Posts by Samhita Mukhopadhyay

Samhita Mukhopadhyay is an editor for Feministing. She is also is the Training and Technology Coordinator at Youth Media Council.

The Continuing Saga of the Jena Six: Charges Reduced, But Not Dropped
Posted by Samhita Mukhopadhyay on September 5, 2007 at 5:19 AM.

This post, written by Samhita, originally appeared on Feministing

UPDATE: For more on this story, click here.

I have failed to write about the Jena 6 case in Louisiana, as have most mainstream news outlets and mainstream blogs. Shame on me, but lucky for you, I stumbled upon this video that sums up what happened quite well, so please watch and take action ASAP.

Nooses are a prank? Can we say Jim Crow? Clearly, the MSM doesn't even know where to begin since this is such a clear display of racism. Granted there is an over generalization that racism happens more so in the South, even though racist shit happens everywhere, so perhaps we want to cover the story in a more balanced manner, thinking about the national state of race relations. However, it is pertinent that the use of a noose to intimidate a group of young black students is at the least horridly offensive, but more like, threatening and attempting to put some black kids in their place using an object that is both historically and geographically relevant.

And I like the apt comparison he draws between mass media coverage of the supposedly wrongly done Duke Lax players, while Mychal Bell, a 16 year old, rots in jail and gets sentenced to 22 years with little to no coverage in MSM. One of the key arguments made by feminist and POC bloggers in response to the Duke case was that the coverage and the treatment of those men would be different if they were black. As we can clearly see, this is true. Where is the outrage about this? Why isn't FOX news or some of the conservative blogs making noise and demanding justice?

Read the rest of the post on the flip side »

Justice Department Proposes Porn Star Database
Posted by Samhita Mukhopadhyay on August 22, 2007 at 5:22 AM.

This post, written by Samhita Mukhopadhyay, originally appeared on Feministing

So I don't really know how this would be that different from USC section 2257, but to take an already faulty law to the next level, the US Dept of Justice wants to generate a list of all actors in the porn industry. The desire to do this is of course to prohibit the production of underage porn. However, the reality of 2257 has been that many women have had their identities and personal information revealed to people that shouldn't have access to it. Or rather people we don't want to have access to it, thusly making a potentially preventative measure backfire or often force performers to leave the country.

The new rules, proposed under the Adam Walsh Child Safety and Protection Act, would require blue-movie makers to keep photos, stage names, professional names, maiden names, aliases, nicknames and ages on file for the inspection of the department's Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section.

"The identity of every performer is critical to determining and ensuring that no performer is a minor," according to the new proposal.

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Is Smoking Pot a Feminist Act?
Posted by Samhita Mukhopadhyay on August 21, 2007 at 11:00 AM.

This post, written by Samhita Mukhopadhyay, originally appeared on Feministing

Do you think men smoke more weed than women? Is that a proven fact? Have you ever been to the Bay Area? LOL. OK seriously, this article in the Stranger (and as a tribute to Hempfest) is about gender and weed smoke and how women don't smoke weed.

Smoking pot is a guy thing. Guys are the ones who deal, buy, and smoke. In 2005, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services stated that adult males were 50 percent more likely to have smoked marijuana in the last month than females. (Alcohol use showed only a 12 percent difference.) All illegal drugs show this approximate divide between the sexes (except illegally obtained prescriptions--women use those in substantially higher numbers).

Is this actually true? Or do women hide that they smoke weed more? A very quick look at my friends, I would say half the women I know smoke weed all the time. Even in my women's studies undergrad, I knew a lot of female stoners. In fact I have never attributed smoking weed to being a male activity. Perhaps this says something about the kind of women I hang out with, but this is seriously news to me.

Reading more into the article, I did have to agree that media depictions of drug use are in general inaccurate and definitely sexist. The war on drugs is extremely racist and gendered with little conversation about how drugs affect the lives of young women, while being absurdly focused on the incarceration of young men. Furthermore, the usual drug user is depicted as male.

But on a much less serious note, maybe women don't like to look lazy. . .

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