Back...

I had taken a too long break from blogging, I admit it. But my friends over at feministing, broadsheet and jezebel seemed to have a pretty good handle on stuff. I am, however, pulled out of my slumber by none other than Rush Limbaugh and what has to be one of the most misogynistic questions I've come across in quite some time.

"Does," he asked in reference to Hillary Clinton, "our looks obsessed culture want to stare at an aging woman?"

Unfortunately for this blog, that question has actually rendered me almost speechless. I'm forced to wonder what exactly Rush would want our "looks-obsessed culture" to do with aging women? I would also argue that the issue to be addressed is not an aging woman per se, but rather the "looks obsessed culture."

And, if I may add, what is Rush Limbaugh still doing on the air? Didn't he have some sort of illegal drug activity going on? Or am I confusing him with another judgmental conservative commentator who hates women?

Jazz & Jewels

Get excited for Planned Parenthood of NYC's latest action fund event tomorrow -- Friday, November 30 -- night!

At the duplex with three amazing jazz performers -- Jacqueline Antaramian, Elizabeth Soychak and Michele -- and jewelry for sale.

9:30-12:30, 2 drink minimum, $20 cover includes action fund membership.

8, 9 and 11

According to the Associated Press, three boys ages 8 and 9 were being held Monday in a detention center on charges of kidnapping and raping an 11-year-old girl in the woods near a suburban apartment complex.

There are a lot of "alleged"s floating around in the story but whatever facts ultimately come to light this is heartbreaking. And I can't honestly think of a better, potentially more tragic, example of why parents desperately need to be involved in their kids lives AND to start having conversations about sex, sexuality, respect, boundaries, and relationships as soon as their kids can talk.

Rounding up

I've been a bad blogger this week. I apologize. To make up for it, I've compiled a bunch of things to get us all riled up.

Great week for women’s right. (Yes, that’s sarcasm).

Let’s see… for starters, the Associated Press reports that the Colorado Supreme Court cleared the way Tuesday for an anti-abortion group to collect signatures for a ballot measure that would define a fertilized egg as a person. If approved by voters, the measure would give fertilized eggs the state constitutional protections of inalienable rights, justice and due process. (I’m not entirely clear how a fertilized egg would seek due process since it’s, umm, not generally outside of a woman’s uterus or, well, able to talk.) But that aside, the award for disingenuity surely goes to those who have the gall to say that this measure is NOT an attempt to outlaw abortion.

In highly depressing news, a rape VICTIM in Saudi Arabia was sentenced to 200 lashes for being in a car with a man unrelated to her.

And in infuriating news, Senator John McCain, upon being asked by a supporter, “How do we beat the bitch?” responded not by denouncing the question, but by calling it “excellent” and then answering it.

On the upside, women do still have the right to vote.

And, speaking of voting, don’t forget to come to Planned Parenthood of New York City’s PNYC Action Fund’s event on Saturday night: Body Politic '08: Pro-Choice Poker! From 5-9 pm at Pete's Candy Store where you can meet other pro-choice New Yorkers, play a friendly (games are for fun, not money) game of poker and support the important political work of the Planned Parenthood of New York City Action Fund! Your $20 ticket** to this fabulous party also gets you a one-year membership to the Action Fund. As a member, you'll get all the latest info on how to make pro-choice political change in 2008 and beyond.

Have a grand weekend.

Birth Control Cri$is

For nearly 30 years, federal laws have been in place to help safety net providers, including college health clinics, buy birth control at affordable prices, then pass on their savings to college and low-income women. But the Deficit Reduction Act (DRA), passed by Congress in 2006, included a provision that adversely affected the ability of university health centers and other safety net family planning providers to purchase contraceptives at a discounted or nominal price. By most accounts, it was an inadvertent outcome of a complicated change in the law. However, nothing has been done to fix it, and millions of college women and low-income are being penalized. For example, the cost of a pack of birth control on college campuses has risen from between $5 and $10 to upwards of $40 and $50. As result, affordable birth control has become out of reach for many college women.

Congress can fix this problem immediately and Congressman Joseph Crowley recently unveiled stand alone, bipartisan legislation to restore low priced birth control at college clinics. The solution will cost nothing, and would simply clarify that college health clinics and other safety net providers are eligible to purchase nominally priced birth control.

Affordable birth control is essential to family planning and reproductive health care policies. Congress should act quickly to fix this problem.

To help bring more attention to the issue, Planned Parenthood of NYC, along with NYU Students for Choice; NYU Law Students for Choice; and Representative Joseph Crowley will be holding a rally on Monday, 11/12 at 4:45 at the Southside of Washington Square Park. Come join us and support access to affordable birth control!

Why am I surprised?

I may have to give up one of my favorite guilty pleasures. No, not Nora Roberts... America's Next Top Model.

Last night -- after all of Tyra Banks' semi-progressive talk about the modeling industry and starving models being bad, the panel voted off Sarah for no reason other than that she was "too thin to be a plus-size model and too large to be... a model."

Heaven forbid there be a beautiful woman with a "normal" body.

Not that we shouldn't have seen this coming: for the past two weeks judge Nigel Barker has been commenting that Sarah seemed to have lost weight since joining the show (can't imagine why, being "plus-size" in a house full of size zeros).

The whole thing is especially ironic, in a not really all that ironic kind of way, considering that "thin" model Heather passed out and needed oxygen after not EATING ENOUGH. I had been wondering why Tyra didn't have some sort of intervention with Heather but after seeing the results I realized that doing so would've exposed the show's hypocrisy even more.

On the plus side (pun really not intended) the episode DID feature singer Enrique Iglesias which may (may) have made up for the negatives. Not sure yet. Thoughts?

Asylum denied

Gosh. Sometimes injustice can be so overwhelming...

Acccording to a NYT article, Alima Traore was a young girl in Mali when she was forced to undergo female genital mutilation. Upon her return home (pending) her father is going to force her to marry her first cousin. In addition to, well, not loving him, she is extremely concerned that her children will have birth defects resulting from such a close union and she fears that her own daughters will be forced to undergo the same mutilation.

Alima applied for US asylum, but in September, the Board of Immigration Appeals rejected her plea and ordered her sent back to Mali. Their ruling was based on the argument that “the cutting, while "reprehensible," could not be repeated. "The loss of a limb also gives rise to enduring harm," the board said, but it would not be a good enough reason to grant asylum.”

Strangely, though, the board acknowledgedthat women who have been subjected to forced sterilization are routinely granted asylum even though that procedure, like genital cutting, cannot be repeated.

In its decision, the board, which is part of the Justice Department, rejected the reasoning of a 2005 decision by the federal appeals court in California, which refused to deport a woman who had been subjected to genital cutting in Somalia. "Like forced sterilization," Judge Stephen Reinhardt wrote for a unanimous three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, "genital mutilation permanently disfigures a woman, causes long-term health problems, and deprives her of a normal and fulfilling sexual life."

Added Judge Reinhardt, “We see no need for using initials rather than the full three-word phrase. We are short neither of paper nor of ink. The use of initials, if it has any effect, serves only to dull the senses and minimize the barbaric nature of the practice.”

Alima’s lawyers are appealing the decision, but – in addition to her own plight -- this should serve as a very painful reminder of all of the women who are forced to have their genitals scraped off with a knife.

Pro-Choice Poker

This just in:

On Sat, 11/17, the Planned Parenthood of NYC Action Fund is sponsoring Body Politic '08: Pro-Choice Poker! From 5-9 pm at Pete's Candy Store (details and RSVP click here), you can meet other pro-choice New Yorkers, play a friendly (games are for fun, not money) game of poker and support the important political work of the Planned Parenthood of New York City Action Fund! Your $20 ticket** to this fabulous party also gets you a one-year membership to the Action Fund. As a member, you'll get all the latest info on how to make pro-choice political change in 2008 and beyond.

Stealing from Broadsheet...

Sorry to copy so egregiously, but... really... what can I say that Lynn Harris doesn't? Except Ouch.
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Teen forcibly shaved, pierced for being "out of control"

Via Feministe, a real Halloween horror show: A 13-year-old girl -- at the behest of her mother, as punishment for alleged promiscuity -- had her head forcibly shaved to make her unattractive to men and her labia forcibly pierced to make intercourse uncomfortable. This happened in Naples. The one in Florida.

Child Protective Services was called when the piercing, performed by Tammy "Tattoo Tammy" Meredith, became infected. A case against the mother, 39, went to trial last week. And in a story that's now making the blog rounds, a jury of five men and one woman, having deliberated over two counts of first-degree aggravated child abuse, took three hours to acquit.

Though you won't read it in this Associated Press story -- or other news briefs that package this, at very least by omission, as a straight-to-Jerry Springer tale of a "teen slut out of control!" -- it turns out, apparently, that the girl, now 16, had been molested since she was 11 by a family friend who is now 30, and who is now the mother's boyfriend. (You will read that in the awkwardly titled "Girl Pierced in Private Area Testifies in First Day of Mother's Trial" on NaplesNews.com, which is thorough enough to mention that jurors "passed around a photo of the girl's labia.") One can imagine that some of the girl's alleged "promiscuity" could have been a response to or symptom of this sexual abuse.

Though there was some dispute about when the mother found out what, prosecutors contended that she intended the piercing as retaliation for the girl's sexual "relationship" with her boyfriend. (Perhaps she was also inspired by something on the History Channel about the shaving of women's heads as a form of sexual punishment?)

Yes, there is a warrant out for the boyfriend's arrest. And yes, Tattoo Tammy is currently spending the year in jail for child abuse.

Fine. Great. Um. What about the mother?

One commenter at Lawyers, Guns and Money maintains that while the woman was clearly guilty of child abuse, the evidence presented may not, strictly speaking, have supported convicting her of charges of aggravated abuse as defined by state law, an even more serious felony carrying 30 years' jail time. (The judge had rejected two bargains in which the mother agreed to plead guilty to nonaggravated child abuse.)

Let's hope that that commenter is correct. (And let's hope that we can find compassion, where appropriate, for end-of-their-rope parents, even for violent, in-denial actings out in response to betrayal.) But let's also hope that had I been in the courtroom, I would understand why what happened in this heartbreaking case does not fall under Section 827.03(2)(b): "Willfully tortures, maliciously punishes, or willfully and unlawfully cages a child; or (c) Knowingly or willfully abuses a child and in so doing causes great bodily harm, permanent disability, or permanent disfigurement to the child." (Yes, piercings heal and hair grows back, but come on.) Let's hope, in other words, that -- even if we don't like the result -- the jury correctly applied the law.

The law of the state, that is, not the law of Springer. "Maybe it was not the best decision in the world," foreman Colin Kelly told the AP after the verdict. "But the intent was to try to stop a girl who was completely out of control," he said (emphasis added). "Are you going to put every parent in jail for making a bad decision?"

-- Lynn Harris

Time to weigh in on Hasbro

I was sorta half watching the hubbub about the Hasbro "Rose Petal Cottage," a toy designed for girls that apparently allows them to fulfill their dreams of doing laundry and making dinner. Yes, it's annoying that the toy conforms to gender role stereotypes but I had Barbies (and yes, the Barbie DreamHouse) and I'm pretty sure I turned out ok.

But now the game gets even dicier with the new Hasbro Tonka Trucks Ad -- which says... "Boys: They're Just Built Different." Incorrect grammar aside (thanks Apple), MUST toy companies insist on drawing such an explicit line between boys and girls?

There's nothing like making parents (or kids!) feel bad if they don't fancy the toys that Hasbro thinks they should play with.

Plus, how much more money could the company make if they pushed both items to both genders?