell’s “My Best Day”; Kate Aselton’s “Black Rock”; Valerie Veatch’s “Me At the Zoo” and Maria White’s short "The Debutante Hunters."

[Image 2: Film tops other art forms in Kickstart funding.]

In a sweeping victory for survivors of rape and their advocates, the Justice Department has officially changed the definition of rape used by the FBI to track the crime. The new definition includes male victims for the first time and more closely follows existing criminal codes and state statutes.

The FBI has used the old definition of rape—“the carnal knowledge of a female forcibly and against her will”—to track the crime since 1927. Now, more than 80 years later, Attorney General Eric Holder has announced the Uniform Crime Report will define rape as “the penetration, no matter how slight, of the vagina or anus with any body part or object, or oral penetration by a sex organ of another person, without the consent of the victim.”

The old definition was “narrow, outmoded, steeped in gender-based stereotypes, and seriously understated the true incidence of serious sex crimes,” a Women’s Law Project Press Release stated.

The new definition counts unconscious or intoxicated victims, and notably includes oral and anal sex. Physical resistance isn’t required.

“These long overdue updates to the definition of rape will help ensure justice for those whose lives have been devastated by sexual violence and reflect the Department of Justice’s commitment to standing with rape victims,” Attorney General Holder said.

And given that the FBI’s annual record of rape crimes is our only national metric for counting this sexual violence, the revised definition will finally allow the bureau to properly measure and understand the extent of rape incidences in the United States.

“This change will give law enforcement the ability to report more complete rape offense data, as the new definition reflects the vast majority of state rape statutes,” the Department of Justice, Office of Public Affairs, wrote in a release. “As we implement this change, the FBI is confident that the number of victims of this heinous crime will be more accurately reflected in national crime statistics.”

Using the old definition, FBI statistics showed 84,767 rapes in 2010. But the Center for Disease Control, employing a much broader definition, estimates that 1 in 5 women, and 1 in 71 men, have been raped in his or her lifetime. It was this mismatch that framed much of the discussion for the revisions, said Lynn Rosenthal, the White House adviser on violence against women.

And thanks in large part to the dedicated advocacy of Philadelphia-based Women’s Law Project, Vice President Joe Biden and Director Susan Carbon of the Department of Justice Office of Violence Against Women—as well as the thousands of supporters in the viral “rape is rape” campaign led by Ms. Magazine—the FBI’s Criminal Justice Information Services Advisory Policy Board voted unanimously for the change.

The new definition is not only a vital part of accurately capturing crime statistics, but also marks a landmark moment in combating this historically minimized problem. The change means that rape will "become a crime to which more resources are allocated," said Eleanor Smeal, president of the Feminist Majority Foundation, in Ms. Magazine (which is published by FMF). “We feel this will have a significant impact,” she said.

Congress approved $592 million this year to address violence against women, including sexual assault, domestic violence, dating violence and stalking, under the Violence Against Women Act and Family Violence Prevention and Services Act. Of that amount, $23 million is spent on a sexual assault services program and $39 million goes to a rape prevention and education program administered by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“The revised definition of rape sends an important message to the broad range of rape victims that they are supported and to perpetrators that they will be held accountable,” the Justice Department’s Susan Carbon, said in a statement.

Now, as Carol Tracy, executive director of the Women’s Law Project, wrote in the WLP release, “we need to direct our attention to preventing rape and aggressively pursuing sexual predators.”

And it’s about time.

I was once summoned to my dean's office to justify comments I made in a radio interview upon publication of my book Prostitution of Sexuality (1995).  I had said that one in ten women in the United States is raped, and that figure—which has since doubled—was an undercount because only 10 percent of rapes are reported. The interview angered a Penn State alumni, who demanded that the university president take action against me. In all seriousness, the president forwarded the complaint to my dean, who expected me to explain myself. My answer didn't satisfy apparently so I was called in once again. This time I told the administration that the call was likely coming from a sexual predator, and I walked out of the dean's office.

Penn State caters to an alumni whose donations are a major source of income, and whose presence is a major segment of the crowd that fills the 100,000-plus capacity football stadium every home game.  In such an atmosphere, coach Joe Paterno, as the lead draw for alumni contributions, was beyond question. So, for a time, was Rene Portland, the Penn State women’s basketball coach whose explicit "No Lesbians" team policy and attendant sexual harassment wreaked havoc on many young women's lives and college careers. When Penn State, under pressure from feminist and lesbian/gay rights groups, mandated sexual harassment training for all coaches in the 1990s, Paterno and Portland, with the arrogance of the untouchable, showed up for only the last 15 minutes of the program.

Despite a 1991 Penn State non-discrimination and harassment policy, Portland persisted with her harassment until 2006 when a student sued the university for being taken off the team and being threatened that her parents and community would be told she was a lesbian. Penn State's own investigation recognized that Portland had created a "hostile, intimidating and offensive" environment for lesbians. The suit, settled out of court, cost Portland her job. But in the world of Penn State athletics, hatred of lesbians combined with a football cult of male macho continued to validate a sexually hostile campus culture.

A beacon of hope for students devastated  by that culture—Portland's victims, survivors of fraternity gang rape and date rape—existed in the Penn State Center for Women's Students, developed and directed for years by Sabrina Chapman and later by feminist therapist Peggy Lorah. Still, the coaches for the most part were untouched and uncaring until the arrest last month of assistant coach Jerry Sandusky on allegations of child sexual abuse, which finally brought down Paterno and University President Graham Spanier as well.

With all the media coverage of the scandal since mid November, the public remains distanced from the actual harm that the children victimized by Sandusky experienced and must live with. And the extent of the hostile sexual climate at Penn State has gone unreported. The language of media reports too often implied implicit consent by the children. As former sex crimes prosecutor Wendy Murphy points out:

While the word "rape" rarely appears, nearly every news source describes the crimes at issue using the following terms and phrases: "engaging in sexual activity"; "fondling"; "the boy performing oral sex"; "anal sex/intercourse" and "sexual assault."

To break through the mainstream media's problematic language and get a sense of the depth of harm the victim experiences in sexual abuse, I suggest reading Christine Stark’s new novel, Nickels: A Tale of Dissociation. The author, also a poet and visual artist, manages to bring the experience of sexual abuse into a present moment reality through the first-person narrative of Little Miss So and So, from age five to twenty-five, from surviving her father's sexual abuse at various ages to a world of support created by feminists and lesbians.

Since feminism broke open this best kept secret decades ago, we have been heartbroken and angered by the testimony and memoirs of women who as children fell victim to a father, stepfather, grandfather or uncle. The effects could be so severe that memory might not contain it—until some experience in adulthood provides the trigger and floods of anguish take over. So the story, Nickels, is not new. But Christine Stark has chosen a style and genre—a stream of consciousness novel—that keeps Little Miss So and So in the present tense.

Her reality is not segmented into sentences or paragraphs; its monologue is born in experience and expressed in a voice authentic to her heroine at various ages. Nothing could bring her reality—the abuse, the doctors, the courts, her escape, breakdown and recovery—closer to our consciousness. The author knows something about survival, about putting one foot in front of the other to move through a situation we are never meant to experience.  Little Miss So and So's present moments yield immediately to new present moments that the reader cannot escape; yet the pace is fast enough to relieve us of the need to "get through it."

This book and its empathetic engagement will be a treasure to anyone working with victims of sexual abuse. And if we want to truly understand the failure in the Penn State scandal, we will look closely to its victims.

As women of the Arab Spring are rediscovering, being participants, even leaders, of the uprisings hasn’t led to women’s equality—a depressingly familiar scenario, notoriously reminiscent of the 1960s aftermath of the Algerian revolution. In fact, the phenomenon is historically omnipresent (including the American revolution).

Here in the Global North, for example, women were active early in the Occupy movement. Yet that movement has presented an optic of being  predominantly male (and in the United States, white and young)—as well as indifferent to the fact that capitalism simply cannot be transformed without confronting its foundation: patriarchy, itself reliant on controlling and exploiting women. And women, by the way, comprise 51 percent of the 99 percent (and virtually zero of the 1 percent).

Who then is the real constituency in need of economic justice?

The United Nations acknowledges that the world’s poor are 70 percent female. Women’s unpaid labor is worth $11 trillion globally, accounting for 41 percent of the GDP in, for instance, North America. It could well be argued that, given women’s massive amount of unpaid labor—and since women are the means of reproduction who produce the labor force itself—most women exist more under feudalism than under capitalism.

Equal pay, reproductive rights, maternity leave, childcare—all are economic as well as human-rights issues. So are sweatshop labor/maquilliadores, sex trafficking/slavery/tourism, and war’s impact on women, who with their children comprise some 80 percent of refugees and displaced peoples. Women are the primary caregivers for the ill, the young, the aged, and the dying—so health costs are “women’s issues.” The pornography and prostitution industries each run into the hundreds of billions of dollars annually; China spends $27 billion just on Internet pornography. We only have statistics for a few “developed” countries on the staggering cost of domestic violence. We do know that domestic violence costs $5.8 billion a year in the United States alone.

One would think that such “women’s issues” would make unarguable the centrality to economics of female human beings. Wrong. Too often, the Occupy movement has betrayed its own vision by revealing itself as a sexist microcosm of the society it opposes. Harassment and assaults required women to define safe sleeping areas—immediate necessities yet questionable strategically, since these can become “ghettos,” while the problem, a  male sense of entitlement, goes unchallenged. Nor does this happen only in the United States, although North American sites got more press attention. Incidents of sexual assault and rape have been reported not only in New York, Cleveland, Dallas, and Baltimore, but in Glasgow, Montreal, London, and more. In some locations, male site monitors were reluctant to call police for fear that negative attention would be deleterious to the Occupy “message.”

Now, however, women are protesting that kind of protest. In Bristol, England, feminists called for “Carrying Our Safe Space With Us,” aiming to empower women to speak at Occupy general assemblies. On November 25, International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women, Feminists Occupy London took to the streets denouncing rape; that same day, Italian women marched in Rome, defining economic austerity measures as a form of violence against women, and citing policies that in effect force women to work multiple jobs, paid and unpaid. In Manila, Occupy was taken over by women, becoming Occupy RH (reproductive health), Filipina-led. Women in Slovenia, New Zealand, and Australia publicly decried the lack of safety for women at Occupy sites. Such international groups as Code Pink, WomenOccupy, RadFem, the Filipina network Af3IRM/GabNet, and others raised women’s profile, thus challenging men’s hegemony. The Feminist Peace Network established the Occupy Patriarchy website, to  provide a supportive, global space for  feminist analysis, response, organizing, and networking within the global Occupy movement.

Having caught the world’s imagination with an admirable energy, seemingly spontaneous and seemingly grassroots,  the Occupy movement is now poised at a crossroads. It has enormous potential—but lasting change will require consciousness that doesn’t ignore the majority of  humanity. It needs to break free of being “a guy thing” or risk drowning in its own rhetorical generalities.

It’s not as if certain models aren’t there. The women of England’s Greenham Common “occupied” turf decades before OWS—they endured, and won. Irish women barred doors to keep men from storming out of Northern Ireland peace talks. Women in Liberia sat singing for months in a soccer field to birth a revolution. Market women in Ghana brought down a government. Gandhi acknowledged copying the concept of

  satyagraha—nonviolent resistance—from India’s 19^th century women’s suffrage movement. These are  different—and long-lasting—techniques of protest, by which at first it seemed the Occupy movement was influenced. (At the risk of offending anarchists, I’ll paraphrase two of the Women’s Media Center slogans: “You have to name it to change it,” and “You have to see it to be it.” As a woman who once agreed “Level everything, then we’ll talk politics,” I recommend examples and clearly articulated demands as pretty good stuff.)

It’s not too late. As the Occupy movement in many areas moves away from the tactic of claiming physical space, a change of protest style is in order: more hit-and-run, engage-disengage, morning-long, afternoon-long, or day-long (not open-ended) demonstrations—plus focused, doable demands. Most women have far too many other responsibilities—including children—to spend months in tents playing drums, even if the tents were safe spaces. The Occupy movement needs women—the numbers, the economic analysis, the different strategic approach—to survive, let alone succeed. Yet women’s engagement with it might well require turning up in numbers massive enough to effect a de facto transformation of leadership and focus;:occupying Occupy in a “women’s style” could make all the difference.

At the minimum, it should be possible to demand that men become the change they claim they want to see.  (I mean, really, guys.) If Occupy men can dare be unafraid of that different kind of leadership—can even seek it out and welcome it—everyone wins and the paradigm is transformed.

If not, they will at least have radicalized a whole new generation of feminists.

[Image 2: Brooklyn, Occupy Imnop, from Occuprint.org]

[Image 3: Christy C Road, Brooklyn, from Occuprint.org]

Donors and grass roots workers are fired up about defending the six Democratic women senators up for reelection and electing at least four more, says Jess McIntosh of EMILY’s List.

“We have the GOP to thank for it,” she says, after House Speaker John Boehner and the Tea Party Republicans “embarked on the most anti-family, anti-women agenda we’ve ever seen…..whether you’re defunding Planned Parenthood or all of family planning.”

The Democratic political action committee supports pro-choice women and put $38 million in their campaigns.  “It’s the Democratic women who are making the case—and effectively—for a Democratic win in 2012,” says EMILY’s List McIntosh.

This could be a tough year to face the voters, however.

The economy improves but slowly, the jobless rate remains high, and voters are “very, very angry and very frustrated,” says Debbie Walsh, director of the Center for American Women in Politics at Rutgers.  “I think this electorate is in total flux. It’s near impossible to predict where they’re going to be ten or eleven months from now.”

The only Republican female senator up for reelection is moderate Olympia Snowe of Maine, and she appears to be in good shape. Texas Republican Kay Bailey Hutchison is retiring.

The spotlight is on the six Democratic women senators: Maria Cantwell of Washington, Dianne Feinstein of California, Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, Kirsten Gillibrand of New York, Claire McCaskill of Missouri and Debbie Stabenow of Michigan.

McCaskill faces strong Republican contenders, including former State Treasurer Sarah Steelman, and Stabenow has to cope with a very depressed Michigan economy.

In addition to the Senate incumbents, the Democrats also are fielding some strong challengers, especially Elizabeth Warren in Massachusetts against incumbent GOP Senator Scott Brown, and Tammy Baldwin in Wisconsin for an open seat but where a former GOP governor has entered the race. Although primary opposition can be fierce in open seats, others expected to have a good shot include Democrats Mazie Hirono of Hawaii and possibly Heidi Heitkamp in North Dakota and Susan Bysiewicz in Connecticut. In Nevada, Shelly Berkeley is taking on the Republican appointed after Senator John Ensign resigned earlier this year.

Connecticut's race, where Senator Joe Lieberman is retiring, is also likely to include Republican Linda McMahon, a former wrestling executive who put up $50 million for her unsuccessful Senate bid two years ago. In addition to McMahon if she runs, other Republican women seen as strong contenders include Linda Lingle, a former governor of Hawaii who could face Mazie Hirono, and Heather Wilson, a former member of Congress from New Mexico. These women could face primary challenges from conservatives who think they are too moderate for today’s GOP.

“Clearly the Tea Party is still a force, driving the Republican Party in the direction it’s been going,” says CAWP’s Walsh.

Few Republican Tea Party women are front-tier Senate contenders, however. Laureen Cummings in Pennsylvania and Jamie Radtke in Virginia, for instance, face men who are far better funded and better known.

Another GOP woman who is strong in her own area of Western Nebraska, rancher and State Senator Deb Fischer, faces two powerhouse GOP men from the urban centers in her primary.  In California, a conservative grass roots advocate for children with autism, Elizabeth Emken, faces fundraising challenges to become GOP nominee to face Feinstein.

It’s not clear what the key issues will be for voters in 2012. McIntosh is confident that the Republicans’ onslaught against women’s rights will get out a strong Democratic women’s vote.

Walsh isn’t so sure.

“I still think the motivating factor will be the economy. People are scared. Their livelihoods are at risk. They don’t know how they’re going to pay these bills, to take care of their family,” she says. And three close calls at shutting down government has tried the patience of voters, no matter what their political affiliation.

On the other hand, the Occupy Wall Street movement has changed the debate, focusing attention on the rich 1 percent benefiting from GOP tax cuts while the other 99 percent bears the brunt of spending cutbacks. That may not have blunted the Tea Party crusade to cut spending—but it’s provided much fodder for political pundits and real folks alike.

McIntosh of EMILY’s List says, “Republicans won in 2010 talking about jobs but they abandoned that with this socially divisive agenda.” That left a vacuum for Democratic candidates with “middle class values” to fill.

CAWP’s Walsh says the campaigns of 2012 have to be broader than women’s rights.

“A small group on either side will fall on their sword on reproductive rights issues, but great numbers will vote on economic security,” she says.

“If women can make the case they represent change, they have not been at the table or they have the capacity to work together across the aisle, to have civil discourse about issues—that can play well for women,” Walsh concludes.

[Image 2: Olympia Snowe is the only GOP woman senator up for reelection in 2012.]

On Monday (10:30 PM, EST), Investigation Discovery (I.D., part of the Discovery Channel) will feature an episode of its series “Stalked: Someone’s Watching,” which dramatizes my personal experience as a survivor of stalking.

The attention is welcome.  There has been a dearth of coverage in the entertainment and news media of the reality of domestic violence and stalking issues in the 21^st century.

First, some background. In 2004, after years of physical and mental abuse, I fled an abusive boyfriend and the home we once shared; but within 24 hours, I became trapped in a new form of hell as my sociopathic abuser—a professional investigator—began relentlessly stalking and cyberstalking me.  Physically, and using a computer, he was watching my every move.

For almost three years, he devised new ways to control and torment me, foiling my attempts to start a new life. I lost the ability to work.  I lost money and, even worse, my good credit history—which meant I couldn’t move, get an apartment, get a car, get a loan or find a job.  I lost friends and the support of family.  After three solid years of torture and abuse, there was even a point when I lost the will to live.

With equal tenacity, I reached out for help, but I was rebuffed by social service agencies, the police and the courts. That meant I had to rescue myself;  so I used my wits to turn the tables on my predator for good.

Finally, five years later, I’m solvent and successful—but it took thousands of hours of attention to the problem to repair my credit and stop his attacks, including having to make extreme financial decisions.  I also filed endless reports to the police, to the sheriff, the FBI and the district attorney’s office.  I finally began braving the outside world again to meet people who believed in me, believed my story and could connect me to others who could help.

I'm not alone as a stalking survivor. According to a major governmental survey released just this week—conducted by the CDC National Center for Injury Prevention and Control—one in six U.S. women has been stalked. And a large majority of the women surveyed who were stalked or victimized by sexual violence also reported symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder as a result of being targeted. The stalkers' tactics varied: more than half the women said her stalker approached her or showed up at her office or home; nearly a quarter said the stalker snuck into her home or car.

I not only fought back, but now I’m helping others regain control.  Seeing how few useful resources there were for domestic abuse and stalking victims, in 2007 I founded Survivors in Action, a national non-profit organization that: 1) fights for better services for all crime victims; and 2) demands accountability from those who provide them.  We’ve taken the crusade all the way to the White House.

There are solutions to the growing number of victims of stalking, cyberstalking and domestic violence being left behind, and they are more than reasonable. However in order to garner support to bring about reform, exposing the issue is vital. We need proactive media to investigate such issues as reform of domestic violence laws, access of victims to funded resources, and growing homicide rates when victims are unable to find proper assistance or tap into resources. And little is known as yet about how cyberstalking is increasingly being used to stalk and harass.

The media is vital to reform efforts. There is no other way to call to action the public or to pressure politicians to take action. If you are a blogger, journalist, or documentarian, I’d love to work with you; please visit my website at http://www.AlexisMoore.com.  Contact me at http://www.survivorsinaction.org for more information on stalking and DV reform. I can also connect you to other survivors and activists.

It wasn’t the first time that President Barack Obama played to a right-wing constituency at the expense of women’s interests, but the reversal last week of an expected decision on emergency birth control provoked perhaps the most critical reaction so far toward the administration by women’s health advocates and feminists across the nation.

When Dr. Margaret Hamburg, commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, recommended that Plan B, a contraceptive pill that when taken immediately after unprotected sexual intercourse prevents most pregancies, be made available as an over-the-counter medication to all at risk for pregnancy, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius took the unprecedented action of publicly overruling the FDA commissioner.

Sebelius’ reversal of Hamburg’s decision means that girls under the age of 17 will have to get a prescription for the drug, which for most girls means a visit to the family doctor—which means telling their parents. Those 17 and over will need to ask for the drug at the pharmacy counter. In a small town, that means telling an authority figure—one who may challenge your decision—that you might be pregnant.

Then Obama added insult to injury with a condescending statement about Sebelius’ maneuver. “As the father of two daughters,” the president said, “I think it is important for us to make sure that we apply some common sense to various rules when it comes to over-the-counter medicine.”

The Paternal Prerogative

The callousness of Obama’s statement hit hard. His characterization suggested that Hamburg, a medical doctor who had reviewed the science, had made a nonsensical determination (silly her!), even as he asserted a paternal prerogative over the bodily integrity of every girl.

It’s the classic conundrum of nearly every female person on the planet: before she is of the age of consent and majority, a girl is subject to conditions that will shape her life ever after in ways that are simply not experienced by boys and men. Though couched in the language of protection, Obama essentially claimed that it’s up to a girl’s father to determine whether or not she will bear a child.

No other explanation pans out. The drug used in Plan B is progesterone, which has been shown safe for use by girls of child-bearing capability as young as 11. Other drugs sold over the counter hold the potential of worse side-effects than Plan B, noted Dr. Susan Wood, a former FDA assistant commissioner in an interview with the New York Times.

Speaking of the pain reliever best known under the brand name Tylenol, Wood told the Times, “Acetaminophen can be fatal, but it’s available to everyone. So why are contraceptives singled out every single time when they’re actually far safer than what’s already out there?”

Woods resigned from the FDA in 2005 because of the Bush Administration’s politicization of Plan B availability.

In fact, right-wing tactics increasingly reveal it’s not just abortion that anti-choice forces oppose: contraceptives, too, are in their sights. To make the case against Plan B, many right-wing opponents falsely claim the drug to be an abortion pill although, if taken immediately after unprotected sex, it expels the egg before it is fertilized.

Politics and Pregnancy

Just like Obama’s previous betrayals on women’s health issues, this one had politics written all over it. No one believed him when he claimed to have had nothing to do with the decision. Some wondered aloud if the Plan B reversal wasn’t the price paid to the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (who oppose all forms of birth control) for the provision of no-co-pay contraception in the president’s health-care plan. That plan, ironically, is where the president’s penchant for flicking away women’s health concerns first made its appearance during the negotiations surrounding the infamous Stupak amendment, which, while defeated, ultimately led to the virtual removal of abortion coverage from the American health-insurance system (starting in 2013). At the center of that battle were men in mitres (as the bishops’ ceremonial headgear is called).

And I’m sure that such voters as those in Ohio are on the president’s mind, as well, as he heads into the 2012 election. In Ohio, Catholics who oppose women’s rights can sometimes be convinced to vote Democratic for economic reasons, and Ohio is a make-or-break state on the electoral map.

The response from feminists came fast—and furious. Wrote Jodi L. Jacobson at RH Reality Check:

[A]pparently helping teens actually prevent unintended pregnancies isn't an authentic a goal of this administration. Perhaps it was among the topics on which President Obama came to “understand the concerns of Catholics [read the 281 bishops],” as Archbishop Timothy Dolan assured the New York Times after his private meeting with the president.

At The Nation, Katha Pollitt took offense at the president’s statement:

Who died and made Barack Obama daddy in charge of teenage girls? Would he really rather that Sasha and Malia get pregnant rather than buy Plan B One-Step at CVS? And excuse me, Mr. President, thanks to your HHS, acquiring Plan B is prescription-only not just for 11-year-olds but for the 30 percent of teenage girls between 15 and 17 who are sexually active...

Redress of Greivances

Others decided to do more than vent, applying a more organized form of political pressure through a petition.  US Women Connect, a national umbrella group of state coalitions that work on women's social justice issues, launched a petition (which you can sign here) under the heading, “President Obama: We are BEYOND CRANKY!” The petition reads, in part:

It's time to Occupy Ourselves. To say this isn't okay. For young women, especially, to say, "You're playing with our future and we're not going to take it. Do not take our support for granted."

Among the petition’s signers is Gloria Feldt, author of No Excuses: 9 Ways Women Can Change How We Think About Power (and a WMC board member). Feldt, an activist who works with US Women Connect, and former president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America, added this to the petition’s comments section:

I respect the president and the office he holds. But I have been increasingly concerned about the many ways this supposedly pro-choice White House has been going back on campaign promises to protect women's reproductive rights, health, and justice....We deserve better than we're getting but politicians can only do the right thing if we make it impossible for them to do otherwise...

Others advocate more radical action than a petition.

Linda Hirshman, author of the forthcoming book, Victory: The Triumphant Gay Revolution (HarperCollins), suggests the women’s movement take a page out of the movement for LGBT rights.

“We already know how the LGBT community deals with the president when he sells their interests out because of his own political calculation,” Hirshman wrote me in an e-mail exchange. “They pound him relentlessly and effectively, using the trifecta of political techniques: reveal what your adversary is really doing; invoke the assumptions of our secular, democratic republic; and assert the morality of your cause.”

As an example of the movement’s success, she notes how gay activists got the administration to decline to defend the Defense of Marriage Act—which denies same-sex couples the spousal benefits afforded those in heterosexual marriages—before the federal courts, even though it is customary for the Justice Department to defend laws passed by Congress. Taking a cue from the slogan of the early gay-rights movement (“Gay is good”), Hirshman suggests adopting a similarly effective slogan: “Teenage Pregnancies Are Not Good.”

The question remains whether Obama’s betrayal on this critical area of women’s health will affect his chances at the ballot box. Enthusiasm for the president among young people—a critical constituency for him in 2008—is already dampening. Women, too, could be turned off by the calculations of the president at the expense of their daughters and themselves. And in what is expected to be a closely contested race, the president can’t afford to have a single voter decide to sit this one out.

Many have said that women provided the president with his 2008 margin of victory. Most weren’t looking for a reward; they were just counting on him to keep his promises and defend their rights. Some are still waiting. Others may have already given up.

As the UN climate change conference drew to a close over the weekend in Durban, South Africa, women's voices were being heard far more than ever before. Still, following COP-17—the Conference of Parties to the Kyoto Protocol—there is work to be done to insure a fully gendered perspective when the world gathers to make decisions on environmental sustainability.

“We’ve gained ground rhetorically but what’s missing is the implementation of specific goals and activities,” says Eleanor Blomstrom, program coordinator The Women’s Environment and Development Organization (WEDO). “That’s starting to happen now.”

It’s happening because of organized efforts like the Global Gender and Climate Alliance (GGCA), a network of civil society organizations and UN agencies “working together to ensure that climate change decision-making, policies and initiatives, at all levels, are gender responsive.” In launching GGCA, organizers emphasized that “women are powerful agents of change” and that “their leadership is critical in addressing all aspects of sustainable development and natural resource management,” including research and policymaking.

Abidah Billah Setyowati is an example of emerging women leaders who advance gender-sensitive policies to address climate change and other key environmental issues. Currently working on her PhD in political ecology at Rutgers University, Setyowati grew up in rural Java, Indonesia, “where women were seen as konco wingking, a companion whose place is in the back of the house.” Valuing higher education as “a door to thousands of possibilities and opportunities,” Setyowati has made good use of grants and fellowships, first earning a master’s degree in geography at the University of Hawaii with support from the Ford Foundation's International Fellowships Program (IFP), then as a Fulbright Scholar. Her PhD research, underwritten by a United Nations Development Program grant, focuses on women’s involvement in the conservation and management of forests and forest-based communities.

Setyowati learned that effective environmental policymaking and implementation are especially complex because of "power relations in natural resources governance.”

She says the world cannot meet its challenges “using environmental science perspectives per se as the problems are closely connected to social, economic, and political circumstances.” Working to promote a participatory approach to natural resources management, she confronted gender-based justice issues. “I noticed that even though women have contributed significantly to [for example] forest and water management, they are rarely engaged in the decision-making processes nor are they acknowledged as an important stakeholder.” Now her professional work with environmental NGOs and international organizations places heavy emphasis on promoting gender justice as well as good natural resources and climate governance.

The importance of cultivating women leaders with weighty academic credentials is underscored by IFP executive director, Joan Dassin. “The international community is right to prioritize education for girls," she says, "but we also need to consider the direct path between higher education and social justice. An untold number of women from underserved communities around the world have the academic and leadership capacity, as well as the social commitment, required for graduate study at top universities, where they would gain access to education, training, and professional networks they need to develop impactful careers.” The problem is that “most lack access to a university system because of their gender, economic background, religion or ethnicity.”

IFP recruits thousands of fellowship recipients in 22 countries—half are women and most  return to their home countries to apply their leadership skills after studying abroad. “IFP has seen that developing more inclusive higher education policies not only empowers women but can lead to a real, measurable impact," says Dassin. "This has tremendous implications for a wide variety of sectors, especially those in which women already play important socio-economic roles by virtue of their gender, but have not been given a voice, or the skills they need.” Citing Abidah Billah Setyowati as an example of the critical role women with higher education can play at meetings like COP-17, Dassin points to the importance of Setyowati’s research.

“Women can and should play a leading role in forest management and governance.  Not only do their livelihoods depend on it but their experience with forest resources makes them extremely knowledgeable stakeholders," she says.

The fact that women have traditionally been excluded when climate change strategies are devised "is a waste of valuable input, talent and expertise. Abidah is giving voice to indigenous women who deserve a seat at the negotiating table, while at the same time holding policymakers accountable,” she says. The United Nations and its members have clearly begun to recognize the need for a gender focus as they look ahead to June 2012, when the global conference “Rio + 20” assesses two decades of progress made toward environmental sustainability. The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, for example, is one of three UN conventions with an articulated gender focus going into “Rio + 20.” Several UN agencies are also working with WEDO within the framework of the Global Gender and Climate Alliance to ensure that gender is a recognized component of the 2012 program.

The UN environmental plan of action, Agenda 21, was "a blueprint for action but it lacked accountability mechanisms,” WEDO’s Eleanor Blomstrom points out.  Now, because women's rights and gender equality groups are highlighting the strong linkages among such entities as COP-17 and the UN Commission on the Status of Women—as well as upcoming assessments of UN population and development policies and the Millennium Development Goals—accountability measures are more likely to be established at “Rio+20.”

Women with impressive education and demonstrated leadership skills are also more likely to be at the table in Rio as implementation documents are written, monitoring plans developed, and funding mechanisms established.  As Abidah Billah Setyowati knows, that could open the door to “thousands of possibilities.”

[Image 2: Setyowati talks to a women's group in Banda Aceh, Indonesia.]

What do children want for the holidays?

Many mall Santas are hearing, “Please find my mom and dad a job.”

On December 8 Congressional leaders heard, “Please bring my mom and dad back home.”

Dozens of children went to Congress with grassroots leaders to share stories of families torn apart by immigrant detentions and deportations. They delivered 5,000 letters, all from children, all written by hand.

The children took their message to elected officials on both sides of the immigration debate. Unlike many adults who’ve given up on Congress, they’re hoping everyone will care about families being able to stay together.

The campaign is known as A Wish for the Holidays—a project of We Belong Together, a collaboration of women's organizations and immigrant rights groups. The children’s loved ones are among more than 1 million immigrants who have been deported during the three years that Barack Obama has been in office—a number far greater than under previous presidencies.

One of the letters comes from Jadon, age 10, in California:

One day I got home and watched TV. Then my dad walked in and said, "There are some people here." So Mom got up from scrubbing the floor and some weird people walked in and went in the basement. My mom walked upstairs and started crying. Then she said, "They're taking your dad away." And before I knew it they were gone. My dad even forgot to say "good-bye."

After my dad was taken away for a while, I thought we weren't a family anymore. I was so sad and mad I couldn't think clearly. The exact reason I was put in foster care is because my mom couldn't take care of me, and my aunt, uncle, grandpa, grandma, and my dad couldn't either so I will always miss them....

Too few decision-makers consider what happens to children when parents are stuck in detention or kicked out of the country—not because they robbed a bank or caused a mine to collapse, but because they had no way to feed their families in their home country and came to the United States. Some children are cared for by older siblings or relatives. But thousands—5,000 in just the first six months of this year—wind up in foster care.

For too long, these children have been invisible. Now, thanks to the campaign launched by the National Domestic Worker Alliance, the National Asian Pacific Women’s Forum and other groups, the children are telling their stories.

In addition to describing the pain of missing a parent, the children’s letters underscore the ripple effect of wondering when la migra will pounce.

I couldn’t be in D.C. December 8, but I heard two courageous young people from Phoenix share similar stories at a Congressional briefing in July 2010, also organized by We Belong Together. Heidi Ruby Portugal, age 11, had to grow up fast when her mother was detained:

Before [my mother’s detention], I would admire all uniformed people that protect our country. It’s a pity that those thoughts are gone thanks to all those mistreatments and the arrests…They took away the most precious thing that children have, our mother.  With one hit they took away my smile and my happiness.

I had to teach [my baby brother] to drink the canned milk because he was used to my mom breast-feeding him. [The family was allowed to bring the baby to see his mother in detention, but she was not allowed to touch him, much less feed him.] For my little brother Miguel, I was getting him ready to enter kindergarten …making sure he was eating because he was losing his appetite. He got really sick from asthma and had to be put on his inhaler every three to four hours. My sister Maria, her grades were dropping really fast…. I had to take her to school really early, around 5:45 am, on the bike. At that time it was really cold.

Heidi was joined by 12-year-old Matteo Perea. He described his anxiety at school that “this would be the day when no one would come to pick me up.” All his friends share this fear, he said.

A Wish for the Holidays is part of a larger effort to put a gender lens on immigration. Those who demonize immigrants want Americans to see them as faceless or as drug-ferrying men. It’s much harder to hate mothers working hard to feed their kids, or to give a thumbs up to families being ripped apart.

The campaign also hopes to appeal to people concerned about huge cuts in education and health care in their communities. The amount spent on kicking people out of our country is staggering—U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, appropriately known as ICE, spends approximately $2.55 billion each year on what it calls Detention & Removal Management.

This holiday season, let’s embrace the children in our lives. And in their names, let’s make a contribution to We Belong Together, to thank the kids who are speaking up so they can hug their own mom or dad.

With two big traveling exhibitions, Gertrude Stein is having a renaissance. She is also embroiled in a political controversy. Did Stein and Alice B. Toklas survive in Nazi-Occupied France because Stein was in cahoots with Marshal Pétain, the head of the French Vichy Government, whose speeches she began to translate in 1941? Did her close friendship with Pétain’s advisor, Bernard Faÿ, who turned fascist and collaborator during the war, mean that she was a collaborator, too? Did she really want Hitler to get the Peace Nobel Prize?

These accusations are snow-balling in articles, blogs, and a new book about Stein and her “Vichy Dilemma.” There is nothing new about the facts, but Stein is always a welcome target. From the moment a woman—a Jewish, lesbian woman—positioned herself at the birth of Modernism and declared, “I am a genius,” she was attacked and ridiculed. It is a fact, however, that Stein’s avant-garde novel, The Making of Americans, was written from 1902 to 1911, long before Joyce wrote Ulysses (1918 to 1920). With her “word portraits” she was the first to create in language what such modernist painters as Cézanne, Picasso and Matisse were producing in painting.

The bias of the recent attacks shows the most clearly in the Hitler “scandal.” In 1934, Stein was interviewed in the New York Times Magazine. The article points to the “impish” expression on Stein’s face. “‘I say that Hitler ought to have the peace prize,’ she says, ‘because he is removing all elements of contest and struggle from Germany. By driving out the Jews and the democratic and Left elements, he is driving out everything that conduces to activity. That means peace.’”  Isn’t this the way Jewish humor works? Stein recommends Hitler for the Nobel Peace Prize, just as Freud “recommended” the Gestapo—with the same perfect irony. The Germans had made a condition for Freud’s emigration, in 1938, demanding a declaration that he had been well treated. Freud declared: “Ich kann die Gestapo jedermann auf das beste empfehlen.” “I can heartily recommend the Gestapo to anyone.” Does this make Freud a collaborator? A Nazi?

Stein was a profoundly apolitical person, coming from an assimilated Jewish family that admired Ulysses S. Grant and George Washington. “Writers only think they are interested in politics,” she wrote, “they are not really, it gives them a chance to talk and writers like to talk but really no real writer is really interested in politics.” She loved to talk about Maréchal Pétain, who was every French person’s hero after saving France in the battle of Verdun, in 1916. Elected prime minister of the Vichy Government in 1940, Pétain’s armistice with Germany again prevented the destruction of France. In Stein’s eyes, Pétain was the great man who would not only keep France safe but lead the country out of the chaos of the Third Republic and restore it to its cherished agrarian and disciplined traditions.

This view was shared by the U.S. Department of State. Washington and Vichy still had diplomatic relations in 1942. In Pétain’s Unoccupied Zone, the  Zone Libre, where Gertrude and Alice’s country house was located, American Jews lived freely, especially if—like Gertrude and eventually Alice—they were over 65 years old. Stein’s hope in French-American relations was encouraged when the Franco-American Committee asked her to “translate for her compatriots Marshal Pétain’s messages.”

How could a radical avant-gardist like Stein at the same time be a traditionalist, a conservative, even a reactionary? We could also ask how a radical avant-gardist like Picasso could join the communist party in 1944, after Stalin’s mass murders had become public knowledge in France. How could Breton, Eluard or Frida Kahlo serve Stalin’s agenda by being active communists? A partial answer is found in the Modernist movement itself, which dreamed of extreme political renewal, of rebirth for their respective nations under the leadership of the “great men” of their time. Stein was part of the Modernist paradox. The same paradox can be found in her long friendship with Bernard Faÿ. The gay, Harvard-educated historian and author was highly respected in the States and had greatly helped Stein’s literary career. Nobody has come up with any proof that Stein knew about Faÿ’s activities, his  collaboration with the Gestapo to persecute the Freemasons in France.  Unlike in Germany, in France three quarters of the Jewish population survived the same way Stein and Toklas did, with the help of friends and neighbors, and often with the help of local French officials who quietly resisted German orders.

These complexities of history are missing in the debate over Stein’s war experience. A particularly interesting omission is the fact that by early 1943, Stein has reversed her position. In her diary-like record of the Occupation, Wars I Have Seen, she is increasingly enamored with the resistance. She has dropped her translation of Pétain and is now clearly anti-Vichy. By contrast to many other writers and intellectuals of her time who idealized “great men” and their extremist doctrines, Gertrude Stein thoroughly changed her mind and said so.

[Image 2:"Stein with Basket, shortly before WWII; photo from "Gertrude Stein: In Words and Pictures"]

"The Steins Collect"—which presents paintings collected by Gertrude Stein and her siblings as taste-makers in Paris—opened at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art before traveling to Paris. It will open in New York City at the Metropolitan Museum on February 28, 2012. The Washington exhibit, "Seeing Gertrude Stein: Five Stories," runs through January 22, 2011 at the National Portrait Gallery.

It's tempting to be passive in our consumption of media. But that's a huge mistake.

One of the most powerful cultural and economic forces at work today, popular media tends to determine our understanding of who we are and our place in the world. Yet it presents a picture that is rarely complete, and likely to remain that way when less than 12 percent of news globally reflects women and their stories, and when women only hold 3 percent of "clout" positions in the media.

Last week, at the 2011 Women’s Media Center Awards in New York City, Gloria Steinem put it this way: “The media is where we get our ideas of what is normal, what is OK, what is possible for us, what we can become.” She described the media marketplace as "the current campfire.  For all the time that human beings have been on Earth, we have been sitting around a campfire telling our stories.  And if one person could not tell their story they were not part of the group, people didn’t learn from them, and the circle was incomplete.” Steinem, who cofounded the WMC in 2004 along with Jane Fonda and Robin Morgan, said a laser-like focus on equality in the media should have happened earlier but that many feminists felt "turned off by the corporate media." It took a while, she said "for us to understand that we could and should transform the media."

To that end, the WMC awards honored CNN's Soledad O'Brien (Broadcast Journalism Award), CBS correspondent Lara Logan (Whole Truth Award), Frontier Communications Chair and CEO Maggie Wilderotter (Business Media Award), Howard University student Yanique Richards (Carol Jenkins Young Journalist Award), and Sady Doyle, founder of tigerbeatdown.com, who was chosen for the WMC Social Media Award out of 27 nominees by visitors to the WMC website. Jane Fonda described those honored as “women who have the guts to stand up and speak as women.  And that gives other women courage. We have to do more and more of that. Because if women will stand up, things will change.”

Women must speak out, said Fonda, because "we will not solve the problems of the world unless women’s voices are in the lead." Further, she added, “if the media shows women in a degrading, demeaning way, if violence is not taken seriously, if female candidates are covered in the context of how they look and what their hair is like and how they’re dressed as opposed to how the male candidates are referred to, this has an impact on women and girls, making us feel somehow we don’t count as much. It’s not a cognitive thing, it’s a visceral response, I think." Back in 2004, she said, WMC's founders recognized "that George Bush may not have won if women had realized that their issues were really at stake." The extreme right, she said, "does a really good job of putting out a media message that is maintained—everyone sticks to the message. And the message is very clear. Progressives don’t do that. Women need to begin to do that."

In order to help a diversity of women professionals develop clear message points and become more media savvy, the Women’s Media Center offers a variety of programs, including the Progressive Women’s Voices media and leadership training program (of which I am a proud and grateful alumnae). Fonda said that she personally “learned the hard way. I’m a movie actress, but when I became an activist, I hadn’t a clue how to go on television shows and radio and not alienate people. And so we train young people and all kinds of people to be able to speak their issue in the media in a way that resonates.” In addition, the WMC “Name It. Change It” program holds media outlets accountable for sexist commentary, including coverage of women candidates and political leaders (regardless of their politics). “If the media was less misogynistic, less sexist, I think more women would run,” said Fonda.

Comedian and television actress Wanda Sykes, who served as the emcee for the awards ceremony, said "we need a watchdog. We need someone out there to keep an eye on how we’re being portrayed and the message that’s being sent. Because a lot of it is pretty bad." Fonda is prepared for a backlash as women around the world continue to speak out. “Patriarchy is like a wounded beast. And wounded beasts are dangerous. I see a dragon tail lashing about and knocking people out of its way.” But while we need to prepare for "a long slog," she also noted that “there are many men on our side.”

WMC founder Robin Morgan said, "we're all constrained by two-dimensional information—at our peril. The greatest threat to democracy in the Information Age is the erasure, underrepresentation, and misrepresentation of women, who after all comprise 51 percent of the U.S. (and global) population.”

As the list of presidential contenders thins, it is likely that the 2012 U.S. presidential final will be an all-male affair. Our forthcoming book invites the audience to consider women with qualifications to serve as president and explores reasons, few of them reasonable, why they have been dismissed as presidential contenders.

We identify the Top Ten “Must Haves” for women who want to be president—qualities that draw voters to women candidates, even those who might not be demanding in the same way of men seeking the highest office.

1. Credentials Women not only have to have government experience but successful campaigning experience. And, as the case of Elizabeth Dole suggests, that campaigning experience must be on your own behalf, not for your spouse. A future female president should have foreign policy experience. Despite the presence of numerous women leaders internationally, such as Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s or Angela Merkel today, the U.S. electorate still tends to see the conduct of foreign affairs as male-defined.

2. Fundraising Women who are being considered for the presidency must have the ability to raise the money necessary for a long, expensive campaign. Historically women have found it difficult to garner the financial support men have. Hillary Clinton in 2008 certainly raised a significant sum as has Michelle Bachmann for the 2012 campaign. No one doubts Sarah Palin's ability to garner financial support. So, perhaps, this “barrier” is coming down.

3. Charisma Women who are being considered for the presidency must be charismatic or, at least, dynamic. Lack of charisma is more of a disqualifying trait for women, such as Washington Governor Christine Gregoire and HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, than it has been for men, such as Michael Dukakis and George H.W. Bush. A restrained style may well be highly effective if one is trying to either court business or work with the opposition, but that style does not attract media beyond state lines. Women without the requisite panache fall below the radar.

4. Assertiveness A woman, however, cannot push that dynamism too far, for, fourth, women who are being considered for the presidency must not be overly assertive or aggressive. Should they do so, they run the risk of being dismissed with the b____ word. That has been a fate suffered by Barbara Mikulski and Nancy Pelosi. That was the fate that Hillary Clinton constantly back-pedaled from in her 2008 campaign. There's a marked difference in perspective between how male and female aspirants are viewed: aggressive males are said to be in need of reining in their style when it truly becomes uncivil; aggressive females are said to be inherently nasty should they state their views strongly too often.

5. An Attractive Appearance Women who are being considered for the presidency must be attractive and, furthermore, must expect their appearance to be front-and-center in the media coverage of a campaign. Dianne Feinstein’s expensive attire and “Snow White” hairstyle; Barbara Mikulski’s short stature and “roly-poly” physique; Kathleen’s Sebelius’ dress color and toenail polish; Nancy Pelosi’s mauve designer suits and cosmetic surgery—commentators will focus on all such attributes. Men running for the presidency will not draw comparable attention; furthermore, physical traits will rarely disqualify them. Some might note their height (Jimmy Carter, Michael Dukakis), their weight (Chris Christie), and their suit color (Al Gore), but these traits will not be what media coverage notes first and, then, dwells upon.

6. The Right Look Women must look the part. The problem here, of course, is that the part has always been played by a male. Thus, to look the part—especially in its commander-in-chief facet, a woman must look masculine but, of course, not too masculine as to be unattractive. Women are then trapped in a double bind to add to the five in Kathleen Jamieson's book—between looking presidential, defined in our culture in masculine terms, and looking attractive, defined in our culture in feminine terms for women. Nancy Kassebaum, a senator from Kansas for two decades, noted that she wasn't tall enough to look the part; Barbara Mikulski, who is even shorter, may have felt the same.

7. The Dennis Thatcher Spouse Women who are aspiring to the presidency must have no “spouse problem.” The problem might be a spouse whose business or political dealings are questionable. Dianne Feinstein had questions raised about the former; Olympia Snowe, the latter. The problem might be a spouse who cannot be successfully scripted. Elizabeth Dole experienced this difficulty; and so did Hillary Clinton. The problem might even be the absence of a spouse as is the case for Barbara Mikulski and Linda Lingle, former governor of Hawaii. An aspiring woman’s spouse must—it seems—be either well in the background or, better yet, deceased.

8. Heterosexual Orientation At least for the present, women who are aspiring to the presidency should be heterosexual. On this point, there may be little sexism, for the door is probably as closed to a gay man as to a lesbian woman.

9. Restraint When It Comes to Playing the Gender Card Women now aspiring to the presidency must remember that their gendered struggle resonates with only a part of their audience. Although there still exist many barriers impeding women’s movement in life and in the professions, we believe that this perspective doesn’t resonate in the same way with younger women who outnumber their male counterparts in universities and law schools and have not experienced the ground breaking “firsts” of the baby boomer generation.

10. Rhetorical Finesse A woman aspiring to the presidency must possess considerable rhetorical finesse. Her phrases will be scanned for the words that suggest high seriousness in a world with major economic and international problems. Rick Perry’s silly gesticulations or Herman Cain’s hat-wearing may make it to late night comedian routines, but they won’t immediately disqualify them. Women candidates who don’t exhibit brainpower, rhetorical constraint and likability simultaneously and consistently will be disqualified as not presidential material.

When we have a critical mass of women willing to run, possessing the qualities above, America will have a woman president.

Separated from her cameraman, Caroline Sinz, a reporter for public TV station France 3, found herself quickly surrounded by a group of men. Then they set upon her. She was beaten, her clothes were torn and she was sexually assaulted in a manner that “would be considered rape,” she said. “[S]ome people tried to help me but failed,” she told AFP. It was 45 minutes before Sinz was rescued. “I thought I was going to die,” she recalled.

The attack happened while she was covering November 25 protests in Cairo, demanding an end to the rule of the military junta that replaced former President Hosni Mubarak. Her reports are among those that fulfill worldwide interest for news about what’s happening on the ground in Egypt.

Sinz’s is the latest disturbing case of this nature involving foreign correspondents who provide critical coverage of the evolving situation. Earlier this year, CBS correspondent Lara Logan faced the same fate in Cairo’s Tahrir Square, which has been the focus of the protests. There were as yet unconfirmed reports this week of other unidentified reporters targeted by groups of men in Tahrir Square.

Egyptian journalists face similar horrors, as many more locals have been targeted than foreigners. Take the case of Mona Eltahawy, a respected Egyptian-American journalist who was picked up by intelligence and Ministry of Interior agents near Tahrir Square and taken to one of their headquarters. She was then sexually assaulted and beaten so badly that both her hands are in casts. However, the well-publicized cases of attacks on foreign women correspondents have been within Tahrir Square at the hands of what look to be protesters.

But looks can be deceiving.

“It is a well-known fact that the Egyptian police send their members in plainclothes into protests to create trouble,” said Farrah Saafan, a 23-year-old video-journalist from Cairo. Although she refused to place the blame specifically on the police, she found it hard to believe that regular protesters were involved. “These men are here for equality, for democracy, for human rights. Why would they give themselves a bad image by doing something like this?”

Egyptian activist and blogger Ahmed Rady wasn’t so cautious. He firmly believes that the military junta currently ruling Egypt, SCAF (State Council of the Armed Forces), is behind the violence against foreign correspondents. “But they can’t do this directly,” he adds, “So instead, they are doing it in a kind of ‘Oops, we didn't know!’ manner. Obviously, the simplest way to deter female journalists is psychological warfare⎯sexual assault.”

To be sure, such instances of violence are not new to Egypt. Local female journalists and protesters were targeted specifically during the protests of 2005 by security forces. And violence and sexual violence in particular is widespread in Egypt.

Saafan herself has been sexually assaulted. “During the protests in September around the Israeli Embassy, I was a target,” she said. “We were running away from tear gas when suddenly, a young man groped me.” Most of the female protesters she knows have been at the very least sexually harassed and in some cases even assaulted, she says, although she’s still not convinced the attacks came from fellow demonstrators.

For Rady, the difference between attacks by local citizens and security forces lies in organization. Instead of isolated instances, he believes that such attacks on foreign female journalists are planned well ahead of time by security forces and then are carried out by plainclothes agents.

Whatever the source of attacks, Reporters Without Borders (RSF) issued a controversial advisory to all media organizations last week cautioning all media organizations not to send female journalists to Egypt for protest coverage. The advisory was later retracted somewhat after widespread criticism.

Mohamed Abdel Dayem, the Middle East and North Africa program coordinator at the Committee to Project Journalists, thinks that the responsibility for the attacks to an extent lies on the state-media for perpetuating xenophobia in general in the wake of the protests. He thinks the state’s role cannot be ruled out in the attacks. However, he’s unsure RSF’s advisory was necessary.

“Where do you draw the line between male and female journalists?” he said, “They have a right to be there. Nobody really has the authority with very few exceptions to tell journalists where they can go or not go. To say it's for your own good doesn't mean anything.” He asked the authorities to do more to identify the perpetrators if this is to be stopped.

For some, though, there are hints of misogyny in RSF’s advisory.

Lauren Wolfe, the director of Women Under Siege, a Women’s Media Center initiative to document sexual violence in conflicts, called it misguided. “Not only are they playing into the idea that women and news managers can't assess what is an acceptable risk for themselves based on the very same information that RSF has in its hands, but I can't understand why they're not telling male journalists to steer clear of Tahrir based on the fact that they too face intense physical violence,” she said, “To tell women to stay home is condescending and unacceptable.”

Fans of Jimmy Fallon—or at least his house band The Roots—were waiting with no small amount of anticipation Monday night just before Representative Michele Bachmann (R-MN) took the stage. Roots drummer Questlove first teased their introductory song selection on Twitter in the afternoon, saying, ”aight late night walkon song devotees: you love it when we snark: this next one takes the cake. ask around cause i aint tweeting title.” The song? A cover of Fishbone’s “Lyin’ Ass Bitch.”

Fallon’s initial response the morning after was  “@questlove is grounded,” though he later took to Twitter to apologize for what he termed “the intro mess.” But calling a guest—let alone a seated U.S. congresswoman who is one of a small number of Republican women to ever run for the Presidency—a “lying bitch” is both sexist and unfunny. It’s not even what one could legitimately call “snark,” which is generally understood to mean a sarcastic comment or snide remark. Calling a powerful woman a “bitch” because you don’t like her views or her attitude is pretty much standard issue sexism—just ask Hillary Clinton, for instance.

And while some fans of Questlove expressed their appreciation for the song choice and others suggested that, while the song choice was inappropriate, so were Bachmann’s ambitions or her policy positions, the fact of the matter is that sexism aimed at any woman—even one who opposes reproductive choice, same sex marriage, equal pay and a host of other issues—is still sexism. And when one of a very small number of women who run for President can take the stage on a late-night talk show to the strains of a song calling her a “lyin’ bitch” in service of “humor,” it makes it harder for any woman of any strong opinions to want to poke her head up and run for office—and it makes a lot of liberal women fairly sure that if we were to express unpopular opinions (like this one), we’d get the same treatment from our ideological compatriots as conservative women.

All of this is not to say that it isn’t possible to criticize Bachmann, or even that it’s impossible to snark her in musical form. After all, as Spin pointed out Tuesday, The Roots’ snark of Ashley Simpson’s appearance—a little too intricate to explain here—neared the sublime. So with that in mind (let alone the inevitable critique that feminists lack a sense of humor), here are five songs The Roots could have used to make the audience snort laughing without alerting Bachmann as she took the stage.

5. Angel Eyes, The Jeff Healey Band

No one will ever forget Newsweek’s unflattering Bachmann cover—let alone the Photoshop meme it inspired.

4. Toxic, Britney Spears

If there’s a more iconic pop violin riff that could still escape the attention of a boomer, I can’t think of one. (I tried it out on my mother just in case.)

3. Where’s Your Head At,

Basement Jaxx Given her history of gaffes on the campaign trail, there are few on either side of the aisle who haven’t wondered what in the world she is thinking some days.

2. Our Lips Are Sealed,

The Go-Gos Oh, fine, peeved at the network censors/feminazi killjoys ruining your fun in calling Bachmann a “lying bitch”? This one’s for you.

1. God’s Gonna Cut You Down, Johnny Cash

But if you want to snark Bachmann where it hurts—do you honestly think she isn’t used to being called “a bitch” by now?—you have to play on her field. “Go tell that long-tongued liar, go and tell that midnight rider, tell the rambler, the gambler, the back-biter, tell ‘em that God’s gonna cut ‘em down,” Cash sang. That’s a far harsher indictment than “lyin’ bitch,” and lacking in sexism—if you really think the problem is her lying.

As the clarion call of  Occupy Wall Street has spread throughout the United States and the world, many feminists have greeted the movement with enthusiasm and the hope that it will be a substantial opportunity to advance many of the issues that we have been working on for so many years.  Affordable childcare and unequal paychecks, for example, are most certainly economic issues and reproductive injustice and the commodification of women’s bodies in the sex trafficking and pornography industries have huge economic ramifications.

Put bluntly, the harms experienced by women as a result of global and national economic policies are, in aggregate, different and often far worse than those experienced by men. For instance, here in the United States:

• Women are lucky to make 77 cents on the male dollar (women of color often earn far less than that).
• Women are still doing the overwhelming majority of unpaid work such as child and elder care and housework.
• Women are more vulnerable to intimate violence in times of economic stress when social services that could help them are being cut.
• Women are still paying more for health care, and our access to reproductive health services is under siege.
• Women still do not have equal rights under the Constitution.
• The United States is one of only six nations (including Iran, Somalia and Sudan) that have not ratified the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW).

For any real economic justice to be gained for the 99 percent, those issues certainly need to be addressed as an integral part of the Occupy agenda.

Unfortunately, logical as that might be, those who seek to address these topics and insist that they be part of the Occupy agenda are finding themselves confronting many of the same obstacles that women often face outside of the Occupy movement—such issues as safety, sexism, misogynist power structures and a lack of gendered analysis.  Women report being harassed and labeled divisive for speaking out and pointing to issues that affect women’s lives. There have been numerous reports of women being physically and sexually assaulted, and of women being shouted down and denied a chance to speak, problems that sound all too familiar to longtime feminist activists working within political, social and progressive movements.

In responding to these incidents and formulating ways to address issues within Occupy from a feminist lens, it is worth taking a step back. Wall Street is a manifestation and symbol of the much larger problem of patriarchal control and power that has been plaguing us for thousands of years and depends in large part on the exploitation, subjugation and control of women.  If we want to occupy Wall Street in a meaningful way, we also need to confront issues of patriarchy.

As a way to further that broader effort and discussion, the Feminist Peace Network (of which I am the founder and director) began a new website called Occupy Patriarchy, which I co-author with feminist activist Kathy Miriam.  We hope that this site will bring feminist activists across the world together to address the problems women are facing within the Occupy movement. We must formulate effective strategies for bringing a feminist perspective to Occupy, one that recognizes that we must address the needs of the 99 percent from a gendered lens. As Angela Davis so eloquently pointed out at an Occupy Philly march last month, it is a “complex unity.”  Just as the Occupy movement itself has spread beyond the United States, support for a feminist perspective has too, and groups such as Feminists Occupy London are making much needed contributions to the dialog.  We welcome feminists who are involved in Occupy to join the dialog both on our webpage and via our Facebook page.

As this movement develops, we are also mindful that the American Fall must take lessons from the Arab Spring, which saw the leadership and participation of historic numbers of women in the public square. Yet human rights advances are far from assured in the aftermath for these women and may quite possibly have been further eroded in some instances.  In this country, conservative media outlets have seized on reports of sexual assaults in Occupy camps as a reason to shut down the movement, completely ignoring that these kinds of crimes continue to take place every second in every city, Occupy or not, and we need to insist that these calls to rescue the damsels are seen for what they are and not in our names.

As the Occupy movement continues, there is a real opportunity to develop a broader commitment from progressives to work on issues such as unequal pay, the ERA, better maternity leave policies and the many other issues that particularly affect women. But that opportunity, of necessity predicated on the understanding that Wall Street is only part of the cause of the problems we face, won’t be easily realized.

Bella Swan has a nightmare about her upcoming wedding. She and her future husband, vampire Edward Cullen, stand under an arch of white flowers, gazing at each other while family and friends smile approvingly. But as the camera pans out, we see that Bella’s wedding gown is stained with blood, and she and Edward are standing on a pile of bloody corpses (the previously smiling and approving wedding guests). Bella almost gets it right. But there’s only one bloody corpse at the end of the movie, and it’s hers.

Breaking Dawn is a horribly violent movie. I’m not talking about the fight scenes; vampires punching CGI-ed werewolves in the snout isn’t exactly frightening—in fact, the critic sitting next to me chuckled every time the werewolves and vampires came within ten feet of each other. The only real violence in the movie was directed at and experienced by Bella, to a nauseating degree.

Where to start? There’s the poor girl’s honeymoon night, a night she’s longed for since around page 10 of the first novel, during which Edward smashes apart the bed, shreds pillows, and leaves Bella bruised. The movie takes a lighter hand than series author Stephenie Meyer did; in the novel Bella describes her body as “decorated with patches of blue and purple,” and then excuses it with “my skin marked up easily.” Her first thought is how she’s going to hide the bruises on her arms. Oh my god. The movie largely glosses over this; we see only two of Bella’s bruises, one on her wrist and one on her back, and they disappear after a couple hours (the film’s director must have realized that watching Bella beg for sex while battered may have been too much for the Twi-hardest Twi-hard.)

There’s also the violence that Bella is forced to commit against her own body. The fetus (and unlike Edward’s sister Rosalie, so desperate for a child of her own that she connives with Bella against Edward’s pressure to abort, I will call it a fetus) is too powerful for Bella’s body and starves her; as her stomach grows, the rest of her shrinks, the exact opposite of a healthy pregnancy. In one particularly horrifying scene, we see Bella’s naked back as she stands in front of a mirror, her skin wan and clammy, her shoulder blades jutting out grotesquely, slowly starving to death. The solution to this comes unwittingly from Edward's rival Jacob, who thinks bitterly that the little vamp is probably just jonesing for some blood. Bingo! Blood cocktail! Edward puts a little O negative in a Styrofoam cup with a straw, like he’s giving Bella a milkshake from a gas station. Drink up!

But the apex of cringe-worthy gore comes when Bella goes into labor. Oh help me Rhonda, what a scene. What’s the worst part? That we hear bones crunching as the fetus fights its way out of Bella’s body? That because resident doctor Carlisle is out hunting, four certified non-doctors perform a Caesarian section? That the fetus is crushing Bella from the inside so rapidly that the makeshift team of surgeons doesn’t even have time to administer any anesthetic, and cuts Bella open as she screams in agony?

No, the most breathtakingly awful moment is when Bella begins to slip away from life, and Edward, after jamming a cartoonishly large needle full of vampire venom in her chest, panics and begins biting her everywhere—neck, arms, legs, everywhere, to change her to a vampire before she dies. I almost jumped out of my seat and screamed, “KNOCK IT OFF! Hasn’t she been through enough already?”

Some people might say, so what? Life is violent. Childbirth, at the very least, is violent. And they’re right. Nobody would stand in line for hours in the pouring rain to see a movie in which every character floated around on an ambrosia-scented cloud and ate bon-bons until the credits rolled. But my point isn’t that this movie is violent; it’s that while Edward stares out the window and mopes and Jacob storms around in various stages of undress, Bella bears the brunt of the movie’s violence at the hands of the people she loves. This is the central message of the movie: love comes hand-in-hand with physical violence. We’re supposed to revel in Bella’s suffering; the bigger her bruises, the louder her bones crack, the better wife she is, the better mother, the better woman. Twilight’s audience skews young—there were nine-year-old girls in the theater with me—so what are they supposed to take away from this?

Those too young to have experienced a sexual relationship and certainly too young to have experienced a pregnancy only see the normalization of violence against a woman’s body. And when the movie ended, they cheered for it.

[Image 2: Pregnant Bella (Kristen Stewart) has a lot to worry about.]

As young lawyers, my female friends and I are keenly aware that the proverbial glass ceiling has been replaced with a less easily metaphorized web of gender inequality and bias.

We know that no matter how stellar our work performance or how many birthday dinners, anniversaries, weekends or weddings we miss, we’re still last in line for equity partnership, the Mecca of Lawyer-dom. We’re going to have babies, after all, and you know what that means, don’t you? A lawyer who’s also a mom.

Given this reality, I was particularly disturbed to have opened my ABA Journal recently to find even more strikes against us lady lawyers in the article, "Not One Legal Secretary Surveyed Preferred Working with Women Partners; Prof Offers Reasons Why."

The article highlighted a part of Chicago-Kent Law School Professor Felice Batlan’s 2009 study on legal secretaries, revealing their preference not to work with female partners.

Seeking, as Batlan put it, to “deconstruct hierarchies and stereotypes” and evaluate “the gendered hierarchies under which [legal secretaries] labor,” her goal in the study was to analyze stereotypes. The ABA article and its subsequent media attention, however, perpetuated them.

The much loved and consumed website Above the Law ran the piece "Why Legal Secretaries Hate Women Lawyers," and the online site Careerist excitedly claimed "Female Partners Still Unloved." The Wall Street Journal Blog at least acknowledged that 47 percent of those Batlan surveyed didn’t have an opinion at all. But it is clear to me that the central point is still missing.

The real issue here is why legal secretaries preferred working for non-female-partners.

Unpacking the why involves a hard look at our social constructions of gender and the societal expectations they create.

Batlan wrote: “For a woman to serve a man is an arrangement that conforms to and reproduces dominant and traditional, although contested and changing, gender arrangements.” “Gender structures,” she said, “tell men that they are entitled to women's help and that women are supposed to freely give it.” Women, on the other hand, are entitled to no such thing.

The ABA Journal tries to answer the why by pulling out of Batlan’s 40-page study the legal secretaries’ own words: they complained that women partners were “more emotional” and “too independent,” and “try harder to prove themselves.”

These rationales so obviously buy into some very deeply entrenched notions of how women are supposed to behave. Did anyone think to question why female partners are trying harder to “prove themselves” or acting “independent”?Could it be rationalized by the fact that only 15 percent of equity partners (the top of the heap) at AmLaw 200 Firms are women? And since when was independence a bad thing?

If you take a close look at the survey results, you’ll also see our good friend, Emotion, played a starring role; women partners were criticized as “more emotional” than their counterparts. But are they?

“When a man gets upset, that’s seen as understandable,” Professor Joan Williams of the University of California at Hastings explains. “He’s just concerned about quality.” But when a woman gets upset, Williams says, “the same display can be seen as evidence that she’s just too emotional.” She cites studies that actually show that displays of anger in the workplace increase a man’s status, but decrease a woman’s status.

Batlan concludes that female lawyers are “in a double-bind situation.” If they don’t act like men, they’re too emotional, but if they do act like men, they are putting on airs.

Plain as day gender discrimination in the legal profession also explains why legal secretaries prefer male partners to female partners: men have the power at law firms. In fact, a recent ABA Journal article actually found a Wall Street law firm knowingly and admittedly giving higher numerical performance reviews to male associates than female associates with equally positive narrative performance reviews.

“It stands to reason,” Batlan told the ABA Journal in a follow-up article, “that secretaries/assistants want to work for the people with the most power.” Victoria Pynchon, who wrote about controversy over the study for the Forbeswoman blog, agrees. "Your destiny is tied to the person you work for," she said.

Listen, we all know that the media loves a good catfight. But this isn’t the woman-on-woman action they seek. This is simply a case of an environment shaped by deep and disgusting gender biases that pit women against one another. It’s time to elevate the status of female lawyers and legal secretaries alike. Let’s embrace this as the opportunity it is: to have a frank conversation about what’s really going on inside those law offices. 

[Image 2: Simplistic interpretations of law professor Felice Batlan's data provide media fodder.]

It looks like Liberia’s President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf won a second term in a run-off election this week, but only time will tell if the divisions that became apparent during the election will continue to haunt the country.

On Friday early results show Sirleaf won 90.8 percent of the votes returned, a landslide victory against her opponent, Congress for Democratic Change (CDC) leader and opposition candidate Winston Tubman. On October 11 Sirleaf won nearly 44 percent of the first round vote and Tubman took around 33 percent, but Sirleaf didn’t pass the 50 percent threshold needed for outright victory—leading to a run-off election this past Tuesday. Tubman had said he would only participate in a second round vote if it were delayed by two to four weeks and if counting procedures were amended.

On Monday violent clashes erupted between Liberian police and protestors from the CDC, leaving at least two dead, according to the UN. Tubman, Liberia’s former justice minister, claimed that eight people died and that he and his running mate, soccer superstar George Weah, were targeted for assassination.

Photos seen around the world showed at least one dead body and many wounded, images reminiscent of those seen during Liberia's 14-year civil war. Protestors fled into CDC headquarters as tear gas and bullets were fired on the building and tanks surrounded the compound.

The protests started after Tubman announced the party would boycott the run-off election, claiming voter fraud and ballot box stuffing in the first round of elections.

Speaking to reporters Thursday at Monrovia's Foreign Ministry, Sirleaf said that if she wanted to steal the election, she would have won outright in the first round instead of having to go to a run-off. “

It's so common for somebody to call fraud when you don't win,” she said.

Victoria Nuland, a spokesperson for the U.S. State Department, said the United States was “deeply disappointed” by the decision of the CDC to boycott the run-off election. “The CDC’s charge that the first-round election was fraudulent is unsubstantiated,” said Nuland. “As evidenced by international and domestic observers, Liberia’s October 11 first-round presidential and legislative elections were fair, free and transparent.”

The U.S. State Department, the African Union, and the United Nations have criticized Tubman's decision to boycott the vote. The Carter Center, the United Nations, and the Economic Community of West African States said the election was mostly fair.

On Tuesday Sirleaf said in a press release that she expresses “deep sorrow and regret over the violence which resulted in the death, Monday, at CDC headquarters.” She said an investigation is currently being conducted, promising that perpetrators will be brought to justice.

Election observers say the streets and polling stations were quiet on Tuesday as voters stayed away either out of fear of renewed violence or apathy after Tubman pulled out of the race. Turnout in Tuesday's poll was 37.4 percent, a dismally low number compared to the 71 percent who voted in the first round a month ago.

The question now is whether low voter turnout will undermine Sirleaf’s presidency.

The election last month was the first democratically run elections in Liberia since the end of the civil war. The UN peacekeeping mission in Liberia ran the election in 2005 that ushered in Sirleaf’s first term as president. Tuesday’s election was supposed to show the world how far Liberia had come since the war ended in 2003 and that it was ready for foreign investment in such natural resources as iron ore and oil. Instead it proved how deep the divisions in the country remain.

Tubman told Reuters that he would not accept the result and may seek to have it annulled.

Nat Bayjay, a Liberian journalist from Frontpage Africa, believes Sirleaf's second term will be extremely difficult following "one of the worst elections in the history of the country." Bayjay, who is currently visiting the United States said, "This is haunting her. Sirleaf will have a serious challenge and a divided nation. She has a serious reconciliatory issue at hand.”

On Thursday at Monrovia's Foreign Ministry, the president emphasized that she is not worried that her mandate has been weakened by the lack of voters.

“The numbers themselves will give us a mandate,” Sirleaf said. “And I think what we do to bring the Liberian people together will strengthen that mandate.”