Posts by Ann Friedman

Ann Friedman is AlterNet's managing editor and an editor at Feministing.com.

Come Fly The Slut-Shaming Skies
Posted by Ann Friedman on September 6, 2007 at 5:28 AM.

This post, written by Ann Friedman, originally appeared on Feministing

Southwest Airlines is apparently now telling its female passengers how to dress. Kyla Ebbert was reprimanded and nearly kicked off a flight for daring to wear a tank top, miniskirt, and cardigan. (This picture is of the outfit she was wearing at the time. Scandalous, no? How dare she walk around in 100-degree weather wearing that?!)

They walked out onto the jet bridge, where [flight attendant/fashion policeman] Keith told Ebbert her clothing was inappropriate and asked her to change. She explained she was flying to Tucson for only a few hours and had brought no luggage.

"I asked him what part of my outfit was offensive," she said. "The shirt? The skirt? And he said, 'The whole thing.' "

Keith asked her to go home, change and take a later flight. She refused, citing her appointment. The plane was ready to leave, so Keith relented. He had her pull up her tank top a bit, pull down her skirt a bit, and return to her seat.

Guess we know what airline Wendy "Modestly Yours" Shalit is going to be flying from now on!

Read the rest of the post on the flip side »

Man Rapes Woman As Several Bystanders Watch
Posted by Ann Friedman on August 27, 2007 at 12:00 PM.

This post, written by Ann Friedman, originally appeared on Feministing

Police: Man Rapes Woman As Bystanders Look On

(AP) St. Paul -- A 25-year-old man was charged Thursday for allegedly raping and beating a woman in an apartment hallway -- an incident apparently witnessed by as many as 10 people who did nothing.

Rage Ibrahim was charged with several counts of first-degree criminal sexual conduct for the attack early Tuesday. According to the criminal complaint, police responded to a call of drunken behavior in an apartment hallway, where they found both Ibrahim and a woman lying unconscious. The woman's clothing had been pulled up, she had fresh scratches on her face and blood on her thigh.

And despite the witnesses -- and the fact that the rape was captured on a surveillance camera -- the guy denies it.

"I'm so upset because of the situation I'm in," Ibrahim told the St. Paul Pioneer Press, as he headed to the county jail on Thursday to turn himself in. "I've got a mom, I've got a sister. I wouldn't rape anyone."

Because no rapists have female relatives? Maybe he's thinking that, because everyone seemed to ignore what was going on, it wasn't really happening:

Read the rest of the post on the flip side »

Wife-Spanking 101: Neither Parody Nor Porn
Posted by Ann Friedman on August 24, 2007 at 4:41 AM.

This post, written by Ann Friedman, originally appeared on Feministing

What if your wife, even after graduating the prestigious homemaking course at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary with a degree in ladylike submission, still won't behave? Uber-conservative Christian patriarchs everywhere now have a solution!

Give her a good spanking. For how to incorporate this into your marriage, see the "Christian Domestic Discipline" site. Unlike the Baptists for Brownback campaign Jen wrote about awhile ago, this site appears to be legit. Not a parody.

A Christian Domestic Discipline marriage is one that is set up according to Biblical standards; that is, the husband is the authority in the household. The wife is submissive to her husband as is fit in the Lord and her husband loves her as himself. He has the ultimate authority in his household, but it is tempered with the knowledge that he must answer to God for his actions and decisions. He has the authority to spank his wife for punishment, but in real CDD marriages this is taken very seriously and usually happens only rarely. CDD is so much more than just spanking. It is the husband loving the wife enough to guide and teach her, and the wife loving the husband enough to follow his leadership. A Christian marriage embodies true romance and a Christian man a true hero.

This is billed as completely consensual, with it made clear that "the husband has authority to spank the wife. The wife does not have authority to spank her husband." The site was created by wife-spankers who were sick of stumbling upon porn when they searched for other like-minded folks online. Lest you become confused that the CDD site is a BDSM site with a Christian spin, they're sure to reiterate that this is about adhering to Biblical gender roles -- not about sexual pleasure. Unless you get off on asserting your patriarchy by slapping your property wife. Not an unheard-of phenomenon, as the site acknowledges:

Though we recognize by its very nature this subject can be erotic, we will keep this website as clean and wholesome as possible. However, we will not seek to deny the erotic nature of some CDD marriages as we believe it is a natural consequence of following God's plan. After all, He created eroticism to be enjoyed inside a Christian marriage.

But what if sometimes your wife doesn't want to be spanked? Well, let's not use an inconvenient phrase like "domestic violence" or "spousal abuse." Nah, "non-consensual CDD" would be more appropriate, really. And the site basically says that it's a man's god-given right to hit his wife, even if those pesky laws against domestic violence get in the way.

Read the rest of the post on the flip side »

Billionaire women signal end of inequality!
Posted by Ann Friedman on March 15, 2007 at 7:18 AM.

Forbes just released its list of international billionaires, which includes more women than ever before. And the ladies of IWF are crowing that this proves women don't need anti-discrimination or pay equity laws:

This is irrefutable proof that women don't need government programs to help them make it in the business world--a fact our friends at NOW and similar organizations are unwilling to admit.

Except for the fact that every woman in the top 100 has inherited her wealth, not shattered the glass ceiling to earn her millions. The presence of these women on the Forbes list has next to nothing to do with the obstacles faced by average working women. And, in fact, it's still a great idea for government to pay attention to how these average women are faring in the workplace. Paris Hilton's riches are no excuse to ignore the issue. (Although she did film a season of "The Simple Life" attempting to be an office intern…see above artwork.)

NYT editor says women are bad military history writers
Posted by Ann Friedman on February 23, 2007 at 11:48 AM.

Amy Hoffman, editor-in-chief of the Women's Review of Books, recently reported that she attended a lecture at the Radcliffe Institute by Barry Gewen, an editor at the New York Times Book Review. In what even he described as a "Larry Summers moment" he explained that the reason so few women reviewers appear in the NYTBR is that they just can't write for a general audience about such topics as military history. He explained that NYTBR editors find reviewers by talking to colleagues and reading publications such as The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, and The New Republic, insisting that he and his colleagues are not overtly prejudiced people but admitted they might have subconscious prejudices.

In the Harvard Crimson's account, Gewen acknowledged his staff wasn't "doing the outreach they should" in order to recruit more women and minorities.

"Looking for reviewers of a certain ethnicity simply because of an ethnicity makes me a little squeamish," Gewen, a 17-year veteran of the Book Review, said.

During the Q&A session, Hoffman suggested that it wasn't necessary for the editors to psychoanalyze themselves to find the source of the problem -- all they had to do was look at their process for finding reviewers, which guarantees that they'll find the same old guys to say the same old thing.

Voters reject gay marriage and abortion restrictions
Posted by Ann Friedman on November 7, 2006 at 11:30 PM.

Both good and bad outcomes on various ballot initiatives.

First off, there's that overturned South Dakota abortion ban. It also looks like both California and Oregan will reject parental notification for abortion. And Missouri, Nevada, Ohio and Montana voted overwhelmingly to raise the minimum wage. Plus, Missouri looks likely to approve stem-cell research.

However, seven states (Colorado, Idaho, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Virginia, Wisconsin) banned same-sex marriage. At this writing, Arizona was leaning that way, too. Arizona also made English its official language. And Michigan voted to restrict affirmative action.

UPDATE: Now it looks like Arizona will reject the gay marriage ban. Awesome.

South Dakota votes to preserve women's rights
Posted by Deanna Zandt, Ann Friedman on November 7, 2006 at 8:33 PM.

Deanna:

By a 55-45 margin, South Dakotans struck down the abortion ban that left no exceptions for rape, incest or a woman's health. I'll refer to Jessica at Feministing to echo my more visceral emotions at the moment. Hurray!!

Ann:

I give the anti-choicers only a few days before they start pushing for a ban with rape and incest exceptions... which is, unfortunately, much more likely to be approved.

But for now, let's celebrate the fact that a direct challenge to Roe has been averted. This is good news.

South Dakota anti-choice campaign broke the law
Posted by Ann Friedman on November 7, 2006 at 4:45 PM.

Campaign finance reports from South Dakota show that the abortion ban campaign has cost a total of around $4 million -- $2.2 million spent by the coathanger club, and $1.8 million spent by pro-choicers.

The abortion-banners have been chirping that most of the money they've used to produce lying ads has come from inside the state. Included in their filing is a report of $750,000 from an anonymous donor via a shell organization in South Dakota. That's right. More than a quarter of the anti-choice funds have come from a single undisclosed source, who made a donation to Promising Future, an organization recently set up by Republican legislator Roger Hunt.

Now Hunt is in some trouble over failing to disclose who funds the shell corporation. Failure to properly file a campaign finance report is a class 2 misdemeanor.

Local progressives are thinking the anonymous donor is Steve Kirby, a wealthy anti-choicer who ran a failed campaign for South Dakota governor. He gave huge amounts of money to the initial push to pass the abortion ban, but his name shows up nowhere on the VoteYesForLife campaign finance filing.

Ms. Magazine reminds us that the campaign has been in trouble over its funding before. Citizens for Ethics and Responsibility in Washington (CREW) filed a complaint against lead abortion-banner Leslee Unruh's crisis-pregnancy center and the Abstinence Clearinghouse for using federal dollars to campaign for the abortion ban. The South Dakota Campaign for Healthy Families has also filed a complaint against Hunt and the recipients of his anti-choice charity for failure to reveal the donors.

In other South Dakota election day news, subscribers received today's Sioux Falls Argus Leader wrapped in VoteYesForLife campaign materials.

Sex ed and its discontents
Posted by Ann Friedman on November 3, 2006 at 11:44 AM.

Rep. Mark Souder (R-IN) is on a mission to discredit the Waxman Report -- which, you'll recall, drew widespread attention the misinformation and gender stereotyping rampant in abstinence-only programs. Souder released a report this week called "Abstinence and Its Critics."

In it, he makes the same old unsupported arguments that abstinence-only works, trots out the same old bunk statistics, and makes the same old distortions of polling data about what sort of sex-ed most parents would like to see. What he doesn't address are the Waxman Report's charges of gender stereotyping in abstinence-only curricula, which leads me to assume that he's probably all for messaging like "wear longer skirts, you sluts" and "boys can't control their urges."

Souder first surfaced on this issue back in May, when he managed to place abstinence-only advocates on a CDC conference panel about STDs. He's now running for re-election and the Cook Report recently downgraded his race from a "solid" to "likely" chance he'll be reelected. The Republicans had to start giving him some money to buy ads. Clearly he expects to gain some political ground with the timely release of his anti-Waxman Report.

Focus on the Family is already fellating Souder for his report, calling him a "defender of life and purity." I think "defender of gender stereotyping and teen pregnancy" is probably more accurate.

On a related note, the Center for Ethics and Responsibility in Washington (CREW) is suing the Dept. of Health and Human Services for failing to respond to a request for information on how the agency uses federal abstinence dollars to fund crisis-pregnancy centers.

Bush Admin. pushes sex-segregated education
Posted by Ann Friedman on October 26, 2006 at 10:09 AM.

The Bush administration recently announced it's easing restrictions to encourage more sex-segregated public schools. I'm with most of the major civil liberties groups in saying I'm not happy with this smackdown of Title IX.

(And before everybody goes shouting that, "Hey! But feminists loooove women-only colleges!", let me say that sex-segregated education is a vastly different issue when we're talking about public K-12 schools. )

Sure, some studies have shown that both girls and boys can benefit from being in a sex-segregated learning environment. But the right-wingers who are pushing for more single-sex schools don't have these benefits in mind. This is more of a tool to reinforce traditional gender roles than it is to improve learning.

Read the rest of the post on the flip side »

Molly Ivins on the Texas sex toy ban [VIDEO]
Posted by Ann Friedman on October 4, 2006 at 2:00 PM.

In The Dildo Diaries, Texans describe how they have to use the "it's for educational purposes" excuse to justify their purchase of adult toys.

Via Jessica at Feministing.